Column: Northern Cheyenne Tribe took a final stand in Oklahoma

Alva — home of Northwestern Oklahoma University — is a town I pass through often when traveling Highway 64 going west to New Mexico. There’s lots of wide open spaces out there and you may drive for miles before you see another car. The area seems remote today, but back in 1878 it was even more so. There were ranches and itinerant cowboys roamed the region that would become Kansas. A few miles to the north, a few farms had started to crop up across the landscape but in general the area was still undeveloped and too rough and wide open to appeal to farmers. This was the setting for the Battle of Turkey Springs.

Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf had led a band of Northern Cheyenne off the reservation in an attempt to return to their original lands in Montana and Wyoming. There were 92 men, 120 women and 141 children many of whom were ill and starving before the journey, but they had pledged to get back to their land or die trying.

Life on the reservation was unbearable for the Cheyenne who were accustomed to living on a wide open range full of game. On the reservation there was only the remains of buffalo slaughtered by white hunters and there was nothing to hunt for food. Many Cheyenne had already died when the tribe was hit by a measles epidemic and they couldn’t take any more.

After leaving the reservation in Fort Reno, the tribe followed trails through canyons and forests to avoid being scene, but outside of present-day Alva they took their final stand. According to Wikipedia, the band had dwindled to 297 people when companies G and H of the U.S. Cavalry found them. With the help of many civilians, the cavalry had tracked the Cheyenne 11 miles up Turkey Creek to Turkey Springs. When they realized the troops were coming, the Indians dug rifle pits for the men without horses and prepared for what became known as “the last armed conflict between the U.S. Cavalry and American Indians in Oklahoma.”