Monday, November 20, 2006
Teddy Blue Abbott - The 1878 Northern Cheyenne Outbreak from Oklahoma,
From “We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher”
By E.C. Abbott (“Teddy Blue” Abbott) and Helena Huntington Smith
1939 Farrar and Rinehart, Inc. New York Chapter XVII
Of all the Indians, the ones I admired the most were the Northern Cheyennes. That time they broke out in Oklahoma and fought their way north to this countryup here, was the greatest fight put up by any bunch of Indians in all history. And they were a hundred per cent in the right all the time, because they were fighting to get back to their own country, that had been theirs for more years than the oldest Indian could remember. One army officer who was out against them said it was “the greatest national movement ever made by any people since the Greeks marched to the sea.”
You can read about it in a very few books, the best being in “Remininiscences of a Ranchman” by Edgar Beecher Bronson, in the chapter called “A Finish Fight for a Birthright.” But except for that book and perhaps one or two others, you will seldom hear anything about the great fight made by Dull Knife and Little Wolf in ‘78, because the white man is such a damn poor loser, he does not talk about the times when the Indians were victorious. Even the Custer fight is no exception to this statement, because, while the Indians cleaned up on Custer at the Little Big Horn, the government sent out more troops and cleaned up on the Indians later in that same year, 1876.
It was after the campaign in the fall of 1876 that Dull Knife and his tribe were sent down to Ft. Reno in Indian Territory, or the Nations as it was called at that time. That is a hot, low lying country and they was used to the High Plains. All through 1877 and the first half of 1878 they sickened and died. They begged the government to let them come back to their own home, but this was refused. In September, 1878, the whole tribe jumped the reservation and headed north. Going up through Kansas they fought five battles oin less than three weeks and fought the soldiers off every time, and when they didn’t fight they slipped through and kept on going, and the United States Army couldn’t stop them.
They crossed the Kansas Pacific Railroad and burned down some houses near Dodge City, after they’d whipped two companies of cavalry first. They crossed the Union Pacific half a mile east of Oglala. And boy, those Indians were travelling. They were making seventy miles a day with women and children, and raiding on the cow outfits as they went along, to get fresh horses. They run onto a band of cowboys at the forks of Republican River and killed eighteen of them,and everybody else that was in the country got out of the way. I know I run at least a hundred miles.
When they got up to the North Platte River, Bill Paxton’s ranch was on their loine of march, and they stole some 0f his horses. From the way Bill talked about it he thought Johnny Stringfellow should have stood them off, or else followed them up and got back the horses. String told me about it. He said, “Bill Paxton wanted to know why I didn’t go after them Indians. I told him I hadn’t lost no Cheyennes.”
They killed quite a few people and burned some ranches, but you couldn’t blame them for that, because they were only savages and were fighting for their freedom like savages. On all that long march, they didn’t do but only one bad thing. I did hear that they come across a lonely schoolhouse, and some of them took the teacher and one of the older girl pupils and abused them. They both got well and I believe got married afterwards. Sixty years is a long time to remember all the details of a thing like that and I am not sure this is right. But I believe it was done by a small bunch of young bucks who were raiding out from the main bunch. The Cheyennes were very moral Indians and it was not like them to do a thing like that as a rule. The Apaches was the worst ones for that kind of stuff.
All this happened in October, before I left home and just before I went up to the Pine Ridge agency with that beef herd. I was up at the North Platte by this time, and when the Indians got up there a posse went out to chase them, and I was with the posse. They was scattered out in bunches of fifteen or twenty, raiding on the different ranches while the main bunch kept pushing on, and this band that we were following dropped back and stood us off, in an arroyo. I was lying down behind a buck brush,trying to get a shot at an Indian, and one of them saw me and took a shot at me, and it kicked up the dust in my face. I can shiver yet when I think of it.
There was an Indian in this bunch called Brave Wolf, who was a great warrior. They claim he danced thirteen dried buffalo heads off him before he started from the reservation, to make his medicine strong. And he got up in the arroyo in front of us, all painted up, and he did a war dance to prove we couldn’t kill him. He was prancing around out there going “Hi-ya, hi-ya,” with sixteen of us shooting at him and all too excited to hit him, until finally somebody got him through the head. They picked him up by the arms and dragged him over the hills. We let them go. We had got our bellyful of Cheyennes.
