A'daltem Ano'nde
A'daltem Ano'nde, or Screaming Skull, was a standard issue carbine converted in the late 1860s to shoot .50/70 gauge cartridges. It was originally used by African American Sergeant James Rufus Daly during the Indian Wars, but during a skirmish at Fort Sill during the summer of 1896, he lost it to Kiowa prophet and Remote soldier Pai'ngya, who believed it was possessed by a dakina that would resurrect his Native American ancestors and drive whites from their lands forever. According to an interview with Dr James Mooney in 1896, Pai'ngya believed the dakina had visited him in a vision two weeks earlier, on the second day of a Ghost Dance ceremony in the summer of 1875, saying he would fight a "buffalo man" and take his rifle, which would have those powers.
Pai'ngya killed Daly and turned his scalp into a medicine bag to hold various totems including the knucklebone of Pai'ngya's own little finger, which he had lost in the skirmish. He believed himself to be an extension of the weapon and a tool to its dakina, and he used it to kill hundreds in fifteen campaigns against white settlers in Oklahoma and Texas between October of 1876 and January of 1879. However, Pai'ngya said the dakina deserted the gun (taking with it the cartouche ordinarily stamped on converted rifles) in late December 1890, just before the massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
