Abbie's Story -- v

 

The monument at the Gardner cabin

The narrative includes descriptions one might expect from victims of such crimes. Abbie Gardner includes lengthy reports, one of them written by a man who led a search team looking for others “who alike fell victims to the merciless savages’ inordinate thirst for human blood.”

She too had cause to speak the way that man did. But in her “captivity narrative,” she at times goes out of way to lend sympathy, not to the killers but to the plight of “the Indian.” She takes the opportunity to offer admonition to her own people as well. At one point, she describes the culture of Dakota men who, as boys, are given eagle feathers when they kill their first enemy warrior. At that point, she stops and gives this warning:

It seems to me that Christian statesmen, and all those who have a duty to perform toward the rising generation in civilized nations, might find a lesson in this. Is there not altogether too much glorification of deeds of blood? Too much talk about gunpowder and glory? Patriotism is a noble emotion; but love of country is one thing; love of war is quite another.

One can’t help but wonder whether, after the conversion she describes and relishes, she didn’t herself determine that the story of her suffering could have a more blessed effect on her readers if she included less bloody spectacle and more reconciliation, more healing and forgiveness, less war and more peace.

Evidence for the spiritual power of her conversion, not just in soul but in body and strength, seems to me to be evident. Perhaps her “conversion” lends the narrative a softness readers would not have expected in a “captivity narrative,” a softness that makes the story feel broken or disjointed. She could well have made the book a greater financial and even artistic success if she’d done more to fulfill expectations of the story of her captivity undoubtedly held; but, as she maintains, finding God changed Abbie Gardner, made her story less terrifying, and therefore less marketable. Read instead as what we might call something of a traditional Christian testimony, the whole story feels different. After her conversion to “the living Christ,” Ms. Gardner’s attempt at a dramatic climax begins with her rescue by three Dakotas, three “farmer Christians” [see note], but it doesn’t conclude there, or with her return to “civilization.” The story doesn’t end with Abbie being freed.

The climax of the story, what she herself might call the eternal climax of the story, occurs when she travels to Flandreau, South Dakota, where what she might have considered an impossible reconciliation happened, an event that would not have happened without war, but neither could have happened without both sides—Ms. Gardner and the Santees--wanting to reconcile, or at least, in the language of her own Christian conversion, wanting peace in their hearts

Early photograph from Flandreau, South Dakota

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"Farmer Christians." One of those rescuers, a devoted Christian Dakota man named John Other Day, played a significant role in ending the captivity of hundreds of homesteaders—most women and children—whom Dakota warriors similarly captured in the 1862 rampage they created throughout their reservation, the Dakota War. Gardner describes him in the story and tells a significant part of his story, even explaining how he was mistreated by his own people after undertaking her release from Inkpaduta and his band.