Case file · Folklore / legend
Wovoka's vision
During the solar eclipse of 1 January 1889, the Northern Paiute man Wovoka (Jack Wilson), ill with fever in Mason Valley, Nevada, had a vision of the dead living happily with God and was given the Ghost Dance to bring renewal.
1889 CE · 38.99, -119.16 · status: account
The account
His message of peaceful living and dancing spread to dozens of nations; the ethnologist James Mooney visited him in 1892. Among the Lakota it led, through army fear, to the killing of Sitting Bull and the Wounded Knee massacre.
The sceptical view
The eclipse is astronomical fact; the vision is Wovoka's own account as told to visitors.
Connections in the atlas
- Nock-ay-det-klinne and Cibecue Creek
- The 1870 Ghost Dance (Wodziwob)
- Ghost shirts and the Lakota Ghost Dance