One Thousand White Women

by Jim Fergus

  I looked about trying to ascertain who, if anyone, had claimed me, when my eyes met the averted glance of the one who had ridden in at the head of this contingent, and now sat on his horse, perfectly motionless and silent. He held a lance and an elaborately decorated shield, and wore a magnificent headdress of eagle feathers that spilled down his back and across his horse’s rump. White zigzag lightning bolts ran down the legs of his black horse, but he wore no paint on his own face. He looked somewhat older than most of the others, or perhaps more accurately only seemed older, for he owned a certain stillness and confidence that suggested maturity. He had dark skin and very fine features with a fierce set to his jaw. Nor did he call out as the others had, but sat his mount like a statue. Now he raised his lance, and made with it a single short shake toward me, an imperious, kinglike gesture of taking, a kind of feudal ownership by right, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this one, the headman, had chosen me to be his bride. I nodded … less to my future husband personally, than in simple resignation, a kind of final acceptance of this terrible bargain we have struck, and I confess that I thought to myself with pure womanly calculation and my bedrock sense of practicality: I could do worse than this one.

  At that precise moment I looked across the yard at the company of mounted soldiers who watched over these strange proceedings in nervous formation. They were trying to control their nervous horses, who snorted and whinnied, pranced and pawed—the air pungent and dangerous with the foreign scents and sights of their wild counterparts. And there at the head of his battalion, standing straight in his stirrups as his own white mount slipped sideways, Captain John Bourke stared at me with a look of unbearable sadness in his eyes.

  As suddenly as they had ridden in and as if by some unknown signal, the savages wheeled all as one in perfect synchronization, like a covey of blackbirds rising from the ground, and galloped off as they had come …

  7 May 1875

  This morning, Colonel Bradley, the post commander, came to see us, accompanied by Captain Bourke—the purpose of their visit, to explain to us the procedures of our impending “transfer.” How little romance there is in that word! This is to be effected in the morning. The Cheyennes will come for us just past daybreak; we are advised to travel with as little luggage as possible—trunks are not a thing understood by the savages, and they have no practical means of transporting them. They have not yet, as the Captain points out wryly, invented the wheel.

  More in our group have had eleventh-hour changes of heart—I’m certain from having viewed the aboriginals yesterday. Indeed, one poor girl, who like me was recruited from an institution in Chicago—to which she had been committed for “Nervousness”—seems to have had a complete mental breakdown, sobbing and uttering gibberish. She has been taken to the camp hospital tent. I suppose this behavior may be expected of one who did, after all, come from an asylum. Truly this is no place for the Nervous. Several others deserted in the middle of the night, but soldiers returned them to us this morning. The women had been found by the Indian scouts wandering in the hills, dazed and half-dead from exposure—for it is still quite cool at night. I do not know what is to become of them now. As far as I’m concerned, we have struck our bargain and now must live with it. God knows we’ve all had second thoughts …

  Yes, tomorrow they come for us … Good God … what have we done?

  A postscript to this day’s entry: Late this evening “Jimmy” came again to our quarters and called me outside.

  “Capn’ needs to see you at his tent, honey,” Gertie said to me. “I better warn you, he’s in a terrible state.”

  I had noticed earlier at our briefing with Colonel Smith that the Captain seemed silent and preoccupied, but I had never seen him so agitated as when I arrived at his tent. He was seated in a chair with a glass and a bottle of whiskey before him, and when I arrived he stood and began to pace the floor like an angry caged lion.

  “Do you know why I have sent for you?” he asked, without any of his usual civility.

  “Presumably not to read Shakespeare,” I answered.

  “You may mock me all you like, May,” he snapped angrily, “for you are a proud and foolish girl. But this is not a game. You are no longer an actor in a farce.”

  “I resent your words, John,” I said. “No one knows that better than I. Let me restate my answer to your question: I suspect that you have asked me here in order to entreat me not to participate in tomorrow’s transfer.”

  He stopped pacing and turned to face me. “To entreat?” he bellowed. “To entreat? No, madam, not to entreat—to forbid! You must not go through with this insanity! I will not permit it.”

  I confess that I did laugh then at the Captain’s distress … but mine was purely the false bravado of a desperate woman. For if the truth be told, I, too, was beginning to lose heart for this venture, was nearly paralyzed with fear and apprehension for myself and my fellow travelers. Ever since we have seen the savages in the flesh, our morale has been shaken to its core. But I could not let the others, or the Captain, see my loss of faith, my failure of courage.

  “My dear Captain,” I answered. “May I remind you that I am not one of your soldiers, that it is hardly your position to forbid me to do anything. In any case, our orders come from a higher authority.”

  The Captain shook his head in something like disbelief, but his anger seemed to drain away. “How can you still laugh, May?” he asked in a soft voice of wonder.

  “Do you honestly believe, John, that my laughter is lighthearted?” I said, “That I mock you? That I consider this to be a game, or myself a player on a stage? Don’t you know that I laugh because it is my last defense against tears?” I quoted: “‘I will instruct my sorrows to be proud—’”

  “‘For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop,’” John Bourke finished for me. And then he knelt beside me. “Listen to me, May,” he said, taking my hands and pressing them hard in his. “You cannot imagine the hardship that will be yours. You will not survive the life these people live—cannot survive—any more than you could survive life with a pack of wolves or in a den of bears. This is how different they are from us. You must believe me when I tell you this. The savages are not just a race separate from ours; they are a species distinct.”

