The Battle of Custer and the Removal of the Cheyenne ...We all went over the divide and camped in the valley of [the] Little Horn. Everybody thought, Now we are out of the white mans country. He can live there, we will live here. ... I went to water my horses at the creek, and washed them off with cool water, then took a swim myself. I came back to the camp afoot. When I got near my lodge, I looked up the Little Horn towards Sitting Bulls camp. I saw a great dust rising. It looked like a whirlwind....I saw flags come up over the hill to the east....Then the soldiers rose all at once ....the Sioux rode up the ridge on all sides, riding very fast. The Cheyennes went up the left way. Then the shooting was quick, quick ....We circled all round...swirling like water round a stone.... Soldiers in line drop, but one man rides up and down the line -- all the time shouting. He rode a sorrel horse with white face and white fore-legs. I dont know who he was. He was a brave man.... All the soldiers were now killed, and...were left where they fell. We had no dance that night. We were sorrowful. - Two Moons, Northern Cheyenne. The Northern Cheyenne are allies of the Teton Lakota. They, too, oppose the Smoky Hill and Powder River roads, which drive away the game from the northern Plains. They, too, defended themselves along the Little Bighorn River against General Custer. They were there when Custer died. And they will pay. In the winter of 1876, Dull Knifes camp is attacked by the United States Army. The following year, the Northern Cheyenne are removed to a reservation in Oklahoma. But the agency is infested with malaria, and the promised food supplies are never issued. The Cheyenne starve. Our men did not want to fight. They wanted to be left alone so they might get food and skins to provide for their families....But we were not allowed to live in quiet. When the snow had fallen deep, a great band of soldiers came. They rode right into our camp and shot women and children as well as men....We who could do so ran away... my husband and our older son kept behind and fought off the soldiers ....I saw him fall, and his horse went away from him. I wanted to go back to him, but my two sons made me go on away with my three daughters. From the hilltops we Cheyennes looked back and saw all of our lodges and everything in them being burned into nothing but smoke and ashes....I was afraid of all white men soldiers. It seemed to me they represented the most extreme cruelty. They had just killed my husband and had burned our whole village. There was in my mind a clear recollection of a time...when they had killed and scalped many of our women and children in a peaceable camp [at Sand Creek]....At that time I had seen a friend of mine, a woman, crawling along the ground, shot, scalped, crazy, but not yet dead. After that, I always thought of her when I saw white men soldiers. - Iron Teeth, Northern Cheyenne. We were *always* hungry; we *never* had enough. When they that were sick once in a while felt as though they could eat something, we had nothing to give them....When winter came we went out on a buffalo hunt and nearly starved; we could not find any game...the children died of a disease we never knew anything about before; they broke out in blotches and dots all over, their noses would bleed and their heads split open.... - Wild Hog, Northern Cheyenne. The Cheyenne are told that if they do not like Indian Territory, they can return to their old homes. This is only rhetoric. No Cheyenne is allowed off the reservation boundary - not even to hunt -- without permission. A hot September wind gusts across the southern Plains. The Cheyenne have decided how they will die; the agent will be robbed of the glory. A slow train of several hundred sick and weakened Cheyenne under Little Wolf and Dull Knife head resolutely north, preferring death by the soldiers who will follow, than the slow agony of sickness and starvation. Thirteen hundred soldiers and civilians swarm after them, and America is electrified with the news that the Northern Cheyenne have broken out. They are on the run. The Cheyenne drop from soldiers bullets; the chase ends with surrender at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. But still the Cheyenne refuse to return to Indian Territory. In a tiny prison cell thirty feet square are the Northern Cheyenne -- forty-three men, twenty-nine women, and twenty children. Daily the harsh question, Will you return south? Daily the quiet answer, No. Food is cut off. Then water. For eleven days, the Cheyenne do not eat. For three days, they do not drink. There is nothing to do but sit, huddled on the cold prison floor, in dignity. All we ask is to be allowed to live, and to live in peace....We bowed to the will of the Great Father and went far into the south where he told us to go. There we found a Cheyenne cannot live. Sickness came among us that made mourning in every lodge. Then the treaty promises were broken and our rations were short.... to stay there meant that all of us would die... [so] we thought it better to die fighting to regain our old homes than to perish of sickness. Then our march was begun. The rest you know....You may kill me here; but you cannot make me go back. We will not go. The only way to get us there is to come in here with clubs and knock us on the head, and drag us out and take us down there dead. - Tahmelapashme (Dull Knife), Northern Cheyenne.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 23:48:14 +0000
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