People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies 1830–1879, With an Epilogue 1969–1974 by Father Peter John Powell (review)

Essay Review PEOPLE OF THE SACRED MOUNTAIN: Restoration, Recreation, Veneration, Negotiation People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies 1830-1879, With an Epilogue 1969-1974. By Father Peter John Powell. (San Francisco: Harper &Row, 1981. Two volumes, 1441 pages, $125.00.) When the shooting finally stopped west of Ft. Robinson, Nebraska, Janu­ ary 22, 1879, U. S. soldiers moved up to count the bodies. Lying in the snow with seventeen young men, four women, and two children, they found a book. The book was strapped to the body of a young warrior, Little Finger Nail, and pierced by the very bullets which killed him. In a series of stately drawings, the book contained a pictorial representation of the struggle Cheyenne Indian people experienced trying to return to their aboriginal lands. Like many other readers of western American literature, I first encountered photographs of Little Finger Nail’s book and a fictionalized account of the events it com­ memorates in Mari Sandoz’sCheyenne Autumn (1953). There as a boy I read how, heady with victories over Crook and Custer in June of 1876, the Chey­ ennes experienced devastating reprisal attacks in the following months, how by 1877 most Cheyennes had surrendered at Fort Robinson and were removed from there south into the Indian Territory we now call Oklahoma, how sep­ arated from “the beloved north country” which nurtured them the Cheyennes languished in sickness and death in the south, how late in 1878 Little Wolf and Morning Star led their people some 1500 miles across railroads, telegraph lines, straight through the United States Army to come home, and finally how when the Cheyennes got there in the snow and cold of a high Plains winter they were locked up yet again at Ft. Robinson, this time without food or water, to await shipment back south. No wonder Little Finger Nail and others chose to break out and run west to certain death in the snow. Peter John Powell writes that it was Mari Sandoz herself who first stimu­ lated his early interest in those he calls the People in the mid-1950s. Since then it seems Powell has been interested in little else. It seems especially fitting that after twenty-five years of intensive study Powell should publish this massive two-volume telling of the fifty years of Cheyenne history preceding Little Finger Nail’s death. In fact, People of the Sacred Mountain was written, Powell tells us, “to commemorate the centennial of Little Wolf and Morning Star’s epic journey home to the North Country,” the very event Cheyenne Autumn commemorates. 152 Western American Literature This book is indisputably a monumental achievement. In its nearly 1500 pages Powell writes as definitive and loving an account of a circle of American Indian history as has ever been told or, likely, will be. As early as 1910, George Bird Grinnell recognized that “almost all the Cheyenne troubles are believed to have followed close on the loss of the medicine arrows and the desecration of the Sacred Hat.” Powell uses those two events as both a conceptual and a temporal frame on which to hang Cheyenne memories of the awful events of the mid-19th century which marked the end of one form of their culture and the birth of another. The loss of the four Sacred Arrows to a crippled Pawnee warrior in 1830 and the mutilation of the Sacred Buffalo Hat by the Keeper’s own wife in 1874 are thus the key events in the book. Powell has written about them before. His previous two-volume study of the Cheyenne, Sweet Medi­ cine: The Continuing Role of the Sacred Arrows, the Sun Dance, and the Sacred Buffalo Hat in Northern Cheyenne History (1969) covers those events (and more) with a consistent focus on Northern Cheyenne ceremonialism. Here in People of the Sacred Mountain Powell takes as his focus rather “the lives of the men who governed and protected the People.” Powell seems uniquely equipped to write such a history. He was long a student and now is heir to John Stands in Timber, formal historian of the Northern Cheyenne People and author of...