  “Are they not human beings, John?” I asked. “May we not at least hope to find some common ground as fellow men and women?”

  “They are Stone Age people, May,” said the Captain, “pagans who have never evolved beyond their original place in the animal kingdom, have never been uplifted by the beauty and nobility of civilization. They have no religion beyond superstition, no art beyond stick figures scratched on rock, no music besides that made by beating a drum. They do not read or write. I ask you this: Where is the savages’ Shakespeare? Their Mozart? Their Plato? They are a wild, indolent race of men. Their history is written in blood, centuries of unrelieved savagery, thievery, and butchery, murder and degeneracy. Listen to me, May: they do not think as we do. They do not live as we do …” He hesitated, and seemed to struggle for the words … “They do not … love as we do.”

  The breath caught in my throat in terror and apprehension at the starkness of the Captain’s words. “Love?” I asked, nearer than ever to breaking down completely. “Tell me, John, in what way do the savages not love as we do?”

  Now he could only shake his head and avert his eyes from mine. “Like animals …” he finally murmured. “They make love like animals.”

  “Good God, John …” I said softly, with a sense of despair as complete as any I have ever known … or so I allowed myself to think for a brief moment. But then I remembered again the despair that I had escaped—and this brought me back from the abyss of my own cowardice.

  “You wondered once why I had agreed to participate in this program,” I said, “and now I must tell you, Captain. Perhaps it will help to put your mind to rest. I was recruited by our government from a lunatic asylum—given the choice between the very real possibi
lity of spending the rest of my life locked up in that place, or going to live among the savages. Which would you have done, John, given such a choice?”

  “Why you’re no more insane than I, May,” the Captain protested. “What was the nature of your illness if I may be so forward as to ask?”

  “Love,” I answered. “I was in love with a man whom my family found unsuitable. I bore his children out of wedlock.”

  I did not miss the flicker of disappointment that crossed John Bourke’s face at this moment—his good Catholic rectitude clearly offended by news of my “sin.” He looked away from me in some confusion. “People are not committed to lunatic asylums for making such mistakes,” he said at last.

  “Mistakes, John?” I said, “Love is no mistake. My dearest children, with whom I pray nightly to be reunited after this present adventure is over, were not mistakes.”

  “And what official diagnosis of your illness did the doctors give in order to have you committed?” he asked.

  “Moral perversion,” I answered directly. “Promiscuity, my family called it.”

  Now the Captain released my hand and stood from his kneeling position. He turned away from me again, a look of even greater distress on his face. I knew what he must be thinking.

  “John,” I said, “I feel no need to defend myself again against such lies, or to justify my behavior, past or present. You and I are friends, are we not? We have become, I think, in a short time, dear friends. Unless my feelings deceive me, had the circumstances of our meeting been different, we might have been much more than that. I may be a woman of strong passions, but I am not promiscuous. I have been with only one man in my life. He is the father of my children, Harry Ames.”

  “I could intervene with the authorities on your behalf, May,” the Captain interrupted, turning back to me. “Perhaps I could arrange that you be excused from the program.”

  “Even if you could do so,” I said, “you could not prevent my family from putting me back in that ghastly place. Just as you tell me that I cannot imagine life among the savages, so you cannot imagine the life that was mine there. Where every day was exactly like the last—an endless string of sunless, hopeless days, one after another after another. Whatever is to come in this strange new world we enter, cannot be worse than the tedium and monotony of existence in the asylum. I will never go back, John. I will die first.”

  Now I stood and went to him. I put my arms around his waist and my head on his chest. I held him, felt his beating heart. “Perhaps you hate me now, John,” I said, “now that you have learned the truth. Perhaps you think that I deserve to be sent off to live with savages.”

  The Captain closed his arms around me, and for that moment and for the first time in longer than I could remember I felt completely safe, as if I had found there against his chest sanctuary at last from the tumult and heartbreak of my life. I smelled his strong man’s scent like a forest in the fall and felt the muscles of his back and arms like the sturdy walls of a well-made house. The rhythmic beat of his heart against my own breast was like the pulse of the earth itself. Would that I could rest there forever, I thought, in the safe haven of this good man’s arms.

  “You must know that I am in love with you, May,” he said, “that I could never hate you, or judge you. If I were able to stop this madness, I would. I would do anything to save you.”

  “You are engaged to marry another, John,” I said. “As I am. Even if I required saving, it is too late.”

  But now I believe that perhaps it was John Bourke, after all, who required saving from me, from my own terrible need, my desire to disappear within him, and him within me, as one being together, inseparable. Who falls swifter or harder from grace and with such splendid soul-rending agony than an Irish Catholic boy raised by Jesuits? An honorable soldier engaged to another? What sweeter love is there than that which cannot be?

