The Ghost Dance

The Federal Government promised the Indians food, materials to build homes, tools to cultivate the land. But the promises were often broken. There was great suffering on the reservation. Epidemic disease swept through them, killing people.

In 1890 a religious prophet told the Sioux to dance a special dance called the Ghost Dance. He told them that if they did so a grea5 miracle would come back to life, the buffalo would return and all the white men would be swept away by a great flood.

The Ghost Dance movement was peaceful. But the Dancers’ beliefs worried the government. So did the fact that some of them waved rifles above their heads as they danced. It ordered the army to arrest the movement’s leaders.

On a cold December day in 1890 a group of 350 Sioux, 120men and 230 women and children, left their reservation. Led by a chief named Big Foot, they set off to join another group nearby for safety. But a party of soldiers stopped them on the way and marched them to an army post at Wounded Knee Creek.

Next morning the soldiers ordered the Sioux to give up their guns. One young warrior refused. A shot rang out, followed by many more. The soldiers began shooting down the Sioux women and children as well as the men. Within minutes most of the Sioux were dead or badly wounded. Many of the wounded who crawled away died later in a blizzard that swept over the camp.

At the time Americans called what happened at Wounded Knee a battle. Other people since have called it a massacre. But whatever the events at Wounded Knee are called, one thing is certain. For the Sioux they marked the end of all hope of a return to their old way of life.

Theodore Roosevelt

(1858-1919)

Born into an aristocratic family in New York City on October 27, 1858, the asthmatic and nearsighted youth built up his strength with sports and natural history outings. At Harvard he was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar and graduated in 1880, already working on the first of his many history books. After years of state politics he joined the U.S. Civil Service in 1889; there and later as a police commissioner in New York he proved to be a dynamic reformer and corruption-fighter. Named in 1897 as assistant secretary of the navy and already chafing for “a bit of a spar” with Spain, he soon got his war and his glory as a leader of the Rough Riders.

Roosevelt returned to popular acclaim and election as governor of New York state, where his liberal approach inspired exasperated Republican bosses to kick him upstairs – he became McKinley’s vice-president in 1900. With McKinley’s assassination six months later, the Republican old guard was appalled to find the “damned cowboy” their leader. The country called him “Teddy”, a nicknamed he hated; at 42, he was the youngest President in American history.

During his two terms as President he reduced the booming power of business interests by busting some trusts and regulating others, often intervening on behalf of labor; he doubled the number of national parks; he regulated interstate commerce (as part of his “Square Deal”) and initiated the Pure Food and Drug Act. Among his foreign initiatives, he began the Panama Canal, admitted Japan to world power and mediated the end of the Russian-Japanese War (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1905).

He left office in 1909, beloved by his country but estranged from conservatives in his party; his bid for the Republican nomination in 1912 was turned down and an independent campaign failed. But at his death in 1919 it was already clear that Teddy would be remembered as one of the great presidents; to many Americans he was already a face on the mountain.