Most comparable figures from this era are either completely undocumented or known only through garbled and biased accounts.

The fact that Denig’s account survives is itself partly accidental.

His writings were collected and edited after his death, and the account of Woman Chief was published as part of a volume on the upper Missouri tribes edited by John C.

Ewers and published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1961.

This publication brought Denig’s account to scholarly attention, and subsequent historians of the American West and of Native American women’s history have drawn on it extensively.

The chain of preservation — Denig observes and writes, the manuscript survives, Ewers edits and publishes, historians find and cite — is the specific mechanism through which Woman Chief’s story entered the modern scholarly record.