by Jim Fergus
I went to Horse Boy’s bed and knelt beside him. The morning light was still dim inside the tipi but I could see that the child’s eyes were open, catching the faint light from the embers of the fire and shining like gunmetal. I stroked his forehead and he smiled slightly. I held my hands open on either side of my ears and wriggled them, the rudimentary sign language for mule. The boy giggled at my antics, and, I think, thought that I was trying to amuse him. Gertie came over and knelt beside me. “Tell the boy where you tied your mule, Gertie,” I said. “He’ll fetch it and take care of it for you.”
She spoke to the lad, who immediately scrambled to his feet, wide-awake and eager as always to perform his duties. I was finally beginning to understand a few words of the language but was still shy about speaking it. “God, I envy you Gertie. I have a terrible time with the Cheyenne language.”
“Like I said, I learnt it when I was just a girl. Always easier to pick up at a young age. But you’ll get the hang of it. Just remember that everything’s done backwards from the way we say things. Let’s say you want to say somethin’ like, ‘I’m heading down to the river to take a swim,’ which in Cheyenne is said—‘Swim, river, go there, me.’ See? It’s all backwards.”
Without a sound, Quiet One had gotten up herself to stoke the fire with sticks and to put a small pot of meat to heating. Then she left the tipi to fill the paunch water vessel. The savages observe a curious custom of emptying out water that has stood all night—“dead” water they call it—and filling the vessel from the creek each morning with “living” water.
Soon she was back, and she poured some of the water into a small tin trade pan into which she also sprinkled a handful of coffee grounds. She put the pan on the fire to boil. Coffee is a precious commodity among the savages, and she was clearly serving it in honor of the company—without even knowing, or asking, who the company was; generosity is a universal trait of these people. And so in spite of the trials of the night, life went on …
The camp was exceptionally well provisioned at the present time. Besides the whiskey that Seminole had brought with him, the southerners had furnished us with the three most prized commodities among the savages—white man tobacco, sugar, and coffee. All these they had brought as gifts from the trading post—although most had probably been squandered last night on the whiskey.
Now I laid a bed of buffalo robes for Gertie next to mine and brought her a bowl of meat and a tin cup of coffee with a generous lump of sugar in it.
“Hell, this ain’t so bad now is it, honey?” she said, making herself comfortable against the backrest I had fixed for her. “I always did enjoy sleepin’ in a Injun lodge. Cozy, ain’t it? Makes ya feel safe.”
“I was beginning to feel so until last night,” I said. “I have lived in a lunatic asylum, Gertie, but never have I seen lunacy like that.”
“It’s just the whiskey, honey,” she said. “Plain and simple. It’s poison to’em. Turns’em plumb crazy.”
“How long did you live among them, Gertie?”
“Oh, I don’t know, let’s see … ‘bout eight years I guess altogether,” she said. “I was stole off a wagon train when I was a girl, and I stayed with’em until after Sand Creek. Someday I’ll tell you the whole story … when I ain’t so plumb tuckered out. But Hell, I liked livin’ with these folks just fine. Hated to leave’em. Yes, ma‘am, a person can get mighty accustomed to this life, you understand what I’m sayin’? Besides last night, how are you takin’ to it, honey?”
“I’ve hardly been here long enough to say,” I confessed. “And I’ve hardly had time to reflect upon it, so busy have we been working and learning, adapting to their ways and trying to teach them something of ours. Now that you mention it, it occurs to me that in the past weeks I have hardly stopped to ask myself if I was happy here … I had simply resigned myself to it … But after the events of the night I shall have to reconsider the question …”
“Naw, you don’t want to do that, honey,” said Gertie, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Like I say last night was just whiskey talkin’. They’ll get over it. You’ll get over it. I knew damn well you wasn’t comin’ back with me. I told the Captain you wasn’t no welcher. This is a good band of people you got here. Some of them southerners is a bad influence, that’s true. They’ve spent too much time with the whites, but all in all, if these folks was left alone, things’d be just fine. If the whites’d leave’em alone, stop lyin’ to’em, stop givin’’em whiskey, things’d be just fine.”
