The History & the Present of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. This week, we're discussing the history of the Northern Cheyenne people. The earliest written record we have of the Cheyenne is from the 17th century, when they traveled from present day Minnesota, to a French fort in present day Illinois, to trade for guns. But of course, the Cheyenne had been around long before Europeans came to write of their encounters. According to their own history, the Cheyenne had previously lived in the Great Lakes region, before another tribe drove them west to what is now Minnesota. In 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition encountered a group of Cheyenne along the Missouri River, in what is now eastern North Dakota. On July 6, 1825, the Cheyenne tribe signed a treaty with General Henry Atkinson and Major Benjamin O'Fallon, who were representing the United States government. In the treaty, one of several the US government established with Native tribes that year, the United States and the Cheyenne people found friendship with each other. They followed that up with the first Treaty of Fort Laramie, which is also called the Horse Creek Treaty, in 1851, in which several Native tribes, including the Cheyenne, agreed to allow safe passage for travelers on the Oregon Trail in exchange for the establishment of Indian Territory in areas of what is now Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and South Dakota. Within a few years, however, white settlers came in droves to the area to hunt for gold, driving the Cheyenne and Arapaho from their lands, with no efforts on the part of the US government to enforce the treaty. In 1861, a group of six Cheyenne leaders signed another treaty with the US government, the Treaty of Fort Wise, ceding much of the land they had been promised in the failed Treaty of Fort Laramie. Many of the Cheyenne people disavowed the treaty, and refuse to abide by it. Despite attempts at peace, tensions continued to rise, leading to violent conflicts between the Cheyenne and the US Army. In 1864, Colonel John Chivington led nearly 700 Men of the Third Colorado Cavalry in an attack on a camp of Southern Cheyenne and Arapahos, killing 137 people, mostly Cheyenne, and many of them women and children, in what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. In 1865, the US government, acknowledging the violence of the Sand Creek Massacre, established a reservation for the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho in what is now Oklahoma and Kansas. The Northern Cheyenne, with their allies, continued to fight the US Army until Red Cloud's War ended with the signing of the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. The discovery of gold, this time in the Black Hills, again quickly threatened the peace. In 1873, a delegation of leaders from the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho Tribes, including Cheyenne Sweet Medicine Chief Little Wolf, traveled to Washington, DC to meet with President Grant. They came to no lasting agreement in the meeting. And upon their return, the tribe fought off white encroachment on their land. The US government had tried to convince the Lakota to sell their gold rich land. When the Lakota rejected the offer, the US government violated the 1868 Treaty of Laramie and issued an order that all Native people in the region needed to return to designated reservations by January 31, or they would be deemed hostile. Groups of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne refused the order and banded together with Lakota Sitting Bull leading them. In June of 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led his Seventh Cavalry in an attack on Sitting Bull's camp along the Little Bighorn River. Custer had greatly underestimated the size and armaments of the Lakota and Cheyenne forces. And within an hour, Sitting Bull, and as many as 3000 warriors had killed Custer and his men. While it was a decisive victory for the Lakota and Cheyenne, the result was increased efforts by the US Army to force the tribes onto reservations. In Fall, 1876, Army troops were on the hunt for Crazy Horse, a war leader of the Oglala Lakota, who had been instrumental in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Brigadier General George Crook heard about a band of Cheyenne camped nearby, which included Little Wolf and Dull Knife, and Crook dispatched Colonel Ronald S. Mackenzie and 1100 men to find them, accompanied by large contingent of Indian scouts from several different tribes, including from the Cheyenne. On November 25, 1876, at dawn, Mackenzie attacked the Cheyenne village. Despite resistance from the men of the village, the troops destroyed 200 lodges, killing and wounding many and driving the remaining survivors into the cold with few supplies. Many more Cheyenne froze to death in the following days. By the next April, with no hope of finding sufficient food, many of the Cheyenne who had been on the run since the attack surrendered at Camp Robinson in Nebraska, under the belief that they would be able to stay on the reservation in the north with the Sioux in accordance with the treaty. Instead, nearly 1000 Northern Cheyenne were exiled south to the Southern Cheyenne reservation. Facing terrible conditions in Oklahoma, two groups of the Northern Cheyenne marched north again, although they initially faced fierce resistance from the US Army. An 1884 Executive Order finally established a 690 square mile reservation for the Northern Cheyenne in present day Montana. Today the Northern Cheyenne tribe has over 12,000 enrolled members of which just under half live on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana. The Cheyenne language is considered endangered. Efforts are underway to preserve it, and students at Chief Dull Knife College on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation can take courses in the Cheyenne language, along with courses in Cheyenne beadwork. Joining me now to help us understand more about the history of the Northern Cheyenne is writer Gerry Robinson, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, and author of, "The Cheyenne Story: An Interpretation of Courage." Hi, Gerry, thanks so much for joining me today.

