The Indigenous people of the central plains understood the Sandhills to be an enormous larder of bison as well as deer, elk, and pronghorn. They knew the Nebraska Sandhills and were not afraid of them; they knew how to travel through them; they knew where the springs and sweet water were, which lakes were alkali, and which were not.
White men, vé’ho’e to the Cheyenne, held quite a different view. The first written description of the Sandhills is on a published map attributed to James McKay, the leader of an Upper Missouri Company fur-trading expedition in the 1790s. He wrote of the region, “Great deserts of drifting sand without trees, soil, rocks, water, or animals of any kind.” Army lieutenant G.K. Warren was the first to traverse the Sandhills north to south and recorded an even dimmer view in 1855, grumbling that “the scenery is exceedingly solitary, silent, and desolate, and depressing to one’s spirit” and he hated having to constantly climb “up one side and down the other” of the dunes while his animals sank deeper and deeper in the sand. Unlike the Indigenous peoples, he did not know how to travel through the Sandhills, how to navigate their passage. Warren was, however, prescient in his observation that the “character of the country is well calculated to cover a stealthy approach or retreat, and if one keeps as much as possible to the hollows he may even fire his rifle within a quarter-mile of an enemy’s camp without the faintest sound reaching it. Two parties may pass close without being aware of each other’s presence, and I consider it hopeless to attempt to capture any who sought refuge in the Sand Hills.”
On the night of September 7, 1878, more than 350 Northern Cheyenne—92 men, 120 women, and 141 children—left their reservation, led by two of their Old Man Chiefs, Morning Star (Dull Knife) and the Sweet Medicine Chief and bundle carrier Little Wolf. They were leaving the hated Oklahoma reservation to which they had been sent after their final defeat and surrender following the Little Big Horn fight. It was a place where the heat, starvation due to insufficient rations, and rampant diseases addressed with wholly inadequate medical care had killed scores; the Cheyenne were heading north to their Wyoming homeland. Military telegrams flew, troops were mustered, and the pursuit began. The story has been told many times of the Cheyenne “exodus,” “odyssey,” the “trek north,” though rarely satisfactorily and never completely.
As the Cheyenne moved into Nebraska, a series of Keystone Cops–type military failures plagued the U.S. Army as thousands of troops were mobilized from Fort Reno, in present-day Oklahoma, to Fort Robinson, yet the Indians continually slipped away. Sometime after crossing the Platte forks in Nebraska, Morning Star and Little Wolf parted ways. Morning Star wanted to go to their friend Red Cloud’s agency in the northwest corner of the state, while Little Wolf wanted to continue home. At this point, every account of the exodus follows Morning Star’s people, who, much to their dismay, discovered that Red Cloud’s agency had been moved and all that remained at Fort Robinson were soldiers. The horrors of their forced starvation while being held prisoner in the barracks, the bloody desperate breakout escape into the snow and bitter cold, and the final decimation in the “pit” at Hat Creek are well-documented.
Yet the story of Little Wolf and his followers is barely told, usually something along the lines of “Little Wolf continued north” or, if we’re lucky, “they wintered in the Sandhills,” and then a yawning ellipsis leading to “they surrendered to Lieut. Clark in Montana.” Why? Because the Cheyenne disappeared into the Sandhills, and try as they might—more troops, more scouting, more telegrams flashing across the frozen wires—the army never found them that winter.
Little Wolf led his people north from the Platte up its tributary, White Tail Creek, at what is now the east end of Lake McConaughy. This is supported by a 1931 letter from rancher John Bratt to Nebraska State Historical Society director Addison Sheldon in which Bratt relates that the Cheyenne made camp a few miles west of his Big Baldy cattle camp. Luther North, rancher and officer of the Pawnee Scouts, relates in his recollections, Man of the Plains, that horses were stolen from his ranch, said to be 15 miles east of the Cheyenne camp, and he writes that Bratt’s nearby ranch had been attacked. Sandhills human geographer C. Barron McIntosh explores these accounts and locates this temporary Cheyenne camp on two of his maps in The Nebraska Sand Hills: The Human Landscape. He writes that Cheyenne Lake in Arthur County gets its name from being the location of the camp.
While Mari Sandoz curiously does not write of this temporary camp between the headwaters of the Middle Loup and Dismal Rivers, the many maps she annotated or drew during her research for Cheyenne Autumn, her novelized account of the exodus, show the necessary eastward bulge of the Cheyenne’s route just where it was located. And out of the hundreds of Sandhill lakes, Sandoz also includes on her maps a small dot labeled Krumpf Lake, approximately midway between the Cheyenne temporary camp and the main winter camp, which further illuminates their route.
