News / Articles

Pretty Shield, Crow medicine-woman

Kathryn S Gardiner | Published on 11/10/2025

Forgotten Foremothers

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

Hinges creaked on the small door of the cannon stove as he stoked the fire within. The harsh winds of March rattled the windows. The white man waited in “a corner of a room in the unused school building” for his interview subject to arrive. “Knowing the natural shyness of Indian women,” he wrote, he was worried she might not come.

But his chosen subject, Pretty Shield, a medicine-woman of the Crow tribe, came. Accompanying her was another woman, a translator named Goes-together, “wife of Deer-nose, the Indian Police Judge.” Pretty Shield had some questions for Frank before they began.

“She wants to know what it is that you wish her to tell you,’” Goes-together asked him. When Frank answered that he wanted to know “everything that happened to her since she was a little girl,” Pretty-shield laughed, “eyes merry.”

“We shall be here until we die. Many things have happened to me,” she said through Goes-together. “I am an old woman.” The year was 1931, and she stood in this old schoolhouse as a woman in the latter half of her 70s.

Frank insisted that this was why he wanted to interview her. “I want only a woman’s story, a woman who has lived a long time.” Pretty Shield took a seat and agreed to their talk. They would speak in a combination of Hand Talk, or Plains Indian Sign Language, which Frank knew, and translations of the Crow language through Goes-together.

In “Tell Me a Woman’s Story”: The Question of Gender in the Construction of “Waheenee, Pretty-Shield,” and “Papago Woman,” author and environmental activist Christine Colasurdo praised Frank B. Linderman for doing what so many white recorders of indigenous stories failed to do: He put himself and his own limitations on the page for the reader.

“One learns that the interview takes place in an impersonal setting—neither Linderman's house nor Pretty-shield's—and one which represents Euro-American culture,” she explained. “It is an ‘unused’ school built by the American government for the Indians. It appears uncomfortable—drafty and abandoned. ... Linderman's relief at their arrival connotes both a certain modesty and victory—he will have his story. The fact that the interpreter, Goes-together, is the wife of the Indian Police Judge tells the reader that Euro-American acculturation has already occurred, and that Goes-together is not only bilingual but most likely bicultural.”

Frank also acknowledged that story through an interpreter would inevitably cause some “mutation.” “Pretty-shield was all that I could have wished. If I have failed to let my readers know her the fault is mine,” he said.

___

Pretty Shield was born in 1856 or 1857, “across the Big [Missouri] river from the mouth of Plum Creek in the moon when the ice goes out of rivers [March] of the snow that Yellow-calf, and his war-party, was wiped out by the Lacota [Sioux].” Her people were the Crow tribe, specifically a clan called the Sore-lip “[Burned-mouth, sun-burned lips.]”

From granddaughter Alma Hogan Snell’s book. The caption reads: “Frank B. Linderman, much as Alma remembers him. Courtesy of Linderman heirs.”

Just five years earlier, the Treaty of Fort Laramie, also called the Horse Creek Treaty, divided the land between the European immigrants and the indigenous tribes. The Crow were given the territory “commencing at the mouth of Powder River on the Yellowstone; thence up Powder River to its source; thence along the main range of the Black Hills and Wind River Mountains to the head-waters of the Yellowstone River...” This tract of land is in modern-day Montana and Wyoming.

Just as their land shrank, their English name of Crow is a condensed translation of Apsáalooke, meaning “people [or children] of the large-beaked bird.” Their tribe initially lived in two primary regions, leading to the titles of Mountain Crow and River Crow. Pretty Shield was one of eleven children born to father Kills-in-the-night and mother Crazy-sister-in-law of the Mountain Crow. As the story goes, she was named by her grandfather in honor of his attractive war shield. “My grandfather’s shield was handsome; and it was big medicine. It was half red and half blue. This war-shield always hung on his back-rest at night,” she said.

“Did women ever name their children?” Frank asked.

