‘I WILL DIE LIKE A MAN’

To a casual observer the biweekly distribution of government rations at southeastern Montana’s Tongue River Indian Reservation, amid the rolling hills of Lame Deer Valley, seemed to have proceeded smoothly. As the sun edged slowly toward its zenith that day in September 1890, many women had already completed their chores, shaving meager slabs of the white man’s “spotted buffalo” into thin strips and carefully arranging them on poles to dry under the brilliant, cloudless sky. Men idled, eating their noonday meals and perhaps recalling happier times before stringy beef had supplanted fat bison. Outwardly, the Northern Cheyennes appeared to have adapted to the bewildering changes reservation life entailed.

Those adjustments had, of course, come at a terrible cost. Fourteen short years earlier, in June 1876, Northern Cheyenne warriors had reveled in the wake of the successful alliance with the Lakotas that had destroyed Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry command at the Little Bighorn. But that was before Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie’s devastating attack on Chief Dull Knife’s village that November and the Northern Cheyennes’ humiliating exile to the reservation of their Southern Cheyenne cousins in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) the following year. Many died during the brutal trek, still more on arrival, and in September 1878 the Northern Cheyennes set out on a grueling exodus north under Dull Knife and Little Wolf, bound for their northern homeland. Dull Knife’s followers eventually surrendered near Fort Robinson, but Little Wolf’s band made it to Montana Territory and was allowed to remain there on the Tongue River Indian Reservation (the present-day Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation), established in 1884