Cheyenne Autumn by Mari Sandoz

First published: 1953

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: 1878-1879

Locale: The Great Plains, from Indian Territory to the Yellowstone Country

Principal Characters:

• Little Wolf, one of the Old Man Chiefs of the Northern Cheyenne, bearer of the Sacred Chief’s bundle
• Dull Knife, another Old Man Chief of the Northern Cheyenne; captured at Fort Robinson, Nebraska
• Little Finger Nail, a young warrior and artist
• Red Cloud, Chief of the Sioux
• Lieutenant William P. Chase, a soldier, friend of the Cheyenne
• Captain Wessells, an officer guilty of Indian atrocities
• Black Coyote, a renegade Cheyenne

The Novel

Although based on intensive research, and supplemented by notes on sources, a map, and an index, Cheyenne Autumn is in fact an epic novel in which Sandoz employs dialogue and other fictional devices to re-create the historical event that is her subject. The novel recounts the fifteen-hundred-mile flight of the Northern Cheyenne in 1878-1879 from the Indian Territory back to their homeland in the Yellowstone Country. After the Cheyenne surrendered to General Miles in the spring of 1877, they were promised good treatment and an agency in their north country, but those promises were immediately broken, and they were told that they must resettle in the Indian Territory, far to the south: If they did not like it there, later they could return. The Cheyenne were refused all food and supplies until they agreed to go, so the starving tribe had no choice but to agree. The Northern Cheyenne were reunited with their Southern relatives at their new reservation near Fort Reno, in the Indian Territory, but that summer they were hungry and sick with malaria. The promised supplies never arrived, and finally Dull Knife and Little Wolf decided to lead their people north to the Yellowstone. A year earlier, they had brought two hundred warriors south, but starvation and disease had reduced their ranks to barely one hundred warriors, plus women and children.

On the night of September 9, 1878, the small troop set off on foot and horseback, slipping quietly past the army sentries under the veiled moon. They were pursued by Rendlebrock’s cavalry from Fort Reno, with additional troops sent from Fort Dodge to intercept them. The Dog Soldiers, or warrior society men, defended the rear and kept the stragglers moving as the tribe wended its way through settled country.

The Cheyenne held off the first army attack at Turkey Springs on September 13 and 14, even though they were outgunned and outnumbered, by following Little Wolf’s strategy of choosing a narrow ravine in which to ambush the approaching soldiers and hold them off while the tribe slipped away. These constant skirmishes were particularly hard on the women and children, already weakened by starvation and disease. As the Cheyenne moved, they lived on buffalo and wild game or on horse carcasses left behind after the fights, but it was still hard for the hunters to find enough meat for three hundred people. Young warriors had to capture wild horses or raid ranch stock to replenish their exhausted mounts. In Kansas, they were repeatedly harassed by cowboys and troopers, who killed women and children, until in revenge the Cheyenne began attacking white settlers. With guns and ammunition in short supply, the Cheyenne searched for army supplies after each skirmish or else brought back guns from their raids. The women dried meat and prepared skins in their temporary camps, but sometimes even these scant supplies had to be abandoned in the haste to escape from the cavalry. Always the Cheyenne kept to ravines, creek bottoms, and washouts to avoid detection. The newspapers exaggerated the size of the Cheyenne band and invented atrocities, whipping up anti-Indian hysteria among the cattlemen and settlers.

The Cheyenne crossed Kansas quickly, striking for the valley of the Arkansas River, which they crossed on the night of September 23. Colonel Lewis bragged in Dodge City that he would “wipe out those murdering redskins or leave his body dead on the ground.” At the battle of Punished Woman Creek, Little Wolf laid a clever ambush for Lewis’s soldiers, which was spoiled when a young warrior became overexcited and fired too quickly, revealing the Cheyenne position. The Indians held their fire, however, until the soldiers approached, and they brought down Colonel Lewis in the battle, causing the rest of the soldiers to retreat in confusion.

