One Thousand White Women (41 page)

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Authors: Jim Fergus

BOOK: One Thousand White Women
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“Yes, go now. Hurry. Take your son. Tell the soldiers who we are and what they have done. Tell them that this is not the village of Crazy Horse, that this is the village of the great Cheyenne Chief Little Wolf. And tell Captain John Bourke this from me—he will recognize it: tell him ‘It is a wise father that knows his own child …’”
 
by Abbot Anthony of the Prairie Saint Anthony of the Desert Abbey Powder River, Montana November 15, 1926
What an extraordinary blessing! God is never in a hurry to divulge His secrets! To bestow His gifts! He has all the time in the world on His hands!
For over a half century I have known of the survival of the preceding journals. But I have told no one. Three days ago they were brought to me at my abbey not far from where the events of these final pages took place. They were delivered here by a young Cheyenne man named Harold Wild Plums, who lives on the nearby Tongue River Indian Reservation. I have known Harold since he was born. I baptized him when he was a child. He is the grandson of the author of these notebooks—May Dodd Little Wolf—
Mesoke,
as she was known by the Cheyennes. Harold is son of the one the Cheyennes call
Ve’keseheso,
Wren, or Little Bird.
Over fifty years! How very different the West is today than it was in 1876. I pray that I am a different man, that I have given up some measure of the pridefulness of youth and in so doing have been blessed to draw closer to God in my old age. I am ill, nearly blind, and I do not have long to live. I wait with a heart full of joy and love to go at last and sit for eternity at the feet of my King. He calls to me. I am blessed to hear His voice, to see His hand in all things.
Truly I have been blessed with a perfect life of prayer and toil, of reading and study. With the sweat of my brow, the labor of my hands, the love of my God, I have been blessed to carve out this humble abbey in the hills above the river. Here I began my hermitage those many years ago in a simple hut upon a hilltop. Here I am blessed to live still, surrounded now by twelve other quiet men of humble mind who have joined me over the years.
For over half a century I have been blessed to walk these hills. I have studied the plants and animals. I have lifted rocks from the Earth and planted my garden. I have been blessed to receive my visitors with a hot meal, a warm bed, and a fresh loaf of bread to take upon their journey. I have prayed.
Fifty years ago I was blessed to come here as a young anchorite with May Dodd and her friends among a band of Cheyennes led by the great Chief Little Wolf. Fifty years!
“Is your mother well?” I asked Harold Wild Plums on the day he brought these journals to me. “She has not been to visit me in many months. I have been thinking much of her recently.”
“She is not well, Father,” Harold said. “She is dying of the cancer.”
“I shall walk to the reservation to see her,” I answered. “For I am old and nearly blind, but I am blessed to be able still to walk, and I can still find my way there.”
“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 chief 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.

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