On October 4, 1878, a group of 300 Northern Cheyenne crossed the South Platte River east of Ogallala. The crossing was part of a daring escape from the reservation of their exile in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Lead by Dull Knife and Little Wolf, the group was determined to get home to their ancestral lands in Montana, a 700-mile trek.
You can visit this historical marker on HW30 between Ogallala and Roscoe. According to UNL professor and author Joe Starita, “These encampments in Oklahoma were concentration camps, where there was no food, no lodging, no medicine and diseases that they had no resistance to, So they began dying and by September of 1878, 13 months after they had arrived, they had lost hundreds of Northern Cheyenne.”
Starita adds the Northern Cheyenne’s journey through Nebraska is part of a powerful lesson about the desire to return home for a native people who had been wronged. “It’s one of the deepest, most profound instincts that the human race has, to go home. That’s what they wanted to do,” he said.
Learn more about the escape of the Northern Cheyenne in the Nebraska Public Media story here: https://bit.ly/33GPdmr