Liberating the Queen

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For this episode, we took a look at verbal accounts of Buffalo Calf Road Woman. Her history has been passed down many years to Cheyenne contemporaries. Two women play a significant role in telling her tale. Kate Big Head and Iron Teeth. Another author, Mari Sandoz also writes the flight north from Indian Territory based on verbal accounts of women who were there as well.

Buffalo Calf Road Woman has a remarkable story. She was a young Cheyenne warrior woman just beginning to build her family when the Cheyenne people were in the midst of defending their land from the westward expansion. The Cheyenne and other native tribes endured attacks, massacres and fought against forced removals from the reservations.

The Rosebud and Little Bighorn battles proved the tribes’ military strength but ultimately contributed to tragic consequences for the victors. As a young Cheyenne mother, Buffalo Calf Road Woman fought alongside her brother and husband at both battles in defense of Cheyenne freedom.

Several brutal massacres of peaceful tribal groups led to widespread fear among the tribes and shocked the American public. No matter the bravery of the tribe they were fighting a losing battle. The US troops relentlessly pursued them and ensured they had little to no chance of survival.  Buffalo Calf Road Woman, her husband Black Coyote and other Cheyenne were on the run for a long time and almost reached the point of starvation.

Cheyenne warriors recorded Buffalo Calf Road Woman’s courageous ride into the Rosebud battle in a ledger drawing. Today the Cheyenne people still call the battle site “Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.” Each January since 1999, Cheyenne runners participate in a four-hundred-mile memorial run from Fort Robinson, Nebraska, to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. They honor their ancestors who fought for their freedom and sovereignty, including Buffalo Calf Road Woman. (https://www.yellowbirdprograms.org/fortrobinsonrun)

Agonito, R. P. (2007). Buffalo calf road woman: The story of a warrior of the little bighorn. Place of publication not identified: Center Point Pub.

Agonito, Rosemary, and Wanda Sue. “Buffalo Calf Road, Heroic Cheyenne Warrior Woman.” Amazing Women In History, 23 May 2014, http://www.amazingwomeninhistory.com/buffalo-calf-road-cheyenne-warrior-woman/.

Cavanaugh, Ray. “Retrobituaries: Buffalo Calf Road Woman, Custer’s Final Foe.” Mental Floss, 22 June 2017, mentalfloss.com/article/502013/retrobituaries-buffalo-calf-road-woman-custers-.

Healy, Donna. “American Indian Images: Northern Cheyenne History Told in Photos, Interviews.” Billings (Mont.) Gazette. August 6, 2006. http://billingsgazette.com/news/features/magazine/american-indian-images/article_7879faa3-6215-52d0-a2f4-731c6c04a064.html.

Hoxie, Frederick E., ed. Encyclopedia of North American Indians. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Marquis, Thomas. Custer on the Little Big Horn. Lodi, Calif.: End-Kian Publishing Company, 1967.

Michno, Gregory F. Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer’s Defeat. Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 1997.

Little Bear, Richard, ed. We, The Northern Cheyenne People: Our Land, Our History, Our Culture.Lame Deer, Mont.: Chief Dull Knife College, 2008.

Sandoz, M. (2005). Cheyenne autumn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Weist, Tom. A History of the Cheyenne People, rev. ed. Billings: Montana Council for Indian Education, 1984.

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Today we are going to talking about not one, not two but three fantastic female adventurers who dared to make their mark in history and travel the world. Spring is in the air and Minnesota; everyone is ready to bust out of there house. The first episode we were able to learn about Jean Barret, who was the first female to circumnavigate the globe. This episode we will break down three adventurers; Nellie Bly, Annie Londonberry, and Isabella Lucy Bird. All three females were born around the mid-1800’s, were non-conformist that didn’t pull any punches. They were ambitious modern thinkers at a time when woman supposed to be timid and obedient. Get settled in, for the first time we are trying a new format with three amazing travelers. Join Layla and me for a trip around the world.

She was born Annie Cohen Kopchovsky in Riga, Latvia 1870. Her family set sail for America and a new life when Annie was just a child. I couldn’t find much about her childhood, earliest accounts have her married with three kids by 1892. That would make her 22 years old. Also in 1892, a group of men made a bet with one another that no woman could beat the record for cycling around the world. A man named Thomas Stevens had set the record ten years earlier. With some caveats, she would have do it in 15 months (Stevens took 32), starting with zero cash and earn $5000. There was speculation that any woman to attempt the challenge was to win $10,000 if she succeeded. Annie had never been on a bike before, she learned 3 days before her big ride.

