The accounts of Woman Chief that survive are almost entirely from outsiders — Denig, Kurz, and the problematic Beckwourth.

This creates a specific kind of documentary problem: we know her through the eyes of people who were encountering someone who didn’t fit their preconceptions, and whose accounts reflect that encounter as much as they reflect her.

Denig and Kurz called her the “Absaroka Amazon.” Absaroka is the Crow name for their own nation; Amazon was the mythological Greek warrior woman.

The comparison was meant to convey her extraordinary character, but it also reveals how their minds were working: they reached for a Western mythological figure to explain something they didn’t have native categories for.