"A Day of Realization"

Without the horror, the blood, the grief, the lifelong sadness, there could not have been the triumph. That’s the story here.

Abbie Gardner was just thirteen when her family set down a perilous homestead out front of the wave of white newcomers to a region of the country few Euro-Americans had ever seen: Iowa’s northwest corner.

Years after the Inkpaduta and his Wahpakute (Wah-pa-koot’-ee) band wreaked travesty on the Gardner family and the thirty-some others they also murdered, Abbigail wrote a memoir about what she’d suffered at the hands of those who’d murdered her mother, her father, and her little brother, and then held her in frightful bondage for about four months.

Her memoir, The Spirit Lake Massacre and the Captivity of Miss Abbigail Gardner (1885), contributed to a genre that had already gathered fascinated readers here and abroad, ever since the publication of a 17th-century predecessor, A Narrative of the Capture and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, (1682), a memoir subtitled The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Capture and Restoration was America’s first “best-seller,” a white woman kidnapped and mistreated by hideous warriors in bright red war-paint. Rowlandson’s story is the progenitor of a genre scholars refer to as “captivity narratives,” stories that attract audiences by what is unthinkably repulsive and therefore undeniably fascinating.

Abbie Gardner Sharp (she married soon after her freedom was purchased) probably knew the popularity of captivity narratives. If she didn’t, someone in her acquaintance would have. That she did, however, doesn’t mean the book she wrote—and later pedelled at the scene of the crimes—was just dime novel material. The Spirit Lake Massacre is an honest, heartfelt and fascinating read—of both tale and teller.

That the Spirit Lake Massacre is common knowledge among those who live in the neighborhood is probably not a valid assumption. For descendants of Iowa pioneers like the Gardners, the dark tales that rose from Manifest Destiny are easier not to remember. Most Iowans know very little about the tribe of Ioways who gave the state its name, even less about how it is the Ioways thas lived in Oklahoma for almost 200 years.

Some background is relevant. Be warned: it’s bloody.

In March of 1857, the Gardner family had just moved to land in a region unsettled by white folks. They were the cutting edge of a cultural wave that had begun in 1620 at the Plymouth Colony: white folks assuming the land to be free and open for settlement, even though their squatting threatened the indigenous who lived there.

Winter never departed that particular March, the temperatures as low as temperatures can dip here, deep snow sharply crusted to make walking any distance almost impossible.

For the Gardners, a band of Indians coming to their door was not rare. Neither was talk. When the Wahpekutes came, Abigail’s father picked up his rifle; but her mother, Abbie remembers, told him to put it down. “If we have to die,” she told him, “let us now die innocent of shedding blood.” Thus, the Gardners allowed Inkpaduta’s men into their cabin and cooked up pancakes for breakfast.

_________________________

Tomorrow: the massacre.