The Cheyenne moved onto the plains in the mid-1700s. In the 1820s, they divided into two groups, the Northern Cheyenne, who lived in the territories that are now Montana and Wyoming, and the Southern Cheyenne, who lived in what are now Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas. The whole Cheyenne population numbered around 3,000 people. From the 1830s, the Cheyenne became friendly with the people of the Lakota Sioux tribe. Their traditional enemies were the Ute, Pawnee, Crow, and Blackfeet.
Cheyenne Indians call themselves Tsitsistas; 'Cheyenne' is a mistake, a Sioux word for Cree. The Cheyenne were Great Plains people, originally native to the area that is now Colorado and Wyoming. Like many tribes, the Cheyennes were forced to leave their homelands by the Americans during the 1800's, and today they live in two distinct communities: the Northern Cheyenne in Montana, numbering 6500, and the Southern Cheyenne, who are united with their longtime allies the Arapaho into a single Nation in Oklahoma with a combined 11,000 members.
Many Native American tribes were victims of their small size, as smallpox and other European diseases left too few survivors to withstand colonization. The Cheyenne were victims of their own large size, for factions within their nation were poorly understood by the American settlers encroaching on their territories. For years relations between Cheyenne Indians and white Americans followed an ugly pattern of some settler killing a Cheyenne woman from one clan, that clan killing some settlers in revenge, and then angry soldiers killing some bewildered Cheyennes from a different clan--prompting their own kin to take revenge, and starting the cycle anew.
This bloody cycle reached its worst point in the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, where one Colonel Chivington deliberately attacked a reservation of peaceable Cheyennes and Arapahoes under American protection and killed more than 150 Native American men, women, and children despite their repeated attempts to surrender. "Nits," he famously proclaimed, "breed lice." The most egregious massacre in American history--none of the participants even attempted to claim that the victims were armed or dangerous--Sand Creek was condemned as an atrocity even by the media of the time.
Eventually the Cheyenne people were forced to move to Oklahoma. The Cheyennes from the south grudgingly accepted this arrangement, but the Cheyennes from the north could not adapt to the hot weather and "broke out" to flee back to the north, led by Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf. Though many of the escapees were killed by the US Army en route, the rest reached safety and their descendents still live in Montana today.
During the pre-reservation era, the Cheyenne were allied with the Arapaho and Lakota (Sioux). They are one of the best known of the Plains tribes. The Cheyenne Nation comprised ten bands, spread all over the Great Plains, from southern Colorado to the Black Hills in South Dakota. In the mid-nineteenth century, the bands began to split, with some bands choosing to remain near the Black Hills, while others chose to remain near the Platte Rivers of central Colorado.
Currently the Northern Cheyenne, known in Cheyenne either as Notameohmésêhese meaning "Northern Eaters" or simply as Ohmésêhese meaning "Eaters", live in southeast Montana on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. The Southern Cheyenne, known in Cheyenne as Heévâhetane meaning "Roped People," along with the Southern Arapaho, live in central Oklahoma. Their combined population is approximately 20,000. |
