From Powder River to Lame Deer:

The Life and Contested Legacy of Chief Two Moon of the Northern Cheyenne

Introduction: A Name Shared, a Life Distinct

The historical record surrounding Chief Two Moon of the Northern Cheyenne is complicated from the outset by a question of identity. Two prominent Cheyenne leaders bore the same name in the nineteenth century, and their stories have often been conflated in the popular literature. The elder Two Moon, the uncle of the man who is the subject of this article, was an important figure in the Bozeman Trail conflicts of 1866 to 1868 and an ally of the Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud. The younger Two Moon, known in the Cheyenne language as Ishaynishus, or Esehe Ohnesestse, was born around 1847 and would go on to fight in some of the most consequential engagements of the Great Sioux War of 1876 to 1877, surrender to the United States Army in the Tongue River country of southeastern Montana, and spend the final four decades of his life navigating the constraints and possibilities of reservation life as head chief of the Northern Cheyenne. His career traced a path from open-country resistance to reservation leadership and diplomatic advocacy, and in doing so illustrated the broader arc of Northern Cheyenne history in the post-conquest era. The younger Two Moon died in 1917 near Busby, Montana, and was buried beside a road that would later become U.S. Route 212, a few miles from the Tongue River Reservation he had helped to establish and maintain.

Origins and Early Life

Two Moon was the son of a man named Carries the Otter, who was originally from the Arikara people before being taken captive and incorporated into the Cheyenne tribe, a not uncommon process on the Northern Plains through which individuals of different nations could become, by adoption and practice, fully embedded members of a new community. According to the EBSCO Research Starters entry on Two Moon, the younger man is sometimes confused with his uncle not only in popular accounts but in some historical documents, making it essential when consulting any primary source to establish which individual a given writer is describing (“Two Moon”). His Cheyenne name translates directly to Two Moon, and his community position as a Kit Fox Society leader made him a man of standing among his people before the events of 1876 thrust him into broader historical view.

The Northern Cheyenne in the 1870s occupied a tenuous position. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had theoretically established reservation boundaries and guaranteed the Lakota and their Cheyenne allies certain lands and hunting rights, but the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874 triggered a cascade of federal policy decisions that made those guarantees worthless. By the winter of 1875 to 1876, the United States government had issued an ultimatum requiring all non-treaty bands to report to their respective agencies by January 31, 1876, or be classified as hostile and subject to military action. Many bands, including the one led by Two Moon, did not comply, whether by choice or because the order never reached them in the deep winter months.

The Road to War: Powder River and the Gathering Storm

The first violent episode of what would become the Great Sioux War came in March 1876 on the Powder River, in the remote country southwest of present-day Broadus, Montana. Army scouts for General George Crook had located a Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux encampment, and on the frigid morning of March 17, Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds led approximately three hundred cavalry soldiers in a surprise assault on the village. According to a history published in Montana Magazine and confirmed by additional battlefield research, the army found a community of about forty lodges led by Two Moon camped there, along with a small number of Oglala Sioux. Reynolds’s attack in blizzard conditions destroyed the village’s food stores, clothing, and shelter, and his men drove off a large horse herd before Two Moon’s warriors, fighting from the bluffs above the river, forced a disorderly army withdrawal (montanamagazines.com, “Battle of Powder River”).

The material destruction visited on Two Moon’s band at Powder River was severe. The women and children fled north on foot in winter weather toward the camp of Crazy Horse, where they were given food and shelter. The battle, poorly executed and resulting in a subsequent court-martial for Reynolds, did not achieve its military aim of breaking Cheyenne resistance. Instead, as historians of the conflict have noted, it effectively pushed Two Moon’s band into the arms of Crazy Horse’s coalition and set the conditions for the summer engagements that followed (Billings Gazette, “Battle of Powder River,” September 6, 2017). Two Moon and his people arrived at Charcoal Butte and joined the large encampment that was gathering along the Rosebud and Little Bighorn river systems.

