Little more than a decade after their defeat of Custer’s ill-fated Seventh Cavalry at Little Big Horn, the Plains Indian nations were destroyed. The tribes – Sioux, Cheyenne and Paiute – were mercilessly hunted and the survivors driven into the nearly worthless land set aside for reservations. There, pestilence and privation further decimated our numbers. But in 1889, a Paiute named Wovoka told of a vision in which an Indian Messiah would appear to avenge the wrongs done to the tribes. The Cult of the Ghost Dance was born of this vision. The Indians believed that the trance-like dance, portrayed here, would invoke the aid of the Indian dead and these spirits would take revenge upon the white man and return the slaughtered buffalo herds to the great plains. - HT