“Yes, sometimes. A wise one, even though she be a woman, possesses this right,” Pretty Shield answered, then told Frank that she herself had “named my own children, and all of my grandchildren. My Helpers, the ants, gave me all these names. I listen to the ant-people, even to this day, and often hear them calling each other by names that are fine. I never forget them.”

One of these grandchildren, a granddaughter named Alma Hogan Snell, wrote her own story with the help of anthropologist Becky Matthews. Grandmother’s Grandchild: My Crow Indian Life was published in 2000. “When I was about eight years old, Grandma gave me a new name,” Alma wrote. “She didn’t have a ceremony. She did it at home by herself, and a few people in my family were there. My first name had been ‘Lady that Searches for Rocks with Holes in Them,’ but Biá Asíitash, meaning ‘Well-Known Woman,’ became my new name. Later, Grandma would laugh and say, ‘It’s good that I changed your name. ... If you had kept that old name, people might have shortened it to Looks for Holes.’ She was always saying something crazy. I was glad she changed my name.”

From granddaughter Alma Hogan Snell’s book. The caption reads: “Alma as a young teen.”

As a child, Pretty Shield was given to an aunt to be raised. Her aunt’s own husband and two daughters had been killed by the Lakota. Pretty Shield then went to live among the River Crow, reuniting with her mother frequently when all the Crows gathered. Of her father, Pretty Shield told Frank that he “had one bad fault that we knew about. He liked other women besides my mother pretty well; and yet he was always kindly, never cross. His heart was big.”

During these long, cold days of talking in an old schoolhouse, Pretty Shield shared many stories of her youth and running around with friends. The girls would dance, hunt, play with dolls, and go sledding down the hills in the winter. As she aged, Pretty Shield tried to copy the women she admired in the village. Her tales reveal a girlhood of long traditions and timeless teachings, as well as the precarity of bordering the lands of other tribes.

“The day was warm. Flowers were everywhere, and birds were singing in the bushes and trees,” she said, describing a sun-dance gathering at the foot of cliff. “We girls wore our usual clothes, as dancing women do, painting our faces to please ourselves. ... The dance made us forget everything else. ... The beating drum, our whistles, made from the big bone of an eagle’s wing, our dancing, made us grownups whose hearts were in the sun-dance. Our heads thrown back, our eyes on the sky above us, we kept our bodies going with the steadily beating drum...”

The euphoric moment was broken when the boy beside her suddenly stopped dancing. “A Lacota war-party was looking down at us from the top of the cliff!” Everyone ran from a rain of arrows. Still so young, Pretty Shield’s first worries were that the Lakota would steal her ball and her doll from her. “Our men were constantly fighting. They had to fight,” she said, speaking of her father as a great warrior. “Ahh, how our men did fight to hold our country against our enemies; and there were so many enemies of the Crows.”

She was “six snows old” when she first saw white people. These initial interactions were with fur trappers and traders, and largely mundane. Pretty Shield recalled that their beards “did not look nice,” but one had “kindly eyes.” At seven, a confrontation with a buffalo left her with a root-digging blade lodged in her forehead. “A wise one” named Medicine-wolf was called to help. “He made these little pulling motions; and the root-digger came out, leaving my eye a lifted a little. This he pushed back into its place with his fingers. But my forehead and eye swelled badly. I had a headache for nearly a moon afterward. ... In three moons I was strong again; but my left eye has never been as good as it was before that made bull got after me.”

In another tale, she and a playgroup of boys and girls found an old, rusted gun high in a hill. “Nobody but a boy would have even picked it up,” she said. “It had been lost a long time. ... Guns were not plentiful then.” The boys danced and played with the weapon, until one of them was accidentally shot and killed. “I ran. We all ran; even the boy who had fired the shot. But he did not run far. He went back, lifted the dying one’s head, and said, ‘I’m sorry. I did not mean to kill you, my friend.’ ‘I know you didn’t, and yet you have killed me,’” the other replied. “He never spoke again.”

“The dead boy’s oldest brother tied the old gun upon his own back, keeping it there day and night, during all his time of mourning,” Pretty Shield said. “I have tried to forget all of this, and yet it stays in my mind as though I wished to keep it there.”

