"The Ghost Dance religion was one of the saddest religions of all time. It was the invention of a Paiute Indian called Wovoka, who may have been inspired by the doctrines of an earlier Paiute holy man called Tavibo. Wovoka had lived with a white family, who knew him as Jack Wilson. Part of his education had consisted of Christian religious training, and he sometimes said he was the Messiah returned, and his followers called him the Christ. It may be impossible for any white person to explain Ghost Dancing, but evidently the idea came to Wovoka in a vision during an eclipse of the sun on January 1, 1889. He said that he went to heaven and saw God, who told him that if the Indians did a dance which He would teach him, and danced long enough and hard enough, all white people would be submerged under a layer of new earth five times the height of a man, and the buffalo would return, and all the Indians who had ever lived would come back to life, and the land would become a paradise. Certainly, this would be an attractive philosophy for any American Indian at the end of that century, who was likely to have more friends and close relations among the dead than among the living. News of Wovoka’s vision spread among the Western tribes, and many sent delegates to meet and talk with him. One of the Sioux delegates reported later that he ‘saw the whole world’ when he looked into Wovoka’s hat."