The Fool Soldiers -- ii

Del Iron Cloud Going Home 

What both illustrations of the Fool Soldiers' rescue share is the single horse and travois, and a warrior--in this case, two warriors--looking behind them. Even though they'd argued successfully and given up whatever they'd brought with them in exchange--horses, blankets, guns; even though they had the hostages with them, even though they were well on their way back to Ft. Pierre, they were scared to death that White Lodge and his band would catch up with them, take back the captives, and get rid of "the boys."

They were wary. No, they were afraid. They were warriors, but they were young warriors.

You can't help but wonder why they did what they did? Take a trip only a fool would entertain mid-winter, blizzards and all. Hands, feet, noses froze. White Lodge and his people were anything but neighborly, and being on the run the way they were made them even more desperate. They were starving. Those hostages were human capital, and White Lodge knew it. Just giving them up to some "boys" from the Two Kettle camp made absolutely no sense. His Santee warriors were neither afraid to die or afraid to kill. The warrior Charger and his friends were fools all right. They were. No kidding.

The most reasonable explanation for their behavior is a dream/vision one of them swore came to him unbidden. A herd of elk arose and the biggest one approached and spoke to him, a young warrior named Kills Game. “There will be ten of you,” that elk told him. “You must be strong and respected.” It was neither odd or strange for a warrior to hear that directive, bravery and courage being foremost among the attributes of warriors.

Charger called the others together to consider what the elk’s prophecy might mean for the warrior society they had named, the Strong Heart Society. His interpretation began with something his father had told him, that being that dreams are often “contrary” visions, meant to be understood in opposite ways to what they might explain themselves to be. 

No one will ever know, of course. However "the boys" described their motivations is buried in an unreachable past by this time. What remains is simply the story of their foolish heroism. The accepted motivation for what they did is the dream--and its interpretation to do the opposite of what that big elk spoke.

But there is another. When her nine children were out and on their own, Josephine Waggoner, a Hunkpapa Sioux from Standing Rock reservation, went on a mission. What was happening all around was the deaths of the old ones, who remembered the days before the white man, the old ways. They were dying.

She'd learned English at Hampton. When she returned to Standing Rock, she translated sermons for both the Episcopalians and the Roman Catholics, as well as letters Sitting Bull, also a Hunkpapa, received from lots of fans (he'd become something of a celebrity). When Sitting Bull was killed, she'd helped lay his body out in traditional ways for his burial. 

Once her children were out of the house, Josephine Waggoner told herself she'd get the old, old stories from all the old, old men and women. So she set out to do just that.

What resulted is a sprawling series of narratives taken directly from the heart and the lips of the old ones. The manuscript she put together took years to get published because oral history--the only kind of history the old ones knew--had no footnotes. It couldn't be documented, as white man's history must be. However can we trust the veracity, the truth, of what some old people say? some publishers told her. It's impossible.



So Josephine Waggoner's Witness: A Hunkpapa Historian's Strong-Heart Song of the Lakota wasn't published until 2014, long after her death.

Amazingly, there's another story of origins in Witness, an explanation for the almost insane foolishness of the Fool Soldiers, an explanation that is real soul food.

That story, tomorrow.

The Shetek hostages

The Fool Soldiers--i

 

The text of this historical marker goes like this:

In 1862, a dramatic rescue of white captives held by a band of hostile Santee Sioux, took place near this spot. A group of eleven young Teton Sioux boys left Ft. Pierre on a cold November day determined to overtake and meet with the Santees to negotiate the exchange of nine women and children for the food and blankets which they took with them. The Santees had taken the captives on a raid of a settlement near Lake Shetek in Minnesota four months earlier.

Memorial at Lake Shetek

The August 20 attack, part of the Dakota War of 1862, left 14 people did and several women and children hostage. The Santees chased up north and west, all the way into North Dakota before turning back. Along the way, they sought refuge with various other bands of Sioux, but generally got little welcome. Other bands were aware that the massacre of white folks at Lake Shetek wasn't going to go unpunished. 

