Every book, record and website this story is drawn from, with links to read them. Paiute and other Native voices come first. The older books are free to read in full; most of the others can be borrowed online from archive.org.
The tribe's own account of its land, Walker Lake (Agai Pahnunadu), its creation story and its history, including the 1859 set-aside and the 1874 executive order that formed the reservation. Wovoka is buried in the Paiute cemetery at Schurz.
The tribal government of Mason Valley, where Wovoka lived. The tribe co-published the first edition of Hittman's biography in 1990.
The first book published by a Native American woman: the Northern Paiute world before and after the emigrants, the taking of the pine-nut mountains and the fisheries, the 1860 war, the Mud Lake killings of 1865, the reservations and the Bannock War, in her words. Wovoka does not appear in it; it is the record of his people in his lifetime. She worked as an army interpreter and her standing among her own people was contested, which she says herself.
The foundational record. Mooney visited Wovoka in Mason Valley on 1 January 1892 and recorded his account of the vision, the Messiah Letter, delegates' accounts such as Porcupine's, and Lakota testimony on Wounded Knee, including American Horse's. Page numbers on this site are the report's. His interpretations reflect a government ethnologist of the 1890s.
The twenty-one surviving letters that people of other nations wrote to Wovoka long after 1890, from Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming and Saskatchewan, asking for his prayers, his medicine and his words. The writers' own spelling is kept. Dangberg's introduction draws on the Wilson family, who read the letters to him and wrote his answers; it is sympathetic but dated in tone, and it misdates Wounded Knee.
Black Elk's own account of the Ghost Dance among the Lakota and of Wounded Knee, which he saw.
The biography, commissioned by the Yerington Paiute Tribe's Wovoka Project for the centennial of his 1889 revelation. Built on Paiute oral history, interviews and documents, it reprints its sources so readers can check them, including Mooney's and Chapman's interviews and Yerington Paiute tribal members' memories of him ("I Remember Jack"). The 1997 edition adds a chapter, "More about Wovoka", and new appendices. Start here after Mooney.
1990 edition on archive.org (free to borrow)
The earlier dance that spread from Walker River around 1869 to 1870, led by Wodziwob, and how it moved into California.
A short, readable account of the movement, its spread and how it continued after 1890.
A recent history that treats the Ghost Dance as a modern religion responding to wage work, reservations and the railroads.
archive.org (free to borrow)
An early popular biography. Romanticised; use only where Hittman or documents confirm it.
The commission sent in the summer of 1888 to get Lakota consent to cutting up the Great Sioux Reservation, with the councils at Standing Rock, Crow Creek and Lower Brule word for word. The Lakota said no.
The commission that got the signatures in 1889 for the sale of half the Great Sioux Reservation, with the council speeches at every agency and the Lakota delegates in Washington that December, American Horse among them. The commissioners admit that the ration cut that followed was a breach of faith.
The first, failed attempt to buy the Black Hills. Its recommendations are blunt: Congress should fix a price and tell the Lakota that refusing it would stop the food. The buffalo page quotes it.
The Commissioner's case for buying the Black Hills, resting on the Lakota's need for rations once the game was gone.
The commission that obtained the Black Hills in the autumn of 1876, with Congress's order that no more food be issued until they were given up. Its journal prints the councils at every agency: what the commissioners said, and what Standing Elk, Spotted Tail, Little Wound, Running Antelope and others answered.
Hearings held at the agencies in August and September 1883, the year the last northern buffalo were killed. At Standing Rock Sitting Bull told the senators how short the rations had become.
Includes the Pine Ridge agent's report of August 1890 on the beef cut after the land sale, the people eating their own cattle, and the news of the Messiah.
Roosevelt's chapter "The Lordly Buffalo" describes the northern plains just after the last herds were killed, strewn with skeletons, and records a ranchman's line about crossing Montana: never out of sight of a dead buffalo, never in sight of a live one.
Read free (Internet Archive) University of California copy (Internet Archive)
The treaties the government’s commissioners made with the Kiowa and Comanche and with the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Each sets out a reservation and, in Article XI, keeps the right to hunt south of the Arkansas so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase
.
