"Nearer, My God. . ."

Wasn't a laughing matter.

Mary C. Collins, an Iowan, wasn't sitting still for what was going on all around her, and she had good reason. She'd been a missionary among the Lakota on Standing Rock Reservation for years, and even though she'd found herself changed substantially from her first days out in the middle of nowhere, from the trip out to Ft.Yates and beyond, what she was seeing and hearing all around her was nothing she could tolerate. When she'd come out to the reservation, she'd hugged the last telegraph pole she'd seen, the last symbol of what she thought of then as "civilization." That hug had happened years and years and years ago, and in that time she'd become an advocate for the people she'd come to love.

But this "Messiah craze" was tribulation of the worst sort and sure to bring disaster--or so she thought.

So she took her case to the highest court in the land, to Sitting Bull himself, the long-time spiritual leader of the Standing Rock Miniconjou Sioux, a man who'd been to Europe and back with Buffalo Bill Cody, the man whose visions of cavalry falling from the skies had been a great boon to the cause of the thousands of warriors ready for action at Little Big Horn. Sitting Bull, who'd gone to Canada after Custer's men were slaughtered, been incarcerated at Ft. Randall, and was now in a kind of retirement back home where he was born. She knew him as well as any white man or woman, or so historians say, and she was sure the old man, revered as he was, didn't believe the fantasies of the Ghost Dance, knew all that mad dancing, as well as she did, to be a hoax.

Mary C. Collins was reared out east, for heaven's sake, and he'd been there. Did he really expect the promise some Paiute made, some guy a thousand miles away in Utah? Just dance, the mystic told the people--just dance and all the old ones will return, and with them the buffalo too, and the world will transform from a cloud of dust into a new heavens and new earth. Just dance, he told them, dance into some sweet state and heaven will come to earth.

Nonsense, she told herself, and Sitting Bull knew it.

So she talked one of her believers into pulling an organ out to the big chief's camp, then assembled a choir of maybe a half-dozen believers and right then and there, with hundreds of dancers crying and singing amid the heavy beat of the drums, she played that outdoor organ for all its worth and led the handful of Christians in one of the most amazingly silly renditions ever of "Nearer My God to Thee."

"Our converts sang the song in a wild rough way," she wrote in her memoirs, "and the music, screams, and shouting of the awful dance were mingled with our voices until you could scarcely hear anything."

Once they'd sung all the way through, Mary C. Collins walked right over to Sitting Bull's tipi and asked him to come out and talk. Twice the old chief said no. When she asked a third time, he told her to enter.

She did, in sudden darkness. He stood there with his back to her.

"Brother," she said, "you are ruining your people. You are deceiving them and you well know it. You must stop it at once and send them away."

The old man told him no. "Sister, I cannot do it," he said. "I have gone too far."

She didn't let that answer sit. "You must do it. The people are neglecting their homes and and their property. There will be great suffering. They are likely to commit violence. The soldiers will come and you will be to blame for it."

Her admonition went as limp as the verses of that old hymn. The dances did not stop. 

It wouldn't be long before Sitting Bull would be shot dead and Custer's own Seventh Cavalry would slaughter three hundred Lakota men, women, and children beneath a small hill beside a creek called Wounded Knee. She couldn't have known that, couldn't have predicted it; but what she told Sitting Bull that day wasn't wrong.

Twenty years later, her poor health sent Mary C. Collins back home to Keokuk, Iowa, where she died after 35 years as a teacher and translator and diplomat on the Standing Rock Reservation.

And I can't help but wonder how she carried that whole story to her death. Just what did she feel when she raised her voice in song once again to that famous old hymn?