The DARK Truth About Native American Women in the Old West

There’s a 1976 document the US government would rather you never read. It proves what they did to native women. And it wasn’t in the 19th century, it was during the Nixon era. But before we get to it, you need to understand how this erasure began. In military records, in courtrooms, and in the journals of government agents.

Number one, while American women couldn’t even vote, Comanche women were already making decisions about war and peace. Records from soldiers and ethnographers between 1830 and 1870 show that they had a say in tribal decisions, owned their own horses and property. And back then, horses were money. They could get divorced whenever they wanted. All they had to do was put their husband’s belongings outside the teepee, and the marriage was over. No judge, no paperwork, no arguments. Now, pay attention to this part. Women in the US didn’t get the right to vote until 1920 with the 19th Amendment, decades after Comanche dominance had been destroyed by the US Army. In other words, the soldiers who fought the Comanche came from a society where their own wives had fewer rights than the women of the people they were destroying.

Number two, Geronimo trusted her to guide women and children across the Rio Grande right under the US Army’s nose. And the army knew who she was. Their own military reports recorded her actions in combat. Lozen was the sister of Victorio, chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, who said of her, “A warrior as dependable as any man.” She fought for decades, crossed rivers with fugitives while soldiers patrolled the banks, and was by Geronimo’s side at the final surrender in 1886. Her reward? She was sent to Florida as a prisoner of war and died of tuberculosis in Alabama in 1889. And here’s the detail that’s hard to ignore. Her name doesn’t appear in a single peace treaty. The documents that ended the war she had fought her entire life simply pretended she had never existed.

Number three, Sand Creek. The order was to spare no one. On November 29th, 1864, Colonel John Chivington led 700 soldiers to a Cheyenne camp in Colorado. Chief Black Kettle had raised the American flag and a white flag, the universal sign of surrender. It didn’t matter. Days earlier, Chivington had told the troops, “Kill them all, big and small.” And that’s what they did. Between 150 and 500 people died that morning, most of them women, children, and the elderly. Soldiers who were there later described scenes they could never forget, and some refused to fire. Congress investigated and called it what it was, a deliberate massacre. But here’s the part few people know. Chivington never spent a single day in jail. He left the army before the trial and the military court could no longer touch him.

Number four, here’s one most Americans never heard about. In 1850, California entered the Union as a free state, but that very same year, it passed a law called the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. The name sounds good, right? In practice, it allowed any citizen to go to court and claim the labor of a Native American considered a vagrant. The result was a system of slavery disguised as a contract, and it mainly affected women and children. Children were sold for as much as $200. Historians estimate that tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced to work this way between 1850 and 1863. In other words, while the rest of the country was fighting over abolition, the free state of California kept Native American slavery going for 13 years and only put an end to it in the middle of the Civil War.

Number five, imagine a government wagon pulling up to your door to take your 5-year-old daughter and you wouldn’t see her again for years. That’s exactly what happened to thousands of native families after 1879 when Richard Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian School under one chilling motto, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Girls as young as five or six were taken by force if their parents resisted and shipped hundreds of miles from home. Letters home were banned or censored. Speak your own language, you got beaten for it. And here’s the part most folks never hear. These girls weren’t being educated for a better life. They were trained to be maids, cooking, cleaning, serving white households. The schooling was kept limited on purpose, enough to make them useful servants, never enough to let them rise. That wasn’t a mistake. It was the plan.

Number six, everyone learned in school that Sacagawea was Lewis and Clark’s willing guide, but here’s what the textbooks don’t tell you. She never had a choice. At 12, she was captured by the Hidatsa, taken away from her Shoshone people and enslaved. Later, a French trader named Toussaint Charbonneau bought her or won her in a bet, depending on the account. When Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau as an interpreter in 1804, Sacagawea came along as part of the deal. She was about 16 years old with a newborn baby on her back. No one asked if she wanted to cross half the continent. Her knowledge saved the expedition more than once. She recognized trails, found food, and negotiated for horses with the Shoshone. But calling that a choice is rewriting history. A choice requires an alternative, and she had none.

Number seven, the US Army’s own reports contain a detail almost no one knows about. During the campaigns against the Apache between 1870 and 1880, officers recorded something that caught them by surprise. Women fighting on the front lines, rifles in hand, shooting at soldiers. General George Crook, a respected veteran of those wars, wrote that in the middle of combat, it was almost impossible to tell who was a man and who was a woman among the warriors. Female warriors like Lozen, Chief Victorio’s sister, even led attacks alongside the men. And here’s the curious part. Because the army didn’t count women as combatants, those who died in battle were listed in the records simply as Indian casualties with no distinction at all. In other words, they fought, fell in battle, and the official paperwork simply made these female warriors disappear from history.

