Porcupine (Cheyenne)

In 1889, Porcupine undertook a long journey to Nevada to visit Wovoka, the prophet of the new Ghost Dance religion.

While the Cheyenne did not suffer tragedy on the scale of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, Porcupine could only perform the dance in secret from 1890 onwards.

[2] Like virtually all Cheyenne young men, Porcupine joined a warrior society, in his case, the Dog Soldiers.

In April 1867, Hancock moved a large force to Fort Larned and demanded that Indian leaders meet him there.

A joint camp of Southern Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux was established thirty miles away at Pawnee Fork.

A handful of Indians entered the fort, including Tall Bull, leader of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.

Hancock waited three days and then ordered the camp burned, despite warnings from the Indian agents that this would make war certain.

It was not very successful, the scattered Indians were hard to follow and when Custer stopped at Fort Hays for forage for his horses he found there was none to be had and he became stuck there.

On 19 April Hancock ordered the camp at Pawnee Fork to be destroyed in retaliation and sparked an Indian war,[4] unnecessarily so according to many commentators both contemporary and modern.

By the time they reached the Union Pacific Railroad near North Platte, Nebraska, they had joined a band of Cheyenne led by Turkey Leg and Spotted Wolf.

Porcupine and Red Wolf drove off the men with rifle fire after which they were pursued and Handerhan was killed.

This did not work, but it did have the effect of causing the train engineer, Brooks Bower, to apply full throttle to escape the Indians.

The fireman, George Hendershot, was poised at the open door of the firebox with shovel in hand ready to throw in more coal.

[11] Following the Indian surrender at the end of the Great Sioux War of 1876, the Cheyennes were forcibly deported to reservations in Oklahoma.

There they found that the hunting grounds they had been allocated were devoid of the large game they needed to survive, and the supplies promised by the U.S. government failed to arrive, or were stolen by the Indian agents.

Facing starvation, chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf in 1878 led the Northern Cheyenne on a fighting journey back to their homeland in Montana, more than a thousand miles away, pursued by the U.S. cavalry all the way.

As a compromise, the military sent seven Indians, Wild Hog, a war chief of the Northern Cheyenne Elk warrior society,[15] Porcupine, and five others (Old Crow, Tangled Hair, Blacksmith, Noisy Walker, and Strong Left Hand) for trial in a civilian court for these killings.

[16] The Ghost Dance religion was founded by its prophet Wovoka in Nevada, a Paiute Indian who had a vision on 1 January 1889 during a solar eclipse.

He predicted that a Messiah figure,[note 3] identified with the Christian Jesus, would come to Earth and resurrect all the Indian dead.

However, James Mooney, an ethnologist tasked by the U.S. government with investigating the Ghost Dance and who travelled far and wide to interview all the principals in the tribes concerned, including Wovoka himself, tells a different story.

Porcupine's delegation was part of a larger, organised mission, perhaps a dozen people, sent out by a conference of chiefs at Fort Washakie in Wyoming with the explicit purpose of obtaining information about the new religion.

It seems likely that the Arapahoe visit was a cover story to make it easier obtaining permission from the Indian agent to leave the reservation.

Settlers living close to reservations became concerned that it would lead to a new Indian uprising and called on the army to intervene.

[note 7] At Porcupine's location on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, reinforcements were sent from Fort Keogh to the Lame Deer agency.

After three days, he reported back to his superiors that Porcupine's preaching was entirely peaceful and that nobody was talking about fighting whites.

[26] Some time after the Ghost Dance was stopped, Porcupine moved to the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Porcupine believed that they should have been paid their share of the money from the enforced sale of reservation land in South Dakota to the government in 1889.

[note 8] They did not get it because they were no longer on the roll at Pine Ridge, even though their move was only supposed to be temporary ("a visit" as Cheyenne tribal historian John Stands in Timber puts it).

Porcupine was the spokesman for a Cheyenne delegation to Washington during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893), the purpose of which was to seek reparations for treaty violations.

Historian Thomas B. Marquis who met and wrote about Porcupine said, As a "bad Indian" he was of the most gentle type.