George Amos Dorsey was an U.S. ethnographer of Indigenous peoples of the
Americas, with a special focus on Caddoan and Siouan tribes. He received
a Bachelor of Arts degree from Denison University in 1888, then a second
Bachelor's Degree in anthropology in 1890 at Harvard university, and
finally PhD in 1894, the first PhD in anthropology from Harvard, and the
second ever awarded in the United States. The following account of the
Cheyenne social organisation was obtained as part of Dorsey's studies of
the Cheyenne Sun-Dance, which, in turn, are part of a comparative study
on this ceremony among the Plains Tribes he began in 1901. The Cheyenne
Sun-Dance forms the subject of Part II. The accounts of the societies,
the myths of the origin of the same, and the story of the
medicine-arrows are given, with but slight changes, as they were
obtained through Richard Davis, a full blood Cheyenne.