“I was always afraid of it, myself. And yet guns did much to make our lives easier. Our men could kill the buffalo without so much trouble after they got guns. ... The guns killed quickly, and I think now, a little too quickly. Looking back I can see this, and other mistakes that we made.” The horse, she determined, was the better of the improvements for her people.

At age 13, Pretty Shield’s father promised her to a man named Goes Ahead. They would marry when she turned 16. “I was then the same as a married woman,” Pretty Shield explained. “This was the custom with the Crows. Being the same as a married woman made me try to act in a dignified manner, although I kept my girl friends and played the same as ever.”

She did not know Goes Ahead well before their marriage, but “I fell in love with him, because he loved me and was always kind. Young women did not then fall in love, and get married to please themselves, as they do now.” Pretty Shield seemed content with her arrangement, considering it still the best practice for her clan.

Goes Ahead was already married to her older sister, Standing-medicine-rock. After Pretty Shield, he would also “take” her younger sister, Two-scalps, when she turned 16. “So...there were three lodges, all sisters, and all belonging to Goes-ahead.”

This was not always harmonious, Pretty Shield admitted, and not all the sisters appreciated the situation. “Standing-medicine-rock, my oldest sister, was not a very good woman. I mean that she liked other men, and that she sometimes forgot she belonged to Goes-ahead. I knew about it, and talked to her. But I did not tell on her. It was my brother’s duty to do this, according to our tribal custom, and not mine, so that I only talked to her. But talking did no good.” She added that her sister was, however, “a good worker. There was nothing lazy about her.”

Soon after she became a married woman, still only 16, Pretty Shield’s father Kills-in-the-night died. “Did the Lacota kill your father?” Frank asked.

“No. Smallpox killed him, and more than a hundred others, in one moon,” she said. “I had it myself. ... We were in our winter camp when it came. We did not know what sickness it was. We did not scatter, as we ought to have done, and the bad-sickness got to every lodge before we knew its power. ... Tst, tst, tst, my heart was on the ground with many others. Until the bad-sickness came to our world my people were scarcely ever sick. War and accidents took many lives. We were used to these, expecting to have to meet them any day, but the bad-sickness was new, and terrible. I will not try to tell you how awful it was. When a woman sees whole families wiped out, even whole clans, and cannot help, cannot even hope, her heart falls down and she wishes that she could die.”

Of the three sisters married to Goes Ahead, Pretty Shield was the only one to have children, which granted her higher status within the tribe and greater favor with her husband. “It was my face that he painted when he had gained that right by saving a Crow warrior’s life in battle. And it was I who rode his warhorse and carried his shield. Ahh, I felt proud when my man painted my face.”

From granddaughter Alma Hogan Snell’s book. The caption reads: “Goes Ahead and Pretty Shield together. c. 1895. He is wearing his presidential medallion, and she is in an elk tooth dress.”

In all, she would have four girls and three boys with Goes Ahead. She described her first delivery to Frank, which was well summarized and explained by Brianna Theobald in Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century:

“When Pretty Shield went into labor, her mother and Left-hand, a ‘wise-one’—healer and midwife—directed her to a lodge constructed for birthing. Once in the lodge, Left-hand placed four live coals on the ground in each cardinal direction and dropped grass on each coal. She then instructed Pretty Shield to ‘walk as though you are busy.’ As Pretty Shield recalled the experience decades later, the delivery proceeded quickly from that point: ‘I had stepped over the second coal when I saw that I should have to run if I reached my bed-robe in time. I jumped the third coal, and the fourth, knelt down on my robe, took hold of the two stakes; and my first child, Pine-fire, was there with us.’ Left-hand wrapped a strip of tanned buffalo skin around Pretty Shield’s waist to help expel the afterbirth, cleaned and dressed Pine-fire, and left the infant in the care of her mother and grandmother. The story of Pretty Shield’s first delivery reveals key features of a Crow birthing culture: she labored in a female-only space, and knowledgeable—in Left-hand’s case powerful—older women played a critical role in her experience.”

