January 22 —
On this day in 1879, American soldiers chasing down Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife and his people as they make a desperate bid for freedom, badly beating them. As a result of that victory, the soldiers effectively crushed the so-called Dull Knife Outbreak.
A leading chief of the Northern Cheyenne, Dull Knife (sometimes called Morning Star) had counseled for peace with the powerful Whites invading his homeland in the Powder River country of modern-day Wyoming and Montana. However, Dull Knife began having second thoughts about the trustworthiness of such advice after the horrific massacre of more than 200 peaceful Cheyenne Indians by Colorado militiamen led by the fanatical Col. John M. Chivington at Sand Creek,
John M. Chivington
Colorado, in 1864. As a result of this massacre, Dull Knife reluctantly led his people into a war he strongly believed they could never win. In 1876, many of Dull Knife’s people fought beside Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull at their victorious battle at Little Bighorn, though the chief himself apparently did not participate.
During the winter after Little Bighorn, Dull Knife and his people camped along the headwaters of the Powder River in Wyoming, where they fell victim to the army’s winter campaign for revenge. In November, General Ranald Mackenzie’s expeditionary force discovered the village and attacked. Dull Knife lost many of his people, and along with several other Indian leaders, reluctantly surrendered the following spring. In 1877, the military relocated Dull Knife and his followers far away from their Wyoming homeland to the large Indian Territory on the southern plains (in present-day Kansas and Oklahoma). No longer able to practice their traditional hunts, the band was largely dependent on meager government provisions. Beset by hunger, homesickness, and disease, Dull Knife and his people rebelled after one year. In September 1878, they joined another band to make an epic march back to their Wyoming homeland. Although Dull Knife publicly announced his peaceful intentions, the government regarded the fleeing Indians as renegades, and soldiers from bases scattered through-out the Plains attacked the Indians in an unsuccessful effort to turn them back.
Arriving at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, near their Wyoming homeland, Dull Knife and his people surrendered to the government in the hopes they would be allowed to stay in the territory. To their dismay, administrators instead threatened to hold the band captive at Fort Robinson until they would agree to return south to the Indian Territory. Unwilling to give up when his goal was so close, in early January, Dull Knife led about 100 of his people in one final desperate break for freedom. Soldiers from Fort Robinson chased after the already weak and starving band of men, women, and children, and on January 22, they attacked and killed at least 30 people, including several in the immediate family of Dull Knife.
Badly bloodied, most of the survivors returned to Fort Robinson and accepted their fate. Dull Knife managed to escape, and he eventually found shelter with Chief Red Cloud on the Sioux reservation in Nebraska. Permitted to remain on the reservation, Dull Knife died four years later, deeply bitter towards the Anglo-Americans he had once hoped to live with peacefully. The same year, the government finally allowed the Northern Cheyenne to move to a permanent reservation on the Tongue River in Montana near their traditional homeland. At last, Dull Knife’s people had come home, but their great chief had not lived to join them.
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Photo courtesy of wikipedia.com