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

  I give you this diary so that you might make regular entries in it, and describe your experiences in the Great Plains. Most importantly, I want you to bring it back and read it out loud to your mama who loves you so.

  Please take care of yourself, my darling little boy. Come home to me. Come home to me.

  Your loving mother,

  Lucille Miller

  I thumbed through the few scant pages of diary that young Josh Miller had filled in with a boy’s poor handwriting, the last page a short letter to his mother.

  Dear Mama,

  Today we meet the enemy for the first time. Lt. Colonel Custer tells us that our troops have set a trap. Major Reno’s three companies will attack the Indian village from the south. Our five companies will cross the river and attack from the north. I am trying to be a brave soldier. I want you to be proud of me when I come home. But I am so scared, Mama … I am so scared. Please help me, Mama. I miss you. I love you.

  Josh

  I realized then that I needed to take these saddlebags back to the scene of the massacre and leave them there. This diary belonged to his mother now. I knew that the Army must keep records of their soldiers, and that they would have his family’s name and address, or at least the name of the nearest town to which they lived, and they would likely send them his last effects. But when I stood to walk from my hilltop, I saw a massive force of mounted soldiers pouring like a blue wave over a distant hill of yellow grass. I knew that I must flee, and take the saddlebags with me.

  28 June 1876

  My friend Carolyn Metcalf, surely the most fastidious of those of our group still among us, has kept a calendar of our time here. She tells me that she also did so in the lunatic asylum to which her husband, the pastor, had unjustly committed her, because the simple act of keeping track of the date helped her to hold some grip on sanity in that ghastly place. The irony of this statement was not lost upon me. Carolyn says she keeps her calendar here “in order to maintain some slight connection to civilization, in case we should ever have occasion to return there,” although she admits that this prospect seems increasingly unlikely.

  And so I resume these journals, counting upon the accuracy of her dates, as I, for one, especially since my last strange experience, have completely lost track of time except in the broadest sense of the seasons and the movement of the sun, which we farm girls come to learn instinctively.

  We are under way again. Apparently, Little Wolf and much of his band did not participate in the battle here. After the fight on the Rosebud, he led away those who wished to follow him, and no one seems to know exactly where. It is true that the Sweet Medicine Chief has always tried to maintain as much distance as possible from both the whites and other tribes, his primary responsibility being to keep his people safe from danger. Perhaps he has found again some sufficiently secluded place in which to hide from the Army. Where that might be, or if such a place even exists, we do not know.

  After the Rosebud battle, some of the young warriors in Little Wolf’s band, and their families, including our white women and their husbands, had continued on to the valley of the Little Bighorn. Having tasted victory, these young men did not wish to miss the massive gathering of tribes there, and what promised to be another rare opportunity to defeat the soldiers, and gain honors on the battlefield. And so, apparently, they have.

  I have had wonderful news from Pretty Nose that my husband, Hawk, is not dead, as the wretched maniac Jules Seminole told me when I was in his captivity. It is true that he was gravely wounded at the battle on the Rosebud, but his grandmother, Náhkohenaa’é’e, Bear Doctor Woman, made a camp for them on a tributary of Rosebud Creek, where she cared for him, nursing him back to a fragile health. Pretty Nose had come upon them herself after she escaped from her captor in Seminole’s camp, and was following the trail of the People to the Little Bighorn. She tells me that Hawk was still too weak to travel, and she feared that the Indian scouts of the Army might discover them. That is the only news I have of him, and old news it is. Yet I remain certain that he is still alive, and will come to me when he is able.

  We ride now with our small band of Cheyenne and Arapaho, our own little reunited family group led by the distinguished warrior chief, Pretty Nose. This includes the chaplain Christian Goodman, our Mennonite spiritual advisor, and his wife, the Norwegian girl, Astrid Norstegard; Lulu LaRue, our lively French songstress and actress; the Mexican Maria Galvez, her skin bronzed by these months in the sun and, due to her own Indian blood, nearly indistinguishable in feature from the Cheyenne; Carolyn Metcalf, former pastor’s wife from Kansas; Martha Atwood Tangle Hair of Chicago, May Dodd’s best friend; and Euphemia Washington, escaped slave, but an African warrior princess in our minds. With Meggie and Susie gone, Martha and Phemie are all that are left now of the original group of white women to be sent among the Indians, though more than were thought to have survived. The attrition rate is high on these plains.

