Background

Alan Boye was born on January 25, 1950, in Lincoln, Nebraska, the United States, to Arthur and Matilda (maiden name, Danca) Boye.

Education

Boye studied at the University of Nebraska and became a Bachelor of Arts in 1972. He then attended graduate courses at the University of Oregon. Boye received a master's degree at the University of Texas.

Career

Alan Boye served as an instructor at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon in 1977-1984. He later became an assistant professor of communication at the University of Texas, El Paso during 1984-1987. Since 1987 Boye serves as the professor of English at Lyndon State College, Lyndonville, Vermont.

Alan Boye, a native of Nebraska, wrote two travel guides to his state in the 1980s before devoting his attention to one of the lesser-known events in the tragic history of Native America: he retraced the long, often violence-scarred 1878 trek of some 300 Northern Cheyenne Indians who were fleeing the constraints of a new reservation.

Boye, an English professor at a Vermont college, explains in his 1999 book, Holding Stone Hands: On the Trail of the Cheyenne Exodus, that some of these Cheyenne had been involved in the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn, in which combined Sioux and Cheyenne forces decimated United States cavalry led by General George Custer, in its aftermath, the tribe was evicted from its original lands in Montana and compelled to relocate to a recently established reservation in Oklahoma. Some Northern Cheyenne, gathering under the leadership of Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, found conditions on the reservation abominable; starvation and disease were killing many, and their livelihood was dependent upon corrupt administrators. The Cheyenne decided to flee to Montana, a trip across the high plains of more than a thousand miles. A United States military posse of several thousand was dispatched to capture them.

Boye and three descendants of Dull Knife retraced that journey on foot in 1995, an experience that formed the basis for Holding Stone Hands. Unlike the Cheyenne, however, they were not pursued by the enemy, and they did not, as their ancestors had done, split their forces in half. Defeated and taken into custody near the border of South Dakota, Dull Knife’s contingent managed to escape from custody, but half of them died in the subsequent battle. The other band of Cheyenne, under Little Wolf, reached Montana in the end and won the right to their own reservation there. Boye explains how making such an arduous trek was, for his companions, an important spiritual journey as well, and a way to connect with their history and their ancestors, who died so they might survive. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Holding Stone Hands “a gracefully written and compassionate account,” and declared that the author “greatly enriches this story by describing his own hardships retracing the exodus through a starkly beautiful landscape.”

Achievements

• Boye received the Mari Sandoz Award in 1972 and the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award in 1999. His books Complete Roadside Guide to Nebraska and A Guide to the Ghosts of Lincoln were included in Nebraska 150 Books honor list in 2017.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Guide to the Ghosts of Lincoln

    (This expanded, updated, and revised edition of A Guide to...)

    1983
  • Holding Stone Hands

    (In 1878 approximately three hundred Northern Cheyennes un...)

    1999
  • The Complete Roadside Guide to Nebraska

    (The Complete Roadside Guide to Nebraska represents a majo...)

    1989
  • Tales from the Journey of the Dead

    (One hundred miles south of Albuquerque, two parallel chai...)

  • Sustainable Compromises

    (Living simply isn’t always simple. When Alan Boye first l...)

    2014

Connections

Alan Boye is married to Linda Wadholder. They have two children.

Father:

Arthur Boye

Mother:

Matilda (Danca) Boye

Spouse:

Linda Wadholder

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001