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Woman Warriors of Little Bighorn

Kathryn S Gardiner | Published on 11/8/2024

Forgotten Foremothers

Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women’s rights

Woman Warriors of Little Bighorn

“One Cheyenne woman fought in the battle when General Custer was killed. Her name was Calf Trail Woman,” Iron Teeth of the Cheyenne told Thomas B. Marquis, a physician and self-taught historian, in 1929. Thomas shared Iron Teeth’s words in his 1973 book Sioux and Cheyenne: The Reminiscences of Four Indians and a White Soldier.

“She rode out and kept beside her husband, Black Coyote, who was one of the Cheyenne warriors there. Wherever her husband went that day, she went also. She had a big revolver and plenty of bullets for it, and she shot the soldiers with this revolver. I was not with the Cheyennes who were camped on the Little Bighorn River at that time, but all our people talked of her having been one of the fighters.”

We met Calf Trail Woman, also called Buffalo Calf Road Woman, in this column before and discussed the various treaties signed between the tribes and the United States. But she was not the only woman who fought General George Custer’s troops at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

Pretty Nose was born in 1851 to the Arapaho. Her childhood was likely similar to Buffalo Calf Road’s. The Arapaho lived alongside the Cheyenne, sharing land and resources in the Montana area.

In 1854, Moving Robe, also called Mary Crawler, was born to Hunkpapa Sioux chief Crawler and his wife Sunflower Face. The tribe lived on the shores of South Dakota’s Grand River throughout Moving Robe’s childhood. At just age 17, she traveled with a war party for a raid on the Crow tribe in Montana. In the 1870s, her whole family moved to the Little Bighorn area when Moving Robe was in her early 20s.

Minnie Hollow Wood was born in the Lakota tribe around 1856. The birthyear of One Who Walks with the Stars, a woman of the Oglala Lakota tribe, is unknown. The Lakota were one tribe that continued to thrive, even as disease and war claimed lives across the nation. “My uncles would always talk about the ‘good old days’ of living off the land, riding horses, and a time when everyone spoke Lakhota,” remembered filmmaker Yvonne Russo, a Sicangu Lakota, in the Lakota Times.

But the clock was ticking on those “good old days.” In 1851, the year of Pretty Nose’s birth, the Treaty of Fort Laramie had been signed between the United States Government and members of the Sioux tribe, declaring “From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall for ever cease.” This peace was not to last, nor were the land allotments granted within it.

Yvonne heard those stories from her uncles, too. “In 1876, after gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills, the U.S. Army forced and confined Lakhota people to reservations, ignoring previous treaty agreements, and invaded the region,” she said.

Pretty Nose, photographed at Fort Keough in Montana, in 1879. Photo by Laton Alton Huffman.

By 1876 those pressures and the annual Sun Dance had brought all five women—Buffalo Calf Road, Pretty Nose, Moving Robe, Minnie Hollow Wood, and One Who Walks with the Stars—to the Little Bighorn region of Montana. The Sioux called this area Greasy Grass.

Custer was already well known as an “Indian Killer” by this time. “In 1864, a Colorado voluntary militia attack on Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyenne at Sand Creek resulted in the slaughter of over 150 Cheyenne people,” reported Leila Monaghan in “Cheyenne and Lakota Women at the Battle of Little Bighorn” for Montana magazine. “Four years later, Custer attacked Black Kettle’s band again, killing the peaceful leader in a bloody massacre and taking over 50 people—mostly women and children—as prisoners at the Battle of the Washita.”

Following this massacre, “naked bodies of Cheyenne men and women ‘were propped up in sexually suggestive positions by Custer’s soldiers,’” Leila wrote, sharing the accounts from a survivor named Moving Behind Woman. Many women were captured and forced into marriages. “[T]oday, what Custer organized and oversaw after Washita would be considered systematized rape.” The tales of these events and their aftermath spread among the tribes.

Minnie Hollow Wood wears her war bonnet as she makes chokecherry patties, a seasonal treat. Photo by Thomas Bailey Marquis.

Custer’s preferred method was to attack tribal encampments. Thomas argued in Keep the Last Bullet For Yourself: The True Story of Custer’s Last Stand that “All the mass killings of Indians by whites have occurred when the Indians were surprised in camp and could not escape. It may be confidently assumed that there was never any big killing of Indian warriors when the Indians were the attackers, since under such circumstance the Indians were able to withdraw whenever they chose to do so.” Custer particularly targeted women and children because the men, he noted, were easier to subdue when their families were captured.

As General Custer and his troops rode into the Montana hills on June 25, 1876, they expected to find a band of a few hundred Native Americans camped along the Little Bighorn River. Instead, they faced numbers in the thousands.

