The Demise of Chief Thunderhead, Chapter Two: The Ghost Dance

A Vision of Hope and Tragedy

When the Ghost Dance reemerged, It began with a shadow sliding across the sun.

It was January 1, 1889, during a solar eclipse, when a Northern Paiute man named Wovoka fell into a vision so powerful it would change the course of Native history. He said God showed him a place beyond pain, a paradise where the dead had returned, healthy and whole, where the buffalo roamed once again, and the land belonged to its first people. No more sickness. No more sorrow. No more broken treaties.

Wovoka came back from that vision not just with hope, but with instructions.

Live peacefully. Work hard. Be kind to one another. And most importantly, dance. Perform a sacred movement he called the Ghost Dance. It would bring about a transformation so divine, so sweeping, that it would restore everything that had been lost.

This dance, Wovoka promised, would usher in a new world. The suffering would end. Half of the white men who had taken so much would vanish. And the ancestors? They’d come home and restore the old way of life, including the return of the buffalo.

Shamans from the Paiute nation carried the prophecy across the Great Plains and beyond, delivering it to the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Kiowa, the Caddo. And eventually, it found its way to the Lakota Sioux.

But it didn’t arrive alone. It came through the hands and heart of a man named Thungwa, a Southern Paiute, chosen to bring the Ghost Dance to the Lakota. When he arrived in their lands, they welcomed him not as an outsider, but as family. In a gesture of deep respect and gratitude, they gave him a name in their own language: “Chief Thunderhead”.

They honored him as a prophet, a teacher, and then, as one of their own. He was gifted a wife, a beautiful young Lakota woman, and they built a life together. A son was soon born strengthening the tribal bond even more. A family. A new beginning.

The Ghost Dance took hold of the Lakota spirit like wind filling a sail.

It wasn’t about rebellion. It wasn’t about revenge. It was about  hope, the kind of hope that moves through the body when nothing else is left. They believed, deeply and purely, that by dancing, by moving their grief through their feet and into the earth, they could heal.

From Wovoka’s teachings came the sacred garments made of white muslin, painted with red symbols representing the blood of the Great Spirit. The Lakota believed these shirts would shield them from bullets, “Ghost Shirts” spiritual armor for the body and soul.

But to outsiders, especially the U.S. government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it all looked like something else entirely.

Newspapers ran stories drenched in fear. The Lakota, they said, were preparing for war. Their rituals, their songs, their shirts, everything was twisted into signs of rebellion. And the U.S. military, already wary of the Lakota’s proud history of resistance under leaders like Sitting Bull, decided they wouldn’t wait to see what would happen next.

The tension broke on December 15, 1890.

Sitting Bull, wise, bold, and beloved, was murdered during a chaotic attempt to arrest him. The government said it was preemptive. The people knew it was personal. And still, in the bitter chill of late December, life tried to go on.

One morning not long after, Chief Thunderhead kissed his wife and son goodbye before heading out on a buffalo hunt with the younger men. It was supposed to be a good day. The kind of day that feels ordinary until it's not.

While Thunderhead was out tracking the great bison of the plains, U.S. troops descended upon a band of Lakota gathered near Wounded Knee Creek. The soldiers ordered them to disarm, but confusion and maybe fear, sparked chaos. A rifle went off. Some say it was accidental, fired by a deaf Lakota man who couldn’t understand the orders.

What followed was not a battle. It was a massacre.

The 7th Cavalry opened fire. Men, women, children—none were spared. The ghost shirts, with all their hope and holiness, offered no protection against the Hotchkiss guns. The ground ran red.

By the time Thunderhead returned, the world he had built was gone.

His wife. His son. Lost in the snow and the smoke.

The soldiers were corralling the survivors, marching them toward the reservations. When they saw Thunderhead, they let him go. “He’s not one of them,” they said. “He’s Paiute.”

But by then, Thunderhead was neither Paiute nor Sioux. He was simply a man who had lost everything. As if the bloodlines drawn by government pens meant more than the love he carried in his heart.

But grief doesn’t follow those rules. Love doesn’t care about tribal rolls or census records. Thunderhead didn’t speak. He didn’t resist. He simply turned and began the long walk back through the silence.

A father with no son. A husband with no home. He didn’t resist. He didn’t plead. He just walked. One foot in front of the other. A journey through grief so thick it threatened to swallow him whole.