In the days of the first settlers, a woman named Mrs. William Dow, along with her husband and children, lived in a town that would become Little Falls, Minnesota, but was, in the 1850s, still the land of the Chippewas.
When the Dows first came, she says she watched an Indian woman emerge from a tipi with a newborn and, with little seeming concern, take that baby down to the river, hold it by its heels and douse it, then reverse the hold by grabbing its head and once more giving the child a bath. She tells that story in a memoir of her life, describes it with as much ordinariness as that which the Chippewa woman bathed that baby. But she remembers. She didn't forget.
Once, she says, she saw Mr. Hall, a neighbor, milking his cow in a pasture, surrounded by a rail fence. Across the field and behind his back, she claims, a couple of the Chippewas were stretching brand new scalps they'd taken somehow from their enemy Sioux. They were stretching them, as if they were muskrat pelts. When they finished, they celebrated with the kind of screaming joy that echoed off the trees all around. Mr. Hall never saw them, but the moment they started screaming Mrs. Dow saw the cow bolt and run, mid-milking. Mr. Hall, she says, without ever turning around, out ran that animal back toward the lean-to. She tells the story in a tone that grins, as if it were a cartoon.
Those were the days of war in the region, Little Crow's war, the Dakota uprising, the 1862 Dakota War--Minnesotans still aren't sure exactly what to call it. For several months, life in Little Falls was lived on fearful edge, even though Mrs. Dow and Mr. Hall lived with the Chippewas, and not the Sioux who'd been those who'd gone to war.
Nonetheless, when she felt things get treacherous, she listened to her friends and took her kids and herself to the sanctuary of St. Cloud, where they'd be safe. One day, she says, she met someone who told her they'd been by her place and couldn't help notice that someone had moved in. "'Well,' said I, 'if anyone can, I can." And she moved back. Home, you might say.
There was, remember, war all around. Her husband was gone down South, fighting the Rebs with some Minnesota outfit. She was alone with her kids, as was her neighbor, an Indian woman named Mrs. Salome, who'd married a white man. He too was gone to the war down South.
So together, the two of them, neighbors and friends, used to sit some afternoons and write letters. Mrs. Salome had no writing education, so Mrs. Dow says she would write Mrs. Salome's husband for her, tell him all the things Mrs. Salome wanted her soldier-husband to know. When the letter was finished, Mrs. Dow says, Mrs. Salome "would sign them with her cross." That's a priceless picture, don't you think?--two women, one white, one red, writing their husband's together.
When the Dakota people started resistance, Mrs. Salome looked at Mrs. Dow and said, "Kinne sagas?--meaning, "are you afraid?" Mrs. Dow says she did not reply, but Mrs. Salome said, "If you are, I will hide you."
Very good reasons exist to explain why people no longer tell stories about settlers like Mrs. Dow. The inescapable fact is that people like the Dows and Halls, often unwittingly, brashly displaced those who'd lived on the prairie and along the woods for generations. That plain fact of history can not be denied.
Still, Mrs. Dow's story deserves not to be buried with her. Her story--their stories--are simply too good to lose.
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