Strongheart: The Lost Journals of May Dodd and Molly McGill Read online

  I had never killed anyone before, and I always imagined that if ever I was forced to under any circumstances, I would feel terrible remorse and guilt. But I did not. I felt only a great sense of vindication, righteousness, liberty … and power. Only later did it occur to me how much the violence I have witnessed and experienced in my time here has changed me … and perhaps it was in this moment when I became a true savage.

  I looked up then to see Wind, already standing in the shadows behind me. She motioned me to come to her. I wiped my hands and both sides of the knife blade on the blanket and slipped from beneath it. We made a wide berth outside the perimeter of the camp to reach the picket line of horses on the far side. This, I knew, was the most dangerous moment, for if one or more of them snorted or whinnied in alarm, everyone who lives on the plains, Indian and white alike, awake or asleep, is attuned to this disturbance that warns of potential intruders. But as she said she would, murmuring almost inaudibly in Cheyenne, Wind somehow steadied the horses, who simply raised their heads in curiosity. The bridles were all draped in a row over a fallen tree next to the picket line, our parfleches lying on the ground beside them. These we fixed upon our backs. Very carefully I picked up a bridle, grasping the bit in my hand. I went to my horse, slipped an arm around his neck, and with the other hand gently stroked his face. He blew just the slightest exhalation of content from his nostrils. I slid the bridle over his head, pressing the bit gently into his mouth. I untied his lead rope, then looped it and tied it to the top of the halter. Wind and I both quickly untied the lead ropes of the other horses from the picket line and tied them as I had mine. We mounted our horses and reined them in the direction of our escape. Now from a pocketlike pouch on the side of her deer hide shirt, Wind pulled a bloody object I could not identify. She looked at me, smiled, and nodded, raising the dripping object in the air, shaking it fiercely, and then issued the most savage, the most enraged, the most bloodcurdling, the most triumphant war cry I have ever in my life heard … and I have heard a few.

  My horse and all the others bolted at her cry. I almost lost my seat but for the fact that I grew up in the rarefied milieu of monied Chicagoans, riding thoroughbred jumpers from the time I was a little girl, and have since vastly broadened my equestrian experience riding bareback the wild ponies of the plains. And so I managed to hang on. We broke free of the trees in the river bottom and crested a hill into the open country, listening to the hollering of our now awakened but still drunken captors fading into the distance. As we galloped across the plains, we watched the nine other horses, spread out under the light of a half moon, running with us, as if they, too, were escaping their captors.

  As dawn was breaking, and after finally putting sufficient distance between us and the outlaw camp, we slowed to a walk to rest our horses and then stopped to let them drink at a water hole. It was then that the other nine reappeared, perhaps having smelled the water, nickering to our two in greeting as they arrived. While the horses were watering, I asked Wind what exactly it was that she had raised up to the sky. It was light enough now that I saw the dark bloodstains on the front of her shirt, and the blood of my deceased captor on my own and dried on my hands. We dismounted to rinse our faces, also bloodied, and our hands.

  She pulled the object, I should say the organ, out of her pocket. “It is the heart of the man called Mad Dog,” she answered. “He cannot go to Seano without it. I wished also to take the heart of Jules Seminole, but he was asleep by the fire in the middle of the camp and I was afraid I would wake the others.”

  sometime in May

  During our escape from the nest of bandits guided by Jules Seminole, though Wind and I recovered our parfleches, all that was left in them was our blankets. Still, we are accustomed to this spartan existence, and not counting our knives and the two lariats we took from the bandits’ saddles at the picket line, we do have one valuable asset: a herd of eleven horses.

