Holding Stone Hands:
On the Trail of the Cheyenne Exodus
Copyright © 1999
by Alan Boye
University of Nebraska P
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A noteworthy mix of Native American history and memoir. In
the aftermath of Little Big Horn, many Northern Cheyenne
Indians were removed from Montana to Oklahoma, far from
their ancestral territory. Beset by illness, famine, poverty, and
corruption on the part of the government officials who oversaw
their reservation, a band of 300 Cheyenne under Chief Dull
Knife fled the reservation in 1878 and journeyed more than a
thousand miles across the high plains to return to Montana; the
federal government declared them to be renegades and sent
thousands of soldiers to return them. In 1995 Boye, a
professor of English at Lydon State College in Vermont, joined
three of Dull Knifes descendants in a journey retracing the
Cheyennes' difficult road home. ... Boye has a light, winning style,
even when he's writing about matters of the utmost seriousness; he
introduces and explains complex points of history and
anthropology with admirable ease. His prose often attains
moments of real beauty, ... A true contribution to the literature of the
Northern Cheyenne past. — Kirkus Reviews
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