"The Day of Realization"--At Flandreau

River Bend Church, Flandreau, SD

In 1869, some of the Santees from that small Nebraska reservation determined to take up farming on their own land in the neighborhood of Flandreau. What Abbie Gardner doesn’t tell her readers is that many of the Dakota Abbie met on that visit to Flandreau would never forget their own tribulation, the great sadness of the Dakota War, just seven years—and so much suffering—in the past.

Abbie Gardner doesn’t tell the reader that Santee story, a story she had to know. If she didn't, however, her surprise at what she experienced would have been even more profound.

When she met the Flandreau Dakota, she stood before men and women who knew very well what had happened to her 35 years before. Clearly more important to her was that she also stood before people she believed were, as she had been, washed in the blood of the lamb. “It seemed as though a miracle had been wrought in this region,” she says, “and the day of realization was at hand.” 

I would like to suggest that the climax of Abbie Gardner’s story is not her release from captivity, which occurs two-thirds of the way through the memoir, but her visit to Flandreau, where a woman who witnessed horrible death and was held captive by those who harmed those she loved, met and spoke with Native men and women who experienced, in outline, a similar story, people who all, by their own testimony, had experienced immense depths of sadness, but also the great relief of forgiveness. Everyone in those two churches had suffered greatly but felt themselves redeemed. Without the horror, the blood, the grief, the lifelong sadness, and without Jesus Christ, there could not have been the triumph of that particular moment in the company of those particular people. That’s the story I think Abbie Gardner is telling in this odd, old blessing of a memoir.

That grand moment of peace, not war, what Abbigail Gardner calls her very own “ day of realization,” is the climax of the story because it was, for her , the most amazing event of all, an occasion for reconciliation, not degradation, of joy in the blood of the lamb.

And all of that, she says so emphatically, happened within sight of the very place on the Big Sioux River where she could never forget the death of her companion in captivity—19-year-old, pregnant Elizabeth Thatcher:

On an elevation about one mile north of town. . .a charming view can be obtained of the picturesque valley of the Big Sioux. From this point I beheld a promising young city (named in honor of the man who conceived the plan of my rescue), two Indian churches, and the river where I stood on the bridge of driftwood and witnessed the death of Mrs. Thatcher some thirty years ago.

She was so close to that riverbank, she claimed she could see the place where Mrs. Thatcher was beaten to death in the swirling rush of water:

The past and present scenes rose up and passed before me like a living, moving panorama, and the change that had come to pass on the stage of life seemed truly marvelous. We attended the services in these churches, listening to impressive sermons, delivered in the Sioux tongue, to large, well dressed, and attentive congregations. What had once seemed an impossibility, had become a living reality—a body of Sioux Indians, with religious thought, congregated together to praise Him whose name is Love!

Some readers may have anticipated the publication of her memoir as yet another “captivity narrative.” Those readers couldn’t help but be disappointed because Abbie Gardner could not tell her story accurately without the stunning moments at Flandreau. She wanted badly to claim she’d been healed of those maladies that kept her an invalid, freed by her belief in Jesus. For that woman, standing in the circle of men and women who could have murdered her family, men and women she knew to be mutual sufferers, then professing the name of Jesus together, was a “truly marvelous” event unlike any she says she could ever have imagined. It is a stunning moment.

Does all of that make Ms. Gardner’s book a better memoir? I don’t believe so. Massacre and Captivity still feels uneven, strangely disjointed, an awkward mix of horror and beatitude amid a file drawer full of historical reports, and a memoir that may well be withholding some of its own secrets.

But this reader, so many years later, finds it much easier to understand the memoir as a Christian “testimony” than a captivity narrative; and so may others, especially those who, like me, share Abbie Gardner’s faith in “a living Christ.”

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Monday:  Conclusion