Grinnel lived among the Cheyenne in the latter part of the 19th century. He was a deeply sympathetic observer of Indian life & culture. In this volume Grinnell gathered both Cheyenne & White accounts of the many battles between the two. He carefully explored Cheyenne culture & the way the Cheyenne to the threats on an alien society.

The Fighting Cheyennes (1915), by George Bird Grinnell, describes the battles fought by the Cheyennes, a Native American people originally from what is now Minnesota.

In July 1857, the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the Cheyenne Indians took place in present-day northwest Kansas. The Cheyennes had formed a grand line of battle such as was never again seen in Plains Indians wars. But they had not seen sabres before, and when the cavalry charged, sabres drawn, they panicked. William Y. Chalfant re-creates the human dimensions of a battle that was as much a clash of cultures as it was a clash of the U.S. cavalry and Cheyenne warriors.

A Plains tribe that subsisted on the buffalo, the Cheyennes depended for survival on the valor and skill of their braves in the hunt and in battle. The fiery spirit of the young warriors was balanced by the calm wisdom of the tribal headmen, the peace chiefs, who met yearly as the Council of the Forty-four. "A Cheyenne chief was required to be a man of peace, to be brave, and to be of generous heart," writes Stan Hoig. "Of these qualities the first was unconditionally the most important, for upon it rested the moral restraint required for the warlike Cheyenne Nation." As the Cheyennes began to feel the westward crush of white civilization in the nineteenth century, a great burden fell to the peace chiefs. Reconciliation with the whites was the tribe's only hope for survival, and the chiefs were the buffers between their own warriors and the United States military, who were out to "win the West." The chiefs found themselves struggling to maintain the integrity of their people-struggling against overwhelming military forces, against disease, against the debauchery brought by "firewater," and against the irreversible decline of their source of livelihood, the buffalo. They were trapped by history in a nearly impossible position. Their story is a heroic epic and, oftentimes, a tragedy. No single book has dealt as intensively as this one with the institution of the peace chiefs. The author has gleaned significant material from all available published sources and from contemporary newspapers. A generous selection of photographs and extensive quotations from ninteteenth-century observers add to the authenticity of the text. Following a brief analysis of the Sweet Medicine legend and its relation to the Council of the Forty-four, the more prominent nineteenth-century chiefs are treated individually in a lucid, felicitous style that will appeal to both students and lay readers of Indian history. As adopted Cheyenne chief Boyce D. Timmons says in his preface to this volume, "Great wisdom, intellect, and love are expressed by the remarkable Cheyenne chiefs, and if you enter their tipi with an open heart and mind, you might have some understanding of the great 'Circle of Life.'"

Grinnel lived among the Cheyenne in the latter part of the 19th century. He was a deeply sympathetic observer of Indian life & culture. In this volume Grinnell gathered both Cheyenne & White accounts of the many battles between the two. He carefully explored Cheyenne culture & the way the Cheyenne to the threats on an alien society.

For almost fifty years George Bird Grinnell's great work The Fighting Cheyennes has stood unrevised and virtually unchallenged as the definitive account of the struggles of the Cheyenne Indians to preserve their way of life. Now Donald J. Berthrong has re-examined Grinnell's findings and searched historical records unavailable to or not used by Grinnell to verify or correct his conclusions. The result is this accurate, highly interesting account of the Cheyennes' life on the Great Plains, their system of government and religion, and their relation to the fur and hide trade during their last years of freedom. After nearly two centuries of fighting other Indians and whites for their lands, in the eighteenth century the Cheyenne's were forced to shift their range from the Minnesota River Valley to the Central and Southern Plains. From 1861 through 1875, they fought to maintain their free, nomadic existence. There were bloody wars with territorial forces and federal troops, and a few years of intermittent peace and retaliation (including the massacre at Sand Creek in 1864). Finally, after the intensive winter campaign of 1874-75, the fierce Southern Cheyenne's were brought to bay by the U.S. Army and herded onto a reservation in western Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Their turbulent, colorful history related by Berthrong will interest the general reader as well as the historian and anthropologist