Was the Ghost Dance a call to war?
No. Wovoka told everyone who came to him the same thing: do not fight, love one another, do right. When James Mooney met him in January 1892 he said his religion was one of “universal peace”. The message written down from his words in 1891 says: You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always.
Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 768–769, 772–773, 777, 780–783 · More: What he stood for
Did Wovoka promise the ghost shirts would stop bullets?
No. The painted shirts came in on the Plains, as the dance travelled east, and among the Lakota they 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. Ed Dyer, the grocer who handled his mail, remembered followers far away writing for a shirt Wovoka had worn himself, and thought the idea of a holy shirt grew from that. That is one man’s memory, recorded late in his life.
Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 772, 789–791 · Hittman 1997, pp. 198, 256–258 · More: The dance
Did Wovoka say he was Christ?
No. Mooney, who sat with him for hours in 1892, wrote that he made no claim to be Christ and offered no proof. He said simply that he had been with God, as though the statement no more admitted of controversy than the proposition that 2 and 2 are 4.
Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 768–769, 772–773 · More: The day the sun died
Was the Ghost Dance a Lakota dance?
Not at first. It began in Nevada, with a Northern Paiute ranch hand in Mason Valley, and crossed the West within a year. The Lakota made it their own, as each people did. The Western Shoshone historian Ned Blackhawk has pointed out how remembering it as a Lakota dance hides where it began, in the Great Basin.
Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 802–809 · Blackhawk 2006, pp. 268–269 · More: A thousand miles east
Was Wounded Knee the end of the story?
No. Wovoka lived another forty-two years in Mason Valley, still working and still visited. He told the visitors who came to go home and stop dancing. People from other nations kept writing to him: twenty-one of their letters survive, from 1908 to 1911, from Assiniboine, Lakota, Yankton and Arapaho writers in Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming and as far north as Saskatchewan. He travelled to followers in Oklahoma several times, and to Wyoming and Montana.
Sources: Hittman 1997, pp. 213, 216–219 · Dangberg 1957, pp. 284–293 · More: He lived on
Was Wovoka an orphan, raised by the Wilsons?
Probably not. Mooney was told that the boy’s father died when he was about fourteen and that the white ranching family he worked for, 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 Wovoka was raised by his own parents. Neighbours remembered the family living in their own hut near the ranch house, and hospital records show his mother was alive in 1898. Hittman, revising his biography in 1997, came down on the elders’ side. The Wilsons did give him the name most white people knew him by, Jack Wilson.
Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 764–765, 771 · Hittman 1997, pp. 201, 207, 212, 295, 357 · More: Jack Wilson
Did the vision come during the eclipse of 1 January 1889?
The sources differ. Mooney, interviewing him three years later to the day, worked out from his account and the astronomers’ tables that the eclipse was the day of his great revelation. A Paiute man named Josephus remembered an earlier experience: Wovoka cutting wood in the mountains, hearing a great noise above him and falling down as if dead. Yerington Paiute elders, asked in the 1980s, did not connect the vision with the eclipse at all.
Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 771–774 · Hittman 1990, pp. 8, 65 · Hittman 1997, pp. 196–198 · More: The day the sun died
Did General Sheridan tell Texas to let the hunters kill off the buffalo?
No record from the time. The speech first appears in a buffalo hunter’s memoir published in 1907, where John Cook tells it as so the story goes
. We have found no record of it from the time, so the buffalo page leaves it out. The record of the time says enough without it: an army officer, Richard Dodge, counted about three million buffalo killed for their hides in 1872 and 1873 alone.
Sources: Cook 1907, p. 113 · Dodge 1877, p. 142 · More: The hide hunters
Every source has an entry under Read more, most of them free to read online. If something here is wrong, please write to lee@wovoka.org. Last updated 20 October 2026.