Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation

Land in southeast Montana set aside for American Indian occupation; area 1,806 sq km/697 sq mi, population (1990) 3,900 (90% Indian). The Northern Cheyenne reservation, which was established in 1884, is located immediately east of the Crow Indian Reservation, and 109 km/68 mi east-southeast of Billings. The settlement of Lame Deer is its headquarters.

The reservation is home to the Northern Cheyenne, an Algonquian-speaking people who left Minnesota in the 18th century and settled in the Black Hills of South Dakota from 1800 onwards. By the 1870s they had been confined within a reservation there, but abandoned it during the Black Hills gold rush, travelling west to fight alongside the Sioux in the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876). This historic battle site lies just west of the present reservation, while the Rosebud River, scene of a preliminary skirmish, flows south–north through its centre. In more recent times, the Cheyenne have strongly resisted plans to exploit the huge coal deposits that lie beneath their land. The Southern Cheyenne, who split off and moved to Colorado in the 1830s, now live with the Arapaho in Oklahoma.