The New York World described her epic adventure as “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman.” She was a celebrity and for a while was given her own column in the New York World, where she wrote about her journey (with her usual amount of creative license!)

http://www.annielondonderry.com/learn.html

“I am a journalist and ‘a new woman,’” she wrote, “if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.”

Her first article was about her round-the-world bicycle adventure

Isabella Lucy Bird wasn’t your stereotypical adventurer. She was a slightly stout, middle-aged woman from Yorkshire, England. She suffered from chronic health issues, which is one of the reasons started to travel. Her first sea voyage to the United States was to help with her insomnia and depression. She was an inspirational writer, see her quotes below.

“She was a truly amazing woman,” says travel photography expert and author Deborah Ireland, who compiled a book on Ms. Bird. “She didn’t start learning photography until she was 60 years old. She decided to take up a new profession when most people are considering retirement.

“It was financial necessity that started her travelling,” says Ireland. “At 40, she is thought to be unmarriable and went to Australia. We don’t know for sure but maybe it was thought she could get lucky there, but she just couldn’t handle the heat, the drunk men and the flies, and she tells her sister she must return home.”

“In Hawaii there are none of the social constraints of colonial rule or Victorian moral correctness, and she observed that people can be truly very happy with very little.”

“No one has an adventure like Ms Bird,” crowed The Spectator magazine, in its review of her next release, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, published in 1879. The book was another hit and includes a timeless description of the charismatic local outlaw Rocky Mountain Jim as “a man any women would fall in love with but who no sane woman would ever marry”.

“No one was writing like this at the time,” says Ireland.”The Volga is a miserable steamer … the ship was damp, dark, dirty, old and cold.”

“Her rivals were staying in five-star accommodation but Isabella could offer her readers danger, dirt and reality,” says Dr Julia Kuehn, of the University of Hong Kong, whose research interests include the travel writing of Victorian women. “This was her ‘wow factor’.”

“People think it witty to ridicule everything Chinese, poke fun at these junks and their ‘pig-tailed’, long-coated crews, but their handling of them is masterly,” writes Bird.

“There is genuine admiration and affection, and she refers to their bravery as they risk losing their footing on steep cliffs adjacent to the river,” says Ireland.

“They are rough, truly, but as the voyage went on, their honest work, pluck, endurance, hardihood, sobriety and good nature won my sympathy and in some sort my admiration,” Bird writes 

Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, she was an American jounralist. Bly’s goal was to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg’s 80-day odyssey, as written in the 1873 novel by Jules Verne. He ambition and drive helped her achieve a new qorld record. It took her only 72 days. Unbeknownst to her—beating out her competitor, Elizabeth Bisland of Cosmopolitan magazine.

“Do you get sea-sick ?” I was asked in an interested, friendly way. That was enough; I flew to the railing.

Sick? I looked blindly down, caring little what the wild waves were saying, and gave vent to my feelings.

Amiens to meet Jules Verne, himself. He wished her luck, saying, “If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands.”

Bly writes:

“Lose it? I don’t understand. What do you mean?” I demanded, beginning to think he was mad.

“Aren’t you having a race around the world?” he asked, as if he thought I was not Nellie Bly.

“Yes; quite right. I am running a race with Time,” I replied.

“Time? I don’t think that’s her name.”

“Her! Her!!” I repeated, thinking, “Poor fellow, he is quite unbalanced,” and wondering if I dared wink at the doctor to suggest to him the advisability of our making good our escape.

“Yes, the other woman; she is going to win. She left here three days ago.”

I am not racing with anyone. I would not race. If someone else wants to do the trip in less time, that is their concern. If they take it upon themselves to race against me, it is their lookout that they succeed. I am not racing. I promised to do the trip in seventy-five days, and I will do it; although had I been permitted to make the trip when I first proposed it over a year ago, I should then have done it in sixty days.

“Champion of Her Sex,” New York Sunday World, 2 February 1896, p. 10.

