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Listen to both sides -- Cries from 'Last Indian Raid' still echo through canyons
OBERLIN -- Echoing over the quiet hills southwest of Oberlin ... through the deep-cut canyons ... caught in the sharp limestone outcroppings ... are the anguished cries of prairie settler families: Husbands, fathers, brothers killed as they worked the hay. Their horses stolen ... lives shattered.
Listen again -- closer. There are other cries -- cries of hungry babies ... mothers who haven't enough to feed their children, to protect them from the cold. Husbands and fathers frustrated and angry because they can't provide for their families. Their home is still so far away ...
Listen to both sides, asked Richard E. Littlebear, a Northern Cheyenne Indian. Listen to the cries of both white families and Indian families ... both sides tell the story of the "last Indian raid" on Kansas soil, 130 years ago.
Littlebear was the guest speaker at the 50th anniversary celebration Sept. 28 of the Last Indian Raid/Decatur County Museum in Oberlin. Littlebear is president of Chief Dull Knife College, named in honor of one of the Northern Cheyenne chiefs who led their people on a devastating 15-hundred mile exodus from a reservation in Oklahoma to ancestral homelands in the Dakotas and Montana in the fall and winter of 1878.
Moses Abernathy, an old trapper, was the first homesteader in Sheridan County, Kan., in 1872. Six years later, in late September, he and Marcellus Felt were on their way to Oberlin to record Felt's purchase from Abernathy of land in Decatur County.
William Laing Sr. had homesteaded in Kansas, from Canada; he and his son, Freeman, were driving a wagon to Oberlin. Laing's other sons, William Jr. and John, were erecting a building on the family's homestead.
L.T. Lull and John Irwin left Nebraska, stopped at the Kirwin, Kan., Land Office, and were searching for land to purchase in Decatur County.
Edward Miskelley was working for the Doweling Brothers Stock Company and was moving cattle to winter pasture.
James G. Smith, his son, Watson, and their neighbor, John Hudson were putting up hay in a Sappa Creek bottom.
Ferdinand Westphalen and his son, Thomas, homesteaded in Decatur County in 1874, and were hitching their mules to a wagon.
Everyone, including Ferdinand Westphalen and his son, Thomas, were going about their usual chores on those warm autumn days in 1878. Most settlers were not afraid of Indians, said Calvin Ufford, a Decatur County history buff. "They knew there could be Indians around," Ufford said. "But they weren't hostile."
So, on Sept. 30, 1878, when several Indian braves rode into the yard of the Westphalens, the father and son thought they were friendly and gave them food.
However, by the end of the next day, the Westphalens and 17 of their neighbors would be dead, many of the women seized, carried off by force and later released, and the Indians were continuing their trek north toward Montana.
Littlebear said he isn't justifying the killing of the Kansas settlers. "I'm against killing," he said, "And it's not to say our killing was better or more justified than yours."
"But," Littlebear said, "what we often don't see is that raids were often retaliation for what happened before."
"The media ... Hollywood movies ... they don't show what prompted the raids," Littlebear said. "Their stories start with the raids."
Littlebear encouraged those on a Decatur County tour and those who attended his presentation afterward, "to get a balanced view ... to look at both sides ... both sides need to be shown."
"Look at a movie," he said. "And ask, 'What happened before?"
He continued, "My purpose here today, is to ask you to take a balanced view, and to question the stereotypes."
In 1874-1875, Indians fought with prospectors arriving to find gold on the Sioux reservation in the Dakotas' Black Hills. In November 1875, the U.S. government ordered all Northern Indians (Sioux and Cheyenne) to report to reservation headquarters and to leave the bulk of the reservation to the whites. Most Indian bands did not respond because they were isolated by winter weather, and those who did hear were reluctant to make such a major move in the winter. The government declared all non-conforming Indians to be in a state of war against the United States, and turned the matter over to the U.S. Army.
On March 17, 1876, Col. J.J. Reynolds and three companies of cavalry attacked and destroyed the winter camp of Northern Cheyenne Chief Two Moon, who was friendly and non-hostile. Two Moon and his forces organized, counterattacked and defeated Reynolds, and Two Moon became actively hostile.
At what would become known as "The Battle of the Little Bighorn" and "Custer's Last Stand" in eastern Montana on June 25 and 26, 1876, U.S. Army Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his battalion of about 250 men attacked what appeared to be a small and defenseless Indian camp, and were killed -- every last soldier -- by 5,000 Sioux, Northern Cheyenne (including Two Moon) and Arapaho.
In August 1876, the government declared that all of the Powder River country in Montana and about a third of the South Dakota reservation (and the Black Hills) were now U.S. government property. On Nov. 25, 1876, Brigadier General George Crook attacked Northern Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife's camp, killing many inhabitants of the camp.
In May, 1877, the government forced about 960 Northern Cheyenne men, women and children from their northern homelands in Montana onto the Darlington Reservation in Indian Territory in what would become Oklahoma. Many died in the unfamiliar lowlands, hunting was limited to restricted lands and rations did not arrive as promised.
