She who must be obeyed: “the words are enough to send a shiver down the spine of many a married man.

Now museum curators have discovered that it was a Scots adventurer’s awe-struck account of a powerful American Indian ‘chieftainess’ that gave birth to the iconic image of a domineering woman.

Hardened 19th-century explorer Robert Campbell – the first westerner to explore the vast wilderness of Canada’s Yukon Territory – told how he owed his life to the woman when she furiously confronted members of her tribe as they prepared to shoot him and his companion, a man called McLeod.

Campbell’s friend, the writer Rider Haggard, was so impressed by the story he wrote the book She, which was made into a 1965 film starring Ursula Andress. Haggard’s description of his African queen as ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ became a byword for the wives of under-the-thumb husbands.

But Campbell was nothing but grateful after his encounter with the Tahltan Indian woman, whose name is not known, on the shores of Dease Lake in northern British Columbia while on a fur trading mission in the 1880s. ” Scotland on Sunday