Black Kettle always wanted peace with the white settlers and he kept working for peace no matter what happened to him or his people.

No one knows when Black Kettle was born but he grew up in the Cheyenne nation which was in western Kansas and eastern Colorado. He was the chief of the Southern Cheyenne tribe.

In 1851 Black Kettle signed the Fort Laramie Treaty. It was supposed to give them their land forever but in 1859 the Pikes Peak gold rush started. This brought lots of settlers to the Cheyenne's land. In 1861 he was forced to sign a new treaty that gave the Cheyenne a smaller territory called the Sand Creek Reservation.

This reservation was not a good place to live for the Cheyenne because they needed more food than they could get and there were no buffalo there. Some men from the Cheyenne left and started stealing from the white settlers. Black Kettle went to get them and told the white military leader, if you let us go back to the reservation we will stay there. The military agreed to let them go in peace.

But John Chivington and his army came one early morning and killed 200 Cheyenne, mostly women and children. Black Kettle escaped and he rescued his wife. Black Kettle wanted the other Cheyenne from his tribe to keep the peace with the white settlers even though the men wanted to strike back.

In 1865 the Cheyenne signed another treaty and moved to a reservation in Kansas and then to Oklahoma.

Black Kettle died when George Armstrong Custer and his soldiers came and attacked the village on November 27, 1868.  Black Kettle put up a white flag on his tipi because he didn't want to fight anymore. The soldiers didn't care about the flag they just wanted to kill the Cheyenne people.

We got our information from
the PBS web site called New Perspectives on the West