The mail-carrier reported his having been fired at by a Cheyenne Indian, and the next day troops from Fort Kearny attacked the Indians and killed six of the war-party. The rest refused to fight, and ran away, leaving their camp and all it contained. The war-party, thoroughly exasperated, attacked an emigrant train, killed two men and a child, and took one woman captive. The next day they killed her, because she could not ride on horseback and keep up with them. Within a short time two more small war-parties had left the band, attacked trains, and killed two men, two women, and a child. The chiefs at first could not restrain them, but in September they sent a delegation to the agency to ask their agent’s assistance and advice. They said that the war-party was now completely under their control, and they wished to know what they could do. They implored the Great Father not to be angry with them, “for they could not control the war-party when they saw their friends killed by soldiers after they had thrown down their bows and arrows and begged for life.”
In October the agent reported that the Cheyennes were “perfectly quiet and peaceable, and entirely within control, and obedient to authority.” The chiefs had organized a sort of police, whose duty was to kill any war-parties that might attempt to leave the camp.
Through the winter the Cheyennes remained in the south and south-eastern parts of the agency, and strictly observed the conditions which their agent had imposed upon them. In the following August, however, a military force under General Sumner was sent out “to demand from the tribe the perpetrators of their late outrages on the whites, and ample security for their good conduct.” The Cheyennes were reported by General Sumner as showing no disposition to yield to these demands; he therefore attacked them, burnt their village to the ground, and destroyed their winter supplies—some fifteen or twenty thousand pounds of buffalo meat.
