Buffalo Calf Road Woman & The Women of Little Bighorn

WARNING: Strong language and graphic descriptions of body mutilation. These ladies did not play.

Recommended Listening: Shower [E] -  DYLN

Buffalo Calf Road Woman was a Cheyenne woman from the 19th century in her mid 20’s with a husband and a four-year-old daughter.  She lived in the Northwestern United States on the Great Plains around what is now known as Montana. She was present at the Battle of Little Bighorn, and it was she who knocked General Custer off his high horse and down into the dirt to meet his fate.

General George A. Custer became an American folk hero thanks to the efforts of his weird ass wife Libbie. She married Custer, even though her dad told her not to, and of course Daddy was right. Custer slept around on her and promised to quit gambling but never did. In addition to that gambling debt, he was deep in with some bad speculating on some railroad stock which he had made with someone else’s money. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it sounds bad. He flat out deserted the army in 1867 and was court martialed, but the army needed someone for their dirty work, so they brought back a dirty man. It was after his death that his wife went on a 57-year mission to make him a hero. No one really wanted to contradict this poor, grieving woman while she was alive, and by the time she died 57-years after The Battle there were statues and buildings named after the dude. Now everyone thinks he’s practically a Founding Father, when he’s really just some guy who got what was coming to him.

A Week Before Little Bighorn

            At the Battle of Rosebud on June 17, 1876, Buffalo Calf Road Woman had ridden into battle with her husband Black Coyote, but it wasn’t going so well, and the braves started retreating. Buffalo Calf’s brother, Chief Comes-In-Sight, was laying wounded on the battlefield and the U.S. troops were coming for him. Buffalo Calf sees this, turns around, and charges in to save him when none of the other braves would (lame). She’s on her horse, zeroing in, dodging bullets, and she scoops him up and saves her brother. The Sioux and Cheyenne male warriors see this and now they’re pumped up! Fuck yeah, Girl! They charge back in, inspired, and win the battle. They named it the Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.

Eight Years Before Little Bighorn

            What makes the Battle of Little Bighorn 10% more messed up is that in 1868 General Custer sat down with Chief Medicine Arrows and they smoked a peace pipe. Literally. They had been fighting for a long time and they went through the whole ceremony of sitting together to talk it out and smoke the pipe together. It held tobacco mixed with kinnikinic, which has a narcotic effect, so everyone was real chill. Custer made a promise to never attack or make war with the Cheyenne again and Chief Medicine Arrows said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “That’s good, ‘cause we’ll fucking kill you if you do.”

            When Custer wasn’t looking, a Cheyenne named Stone Forehead had knocked the ashes from the pipe into his boots to hold him to his promise. They were probably all looking around the tipi at each other thinking this dude won’t keep his promise for a decade…

Okay, now come back

The goal of the U.S. Army at this point in time was to round up indigenous people and confine them to reservations so that white people could use their land. Until that land looked good. Gold had been found in the Black Hills of Dakota that were especially sacred to the Native American people… the Army discovered they needed those hills too. The plan was for Generals Custer, Terry, Crook, and Colonel Gibbon to meet up together with troops. Then, they would send a scout to locate the Native Americans, surround the people, force them to surrender and move to reservation land. A simple and solid plan.

The plan fell apart right away. General Crook never showed, so the other 3 Stooges decided to forge ahead without him. They sent Custer and his cavalry ahead to surround the people and wait for reinforcements. So, he went ahead of the group to wait, but he’s started to get paranoid that the ‘enemy’ knew they were there. He decided that he couldn’t wait for the others, it had to be NOW! They must attack NOW! Earlier they had sent out a scout that had placed the Native American numbers at around 800 fighting me. Fire that dude.

Custer gathered them up, all his commanders and troops and divided his 600 men into battalions to attack the 10,000 people in the valley below.

June 25, 1876

            This brings us to the Battle of Little Bighorn, the quintessential example of fucking around and finding out. Custer even did this stupid thing called “Coloring the Horses”, which pissed his own men off. When he came over the hill into the valley to murder all those innocent people, he wanted it to look nice and pretty, so he made some of his officers switch their horses so they would be color coordinated with their men. Apparently, it had strategic value in the Civil War, but not here. Now Custer was just looking for aesthetics while committing genocide.

He divided his men into 4 battalions. The first stayed back with the supplies and we can call them the Lucky Bastards. The other 3 were led by General Custer, Major Reno, and Captain Benteen respectively. Custer went North with his 209 men. Reno and Benteen came from the South to attack. Reno went in first and immediately noped right back out of there. Benteen came to try to help him, and they met on Reno’s Hill (what are the odds?), minus a couple dozen men, to try to figure out what in the hell just happened. They could hear the heavy fire, pleas, and screaming coming from Custer’s position to the North. Though Reno and Benteen received Custer’s orders; “Come On” “Big Village” “Bring Packs”, they later admitted they did not respond and remained on Reno’s Hill until evening.

