Wovoka (1858?-29 Sept. 1932), Northern Paiute prophet of the 1890 Ghost Dance, was the son of Tavibo, a shaman and headman who was involved in the 1870 Ghost Dance. Wovoka was commonly known as Jack Wilson. Although generally reported as having been born in the Walker River country, a 1910 census schedule lists California as his birthplace and his birth year as 1858. A 1900 census schedule, however, gives Wovoka's birthplace as Nevada and the year of his birth as 1855.

Widespread hunger was being experienced by the Northern Paiutes when Wovoka's mother died and his father became involved with the Ghost Dance. The boy seems to have then set out on his own. He soon became associated with the family of Presbyterian rancher David Wilson of Mason Valley, whose brother had in 1865 discovered a rich mine at Pine Grove, not far to the south. Wovoka took the name Jack Wilson and maintained some relations with the David Wilson family for more than four decades. The name Wovoka ("chopper" or "cutter") shows that his primary work for the Wilsons was as a woodchopper.

Sometime between about 1874 and 1879 (probably by 1875) he established his own household, but continued to work for the Wilsons, when he married the Northern Paiute woman Mary, who was about his own age. David Wilson may have read the Bible to Wovoka, as white acquaintances later recalled, but the Christian elements of Wovoka's 1890 Ghost Dance cannot be ascribed to this source. Nor, until after he became prominent, is there evidence that Wovoka traveled beyond his home area, contrary to claims that he had early knowledge of Smohalla's religion of the Pacific Northwest.

The early 1870s were a time of "nativistic" religious ferment among the Indians of the Walker River country. The nativistic movements of the trans-Mississippi West had something of an accretional character, with each movement building on the heritage of the previous one. The 1870 Ghost Dance began as a "cargo cult," promising the arrival of a trainload of goods for the Indians. It later promised the destruction of non-Indians. Wovoka's own 1890 Ghost Dance was first directed toward curing the sick, but soon moved to a second stage very similar to the last stage of the 1870 movement. It is not known if Wovoka was actively involved in the 1870 Ghost Dance.

Sometime between 1875 and 1880 David Wilson purchased his brother's mine at Pine Grove. For the next three decades Wovoka appears to have maintained his summer residence in Smith Valley and to have worked for the Wilsons and others following the pinenut harvest and into winter, which was the season for woodcutting and flour milling for the whites. In January 1892 anthropologist James Mooney found Wovoka's camp at Pine Grove.

Wovoka seems to have dated his first revelation to the series of earth tremors ending in March 1888. At this time Wovoka fell down as if dead and was taken to heaven. God told him that he (Wovoka) had the power to control weather and do other things. God said there must be peace, that all men are brothers, that people must be good to one another, and that people must not steal, lie, swear, or drink liquor. Later God showed him all the people who had died (white as well as Indian), including his mother. God then told him that the people must dance often, four nights and five days (but some sources say five nights) each time--five being the Paiute sacred number--and God gave him five songs (apparently one song for each weather power).

The first putative Ghost Dances after Wovoka's earliest revelation took place in late January and February 1888 at Sodaville and the Walker River Reservation. It is uncertain if these were led by Wovoka. By December 1888, more than a week before the total eclipse of the sun on 1 January 1889, it was stated that the "Mason Valley Piutes [sic] are having big dances every night now." At this time Wovoka's message seems to have only concerned healing the sick. In 1887 the Northern Paiutes suffered the highest death toll from disease (scarlet fever, measles, and smallpox) in almost a quarter of a century, and the dances of early 1888 took place during a new smallpox scare. Directly informed by Wovoka, Mooney called the prophet's vision during the eclipse of 1889 his "Great Revelation": When " . . . 'the sun died' . . . he fell asleep in the daytime and was taken up to the other world." The world, said God, was old and worn out and must be remade. The dead would come back to life; the earth would be enlarged to hold them by doing away with heaven, and the land would be extended into the Pacific Ocean. Volcanic eruptions and mud slides, which would build the new earth, along with floods and whirlwinds would kill the whites. The believers would escape by being taken up into a great cloud above Mount Grant. After a sleep or trance of four or five days, they would descend from the cloud with the Messiah and the revived dead to possess the new earth with its fresh supply of game. Not only must believers dance to ensure the return of the Messiah; they must even quit wearing the clothes of whites. After the world transformation, which would eliminate the whites, the sick would be well, the blind would see, and everyone would become young again.