In 1937 the mixed-blood Lakota interpreter from Pine Ridge who Sandoz had worked with while on her research trip for her Crazy Horse book, gave her or showed her a map made by a Lakota man who had visited his Cheyenne wife at that final hidden winter camp in the Sandhills. The Sandoz map collection includes a pencil sketch made from that map with the notation: “From John Colhoff, winter 1937. Original map made by Sioux named Hawk whose wife was a Cheyenne and who went to Little Cherry Valley [sic] while Little Wolf’s people were there.” The map shows the shape and orientation of the lake and keyed identifying features surrounding it. Also included in the collection are three photostat copies of it with all of the text typewritten. Because photostats, an early form of making photocopies, was a time-consuming and bulky process, this was clearly an important piece of evidence for Sandoz.
As much as possible, Sandoz insisted on familiarity for the places she wrote about. She retraced the entire Cheyenne exodus route, surveyed on foot and in detail the Fort Robinson breakout, and according to neither “could she rest until she was able to identify the place where Little Wolf and his followers survived the harsh Nebraska winter undetected after they had earlier parted from Dull Knife’s band and thus avoided the fate that group suffered. To accomplish her purpose, she enlisted the aid of several of her siblings. When they finally helped her locate the place after tedious and prolonged efforts, she identified it as Lost Chokecherry Lake. To her surprise, it was located in a remote region of the ranch of her brother Jules A. Sandoz, Jr.,” as LaVerne Harrell Clark wrote in 2005 in an article for Whispering Wind. The site of the Cheyenne winter camp that kept Little Wolf and his people safely hidden and protected during the winter of 1878–79 was only a few miles from where she had grown up.
It was in 1949 that Sandoz identified the camp site at Chokecherry Lake, just south of the Snake River on the Cherry County–Sheridan County border. Her typed notes about the trip with her siblings read:
Oct 11, 1949
LITTLE CHOKECHERRY, valley in SandhillsLegal Des: T30 R41 SE½ SEC 36, T30 R40 W½ SEC 31App 140–160 acres in valley, about 40 acres in lake, usually.
Protected from wind, water sweet. . . .
Rushes, probably muskrats then, and timber along north slope full of deer. Timber includes a few evergreens, cedar, hackberry, cottonwood, plum, willows, buckbrush [coralberry], chokecherry, rosebrush.
Suggested by Jules. Flora driving, Caroline along. Walked across where no road led to valley. Located it then went around on trail made by mowers. No road into valley. Got in ok, with car. Ate lunch under hackberries on slope of west end.
Mari Sandoz was the first white historian to identify and locate the elusive winter camp of Little Wolf’s fleeing Cheyenne where they managed, apparently without tipis, to live off of deer, elk, and the escaped cattle that wandered the hills. The map from Hawk matched the lake and its environs on her brother’s land; as Sandoz wrote, “Lost Chokecherry turned out exactly as both the Sioux and Cheyenne described it to me.” Cheyenne sources later told Sandoz that they, as well as the Lakota, knew this lake as in the past they would make their final night’s camp there when they traveled to Frederick LaBoue’s trading posts a few miles away along the Snake River. They explained, “Because there were always enemies in the region, Poncas and Pawnee come to trade too . . . because it offered all that a camp needed, including escape gaps in each direction and brush enough to hide out.”
Lieut. G.K. Warren’s words proved true: the Lost Chokecherry camp was so close to the Kearney–Black Hills trail, used by miners and the military, that the road could be seen from the Lone Tree on a nearby hill (F on the sketch map). Despite traffic on the trail, army camps on the Snake and Niobrara Rivers, and patrolling reconnaissances for the Cheyenne from these camps, the Cheyenne remained safely hidden. When troops tried to search for the Indians, they were driven back by the bitter cold and snow. Eventually, they concluded that Little Wolf’s band had slipped away again, headed north, they believed, to Sitting Bull in Canada. Toward spring, however, the troops would stumble on the large trail made by the Indians when they eventually left the valley in late February. Only then, backtracking the trail, did they discover the Chokecherry Lake camp, so near yet never found over the course of almost four months.
Little Wolf guided his people east when they first left the lake, thus avoiding the Niobrara crossing of the Kearney–Black Hills trail and all the soldiers camped in the area. Eventually they turned northwest and continued along the east side of the Black Hills, finally making it to their homeland where 114 people—33 men, 43 women, and 38 children—surrendered peacefully to their old friend Lieut. Philo Clark, who they called White Hat, on March 25, 1879, near Fort Keogh in southeast Montana. The Cheyenne Sweet Medicine Chief had led his people home.