  It is the purview of medicine men and women to take credit for extraordinary occurrences, and though she never boasts of such things, I can safely say from our experience that Wind has big medicine in matters equine, among additional talents. For what other explanation can there be for the fact that all the horses, free from the picket line, followed us as we fled? I came to understand that somehow, as we were riding yesterday with the bandits, Wind had identified the dominant horse in the herd, and that was the one she expressly chose to ride for our escape, with the hope that at least some of the others would follow the leader. They had all fanned out in the plains as we galloped, and I was not confident we would ever see any of them again. Perhaps they might even return to the bandits’ camp. For my part, I felt lucky just to have the two we rode. Now it is reassuring to know that our captors have not a single horse between them, and a long way to walk in all directions.

  One thing is clear, we need somehow to resupply. Our requirements are modest, and we can cook meat by impaling it on sticks, and eat with our fingers, which all Indians and all of us white women are long accustomed to doing. Still, we need something with which to hunt besides our knives, at least a bow and arrow, though as we travel these past days, we have managed to kill a few prairie chickens and rabbits with rocks, and scoop fish from the streams with our hands, securing enough sustenance to at least keep us alive.

  I have devised a bolder and more profitable plan for us, a rather entrepreneurial idea. Whereas we have previously given wide berth to settlements and homesteads, now we seek them out. We risk traveling along the foothills of the Bighorns, to within a dozen miles of Fort Fetterman, in northern Wyoming Territory, where a large garrison of soldiers is stationed and which serves as headquarters for General George Crook. My friend Gertie had warned us that it was from Fetterman that Crook’s forces would launch the winter campaigns that destroyed our village, and which were designed to finally break the resistance of the last free bands. It occurs to me that Crook’s aide-de-camp, my former paramour and the father of my daughter, Little Bird, Captain John G. Bourke, may well be in residence here.

  To get the lay of the land, Wind and I have been moving through the area as surreptitiously as possible, as only Indians can. She has known this country since she was a girl, long before anything was here, but much has changed in recent years. There is now a small settlement of homesteaders and ranchers in proximity to the fort, whose needs are serviced by a fledgling town, still mostly a collection of tents, with a handful of new buildings, and others under construction.

  The first homestead we come upon is a small ranch/farm operation, with a modest clapboard house, the hand-hewn lumber still fresh and unpainted. Across from the house is a lean-to shed beside a corral holding a horse and a dairy cow. Next to that is a pen with two pigs, and a litter of piglets. Behind the house is a fenced pasture with a small herd of cattle. We have been watching the place now from the hills above for a full day and a half, to get a sense of the owners and their movements. They are a young couple, without children, and the man carries a Winchester rifle wherever he goes, setting it down within reach while doing his chores. The woman works in the garden, tends the chickens and pigs and hauls water from a spring creek that runs through the property.

  This afternoon, Wind stayed back at our vantage point, while I rode in, trailing another horse by its lead. As soon as he spotted me, the man picked up his rifle, cocked it, and held it across his chest.

  “Stop right there,” he called to me, holding up his hand in the universal sign.

  I did so.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” he asked.

  “I’m a white woman,” I called back, “even if I don’t look like one. I’m unarmed and I just want to talk to you.”

  “Alright. Come in … real slow … and watch your hands.”

  I held up my empty hands. His wife now came out of the house and watched me from the porch. I rode up to him and dismounted.

  He looked me up and down, with curiosity. “If you’re a white woman, why are you dressed like a savage?” />
  I followed the man’s eyes to look down at my own attire. My hide shift, leggings, and moccasins are stained and torn in places, though Wind has soaked most of the blood off them and mended them where possible. I could only imagine how I must appear to these people.

  “I’ve been a captive,” I said, “but I was released. Yours is the first house I’ve come upon. I want to trade you for this horse.”

  “What tribe took you?”

  “Pawnee,” I lied, giving him the name of one of our enemy tribes.

  “The savages with the strange haircuts, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long were you with them?”

  “I’ve lost track of time … about two years, I think.”

  “Did they…?” He cast his eyes away and scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt. “Did they…?”

  “No, they didn’t do anything like that. They treated me well, and they let me go.”

  “Why don’t you go into Fort Fetterman,” he said. “It ain’t far from here, and I’m sure the Army can help you.”