Following his Great Revelation, Wovoka required that believers dance every three months. Each dance involved singing and dancing in a circle with clasped hands. The writer Dan De Quille believed that Wovoka fell into a trance of about an hour at each dance. When he awoke, he told of the vision he had experienced and then, pointing above, told the people to listen, for he could see and hear the dead above him. Then he called on the people to sing and dance again, until they too could hear and see the dead. Porcupine, however, makes it clear that Wovoka had trances only on the last night, but he erred in believing that Wovoka then claimed to be Christ.

The first demonstration of Wovoka's great powers came at the end of April and the beginning of May 1889. Wovoka brought rain to western Nevada, which had experienced a long drought. This demonstration convinced many skeptical Northern Paiutes and drew emissaries from other tribes. The actual appearance of the Messiah seems to have first been predicted for the winter of 1890-1891. According to Dan De Quille, the plan had been for all the believers to assemble at Mount Grant, but the migration was frustrated by the trouble at the Pine Ridge Reservation and the "Sioux outbreak."

There are definite signs that the Ghost Dance was building to a crescendo in Nevada as the end of 1890 approached. Three large dances in the Western Shoshoni country, heavily attended by Northern Paiutes, and perhaps led by Wovoka, were held in November: at Raycroft Canyon, "near Belmont"; near Battle Mountain; and in Smoky Valley, between Austin and Belmont. The concluding dance, in Mason Valley, was attended by 1,600 people. The scout Chapman interviewed Wovoka a few days later, just before a snow storm ended hope of the arrival of the Messiah. From this interview it is clear that Wovoka conceived of himself as the head of "confederated" tribes of believers. And while the Northern Paiutes north of the Walker River country were actively against him, those of Walker River were solidly in his favor.

By this time Wovoka was prosperous for a Northern Paiute. Although he had three (perhaps four) children with Mary, Wovoka took another, younger wife in November 1890, as befitting a prominent man. He was said to have two "ranches," one in Mason Valley and the other seemingly in Smith Valley, with much stock.

When the Messiah failed to appear before the first snow of the winter of 1890-1891, Wovoka was reported to have extended the time of the Messiah's coming to the spring of 1891. Likely the Bannocks, Kiowas, Arapahoes, and Sioux who met with Wovoka in early 1891 came to find out what had happened to the predicted Messiah. Some of these delegates went away convinced that Wovoka was a fraud, even though he had had a new, third revelation and a new song, from Esa (Wolf), the Northern Paiute culture hero, who would release the dead. Gradually, Wovoka pushed forward the time of the Messiah's appearance from early spring 1891 to mid-May, then June, and finally July. By August 1891 Wovoka had begun to leave open the date of the Messiah's coming.

Following the fighting at Wounded Knee, all the Northern Paiutes feared that the whites might begin a war with them. Wovoka's new revelation effectively defused the potentially explosive "anti-white" doctrines of the Great Revelation. From that time on, Wovoka told emissaries that they should farm and take up white ways when they returned home.

The third revelation appears in the "Messiah Letter" that Mooney printed. Taking up white ways was presented as a "temporary" expedient until the Messiah transformed the earth. Jesus was said to be already on the earth, but Wovoka did not know when the dead would come back. Although this breaks with the nativism of the Great Revelation, it does not necessarily modify the apocalyptic vision.

