A Phantom Storm: Sitting Bull, America, and the Ghost Dance

In the fall of 1890, a new religion swept onto the Sioux reservations like a prairie fire. The Ghost Dance, as it was called, promised that if American Indians would dance and pray, a Messiah would deliver them from the misery of reservation life. The movement was soon trumpeted as a new Indian war in the making by those who refused to see it as the lament of a downtrodden people.

At the center of the controversy was Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota chieftain and medicine man who was relent...