There is something fitting, if not comfortable, in this: a woman whose life is imperfectly documented in the available records, whose burial location was erased by fire, whose story has been repeatedly at risk of disappearing into the larger narratives that the history of the American West constructed.

She did not disappear.

The records are thin, but they exist.

The Franchère journal records the moment of recognition on the Columbia River.

The NPS account preserves the basic shape of the survival journey.

The historical markers and the statue in Parma, Idaho, acknowledge that she was there and that what she did mattered.

The Larger Story She Was Written Out Of

The history of the American West, as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was largely written as the history of European and Euro-American exploration, settlement, and commercial expansion.