Gerry Robinson  9:31  
Thanks, Kelly. Wonderful to be here. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:33  
Yes, I am really excited to have learned this history and to be talking to you about this. So I want to understand a little bit about how you came to write this book. This is in some ways your own family's history. Can you tell me a little bit about you know the the process of getting to writing this book?

Gerry Robinson  9:52  
First, it is based on the history of my tribe, the Northern Cheyenne people. And I was born and raised on our reservation in Montana, southeastern Montana. I am an enrolled member. And like a lot of young people who grow up, I wasn't too interested in history at first until I moved away from home, and got a little homesick, and looked back and wanted to reconnect. And I had been told stories, since an early age, about our people's history, and of course, when I was younger, I had other interests and history was for old people. And but once I moved away and got a little homesick, and looked back and wanted to reconnect, it just, I just realized that what a what a rich and impressive history it was, that I was connected to. And it's very important to Cheyenne people to know how we're connected to the tribe, what what family and there was a time when the bands, different bands were very important. So that's essentially how I started was just finding my own lineage, my own heritage, and tracing that back. And the first person that I really connected with was actually a white man named Bill Rowland who moved out west in the 1840s. And he married my great great grandmother, who is in the book, Sis Frog is her name. And then the rest of this came after that. So Bill Rowland was essentially the thread, the first thread that I found that I was able to weave into the story, and my connection to him. And in the process of following his thread through the story, I found the rest of the details of the story. When I was younger, I heard some of the more general parts of the story. Or if it wasn't the general part of the story, if it was more specific, it was specific to a certain person, or a certain perspective. And so following Bill Rowland through the story, I was able to find a broader pattern in the story, and a more detailed pattern in the story, a more cohesive pattern. And once that started to appear, I knew that this was something I had to I had to write down. It has been written about before but never by a Northern Cheyenne.

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:58  
You decided to write this then as a novel and you with the the book sort of goes between two different viewpoints. Could you talk a little bit about the your choices? When you're doing something that is, you know, it's it's historical fiction, it's based in real events based on real people, but there's choices to make, of course, in terms of, you know, little things that might change here and there that that don't necessarily affect the overall story. So what was your process in doing that?

Gerry Robinson  13:26  
So I write Bill Rowland in first person, because I have a direct family tie to him. And from the Cheyenne perspective, you really can't tell another person's or another family's story. With a story this large, with all the families involved, you can you can tell it from a historical perspective, but it's it's, it wouldn't be right for me to take a first person approach with Little Wolf who is my other protagonist, though I am related to him through marriage. But because I don't have the blood ties to him, I write him in third person. And when I introduce both characters, I try to introduce them at their, the point of their biggest dilemma in in this this history. And for Bill Rowland, it was that moment when he realized that he was going to be riding with the US Army up into the mountains to attack the Northern Cheyenne, the main winter camp of the Northern Cheyenne. And for Little Wolf, it was that moment when he realized that that the soldiers were in the vicinity and there was a very good chance they could attack and it would be wise to move. But because of the Cheyenne social and political structure, there were impediments to that, that he couldn't overcome. And so he was caught between necessity and tradition.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:18  
So I want to pick up on this the social and political structure of the Northern Cheyenne. It's really interesting. And you really draw this out in the book, that there isn't one leader, there isn't one person speaking for the group or at times, there are attempts by people to do that. Could you talk a little bit about that, and you know, how decision making happened in this time period with this group?

