Strongheart: The Lost Journals of May Dodd and Molly McGill

by Jim Fergus

  The name “Cheyenne” was at first believed by white ethnographers to have been derived from the French word chien, which means “dog.” Later research revealed that it was an interpretation of the Sioux term Sha hi’ye na, meaning in their language “red talker,” and can be translated as “people of alien speech” or simply those whose speak a language different than their own, for the Sioux called themselves “white talkers.” Of course, I can’t presume to speak for all tribes, or even for my own, but in our own modern vernacular, we collectively call ourselves “Indians,” not to be confused, of course, with the people in the country of India. White people don’t need to feel guilty about calling us Indians because it’s a step up from “savages” as we’ve been called for centuries, and still are by some.

  As I was saying, we Indians are a secretive people, and no one guards their secrets better than we. We learned long ago to keep secrets from the whites, to tell them nothing personal, nothing of value, nothing that can be used against us. But we are also, by nature, secretive with each other. We often simply don’t talk about certain things. Because everyone deserves a modicum of privacy, this quality of secrecy can be a good thing. But it can also be a bad thing, as well. For instance, in the old days, such crimes in the tribal family as child abuse, spousal abuse, and sexual abuse were unheard of. Today, as a result of the historical trauma we have suffered, the resulting lack of self-respect, and the introduction of an easy escape into oblivion offered by alcohol and drugs, and, frankly, from behavior we learned from white culture and even from their priests in church, these crimes and others are sadly common among our people. As one who has suffered from it, I know this to be true. But no one speaks of it. If someone hears a neighbor being beaten by her husband, they say nothing, that is not their business, they don’t get involved. Even if they see that neighbor the next day, bruised and bloodied, they greet her politely, but they ask no questions, and offer no comfort. It is not their business.

  Certainly there were people down through the generations who must have known about the existence of the following journals, but for various reasons, both good and bad, they were kept secret all this time. As described previously, the first page, torn out of a ledger book, was found by my ancestor Molly McGill in a cave where May Dodd was said to have died. At the time, without reading it, she gave it to Meggie Kelly, who, before her death, gave it back to Molly. The original page was nearly illegible and clearly written under great duress. It was found tucked into the front of a ledger book written in Molly’s hand, but I have placed it where it belongs, in sequence to the following journal written by May. I will explain later how her lost journals came into my possession. Right now, I think perhaps the reader wants to read it.

  undated entry on page torn from ledger book, discovered by Molly Standing Bear in May’s cave—ED.

  I am May Dodd. I am wounded, I am dying. My friend Martha has gone to find John Bourke. I sent Quiet One, Pretty Walker, and Feather on Head to join Little Wolf, and to take my baby, Little Bird, with them, and my journal, too, leaving me this one page I tore out to say a final adieu to my short life on earth, which has known both misery and joy, serendipity and tragedy …

  But I am not dead yet, for my husband Little Wolf has sent the prophet Woman Who Moves against the Wind to care for me. I leave this page here, in this dark cave … a message in a bottle … and in the unlikely event that someone finds it, you may also find my bones, picked clean perhaps by the scavengers. But if there remains no trace of me, then you must believe … I am alive.

  (The following undated entry began another ledger book.—ED.)

  I must have fallen asleep, and when I awoke Woman Who Moves against the Wind was squatting before me. She covered me with a buffalo robe. As she did so, I heard Martha and Brother Anthony speaking at the entrance to the cave. “I think this is the place,” Martha said, weeping hysterically, “but I’m not certain, Brother, I can’t say for sure. Oh, God … what have I done, I’ve lost May…”

  “It’s alright, Martha,” said Brother Anthony, “calm yourself. I’ll go in and see, you wait here for me.” Then, as he was crawling in through the narrow opening, I heard Brother Anthony call my name.

  The medicine woman gripped my arm. “Do not move, Mesoke,” she whispered, “do not speak, do not let them take you away from here, if you do you will die, you must believe me, close your eyes and sleep now.” And then she was gone, and Brother Anthony was crouched before me. I could not have moved if I wanted to. I was paralyzed, frozen in place. I believed that I was hallucinating. Perhaps I was already dead. With his forefinger, Anthony traced the sign of the cross on my forehead. His finger seemed so warm. “Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord, who frees you from sin, save you and raise you up … Safe journey, my dear friend, May Dodd,” he said, and I slept, comforted by the knowledge … relieved that the end had come … happy even … that surely, I was on my way to heaven.

  I was awakened again by a sharp stabbing sensation in my back where I had been shot. A fire burned in the center of the cave. I was lying on my stomach with my deerskin shift pulled up over my shoulders. I cocked my head, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Woman Who Moves against the Wind kneeling at my side. “You’re hurting me,” I said. “Leave me alone, what are you doing?”

  “Do not move, May,” she answered, and she whispered some kind of incantation in a voice so low I could not make out the words. Then I felt a searing, burning pain and I screamed. I must have passed out. When I woke, I was propped up against the wall of the cave, wrapped in the buffalo robe. Woman Who Moves against the Wind handed me a wooden cup filled with some kind of broth. “Drink this,” she said. “It will help with the pain, and replenish your lost blood.”

