She died three years after the Fort Laramie Treaty and a little over two decades before the Great Sioux War and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The world she knew — in which the Crow and their neighbors were the dominant forces of the northern plains, where the fur trade economy created sustained contact with Americans but not conquest, where a woman could build a career as a warrior chief and die on a diplomatic mission — that world was already ending when she died.

In some ways, her death was symbolic of the world’s ending.

The peace mission that killed her was premised on the idea that the new diplomatic reality created by the Fort Laramie Treaty made Gros Ventre-Crow reconciliation possible.