1950: Koshare Indian Boy Scout leader takes credit for reviving the "forgotten" Ghost Dance.

Colorado Boy Scouts Star 

in Indian Dances

by Marge of Sunrise Mountain Farm

1950, Feb 26 Chicago Tribune

As you drive along a cross-country highway next summer, watch for a big 37-passenger bus bearing an Indian sign [a stylized sunflower] on the outside, tent poles and tomahawks on the top, and inside, a load of the liveliest lads you have ever seen. If at all possible, follow the bus to its destination and have the thrill of your life watching those kids do ceremonial Indian dances to the throbbing broken cadence of tomtoms or the great boom of their six-foot thunder drum. The boys are not Indians.

     They are lads of La Junta, Col., members of Troop 230, Boy Scouts of America. However, the dances they perform are as authentic as their beadwork and often they are asked to teach long forgotten dance rituals to the very tribe that originated them.

1949 press clippings 

     For 17 years, under the leadership of James Francis [Buck] Burshears, a railway contractor and a bachelor until last year, lads of La Junta have been studying and performing Indian dances. Buck has been the first Eagle Scout in the Arkansas valley and was scoutmaster of his old troop by the time he went to Colorado college. 

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     Later, as a scoutmaster and collector of Indian costumes, weapons and jewelry, he dreamed up the idea of Indian dances as means of keeping high school boys interested in scout work. At first he had 12 dances, known locally as Buck's Brats. Now he has 80 active dancers, between the ages of 13 and 17, and 120 still enrolled in the troop altho they are in college or have become doctors, lawyers and business men.

     The name, Koshare, was chosen for the dancers for that is a Pueblo Indian word meaning clown or playmaker. Actually the lads are playing at being Indians, real of synthetic, their dances and music make your scalp tingle. When you watch their poise and grave before a great audience, it is hard to believe they are not professionals, but just ordinary schoolboys who have made their own fabulous beaded and feathered costumes.

     Then as you concentrate on their footwork and endurance, you understand why La Junta football, basketball and track teams are state champs. It is said that the mother of a baby boy in La Junta does not dream of her son as a future President, but a future Koshare.

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     The lad that gets into the Koshares must be quite a boy. He must be a First Class Scout, with a year's activity in scout work, and he must be a graduate of the 8th grade, or in the last part of that year. If he quits high school before graduation, he is dropped from the Koshares.

     He must be noted for general good fellowship, have an interest in handicraft and Indian lore and be considered adaptable to club standards. If he rates A-1 in all of these, he and his parents will be invited to a Koshare meeting and the rules and regulations of the group will be explained. Then he is acceptable as a papoose. From here he works his way to the higher ranks of braves, chiefs and Chippewas.

     Beyond high school, he will be in the Koshare Caddoa clan, whose members now turn out with squaws and papooses also dressed to the teeth in traditional Indian costumes. Each year the Caddoa members must compete in endurance and frenzied footwork with the young chiefs so the Koshare standards of clean living and wholesale exercise are necessarily carried into business and professional life.

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     In the active membership, the Sioux and Kiowa clans are the dancers with the Navajo clan supplying the drummers, choir and wardrobe committee. What a chore, that wardrobe task! Each dancer's outfit is an amazing array of Indian magnificence. For instance, just an ordinary dancer of the Kiowa clan must have four bustles (for arms, tail and neck) arm and leg bands, ankle furs, choker, necklace and choker, cuffs, breechcloth, pouch, beaded belt, moccasins, wig and roach with headlights, and a small vest.

     All of these must be made by the boy himself, using beads, buckskin, quills and rawhide in the old Indian manner. For this reason, the lights burn in the Burshears basement, the headquarters for costume work. If the lad is in doubt about any part of the costume, he can step into Buck's den in the same basement and study the handsomest collection of Indian books, pictures, costumes, jewelry and relics outside a public museum.

* * * 

     On date nights, a Koshare has been known to carry his handwork troubles alone. One pretty "squaw" complained that she never got to see a movie. She had to help her boy friend make his feather bustle on date nights! Rehearsals are no problems. The lads dance for hours to perfect the smallest part of each routine, says Buck, and are their own severest critics.

     The Koshares do 12 dances, in 18 parts, and each has its own costume. For instance, they could never do the ghost dance in the costume in which they present the beautiful Sioux pipe ceremony, learned first hand from Chief Black Elk, of South Dakota. The Messiah or ghost dance must be performed in a fringed white costume. In this dance, the Indians picked up the old time shouting revivals of the whites and combined it with a dance marathon strictly their own.

     The whites suspected it was "war medicine" and the government banned it. Gradually the dance was forgotten, but the Koshares revived it. In the Acoma buffalo dance they wear buffalo skin headdresses, complete with horns. When the horns were boiled on the Burshears cookstove, the odor brought an evacuation of the entire neighborhood.

* * * 

     In the Taos horsetail dance, the boys wear a special costume that features long sweeping horse tails; for the rain dance, they use live snakes, and squaws are allowed to dance in the Kiowa hummingbird dance. In the age old devil or crown dance, they wear a spectacular hooded costume with a sort of wrap around bathtowel effect. The eagle dance, a heartbreaking ritual that represents the struggles of a great eagle caught in a trap, is a solo dance, traditionally danced by the Koshare head chief [what a lad you must be to attain that position] wearing a costume that looks like eagle wings.

     Making up the dancers is a two hour job, for almost every inch of every boy must be given that red skin look. Added to this is the ceremonial paint job that goes with each dance. At one performance, where I saw the Koshares dancing indoors on a hot night, the master of ceremonies had to start the program early. The Koshares were ready, he explained, and their paint was running!

* * * 

     Each year, the Koshare Indians, in their scout uniforms, go on a long trip that combines sightseeing and moneymaking. In the year just ended, they made $30,000, which isn't bad for a bunch of kids. Now they are building a Kiva, or Indian council hall, on the campus of the La Junta Junior college. The roof of the 60 foot circular room is made of logs with no interior supports or beams. The logs are placed in courses, each succeeding course spanning a shorter distance. The longest log is 26 feet but there are 40 tons of them in the roof. They are held in place by five tons of steel drift pins, made in the Santa Fe shops of La Junta by workmen who volunteered their time. 

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Note: Scoutmaster Burshears gives himself far too much credit when claiming that he and his dancing group are reviving forgotten dances. 

After 1930, when the ban for some (definitely not all) of the "tamer" Indian ceremonial dances was lifted, tribal nations - alone, with like groups and during inter-tribal exhibitions - started to publicly perform their traditional dances for themselves and for the pubic. Often times, the Koshares would be declaring that they were teaching Native people their own dances, yet I can find newspaper articles that proves the indigenous people were holding their own dances. My thought is that this was an advertising ploy - to say that these Boy Scouts were the keepers of these sacred dancers, even though they were not. 

Below are two articles from 1931 of an inter-tribal pow-wow that featured a great deal of these ceremonial dances, and more! And performed by the actual people who originated these dances. A few that are mentioned include: Taos Hoop Dance, Apache Social Dance, Eagle Dance, Hopi Butterfly Dance, Butterfly Dance, Navahos Rainbow Dance, Taos Peace Dance, Apache War Dance, Zuni Rain Dance, Acoma Eagle Feather Dance… and more! 

1931, Aug 18 Albuquerque Journal 

1931, Aug 18 Albuquerque Journal 

1950, Feb 26 Chicago Tribune