This is the point at which Richard Littlebear picked up the story of "the Last Indian Raid on Kansas soil" during the commemoration of Oberlin's "Last Indian Raid Museum." Littlebear told the 140-or-so tour participants, "They couldn't acclimate to the weather. They were given substandard food. And they had clashes with the Southern Cheyenne."
Littlebear said that Northern Cheyenne chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf had been promised by the U.S. government and by the reservation commissioner that if they could not adjust, they could go back north. But the government went back on its word, and Little Wolf and Dull Knife were told time and time again that they could not leave Oklahoma.
Little Wolf wanted: "a springtime when the Cheyenne (are) once more warm, a well-fed, a straightstanding people."
The Northern Cheyenne were physically sick, homesick, and heartsick. Their elderly and young were dying. Everyone was hungry. Under the cover of early-morning darkness on Sept. 10, 1878, 335 survivors fled the Darlington Reservation, determined to reach their homelands 15-hundred miles away, in the Black Hills of the Dakotas and Montana. They left behind their tipis and their burning fires, and took with them only what they could carry.
Calvin Ufford of Oberlin points out -- during a tour Sept. 28 of the sites where 19 Decatur County settlers died 130 years ago -- that the Northern Cheyenne "just wanted to go home. They needed the settlers' horses for transportation and for food. They were starving. They just wanted to go home."
Ufford pointed out that the Indian scouts did not scalp the men they killed, nor did they kill women and children. "The men, yes, working with their horses," Ufford said. And they took little more than the horses and food. "They were not just rampaging," Ufford said. "These Indians had to be looking for provisions."
Museum director Sharleen Wurm asked, "What would you do, in the same situation, needing to feed 300 people, your family? They just wanted to go home."
Littlebear said that the story of the Northern Cheyenne's epic journey records within it -- from the Cheyenne viewpoint -- unforgettable tales of heroism.
"Fleeing through here," he said, "a young Cheyenne boy carried his little sister, so the soldiers were following only one set of tracks, to a hole in a cliff above a creek bed."
Littlebear continued, "The young boy was unarmed, and he could see the soldiers coming. He told his little sister, 'keep quiet. Keep quiet.'"
The young boy grabbed a stick, stepped from his hiding place and was killed when he was confronted by the soldiers. "The young boy knew that for his sister to survive, he had to act as he did," Littlebear said.
Fleeing Indians discovered the little sister, and she survived. "She told the story after the traumas ended," Littlebear said.
In Nebraska, the Cheyenne split into two groups somewhere near their crossing of the Platte River. Little Wolf and 114 of his followers moved north into the sand hills of Nebraska, where they spent the winter in a well-secluded camp.
Dull Knife's band moved northwest and was captured and imprisoned at Fort Robinson in the wind-swept Nebraska panhandle. The government insisted the Indians return to the southern reservation, and Dull Knife announced they would rather die than return. The government refused his request for a small reservation in the north, and troops locked the Indians in barracks -- in the dead of a northern Nebraska winter -- with no food, no water and no fuel.
On Jan. 9, 1879, soldiers killed 30 Northern Cheyenne as they attempted to escape the barracks. Thirty-five were wounded; others fled.
Soldiers caught up with the escapees, killed many, and brought seven women and children -- five of them wounded -- back to the fort. Dull Knife and his son escaped and were hidden by friends on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation.
Little Wolf and his band had hunkered down in a winter camp in north-central Nebraska, and continued north in the early spring. In March 1879, soldiers captured them and took them to Fort Keogh in Montana.
By this time, public opinion was on the side of the Northern Cheyenne, forcing the Bureau of Indian Affairs to abandon plans to relocate them. A reservation was established on the Tongue and Rosebud rivers in Montana, where Dull Knife and his people (fewer than 80 remaining) were finally allowed to settle, rejoining Little Wolf's band.
When the two chiefs died, Dull Knife in 1883 and Little Wolf in 1904, they were buried on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, on the campus of what is now Chief Dull Knife College, in Lame Deer, Mont.
Littlebear asked, "Why hasn't this been written about more? Studied, and researched, as other long walks of tribes have been?"
(The well-known "Trail of Tears" is in the opposite direction -- the forced removal in 1838 of Cherokee Indians from their homelands in Georgia to Indian territory in Oklahoma, a journey that killed approximately 4,000 Cherokees.
Tensions between the Cherokees and the white settlers in Georgia had escalated when gold was discovered in Dahlonega, Ga., in 1829, and prospectors began trespassing on Cherokee lands. With the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Treaty of New Echota (a treaty never accepted by the Cherokee), the U.S. Congress gave President Andrew Jackson authority to negotiate Indian removal treaties, exchanging Indian land in the east for land west of the Mississippi River.
Jackson's successor President Martin Van Buren allowed Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama militia to round up about 13,000 Cherokees into concentration camps before sending them west. Disease, starvation and cold in the camps caused many of the 4,000 Cherokee deaths.
After the initial roundup, the U.S. military continued to oversee the 1,000-mile emigration until the Cherokee met their forced destination near what would become Talequah, Okla.
In the Cherokee language, the Cherokee's forced relocation is called "Nunna daul Tsuny (or Isunyi)," "The Trail Where They Cried.")