As the band approached the site of the April 23, 1875, Cheyenne massacre at the Sappa, many in Little Wolf’s band recalled the deaths of their relatives three years earlier, when soldiers and buffalo hunters had butchered almost 120 women and children, clubbing infants and throwing them on the fire. As the Cheyenne returned north, they were angered by the memory of the Sappa, and they began to raid the scattered settlements for guns and horses.

For more than a month, the ragged little band had moved more than five hundred miles north, crossed two railroads, and evaded several detachments of cavalry. Then they pushed northward to the valley of the Republican River, into the Nebraska Territory, and on to the Platte. There, soldiers of General Crook and General Miles were awaiting them, and behind them came the troops of Mauck. With the route to their Sioux relatives at Red Cloud’s and Spotted Tail’s agencies blocked by troops, the two old chiefs quarreled for the first time about where they should go. Dull Knife argued for the Red Cloud agency at Fort Robinson, while Little Wolf insisted that the band should continue north to the Yellowstone. The two chiefs could not agree, and the Cheyenne split that night on White Tail Creek.

Winter arrived early that year, with the fall’s first blizzard coming on October 23. Major Thornburgh and his cavalry pursued Little Wolf’s diminished band across the sandhills toward the Niobrara. Meanwhile, Dull Knife’s band pushed west toward the Red Cloud agency at Pine Ridge. The Cheyenne were short of meat and ammunition, and winter was upon them. Dull Knife’s band tried to make a last run but was surrounded at Chadron Creek during a blizzard and forced to surrender to Colonel Carlton’s and Captain Johnson’s soldiers. The Cheyenne were forced to turn over their ponies and weapons and march back to Fort Robinson. There Dull Knife’s band was held prisoner in the army barracks, while it was decided when to send the tribe back south to the Indian Territory.

At first the Cheyenne were treated well, but they were restless in their confinement and uncertain about their future. When Dull Knife refused to move back to the southern agency, Captain Wessells locked the Cheyenne in their barracks, without food, water, or fuel, and tried to starve them into submission. On the bright, moonlit night of January 9, 1879, the Cheyenne broke out of the barracks and fled across to the White River. The weak and poorly armed Cheyenne, numbering only 130, were pursued by five companies of cavalry and many civilians, the trigger-happy troops shooting women and children wherever they were found dug in the snow for protection. By January 22, the last of the Cheyenne had been captured, with only seventy-eight remaining, many of them severely wounded. There was widespread revulsion against the Cheyenne massacre, and Captain Wessells was investigated. Dull Knife and his family escaped to the Red Cloud agency, but the experience left him a broken man.

That winter, Little Wolf had eluded the troops and pushed north with his band of Cheyenne toward the Yellowstone. The strain of the winter created dissension among the warriors. By March, Little Wolf had reached the Yellowstone, only to be surrounded by Lieutenant White Hat Clark and his troops. Little Wolf was forced to surrender to Clark on March 25, 1879, thus ending one of the most remarkable exploits in the American West. The 114 Cheyenne remaining were brought into Fort Keogh and promised an agency of their own there. The Cheyenne found it a good, safe place, but there was nothing for them to do, and many turned to drinking and gambling. After a drunken argument, Little Wolf shot his friend Thin Elk and was afterward stripped of his chief’s powers. He lived on for twenty-five years, keeping to himself and going afoot to visit relatives, often alone. He finally died in 1904, remembered by a few as the chief who had led his tribe back to the Rosebud.

The Characters

Mari Sandoz tries to be fair in her presentation of both Indian and white historical figures, though her sympathies are clearly with the Cheyenne. While not romanticizing the Cheyenne as “noble savages,” she is able to view their actions from the Cheyenne cultural perspective. She manages to avoid the archetypes and clichés of Indian characterization in depicting the individual personalities of a number of the Cheyenne.

Certainly, the most admirable figures in her novel are the two Cheyenne chiefs, Little Wolf and Dull Knife, and of these two, perhaps Little Wolf is the more interesting since his fate is the more tragic. The underlying strength and integrity of his character comes through in his forbearance toward the whites and his unwillingness to engage in unnecessary violence that would risk the safety of the women and children in his tribe. He tries to keep his word and to honor his promises, even in the face of the continual failure of the army and Indian Bureau agents to honor their agreements with his tribe.

