2024 Little Wolf Homecoming Commemoration observed

LAME DEER, Mont. – Every American Indian Tribe has a dark story to recall about surviving the onslaught of Manifest Destiny and U.S. Military attempts to exterminate them. Sadly some Tribes did not survive, but Northern Cheyenne did because the great bravery, determination of a hardy few such as Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf.

On April 1, 1879 a small group of one hundred fourteen arrived in Montana after making a harrowing journey (mostly walking, running and even crawling) in order to return from Oklahoma to their beloved northern country. Their leader was Little Wolf. They were among 350 Northern Cheyenne who had fled from Fort Darlington, Oklahoma Indian Territory, the previous fall.

Each year the Northern Cheyenne Cultural Commission holds a commemoration of this historic event. Wallace Bearchum, a fifth generation descendent of Little Wolf, also carries that name.

“It came from the elders to continue to remember our old people and the return of the Northern Cheyenne to Montana,” he commented. “Without them we would not be here”.

Another tribal elder, Dennis Limberhand explained that Little Wolf an extraordinary man “one who only comes once in a lifetime, when Maheo’o (the Creator) knows we really need somebody like that – very strong and cunning.”

(Writer’s note: The following historical account was compiled by Gerry Robinson, Northern Cheyenne historian and author, based upon both military and oral history accounts)

The Northern Cheyenne were among tribes attacked by Custer at the Little Bighorn in June 1876. But disaster came five months later for the Northern Cheyenne, when their main winter camp was attacked again in the Bighorn Mountains by U.S. troops under General George Crook. That time the Cheyenne were routed.

Late in 1876, the Army attacked and destroyed their village in the Bighorn Mountains. Their people surrendered in 1877, and were sent to Oklahoma—and finally, after much strife, hunger and death, made their way back to their homeland in Montana.

Little Wolf and Dull Knife opposed the move to Oklahoma. But one influential leader named Standing Elk, who had surrendered with Little Wolf and Dull Knife, agreed to the move. Crook and McKenzie promised that if they didn’t like the place after a year, they could return north. Then in 1877 Northern Cheyenne were moved south.

The Darlington Indian Agency was about 700 miles south of Fort Robinson as the crow flies; 30 miles west of what would eventually become Oklahoma City. It was also hotter, more humid and more barren than the Northern Cheyenne homeland, arriving in August 1877.

The agent, John D. Miles expecting them to abandon their traditional ways and become farmers. Little Wolf and Dull Knife, began to express their dissatisfaction with their new agency, and their unwavering desire to return home. Miles refused to let them go.

Measles and malaria proved deadly to the Northern band. The agency’s food supply was seriously short. Because of their added numbers, medication quickly became unavailable and to make matters worse, Miles often withheld the rations as punishment when they refused to take up farming or to send their children to the agency school. In addition, many of their southern relatives resented their presence. During their time at the southern agency, nearly 50 of the northerners died.

They tried to convince agent Miles to allow their people to return to the north, Little Wolf informed that he and his band would be leaving. He spoke pointedly: “My friends, I am going to my camp. I do not wish the ground about this agency to be made bloody, but now listen to what I say to you, I am going to leave here. I am going north to my own country. I do not wish to see blood spilled about this agency. If you are going to send your soldiers after me, I wish that you would first let me get a little distance away from this agency. Then if you want to fight, I will fight you, and we can make the ground bloody at that place.”

The next morning after the confrontation the soldiers were surprised to discover that the Cheyenne were gone. They had packed their belongings, left their lodges standing and their fires burning, then quietly slipped over the top of a hill behind camp, climbed onto a herd of horses their young men had been stealing from around the agency for several weeks and left for their homeland while the soldiers slept.

There were 350 Northern Cheyenne that left Oklahoma Indian Territory. Ninety-two were men of fighting age, while the remaining 261 were women, children and elderly. Each was resolved that it was far better to die trying to return home than to stay and resign themselves to a pitiful death from disease or starvation. Up north there was game, medicines for healing, fresh water, for the Cheyenne to become strong.

During the return trip home, the Northern Cheyenne were eventually pursued by up to 30,000 troops. However, they survived many encounters with the military including Turkey Springs, in Oklahoma territory; all across Kansas where the Cheyenne had to raid for new horses and supplies; Bluff Creek and Sand Creek in Kansas; along the way they crossed the Arkansas River; Punished Woman’s Fork; three tributaries of the Republican River; the Platte River, near Ogallala, Neb.

After the Platte crossing they were home, but not home safe. Four companies of soldiers were still pursuing them and another four were about to join the chase. The Cheyenne slipped into the familiar sand hills of Nebraska and, while the exact location is uncertain, Little Wolf and Dull Knife decided to divide their party for the last time.

After the separation, Little Wolf decided to spend the winter of 1878-79 in the sand hills on Lost Chokecherry Creek with his remaining party of 114 before resuming their trek north in the spring.  Dull Knife, opted to join the Lakota at the Red Cloud Agency.

But the old chief didn’t know that while the Cheyenne were in the south, the Red Cloud Agency had been moved some 60 miles northeast, to Dakota Territory. Fort Robinson, a military outpost, was all that remained in the location he was heading to. In a blinding October snowstorm shrouding the already maze-like sand hills, Dull Knife’s band and an army patrol from Fort Robinson, who had been alerted and were searching for them, nearly walked into each other. After a tense two-day negotiation in which they were told that the Lakota had been removed from their old agency, Dull Knife and his band reluctantly agreed to surrender and go to Fort Robinson.

That is another saga in Cheyenne history – the Fort Robinson Outbreak, which requires another story.  Too many were killed there as well. However, the survivors made it to Red Cloud agency, now called the Pine Ridge agency. When they arrived, friends and relatives built them a lodge in a remote area where they could recover from their ordeal. They were eventually joined by the other survivors of the massacre at Fort Robinson.

The following spring, Little Wolf’s band left the sand hills and traveled an old Indian trail along the Black Hills, though the northwest corner of Wyoming Territory, then north to the confluence of the Powder and Yellowstone Rivers in Montana Territory.

They were discovered there by scouts for Lt. William P. Clark, who convinced Little Wolf to surrender at the Tongue River Cantonment, now called Fort Keogh, where Two Moons and White Bull and their people had been allowed to stay since the spring of 1877.

Regional journalists had documented the Cheyenne flight from Indian Territory and by the time Little Wolf surrendered at Fort Keogh, support for their cause had grown. President Chester A. Arthur eventually issued an executive order establishing what was first called the Tongue River Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, the current Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. There, Dull Knife and the Northern Cheyenne at the Pine Ridge Agency, as well as those who wished to of the nearly 600 who had remained at the Darlington Agency in the south, were allowed to settle.

Nearly 145 years after their desperate escape and successful homecoming, the descendants of Little Wolf, Dull Knife and all those who traveled with them continue to celebrate and acknowledge their tremendous sacrifice and heroic efforts to reclaim their beloved homeland in the northern plains.

Little Wolf had a vision of people coming back together “straight-standing.” He had a prayer, “Great powers hear me. The people are broken and scattered. Let the winds bring the seeds together to grow together in a good place. These are still remembered by some of our people. It is our duty to make sure those words will never be forgotten by our people. 

(Contact Clara Caufield at 2ndcheyennevoice@gmail.com)

 

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