Mooney’s history of the Kiowa, built around calendars kept by Kiowa families. His account of the treaty of Medicine Lodge reprints a New York Times correspondent’s report of Satanta’s speech to the commissioners.
The Secretary’s report of 31 October 1873. Under “Interference with Indians on reservations” he writes that he would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo, as a means of making the Indians depend on farming.
Read free (University of Michigan copy, Internet Archive) Transcription (Wikisource)
The debate on Fort’s bill to stop the slaughter (H.R. 921). In the House, pp. 2105 to 2109: General Hazen’s letter, the argument over the Secretary of the Interior’s view, Fort’s reply, and the vote. In the Senate, pp. 5413 and 5414: the motion to make the law cover Indians too, the senators who said it would take away the Indians’ food, and the passage of the bill.
House, March 1874 (Internet Archive) · Senate, June 1874 (Internet Archive)
Its tables give, agency by agency, each agent’s estimate of how much of his people’s food came from their own work, from hunting, fishing and gathering, and from government rations. The Nevada agent’s report describes the Paiute working on the ranches of Mason Valley and the valleys around it.
Prints the Lakota and Dakota winter counts, the year-records painted on hides, with an English explanation of each year’s sign: Lone-Dog’s count from 1800 to 1871 and Battiste Good’s to 1880. We quote its text only, not the drawings.
A pamphlet pressing Congress to send food to the Piegan after the hungry winter of 1883 to 1884. It opens with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ own statement from his report for 1884: the money for their food came late and short, and many died for lack of it.
A buffalo hunter’s memoir of the southern hunt. It is the earliest source we have found for the speech General Sheridan is said to have made to the Texas legislature, which Cook tells as so the story goes
. The buffalo page does not quote it.
The government's history of the Comstock Lode, written for the 1880 census: how much silver and gold came out, who was paid, and how much timber and firewood the mines consumed. It also records the Paiute side of the 1860 war, from Sarah Winnemucca and her brother Natchez.
A Virginia City newspaperman's account of the Comstock in its richest years, including the cutting of the Sierra forests for the mines. He writes about the Paiute with open contempt; we quote him for what he saw.
Includes Numaga's protest at Como in 1863, from the journal of the journalist Alf Doten, and the Pyramid Lake war of 1860 as Paiute veterans told it in 1880.
Reprints the Indian agent Frederick Dodge's report from Carson Valley of January 1859, written months before the silver strike.
The standard nineteenth-century account of American trees. We use its plate of the single-leaf piñon, the pine whose nuts fed the Paiute.
The yearly reports of the government's own agents in Nevada, as the Comstock took the pine nuts, the grass and the fish: Lockhart and Burche in 1864, the Pyramid Lake sawmill in 1865, Parker in 1866 to 1869, Campbell in 1868, Bateman in 1871.
1864 · 1865 · 1866 · 1867 · 1868 · 1869 · 1871 (Internet Archive)
The laws as passed. Page 192 holds the clause of August 1876 that stopped the Lakota's food until they gave up the Black Hills; page 256 the act of February 1877 that took the Hills and set out the ration and its conditions.
The court's account of how the Black Hills, set apart for the Sioux by the treaty of 1868, were taken by the act of 1877, and its finding that the taking had to be paid for. It quotes the Court of Claims: A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.
Read free (Cornell Legal Information Institute) With the printed page numbers (Caselaw Access Project)
How land cessions, hunger and policy led to 1890, and why the Lakota Ghost Dance was not an uprising.
How politics in Washington put the army at Wounded Knee Creek.
The Medals of Honor awarded for Wounded Knee and the record behind them.
Congress's resolution on the centenary of Wounded Knee, expressing deep regret to the Lakota people.
The Defense Secretary's decision, after a review ordered in 2024, that the Medals of Honor given for Wounded Knee will not be withdrawn. Reports give the number of medals as 19 or 20.
The government's own maps of every reservation in the country, reprinted every few years. The vanishing map on this site lays these three editions on top of each other.
One map of the whole country showing every tract that a tribe proved, before the Indian Claims Commission or the Court of Claims, it had originally occupied. Peoples whose names stand outside a coloured tract did not get a ruling on their land. It is the first map in the vanishing map on this site.
