In the 19th century a stalemate that had held for hundreds of years between the European powers and the Amerindian nations broke. The newly formed United States of America had liberated itself from the English crown and, with that, from the restraints of treaties that had held back the white man's westward expansion. Wagon trains began to roll west, extending pseudopodia of settlements into Indian country. Soon the wagon trains were replaced by the steam engine, and the trickle of European expansion became a flood.
War was as inevitable as the war's conclusion. The red man fought fiercely and bravely, inflicting savage terror on the interlopers, slaughtering settlers, taking scalps and wives. But every bullet he fired had to be replaced by trade with the very enemy against whom he struggled, while for every one of those enemies he tortured to death, ten more took his place. And for all that he was capable of inhuman brutality, the ice-water that ran in his enemy’s indifferent veins was every bit as terrifying. The red man, outnumbered and technologically out-matched, was doomed.
Towards the end, despair began to set in.
Just as the red man was on his knees, hope flooded back into his heart.
A messiah came, and told them that if they danced correctly, danced in the way their ancestors had danced, the spirits of those ancestors would return from the otherworld to aid their fight against the white man. There was more to it – the messiah spoke of peace, of brotherhood, of cooperation between the tribes; he taught clean living, a rejection of the white man's poisonous firewater; and he prophesized not only the assistance of ghostly legions, but an Armageddon, a cataclysmic renewal of the Earth that would wash away all the white man's railways and telegraphic wires and cattle fences and garbage. The braves won over to this lone light of hope shining in darker times than their people had ever known took to wearing ghost shirts, believed to make the wearer bulletproof.
The Ghost Dance inspired the Indians to unify, or at least to aspire to unity, and to renew their resistance to white encroachment.
It didn't work. Bullets, it turned out, did not bounce off of ghost shirts.
The Ghost Dance led directly to the massacre at Wounded Knee, and while white society was horrified at the piles of dead women and children, the red man's dominance of the continent was broken, and did not return.
The Ghost Dance was far from a unique historical occurrence. Apocalyptic movements have swept through populations stressed by invasion and foreign domination past their breaking points numerous times in history....
Read full text: https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-white-mans-ghost-dance