That four-month trek brought them into winter, and as temperatures dropped and snow began to fall, simply securing provisions to live became difficult. One of the groups who would not take them in was a Two Kettles band, who fed them, but determined that they would have to leave. "The boys" the historical marker speaks of, were members of that Two Kettles band.

The boys: Martin Charger, Kills Game and Comes Home, Swift Bird, Four Bear, Mad Bear, Pretty Bear, Sitting Bear, One Rib, Strikes Fire, Red Dog, and Charging Dog had decided on their own to attempt this dangerous and entirely selfless mission of mercy after hearing of the plight of the Lake Shetek captives. The hostile band of about one-hundred and eight Santees was led by Chief White Lodge.

The woman standing near the sign (above) is Marcella LeBeau, whose ancestors include Four Bear, one of "the boys" the sign identifies as "Fool Soldiers." In the last few years, she's become a friend of mine.

History states that they came upon the Santee encampment on the east side of the Missouri River at a point opposite the mouth of the Grand River. The Santees drove a hard bargain and the young Tetons had to give all of their worldly possessions, including their guns and horses, to effect the exchange. Only one horse and wagon was left to carry the weak and distraught captives the one hundred miles back to the nearest white settlement at Ft. Pierre. The Tetons walked and gave their clothes to the white women and children. This Christian act of mercy by the Tetons was never rewarded by the U. S. Government and no record can be found of any repayment for the personal possessions given in exchange.

 

Because the Santees had been on the warpath, the odds against success were very high. Thus, the Teton boys were dubbed the 'Fool Soldier Band.'”

The Fool Soldiers' heroism happened at a spot along the Missouri River now under the waters of Lake Oahe, created when river was drawn and quartered by a series of dams that created reservoirs for farmers and ranchers, as well as immense recreational resources for tourism, but also buried all kinds of history and culture of the Native people who lived there.

Today, the town of Mobridge celebrates the story of the Fool Soldier Band with markers in the downtown cemetery, and one of seven murals painted into the ceiling of the municipal building downtown, murals undertaken and finished during the 1930s, when the Works Progress Administration hired the Lakota artist, Oscar Howe to honor the Lakota people.

 

Just exactly why the Fool Soldiers Band determined to rescue the hostages White Lodge and his people had captured and abused is a question no one will ever answer with certainty, but this almost non-sensical act of bravery and heroism had to have cause. 

Tomorrow, I'd like to offer a possible answer. 

The End is Near

It's not particularly difficult to imagine yourself into an "end-times" scenario these days because there's no end to the apocalyptic rhetoric. Trump does it constantly, makes claims that if the Democrats win anything, we're unimaginably close to Stalinist Russia. What's worse, we're being overrun by hordes of dark-skinned people from a--hole countries. The end is near he says, time and time again, to fanatic crowds who simply believe him.

Those who oppose him are just as sure of horror just down the road, but their slant moves in an opposite direction. Arizona's highly hyped vote recount, accomplished by Trump money and Trump people, finally released its long-awaited findings and determined last weekend that the original vote was mostly right--with a few extra Biden votes thrown in. 

Then, His Dishonor goes to Georgia last weekend and dons his typical swaggering arrogance and tells a couple thousand of his disciples that what the Arizona recount determined was that he'd won in a landslide, just as he's been maintaining. "We won on the forensic Arizona recount yesterday at a level you wouldn't believe." 

He. Said. That.

More tan once, he said that. Nobody could make this stuff up. Well, except the Liar King.

Here's what makes the lefties see "end times." The thousands who came out to greet him in Georgia probably get their news from sources that may well have said what he did. They don't know any different. If he says a turtle is a greyhound, then they put their money on turtles. That's the way it is. Gospel, according to Trump.

Lefties say the end is near because millions of otherwise Republicans simply fall in line with Trump's lies and are, as we speak, changing voting laws in as many states as will let them so as to insure a Trump victory next time around, rewriting statutes at the same time to allow some kind of intercessory committee to determine vote counts without counting votes. Neat trick.

