Wovoka

Chapter 1

A country that fed its people

The Northern Paiute call themselves Numu, the People. Their home is the western Great Basin, the dry valleys and bright lakes along the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada.

It looks like desert. It was a pantry. In spring the lakes and rivers ran with fish. In summer there were seeds and roots. In autumn whole families went up into the mountains to gather pine nuts from the piñon trees, enough to last the winter. People moved with the seasons and knew where everything was.

The people of the Walker River, where Wovoka would one day be buried, are called the Agai Dicutta, the Trout Eaters, after the great trout of their lake. In their own telling, the world was once all water, until a flaming mountain, Kurangwa, rose out of it. The sagehen sheltered the fire under her wings, and her breast feathers are still scorched black. What was left of the water became Agai Pah, Trout Lake. Each spring the trout ran up the river, and neighbouring peoples came to share the feast.

Sometimes we are called Pine-nut eaters, for we are the only tribe that lives in the country where Pine-nuts grow.

Sarah Winnemucca was a Paiute girl when the first white wagon trains crossed her people's country in the 1840s. She grew up to write the first book ever published by a Native American woman. Much of what we know about those years, told from the Paiute side, comes from her.

Sources: Walker River Paiute Tribe · Johnson 1975, pp. 7–16 · Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, chs. I and IV

Chapter 2

Silver

Wovoka was born around 1856 near the Walker River in western Nevada. He was about three years old when everything changed.

In 1859 prospectors found silver in the hills above the Carson River: the Comstock Lode, one of the richest silver strikes ever found. Within a few years the boomtown of Virginia City stood on the mountain. Sarah Winnemucca remembered wintering there as a child, before it was built. It was then our Pine-nut mountains.

The mines and mills needed wood, and the nearest wood was the piñon forest, the trees whose nuts fed the Paiute every winter. By 1868 the piñon near the mines was gone, and by 1880 the mines had burned more than two million cords of wood. In 1863 the Paiute leader Numaga went to the mining camp of Como and told its leading men that the pine nut groves were the Indian's orchards, and must not be cut. No one listened. The grass went the same way. At Pyramid Lake, ranchers ran some 3,000 cattle on Paiute land on a promise to pay the leader Winnemucca for herding them, then refused to pay.

Violence came with the miners. In 1860, two Paiute girls who had gone missing were found tied and gagged, hidden under a trap door at a trading post on the Carson River. Their relatives killed the men who kept the post. A volunteer militia marched on the Paiute at Pyramid Lake without asking what had happened, and the Paiute beat them. A larger force came back. Wovoka later worked out his own age from that war: he had been about as big as his own four-year-old son.

In March 1865 soldiers rode into a Paiute fishing camp at Mud Lake and killed almost everyone there. Most were old men, women and children. One of them was Sarah Winnemucca's baby brother.

Oh, it is a fearful thing to tell, but it must be told. Yes, it must be told by me.

Two years later the railroad came through. The white people have taken all the best part of the reservation from us, she wrote, and one of the lakes also.

The silver and the pine nuts: how the Comstock was paid for by the Paiute, in the words of the time.

Sources: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, chs. III to V · Reid and James 2004, p. 13 · Hittman 1990, p. 51 · Lord 1883, p. 351 · Angel 1881, p. 169 · Knack and Stewart 1984, pp. 65–66, 76 · Mooney 1896, p. 771

Chapter 3

The West taken apart

What happened to the Paiute was happening everywhere west of the Mississippi, and fast. In the space of one man's childhood and youth, the West that Native peoples had lived in for thousands of years was broken up and fenced off.

On the Walker River it went step by step. In 1906 the reservation was opened to white settlers. The People gave up about 268,000 acres, Walker Lake included, for twenty-acre allotments and about $30,000 in all; each family head saw $25 of it in cash. In 1919 a federal court, in a case the tribe was not even part of, left the reservation a share of the river so small that it ran dry by July. A dam built in the 1930s had no fish ladder, and the great trout could no longer reach the river to spawn.

