One Thousand White Women (42 page)

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Authors: Jim Fergus

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Little Wolf himself was wounded seven times on the morning of the attack. He fought valiantly to protect his People as they fled from the camp, and somehow survived. With his wives Quiet One and Feather on Head, and his daughter Pretty Walker, he led his ragged band of refugees over the mountain to the camp of Crazy Horse.
The Cheyennes had nothing left, their spirit was broken. Less than a month later many of them began to straggle into Camp Robinson to give themselves up.
The government quietly arranged for the white women who had gone with their Indian families into the agencies earlier that fall to return to their own homes. Some took their children and raised them in the white world, others left their infants with the Cheyennes to be raised on the reservation.
Martha Atwood Tangle Hair, the sole white woman to officially survive the Mackenzie attack, returned to Chicago with her son, whose Christian name was Dodd. I never saw Martha again, but for many years after we kept up a correspondence. She eventually remarried and had several more children. Except to say in her very first letter to me that she had delivered her friend May’s last message to John Bourke, Martha never mentioned the affair again. Nor did I ever learn what arrangement she had made with the authorities to purchase her silence. It is not a monk’s business to ask such questions. But silent on the subject she remained. Martha joined our Lord in His Kingdom three years ago.
All know the tragic story of Little Wolf’s last years. One day several years later he got drunk and shot Jules Seminole dead in the agency store for making a lewd remark to his daughter Pretty Walker. For this crime one of the great men in Cheyenne history was stripped of his position as Sweet Medicine Chief, renamed Stinking Flesh, and banished from the People.
Little Wolf lived in exile for another twenty-five years until he was well into his nineties. He took up a kind of monastic life himself and went everywhere on foot with his faithful first wife, Quiet One. I often used to see the two of them walking across the hills together. Sometimes I was blessed to have them pitch their tipi for a few days next to my hut. It was there that the Chief first gave me these journals to read to him. I always baked a loaf of fresh bread for Quiet One, and Little Wolf would tease her with gentle mischief about the arsenic incident.
Feather on Head had moved out of Little Wolf’s lodge when the Cheyennes were required to give up their practice of polygamy. Eventually she married a young man named Wild Plums, and together they raised the child, Wren, as their own daughter. Of course, the People all knew that the sacred white child was the daughter of the white woman May Dodd and Little Wolf—and the Cheyennes still referred to her in their secret old-time ceremonies as
Vo’estanevestomanehe
—the Savior. They still believed, as Little Wolf had always maintained, that the child was
Maheo’
s, gift to the People, that she had been sent by God to teach them the new life that must be lived when the buffalo were gone.
Even though I had read all of May Dodd’s journals to Little Wolf, and he knew about John Bourke, he never gave up that faith. It was for this reason that he kept the journals secret and never told his daughter of their existence. Before he died he arranged with the keeper of the Sweet Medicine bundle for Wren to be given the journals at the end of her own life. He was a very great man, Little Wolf. I was blessed to know him on Earth.
John Bourke became a great advocate of Indians’ rights, and a harsh critic of their treatment at the hands of our government. His outspokenness in such matters largely cost him advancement in his military career. Eventually he married another woman and had a family of his own. His health had been ruined by those terrible years of Indian wars, and he died in 1896.
John Bourke never claimed May Dodd’s child, Wren, as his own daughter. But he always secretly watched over her and saw to her welfare as much as he was able. I know this to be true, because I was blessed to be his agent in these efforts. It was I, Brother Anthony of the Prairie, who prayed with John Bourke, and who counseled him to allow these People, and himself, the final miracle of the child’s birth. May Dodd was quite right, the children were all that were left of this grand experiment … and they are enough.
Blessed be the children of God!
 