It had been quiet in the camps that morning. Normally, the women would have risen with the sun to start making food for their families, but they had been up late the night before, packing and preparing for a journey ahead of them. However, Pretty White Buffalo had woken up early to make a meal for her brother who had come by. A Cheyenne man could approach a woman’s lodging door and expect to be fed - if he asked her with respect.

Antelope had joined some friend who were bathing in the river, and Moving Robe was picking turnips in the Southern Hills. From where she was, Moving Robe could see the first clouds of dust as the soldiers approached. A warrior rode up to her group and told the women, children, and elderly to run and hide in the hills farther beyond. The group turned and ran into the hills to hide. Moving Robe ran towards the village and her family.

            When the camps were attacked the women, children, and vulnerable were sent to the hills above the Sioux camp , where they could still see the battle. But not all women were sent away, because not all the women were vulnerable.

            Some women were seen regularly on the battlefield. Antelope would follow her nephew Noisy Walking into battle. She was his hype man, singing “Strong Heart Songs” to him in battle to keep him pumped up.

Buffalo Calf Road Woman would ride into battle with her husband Black Coyote to cover him with her six-shooter. Women would gather ammunition, land death blows, act as medical attendants, and perform death rites. Even cook meals if it got to poppin’ off for too long.

            The women also used psychological shaming to keep the men from faltering during battle. One of their songs has lyrics that go “If you are afraid when you charge, turn back: The Desert Women will eat you.” When interviewed, male tribal members consistently stated that they would rather take on an enemy in battle than face the mockery of the women. Women had a lot to do with the image of a man by the way they treated him in public. A young woman calling out, “If you had fought bravely, I would have sung for you” across the village to a young man could devastate his social standing.

Moving Robe joined the battle after hearing that her brother, One Hawk, had been killed. Her mourning was intense. She sang a Death Song, unbraided her black hair, and painted her face red. Her father brought her her black horse and together they rode out for vengeance. She was 17 years old. Rain-In-The-Face, a warrior who saw her ride by shouted to the other men, “Behold, there among us is a young woman! Let no young man ride behind her garment!”

Epic.

Former slave Isaiah Dorman had married a Hunkpapa woman and was therefore considered a tribal member. When Moving Robe saw him on the battlefield serving as an interpreter for the Seventh Cavalry, she decided to go have a chit chat. An Oglala warrior later recalled hearing Isaiah pleading with her for his life and Moving Robe asking him:

“If you did not want to be killed, why did you not stay home where you belong?”

before she shot him right off his horse. When they found his body, his blood had been drained and body was held to the ground by an iron pin through his testicles. His penis was found in his mouth. Yikes, Isaiah. Better luck next life.

As for Custer and the 209 men that followed him.

      Custer came over the final Northern ridge and realized he and his men were in trouble. A warrior named Brave Bear later said, “…he was hemmed in all around and could do nothing only to die then.” Some troops attempted to throw down their guns and surrender, but the danger to the families had enraged the warriors: there would be no prisoners that day. Others drew their guns and shot themselves in the head, knowing that was the only thing they could do for themselves now. There was mass confusion and air was thick with smoke from the guns. Buffalo Calf Road Woman rode up behind Custer and knocked him off of his horse by hitting him in the  back with a club. He fell to the ground and stood up covered in dust. He was standing among his men when he received 2 bullet holes to his body, one in the chest and one in the head. No one in the historical record is able to confirm the shooter that delivered Custer’s end in all the confusion, but Buffalo Calf Road Woman was known to carry a gun.

Native Americans held a belief that an individual carried their bodies into the afterlife with them. Post-mortem mutilations were a part of the grieving process and the sense of justice that was an integral part of Cheyenne society.

       When the Cheyenne women present at the Battle of Little Bighorn saw the Sioux male warriors getting ready to mutilated Custer’s corpse, they allowed them only to take the joint of a finger, telling them to leave his body for them: “He is a relative of ours.”

       STOP THE PRESSES!!! SAY WHAT????

Custer’s Second Marriage

These nice, respectable soldiers loved the Cheyenne and Lakota women, who exercised some control over their own bodies and had sex when they felt like getting some.  Custer had his own ‘wife’ among the Cheyenne named Monahsetah. Custer himself estimated her age at “probably 17” when their marriage ceremony was performed against her will.

After the Washita Massacre in 1868, Custer was talking terms with the captured women. He let them know the younger, prettier ones would be passed around the officer’s tents each night and he expected the ladies to be nice about it. A Cheyenne woman named Mahwissa, in an attempt to prevent all out gang rape, negotiated and performed marriage ceremonies between the officers and the individual women they chose. For George Custer, Monahsetah was chosen, and she was seen going into his tent every night. He later dropped her off at Fort Hays, where she gave birth to his son, Yellow Swallow, in June 1869. He told Libbie there was nothing between the two of them, she was just really good at….  tracking.