Pretty Shield would outlive all of her daughters—two died in infancy, two as adults with children of their own. As she described to Frank, it was grief that first brought her to her trusted friends, the ants. “I had lost a little girl, a beautiful baby girl. I had been mourning for more than two moons. I had slept little, sometimes lying down alone in the hills at night, and always on hard places. I ate only enough to keep me alive, hoping for a medicine-dream, a vision, that would help me to live and to help others.”

She would have that dream, or a vision, “one morning, after a night spent on a high cliff.” As she returned to her lodge, she saw a woman who called to her. This apparition led her to an ant hill. “Rake up the edges of this ant hill and ask for the things that you wish, daughter,” the woman said to her. So Pretty Shield did, wishing for “good luck and a good life.”

“I was weak. In my lodge there were no bed-robes for me, because I had long ago destroyed all my comfortable things. But now, in this medicine-dream, I entered a beautiful white lodge with a war-eagle at the head. He did not speak to me, and yet I have often seen him since that day, and even now the ants help me. I listen to them always. They are my medicine, these busy, powerful little people, the ants.”

Frank set out to record “a woman’s story,” so Pretty Shield’s narrative includes several interactions where he urged her to return to topics related to women, or she self-consciously adjusted her narrative—“you only want women’s stories”—cutting off a wider discussion before Frank could. Once, because she wanted to speak of animals and our relationship to them, she assured Frank, “You have asked me only for a woman’s story, and I have found one. It is about a woman I used to know, a woman and a mouse; and even the mouse was a woman-mouse, so I will tell you the story.”

In her essay, Christine “wonder[ed] if the unrecounted details of her life as a medicine woman from a prestigious clan within the Crow nation would not provide a very different sort of narrative. ... Because Pretty-shield is ‘supposed to’ talk only about ‘women's matters,’ her story is essentially contrived; she is not comfortable talking about ‘women's things’ with a white male interviewer and therefore tends to stray to general tribal stories. Or perhaps the Crow medicine woman simply does not view the world as her Euro-American interviewer does; perhaps ‘women's things’ and ‘men's things’ are simply ‘tribal things.’”

Alma shared this story from her youth. “Sometimes I would be with my grandma and other women, and I noticed that they enjoyed being together. They enjoyed each other. They teased and told jokes, and the joke would kind of catch on, and it would go from one to one. But if someone came in, they got quiet. It’s as if they were always anticipating something—like in the old days watching out for the enemy.”

In her book, granddaughter Alma Hogan Snell shared many photos of her grandmother. The caption reads: “Pretty Shield with firewood on her shoulders.”

Pretty Shield was a young mother in her 20s when the Battle of Little Bighorn, also called Custer’s Last Stand, broke out in June of 1876. Pretty Shield wasn’t there, but her husband Goes Ahead was. He was one of the scouts for George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry. “And for that the Great Chief in Washington sends me, every moon, a paper that I trade away for thirty dollars,” Pretty Shield said. “And I need it for my grandchildren. I wish it were more.”

Invited to share what she can remember of the battle, she walked to the old schoolhouse’s door and “stood there looking out at the hill that is thickly covered with gleaming white monuments marking the supposed spots where, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1876, General Custer and Troops C, E, I, F, and L, of the famous Seventh United States Calvary, died to the last man,” Frank described.

“This country smelled of dead men for a whole summer after the fight... Ahh, war is bad. There was always somebody missing, because of war,” she said, before she “paused, a quizzical look in her eyes.” She then told Frank the story of Osh-Tisch, a woman who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn (whose story we have explored before—and Osh-Tisch was not the only woman who fought).

Pretty Shield said that Goes Ahead tried to warn Custer, or “Son-of-the-morning-star” as they called him, that “there were more Lacota, more enemies, than there were bullets in the soldiers’ belts, that there were too many to fight. But Son-of-the-morning-star was going to his death, and he did not know it. He was like a feather blown by the wind, and had to go. ... Tst, tst, tst! He would not listen. ... [T]he soldier chief wanted to fight. He had to fight because he had to die. And this made others die with him. ... My man, Goes-ahead, told me that Son-of-the-morning-star drank too often from the straw-covered bottle...”

