The People the City Was Named For

Long before a surveyor planted his stake at Crow Creek Crossing, the Cheyenne people had been living and hunting across the northern plains for generations. They had not always been here. In the sixteen hundreds, their ancestors lived near the Great Lakes, farming and harvesting wild rice. Pressure from the Assiniboine drove them westward, and by around seventeen thirty, they had reached the Black Hills and the Powder River Country, where they embraced the buffalo economy that would define plains life.

With horses, which they introduced to Lakota bands around that same decade, the Cheyenne became accomplished hunters and riders. Buffalo sustained everything: food, shelter, clothing, tools, ceremony. Women tanned hides and maintained portable tipi villages that could move with the herds. Men hunted and defended territory against rival nations on an open, contested grassland.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen fifty-one formally recognized Cheyenne and Arapaho territory across a vast stretch of the central plains. It did not hold. Gold rushes and emigrant wagon trains brought pressure the treaty could not absorb, and the violence that followed peaked in November of eighteen sixty-four, when Colonel John Chivington led roughly seven hundred soldiers against a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. Congressional investigators called it a massacre. Chivington had already resigned his commission, and no charges were ever brought.

Two years and a few months later, a railroad company named its new townsite after the people whose land it occupied. The Cheyenne Nation today is divided between the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in Montana and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. The city of Cheyenne carries their name, though not their story, in its sign.