The Cheyenne warrior known as One-Eyed Antelope cried out and sang his death song as he reloaded his rifle on the rocky hillside in northern Wyoming. Below him, the Crow warriors swarmed toward the small outcropping where the remnants of his party had made their final stand. He shot down one Crow, then another, singing all the while, urging his companions to fight on. He was still singing when the Crow arrows found him.
He was among the last to fall. The Crow scalped the dead, stripped them of their possessions, and left them to the scavengers. The Cheyenne would later learn of the battle through the Crow’s own songs, when survivors of that day recognized the death song One-Eyed Antelope had sung while killing four enemies in a row. The place would be remembered as Standing Crow Creek.
These were the wars of the Northern Plains, fought between tribes long before the United States Army became the common enemy. They were wars of vengeance, of resources, of honor. In 1819, thirty-two Cheyenne warriors, many of them members of the elite Dog Soldier society, had been drawn into a Crow ambush after killing a Crow scout. The Dog Soldiers, who had sworn an oath to die rather than retreat and who sometimes literally staked themselves to the ground with their hooked lances, fought to the last man.
It was a story repeated across the plains in countless unrecorded battles, where life was short and survival meant being willing to kill. Nearly two decades later, in June 1837, a different lesson in tribal law and vengeance unfolded. In a Cheyenne camp on the Arkansas River, the young warriors of the Bowstring Society demanded that White Thunder, the seventy-year-old Keeper of the Sacred Arrows, perform a cleansing ceremony so they could go on a horse-raiding expedition against the Kiowa, Comanche, and Lipan Apache camps in the Texas Panhandle. When the old medicine man refused, insisting the proper time had not come, the young men beat him with their quirts until he relented.
White Thunder warned them that the coerced ceremony would bring no blessing. The Arapaho, their allies, also refused to join, warning that their medicine men had seen visions of destruction. The Bowstring warriors went anyway. Thirty-eight Bowstrings and four members of the Contrary society slipped out of camp.
By the time they reached the target, they were exhausted and low on arrows. Two scouts stumbled upon a Kiowa boy gathering branches, who escaped and raised the alarm. The hunters became the hunted. Cornered in a ravine behind hastily built rock walls draped with buffalo hides, the forty-two Cheyenne sang their death songs and fought until every one of them lay dead.
The Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache scalped all forty-two and, according to one Kiowa witness who visited the site years later, lined the skeletons up along the walls of the barricade as a warning. The massacre ignited a fire of revenge that would not be contained by tribal politics. That winter, a Cheyenne war chief named Porcupine Bear, leader of the Dog Soldiers, traveled from village to village calling for vengeance. But the practical hardships of winter and the grief of forty-two newly fatherless families slowed the war effort.
Then Porcupine Bear made a disastrous error. While visiting relatives, he became drunk on rotgut whiskey, and when his cousin was beaten in a brawl, Porcupine Bear stabbed the aggressor to death. The chiefs convened and banished Porcupine Bear, his family, and his followers from the tribe. The banished Dog Soldiers did not go far.
As the main Cheyenne and Arapaho forces moved south toward the Kiowa and Comanche camps in the spring of 1838, Porcupine Bear’s outlaw band shadowed them, determined to take part. The main forces tolerated their presence, recognizing that Porcupine Bear had lost friends and family at the hands of the Kiowa and Comanche and was due his vengeance. On the morning of the attack, Porcupine Bear lured a party of about thirty Kiowa hunters and their wives into an ambush near the North Canadian River in what is now northwestern Oklahoma. His warriors killed all thirty.
Porcupine Bear himself was witnessed killing twelve people. They stripped the dead but took no scalps, obeying the head chiefs’ instructions that the outlaws were not to count coup. The raid widened into the Battle of Wolf Creek, the largest and last great battle between the major tribes of the Southern Plains. Hundreds were killed on both sides.
The fighting was savage, with whole camps of women and children falling to lances, arrows, and clubs. Among the dead were highly respected Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs. The battle settled nothing permanently, but it stood as a testament to the brutal warfare that shaped the plains long before white settlement reached its peak. The wars between tribes were not limited to the southern plains.
In October 1870, a large force of Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux warriors, perhaps six to eight hundred strong, marched southeast across the Alberta plains against the Blackfoot, who had been weakened by a smallpox outbreak. The war chief named Piyami (or Piyam) warned them against proceeding, telling of a vision of a giant buffalo with iron horns destroying their camp. The young warriors dismissed the dream and pressed on. They discovered a small camp of Bloods near the Oldman River, but failed to realize that a far larger Blackfoot force was camped just upstream.
The initial attack succeeded in slaughtering the small camp, including women and children, but the alarm reached the main Blackfoot camp. Warriors poured out, surrounded the Cree near the Belly River, and turned the attack into a massacre. The Blackfoot, armed with more rifles and revolvers, shot down the fleeing Cree in large numbers. A half-Blackfoot scout named Jerry Potts recalled that the Cree were so thick in the river that a man could close his eyes and still kill one.
