Pine Leaf
"I conceive it to be my duty to devote a few lines to the bravest woman that ever lived, namely, Pine Leaf – in Indian, Bar-chee-am-pe. For an Indian, she possessed great intellectual powers. She was endowed with extraordinary muscular strength, with the activity of the cat and the speed of an antelope. When I engaged in the fiercest struggles, no one was more promptly at my side than the young heroine. She seemed incapable of fear; and when she arrived at womanhood, could fire a gun without flinching, and use Indian weapons with as great dexterity as the most accomplished warrior." - James “Bloody Arm” Beckworth, American Frontiersman
Pine Leaf was a badass Warrior Chief of the Crow who led her tribe heroically into combat, married four wives, killed at least five men in combat (probably a shitload more), and then died negotiating a peace treaty of all things. In her twenty years leading one of the most powerful tribes of the West to glory across the plains of present-day Montana, she became legendary among everyone who met her for her strength, skill at weapons, and ability to kill buffalo with her bare hands, skin it with her pocketknife, and then lug an entire buffalo’s worth of meat back home on foot just to prove that she had bigger nuts than anyone else in the North American Frontier.
She went from kidnapped orphan to teenage war chief, led her people though two decades of relative peace, never took shit from anyone, and was so badass that she was reverently written about in hushed tones by a bunch of 19th-century American Frontiersmen who, let’s be honest, didn’t really have a whole lot of nice stuff to say about the Indigeous Peoples of the Midwest.
Beckworth’s drawing of Pine Leaf.
It needs to be mentioned here that the story of Pine Leaf is generally comprised of two different accounts. The first is from a grizzled old hardcore mountain man named Bloody-Arm Beckworth, who lived with the Crow for a while in the 1820s and told stories of a badass warrior woman he calls Pine Leaf – most likely due to a pretty hilarious fuck-you she gave him that I'll get into more detail below. The second accounts come over a decade later, from two traders named Denig and Kurz, who wrote about a commanding and powerful Crow leader named Woman Chief who led her people not only in combat but also in attempts to make peace with neighboring peoples and tribes. The physical description and backstories these guys give for Pine Leaf and Woman Chief are fairly similar (though not completely identical), the timelines and locations of these stories more or less line up, so most historians just assume these are both the same woman and call it a day. So that's my plan as well.
You're probably wondering about that Bloody-Arm Beckworth dude right about now, so let's start with his account. His birth name was James, but he earned the badass nickname "Bloody Arm" because he was really fucking awesome at hacking people into top sirloin with a cavalry saber and spraying their blood and guts all over his heaving biceps. Born into slavery in Virginia, Beckworth escaped that shit, fled West, learned the Crow language, and eventually fell in with them during his adventures shooting, drinking, and fighting around the hills and countrysides of Montana. As he was riding with them, he met a woman named Pine Leaf, who captured his attention pretty much immediately, and he spends a lot of his memoirs writing about her exploits.
Pine Leaf (Barcheeampe in Crow) was born around 1806, a member of the Gros Ventre, a neighboring tribe in the foothills of Montana. Around the age of ten, her home was raided by the Crow, who captured her and brought her back to their village. She was raised by foster parents among the Crow, but instead of being happy doing the same boring stuff the other girls were doing, she was interested only in combat. She practiced and excelled at horseback riding, archery, rifle marksmanship, and hunting, and, before long, became known among her people as the best shot and the fastest rider in the village. When her foster brothers were killed or captured in battle, Pine Leaf's father encouraged her "to be as a son", and she honored him by swearing to avenge the fallen brothers.
Crow warriors.
Now, it's not super uncommon to see women warriors among the Native American peoples (see Running Eagle, for instance), but where most of these women went into combat dressed as a man, Pine Leaf fought in women's clothing, unwilling to disguise her sex just because she thought she’d take shit for it. It's a kind of Anne Bonny vibe, which, of course, is fucking rad. And, of course, she could back it up by being tall and strong, a Platinum sniper with a rifle or a recurve bow, rode bareback like a Real Man and was described as being utterly “incapable of fear”.
When Bloody-Arm Beckworth met Pine Leaf in the 1820s, she was already among the leaders of her tribe. Her adoptive father had died when she was a teenager, but she’d taken over his household and brought it to prominence and earned it an honorable name among the Crow people. She was also personally pretty famous, not just because she kicked grown mens’ asses at arm-wrestling and Scrabble, but also because her favorite pastime was hiking out into the wilderness on foot, killing bison, buffalo, bighorn deer, and elk with a damn bow and arrow, skinning and butchering the animal in the field, and then walking casually back into camp with a hundred or so pounds of raw beef strapped to her shoulders.