"Our constitutional crisis is already here," screamed Robert Kagan's weekend essay in the Washington Post. Kagan, who is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, hardly a leftie bunch, and has, himself, impeccable conservative credentials, makes clear in that long essay that forces are already operating to erode democracy, because of "the Big Lie" and its creator.

Kagan says the balance of power right now, the people who can balance the ship of state is Republicans who hold fast to their conservative principles but come out of the closet and oppose Trump publicly, which few of them, right now, are willing to do. If they don't do that, he says, democracy is in grave danger--no, we already are because we're much farther down that road right now than most of us think.

End-times stuff. It's really tiring, but if Kagan is right--and I certainly believe he is--then the country in which we live and the way of life we've maintained since parting from King George is not only in peril but there already. 

Scary stuff. But thousands genuflect when he lies. Thousands. Millions.

"I was wrong"--amazing

What can you say?--not often will a politician with significant standing, not to mention national prominence, repeat those three words, as Liz Cheney did yesterday: "I was wrong. I was wrong. . . .I was wrong."

Shocking. Amazing.

It could be, however, that her political career was already steaming toward disaster, as one of only two Republicans in the legislature siding against The Donald, who continues to proclaim "the big lie," that somehow thousands of poll workers got together to make sure that Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential election and not his Eminence.  Liz doesn't like him. 

And, shockingly, she is not afraid to say it.

She's one of only two Republicans who joined the Select Committee investigating the January 6th madness. On Trump's enemies list, the name "Liz Cheney" may well be the only one written in with a branding iron. No love lost between them really because there never was any to speak of.

So what she said yesterday on 60 Minutes may well have negligible value politically, one way or the other. Taking the positions she has on the ex-President long ago sealed her fate--for good or ill. If she wins or loses her next campaign remains to be seen.

The issue is personal, she said, immensely personal, and her response--"I was wrong"--has to do with the issues around accepting the LBGTQ community. Rep. Cheney has a sister, Mary, who is a lesbian. Furthermore, her sister has a spouse who has a name too--Heather Poe. Mary and Heather are married. They've been together for 21 years, and there are children, a family, a little boy and a little girl.

So when Lesley Stahl asked Liz Cheney about her previous answers to questions about gay marriage (she was always against it) Stahl herself was clearly shocked when Representative Cheney said, three times, "I was wrong."

I suppose that'll be it with Wyoming's evangelical vote. Among evangelicals (whatever exactly they may be these days), maybe the most venomous of sins is gay marriage. Yesterday, very publicly, Liz Cheney, who voted for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, notified Lesley Stahl and the nation that she had changed her mind--as impossible as that may be among pols. "I was wrong," she said, three times. 

Until the issues touch you personally, it's not all that difficult for evangelical-types to fortify their anti- positions with a blunderbuss loaded with scripture versus. But when your son or your granddaughter or the sweet kid next door announces his or her sexuality, defining righteousness gets sticky.

Good for Liz Cheney, I say. Honesty is a rare commodity these days, even biblical, as I remember. 

The hoppers are back!

He's in there. You've got to look hard, but you'll see him--or her. He's pretty much right in the middle, just now approaching that chunky pink quartzite. He's one of millions, literally, out in the fields around the pond south of town a couple of afternoons ago. They regularly come out of the woodwork about this time of year. When I sat down, they didn't scurry out of the way like they did when I was walking, and this young man or woman crept up in the grass beneath my feet and did the courtesy of  allowing a photograph. 

Let me bring him up closer. He's camera-shy.

Maybe he's trans, I don't know. But I'm stymied about proper pronoun use, without a clue as to traditional grasshopper gender identification. What I do know--and what's readily convincing right now anywhere in the region, is that whatever each of them is, they do very well at locating each other. Right now, they're legion. 

This year's batch are no more than an inch long, and while their appetites may well be as legendary as they're meatier cousins, their effects are not so readily discernable. 

