by Jim Fergus
We are being kept isolated from the tribe. We even perform our bodily functions in a different place than the Lakota women, although occasionally we catch a glimpse of some of them walking to another part of the river some distance away from ours, where presumably they bathe and gather their own water. We are trying to make some sense of all this, to find any small reasons to think that we might one day be free. Thus far about all we have to hang on to is that we are still alive, and have not yet been violated by our abductors, both of which things we must take as hopeful signs.
25 March 1876
Despite the Kelly sisters’ admonition that “no one is coming to save you,” as they warned us on their first visit, it appears that there may be a savior in our midst, after all. This would be in the person of an extraordinary woman known as “Dirty Gertie” … or, alternately, “Jimmy the muleskinner,” who rode in several days ago on a big gray mule, stunning the Lakota with her brazen, unannounced entrance, having evidently slipped past the sentries who are constantly posted around the perimeter of the village to protect against intruders. I liked her right away, a rough, tough-looking character who speaks her mind and who, to hear the Kellys tell it, has achieved some legendary status across the plains, with both Indians and whites alike. Indeed, she had not been seen for several months and was reported to have been killed by a band of Indian scouts who work as guides for the Army. Many of the Lakota seemed to believe that the reason she was able to evade detection by the sentries was because she was a spirit being, a ghost. Gertie and the sisters tell us that the Indians make no real distinction between the natural and the supernatural worlds, and believe that both humans and the other animals are capable of moving freely between them … an interesting concept to be sure …
With Gertie’s invaluable help we were able to arrange a “powwow” with several Lakota chiefs and prominent warriors. I was allowed to attend with Gertie and the Kellys, for I have been selected by default as the nominal leader of our group, some of whom seem to have mistaken my relative sangfroid for strength of character, when in fact it is simply indifference to my personal fate. Among the native attendees was the one called Crazy Horse, who barely spoke, but appeared to listen thoughtfully to all the proceedings. He does not at all seem to fit the image of fearsome warrior and great leader of his people which the twins tell us is his reputation on the plains.
I came away from the powwow with the first genuine hope I have felt since the attack that we might actually be set free. Gertie speaks fluent Cheyenne and Lakota, and she addressed the Lakota leaders eloquently and formally, asking that they give us horses and safe passage from the village, after which, of course, we are entirely on our own. They seemed to listen respectfully to her words and are now considering her request.
After the powwow, Gertie came back to our tipi to meet the other girls and give them a report. Of course, all were greatly heartened by the news that we might possibly be freed.
“Let’s say the Lakota agree to cut loose a’ some horses and let you gals go,” Gertie said. “How many of you know how to ride?”
Only three of us, myself included, raised our hands. The second was a strong, Sapphic Englishwoman by the name of Lady Ann Hall, who, indeed, I was rather surprised had not been elected leader of our troupe. Lady Hall commands sufficient natural authority that everyone calls her thusly by her title and family name, rather than her given name, as the rest of us do each other. I admire the woman, for she came all this way to locate her lover who joined the brides program with Meggie and Susie’s group last year.
The third to volunteer her equestrian experience was our Mexican girl, Maria Galvez, the former mistress of an infamous gentleman bandit from Mexico City. I use the term “mistress” with reservation, for evidently when she was a young girl the bandit purchased her … or stole her from her impoverished family in a village in the Sierra Madre mountains of Sonora. She is a small but sturdily built girl, who clearly has Indian blood herself for she is dark-skinned and shares certain common facial features with the Lakota … a kind of Asian or Mongolian appearance.
Now our Norwegian girl from Minnesota, Astrid Norstegard, raised her hand uncertainly. “My people were fishermen,” she said, “and had little use for horses, for we lived in a world of water. However, like all of us, I rode holding on behind my captor when we were first brought here. Does that count?”
“No, missy, that don’t count,” Gertie answered. “That’s like saying you know how to drive the train, because you once rode in one. The reason I ask is that these folks have a real eye for horseflesh, and they’re the finest damn riders you ever seen. One thing for sure is that they ain’t gonna give you the pick of the string. They’ll keep the best mounts for themselves, and let you have what’s left over. You’re liable to end up with some real wild-ass mustangs.”
“Then we’ll just have to take whatever they give us,” I said, “and consider ourselves lucky.”
“Well now, that is another matter I’d like to talk to you gals about,” said Gertie. “As you know by now, the brides program has come to an end. It is way too late for you to help civilize the Cheyenne.” She looked now at the Kellys. “Didn’t work out so good for the first group that came here, did it now, girls?” The sisters did not answer, but in their gaze was all the pain they had experienced and not yet described to us.
“And since then, things has only got worse,” Gertie continued. “The Indian bands still at large, mostly Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, are scattered and on the run. Meggie and Susie here are gonna try to find their Cheyenne people and fight on with ’em, and for that I respect ’em, I truly do. But the thing is, you new gals are greenhorns, and believe me, you do not want to get caught in the middle of the shit storm that is headed this way. General Crook is resupplying and come spring the troops will be on the move again. He has orders from General Sheridan to clear the region of hostiles from the Black Hills south to the Platte River and north and west to the Yellowstone. That means attack and destroy every Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho village they come across, because every band still out there are now considered hostiles. The Army will show no mercy. If they haven’t already, Meggie and Susie can tell you all about that, can’t you, girls?”
