January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878–1879 by Jerome A. Greene

Abstract

Reviewed by: January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878–1879 by Jerome A. Greene Eric Melvin Reed January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878–1879. By Jerome A. Greene. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. ix + 319 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $32.95 cloth. In January Moon, Jerome A. Greene, a retired research historian for the National Parks Service and author of numerous works of western military history, recounts one of the most tragic and heartrending episodes to befall Native Americans following the Great Plains Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. For readers unfamiliar with the major details, in 1877 the United States government decided to remove nearly one thousand Northern Cheyenne hundreds of miles south to Indian Territory. Conditions there proved to be unbearable. Plagued by disease, unaccustomed to the climate, and deprived of adequate food and medical care, dozens of Northern Cheyenne died. Others, desperate and nostalgic for their lands and relatives in the north, slipped away and headed home. Along the way (somewhere in northwest Nebraska), they separated into two groups under chiefs Little Wolf and Dull Knife. While those who went with Little Wolf escaped farther north, those who remained under Dull Knife surrendered to nearby troops and were incarcerated at Fort Robinson. Eventually, the Northern Cheyenne at Fort Robinson were denied food, fuel, water, and sanitary privileges (including for women and children) as an effort to compel them to return south. In response, the people attempted a breakout. The military pursued, and when it was over, sixty-four Cheyenne and several soldiers lay dead. Greene recounts these events using new and previously underutilized sources. In doing so, he provides sufficient contextualization, exposition, and a judicious weighing of evidence to constitute a comprehensive and fair treatment. The US government violated its own moral and political principles when it deprived the Northern Cheyenne of life, liberty, and property (to say nothing of happiness) during its conquest of the West. Still, the reasons for the Fort Robinson breakout are myriad and complex. (It did not help, for example, that young Cheyenne men assaulted and killed dozens of settlers on their journey north and that the people were able to conceal serviceable firearms during their internment.) At a time when states and school boards are engaged in ideological debates about how to teach American history (debates in which one side accuses the other of indoctrinating students in a dark and twisted version of the country’s past), the US needs historians who can both write well and lay bare the worst aspects of the American experience in the West without yielding to simple or Manichean interpretations. Greene is such a historian: January Moon is written in a descriptive and often engaging narrative style; it follows the facts but [End Page 357] never strays from an appropriately sympathetic Northern Cheyenne vantage point. Eric Melvin Reed University of Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln