by Jim Fergus
“No, Father,” Harold answered, “my mother asks only that you read these journals and then write down the rest of this story in the last one that still has blank pages. She asks that I come back next week and pick them up and return them to her.”
“Tell me, my son,” I said. “I have been blessed to know your mother, Wren, since the day that she was born. But we have never spoken of these journals before. Has she always known that they survived the fires of that day?”
“No, Father,” Harold said. “They have been kept all these years as a sacred tribal treasure with the Sweet Medicine bundle. Only a few elders knew about them. Old Little Wolf himself kept them in his possession until he died in 1904, but he never told my mother of their existence. He kept them secretly and illegally for twenty-five years after he was exiled by the People for killing Jules Seminole and was stripped of his position as the Sweet Medicine Chief. After his death they were placed in the Sweet Medicine bundle and only recently, because she is dying, were they given to my mother to read.”
“And thus after all these years your mother learns the true identity of her father,” I said to Harold. “And you, my son, learn the true identity of your grandfather.”
“Yes, Father,” Harold said. “We know, and now my mother wishes for you to write down in the last notebook that is not yet full the rest of the events of that day so that she may die knowing the whole story.”
“You’re a fine boy, Harold,” I said to him. “Your mother must be very proud of you. I am blessed to do as she requests. Come back next week, and my work will be finished.”
And so God in His infinite Grace and Wisdom has set me this final task to complete on Earth at the end of my own life. He has blessed me by placing this great gift of journals in my temporary care. I read them before, many years ago, when old Little Wolf brought them here to me, to read to him, for he never did learn English.
Now as humble scribe I am blessed to take up the last of these notebooks to write this codicil. One side of the notebook is soaked with the dried blood of May Dodd. I press my lips to it in blessing. I write around the brown, burnt edges of the bullet hole that passes through each and every page, to disappear in the flesh of my friend’s back.
On the day the soldiers attacked I did not run to the hills with those fleeing. I ran toward the village. There I walked amid the slaughter and burning. In my habit the soldiers did not harm me. God protected me on that day as He has every day of my life, before and since, so that I might spread His Word and offer His Gift of Mercy to all who would accept it.
I tried to protect those who could not flee, the old and the infirm, from the wrath of the attackers. I tried to help those who ran to effect their escape. Where I could I put coverings on the naked children and women. I ministered to the wounded, and offered Last Rites and the Lord’s comfort to the dying. I walked amid the death and destruction, the fires of Hell on Earth.
Many died in the village that day, cut down by the soldiers. The Englishwoman, Helen Elizabeth Flight, an extraordinary young woman, died defending her home. The last time I saw her alive, she stood before her tipi, with her feet spread, calmly charging her muzzle loader and shooting at the invading soldiers. She held her pipe in the corner of her mouth. One of the soldiers shot Helen through the forehead and killed her. Later all of her beautiful bird paintings were consigned to the flames. It was a great loss to the world of Art. Helen would have been quite well known had her work survived. All that remains of it are the few sketches included here in May’s journals.
The Negro woman, Euphemia Washington, also died that day. She died fighting, but killed many soldiers first. She fought like a demon and terrified the young soldiers. Many of them were just boys. Euphemia had a great calm, but she also had a great anger in her heart. I believe that God would have tamed her anger, for she was a spiritual woman. But He had other plans for her. I remember Phemie less for her anger than for the slave songs of joy, sorrow, and freedom that she used to sing. Sometimes when I am gardening, or baking, or just walking in the hills, I still find myself humming one of these songs. Then I am blessed to recall Euphemia—Mo’ohtaeve’ho’a’e, Black White Woman, the Cheyennes called her—and later Nexana’hane’e. Yes, the Cheyennes still recall the warrior feats of Kills Twice Woman in their old-time ceremonies. I am blessed by the Lord to recall her songs.
