Hope Springs Eternal—The Ghost Dance by Howard Terpning
The Ghost Dance was the last desperate hope of the Plains Indians to regain the old way of life the white man had wrested from them. It arose from a vision by a Paiute medicine man named Wavoka, who in 1889 was in a high fever at the time of a major eclipse of the sun. He said that in his vision he was carried to the afterworld, where all those who had died were living a happy life.
The movement spread like wildfire. Tribes as widely dispersed as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, Shoshone, and Arapaho began dancing and chanting to make the white man go away and the great buffalo herds return. In the painting, Arapaho figures wear buckskin garments with long, flowing fringes, ghost shirts supposed to be impervious to bullets. They cast dust into the wind to signify the burial of the whites beneath the earth.
The movement greatly alarmed the authorities. Trouble came to a head on December29, 1890. The Seventh Cavalry, still keen upon vengeance for Custer, massacred almost a hundred and fifty men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek, losing twenty five of their own.
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