Keep in mind that this is real outdoors mountain man shit -- it’s not like jerking off that plastic shotgun in Big Buck Hunter.
As you can imagine, Bloody-Arm Beckworth was pretty mind-blown insta-in-love with Pine Leaf (as was pretty much every eligible bachelor in her tribe), so he asked if she’d marry him. She told him she made an oath not to marry until she’d killed a hundred men in battle, and that hadn’t quite happened yet (we don’t know where she was yet in her count, because Beckworth didn’t bother asking, but Pine Leaf does have five confirmed kills on enemy combatants at this point so we know she was at least somewhat on her way). He got all whiny and weird about it and kept pestering her, so, finally, Pine Leaf was like, “Oh, ok, fine. I’ll marry you when the pine leaves turn yellow.”
Beckworth rode home all happy and shit. Fall wasn’t too far away, he could wait.
Then he remembered that pine trees are evergreens. The leaves never turn yellow.
When he saw her a few months later and asked her about it, she fucking laughed in his face.
What a legend.
A Crow village, circa 19th century.
The second story we have comes twenty years later, when two frontier traders named Edwin Denig and Rudolph Kurz are trying to swap furs or whatever the fuck out in Montana and they run into a super badass, grizzled older Crow leader known as Woman Chief. As I said, there’s a decent chance this is time-skip Pine Leaf, though unfortunately we didn’t invent that facial recognition stuff that gets you on no-fly lists until the PATRIOT Act of 2001 so we can’t positively I.D. these women as the same person without obtaining some mitochondrial DNA samples.
Woman Chief’s story goes like this -- She was born to the Gros Ventre, then abducted by the Crow, and then took over her foster father’s household after he and his sons passed away. She rose to prominence, led the tribe to glory, and was an expert shooter, rider, and hunter, basically the human version of that Oregon Trail strat where you spin around in circles hammering space bar and spraying enough double-aught buckshot into the atmosphere to slaughter every buffalo in a twelve-mile radius, only to realize you can only carry like three buffaloes worth of flank steak back to town with you.
Denig’s story mentions that Woman Chief earned her place as a war leader of the Crow in a vicious battle many years earlier, when the Crow were trading with a few families of American frontiersmen when the fort came under attack by a raiding party of Blackfoot. The Blackfoot killed a few of the fort’s defenders, but then Woman Chief rode screaming into battle, killing one enemy with a musket and two with arrows, then rallying the defense to turn back the raid. Her blood lust still unsatisfied, and her desire for vengeance reaching Ghost Rider levels of intensity, she then organized her best warriors, led an attack on the Blackfoot camp, and returned back with the scalps of her enemies hanging from her saddle and their rifles slung over her saddlebags.
"She could rival any of the young men in all their amusements and occupations, was a capital shot with the rifle, and would spend most of her time in killing deer and bighorn, which she butchered and carried home on her back when hunting on foot."
-Denig
By the time Denig and Kurz meet Woman Chief, she’s already distinguished herself in several battles, and the Crow had written many songs about her victories, granting her almost a mythical status among her tribe. She was accepted as a chief, granted the honorific title Biawacheeitchish, meaning “Woman Chief”, and took four wives who lived in her giant tent and took care of all the housework and cooking and stuff for her. Denig was particularly impressed by the last part, as you might imagine. He wrote, "Strange country this, where males assume the dress and perform the duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex!"
Woman Chief led the Crow for twenty years, first as a war chief, but then also in times of peace, negotiating treaties with neighboring tribes (and the American frontiersmen), resolving disputes, and doing all that Good King stuff you expect from this type of thing. Of course, she also decorated her robes with war trophies, making her outfit look like those World War II aircraft where they paint little pictures on it for all of their confirmed kills, and I’m sure this constant reminder of her ability to fuck you up like a car crash only helped strengthen her diplomatic position in most situations.
Unfortunately, it was this diplomacy that ended up being her undoing. In 1854, while trying to strengthen a peace treaty with the Gros Ventre -- her native tribe -- Woman Chief and her bodyguards were ambushed and attacked. They drew their weapons and fought back heroically, but Woman Chief was killed in action, fighting under a flag of peace at the age of 48. For a woman who had dedicated her life to war and vengeance, there’s a sort of sad irony that she died during a peace negotiation. Although, in her defense, she also died with a gun in her hands -- and the accounts of her death indicated that she made her attackers pay dearly for their treachery before they finally brought her down.
Links:
Books:
Beckwourth, James P. The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth. United Kingdom: Harper & Brothers, 1856.
Lisa, Laurie., Bataille, Gretchen M.. Native American Women. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Roscoe, Will. Living the Spiri. United States: St. Martin's Publishing Group, 1988.
