The soldiers who survived did not know her name.

The accounts of the battle that dominated American historical memory for a century were written by the survivors of the Army columns, by journalists, by historians working from American documentary sources, in a tradition that did not seek out or credit Native testimony.

The Cheyenne oral tradition — preserved by generations of Northern Cheyenne storytellers, eventually recorded by ethnographers and historians who worked with tribal members — tells a different story.

In this tradition, Buffalo Calf Road Woman was present at the Little Bighorn.

She fought.

And in some versions of the account, she is credited with striking Custer — knocking him from his horse in the final moments of the battle.

The most specific and influential recording of this tradition came in the early twenty-first century, when Northern Cheyenne elders shared their community’s oral history with researchers in a more public way than had been done before.

In 2005, the Northern Cheyenne released accounts that had previously been kept within the community.

These accounts named Buffalo Calf Road Woman as the person who had knocked Custer from his horse, giving rise to the Cheyenne name for the battle: “Where the Woman Killed Him.”

The historians and scholars who have engaged with this tradition have responded in various ways.