The Kellys cast their eyes to the ground and nodded in unison.
“OK, so if the Lakota do let you go and do give you the horses,” Gertie continues, “the sisters are gonna ride out north and west with some of the other Cheyenne to try to hook up with Little Wolf’s band again. And you all are gonna ride south with me back to Fort Fetterman. You ain’t even supposed to be here in the first place, so the Army’ll take you down to Medicine Bow station, put you on a train, and send you right back where you come from.”
I noticed Meggie and Susie sharing a look at this point. Clearly, this is just what they had been hoping for—that Gertie was going to take us off their hands. “That’s the God’s truth, lassies,” says Susie. “Like Gertie says, you got here too late and there ain’t a damn thing you can do for the Cheyenne. They don’t need any more wives or babies just now, they need warriors, horses, guns, and ammunition. And you all need to go back home.”
“Home?” I said. “My home is a life sentence in a windowless prison cell in solitary at Sing Sing, where I am not allowed to speak … even to myself. I won’t go back there. I prefer to take my chances on the unknown.”
“And my home is a bed in the Kansas state insane asylum,” said my friend Carolyn Metcalf, “to which I am frequently tied and abused by sadistic attendants and doctors. I would rather die out here than return to that.”
“My home is a bedroom in a bordello,” said our French gamine, Lulu LaRue, “where fat old men sweat on top of me, and the proprietor beats me for not being sufficiently enthousiaste with the clients.”
“I lived in Mexico City with a bandito named Chucho el Roto,” said Maria Galvez. “And when he believed that I betrayed him, he put an order out to have me killed. Until I crossed the border, I lived in a d
ifferent room under a different name in a different hostel or posada every night. And often I slept on the street or on the ground. That’s what I have to go home to. That and a death sentence.”
“Well, my goodness,” said Lady Ann Hall. “I, on the other hand, as you all know by now, have a magnificent estate in Sunderland … a quite satisfactory home in which to live, I must confess. However, it does feel rather lonely there without my dearest companion, Helen Elizabeth Flight. If the others are considering staying here, I would join them in the adventure. Having come all this way, I believe I owe that to my Helen.”
“My home is with m’lady, wherever she requires my services,” said the Liverpudlian girl, Hannah Alford, in her tiny voice.
“Listen now,” said Susie Kelly, “if you lassies are thinkin’ you might be comin’ with me and Meggie, then think again. Aye, we offered to look after you, but that was before Gertie showed up. Now you got a way out of this country. We are sorry for you, truly we are. Believe me, we understand about not having a home to go back to, we been there, too. But we got our own troubles and we ain’t responsible for yours.”
“Aye, and neither are we babysitters,” added Meggie. “So let us be clear: you ain’t invited to come along with us. Period. We are goin’ to be traveling with other Cheyenne here who also want to rejoin their people, and who know where to look for Little Wolf. The last thing in the world they’re gonna tolerate is being burdened by a bunch of greenhorn white women, half a’ whom don’t even know how to ride a damn horse.”
“Then those of us who choose to stay,” I said, “will do so on our own. We’ll follow you and not get in your way. We’ll take care of ourselves.”
“Aw, c’mon now, Molly,” said Susie, “You know you’d last about a half day before you come cryin’ to us. And if you fell behind, which you’re sure to do, we’d have to leave you. There are all kinds of hostile bands wandering the countryside, not to mention some real unsavory white men you do not want to run into, either.”
“Aye, that is the God’s truth,” said Meggie. “And how do you plan to feed yourselves while you’re traveling? Besides horses, if they be that generous, the Lakota will not give you much when you leave here. Who’ll do your hunting for you?”
“I will,” I said.
“As will I,” said Lady Hall.
“You gals are dreamin’ if you think the Lakota are also going to give you valuable guns and ammunition,” said Susie. “I suppose you’re both handy with a bow and arrow? Aye, it’s true, maybe they’ll part with one or two a’ them.”
“Ladies, please,” Gertie interjected, “let’s talk about this when and if the time comes. We don’t even know yet if they’re gonna turn you loose, let alone give you horses.”
“They’re going to let us go and give us horses, Gertie,” I said. “I know it. I watched them as you spoke. Of course, I didn’t understand what you said, but I could see you had them eating out of your hand.”
Despite my intransigence on the subject, I fully understood that the Kelly sisters wish to send us off with Gertie. They clearly have their own troubles, having already witnessed enough horrors, and still facing sufficient trials without having to look after us … greenhorns, as they put it. At the same time, despite their insistence, I sensed some reluctance in their resolve to send us back with Gertie. Whatever they have been through in the past year, I suspect that in us they see some mirror of themselves and their friends when they first came out here. We are the innocents they once were, escaping dark pasts into uncertain futures, and in denying us that chance, they would be turning their backs on their own experience, denying themselves and their friends.
