Aridity, Millenialism, and the Origins of the 1890 Ghost Dance in the U.S. West

Most scholars focus on the demise of Plains Indian autonomy as the prime inspiration for the millennial Ghost Dance movement of 1889-90, which culminated in the tragic Wounded Knee massacre. But the dance in fact originated far from the Plains, in the arid Great Basin country of Nevada. Here, the Paiute visionary and rainmaker Jack Wilson, or Wovoka, promised the dance would bring a renewed earth. Wovoka spoke to Paiutes increasingly pressured by a terrible drought in 1889, but his message in a sense spoke to a larger audience. The drought that swept Nevada heightened anxieties among white residents that the state was lurching towards collapse. With the decline of mining, the state's population fell far below the legal threshold for statehood. By 1890, there were more people in San Francisco than in all of Nevada. There were serious discussions about returning Nevada to territorial status. The moment called for a vision to remake the earth, and Nevada's lone congressman, Francis Newlands, began to draw up legislation to do just that. Starting in 1890, he began to craft language for the law that became the National Reclamation Act, which would bring federally-financed irrigation to water Nevada's deserts. In a remarkable irony, both indigenous visionaries and colonial technocrats were dedicated to renewing Nevada's earth. As we shall see, these visions were as distinctive as the visionaries who articulated them - but American reclamationists were every bit as millennial as Ghost Dancers, and the scientific quest to bring water to the arid West would be infused with religious sentiment.