The Battle of the Rosebud and Little Bighorn, June 1876

Two Moon fought at both of the major engagements in the summer of 1876. On June 17, Northern Cheyenne and Lakota warriors clashed with General Crook’s column at the Battle of the Rosebud, a sharp engagement in which Crook was effectively stopped and turned back, removing him from the campaign that culminated eight days later. Two Moon was among the Cheyenne participants at the Rosebud (EBSCO Research Starters, “Two Moon”).

The Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, is the event for which Two Moon became best known outside the Northern Cheyenne community. On that day, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry against a large encampment of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne on the Little Bighorn River in what is now Big Horn County, Montana. Two Moon, then approximately twenty-nine years old, commanded Cheyenne warriors in the fighting. According to the account published in the September 1898 issue of McClure’s Magazine, Two Moon described to writer Hamlin Garland how, upon hearing that soldiers had attacked the southern end of the village, he rode out to meet them, eventually swinging north with other warriors to close in around Custer’s battalion. In Garland’s account, Two Moon described the final fighting around the ridge where Custer and his men were killed as a rapidly escalating encirclement in which warriors from multiple tribal groups converged, making any individual’s account of the sequence of events necessarily partial (“Battle of the Little Bighorn, Narrated by an Indian Who Fought in It,” McClure’s Magazine, September 1898, reprinted in Minn State Press Books).

Two Moon’s testimony to Garland is one of the most detailed Native accounts of the battle in print and has been reprinted and analyzed in numerous scholarly works. Richard G. Hardorff, whose compilation Cheyenne Memories of the Custer Fight brought together thirteen Cheyenne testimonies alongside Garland’s piece, placed Two Moon’s account within the broader corpus of Native recollection, noting that it offered an eyewitness perspective on the encirclement of Custer’s battalion that, while selective and shaped by memory and translation, remained one of the most vivid first-person documents of the engagement (Hardorff, Cheyenne Memories of the Custer Fight). Scholars have cautioned that some of Two Moon’s numbers and timing details, as filtered through a Cheyenne interpreter and then shaped by Garland’s literary hand, should be treated carefully, but the general outline has been corroborated by other sources.

From Resistance to Surrender: Wolf Mountain and Fort Keogh

The aftermath of Little Bighorn did not bring the large coalition of Sioux and Cheyenne a sustainable peace. The United States Army responded by sending substantial reinforcements into the region, and through the winter of 1876 to 1877, Colonel Nelson A. Miles pressed a sustained campaign from his base at the Tongue River Cantonment, which would later become Fort Keogh near present-day Miles City. On January 8, 1877, Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors under Crazy Horse, including Two Moon and his men, engaged Miles’s forces in the Battle of Wolf Mountain along the Tongue River near what is now Birney, Montana. The battle was fought in heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures. Both sides deployed artillery and rifles against terrain features and ridge lines. The fighting ended in a tactical draw, but the broader strategic situation was becoming untenable for the coalition. Miles’s army was well-supplied and capable of winter operations; the Cheyenne and Lakota encampments were not. As conditions at Wolf Mountain demonstrated, the army could locate and engage them in the deepest winter months, and sustained resistance was exhausting food supplies and horse herds (Wikipedia, “Battle of Wolf Mountain,” which cites Jerome A. Greene, Yellowstone Command, as the primary scholarly source on the engagement).

Two Moon came to a pragmatic assessment of the situation. In April 1877, he led his band into Fort Keogh and surrendered to Miles. The decision was not simply capitulation. Observers including Miles himself noted Two Moon’s capacity for navigating complex political situations, and he clearly understood that the terms he negotiated at Fort Keogh offered more than what awaited those who held out. The other major Northern Cheyenne faction, led by Dull Knife and Little Wolf, had surrendered separately and were being sent south to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, an outcome Two Moon’s band avoided by remaining in the Tongue River country. 

According to the WyoHistory.org account of the Northern Cheyenne diaspora, after the destruction of Dull Knife’s village in the Bighorn Mountains and the subsequent exile to Oklahoma, Two Moon and his band at the Tongue River Cantonment became the anchor point for Northern Cheyenne people who eventually made their way back to their homeland (“The Cheyenne Homecoming,” WyoHistory.org).

