Cheyenne Autumn is an unflinching historical portrait of a people confronting physical extermination and cultural annihilation at the hands of duplicitous government forces. This work is a chronicle of a Cheyenne outbreak starting in Oklahoma and ending in the surrender of Little Wolf and his followers hundreds of miles and six months later in Montana. The northern Cheyennes of the Yellowstone region are promised land, food, and protection in treaties signed by the U.S. government. These agreements, however, are repeatedly and brutally broken by the government.

Hundreds of northern Cheyennes agree, under government coercion, to removal to Oklahoma on condition that they can later return north if they choose. Finding the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma unacceptable, Little Wolf leads his people back to the Yellowstone region. In returning north, the Little Wolf Cheyennes face massive resistance and retaliation by the U.S. Army. The Cheyennes’ struggle to return home is a study in human contrasts: of loyalty and betrayal, resolve and hesitation, mutual cooperation and unthinkable brutality. Mari Sandoz describes a native culture placed under extreme and unpardonable duress by a dominant white society motivated by greed, fear, and the changing winds of popular opinion.

The central narrative details the difficult challenges encountered by Little Wolf: first, the need to elude U.S. troops while simultaneously securing horses, food, and temporary shelter for his followers during the bitter winter of 1878-1879; and, second, the need to control members of his band who oppose his decisions and who threaten to further endanger the little group of Cheyennes by taking revenge against white settlers. Ultimately, a schism between Little Wolf and Dull Knife deepens into the fateful division of the northward-moving Cheyennes into two groups.

The Dull Knife contingent is captured and incarcerated at Fort Robinson, in western Nebraska. Learning that they are scheduled for involuntary restoration to Oklahoma, the Dull Knife Cheyennes launch a desperate escape during January, 1879. Only a few Cheyennes survive the Army’s relentless onslaught under Captain Wessels.

Meanwhile, the Little Wolf Cheyennes winter among the Nebraska sandhills and then resume their flight toward Yellowstone. Rather than witness the unavoidable slaughter of his people, however, Little Wolf eventually surrenders to Lieutenant White Hat Clark in March, 1879. By this time, however, adverse publicity has reversed the government’s removal policy, and the surviving Little Wolf Cheyennes are allowed to stay in the north in what is now Montana.

Drawing on archival records, historical documents, and interviews with Cheyenne informants, including a survivor from Little Wolf’s band, Sandoz crafts an epic tragedy that reads more like a novel than the sociologically astute historical account that it actually is. This effect is created by Sandoz’s poetic and sonorous prose, evocative descriptions, and liberal use of imagined dialogues. Her authoritative narrative voice—together with documentary notes, maps, photographs of several participants, and an index—frames the dialogues and soberly reminds readers that the unfolding story is not at root a work of fiction.

The interconnected sagas of the Little Wolf and Dull Knife bands are embedded in past conflicts with white people, and these events are woven into the story as flashbacks. Sandoz employs the Cheyenne convention by which significant historical events “become as today” when one nears or stands on the place where the events originally took place. Thus, as the Cheyennes move northward, they also travel back in time to earlier pivotal struggles of the nineteenth century, including the Washita fight, in which General George Armstrong Custer smashed a Cheyenne village in 1868, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in which the Sioux destroyed Custer and his troops in 1876. The temporal organization of the work as a whole is progressive, however, and opens with an historical forward that sets the stage for Little Wolf’s northward march. The book ends with an afterword describing Little Wolf’s subsequent fall from leadership and his death in 1904.