The fact that her community named a battle after her act of courage — the most significant naming they could bestow — is the clearest possible evidence that what she did was understood and honored within the framework of Cheyenne values.

EXTENDED SECTION: THE BATTLE OF THE ROSEBUD — A CLOSER LOOK

The Battle of the Rosebud deserves more attention than it typically receives in popular histories of the Indian Wars.

It is usually treated as a prelude to Little Bighorn — important primarily because it removed Crook’s column from the converging advance that might have made a difference to Custer’s fate.

But the battle itself was a remarkable military engagement, and the forces and personalities involved illuminate the world that Buffalo Calf Road Woman moved through.

General George Crook was, by most assessments, one of the more capable and thoughtful of the Army officers involved in the Indian Wars.

He was a careful planner, attentive to logistics, and notably more willing than some of his colleagues to acknowledge the humanity and military effectiveness of the people he was fighting against.

He was also, by the late 1870s, genuinely conflicted about the policy he was being asked to implement — he had seen enough of reservation conditions to understand that the government’s promises to Native peoples were consistently broken.

None of this made him the enemy of those promises, in the sense of refusing to carry out his orders.

But it meant that his accounts of the battles he fought carry a certain quality of honest observation that is sometimes absent from the more triumphalist reports of other officers.