She rode through the night and through mountains and through hostile country for years.

She was captured.

She was imprisoned far from home.

She died of disease in a place that bore no resemblance to the mountains she had defended.

She was probably in her forties when she died.

She never surrendered.

The specific combination of these facts — the extraordinary capability, the specific commitment, the specific end — is what makes her story worth telling and worth remembering.

Not because it has a happy ending.