Scout, Chief, and Advocate: Life at Fort Keogh and the Reservation

Following his surrender, Two Moon enlisted as an Indian scout under Miles, serving in that capacity during the Nez Perce War of 1877, when Miles’s forces pursued Chief Joseph’s band across northern Idaho and into Montana. Two Moon’s willingness to work with the military was not unusual among reservation-era leaders who had concluded that direct confrontation with federal power was no longer viable and that working within the system offered the best available protection for their communities. Miles was by most accounts genuinely respectful of Two Moon and came to rely on him as a leader. When the Northern Cheyenne Reservation was formally established by executive order of President Chester A. Arthur on November 16, 1884, as the Tongue River Indian Reservation, comprising approximately 371,200 acres in southeastern Montana, Miles appointed Two Moon as head chief of the Northern Cheyenne. This appointment was subsequently ratified by the Cheyenne Nation itself, giving him a dual legitimacy rooted in both federal recognition and internal tribal authority (Arthur, Executive Order, Northern Cheyenne Reservation, November 16, 1884, as archived at the American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara).

The reservation was expanded in 1890 and again in 1900 under President McKinley, with the Tongue River eventually becoming the eastern boundary and the total land area growing toward 444,000 acres. As described in the Montana History Portal’s entry on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, cattlemen and ranching interests attempted to have the original executive order reversed, but federal policy ultimately supported the reservation’s continuation and expansion, in part due to active Cheyenne lobbying (Montana History Portal, “Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation,” mtmemory.org, accessed March 25, 2026).

Two Moon understood that securing the reservation’s physical boundaries and improving conditions on it required sustained political engagement with Washington. He traveled to the capital on multiple occasions to speak with federal officials on behalf of his people, representing the Northern Cheyenne’s interests in land, rations, and educational resources. In 1914, near the end of his life, he met with President Woodrow Wilson to discuss the conditions of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. These visits were substantive diplomatic efforts, not ceremonial appearances, and they placed Two Moon in direct conversation with the policymakers who controlled his community’s material circumstances.

The Buffalo Nickel and the Problem of Representation

One episode in Two Moon’s later life illustrates the complicated position that prominent Native leaders occupied in early twentieth-century American culture. In 1911, sculptor James Earle Fraser began designing what would become the Buffalo Nickel, first struck in February 1913. Fraser used three Native American men as models for the composite portrait on the obverse of the coin. Two Moon was one of the three, along with Iron Tail, an Oglala Lakota leader, and a third whose identity Fraser later struggled to recall with certainty, eventually settling on Big Tree, a Kiowa. Fraser himself confirmed in 1938 that the three models had been Iron Tail, Big Tree, and Two Moon. The sculptor encountered them in New York when they stopped there on their way to Washington to visit President Theodore Roosevelt, and he photographed them and worked their features into a composite image intended to represent an idealized Native American type rather than any one individual (Fraser, as cited in Q. David Bowers, A Guide Book of Buffalo and Jefferson Nickels, Whitman Publishing, 2007).

The Buffalo Nickel’s history involves the kind of appropriation that characterized much of the dominant culture’s engagement with Native peoples during this era. The coin was designed to embody a sense of vanishing America, and the choice of a composite Native portrait rather than a specific individual’s likeness reflected a set of aesthetic and ideological assumptions about Native people as symbols rather than persons. Two Moon, who was very much alive when the coin began circulating and who continued his reservation advocacy work through the coin’s early years of production, occupied a different relationship to the image than the public did. He was present at the groundbreaking ceremony for the National American Indian Memorial in Staten Island in 1913, where forty of the new nickels were distributed to attending Native chiefs including Two Moon himself (uscoinsandjewelry.com, “The Face Behind the Five-Cent Indian Head Nickel”). The gesture had an obvious irony: the man whose face partly comprised the coin’s composite portrait receiving that coin as a gift at a public ceremony.

