Nevada · January 1, 1889
A Paiute named Wovoka fell sick with fever as the sun went dark, and woke with a message: the dead would return, and the earth be made new.
Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion · Smithsonian, 1894
His instruction was peace. Do no harm to anyone. Do right always.
Wovoka, recorded by James Mooney
"Father, I come;
Mother, I come;
Brother, I come."
Ghost Dance song · Lakota, 1890
They held one another in a great circle and turned with the sun, until the fine dust rose and hid them from view.
No drum. The rhythm is feet on bare earth, breath, and song — and a closed ring of joined bodies pulls every pulse toward one shared cadence. Hours of it. Hundreds of them.
Mrs. Z. A. Parker, eyewitness · Pine Ridge, June 1890
They raised their eyes to heaven, their hands clasped high above their heads, and stood perfectly still.
Parker, 1890
One by one they broke from the ring and staggered out, and fell where they reeled. The circle drew in smaller and danced on — and there the fallen lay, until dawn.
What a physician sees: sustained exertion and breath blow off CO₂, the brain's own vessels narrow, and an under-perfused body goes down — rigid first, then still. Not the spin of the circle: the pull is far too weak for that. It is the depleted who fall first.
Parker, 1890
And they woke. Each was helped to the center to tell what they had seen — and it was shouted to the crowd. They had not died. They had gone, and come back with news.
Mooney, 1894 · Parker, 1890
In the vision: the buffalo returned, the grass was green, the rivers ran — and the departed, all of them young again. No fences. No end.
Dancers' accounts, collected by Mooney