And that was all I saw of them until I got up to Montana in ‘83 and they was here. But I heard the rest of the story from Hank Thompson, who was a government scout at Ft. Keogh for years, and knew the Cheyennes very well, and was married to a Cheyenne woman. And I also heard about it from some of the Indians who made the trip, especially Wolf Robe and High Walking. When they got up into the sand hills of western Nebraska they run out of cow ranches, so they run out of horses. They knew they would never make it the way they were going, so Dull Knife and Little Wolf decided to separate. Little Wolf, the young chief, was to take the fighting men and most of the ammunition and the best horses, and try to get through. Dull Knife took the old men and women and chiildren, and just a few warriors.
The country was full of soldiers, patrolling up and down, ready to head them off. So Little Wolf and his band went up and showed themselves on top of a high hill, and the soldiers saw them and surrounded the hill in the night and thought they had got them. When morning come there wasn’t an Indian -- they was so much smarter than the troops at that kind of game. But that move by Little Wolf gave Dull Knife the only chance he had, and he and his women and his old men sneaked off into the brush down on White River. The soldiers captured them there a few days later and took them to Fort Robinson. They were out of ammunition, they were starving, they didn’t have a horse that could travel. Of course when they were taken prisoner the soldiers took all their weapons away, but in spite of everything those Indians managed to take a few guns apart and hide them under the squaws’ dresses, and a few small knives, and when they got to the fort they hid them under the floor boards of the guardhouse.
And the post commander was going to send them back to the reservation down in Oklahoma, marching overland through that terrible below zero weather, and those Indians had no clothes, they were naked, they would have froze to death. So Dull Knife refused to go. So that fool of a commander ordered their rations cut off because they were disobedient, and for three days they were in the guardhouse with nothing to eat, just swaying back and forth and singing their war chants; and the third night they took their few poor weapons that they had hid and killed a sentry and made a break for the hills. They had nothing to fight with, nothing, only sticks and a few guns and a few knives, but they fought anyway, women too; and one man who was there tells of seeing a big six-foot warrior dying, with a little three-inch skinning knife in his hand. That was all he had. Pretty nearly the whole band died fighting, women and all.
But Little Wolf and his followers won out, and that is one of the miracles of Indian history. They got clear up here almost to Tongue River, when General Miles come down from Ft. Keogh with a big body of troops and demanded their surrender. They said no, they would never surrender. They said that before they would go back to the reservation in Oklahoma they would kill each other with their knives. But then they told him that if the government would let them stayup here in their old country on Tongue River, they would lay down their arms and be good Indians and never make any more trouble. Miles knew it was a question of that, or else he would have to massacre these Indians and lose a lot of men himself, so he agreed.
And for a wonder the government backed him up, instead of doublke crossing him and making a liar out of him the way they done when Chief Joseph surrendered after the Nez Perce campaign. And so Miles’ word was not broken, and the Indians was allowed to stay and keep their victory.
And that is the whole story of why the Northern Cheyennes were up here when I came to this country in ‘83, and why they are here today. They have a little bit of a reservation on Tongue River and the Rosebud, not half as big as the reservation next to it that the government gave the Crows. But the Crows were smart; they fought on the government side in the seventies. And so the Crows are well off, they drive cars and run race horses, but nobody ever heard of a Cheyenne with a race horse. They are too poor.
But this reservation they are living on today is their country that they fought for in ‘78, and half of them died. In the old days, no matter how far they went on their hunting parties they would always come back to Tongue River to winter. It was home to them. And no wonder. It is a beautiful country, well watered, with high hills and big yellow pines scattered over them, and grass everywhere, and lots of shelter. They were used to this, and that is why when they had to go down to that low, flat Oklahoma country they took sick and died.
But a lot more things happened even after they were allowed to stay up here in ‘78. Because wherever Indians and white men come together there is bound to be trouble, or there was until the Indians was completely broken. There was trouble up here with the Cheyennes in the season of ‘83-’84, and I was mixed up in it, though it was more or less against my will.
