The prophet Erect Horns told the Cheyenne people of four life changing events that the tribe would endure. Erect Horns first spoke of the Cheyenne’s beginning. They would live in the Great Lakes area. They would plant corn and eat fish. They would make their way as sedentary people (Moe’ema’etaste 11).

The second phase, he foretold, was the phase of the buffalo. They would hunt buffalo and use the bodies to sustain the tribe (Moe’ema’etaste 11). During this 

time the tribe would move from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains following the herds. The prophetic vision became true. In fact, the effect of the buffalo on the Cheyenne tribe living in the Great Plains was significant. “The centrality of bison in Cheyenne society is evident in its high ratio of consumption over other tribes” (Leiker and Powers 41). The Cheyenne nation used buffalo hides, for example, to create blankets important for warmth and their courting rituals. They also turned to hides to produce colorful and complex drawings, which generally depicted the glory and power of Cheyenne combat. The Cheyenne also created sweat lodges that imitated the buffalo (Schlesier 62). The buffalo played such a central cultural role because the animal took care of all the Cheyenne’s needs. “If any animal was ever designed by the hand of nature for the express purpose of supplying, at one stroke, nearly all the wants of an entire race, surely the buffalo was intended for the Indian,”(Petersen 50).

The third time period Erect Horns envisioned was the time of the horse (Moe’ema’etatse 11). As a matter of fact, the introduction of the horse dramatically increased the Cheyenne’s ability to hunt buffalo. It also changed their efficiency and culture. The Cheyenne excelled as hunters, so much so that their “ratio of kills per person was an astounding nineteen, making them the most prolific bison killers on the Plains” (Leiker and Powers 41).

The fourth and final prophesy spoke of yet another cultural shift. This final phase was the time of the reservation (Moe’ema’etatse 11). It would cause suffering and anger to those living, Erect Horns knew, and create dependence and greed. It is understandable, then, that the Northern Cheyenne people fought hard to resist reservations in the nineteenth century. Yet it was something they knew about for a long time. They understood what came with life on a reservation, and it was not what they wanted. The Cheyenne would lose the ability to hunt the buffalo, which held an important spiritual role in their culture. It was the way in which men could distinguish themselves. There are stories of Cheyenne women refusing to let their sons work on the farm on reservations because they believed it would dishonor them. The Northern Cheyenne were the last indigenous tribe forced onto reservations, but it came with much struggle and loss.

Historical Framework

Originally, the Cheyenne lived in between the Mississippi River and the Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota. They were a sedentary tribe, making a living by planting corn and fishing. After the prophet Erect Horns convinced the Cheyenne to switch to a nomadic lifestyle, they started to hunt buffalo for their sustenance. This transformation came with a move from their original homeland to life on the Great Plains. Here the Cheyenne ranged from Missouri to Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and South Dakota. Due to tribal warfare and scarcity of resources caused by competition with white settlers, the tribe eventually lived between southern Colorado and the Black Hills in North Dakota. At this point, the tribe split into two groups: the Platte River and the Black Hills Cheyenne.

White settlers made incursions on the lands inhabited by indigenous Americans since the Puritan colonists came to the New World. But it was not until the Indian Removal Act that these land claims started to become a large-scale legal and national agenda. In 1830, Andrew Jackson passed the Act, which encouraged “negotiation” with Native American tribes to leave their land for different territory. Essentially, the Act promoted the forceful removal of indigenous tribes from their lands to reservations. As a result, many tribes resisted and battles broke out. The Cheyenne resisted the encroachment for the longest time. Sweet Medicine, a Cheyenne medicine man, foretold of the white men and the destruction that they would bring, thus predisposing the Cheyenne to be wary of them. One moment of such resistances was Red Cloud’s War, which spanned from 1866 to 1868. Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho tribes allied and defeated white American forces. The victory gave the indigenous tribes possession over the Powder River Country area of the Great Plains, which served as a key location for their survival. However, the victory only lasted until The Great Sioux War from 1876-1877. The war featured the same combatants, but this time the United States prevailed. The defeat forced the Cheyenne onto reservations.

