Cheyenne

Few peoples of the American West travelled as far as the Cheyenne, who call themselves Tsétsêhéstâhese, usually written Tsitsistas, and speak an Algonquian language. Over some four centuries they moved from the Minnesota woodlands to the high plains, becoming a great horse nation. Today they form two federally recognised nations: the Northern Cheyenne of Montana and the Southern Cheyenne, who share the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma with the Southern Arapaho.

The English name comes from a Lakota word, Šahíyena. The modern Cheyenne descend from two related groups, the Tsitsistas and the Suhtai, who merged in the nineteenth century. French records of the mid-seventeenth century place them between the Mississippi and Mille Lacs in Minnesota, harvesting wild rice and hunting bison. Pressure from the Assiniboine, the Ojibwe and the Lakota pushed them west in stages. Like other woodland peoples they farmed maize, squash and beans. In what is now North Dakota they built villages such as Biesterfeldt on the Sheyenne River, and after reaching the Missouri in 1676 they adopted many customs of their Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara neighbours.

According to Cheyenne tradition, the Suhtai prophet Erect Horns brought the Sun Dance and persuaded the people to leave farming for a mobile life following the bison, with tipis in place of earth lodges. The Cheyenne were the first of the later plains peoples to move into the Black Hills and Powder River country, and around 1730 they introduced horses to Lakota bands. Around 1811 they formed a lasting alliance with the Arapaho. After the trader Charles Bent built Bent's Fort, part of the nation moved south towards it on the Arkansas River, creating the Southern and Northern divisions, which stayed in close contact. In 1840 the Cheyenne made peace with the Comanche, Kiowa and Plains Apache.

The prophet Sweet Medicine brought the Sacred Arrows, received at Bear Butte, and the Suhtai the Sacred Buffalo Hat; these two bundles are the great covenants of the nation. Sweet Medicine is also credited with founding the Council of Forty-Four peace chiefs, four from each of ten bands plus four principal chiefs, and the military societies, such as the Dog Soldiers, Bowstrings and Swift Foxes, which policed hunts and camps and led in war.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 recognised Cheyenne and Arapaho lands between the North Platte and the Arkansas. Cholera in 1849 killed about 2,000 Cheyenne, perhaps half or more of the people, and after the 1859 Colorado gold rush settlers poured into their lands. On 29 November 1864 Colorado militia attacked Black Kettle's peaceful camp at Sand Creek, killing between 150 and 200 people, mostly women and children. On 27 November 1868 George Armstrong Custer struck Black Kettle's band again on the Washita River; casualty figures differ widely between Army and Cheyenne accounts. Northern Cheyenne fought beside the Lakota at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on 25 June 1876.

After defeat in the Dull Knife Fight in November 1876, the Northern Cheyenne were sent to Indian Territory, where hunger and sickness drove Little Wolf and Dull Knife to lead part of the people north in September 1878. Dull Knife's band was captured and held at Fort Robinson without food or heat; on 9 January 1879 most broke out in extreme cold, and all were killed or recaptured. In 1884 the United States created a reservation for the Northern Cheyenne on the Tongue River in Montana.

The 2020 US census counted 22,979 Cheyenne. The Northern Cheyenne Tribe had about 10,840 members in 2014 and controls around 98% of its reservation land. The Southern Cheyenne live in western Oklahoma. About 800 people speak Cheyenne in Oklahoma.

Our maps for 1492, 1500, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Cheyenne territory near the Black Hills, where the Cheyenne lived from the eighteenth century; in earlier centuries they were still further east, in Minnesota. On the 1650 map it borders the Arapaho, the Crow and the Teton (Lakota) division of the Sioux.