these people. The Reverend M. G. Mann has been the missionary to
the Indians of Puget sound for many years, and has succeeded in
making a very favorable impression upon them. He has been specially
attentive to the Shakers, and, to his credit be it said, has never
tried to coerce them, and has only dealt with them kindly. So far
has this gone that Louis Yowaluch was long ago taken into the
Presbyterian church, and is now an accredited elder therein. Louis
does not know, seemingly, how to escape from his dual position,
or rather does not seem to think that he needs to escape. It all
seems to be for the best interest of his people, so he continues to
occupy the position of elder in the Presbyterian church and headman
of the Shaker church.”
“At a recent meeting of the Presbyterian ministers the position of
these Shaker people was fully discussed, and the strongest language
was used in saying only good about them, and every effort seems
to be made by the Presbyterians to claim the Shakers in a body
as members of the Presbyterian church. If this account were not
already too long, the reports of the church on the subject would
be quoted, but the fact speaks volumes for the character of the
Shakers and their teaching.”
“In conclusion: I have known the Shaker people now intimately, as
their attorney, for more than a year, and out of the many drunken
Indians I have seen in that time not one was a Shaker. Not one
of their people has been arrested for crime in that time. They
are good citizens, and are far more temperate and peaceable than
those Indians belonging to the other churches. I feel that their
church is a grand success in that it prevents idleness and vice,
drunkenness and disorder, and tends to produce quiet, peaceable
citizens, and good Christian people. I think the Presbyterians
make a mistake in trying to bring the Shakers into their fold—they
ought rather to protect them and give them every assistance in
their autonomy. It adds the greatest incentive to their labors, and
makes them feel as if they were of some account. It lets them labor
for themselves, instead of feeling, as always heretofore, that
some one else—they hardly knew who—was responsible. Their forms of
Christianity are not very unorthodox—their Christianity is quite
orthodox, not exactly because they take Slocum’s revelation instead
of the Bible, but the result is the same—a Christian.”
“+James Wickersham.+”
“+Tacoma, Washington+, _June 25, 1893_.”
From competent Indian informants of eastern Washington—Charles Ike,
half-blood Yakima interpreter, and Chief Wolf Necklace of the Pä’lus,
we gather additional particulars, from which it would appear that
there are more things in the Shaker system than are dreamed of in the
philosophy of the Presbyterian general assembly.
According to their statements, Yowaluch, or Ai-yäl, as he is known
east of the Cascades, was noted as a gambler before he received his
revelation. His followers are called _Shäpupu-‛lĕma_, or “blowers,”
by the Yakima, from the fact that on meeting a stranger, instead of
at once shaking hands with him in the usual manner, they first wave
the hand gently in front of his face like a fan, and blow on him, in
order to “blow away the badness” from him. They first appeared among
the Yakima and other eastern tribes about six years ago, and are
gradually gaining adherents, although as yet they have no regular time
or place of assembly. They are much addicted to making the sign of the
cross—the cross, it is hardly necessary to state, being as much an
Indian as a Christian symbol—and are held in great repute as doctors,
their treatment consisting chiefly of hypnotic performances over the
patient, resulting in the spasmodic shaking already described. In
doctoring a patient the “blowers” usually gather around him in a circle
to the number of about twelve, dressed in a very attractive ceremonial
costume, and each wearing on his head a sort of crown of woven cedar
bark, in which are fixed two lighted candles, while in his right hand
he carries a small cloth, and in the left another lighted candle. By
fastening screens of colored cloth over the candles the light is made
to appear yellow, white, or blue. The candle upon the forehead is
yellow, symbolic of the celestial glory; that at the back of the head
is white, typical of the terrestrial light, while the third is blue,
the color of the sky.
Frequently also they carry in their hands or wear on their heads
garlands of roses and other flowers of various colors, yellow, white,
and blue being the favorite, which they say represent the colors of
objects in the celestial world. While the leader is going through his
hypnotic performance over the patient the others are waving the cloths
and swinging in circles the candles held in their hands. In all this it
is easy to see the influence of the Catholic ritual, with its censers,
tapers, and flowers, with which these tribes have been more or less
familiar for the last fifty years.