Christine noted that these memories further challenged Frank’s imposed borders to their talk. “The fact that the last few chapters discuss an ‘unwomanly’ thing—war—and that the stories are Pretty-shield's own,” she wrote, “testifies to the fact that the division between women's stories and men's stories can and does blur, regardless of culture.”

In the late 1880s, Pretty Shield’s Crow clan still lived in the Little Bighorn area. “I was thirty-two years old when my good mother died. She was not much older than I am when she went away from us. I missed her more than you can understand. My mother appeared to be well and strong as ever, and then one day when our village was on the Little Bighorn, she left us.”

She had been a widow for 12 years when Frank interviewed her in 1931. After Goes Ahead’s death, granddaughter Alma shared that “there were other, older men who wanted her. This one man said, ‘I have no heirs. If you marry me, then I’ll take your grandchildren as my own. My land will be yours and theirs.’” Pretty Shield let him down gently. No, she said, she still belonged to Goes Ahead and she “want[ed] him to see me as he left me.”

During these cold March days of conversation, Frank, Pretty Shield, and the translator Goes-together spoke of the Battle of Little Bighorn, a past long destroyed, and an uncertain future for her people. On these last topics, Frank let Pretty Shield talk without interruption. Nearly 100 years later, that still feels like the right thing to do:

“Tst, tst, tst! I haven’t seen a buffalo in more than forty years. ... I do not hate anybody, not even the white man. ... I have never let myself hate the white man, because I knew this would only make things worse for me. But he changed everything for us, did many bad deeds before we got used to him.” She then leaned toward Frank to say, “White cowboys met a deaf and dumb Crow boy on the plains, and because he could not answer their questions, could not even hear what they said, they roped him and dragged him to death.”

“‘Sickness came, strange sickness that nobody knew about when there was no meat,’ she said, covering her face with both hands as though to shut out the sight of suffering. ‘My daughter stepped into a horse’s track that was deep in the dried clay, and hurt her ankle. I could not heal her; nobody could. The white doctor told me that the same sickness that makes people cough themselves to death was in my daughter’s ankle. I did not believe it, yet she died, leaving six little children. Then my other daughter died, and left hers. These things would not have happened if we Crows had been living as we were intended to live. But how could we live in the old way when everything was gone?”

“Ahh, my heart felt down when I began to see dead buffalo scattered all over our beautiful country, killed and skinned, and left to rot by white men, many, many, hundreds of buffalo. ... The whole country smelled of rotting meat. Even the flowers could not put down the bad smell. Our hearts were like stones. And yet nobody believed, even then, that the white man could kill all the buffalo. Since the beginning of things there had always been so many! Even the Lacota, as bad as their hearts were for us, would not do such a thing as this; nor the Cheyenne, nor the Arapahoe, nor the Pecunnie; and yet the white man did this, even when he did not want the meat.”

“We believed for a long time that the buffalo would again come to us; but they did not. We grew hungry and sick and afraid, all in one. Not believing their own eyes our hunters rode very far looking for buffalo, so far away that even if they had found a herd we could not have reached it in half a moon. ‘Nothing; we found nothing,’ they told us, and then, hungry, stared at the empty plains, as though dreaming. After this their hearts were no good anymore. If the Great White Chief in Washington had not given us food we should have been wiped out without even a chance to fight for ourselves.”

“And then white men began to fence the plains so that we could not travel; and anyhow there was now little good in traveling, nothing to travel for. We began to stay in one place, and to grow lazy and sicker all the time. Our men had fought hard against our enemies, holding them back from our beautiful country by their bravery; but now, with everything else going wrong, we began to be whipped by weak foolishness. Our men, our leaders, began to drink the white man’s whisky, letting it do their thinking. Because we were used to listening to our chiefs in the buffalo days, the days of war and excitement, we listened to them now; and we got whipped. Our wise-ones became fools, and drank the white man’s whisky. But what else was there for us to do? We knew no other way than to listen to our chiefs and head men. Our old men used to be different; even our children were different when the buffalo were here.”