At Pyramid Lake, the Paiute's other great lake to the north, the state and the federal government did the taking themselves. Through the 1870s and 1880s the people there sold up to 100,000 pounds of trout a year, most of the cash the reservation had. In 1891 a new Nevada law stopped the fish being shipped for half the year, and the next year that income was gone. In 1905 the government finished Derby Dam, ten miles up the Truckee River, and began sending about half the river to new farms in another valley. No one asked the tribe. The lake fell by about eighty feet, and the trout's road up the river to spawn was cut. This lake is my meat, the elder Dave Numana told the agent in 1922.

None of it was an accident. The bison were the Plains peoples' food, shelter and clothing; with the herds gone, people who had fed themselves for generations had to line up at a government agency for rations, and the rations became a way to make them give up more land (how it was done). The land and the water went to ranches, railroads and mines. Children were sent away to boarding schools to be made to forget their languages. One opened in Carson City, Nevada, in December 1890, for Paiute, Washoe and Shoshone children.

See it on the map: the homelands, then the West of 1870 and 1876, then the government's reservation maps of 1883, 1888 and 1892, laid on top of each other.

There are words for this now. What was done to the land is called ecocide. What was done to the people is called genocide, and in California the state itself uses that word.

Sources: Hornaday 1889 · Madley 2016 · California Executive Order N-15-19 · US Geological Survey · Johnson 1975, pp. 105, 107, 126, 136, 152 · Knack and Stewart 1984, pp. 269–279, 301–303, 342–343 · Mooney 1896, p. 826 · Stewart Indian School · US Department of the Interior 2024

Chapter 4

Jack Wilson

Wovoka's family worked for a white rancher in Mason Valley, David Wilson. Food was scarce, and the Paiute families who worked for the Wilsons brought their children to the ranch to be fed. Wovoka, about eight years old, started playing with the Wilson boys, Billy and Joe: marbles, swimming and fishing in the Walker River, and practical jokes, which all three loved. The Wilsons called him Jack Wilson, and that is what most white people called him for the rest of his life.

The rest depends on who tells it. James Mooney was told that the boy's father died when he was about fourteen and that the Wilsons took him in. Paiute elders remembered it differently: his father, Numu-tibo'o, known in English as Buckskin, lived until about 1914, and one of them said plainly that Wovoka was raised by his own parents, not by the Wilsons. Hittman, revising his biography in 1997, came down on their side. Neighbours remembered the family living in their own hut near the ranch house, and hospital records show his mother was still alive in 1898. He was no orphan.

Either way he grew up around the ranch. He learned English there, and heard David Wilson read the Bible aloud every morning after breakfast. As a grown man he married and kept working, known as hard-working and reliable. His name, Wovoka, means "the Cutter": cutting something into many pieces, the elders say, like wood. That was his work. He cut wood for the mines and the mills, because, as his son-in-law put it, the power was made by wood. Paiute men like him were paid to cut down the piñon their families had lived on.

Among his own people he was also something else: a weather doctor, a man who could bring rain or snow. In a drought in the late 1880s, with the Walker River shrinking to a trickle, the Paiute police captain Josephus rode twenty-five miles to ask him for rain. Wovoka sat all evening with his head bowed and said nothing. In the morning he said the rain would come on the third day. It came, the river flooded, and Josephus became a believer. White ranchers paid him for rain too, and one said his forecasts were so good he used him as a weathervane. People told of a hot July day when a block of ice fell out of the sky onto a blanket Wovoka had spread by the river.

His father had been known as a doctor and a dreamer too. And around 1870 another Paiute prophet near Walker Lake, Wodziwob, had taught that the dead would come back, and a dance spread from there for a time. Paiute accounts say Wodziwob lived on for decades as a doctor, known as Fishlake Joe. Wovoka grew up with that memory.

Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 701–703, 764–765, 771–772 · Hittman 1990, pp. 9, 29–34, 48–55, 293 · Hittman 1997, pp. 201, 212, 224, 295, 357 · Warren 2017, pp. 57, 82, 106–112 · Du Bois 1939 · Johnson 1975, pp. 42–44

Chapter 5

The day the sun died

On 1 January 1889 the moon passed in front of the sun. Over Mason Valley it covered almost all of the sun, and the daylight dimmed in the early afternoon. People in Mason Valley shouted and fired guns into the air to drive away whatever was eating the sun.