However, William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War general, took a different approach to moving Native Americans. Sherman ordered the slaughter of the buffalo herds on the Great Plains. In fact, thousands of buffalo hides were gathered in Dodge City, Kansas, and eventually went to waste. Sherman knew how much the tribes relied on the buffalo. By exterminating the buffalo, Sherman tried to force the Native Americans off their land. Without a way for the Northern Cheyenne to sustain themselves, they became desperate. In February 1879, seven Northern Cheyenne men—Wild Hog, Porcupine, Old Crow, Strong Left Hand, Noisy Walker (or Old Man), Tangle Hair, and Blacksmith—were imprisoned in the Dodge City jail after a failed attempt to avoid American forces. They were charged with the murders of forty Kansas settlers. When the Cheyenne men arrived in Dodge City, they were wounded and exhausted. Some of them even tried to commit suicide during their imprisonment. The Cheyenne tribe had been separated, desperately trying to avoid being put onto the reservation. In prison these seven Cheyenne men lived peaceably. They began to draw artistic, figural narratives in ledgers, or small notebooks typically used for schoolwork during the nineteenth century. The seven Cheyenne men created four ledgers and a few loose-leaf drawings during this time in the Dodge City prison.

The unassuming notebook stands at 3.25 inches by 5 inches, and it is barely bigger than a notecard. The cover of the ledger is tan with a dark brown line framing the book and a dark brown crest in the middle. However, the inside contains the more interesting details: drawings from the Northern Cheyenne men imprisoned in Dodge City. The colorful images start on the inside of the front cover. The ledger looks as if the artists wrote on the left hand pages first, then flipped the ledger and wrote on the left hand pages again until they reached the end of the booklet. As a result, each page now shows one drawing right side up and the other opposite page is upside down, depending on the direction you are reading. In total, the ledger holds 113 depictions of people. Forty-six of these are male and sixty-seven are female. Fifty-seven of these drawings are Cheyenne men shown courting a woman in some fashion. Thirty-six people are depicted in a group, perhaps representing a dance or some other type of gathering. Twenty are shown as Cheyenne warriors. Out of these twenty warriors there is only one depiction of combat. In the combat picture we see a Northern Cheyenne man on horseback charging at two Crow gunmen. All other warrior depictions merely display Cheyenne men in their combat attire.

The Northern Cheyenne men held at the Dodge City jail had been charged with forty counts of murder, which is why we need to read these ledgers as a clever rhetorical intervention and testament to their peaceful behavior and intentions. By drawing the ledger, the Cheyenne men made a case for themselves against their accusers while purposefully fashioning their public perception themselves. As mentioned before, the ledger only depicts twenty warriors and only one Northern Cheyenne man in combat against two Crow men. In other words, the Cheyenne artists were careful not to show scenes of indigenous violence against United States soldiers. In fact, the drawings depict the Cheyenne as a peaceful, amiable group. Thirty-six Cheyenne are shown as standing in groups, representing the importance community held within the tribe. Fifty-seven Cheyenne men are shown courting, thus engaged in the psychological opposite of war, love. The high number of women depicted also speaks to the tribe’s matrilineal organization. There are 1.5 times as many women depicted than men, even though men created the ledger. By creating these kinds of drawings, the men were not distancing themselves from their cultural background, but rather emphasizing the side of their culture that sought peace and restoration. The ledger did not promote false images, that is. The men merely tapped into the side of their culture that welcomed peace, restoration, love, and family.

Another way these Cheyenne artists avoided incriminating images was by drawing animals. Altogether we are introduced to ninety-three animals in the ledger. Two bears, three birds, two opossums, twenty-two horses, seventeen buffalo, twenty-seven elk, six turkeys, one turtle, nine owls, and four beavers are depicted. All of these animals were part of the Cheyenne’s everyday and spiritual life. There are sixteen depictions of mother and child animals, which account for thirty-two 

animals out of the ninety-three.

The only animals that could potentially be a threat were the bears depicted in mother-and-child pairs. But in the Northern Cheyenne culture bears represent healing, so they again do not fulfill a threatening function here. Likewise, horses are never portrayed on their own. They always have a rider, whether it is together with a dressed up warrior or with a group of women covered in a courting blanket. Which is to say, the horses also serve more as decoration than as war-time steeds.

As a rule of thumb, the more often an animal is depicted, the more common its presence would have been for the Cheyenne tribe. Seventeen buffalo, for example, can be found in the ledger. The Northern Cheyenne, as mentioned earlier, had changed their lifestyle from farming and fishing to following buffalo herds. The buffalo were the Cheyenne’s primary source of livelihood. As the buffalo became more and more extinct, however, the tribe began to hunt and live off of elk. The high numbers of elk in the ledger—there are seventeen buffalo compared to twenty-seven elk depicted in the volume—can be attributed to the Cheyenne tribe starting to hunt elk instead of buffalo as their new food source.

