Once upon a time, I was working as a freelance editor and copywriter. Equally distant in my memory is that I was also friends with a developer and her spouse. This couple asked me to write some marketing copy for their firm’s website and brochures, which was something I had been doing as a side hustle for quite some time.

Among the soul-selling words I wrote for these developers in order to convince millionaires to purchase land at the foothills of the Bridgers was this line: “Homeowners will wake each day to a southern view of the expansive Gallatin Valley, and northeastern views of Sacajawea and Naya Nuki peaks in the Bridger mountains, named for two of the famous Native American women involved in Lewis and Clark’s expedition into this region in the early 1800s.”

Creating that sentence took me on a journey.

I knew exactly who Naya Nuki was, but realized I hadn’t thought about her in decades—not since 1986, when I was assigned to read the book Naka Nuki: Shoshone Girl Who Ran, by Wyoming author Kenneth Thomasma, as a fourth grader at Longfellow Elementary School.

The story is an account of Sacajawea’s close friend, Naya Nuki, the Shoshone Indian girl who escaped the tribe that captured the two of them, along with other women and children in their tribe, near the headwaters of the Missouri River at the turn of the nineteenth century. Naya Nuki was able to escape, then locate and rejoin her tribe, after traversing almost all of Montana and half of North Dakota alone and on foot. I was completely transfixed by the concept, and I asked my teacher if this tale was fiction or fact. She explained that it was hard to know for sure, since most Native American stories are passed down orally and there is very little written record of this time.

Yet I wondered about this for years – would someone make this up? Growing up in Bozeman, we were all taught about Sacajawea from the second we hit school, but why wasn’t there more information about her BFF, who was obviously a badass? Many years later, I found that I wasn’t alone in asking this question (more on that later). Encouraged by the existence of the world wide web, I did some digging. I learned that this fierce young female was very real, and that she did indeed escape her captors and reunite with her tribe.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, the developers were not familiar with any of this. So I wrote a detailed summary for them, explaining that Naya Nuki was an indigenous girl, likely around 11 years old, who was taken prisoner by the Hidatsa tribe of North Dakota in 1801, very near Bozeman. Specifically, as the Shoshoni came out of Lemhi Valley in Idaho, they were attacked near present-day Three Forks, where Naya Nuki, Sacajawea, and others were taken as slaves. They were forced to march more than 1,000 miles across present-day Montana to a North Dakota village, where they were kept as slaves. After about two months of slavery, Naya Nuki was able to escape alone in the middle of the night, and began the long trek back along the Missouri, determined to find her people. After traveling solo on foot for one month, she found her Shoshoni tribe near the Montana-Idaho border in the Beaverhead Valley, very close to where she’d been taken.

The developers seemed fairly unmoved by the significance of Naya Nuki having walked alone over nearly half of North Dakota and almost all of Montana, likely using landmarks such as the Gates of the Mountains near Wolf Creek to stay on track, and of her having experienced incredible hardships including hunger, illness, danger of attack by wildlife and enemy tribes, and the elements. But for my part, I felt reawakened.

In my searches for information about Naya Nuki, I learned that accounts of her endurance, fortitude, and spirit are recorded in very few places. However, Lewis and Clark documented her reunion with Sacajawea, who by then was “married to” (i.e., enslaved by) French-Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, in their journals. On August 17, 1805, Lewis wrote:

“Shortly after Capt. Clark arrived with the Interpreter Charbono, and the Indian woman, who proved to be a sister of the Chif Cameahwait.  the meeting of those people was really affecting, particularly between Sah cah-gar-we-ah and an Indian woman, who had been taken prisoner at the same time with her, and who had afterwards escaped from the Minnetares and rejoined her nation” (sic).

And Clark wrote:
“... The Interpreter & Squar who were before me at Some distance danced for the joyful Sight, and She made signs to me that they were her nation…” (sic).

I now know that this story affected my fourth-grade self so greatly for a couple of reasons: for one thing, I was about the same age as Naya Nuki and Sacajawea when they were captured, and the idea of being yanked by my hair out of hiding in a willow tree was beyond chilling. Like any good latchkey child of the 1980s, I was raised with a healthy paranoia of being kidnapped. It didn’t help that Charbonneau was documented as having been quite the abuser, which Sacajawea was stuck with until her posited death from fever in 1812, according to the National Park Service. (There’s an account in 1795 of Charbonneau being stabbed with a canoe awl by a woman who found him in the act of assaulting her daughter, and it’s hard not to wish she had finished the job.)

But I was also residing on nearly the same land where this happened. These young women and their people lived without heaters in winter, without cars, without bear spray, without modern medicine, often without food. Not only that, but they’d been living this way for centuries before Europeans showed up and ultimately obliterated their way of life. It was one of the first stories to truly give me a perspective of how life once was in southwest Montana, and my first real appreciation for the grit of the people who lived off this beautiful but unforgiving land.

Something else has always bothered me about this: we know much more about the men of Montana’s history than the women, particularly indigenous women. Granted, my fourth-grade teacher was correct that the Shoshone language is primarily a spoken language and there may be no known current writings about Naya Nuki’s life besides the aforementioned, but it seems that many more men of the 1800s managed to be commemorated. As an adult, I understand the whys behind this. But we don’t have to accept those “reasons” today. We can teach our Montana kids about important young females in our state’s history – and I can’t think of a more awe-inspiring example than Naya Nuki. If she influenced me to be independent, courageous, and tenacious, she will also influence the kids of the twenty-first century.

Finally, in an extremely gratifying full-circle situation: the person responsible for having the peak in the Bridgers named for Naya Nuki was another young local girl, Kristin Anderson. She smiles back at me from my yearbook as I type this, and was in third grade in Bozeman when she read Thomasma’s book. As it turns out, she felt like I did, and wondered why Sacajawea had a peak named after her but Naya Nuki did not. Incredibly, Anderson successfully campaigned the United States Board of Geographic Names to have the unnamed peak in the Bridger Mountains next to Sacagawea peak officially named Naya Nuki peak in 1988.

“I definitely had a lot of help,” Anderson says. “It felt like it took a really long time – there were calls to the Geographic Names office, many people writing letters in support… there were a lot of hoops to jump through. I can’t imagine trying to do it now. It was a slow process, which ended up being an excellent lesson for me about how difficult change is. It taught me that persistence pays off, which Naya Nuki also taught me. For her, not going home wasn’t an option, despite the risks. What a great example of the definition of courage: being afraid and doing it anyway.”

Anderson clearly shares Naya Nuki’s determined spirit. It goes without saying that they’re both heroes of mine.

I lost track of the developers and their plans for the area around Springhill, but my hope is that anyone residing in the Gallatin Valley – whether they were born and raised here, or just moved here from Florida/Texas/California – will have some appreciation for our land’s extraordinary history. We who live here today get to ski, hike, and live in the Bridger mountains, and we fish, float, and paddle the Gallatin, Madison, Jefferson, and Missouri rivers. Part of honoring the people who lived here before us is talking about who they were, as well as thoughtful and considerate stewardship of this land. In Anderson’s words, we have more in common than we don’t, and there are always things to be learned as we walk through life.