The Cheyenne Wars: The Dramatic Saga of the Greatest of All Native American Tribes

Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

IN A VERY ANCIENT TIME…

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

The Cheyenne Wars is copyright © 1964 by Joseph J. Millard.

All rights reserved.

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A shorter and significantly different version of this book appeared in True magazine.

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Published by Wildside Press LLC.

www.wildsidepress.com

INTRODUCTION

For more than two hundred years the warpath of the Cheyenne Indians wove a crimson thread across the tapestry of our Western history. This long trail of blood began with a strange encounter, and it ended at last in one of the greatest epics of sheer courage in human history. Between these two points runs the saga of a mighty people who had war forced upon them and who reluctantly but determinedly made themselves the scourge of the Plains. It is the story of perhaps the greatest of all American Indian tribes.

The story is not always pretty. The Cheyennes’ treatment at the hands of the white man repeated a pattern shamefully common in the era of our Western expansion. Yet for decades the Cheyennes endured abuses with incredible forbearance, and without spilling a single drop of white blood in well-merited reprisal.

When finally, goaded beyond human endurance, they turned on their white tormenters, it was with all the pent-up ferocity of their savage natures. They gave the U.S. Army some of its most galling and bloodiest trouncings. Hungry, homeless and driven, they repeatedly outwitted and defeated overwhelming forces of trained and well-equipped troops. Generals such as Crook, Terry and Miles considered the Cheyenne warriors the finest natural cavalry on earth.

They fought with desperate courage, but also with a high sense of honor that was a proud heritage of the Cheyenne nation. Some of the finest tributes paid them came from the lips of men they had defeated. There are few higher accolades to be earned.

This side of the picture is too often obscured by the fact that the Indian Wars followed the Old Testament pattern of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The code of the Indian held an entire tribe responsible for the acts of any member. Consequently, an outrage perpetrated by one white man automatically demanded retaliation against any or all whites.

Out of an arrogant ignorance, the settlers followed much the same code. To most of them, all Indians looked pretty much alike and therefore must act alike. Few could identify tribal markings or distinguish between hostile and friendly bands. To them, the only good Indian was a dead Indian. The inevitable result was that more often than not it was innocent parties on both sides who paid the penalties.

The Indian Wars frequently took on the nightmarish character of a contest between red man and white to see which could indulge in the more savage barbarities. In this sport, it was too often the Indian who found himself hopelessly outclassed.

But before we condemn the American people or the government too harshly, we should understand the conditions and the circumstances under which this conflict took place.

At the time the Cheyennes set off the conflagration that swept the West, the Union was fighting for its life in a bloody Civil War. Most of the better officers, men of ability, common sense and decency, had been recalled to commands in the East. Their places on the frontier had to be filled with whatever material was available.

Let’s face it. Despite a flood of romantic nonsense to the contrary, the average settler was something less than a sterling character. The hardships and perils of the raw frontier were not a powerful magnet to men of culture and sensitivity. Rather, they attracted the misfits and castoffs of a more civilized East, the ignorant and the bigoted, thugs and bullies and opportunists in search of plunder, peanut politicians with more ambition than ability.

These were the types most frequently elevated by necessity to posts of responsibility they were totally unfitted to hold. They were the men most frequently responsible for the shameful massacres and the inhuman treatment of the red man.

Similarly, the war had denuded the West of its Regular Army troops, men trained to the habit of obedience. Their places were taken by a rabble of volunteer militia. Too often these were recruited in times of crisis, when an Indian attack threatened or some outrage demanded vengeance. At such times, reason was overruled by emotion and it was easy for passions to explode with the senseless frenzy of a race riot.

The end of the Civil War brought little improvement. Under the slovenly administration of President Grant the Bureau of Indian Affairs fell into the clutches of a heartless set of plunderers whose only god was gold. They robbed both the government and its Indian wards with happy impartiality.

The post of Indian Agent in the various districts was openly peddled to the highest bidders. Many of these agents made enormous profits at the expense of the Indians. They took huge kickbacks from suppliers who furnished shoddy clothing and spoiled provisions in place of promised government annuities. They sold licenses to peddle illegal whiskey on reservations.

One such agent, S. E. Colley, forced the Indians to give him presents of horses, robes and valuable bead-work before he would release their annuity goods. Even then he gave them only sick and bony cattle for beef and the cheapest of shoddy clothing. Anything good was handed over to his son to sell as a trader, a scheme that netted him some $30,000 profit in less than three years.

What was worse, the Indian Bureau controlled the Army for much of this period. To further their schemes of rapine, the agents frequently forced officers and men to carry out the most shameful acts of treachery and brutality.

Being a fiercely proud and independent people, the Cheyennes steadfastly refused to grovel before their persecutors. Consequently they were singled out for more than their share of measures designed to break their spirit. When they finally rebelled, they exacted a fearful price for the long period of forbearance.

The war they touched off set the frontier aflame, took an uncounted number of lives and cost the U.S. Government in excess of $30,000,000. It was inevitable that in the end the Cheyenne Nation would be almost wiped out, but their spirit was never broken.

More important, their sufferings and heroism aroused the conscience of a nation and exposed the true situation in the West. Out of their sacrifice came lasting reforms and some small beginnings of a new era for all Indians. For this and many other reasons, all Americans, red and white, owe a tremendous debt to the once-mighty Cheyenne Nation.

This book is a sincere effort to recreate the story of that great nation with some of the sweep and color and drama of its original enactment. To accomplish this and to maintain narrative interest, I have taken the liberty of occasionally inventing some conversations.

