"The Day of Realization"-- an odd style

Oddly enough, just a few pages before the description of that vicious murder Gardner describes the famous pipestone quarries in a passage whose style could well be lifted from a travel brochure:

Our journey led through the famous pipe-stone quarry, in Pipestone county, Minnesota. It is situated on a small tributary of the Big Sioux, called Pipestone Creek. The surface of the country is broken and picturesque, abounding in bluffs and cliffs. But its principal attraction, of course, is a layer of peculiar and beautiful rock, highly prized by the Indians and no doubt valuable to the whites. The cliffs here are similar to those at Luverne, but smaller. Beneath these, on a level tract of land, is found the precious pipestone. The stratum is about fourteen inches thick and is overlaid by four feet of other rock, and about two feet of earth, which must be removed before the coveted rock is reached. It is softer than slate, entirely free from grit, and not liable to fracture. When first taken out, it is soft and easily cut with ordinary tools, hardly dulling them more than wood does. On exposure to the air, it becomes hard and is capable of receiving a high polish. It had already been used for mantels, table-tops, and the like, as well as for ornaments, and is doubtless destined to more extensive use. In color it varies from light pink to deep, dark red; while some of it is mottled with all these shades, giving great variety.

These disjunctions in the narrative are a problem that at least one Amazon reviewer observed: “I felt like she very lightly touched on her childhood, the Massacre, her captivity. There was a lot of back and side history of the Sioux and other tribes, the US government, etc. I was hoping for more of what she actually endured personally.”

What Abbie did endure is there in the memoir, but details are sometimes hidden beneath and behind other official reports of the events and her own interest in both the region and its aboriginals. If Abbigail Gardner knew what “captivity narrative” readers were looking for, she didn’t deliver the details, even though the brutal truth of what happened is here.

Why? For what reason would Abbie Gardner Sharp hesitate to do what she might have done in her own book? It seems clear that her reluctance to overdo the violence did not originate in emotional reticence. She wrote the story first just a few years after her release, but a house fire destroyed that manuscript. This 1885 version clearly took her more years to write and publish, but she was not shy about touting it. Her life post-capture was not without difficulty; married at 14, she lost children, suffered a divorce, then moved back, oddly enough, to Spirit Lake. When, years later, she and her son could afford it, she bought the very log cabin from which she’d been taken captive and where her family was murdered, then lived there for the rest of her life.

Once in residence there, she set up her own gift shop, where she sold her memoir and told her story to the vacationers who had begun to make Lake Okoboji a popular tourist destiny. She became Spirit Lake’s own Buffalo Bill, a showman, a carnival barker right there where her sadness began, just beside Arnolds Park’s famed wooden roller coaster.

Abbigail Gardner admits she suffered from something akin to PTSD: “Never have I recovered from the injuries inflicted upon me while a captive among the Indians,” she tells her reader late in the memoir. “Instead of outgrowing them, as I hoped to, they have grown upon me as the years went by, and utterly undermined my health.”

She does not seem to have been emotionally silenced by the brutality she suffered; she spent years retelling it. If that’s true, then why does the tone of the narrative so frequently seem reluctant and scattered? How can we explain the oddly disjointed memoir of a woman who returned to the scene of her horror only to replay the story a thousand times and turn the cabin itself into an Okoboji tourist sideshow?

Abbie’s hawking her book requires psychological analysis I won’t attempt, but the book’s mottled character and reputation may have suffered from its being misunderstood--by both reader and writer.

---

Tomorrow: A different way of looking at Abbigail Gardner's memoir.