“The Life of Isabella Bird”. The Spectator. London: 6. 26 January 1907.

Bear, David. “Around the World With Nellie Bly.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 26, 2006

Bird, Isabella (1883). The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither. Archived from the original on 1 July 2012.

Bird, I. L., Ireland, D., & Gardner, R. (2015). Isabella Bird: A photographic journal of travels through China 1894-1896. Lewes, East Sussex, United Kingdom: Ammonite Press.

Foulkes, Debbie (April 5, 2010). “Annie Kopchovsky Londonderry (1870? – 1947) Rode A Bicycle Around the World”

Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly – Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. Times Books Random House, 1994

Macy, Sue (2011). Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (with a Few Flat Tires Along the Way). Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Children’s Books. pp. 67–69.

Miss Londonderry’s Trip Ended”. New York Times. September 25, 1895

Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey (1986). Women in science: antiquity through the nineteenth century: a biographical dictionary with annotated bibliography(Reprint. ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly – Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. Times Books Random House, 1994

Ruddick, Nicholas. “Nellie Bly, Jules Verne, and the World on the Threshold of the American Age.” Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 29, Number 1, 1999, p. 5

Zheutlin, Peter (2007). Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride. New York: Citadel.

Zheutlin, Peter. “Chasing Annie: The Woman Who Changed My Life Was Brave, Cunning, Daring And Free — And I Never Met Her”

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Birth/Death (1507–1458 BC)

Our third episode is about an ancient Egyptian bad-ass, Queen Hatshepsut or as we call her Queen H. She is attributed to being one Egypt’s greatest and longest rulers.  Somewhere in time, she was lost in the history books, some by her on doing and others by people trying to erase her existence as pharaoh.

There is a lot of information about Hatshepsut out there, below is the bibliography for all citations used for this podcast. There continues to be a lot of questions and a lot of excitement around Hatshepsut and even a rumored movie.

Hatshepsut began her reign by marrying her daughter to Thutmose III and bestowing on Neferu-Ra the position of God’s Wife of Amun in order to secure her position.

She presented herself as a direct successor to Ahmose, whose name the people still remembered as their great liberator, in order to further strengthen her position and defend against detractors who would claim a woman was unfit to rule. Her numerous inscriptions, monuments, and temples all demonstrate how unprecedented her reign was: no woman before her had ruled the country openly as pharaoh.

She kept the economy moving;

Senenmut and Neferu-Ra had both died long before and there was no one at court, it seems, who had the power or inclination to change this policy. The wreckage of some of these works was dumped near her temple at Deir el-Bahri and excavations brought her name to light along with the inscriptions inside the temple which Champollion was so mystified by. Although there have been many theories over the years as to why Tuthmose III tried to blot Hatshepsut’s name from history, the most likely reason was that her reign had been unconventional and departed from tradition.

The Egyptian belief that one lives on as long as one’s name is remembered, however, is exemplified in Hatshepsut. She was forgotten as the period of the New Kingdom continued and remained so for centuries. Once her name was found again by Champollion in the 19th century CE, and then by others throughout the 20th, she gradually came back to life and assumed her rightful place as one of the greatest pharaohs in Egypt’s history.

It is unknown how or when she died, although there is speculation based on when pronouns started changing in Egyptian artifacts.  As we continue to discover it will be exciting to see what else comes out from the stories of Queen H.

“has become one of the most celebrated and controversial women of Egypt and the ancient world in general……

Whereas she had been represented as a woman in earlier statues and relief sculptures, after her coronation as king she appeared with male dress and gradually  became represented with male physique. Her breasts did not show and she stood in a traditional man’s posture rather than a woman’s. Some reliefs were even re-carved to adjust her representation to appear more like a man.”

Page 172. M. V. Mieroop, A history of ancient Egypt. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

“He [Amun] in the incarnation of the Majesty of her husband, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, [Thutmose I] found her sleeping in the beauty of her palace. She awoke at the divine fragrance and turned towards his Majesty. He went to her immediately, he was aroused by her he imposed his desire upon her. He allowed her to see him in his form of a god and she rejoiced at the sight of his beauty after he had come before her. His love passed into her body. The palace was flooded with divine fragrance (van de Mieroop”

Page 173. M. V. Mieroop, A history of ancient Egypt. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

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