Running as a memorial to their Ancestors
Story and Photos By JENNIFER McKEE
Of The Gazette Staff
BUSBY - The young men sloshed through thick snow in their identical Nikes, stopping at the finish line their grandmothers died for. That night they would eat steak and laugh with girlfriends. They would rest for the first time in 400 miles.

"Each of these kids and these young men has a story to tell," said James Walksalong.

These men, part of the Northern Cheyenne Breakout Runners, ran on foot from Fort Robinson, Neb., to the Two Moon Monument above Busby. They did it in five days last week, running from pre-dawn to well past dark. They ran out of money along the way and finished the trip by running most of the night and sleeping in their backup vans. They ran in what they had - donated shoes, sweatshirts and wind pants - with no other clothes to add on when the temperature dropped to 20 below zero and a blizzard hit in the Black Hills. The oldest runner was a grandfather. The youngest was 8.

Collins Russell, 11, talked his father, Clifford Russell, into running the ultra-marathon. Clifford was a national champion cross-country runner in 1974 when a shooting accident lodged a bullet in his leg and ended his running career. Collins loves to run and talked his father into lacing up for the challenge.

But the story behind the ultramarathon didn't start with these runners. This race started 120 years ago.

To hear race organizer Philip Whiteman Jr. tell it, this run is about more than athletes and miles. It's about the people and their history. It's the story of their spirit, too, and, possibly, their salvation.

"This run itself is very sacred," said Steve Brady, headsman for the Crazy Dog Society, the traditional military group for the Northern Cheyenne. "It memorializes their grandmothers and grandfathers who were massacred."

The night of Jan. 9, 1879, was clear and cold at Fort Robinson, where Northern Cheyenne chief Dull Knife was starving with 148 of his people. The band of mostly the sick and old, women and children had been held in an Army barracks for five days without food, heat or water.

They should've been in Montana by now. They should've met up with another chief, Little Wolf, in the homeland of the Cheyenne.

Flanked by supporters, Breakout Runners pound the final yards of their 400-mile road run.

The two chiefs led 300 of their people away from Oklahoma Indian Territory the year before. The cavalry had driven the tribe there after the Battle of the Little Big Horn where Cheyenne soldiers helped decimate the U.S. Army.

But Oklahoma wasn't a good land, and disease, starvation and homesickness thinned the tribe. The two chiefs decided to lead their people home in September 1878. They traveled together to Nebraska, where they split up and Little Wolf led the young, mostly soldiers back to Montana. Dull Knife led the rest to refuge with Red Cloud, a Lakota chief, whose people lived nearby.

Little Wolf and his band made it to Montana. Every Northern Cheyenne living on the reservation today is a direct descendant of those people.

But Dull Knife wasn't so lucky. The cavalry rode up on the band on Oct. 23, 1878, just outside Fort Robinson. They marched the group 28 miles back to the fort and put them in Army barracks there. Then they told Dull Knife that he and his people would be going back to Oklahoma.

The chief refused. It was Jan. 4. To break the tribe, Capt. Henry Wessells cut off food, water and heat. By Jan. 9, the tribe was desperate. Cheyenne Dog Soldiers broke out first. The entire band followed.

"A lot of the sick and women died on the doorstep of that barracks," said Lynette Two Bulls, who ran in the race.

Race organizer Phillip Whiteman Jr.

Some escaped, scrambling up a nearby ridge for cover. But over the ridge lay nothing but the Great Plains. A few, including Dull Knife, ran on to Montana, eating their moccasins for lack of food. Most, however, sought shelter in a buffalo wallow on the banks of the White River. Two weeks after the breakout, cavalry found their camp and killed them on the spot, shooting many in the back of the head. Scientists later dug up the bodies and used them for experiments. Eventually, their bones ended up in museums.

Six years ago, a group of Northern Cheyenne reclaimed the remains. They brought them back to the reservation and buried them in unmarked graves on a bluff overlooking Busby.

That is where the runners stopped last week - on the land their grandmothers and grandfathers died running for. They stood in a group apart, closest the burial grounds, watching as their neighbors slowly arrived. Old women carried blankets for them. Fathers brought camcorders. One old man carried a plastic box and pack of cigarettes. He knelt in the center of the informal circle, kicking wet snow away with his boots, as he blessed the runners and their people.

That was Gilbert White Dirt, keeper of the sacred hat - a symbol of the core beliefs of the Northern Cheyenne.

"Let us all have the same mind together to make things happen in a good way," he said.

Whiteman can tell you what needs to happen on this reservation. People here die in their 40s, he said. They have kids in their teens. And alcohol is a part of everyone's family, if not their own lives.

"It makes me sad what our children are faced with," he said.

The run was spiritual and practical. In a land with rampant diabetes and an 80 percent unemployment rate, running gives people something to do and way to lead a healthy life, Whiteman said.

It also offers a diversion to other problems.

Runners hold a sacred staff they carried as they ran. During the run, the staff must be kept moving at all times.

"They're battling with drugs and alcohol abuse," said Florine Walks Along, Whiteman's sister who drove backup vans for the runners. "And going back there, you could see it in them, just like an awe."

Collins Russell, 11, grew up hearing the story of Dull Knife and Little Wolf. He also grew up hearing his dad, Clifford Russell, talk about running. Clifford Russell was a national champion cross-country runner in 1974 when he was junior in college. Running almost took him off this reservation, to Kansas where he had a scholarship to run cross-country. But before he could accept the scholarship, he was accidentally shot in the leg.

"This is the first time I've run in 15 years," said Russell, one of the breakout runners, who did the run with his son.

"We didn't stop," Russell said. "I just thought about what our ancestors went through."