Amache was born about 1846 near Bent’s Fort. She was the daughter of Ochinee, or Lone Bear, a Cheyenne sub-chief. In her teens she met John Prowers, a young trader employed by Bent, St. Vrain & Company. They married in 1861 and that same year Amache gave birth to Susan, who was to be the first of the Prowers’ nine children.
In 1864, Amache’s family was at the encampment of the Cheyenne tribe at Sand Creek when Colonel John Chivington and his soldiers attacked the unarmed camp. Although Amache’s mother escaped, Ochinee and others of Amache’s relatives were killed. By way of atonement, the U.S. Government gave surviving family members of some of those killed at the Sand Creek Massacre a 640-acre parcel of land. Amache, her mother and the Prowers’ two oldest daughters were all given tracts along the Arkansas River. It was primarily on their Cheyenne lands that John Prowers ran his cattle.
The Victorian world into which Amache Ochinee Prowers married required many skills different from the Cheyenne world into which she was born. Amache used culture creatively. For example, she spoke Cheyenne and Spanish fluently, and understood English, but apparently only spoke it when she chose to. In the photograph, she appears to be a Victorian woman, except it seems she refused to wear a corset. She insisted the Prowers’ Boggsville house face east as was Cheyenne custom and she had her own teepee erected near the house where she would escape whenever the bustle became too much.
The recollections of her daughter and granddaughters also paint a vivid picture of Amache. Although they discuss various ways she adapted to Anglo culture — she reportedly loved to ice skate and ride a bicycle — their favorite memories of Amache have to do with her Cheyenne ways. She made prickly pear pickles and gathered wild herbs and greens from the prairie. Every Christmas she made buffalo candy out of dried buffalo meat, cinnamon and sugar. Amache and her best friend Mary Bent Moore (the daughter of William Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman) went buffalo hunting together. In the summer, the traveling Cheyenne allowed the women to lasso colts from their band of horses and keep them until fall. Excavations at Boggsville yielded stone tools and pestles that indicate she used Cheyenne cooking methods.
Amache was an innovative mediator between cultures. As an active participant in her family’s cattle ranching business and a leader in her community, she bridged the diverse cultural traditions of the Native American, Hispanic and Anglo people who resided in Colorado’s southeastern plains.
Amache died in 1905 at the age of 58 in Boston, Massachusetts, where she was undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. She is buried in the Bent County Las Animas cemetery. The WWII Japanese internment camp near Granada is named for her. She was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 2018.