  “What did you do to me?” I asked.

  Between her thumb and forefinger, she held up the piece of deformed lead. A dull flame reflected off it. “I took this out of your back, and I closed the wound with fire. You bled a lot, Mesoke. The bullet was lying against the bone of your back, but it did not go deep into the flesh. Your journal slowed its passage and saved you. Still, it needed to come out.”

  She turned to the fire and held a piece of meat impaled on a stick over the flames. The fat began to drip from it, sizzling in the coals … the smell of it … I could not remember the last time I had eaten … ah, the glorious smell of meat cooking, fat dripping … Well, alright, I was not in heaven, after all … I was alive and that did not seem so bad, either.

  undated entry

  I do not know how long we have been in this cave for I have spent much of my time here asleep. I have lost the feeling in my legs and cannot move them. Woman Who Moves against the Wind tells me that the soldier’s bullet that came to rest against my backbone has done this.

  “No, I ran a long distance after I was shot,” I said. “My legs were fine. You must have done the damage yourself when you took the bullet out. You have made me a cripple. I’d rather be dead.”

  The medicine woman just looked at me then, neither denying nor confirming my accusation. “The feeling will return, Mesoke,” she said, “and you will walk again. You will grow strong and be able to run again.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” I said angrily. “I suppose it is because you think you can see into the future, is that it? But you are not a real doctor, you’re a charlatan. You should have let me die.”

  She did not answer.

  I descended into a deep melancholia … and I slept. It was all I wished to do. She woke me to feed me and to massage my legs at least three times a day. All I wanted was to sleep. “Leave me alone,” I kept telling her. “Let me sleep, let me die in peace.”

  She left the cave every day to collect firewood, and killed a deer with her knife to feed us. She obscured the narrow opening to the cave with rocks, so no one would come upon us … not that anyone would be looking. She said that more snow had fallen and obscured any tracks lead
ing to us, and any distinguishing features of the landscape.

  Who would be looking for us? Brother Anthony would have told the others that I was dead, and he would be attending to the living. Quiet One said that Little Wolf planned to lead the people across the mountains to seek sanctuary in Crazy Horse’s village. Captain John Bourke’s soldierly responsibilities would preclude him from coming to look for my corpse, and to what end? To give me a Christian burial?

  “Leave me here, and let me die in peace,” I said to her. “I do not wish to be found. What good am I to anyone now? How can I even care for my daughter when all I can do is crawl on the ground?”

  “Your husband, Little Wolf, sent me here to look after you,” she answered. “You will walk again, Mesoke.”

  I hated her.

  It was a strange thing after believing I had been saved, to know again that this cave was to be my final resting place, after all. I was dead to all who knew me, and now to myself. Dead and embittered. I was no longer an escapee from a lunatic asylum, or the participant in a secret government program, nor was I the wife of a great Cheyenne chief, or the leader of a band of white women. I knew that my fellow wives Quiet One and Feather on Head, and Quiet One’s daughter, Pretty Walker, were the most capable of women and would protect my daughter, Little Bird, with their own lives. And so, I was no longer even a mother. After all the ordeals of this past year, and especially that terrible dawn attack upon our camp, in this rare moment I had no responsibilities as wife, mother, friend. I was a cripple, and I was free to die. I slept, wondering if one can sleep oneself to death. I slept.

  The medicine woman descended to our charred village and managed to scavenge certain articles and goods that had somehow been overlooked by the soldiers in their otherwise nearly thorough destruction of all we owned. She found a few intact blankets, buffalo robes, and hides, as well as an iron pot and a skillet obtained in trade that had survived the flames, and even, miraculously, a pair of unbroken china plates also secured in trade.

  We had been rich as a band, and had enjoyed a successful hunting season to see us through the winter, and the medicine woman found, as well, two bundles of dried buffalo meat that the soldiers had neglected to throw upon the fires. She came upon several bows still intact, as well as four quivers full of arrows, and a bone-handled knife, charred by the fire but not destroyed. She also found a coiled lariat that was only partially burned.

  These things she found while digging carefully through the rubble, but all else was gone, she said, burned, taken away by the soldiers and the scouts, or shattered beyond repair, in order to expedite the government’s campaign to drive the last free tribes to extinction … as well as the white woman they had sent here to civilize the savages.

  I had watched as Captain John Bourke killed a young boy, my little horse boy, who was guarding the horses on that freezing morning of the massacre. The brave child wrapped his blanket around himself and faced Bourke’s drawn pistol with a stoicism beyond his years. The captain pulled the trigger. I hated him, and would never forgive him.

  Woman Who Moves against the Wind brought the surviving items to our camp in the cave, making a number of trips back and forth to the village over a period of days. The last thing she returned with was, she announced, a gift for me: two unused ledger books, and a packet of colored pencils that had belonged to one of our tribal artists, a young man named Little Fingernail, who she said had died in the attack while fleeing the soldiers. She found the ledgers where he had stored them in an empty ammunition crate in his tipi that had been set afire like all the others, but had not burned completely. It is with this poor boy’s implements that I make these entries.

