Pretty Shield, born around 1856, grew up among the Crow people, a nation caught between the great powers of the northern plains. She was the niece of Half Yellow Face, a respected leader who would eventually guide the Crow scouts attached to the United States Seventh Cavalry. Her own husband, Goes Ahead, served under General George Armstrong Custer. The story she told in her later years, seated in her lodge, was that of the Crow scouts who rode with Custer and the disastrous fight that came to be known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
When asked if her husband had been with Custer on the day of his death, Pretty Shield’s face filled with pride as she answered that he had. She described how Washington sent her a paper every month, which she exchanged for thirty dollars, a sum she used for her grandchildren, though she readily admitted a larger amount would have been welcome. She rose and looked out over the hills marked with white monuments, where on June 25, 1876, Custer and the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry had fallen. The stench of death, she recalled, hung over the land for an entire summer, forcing the Crow to move away because the odor was unbearable.
War, she said with a deep sigh, is a calamity, for it always leaves loved ones absent. Her account began with the Crow camp above the mouth of Rotten Sun Dance, near the Clark Fork River. A contingent of blue soldiers arrived asking the chiefs for wolf scouts, men who would track and fight for the army. They had come up the Yellowstone River in a fireboat, and the Crow chiefs hosted a feast for them.
Though she was not privy to the deliberations, twenty-five young Crow men pledged to meet the soldiers at the mouth of the Tongue River. Half Yellow Face led them. On the second night out, near present-day Forsyth, the Lakota stole every horse belonging to the Crow contingent. Pretty Shield laughed at the memory, acknowledging that the Lakota were cunning horse thieves, just as skilled as the Crows themselves.
The Crow wolf scouts were now on foot and had yet to understand the white man’s way of war. Some of the men had to return to the village for horses, and twelve additional young warriors came back with them. While the camp prepared for the fight, a Shoshoni warrior arrived asking for more Crows to join General Crook near present-day Sheridan, Wyoming. Over a hundred Crow men, perhaps nearly 150, went with him, carrying the pipe of Plenty Coups and following leaders such as Flathead Woman, Medicine Crow, and Alligator Stands Up.
Crook’s campaign went badly. He was defeated by Crazy Horse on the Rosebud, and the Crows and Shoshoni who fought beside him were routed as well. Pretty Shield recalled that Bull Snake returned grievously wounded and many blue soldiers were slain. During the absence of the warriors, the women of the village remained subdued and quiet.
But there was a story the Crow men would not speak of, and Pretty Shield told it with delight. A woman had fought alongside the warriors on the Rosebud. Her name was Finds Them and Kills Them. She appeared as a man yet wore woman’s clothing and had a woman’s heart.
She was not as strong as a man, Pretty Shield said, but wiser than a woman. There was another woman too, known as the Other Magpie, who was wild, brave, and beautiful. When Bull Snake fell wounded, Finds Them and Kills Them rushed to his side, firing her gun at the Lakota with fierce determination. The Other Magpie rode circles around them, singing her war song and waving a shield adorned with a single breath feather.
When the Lakota charged to take Bull Snake’s scalp, the Other Magpie rode forward, her medicine so strong that they drew back. Bull Snake’s life was spared, and every man had seen it, yet none ever spoke of it afterward. Pretty Shield’s own husband, Goes Ahead, was not among those who returned from the Rosebud. He had gone with Custer to the mouth of the Tongue River.
When Custer left the soldiers’ camp there, he rode toward the Rosebud with Goes Ahead and six other Crow scouts: White Swan, Half Yellow Face, Hairy Moccasin, White Man Runs Him, and Curly. The land was swarming with Lakota and Cheyenne. The scouts read the signs, the tracks, the old fires, the half-consumed buffalo carcasses, and knew the enemy was on the move. Goes Ahead, White Man Runs Him, and Hairy Moccasin rode ahead of the column and discovered evidence of a large Lakota camp.
Some fires still smoldered. They found and captured several Lakota horses. They understood that there were more Lakota and Cheyenne ahead than bullets in the soldiers’ belts, so they turned back and warned Custer. He merely told them to go on again and drank from a bottle covered in straw, seemingly unconcerned.
When the three scouts returned to the site of the great village, they waited rather than go further into the overwhelming enemy force. When Custer arrived, he asked about a better campsite. Goes Ahead recommended a creek known to the white men as Thompson, with cool spring-fed waters. The soldiers camped there for the night, and at dawn the scouts resumed their reconnaissance.
By mid-morning they saw the largest village they had ever seen, spread along the Little Bighorn River, with lodges filling the flat and horses covering the hills as far as the eye could see. Goes Ahead admitted to feeling fear at the sight. He, Hairy Moccasin, and White Man Runs Him retreated up the creek known to white men as Reno and met Custer coming down. They warned him of the staggering numbers, greater than the soldiers’ ammunition, and urged him to reconsider.