A single instance will suffice to show the methods of the blower
doctors. The story is told from the Indian point of view, as related
by the half-blood interpreter, who believed it all. About six years
ago two of these doctors from the north, while visiting near Woodland
on the Columbia, were called to the assistance of a woman who was
seriously ill, and had received no benefit from the treatment of
the native doctors. They came and almost immediately on seeing the
patient announced to the relatives that the sickness had been put into
her by the evil magic of a neighboring medicine-man, whom they then
summoned into their presence. When the messenger arrived for him, the
medicine-man refused to go, saying that the doctors were liars and
that he had not made the woman ill. By their clairaudient power—or
possibly by a shrewd anticipation of probabilities—the doctors in the
other house knew of his refusal and sent another messenger to tell
him that concealment or denial would not avail him, and that if he
refused to come they would proceed to blow the sickness into his own
body. Without further argument he accompanied the messengers to the
sick woman’s house. As he entered, the chief doctor stepped up to
him and looking intently into his face, said, “I can see your heart
within your body, and it is black with evil things. You are not fit
to live. You are making this woman sick, but we shall take out the
badness from her body.” With the cloths and lighted candles the two
doctors then approached the sick woman, and commanded her to arise,
which she did, although she had been supposed to be too weak to stand.
Waving the cloths in front of her with a gentle fanning motion, and
blowing upon her at the same time, they proceeded to drive the disease
out of her body, beginning at the feet and working upward until, as
they approached the head the principal doctor changed the movement to
a rapid fanning and corresponding blowing, while the assistant stood
ready with his cloth to seize the disease when it should be driven out.
All this time the medicine-man standing a few feet away was shaking and
quivering like one in a fit, and the trembling became more violent and
spasmodic as the doctors increased the speed of their motions. Finally
the leader brought his hands together over the woman’s head, where,
just as the disease attempted to escape, it was seized and imprisoned
in the cloth held by his assistant. Then, going up to the medicine-man,
with a few rapid passes they fanned the disease into his body and he
fell down dead. The woman recovered, and with her sister has recently
come up to the Yakima country as an apostle of the new religion,
preaching the doctrines and performing the wonders which she has been
taught by the Nisqually doctors.
This is the Indian story as told by the half-blood, who did not claim
to have been an eye-witness, but spoke of it as a matter of common
knowledge and beyond question. It is doubtless substantially correct.
The hypnotic action described is the same which the author has
repeatedly seen employed in the Ghost dance, resulting successively in
involuntary trembling, violent spasmodic action, rigidity, and final
deathlike unconsciousness. The Ghost dancers regard the process not
only as a means of bringing them into trance communication with their
departed friends, but also as a preventive and cure of disease, just
as we have our faith healers and magnetic doctors. With the Indian’s
implicit faith in the supernatural ability of the doctor, it is easy
to suppose that the mental effect on the woman, who was told and
believed that she was to be cured, would aid recovery if recovery was
possible. It is unlikely that death resulted to the medicine-man. It
is more probable that under the hypnotic spell of the doctors he fell
unconscious and apparently lifeless and remained so perhaps for a
considerable time, as frequently happens with sensitive subjects in
the Ghost dance. The fact that the same process should produce exactly
opposite effects in the two subjects is easily explainable. The object
of the hypnotic performance was simply to bring the mind of the subject
under the control of the operator. This accomplished, the mental, and
ultimately the physical, effect on either subject was whatever the
operator wished it to be. After bringing both under mental control in
the manner described, he suggested recovery to the woman and sickness
or death to the medicine-man, and the result followed.
Until the advent of these women from beyond the mountains such hypnotic
performances seem to have been unknown among the Yakima and other
eastern tribes of the Columbia region, the trance condition in the
Smohalla devotees being apparently due entirely to the effect of the
rhythmic dances and songs acting on excited imaginations, without the
aid of blowing or manual passes.