“Stop giving them white brides,” I added.
“Yeah, we’re always messin’ around where it ain’t none of our business,” admitted Gertie. “An’ that’s exactly the good thing about the Injun life—you don’t have to stop and think about whether or not you’re ‘happy’—which in my opinion is a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks—like whiskey. You don’t have to think about it any more than a bear cub or a pronghorn antelope or a coyote or a damn bird has to think about it. You got a roof over your head? You warm? You got enough food to eat? You got plenty a good water? You got a good man? You got friends? You got somethin’ to do to keep you busy?”
I nodded affirmatively to each of these in turn.
“You got a Injun name yet, honey?” Gertie asked. “I forgot to ask ya that. Mine was Ame’ha’e—which means Flying Woman because one time I jumped off a runaway horse at a full gallop and landed right in a damned tree and the Injuns all thought I could fly. I always did like that name.”
“The name they’ve given me is Mesoke,” I said.
“Swallow,” Gertie said. “Yup, that’s a real purty name. Seems to me that you got everything a body really needs in life. Hell, honey, you tell me, what more does a person need?”
I thought the question over for a moment and then I said: “Safety … security … love, perhaps.”
“Aw, hell, honey,” Gertie scoffed, “if them first two things was so important to you, you wouldn’t be here. You still be livin’ in that asylum you mentioned. And love? Hell, that’s the easy part! You see that old girl squattin’ by the fire?” she asked pointing to Quiet One. “Now you think she spends her time worrying about whether or not she’s happy? You think maybe she ain’t got enough love in her life—what with her family, her husband, her children? I’ll tell you something. You know when you’ll find out if you been happy here? You’ll find out after you leave. When you really got some time on your hands to think things over.”
“I miss my babies, Gertie,” I said. “That’s the worst part of it. Do you know that I have two children? It was for them that I signed up for this program, to gain my freedom so that one day I might be with them again. I think of them every day, try to imagine how their lives are, what they look like now. It helps me to go on. I like to imagine how it would be for them if they came to live with me here, grew up among the savages.”
“Oh, they’d plumb love it, honey,” Gertie said. “Put the damn whiskey aside, and it’s a wonderful life for children. I thought I was goin’ to die when they first took me, but after a while I practically forgot all about my real folks. It was like livin’ a damn fairy tale. Like I say, where the fairy tale comes to end real fast is when you bump against the white man’s world again. That’s what happened to you last night. An’ that’s what happened to me at Sand Creek.”
“If I give you a letter to my babies, Gertie,” I asked, “will you post it for me at the fort when you return? They would not permit us to send any communication to our families before we left, but perhaps you could post one for me?”
“I’ll try, honey,” she said. “Sure I will.” And she laughed. ‘You’re a long way from mail delivery out here, ain’t you?”
“If you liked this life so much, why did you go back to the white world, Gertie?” I asked. “Was it because Blackbird was killed at Sand Creek?”
Gertie was silent for a long time, and I thought perhaps that she had drifted off to sleep. “That was part of the reason,” she finally s
aid. “But it was also just because I couldn’t get away from the fact that I’m white myself. There’s no damn way around that, honey.”
And after that we fell silent, as the exhaustion of the night’s efforts overcame us. I curled up on my own sleeping place next to Gertie’s. I felt like a little girl having a friend spend the night and was especially grateful this morning to have her here with me. She is a rough woman, it is true, and could surely use a bath, but she has a big heart, and what more can be said of a person than that?
The sun had risen, and the camp was going about its business, but it was muffled quiet and safe inside the tipi, the gentle morning sunlight filtering softly through the buffalo skins; the fire was warm and took the early-morning chill off the air, the tent pungent with the mingled scents of human beings and smoke and coffee and meat cooking, the smell of animal hides and earth. All these no longer seemed to me to make for an offensive odor, but rather an oddly comforting one—the smells of home.
