In the fall of 1890, a new religion swept onto the Sioux reservations like a prairie fire. The Ghost Dance, as it was called, promised that if American Indians would dance and pray, a Messiah would deliver them from the misery of reservation life. The movement was soon trumpeted as a new Indian war in the making by those who refused to see it as the lament of a downtrodden people.
At the center of the controversy was Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota chieftain and medicine man who was relentlessly villainized as "Custer's assassin." In reservation life he had become a staunch opponent of federal Indian policy, and when he refused to forswear the movement, even if he did not openly embrace it, his enemies tarred him as a crazed malcontent. Ambitious generals, self-righteous Indian Agents, reservation rivals, unscrupulous reporters, and self-serving politicians were determined to suppress the Ghost Dance and arrest Sitting Bull as the new religion's alleged ringleader—resulting in a double tragedy for the Lakotas.
In
A Phantom Storm
, Norman Matteoni deftly traces the smear campaign against Sitting Bull in the words and actions of public figures and the nation's media. The resulting narrative reveals the previously unexplored manipulation of public perceptions by those seeking to gain from the demise of Sitting Bull and all that he represented.