The winter of 1876-77 was brutal, and not primarily because of the weather.

On November 25, 1876, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie led nearly a thousand soldiers in a dawn attack on Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne village in the Bighorn Mountains.

The village was destroyed.

Blankets, food, ammunition, and the carefully preserved belongings of a hundred families were burned.

The village’s horse herd — the basis of Cheyenne mobility and economic life — was seized.

Without horses, without supplies, in temperatures that fell far below zero, the survivors of the attack spent days struggling through mountain terrain, some of them freezing to death before they reached safety.

This attack broke the Northern Cheyenne’s ability to resist militarily.

Buffalo Calf Road Woman and her husband Black Coyote were among the Northern Cheyenne who eventually surrendered.

They were brought to a reservation in Indian Territory — present-day Oklahoma — far from their homeland in the northern plains.

The Cheyenne call what followed the Exodus.