Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation

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Northern Cheyenne Indian Nation flag

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation is an Indian reservation that is home to the Northern Cheyenne tribe of Native Americans. It is located around the small towns of Lame Deer and Ashland, Montana in parts of Rosebud and Big Horn counties. This land is located approximately 100 miles east of the site of the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn, or Greasy Grass as it is called by the Lakota. There are also small parcels of non-contiguous off-reservation trust land in Meade County, South Dakota, northeast of the city of Sturgis. The total land area is 1,831.059 km² (706.976 sq mi), and a population of 4,470 was reported in the 2000 census.

Approximately 91% of the population were Native Americans (full or part race) and 72,8% Cheyenne. Also some Crow live in this reservation. 26,8% of the population 5 years or older spoke language other than English.

The Northern Cheyenne were allies of the Lakota in the Black Hills War of 1876-1877. Many of the people still care for this land and a lot of the forestry workers, fire fighters and EMS employees are Cheyenne, helping a great deal to save the land they have left.

A historical buffalo jump, burial sites of Indian chiefs, the site of Custer's last camp before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Cheyenne Indian Museum, Ten Bears Gallery, St. Labre Indian School and the Ashland Powwow are of special interest in the Ashland area. Lame Deer is tribal headquarters and home of the Northern Cheyenne Powwow.

The Northern Cheyenne are close relatives of the Southern Cheyenne, an AmerInd nation located in Oklahoma. Following the Black Hills War and earlier conflicts in Colorado (see Sand Creek Massacre and Washita Massacre), the Northern Cheyenne were sent to Oklahoma to join their southern relatives. Unacclimated to the hot conditions of western Oklahoma (still Indian Territory at the time), the northerners began dying like flies. In desperation, a small band left the reservation and headed north in 1878, an odyssey that formed the basis of Mari Sandoz's novel, Cheyenne Autumn, and described in detail in the Wikipedia article Cheyenne.

The Northern Cheyenne briefly settled around Fort Keogh (Miles City, Montana), and in the early 1880s many families began to migrate south to the Tongue River watershed area and established homesteads in the northern edge of the Powder River Basin, which they considered their natural home. Seeing a need for a reservation, the United States government established, by executive order, a reservation in 1884, finally giving the Cheyenne a permanent home in the north. The reservation was expanded in 1890. The current western border is the Crow Indian Reservation, and the eastern border is the Tongue River. The Reservation has a number of the timbered ridges of Southeastern Montana and Northwestern South Dakota that are also part of the Crow Reservation and Custer National Forest.