Medicine Lodge

In October 1867, the largest gathering of Plains tribes in American history met at a grove of elms and cottonwoods where Medicine Lodge Creek meets Elm Creek — five to fifteen thousand Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache camped at a site the Cheyenne already considered sacred. The U.S. Indian Peace Commission came with five hundred men of the Seventh Cavalry, two Gatling guns, a hundred wagons of gifts, and a young newspaper correspondent named Henry Morton Stanley, five years before he found Dr. Livingstone.

The Medicine Lodge Treaty was supposed to end the Plains wars. Black Kettle of the Cheyenne, Little Raven of the Arapaho, Satanta of the Kiowa — the leaders who signed ceded the land between the Platte and Arkansas rivers and accepted reservations in Indian Territory. Buffalo Bill Cody was one of the Army's scouts. The commission's own report admitted the wars had been caused by American treaty violations; the treaty was supposed to be different. It wasn't. Within thirteen months, Custer's Seventh Cavalry — some of the same soldiers who had ridden escort at Medicine Lodge — attacked Black Kettle's village on the Washita and killed him.

The treaty site is preserved now — the grove, the river, the town that took the treaty's name. The Medicine Lodge pageant is still performed. The peace that was signed there is remembered as the last time the Plains tribes and the United States met as something approaching equals.