She did not orient herself toward the domestic roles that Crow society assigned to women.

She oriented herself toward the world of the hunter and the raider.

And her father did not stop her.

He encouraged her.

Edwin Denig, writing about this period of her life, noted that she received training in the skills typically reserved for male members of the community — that she learned to ride, to hunt, to handle weapons, and to think like a warrior.

By the time she was a young adult, she could, in Denig’s phrase, “rival any of the young men in all their amusements and occupations.”