The Ghost Dance and the Stronghold: What the Badlands Witnessed

In eighteen eighty-nine, a Paiute holy man named Wovoka, living in the Walker River country of Nevada, reported a vision during a solar eclipse. The vision taught that if the people danced a particular circle dance, the Ghost Dance, the earth would be renewed, the dead would return, the buffalo would come back, and the settlers would be gone. The teaching spread with extraordinary speed across Plains reservations. By the summer of eighteen ninety it had reached the Lakota at Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Standing Rock, and Cheyenne River.

Federal agents and the Army did not read the Ghost Dance as a spiritual renewal. They read it as preparation for armed uprising. Tensions escalated through the fall of eighteen ninety. In November and December, as the Army massed around Pine Ridge Reservation, thousands of Lakota left the agency and traveled southwest to the Stronghold Table, a plateau in the remote southern Badlands accessible only across a narrow neck of land. The Stronghold was defensible. It was also, in the end, a trap.

The Miniconjou band that included Chief Spotted Elk did not make it to the Stronghold. They surrendered and were escorted toward the agency. On December twenty-ninth they reached Wounded Knee Creek.

What happened there is documented at a separate stop. What happened at the Stronghold is the prelude: a frightened community in flight, the Badlands terrain as momentary sanctuary, the moment when a religious movement was translated into a military threat by people who did not want to understand it as anything else.

The Stronghold District today is part of the Badlands South Unit, co-managed with the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Access requires coordination with the tribe. The plateau itself has not changed.