dependent on them. And even these inadequate rations did not arrive when they were due. Their agent writes, in 1875: “On last year’s flour contract not a single pound was received until the fourteenth day of First Month, 1875, when six months of cold weather and many privations had passed, notwithstanding the many protestations and urgent appeals from the agent.”
The now thoroughly subjugated Cheyennes went to work with a will, In one short year they are reported as so anxious to cultivate the ground that, when they could not secure the use of a plough or hoe, they used “axes, sticks of wood, and their hands, in preparing the ground, planting and cultivating their garden spots.”
The Northern Cheyennes are still on the Red Cloud Agency, and are reported as restless and troublesome.
In 1877 they were all removed to the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Agency, in Indian Territory. The Reports of the Department say that they asked to be taken there. The winter of 1866 and the summer of 1867 were seasons of great activity and interest at this agency. In the autumn they went off on a grand buffalo hunt, accompanied by a small detail of troops from Fort Reno. Early in the winter white horse-thieves began to make raids on their ponies, and stole so many that many of the Indians were obliged to depend on their friends’ ponies to help them return home. Two hundred and sixty in all were stolen—carried, as usual, to Dodge City and sold. A few were recovered; but the loss to the Indians was estimated at two thousand nine hundred dollars. “Such losses are very discouraging to the Indians,” writes their agent, and are “but a repetition of the old story that brought on the war of 1874.”
In midsummer of this year the “Cheyenne and Arapahoe Transportation Company” was formed: forty wagons were sent out, with harness, by the Government; the Indians furnished the horses; and on the 19th of July the Indians set out
