The Flight of the Cheyennes

Iron Teeth, a Northern Cheyenne woman, described the barracks to Thomas Marquis in 1929: one room about thirty feet square with 43 men, 29 women and 20 to 30 children, eleven days with almost no food and three without water. Five pistols lay under a floorboard, and she kept one in her dress for her son, 22, who broke a window with it after the night bugle. He ran carrying his little sister. Iron Teeth and her older daughter hid in a cave for seven days on dried meat and snow before a captain coaxed them out.

What the plaque says

The Flight of the Cheyennes Just before 10 P. M. on January 9, 1879, the 130 Cheyennes held in the cavalry barracks made their desperate bid for freedom. After disabling the soldier guards, they fled across this ground to the White River beyond. Under heavy fire from pursuing troops, they followed the river and climbed the high buttes several miles to the west. During this initial fighting, twenty-seven Cheyennes and five soldiers were killed. The Cheyennes were buried in a mass grave near the post sawmill. Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Robinson State Park — 0.3 mi
  The army post beside the Red Cloud Agency where Crazy Horse was bayoneted in 1877 and Morning Star's Northern Cheyenne broke out into the January cold of 1879.
• Toadstool Geologic Park — 15 mi
  A pocket of badlands in the Oglala National Grassland where sandstone caps balance on clay stems, ancient tracks cross the rock, and a trail leads on to a 10,000-year-old bison bone bed.
• Agate Fossil Beds National Monument — 21 mi
  A fossil quarry on the Niobrara that also keeps the gifts Red Cloud and other Lakota and Cheyenne visitors gave the ranching family who were their friends for thirty-five years.

More markers nearby

• Sea Level Bench Mark — steps away
• Fort Robinson — steps away
• Officers' Row, 1874-1875 — steps away
• The Fort Robinson Cemetery — 0.2 mi