So why does this matter? Custer was considered kin to the Cheyenne, adding another layer of scum to the ball of sleaze.

Reports that Custer’s body remained untouched were manufactured. His body mutilations were kept secret in order to preserve his dignity, but the women made sure that Custer got his. Georgie had a sewing awl shoved into each ear “to improve his hearing”, as he hadn’t heard what Chief Medicine Arrows had said when they smoked that peace pipe together in ’68. He also had an arrow threaded straight down his penis, turning his hot dog into a corn dog. They left him like that, naked and humiliated on top of a hill among the 209 men he led to their deaths.

Antelope found her nephew, Noisy Walking. He was laying in a ravine, on the other side of the river. She stayed with him while one of his young friends went to go find his mother and tell her. His mother brought back a travois, and another aunt and together they got him back to camp, where he died surrounded by love later that night. 

They travelled for 16 days and kept finding Custer’s stashes of food. They joked about how nice their relative was to leave it for them, there was even food for the horses. They eventually split up into 6 groups and moved camp daily. The U.S. Government doesn’t like to look bad, and Little Bighorn didn’t really look good for them. The government hounded them for over a year and none of the groups could avoid capture indefinitely.

The group that Buffalo Calf and Black Coyote went with had moved into the Bighorn Mountains and in November of 1876, Colonel Randall Douchebag Mackenzie attacked the group, burning the village and all of their earthly belongings. The Cheyenne fled, and 45 were killed that night. That number does not include the 11 babies that froze to death in the subzero temperatures. Luckily, Buffalo Calf Road’s second child was still warm inside her womb, as she was 6/7 months pregnant that night. If you are mathing along, yup. This badass Buffalo Calf was pregnant when she took down Custer.

Buffalo Calf Road Woman gave birth in January of 1877, and at that point there was no food and no hope of survival unless they turned themselves in. The band was forced to live in Oklahoma, where there was measles and malaria, and the people were not allowed to hunt for their own food. After a while they concluded they had to get the fuck out of Oklahoma. 300 Cheyenne came together in the night, busted out, and and began the 1,500-mile journey back to the Yellowstone territory. The entire way they were pursued by soldiers, but Buffalo Calf led the women whenever it was time for an altercation with the soldiers.

When the group got to Nebraska, half of them thought they had made their point (?) and wanted to go to a different, nicer reservation that they had been to before. Maybe the government would let them stay there? So, that half went to the ‘nice’ reservation, where they were told, “Uh, no, back to Oklahoma with you.” When they refused to go, the government tried to starve them into compliance, and then when they broke out on January 8, 1879, in an attempt to survive, they were killed.

The group with Black Coyote, Buffalo Calf, and others continued on, but Black Coyote became more bitter and angry about their situation and was putting the group in danger. He got in a fight with a fellow Cheyenne and unintentionally killed him. The family was exiled from the group and four other tribal members left with them. In April, Black Coyote killed a U.S. soldier, and the entire group was taken to Fort Keogh while he stood trial.

While waiting for Black Coyote to stand trial, Buffalo Calf Road Woman caught diphtheria and died in June of 1879. When he was told that she had died, Black Coyote hung himself. He couldn’t live without her, his beautiful warrior woman.

References

Beyreis, David. “‘If You Had Fought Bravely I Would Have Sung for You’: The Changing Roles of Cheyenne Women during Nineteenth-Century Plains Warfare.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 69, no. 1, 2019, pp. 3–91.

Cavanaugh, Ray. “Retrobituaries: Buffalo Calf Road Woman, Custer’s Final Foe.” Mental Floss, 22 June 2017, www.mentalfloss.com/article/502013/retrobituaries-buffalo-calf-road-woman-custers-final-foe.

 Kennedy, David M., and Thomas Andrew Bailey. The American Spirit: United States History as Seen by Contemporaries. Cengage Learning, 2016.

McDermott, Anaette. “What Really Happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn?A.” History.Com, 27 Feb. 2018, www.history.com/news/little-bighorn-battle-facts-causes.

 Monaghan, Leila. “Cheyenne and Lakota Women at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 67, no. 3, 2017, pp. 3–21.

Sagan, Scott D. “The Face of Battle without the Rules of War: Lessons from Red Horse & the Battle of the Little Bighorn.” Daedalus, vol. 146, no. 1, 2017, pp. 24–43.

Magazine, Smithsonian. “How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won.” Smithsonian.Com, 1 Nov. 2010, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-battle-of-little-bighorn-was-won-63880188/