The Northern Cheyenne Walk Home

In September of eighteen seventy-eight, approximately three hundred fifty Northern Cheyenne people walked out of the Darlington Indian Territory reservation in what is now Oklahoma and began moving north. They had been forced there after their defeat in the Indian Wars two years earlier, and the reservation was killing them. The food rations were insufficient, the land could not support the people, and disease was spreading through the camps. Dull Knife and Little Wolf, the two principal leaders, had petitioned the federal government for permission to return to their Montana homeland. The government refused. So they left anyway.

The Army pursued them across Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas for months. The group eventually split. Little Wolf led his faction north and west, moving through the hills and river breaks with a skill that kept the Army at bay. His group reached the Tongue River country in what is now southeastern Montana and eventually won the right to remain there.

Dull Knife's faction was captured near Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in January of eighteen seventy-nine. The Army confined them in the fort barracks and cut off their food and heat in an effort to force their return to Indian Territory. After days of this, the people broke out. They fled into the snow. The exact number killed by Army fire in the breakout and in the pursuit that followed is a figure historians have recorded in a range of approximately fifty to sixty-four people, including women and children. The Northern Cheyenne Tribe's own documentation is the most authoritative voice on this count, and that documentation acknowledges the uncertainty in the archival record.

The survivors were eventually permitted to return to Montana. The Northern Cheyenne Reservation was formally established in eighteen eighty-four near the Tongue River country where Little Wolf's band had held on. It was a rare outcome: the federal government reversed a removal policy, not as an act of justice, but because the Cheyenne had simply refused to disappear.

Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, just ahead, carries his name today. The Northern Cheyenne remain in their homeland.