By the time I came upon Gretchen Fathauer she was still alive but mortally wounded. She held her dead daughter to her mighty naked breast and wept great sobs of sorrow. Her husband, No Brains, had run into the hills at the beginning of the attack, leaving his family behind to perish. Gretchen was a dear child of the Lord. I covered her and the infant and tried to make her as comfortable as possible in her last moments. “He left his baby,” she sobbed. “De bick ninnyhammer forgot to take de baby wit him when he run away. I tried to save my little Sara, brudder Antony.”
“Of course you did, my sister,” I said to her. I was blessed to administer Last Rites to Gretchen and her child and as I did so I broke down and wept myself.
“It be OK, brudder Antony,” Gretchen said trying to console me through her own sobs of grief. “Yah, it be OK. Me and baby we go to live with Sara and God in Seano. Tings be OK dare. Yah, you’ll see.” There amidst the brutality and death, God revealed Himself to me in Gretchen’s goodness. He gave me strength for the coming ordeal.
The soldiers were by now largely finished with their grim business of destroying the camp. A mournful keening had arisen from the contingent of Shoshone scouts. They had discovered the Cheyennes’ grisly trophy bag of babies’ hands and had identified these as their own. Their cries of grief were terrible to hear. I stopped on my way to try to comfort them. I did not speak Shoshone, but I blessed the bag and I prayed for the souls of the children.
Some Cheyennes lived that day and were spared by the soldiers and others escaped into the hills. Later that morning I came across Martha Tangle Hair, wandering dazed through the village, holding her baby son in her arms.
“Help me, Brother Anthony,” Martha begged when she saw me. “My baby is so cold.”
I had gathered a small pile of blankets saved from the fires. I wrapped one of these around her child, and another around Martha.
“I must find Captain Bourke,” she said. “Please help us, Brother. May is wounded. She needs help. I must find Bourke.”
“Can you show me where she is, Martha?” I asked. “I will help her.”
“May is very cold, Brother, she is shot.”
Martha led me into the bluffs above the camp, but she had some difficulty finding the place again. At last we came to it. It was a shallow cave in the rocks. I still go to that place. I have been blessed to make of it a small shrine in May Dodd’s memory. There my fellow monastics and I sometimes say our liturgies and there we sit in contemplative silence. The Cheyennes believe that everything that ever happens in a place—every birth, every life, every death—still exists there, so that the past, present and future live on forever in the earth. And so I, too, have come to believe.
I called out to May on that terrible, frigid morning, but no one answered. When I entered the cave, I found her alone there, dead, sitting up against the rock wall. Quiet One, Feather on Head, and Pretty Walker were all gone, as was May’s baby, Wren. In that cave, I administered the Last Rites to May Dodd and from her frozen fingers I removed the pencil. Her notebook, this notebook that I am blessed to hold now in my own hands, was also gone.
I led Martha back down to the smoldering village, and there I personally handed her and her infant over to the care of Captain John G. Bourke. It was the first time that I was to meet this man. But I would come to know him well later. He came often here to my hermitage over the years to pray, and I was blessed to help him do his penance.
The night after the attack the mercury dipped below zero. With everything destroyed by the Army, the Cheyennes had no protection from the elements and hardly any clothing. The survivors fled toward the village of the Lakota chie
f Crazy Horse, who was encamped on the other side of the mountain. I followed and did what I could to help and comfort the survivors.
It was a two-day journey of unimaginable hardship and suffering. Eleven Cheyenne babies froze to death in their mothers’ arms the first night, three more the following night—including all of the remaining white children, with the sole exception of May’s daughter, Wren.
Perhaps some scholars of religion might be tempted to find here a lesson in the vengeful hand of God. But God is not vengeful, my children. God is full of Grace, Light, and infinite Mercy. God did not kill the Shoshone babies. Nor did He punish the Cheyennes in retribution by killing their babies. Misguided men on both sides slaughtered the infants. And God took the souls of His children to His Kingdom.