Gerry Robinson  15:43  
That's a, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked that. Contrary to some people's beliefs, the Native American people were not uncivilized. They were not. They did not move in, en masse around the country. Their lifestyle, their culture, just their their familial eyes were much more complex in their society and their political leadership was much more complex than than most people understand. The Northern Cheyenne tribe had, for hundreds and hundreds of years lived under the guidance of what we call the Council of 44. And it's a it's a very well balanced leadership structure that incorporates different representatives from from different parts of the tribe and establishes different, if you will, offices, much like the US government does, to manage the affairs of the tribe. And they they provide this, this, balance this counterbalance, so that no one part of the leadership structure has more power than any other part. And they and for anything to be decided it takes deliberation, oftentimes a long deliberation and discussion to to come to a decision. And that's essentially what Little Wolf was up against at the beginning of the of the book. And in that case, a, a younger Warrior Society leader, named Fast Bull, basically declared martial law, which was his right as a society head man to do. And in that case, the it's it's martial law that the military takes over and they make the decisions because it's an emergency type situation. However, in this case, the reason that he declared it was just simply to hold the camp in their place, so that they couldn't move. And that's where all the problems began, at least on that night. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:13  
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about language and the the Cheyenne language. So that's a really important piece of this story. Bill Rowland is an interpreter. And I what I found interesting, and your book really demonstrates this, is that even within the Northern Cheyenne people, they might not all speak exactly the same dialect of the language and there you know, there are neighboring tribes that might speak similar, but not the same language. So can you talk a little bit about that, and the ways that language is so important then when they're trying to interact and communicate?

Gerry Robinson  18:49  
So much of the language that is that I refer to in the book is the Plains Indian sign language. That takes a central role in in not only Bill Rowland's relationship with with Lieutenant William Philo Clark, and and the interactions that took place there. But it was the the common language used between tribes for trade and negotiations and, and all of that for centuries. So that's really that is where, if you want to relate at that, at that time, at that point in history, if you wanted to have a conversation with someone from a tribe that you didn't know too well, that was the go to language to use. It was general enough, was broad enough that that you could have that discussion. But again, with the with the Northern Cheyenne language, I go back to the comment I made about complexity. People don't understand that, that you can't have it, and especially today that the tribe is essentially split. It's two separate tribes, the Northern Cheyenne, who live in Montana and the Southern Cheyenne, who live in Oklahoma. And they have been living separately since about 1830. And as a result of that, strong differences in the dialects have occurred. And the person that I used that was my go to, for the book was Dr. Richard Littlebear who was, at that time, the president of Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, Montana. He's a linguist. He also has a friend, Wayne Lehmann, who was a big, big help with a lot of the, the grammatical spelling. And, and they are, I would say that they are the two best authorities on the Cheyenne language today. Even with that said, though, there are people who will disagree with how they pronounce words or how they spell words. And so even on the reservation, just a 20 mile difference, 30 mile difference on the reservation, you might find someone who says a word just a little bit differently than than someone else. So it's, there's a complexity there. And it occurs not only in the Northern Cheyenne culture, it occurs worldwide. And again, just just a small bit of, of complexity that that people aren't aware of. From, from the time I was a child, and used to watch John Wayne movies and cowboys and Indians on TV, even though I was I was watching the the show sitting in my living room on the reservation, my understanding was that all the Indians thought the same at the same time and spoke to the you know, said the exactly the same words and moved and all at once, you know. And it wasn't until I got to a to, I guess, a better understanding, an age of self awareness, I guess, where I realized, "Wait a minute. Something's wrong here."

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:17  
And you grew up with some familiarity with the language but not as a fluent speaker. Is that right?