The government's own schedule of every piece of land it recorded taking from Native peoples from 1784 on, by treaty, executive order, act of Congress or no document at all, with state maps. For Mason Valley it records no treaty: “Remainder of Pai Ute country taken possession of by U. S. without formal relinquishment by the Indians” (p. 872). The Whose land was this? map is built from it.
Royce's areas drawn as digital boundaries, with his schedule's dates, tribes and page references. The Forest Service notes that the boundaries are not legal documents and may not be used to settle title or ownership.
The text of every ratified treaty with Native nations, 1778 to 1883, with Kappler's notes on what the Senate changed after signing.
Kappler's second volume transcribed treaty by treaty, with links to the signed originals at the National Archives. The treaty words on the land map are taken from it.
The signed originals, digitised page by page. The land map shows pages from four: Potawatomi 1828, Ruby Valley 1863, Medicine Lodge 1867 and Fort Laramie 1868.
Ruby Valley 1863 Medicine Lodge 1867 Fort Laramie 1868 Potawatomi 1828
On the California treaties of 1851 and 1852, and why Royce's map of them is “his own artifact” (p. 703).
The government's picture of the 1870 census. Plates XVIII–XIX map how many settlers lived on each square mile, leaving out Indians not taxed
, and add a sketch of the principal Indian reservations and hunting ranges as the Office of Indian Affairs reported them in 1871. It is the 1870 map in the vanishing map on this site.
Library of Congress Read free (Internet Archive, Smithsonian Libraries copy)
An army officer's account of the plains, the buffalo and the peoples who lived there, written from the standpoint of his time. Its folding map shows the reservations of the day and the buffalo range in 1830 and in 1876; it is the 1876 map in the vanishing map on this site.
Read free (Internet Archive, University of California copy) The map (Getty Research Institute copy)
The Walker River Paiute Tribe's own published history, written by a tribal member from agency records, newspapers and interviews with elders in 1974. The best account of how the reservation, the river, Walker Lake and its trout were lost, and of the People's own origin story.
archive.org (free to borrow)
How the Northern Paiute of Pyramid Lake, Wovoka's nearest neighbours to the north, lost their land, water and fish, and fought to keep them, told from the agency and court records. It grew out of the tribe's water case of the 1970s, and its authors say openly that they take the Paiute side. It ends in 1983.
The Great Basin's history of violence, told from the side of its Native peoples: the fur trade, the emigrant trails, Bear River and the treaties that left the Shoshone without land. Its epilogue argues that the Ghost Dance's Great Basin roots have been forgotten behind Wounded Knee.
Nevada's history in its documents, including the Comstock's cutting of the piñon groves the Paiute depended on.
The record of Walker Lake's decline since 1882: nearly 160 feet lower, total dissolved solids from 2,500 to 28,000 mg/L, the last reported Lahontan cutthroat trout in May 2009.
The program buying back water rights to restore flows to Walker Lake.
An irrigation engineer's compilation of every record he could find of the levels of Pyramid and Winnemucca Lakes, from Frémont in 1844 to 1960: survey readings before 1927 (Table 10, p. 94), monthly levels from 1927 (Table 11, p. 97), and the drying of Winnemucca Lake by 1939 (pp. 106–109).
The government's gauge records: Walker Lake from 1882, Pyramid Lake from 1950. Recent readings are provisional.
The New York illustrated weekly. Two wood engravings by Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier show the hide trade as its readers saw it in 1874: "Sketches in the far West: curing hides and bones" (4 April) and "Slaughtered for the hide" (the cover of 12 December).
Curing hides and bones (Library of Congress) Slaughtered for the hide (Library of Congress)
The Smithsonian's own record of how the bison were destroyed, with the census of those left alive.
The documented history of the killing of California's Native peoples, and the source of the estimate that their population fell from perhaps 150,000 to about 30,000.
California's formal apology to its Native peoples, quoting Governor Burnett's 1851 call for "a war of extermination".
The boarding school that opened on 17 December 1890 for Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone children, now a museum run with former students.
The federal investigation of the boarding schools: 417 schools, and at least 973 children known to have died, a count it calls incomplete.