Hypnotism and so-called magnetism, however, appear to have been
employed by the medicine-men of the Chinook tribes of the lower
Columbia from ancient times. Especially wonderful in this connection
are the stories told of one of these men residing at Wushqûm or Wisham,
near The Dalles.
About the time the two blower doctors appeared at Woodland, other
apostles of the same doctrine, or it may have been the same two
men, went up Willamet river into central Oregon, teaching the same
system and performing the same wonders among the tribes of that
region. And here comes in a remarkable coincidence, if it be no more.
It is said among the northern Indians that on this journey these
apostles met, somewhere in the south, a young man to whom they taught
their mysteries, in which he became such an apt pupil that he soon
outstripped his teachers, and is now working even greater wonders
among his own people. This young man can be no other than Wovoka,
the messiah of the Ghost dance, living among the Paiute in western
Nevada. The only question is whether the story told among the Columbia
tribes is a myth based on vague rumors of the southern messiah and
his hypnotic performances, so similar to that of the blower doctors,
or whether Wovoka actually derived his knowledge of such things from
these northern apostles. The latter supposition is entirely within
the bounds of possibility. The time corresponds with the date of his
original revelations, as stated by himself to the writer. He is a young
man, and, although he has never been far from home, the tribe to which
he belongs roams in scattered bands over the whole country to the
Willamet and the watershed of the Columbia, so that communication with
the north is by no means difficult. He himself stated that Indians from
Warmspring reservation, in northern Oregon, have attended his dances
near Walker lake.
+Chapter IX+
WOVOKA THE MESSIAH
When the sun died, I went up to heaven and saw God and all the
people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back
and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and
not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my
people.—_Wovoka._
When Tävibo, the prophet of Mason valley, died, about 1870, he left a
son named Wovoka, “The Cutter,” about 14 years of age. The prophetic
claims and teachings of the father, the reverence with which he was
regarded by the people, and the mysterious ceremonies which were
doubtless of frequent performance in the little tulé wikiup at home
must have made early and deep impression on the mind of the boy,
who seems to have been by nature of a solitary and contemplative
disposition, one of those born to see visions and hear still voices.
[Illustration: +Fig. 69+—Wovoka.]
The physical environment was favorable to the development of such a
character. His native valley, from which he has never wandered, is
a narrow strip of level sage prairie some 30 miles in length, walled
in by the giant sierras, their sides torn and gashed by volcanic
convulsions and dark with gloomy forests of pine, their towering
summits white with everlasting snows, and roofed over by a cloudless
sky whose blue infinitude the mind instinctively seeks to penetrate to
far-off worlds beyond. Away to the south the view is closed in by the
sacred mountain of the Paiute, where their Father gave them the first
fire and taught them their few simple arts before leaving for his home
in the upper regions of the Sun-land. Like the valley of Rasselas, it
seems set apart from the great world to be the home of a dreamer.
The greater portion of Nevada is an arid desert of rugged mountains
and alkali plains, the little available land being confined to narrow
mountain valleys and the borders of a few large lakes. These tracts
are occupied by scattered ranchmen engaged in stock raising, and as
the white population is sparse, Indian labor is largely utilized, the
Paiute being very good workers. The causes which in other parts of
the country have conspired to sweep the Indian from the path of the
white man seem inoperative here, where the aboriginal proprietors are
regarded rather as peons under the protection of the dominant race, and
are allowed to set up their small camps of tulé lodges in convenient
out-of-the-way places, where they spend the autumn and winter in
hunting, fishing, and gathering seeds and piñon nuts, working at fair
wages on ranches through spring and summer. In this way young Wovoka
became attached to the family of a ranchman in Mason valley, named
David Wilson, who took an interest in him and bestowed on him the name
of Jack Wilson, by which he is commonly known among the whites. From
his association with this family he gained some knowledge of English,
together with a confused idea of the white man’s theology. On growing
up he married, and still continued to work for Mr Wilson, earning a
reputation for industry and reliability, but attracting no special
notice until nearly 30 years of age, when he announced the revelation
that has made him famous among the tribes of the west.
