[RERUN] EPISODE 57 Sitting Bull: Compulsory Civilization with a Side of Murder (Part 4)

·1 hr 37 min·7 clips

Sitting Bull demanded: 'Why should the Indian police come against me? We are of the same blood. We are Sioux. We are relatives. It will disgrace the nation.'

1. History on Fire episode 57 covers the 1890 Ghost Dance crisis and the escalating threat to Sitting Bull's life at the hands of Agent McLaughlin and the Lakota police. 2. Host Daniele Bolelli narrates solo, drawing on multiple historians including Lewis Warren, Heather Cox Richardson, and Billy James Chandler, as well as primary sources including direct testimony from Lakota leaders Big Road, Two Strikes, and Little Wound. 3. The episode's thesis is that the Ghost Dance 'crisis' was primarily a manufactured media and political event driven by incompetent agents, cynical generals, and journalists who invented stories of an uprising that never existed. 4. The Ghost Dance originated with Paiute prophet Wovoka in Nevada and promised an apocalyptic event would restore the bison, bring back the dead, and reverse American expansion — spreading rapidly through starving reservation communities in 1890. 5. Agent Daniel Royer arrived at Pine Ridge in 1890 and within days was demanding military intervention; the Lakota gave him the nickname 'Young Man Afraid of Indians' and one man responded to his threats by baring his chest and saying 'Here, kill me, for I am going to dance.' 6. Ghost Dance leader Short Bull was falsely attributed inflammatory statements by the Chicago Tribune — including claims that white people would be wiped out and that dancers should strip naked, entirely contrary to Lakota custom — which Bolelli argues were almost certainly fabricated. 7. Educator Elaine Goodall, working on a Lakota reservation, accused journalists from Omaha, Chicago, and New York of inventing stories, and named Will Cressy of the Omaha Bee and William Fitch Kelly of the Lincoln State Journal specifically as fabricators. 8. A local Nebraska newspaper accused the out-of-town journalists of manufacturing stories 'to pander to the depraved tastes of the lovers of the marvelous and create a sale for the papers which they represent.' 9. Reverend Thomas Riggs, the Episcopal missionary at Pine Ridge, stated 'not one in a hundred of the Western Sioux had any thought of making war against the whites' and described the conflict as 'in very truth, a newspaper war.' 10. General Miles began as a skeptic who told the president that natives were starving and would prefer to die fighting rather than starve peaceably, but shifted to fearmongering — fabricating reports of 15,000 fighting Sioux — partly to lobby Congress for more Army funding and gain military control of reservations. 11. Historian Heather Cox Richardson argues Miles chose fearmongering because President Harrison's Republican Senate majority was at stake in a South Dakota election, and mobilizing troops boosted profits for local merchants and military contractors. 12. A Yankton interpreter named William Selwyn — secretly Sitting Bull's cousin — served as a disinformation source for Agent Royer, selectively highlighting the most alarming aspects of Ghost Dance reports and likely fabricating others to curry favor and gain land and money. 13. Sitting Bull's own position toward the Ghost Dance was skeptical: he didn't believe the promised apocalyptic events would happen, but he gave his blessing to followers who practiced it because he saw no harm in people praying for a better world. 14. Agent McLaughlin had hated Sitting Bull for years before the Ghost Dance emerged — a reservation policeman named Grasping Eagle testified that McLaughlin expressed a desire to kill Sitting Bull two months before the Ghost Dance reached the reservation. 15. McLaughlin's hostility had both political and personal dimensions: Sitting Bull's 1887 refusal to join Buffalo Bill's European tour cost McLaughlin's wife her planned role as interpreter, and Sitting Bull was known to have remarked that McLaughlin reminded him of 'a jealous woman.' 16. When Sitting Bull stopped attending the agency in October 1890 — knowing McLaughlin would have him arrested on fabricated charges — McLaughlin sent police to intercept him, but Sitting Bull took a different road. 17. In August 1890, Sitting Bull heard a disembodied voice that turned out to be a meadowlark warning him 'Lakota will kill you,' fulfilling a foreboding about how divide-and-conquer reservation politics would ultimately destroy him. 18. President Harrison ordered 25% of the entire US Army to Lakota reservations in November 1890 — the largest military mobilization between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War — ostensibly to police roughly 18,000 Lakota, most Ghost Dancers being women, children, and elders. 19. People with an interest in Native American history, 19th-century media criticism, or the mechanics of manufactured political crises will find this episode historically rich. 20. Listeners who haven't heard earlier episodes in the Sitting Bull series will have less context for some of the personal dynamics, though Bolelli does offer standalone summaries.

As heard by us

Sitting Bull's last stretch is rendered with slow pressure and little room to breathe.

Daniele Bolelli keeps Sitting Bull's final stretch tight and unsentimental. McLaughlin's hostility, Buffalo Bill's bid to take him on a European tour, and the sense of protections falling away all land with the same pressure.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want the last quiet before the story breaks open.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from History on Fire