The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory
The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory

Author: Ramon Powers

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2012-09-13

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0806185902

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The exodus of the Northern Cheyennes in 1878 and 1879, an attempt to flee from Indian Territory to their Montana homeland, is an important event in American Indian history. It is equally important in the history of towns like Oberlin, Kansas, where Cheyenne warriors killed more than forty settlers. The Cheyennes, in turn, suffered losses through violent encounters with the U.S. Army. More than a century later, the story remains familiar because it has been told by historians and novelists, and on film. In The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory, James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers explore how the event has been remembered, told, and retold. They examine the recollections of Indians and settlers and their descendants, and they consider local history, mass-media treatments, and literature to draw thought-provoking conclusions about how this story has changed over time. The Cheyennes’ journey has always been recounted in melodramatic stereotypes, and for the last fifty years most versions have featured “noble savages” trying to reclaim their birthright. Here, Leiker and Powers deconstruct those stereotypes and transcend them, pointing out that history is never so simple. “The Cheyennes’ flight,” they write, “had left white and Indian bones alike scattered along its route from Oklahoma to Montana.” In this view, the descendants of the Cheyennes and the settlers they encountered are all westerners who need history as a “way of explaining the bones and arrowheads” that littered the plains. Leiker and Powers depict a rural West whose diverse peoples—Euro-American and Native American alike—seek to preserve their heritage through memory and history. Anyone who lives in the contemporary Great Plains or who wants to understand the West as a whole will find this book compelling.

Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors
Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors

Author: Denise Low

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-11

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1496223012

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Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors presents the images of Native warriors—Wild Hog, Porcupine, and Left Hand, as well as possibly Noisy Walker (or Old Man), Old Crow, Blacksmith, and Tangled Hair—as they awaited probable execution in the Dodge City jail in 1879. When Sheriff Bat Masterson provided drawing materials, the men created war books that were coded to avoid confrontation with white authorities and to narrate survival from a Northern Cheyenne point of view. The prisoners used the ledger-art notebooks to maintain their cultural practices during incarceration and as gifts and for barter with whites in the prison where they struggled to survive. The ledger-art notebooks present evidence of spiritual practice and include images of contemporaneous animals of the region, hunting, courtship, dance, social groupings, and a few war-related scenes. Denise Low and Ramon Powers include biographical materials from the imprisonment and subsequent release, which extend the historical arc of Northern Cheyenne heroes of the Plains Indian Wars into reservation times. Sources include selected ledger drawings, army reports, letters, newspapers, and interviews with some of the Northern Cheyenne men and their descendants. Accounts from a firsthand witness of the drawings and composition of the ledgers themselves give further information about Native perspectives on the conflicted history of the North American West in the nineteenth century and beyond. This group of artists jailed after the tragedy of the Fort Robinson Breakout have left a legacy of courage and powerful art.

January Moon
January Moon

Author: Jerome A. Greene

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0806166886

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Historian Jerome A. Greene is renowned for his memorable chronicles of egregious events involving American Indians and the U.S. military, including Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee. Now, in January Moon, Greene draws from extensive research and fieldwork to explore a signal—and appallingly brutal—event in American history: the desperate flight of Chief Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne Indians from imprisonment at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. In the wake of the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, the U.S. government expelled most Northern Cheyennes from their northern plains homeland to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. Following mounting hardships, many of those people, under Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, broke away, seeking to return north. While Little Wolf’s band managed initially to elude pursuing U.S. troops, Dull Knife’s people were captured in 1878 and ushered into a makeshift barrack prison at Camp (later Fort) Robinson, where they spent months waiting for government officials to decide their fate. It is here that Greene’s riveting narrative edges toward its climax. On the night of January 9, 1879, in a bloody struggle with troops, Dull Knife’s people staged a massive breakout from their barrack prison in a last-ditch bid for freedom. Greene paints a vivid picture of their frantic escape, which took place under an unusually brilliant moon that doomed many of those fleeing by silhouetting them against the snow. A climactic engagement at Antelope Creek proved especially devastating, and the helpless people were nearly annihilated. In gripping detail, Greene follows the survivors’ dreadful experiences into their aftermath, including creation of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Carrying the story to the present day, he describes Cheyenne tribal events commemorating the breakout—all designed to ensure that the injustices of nineteenth-century U.S. government policy will never be forgotten.