Daisy Lovelace and her son, Wesley, God bless them, succumbed to the cold the first night. To them, too, I administered the sacrament of Extreme Unction under a cold full moon, and Daisy and her child went bravely and in peace to the Kingdom of our Lord. The little dog, Fern Louise, lay curled shivering beside the frozen body of her mistress. I put her beneath my habit and she survived. Fern Louise lived with me for several years before dying peacefully of old age in her sleep.
The Kelly twins, Margaret and Susan, lost both of their sets of twins in the course of the two-night march. The anguish of their grief was a terrible thing to behold. They cursed me, and they cursed the Lord in His Heaven for taking their baby girls.
They were a sprightly pair, Meggie and Susie. Besides Martha, they are the only white women of whom I am aware to have survived the ordeal of Mackenzie’s attack and its aftermath. After the death of their infants, they went quite mad. They joined various bands of marauding Cheyennes and Sioux and fought like demons against the whites in the final days of the Indian wars. They are reported to have ridden with the warriors when Custer and his men were killed later that summer at the Little Bighorn, and to have taken themselves grisly trophies of war there. I made many inquiries on behalf of the Kelly twins over the years and heard many rumors, but I was never able to learn what finally became of those girls. God bless them both.
Little Wolf himself was wounded seven times on the morning of the attack. He fought valiantly to protect his People as they fled from the camp, and somehow survived. With his wives Quiet One and Feather on Head, and his daughter Pretty Walker, he led his ragged band of refugees over the mountain to the camp of Crazy Horse.
The Cheyennes had nothing left, their spirit was broken. Less than a month later many of them began to straggle into Camp Robinson to give themselves up.
The government quietly arranged for the white women who had gone with their Indian families into the agencies earlier that fall to return to their own homes. Some took their children and raised them in the white world, others left their infants with the Cheyennes to be raised on the reservation.
Martha Atwood Tangle Hair, the sole white woman to officially survive the Mackenzie attack, returned to Chicago with her son, whose Christian name was Dodd. I never saw Martha again, but for many years after we kept up a correspondence. She eventually remarried and had several more children. Except to say in her very first letter to me that she had delivered her friend May’s last message to John Bourke, Martha never mentioned the affair again. Nor did I ever learn what arrangement she had made with the authorities to purchase her silence. It is not a monk’s business to ask such questions. But silent on the subject she remained. Martha joined our Lord in His Kingdom three years ago.
All know the tragic story of Little Wolf’s last years. One day several years later he got drunk and shot Jules Seminole dead in the agency store for making a lewd remark to his daughter Pretty Walker. For this crime one of the great men in Cheyenne history was stripped of his position as Sweet Medicine Chief, renamed Stinking Flesh, and banished from the People.
Little Wolf lived in exile for another twenty-five years until he was well into his nineties. He took up a kind of monastic life himself and went everywhere on foot with his faithful first wife, Quiet One. I often used to see the two of them walking across the hills together. Sometimes I was blessed to have them pitch their tipi for a few days next to my hut. It was there that the Chief first gave me these journals to read to him. I always baked a loaf of fresh bread for Quiet One, and Little Wolf would tease her with gentle mischief about the arsenic incident.
Feather on Head had moved out of Little Wolf’s lodge when the Cheyennes were required to give up their practice of polygamy. Eventually she married a young man named Wild Plums, and together they raised the child, Wren, as their own daughter. Of course, the People all knew that the sacred white child was the daughter of the white woman May Dodd and Little Wolf—and the Cheyennes still referred to her in their secret old-time ceremonies as Vo’estanevestomanehe—the Savior. They still believed, as Little Wolf had always maintained, that the child was Maheo’s, gift to the People, that she had been sent by God to teach them the new life that must be lived when the buffalo were gone.
Even though I had read all of May Dodd’s journals to Little Wolf, and he knew about John Bourke, he never gave up that faith. It was for this reason that he kept the journals secret and never told his daughter of their existence. Before he died he arranged with the keeper of the Sweet Medicine bundle for Wren to be given the journals at the end of her own life. He was a very great man, Little Wolf. I was blessed to know him on Earth.
