Among them was the family of a young Cheyenne boy who resented what he saw as the passivity of his people, and their domination by white settlers and a distant white government.

At puberty, Cheyenne youngsters are encouraged to seek truths about themselves in isolation in the hills. In days of lonely fasting and deliberately skipping sleep, a boy will thus bring on visions and voices, which tell him his role in life, the symbols of his personal power (later called 'medicine' by erroneous translation into English), and his true and secret name.

From about the age of twelve, almost certainly as the result of these personal visions and spiritual revelations, this one Cheyenne lad became notorious at the US Army outpost in Denver as the boy ringleader of a band of other equally disenchanted Cheyenne youths. These youngsters constantly harassed the soldiers by stealing horses at night and riding off north to hunt in the hills. Invariably they returned the horses, also in the dead of night, often after weeks of hunting game and enjoying the freedom of their traditional lands.

Because he was never caught, and because the horses always came back, and were well treated, little was done.

Eventually the teenage raids stopped.

The boy had fallen in love...and of all things, with the daughter of one of his hated white settler families, a young girl from Denmark. When they presented themselves to the Army chaplain for a marriage which her parents would approve of, he was asked his name.

"Billy," he said, giving the common nickname he was known by throughout the reservation.

"But what's your real name?" the chaplain asked. The boy refused to give it ... Cheyenne people believe that anyone who knows your real name will have power over you.

The stalemate was not resolved until an Army clerk was called in to talk the young Cheyenne round.

"But I know this boy," the clerk said. "He's young Billy, the horsethief." Promptly the chaplain married him to the young Danish girl, giving them the family name Robb as an invented pun.

"Better than Horsethief," he muttered.

Billy the Horsethief took his real and secret name to the grave.

He and his young Scandinavian wife managed somehow to live in the harmony that their two societies never achieved.

Their son learned the Cheyenne ways but lived in the white world. He travelled extensively, and came to New Zealand.

Their grandson, though born in the South Pacific, still went through the ritual Cheyenne awakening at puberty, and thus he has as well a secret 'real' name.