On this day

A total eclipse of the sun crosses Nevada. Wovoka, sick with fever, says that "when the sun died" he was taken up to the other world, saw God and the dead, and was sent back with a message of peace and a dance. Mooney judged this eclipse the best fit for Wovoka's account, though he could not settle the date for certain. Yerington Paiute elders interviewed in the 1980s did not link the vision to the eclipse.

After a blizzard, a burial party buries the dead in one long trench. Four babies are found alive beside their mothers; one, a girl, survives.

James Mooney, guided by Wovoka's uncle Charley Sheep, finds his camp on the East Walker River in deep snow. With the grocer Ed Dyer interpreting, they talk for hours at a neighbouring rancher's house. Wovoka says he preached peace and that the whites had lied about him.

About 4,000 Lakota surrender at Pine Ridge. Kicking Bear and Short Bull are sent to Fort Sheridan as hostages.

Bear River. California Volunteers under Colonel Patrick Connor attack a Shoshone winter camp on the Bear River, on the Idaho–Utah line. They burn more than seventy lodges and destroy the people's wheat and food stores in midwinter. Connor reports: "It was not my intention to take any prisoners."

Troops evict a commercial fishing fleet of about 75 white men and 45 boats from Pyramid Lake. Nine fishermen are convicted; the next year the President pardons them.

The first Ghost Dance on the Walker Lake reservation is held about a mile above the railroad bridge near the agency. A second large dance soon after draws Ute from Utah.

Fred Robinson, an Assiniboine taught by Kicking Bear, has carried Wovoka's message north to Saskatchewan. He writes: "I am telling them about the good road and good life."

Bear Comes Out writes from Pine Ridge that his people are afraid of the star in the sky, and asks Wovoka what it means: "The star we afraid what he doing Let me knowed." It is Halley's Comet.

In Washington, American Horse, Turning Hawk and others give the Lakota account of Wounded Knee. "Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing."

At Clover Valley near Winnemucca, Nevada, a posse kills the adults of a small Shoshone band that had lived outside the reservations, after four ranchers were killed. The historian Ned Blackhawk calls it the last documented massacre of Great Basin Indians.

The act that takes the Black Hills becomes law. It promises a daily ration of beef, flour and corn, but withholds it from children who do not attend school, and on farming land from families who do not work.

Wovoka visits the Walker River reservation. At least two hundred men turn out in a driving snowstorm to hear him and take up a collection of $25. He asks to farm there.

The House passes a bill to protect the buffalo. It would have made it unlawful for anyone but an Indian to kill a female buffalo in the territories. In the debate, Representative Fort mocks the view that the buffalo should be killed off to civilize the Indians.

Soldiers under Captain Wells fire into a Paiute camp at Mud Lake (she calls it Muddy Lake), where people were living and fishing, and kill almost everyone there: old men, women and children. Her baby brother is among them. "It is a fearful thing to tell, but it must be told."

The Lakota delegates report at Pine Ridge. The agent arrests Good Thunder and two others. The dance begins on White Clay Creek. That month the beef issue is 205,000 pounds against the 470,400 the treaty calls for.

The Senate passes the buffalo bill. It goes to President Grant for his signature and, in Hornaday’s words, expired in his hands.

At a great dance on White Clay Creek, ghost shirts are worn, probably for the first time. Wovoka later disclaimed them; they were no part of the dance in Mason Valley.

Congress cuts the Sioux subsistence money to $950,000, $50,000 less than before, and the crops fail in a drought.

Arapaho and Cheyenne delegates visit Wovoka. Casper Edson writes down his message, the Messiah Letter: "You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always."

The superintendent stops the Indian dance planned for Yerington's Labor Day and threatens to arrest its leaders. Washington backs him, against gatherings that keep up "ancient and barbarous customs". He accuses Wovoka of telling his people they are "the same as in jail".

Wovoka dies at the Yerington Indian Colony, a month after his wife Mary. The date is his death certificate's; some later accounts give 20 September. He is buried in the Paiute cemetery at Schurz, on the Walker River reservation.

The Secretary of Defense decides that the Medals of Honor given to soldiers for Wounded Knee, about twenty, will not be withdrawn.

Numaga protests the cutting of the pine-nut trees. At the mining camp of Como, in what is now Lyon County, the Paiute leader tells the miners that the pine nut groves were the Indian’s orchards, which the whites must not destroy. The cutting goes on.

The Medicine Lodge treaties tie a hunting right to the buffalo. The Kiowa and Comanche, then the Cheyenne and Arapaho, keep the right to hunt south of the Arkansas so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.

The Walker River farmer reports that men from Wadsworth are said to be coming to kill "Jack Wilson, the Messiah". Captain Josephus asks the agent to stop them.

The new Pine Ridge agent, whom the Lakota call "Young-man-afraid-of-Indians", reports that half his people are dancing and asks for troops.

The Chicago Tribune prints a war "sermon" attributed to Short Bull, telling dancers to wear holy shirts against the soldiers. It is quoted for a century; Warren finds no original in the government's files and judges it probably invented.

Arapaho visitors report that Wovoka is tired of visitors and tells them to stop dancing. Most refuse to accept the message as his.

Ration day at Pine Ridge. Police try to arrest a man for killing a cow and about 200 Ghost Dancers surround them. American Horse calms the crowd: killing the police would bring the soldiers and the end of their families.

Troops are ordered onto the Lakota reservations; the first reach Pine Ridge on 19 November. Soon nearly 3,000 soldiers are in the field. American Horse: "The commission made us believe that we would get full sacks if we signed the bill, but instead of that our sacks are empty."

The agency refuses Wovoka a railroad pass because he is "not on our Roll", though his wife holds an allotment at Walker River.

The army scout Arthur Chapman, sent to find the "messiah", interviews Wovoka at a ranch house in Smith Valley: the first recorded interview. Wovoka says he has told every headman who came to him to go home and tell his people to keep the peace. Asked whether he promised to protect the Indians from the whites: "That was my dream. It has not come to pass yet."

Indian police sent to arrest Sitting Bull on Grand River kill him in the fight at his cabin. Eight of his people die, among them his seventeen-year-old son Crow Foot, and six police.

The Stewart Indian School opens in Carson City for Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone children.

Big Foot takes in Sitting Bull's fleeing people, who "had come to his people hungry, footsore, and almost naked". His band sets out for Pine Ridge. On 28 December the cavalry intercepts them and camps them at Wounded Knee Creek.

Wounded Knee. While the Seventh Cavalry disarms the men, a deaf man, Black Coyote, refuses to give up his rifle unless he is paid for it; as soldiers seize him it goes off into the air; the soldiers fire into the warriors and the Hotchkiss guns open on the camp. Mooney puts the Lakota dead at "very nearly 300" (the army counted 128), most of them women and children. Thirty-one soldiers are killed.

Cloud Horse, a Lakota delegate to Wovoka in 1890, is still writing from Pine Ridge: "all the Indians out here make fun of me but I allways think dear Father that around me you would give me strength."

Washington warns the Stewart Indian School that "Jack Wilson, The Messiah" may be spreading peyote. The rumour was unfounded; his son-in-law remembered him warning people against it.

About three months after Wovoka's death a powerful earthquake shakes Nevada. He had told his followers that when he died he would shake the earth to show he had reached heaven.