Few people have heard of Buffalo Calf Road Woman, a Northern Cheyenne warrior whose life intersected with one of the most famous defeats in American military history. She was the woman credited with killing Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Yet the details of her life before that moment are remarkably sparse, and the story of what happened to her afterward is as tragic as the war that made her known. Born sometime in the 1840s or early 1850s, she was a member of the Cheyenne tribe, one of the many Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains.
The Cheyenne shared that vast expanse of grassland with the Sioux, who were themselves divided into the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota bands. By the time Buffalo Calf Road Woman was born, the United States was pressing westward, and the lives of these peoples were beginning to change in ways that would eventually destroy their traditional world. The first significant outbreak of violence between the U. S.
government and the Plains peoples came in 1854 with the First Sioux War. More conflicts followed through the 1860s, fueled by broken agreements and, after 1862, by a gold rush in Montana that drew thousands of prospectors through Indigenous lands. In 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie brought a temporary peace, reserving the Black Hills and other lands for the Indigenous peoples. But the peace did not last.
By the mid-1870s, Buffalo Calf Road Woman had married a man named Black Coyote, and the couple had two young children. In 1874, the U. S. government sent an expedition into the Black Hills, an act that violated the treaty.
The expedition was led by none other than George Armstrong Custer, the man who would later become infamous for his defeat at the Little Bighorn. The official goal was to find a suitable site for a fort, explore the region, and investigate the potential for gold. When word spread that gold had been found, prospectors poured into the Black Hills, and the situation quickly spiraled out of control. Some Sioux leaders, including Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, traveled to Washington to petition the government to stop the influx of settlers.
Others, like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, were done with negotiation. They led a confederacy of Sioux and Cheyenne into war against the United States in 1876. This conflict became known as the Great Sioux War, and Buffalo Calf Road Woman would emerge as a notable figure within it. Her first known action came at the Battle of the Rosebud on June 17, 1876, in Montana Territory.
A force of roughly one to two thousand Sioux and Cheyenne fighters engaged about nine hundred American soldiers under General George Crook near Rosebud Creek. The fighting was intermittent, and at one point Crook appeared to be gaining the upper hand, forcing the Sioux and Cheyenne to retreat. Then Buffalo Calf Road Woman rode back toward the enemy lines. Her brother, Chief Comes in Sight, a prominent Cheyenne warrior, had been wounded and would otherwise have been left behind.
She grabbed him and carried him to safety. The act rallied the fighters, and in the hours that followed, Crook was forced to withdraw to await reinforcements. In honor of her bravery, the battle became known among her people as the fight where the girl saved her brother. That engagement, however, was only a prelude.
Just over a week later, on June 25, 1876, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse deployed a force of between two and twenty-five hundred Sioux and Cheyenne along the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana Territory. Buffalo Calf Road Woman was among them, waiting for the same Custer who had led the expedition into the Black Hills two years earlier. Custer had the Seventh Cavalry, roughly seven hundred men, but he made a serious error. Despite reports of the strength of the opposing forces, he split his command.
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse ordered an attack on Custer and the men under his direct control. They were surrounded, and Custer was killed along with 268 of his soldiers. It was one of the greatest victories the Plains peoples ever won against the U. S.
Army. For all the legend of Custer’s Last Stand, remarkably little is known about what actually happened to him. Nearly all the Americans in the vicinity were killed, leaving the Sioux and Cheyenne as the only surviving eyewitnesses. The story of Buffalo Calf Road Woman’s role did not emerge publicly until 2005, when a Cheyenne elder named Frank Rowland told a Montana newspaper that the chiefs had long kept a vow of silence, one that was meant to last for one hundred summers.
That time had passed, and the silence was broken. According to this account, several female warriors had been waiting at the edge of the battle when Buffalo Calf Road Woman moved forward and struck Custer off his horse with a club. He was then either ridden over or cracked his head on the fall, and she was credited with killing him. The victory at the Little Bighorn, however, proved to be the high point of the war.
When news of Custer’s defeat reached Washington, additional forces were sent west. Military campaigns resumed in the spring of 1877, and several of the tribes began to surrender. In September of that year, Crazy Horse was apprehended and killed. Sitting Bull led some of his followers across the border into Canada.
By 1878, the war was essentially over, and many of those involved were being relocated to new reservations. Large numbers of Cheyenne, including Buffalo Calf Road Woman, her husband, and their two children, were moved south to Oklahoma. It was their confinement there that led to the final known chapter of her life. On the reservation in Oklahoma, an outbreak of measles began decimating the Cheyenne.
In August 1878, the chiefs began organizing an escape back north to their ancestral lands. On September 8, chiefs Little Wolf, Dull Knife, Wild Hog, and Left Hand led roughly 350 Cheyenne north from the reservation, with Buffalo Calf Road Woman and her family among them. This trek became known as the Northern Cheyenne Exodus. It ultimately ended in success for the main group, who made it back north and were eventually granted lands in Montana by the federal government.
Buffalo Calf Road Woman and her family never reached that destination. Along the way, her husband Black Coyote became involved in an argument with another man named Black Crane and shot him dead. As a result, Black Coyote and his extended family members, including Buffalo Calf Road Woman, were banished from the group. Their final encounter with U.
S. soldiers occurred near Mitzvah Creek in the late spring of 1879. Soldiers were dispatched from nearby Fort Keough, and on April 10, 1879, the small group was arrested and taken to Miles City, Montana. Black Coyote was charged with murder, found guilty, and scheduled to be executed along with three other men from the group in early June.
Buffalo Calf Road Woman did not live that long. While under arrest in Miles City, she succumbed to an illness, most likely diphtheria or malaria, one of the many diseases introduced to the Americas by European settlers. Black Coyote hanged himself days before his execution could be carried out. The woman who had killed Custer at the Little Bighorn died not on a battlefield, but as a prisoner, struck down by a disease her body could not fight.
Her story, once kept silent for a hundred summers, now stands as a reminder of both the strength and the destruction that marked the end of the Plains peoples’ way of life.