50 Fun Facts About Cheyenne

Which US state's capital city is named after the Cheyenne people, who have no reservation there?

Wyoming got its capital from a Union Pacific railroad junction founded in 1867, which residents named for the Cheyenne people. The tribe's two nations live in other states today.

Northern Cheyenne chief Two Moons was a model for the Native American profile on which US coin?

Buffalo nickel sculptor James Earle Fraser said he drew on several sitters, naming Two Moons and the Lakota chief Iron Tail. He wanted a type, he said, not a portrait.

Cheyenne oral history credits Buffalo Calf Road Woman with knocking which cavalry commander off his horse in 1876?

George Armstrong Custer was knocked from his horse by her blow before he died, Northern Cheyenne storytellers said in 2005, breaking more than a century of silence.

The Cheyenne word for a white person, vé'ho'e, is also the word for which creature?

Spider and white person share one word in Cheyenne. A common folk explanation is that settlers fenced the open range until it looked like a web.

Cheyenne Mountain, named for the Cheyenne people, houses the underground bunker of which military command?

NORAD built its operations centre inside the mountain during the Cold War, to watch North American skies for missile launches and Soviet aircraft.

Warriors of the Cheyenne Contrary Society were best known for going into battle in which unusual way?

Riding backward was a show of bravery, and Contraries turned daily life around too, doing the opposite of what other people normally did.

Which actor played Jack Crabb, a white man raised by the Cheyenne, in the 1970 film Little Big Man?

Dustin Hoffman starred beside Chief Dan George, who became the first Indigenous North American actor nominated for an Oscar.

Cheyenne warriors won high honour by counting coup, which meant doing what to a living enemy?

Touching him with a hand, bow or coup stick and getting away unharmed was among the most prestigious acts of war on the Plains.

Before becoming Plains buffalo hunters, the Cheyenne farmed and gathered wild rice in which state?

Minnesota was the tribe's home when French records first mention it in the 1600s. Over the next two centuries the Cheyenne moved west and swapped cornfields for tipis.

Which director's last Western, Cheyenne Autumn, retold the Northern Cheyenne's 1878 trek home?

John Ford called the 1964 film an elegy for the Native Americans his own earlier Westerns had misrepresented.

Lou Diamond Phillips plays Henry Standing Bear, the sheriff's Cheyenne friend, in which modern Western crime series?

Longmire is based on Craig Johnson's mystery novels, and its plots often turn on who has authority on the neighbouring Cheyenne reservation.

Cloud Dancing, a Cheyenne who is blood brother to Byron Sully, appears in which 1990s frontier TV drama?

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman first cast Larry Sellers as a minor brave called Black Hawk, then quietly reworked the part into a major recurring character.

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, bounded on the east by the Tongue River, lies in which state?

Montana became the tribe's permanent home in 1884, after years of exile in the south. Unusually, the Northern Cheyenne control most of the land inside their reservation.

The Southern Cheyenne today share a tribal government, headquartered in the town of Concho, in which state?

Oklahoma was still Indian Territory when the Southern Cheyenne were assigned a reservation there. Its unallotted land was opened to settlers in the Land Run of 1892.

Which Plains tribe, allied with the Cheyenne since about 1811, shares one tribal nation with the Southern Cheyenne?

Arapaho and Cheyenne are related languages that are not mutually intelligible, yet the alliance between the two peoples has held for more than two centuries.

Which Cheyenne peace chief flew an American flag over his tipi at Sand Creek in 1864, yet was attacked?

Black Kettle had been given the flag by the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who told him it would show anyone he was a friend of the United States. He survived the massacre and kept working for peace.

At which 1876 battle did Northern Cheyenne and Lakota warriors wipe out five companies of the 7th Cavalry?

Little Bighorn drew an allied camp of about 10,000 people, one of the largest gatherings of Native Americans before the reservation era.

Which Cheyenne warrior society's bravest men pinned themselves to the ground in battle with a rawhide rope?

Dog Soldiers who staked the rope were declaring they would not retreat, whatever the odds. A comrade could free one only by driving him from the field with a whip.

Which pair of explorers visited a Cheyenne village in present-day North Dakota in 1804?

Lewis and Clark met a people in mid-migration. Explorers of the day recorded so many names for the Cheyenne that they failed to see a single tribe taking shape.

Before adopting the portable tipi, the farming Cheyenne lived in which kind of permanent home?

Earth lodges were left behind when the tribe gave up its fields for a nomadic life on horseback, following the bison across the Plains.

The Cheyenne language belongs to which family, shared with Cree, Ojibwe and Blackfoot?

Algonquian speech ties the Cheyenne to peoples far to the east of the Plains, and the tribe's own alphabet gets by with just 14 letters.

Which name do the Cheyenne use for themselves, in place of the Sioux-derived word Cheyenne?

Tsitsistas is often translated as 'those who are like this', though its exact origin is uncertain. The word Cheyenne began as a Sioux name for the tribe.

Which Methodist preacher turned colonel led the Colorado volunteers who attacked the Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek?

John Chivington's order to attack was defied by Captain Silas Soule, who told his company to hold fire and later testified about the massacre.

Which river gave its name to the 7th Cavalry's 1868 dawn attack on a Southern Cheyenne village in Indian Territory?

Washita Battlefield is now a National Historic Site, and it lies beside a small town that is itself named Cheyenne.

Which body of Cheyenne peace chiefs, each chosen for about ten years, traditionally governed the whole tribe?

Council of Forty-four chiefs were not voted in but named their own successors, and they kept the peace through moral authority.

At which sacred mountain near the Black Hills do the Cheyenne say their great prophet received the tribe's laws?

Bear Butte is Noahvose, the Giving Hill, to the tribe. In 1945 Northern Cheyenne held a ceremony there to pray for the end of World War II.

