by Enss, Chris
According to information passed down through generations of Cheyenne Indians, Mochi spent most of her days at Fort Marion staring out at the vast ocean beyond the barred prison windows thinking of her days at Sand Creek. She never ceased to mourn the loss of her family or her former way of life, and she would not forsake her heritage regardless of the punishment she received for speaking the Cheyenne language and observing her own religion. Mochi could not be persuaded to put out of her mind the way the Cheyenne tribe she belonged to was killed. She longed to be with her loved ones and prepared herself for the death she thought was inevitable as an Indian captive.[34]
1. Nesho Valley Register, December 12, 1874; Peter Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 16–17.
2. Patrick M. Mendoza, Ann Strange-Owl-Raben, and Nico Strange-Owl, Four Great Rivers to Cross: Cheyenne History, Culture and Traditions, 102–3; Grace E. Meredith, Girl Captives of the Cheyennes: A True Story of the Capture and Rescue of Four Pioneer Girls, 1874, 108–9; Brad D. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners, 85.
3. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 85; Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 102–3.
4. Meredith, Girl Captives of the Cheyennes, 25–29; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 24.
5. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 24; Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 31–32.
6. Patrick M. Mendoza, Song of Sorrow: Massacre at Sand Creek, 147; Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 103.
7. Greencastle Banner, August 5, 1875; The Press, May 26, 1875; Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 54–55.
8. Athens Post, May 23, 1875.
9. Greencastle Banner, August 5, 1875.
10. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 26–27.
11. Florida Press, July 3, 1875; Billings Gazette, October 22, 1933; Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 59–60.
12. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 63–64.
13. Ibid., 66–69.
14. Ibid., 67; Memorandum on Sending Indian Prisoners to Fort Marion.
15. Ibid..
16. Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 102; Sallisaw Star, September 11, 1908.
17. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 77.
18. Ibid., 5–6, 78–80.
19. Ibid., 112.
20. Ibid., 85, 95; Salt Lake Tribune, March 22, 1936.
21. Dubuque Herald, August 15, 1875; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 27.
22. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 122–23.
23. Athens Messenger, January 25, 1877.
24. Ibid.; Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 125.
25. Indianapolis Journal, October 30, 1875.
26. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 96, 112–13.
27. John Speer, “Report to Fred Martin of Interview with Mrs. John Chivington”; Reginald S. Craig, The Fighting Parson: Biography of Colonel John M. Chivington, 233–34; Patricia Kinney Kaufman, My Mother’s People to Colorado They Came, 36–37.
28. Lebanon Patriot, August 24, 1883.
29. Clinton County Democrat, August 17, 1883.
30. Daily Denver Times, October 8, 1883.
31. Ibid.; Kaufman, My Mother’s People, 36; Craig, Fighting Parson, 233.
32. Craig, Fighting Parson, 234–35; Daily Denver Times, October 8, 1883.
33. Ibid.
34. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 28; Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 102–3; Linda Wommack and John L. Sipes, Jr., “Mo-chi: First Female Cheyenne Warrior,” Wild West Magazine April 2008; Mendoza, Song of Sorrow, 164; Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 95.
Chapter 10
Never to Be Home Again
Residents and tourists in the southern Florida town of St. Augustine gathered at the Magnolia Hotel on March 4, 1878, for an evening of entertaining presentations by the Indian prisoners from Fort Marion. Cheyenne inmates demonstrated a traditional dance performed at the summer solstice. Some of the Indians wore headdresses made with feathers to represent an eagle, and others wore hides over their shoulders to represent the buffalo. The eagle symbolized the spirit, and the buffalo symbolized the body. The dance served as a reminder of how important the buffalo was to the Plains Indians.[1]
The enthusiastic audience applauded the exhibition and many of the Cheyenne Indians watching the performance followed suit. Mochi was one of a handful of people that did not clap; remembering how few buffalo were left and how the Indians’ lives had changed as a result made them fiercely unhappy. At the conclusion of the program, the audience filtered out of the main auditorium into the lobby to look over the various items on display made by the Fort Marion prisoners. Shells, drawings, bows, and arrows were available for purchase.[2]
Many Indians made money from curio sales. Some used the funds to buy postcards and watermelons. Many Cheyenne Indians turned their earnings over to prison officials and entrusted them to send the funds to their families living on reservations. More often than not, corrupt guards would steal the meager funds.[3]
Mochi poses for a picture alongside her husband, Medicine Water, and three unidentified Cheyenne Indians during their incarceration at Fort Marion. Mochi is standing at the top left; Medicine Water is standing next to her. This photo was taken circa 1877.