Try this on for size:

The worst grasshopper visitation we had was in July, 1876. One Sunday morning father and mother and I went to town to church. The small grain had been harvested and the corn all along the way was a most beautiful, dark green. When we were about a mile from town a slight shade seemed to come over the sun; when we looked up for the cause, we saw millions of grasshoppers slowly dropping to the ground. They came down in such numbers that they clung two or three deep to every green thing. The people knew that nothing in the way of corn or gardens could escape such devastating hordes and they were very much discouraged. To add to their troubles, the Presbyterian minister announced his intention to resign. He, no doubt, thought he was justified. 

I was pretty small at that time and didn't understand what it all meant, but I do know that as we drove home that afternoon, the cornfields looked as they would in December after the cattle had fed on them--not a green shred left. The asparagus stems, too, were equally bare. The onions were eaten down to the very roots. Of the whole garden, there was, in fact, nothing left but a double petunia, which grandmother had put a tub over. So ravenous were the pests that they even ate the cotton mosquito netting that covered the windows. 

Lucy Hewitt, "Early Days in Dawson County."

The only link between past and present manifestations is the dozens you can raise with every last step right now. But no one I know considers them an abomination right now. Most of us barely know they're around. 

They are. 

Environmentalists, who are blessed with gentle souls, will tell you what they're good for, what they do in the great balance of things. Let me summarize: they poop. They eat a variety of green things--grasses, plants--and then, well, leave the refuse behind, tiny as they are, incidental as their poop must be. 

I'll grant you that the character I photographed above is no behemoth, but every last one of them know how to slam meals. They eat half their weight every day. Let me see--if that were my diet, I'd spend most of life eating, and the other half--well, you know. They do, and all that blessing is left behind, and what scientists call "fecal matter" is oh-so-good for the earth.

Here's yet another at his or her calling on rosier terrain. Soon enough, he will leave deposited his or her bit of precious sustenance. 

Thus, the wholesome "circle of life."

I think a good Calvinist can turn anything into a sermon.

Our Cornfed Pocahontas

 

And why not? If major leaguers can dream-walk out of Iowa's tall corn, as they did not long ago on the "Field of Dreams" game, why can't dear old Pocahontas do the same? Here she is, Shoeless Joe in pigtails and buckskin, waist deep in September corn.

For the record, the real Pocahontas never grew old, having died at 21 years old in jolly old England, after moving there with her husband, John Rolfe, who, by the way, has a town--or had a town--named after him also in Pocahontas County, Iowa. Isn't that sweet?

Our cornfed Pocahontas is statue-esque, tall and thin and trim, with an exceedingly wide and tall face, huge startled eyes, and not one iota of a smile, not even a suggestion. She's tentative, as if worried, maybe even a little angry about her bushels per acre.

Disney did their Pocahontas up far more delightfully, but then you would expect nothing less. Disney gave her a heavy turquoise necklace, gorgeous flowing hair, an armband tattoo beneath perfectly sculptured shoulders, and, oh yes, breasts sufficient to fill out that lovely fringe bikini she wore when she took those first few steps out of the primeval forest. 

Our flat-chested Miss Iowa, the one standing straight and tall just a few yards off Highway 3, east of a town that's named after her, seems younger but a whole lot angrier, sourpussed by I don't know what exactly. 

Pocahontas's Pocahontas greets visitors here because long, long ago, John Howell, a Virginian serving in the Iowa State Senate, thought it would be grand to honor a Native Virginian by naming one of the brand new counties in far northwest Iowa after her. It was 1850. He'd be pleased, he said, "to have the name of Pocahontas, the Indian princess of Virginia, remembered," as it is and has been since before the 25-foot cornfed growler was erected in 1954. 

Seems the real Pocahontas is far better known than her story, even after the Disney film. Legends claim that by pleading for his life, Pocahontas saved Captain John Smith a split second before his brains would have been spilled over a pair of rocks. She jumped between warring cultures, white and red, to save the man she loved. My, who wouldn't love that story? Not a smidgeon of critical race theory there. No sir.  Vintage Americana.