Wovoka was lying sick with a fever. He said afterwards that when the sun died, he was taken up to the other world.

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.

In that world he saw the dead young again and happy, hunting and living as they used to, in a good land full of game. If the living kept to what God asked of them and danced the dance he was given, they would be reunited with the dead on a renewed earth, with no more sickness, old age or death.

That is how Mooney heard it, and how the Plains peoples took it. In Mason Valley, Paiute memory kept a gentler version: the dead were happy in heaven, and the living would join them there. Don't feel bad, Nellie Emm remembered him telling mourners. Because when you die you're going to meet them up in heaven.

Josephus remembered that the vision came while Wovoka was cutting wood in the mountains and heard a great noise. And Yerington Paiute elders, asked in the 1980s, did not connect it with the eclipse at all.

Exactly three years later, the government researcher James Mooney came to Mason Valley to find him. He came with Wovoka's uncle, Charley Sheep, and a young Yerington grocer, Ed Dyer, to interpret. Deep snow lay over the valley; Sheep said that was his nephew's doing. They found his camp up the East Walker River, and the two men talked for hours at a table in a neighbouring rancher's house. Mooney found a man of about thirty-five, back from hunting jackrabbits: nearly six feet tall, in a good suit of work clothes and a broad white hat, living in a traditional Paiute house and working on a ranch. Wovoka told him his religion was one of "universal peace". He made no claim to be Christ, and offered no proof. He said simply that he had been with God, Mooney wrote, "as though the statement no more admitted of controversy than the proposition that 2 and 2 are 4."

Much of what we know of Wovoka's own words comes from that conversation.

Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 764, 768–777 · Hittman 1990, pp. 8, 65 · Hittman 1997, pp. 196–198, 207–208, 258

Chapter 6

What he stood for

In February 1890 at least two hundred men stood in a driving snowstorm on the Walker River reservation to hear Wovoka. Soon people were coming to Mason Valley from all over the West to hear him. In August 1891 a young Arapaho, Casper Edson, wrote down on the spot what Wovoka told his delegation, so it could be carried home. It is the closest thing we have to Wovoka's teaching in his own voice:

When your friends die you must not cry. You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life.

Put simply, he asked for four things.

• Peace. Do not fight, not each other and not the whites. Do no harm to anyone.
• Goodness. Love one another. Do not lie or steal. Work.
• Hope. Do not mourn the dead; they are coming back, and the earth will be made new.
• Together. Dance, all of you, side by side, hands joined in one circle.

The Lakota visitor Short Bull remembered more practical advice too: work your land, send your children to school, go to church and do not quarrel over which one. All these churches are mine, Wovoka told him. He never joined one himself. He had his own belief, his daughter Alice said.

That last one mattered. Peoples who had been bitter enemies for generations (Mooney names the Ute, the Cheyenne and the Pawnee) now danced the same dance. Mooney wrote in the prejudiced language of his day, but he saw what it meant. He called it such a revolution as comes but once in the life of a race.

Wovoka's dream was not of war. It was of the land and the people made whole again, without anyone lifting a weapon.

Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 772, 777, 780–783 · Warren 2017, pp. 185–186 · Hittman 1997, p. 200 · Johnson 1975, p. 48 · Kehoe 2006

Chapter 7

The dance

At the upper end of Mason Valley, Wovoka's people cleared a great circle of sagebrush and levelled the ground. Around its edge they built low shelters of willow branches for the people who came to stay. On one side stood a larger shelter of branches, where Wovoka met the delegates from far away.

The dance itself was simple. Mooney, who watched it among the Arapaho, the Cheyenne and others, described it like this. Men, women and children joined hands, fingers laced together, in one great circle, and moved slowly to the left, the way the sun travels, with a soft dragging step, singing as they went. Each song began quietly, with everyone standing still, and then swelled as the circle began to turn. Old people with sticks danced, and small children, and the circle slowed for them. There was no drum and no rattle; in that, Mooney wrote, it was unlike every other Indian dance.

