gen. george crook

Frank Grouard lived with Hunkpapa and Oglala Lakota bands as captive, adopted brother and champion hunter. Later he re-entered the world of White men as an army scout in the Indian Wars. He told his life story to Buffalo, Wyoming journalist Joe DeBarthe, who published it—and made some of it up.

In a saga of bitter hardship and resolve, 350 Northern Cheyenne led by Little Wolf and Dull Knife escaped the Darlington Agency in present Oklahoma late in 1878. Struggling north, they were imprisoned in Nebraska, broke out and, crossing a corner of Wyoming Territory, finally returned to their Montana homelands. 

Two military posts were built a few miles apart during the Indian Wars near the strategic Bozeman Trail crossing of Powder River—Fort Reno in the 1860s and Cantonment Reno in the 1870s. The first was one of three forts whose existence provoked the tribes into war. The second was an important Army base for later campaigns.

In November 1876, about 700 cavalry and 400 Indian scouts led by Col. Ranald Mackenzie, burned the main village of the Northern Cheyenne to the ground near the Red Fork of Powder River about 20 miles west of present Kaycee, Wyo. Seven soldiers were killed and about 40 Cheyenne, but the economic and cultural loss to the tribe was devastating. The Northern Cheyenne surrendered to government authorities the following spring.

Fort Fetterman was established by the U.S. Army on the North Platte River near present Douglas, Wyo. in 1867. It served as a staging point for Gen. George Crook’s three campaigns against Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux Indians in 1876, near the end of the Indian Wars. The Army abandoned the post in 1882, and the settlement finally closed down a few years later when the railroad arrived at Douglas, seven miles to the south.

Was she a hard-drinking, swashbuckling mule skinner and Indian fighter? Or an alcoholic prostitute, stuck in menial jobs in a life both dreary and mundane? Calamity Jane's life is two stories: the facts of her biography, and the romantic tales that came to comprise the Calamity Jane legend.