by J. Will Dodd
Chicago, Illinois
February 23, 1997
Abbot Anthony of the Prairie died on the morning of December 7, 1926, just two weeks after he completed the preceding codicil to May Dodd’s journals. The Saint Anthony of the Desert Abbey which he founded in the hills above the Powder River is still an operating monastery. It was there, propitiously—perhaps even miraculously Abbot Anthony would surely say—that I began my search when I first came out to the reservation, bearing my own family letter of introduction—the one link that I had between my great grandmother, May Dodd, and the Cheyennes.
The monks at the abbey were very interested in my last name—joyously so—for they know well the legend of May Dodd, and the brothers still say their liturgies and hold their contemplative silences in the rocks where she died. Through them I was put in touch with ninety-six-year-old Harold Wild Plums, said to be the oldest living descendant of the great Cheyenne Chief Little Wolf.
Harold lives with his granddaughter, named, not coincidentally, May Swallow Wild Plums, in a concrete block HUD house in the town of Lame Elk, Montana, on the Tongue River Indian Reservation. Like many such reservation towns in America, it is a bleak place with a distinct third-world feel to it. On an abandoned gutted building across the street from Harold’s house, emblazoned in dripping blood red spray paint, is the ghetto legend—
Fuck Tha Police.
I had already learned from the monks that as a young man Harold had attended college off the reservation and had gone on to become a well-known attorney in the Native American community. For many years he worked on the reservation, representing the Cheyennes, often without pay, on a variety of Native American issues.
The letter I brought to Harold Wild Plums, of course, was the one I had discovered in my own family’s archives, the letter that had fueled my initial search, and the rumors of which had haunted mine amd my brother Jimmy’s childhood. It was the only surviving correspondence from May Dodd to her children Hortense and William in Chicago.
The letter was written in coarse lead pencil, much faded, on a sheet of yellowed paper that had been torn from a bound notebook. It was dated
10 June 1875
below which date was written,
“Somewhere in Nebraska Territory North of the Niobrara River.”
According to my own family research, on June 10, 1875, Hortense and William, who was my grandfather, were living with May’s parents at their home on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. May herself, by all family records, was still living in the Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum, a private facility for the insane in the countryside on the banks of Lake Michigan thirty miles north of the city. This institution is still in existence, having undergone several name changes over the years in keeping with the fashions of the times, and presently known as “Serenity Dunes.” Of course no patient records from the 1870s survive there, but according to the official family history, May would die in the asylum the following winter of undisclosed causes. She is buried in the Dodd family plot in the Lake Forest Cemetery, or at least she has a stone there. Like all of Chicago’s old, monied families ours is a large one, by both birth and marriage, and I have often, over the years, been to the plot for the burials of relatives, including that of my brother, Jimmy, after he was killed in Vietnam. His own grave is not far from that of our great grandmother, May Dodd.
Neither my grandfather William Dodd, nor his sister Hortense, would read their mother’s only surviving letter to them until many years after it was written. Not wishing to frighten the children with this mad missive from their mad mother, of whom they knew little—except that she had died when they were infants—May’s family kept the letter in a safe deposit box, the existence of which was not revealed to the children until after the death of both May’s parents. By then William and Hortense were young adults themselves. Their mother’s letter, then, took some twenty years to reach them—slow mail delivery even by the standards of the day. It is a short letter, as if hastily written.
My Dearest Children, Hortense and William,
I have entrusted this letter to my good friend Gertie McCartney, known infamously and variously on the western prairies as “Dirty Gertie” or “Jimmy the Muleskinner.” I do not know if this will ever reach you. And if it does, I do not know if you will ever read it. In this way, I feel that sending this letter is much like putting it into a bottle and throwing it into this great sea of grass, all the while hoping desperately that it will wash up one day on your shores.
Even more fervently than that wild hope, I hope and pray daily that you are both well, and that we shall all be soon reunited. I have neither time nor space here to tell you of all that has happened. I am keeping a detailed journal of my journey here so that you may one day know the full story of your mother’s life. I can only day now, briefly, that I was unjustly taken from you and committed to an asylum. My love for your father, Harry Ames, was deemed to be my “madness”—of which you are both the cherished result. For that I have no regrets on any score. I do not know what bad become of your father. Only perhaps your grandfather can explain this to you—if he bad the courage.
Presently I am living on the western prairies with a band of Cheyenne Indians … oh, dear, how insane that must seem to you … I am married to a man named Little Wolf, a great leader of his people … Good God, perhaps this letter is not such a good idea, after all, and will only confirm in your minds that your mother is, indeed, “crazy as a hoot owl,” as my friend Gertie would put it. Well, too late for such worries … I am with child by Little Wolf, and will give birth to your brother or sister next winter. There are others with me here—by that I mean, other white women. We are members of an important government program, of which you will one day learn. I hope then that you will be very proud of your mother. I cannot here day more.
Please know that you are both kept close to my heart, that not a moment passes when I do not think of you, or long to hold you again in my arms. One day soon I will do so—I will come back to you, I promise you that, my dears. Every fiber of my being lives only toward that end.
Please remember me as your loving mother,
May Dodd
 
Harold Wild Plums was blind but still keen of mind and his granddaughter, May, read him the letter as I sat on the edge of his ratty, stained sofa. Hearing it read out loud, I understood again how “going West to live with Indians” had become the euphemism it had in our family for insanity. It was a tale for impressionable children, and I think possibly my brother Jimmy and I alone in the family ever actually believed it.
But all I could think of now looking around this bleak concrete block house, a child of privilege myself, was how far away I was from my own world, and how far away my great grandmother must have felt on these prairies. And it was then that I suddenly knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the story was true.
Harold smiled as the letter was read to him, and nodded. “Yes,” he said when she had finished, “those are grandmother’s words. Do you recognize her handwriting, May?”
May was an attractive woman in her late thirties. “Yes, Grandfather,” she said. “It is the same handwriting as the journals, and the same paper. I’ll bet I can find the very page where it was torn out.”
“You’ve got the journals?” I asked in a low voice of wonder.
“May, go and fetch Grandmother’s journals from the Sweet Medicine bundle,” Harold said to his granddaughter. “Our guest is a relative. He is the grandson of my mother’s half brother, Willie. He has finally found us.” And then to me Harold looked with his milky blind eyes. “I often thought over the years of searching for my white family,” Harold said. And he shrugged. “But I was very busy with other matters. Does your grandfather, William, still live?”
“He died of cancer over thirty years ago,” I said.
“Ah, yes,” Harold said, nodding thoughtfully. “My mother, Wren, also died of the cancer when she was too young. I do not know why I have lived as long as I have. Perhaps to give you these papers now. That’s what Father Anthony would have said.” And Harold smiled. “Father Anthony would have said that I am blessed to give you these journals.”
At that moment, May came back into the room carrying a stack of old cracked leather-bound notebooks, tied together in a bundle by rawhide thongs.
“Yes, perhaps you would be interested in reading these journals, Will Dodd,” Harold said to me.
And very carefully May Swallow Wild Plums placed the bundle in my hands, and with long graceful fingers untied the thongs that bound it.

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