Gerry Robinson  22:23  
Correct. I'm the product of three generations of boarding schools, my grandmother, my mother, and myself, and at boarding schools, it was just impossible to speak your language to until about until about the 70s, 1970 or so, changes slowly started to occur. And people realized that if we don't start to preserve the Cheyenne language, it would disappear. And, and that's, that's something really that this book is, I feel this book plays a small part in is, is that that effort, that movement, to reclaim language, culture, heritage tradition, just just to help, so many of the younger generation don't know this history. They'll they'll know, as I did, maybe a name or two, and something about being sent to Oklahoma. And, and that's it. I can tell you that the the part of the story, this is the this book is the first volume in a trilogy that I'm writing, I'm currently writing book two and trying to get that done. But when I started writing this book, so much of this part of the Northern Cheyenne history, was brand new to me. I did not know about this battle that took place in the Bighorn Mountains. And I would venture to say that, that 75, if not 80, or 90%, of the Northern Cheyenne people at that time, around 1990, 2000, did not know that, that this fight took place at all, or the role that it played in the the ending of the what what has been called The Great Sioux War or the Plains Indian War.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:18  
What are the kinds of sources that we have then? And I'm particularly interested in knowing, I'm sure that the US military has a ton of their own sources and the US government has their own sources. You know, so what what are the sources we have from that perspective, but then what what are the Cheyenne sources that we have for this?

Gerry Robinson  24:38  
As far as sources that I've used, I, people often ask me what kind of research I've done. And my go to for that is it's butt in the chair, boots on the ground, rubber on the road research. The elders have have helped a lot in my understanding of history. They have their limitations. We are in one way we are, we're at that point in time where these stories are starting to fade. I have talked to others of my generation from the reservation who realize we are a crucial generation because we have connections to those elders who are still with us. And it's imperative that we get from them what we can so that we can turn around and pass it on to the, to the next generations. So we've been doing a lot of that. The book has opened some doors, and I'm working on a couple different history projects for the tribe that has helped with the research for books two and three to get more in depth with with some of the stories from the elders. So that's, that's there. We're gleaning what we can from them. The there are two problems with that. One is oral tradition is fragile. Over time, it breaks down. As much as I want to, I would like to tell you that I used the exact same words that I heard from those elders, I can't. And and as much as those elders want to say they told me the story in the exact same way that their grandmother told them, they can't. Over time, we forget, but you adapt and change a word or two. And the story starts to take a little different angle. That said, I think that I think that they're trustworthy. The what I have to do, though, is to take that history and run it parallel with documented history. And, and this is where the boots on the ground come in, with being out in the on that site, and seeing how that story fits into that site. And there have been times where both historical documents and oral tradition have misremembered a site, when I've got out onto it and looked in and compared notes, you know, but yeah, tons of government documents. There are a lot of interviews that were done from back in the day. Mari Sandoz, who was a Swiss woman from Nebraska, who lived in the area of Fort Robinson, did a lot of interviews, and captured a lot of this history. George Bird Grinnell is another who was an anthropologist who was able to do interviews with the participants of all of these events. So yeah, and then and then it was, with this particular book, there are a few recorded newspaper documents about it. When I get into books two and three, there are a lot more recorded because they're, they're down into ceded territory at that time, where settlers are, are setting up their homesteads and whatnot, and the journalists tend to hang where it's a little safer there and write their stories.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:21  
You were just talking about going out and looking at sites. Land is such an important piece of this story. It's really, you know, one of the characters in the story. Could you talk a little bit about that, and the importance of you having grown up on this land and being able to go out and look at it to understand the story.

Gerry Robinson  28:41  
And thank you for recognizing land as a character. It's for the Cheyenne, it is, it is our mother. And so yes, it is. It's, it's, it's, it's what holds us and what we're connected to. So it plays a big, big role in and I can say most certainly that, that I have felt a much stronger connection myself as a result of my writing and the research and the work I've done and getting out into the hills and out on the prairie and walking where my ancestors walked and and being there with them and listening to the wind blowing through the trees and feeling the heat on my back and watching the water flow and and seeing the just the terrain they had to move through. It it is it's it's as the story goes on, I mean, they my ancestors did not want to leave their home. That's that's what it boils down to. And book one tells the story of, of how it came about that they had to, and it broke their hearts. Book two and book three will tell the story of, of that connection, hopefully, in a way that that takes that character, the land and, and puts it front and center in really in, in such a way that the reader will understand that just just the love the connection, you know, the the necessity of being in their homeland, and what they were willing to do to, to achieve that. Land is a relative, and just as important to us as any of our relatives, and to lose any of that land or relative is heartbreaking.

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:07  
Yeah, and so so much of this story is really hard history. It's it's incredibly devastating, what happens and the things that the Northern Cheyenne have to have to deal with, have to pick up and keep going and going and going. Could you talk a little bit about what it's like as a as a writer to be telling a story that is so difficult is so devastating like that?

