What Chief Turkey Leg of the Cheyenne thought of the white man’s contraption called a railroad wouldn’t, if translated into English, be printable. Yet, as much as he hated the iron horse, he valued with equal intensity the gear and material the white man’s trains carried.
The Chief and his braves weren’t the only members of the tribe that looked with greedy eyes on the things the train carried. Cheyenne women were, for the first time, wearing orthodox lingerie instead of pantaloons made from buffalo hides with the hair scraped off. The underwear, may it be said, had originally been consigned to fancy white vixens plying their trade in the Western mining camps. Turkey Leg’s number one wife, who set the social pace of the tribe, was decked out in silky ribbons that had come from Belfast by way of Boston and with bracelets intended for the doxies of gamblers in such merry hells of sin as Denver and Omaha.
Early in August of 1867, Turkey Leg and his band of warriors staged a hold-up on a Union Pacific train four miles west of a Nebraska homesteader settlement called Plum Creek. Since they lacked pistols and other such weaponry, they did not board the engine. Instead, they tore up four miles of track with stout, sharp poles then waited for the train to arrive.
The train stopped just short of the spot they had chosen. Warriors broke down doors with sledge hammers stolen from miners. Though what happened to the crewmen isn’t exactly clear, the Cheyenne came away from the heist with enough loot to give each woman of the Cheyenne Nation a bright bandeau for each of the seven days of the week, pantaloons, bells and braiding, and bolt after bolt of gingham fabric.
As an added bonus, the Cheyenne warriors found compensation in the piles of good serviceable wares. There were watches; though the warriors were not sure what the round metal things were used for, top hats, wool pants, and a huge stack of Spencer carbine rifles. The latter was a sight that caused Chief Turkey Leg and his men to start dreaming. With the white man’s weapon they could drive out the white man. The buffalo would return and teepees would again spread out across the prairies replacing the hated towns where the people were never safe.
However, these dreams were of no concern to the U.S. Cavalry. At Fort Laramie the concern was that the Cheyenne now had rifles to go with their hidden caches of ammunition. When an army courier brought word of the trail derailment, Major Frank North, a commander of Pawnee scouts, immediately dispatched thirty-five Pawnee scouts led by Captain James Murie to the junction of Plum Creek and the Platte River, the very heart of Chief Turkey Leg’s domain.
Major North took the first train to Plum Creek as he planned to take overall command. He arrived at the tiny village and so began one of the weirdest battles ever fought between the Pawnee and Cheyenne....
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Excerpt from the book "Fighting Cheyennes" by George Bird Grinnell