  “I plan to do just that,” I said. “But first I want to see if we can make a trade for this horse.”

  “We might be able to use him. Is he broke to saddle?”

  “Broke to saddle and pack.”

  “He ever work cattle?”

  “Not that I know of. But he’s biddable, and he neck reins. I see no reason he couldn’t learn to work cattle.”

  “What do you want for him?”

  I looked now at the woman. “I want to take a bath, and I need a dress, undergarments, a pair of shoes and stockings, a hairbrush or a comb.” I looked back at the man. “And one hundred dollars cash.”

  “That’s awful high,” he said.

  “I don’t know what the market is for horses these days,” I answered, “but I do know that a few years back, a good saddle horse was worth $200. This one is sound, he’s still young, he’s gentle, and he’s well shod. Go ahead and look him over.” I looked again at the woman. “I’m not asking for your best dress or your finest pair of shoes. Anything will do—a pair of work clothes. I just want to be able to go into a town without getting jeered at, beaten, or killed for being a white squaw.” I cut my eyes back to the man. “I’m asking a fair price.”

  Now his wife smiled. “Will you join us for supper, miss,” she said, “after you’ve had your bath and are dressed in your new clothes?”

  “Yes, thank you, that’s very kind of you. I would be delighted.”

  Her name was Sarah, and she heated water on their cookstove and let me bathe in a tin tub with real soap. I unwound my braids and washed my hair. God, it was heavenly. She gave me a simple faded red-and-white-checked gingham dress, an undergarment, a pair of long cotton stockings that had been darned in a number of places but were soft and warm, and a well-worn pair of canvas shoes with thankfully short heels. Accustomed as I am to flat moccasins, the shoes were still a challenge, and I teetered clumsily when I took my first few steps.

  Sarah was apologetic, even embarrassed about her offering, but I assured her that to me it was all quite elegant and luxurious. I brushed my hair, and she pinned it up. Then she held a mirror up in front of me. “Have a look, May,” she said, “and see how lovely you are.” Nearly all lodges in our village owned trade mirrors, but it had been a long time since I had looked in one. Now I felt like I was gazing at a perfect stranger. “Who is that woman?” I asked, under my breath. “I don’t recognize her.” Indeed, I realized in that moment that I am, and will always be, two different people, and that I need to reacquaint myself with this stranger staring back in the mirror, who did not appear to recognize me either.

  It had been even longer since I had sat for dinner at an actual table … not since Fort Laramie, when I dined with Captain John Bourke … another lifetime ago … Good God, it seems an eternity gone by … How suddenly and profoundly our lives change … nothing ever returning to the way it was, only going forward to the way it will be … and often, as hard as we try, we have little control over the destination.

  I had to consciously watch my manners at table, avoid picking up the pieces of stew meat with my fingers and then licking them clean. It occurred to me that I am no longer really suitable company among civilized folk. The gentleman’s name was Wendell Peterson, and he and his wife, Sarah, had traveled here to homestead from Missouri less than six months ago. They asked many questions about my time among the savages, and, as I had reflexively when he was trying to suss out a polite way to ask if I had been violated … a question, to be sure, which there is no polite way of asking … I found myself defending the comportment of our enemies the Pawnee. All savages are the same to the whites, who make little effort to differentiate between the tribes. The only good Injun, goes the old trope Gertie had told us, is a dead Injun. And, therefore, in order to avoid reinforcing my hosts’ prejudices, I made my invented captors sound like perfect ladies and gentlemen within their own culture. I secretly sensed that Mr. Peterson was disappointed that my account was not more lurid, and I spared them the tale of my encounter with the white outlaws.

  “Have you had any contact with Indians since your time here?” I asked.

  “We see the hangs-around-the-fort Indians when we go into the mercantile in town,” he answered. “A sorry lot of beggars and drunks they are, but not threatening. With the fort so close by, the dangerous renegades stay away from here.” (To which I felt like saying, That’s what you think, but, of course, I did not.) “The Army patrols the region regularly, and we have been assured that the savages have been largely subdued, and most of them confined to reservations. But they tell us to remain vigilant, and always armed. That’s why I keep my rifle handy.”