From the time of the Esa revelation up through 1893, Wovoka may have been more influential than ever. Even though the Sioux had been made to stop dancing by force of arms, and the Western Shoshonis were also said to have stopped, the Kiowas held their first Ghost Dance in the same year, 1891, that the Cheyennes and Arapahoes twice sent delegates to Wovoka. That fall, Caddos, Wichitas, and Delawares went to see Wovoka. From 1892 to 1894 more tribal delegations met with him. In the summer of 1894 the Kiowas again took up the Ghost Dance, in a gathering that was attended by several thousand Indians from all over Oklahoma. Wovoka himself ended his connection with the Ghost Dance the next year. He had told a visiting delegation of Arapahoes in 1892 that he was "tired of so many visitors and wanted them to go home and tell their tribes to stop dancing." The death of Wovoka's son, the third to die in three years, evidently was a factor too. A June 1895 issue of a local paper reported, "The Indian Doctors tell Jack [Wilson] that he talks too much [and] that is the cause of [his sons'] death[s]." Witchcraft could harm his family even if the prophet was immune to it. The presumed source of this witchcraft must have been the Northern Paiutes toward Pyramid Lake, who feared his continuing influence. The tribes that kept dancing after Wovoka's retirement in 1895 did so for varying lengths of time, but after a while more of the tribes ceased to believe that the Messiah would return in the near future. Among some tribes, particularly the Caddo, the Ghost Dance became something of a tribal church, synthesizing some of the elements of Christianity and native beliefs. In some tribes, Ghost Dance leaders turned more and more to peyote at the expense of the Ghost Dance doctrine.

By February 1896 Wovoka was working at the ranch of D. C. Simpson in Smith Valley, and circumstances suggest that he was employed there until 1902 or later. Four more children were born to him between about 1897 and 1902. By 1906 he had begun working seasonally at the Wilson Nordyke flour mill.

Wovoka returned to preaching the Ghost Dance between 1904 and 1906, but very little is known of these activities. During that time, Arapahoes and Sioux visited him. After the tentative revival of the movement, old believers sent Wovoka periodical requests for medicinal assistance, sacred paraphernalia and paint, and items associated with his person, such as shirts and hats, often enclosing money.

During his 1910-1917 revival of the Ghost Dance, Wovoka first became politically active in the concerns of the Northern Paiutes. The earliest dance of the 1910 revival was held in May, just after the appearance of Halley's comet. Probably soon after this dance, Wovoka undertook a mission to the Wind River reservation. His break with the David Wilson family seems to have occurred early in 1912 but surely became final in 1916; it likely began with Wovoka's new concern with Northern Paiute activism. By 1912 the prophet had moved to the Indian settlement near the town of Mason and perhaps lived with or in the vicinity of his declining father. No doctrinal statements survive from the 1910-1917 revival, but Wovoka's failure to burn his father's house and other possessions after his death shows that the prophet still held the views expressed in the Messiah Letter. In addition, it is known that Wovoka preached against peyote, after it became inescapably evident that peyote represented a challenge to Ghost Dance teachings.

The details of Wovoka's missions of 1916 and 1917 are not known. It appears that in 1916 he made two trips to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and on one or both trips went on to Oklahoma. Even fewer details of his 1917 mission are known. The 8 March 1917 issue of the Colony Courier (Okla.) noted that he had just made a "flying trip among Cheyennes and Arapahoes to try to do some Faith Curing among the sick."

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, any disturbance among the Indians was looked on as subversive, and Wovoka appears to have almost immediately halted his Ghost Dance involvement. The Yerington Indian Colony townsite was laid out in early 1918; not long afterward Wovoka moved there and erected a small frame house. On the death of Mary's uncle, she inherited half of allotment number 65 on the reservation, which Wovoka began to farm in late 1921 or early 1922. He may have made final efforts toward reviving the Ghost Dance between 1923 and 1926, but there is no evidence of his missions during this time. A dance of "five nights" held in May 1926 at the colony may have been, however, a Ghost Dance.

