Fighting Cheyennes

Annotation This book deals with the wars of the Cheyennes. A fighting and fearless people, the tribe was almost constantly at war with its neighbors. This account follows the local tribal wars and the eventual Indian wars between the westward moving settlers. A reprint of the 1916 edition an appendix has been added from the Smithsonian Institutions Handbook of North American Indians Bulletin 30.

This book deals with the wars of the Cheyennes. A fighting and fearless people, the tribe was almost constantly at war with its neighbors. This account follows the local tribal wars and the eventual Indian wars between the westward moving settlers. A reprint of the 1916 edition with a additional appendix that has been added from the Smithsonian Institutions Handbook of North American Indians Bulletin 30.

In July 1857, the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the Cheyenne Indians took place in present-day northwest Kansas. The Cheyennes had formed a grand line of battle such as was never again seen in Plains Indians wars. But they had not seen sabres before, and when the cavalry charged, sabres drawn, they panicked. William Y. Chalfant re-creates the human dimensions of a battle that was as much a clash of cultures as it was a clash of the U.S. cavalry and Cheyenne warriors.

Only six Cheyenne Indians (but 32 Sioux) died in the fighting that wiped out the command of General George Custer. Brave Wolf was at the scene on that bloody Sunday in 1876. Brave Wolf and others of his tribe recall the courage of the doomed men in the Seventh Cavalry and give a firsthand account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. 10 photos. 3 maps.

A Plains tribe that subsisted on the buffalo, the Cheyennes depended for survival on the valor and skill of their braves in the hunt and in battle. The fiery spirit of the young warriors was balanced by the calm wisdom of the tribal headmen, the peace chiefs, who met yearly as the Council of the Forty-four. "A Cheyenne chief was required to be a man of peace, to be brave, and to be of generous heart," writes Stan Hoig. "Of these qualities the first was unconditionally the most important, for upon it rested the moral restraint required for the warlike Cheyenne Nation." As the Cheyennes began to feel the westward crush of white civilization in the nineteenth century, a great burden fell to the peace chiefs. Reconciliation with the whites was the tribe's only hope for survival, and the chiefs were the buffers between their own warriors and the United States military, who were out to "win the West." The chiefs found themselves struggling to maintain the integrity of their people-struggling against overwhelming military forces, against disease, against the debauchery brought by "firewater," and against the irreversible decline of their source of livelihood, the buffalo. They were trapped by history in a nearly impossible position. Their story is a heroic epic and, oftentimes, a tragedy. No single book has dealt as intensively as this one with the institution of the peace chiefs. The author has gleaned significant material from all available published sources and from contemporary newspapers. A generous selection of photographs and extensive quotations from ninteteenth-century observers add to the authenticity of the text. Following a brief analysis of the Sweet Medicine legend and its relation to the Council of the Forty-four, the more prominent nineteenth-century chiefs are treated individually in a lucid, felicitous style that will appeal to both students and lay readers of Indian history. As adopted Cheyenne chief Boyce D. Timmons says in his preface to this volume, "Great wisdom, intellect, and love are expressed by the remarkable Cheyenne chiefs, and if you enter their tipi with an open heart and mind, you might have some understanding of the great 'Circle of Life.'"