BiblioVault - Books about Cheyenne Indians

The Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867-1869

Second Edition

John Monnett

University Press of Colorado, 2021

During the morning hours of September 17, 1868, on a sandbar in the middle of the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River in eastern Colorado, a large group of Cheyenne Dog Men, Arapaho, and Sioux attacked about fifty civilian scouts under the command of Major George A. Forsyth. For two days the scouts held off repeated charges before the Indian warriors departed. For nine days, the scouts lived off the meat of their horses until additional forces arrived to relieve them. Five scouts were killed and eighteen wounded during the encounter that later came to be known as the Battle of Beecher Island.

Monnett’s compelling study, a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award in 1993, was the first to examine the Beecher Island battle and its relationship to the overall conflict between American Indians and Euroamericans on the central plains of Colorado and Kansas during the late 1860s. Focusing on the struggle of the Cheyenne Dog Men warrior society to defend the lands between the Republican River valley and the Smoky Hill River valley from Euroamerican encroachment, Monnett presents original reminiscences of American Indian and Euroamerican participants.

Since its original release several developments and an important original source document have come to light and offer new information. The second edition presents and examines these new discoveries and developments that moderate the original interpretive causes and more modern effects of this historical episode. Scholars and general readers alike interested in this important episode in the post–Civil War conflicts on the Great Plains and western history will find this new edition of The Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867–1869 illuminating, surprising, and perhaps even controversial.

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Fort Reno and the Indian Territory Frontier

Stan Hoig

University of Arkansas Press, 2005

Following the Indian uprising known as the Red River War, Fort Reno (in what would become western Oklahoma) was established in 1875 by the United States government. Its original assignment was to serve as an outpost to exercise control over the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. But Fort Reno also served as an embryonic frontier settlement around which the first trappings of Anglo-American society developed a regulatory force between the Indian tribes and the white man, and the primary arm of government responsible for restraining land-hungry whites from invading country promised to Native American tribes by treaty. With the formation of the new Territory of Oklahoma and introduction of civil law, Fort Reno was forced to assume another purpose: it became a cavalry remount center. But when the mechanization of the military brought an end to the horse cavalry, the demise of Fort Reno was imminent. When Ben Clark, the prideful scout who knew and loved Fort Reno, ended his own life in 1914, the military post that had once thrived on America’s frontier was brought to a poignant end.

The story of Fort Reno, as detailed here by Stan Hoig, touches on several of the most important topics of nineteenth-century Western history: the great cattle drives, Indian pacification and the Plains Wars, railroads, white settlement, and the Oklahoma land rushes. Hoig deals not only with Fort Reno, but also with Darlington agency, the Chisolm Trail, and the trading activities in Indian Territory from 1874 to approximately 1900. The author includes maps, photographs, and illustrations to enhance the narrative and guide the reader, like a scout, through a time of treacherous but fascinating events in the Old West.

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from Sand Creek

Simon J. Ortiz

University of Arizona Press, 2000

The massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children by U.S. soldiers at Sand Creek in 1864 was a shameful episode in American history, and its battlefield was proposed as a National Historic Site in 1998 to pay homage to those innocent victims. Poet Simon Ortiz had honored those people seventeen years earlier in his own way. That book, from Sand Creek, is now back in print.

Originally published in a small-press edition, from Sand Creek makes a large statement about injustices done to Native peoples in the name of Manifest Destiny. It also makes poignant reference to the spread of that ambition in other parts of the world—notably in Vietnam—as Ortiz asks himself what it is to be an American, a U.S. citizen, and an Indian. Indian people have often felt they have had no part in history, Ortiz observes, and through his work he shows how they can come to terms with this feeling. He invites Indian people to examine the process they have experienced as victims, subjects, and expendable resources—and asks people of European heritage to consider the motives that drive their own history and create their own form of victimization.

Through the pages of this sobering work, Ortiz offers a new perspective on history and on America. Perhaps more important, he offers a breath of hope that our peoples might learn from each other:

This America
has been a burden
of steel and mad
death,
but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising
from Sand Creek.

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A Misplaced Massacre

Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

Ari Kelman

Harvard University Press, 2012

In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.

This site opened after a long and remarkably contentious planning process. Native Americans, Colorado ranchers, scholars, Park Service employees, and politicians alternately argued and allied with one another around the question of whether the nation’s crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized. Ari Kelman unearths the stories of those who lived through the atrocity, as well as those who grappled with its troubling legacy, to reveal how the intertwined histories of the conquest and colonization of the American West and the U.S. Civil War left enduring national scars.

Combining painstaking research with storytelling worthy of a novel, A Misplaced Massacre probes the intersection of history and memory, laying bare the ways differing groups of Americans come to know a shared past.

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White Man's Water

The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community

Erica Prussing

University of Arizona Press, 2011

In recent years, efforts to recognize and accommodate cultural diversity have gained some traction in the politics of US health care. But to date, anthropological perspectives have figured unevenly in efforts to define and address mental health problems. Particularly challenging are examinations of Native peoples’ experiences with alcohol.

Erica Prussing provides the first in-depth assessment of the politics of Native sobriety by focusing on the Northern Cheyenne community in southeastern Montana, where for many decades the federally funded health care system has relied on the Twelve Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. White Man’s Water provides a thoughtful and careful analysis of Cheyenne views of sobriety and the politics that surround the selective appeal of Twelve Step approaches despite wide-ranging local critiques. Narratives from participants in these programs debunk long-standing stereotypes about ”Indian drinking” and offer insight into the diversity of experiences with alcohol that actually occur among Native North Americans.

This critical ethnography employs vivid accounts of the Northern Cheyenne people to depict how problems with alcohol are culturally constructed, showing how differences in age, gender, and other social features can affect involvement with both drinking and sobriety. These testimonies reveal the key role that gender plays in how Twelve Step program participants engage in a selective and creative process of appropriation at Northern Cheyenne, adapting the program to accommodate local cultural priorities and spiritual resources. The testimonies also illuminate community reactions to these adaptations, inspiring deeper inquiry into how federally funded health services are provided on the reservation.

This book will appeal to readers with an interest in Native studies, ethnography, women’s studies, and medical anthropology. With its critical consideration of how cultural context shapes drinking and sobriety, White Man’s Water offers a multivocal perspective on alcohol’s impact on health and the cultural complexities of sobriety.

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