09/03/2026
In March 1881 a Northern Arapaho boy named Little Chief left Wind River for a school in Pennsylvania. He was fourteen, the eldest son of Chief Sharp Nose, and two younger friends went with him. Horse was eleven. Little Plume was nine. Within two years all three were dead at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and they were buried in a row of small graves seventeen hundred miles from home.
They stayed there for more than a century. Carlisle ran from 1879 to 1918 and took children from dozens of nations, and the cemetery at the edge of the old grounds holds about one hundred and eighty of them. The families always knew where their children were. Getting them back was another matter.
Yufna Soldier Wolf, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Northern Arapaho, spent roughly ten years asking for them. In August 2017 the exhumations finally began, and Little Chief and Horse came home to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Then the record failed. Little Plume's grave held two sets of remains and neither was his. The tribe did not leave it there. They went back, and he was brought home the following summer.
Three boys left Wind River in 1881. Three boys came back. It took a hundred and thirty seven years.
