experience I make the assertion that nine of every
ten Indian outbreaks are fomented by the "Medicine" men. These men are
at the same time both priest and doctor. They not only ward off the "bad
spirits," and cure the sick, but they forecast events. They deal out
"good medicine," to ward off the bullets of the white man, and by
jugglery and by working upon the superstitions of their followers,
impress them with the belief that they possess supernatural powers.

This was especially conspicuous in the Pine Ridge outbreak. The medicine
men made their deluded followers believe the white men were all to be
killed, that the cattle were to be turned to buffalo and that the red
man would again possess the country as their fathers had possessed it
in the long ago, and that all the dead and buried warriors were to
return to life. This doctrine was preached from the borders of Colorado
and the Dakotas to the Pacific, and from British Columbia to the
grottoes of the Gila. The doctrine probably had its origin in the
ignorant preaching of the religion of the Savior by honest but ignorant
Indian converts. They told their hearers of the death, burial and
resurrection of the Son of Man. The medicine men seized upon the idea
and preached a new religion and a new future for the red man.
Missionaries were sent from tribe to tribe to preach and teach the new
doctrine, and everywhere found willing converts.

The craze started in Nevada, among the Shoshones, and in a remarkably
short time spread throughout the tribes on both sides of the Rocky
Mountains. Lieutenant Strothers of the United States Army and I talked
with Piute Indians in Modoc County, after the "ghost dance" scare had
subsided, who were firm in the belief that a chief of the Piutes died
and then came back. They assured us that they had talked with a man who
had seen him, and that there could be no mistake. But they said: "Maybe
so; he did not know. The white man medicine heap too strong for Ingin."

So it was with the Bannocks. Their medicine men taught that the white
man was to be destroyed, that his horses, his cattle and his houses and
land were to revert to the original owners of the country. Accordingly
few houses were burned throughout the raid of several hundred miles.
Even the fences around the fields were not destroyed, but were left to
serve their purposes when the hated white man should be no more. The few
exceptions were where white men were caught in their homes a