Cheyenne County: Last of the Buffalo Range

Cheyenne County sits in the far northwest corner of Kansas, on the high plains where the state edges toward Colorado and Nebraska, and in the eighteen seventies it was still one of the last places in Kansas where the buffalo grass was undisturbed and the Cheyenne still moved through on their seasonal rounds.

The county was created by the Kansas legislature in March of eighteen seventy-three, named for the Cheyenne people whose territory extended across the southern plains. At the time of the county's creation, no permanent Anglo-American settlement existed within its borders. The first survey of public lands came in eighteen seventy-four. The first cattle ranch, the T Ranch, was established in eighteen seventy-six near a trading post on the Republican River called Wano, which sat about a mile and a half northeast of where the town of Saint Francis stands today. The first homesteaders didn't arrive until eighteen seventy-nine.

The country was full of buffalo hunters in those years, men following the systematic slaughter that would effectively end the great southern herd by the early eighteen eighties. The Cheyenne, dispossessed from their lands in the south and forced onto a reservation in Indian Territory in eighteen seventy-seven, had endured enough. In September of eighteen seventy-eight, about three hundred fifty Northern Cheyenne under chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf broke from the reservation and began a desperate march north toward their homeland. Their route cut through western Kansas. The breakout covered hundreds of miles over weeks of cavalry pursuit, and it became one of the defining acts of resistance in the history of the Southern Plains.

The land the Cheyenne were fleeing through, the same land that would become Cheyenne County, was transformed within a decade by homesteaders, wheat farmers, and the railroad. Saint Francis was incorporated and became the county seat. The county that bore the Cheyenne name had absorbed its former inhabitants' homeland into the grid of American settlement, leaving only the name behind.