Number eight, here’s something almost no one learned in school. Among the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, women owned land. And that was written into the treaties signed by the US government itself. The house and farmland passed from mother to daughter, and among the Cherokee, the man was the one who moved onto his wife’s land. Then came 1887 and the Dawes Act. Washington divided tribal territory into individual plots, but followed the American rule of the time. The title was put in the man’s name, the head of the household. With the stroke of a pen, women who had owned land for generations became dependent on their husbands on paper. The detail few people talk about. All of this was sold as progress, as a way to civilize the Indians. In practice, a system where women were property owners was replaced with one where they had no rights to anything.

Number nine, in 1900, a young teacher did something no one expected. Zitkala-Sa, born Gertrude Simmons Bonnin on the Yankton Reservation, published in the Atlantic Monthly, one of the most respected magazines in the country, what was really happening inside Native American boarding schools. She described how she was taken from her mother at 8 years old, forbidden from speaking her language, and physically punished. And here’s the detail. She was a teacher at the Carlisle Indian School, the very institution she was exposing. The school responded with a campaign to destroy her reputation. It didn’t work. She spent the rest of her life writing and fighting for Native American rights until she died in 1938. But her writings were largely forgotten for decades. They only made their way into universities in the 1990s, almost a century after they were written.

Number ten, here’s a court case most folks have never heard of. In 1879, Standing Bear versus Crook ruled that Native Americans were legally persons under US law. Sounds like progress, right? But there was a catch. Between the 1880s and 1910, reservation agents and missionary doctors kept filing reports about crimes against Native women, assaults happening right on federal land. The Bureau of Indian Affairs received complaint after complaint. And what did they do? They filed them away. No investigations, no charges, nothing. The unspoken rule was simple. The protections that Standing Bear won didn’t seem to apply to women. Records from the era suggest these crimes happened at rates far above the national average. And the paper trail proving Washington knew about it still sits in the archives today.

Number eleven, the US government spent decades trying to erase the Navajo language. In boarding schools, children caught speaking their parents’ language were beaten or had their mouths washed out with soap. But Navajo women refused to let that happen. Testimonies recorded between the 1970s and 1990s show that grandmothers and mothers secretly taught the language, whispering in the dorms at night using codes the supervisors couldn’t understand. And here’s the irony. In 1942, the same government that punished those children came knocking on the Navajos’ door asking for help. The Marines needed a code the Japanese couldn’t break. That’s how the code talkers were born. More than 400 men served in the Pacific and their code was never cracked. It worked for one reason. Those women kept alive the language Washington had tried to bury.

Number twelve, imagine surviving one massacre and four years later dying in another. That’s what happened to Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief who spent his life seeking peace with the white settlers. At dawn on November 27th, 1868, along the Washita River, Custer surrounded the snow-covered camp and attacked as the band played the Garryowen March. Black Kettle and his wife were shot in the back while trying to cross the river. Most of those killed were women and children. But the coldest detail came afterward. Custer ordered more than 800 horses and ponies to be killed one by one. Without horses during a winter on the plains, the survivors were doomed. In Washington, no one called it a massacre. They called it a victory, and Custer became a war hero. Eight years later, warriors from those same plains would settle the score at Little Bighorn.

Number thirteen, imagine finding out that a portrait of your great-grandmother was sold on postcards all across the country, and she never saw a single cent. That’s what happened to thousands of Native American women between 1870 and 1900. Photographers like Edward Curtis traveled to reservations and asked them to wear traditional clothing that many of them no longer even wore, just to make the photo look more authentic. Those images became big business. They were sold as postcards, printed in magazines, and displayed at the World’s Fairs in Chicago and St. Louis. The women signed nothing, were paid nothing, and in most cases, their names weren’t even recorded. In the archives, many are listed simply as an Indian maid. They became collectible merchandise, while the photographers got the fame and every cent of the profit.