But Custer, like a feather blown by the wind, was destined for his fate. The half-breed interpreter warned him that he could still escape safely, but Custer was determined to fight. Goes Ahead said that Custer then made a grave mistake, dividing his soldiers into three parties and sending two of them away from himself. Goes Ahead prepared for battle, adorning his hair with breath feathers.
Reno crossed the river, fired, and then retreated, recognizing the inevitable outcome. Goes Ahead was beside Custer as he rode into the waters of the Little Bighorn. A Lakota warned Two Bodies to turn back or die, but Custer pressed on, entering the water with Two Bodies and his flag bearer. There he fell, and with him Two Bodies and the flag bearer.
As Custer fell, the remaining soldiers retreated up the hill, and the three Crow scouts fled, recognizing the futility of their position. Goes Ahead later showed Pretty Shield the exact spot where Custer had died in the water. The monument the white men had erected, she insisted, marked the wrong place. The three Crows ran to the pack train, which was surrounded by soldiers and supplies.
The mules were falling dead, and the men dug pits and used the fallen animals as cover while bullets rained down. Goes Ahead claimed that alongside the packers, they killed more Lakota and Cheyenne than the blue soldiers did. He admitted to being afraid, but he did not flee until he saw Custer fall into the Little Bighorn waters. When the fighting finally stopped, with the sun well past its zenith, White Man Runs Him urged the others to leave before the enemy charged.
The three scouts rose, now armed with soldiers’ guns, and when the chief packer asked where they were bound, White Man Runs Him said they were seeking a drink of water. Each was handed a canteen to fill, but they did not pursue the water. Instead, they followed Reno Creek upstream until they reached the pine trees, where they encountered four Lakota wolves who had watched the battle from a distance. One of them, riding a gray horse and leading a sorrel mule, lagged behind.
Goes Ahead killed and scalped him and took the gray horse, giving it to White Man Runs Him. They alternated riding it, having lost their own horses in the fight. Reaching the Bighorn River, they found it swollen and treacherous. Rain fell in the darkness as they began to swim, unable to see the far bank.
They thought they had reached land but had only arrived at an island, where they rested before completing the crossing. Exposed and famished, wearing no clothes after shedding them for the fight, they finally crossed near what is now the city of Hardin. Goes Ahead spied two figures on the distant hills whom he believed to be Crows, though the others suspected Lakota. He called out and made signs, and the two men proved to be Crows.
They conveyed the news that all the blue horse soldiers had perished. One of them, No Milk, who had accompanied the limping one, crossed the river and gave Goes Ahead and his companions bacon, soldiers’ bread, and clothing. He warned of approaching walking soldiers hindered by six wagons. He also reported the deaths of White Swan and Half Yellow Face, the two Crow scouts who had mistakenly gone with Reno.
When the returning scouts finally reached their people, the first reception was hostile. A war party, mistaking them for Lakota, attacked, and Goes Ahead had to kill two horses to stop the error. Everyone was nervous and on edge in those days, Pretty Shield explained, for everybody looked like a Lakota. The homecoming was somber.
Though she rejoiced at seeing Goes Ahead, the news of Half Yellow Face and White Swan devastated her. The mourning was intense, with relatives giving away possessions, cutting themselves, and wailing. When her own father began to mourn his brother Half Yellow Face, Goes Ahead urged him to wait four days, saying that if the brother did not return, he would mourn with him. But Half Yellow Face and White Swan were not dead.
They told their tale when they returned, and to hear it, as Pretty Shield put it, was like hearing the voices of the dead. They had misunderstood and gone with Reno, remaining with him until his men approached the great village. When they saw a lesser chief become entangled in his stirrup and dragged away by his frightened horse, they recognized an ominous sign and fled to a hole in the hill. The Lakota set the surrounding grass on fire to flush them out, and White Swan was shot in the hand, a wound that never fully healed, along with injuries to his foot and shoulder.
They endured two days and two nights in that hole, choking on smoke alongside some Arikara scouts, until the Lakota and Cheyenne departed and the walking soldiers arrived. Pretty Shield, reflecting on the battle, was willing to defend Custer, even while describing his poor judgment. Even had he not divided his forces, she said, he would have been defeated and slain, for the enemy numbers were too great. Had Terry, Crook, and Custer united, they might have triumphed, but no single leader could have achieved victory alone.
Two years after the battle, Half Yellow Face guided Goes Ahead and Pretty Shield over the battlefield, recounting the events in detail. For over a year afterward, she said, the Crow people found the remains of blue soldiers and Lakota far from the Little Bighorn. Four blue soldiers, including a chief, were found near Big Shoulder’s Bones in Middle Creek, six miles from the battle site. An elderly Indian at the trader store later confirmed her account unprompted.
He had known Goes Ahead well and pointed out where Custer had fallen in the water, where the three scouts had climbed the creek to join the packers, and where the bodies of four cavalrymen, including an officer, had been discovered six miles from the battlefield. Pretty Shield’s story, told with firmness and sorrow decades later, remains one of the closest surviving accounts of what the Crow scouts saw on the day Custer rode into the Little Bighorn.