Gerry Robinson  31:34  
For me, knowing knowing the entirety of the story, this is really a story of of great victory, and so a story of that just fills me with such pride. And I think every story that's worthy of being read will take the reader through these dark places. And it's, it's how the protagonists, or how the the well, they were winners in the end how how those that you're rooting for, go through those dark places and come out on the other side, and how they find that victory and what that victory looks like. And I can tell you that there are many like me on the reservation, who look back at this history and, and recognize absolutely recognize all the pain and misery and heartache that our ancestors went through. What we realize is that they went through it for us, so that we would have this homeland. And they were thinking of us. And I, I tell that to people and I say they, they didn't know me specifically, but they knew I was coming along with a lot of others. And they did this for us, they went through all of this for us. And so when we look back at this pain and struggle, and suffering, certainly our hearts go out to our ancestors for for having to go through that. But speaking for myself, my heart fills with such pride, to know that I'm connected to a group of people who were brave, who were resilient, who were determined, who who gave everything they had, so that they could come back to the place that they loved, and as we mentioned before, to their relative that they loved, and meant so much to them, so that their descendants could know that connection as well. So to sit down and write the dark spots, as you say these this portion of the story is it's a struggle. And there's more of it to come. But that just for me, what is the saying, "The stars would not be as bright were it not for the dark." And that's what that's what we're going through now are the, that that period of darkness that they they had to go through. It would have been nice if they didn't. But because they went through it today, the Northern Cheyenne people have have the reservation, albeit a much smaller portion of land.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:34  
So I think this is a really important story that that everyone should read. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy of your book?

Gerry Robinson  34:43  
Sure. The book is available on Amazon. It is also available in bookshop. I often refer people who asked me that question to go to it's an online, if they're interested in supporting an author, a Native author and a Native business owner, my brother owns a small Etsy store. And the store is called Sage and Oats. And it's in just an Etsy, Etsy store Sage and Oats. And just scroll through it's a while he's Northern Cheyenne has as well as I, of course, his his wife, Michelle is a Irish descendant. And so hence the Sage and Oats name. And he sells it online there as well. But Amazon would be the would be the most well known place to find it. I know you can also get it Barnes and Nobles. And no, it's not. It's not really well distributed. But, but it's out there.

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:00  
And people should of course also recommend that their libraries get a copy.

Gerry Robinson  36:04  
Absolutely, absolutely. Then just to I guess toot my own horn a little bit, it did win the 2019 Western Heritage Award for novel of the year, which is, and a couple others, but the Western Heritage Award was really the one that just was very notable to me. When I saw the list of other people who have won that award, it kind of blew me away a little bit.

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:35  
Was there anything else that you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Gerry Robinson  36:40  
I think that the book, as I said, it's a small part of a big effort that is ongoing, to remind the world, that Native Americans are still here, that we haven't been lost to history, that our history is worth revisiting, especially now that we as Native Americans are gaining a platform to tell our own stories. And this is my effort to do that. There are many, many others out there who are doing the same thing and are just as worthy of being read and listened to. There's a truth about what happened. What I tried to capture in my book is, is that truth and it's in it's a more balanced perspective about what really went on. In the book I mentioned, a quote from the Lakota Chief Red Cloud, who was approached by the commander of Fort Laramie at one point when the Red Cloud Agency was on the Platte River. And there had been a an altercation between some Lakota and some soldiers and the commanding officer came down to talk to Red Cloud and he wanted the Lakota warriors to be to be reprimanded, for their part in this altercation, and Red Cloud, told the officer, there were fools on both sides of that. And that is, I think, the first balanced perspective that I ever read of what happened back in those times. There were fools on both sides. There were heroes on both sides. There were good people on both sides. Bad things happened. Bad things happened. Hard history was made. But the time has come that we look at that hard history, from a from a more realistic perspective, in order to understand it better, in hopes that we won't repeat a lot of those same mistakes as we move forward. Thank you for this opportunity to share that.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:17  
Yeah. Thank you, Gerry, for telling your story and for speaking with me today.

Gerry Robinson  39:23  
I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Teddy  39:25  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode, and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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