Cheyenne tribal members
between two worlds
'We're part of Oklahoma history'

By Ron Jackson
Lawrence Journal-World

HAMMON, Okla. — Only the green stubble of budding wheat lives on the high ground where the Whiteshield Camp once thrived.

Crude box tents made of canvas once home to entire families along the Washita River are gone. So is the water well, likely buried by a plow. Tracks where trains periodically carried supplies to camp residents have vanished. A drilling rig stands in its old path.

“This is the first time I’ve been down here in years,” said Archie Hoffman, 71, while he canvassed the terrain two miles north of town. “I have a sad feeling coming back. Everything has changed. Nothing is as I remember.”

Hoffman struggled to find his bearings at the old site, sifting through his memory to reconstruct the camp he knew as a child. Descriptions turned into recollections about life — the spiritual ways of his ancestors, the cadence of the Cheyenne language and the communal camaraderie of his people.

“Those were really good times,” said Edwin Pewo, 73, of Hammon and a Cheyenne peace chief. “My people never had a hard time putting food on the table back then. We lived off the land.”

Living the old way

“We had a dirt floor,” said Pewo, as if still feeling the packed dirt beneath his feet. “No running water. No gas. No electricity. We chopped wood with an ax, and we kept warm by burning the wood in a big stove.

“For food, we’d hunt for turtles or we’d fish. We’d use a string and hook, or we’d just pull the fish out of the water with our hands.”

Prayers were spoken solely in Cheyenne.

Camp elders, in turn, taught the spiritual and traditional ways of the Cheyenne in their native tongue. Pewo’s education came from his grandparents, Chief Henry Elk River and his wife, Lillie.

“I consider it a real blessing to have been raised in the Whiteshield Camp with all those elders,” Pewo said. “We were just like one big, happy family.”

Cultures clash

Whiteshield Camp descendants can trace their ancestry back to some of the darkest hours of western frontier history, let alone the Southern Cheyenne. In 1864, their ancestors camped on the banks of Sand Creek in Colorado Territory, believing they had negotiated peace with U.S. officials.

Black Kettle, chief of the Southern Cheyenne’s Wotapio band, even flew a U.S. flag outside his lodge with the assurance Old Glory would protect his people from military aggression. Yet on the morning of Nov. 29, 1869, with most Cheyenne warriors on a hunt, some 800 troops of Colorado territorial militiamen attacked the Cheyenne and Arapaho villages.

Between 150 and 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed during the attack, most of whom were reportedly women, children and elderly men. Black Kettle’s band suffered the greatest loss of life.

The nightmares wouldn’t stop. Almost exactly four years later — on Nov. 24, 1868 — Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry plunged into Black Kettle’s camp on the icy banks of the Washita River in a pre-dawn attack.

Death would again revisit the same family bands who suffered so greatly at Sand Creek. More than 100 Cheyenne people were estimated to have been killed in the attack, including Black Kettle and his wife.

Black Kettle was shot in the back.

“Our people were devastated,” Pewo said. “My grandfather told me Black Kettle’s body was secretly taken away somewhere and buried. He said, ‘No one knows where that old man is buried ...’

“I still have people who cry whenever they talk about what happened at Washita.”

Origin of the camps

Chief Red Moon emerged as the leader of the family bands in the wake of Black Kettle’s death at the Washita.

By 1892, the heads of 11 families of the Red Moon band received individual allotments to make way for the opening of the Cheyenne and Arapaho lands to white settlement. Five of those families selected land near Hammon and subsequently became known as Whiteshield’s Band or simply the “Hammon Bunch.”

Allotments were dolled out as more families emerged, but few chose to actually live on their assigned land.

Instead, families did what Cheyenne families had always done — they lived in communal settings along the Washita River. The Whiteshield Camp was born.

By then Ben Whiteshield – son of the great warrior Old Man Whiteshield — had emerged as the most prominent chief of the surviving Wotapio families.

Hoffman would run seven miles each day from his grandfather’s allotment to play with other children in the Whiteshield Camp. In his wake, his grandfather industriously ventured into the white man’s world with seeds and a plow.

Paradise lost

Hoffman believes his grandfather saw the future.

“My grandfather farmed,” Hoffman said. “But we also had a home at the camp. Other people maintained two homes.”
Most Cheyenne families leased their allotments to white settlers, preferring to remain at the Whiteshield Camp permanently. But if history taught the Cheyenne people anything, it was that their world was destined for transition.

Government officials began ordering families to move into towns in the 1950s. They were driven by an ever-evolving policy of acculturation. Historian Donald Berthrong noted that a per capita payment was given to families by the federal government to expedite the process until 1968.

Suddenly, families who knew nothing more than the simplicities of the old ways were thrust into a world of mortgages, rent, utility bills, and jobs. Perhaps most devastating of all was the disbandment of the communal structure that kept families strong.

Bouts of alcoholism, cancer and diabetes became rampant.
“When we lived in the camps, we never had cancer and diabetes,” Pewo said. “Now all of a sudden we have people dying from cancer and diabetes.”

Pewo thinks of all those who have died before him, many perhaps even before their time. His eyes water. His voice cracks.

“I don’t really have anyone to talk to any more in my language, other than my wife,” Pewo said. “Our language is almost gone. I’m now the oldest one around here. There’s nobody I can go see. I get lonely. I cry.

The white man’s world

Archie Hoffman transitioned into the white man’s world with savvy and a little luck. Others weren’t so lucky.

“I was one of the few Indians taught in a regular school,” Hoffman recalled. “But no one was there telling me the importance of getting an education. By the time I graduated, I found out you had to have a B average to get into college. I didn’t have that, and there were no assistance programs in those days.

“So I had to make a decision.”

Hoffman joined the Air Force.

The decision forever ensured Hoffman would not be left behind. The Air Force taught him for the next four years to be an airplane mechanic.