Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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Mormons believed, as did many Paiutes, that God’s curse on the American Indian was to give them a dark skin. In the Mormon Sunday School the doctrine that God’s curse on the Indian (called descendants of Laman or Lamanites) took the form of an invasion by Gentiles (non-Mormons) who would conquer the Indian, but that the curse would eventually be lifted and the Lamanites would become “white and delightsome.” The curse would be lifted with the second coming of Christ, and 1890 was that year for many of those “Latter Day Saints.” Another notion that did not come from the Paiutes was the idea of sacred temple garments that the Saints wore that would protect them from evil influences. Although Paiute shamans like Wovoka talked about bullets bouncing off their chest, the power was a supernatural one and not a Ghost Shirt. That idea was likely developed again by Bannock Mormons who passed it on to their Sioux cousins.¹⁰⁹

Just as the 1870s wave had spread the Ghost Dance ceremonies and doctrines throughout southern Oregon and California, the 1890s wave was spread eastward, first to Fort Hall in Idaho, and from there to the Great Plains, including the Dakotas and Oklahoma. The latter event was precipitated by the coming of the railroad. In 1868 the Central Pacific Railroad, following the Truckee River east from California, reached the Pyramid Lake Reservation town of Wadsworth. It eventually joined the Union Pacific near Ogden, Utah, creating a transcontinental link across the plains. By the 1890s Fort Hall was one of the crossroads of the West, a junction of the Oregon Short Line Railroads and the Utah Northern. Numerous parties of indigenous people passed through Fort Hall on their way east or west, and the Bannocks and Shoshones, who were among the first people to visit Wovoka, were anxious to spread the holy word. Ritualistic connections could now be made quickly by rail, and Fort Hall became a center of Ghost Dance activism.¹¹⁰