Following are the various forms of his name which I have noticed:
Wo′voka, or Wü′voka, which I have provisionally rendered “Cutter,”
derived from a verb signifying “to cut;” Wevokar, Wopokahte,
Kwohitsauq, Cowejo, Koit-tsow, Kvit-Tsow, Quoitze Ow, Jack Wilson,
Jackson Wilson, Jack Winson, John Johnson. He has also been confounded
with Bannock Jim, a Mormon Bannock of Fort Hall reservation, Idaho, and
with Johnson Sides, a Paiute living near Reno, Nevada, and bitterly
opposed to Wovoka. His father’s name, Tävibo, has been given also as
Waughzeewaughber. It is not quite certain that the Paiute prophet of
1870 was the father of Wovoka. This is stated to have been the case
by one of Captain Lee’s informants (_A. G. O., 4_) and by Lieutenant
Phister (_Phister, 2_). Wovoka himself says that his father did not
preach, but was a “dreamer” with supernatural powers. Certain it is
that a similar doctrine was taught by an Indian living in the same
valley in Wovoka’s boyhood. Possibly the discrepancy might be explained
by an unwillingness on the part of the messiah to share his spiritual
honors.
In proportion as Wovoka and his doctrines have become subjects of
widespread curiosity, so have they become subjects of ignorant
misrepresentation and deliberate falsification. Different writers have
made him a Paiute, a half-blood, and a Mormon white man. Numberless
stories have been told of the origin and character of his mission and
the day predicted for its final accomplishment. The most mischievous
and persistent of these stories has been that which represents him as
preaching a bloody campaign against the whites, whereas his doctrine is
one of peace, and he himself is a mild-tempered member of a weak and
unwarlike tribe. His own good name has been filched from him and he
has been made to appear under a dozen different cognomens, including
that of his bitterest enemy, Johnson Sides. He has been denounced as an
impostor, ridiculed as a lunatic, and laughed at as a pretended Christ,
while by the Indians he is revered as a direct messenger from the
Other World, and among many of the remote tribes he is believed to be
omniscient, to speak all languages, and to be invisible to a white man.
We shall give his own story as told by himself, with such additional
information as seems to come from authentic sources.
Notwithstanding all that had been said and written by newspaper
correspondents about the messiah, not one of them had undertaken to
find the man himself and to learn from his own lips what he really
taught. It is almost equally certain that none of them had even seen
a Ghost dance at close quarters—certainly none of them understood
its meaning. The messiah was regarded almost as a myth, something
intangible, to be talked about but not to be seen. The first reliable
information as to his personality was communicated by the scout, Arthur
Chapman, who, under instructions from the War Department, visited
the Paiute country in December, 1890, and spent four days at Walker
lake and Mason valley, and in the course of an interview with Wovoka
obtained from him a detailed statement similar in all essentials to
that which I obtained later on. (_Sec. War, 3._)
After having spent seven months in the field, investigating the new
religion among the prairie tribes, particularly the Arapaho, and after
having examined all the documents bearing on the subject in the files
of the Indian Office and War Department, the author left Washington
in November, 1891, to find and talk with the messiah and to gather
additional material concerning the Ghost dance. Before starting, I
had written to the agent in charge of the reservation to which he
was attached for information in regard to the messiah (Jack Wilson)
and the dance, and learned in reply, with some surprise, that the
agent had never seen him. The surprise grew into wonder when I was
further informed that there were “neither Ghost songs, dances, nor
ceremonials” among the Paiute.[6] This was discouraging, but not
entirely convincing, and I set out once more for the west. After a few
days with the Omaha and Winnebago in Nebraska, and a longer stay with
the Sioux at Pine Ridge, where traces of the recent conflict were still
fresh on every hand, I crossed over the mountains and finally arrived
at Walker Lake reservation in Nevada.
