Scarlet Plume, Second Edition

by Frederick Manfred

  Not long after the completion of Conquering Horse Manfred moved to Luverne, Minnesota, a few miles north of his birthplace near Doon, Iowa, and began building himself a house in the rock of Blue Mound, a massive outcropping that dominates Siouxland. He had gathered so much Indian material already that he felt able to contemplate two more Indian novels, the first of them the story of the Sioux Indian War of 1862. But a head injury suffered in a fall at his new house interrupted work on Scarlet Plume in its early stages, and when he at last returned to it, the longer enterprise had left his mind.

  The novel that consumed Manfred’s attention in the early 1960s was based on the largest Indian uprising in American history, and it concluded with the greatest mass execution, the hanging of thirty-eight Indian men for their part in the atrocities that had occurred across three hundred miles of the Minnesota frontier. The outbreak had begun on August 18 along the Minnesota River valley, and within two days nearly a thousand settlers had been killed or taken prisoner. Thousands more fled eastward in every sort of conveyance, on foot, on horseback, and even on the backs of oxen. The military was virtually helpless during the first few weeks, the experienced troops having been siphoned off for the Union armies in the South. Settlements like that at Skywater (Lake Shetek), where Judith Raveling lived with her missionary sister and brother-in-law, were especially vulnerable because they were far away from the large towns like New Ulm and from what few troops there were.

  The Sioux Uprising came about after many years of mistreatment by Indian traders and by the government and followed an especially bad harvest and a bitter winter. But one event, a scornful remark by a leading trader at the Lower Agency, triggered the outbreak of violence. In June 1862, when the Indians had gathered at the Upper Agency (near present-day Granite Falls) for payment of the annuity that was due them by treaty, the agent refused to distribute any stores until the money arrived from Washington. After much fruitless pleading and driven to desperation by hunger, the Sioux bands traveled down river to the Lower Agency to arrange with the traders there to dole out provisions. When the leader of the traders replied scornfully that if the Indians were hungry they should eat grass, outraged members of the tribes began to plan for war. It broke out three days later and the head trader was among the first to be killed. When the body was found, the mouth was stuffed with grass. Manfred knew that story well and used it to depict the end of Charlie Silvers, the trader at Skywater who tells the Christianized Indian Pounce, “You and your whitewashed bunch can go eat grass.”

  For a month bands of Indians ravaged the frontier. Then, on September 20, government troops under General Henry R. Sibley won their first considerable victory. Near the Upper Agency a force of two thousand men with cannon crushed a quarter that number of Indians. The negotiations that followed led to the surrender of some fifteen hundred warriors and the return of more than two hundred prisoners, nearly all of them women. Sibley’s report describes the terrorized state of these poor wretches, and in telling Judith’s story Manfred drew heavily on the account, as well as on General Sibley’s letters to his wife. Sibley speaks of the scanty clothing, the dumb stares, the wild weeping, and the desperate insistence with which the rescued girls and women pleaded to be taken to safety. Many had been chosen as wives by leading warriors, but most had been passed around like property, and the psychological effect on them had been devastating.

  While there is no evidence that the atrocities were widespread or typical, Manfred was able to discover in the histories of Minnesota enough eyewitness accounts to provide him with the details he needed in Scarlet Plume: reports of the mother and infant chased down by braves who stabbed the baby while the mother struggled to protect it and who then crushed the skulls of both, of the discovery of the mutilated bodies of whole families, and of children wandering aimlessly through deserted settlements and driven so wild by fear that they had to be hunted like animals by their rescuers. There were also reports of dramatic escapes by captives, and their accounts and those of the returned prisoners were especially useful. He says: “I checked all the records and read all these captivity stories and went into the Civil War. . . . Then I ran across this letter from General Sibley to his wife about this woman. That caught my mind. From that point on I began to drop the historical-looking and went more in for the character-looking.”1 Manfred excerpted several passages from the Sibley letters as a historical preface to Scarlet Plume.

