Wovoka was a Northern Paiute man of the Mason Valley in Nevada, known to his white neighbours as Jack Wilson, who fell ill during the solar eclipse of 1 January 1889 and returned with a vision. In it he had been taken up and shown the dead alive and happy, and had been given a dance and instructions: the people were to live at peace, to work, to harm no one, to lie and steal not at all, and to perform the dance he had been given at intervals of several days. If they did, the dead would return, the buffalo would come back, and the world would be renewed.
Delegations came from across the Plains and the Great Basin to hear him, some travelling by railroad, and carried the dance home with them. It was a simple form: dancers held hands in a circle and shuffled sideways, singing songs that came to individual dancers in trance, sometimes for four or five nights running. There was no drum. Because it spread through delegates rather than through any central authority, the dance was understood differently in each nation that received it, and its emphasis shifted as it moved east. The Northern Paiute doctrine of patient waiting and peaceable work was not what every receiving community heard, and the difference between what Wovoka taught and what was later attributed to him is one of the clearer findings of the record.