Poverty marked Wovoka's last few years. Having managed to maintain a wagon and team of horses, he did occasional work for the government until at least 1931. In 1929 and 1930 his wife Mary was one of twenty-seven destitute Indians drawing rations at the reservation. Wovoka was given a "quantity of old Clothing" by the field matron in early January 1930, and a year later both he and his wife were among the sixty-eight people drawing rations. After Mary's death in August 1931, Wovoka continued to be carried on the rations roll for another year. The prophet himself became very ill in September 1932 and, after two weeks in the care of the agency doctor, died at his Yerington Colony, Nevada, home.

In the 1890s James Mooney said of the Ghost Dance, "The moral code inculcated is as pure and comprehensive as anything found in religious systems from the days of Gautama Buddha to the time of Jesus Christ." Mooney found the best assessment of the prophet and his religion in the words a Christian used to describe one of Wovoka's disciples: "He has given these people a better religion than they ever had before, taught them precepts which, if faithfully carried out, will bring them into better accord with their white neighbors, and has prepared the way for their final Christianization."

Except for the ethnocentrism and Christian value judgments embodied in the remarks he quoted, Mooney's conclusions would still be adequate. Above all, Wovoka's syncretic religion offered Indians a means of accommodating themselves to a dominant alien society while preserving core Indian values. Mooney, however, failed to recognize Wovoka's political message: the unity of Indian believers and Indian interests beyond the interests of tribalism. Wovoka's changes in doctrine reflect his assessments of the political realities facing the Indians of his times, and thus they illustrate his penetrating intellect and acute political understanding. After the failure of his universal message, twice modified, he recognized the potential value of local activism.

Bibliography

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, Special Case 188, National Archives, Washington, D.C., includes virtually all the important letters received by the commissioner of Indian affairs on Wovoka's Ghost Dance movement. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received series, Nevada Superintendency, contains material on Wovoka's people. The papers of the Carson School and Agency, the Reno Agency, and the Walker Lake School and Agency, plus the Dorrington papers, are in the National Archives, Pacific Sierra Region, San Bruno, Calif. Some valuable manuscript items are also in the Nevada State Historical Society (Reno) and the University of Nevada, Reno, Special Collections. The historical society holds the original letters to Wovoka between 1907 and 1911, published by Grace Dangberg in Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 154:279-96, and in a more useful edition in the Nevada Historical Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1968): 1-53. Dangberg's original notebook and the Jennie Weir fieldnotes are also in the historical society collection. The most useful newspapers for Wovoka's life are the Walker Lake Bulletin and the Lyon County Times of Nevada, but many sporadic items of value appear in a great number of 1890-1891 newspapers from all areas of the country. The most important single newspaper items are Dan De Quille's contributions to the Salt Lake Daily Tribune, 21 Dec. 1890, 18 Jan. 1891, and 1 Feb. 1891.

The biography by Paul Bailey, Wovoka, the Indian Messiah (1957), and his fictionalized Ghost Dance Messiah (1970) are in error at almost every point. Michael Hittman, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (1990), is a study of Wovoka's life and summarizes the views of an ethnographer with long experience among Wovoka's people; a third of the book conveniently reprints many of the sources on the prophet. For information on the Northern Paiutes and the Ghost Dance, see Edward C. Johnson, Walker River Paiutes: A Tribal History (1975). For Wovoka's position as a shaman, see Willard Z. Park, Shamanism in Western North America: A Study in Cultural Relationships (1938). James Mooney's classic The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896), based on his own fieldwork and study of Special Case 188, is still the most penetrating work on the movement and contains several important documents, including the Messiah Letter, the only extant letter known to have been dictated by Wovoka. Mooney's book, however, must be considered in light of later studies of the 1870 movement, beginning with Cora Dubois, The 1870 Ghost Dance (1939). The study of the manuscript and newspaper sources cited here was made possible by grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Melburn D. Thurman

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