  Although he had read widely in preparing to recreate the suffering that some captives had undergone, many of the facts had of necessity been of his own contrivance: the rape-murder of Judith’s daughter Angela and of the pregnant Mrs. Christians, and the abuse and murder of Maggie Utterback and Theodosia Codman. To his surprise, however, after Scarlet Plume was essentially complete, and at a time when he thought the violence might be overdone, he came upon an account that outdid his wildest imaginings. At Tracy, near Lake Shetek, he witnessed an unusual celebration, the centennial of the return of the captives of the 1862 Uprising. There he heard from a newsman of the existence of the medical reports on the women who had been brought back. Manfred was able to read the account in full, a two-hundred-page typescript made by the physician attached to General Sibley’s staff who interviewed most of the returned prisoners. When he had finished reading the report, Manfred realized that what he had imagined in Scarlet Plume—while accurate in the main—was tame by comparison. What he did discover and did add to the draft of the novel was the fact that, in the case of this particular group of prisoners, the worst offenders were the supposedly Christianized Indians. They had cast off the weak restraints of their new faith and the half-forgotten rules of their old and committed the most brutal atrocities.

  The two characters whom Manfred chose to place at the center of the action of his novel about the Sioux Uprising could well be thought of as a summation of the story of centuries of relations between white people and Indians in America: the Indian, the reluctant but fated victim of the white’s hunger for land; the white man coming to a slow and grudging realization that there is value to be found in a way of life that is now destroyed beyond possible recovery. Judith Raveling is Manfred’s most fully realized woman character, and the story is told from her point of view. She is intellectual by inclination and quick enough with languages to learn Dakota. She is a frontier bloomer girl, a fervent supporter of women’s rights, so strong-willed that she dares to speak defiantly to her Indian husband, Whitebone, against the murder of her brother-in-law, the Reverend Claude Codman, even after the three white women with her have been killed for disobedience. And she shows a sort of ultimate strength of will when she steadfastly defends Scarlet Plume’s innocence from the moment of his arrival to his execution, defying the military and the traumatized whites by continuing to wear her Indian clothing.

  Judith is able to realize her complete womanhood, however, only when she meets a man whose moral strength and self-respect elicit her admiration. Scarlet Plume is such a man, one of the last pure Dakota Indians, untainted by white ways and beliefs, but doomed himself just as his people are. As he tells Judith on their trip back to Minnesota, “Yet the power of the whites will prevail. We will be annihilated. This is a terrible thing for a Yankton to think about. Not even Whitebone will survive. It is a fated thing. Just as this mother deer is feeding us, so too the Yankton will be killed up and fed to the white man.” The love between these two, besides its value to the narrative, is Manfred’s way of illustrating the bonds that join and the barriers that separate the two races.

  For most readers Scarlet Plume is an exciting experience, a fast-paced adventure that moves from one memorable scene to another: the atrocities at Skywater and on the trail, the beautifully detailed buffalo hunt, Judith’s escape and flight from Sioux Falls toward New Ulm, the sweet love along the way between Judith and Scarlet Plume, and the climactic events at Camp Release, New Ulm, and Mankato. For other readers, however, the story is too painful to bear. Rape and mutilation, of children as well as women, brutal a
nd wanton killing, the scalping of the body of a buried child, and a frontier missionary killed and his heart eaten slice by slice by the Sioux who had shot him to death. Scarlet Plume is the sort of book one has to put down from time to time in order to pick it up again. The shocks in the first half and at the end come too close together, the horror is too intense, too prolonged to be borne.

  My own first reading of Scarlet Plume shortly after it appeared was a mixture of delight and pain, made more poignant by the fact that many years before, I had lived for a time on the shore of Lake Shetek without ever knowing the story of the 1862 Uprising. I had swum in its waters every day for seven summers and had passed the strange, weed-concealed monument at its east end without knowing whom it commemorated. No one at the camp where I worked knew the story—or cared. It was simply a distant rumor. Once, late at night, I tried to create an atrocity story, but it had no more substance that the last flicker of the nearly dead campfire, and the little scouts huddled about it were nearly asleep and clearly bored. With the publication of Scarlet Plume those hints of stories hiding behind that monument took on a vivid new life. Too late for campfire tales by twenty years, too powerful, too, even for boy scouts, around a campfire, late at night along the shore of Lake Shetek, Skywater.

