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

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.'"

A study of contemporary Southern Cheyenne women's music, including an overview of Cheyenne culture and history as well as analyses of 32 songs and their variants: lullabies and children's songs, hand-game songs, social songs, and Christian spiritual songs. A sampling of closely related Arapaho India

The Sioux constitute a diverse group of tribes who claimed and controlled almost a quarter of the continental U.S. from the late 1700s to the 1860s. The name Sioux was coined by French traders and was taken from the Anishinabe word Nadoweisiw-eg, meaning little snake or enemy. The rival Chippewa (Ojibway/Anishinabe) tribe used this term to describe the group. The Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, a central part of the Great Sioux Reservation, is home to four bands of the Western Lakota Sioux prominently featured in this book: the Minnicoujou, Itazipco, Siha Sapa, and Oohenumpa.

In this illuminating book, the Plains Indians come to life as shrewd traders. The Cheyennes played a vital role in an intricate and expanding barter system that connected tribes with each other and with whites. Joseph Jablow follows the Cheyennes, who by the beginning of the nineteenth century had migrated westward from their villages in present-day Minnesota into the heart of the Great Plains. Formerly horticulturists, they became nomadic hunters on horseback and, gradually, middlemen for the exchange of commodities between whites and Indian tribes. Jablowøshows the effect that trading had on the lives of the Indians and outlines the tribal antagonisms that arose from the trading. He explains why the Cheyennes and the Kiowas, Comanches, and Prairie Apaches made peace among themselves in 1840. The Cheyenne in Plains Indian Trade Relations is a classic study of "the manner in which an individual tribe reacted, in terms of the trade situation, to the changing forces of history."

This book provides a history and ethnography of the Cheyenne people from their prehistoric origins north of the Great Lakes to their present life in the reservations in Oklahoma. It is based on archaeological material, historical and linguistic evidence and draws vividly on the oral traditions of the Cheyenne themselves.

Tell Them We Are Going Home details the courageous journey of the Northern Cheyennes, under the leadership of Little Wolf and Dull Knife, from Indian Territory northward to their homelands in the Powder River country. Incorporating the perspectives of the Cheyennes, the U.S. military, the Indian Bureau, and the Kansas settlers who encountered the traveling Indians, this book provides a complete account of the odyssey. The dramatic fifteen-hundred-mile trek of the Northern Cheyennes through Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, lasting from 1878 to 1879, would become one of the most important episodes in American history and in Cheyenne memory.