And so I decided to try another tack. “Tell me,” I said to the twins, “which among the Cheyenne going with you will make the final decision about whether or not we are allowed to come?”
“Why do you want to know?” Susie asked.
“Because I want to talk to him.”
“Going over our heads, are you now, Molly?”
“If I need to. Didn’t you tell me that I was the leader of our group? Didn’t you say I was responsible for keeping us alive?”
“That don’t mean you’re our leader, Molly,” said Meggie. “That don’t give you the right to make decisions over us.”
“I don’t want to be your leader, or make decisions over you. I want to talk to your leader and let him decide our fate.”
The sisters exchanged a glance. “His name is Aénohe,” said Meggie, grudgingly. “That means Hawk in English. He was at the powwow. He’ll be leading us back to find Little Wolf.”
“Which one is he?”
“The fair one. He’s mixed blood.”
“That’s perfect.”
“What’s so perfect about it?”
“Because I know him.”
“Whoa, easy now, lassie,” said Susie. “What do you mean you know him?”
“I mean, he’s the one who took me off the train. I can’t explain it … he was going to kill me but at the last instant we came to some kind of understanding … I felt him change his mind. And I rode holding on to him for six hours. I know that much about him.”
Meggie and Susie shared another twin look that suggested some surprised acknowledgment of what I said. “It’s true that the only reason the rest of you weren’t killed and scalped,” said Meggie, “was because Hawk was the leader of the raiding party and he stopped the other warriors from doin’ the dirty deed. We heard this from another Cheyenne fella who was there with him. They weren’t supposed to bring any survivors back, just the horses, and any rifles and ammunition they could collect. They don’t need any more mouths to feed here. But Hawk wouldn’t let ’em kill you, don’t ask us why … but you’re right, Molly, you can all thank him for still being alive.”
“Can you tell me anything about him?” I asked.
Now between them, and with some additions from Gertie, they told us about the man called Hawk.
His mother was a white girl kidnapped by the Cheyenne when she was ten years old, taken during an attack on her family’s wagon train, which was headed west to the gold fields of California in the early 1850s. This was not uncommon in the day, one of the great hazards of travel through Indian country. When she was fourteen, the girl married a young Cheyenne warrior named Lone Bull, whose father was Oglala Lakota, Crazy Horse’s people. She had three children by Lone Bull, two daughters and a son, Hawk. Because she had blond hair, the girl became known among the Cheyenne as Heóvá’é’ke—Yellow Hair Woman.
When Hawk was eight, he was gathering wood along the river bottom with his mother, who was now around twenty-two years old. A company of U.S. Army soldiers came upon them. Recognizing her as a white woman, the soldiers managed to catch her before she could run away. They questioned her, and she admitted that she had been taken as a child, but said she did not remember the name of her white family, although, in fact, she did. However, after twelve years among the Indians, with a Cheyenne husband and children, Yellow Hair Woman had become fully integrated into the tribe, and she had no interest in returning to the white world.
As it happens, the girl’s parents had survived the attack on the wagon train when she was abducted, and had never given up looking for their daughter, whose Christian name was Samantha. The attack and her abduction had convinced them to turn back from their original destination of California and settle in Grand Island, Nebraska, where her father became the minister in the Methodist church. For those twelve years her parents had continued to post flyers in the trading posts and at the forts around the region asking for information about their daughter. Among the soldiers who caught the girl were several who had seen these flyers. And so they took her and her son, Hawk, with them back to Camp Robinson, in northwestern Nebraska. Her parents were contacted and they traveled there. In a sense, in this way she was kidnapped back to her first family.
Of course, as delighted as her mother and father were to be reunited with their long-lost daughter, Samantha was not th
e same little girl who had left them. She had lost much of her English and refused to even acknowledge her white name. Her parents recognized that to bring her out of what they considered savagery and back into the civilized world would be no easy task. Toward this end, and because they also knew that it would be unacceptable for the Methodist minister and his wife to return to Grand Island with an unbaptized, illegitimate, half-breed grandson in tow, her parents decided to ship young Hawk away to a special school for Indian children in Minnesota, run by Jesuits who were tasked with civilizing and educating the young savages. This her parents arranged with the fort commander, who sent four soldiers one morning to the family’s quarters to take the boy. Against this separation, both Hawk and his mother fought the soldiers like wild animals, scratching, biting, shrieking, but finally they were subdued and the boy dragged away.
Hawk spent four years at the Indian school, which was virtually a prison. There he learned English but little else besides a hatred of whites and the white world. He gained a reputation among the priests as an incorrigible troublemaker. At age twelve he escaped with two other Indian boys, one a Dakota, the other Ojibwe. They traveled for three days together and then went their separate ways to find their own people. Of the three, Hawk was the farthest away from his home country—over a thousand miles. But somehow he made his way, walking the entire distance. One day he appeared in Little Wolf’s village, where he was reunited with his mother, who had run away from her parents before they even reached Grand Island. Because she had no idea where her son had been sent, Yellow Hair Woman returned to Little Wolf’s people, and for those four years, she waited for Hawk, hoping that somehow he might find his way back to her. And so he had.