The Cheyenne Woman Whose Courage Changed The Battle Of The Little Bighorn Forever

THE WOMAN HISTORY ALMOST FORGOT

You know the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Almost every American does, at least in outline.

June 25, 1876.

The rolling grasslands of what is now Montana.

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, brash and golden-haired, leading the Seventh Cavalry into a valley that held far more warriors than his scouts had reported.

The thunder of hooves and gunfire.

The stunning defeat of the United States Army at the hands of a coalition of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors.

Custer’s Last Stand.

One of the most mythologized moments in American history.

You know Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader whose spiritual authority unified the coalition and whose vision of soldiers falling from the sky into the warriors’ camp preceded the battle.

You may know Crazy Horse, the Oglala war leader whose tactical genius helped turn the field.

You may know the names of the cavalry officers, the disputed details of exactly what happened in those final hours, the debates that historians have conducted for nearly a century and a half about how and why it all unfolded as it did.

But there is another name.

A name that belongs to someone who was present not just at Little Bighorn, but at a battle two days earlier that shaped everything that followed.

A name that Cheyenne oral tradition has preserved with fierce pride for generations, while the official histories of the United States forgot her almost entirely.

Her name was Buffalo Calf Road Woman.