You know what I'm talking about, right?--this story: 

Doubtful. Likely didn't happen. For the record, Pochie was 11 or 12 years old when the swashbuckling captain went deep into the forest outside Jamestown. Some stories of Native origin claim she was abused, even raped, then pirated on board a ship and sent to England with her English husband, a man named Mr. John Rolfe.

True story? Who knows?

What is true is that the guardian angel Pocahontas was much desired by white folks, who were willing to do most anything they could to steal her away from her "savage" family, specifically her father, who happened to be chief. Even during the girl's own lifetime she was more iconic than human. When our President Trump wanted to dim the Presidential chances of Elizabeth Warren, he called her "Pocahontas," a smear of limited historical significance but immense cultural heft. 

We're likely far beyond the statue of limitations that history sets; certainly, those who once knew the facts are no more. Just exactly what Pocahontas was, what she stood for, what were the circumstances of her life and death is not likely to be revealed by any historical sleuthing. 

Somewhere close to 175 years ago, an Iowa senator suggested naming a spanking-new county after a Indian princess from his home state of Virginia. A century later, Senator Albert J. Shaw, who lived in a county township, Powhatan, named after Pocahontas's father, determined a statue in her honor was appropriate right there in the heart of the county. During the summer of 1956, she went up. Just 25 years ago, Disney tried to make a movie from a life obscured by time and a thousand different versions. It didn't go well. 

No matter. You can't help thinking that if there weren't a Pocahontas, we'd conjure one from our dreams because what she so such a dear offering for our guilt. This delightful Indian maiden brought us together, whether she did or not, right?

Think I'm being cynical? Drive through town. She's waving, being nice--I think.

It would be nice, wouldn't it, to say wish her the best: may she rest in peace.

Poor child hasn't. That's for sure. Maybe that's why she seems such a grouch.

Abbie's story -- end

 

And all of that Christian fellowship, she says so emphatically, happened within sight of the very place on the Big Sioux River where she had stood witness to the horrible 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[1]), 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.

Standing there before the church at Flandreau, 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 of reconciliation 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 their mutual faith 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, I suppose, those who share Abbie Gardner’s faith in a person she describes as “the living Christ.”

I’d like to believe that Abbie Gardner’s memoir describes a very specific place in Flandreau, South Dakota, just up the hill from town where, today, stands “the oldest continuously used church in the state,” or so the sign out front says—River Bend Church. The building was constructed in 1873; the original structure still stands on the grounds of the Moody County Museum, in Flandreau.

River Bend Church sits quite reverently away from things, a quiet and beautiful place. A cemetery, which stands just west of the building, tells its own incredible stories, gravestones etched with Bible verses in both English and the Dakota language.

It just seems fitting that even the much-hated and much-loved Dakota headman Little Crow is here too, in peace, in a far corner.

If you stop sometime, you’ll almost certainly be alone. But I’m guessing that’s where Abbie Gardner stood one day in September, 1892, and saw before both her death and life in a vision something akin to a new heavens and new earth, on a day she calls her “Day of Realization.”

It is unlikely that anyone will ever know who wrote the epithet on the stone over the grave of Abbie Gardner Sharp, if she did not. It sits just a few steps east from the cabin where Abbie lived just a few decades after watching her family murdered right there. The words on the stone speak to a similar place in the human heart, a place she would have called “the soul”:

ORPHANED AND ENSLAVED BY HOSTILE SIOUX SHE LIVED TO EMBRACE

IN CHRISTIAN BENEVOLENCE THE AMERICAN INDIAN AND ALL MANKIND

Abbie's Story -- vii

During that deathly winter on Pike Island, something fierce happened to the Dakota people amid their suffering. It is not easy to talk about the phenomenon because historians do not propose eternal answers to spiritual questions. But what happened just before those who were hanged sang their death songs was what one might call a mass “conversion.” An immense spiritual about-face was somehow passed along from death row and into the internment camp, where their families were shivering and too often dying in a Minnesota winter. While fevers and disease raged, so did a full-blown religious awakening. Missionaries who stayed with the Santee people before and after incarceration and were angrily reviled for visiting “the savages,” claimed the Holy Spirit came upon the people and created a mass conversion.

