And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
....A group of Cheyenne from the Montana res
walked/ran from Fort Robinson to their res just a month or so ago, to
commemorate this historic event - it must have been two months ago,
coz the "outbreak" came on January 9. A Cheyenne friend of mine who
lives on the res told me they should have started in Fort Reno.
I have a couple of comments about the article itself. The author asks the
rhetorical question of why people would leave a warm shelter [the Ft.
Robinson barracks where they were held prisoners] and risk their lives
to venture out into a bitter cold January morning. The author should have
done his homework...There was no heat in the barracks, no food, no
water, no nothing. Dull Knife - aka Morning Star - adamantly refused to
go back to Ft. Reno, and the American military brass at Ft. Robinson
insisted that it was their only option. Morning Star said the only way they
would go back would be dead, and then the Army would have to carry
them back. So the Army decided to freeze them out, starve them out.
They cut off all contact with the barracks, nothing was allowed in; the
barrack doors were nailed shut. After two or three days of this, children
were slipping their tongues on the window panes to absorb what little
moisture they could that had condensed on the windows. They were NOT
going back to Ft. Reno, not on their own anyway, and so their only choice
was to break out.
Of course, they had been disarmed before being confined to the barracks,
but the Cheyennes had broken apart several guns and put them on the
clothes of women and children as "decorations" - firing pins, screws,
whatever
the hell guns are made of - and they had a stash of gun barrels and larger
gun parts under the blankets of the women. In the night of the 8th, they put
what little they had together, and three - or perhaps four, my memory's
bad -
men had functional rifles trained on guards. Three guards were shot dead
in an instant as a 100-year-old man busted out through a back window, the
others following suit.
Another paragraph in the article says that leaders Little Wolf and Dull
Knife
led their people on a "walk" from Fort Reno back to their homeland. All the
Cheyenne who embarked on that historic journey knew that it wouldn't be
a "walk", as if through a park. There were about 300 of them, and they were
pursued by 10,000 cavalary from forts all over the region, plus another
3,000
volunteer militia. Little Wolf, their war leader, met with the CO of the
Fort
Reno bricks and told him they were going, and asked only that they give the
Cheyenne enough time to get away from the Ft. Reno area,so their cousins
would not see them die right their on the res. Let the Cheyenne get just a
little ways away, he said, and We can turn the snow red with our blood...
They knew their chances were slim, but as a man named Little Finger Nail
urged, it is better to die with honor trying to get back home than it is to
die like dogs in a reservation prison. And so they went...
One last thing I thought was a little misleading in the article. It said
that the
young men and some old folks and children went with Dull Knife to Ft.
Robinson, while the rest continued with Little Wolf to Montana. Dull Knife
actually had only a few young men with him. He was followed by people who
were tired, obviously, and only wanted to seek shelter with their Oglala
friends at Red Cloud's Agency at Fort Robinson. Little did they know that
Red Cloud's people had been moved in the past year, and were no longer
at Ft. Robinson. The relatively short trip to that Nebraska Fort was
considered
a safe option because they believed the Oglalas still resided there. A few
young men went with them to help the predominantly older crowd, and the
women and children, who followed Dull Knife's course. Dull Knife's decision
to part ways with the rest of the Cheyenne heading to Montana prompted
Little Wolf to say that Dull Knife was "more Lakota" than he was Cheyenne.
Of course, Dull Knife - whose real name was Morning Star, but given the
name "Dull Knife" by his Lakota brother-in-law - was married to an Oglala
women, and his descendants have lived on or near the Pine Ridge reservation
ever since.
dave
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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