Winter's Child (23 page)

The story of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Brokenhorn, her captivity and subsequent life as an Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation, is based on historical records. We know that Amanda Mary Fletcher Cook spent thirty-seven years trying to find her sister, that they were briefly reunited in 1902, and that Lizzie was deeply affected by the reunion and by learning of her background. Still she chose to remain with her husband and children and to live out the only life she had known. The records are also clear that John Brokenhorn was a good husband who cared for his wife, worried that white authorities would take her away, and tried to protect her.

But records are thin on how Lizzie might have felt about her situation—what Shannon calls “the outside of history.” While actual descendants of Lizzie and John Brokenhorn no doubt exist, the descendants you meet in this story are fictional. The stories they relate about Lizzie's day-to-day life are not found in the historical records
about Lizzie but are consistent with the life of a traditional Arapaho woman in Lizzie's time.

Did Lizzie Brokenhorn actually butcher cattle, make fry bread, attend to the dancers at the Sun Dance, look after the grandchildren, as the fictional descendants relate? As Shannon would say, it might not be in the historical records, but we know it is true.

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