The tragic dimension of both Little Wolf and Dull Knife emerges in their depiction as the leaders of a vanishing culture and a disappearing way of life. The Cheyenne were a nomadic people whose culture and land-use patterns conflicted with the American settlement of the Great Plains. Their eventual defeat was perhaps inevitable, but they fought so bravely against such overwhelming odds that they earned the respect of many whites.

Little Wolf was a particularly shrewd and capable leader, a brilliant strategist who was able to evade a succession of cavalry attacks, even when his small band seemed hopelessly outmanned. Little Wolf’s tragic fate, after his surrender, in a sense represents the tragic fate of all the Plains Indians, a once-proud, nomadic people reduced to idleness and alcoholism. Dull Knife is perhaps a less interesting figure who serves as a foil to Little Wolf, demonstrating the wisdom of Little Wolf’s decision to continue pressing northward, since “the Indian never caught is the Indian never killed.”

Since Sandoz’ novel is narrated from the Cheyenne point of view, the white characters are not as fully developed, with the exception of several of the army officers. By far the most sympathetic of these are the young Lieutenant Chase, who gives food and clothing to the Cheyenne out of his own pockets, and Lieutenant Clark, who permits Little Wolf to surrender with dignity. Many of the other army officers are depicted as cold and ruthless men, professional “Indian haters,” or the unthinking agents of a genocidal policy.

Critical Context

Cheyenne Autumn is the third in a series of six books in which Mari Sandoz tells the story of the settlement of the Great Plains, from the time of the earliest fur trappers and frontiersmen to the later Indian rebellions and immigrant settlements. Her theme is the epic pageant of the Old West, with its violence, beauty, bravery, hardship, and change. Other works in this series include Old Jules (1935), based on the life of her father, a Swiss pioneer in western Nebraska; Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942), the story of the famous Oglala chief; and The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men (1954). The Cattlemen of the Rio Grande Across the Far Marias (1958) and The Beaver Men: Spearheads of Empire (1964) depict the history of settlement in the Old West. Of these novels, Cheyenne Autumn is among the most powerful, evoking an elegiac mood in its account of the heroic flight of the Northern Cheyenne back to their ancestral home. A dedicated and prolific novelist of the Nebraska frontier, Sandoz employs an honest realism to re-create the annals of Western history. Her accounts of the Indians and the white settlers attempt to present the region both as it was and as part of the enduring American myth of the Frontier West.

Bibliography

Lindell, Lisa R. “Recasting Epic Tradition: The Dispossessed as Hero in Sandoz’s Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn.” Great Plains Quarterly 16 (Winter, 1996): 43-53. Lindell examines Sandoz’s depiction of the treatment of the Cheyenne Indians and her portrayal of Crazy Horse.

Rippey, Barbara. “Toward a New Paradigm: Mari Sandoz’s Study of Red and White Myth in Cheyenne Autumn.” In Women and Western American Literature, edited by Helen W. Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowki. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1982. An analysis of Sandoz’s exploration of myth in the novel.

Stauffer, Helen, ed. Letters of Mari Sandoz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. A collection of letters dating from 1928 to Sandoz’s death in 1966 that focus on her career as a writer. Furnishes useful insights into Sandoz’s knowledge of Great Plains history. Correspondence with readers, publishers, and other authors provides a compelling overview of Sandoz’s literary career.

Stauffer, Helen. Mari Sandoz. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1984. A brief but solid introduction to Sandoz’s works.

Stauffer, Helen. Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. A literary biography of Sandoz, detailing her meticulous research and dedication to accuracy and her quarrels with editors and publishers. Stauffer also provides an analysis of Sandoz’s writings.

Villiger, Laura R. Mari Sandoz: A Study in Post-Colonial Discourse. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Villiger’s study examines Sandoz’s work as a series of contrasts, including regional versus universal dimensions, the indigenous world and the newcomer’s world, and text and context. A useful study for further exploration of Sandoz’s works.