Tell Them We Are Going Home
Tell Them We Are Going Home

Author: John H. Monnett

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780806136455

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Tell Them We Are Going Home details the courageous journey of the Northern Cheyennes, under the leadership of Little Wolf and Dull Knife, from Indian Territory northward to their homelands in the Powder River country. Incorporating the perspectives of the Cheyennes, the U.S. military, the Indian Bureau, and the Kansas settlers who encountered the traveling Indians, this book provides a complete account of the odyssey. The dramatic fifteen-hundred-mile trek of the Northern Cheyennes through Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, lasting from 1878 to 1879, would become one of the most important episodes in American history and in Cheyenne memory.

Sovereignty for Survival
Sovereignty for Survival

Author: James Robert Allison

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0300206690

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Explores the influence of America's indigenous peoples on energy policy and development, documenting how certain federally supported and often environmentally damaging energy projects were seen as threats by native American and sparked a pan-tribal resistance movement leading to increased autonomy.

Powder River
Powder River

Author: Paul L. Hedren

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 0806156120

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The Great Sioux War of 1876–77 began at daybreak on March 17, 1876, when Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds and six cavalry companies struck a village of Northern Cheyennes—Sioux allies—thereby propelling the Northern Plains tribes into war. The ensuing last stand of the Sioux against Anglo-American settlement of their homeland spanned some eighteen months, playing out across more than twenty battle and skirmish sites and costing hundreds of lives on both sides and many millions of dollars. And it all began at Powder River. Powder River: Disastrous Opening of the Great Sioux War recounts the wintertime Big Horn Expedition and its singular great battle, along with the stories of the Northern Cheyennes and their elusive leader Old Bear. Historian Paul Hedren tracks both sides of the conflict through a rich array of primary source material, including the transcripts of Reynolds’s court-martial and Indian recollections. The disarray and incompetence of the war’s beginnings—officers who failed to take proper positions, disregard of orders to save provisions, failure to cooperate, and abandonment of the dead and a wounded soldier—in many ways anticipated the catastrophe that later occurred at the Little Big Horn. Forty photographs, many previously unpublished, and five new maps detail the action from start to ignominious conclusion. Hedren’s comprehensive account takes Powder River out of the shadow of the Little Big Horn and reveals how much this critical battle tells us about the army’s policy and performance in the West, and about the debacle soon to follow.

Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight
Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight

Author: John H. Monnett

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-03-16

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0806158697

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The Fetterman Fight ranks among the most crushing defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the nineteenth-century West. On December 21, 1866—during Red Cloud’s War (1866–1868)—a well-organized force of 1,500 to 2,000 Oglala Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors annihilated a detachment of seventy-nine infantry and cavalry soldiers—among them Captain William Judd Fetterman—and two civilian contractors. With no survivors on the U.S. side, the only eyewitness accounts of the battle came from Lakota and Cheyenne participants. In Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight, award-winning historian John H. Monnett presents these Native views, drawn from previously published sources as well as newly discovered interviews with Oglala and Cheyenne warriors and leaders. Supplemented with archaeological evidence, these narratives flesh out historical understanding of Red Cloud’s War. Climate change in the mid-nineteenth century made the resource-rich Powder River Country in today’s Wyoming increasingly important to Plains Indians. At the same time, the discovery of gold in Montana encouraged prospectors to pass through the Powder River region on their way north, and so the U.S. Army began to construct new forts along the Bozeman Trail. In the resulting conflict, the Lakotas and Cheyennes defended their hunting ranges and trade routes. Traditional histories have laid the blame for Fetterman’s 1866 defeat and death on his incompetent leadership—and thus implied that the Indian alliance succeeded only because of Fetterman’s personal failings. Monnett’s sources paint another picture. Narratives like those of Miniconjou Lakota warrior White Bull suggest that Fetterman’s actions were not seen as rash or reprehensible until after the fact. Nor did his men flee the field in panic. Rather, they fought bravely to the end. The Indians, for their part, used their knowledge of the terrain to carefully plan and execute an ambush, ensuring them victory. Critical to understanding the nuances of Plains Indian strategy and tactics, the firsthand narratives in Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight reveal the true nature of this Native victory against regular army forces.

