Prairie Imperialists - Katharine Bjork America in the Nineteenth Century

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vocabulary, he also wrote thoughtfully on the structure of the sign language and analyzed how its properties were analogous to those of spoken language. He recognized sign language as a living, evolving language, with its own rules and grammar, although he persisted in fitting it into a hierarchy of languages in which some (like the sign language) were primitive and some were more advanced. Scott’s thinking about the evolution of increasingly complex language was consistent with prevailing racial ideas, such as those informing the exhibitions at the Centennial Exposition.50

      Soon after arriving at Fort Sill, Scott was detailed by the post commander to study the religious movement known as the Ghost Dance among the Indians of western Indian Country. In December 1890 the War Department commissioned him to investigate the meaning and causes of the movement and assess whether it constituted a danger to white settlers, who had become alarmed by the rumors of possible uprisings linked to the new craze. From 1890 through February 1891, Scott visited camps in the vicinity of Fort Sill, observed dances, and interviewed practitioners about the meaning and power of the religion and its rituals.51

      To carry out these inquiries among eight tribes in the western part of Indian Territory, Scott recruited several Indian soldiers from Troop L, including Sergeant Iseeo, who became one of Scott’s closest associates and collaborators in his ethnographic work. In addition to Iseeo, the investigating party included several enlisted Indian soldiers who served as orderly, scout, cook, and driver. So as not to alarm the Ghost Dancers they visited, the group traveled under the guise of being a hunting party, obscuring the true interests of their expedition.52 Of course, at the same time Scott was leading his ethnographic fact-finding tour through Oklahoma, preoccupation with the Ghost Dance was reaching a crisis point among whites on and near the Sioux Reservation to the north. In fact, as Scott’s undercover ethnographers gathered information and formed an impression of the movement on the southern plains, the largest army assembled since the Civil War was converging on the Sioux agencies from around the country. By the end of December, overreaction to the religious movement had led to the tragic killing of more than 250 Lakota as well as a number of soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry when they attempted to disarm Big Foot’s Minnecounjous on Wounded Knee Creek.

      In contrast to the semi-hysterical view of some in the civil Indian service and many anxious settlers around the reservations, who worried that the vision of a world in which whites had been replaced by resurgent buffalo would be sought through violence against them, Scott’s conclusion was that the dance was purely religious and posed no threat. “These songs and the dance itself are of a purely religious character,” he wrote. “Being a prayer to and worship of the same Jesus the white man worships and who has come down in the North.” As far as threatening violence to whites in order to bring about the prophecy of a restoration of buffalo and the return of dead relatives, Scott wrote: “The doctrine of the separation of races, the red man from the white called for no action on the part of the former, it was to be accomplished by supernatural means alone Jesus was to do it all that the red man had to do was to push this dance and stand by see it done and reap the benefits.”53 Scott counseled that the dance be allowed to run its course without interference, “that the whole structure would fall from nonfulfilment of the prophesies.”54

      Scott wrote up the findings of his ethnographic hunting trip in a paper for the Fort Sill Lyceum the following winter. Several things emerge from this report. One is Scott’s wry and ironic sense of humor. Commenting on the wide appeal of the Ghost Dance prophecy of the resurrection of dead relatives and their return to earth, Scott noted an exception to the general happiness at the prospect of being reunited with lost dear ones. “These tidings brought great joy to all who heard them,” he wrote. “Except to Tabananaca the Comanche Chief who did not relish the idea of furnishing all his departed relatives with horses from his large herd.”55

      Scott’s report is also notable for the level of detail and nuanced and contextualized ethnographic description it provides. Take, for example, his description of the ritual at the center of the controversy over the movement, the dance itself. First, he provided a precise description, revealing both attentive observation and his ability to convey the details of unfamiliar practice in understandable terms.

      Our first view of the dance was at a small Kiowa Camp in the northern foot hills of the Wichita Mountains; there nicely sheltered from the cold winds from the north in a timbered bend of Sulphur Creek was found the village, the lodges arranged in the shape of a horse_shoe. When we arrived there were gathered together in a ring in the open space in the centre of the horse_shoe about fifty people having hold of each others hands the fingers interlocked dancing with a peculiar side step. the mechanism of which seems to be : first the weight of the body being on the right leg the right knee is bent lowering the body slightly then a short step is made to the left with the left foot, the weight is then transferred to the left leg which is immediately straightened, the right foot brought to the side of the left and the weight again placed upon the right leg, this is repeated continuously all keeping time to the singing.56

      To this he added his own analysis and commentary on the dance.

      The music of these songs is unique and distinctive; none of us had ever heard anything precisely like it. The Messiah songs could be distinguished at once from the war songs or those used at the “wokowie” feasts or sun dances by the character of the music even if the words and air were unknown. There was a great variety to the songs, some owing to the minor key in which they were sung were very weird some were low rich and beautiful but all had a certain monotony owing to the fact that each line was repeated and the song itself sung over and over again in making each round of the circle: yet all were pleasing one especially delighting us, it gave all the impressions of a noble chant and when sung by a large concourse of people in the moonlight with the wild surroundings the peculiar accompaniment of the crying and the solemn dance, its effect was most striking and will never be forgotten by those who heard it.57

      Scott made sense of the landscape and the work before him by recourse to another nineteenth-century heuristic for knowing and classifying the natural world: collecting. The nineteenth century gave rise to all kinds of colonial collecting. From geology to folklore, amateurs with natural curiosity and a scientific bent searched places both familiar and remote for everything from fossils to birds’ nests.

      As would be the case later in the Philippines and Cuba, Scott’s early attempts to know his surroundings and to make sense of them relied heavily on classifying and articulating the similarities and differences among classes of things, creating a typology and then elaborating and refining it. Thus, an early letter home to his mother from Fort Lincoln bragged that in his first year in the Northwest he had seen “nearly all” the Indians with whom the army had dealings. He proceeded to provide a typology for his mother, clearly informed by his own cultural categories and values and also attuned—one suspects—to his knowledge of his mother’s prejudices. “The Cheyennes are the Indians I like. The braves—cleaner and more manly in every way than any I’ve seen in the Northwest and I’ve seen nearly all of them—the Nez Perces are too much like the Crows and of all horrible cowardly wretches the Crows are the worst—the Nez Perces are not cowardly, but in stature, appearance dress hair & filth they are very much alike—the Yanktonais Siouxs don’t pan out well or the Assiniboines or the Rees Mandans or Gros Ventres—the Cheyennes beat them all.”58 Confident of his young man’s ability to judge types of men, although he had as yet little knowledge of them, his early assessments reflected most of all the prejudices of the East and of the civilization from which Scott came. To a great extent, Scott’s close and interested association with Native peoples over the next two decades of service in Indian Country led him to move away from such crude typologies. With more experience with Indian scouts and more time spent actively seeking ethnographic knowledge for strategic military purposes in Indian villages, Scott’s knowledge progressed increasingly beyond such superficial and impressionistic typologies. What started out as little more than a cataloging of tribes in a way that reinscribed the stereotypes and prejudices available to him through the dominant Indian-hating culture, developed over time into a more finely tuned ethnographic sensibility. Interestingly, he later wrote not just with sensitivity but with admiration of the village life of the Crows in particular, the group that seems to have provoked the disdainful assessment he expressed

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