Abbie's Story -- iv

Why? For what reason would Abbie Gardner Sharp hesitate to do what she might have done in her own book?--create another "captivity narrative"? It seems clear, by the way, that her reluctance to overdo the violence did not originate in emotional reticence. She wrote the story first just a few years after her release, but a house fire destroyed that manuscript. The 1885 version clearly took her more years to write and publish, but she was not shy about touting it. Her life post-capture was not without difficulty; married at 14, she lost children, suffered a divorce, then moved back, oddly enough, to Spirit Lake. When, years later, she and her son could afford it, she bought the very log cabin from which she’d been taken captive and where her family was murdered, then lived there for the rest of her life.

Once in residence there, she set up her own gift shop, where she sold her memoir and told her story to the vacationers who had begun to make Lake Okoboji a popular tourist destination. She became Spirit Lake’s own Buffalo Bill, a showman, a carnival barker right there where her sadness began, just beside Arnolds Park’s famed wooden roller coaster.

Abbie Gardner admits her experiences prompted something akin to PTSD: “Never have I recovered from the injuries inflicted upon me while a captive among the Indians,” she tells her reader late in the memoir. “Instead of outgrowing them, as I hoped to, they have grown upon me as the years went by, and utterly undermined my health.”

She does not seem to have been emotionally silenced by the brutality she suffered; she spent years retelling it. If that’s true, then why does the tone of the narrative so frequently seem reluctant and scattered? How can we explain the oddly disjointed memoir of a woman who returned to the scene of her horror only to replay the story a thousand times and turn the cabin itself into an Okoboji tourist sideshow?

Abbie’s hawking her book requires psychological analysis I won’t attempt, but the book’s mottled character and reputation may have suffered from its being misunderstood—by both reader and writer.

Without a doubt, I read her book with an agenda, but I would like to believe that the style and the character of The Spirit Lake Massacre and the Captivity of Miss Abbie Gardner

Mary Baker Eddy

can be best understood by the author’s own testimony late in the book. In the chapter titled “The Epoch of Advancement,” she explains that she wrote her memoir twice, then edited again when she gained blessed relief from what she described as her own lifelong pain.

How exactly did that lifelong pain disappear? The agent, she testifies, was a newfound Christian faith. She says Jesus Christ granted her spiritual, healing powers she discovered by way of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science:

. . . after long meditation I resolved to give this new yet old religion a trial, with little faith or hope that I could be relieved by its ministry. However, to the great surprise of all who knew me, I was healed by this demonstrable truth.

The passage is “testimony”: she believed a newfound faith brought her to the Throne and “the living Christ,” she says, “who forgives our sins, and heals all our diseases.”

In Massacre and Captivity, Abbie Gardner Sharp is herself conflicted by two stories of her life as a captive of the band that slaughtered her family. One of those stories is something of a “captivity narrative,” replete with bloody evidence to describe her suffering and explain her hatred for the murderers. But a different Abbie created a subsequent and different edition. That Abbie claimed to have been healed and blessed, even forgiven by that same “living Christ.”