The few dozen survivors who reached a distant thicket were left alone. The Battle of the Belly River became the last and largest intertribal confrontation in Canadian history. It was in this world, where a young man’s reputation was built on horses, scalps, and courage, that one of the most famous figures of the American West began his rise. Around 1831, a young Hunkpapa Lakota known as Slow joined a raiding party against the Crow in South Dakota.
When the raiders were pinned down in a ravine and escape seemed impossible, Slow proposed a solution: he would challenge the Crow chief to single combat. Wounded by the chief’s musket ball in the foot, Slow coolly waited until the chief closed distance, then shot him through the torso, and scalped him after stabbing him in the heart. He was greeted on his return as a hero. The Lakota knew him as Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull, and he would go on to lead his people through the bloodiest era of plains warfare, including the annihilation of Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn.
By the summer of 1876, the Lakota and Cheyenne had gathered in the largest encampment of plains tribes ever recorded, near the Little Bighorn River, intending to lure the U. S. Cavalry into a decisive engagement. Among those who sensed the coming battle was Crazy Horse, who had foreseen in a vision long ago that he would be a great warrior and would die at the hands of the blue coats.
When the Seventh Cavalry attacked, Crazy Horse led the assault that shattered Major Reno’s command, then moved against Custer’s forces on a hill above the river. He rode between the two isolated elements, blowing an eagle-bone whistle and shouting orders, untouched by fire. The final massed charge overwhelmed Custer’s 210 men. Every soldier under his command was killed.
The battle was a stunning victory for the plains tribes, but it marked the beginning of the end of their way of life. The following year, Crazy Horse was stabbed to death at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. His prophecy had been completed. Decades earlier, the same cycle of raid and counter-raid drove the Cheyenne and their Teton Sioux allies against the Crow in 1820, in what became known as the Tongue River massacre.
The Cheyenne raided a Crow village of about one hundred lodges, killed those who resisted, and took roughly one hundred women and children captive. As the raiders retreated with their plunder and prisoners, arguments broke out over the division of the captives. A number of the weaker, younger, and slower prisoners were pulled from their horses and killed, their bodies left for the wolves. The Crow were so incensed by this massacre that they refused to ally with the Cheyenne and Sioux even against the U.
S. Army during Red Cloud’s War in the 1860s. The violence was not confined to the tribes. In February 1847, rescuers reached a camp on the shore of Truckee Lake, where survivors of the Donner Party, stranded in the Sierra Nevada, had descended into cannibalism.
The first women to emerge asked the rescuers in a hollow voice whether they were men from California or from heaven. By the time the fourth relief arrived in April, the scene was macabre: bodies had been butchered, brains scooped out, and one survivor, Lewis Keseberg, was found amid human bones with a pan full of fresh liver. The survivors were ostracized, and the lake was later renamed Donner Lake in memory of the tragedy. The West also produced its own legends of violence and exploration.
Jedediah Smith, one of the greatest explorers of the era, survived grizzly attacks, tribal ambushes, and the Mojave massacre, only to be killed by Comanches on the Cimarron River in May 1831. His body was never found. His rifle and pistols were later recovered by traders and returned to his grief-stricken brother, who wrote to their father describing the account of his death. Smith’s memoirs and maps were never published, and his legacy was largely forgotten for nearly a century and a half.
In June 1846, during the Bear Flag Revolt in California, Kit Carson, acting on orders from John C. Fremont, shot and killed two defenseless brothers and their elderly uncle on the shore of San Francisco Bay. Carson, loyal to the point of moral obedience, did not hesitate, and Fremont, eager to advance the revolution, showed no concern for the innocent deaths. The murders of the de Haro brothers and Berreyesa remain a dark stain on the founding of American California.
Even the settled frontier held horrors. In the spring of 1873, the Bender family, who ran the Wayside Inn in Labette County, Kansas, were discovered to be murderers. They had invited travelers to dinner, bludgeoned them with an axe from behind a curtain, slit their throats, and buried them on the property. The family fled just before a search warrant could be executed.
The body of Dr. William York, a respected physician, was found buried head down. George Lancer and his two-year-old daughter Maryanne were also exhumed, the child believed to have been buried alive. The family was never caught.
Their total number of victims remains unknown. And on a cold December morning in 1866, the warriors of Red Cloud executed one of the most devastating ambushes in U. S. military history.
Captain William Fetterman, who had boasted that with eighty men he could ride through the entire Sioux nation, ignored explicit orders not to pursue the enemy over Lodge Trail Ridge. He led his men into a trap sprung by perhaps a thousand Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors, among them Crazy Horse, who had mocked the soldiers and exposed himself to goad them into pursuit. All eighty-one men under Fetterman’s command were killed, including the bugler Adolf Mezer, who fought to the last with only his brass instrument. The Lakota called it the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, after a medicine man’s vision of holding a hundred dead soldiers in each hand.
It was the most costly defeat inflicted on the U. S. Army until the Little Bighorn a decade later, and it drove the United States to eventually abandon the Bozeman Trail, a rare strategic victory for the plains tribes.
These were the wars and the price of the American West, fought between tribes, between peoples, and between the old world and the new, in a land where life was short, resources were scarce, and survival demanded the willingness to kill.