Courtesy of Castillo de San Marcos & Fort Matanzas, St. Augustine, Florida, National Park Service
Mochi and several other rebellious Indians, including Medicine Water, refused to participate in the souvenir-selling enterprise. They resented being imprisoned and were concerned only with the day they would be released. Some Cheyenne had difficulty believing they would ever be free and plotted their individual releases. Indians tried to escape on makeshift rafts or by lowering themselves down the high prison walls to the open sea. Many died in their attempts to be free. Warriors like Mochi were convinced such deaths were honorable compared to living a lifetime in captivity.[4]
In the fall of 1876, a severe type of typho-malarial fever claimed the lives of seventeen Indians at Fort Marion. In October an influential Cheyenne leader at the prison named Heap of Birds died of congestion and heart disease. Those closest to the one-time chief noted his greatest desire was to rejoin his family on the plains. His desire was shared by all the Indians interned at the stone stockade. An attitude of melancholy and hopelessness filled the hearts of the Native American captives. The administrators in charge of the prison were aware of the despair that had overtaken many of the Indians, and urged the government to intercede before all perished.[5]
According to a report issued by Ezra A. Hayt, commissioner of Indian affairs, to William T. Sherman, secretary of war, on November 10, 1877, Hayt suggested that serious changes be made to keep the Indians alive. “Their suffering seems to have been of sufficient severity for all reformatory purposes,” Hayt wrote. “Severe punishment may have been, and probably was, visited upon some who were innocent of deliberate crimes, and a part of them have died away from their family and friends and of those remaining many are sick.” Although Hayt acknowledged their good behavior, he expressed no remorse for their agony. “Believing that no possible interest would be served by their further imprisonment,” he concluded, “I respectfully recommend that all these prisoners be returned to their tribes and released.”[6]
In April 1878, the United States government approved Commissioner Hayt’s suggestion to send the Indians to the Darlington Indian Agency. On April 17, the long journey from Florida to Oklahoma began. Colonel Nelson Miles, the same military officer who oversaw the Indians’ transfer to Fort Marion, was placed in charge of escorting the Indians to the reservation. Thirty-seven-year-old Mochi was ill when she made the twenty-three-day trip to the setting the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians were to call home. She had contracted tuberculosis while in prison and was struggling with a fever and coughing blood.[7]
The April 19, 1878, edition of the Indianapolis Journal contained an article about the transfer of the prisoners and noted that with t
he “exception of a certain few the worst desperados were being returned civilized and intelligent.” According to the article, when the Indians passed through Indianapolis they attracted a great deal of attention. Citizens turned out by the hundreds to get a look at the many braves and the warrior woman. “These same prisoners who were sent to Florida chained and pinioned are now being released but their bloodthirsty nature has been reformed,” the report read. Army officer R. H. Pratt was credited with transforming the Indians, including one female known as the “ruthless slayer of the German family.” The article continued:
Captain Pratt is a native of Indiana, and is now enjoying a respite from his official duties and visiting with his sister in this fair city. In conversation with a journal reporter last evening, Captain Pratt stated many interesting circumstances and reported the entire success of the experiment which had been tried on this company of Indian desperados. The captain used all kindly means to induce them to change their modes of life. He gradually succeeded in persuading them to abandon the use of a blanket as an article of clothing and wear half military dress which had been provided for them by the government. Then classes were organized for giving those who deemed to learn a rudimentary education, and most of them availed themselves of the opportunity offered. The older men made but little progress, but those under thirty years of age made, in some cases, excellent progress. And now, three years since education was introduced to the Indian, they are prepared for civilized life. Some men stayed on in Florida to continue learning; the older men have for the most part returned to their tribes, but it is believed their characteristics have been entirely changed.
Captain Pratt does not make any comment expressive of his views on the Indian question but simply gives the facts as related above and leaves them to make their own impress. His testimony as to the remarkable change wrought in these apparently desperate and hardened Indians.[8]
With or without an education, former Fort Marion prisoners found it hard to readjust to life outside of jail. Their difficulty was not only becoming reacquainted with being free, but also adjusting to freedom on the government’s terms. Indians were confined to the Oklahoma reservations, and they were not allowed to organize hunting parties. They had no money and no livestock, a situation that was particularly difficult to accept for the Cheyenne because they measured wealth in terms of horses. The government wanted the Indians to be farmers and teachers, to bring up a younger generation to read and write English, and to focus solely on the white man’s vision for the Indians. They were to depend entirely on rations government agents issued. The system was fraught with corruption, and, as a result, Cheyenne leaders complained that the tribes were “often hungry and always poor.”[9]
According to the October 20, 1878, edition of the Indianapolis Journal, Cheyenne Indians were leaving the reservation to find food. Cavalry leaders informed officials in Washington that there were too few troops to keep the Indians contained. General John Pope, commander of the Department of Missouri, was one of the first officers to learn that the daily Cheyenne Indian trouble was because the provisions promised were not being given to them. The Indianapolis Journal reported on the tumultuous situation:
There is an enormous deficiency in Indian supplies. The daily rations of one and a half pounds of beef, a half-pound of flour or corn, and four pounds of coffee, eight pounds of sugar, and three pounds of beans in each hundred rations had only been partially carried out. None of the stock and aid in building their houses, which was promised, has been afforded them.
