This chapter examines the 1890 Ghost Dance, a nonviolent religious practice among the Lakota Sioux. In covering the Ghost Dance, daily newspaper editors Joseph Pulitzer (the New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (the San Francisco Examiner), along with the New York Herald and ChicagoTribune, experimented with the limits of news illustration. Their images mischaracterized the dance as a declaration of war, contributing to events leading to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Their quest for illustrations that were both “authentic” (photograph-based) and dramatic led editors to appropriate images from the entertainment marketplace (photographs of Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show), for political and commercial benefit. The Lakota’s efforts had limited power to correct misrepresentations of the dance and its aftermath.
Identifying a living great-grandson of the Lakota Sioux leader Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull)