Within moments Gertie had started to snore, loud and rhythmic, a snore befitting a muleskinner named Jimmy, but it did not disturb me … and soon I drifted off to sleep myself.
15 June 1875
Over a week has passed since our night of terror. I have rested my pen, and with the others thrown myself back into the business of living day to day, trying in the process to repair the dreadful damage done, to refill the empty well of our spirits.
Gertie left this morning, alone, for Camp Robinson. She carried only a letter from me to my children, and a private message to Captain Bourke. In the letter I thanked the Captain for his concern for my welfare but declined his offer to return with Gertie. I wished him well in his new married life. I told him that I was most satisfied in my own …
As to the news that she had brought from him, I have not mentioned a word of it to any of the others. Perhaps I err in this decision and should let all decide for themselves what course to follow, but I see no reason to alarm the women about events that are quite beyond their control. To panic them now when all are at their most fragile could only lead to more tragedy and despair. We may have entered into this enterprise as volunteers, but recent events suggest that we are, in reality, captives.
As I had feared, a group of our women, led by Narcissa White—who after the night of drunken debauch and her own violation by her husband, apparently decided to give up her mission here—tried to leave camp the very next day. Just as Gertie predicted, the women’s husbands had no difficulty tracking them and returning them to their lodges within a few hours. They wouldn’t have gotten far anyway and would only have perished in the prairie or been captured by some other tribe. “If they’d a got caught by the Crows or the Blackfeet,” Gertie said, “they’d a found out how cushy life is here with the Cheyennes.”
My own husband Little Wolf did not return to our lodge for three days and three nights, nor was he anywhere seen about the camp. He stayed out during that time, alone in the prairie, without shelter, food, or water, sleeping on the ground, doing, I believe, penance for his sins. Perhaps he sought divine guidance from his God.
When he came back in at last he was trailed by a sickly coyote; everyone in camp saw it and everyone remarked upon it—although only we white women seemed to consider this to be a particularly bizarre sight. We are beginning to realize that the savages’ world has even a different corporeality than ours, and one quite inaccessible to us.
The coyote was gaunt and losing its hair in patches, and skulked around our lodge for three more days, always keeping a little away. I was frightened of the beast—when I shooed him he skittered sideways like a crab and made a strange hissing sound. Each time that Little Wolf departed the lodge, the coyote followed him, trailed along always the same distance behind. For their own reasons, the camp dogs did not bother the coyote—perhaps they recognized its illness—and they seemed intentionally to keep away from it.
Little Wolf himself never spoke of the coyote, never so much as acknowledged its presence; he remained silent and brooding as if involved in some terrible struggle of his own. He refused even to make the sign talk with me and when I tried to speak to him in English as I had done on our honeymoon outing together, instead of responding in his own language as was our way, he ignored me altogether. There was much speculation in camp about his behavior.
The medicine man, White Bull, told Helen Flight that the coyote was the Chief’s medicine animal, that its sickness represented his own sickness and the sickness of the People from drinking the whiskey, and that if the coyote died in the camp, this would be a very bad thing for everyone. But after three days the coyote disappeared—one morning it was simply gone and did not return—and gradually Little Wolf came back to himself.
Other repercussions of that night: a man named Runs From Crow, who was married to our own little French girl Marie Blanche, was killed by a fellow named Whistling Elk—shot dead through the heart. Poor Marie has had a very hard time of it, what with her parents both murdered in Chicago, and now her husband. She is quite beside herself, for she rather liked the fellow. Now Runs From Crow’s younger brother, One Bear, has offered to marry her, which is the Cheyenne custom—and rather a civilized one in my opinion. It is my limited experience that French women are, by nature, a practical race, and Marie Blanche, while still grieving for her first husband, is considering the proposal. She will certainly need someone to care for her and her child.
