The question the title of this article asks — how did someone this remarkable come to be forgotten? — has been answered in the course of telling her story.

She was forgotten because the mechanisms of historical memory were not designed to preserve her story.

She was a Native American woman in a world that mostly didn’t document Native American women.

She died before she could leave an extensive documentary record.

The main accounts of her life were written by outsiders with limited categories for understanding her, or by a frontiersman whose reliability was severely compromised by his own interests and imagination.

These are the reasons.