  It may be, as Robert C. Wright believes, that Scarlet Plume—and Conquering Horse—“get at universal truths and move people’s hearts toward reconciliation” and therefore should be “cherished as instruments of peace.”2 Certainly the continuing sale of the Buckskin Man Tales and other of Manfred’s novels is an encouraging sign. That he has gained wide acceptance among Sioux Indians as a sympathetic storyteller continues to be demonstrated. In 1980, for example, he was invited to Pine Ridge to talk about Conquering Horse. When he had finished, an old Indian who had read the book arose and announced to the assembly: “We thank Wakantanka [God] for bringing Frederick Manfred to our country to tell us how we used to live.”

  Even more hopeful, perhaps, is Manfred’s current work. Siouxland Saga will cover a century of history in Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota, from the Sioux Uprising of 1862 until the present, stretching over four generations. Some of the characters in the new work have been talking to Manfred for forty years, waiting for him to tell their story. If Frederick Feikema Manfred listens closely enough, perhaps Siouxland Saga will be the bridge that ties the Buckskin Man Tales to the farm novels—The Golden Bowl and This Is the Year—that unites Manfred’s own twentieth-century experiences, growing to maturity in Siouxland, with those of the buckskin men of the preceding two centuries. That, as a matter of fact, was what he was aiming for all along, to find the spiritual roots of the land that had nourished him to intellectual ripeness, to know the other men and women of Siouxland so that he could come to know himself.

  Notes

  1. Conversations with Frederick Manfred, moderated by John R. Milton, with a foreword by Wallace Stegner (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1974), p. 68.

  2. Robert C. Wright, Frederick Manfred, Twayne’s United States Authors Series, no. 336 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), p. 76.

  DEAR DAVID MCDOWELL—

  The import of this book may seem shocking to some people—still it is a book written in love, since it has always been my belief that if one wishes to speak with truth in the brain one must speak with love in the heart.

  My friend, if I have achieved this, I offer it all to you.

  FREDERICK

  ONE rather handsome woman among them had become so infatuated with the redskin who had taken her for a wife that, although her white husband was still living at some point below and had been in search of her, she declared that were it not for her children, she would not leave her red lover. . . .

  The woman I wrote you of yesterday threatens that if her Indian, who is among those who have been seized, should be hung, she will shoot those of us who have been instrumental in bringing him to the scaffold, and then go back among the Indians. A pretty specimen of a white woman she is, truly. . . .

  I learn that Mrs.——, of whom I wrote you, is displeased because I did not call to see her more frequently and will not interpose my authority in behalf of her Indian friend, who stands a fair chance of swinging. . . .

  —GENERAL HENRY R. SIBLEY, Letters to His Wife

  Contents

  PART ONE: Skywater

  PART TWO: Dell Rapids

  PART THREE: Lost Timber

  PART FOUR: Camp Release

  PART ONE

  Skywater

  A family of wild swans skimmed across Skywater. Something had disturbed them. Father swan was swimming a zigzag course in the rear and trumpeting hoarse warnings, mother swan was breasting the water up front and dipping her long neck from side to side, and four baby swans, two to each side, were holding up the edges of a swiftly cutting arrowhead. Father and mother were pure white, with a wash of rust over the raised high head; the little ones were an ashen gray, also with rusty heads. Except for the spreading wakes of the hurrying swans, the glistening lake was as smooth as the pupil of an eye. The trumpeter swans headed straight for an island; after a moment vanished behind it.

  Presently, after the wakes had also vanished, natural sounds returned. A woodpecker worked in the scrub oaks along the shore. Redwing blackbirds sang in a swale. Bluejays cracked the solitude with raucous scolding. A turtledove moaned pleasantly for his mate.