  With the departure of Ann Hall and Hannah Alford, we are but five left in our small band of brides. We are strangely heartened to know that those two, at least, are alive and going home, as if we somehow share vicariously in that journey, for home is a place that increasingly exists only in our imaginations. The absence of our missing friends both dead and alive is keenly felt by us all, yet as we ride once again into the unknown, homeless and reduced in number though we be, we are long past the point of self-pity. Indeed, whatever is to come, I think we all consider ourselves among the fortunate … perhaps, I, more than anyone.

  Except for the addition of several Arapaho families who have joined us, we know most of those with whom we ride. At this point we have no idea where we are headed. The thousands of Indians from the three tribes who congregated in the river bottom of the Little Bighorn have similarly split up into smaller bands and family groups, dispersing in all different directions in order to confuse and evade the soldiers, giving them too many tangents to chase in any effective way. In addition, because they have camped here in such great numbers, the game in this area have been largely depleted, and, to be sure, it is easier to feed a small band than a larger one.

  I was stunned and relieved to be presented by Phemie with my mare, Spring. I had last seen her corralled in General Crook’s supply base camp on Goose Creek, before I was to be sent to the train at Medicine Bow station, intended final destination Sing Sing. She told me that, emboldened by their victory at the Rosebud, some of the young warriors had trailed the defeated Army troops there and executed a successful raid on their herd, among which Spring had been turned out.

  “We took it as a sign that you were coming back to us, Molly,” she said. “We felt that no matter how dire your situation, you were too resourceful not to find a way out of it. And so you did.”

  “I have only the most scattered, contradictory recollections of the events of that day, Phemie,” I answered as Spring nuzzled me with her nose, “but I am told that I owe my rescue to you and Pretty Nose. I am sorry, but I do not remember. The only thing I know is that I stood on the edge of the cliff, preparing to fall. Indeed, I believe that I did fall. I am not sure that act qualifies as resourcefulness, so much as simply choosing the last available option.”

  “Sometimes those are the same things, Molly,” Phemie said. “And that appears to have been the case, for here you are with us again.”

  “And how is that, Phemie? Can you tell me now exactly how it happened?”

  “I think it is best that you let those memories return in their own time,” she said. “And I believe they will. Neither I, Pretty Nose, Martha, Astrid, nor Christian have spoken to the others about what happened that day. Nor will we, we have since agreed, for each of us carries a different version of those events … or perhaps I should say, a different interpretation, and perhaps you, too, will come to your own conclusion in time, uninfluenced by our disparate memories. I have been among the Cheyenne long enough now to know that sometimes things happen in their world for which there is no single rational explanati
on. All you really need to do now is take comfort in being back with us, however exactly that came about.”

  I did not tell Phemie or anyone else about the strange, disorienting visions I have been having since my return … I can think of no other word to describe them, although they sound a good deal like the “poppycock” of which Ann Hall spoke. It appears to be a kind of madness in which dreams and reality overlap, and I am unable to differentiate one from the other. The images come to me both day and night, both waking and asleep. One minute I am riding in the air on the back of a giant raptor, my arms holding on to its broad neck, my naked body stretched across its back, my face buried in its soft, warm, pungent feathers that hold a scent exactly like the skin of the man, Hawk … and I am aroused. The next moment, I am simply riding across these plains on my mare, Spring, surrounded by my friends. Truly, I fear that I am going mad.