By E.C. Abbott (“Teddy Blue” Abbott) and Helena Huntington Smith
1939 Farrar and Rinehart, Inc. New York Chapter XVII
Of all the Indians, the ones I admired the most were the Northern Cheyennes. That time they broke out in Oklahoma and fought their way north to this countryup here, was the greatest fight put up by any bunch of Indians in all history. And they were a hundred per cent in the right all the time, because they were fighting to get back to their own country, that had been theirs for more years than the oldest Indian could remember. One army officer who was out against them said it was “the greatest national movement ever made by any people since the Greeks marched to the sea.”
You can read about it in a very few books, the best being in “Remininiscences of a Ranchman” by Edgar Beecher Bronson, in the chapter called “A Finish Fight for a Birthright.” But except for that book and perhaps one or two others, you will seldom hear anything about the great fight made by Dull Knife and Little Wolf in ‘78, because the white man is such a damn poor loser, he does not talk about the times when the Indians were victorious. Even the Custer fight is no exception to this statement, because, while the Indians cleaned up on Custer at the Little Big Horn, the government sent out more troops and cleaned up on the Indians later in that same year, 1876.
It was after the campaign in the fall of 1876 that Dull Knife and his tribe were sent down to Ft. Reno in Indian Territory, or the Nations as it was called at that time. That is a hot, low lying country and they was used to the High Plains. All through 1877 and the first half of 1878 they sickened and died. They begged the government to let them come back to their own home, but this was refused. In September, 1878, the whole tribe jumped the reservation and headed north. Going up through Kansas they fought five battles oin less than three weeks and fought the soldiers off every time, and when they didn’t fight they slipped through and kept on going, and the United States Army couldn’t stop them.
They crossed the Kansas Pacific Railroad and burned down some houses near Dodge City, after they’d whipped two companies of cavalry first. They crossed the Union Pacific half a mile east of Oglala. And boy, those Indians were travelling. They were making seventy miles a day with women and children, and raiding on the cow outfits as they went along, to get fresh horses. They run onto a band of cowboys at the forks of Republican River and killed eighteen of them,and everybody else that was in the country got out of the way. I know I run at least a hundred miles.
When they got up to the North Platte River, Bill Paxton’s ranch was on their loine of march, and they stole some 0f his horses. From the way Bill talked about it he thought Johnny Stringfellow should have stood them off, or else followed them up and got back the horses. String told me about it. He said, “Bill Paxton wanted to know why I didn’t go after them Indians. I told him I hadn’t lost no Cheyennes.”
They killed quite a few people and burned some ranches, but you couldn’t blame them for that, because they were only savages and were fighting for their freedom like savages. On all that long march, they didn’t do but only one bad thing. I did hear that they come across a lonely schoolhouse, and some of them took the teacher and one of the older girl pupils and abused them. They both got well and I believe got married afterwards. Sixty years is a long time to remember all the details of a thing like that and I am not sure this is right. But I believe it was done by a small bunch of young bucks who were raiding out from the main bunch. The Cheyennes were very moral Indians and it was not like them to do a thing like that as a rule. The Apaches was the worst ones for that kind of stuff.
All this happened in October, before I left home and just before I went up to the Pine Ridge agency with that beef herd. I was up at the North Platte by this time, and when the Indians got up there a posse went out to chase them, and I was with the posse. They was scattered out in bunches of fifteen or twenty, raiding on the different ranches while the main bunch kept pushing on, and this band that we were following dropped back and stood us off, in an arroyo. I was lying down behind a buck brush,trying to get a shot at an Indian, and one of them saw me and took a shot at me, and it kicked up the dust in my face. I can shiver yet when I think of it.
There was an Indian in this bunch called Brave Wolf, who was a great warrior. They claim he danced thirteen dried buffalo heads off him before he started from the reservation, to make his medicine strong. And he got up in the arroyo in front of us, all painted up, and he did a war dance to prove we couldn’t kill him. He was prancing around out there going “Hi-ya, hi-ya,” with sixteen of us shooting at him and all too excited to hit him, until finally somebody got him through the head. They picked him up by the arms and dragged him over the hills. We let them go. We had got our bellyful of Cheyennes.
