The thermometer had been their weapon for eleven days, and now, on the night of January 9, 1879, the people inside the cavalry barracks at Fort Robinson in the northwest corner of Nebraska decided they would rather face the guns than the cold. There were 149 of them—men, women, and children of the Northern Cheyenne, followers of the chief the whites called Dull Knife and his own people called Morning Star. They had been locked in that barracks without food, without water, without firewood for warmth in a Nebraska January, because they had refused to go back. The army had driven them a thousand miles south the previous year to Indian Territory, to a reservation whose water was poisoned and whose food was scarce, where measles and malaria had killed their children.
So they had left. Three hundred and fifty of them had walked north toward home, toward Montana. The army had chased them across four territories and captured this band and locked them in this barracks, and the officer assigned to return them south had decided that cold and hunger would be his instruments of persuasion. Surrender, or freeze.
Inside the barracks, the Cheyenne had hidden their disassembled rifles beneath the floorboards and sewn parts of them into their clothing. Now they gave their answer. They smashed the windows and surged out into the snow, the warriors covering the women and children who ran toward the bluffs in the darkness. The soldiers pursued with their rifles, and over two weeks across the frozen ground the army hunted them.
By the time it was over, roughly 64 of the 149 were dead, killed in the snow, many of them women and children. About 70 were recaptured, most of them wounded. The film Hostiles, on which this story is based, begins with the murder of a settler family on the frontier and a soldier full of hatred. It imagines a fictional journey in 1892 to carry a dying Cheyenne chief home to Montana.
But the journey of history ran in the opposite direction, and no soldier accompanied them, because the soldiers were the ones firing into the snow at Fort Robinson. The Cheyenne who reached Montana got there not with the army’s help but by fleeing from it. And those who did not make it are the reason the grief in the film is not invented. Hostiles, released in 2017, directed by Scott Cooper and starring Christian Bale as Captain Joseph Blocker and Wes Studi—the Cherokee actor and Vietnam veteran—as the dying Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk, is a work of fiction.
Both Blocker and Yellow Hawk are fictional characters. The plot, an army officer ordered to escort his old enemy to his homeland, never happened in reality. But the history around them was real: decades of war, forced removal, and broken treaties. The film, made with consultants from the Northern Cheyenne tribes and with Studi speaking the native Cheyenne language, tries to honor that history honestly even as it invents its characters.
The framework it presents is one this story owes: not a legend to be corrected, but the history of a people to be preserved. That means naming the dead as the record names them, and treating the violence of both sides in the same frame as the film does, without excusing the army’s actions or erasing the memory of the settlers the Cheyenne killed along the way. Because the grief of the frontier, as the film’s only real subject insists, ran in every direction at once. Begin with the war, because Blocker’s hatred had real sources, and so did the Cheyenne’s.
The Northern Plains Cheyenne fought the United States throughout the 1860s and 1870s, and the war between them produced, on both sides, the atrocities the film’s heroes carry in their memories. In November 1864, at Sand Creek in Colorado, a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho—who believed they were under the army’s protection and flew an American flag and a white one—was attacked at dawn by Colorado volunteers under a colonel named Chivington. About 150 people were killed, most of them women, children, and the elderly, and their bodies were mutilated. It was a massacre so brutal that Congress itself investigated and condemned it, and the Cheyenne never forgot it.
Yellow Hawk in the film would have been alive to remember it. In November 1868, at the Washita River, Custer’s Seventh Cavalry attacked a Cheyenne village under Chief Black Kettle, a survivor of the Sand Creek massacre, and killed him and many others. In June 1876, at the Little Bighorn, the Cheyenne and their Lakota allies destroyed Custer and five companies of the same regiment, the greatest Native victory of the Plains wars—the event that ensured the army would not stop until the northern tribes were broken. That is the war behind the film, and its record is what the character of Blocker embodies: a man who fought in it, committed terrible acts in it, and watched his comrades die in it.
On a frontier where both peoples committed massacres and were victims of them, the hatred the film gives its soldier was fully justified and fully mutual in the historical record. The removal is the film’s journey reversed, and history’s cruelty lies in its geography. After the Little Bighorn, the army hunted the northern tribes into submission, and the Northern Cheyenne under Morning Star and Little Wolf surrendered at Fort Robinson in 1877. They were told they would be sent south to the Southern Cheyenne reservation in Indian Territory, what is now Oklahoma, more than a thousand miles from the Montana lands that were their home.
They walked more than 800 miles there in the summer of 1877, more than 900 people, and what awaited them was the true face of the reservation system of that decade. Everywhere on the plains, food rations were short, water was polluted, and diseases swept through populations with no immunity—measles and malaria struck the children hardest. The agency responsible was unable or unwilling to feed the numbers sent to it. Within a year, the Northern Cheyenne were dying, and their leaders concluded they had been sent south to disappear.
The treaties they had signed promised them the north. The choice was to die on the reservation or die trying to get home. The film imagines the journey of a chief to his homeland as an act of grace. The return journey in the record was an escape undertaken because the alternative was extinction by ration.
It began in the dark. By the late 1870s, the United States had settled on the reservation system as its solution for the Plains tribes, confining peoples who had lived by following the buffalo herds across the continent to fixed agencies where they would subsist on government rations and be remade as farmers on land that was often unfarmable. The system rested on treaties the government wrote and then broke, on rations that arrived short, spoiled, or not at all because the agencies were centers of corruption, and on the deliberate destruction of the buffalo herds that had given the tribes their independence. The architects of the system said openly that the old life had to be made impossible so the new life could be imposed.
