The Cloud People: A History of the Arapaho on the Central Plains
By Marcus Hale Whitfield
Length4h 36m
About this audiobook
By firelight an old woman presses the first mark into an infant's brow, dot by dot, with a bone needle and blue-black pigment, while the mother watches and does not look away. Later a matching mark will ride above each cheek. It is the first public fact about the child, the sign of the Hinono'ei, the people the rest of the world would come to call Arapaho, and nothing will ever take it off.
Speakers of an Algonquian language, they remembered an older life of earth lodges and river-bottom gardens on the eastern edge of the plains. By the early 1700s they were a nation on horseback, organized in seven bands that could scatter in a lean year or gather into a single great camp circle, and joined to the Cheyenne in an alliance that has outlasted every war since.
Their years on the central plains run through the buffalo-robe trade and the 1851 treaty council, the Pike's Peak gold rush that planted Denver on Arapaho ground, the massacre at Sand Creek, the treaty of 1868 and the fight for the Powder River country, the Little Bighorn and the flight of the northern bands, and the ration years, into the territory era and a new century. The mark on a Hinono'ei child's brow was meant to last a lifetime. The nation that wore it has proved just as hard to erase.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 36 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Tattooed People
2Chapter 2: The Coming of the Horse
3Chapter 3: The Great Alliance
4Chapter 4: The Horse and the Robe
5Chapter 5: The Treaty of 1851
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6Chapter 6: Gold, Roads, and the Pike's Peak Rush
7Chapter 7: Sand Creek
8Chapter 8: The Treaty of 1868
9Chapter 9: Red Cloud's Road and Powder River
10Chapter 10: The Little Bighorn and the Flight of the Northern Bands
11Chapter 11: Rations
12Chapter 12: The Territory and the New Century
13About the Author
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