The Paiute danced four nights in a row, and on the last night kept on until the morning of the fifth day, as Wovoka told his visitors to do. Then everyone shook out their blankets in the air, to drive away sickness and evil, and went down to wash in the river before going home.

What they sang

Mooney wrote down nine of the Paiute songs, taking them from Wovoka himself and from his uncle, Charley Sheep. They are about the land: snow on the mountains, wind in the grass, the whirlwind, the rocks ringing in a storm. This one, Mooney was told, was among the favourites. In Paiute belief the Milky Way is the road the dead travel to the other world.

Nüvä′ ka ro′răni′!
Gosi′pa′ hävi′gĭnû′.

The snow lies there!
The snow lies there!
The Milky Way lies there,
The Milky Way lies there.

Mooney thought this one pictured the new earth on its way:

The whirlwind! The whirlwind!
The snowy earth comes gliding, the snowy earth comes gliding.

Others are simply the land itself:

The wind stirs the willows,
The wind stirs the grasses.

And this one, he thought, is the coming of spring:

The cottonwoods are growing tall,
They are growing tall and verdant.

One was made by an old woman who left the circle, stood alone in the middle of the ring, and called on the weather: Fog! Fog! Lightning! Lightning! Whirlwind! Whirlwind!

The ghost shirts

As the dance travelled east, each people made it their own. On the Plains, dancers wore shirts and dresses of white cloth or buckskin, painted with the sun, moon and stars, birds, and whatever they had seen in their trances, and hung with eagle feathers. Among the Lakota the shirts were believed to stop bullets.

That was not Wovoka's teaching. He told Mooney he had nothing to do with the shirts, and they were never part of the dance in Mason Valley. The grocer Ed Dyer, who handled his mail, remembered a likelier start: followers far away wrote asking for a shirt Wovoka had worn himself, and he bought shirts and hats at Dyer's store to send them. Dyer, telling it in old age, thought the idea of a holy shirt grew from that. But many of the Lakota at Wounded Knee wore them.

Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 772, 789–791, 802–803, 919–921, 1052–1055, pl. CIII · Hittman 1997, pp. 198, 257–258

Chapter 8

A thousand miles east

The news travelled by railroad, by letter and by word of mouth. Through 1889 and 1890, peoples across the West sent delegates to Nevada to see the man for themselves. They rode the trains for days. Many of them expected a white man.

I had always thought the Great Father was a white man, but this man looked like an Indian.

Others wrote. Letters came from Cheyenne and Arapaho in Oklahoma addressed to him as "Father". Wovoka had never been to school and could not read them, so he took them to Ed Dyer's store in Yerington. He would not have them read out front (too many ears), so Dyer read them to him in a back room and wrote down his answers.

The delegates went home and taught the dance. Nowhere did it land harder than among the Lakota in South Dakota, because nowhere were people more desperate.

In 1889 the government took half of their remaining land. Families kept waiting at the agency to sign lost their crops. Their beef ration had already been halved (at Pine Ridge, from eight million pounds a year in 1886 to four million in 1889), and right after the land deal Congress cut it again. Measles and whooping cough went through the camps. In 1890 drought burned what crops were left.

Hungry people danced for the world to be made new. The agents, and the newspapers, saw an uprising. In October 1890 the Chicago Tribune printed a war "sermon" said to be Short Bull's, telling dancers to wear holy shirts against the soldiers. It was repeated in history books for a century, but no original exists in the government's files, and it was probably made up. The new agent at Pine Ridge, whom the Lakota nicknamed "Young-man-afraid-of-Indians", telegraphed that the people were "wild and crazy" and asked for troops. In November 1890 the army moved in.

In Nevada the army sent a scout, Arthur Chapman, to find the "messiah" behind it all. He found Wovoka at a ranch house in Smith Valley on 4 December 1890. Wovoka told him that he had told every headman who came to see him to go home and tell his people to keep the peace. Asked whether he had promised to protect the Indians from the whites, he answered: That was my dream. It has not come to pass yet.

Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 795–796, 802–809, 817–821, 826–830, 845–852 · Ostler 2004 · Warren 2017, pp. 186–188 · Hittman 1990, pp. 7–12 · Hittman 1997, p. 257

Chapter 9

Wounded Knee

At daybreak on 15 December 1890, Indian police came to arrest Sitting Bull, the great Lakota leader, at his cabin on the Standing Rock reservation. A crowd gathered. Someone fired. Within minutes Sitting Bull was dead, with seven of his people, among them his seventeen-year-old son, Crow Foot. Six of the police died too.

His frightened followers fled south to the camp of a chief called Big Foot. When an officer asked why he had taken in runaways, Big Foot said they were his brothers and relations, who had come to him "hungry, footsore, and almost naked", and that "no one with a heart could do any less".

Big Foot, sick with pneumonia, set out with his band for Pine Ridge. On 28 December the Seventh Cavalry stopped them and camped them at Wounded Knee Creek: about 470 soldiers around 106 men and their families, with four Hotchkiss machine guns on the rise above, trained on the camp. In the middle of the camp the Lakota raised a white flag.

These were not wild holdouts. Many of Big Foot's people farmed, went to church and sent their children to school; some of the boys were still in their day-school uniforms.

The next morning the soldiers began taking the men's guns. One man, Black Coyote, was deaf. He did not want to give up his rifle, which had cost him money, unless he was paid for it. Two soldiers grabbed him and the gun went off into the air. No one was hit. The soldiers fired into the men, and the guns on the rise opened on the camp. People ran for a ravine and were hunted down along it.

There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce.

The army counted 128 Lakota dead. Mooney, adding the wounded who died later and the bodies found afterwards, put it at very nearly three hundred, most of them women and children. Thirty-one soldiers died.

Some of the wounded were laid in a church. One woman, told that her ghost shirt had to come off so her wound could be treated, said: Yes; take it off. They told me a bullet would not go through. Now I don't want it any more.

A blizzard followed. On New Year's Day a burial party came out, paid two dollars a body, and laid 146 men, women and children in one long trench. Four babies were found still alive beside their mothers. One, a little girl, survived.

About twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for that day. In 1990, a hundred years later, Congress expressed its "deep regret". In 2025 the Secretary of Defense decided that the medals would stand.

Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 790, 857–879, 885 · Warren 2017, pp. 1–7, 286–290 · Richardson 2010 · Green 1994 · S. Con. Res. 153, 1990 · Military Times 2025

Chapter 10

He lived on

Wounded Knee is often told as the end of the story, and the Ghost Dance is often remembered as a Lakota dance. The Western Shoshone historian Ned Blackhawk has pointed out how that memory hides where it began, in the Great Basin. And Wounded Knee was not the end of Wovoka. He told the visitors who still came to go home and stop dancing, and he grew quiet. My boy, don't mention it to the white people, his son-in-law remembered him saying. In 1893 one of the Wilson sons got government permission to take him to the Chicago World's Fair as an attraction. A month before they were due to leave, Wovoka went into the hills and stayed there eight weeks, until the plan was dropped.

He lived another forty-two years in Mason Valley, still working, still visited. He pitched hay, and at the Wilsons' flour mill he kept a running count in his head of all the wheat that came in. He never had a day of school, but he knew how to count, his daughter Alice said. He travelled too, to followers in Oklahoma several times, and to Wyoming and Montana. After his first trip east he came home delighted: he had stood from sunup to sundown shaking hands with the crowds.

People from other nations kept writing to "Jack Wilson" for decades. Twenty-one of their letters survive, from 1908 to 1911, found in a root cellar he had dug on the Wilson ranch. They come from Assiniboine, Lakota, Yankton and Arapaho writers in Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming and as far north as Saskatchewan. They ask him to pray for a sick niece, for medicine against coughs and measles among the children, and what the frightening star in the sky meant; it was Halley's Comet. He sent back sacred red paint from near Mount Grant, packed in old tomato cans, with feathers and medicines. Cloud Horse, who had come to Nevada as a Lakota delegate in 1890, wrote twenty years later that the others laughed at him, but I allways think dear Father that around me you would give me strength. A woman of the Wilson family read the letters to Wovoka and wrote down his answers, and he made sure every reply said there was plenty of rain in Nevada and his people were well and happy.

