Cheyenne

Cultural History

While it is difficult to link the Cheyenne with specific prehistoric traditions, oral tradition and historical accounts indicate that the Cheyenne originally lived west of the Great Lakes in what is now Minnesota. [Page 264]They lived in bark-covered lodges, subsisting on wild rice, wild plants, horticulture, and wild game.

Great Omaha powwow dance of the Cheyenne in Montana (1891). Ancient stories and rituals are enacted through singing, dancing, drumming, and colorful regalia. Then as well as today, these get-togethers bring together kinfolk and other tribal members.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-101168.

Pressured by armed Chippewa and Assiniboine, Cheyenne villages began migrating west, eventually reaching the Missouri River as early as the mid-17th century. Some Cheyenne settled into horticultural earth lodge villages along the Middle Missouri River and other river systems. While living near other tribes, the Cheyenne acquired new political and religious traditions. The Cheyenne council of chiefs probably originated here; and the Mandan Okipa ceremony and Hidatsa Sacred Arrow traditions influenced their ceremonial complex and political structures.

Other Cheyenne bands continued to move west, adopting a nomadic lifeway oriented toward bison hunting. Gradually, the Middle Missouri River villagers abandoned their villages, joining the nomadic Cheyenne. By 1760, Cheyenne bands, armed with some trade guns and horses, were unified in the vicinity of the Black Hills, South Dakota. It is at this location that Cheyenne religious and political structures took their historical form. According to oral traditions, a prophet, Sweet Medicine, brought the Cheyenne the Sacred Arrows and mandates for living. The Cheyenne also encountered and incorporated the So?taa?e, who brought the Sacred Hat and the Sun Dance. From the Black Hills, the Cheyenne actively extended their territory south and west between the forks of the Platte River, warring with the Shoshone, the Pawnee, and the Crow.

The territory used by the Cheyenne changed rapidly after their migration to the Great Plains. By the 1830s, the territory occupied by the Cheyenne encompassed portions of the western Dakotas and eastern Montana, most of eastern Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, and Wyoming, into western Oklahoma. The Cheyenne often shared portions of this area with the Arapaho and Teton Dakota bands further north.

[Page 265]The separation of the Cheyenne began in the early 19th century, accelerated by the building of Bent's Fort, south along the Arkansas River, and Fort William in 1834, on the North Platte River. The Northern and Southern tribal divisions became more permanent in the 1840s with the opening of the emigrant trails and the associated ecological destruction surrounding the trails. The 1849 Asiatic cholera epidemic drove three Cheyenne bands to near extinction, prompting the survivors to amalgamate with other Northern or Southern Cheyenne bands. The Northern Cheyenne increasingly allied with the Teton Dakota to resist U.S. expansion, while the Southern Cheyenne attempted to pursue a policy of accommodation through negotiation and treaty making. The 1851 treaty set the Southern and Northern Cheyenne divisions as politically distinct.

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