Tȟašína Máni

On the morning of June 25, 1876, Tȟašína Máni — Moving Robe Woman — was digging wild turnips near the great encampment on the Little Bighorn when dust rose over the valley and word spread that soldiers were attacking. Then came harder news: her young brother, named in some accounts as One Hawk and in others as Deeds, had been killed. She was about twenty-three, a daughter of the Hunkpapa headman Crawler. She later described stopping to braid her hair, painting her face crimson in mourning, and mounting her black horse to ride toward the fighting alongside the warriors.

Her own account of the battle was taken down in 1931 through the interpreter Frank B. Zahn at Fort Yates and later published in Richard Hardorff's “Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight.” “I was a woman, but I was not afraid,” she said. Lakota and Cheyenne witnesses placed her in the valley fight against Major Reno's command, and several credited her with striking down two soldiers. A later claim that she helped kill Custer himself is contradicted by other evidence, and historians treat it as legend rather than fact.

After the victory she went north to Canada among the bands that followed Sitting Bull, returning in the early 1880s to settle near Kenel on the Standing Rock Reservation. Agency records from 1923 show her, known then as Mary Crawler, living alone in a one-room log house with her horses and cattle. She was honored as a warrior among her people for the rest of her life and died in 1935. No verified photograph of her youth survives; the portrait tradition behind this painting is part of how her story has been kept, passed hand to hand like the account she left.