Punished Woman's Fork: The Dull Knife Outbreak Reaches Kansas

In September of eighteen seventy-eight, a band of Northern Cheyenne people under the leadership of Dull Knife and Little Wolf walked out of the Southern Cheyenne reservation in Indian Territory and began a twelve-hundred-mile march north toward their homeland in Montana. They had been removed to the southern reservation the year before under a government policy that lumped Northern and Southern Cheyenne together despite their different territories, customs, and political structures. Within a year, more than sixty people had died of disease and malnutrition. The survivors left because they believed they would all die if they stayed.

The Army sent columns from multiple directions to intercept them. On September twenty-seventh, eighteen seventy-eight, a pursuing force under Colonel William H. Lewis caught up with part of Dull Knife's band at Punished Woman's Fork of the Smoky Hill River in present-day Scott County, Kansas. The Cheyenne had fortified a position in the rough breaks along the creek, and what followed was a multi-day engagement. The Cheyenne held off the soldiers long enough for the main band to continue moving. Colonel Lewis was mortally wounded in the fighting and died from loss of blood the next day. Several soldiers were wounded. Cheyenne losses were uncertain and variously reported.

The engagement is part of what historians call the Cheyenne Outbreak or the Dull Knife Raid, depending on whose perspective frames the telling. The band eventually split: Little Wolf's group reached Montana and eventually surrendered there. Dull Knife's group was captured and taken to Fort Robinson in Nebraska, where they were imprisoned under conditions so severe that in January of eighteen seventy-nine they broke out of the barracks. Soldiers killed most of those who ran. Perhaps sixty-four Cheyenne died at Fort Robinson in what became known as the Fort Robinson Massacre.

The Kansas battlefield site is on private land. A historical marker identifies the general area. The larger story of the Dull Knife Outbreak is one of the starkest accounts of what forced removal actually looked like when the people removed refused to stay.