The Rev. Stephen R. Riggs, who spent his life as a missionary to the Dakota, explained what happened this way:

The circumstances were peculiar, the whole movement was marvelous, it was like a “nation born in a day.” The brethren desired to be divinely guided; and after many years of testing have elapsed, we all say that was a genuine work of the Holy Spirit.

While this reader may be less sure of what happened than was Rev. Riggs, my judgement of what happened spiritually in Mankato, and then on Pike Island, or even to Abbie Gardner, what forces ignited religious enthusiasm or sustained it, is not my concern. Believers claim such “conversions” happen in a thousand ways. What interests me is the effects of a degree of spiritual faith that changes hearts and minds of people who believe they have come into the presence of a being they consider to be “the living God.” What is of importance to the Abbie Gardner’s story and the book itself is what happened in the lives of those people as a result of their “conversions.”

Big Sioux River (foreground) and 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 people 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.

In her memoir, Abbie Gardner doesn’t tell the reader that Santee story, a story she almost certainly had to know.

Presbyterian and Episcopal churches of Flandreau, SD

When she met the Flandreau Santees, descendants of those who’d fought in the 1862 war, 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 am suggesting that the climax of Abbie Gardner’s story is not her physical release from captivity of Inkpaduta, which occurs two-thirds of the way through the memoir, but her visit to Flandreau, near the place on the Big Sioux river where she had witnessed the horrible death of her friend, where she was held captive herself by those who had slaughtered the family she loved. But what she’d recognized that day at the Flandreau church, where she had met and spoken with Santee men and women who had experienced, in outline, a similar story of suffering, was a people who, by their own testimony, had experienced horrific cruelty and immense sadness, but also what they all would have called peace. Everyone in those two Flandreau churches had suffered greatly but felt themselves redeemed by their faith. Without the horror, the blood, the grief, the lifelong sadness, and without subsequent spiritual renewal, the triumph of that particular moment in the company of those particular people would have been impossible. That reconciliation is the heart of the story Abbie Gardner wants told in this odd, old blessing of a memoir.

That grand moment of peace, not war, what Abbie Gardner calls her very own “day of realization,” is the climax of the story because that moment was, for her, the most amazing event of all, an occasion for reconciliation, not degradation. She couldn’t help feeling their mutual faith brought her and the Santees together.

Abbie's Story -- vi

Flandreau, South Dakota, is a small town a half hour west of the greatly revered Catlinite quarries at Pipestone, Minnesota. A few white settlers were in the region when, in 1868, 11 years after the massacre, many Santee Sioux families, some Wahpeton and others Wahpakute, moved north and east from their reservation in Nebraska to claim farmland there, around a bend in the Big Sioux River.

Abbie Gardner begins her narration of the Flandreau story this way:

On Sunday, September 26, accompanied by C. H. Bennett and wife, and H. L. Moore and wife, a drive of some fifteen miles was made to Flandrau [sic], visiting on this occasion the Indian Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. It seemed as though a miracle had been wrought in this region and the day of realization was at hand. Here at Flandreau the red man and the white man are brought face to face in daily contact, living, as it were, next door neighbors, the Indians commanding the utmost respect of the white residents.

What she says she witnessed in Flandreau is a degree of shalom she had not seen or imagined on the frontier. Something that clearly thrilled her was going on in this small South Dakota town, something she found to be what she might well have called a miracle.

Understanding her incredulity at the “utmost respect” she witnessed there in Flandreau, once again, requires some historical background. 

Historians have claimed—as Ms. Gardner does in her memoir—that the Dakota Sioux of the Minnesota River reservation were emboldened by Inkpaduta’s crimes and his having escaped punishment. That he and his band roamed free after the slayings meant depredations against settlers exhibited the white man’s disregard for what the Wahpakutes had done: in short, Inkpaduta’s escaping punishment made subsequent attacks easier. After all, well-defined links exist between the blood shed on the shores of Spirit Lake in 1857 and Lake Chetek in 1862, as well as New Ulm and throughout the region in the Dakota War. The Wahpakutes and the Santees spoke a similar language; they were all Dakota Sioux people.

