Cheyenne

01Summary

Plains horse people and close allies of the Lakota and Arapaho, whose hunting grounds lay between the North Platte and the Arkansas, along the southern side of the trail. Emigrant traffic thinned the bison and brought cholera, which may have killed half the Southern Cheyenne in 1849. The Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 turned growing tension into years of war.

02History

The Cheyenne call themselves Tsétsėhéstȧhese. Once hunters and gatherers in what is now Minnesota, they moved west in the 1700s, farmed for a time in river villages, and became mounted bison hunters on the plains. After the Bent brothers built a trading post on the Arkansas River in the 1830s, part of the nation moved south, and the people became two divisions, the Northern and Southern Cheyenne, who stayed in close touch.

The Oregon Trail ran along the northern edge of Cheyenne country. Emigrant traffic meant competition for grass, water and game, and in 1849 cholera reached the plains. Historians estimate that the Southern Cheyenne lost about half of their people. In 1851 Cheyenne leaders signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which recognized their lands between the North Platte and the Arkansas.

Settlers and gold seekers poured into Colorado from 1858, and by the 1860s fighting had spread. On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington's Colorado volunteers attacked a camp of about 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek, where Black Kettle had camped as the Army told him to and flew a U.S. flag over his lodge. The soldiers killed about 230 people, most of them women, children and elders.

In 1868 Black Kettle, who had survived Sand Creek, was killed when Custer's cavalry attacked his camp on the Washita River. The Northern Cheyenne fought beside the Lakota at the Little Bighorn in 1876 and were sent south to Indian Territory in 1877. In 1878 about 300 of them broke away and fought their way north under Little Wolf and Morning Star (Dull Knife). In 1884 the survivors won a reservation in their Montana homeland.

03Notable leaders

• Black Kettle (Mo'ohtavetoo'o)
  Southern Cheyenne peace chief, c. 1803-1868, who survived Sand Creek and was killed at the Washita.
• Morning Star (Vóóhéhéve), also called Dull Knife
  Northern Cheyenne chief, c. 1810-1883, a leader of the 1878 flight north.
• Little Wolf (Ó'kôhómôxháahketa)
  Northern Cheyenne leader, c. 1820-1904, who led the other half of the 1878 flight north.

04Today