Another cause of the problems with the Indians was that they objected to the manner of serving their rations. General Pope suggests that the Indian commissioner may, in the light of these facts, find it necessary to modify his view of affairs at the agency and instead of sending more troops to keep the Cheyenne on the reservation launch an investigation into the corruption that has taken place.[10]
Lack of health care was yet another issue that plagued the Indians. Those like Mochi who suffered from life-threatening illnesses received little to no medical attention and were not allowed to leave the reservation for help. “The Indian has no right[s] which the white man are bound to respect,” an article in the April 15, 1880, issue of the Dearborn, Indiana, newspaper the Dearborn County Register noted regarding medical treatment for Native Americans. “If he submits to the white man’s authority he is starved by hunger, disease, and cold united; if he is too proud to submit, and rebels, the military is employed to massacre him and his family.”[11]
In late 1881, Mochi died from tuberculosis. She was forty-one years old. The traditional service for a Cheyenne Indian warrior who had passed began when his body was laid on a scaffold in tall trees. The belief was that resting on a high scaffold aided in the journey across the four great rivers. The four great rivers were bodies of water that combined to transport the deceased to the place of the dead called Seyon. Water from Sand Creek is said to have flowed into the great rivers. Weapons, jewelry, and a variety of gifts were left at the burial site so the deceased could use them in the afterlife. There were no trees in the area of Oklahoma where Mochi died, so she was buried on a high mound in order to find her way to Seyon. In Seyon she would be reunited with the friends and family that were slain at the Sand Creek Massacre, and they would live in the camp of the dead forever.[12]
Medicine Water was devastated by his wife’s passing but found a way to work through his sorrows with a job as a reservation police officer. His position and those of the other Indian law enforcement agents ended in 1883 due to lack of funds.[13]
In 1926, more than forty years after losing Mochi, Medicine Water passed away. The late John L. Sipes, tribal historian for the Cheyenne Nation, noted in the April 2008 edition of Wild West Magazine that “death and the will to fight ran strong in the lives of Mochi and Medicine Water.” He added that “the Old Ones [ancestors] have taught us that to endure the hardships of surviving, while maintaining love and courage to stand beside each other in overwhelming odds, was tremendous. In the end, it was the love and dedication to their people, their family, and their Cheyenne way of life that saw them through.”[14]
Medicine Water was ninety years old when he died.
1. Daily Graphic, April 26, 1878; Brad D. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners, 85–88, 94–95.
2. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 87; New Smyrna Daily News, December 3, 1915; Aurora Dearborn Independent April 15, 1880.
3. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 87–89.
4. Ibid., 57, 65–66; George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 132–34.
5. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 67–68.
6. Ibid., 159–60, 245.
7. Indianapolis Journal, April 17, 1878; Peter Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 27–28; Patrick M. Mendoza, Song of Sorrow: Massacre at Sand Creek, 164.
8. Indianapolis Journal, April 19, 1878.
9. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 178–79; “Pathetic Letter from Indians,” Southern Workman, June 8, 1879, 68.
10. Indianapolis Journal, October 20, 1878.
11. Petersburg Index-Appeal, April 30, 1878; Galveston Daily News, May 1, 1878; Dearborn County Register, April 15, 1880; Elkhart Sentinel, July 31, 1885; Reno Evening Gazette, December 3, 1889.
12. Biren Bonnerjea, Reminiscences of a Cheyenne, 9–11; George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History & Lifeways, 193.
13. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 28; Linda Wommack and John L. Sipes, Jr., “Mo-chi: First Female Cheyenne Warrior,” Wild West Magazine, April 2008; Mendoza, Song of Sorrow, 164.
14. Mendoza, Song of Sorrow, 164; Wommack and Sipes, “Mo-chi: First Female Cheyenne Warrior.”
Chapter 11
The Sand Creek Massacre
Historic Site
Tribal leaders today in and around Chivington, Colorado, maintain they hear the cries of the children that were slaughtered on the banks of the Sand Creek in the winter of 1864.
It was there that a unit led by Col. John M. Chivington led an unprovoked, early morning raid on an American Indian village, killing more than 150 Cheyenne and Arapahos, mostly women, children, and elderly men.
