And now:Sonja Keohane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<http://www.billingsgazette.com/regionframe.htm>
FROM NEBRASKA TO MONTANA
30 Northern Cheyenne complete 400-mile trek
Runners fight weather, fatigue to commemorate escape 120 years ago
By JENNIFER McKEE
Of The Gazette Staff
BUSBY - Battling blizzards, mountain passes and fatigue, 30 Northern
Cheyenne runners sprinted the final yards of their 400-mile trek into this
small reservation town.
"From the time we left Fort Robinson, this is what we were looking forward
to," said Philip Whiteman Jr., a Northern Cheyenne who organized the group
dubbed the Fort Robinson Breakout Runners.
The 400-mile run from Fort Robinson, Neb., to Busby, Mont., commemorates
120 years since Northern Cheyenne chief Dull Knife led an escape of 148
Cheyenne men, women and children from imprisonment at Fort Robinson.
Dull Knife and another Cheyenne chief, Little Wolf, were leading the tribe
back to Montana after a year of exile in Oklahoma as punishment for the
Cheyenne's role in the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Little Wolf's band
made it back to Montana and settled in the land that would later become the
Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Dull Knife's group, however, was captured
and never made the final 400 miles from Nebraska to Montana.
That's why the runners did this, said Steve Brady, the leader of an elite
Cheyenne warrior society, to "memorialize their grandfathers and their
grandmothers."
The run ended at a small cemetery where the remains of Little Wolf's band
are buried.
"They ran for these people here that are buried," Brady said. "It was a
long trek home."
Ranging in age from 72 to 8, the runners ate, rested and sometimes slept in
support vans that drove ahead and behind them.
Almost from the run's beginning last Tuesday, the runners fought bad
weather and low cash flow. The band ran through subzero temperatures as a
rule, not stopping for blizzards or closed highways.
They ran out of money toward the end of the run, Whiteman said. The runners
decided to run most of the night and sleep in their support vans rather
than call it quits.
"They ran on guts," Whiteman said.
----end of article----