Final Years and Legacy

Two Moon died in April 1917 at his home near Busby, Montana, at approximately seventy years of age. He was buried near Busby, on land that was later purchased by W. R. Moncure, a local Indian trader who had known Two Moon and who erected a mortared stone monument at the grave. In 1941, Moncure deeded the burial parcel into trust for the Northern Cheyenne, ensuring its preservation. A feature article on Moncure and Two Moon appeared in the winter 1957 issue of Montana magazine, documenting this relationship and the provenance of objects associated with the chief (Heritage Auctions lot documentation for Two Moon saddle, ha.com, accessed March 25, 2026). The Northern Cheyenne Nation’s official website notes that a historic monument built in 1936 in Two Moon’s memory stands on the reservation as a marker of his role in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and in the community’s subsequent history (cheyennenation.com, accessed March 25, 2026).

Two Moon’s life resists straightforward categorization as either heroic resistance or accommodation. He was a war leader who fought with skill and determination through three engagements in 1876 and 1877, and he was also a pragmatic negotiator who understood that the material welfare of the Northern Cheyenne after military defeat depended on working within federal structures rather than outside them. His willingness to serve as a scout for Miles, which some critics have seen as a form of collaboration, was part of a sustained effort to position himself and his band favorably in the political environment of the post-conquest Tongue River country. The result was that Two Moon’s people remained in their homeland while other Northern Cheyenne bands were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma, a distinction of enormous consequence for the community. The Tongue River Reservation he helped secure is today the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, home to approximately six thousand enrolled tribal members, its boundaries still shaped in part by the political decisions Two Moon made in the years between 1877 and his death.

His account of the Little Bighorn, given to Hamlin Garland twenty-two years after the fact, remains one of the most-cited Native testimonies of that engagement, a document that has been reprinted in anthologies and analyzed in academic works including Hardorff’s Cheyenne Memories of the Custer Fight. That a Northern Cheyenne war leader’s voice entered the literary and historical record at all, and did so in his own words through a national magazine, was itself an unusual achievement for a Native man in 1898. Two Moon understood the value of that record and the terms on which he gave it.

Works Cited

“Account of the Battle at Little Bighorn (Recalled in 1898 by Two Moon).” Dictionary of American History, Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/account-battle-little-bighorn-recalled-1898-two-moon. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

Arthur, Chester A. Executive Order – Establishment of Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. 16 Nov. 1884. The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-establishment-northern-cheyenne-indian-reservation. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

“Battle of Powder River.” Montana Magazine / montanamagazines.com, 6 Sept. 2017, https://montanamagazines.com/battle-of-powder-river/article_8d14285c-b8b4-5758-8e22-f682338853db.html. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

“The Cheyenne Homecoming.” WyoHistory.org, Wyoming State Historical Society, https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/cheyenne-homecoming. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

Garland, Hamlin. “General Custer’s Last Fight as Seen by Two Moon.” McClure’s Magazine, vol. 11, Sept. 1898. Reprinted in Minnesota State Open Textbook, https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/ushistory1/chapter/battle-of-the-little-bighorn-1876/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

Hardorff, Richard G., ed. Cheyenne Memories of the Custer Fight: A Source Book. University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Harrison, William Harvey. Chief Two Moons, Northern Cheyenne. Circa 1910. Montana History Portal, University of Montana Mansfield Library / Montana Historical Society, https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/14245. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

Huffman, L. A. Cheyenne Chief Two Moons’ Lodge – Lamedeer Agency, Montana. 1886. L. A. Huffman Photograph Collection, Montana Historical Society Library and Archives, https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/72074. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

“Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation.” Montana History Portal, Montana Historical Society, https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/128163. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

“Two Moon.” EBSCO Research Starters, EBSCO Information Services, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/two-moon. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

“Two Moons, a War Memorial.” Historical Marker Database, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=189213. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

“Plains Indians: A Fine Saddle, with Accompanying Research Attributing It to the Cheyenne War Chief Two Moons.” Heritage Auctions, lot 44166, https://historical.ha.com/itm/western-expansion/indian-artifacts/plains-indians-a-fine-saddle-with-accompanying-research-attributing-it-to-the-cheyenne-war-chief-two-moons-a-major-figure-a-total-2/a/6079-44166.s. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​