The Good, the Bad and the Ancient
The Good, the Bad and the Ancient

Author: Sue Matheson

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-11-03

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1476646104

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Although Americans are no longer compelled to learn Greek and Latin, classical ideals remain embedded in American law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history and especially popular culture. In the Western genre, many film and television directors (such as John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah) have drawn inspiration from antiquity, and the classical values and influences in their work have shaped our conceptions of the West for years. This thought-provoking, first-of-its-kind collection of essays celebrates, affirms and critiques the West's relationship with the classical world. Explored are films like Cheyenne Autumn, The Wild Bunch, The Track of the Cat, Trooper Hook, The Furies, Heaven's Gate, and Slow West, as well as serials like Gunsmoke and Lonesome Dove.

Massacring Indians
Massacring Indians

Author: Roger L. Nichols

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 080616980X

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During the nineteenth century, the U.S. military fought numerous battles against American Indians. These so-called Indian wars devastated indigenous populations, and some of the conflicts stand out today as massacres, as they involved violent attacks on often defenseless Native communities, including women and children. Although historians have written full-length studies about each of these episodes, Massacring Indians is the first to present them as part of a larger pattern of aggression, perpetuated by heartless or inept military commanders. In clear and accessible prose, veteran historian Roger L. Nichols examines ten significant massacres committed by U.S. Army units against American Indians. The battles range geographically from Alabama to Montana and include such well-known atrocities as Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee. Nichols explores the unique circumstances of each event, including its local context. At the same time, looking beyond the confusion and bloodshed of warfare, he identifies elements common to all the massacres. Unforgettable details emerge in the course of his account: inadequate training of U.S. soldiers, overeagerness to punish Indians, an inflated desire for glory among individual officers, and even careless mistakes resulting in attacks on the wrong village or band. As the author chronicles the collective tragedy of the massacres, he highlights the roles of well-known frontier commanders, ranging from Andrew Jackson to John Chivington and George Armstrong Custer. In many cases, Nichols explains, it was lower-ranking officers who bore the responsibility and blame for the massacres, even though orders came from the higher-ups. During the nineteenth century and for years thereafter, white settlers repeatedly used the term “massacre” to describe Indian raids, rather than the reverse. They lacked the understanding to differentiate such raids—Indians defending their homeland against invasion—from the aggressive decimation of peaceful Indian villages by U.S. troops. Even today it may be tempting for some to view the massacres as exceptions to the norm. By offering a broader synthesis of the attacks, Massacring Indians uncovers a more disturbing truth: that slaughtering innocent people was routine practice for U.S. troops and their leaders.

Indian Tribes of Oklahoma
Indian Tribes of Oklahoma

Author: Blue Clark

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 0806167629

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Oklahoma is home to nearly forty American Indian tribes and includes the largest Native population of any state. As a result, many Americans think of the state as “Indian Country.” In 2009, Blue Clark, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, produced an invaluable reference for information on the state’s Native peoples. Now, building on the success of the first edition, this revised guide offers an up-to-date survey of the diverse nations that make up Oklahoma’s Indian Country. Since publication of the first edition more than a decade ago, much has changed across Indian Country—and more is known about its history and culture. Drawing from both scholarly literature and Native oral sources, Clark incorporates the most recent archaeological and anthropological research to provide insights into each individual tribe dating back to prehistoric times. Today, the thirty-nine federally recognized tribes of Oklahoma continue to make advances in the areas of tribal governance, commerce, and all forms of arts and literature. This new edition encompasses the expansive range of tribal actions and interests in the state, including the rise of Native nation casino operations and nongaming industries, and the establishment of new museums and cultural attractions. In keeping with the user-friendly format of the original edition, this book provides readers with the unique story of each tribe, presented in alphabetical order, from the Alabama-Quassartes to the Yuchis. Each entry contains a complete statistical and narrative summary of the tribe, covering everything from origin tales to contemporary ceremonies and tribal businesses. The entries also include tribal websites, suggested readings, and photographs depicting visitor sites, events, and prominent tribal personages.