“Tst, tst, tst! We were given a reservation, a fine one, long ago. We had many, many horses, and even cattle that the Government had given us. We might have managed to get along if the White Chief in Washington had not leased our lands to white stockmen. These men, some of them, shot down our horses on our own lands, because they wanted the grass for themselves.”

“‘Yes,’ she went on, her eyes snapping, ‘these white men shot down our horses so that their cows and sheep might have the grass. They even paid three dollars for each pair of horse’s ears, to get our horses killed. It was as though our horses, on our own lands, were wolves that killed the white man’s sheep.”

“I have not long to stay here. ... I shall soon be going away from this world; but my grandchildren will have to stay here for a long time yet. I wonder how they will make out. I wonder if the lease-money that is paid to the Government in Washington by the white stockmen will be given to my grandchildren when it is paid in, or if they will have to wear out their moccasins going to the Agency office to ask for it, as I do. … But then ... I suppose they will be wearing the white man’s shoes, because shoes last longer than moccasins.”

As one of these grandchildren wearing “white men’s shoes,” Alma heard even more about this struggle in her grandmother’s heart. “Pretty Shield said, ‘I understand. Now, I’m beginning to understand what it’s all about. They want all our children to be educated in their way—the white man way. ... It hurts. It hurts, and I feel so helpless. It’s just as if I’m nothing. I’m nothing no more; where I was capable, where I prided myself in keeping my lodge, here I am at the brink of no more. ... My children are snatched from me and sent away to learn this new way which I fear. But they must go. It’s the law. They do what they want to us in spite of our protests, so we just have to try to suppress our emotions and harbor them in our hearts and hope for the best.”

Frank’s book, originally titled Red Mother, was published in 1932. It would be reprinted in 1972 as Pretty-shield: Medicine Women of the Crows. Nearly each chapter ends with Pretty Shield saying she needed to return home and feed her grandchildren. In her book, Alma shared stories of who Pretty Shield was in the hours after meeting with Frank: a grandmother teaching her grandkids to dig up turnips, an old woman who still dressed in the old ways and washed her clothes in the river. She never learned English and would point to the items in stores that she wanted to buy. She converted to Christianity in her later years, and stopped her medicine woman practice, though some Crow beliefs would stay with her forever. She would often caution Alma about different animals, like otters whose fleeting touch in the water could be a harbinger of death.

Pretty Shield died in 1944 in her late 80s. Alma recalled a conversation she had with her sister Frances, before her own early death during a surgery to remove a tumor. Sick in bed, Frances saw her grandmother Pretty Shield sitting in the room. “Frances thought, ‘Well, Grandma’s dead, but she’s here.’ ... From that moment, she knew she was going to go. ... Because of that,” Alma wrote, “I always think Pretty Shield is in heaven.”

A comment Pretty Shield made to Frank gives us a picture of what her heaven might be. “The happiest days of my life were spent following the buffalo herds over our beautiful country,” she said. “My mother and father and Goes-ahead, my man, were all kind, and we were so happy. Then, when my children came I believed I had everything that was good on this world. There were always so many, many buffalo, plenty of good fat meat for everybody.”

Sources:

Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows by Frank B. Linderman

Grandmother’s Grandchild: My Crow Indian Life by Alma Hogan Snell

“Tell Me a Woman’s Story”: The Question of Gender in the Construction of “Waheenee, Pretty-Shield,” and “Papago Woman” by Christine Colasurdo

Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians: Pretty Shield (CA. 1856/1857-1944)

Montana.gov: Treaty of Fort Laramie with Sioux, Etc., 1851

National Parks Service: Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 (Horse Creek Treaty)

Crow Reservation Timeline: Crow Tribe 2017

Wikipedia: Pretty Shield, Goes Ahead, Battle of Little Bighorn, Alma Hogan Snell

Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century by Brianna Theobald

Return to Previous Page