All the animal depictions in the ledger burst with color. Though the Cheyenne men had to work with limited resources, they managed to establish a rich pallet of colors on every page of the ledger: the color red is employed 125 times, yellow is used thirty-eight times, blue is seen eighty-one times, black is used eight times, and gray is utilized 134 times. The colors give life to the blankets thrown around courting Cheyenne men and women, to warriors and their outfits, to the horses upon which the warriors ride, and to the various animals depicted. Perhaps in these detailed and colorful images the Cheyenne artists remembered a specific blanket they once possessed while living with their tribe, which is why they added a little extra red when drawing the blanket into the ledger. Maybe they were thinking about a woman they loved who wore yellow, so they included her color in their drawings. We can only imagine what might have gone through the Cheyenne’s minds as they drew the pictures in the ledger.

But the ledger speaks not just about these imprisoned Cheyenne men, but also about the general ability of the Cheyenne to adapt and transform their way of life while maintaining their cultural core. These Cheyenne warriors focus in their art on women, courting, large group gatherings, and animals because these things were just as important to them as depicting war scenes, which traditional Cheyenne drawings on hides typically displayed.

The Northern Cheyenne men traded, sold, and gifted their ledgers to various people. One was Sallie Straughn. We know that her husband John Straughn served as the prison warden of Dodge City during the time the Cheyenne men were imprisoned. Inevitably, Sallie would have come in contact with these Cheyenne men. It was not likely that Mrs. Straughn had much time to be out and about, since she had four small children (Cassie, thirteen; Louis, seven; Franklin, five; and Carl, two months old). With such a big family to care for it makes sense that Sallie Straughn was listed as “keeping house” in the census. Perhaps it was due to the fact that Sallie was tied to her house with her two-month-old child that she valued the Cheyenne ledger. Or maybe the colorful ledger with the numerous depictions of mother animals with their young ones reminded her of her own relationship to her children. Many of the animal scenes would have symbolically shown her relationship to her young son Carl at the time. The Cheyenne courting scenes might have spoken to her, too. They could have reminded her of herself when she was younger and fell in love with John. Perhaps the ledger made her remember the time when John served in the Union army in Indiana. Just as the Cheyenne men of the ledger were dressed for combat, she could picture John in his Union uniform. While the ledger stayed true to Northern Cheyenne traditions, its rich and suggestive images were able to cross cultural boundaries and strike sympathy with Sallie. The Cheyenne artists probably purposefully constructed this emotional appeal so that the ledger could function as an eloquent claim for the Cheyenne’s innocence and humanity.

 Several scenarios seem likely as to how Sallie Straughn obtained the indigenous artwork. She could have been visiting John at the prison, or perhaps she wanted to see the Northern Cheyenne men for herself. Another possibility was that the Cheyenne men gave her the ledger upon seeing her children. The Cheyenne men, we know, had families of their own. Or Sallie may have tried bartering with them, which was something she was very familiar with. As the story goes, a family friend named John H. Mathias discovered a “prospect hole” in Colorado and named it the Sarah Ellen after Sallie Straughn. Mathias even wanted her to have it. All he asked in return was “a good six shooter, scabbard and belt,” which she delivered by sending Mathias a “magnificent pistol” (“Mineral Wealth”).  Mathias was a family friend of the Straughns, and the Dodge City Times states, “old timers here remember him as a successful buffalo hunter.” Maybe Mathias was one of the men who helped decimate and kill the buffalo from the Plains, forcing the Cheyenne onto reservations. Perhaps he even was instrumental in leading these seven Cheyenne men into bartering with Sallie. Whatever the scenario, what we know for sure is that Sallie cherished and held onto this ledger for a long time. In the end, the charges against the Cheyenne men were dropped due to legal complications. The imprisoned Cheyenne were sent to the reservation to join the survivors of their tribe.

Even though the ledger was created in a relatively short period of time, the ledger as a complex work of art reflects the Northern Cheyenne’s larger and complex history and disenfranchisement. In the face of aggressive nineteenth-century racism, the Cheyenne remained true to themselves. Their drawings recreate their cultural values and might have even bridged the gap between European settlers and indigenous cultures. Clearly the ledger spoke to Sallie Straughn, who probably shared the Cheyenne artifact with other women and men in town, revealing to the white settlers of Dodge City that the Cheyenne were a peaceful and artful people who celebrated their way of life in colorful ledger drawings.