Cheyenne Warriors, New Fort Kearny, and the Coming Plains Wars, 1856

In this book, Catherine Nealy Judd demonstrates the profound significance of a U.S military siege rashly launched from Fort Kearny against a small war party of Northern Cheyenne. This event occurred on the Platte River Road in August 1856 and triggered four Cheyenne reprisal counterattacks. Drawing on history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, military records, governmental archives, diaries, letters, and other primary sources, Judd scrutinizes a tumultuous moment in the pre-railroad expansionist era, presenting her readers with a tale of struggle between Indigenous Americans and an increasingly aggressive federal military stationed at the forts of the Plains. As Judd scrutinizes the causes, conduct, and consequences of this long-neglected series of events, her insights encourage us to reassess the trajectories of federal aggression and of an Indigenous response to that bellicosity. By placing the Cheyenne Nation at the center of the history of the Overland Trail, this study offers a long overdue reinterpretation of the Platte River Road in the 1850s and beyond.

Catherine Nealy Judd is a Professor in the English Department at the University of Miami, Florida, USA. She publishes works on topics pertaining to nineteenth-century American, British, and Irish cultural history. She is the author of several books, including Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845-1853 (2020) and Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830-1880 (1998). Her most recent essay, "Building New Fort Kearny, 1848: The Pawnee Nation, William Henry Tappan, and Powell's Missouri Volunteers," was published in 2023 in Great Plains Quarterly.