  * * *

  I waited until we were fully on the move, some distance away from the great encampment and battlefield, leaving Meggie and Susie behind on their scaffold, before I opened Meggie’s medicine bag. In it I found several of her totems—a smooth red touchstone from the Powder River; a petrified shell, an ironic portent of a long life; a piece of braided sweetgrass that lent the bag an aromatic scent; and a wing of the twins’ spirit animal, the kingfisher. I remembered that one of the young Cheyenne boys, using a kind of slingshot device, had killed the bird as it sat on a branch above the river, scouting for fish in the river below. He threw a stone and made a direct hit, and the bird tumbled into the water. The Kelly girls gave the boy hell for killing the kingfisher, both because it was their spirit protector and for the fact that, due to its fishy-tasting flesh, it was not even palatable as a food source, thus the senseless waste of a creature they held in such high esteem. They told him that his act would bring bad medicine upon them all. The boy, terrified, ran frantically downstream to retrieve the dead bird, bringing it back as a kind of offering to Meggie and Susie, who each kept one of the bird’s wings in their medicine bags. The kingfisher is prized as a protector in battle by the People for the way in which the water closes up over it when it dives into the water after fish. It was believed that this property would be transferred to the warrior who bore an image or a skin, or a wing of the bird, and that if a bullet struck him or her, the holes would close up around the wound in the same way. How superstitious these people are, and so some of us have become in our time among them, embracing a belief in the ability of spirit animals to protect us, in good and bad medicine, in the ministrations and predictions of tribal visionaries, even in the antics of the bizarre “contraries” of the tribe, men and women who do everything backward as a means of counterbalancing the inexorable forward movement of time. And why not? I seem myself to be slipping into that world of make-believe. Perhaps the relentless reality of life here causes all to eventually seek refuge there.

  Also enclosed in Meggie’s medicine pouch were two tightly folded pieces of ledger book paper, one with my name written on the outside in Meggie’s hand. When I unfolded the other, I recognized it as the page I had found in the cave to which Martha had led us, where May Dodd died, written in her hand and torn from her journal. With all that had happened so quickly since then, I had completely forgotten about this, nor had Meggie ever mentioned it again in my presence. I read Meggie’s missive to me first.

  Our dear Molly,

  Susie and me are both writin’ this letter to ya. We do not know what has become a ya, and we will die tomorrow without knowin’. But here is what we think. We know ya to be a survivor like us, Moll, a strong, brave lass who knows how to land on her feet when the goin’ gets tough. Aye, we believe you’ll find your way out of whatever mess you’re in, just like we always done … until now at least … and that you’ll find your way back to your friends and family, especially your husband Hawk, and your baby that is on the way according to Woman Who Moves against the Wind. So we write this letter to ya, believin’ that you’re goin’ to read it one day. Aye, Susie and me is tired now of the fight, we’re done in, knackered … the truth is we ain’t been able to get the image of that poor paddy laddy we killed on the Rosebud out of our heads. He was so scared, that boyo, Molly, he begged us … he begged us … please don’t kill me he said, please don’t kill me … but we did and we butchered him, too, we cut his nut sack off … I was goin’ to make a tobacco pouch out of it. We thought maybe goin’ back to war and killin’ more lads would erase the memory, or maybe just make it easier once we’d done it a few more times and had more scalps hangin’ from our belt, more nuts on our testicle necklace. But no, it don’t work that way, Moll … not at all. See, we got to thinkin’ … that boy had a mam, too, aye, an’ she was waitin’ for him to come home, worryin’ about him, just like all mams do. But now on accounta us, he ain’t comin home … ever … an’ maybe his mam will never even know for sure what became of him. Sure maybe someone else wuda killed him that day if it hadn’t been us, but they did not, it was me and Susie who did the deed. See there just ain’t no answers, Molly, they kill us, we kill them, there ain’t no end to it. An’ if we don’t fight and try to kill ’em, the way Christian Goodman and his people believe, there goin’ to keep killin’ us anyhow. There goin’ to keep killin’ our babies. Aye, we are all done in now Susie an’ me, our hate has been such a heavy load to carry all this time, and has finally wore us out. We thought maybe takin’ vengeance might lighten the weight, but it don’t work that way … no, not at all. Nor did it bring back our girls. So here is what we are goin’ to do, Moll. We are goin’ to make one last charge, aye, the Kelly twins are goin’ to ride one last time against the soldiers, just to scare ’em, that’s all. We won’t be carryin’ guns, knives, clubs, or lances, we are just goin’ to charge those boys, ride in on ’em like the Gaelic banshee she-devils we are, but this time our howls will be announcin’ our own deaths, not theirs. We figger that is the only way we are goin’ to find some peace at last, maybe we’ll even find our wee little lassies again in Seano, who knows? That is a grand place, the Cheyenne say, where folks live just like they did on earth, huntin’ and feastin’, dancin’ and makin’ love. They say the men even go to war there, only they can’t kill each other, see, all they can do is count coup because they be already dead. Ain’t that brilliant? Susie an’ me has talked a lot about it an’ we figger those wee babes of ours must be in Seano now, but we believe they won’t ever be able to grow up proper until their mams are back with ’em to show ’em the way. Aye, death will be sweet there with our girls, Moll, we figgered you more than anyone would understand that …

