Deadlier Than The Male (June 1965 | Volume: 16, Issue: 4)

Deadlier Than The Male

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Authors: John C. Ewers

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June 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 4

When I first met Elk Hollering in the Water on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in 1941, she was a frail little old lady in her middle seventies. She was short and she was spare. I doubt if she ever weighed as many as one hundred pounds. Nothing about lier appearance would remind one of artists’ conceptions of the legendary Amazons. Nevertheless, Elk Hollering in the Water was a com bat veteran in her own right, a fighting member of the most aggressive tribe of the upper Missouri. As a lively teen-ager she had accompanied her stalwart husband, Hear Chief, on raids against enemy tribes. And she had won honors by “taking things from the enemy.”

Aged men of her tribe, men who had journeyed on many war excursions against the Grows, decs, Assiniboins, Flathcads, and Sioux, readily acknowledged Elk Hollering in the Water’s claim. Furthermore, they assured me that womanly participation in what we commonly regard as the man’s game of war was not considered abnonnal conduct in the days of intertribal conflict on the tipper Missouri prior to the middle iSSo’s. Young childless women sometimes joined their husbands on fatiguing and dangerous horse-stealing raids upon distant enemy villages in preference to remaining at home praying and worrying about the safety of their mates. Sometimes small war parties travelled two or three hundred miles before their scouts located an enemy camp. Usually the women cooked for the entire party and performed other menial tasks during the outward journey. Hut they also look active parts in the dawn attacks on enemy camps and helped to drive the stolen horses homeward. Sometimes the fleeing raiders were overtaken by angry enemy warriors bent upon recapturing their pilfered livestock. Then the horse thieves, female and male, had to fight for their lives as well as for their newly acquired property.

Women warriors also appeared among the Crows, south of the Yellowstone. The Crows were a small tribe, but they were wealthier in horses than any other Indians on the upper Missouri. They fought valiantly to protect their herds from frequent raids by the Blackfeet from the north and the mighty Sioux from the east. To protect themselves from extermination by those more powerful tribes, the Crows made alliantes with the white men.

Some thirty years ago or more an aged Crow woman, Pretty Shield, told Frank Mird Linderman of a brave Crow girl who aided General Crook against the Sioux and Cheyenne tinder Crazy Horse in the historic Battle of the Rosebud on June 17, 1876, only a week prior to the Custcr debacle on the Little Big Horn. The Other Magpie was her name. She was wild and she was pretty. But she had no man of her own. When some 175 Crow warriors rode oil to join Three Stars (General Crook) in his campaign against the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne, The Other Magpie went along. She had recently lost a brother at