  “You know, some of the People call you Paper Medicine Woman, Mesoke, because you are always scribbling away in your journal. I thought these might give you something to do besides sleep all the time.”

  The cave seems rather full now with these few salvaged items. It isn’t much, and most of it at least partially damaged and needing repair, but when you have nothing, anything seems a lot. And so I have begun to write again, but I did not thank her for the gift. I can only assume that my other journals, besides that which I had carried strapped to my back and gave to Quiet One before the women left the cave with my Little Bird, were likewise consigned by the soldiers to the flames. It is of no matter to me now. I believed at the time that I was writing to my dear children in Chicago, who were torn from me by my parents in the first brutal act that led me first to the lunatic asylum, and then here to these inhospitable plains. I held then the notion that by some miracle, the journals might find their way to my babies, and they would not have to spend the rest of their lives believing that their mother, who loved them more than anything on earth, was insane.

  Yet, since the Army’s attack upon our village, and my injury, I have come to the inevitable conclusion that no one, and none of the scanty possessions that belong to this ancient race of native people, or even those of us who only speak of it in journals, nothing will survive the relentless invasion of the white race, with their ability to erase entire civilizations that happen to be in their way. And, certainly, my modest attempt to record the events of these times are of the very least importance. Now I just write for myself, with no further vain illusions that anyone else will read what I record, especially my beloved babies, Hortense and William … God bless you.

  I remember that my dear friend, Helen Elizabeth Flight, who has always encouraged me in my writing, as I have encouraged her in her beautiful artwork, once told me of a line in a play written by an Englishman named Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” At the time, I found that to be such a lovely, uplifting sentiment, but now I realize that it flies in the face of human history, for no one kills people with pens.

  I do not know how many of my friends survived the attack, and, if any did besides Martha, where they are now? When the Army charged, I did what all the mothers did that morning, I gathered up my baby and I ran. I fled with the others as the mounted soldiers stormed through the village, bearing down upon us with trumpet blowing and flag flying, these proud American boys firing their weapons, or wielding their swords in vicious arcs, mothers with their children, old men and women falling around me, cut down indiscriminately, while our own warriors tried valiantly to distract the soldiers and cover our retreat with return fire. I ran … I ran … only one goal in my mind amid the chaos and terror, the goal of us all, to protect our children.

  In these last days, weeks in the cave … how many I do not know, I have relived that morning again and again both in dreams and awake. What has become of my friends? Now I will never know, I will never see them again, and I have lost a third child.

  * * *

  The days pass, one bleeds into the next—weeks perhaps go by, I don’t know, I’ve lost all track of time, I don’t care. I sleep, I wake, I write a few words, I sleep. Woman Who Moves against the Wind feeds me, massages my useless legs … she cleans my mess. Every morning, in all weather she goes down to the creek and breaks a hole in the ice if necessary, and hauls fresh water back in a pouch fashioned from the bladder of a moose. She cleans my legs and buttocks of the feces and urine that have spilled from my useless body in the night. I disgust myself.

  And then one morning when I wake up, and Woman Who Moves against the Wind is massaging my legs, I suddenly realize that I can feel her strong hands upon them, I can feel the movement of her fingers pressing into what little remains of my muscles. I look up at her and she nods with the slightest smile on her face. My whole being floods with relief, and at the same time with an intense sense of shame at the recognition of how terribly I have treated this noble woman. I begin to weep, I begin to bawl like a child as the full depth of my endless, pathetic self-pity reveals itself to me. “I am so sorry,” I blubber, “I am so sorry, can you ever forgive me? Please, please try to forgive me.” But I do not deserve to be forgiven.

  “You will not be able to walk yet,” she says, “for your muscles are
too weak, and if you try too soon, you may injure yourself again. You must be patient, Mesoke, we will know when you are ready to walk again.”

  I know well that Woman Who Moves against the Wind is Little Wolf’s most trusted advisor, his seer into the future, and is also reputed to have sacred healing powers. I have always been a skeptic regarding such matters, yet in our time among the Cheyenne, it is true that we have all witnessed occurrences that seem to defy rational explanation. For instance, one day a young warrior had his leg broken when his horse stepped in a badger hole, fell, and rolled upon him. The horse, too, had broken its leg and they had to kill it. When his fellows extricated him and carried him back to the camp, we saw with our own eyes the shard of leg bone protruding through his skin. He was taken to the lodge of one of the medicine men, and a week later, he was walking about the camp with only a slight limp. We white women spoke often together of such inexplicable matters, and discussed them at length with Brother Anthony, who, of course, ascribed them to divine intervention, one of the luxury beliefs owned by the reverent.

  “But they do not worship our God,” I pointed out, “so how is it possible that he intervenes in the affairs of savages, when he has his own faithful flock to look after, and doesn’t, frankly, even do such a good job at that?”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways, May,” he said, one of those solemn aphorisms that has always annoyed me.