Medicine Woman Later (Ar-no-ho-wok)

Medicine Woman Later

NPS Illustration, Steven Lang

Ar-no-ho-wok (Medicine Woman Later or Medicine Woman Hereafter) was a Ponca captive, and the third wife of Chief Black Kettle. He married her in 1855 in Colorado. She was severely wounded during the Sand Creek Massacre on November 29, 1864. Black Kettle risked his life by going back into the Sand Creek camp while Colonel John Chivington's troops were still there to search for her. He found her alive even though she was shot nine times. He carried her back to Kansas and to the safety of the other Cheyenne camps. During the evening of November 26, 1868, she stood outside of Black Kettle's lodge while he and the other chiefs ruminated over what to do and chastised them for not moving the camp down river. On November 27, 1868, she died alongside her husband on the banks of the Washita River during Lt. Col. George A. Custer's dawn attack. According to George Bent, no children were born from this marriage.




Bibliography

Greene, Jerome A. Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867-1869.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. (pgs. 129, 253)

Hardorff, Richard. Washita Memories: Eyewitness Views of Custer's Attack on Black Kettle's Village.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. (pgs. 15, 309, 321, 327-28, 427-28)