His own people still had no land. In 1912 he led thirty Mason Valley Paiute to the Walker River reservation to look at land. The superintendent had written that he would make Wovoka "a power for good" or show his people that he had no power; when Wovoka would not go along, the offer was withdrawn. That August the same superintendent stopped the Indian dance planned for Yerington's Labor Day and threatened to arrest its leaders, and Washington backed him against gatherings that kept up ancient and barbarous customs. Wovoka, he complained, had been telling his people they were the same as in jail.

Near the end he told his son-in-law that no one in the family could take his place. It will probably be forgotten when I pass away. His wife Mary died in August 1932. He died a month later, on 29 September, at the Yerington Indian Colony, and is buried in the Paiute cemetery at Schurz.

Late in life he told his followers that when he died he would shake the earth to let them know he had reached heaven. About three months after his death a powerful earthquake shook Nevada. Son of a gun, Jack! said one white neighbour. Said he was gonna shake this world if he made it, and by God, he did!

The dance did not end with him either. The Caddo in Oklahoma kept it as a weekly observance for a century. And in 2006 his own neighbours, the Walker River Paiute Tribe, brought the Ghost Dance back, partly to heal the river and Walker Lake.

And his own people did not let him be forgotten. In 1936 the Paiute of Mason and Smith Valleys got farm land of their own at last, and the Yerington Paiute Tribe's first chairman was Wovoka's grandson, Dennis Bender. In 1975 the Tribe put up a marker to Wovoka. In 1986 it started a Wovoka Project, and in August 1989, a hundred years after his vision, it held a centennial celebration. The next year it published his biography, and its Wovoka Project asked for a postage stamp of "the great visionary and man of peace".

And some of what was taken is coming back. Since 2019, water bought back from upstream farms has been flowing into Walker Lake again. The Walker River Paiute Tribe puts it in its own words:

We are still resourceful in use of the land and reciprocity of responsibility to the land.

Sources: Hittman 1990, pp. ix, xi, 37, 42, 55, 102–103, 149–150, 168–176 · Hittman 1997, preface, pp. 213, 216–219, 351 · Dangberg 1957, pp. 284–293 · Blackhawk 2006, pp. 268–269 · Warren 2017, pp. 368–372, 399 · Kehoe 2006 · Walker Basin Conservancy · Walker River Paiute Tribe · Yerington Paiute Tribe

See it year by year on the timeline, or read the books this story comes from.

A note

Why a company carries his name

This site is kept by Wovoka, a company that restores damaged tropical land together with the communities who hold it, starting in the Philippines. The company took his name. Its field app, which pays community members to photograph and record their own land, is called Ghost Dance.

We took the name because of the vision: an earth made whole again, the land and what lives on it restored, and the people who belong to it alive on it. We are not Paiute, we do not speak for the Paiute, and the name is not ours to explain away. What we can do is make sure that anyone who meets the name can find out who he was, what he taught, and what was done to his people and their land.

We have asked the Yerington Paiute Tribe and the Walker River Paiute Tribe to review this site, and to tell us if they object to our use of these names. What they say will be reflected here.

The company's own site is wovoka.io.

About

About this site

This is not a tribal website. It is put together from published sources, every one listed under Read more with links, most of them free to read online. It sells nothing and asks for nothing. There are no photographs of Wovoka or of any Native person here, by choice. The songs and the description of the dance are those James Mooney published in 1896, from what Wovoka and his people told him.

Some things often said about Wovoka, the Ghost Dance and the buffalo do not hold up. Often said, and what the record says checks eight of them against the sources.

If something here is wrong, missing, or should not be here, please write to lee@wovoka.org. Corrections from Paiute people come first.

Last updated 13 October 2026.