  I recognized that these were fine people, just trying to survive, to make a life for themselves, as are we all. It did not concern them, or even really occur to them, that this land the government had parceled into 160-acre homesteads and was giving away to settlers like them, or selling cheap in larger tracts to more affluent ranchers, had, for a thousand years, been the home of these native peoples, the last of whom were now being hunted down, slaughtered, or confined to reservations, so that the colonizers could take over the earth.

  The Petersons paid my asking price for the horse and offered me a place to sleep for the night, which I declined … a bit reluctantly even. I have to admit that my first foray back into the civilized world was seductive: a bath with warm water, clean hair, wearing a simple gingham dress freshly washed, and eating dinner at a farm table with people who spoke my native tongue … plus I now had $100 in my pocket.

  I wrapped my hide clothing up and tied it around my neck. Mounting my horse thusly attired proved to be problematic, and riding sidesaddle without a saddle was equally improbable. I finally had to hike my dress up to my waist and swing onto my horse’s back, which made Sarah giggle, and had already caused her husband, Wendell, to turn his back to me out of a sense of Christian decorum. I touched my heels to the horse’s flanks and went from a walk to a brisk trot out of their ranch yard, heeled him again, and broke into a lope. Without turning to look back at them, I raised my arm in good-bye and gave out my best Indian war cry, a chilling sound even to my ears, just to remind them, and myself, that despite my new outfit and my pocketful of money, I was still not fully civilized.

  * * *

  Wind looked at me with some amusement when I returned. “I wondered if you were going to return, Mesoke,” she said.

  “You know that I would never leave you, Wind.”

  “You look just like a white woman.”

  I laughed. “Sometimes we forget that I am a white woman. But I must get out of these clothes now. I’ll save them for tomorrow when we go to town.”

  “When you go to town,” Wind corrected me. “I must stay here with the horses. And besides, I am afraid to go there. I have bad dreams about being in the iron jail.”

  the next day sometime in late May

  Early this morning, in add
ition to my mount, I leave our camp with three more horses, two of which I hope to use in trade, and the other to carry back whatever goods I might be able to secure. Wind and I have decided that the first thing I should try to find are good saddles, and then I hope to acquire a rifle, both for hunting and to defend ourselves, and to purchase more suitable white-woman riding attire.

  It occurred to me that it would be awkward and arouse unwanted attention for me to ride into a white settlement bareback with my dress hiked up to my waist. Thus, as soon as I caught sight of the town, I dismounted and walked in leading the horses. I still hadn’t shaken the sense that I was an outsider and no longer dressed in animal skins, and I had to keep reminding myself of my new role as a respectable white woman. I was relieved to see that there were enough people about that no one paid me much attention. Due to its proximity to the fort, a number of what appeared to be officers’ wives were in town shopping, as well soldiers with wagons picking up supplies.

  I went first to the stables, which were easy to find, and tied my horses to a hitching rail in front. A sign read: P. J. BARTLETT & SONS. There was a riding ring beside the stable, and a corral behind it. Inside the stable, two boys were mucking out stalls. I asked them if the stablemaster was available, and they directed me to the office in the middle of the hallway of stalls.

  When I reached it, I saw that the office also doubled as a tack room. A man was working at the desk in front, and he stood when I appeared in the open doorway. He was a tall, stout, middle-aged fellow, balding and with an impressive handlebar mustache. “What can I do for you, young lady?” he asked.

  “Are you Mr. Bartlett?”

  “I am,” he said, coming around the desk. “Please, come in. And to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

  “My name is Abigail Ames,” I said, taking my ex-common-law-husband’s family name as an alias. “I have two horses for sale. I wondered if you might be interested in buying, or know someone in town who would be. I’d also like to buy a pair of saddles, if you can direct me to a saddlery shop.”