Pretty Nose

In 1878, two years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the frontier photographer Laton Alton Huffman made a glass-plate portrait of a young woman at Fort Keogh, near present-day Miles City, Montana. He captioned it “Pretty Nose, Cheyenne Girl, Fort Keogh.” She was about twenty-seven, her braids wrapped, a robe over her shoulder, her gaze level and direct. Huffman recorded her as Cheyenne, and some archives still do; her beaded cuffs and her family's testimony identify her as Arapaho. The two nations fought as allies at the Little Bighorn and remain formally joined today as the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.

Pretty Nose took part in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876, riding with a combined Cheyenne and Arapaho contingent. Plains women were present at that fight in many roles — holding horses, guarding camps, singing strong-heart songs, and in some cases fighting — and her family remembered her among the fighters. According to her descendants she became a war chief, a standing signified by the cuffs she wore, and she carried that honor for the rest of a very long life on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

She lived to see another century's wars. In 1952 her great-grandson Mark Soldier Wolf came home to Wind River from Marine Corps service in the Korean War. Pretty Nose greeted him at the age of 101, wearing the cuffs that marked her as a war chief. He became an Arapaho tribal elder and storyteller and carried her story until his own death in 2018, which is how her name stayed joined to the photograph. The record does not say when she died; she was alive past her hundredth year, having outlived nearly everyone who fought on either side at the Little Bighorn.