The Cheyennes

The expedition journalists spelled the people’s name Chyenne, Cheaun, Chion, and Chien. Originally, they lived along the Minnesota River. In 1680, a delegation traveled to La Salle’s Fort Crevecoeur in Illinois to invite the French to visit their lands. Later, the people migrated westward to avoid Sioux encroachment, and by the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, these Algonquian-speaking people lived on the Cheyenne River between the Missouri and Black Hills. The people had transitioned from gathering wild rice to horticultural and then, to a horse-based Plains culture subsisting primarily on buffalo.^[1]John H. Moore, Margot P. Liberty, and A. Terry Straus, Handbook of North American Indians: Plains Vol. 15, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 863, 880.

Many, including the expedition members, misheard the people’s name as ‘chien’—French for ‘dog’. Their name actually comes from the Sioux exonym shahíyena, perhaps meaning ‘people of alien speech’. Their language was Algonquian, very different from the Siouan languages spoken by most of their neighbors.^[2]Frederick Webb Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Vol. 1 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Government Printing Office, 1912), 250–251.

On their way up the Missouri River in 1804, the expedition passed an abandoned Cheyenne village and met only a handful of Cheyenne. One was Big Man, adopted by Hidatsa chief Le Borgne. Clark recorded what he and Lewis could learn about the people. The captains’ entry for the Cheyenne in their “Estimate of the Eastern Indians” written during the winter at Fort Mandan remains accurate:

They are the remnant of a nation once respectable in point of number: formerly resided on a branch of the Red river of Lake Winnipie [Winnipeg], which still bears their name [North Dakota’s Sheyenne River]. Being oppressed by the Sioux, they removed to the west side of the Missouri, about 15 miles below the mouth of the Warricunne creek, where they built and fortified a village, but being pursued by their ancient enemies the Sioux, they fled to the Black hills, about the head of the Chyenne river, where they wander in quest of the buffaloe, having no fixed residence. They do not cultivate. They are well disposed towards the whites, and might easily be induced to settle on the Missouri, if they could be assured of being protected from the Sioux. Their number annually diminishes. Their trade may be made valuable.^[3]Moulton, Journals, 3:421.

Homeward-bound, the expedition met a large Cheyenne group at an Arikara village. The captains delayed to council with Mandan Chief Sheheke and various chiefs of the Arikara and Cheyenne. All but Sheheke declined the captains’ invitation to travel to Washington City, but one Cheyenne did ask the United States to establish trade with his people.

To maintain their hunting grounds, the Cheyenne continually fought with the Shoshones, Pawnees, and Crows. Around 1850, disruption from emigrant travel through their lands began diminishing the tribe, and many members died from cholera. On 29 November 1864, a peaceful tribe was massacred at Sand Creek, Colorado—the infamous Sand Creek Massacre.^[4]Moore, et al., 863,865. Today, the Southern Cheyenne of Oklahoma and Northern Cheyenne of Montana constitute two federally recognized nations within the United States.^[5]“Cheyenne,” Wikipedia accessed on 21 December 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne.

The Dog Soldiers are one of six Cheyenne military societies that formed in the mid-1800s. The Cheyenne fought may battles with the U.S. Army to preserve the Cheyenne way of life, and the Dog Soldiers remain especially popular in literature and film.