Number fourteen, imagine losing everything because of a marriage. In the late 19th century, during the era of the Dawes Act of 1887, a Native American woman who married a white man could lose her status as a member of her tribe. In practice, that meant losing her right to land, her voice in tribal councils, and the protections of treaties. And here’s the harshest part. American law didn’t fully accept her, either. An 1888 law granted citizenship to women who married white men, but before the 19th Amendment in 1920, she couldn’t even vote. In other words, that woman was stuck in between, without the protection of her tribe and without the full rights of an American citizen. All it took was signing a marriage certificate for her to become a stranger in the very land where her ancestors had lived for generations. While white men gained access to native land, these women lost their identity, a double exclusion stamped by the government.

Number fifteen, here’s one they never taught in school. In 1976, the Government Accountability Office, the government’s own watchdog, investigated the Indian Health Service and confirmed thousands of Native American women had been sterilized in just 4 years. Researchers later estimated it hit 25 to 50% of Native women of childbearing age. Many never gave real consent. Some were under anesthesia for other procedures when it happened. And here’s the part that gets you. This wasn’t the 1800s. It happened while Nixon was in the White House and families were watching All in the Family. The report was published, the numbers were in black and white, yet not one person was ever prosecuted. It was population control aimed at one specific group of American women. And it happened within living memory.

Number sixteen, in November 1868 on a freezing morning along the Washita River in Oklahoma, Custer’s Cavalry attacked Chief Black Kettle’s Cheyenne camp. Among the dead were women the tribe could not afford to lose, the keepers of its memory. They were the ones who led healing ceremonies and recorded their people’s history in pictographs, drawings that worked like books. Cheyenne oral histories preserve their names and roles to this day. When those women fell, centuries of knowledge fell with them. And here’s the part almost no one talks about. Years later, the government itself used the argument that native people had no written history to deny rights and treaties. First, they destroyed the people who did the writing. Then they said nothing had ever been written. The record wasn’t lost by accident. It was erased on purpose.

Number seventeen, here’s something they never taught you in school. Long before syrup hit your pancakes, women from the Ojibwe, Menominee, and Potawatomi nations around the Great Lakes ran a full-blown sugar operation for generations. Every spring, they tapped the maples, hauled the sap, and boiled it down. A process that demanded exact timing and temperature. Get it wrong, and the whole batch was ruined. That sugar wasn’t just food. It got families through brutal winters and worked as currency in trade. When European settlers showed up, these women taught them the whole craft. The settlers took that knowledge and built a commercial industry on it. And the history books? They credited the discovery of maple sugar to European colonists, while the women who invented it never even got their names written down.

Number eighteen, think about this. The US Army knew the name of every soldier who fell in combat. It sent letters to their families and recorded their rank, the date, and the place of death. But on the other side of the battlefield, it was a different story. In the 19th century, the military records office used a single category for native people who were killed. Indian casualties. No name, no age, no distinction between warrior, woman, or child. They were just numbers in a report. That’s why even today, no one knows exactly who died at Sand Creek, Washita, or Wounded Knee. Researchers trying to put those lists together depend almost entirely on the tribes’ oral memory passed down from generation to generation. And here’s the disturbing detail. This wasn’t an oversight. It was official government policy. The erasure of these women began on paper long before it made its way into the history books.

Number nineteen, here’s something no one ever told you in school. Long before 1776, there was already a democracy working in North America. And the women were the ones who really held the power. In the Iroquois Confederacy, the elder women of each clan, known as clan mothers, chose the chiefs. And more than that, if a chief messed up, they had the power to remove him from office. Benjamin Franklin knew this system well. He studied the political structure of the Iroquois and admitted that it helped inspire the union of the colonies. But when it came time to copy the model, the founders left one part out. Women’s power. American women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920, almost 150 years later. And the elder women who helped shape that history still barely show up in school textbooks today. A detail that changes the way we see the founding of the country.

Number twenty, Native women of the Old West. Here’s something school never told you. While white American women couldn’t even vote, Comanche women already had property rights and a voice in tribal decisions. And there’s more. Lozen, an Apache warrior, fought side-by-side with Geronimo for years. But when the treaties were signed, her name simply disappeared from the documents. Sacagawea, she didn’t volunteer to guide Lewis and Clark. She was included in her husband’s agreement as part of the deal. And Iroquois women, whose council system inspired ideas of American democracy, don’t appear in any school textbooks. The most disturbing part, until 1976, the government maintained a documented program of forced sterilization of native women. And in military reports on the massacres, they didn’t even have names. They were just numbers in the count. Most of these women lived and died without any record at all. Learning this history is the least we can do for the people the official records chose to forget.