Holding Stone Hands: On the Trail of the Cheyenne Exodus

In a gracefully written and compassionate account of his return to a dark page in this country's past, Boye, who is white, relates one of the most poignant, if largely forgotten, tragedies of Native American dispossession in the 19th century. In 1878, some 300 Northern Cheyenne Indians, under the leadership of Dull Knife and Little Wolf, fled starvation and disease on an Oklahoma reservation in an attempt to return to their Montana homeland. Pursued by soldiers in running battles for more than 1000 miles, the Indians split into two bands, terrorizing settlers along the way with retaliatory rape and murder. When Dull Knife's band was finally captured near the South Dakota border, he resolved to defy the army's order to return to Oklahoma. Knowing that they faced certain death, the Cheyenne escaped again late one winter night; in the brutal fight that ensued, nearly half the band, mostly women and children, perished. Because of their determination, the survivors of the second band eventually received a reservation of their own in Montana. Boye greatly enriches this story by describing his own hardships retracing the exodus through a starkly beautiful landscape, accompanied by descendants of the surviving Cheyenne. Never mawkish or patronizing, Boye recognizes early on that both journeys belong more to his companions than to himself. By reaching back and touching the suffering of their ancestors, they begin what Native Americans call ""a healing,"" a reconciliation of the past with the present. Sam Spotted Elk Jr., who took the journey with Boye, aptly sums up the tribal spirit that transcends generations: ""What we leave behind is what the children pick up from us and carry with them."" (Aug.)