No liberties whatever have been taken with events or the characters involved in them. Every incident is soundly documented and as accurate as any history can be where the records left by white frontiersmen were apt to be fragmentary, sharply biased and often no more than semiliterate. The red man kept no written records at all.

He painted his crimson history across the canvas of the West with arrow, lance and gun.

—J.J.M.

IN A VERY ANCIENT TIME…

Long before the Cheyennes had ever seen a horse, a cow or a white man they knew of all three. They had been told of them in an ancient prophecy, and warned that their coming spelled the nation’s doom.

In a far-off time their culture hero, Sweet Medicine, came to earth from the spirit world to guide and teach and advise his children. When his task was almost done, he called the Cheyennes together to smoke a last pipe of good kinnikinnick and to hear his farewell words.

I shall not be with you long now, Sweet Medicine told them. Before I go I have something to tell you. A time is coming when you will meet other people, and you will fight with them and will kill each other. Each tribe will want the land of each other tribe, and you will be fighting always.

The Cheyennes looked at one another in amazement, for in their whole tribal memory they had never fought with anyone, nor taken the life of any human being. But Sweet Water was continuing.

He pointed toward the south. Far away in that direction is another kind of buffalo, with long hair hanging down its neck, and a tail that drags on the ground; an animal with a round hoof, not split like a buffalo’s, and with teeth in the upper part of its mouth as well as below. This animal you shall ride upon.

Then, having told them of the horse, he spoke of cattle. In time the buffalo will disappear from the land, and when they have gone, the next animal you will have to eat will be spotted.

Sweet Medicine went on to warn of many other things, and then his voice grew soft and sad.

Soon you will find among you a people who have hair all over their faces, whose skin is white; and when that time comes you will be controlled by them. The white people will be all over the land, and at last you will disappear.

And then Sweet Medicine was gone; but the people remembered his words, and in time all his prophecies except the last one came true.

CHAPTER 1

PRELUDE TO SLAUGHTER

It was November of 1864, and winter held the land along the Arkansas in its harsh grip. In the Big Timbers that fringed the river powdery snow smoked in the wind from the limbs of the giant cottonwoods. Northward, across the barren waste, soapweed and sagebrush lay crushed under mounded snow and the yucca’s green spikes poked up through the icy crust.

The vihiyo—the delegation of chiefs—had ridden forty miles through the bitter cold to bring their assurance of peace to the new commander of Fort Lyon, on the river. Nevertheless they were kept standing on the open porch in front of the stone headquarters building while an orderly took his time hunting up the post interpreter.

They waited patiently in ragged dignity, shivering a little in the biting wind, for their blankets were threadbare and thin. Once they would have been snug in finely dressed buffalo robes, as befitted their high positions, but that was in a good time long past, before they had been forced to trade the robes for scraps of food.

Their blood was as thin as their blankets, for they were no longer young men. Yellow Wolf was in his eighties and White Antelope seventy-five. War Bonnet, Lone Bear and the Arapaho chief, Left Hand, were but little younger. Their leader, Moketavata, whom the pale faces called Black Kettle, was sixty-one. For nearly half of his years he had labored earnestly and diligently for peace between red man and white.

Under his blanket now he clutched a fruit of that labor, his most cherished possession. It was a large American flag, given him in appreciation for his efforts in bringing hostile Indians together for the Treaty of 1860.

Fly this above your lodge, he had been told, so all soldiers will know your village is friendly and peaceful. It is a strong medicine that will protect you always from attack by white soldiers.

Peace had not always been the way of Black Kettle. In his youth he had been as fierce as any among the Cheyennes. Then, during one of the long fasts that were the custom of his people when seeking spiritual guidance, he had seen a vision. Sweet Medicine, the culture hero of the Cheyennes, appeared and spoke words of warning.

As I foretold long ago, the white people have come and are all over the land. Their weapons are powerful and their soldiers like the blades of grass on the prairie which no man can count. To take the warpath against them is but to follow the road to extermination. If you would save your people from this doom, you must persuade the warriors to put aside their bows and their lances, to make peace with the white man and learn to follow his way.

From that day on, Black Kettle never again lifted a hand against the veho, or wihio, the Cheyenne word for spider, which they had come to apply also to the white man. Instead, he tirelessly preached a gospel of compromise and conciliation. Repeatedly he had averted bloodshed by talking hot-blooded warriors out of a projected raid.

As his influence grew, these other chiefs had become his disciples. Under his tattered blanket, White Antelope, too, wore the white man’s silver medal of peace. In Black Kettle’s village, camped now in the big bend of Sand Creek, more than two hundred men and five hundred women and children were gathered under the mystical protection of his white man’s medicine flag.

So they waited patiently in the cold to assure the new commander of Fort Lyon that their hearts were good. A few soldiers, hurrying between the raw wood barracks and the stables, paused to gape at them with the impersonal curiosity of visitors at a zoo. The wind brought the rich aroma of tobacco and boiling coffee, but no one thought to offer the visitors any.

After an endless time the half-breed interpreter came shuffling across the compound, hunched in a greasy capote. At the steps he spat out a huge cud of tobacco, then pushed past and inside. Presently the door opened again and a red-faced cavalry sergeant motioned them in with a jerk of his head.

Inside, a sheet-iron stove glowed cherry-red and its heat struck their chilled bodies with an almost physical impact. At a table littered with maps,