Cheyenne Warriors, New Fort Kearny, and the Coming Plains Wars, 1856

By: Catherine Nealy Judd

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Synopsis: In this book, Catherine Nealy Judd demonstrates the profound significance of a U.S military siege rashly launched from Fort Kearny against a small war party of Northern Cheyenne. This event occurred on the Platte River Road in August 1856 and triggered four Cheyenne reprisal counterattacks. Drawing on history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, military records, governmental archives, diaries, letters, and other primary sources, Judd scrutinizes a tumultuous moment in the pre-railroad expansionist era, presenting her readers with a tale of struggle between Indigenous Americans and an increasingly aggressive federal military stationed at the forts of the Plains. As Judd scrutinizes the causes, conduct, and consequences of this long-neglected series of events, her insights encourage us to reassess the trajectories of federal aggression and of an Indigenous response to that bellicosity. By placing the Cheyenne Nation at the center of the history of the Overland Trail, this study offers a long overdue reinterpretation of the Platte River Road in the 1850s and beyond.