The warriors defending the camp — led by Crazy Horse among others — cut off his column from the river crossing that was his best route to the camp.

Surrounded, outmanned, and outmaneuvered, Custer’s five companies were destroyed in what was probably less than an hour of fighting.

The Cheyenne warriors who fought at the northern end — some of them the same men who had fought at the Rosebud eight days earlier — were among the most aggressive in the final action.

Their anger at everything they had been through, their determination to protect the families in the camp behind them, their skill and courage — all of it came to bear in those final chaotic minutes.

And the community’s memory preserved the name of a woman who was part of it.

EXTENDED SECTION: HOW SCHOLARS HAVE APPROACHED BUFFALO CALF ROAD WOMAN

The scholarly treatment of Buffalo Calf Road Woman’s story has evolved significantly over the past several decades, in ways that reflect broader changes in how American history is written and whose voices are considered authoritative.

In the decades immediately following the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the scholarly literature on the battle was almost entirely written from American military sources — the official reports, the survivor testimonies from Reno and Benteen’s commands, the investigations and analyses produced by Army officers and their allies in the press and publishing world.

Native perspectives were occasionally quoted when they confirmed elements of the American account, but they were rarely treated as independent historical sources of equal standing.

The first generation of researchers who seriously engaged with Native testimony — people like Thomas Marquis, who recorded Wooden Leg’s account in the 1920s — were working in a scholarly environment that was somewhat more receptive to Native sources than the immediate postwar period had been, but still tended to treat Native accounts as supplementary color rather than primary evidence.