John Bourke became a great advocate of Indians’ rights, and a harsh critic of their treatment at the hands of our government. His outspokenness in such matters largely cost him advancement in his military career. Eventually he married another woman and had a family of his own. His health had been ruined by those terrible years of Indian wars, and he died in 1896.
John Bourke never claimed May Dodd’s child, Wren, as his own daughter. But he always secretly watched over her and saw to her welfare as much as he was able. I know this to be true, because I was blessed to be his agent in these efforts. It was I, Brother Anthony of the Prairie, who prayed with John Bourke, and who counseled him to allow these People, and himself, the final miracle of the child’s birth. May Dodd was quite right, the children were all that were left of this grand experiment … and they are enough.
Blessed be the children of God!
EPILOGUE
by J. Will Dodd
Chicago, Illinois
February 23, 1997
Abbot Anthony of the Prairie died on the morning of December 7, 1926, just two weeks after he completed the preceding codicil to May Dodd’s journals. The Saint Anthony of the Desert Abbey which he founded in the hills above the Powder River is still an operating monastery. It was there, propitiously—perhaps even miraculously Abbot Anthony would surely say—that I began my search when I first came out to the reservation, bearing my own family letter of introduction—the one link that I had between my great grandmother, May Dodd, and the Cheyennes.
The monks at the abbey were very interested in my last name—joyously so—for they know well the legend of May Dodd, and the brothers still say their liturgies and hold their contemplative silences in the rocks where she died. Through them I was put in touch with ninety-six-year-old Harold Wild Plums, said to be the oldest living descendant of the great Cheyenne Chief Little Wolf.
Harold lives with his granddaughter, named, not coincidentally, May Swallow Wild Plums, in a concrete block HUD house in the town of Lame Elk, Montana, on the Tongue River Indian Reservation. Like many such reservation towns in America, it is a bleak place with a distinct third-world feel to it. On an abandoned gutted building across the street from Harold’s house, emblazoned in dripping blood red spray paint, is the ghetto legend—Fuck Tha Police.
I had already learned from the monks that as a young man Harold had attended college off the reservation and had gone on to become a well-known attorney in the Native American community. For many years he worked on the reservation, representing the Cheyennes, often without pay, on a variety of Native American issues.
The letter was written in coarse lead pencil, much faded, on a sheet of yellowed paper that had been torn from a bound notebook. It was dated 10 June 1875 below which date was written, “Somewhere in Nebraska Territory North of the Niobrara River.”
According to my own family research, on June 10, 1875, Hortense and William, who was my grandfather, were living with May’s parents at their home on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. May herself, by all family records, was still living in the Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum, a private facility for the insane in the countryside on the banks of Lake Michigan thirty miles north of the city. This institution is still in existence, having undergone several name changes over the years in keeping with the fashions of the times, and presently known as “Serenity Dunes.” Of course no patient records from the 1870s survive there, but according to the official family history, May would die in the asylum the following winter of undisclosed causes. She is buried in the Dodd family plot in the Lake Forest Cemetery, or at least she has a stone there. Like all of Chicago’s old, monied families ours is a large one, by both birth and marriage, and I have often, over the years, been to the plot for the burials of relatives, including that of my brother, Jimmy, after he was killed in Vietnam. His own grave is not far from that of our great grandmother, May Dodd.
Neither my grandfather William Dodd, nor his sister Hortense, would read their mother’s only surviving letter to them until many years after it was written. Not wishing to frighten the children with this mad missive from their mad mother, of whom they knew little—except that she had died when they were infants—May’s family kept the letter in a safe deposit box, the existence of which was not revealed to the children until after the death of both May’s parents. By then William and Hortense were young adults themselves. Their mother’s letter, then, took some twenty years to reach them—slow mail delivery even by the standards of the day. It is a short letter, as if hastily written.