On inquiry I learned that the messiah lived, not on the reservation,
but in Mason valley, about 40 miles to the northwest. His uncle,
Charley Sheep, lived near the agency, however, so I sought him
out and made his acquaintance. He spoke tolerable—or rather
intolerable—English, so that we were able to get along together
without an interpreter, a fact which brought us into closer sympathy,
as an interpreter is generally at best only a necessary evil. As
usual, he was very suspicious at first, and inquired minutely as to
my purpose. I explained to him that I was sent out by the government
to the various tribes to study their customs and learn their stories
and songs; that I had obtained a good deal from other tribes and now
wanted to learn some songs and stories of the Paiute, in order to write
them down so that the white people could read them. In a casual way
I then offered to show him the pictures of some of my Indian friends
across the mountains, and brought out the photos of several Arapaho
and Cheyenne who I knew had recently come as delegates to the messiah.
This convinced him that I was all right, and he became communicative.
The result was that we spent about a week together in the wikiups
(lodges of tulé rushes), surrounded always by a crowd of interested
Paiute, discussing the old stories and games, singing Paiute songs,
and sampling the seed mush and roasted piñon nuts. On one of these
occasions, at night, a medicine-man was performing his incantations
over a sick child on one side of the fire while we were talking on
the other. When the ice was well thawed, I cautiously approached the
subject of the ghost songs and dance, and, as confidence was now
established, I found no difficulty in obtaining a number of the songs,
with a description of the ceremonial. I then told Charley that, as I
had taken part in the dance, I was anxious to see the messiah and get
from him some medicine-paint to bring back to his friends among the
eastern tribes. He readily agreed to go with me and use his efforts
with his nephew to obtain what was wanted.
It is 20 miles northward by railroad from Walker River agency to
Wabuska, and 12 miles more in a southwesterly direction from there
to the Mason valley settlement. There we met a young white man named
Dyer, who was well acquainted with Jack Wilson, and who also spoke the
Paiute language, and learned from him that the messiah was about 12
miles farther up the valley, near a place called Pine Grove. Enlisting
his services, with a team and driver, making four in all, we started
up toward the mountain. It was New Year’s day of 1892, and there was
deep snow on the ground, a very unusual thing in this part of the
country, and due in this instance, as Charley assured us, to the direct
agency of Jack Wilson. It is hard to imagine anything more monotonously
unattractive than a sage prairie under ordinary circumstances unless it
be the same prairie when covered by a heavy fall of snow, under which
the smaller clumps of sagebrush look like prairie-dog mounds, while
the larger ones can hardly be distinguished at a short distance from
wikiups. However, the mountains were bright in front of us, the sky was
blue overhead, and the road was good under foot.
Soon after leaving the settlement we passed the dance ground with the
brush shelters still standing. We met but few Indians on the way. After
several miles we noticed a man at some distance from the road with
a gun across his shoulder. Dyer looked a moment and then exclaimed,
“I believe that’s Jack now!” The Indian thought so, too, and pulling
up our horses he shouted some words in the Paiute language. The man
replied, and sure enough it was the messiah, hunting jack rabbits. At
his uncle’s call he soon came over.
As he approached I saw that he was a young man, a dark full-blood,
compactly built, and taller than the Paiute generally, being nearly
6 feet in height. He was well dressed in white man’s clothes, with
the broad-brimmed white felt hat common in the west, secured on his
head by means of a beaded ribbon under the chin. This, with a blanket
or a robe of rabbit skins, is now the ordinary Paiute dress. He wore
a good pair of boots. His hair was cut off square on a line below
the base of the ears, after the manner of his tribe. His countenance
was open and expressive of firmness and decision, but with no marked
intellectuality. The features were broad and heavy, very different from
the thin, clear-cut features of the prairie tribes.
[Illustration: PL. XCII
WINTER VIEW IN MASON VALLEY, SHOWING SNOW-COVERED SAGEBRUSH]