And that was all I saw of them until I got up to Montana in ‘83 and they was here. But I heard the rest of the story from Hank Thompson, who was a government scout at Ft. Keogh for years, and knew the Cheyennes very well, and was married to a Cheyenne woman. And I also heard about it from some of the Indians who made the trip, especially Wolf Robe and High Walking. When they got up into the sand hills of western Nebraska they run out of cow ranches, so they run out of horses. They knew they would never make it the way they were going, so Dull Knife and Little Wolf decided to separate. Little Wolf, the young chief, was to take the fighting men and most of the ammunition and the best horses, and try to get through. Dull Knife took the old men and women and chiildren, and just a few warriors.
The country was full of soldiers, patrolling up and down, ready to head them off. So Little Wolf and his band went up and showed themselves on top of a high hill, and the soldiers saw them and surrounded the hill in the night and thought they had got them. When morning come there wasn’t an Indian -- they was so much smarter than the troops at that kind of game. But that move by Little Wolf gave Dull Knife the only chance he had, and he and his women and his old men sneaked off into the brush down on White River. The soldiers captured them there a few days later and took them to Fort Robinson. They were out of ammunition, they were starving, they didn’t have a horse that could travel. Of course when they were taken prisoner the soldiers took all their weapons away, but in spite of everything those Indians managed to take a few guns apart and hide them under the squaws’ dresses, and a few small knives, and when they got to the fort they hid them under the floor boards of the guardhouse.
And the post commander was going to send them back to the reservation down in Oklahoma, marching overland through that terrible below zero weather, and those Indians had no clothes, they were naked, they would have froze to death. So Dull Knife refused to go. So that fool of a commander ordered their rations cut off because they were disobedient, and for three days they were in the guardhouse with nothing to eat, just swaying back and forth and singing their war chants; and the third night they took their few poor weapons that they had hid and killed a sentry and made a break for the hills. They had nothing to fight with, nothing, only sticks and a few guns and a few knives, but they fought anyway, women too; and one man who was there tells of seeing a big six-foot warrior dying, with a little three-inch skinning knife in his hand. That was all he had. Pretty nearly the whole band died fighting, women and all.
But Little Wolf and his followers won out, and that is one of the miracles of Indian history. They got clear up here almost to Tongue River, when General Miles come down from Ft. Keogh with a big body of troops and demanded their surrender. They said no, they would never surrender. They said that before they would go back to the reservation in Oklahoma they would kill each other with their knives. But then they told him that if the government would let them stayup here in their old country on Tongue River, they would lay down their arms and be good Indians and never make any more trouble. Miles knew it was a question of that, or else he would have to massacre these Indians and lose a lot of men himself, so he agreed.
And for a wonder the government backed him up, instead of doublke crossing him and making a liar out of him the way they done when Chief Joseph surrendered after the Nez Perce campaign. And so Miles’ word was not broken, and the Indians was allowed to stay and keep their victory.
And that is the whole story of why the Northern Cheyennes were up here when I came to this country in ‘83, and why they are here today. They have a little bit of a reservation on Tongue River and the Rosebud, not half as big as the reservation next to it that the government gave the Crows. But the Crows were smart; they fought on the government side in the seventies. And so the Crows are well off, they drive cars and run race horses, but nobody ever heard of a Cheyenne with a race horse. They are too poor.
But this reservation they are living on today is their country that they fought for in ‘78, and half of them died. In the old days, no matter how far they went on their hunting parties they would always come back to Tongue River to winter. It was home to them. And no wonder. It is a beautiful country, well watered, with high hills and big yellow pines scattered over them, and grass everywhere, and lots of shelter. They were used to this, and that is why when they had to go down to that low, flat Oklahoma country they took sick and died.
But a lot more things happened even after they were allowed to stay up here in ‘78. Because wherever Indians and white men come together there is bound to be trouble, or there was until the Indians was completely broken. There was trouble up here with the Cheyennes in the season of ‘83-’84, and I was mixed up in it, though it was more or less against my will.
