The Council of Forty-Four, composed of peace chiefs who held their positions for ten years, was the closest thing to a central governing body, but its authority was deliberative and persuasive rather than coercive.

Military societies, organized separately from the civil chiefs, had their own leaders and their own traditions of independence.

This political complexity would become one of the most persistent sources of misunderstanding in Cheyenne-American relations.

American officials consistently assumed that the chiefs they made agreements with could enforce those agreements on all Cheyenne people.

They could not.

A peace chief who signed a treaty had no authority to compel the military societies, whose young warriors might have entirely different ideas about how to respond to American encroachment.

Black Kettle was a peace chief in this tradition.