She was the sister of a warrior named Comes in Sight — and this relationship, between sister and brother, would become the pivot point of the most important moment in her known history.

She married a warrior and chief named Black Coyote, who was known to the Northern Cheyenne as a man of standing and ability.

They had at least one child together — a daughter.

Buffalo Calf Road Woman was, in the complete sense, a person embedded in a community of people she loved, with responsibilities and relationships that gave her life its texture and meaning.

She was also, by the testimony of those who knew her, extraordinary.

SECTION 3: A NATION UNDER PRESSURE — THE WORLD CLOSING IN

The world that Buffalo Calf Road Woman had been born into was not the world she came of age in.

By the time she was a young woman, the pressures on Northern Cheyenne life had become enormous, and they were accelerating.

The great transformation began, for the Plains peoples, with the California Gold Rush of 1848 and the subsequent waves of American emigration westward.

The trails across the plains — the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, the Santa Fe Trail — carved highways through the heart of buffalo country.