The Tse-tsehese-staestse (the people) are an Algonquian-speaking tribe known to outsiders as the Cheyenne—a word possibly derived from their Sioux neighbors, meaning "people of a different language." The Cheyenne originally lived in permanent farming villages around the Great Lakes in Minnesota. Over the next two hundred years, the Cheyenne migrated one thousand miles westward to the Black Hills area, moving their camps, and adapting to a life dependent on the horse and buffalo. It was during this journey that Sweet Medicine, the Cheyenne prophet, appeared, bringing one of the two sacred covenants, their teachings, and their protection to his people. The Cheyenne developed a well-defined system of kinship, organized into bands and military societies, with a council of forty-four chiefs handling peace and trade relations.

The Cheyenne met their first Europeans in 1680 when visiting the French Fort Crevecoeur on the Illinois River. For decades they retained friendly, if distant, relations with the white settlers. The discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 and the subsequent Sand Creek Massacre significantly altered this relationship. In 1864 Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister with political aspirations, attacked Chief Black Kettle's camp of five hundred Cheyenne at Sand Creek. Seeking peace with the white man, Black Kettle had surrendered under a promise of protection from Colorado's governor, John Evans. With Chivington reportedly stating, "I have come to kill Indians and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians" (Brown, 1970, p. 86), seven hundred U.S. soldiers under his command brutally killed and mutilated nearly two hundred Cheyenne, mostly women and children. Four years later Lieutenant Colonel George Custer attacked Black Kettle's camp on the Washita River, killing the chief and sixty others, mostly women and children who, as before, had surrendered to the military before being slaughtered. In 1876 the Cheyenne, then fighting with the Sioux, defeated Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. A year later several Northern Cheyenne bands surrendered. As retribution, the government sent them to Oklahoma Indian Territory, where they faced confinement and starvation. In January 1879, after the Cheyenne had mounted an unsuccessful escape attempt, the U.S. military brutally murdered their much-respected leader, Dull Knife, and seventy-three other men, women, and children at Fort Robinson.

Some of the Northern Cheyenne nevertheless managed to return to Montana, where, with other tribal members, they settled on a reservation established by executive order in 1884. In the early twenty-first century 6,500 members of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe control a 445,000-acre reservation in southeastern Montana that contains one of the largest coal deposits in the United States. Remembering the words of Sweet Medicine, who instructed them to take care of Escehenan (Mother Earth) above all else, they have, despite high unemployment rates, refused to open their lands to mining. Other bands of Cheyenne, who had traveled southward over the years and became known as the Southern Cheyenne, settled with the Southern Arapahoe on a reservation in Oklahoma. In preparation for Oklahoma's admission to the Union as a state, the federal government dissolved the Oklahoma reservations, allocating the majority of former reservation lands to individual tribe members. As of 2004, a combined Southern Cheyenne and South Arapahoe population of 7,300 reside on approximately 87,000 acres in northwestern Oklahoma.

SEE ALSO Indigenous Peoples; Native Americans; Sand Creek Massacre

Sharon O'Brien