Sadly, the murderer, Whistling Elk, is married to Ada Ware—as if that poor dark thing didn’t already have sufficient cause for Melancholia in her life. The affair is a shocking event for the Cheyennes, as killing another member of the tribe is the greatest crime of which a man is capable in their society, and has occurred only rarely in all their history. The murderer, with any members of his family who choose to accompany him, is exiled and must live alone beyond the perimeters of the village. He will be forever an outcast, never fully accepted back into the tribe. People cease to address him, or to so much as acknowledge his presence, and he is not allowed to participate in any tribal activities. He becomes, in effect, an invisible man.
Ada’s exiled husband has even been stripped of his name and renamed, Stinking Flesh, for the Cheyennes believe that one who kills a tribal member begins to rot from the inside out. By tribal law, Ada is free to leave the man with no formal divorce decree being required, but for the moment at least has chosen to join him in his banishment. As she is guilty of no crime herself, she is free to come and go among us. However, as the wife of the murderer she is considered to be tainted by her contact with him, and is not allowed to touch anyone or anyone’s possessions. Pots or dishes from which she eats at the lodges of others must be broken or discarded for fear that they have been contaminated. I need hardly add that this superstition does not make Ada a popular visitor or dinner guest in anyone’s lodge.
“When the doctors at the hospital questioned me about my illness,” the poor hapless thing said at our meeting the other day, “I told them that I found it unsupportable being married to an adulterer—especially through the long gray Chicago winter. It was that time of year in particular that I felt the full weight of the black dog crouched on my chest, as if suffocating me. And so that winter the doctors consigned me to a dark room in an insane asylum, where the black dog was my sole company. My husband took the opportunity of my illness and prolonged absence—which was really in payment for his sins—to divorce me and marry his lover. Still the doctors questioned me incessantly: Why was I so sad? Why did I dress always in black? To what did I attribute my Melancholia?
“Now I find myself married to a murderer by the name of Stinking Flesh—who by all accounts is rotting from the inside out … and once again I have been exiled for his crime. Now does any among you wonder why I dress in black? Is there no end to a woman’s suffering on this earth?” It was the most Ada had ever spoken to us or revealed of herself.
“Aye, but look on the bright side then, Ada,” said Meggie Kelly. “Ya may be married to a moordoorer but
now that he’s an outcast, at least you don’t have to worry about the beggar committin’ adooltory on ya, for no one else’ll tooch him!”
We all laughed; even Ada smiled, for she is not without a sense of humor, albeit a frequently dark one.
“Meggie’s right,” said her sister, Susie, “and furthermore, dear, I get a tooch of the Melancholia meself in Chicago in the wintertime, but ya’ave to admit that thar’s a great deal more soonshine in the prairie in the summertime than ever thar was in Chicago in winter. It’ll be too damn hot for that old black dog in this country, I’ll wager. You won’t be seein’ mooch of him out here.”
And in such ways we try to bolster each other’s spirits.
This next sad fact I am most loath to report: a number of other girls, both native as well as several of our women, were ravaged that night by drunken savages—in some cases, as in that of Narcissa White, the women’s own husbands forced themselves upon them. Daisy Lovelace has grown silent and withdrawn since her terrible ordeal, and we are all filled with concern for her. Her husband, at least, is a kindly and patient man and seems to be caring well for her.
Perhaps most unfortunate, the wretch responsible for the entire night of terror, Jules Seminole, remains still among us, unpunished and by all appearances unrepentant. But for a still swollen ear he seems to have recovered from Crooked Nose’s blow, and has already several times come by our lodge to leer at me and make his unspeakably degenerate talk … I try to disguise my fear of him, but I am terrified of the man, and make every effort not to go abroad unaccompanied.
Little Wolf, too, is aware of Seminole’s skulking and unwholesome interest in me, but has thus far managed to keep vigilant control over his temper when the man comes around. As Sweet Medicine Chief, my husband is powerless to do anything other than speak out against Seminole in council for bringing the whiskey among the People. Truly, but for his own fall from grace as a result, Little Wolf’s observance of his duties is monk-like … nearly Christ-like in its selflessness.