The Northern Cheyenne were sent south into that system at its deadliest moment, to an agency already unable to feed the Southern Cheyenne living there. The disease and hunger that killed their children were not a side effect of the removal. They were part of its ordinary operation, the same conditions that were destroying Native peoples at agencies across the West in those years. The exodus was the record’s epic.
On the night of September 9, 1878, about 350 Northern Cheyenne under Little Wolf and Morning Star slipped out of the reservation and headed north. What followed was one of the great escapes in American history. They crossed a thousand miles of settled, soldier-garrisoned country in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, pursued by as many as 10,000 troops by the army’s own count. Columns of cavalry were sent from every fort on the plains to stop 350 people, most of them women and children who only wanted to go home.
They fought when they had to, at Turkey Springs and Punished Woman’s Fork, and hid when they could, moving by night. The record holds without flinching the fact that during the passage through Kansas, some Cheyenne warriors killed settlers in raids and reprisals, in the violence of the war they were still part of—and that the settlers they killed were as real as the Cheyenne children who had died of measles. The grief of the frontier, as the film insists, ran in every direction at once. They reached the South Platte River in October, and there the two chiefs made the decision that splits the record in two.
Little Wolf’s band turned north toward the Sand Hills to winter in hiding and continue on to Montana. Morning Star’s band, thinking they would find refuge at Red Cloud’s agency, headed toward it, not knowing it had been moved. Cavalry intercepted them, they surrendered, and they were taken to Fort Robinson and locked in the barracks. For them, the road home became the cold room, the smashed windows, and the snow.
Fort Robinson, the cold opening scene. The record asks only that its numbers stay accurate, because they carry the film’s grief into reality. One hundred and forty-nine people in a barracks refusing to return to the reservation that was killing their children. A commander who cut off their food, heat, and water for eleven days in January to break their will.
People who chose the snow over going back and ran for it, were hunted, and about 64 of them died in the drifts and along the creeks, women and children among them, over two weeks of pursuit. About 70 were recaptured, wounded and frozen. Then came the shift, the closest thing in this story to what might be called the film’s hope. The newspapers published the news from Fort Robinson, and the country that had wanted the Cheyenne gone read what that going meant: a barracks full of families starved, then shot in the snow for wanting to go home.
Public opinion turned. The government that had ordered the removal could not order the survivors back south under those circumstances. Morning Star himself had escaped the breakout with a handful of his family and reached the Lakota, while Little Wolf’s band emerged from the Sand Hills in the spring of 1879 and surrendered in Montana, where they were allowed to stay. The survivors of both bands, those the snow and the march had kept alive, were finally permitted to remain in the north.
In 1884, a reservation was created for them on the Tongue River in Montana, the Northern Cheyenne homeland. It is the place Yellow Hawk dies trying to reach in the film. It exists today, and its people are there because enough of them died in 1879 in a way the country could not ignore. The chiefs met their ends.
The leaders of the record were not symbols but men, and their fates diverged as sharply as their bands’ fates did. Morning Star—Dull Knife to the whites—escaped the Fort Robinson breakout with a handful of his family, hid in the bluffs for days in the January cold, and reached the Lakota at Pine Ridge, living his last years in the north he had nearly died to reach. He died in 1883 at Rosebud, a year before the reservation he had wrested from the government was formally established. He is buried now in his homeland in Montana.
Little Wolf, who led the other band through the winter and brought it home, surrendered in Montana in the spring of 1879. Then, in a turn the record does not soften, he served as a scout for the army he had fled. Later, in a personal tragedy his people document, he killed another Cheyenne in a quarrel and lived the rest of his life in a kind of internal exile within his own community. The war hero who saved his people ended broken among them.
He died in 1904. The film gives its chief a peaceful death and a triumphant return home. The historical record gives its chiefs the endings of men who carried an impossible burden and were changed by it. One died just short of victory.
The other lived long past it and suffered the grief. Both were buried at last in the north—the only part of the film’s promise the record fully kept. The convergence between film and record comes down to this: Hostiles is an honest film about a fictional mercy, while the record is the true story that mercy was invented to replace. Captain Blocker begins the film with a hatred learned in a real war and is changed by the journey, by shared grief between enemies who had tasted the same bitterness from each other.
In the end, he cannot let the dying chief’s family go alone. The film means this as the only possible redemption of the frontier: one man, too late for almost everyone, choosing to carry his enemy home. The historical record contains no such captain. The soldiers of Fort Robinson did not carry the Cheyenne home.
They starved them, then shot them in the snow. The Cheyenne reached home despite the army, not with its help. The redemption, if there was one, did not come from a soldier who changed his convictions. It came from a public that was shamed.
From newspapers and a shift in public opinion that made the final cruelty politically impossible. A nation that decided, after 64 bodies fell in the Nebraska snow, that it had seen enough. That is the record’s true version of the film’s hope—darker and more honest, because it places change not in the heart of a man who did the killing, but in the conscience of a country that ordered it and then recoiled when faced with the images. The film asks: what happens after the war ends, when the survivors have to live with what they did?
The historical record answers that the war did not end. It did not end for the Northern Cheyenne until they were nearly annihilated and the country finally felt shame. The homeland they live in now was bought, every acre of it, at Fort Robinson in January, by people who chose to run into the snow rather than return to the place the government had sent them to die. Yellow Hawk is fictional.
Morning Star was real, and he did not live to see the reservation formally granted, dying in the north in 1883, a year before the country passed the law. The film gives its chief a soldier to carry him home. The real chief carried his people most of the way himself and buried those who did not survive under the snow of a country that only understood what it had done when it read about it in the papers.