Years later, Moving Robe told an interpreter about the day Custer’s men arrived. “I was several miles from the Hunkpapa camp when I [saw a] cloud of dust rise beyond a ridge of bluffs in the east. The morning was hot and sultry. I was then 23 years old.” Custer intended his usual method of surprise attack upon a domestic encampment—but this may have been what spelled disaster for him. Custer, his soldiers, their horses...all of them had been traveling for days through the rugged terrain of Montana, hiking hills and fording rivers.

“On the Indian side, both the warriors and their ponies were in fresh condition. Up to the moment of the alarm being given that soldiers were approaching the camps, they had been engaged in the regular routine of daily life for long enough to have their vital batteries stored to full capacity,” Thomas wrote. “Even had the warriors been naturally inferior as individual fighters, their advantage in being fully rested might have enabled them to outwit and outdo their fatigued enemies.”

Moving Robe Woman in the 1900s. Photographer unknown.

It cannot be known if Pretty Nose, Moving Robe, Minnie Hollow Wood, One Who Walks with the Stars, and Buffalo Calf Road knew each other. In the numbers of thousands that were celebrating the Sun Dance, a meeting would not be inevitable, except for those who shared a tribe. It can be assumed, however, that when the first call of danger rang out, they were not in the first line of response.

“The warriors meeting them [Custer’s troops] were only a few when compared with the great numbers who came afterward. The first few were probably mostly the camp policemen, or dog soldiers, which every Indian tribal camp regularly kept ready for immediate action.” In his book, Thomas painted the dramatic scene. “There was a whirlwind of excitement and bewilderment in all the camps. Pony herds were hurried in for warriors to get their mounts. There was a rushing to get ready, and a rushing forth by each warrior as soon as he was prepared. Family noncombatants seized packs and ran for the hills. Many ran without packs, abandoning all property. Frail old people shuffled along. Sick people made off as best they could. Children screamed for mothers not in sight. Distracted mothers tried to find children lost in the tempestuous melee.”

It was in the second wave of fighters, after the “camp policemen,” that our four heroines likely took up arms. While most wives, mothers, and sisters ran for safety in the hills, Minnie Hollow Wood and One Who Walks with the Stars insisted upon staying with their husbands.

One Who Walks with the Stars, Oglala Sioux. Art by Daniel Long Soldier.

Custer’s men had murdered Moving Robe’s brother, so she had a score to settle. “I sang a death song for my brother who had been killed,” she said. “My heart was bad. Revenge! Revenge! For my brother’s death. I thought of the death of my young brother, One Hawk. ... I painted my face with crimson and braided my black hair. I was mourning. I was a woman, but I was not afraid.”

It’s uncertain what motivated Pretty Nose beyond what motivated all the other warriors around her: their homes and their people were under attack.

“To show bravery—preferably without being obliged to do any killing—was the Indian warrior’s paramount aim,” according to Thomas’s interviews. “The degree of risk a warrior took, not the devastation he wrought, brought him the honor he coveted.”

But all of these tribes had interacted with Custer and his men before, and they had heard the stories from Sand Creek and Washita. “According to the Indian conceptions of warfare, white soldiers did not fight fairly,” Thomas said. “They simply began at once to try to kill, and kept on doing nothing else. They did not mourn or show any indication of sorrow at the taking of life. By Indian standards, such opponents may well have seemed to behave like outright murderers rather than like honorable combat opponents.”

“It was not a massacre, but a hotly contested battle between two armed forces,” Moving Robe said.

In the fury of battle itself, only Moving Robe and One Who Walks with the Stars have been tied to specific events. A few eyewitness accounts say One Who Walks with the Stars clubbed to death two soldiers trying to flee across the river.

Based upon the recollection of Eagle Elk, an Oglala warrior whose account Leila shares in her article, Moving Robe killed two soldiers, including Isaiah Dorman. Isaiah was a former slave who had married into the Hunkpapa tribe, but he’d also become an interpreter for Custer’s cavalry. “Do not kill me, because I will be dead in a short while anyway,” Eagle Elk reported the man saying. Isaiah had been wounded already and fallen from his horse. Eagle Elk said Moving Robe then replied, “If you did not want to be killed, why did you not stay home where you belong and not come to attack us?”

After his death, Isaiah’s body was shot repeatedly with both bullets and arrows, his blood was drained, and his genitals mutilated. Leila wrote, “As the husband of a Hunkpapa woman, [Isaiah] had been regarded as a member of the tribe, thus his role as interpreter and aid for the Seventh Cavalry was viewed as betrayal.”

White soldiers reported such mutilations, especially those perpetrated by women, with great shock and disdain. “Rather than seeing Native women as having a legitimate role in the defense of their community,” Leila said, “witnesses...applied white norms and consequently judged these women to be failed members of their gender. In doing so, they characterized the women’s expression of grief as ‘howling’ rather than what it was: mourning rites for dead relatives. ... White Americans have long conceived of warfare and domestic life as separate spheres, but Indian people on the plains had no such luxury during the nineteenth century.”