  Judith sat in a black rocker just inside the open door of a log cabin. It was early morning. A breeze had risen in the northeast quarter and a perfume of sweet peas drifted in through the door. The night had been sticky warm, and the breeze felt cool, delicious. The breeze touched the back of Judith’s hand as if it were the passing of a sprinkling of rain. It cleansed the air of stale nighttime odors.

  Judith loved the cool mornings of the wild frontier prairie. It was the one time of the day she had to herself. At the moment, her sister Theodosia was at the mission church, her brother-in-law Claude was making the rounds in a new Indian encampment across the swale, and the children, her own Angela and Theodosia’s Ted and Johnnie, were out playing Indian in the tall grass.

  The sound of the singing of many birds came softly to her. Under it, like a bumping bass on a church organ, came the distant beating of savage drums. The birds might quit singing at dusk, but the Indians never seemed to stop their drumming, dusk or dawn.

  Judith was a slim woman, tall for her day. She had sun whitened gold hair, high-blue eyes, and a complexion like the skin of a pale-gold pear. She had only one blemish: four thick black hairs grew in a bunch on the edge of her upper lip. She hated those four black hairs and periodically pulled them out.

  Judith rocked slowly back and forth. The runners of the rocker creaked on the puncheon oak floor with a comfortable sound. Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement outside the only window in the cabin. It was Theodosia’s purple hollyhocks swinging back and forth in the light breeze. The hollyhocks brushed against each other and appeared to be trying to look inside the cabin at her.

  Judith had a letter in hand. It was from her husband, Vincent Raveling, at the moment a soldier fighting the Rebels in Tennessee. Judith turned the envelope over. It had been posted in St. Louis, June 20, 1862. She glanced at the calendar hanging on the log wall. Today was August 20, exactly two months later. Looking down at the envelope again, she noted the many finger marks along its edges. In her mind’s eye she could see the letter shuttling its way north: by stage to St. Louis, then on a steamboat up the Mississippi River to St. Paul, then by two-horse buggy down the Minnesota River valley to Mankato and New Ulm, then by one horse sulky to Skywater.

  The letter had come the day before. She had read the letter eagerly, even though she and Vince had not got on well the last years. It had really been she who had got Vince into the war to help preserve the Union. Vince hadn’t wanted to go. Vince considered all wars futile. Wars proved little or nothing, he said. And this war, why, it was ridiculous. “I wash my hands,” he often said, “of an invading race whic
h, before it has settled its account with a red aborigine, is already fighting brother against brother over a black aborigine. And a black aborigine, I might add, which it imported from another continent and then enslaved.” Vince preferred keeping the peace. There were good books to read in the evening—Lucretius and his scandalous notions of how a man should make love to a wife, Dante and his daring descent into hell—as well as whiskey to drink in a tavern with a doctor friend. Besides, Vince rather liked his job as clerk in a waterfront warehouse. But Judith kept taunting Vince more and more, about his growing potbelly, his humped-over shoulders, his soft, slack hands, until one day in a drunken pet Vince enlisted.

  Glancing through the letter again, Judith noted that Vince seemed to have adjusted fairly well to army discipline. He was in charge of a burial detail and ate with the officers. She smiled grimly to herself. She wasn’t too sure that eating with officers would make more of a man of him, but burying the dead might. Perhaps army life would stiffen his backbone after all. Judith and Theodosia Woods had grown up together in a large family. The Woodses lived on a farm near Davenport and all four Woods brothers had been rugged men. Judith missed in Vince the hardness of her brothers. Vince was too bookish, too soft for her. She admired a civilized husband, but she still wanted him to be manly, to take the lead in emergencies. Otherwise the civilized husband might just as well be the wife. Part of her was contemptuous of Vince. He was not half the man that she herself was. Bloodletting had been a common thing to her as a farm girl, while Vince had been known to shy away from a drop of fly blood.

  Judith stared through the open door. The land rolled away in slow, even swells all the way to the horizon. There were no habitations in that direction. The few pioneer homes around, along with a general store and a mission church, lay mostly to the north in and among the fringe of oaks bordering Skywater.