The Cheyenne Indian tribe were in the Great Plains of America, they lived in what is now Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota.
Hunting was a main part of the tribe, it provided them with food and materials for clothing, tools, weapons, and their homes. Hunting was so important to the Cheyenne that they “changed their lifestyle to become nomadic buffalo hunters who lived in tepees.” (Tribes et al., 2018) to follow the buffalo herds. Families typically had a man, women and one or two children, they lived in lodges that were built in the ground and later lived in teepees, teepees were on average “approximately 12 to 16 feet in diameter at the base.” (Tribes et al., 2018). The Cheyenne tribe “can be distinguished from other Plains Indians for having a much lighter skin tone.
” (Onlytribal.com, 2018) compared to other tribes.Some important battles that the Cheyenne were in are the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Battle of Washita River, Battle of the Rosebud, Dull Knife Fight just to name a few. During the Plains Indian War there was a warrior who was idolized the most, Roman Nose or later known as Hook Nose. Roman Nose was part of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, he was often mistaken as a chief and he never was one, though people would look at his stature and his size and would believe he was a chief. The Cheyenne tribe was “composing of two Native American tribes namely, the Sutaio or Suhtai, and the Tsitsistas, is hailed as one of the most prominent Great Plains tribe.” (Onlytribal.
com, 2018) The name they call themselves are the Tsitsistas and could be translated to “people alive”, “our people”, or “the people”. The topic I chose for the Cheyenne tribe was battle tactics and how they attacked other tribes or people. There was an honorable group in the Cheyenne tribe, called the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, “Cheyenne Dog Soldiers were a military driven band of Cheyenne warrior Indians who were known to fight to the death to protect their people.” (Native-american-indian-facts.com, 2018) After horses were introduced to the tribe they could hunt buffalo better, and were able to attack people easier by having a higher ground advantage. Their main food source “changed from vegetables to buffalo meat. They also ate fruits, nuts, berries and fish.
” (Native-american-indian-facts.com, 2018) They made their arrows from animals bones, they would use every part of an animals so that nothing would go to waste. The ones who used the battle tactics were most of the Cheyenne men, boys would be taught how to hunt buffalo at a young age and they could grow to use those same hunting tactics as battle tactics, because it’s about the same thing, hunting. These tactics weren’t used as much when the tribe was first formed, but as people started to come to North America they would attack them to keep them from taking their territory. Battle tactics were very significant because they were the ones who had most of the territory in North America, more towards the upper-middle of the continent. As people went more and more west in North America, they would take land and claim it as their own and many Native Americans thought that slowly over time that people would take over all their territory, so they applied many battle tactics. A type of battle tactic that the Cheyenne used quite a bit was they would go in “small private raiding parties were out either to take horses or to get a scalp for revenge for the death of a friend or relative.
” (Mr_sedivy.tripod.com, 2018) They also had the desire for horses so “when the enemy camp was found for the purpose of a horse raid and circumstances were favorable, at night when the camp was asleep, they crept down and took whatever horses they could.” (Mr_sedivy.tripod.com, 2018) The Cheyenne tribe had lived in many different areas before they were located to a final area “their territory comprised at some point in remembered or recorded history, land in the present states of Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming”, (Access Genealogy, 2018) but are now located more in the Oklahoma and Montana areas. The Cheyenne were moved in 1851 to the area that they were “given” from the US. The battle tactics that the Cheyenne used could be considered the reason that they are seen as a group of people who would attack when they saw people on their property, or their land they would attack them, and it would be an attack that couldn’t be seen really beforehand.
They would see an “enemy” they would attack them from the flank and kill everyone they saw and would scalp some. They could be looked at as people who will protect their land whichever way they can, and still be seen as that today as well. There aren’t many problems that the Cheyenne tribes have in modern America, the only issue they would probably have is that they have to live on a reservation but the tribe has been decreasing in size. There are currently 11,266 tribal members and about 5,012 on reservations.
