The 1870 Ghost Dance (Du Bois)

Cora Du Bois's 1939 ethnographic monograph documenting the 1870 Ghost Dance, a Northern Paiute renewal movement that preceded and is historically distinct from Wovoka's better known 1890 Ghost Dance, published in the University of California's Anthropological Records series. Based on fieldwork and interviews conducted decades after the fact with surviving participants and their descendants, it identifies the Walker Lake Paiute prophet Wodziwob as the movement's originator and traces its spread among California and Plateau nations, where it fed directly into several distinct prophetic revitalization traditions. Its strength is being the first systematic scholarly reconstruction of the earlier movement, disentangling it from the later and more famous one it is often conflated with. Its limit is that it relies on decades-old secondhand memory, the events themselves having gone unrecorded in real time.