Book Review: Morning Star Dawn: The Powder River Expedition and the Northern Cheyennes, 1876

Authors

• William Bauer, University of Wyoming

Date of this Version

2004

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:3 (Summer 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

In November 1876, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie led a successful attack on a Northern Cheyenne village in the Bighorn Mountains. In military historian Jerome Greene's rendering, this often overlooked battle and the ephemeral Powder River Expedition became a seminal event in ending the Sioux Wars of 1876-77. "The attack on the encampment and its subsequent destruction," Greene writes, "not only compelled the Cheyennes' eventual surrender but also influenced many of their Lakota compatriots, including the war leader Crazy Horse, to do likewise."