Dodge City met the Northern Cheyenne three times in three years. In July 1877, on their way under army escort to Indian Territory, about eleven hundred of them camped for nearly a week on the north bank of the Arkansas nine miles west of town. They came into Dodge to dance and trade; a Dodge City woman, Maggie Brulport, wrote in her diary that she had held a baby in her arms at their camp, and that their leaving "looked like a moving Panorama on the Arkansas River."
In September 1878 some three hundred of them came back the other way, walking north from the agency where they had been sickening and going hungry. By the account Cheyenne survivors gave George Bird Grinnell, they crossed the Arkansas a short distance above Fort Dodge.
The jail
The third time was February 17, 1879. Ford County Sheriff Bat Masterson stepped off the train with seven Tsétsėhéstȧhese men, survivors of the Fort Robinson breakout, whom Kansas meant to try for the killings of settlers on the walk north. Crowds had mobbed the stations from Fort Leavenworth to Topeka. In Dodge nobody came. One of the prisoners collapsed from his wounds and was carted to the jail in a wheelbarrow. A reporter found them shackled hand and foot, sitting in rows on the damp floor of the courthouse basement.
They stayed almost five months, through interviews traded for cigars, river baths, and a defense by a Salina lawyer, J. G. Mohler, while the charges narrowed to a single killing near Meade Center. Someone gave them small notebooks, three and a half by five and a half inches, and pencils and crayons, and they began to draw.
The notebooks
Four notebooks and a few loose drawings survive, 245 images in all, studied by Denise Low and Ramon Powers for Kansas History in 2012. More than a hundred are camp scenes, fifty-five of them courtship, men on horseback approaching women wrapped in striped blankets. Eighty-six are birds and animals. Twenty-seven are hunts. Of the twenty-eight warrior scenes, only five show combat, and those are with the Crow and other nations, never with the United States Army. Drawings of war could have been used against them in court. Black ink was smudged into some outlines with a finger, and the artist's fingerprints are still in it.
Where they went
The notebooks left the jail the way things did. One went to the jailer's wife, Sallie Straughn, who gave it to the Kansas Historical Society in 1920. Another came in 1939 from Dora Clayton, whose husband had clerked for the state commission that tallied Cheyenne damages. L. M. Hyatt, perhaps the gambler of that name, wrote that he bought one from Wild Hog and another from Porcupine on April 4, 1879; both are now in a private collection in Norway. Wild Hog drew a figure on the back of a visiting doctor's card and told him that while he carried it no harm would come to him.
In June the six who remained were moved to Lawrence, and that October the charges were dropped. The two Kansas notebooks can be paged through online at Kansas Memory.