This story was told by Iron teeth, a Northern Cheyenne woman. Her people had been sent to a reservation in Oklahoma but found life there so hard that they insisted on returning to their Dakota homeland. She lived to recount the suffering endured in one of the landmark events in American Indian history.

"In Dakota we Northern Cheyennes were told we must go to Oklahoma to live there on a reservation with the Southern Cheyennes.

In Oklahoma we all got sick with chills and fever. When we were not sick, we were hungry. We had been promised food until we could plant corn and wait for it to grow, but much of the time we had no food. Our men asked for their guns to be given back to them so they might kill game, but the guns were kept from them. We had many deaths from both the fever sickness and starvation. We talked among ourselves about the good climate and the plentiful game food in our old northern country hunting lands.

After about a year, Little Wolf and Morning Star, our principal Old Man Chiefs, told the agent, 'We are going back to the North.' The agent replied, 'Soldiers will follow and kill you.'

The white soldiers chased us. But my older son kept saying we should go on toward the north unless we were killed, that it was better to be killed than to go back and die slowly.

We dodged the soldiers during most of our long journey. But always they were near us, trying to catch us. Our young men fought them off in seven different battles. At each fight some of our people were killed, women or children the same as men. I do not know how many of our grown-up people were killed. But I know that more than 60 of our children were gone when we got to the Dakota country.

Morning Star said we should be contented, now that we were on our own land. He took us to Ft Robinson, where we surrendered to the soldiers. They took from us all of our horses and whatever guns they could find among us. They said then that we must go back to the South, but our men told them it was better to die by bullets. After a few weeks of arguing, our men were put into a prison house. We women and children were told we might go to the agency. Some of them went there, but most of us went into the prison with the men. In the one room, about 30 feet square, were 43 men, 20 women, and 20 or 30 children. Eleven days we had no food except the few mouthfuls of dry meat some of the women had kept in their packs. Three days we had no water.

[We] decided to break out of this jail. I gave my son the six-shooter I had. He was my oldest child, then 22 years of age. After the night bugle sounded, my son smashed a window with the gun I had given him. Others broke the other window and tore down the door. We all jumped out. My son with the little girl on his back ran off in one direction, while the other daughter and I went in another direction.

I and the daughter with me found a cave and crawled into it. We could hear lots of shooting. We stayed in the cave seven nights and almost seven days. More snow kept falling, it was very cold, but we were afraid to build a fire. We ate snow for water. Finally a captain found our tracks [and he] and his soldiers then took us back to Ft Robinson.

I was afraid to ask anybody about my son and the little daughter, as my asking might inform the soldiers of them. But I kept watching for them among the Indians there. After a while the little girl came to me. I asked her about her brother. It appeared she did not hear me, so I asked again. This time she burst out crying. Then I knew he had been killed.

A day or two later all of us were again put into the prison house. Our number now was only about half what it had been. The soldier chief at the fort...asked if we were willing now to go back to Oklahoma, so that no more of us would be killed. But we were mourning for our dead and we had no ears for his words.

Everybody said, 'No, we will not go back there.' We expected then that the soldiers would come at once into the prison and shoot all of us. Instead, a few days later we were taken to the Pine Ridge Agency [in South Dakota].