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Word comes from the South Dakota Historical Society Press that it will be publishing a new book in coming days. “A Phantom Storm: Sitting Bull, America, and the Ghost Dance” is by Norman E. Matteoni, a California attorney and historian.

The book recalls the start of the 1890 Ghost Dance religious fervor that consumed South Dakota Indians living on reservations. The Ghost Dance was blamed for prompting Indians to threaten waging war. Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota chief and medicine man, was targeted as one of the sources of the revival. Sitting Bull had become an opponent of the federal policy on placing Indians on reservations, and his opponents labeled him a “crazed malcontent.” He was shot dead on the Standing Rock Reservation in 1890 by Indian law enforcement.

“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 Historical Society Press says. “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.”

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