Hidden Figure: Buffalo Calf Road, A Young Cheyenne Warrior

You know this story as “Custer’s Last Stand” from history class when a glorified US troop was defeated by Native Peoples. But do you know about the brave Native Woman who defeated him? The account of this history from the Cheyenne people surfaced over 100 years later and at the center of this Indigenous history is Buffalo Calf Road, the brave woman who defeated colonizer General George Amstrong Custer. Tribal oral accounts of history would reveal the story of Buffalo Calf Road after 130 summers of silence, a vow made by Northern Cheyenne Chiefs to wait 100 summers to publicly issue their account of this battle in fear of retribution from the U.S government.

An illustration of Buffalo Calf Road at Little Bighorn Battle. No known photos exist of the warrior.

Buffalo Calf Road, a young Cheyenne warrior woman with a gun in one hand, and her baby tied securely to her back, in her early twenties was fighting against the westward expansion of pioneers, miners, and an army seeking to devour and colonize the land on the great plains and force the Lakota Sioux, the Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho onto reservations. Indigenous people in this area would experience mass genocide, massacres, and forced removal. Colonizers brutally stole the land and resources, and the native people suffered, but not without resistance.

At the Battle of the Rosebud on June 17, 1876, Buffalo Calf Road took up arms and rode into the fight alongside the warriors. Despite opposition to women joining the battle, Buffalo Calf Road was determined to save her people from the advancing colonizers. One woman remembers Buffalo Calf Road's at this battle:

"Most of the women looking at the battle stayed out of reach of the bullets, as I did. But there was one who went in close at times. Her name was Calf [Road] Woman …[she] had a six-shooter, with bullets and powder, and she fired many shots at the soldiers. She was the only woman there who had a gun. She stayed on her pony all the time, but she kept not far from her husband, Black Coyote."

She fought bravely and came to the aid of her brother, Comes in Sights. Colonizer soldiers were rapidly closing in and had trapped him in a gully. Buffalo Calf Road rode down into the gully amidst flying bullets, pulling her brother onto her horse and out of the gully to safety. Victorious, her people named the battle for her, The Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother, and called her Brave Woman.

*A Cheyenne hide painting, commemorating the 1876 defeat of the 7th Cavalry.*

Only a few days later, on June 25, 1876, Buffalo Calf Road took another stand against the colonizers, as Custer took his last. The people of the Northern Plains (Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho) would quickly overwhelm and defeat the army leaving 260 casualties, including General Armstrong Custer. Cheyenne elders ' accounts of the Little Bighorn Battle credit Buffalo Calf Road as delivering the final crushing blow to Custer. She knocked Custer off his horse, leaving him vulnerable, possibly even killing him. This defeat would be recorded "as the most successful action fought by Native Americans against the U.S. Army in the West."

*Memorial at the site of the Battle of Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn.*

Buffalo Calf Road would go on riding with her people into battle against colonizers, showing courageous acts of rescuing her fellow warriors. About five months into the resistance, colonizer soldiers viciously attacked the Cheyenne village. The attack left more than 40 Cheyenne people dead and many wounded. To further debilitate and demoralize the villages, colonizers burned the village to the ground. Colonizers brutalized and murdered the Cheyenne. With homes destroyed, the brutality of colonizers again displaced the Cheyenne from their lands.

The Cheyenne people were forced into a freezing snowstorm without blankets, adequate clothing, and food. Eleven babies froze to death on that first night without the safety and comfort of their homes and village.

They would go on to be relentlessly pursued and haunted by the colonizers, forcing most of the Cheyenne people to surrender. However, despite being pregnant, Buffalo Calf Road stood with about 30 other courageous Cheyenne people and children and refused to surrender. Conditions continued to deteriorate, and with colonizers dangling the promise of land for the Cheyenne, the brave group finally surrendered. Little did they know colonizers would send the Cheyenne far from their native lands in what is today known as Montana far south to what is today known as Oklahoma.

After the long, forced march south, they arrived in inhospitable lands with an unfamiliar climate, new diseases, and a circumscribed life. Injustice after injustice did not dampen the spirit of the Cheyenne people. Conditions were so bad that a group of about 300 Cheyenne, including Buffalo Calf Road and her family, made a plan to return home.

Three Cheyenne warriors on horseback. / Edward Curtis, Library of Congress

By foot and in the night, a small resistance group escaped. During this harrowing 1,500-mile journey north, colonizers pursued them the entire way. The army relentlessly attacked the group. Buffalo Calf Road fought ceaselessly and bravely on behalf of her people as they struggled onward.

Eventually, the group would split in two, unable to align on how to proceed in their resistance to the colonizers. Both groups, in time, ended up captured and imprisoned at the hands of the army. In despair, deprived of food and water, one group under the leadership of Dull Knife broke out of prison, only to be massacred. Over 65 Cheyenne men, women and children were killed by the soldiers. Buffalo Calf Road’s party was later captured and imprisoned at Fort Keogh, where she died of diphtheria. All the while, Buffalo Calf Road and the Cheyenne stood in firm opposition to the colonization of Indigenous lands and the genocide of Indigenous people.

Though she did not live to see it, the great and brave Cheyenne people settled on their land in 1884 in southeastern Montana on the Lame Deer Reservation. And her story lives on today through tribal oral accounts.

Hidden Figure: Buffalo Calf Road, A Young Cheyenne Warrior

Sources:

Hidden Figure: Alice Mae Lee Jemison, Warrior of written words against government intervention of tribal rights

Hidden Figure: Thocmetony Sarah Winnemucca