Any number of factors may have contributed to the tribes’ victory in what they called the Battle of the Greasy Grass. They were greater in number, better rested, and knew their home terrain far better than outsiders ever could. “The warriors on their swift ponies found it easy to catch up with the fleeing soldiers, and the soldiers for their part found it impossible to evade them,” Thomas reported.

Many tribes and individuals took credit for the final murder of Custer. Leila shared the account of Pretty White Buffalo, one of the women who fled to safety, who said, “The women crossed the river after the men of the village, and when we came to the hill there were no soldiers living and Long Hair [Custer] lay dead among the rest. ... The blood of the people was hot and their hearts bad, and they took no prisoners that day.”

The tribes celebrated their victory and mourned their dead. As was custom, they moved camp. For her courage in the conflict, Minnie Hollow Wood received a war bonnet, a beautiful, feathered headdress. She was the first woman to ever earn the honor. Thomas took a photo of her wearing it in 1926, giving the photo only the caption, “Turkey Leg and his wife.”

What happened to One Who Walks with the Stars after the battle is unknown, but her husband, Crow Dog, lived on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota until his death in 1912.

Moving Robe eventually relocated the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Some reports indicate she had a one-room log house and owned horses and cattle. “The brave men who came to punish us that morning were defeated; but in the end the Indians lost,” Moving Robe said in 1931. “I am a woman, but I fought for my people. The white man will never understand the Indian.” She died in 1935, in her early 80s.

Pretty Nose lived to the age of 101, long enough to see her great grandson become a veteran of the Korean War. She was there to meet him when he returned to Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation in 1952. As Mark tells it, his great grandmother Pretty Nose wore the tribal cuffs of a war chief. “For many of us, it was just a few grandmothers ago that the Battle of Little Bighorn happened,” Yvonne said.

Perhaps it seems strange to profile these women as “heroes” for “women’s rights” as the subhead of this series suggests. Frequent readers of this column might have wondered at this writer’s definition of those terms before. In Forgotten Foremothers we’ve met glorious speakers and individuals of kindness and virtue—but we’ve also met neglectful mothers, women involved with criminal circles, and those who have taken the lives of others as our warriors here likely did.

Historical narrative tends to distill the indigenous people of the United States into two archetypes. Thanksgiving lore tells of the welcoming tribe who shared a meal with the newly arrived and poorly equipped immigrants from England. Western movies and novels often depict the “noble savage,” or simply a bloodthirsty one.

There’s value, in this writer’s opinion, in presenting people—especially women—with greater nuance. So why has this column treated fighters as heroes? Why has it called rough women, apathetic women, and even women who viewed society with contempt “heroes”?

In a culture that wants to deem only certain qualities “feminine,” there’s revolution in demanding that women be reckoned with as the complex human beings they are. These profiles are not to praise war or violence but to recognize courage of conviction—the bravery to resist and the will to act.

For every defeat, there was a fight. The fights mattered, even if they were lost. Our actions and words can stand as a record to time: “Someone knew this was wrong.” We should never look back at history’s bleakest outcomes and say, “Why didn’t anyone stop it?” because there are surely countless stories of those who tried. Perhaps they even nearly succeeded. Perhaps they even celebrated and believed they had won.

The long lens of time dulls the landscape, but the people in the moment live on the edge of a knife, not knowing which way each event may cut and who may be left bleeding. Fictional heroes have the foresight of a guided narrative. As we exist in the real world with history unfolding beneath our feet, we can only act with hope and the courage of our convictions.

“I was a woman, but I was unafraid,” Moving Robe said. “I was a woman, but I fought for my people.”

“Lots of times I sit here alone on the floor with my blanket wrapped about me,” Iron Teeth told Thomas in 1929. “I lean forward and close my eyes and think of him [her son, Gathering His Medicine] standing up out of the pit and fighting the soldiers, knowing that he would be killed, but doing this so that his little sister might get away to safety. Don’t you think he was a brave young man?”

Sources:

Lakota Times: Minnie’s War Bonnet: A Modern Native Warrior Woman by Yvonne Russo
Archive.org: Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself: The True Story of Custer’s Last Stand by Thomas Bailey Marquis; Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight: New Sources of Indian-Military History; Cheyenne and Sioux: The Reminiscences of Four Indians and a White Soldier by Marquis Bailey Marquis

Montana magazine: Cheyenne and Lakota Woman at the Battle of Little Bighorn by Leila Monaghan

Landmark Events in Native American History by Michael L. Lawson

Wikipedia: Minnie Hollow Wood, Moving Robe Woman, One Who Walks with the Stars, Pretty Nose, Battle of Little Bighorn, Thomas Bailey Marquis

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