Black Kettle

Black Kettle was a leader of the Southern Cheyenne people in the central Great Plains during the violent middle decades of the nineteenth century. Known in Cheyenne as Mo'ohtavetoo'o, he was born around 1803 in the Black Hills region and rose to prominence as a peace chief, one of the council leaders responsible for diplomacy and the welfare of the band.

He signed the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise, which sharply reduced Cheyenne and Arapaho lands in Colorado Territory, and afterward sought repeatedly to maintain peace with United States authorities even as settlers and militia pressed onto the plains. In November 1864 his village was camped on Sand Creek under what he and federal officers understood to be a flag of protection. Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked at dawn, killing more than one hundred and fifty Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women, children, and elderly men. Black Kettle and his wife survived, though she was severely wounded.

Despite the massacre, he continued to argue for accommodation, signing the Treaty of the Little Arkansas in 1865 and the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867. In November 1868, his village on the Washita River in present-day Oklahoma was attacked at dawn by United States cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

Black Kettle and his wife Medicine Woman Later were killed while attempting to flee on horseback across the river. He was about sixty-five.

The name Black Kettle is the English rendering of his Cheyenne name, in which Mo'ohta refers to the color black and the second element refers to a cooking kettle. He carried that traditional Cheyenne name through one of the most painful chapters in Plains history.