The Fort Robinson Breakout of 9 January 1879 was one of the most tragic episodes in the Indian Wars. Dull Knife's Northern Cheyenne, returned from their epic exodus from Indian Territory, were imprisoned at Fort Robinson and denied return to their homeland. When they refused to go back, the Army cut off food, water, and heat in midwinter. After two weeks, the starving Cheyenne broke out through windows in a desperate bid for freedom. Most were shot down in the snow. The episode shocked public opinion and contributed to reform movements that eventually resulted in the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
64 Cheyenne killed including women and children; 3 US soldiers killed
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