Among the many unexpected lessons that await the reader of James Mooney's (1991 [1986]) classic account of the Ghost Dance, none is more striking than the one contained in his description of his first meeting with Jack Wilson, the Paiute man also known as Wovoka the messiah. By the time Mooney recounts this meeting, the reader is prepared to encounter a sacred personage of awesome stature. After all, this is the man whose millenarian teachings of the return of the dead and of the lifeways of the past had spread across the West and Midwest and had been blamed for the “Sioux Outbreak” that led to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. It was that massacre that set Mooney to investigating the Ghost Dance, and it was because of Wovoka's alleged role in fomenting the “outbreak” that Mooney found himself on New Year's Day 1892 in Mason Valley, Nevada looking to meet the messiah.