  We leave the other piece of paper in this medicine bag to ya too because we don’t know what to make of it. It is written in May Dodd’s hand that much we know for sure, but what it says don’t make sense. Because May was the leader of our group and you bein’ the leader of yours, we are leavin’ it to you. After all, yer the one who found it, an’ maybe ya can figger it out. Who knows maybe May really is still alive, but then we wonder if maybe she jest didn’t go a little delirious in the head at the end. If yad ever had the chance to read May’s journals, yad know that she was a lass who liked to tell a tale, she could hardly stop writin’ in that damn book a hers. An’ we think maybe she was just imaginin’ a story about herself not dyin’. Because if she really had lived, she woulda found us, or we’ed ’ave heard something about her. Brother Anthony himself said he saw her dead after Martha led him back to the cave, said he took the pencil out of her frozen fingers, and gave her the last rites. Dead is dead, and we know Brother Anthony to be a man who would not invent such a tale. Then again we all remember how dark it was in that cave when we went there with you and Martha. Now that her mind’s right again you must ask Martha about it, because we ain’t had the time, and we got more important business of our own to take care of just now.

  Well, that is about it from Susie an’ Meggie Kelly, Moll. Not much left to say, except we leave you believin’ in our hearts that you are alive and well … which is a tric
k in itself these days ain’t it?… an’ that you found your way home and that yer readin this letter. Sorry our spellin’ ain’t better. We done the best we could given our poor education … but we are done writin’ now. Moll, just to let you know, sure, we may ’ave had our differences between us from time to time, but Susie and me we loved ya lass, an’ we know that ya loved us back. Aye, an’ what better way is there than that for us to be sayin’ goodby. May good medicine keep ya well, Molly, and may the spring winds be always at your back.

  Your dear friends,

  Susie & Meggie Kelly

  I had to take a deep breath after finishing Meggie and Susie’s letter and try not to let the others see me cry. How we’ll miss those girls.

  THE LOST JOURNALS OF MAY DODD

  Alive

  As we are leaving the cave, Molly spots a piece of paper in the shadows of the corner. She picks it up, looks at it, and hands it to me. Straightaway I recognize it as a page torn out of May’s notebook, written in her hand. But it is too dark to read here, and so I fold it and put it inside the small beaded leather pouch I carry at my waist.

  —from the journals of Margaret Kelly

  Preface

  by Molly Standing Bear

  We Indians are a secretive people. By the way, I will not refer to us in these pages as Native Americans. That is a relatively recent name bestowed upon us by well-meaning white people to recognize Indians as the original residents on the continent they took away from us. It makes the liberal whites feel good about themselves to recognize that we were here first, and to tacitly, if not directly, admit to that grand theft and genocide.

  Historically, of course, all the different tribes had different names for themselves, and each other, names that tended to evolve and change over the centuries. We called ourselves Tsistsistas, which in our language means simply “people,” as opposed to “bears,” “buffalo,” “birds,” “fish,” “horses,” etc., etc.… It was a modest, unpretentious name that recognized the fact that we were simply part of the animal world, neither above nor better than the others, just different. Later we became Cheyenne, by which name we are still known and also call ourselves, although “Tsistsistas” is making a comeback with the renewed interest in our own language and culture.