Don Wildman

How would it have been such a trigger for American troops?

You know, so much of the West at that time was energized by the Mormon movement too.

I mean,

That entire Messiah craze of the Mormons out there in the West, it was a hotbed of lots going on.

But most of all, the desire was to preempt an unrest and an uprising by confronting this head on, right?

A few years before this, 1882, U.S.

Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller issued new orders to suppress, he calls them, heathenist dances, such as the Sundance, the scalp dance, and so forth, in order to bring Indians, as he says, into line with conventional Christian practice.

That hits the nail on the head, I would say, in terms of the motivations here, right?

We didn't even mention that the land that they were put onto was not great for farming, which was supposed to be the idea for so many of them.

Yeah.

November 13th, 1890, President Harrison orders a third of the U.S.

Army to prevent any outbreak.

That's a lot, right?

I mean, the U.S.

Army is not as big as we know it today, but it's a lot of people.

A lot of troops they're sending out there.

And the press gets involved as it begins to do more and more over this time period about bloodthirsty Native Americans.

There were about 4,200 ghost dancers at peak, I suppose, in the Lakota area, right?

Is that the idea?

I'm citing an article in the New York Times, which actually estimated to be 15,000.