The Legend of Crazy Woman

Many legends have arisen from settling the West. This is just one of them. Some of them originated from conflicts between Indians and settlers as they fought for land and other natural resources. Those were times of uncertainty for our developing country, and sometimes soldiers were brought in by the US government to settle or minimize these disputes. One of these legends that arose during these times that I found most intriguing was that of a woman who had become known as the crazy woman. Some say she was Indian and others say she was a white woman. As legends go we’ll never know for sure. For all we know, the legend may have originated and existed only in the mind of an imaginative mountain man or a trapper as he entertained his friends around a camp fire one evening, and thus the legend was borne.
Through my travels in Wyoming and Montana over the years, I have seen references to the character such as that of Crazy Woman Creek, Crazy Woman Trading Post and so on, and wondered whether that woman had actually played a role in the American history. It wasn’t until recently that I did some research on the legend and so far as I can tell, it is just a legend.
As a writer fiction and a history enthusiast, I am merely putting my own spin on the possible origin of this legend. I am not attempting to change the legend at all. It is possible that any one of the bloody conflicts between Indians and settlers could have driven a sane woman crazy if she witnessed a loved one being tortured or killed. I am not a historian; just a novice history enthusiast, whether American or European. And this is one of the historical snippets that took my fantasy one day to write about, so here it goes. I even tried to add where appropriate a little humor as I do in most of my writings.