“General Miles Put Us Here”: Northern Cheyenne Military Alliance and Sovereign Territorial Rights

Today, the Northern Cheyenne Reservation stretches west from the Tongue River over more than 400,000 acres of pine forests, gurgling streams, natural springs, and lush grasslands in southeastern Montana. During the 1870s the Cheyenne people nearly lost control of this land, however, because the federal government was trying to forcibly remove them from their homeland and confine them to an agency in Oklahoma. In both popular and scholarly histories of the establishment of the reservation, Dull Knife and Little Wolf have been exalted as heroes who led their people back to their Tongue River Valley homeland. As anyone who has listened to or read this history knows, these Cheyenne acted with great bravery and overcame brutal obstacles to return from Oklahoma to their northern homeland. Even so, this is only half the story of the Northern Cheyenne fight to remain in southeastern Montana. As Dull Knife and Little Wolf made their arduous journey to escape from the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho agency, other Northern Cheyenne still living in the Tongue River Valley were struggling to remain there. The unpublicized sacrifices of these families ensured that the men, women, and children following Dull Knife and Little Wolf and other Cheyenne refugees had a secure place to call home once they returned. Each group of Northern Cheyenne fought to maintain their presence in their homeland while drawing on different culturally informed strategies to achieve success.

This story of these Northern Cheyenne families begins after the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. After the battle, military officials worked ceaselessly to bring Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho camps into agencies on the northern plains. These military maneuvers led to an encounter that both the military officials involved and later historians would portray as a Cheyenne surrender. From a Cheyenne perspective, however, the actions associated with this encounter closely resembled those that Plains nations often took to negotiate the creation of military alliances among themselves. These alliances were sealed by gift exchanges, frequently instigated by captives, and often reinforced by adoptions or marriages. Once established, the two former enemies fought alongside each other and shared previously disputed territories.¹ To instigate peace, Gen. Nelson A. Miles, commanding officer at Fort Keogh, encouraged Two Moons and a small group of Cheyenne to come to Fort Keogh to negotiate terms using gifts presented by a Cheyenne woman captured by the soldiers days earlier. Bolstered by this approach, the group agreed to talk, and the two groups successfully established peace. More surprisingly, most of the young men soon enlisted as scouts with Miles, even though they had been fighting against the US military only a few months before. This negotiation has been represented in the literature as a military surrender. Miles even described it as such in his correspondence. Nevertheless, this is not a simple narrative of a people forced to adapt and assimilate after their resistance was quashed. This response reflected specifically Cheyenne perceptions of the situation, resulting in actions that held a meaning for the participating Cheyenne people that was different from that for the European Americans.

Two Moons and his people certainly realized the gravity that their response to Miles would hold in shaping their future, and they looked at their own strategies for obtaining peace while reshaping their expectations to confront the restrictive demands of the colonizing nation-state that Miles represented. They employed creativity in negotiating for peace with General Miles, establishing a newly forged relationship that was relatively intuitive to them because it was similar to past Plains military negotiations leading to alliances, but it also creatively accommodated the pressures of the US military presence in their territory. The Cheyenne weighed the benefits of a certain level of accommodation, knowing it would relieve some of the immediate military pressure and allow them to remain in their homeland a little while longer. By incorporating Cheyenne styles of alliance building into their negotiations, however, Two Moons’s people also bought some time to reassess their strategy to maintain their distinctness as a people and to set the stage for future negotiations. [End Page...