Littlebear answered his own questions, "Because the Cheyenne are reticent to speak of our own trials. And because the Cheyenne prevailed in their march home."
There are books about the Northern Cheyenne's exodus north, one of which carries the endorsement of Richard Littlebear.
About "In Dull Knife's Wake: The True Story of the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878," Littlebear Bear writes: "'In Dull Knife's Wake' is a highly informative reading experience."
John Monnett wrote, "Tell Them We are Going Home: The Odyssey of the Northern Cheyenne." Alan Boye wrote, "Holding Stone Hands: On the Trail of the Cheyenne Exodus."
Nebraska author Mari Sandoz wrote, "Cheyenne Autumn."
The suffering of the Northern Cherokee continued. Indians killed at Fort Robinson were decapitated, and their bones and heads sent east for study and research -- "to prove the Cheyenne people were inferior," Littlebear said.
In 1993, the bones and heads -- in separate boxes -- were repatriated to the Northern Cheyenne. "Those carrying the boxes could hear movement ... The clear voice of an old lady could be heard," Littlebear said. " ... 'thankfully', they heard from the trees surrounding Fort Robinson ... we are grateful to the government for the return of the bones ... "
The survivors of the attacks in Decatur County weren't without their own hardships. As they buried their dead and determined their material losses, prairie fires swept across their lands, destroying farmsteads, crops, hay, trees -- and exposing the body of yet another victim of the Indian attacks.
George Walters, the son-in-law of Moses Abernathy, had been on his way home from Buffalo Park (Park, Kan.)., with supplies when he was attacked and killed. Three weeks later, as settlers examined prairie fire damages, they found Walters' body, and buried him in an unmarked grave on the charred high plains.
Walters' grave, now marked with a white cross, is the only physical evidence of the "last Indian raid" on Kansas soil, Ufford said.
On Oct. 26, 1878, an Army lieutenant colonel of the 16th Infantry tallied and recorded the settlers' losses. He counted horses, ponies and mules, cattle, ducks and chickens, clothing and household goods, foodstuffs, firearms, saddles and harnesses, and assessed dollar values to the losses. The figures seem a pittance by today's standards -- one pony, $40; one yearling steer, $9; 31 yards new carpet, $31; grain and corn, $55; 1 cow, 2 hogs and 100 chickens, $75 -- but to the homesteaders in 1878, they represented all they had.
The colonel wrote: "I have given here the simple statement of facts regarding the depredations by the Indians without the resulting hardships. All these people except the cattlemen have lost nearly all, with the winter before them. They were all homestead settlers and all their money and labor invested in what, in the most cases, they are obliged to abandon. This applies particularly to the widows."
The lieutenant colonel's notes indicate that many widows and their children left their homesteads to live with family: the Laings to Omaha, Nebr.; James Smith's family to Smith County, Kan.; Marcellus Felt's widow and children to Kirwin, Kan.
Ferdinand Westphalen's brother, Peter, another Decatur County homesteader, took his own family, Ferdinand's widow and her seven children back to Scribner, Nebr. Historical notes at the museum in Oberlin indicate: "The sister-in-law, with no possible way to earn a livelihood, was forced to give her children away."
Killed that day on the Kansas plains and memorialized with a monument in the Oberlin Cemetery were: William Laing Sr., John C. Laing, William Laing Jr., Freeman Laing, James G. Smith, E.P. Humphrey, John Humphrey, Moses F. Abernathy, John C. Hudson, George F. Walters, Marcellus Felt, Ed Miskelley, Ferdinand Westphalen, Thomas Westphalen, John Wright, L.T. Lull, John Irwin, John Young and Fred Hemper (Hamper).
No one -- Indian or white -- escaped life-shattering repercussions set in motion those last days of September 1878 when, along the Sappa Creek in Decatur County, the paths of Indians desperate to find their home crossed with white homesteaders determined to protect theirs.
Native Americans today, in today's white society, "have lots of baggage -- cultural, spiritual, historical," Littlebear said. "They still resonate through the Cheyenne people."
He continued, "I'm not making excuses, but those traumas make sense to us ... to our history."
But, he said, he himself is "an indication, a living personification, of what happens with motivation and perseverance -- not necessarily more brains," he chuckled, "just plain perseverance."
On the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Littlebear said, "we have doctorates, juris doctors, Ph.D.s. We're making it." Littlebear has been president of Chief Dull Knife College on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer since 1999.
Littlebear said that initiatives by the Montana legislature and governor are permitting the Northern Cheyenne to research and tell their stories. Northern Cheyenne researchers and historians are traveling to history centers, archives, collections and libraries to gather Northern Cheyenne history. "That's what the money has permitted us to do," Littlebear said.
"We're learning that history can be manipulated, skewed to one perspective ... viewpoints can be narrowed," he said. "But we're trying to do away with stereotypes that continue to pull us down. We're trying to pull all Native Americans into the present -- so that we are no longer looked at as artifacts of history."
Stereotypes of Native Americans, and whites, are "so pervasive in America," Littlebear said. "Please, just question them. Get a balanced view ... listen to both sides of the story. "