The Cheyenne called themselves Notameohmesehese, the Northern Eaters, because they were great hunters who kept their people well-fed in the Powder River Country. But after the Black Hills War and the horrors of Sand Creek and Washita massacres, the government forced them south to Oklahoma. The heat was unbearable, food was grown rather than hunted, and disease spread through the crowded barracks. When the exodus began in 1878, the survivors walked north through autumn and winter, pursued by the Army. Those who survived eventually settled near Fort Keogh before migrating south to the Tongue River watershed, the land they considered their natural home.

President Chester Arthur established the Tongue River Indian Reservation by executive order on November 16, 1884. The original boundaries left out many Cheyenne families who had already homesteaded east of the Tongue River, so the St. Labre Catholic Mission stepped in to help them. In 1900, President McKinley extended the reservation to include the west bank of the Tongue River. Today the Northern Cheyenne Tribe counts over 12,000 enrolled citizens, with about 6,000 living on the reservation. Lame Deer serves as the tribal capital, home to Chief Dull Knife College and roughly 4,000 residents, ninety-two percent of them American Indian.

The reservation sits approximately twenty miles east of the Little Bighorn battlefield where Cheyenne warriors like Wooden Leg fought alongside the Lakota in 1876. That same fighting spirit took a different form at Tongue River Boarding School in Busby, which opened in 1904. By the 1950s, the school's basketball team had grown so formidable they defeated the Harlem Globetrotters and won a state championship. Nearby Ashland, where St. Labre Indian School was established in 1884, developed its own basketball tradition, and when Busby joined their district, the rivalry games became legendary.

More than a quarter of reservation residents over age five speak a language other than English, keeping the Cheyenne tongue alive across generations. The tribe has produced Grammy-nominated flutist Joseph Fire Crow, linguist and human rights activist Marie Sanchez who served as chief judge, and writer Belle Highwalking who recorded reservation life in 1970. Ben Nighthorse Campbell rose from the reservation to represent Colorado in both the House and Senate. At the St. Labre museum, Cheyenne artifacts and cultural displays preserve traditions, while the school integrates Native culture throughout its curriculum for nearly 450 students from pre-K through twelfth grade.