Which disease, spread along the emigrant trails in 1849, killed around half of the Cheyenne in one summer?

Cholera struck a decade after the tribe had escaped the smallpox epidemics of 1837–39 by heading into the Rocky Mountains.

Which adobe trading post on the Santa Fe Trail, built in 1833, drew many Cheyenne south to the Arkansas River?

Bent's Fort traded with the tribe for buffalo robes, and trader William Bent married Owl Woman, daughter of the keeper of the Sacred Arrows.

Which Northern Cheyenne chief, also called Morning Star, led his people out of Indian Territory toward home in 1878?

Dull Knife is the English form of the name the Lakota gave him, while Morning Star translates his Cheyenne one. A tribal college now carries his name.

Besides its bundle of arrows, which holy object kept by the Northern Cheyenne is the tribe's other great covenant?

Sacred Buffalo Hat stands for female power, as the arrows stand for male. Its keeper must come from the Suhtai, once a separate tribe that merged with the Cheyenne.

Which rival Plains tribe captured the Cheyenne's Sacred Arrows, among the nation's holiest objects, around 1830?

Pawnee warriors later rode as army scouts against their old enemy, leading the cavalry to a Cheyenne village at Summit Springs in 1869.

Which future Confederate general was shot in the chest while fighting Cheyenne warriors in Kansas in 1857?

J.E.B. Stuart, then a young lieutenant, was hit by a pistol ball that barely broke the skin. It was the first battle the Cheyenne fought against the US Army.

From which Nebraska army post did imprisoned Northern Cheyenne break out of an unheated barracks in January 1879?

Fort Robinson's soldiers had cut off food, water and firewood to force the band back south. Crazy Horse had been killed at the same post in 1877.

Which town, named after a Lakota chief, is the capital of the Northern Cheyenne nation and home to its tribal college?

Lame Deer honours a Miniconjou chief killed by the army in 1877 under a flag of truce, just south of where the town now stands.

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation shares its western border with the reservation of which old enemy tribe?

Crow and Cheyenne warriors fought for generations, and Crow scouts rode with the 7th Cavalry in 1876. Today the two nations are next-door neighbours.

The Northern Cheyenne joined which Lakota chief's 1866–68 war that forced the army to abandon its Bozeman Trail forts?

Red Cloud refused even to meet the peace commissioners until the soldiers had gone. The day after they marched out, the forts were burned.

In 1840 the Cheyenne made a lasting peace with the Kiowa and which other powerful southern Plains tribe?

Comanche friendship opened the Llano Estacado to Cheyenne hunters and traders, and the former enemies later fought side by side in the Red River War.

The Cheyenne prophet Erect Horns is said to have given the tribe which great ceremony shared by many Plains peoples?

Sun Dance came to the tribe with Erect Horns of the Suhtai, tradition says, and his vision is credited with turning the Cheyenne from farming villages to a roaming life on the Plains.

Cheyenne prisoners of war at Fort Marion in the 1870s became pioneers of which art form?

Ledger art grew out of hide painting: when buffalo became scarce, Plains artists turned to the pages of accountants' books instead.

Cheyenne women won great prestige by joining a sacred guild devoted to which decorative craft?

Quillwork came to the tribe, Cheyenne oral history says, from a man who learned it while visiting his wife, who was secretly a buffalo.

By which name do the Cheyenne know the Creator, who gave the tribe its holiest bundles through two prophets?

Ma'heo'o was known as He'emo to the Suhtai, the sister tribe that brought its own prophet and holy bundle into the Cheyenne nation.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Northern Cheyenne chief and US senator, competed at the 1964 Olympics in which sport?

Judo took him to Meiji University in Tokyo for four years of training, and he took first place at the 1963 Pan-American Games.

Chris Eyre, enrolled in the Southern Cheyenne's tribal nation, directed which landmark 1998 Native American film?

Smoke Signals is recognised as the first feature written, directed and produced by Native Americans to reach a wide audience at home and abroad.

The US Army gave the name Cheyenne to the AH-56, a 1960s design for which kind of aircraft?

Attack helicopter was a new idea then: the Cheyenne was meant to be the Army's first dedicated one, but the programme was cancelled in 1972.

Which army post gave its name to the 1851 treaty recognising Cheyenne land between the North Platte and Arkansas rivers?

Fort Laramie lent its name, but the treaty was signed 30 miles downriver at Horse Creek, because the land around the fort had no food left for the horses.

Which Cheyenne war hero, who trusted a sacred war bonnet to protect him, was killed at Beecher Island in 1868?

Roman Nose was never a chief, yet he fought so fiercely that the US military mistook him for the leader of the whole Cheyenne nation.

The Cheyenne remember which 1876 battle as the fight Where the Girl Saved Her Brother, after a woman's daring rescue?

Rosebud was where Buffalo Calf Road Woman rode onto the field at full speed and carried her wounded brother, Chief Comes in Sight, to safety.

Cheyenne warrior David Pendleton Oakerhater, once a prisoner of war, was named a saint in 1985 by which denomination?

Episcopal Church clergy ordained him a deacon in 1881, and he went home to the West to serve as a missionary among Native Americans.

The 1859 rush for which metal near Pikes Peak drew thousands of settlers onto lands reserved for the Cheyenne?

Gold seekers poured in from 1859, and a new treaty soon tried to confine the Cheyenne to a small reservation in the southeast of the territory. Many Cheyenne never signed it.

Cheyenne warriors captured in the Red River War were sent in 1875 to Fort Marion, an old Spanish fort in which state?

Florida held them at the Castillo de San Marcos near St. Augustine, where their jailer, Richard Henry Pratt, handed out pencils, paints and paper.