  When John Bourke kissed me, I tasted the faint sweetness of whiskey on his lips, and felt his deep moral reluctance giving itself up to my more powerful need for him. I felt us both being swept away together, and I held tight, held on for dear life, as if only the contact of our bodies could fix me in this time and place, as if only when his flesh and mine became seamless, seared together as one, would I be truly anchored to this world, the only world I know. “Will you show me now, John,” I whispered into his mouth, “dear John, will you show me now,” I implored, “how a civilized man makes love?”

  8 May 1875

  My Dear Harry,

  I must try to write you the breeziest, the chattiest letter possible this evening, for if ever I am to go completely mad it will be on this strange night, our first in Indian country. And if I write to you and imagine that you will actually read this letter, perhaps I can pretend for this one moment longer that all is well, that I am simply having a dream from which I will awaken in your arms, in our apartment, our babies sleeping beside us … and all will be well … yes … all will be well …

  I am to be a Chief’s wife. That’s right, the head savage has chosen me to be his bride. His rank being the savage equivalent of royalty, this will make me something like a Queen, I should think … Hah! And what would you think of that, Harry, if you could only know where our actions have led me? A Chieftain’s wife, Queen of the Cheyennes, future mother of the royal savage children … .

  The man’s name is Little Wolf—he is much celebrated among the Plains Indians and has had a personal audience in Washington, D.C., with President Ulysses S. Grant himself. Even my Captain admits that the Chief is by reputation a fearless warrior and a great leader of his people. And I must say, as savages go he is not altogether unpleasant to look upon. It is impossible to guess how old he is. Not a young man, certainly, and quite a bit older than I, but not old either … perhaps near forty years of age. But very fit and healthy-looking, with dark, almost black eyes, and strong features set in a kind of wolflike demeanor. Yet he strikes me as a gentle man with a soft pleasant manner of speaking that makes even the hideous Indian language seem less ugly.

  They came early this morning, Harry, driving a herd of horses ahead of them with unimaginable fanfare, making strange yipping, animal-like sounds—exactly the noises one might expect savages to make. The horses were herded into the camp corral, where they were counted by the camp comptroller.

  Yes, well, naturally, I have mixed feelings about being traded for a horse … although I suppose I should take some consolation from the fact that the mount Little Wolf presented to the post commander for my hand was, by all accounts, one of the finest in the string … not that I, personally, am any great judge of horseflesh, but so said my new muleskinner friend “Jimmy.”

  So perhaps I can take some solace in knowing that I have been traded for a particularly excellent specimen of equine flesh … does that sound better?

  My true friend, Martha, is to marry a fearsome-looking fellow, aptly named Tangle Hair, whose wildly unkempt hair causes him to look quite like one of the maddest of the mad inmates from the asylum. But he, too, is by all accounts a distinguished warrior.

  In one of the oddest circumstances of this bizarre situation our brave Negress Phemie has been chosen by a black man among the savages. Indeed, that is his name—Black Man. It was explained to us by the camp interpreter, a half-breed Frenchman-Sioux named Bruyere, that Phemie’s prospective husband was captured from a wagon train of escaped Negro slaves when he was only a child. Brought up among the Cheyennes, he is considered to be as much one of them as if he were natural born to the tribe. He speaks no English and is treated in all ways as an equal. Perhaps in this regard the savages are more civilized than we. He is a handsome fellow, quite a bit taller than most of the others, well over six feet I should guess, and I must say he seems to be a fine match for our Phemie … forgive me if I appear to ramble on Harry … exhaustion and terror will do that to a girl … I try only to give some order and definition to this desperate affair …

  Helen Elizabeth Flight, our artiste in residence, has been chose
n by a famous Cheyenne warrior named Hog. “Yes, well I expect I’ll keep my professional name,” she says with great good humor. “That is to say, Helen Hog has rather a disagreeable ring to it, don’t you agree?” However unattractive his name, Mr. Hog is a fine-looking fellow, taller and broader of shoulder than most of the others.

  Sweet little Sara is to wed a slender young man named Yellow Wolf, a youth who appears to have barely reached adolescence. But again I must say that the Cheyennes seem to have chosen wisely, for the boy is extremely shy of countenance and altogether smitten with the girl—can hardly take his eyes off her. Perhaps he will succeed where we have failed in bringing Sara out of her silent, fearful world.

  Captain Bourke tells us that among the savages madness is considered a gift from the gods, and as such the insane are accorded great respect, even reverence in their society. Thus some of our group should be held in very high esteem by our hosts, possibly even regarded as idols! Indeed, there was spirited competition among several of the savage men over which of them gets poor Ada Ware as his wife. A former asylum inmate herself, suffering from Melancholia, Ada would hardly be considered a “catch” by men in our own society. But according to the interpreter, Bruyere, the savages believe that she is some kind of holy woman because of her black attire. They have had just enough exposure to our sundry religions to have things all in a muddle.

  Our valises were objects of great mirth to the Indians. Those less dignified among them, grasped them by the handles and made quite an exaggerated show of carrying them around for the amusement of their foolish compatriots, and then all fell down laughing and rolling on the ground. Truly these people are like unruly children! I was pleased to see that my own intended did not participate in this nonsense, but merely watched sternly.