"The Day of Realization" --- "An Epoch of Advancement"

Without a doubt, I read Abbigail Gardner's memoir 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 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 Jesus Christ, whose spiritual, healing powers she found 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”: 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 I am arguing here that a different Abbigail created a subsequent and different edition. That Abigail claimed to have been healed and blessed, even forgiven by that same “living Christ.”

The captivity 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 her conversion, she didn’t herself determine that the story of her suffering could have a more blessed effect if she included less bloody spectacle and more reconciliation, more healing and forgiveness.

She gives the reader cause to believe that, in her mind, there was yet another dramatic powerful tale in her lifetime, the story she goes on to tell in the book after the massacre and captivity.

Evidence for the reality of her conversion, not just in soul but in body and strength, seems to me to be evident. What I’m suggesting is that 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; but, as she herself maintains, finding God changed Abbie Gardner, made her story less sensational, and therefore less marketable.

Read instead as a traditional Christian testimony, the book feels different. After her conversion to “the living Christ,” Ms. Gardner’s attempt at a dramatic climax for the memoir begins with her rescue by three Dakotas, three “farmer Christians,”[i] but it doesn’t conclude there, or with her return to “civilization.”

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Tomorrow: What happened at Flandreau.