The Ghost Dance in Popular Culture
Paper submitted to fulfill HIS 252 course, Cultural History of the United States, 1876-Present taught by Professor Joan Rubin, Spring 2010
Introduction: "On June 2, 1891, Beadle’s Half Dime Library, a weekly publication of the dime novel company Beadle & Adams, published the first in a series of four “Silverblade” novels by Joseph Badger.[1] Badger was a regular writer for the company, and published over 200 dime novels with them over the course of his career. In many ways, his “Silverblade” novels were typical of other dime novels published by the firm including Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, and Pawnee Bill. The Silverblade series included recurring plot devices with plenty of action and suspense and were very popular when first published.[2] What makes these four novels exceptional is Badger’s fictionalization of recent history. In the Silverblade stories, the plot revolves around a half-blood Shoshone named Silverblade and his experience in the Ghost Dance. Throughout the previous year, news coverage of the Ghost Dance and the associated violence in South Dakota was extensive, and Badger, writing only months later, most likely drew upon this coverage in his depictions of historical events and figures. While the stories are fictional, they fairly accurately depict the historical events of the Ghost Dance as they were understood by the American public at the time. Therefore, although these stories are historically erroneous, they do provide an accurate picture of how the Ghost Dance was popularly understood and described by newspapers in 1890."
This document was adapted from a webpage hosted on the Rare Books, Special Collections, and Manuscripts website, before being converted into a static document and uploaded to URRR on 2024-10-09.