What Abbie Gardner doesn’t say in her description of the Flandreau visit is that there may have been a handful of Santees at Flandreau who, years earlier, were part of Inkpaduta’s bloody band. In that town, in two churches, she had to know not only that they were Native but that they were themselves related to her oppressors and her family’s killers.

But on Sunday, September 26, 1892, Abbie Gardner Sharp wasn’t the only soul in those churches who had suffered horrors; so were the Santees who were that day sitting in hand-cut pews. She doesn’t mention their suffering, but, again, it’s difficult to believe she didn’t know. It was the Santees, led by their headman Little Crow, who had raided the Lower Sioux Agency at Redwood Falls on August 18, 1862, the frontier town of New Ulm a day later, and Fort Ridgely on the 20th and the 21st.

Little Crow's tombstone at Flandreau

During the Dakota War, the total number of settlers murdered in a one solitary month of raids will never be known; historians estimate between 450 and 800, all of them murdered after the bloody fashion of Abbie’s own family and their neighbors.

During the Dakota War, hate boiled over into death throughout the Minnesota River valley. When it was over, mass trials, some no more than five minutes long, determined the fate of the more than 400 Dakota warriors accused of atrocities. When tallied, the military tribunal found 303 men guilty of rape and murder, and sentenced them to be hanged.

In December, 1862, the nation was preoccupied with the Civil War. The list of convicted warriors was sent to Washington, where President Lincoln surveyed names and stories’ charges, then narrowed the list of guilty to 39, one of whom was later exonerated.

Thus, on December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged when a man whose wife and family had been killed at Lake Shetek massacre pulled a rope on the gallows erected in Mankato, Minnesota, for the public to witness.

Ft. Snelling captives

A thousand more Santees, mostly women and children, were interned on Pike Island, near Ft. Snelling, where hundreds died of infectious diseases that winter. The 275 convicted men who’d not been hanged were, early the next spring, shipped down the Mississippi to a fort near Davenport, Iowa, where they spent the next two years as prisoners.

Suffering at Crow Creek

The rest of the Dakotas interned on Pike Island were also sent down river, then up the Missouri to Crow Creek, South Dakota, where they suffered through drought and heat and long hard winters, before begging the government to let them go south to Missouri River land and a reservation in northeast Nebraska.

The Santee reservation at Running Water

Hundreds of women, children, and old men were moved once more to the place where some of their descendants live yet today, a small Santee reservation where the tribal museum includes photographs of some of those warriors, freedom fighters, who were hanged at Mankato. The museum’s prize possession is mounted in a window box on the south wall—the rifle of Little Crow himself, killer to some, hero to others.

Sunday Morning Meds--"a table before me"

“thou preparest a table before me

 in the presence of my enemies” Psalm 23

That King David had real enemies is, I suppose, both a curse and a blessing. The curse was that his scalp was frequently in danger, from enemies both without—warring tribes—and within—his predecessor as King, as well as his own son. There were human beings who, quite literally, wanted him dead.

I can’t really say the same is true of me. In a way, it’s a blessing, to have enemies so dauntingly verifiable. It’s far more difficult for me to visualize who exactly might be lying in wait around the corner. I honestly don’t know anyone who literally wants my life, nor why they would.

Not that I don’t have enemies. But it’s entirely possible that the most villainous characters in my life are all in me, I don’t need to look outside my own heart for enemies.

But it’s not me I’m thinking of this morning. Yesterday I listened once again to the story of Pong, a thirty-something Lao immigrant whose English language skills required a translator for me to understand him. I don’t know what nuance I may have missed because I don’t speak the Lao language, but Pong’s incredibly blameless smile, in the presence of his deep sadness, is a snapshot not unlike the one David offers in this verse.

Eight months ago, Pong’s wife left him. Overnight, he found himself entirely bereft of those in life for whom he cared most. But he wouldn’t consider her an enemy, even though she took their children and moved in with another man. Today, he actually smiles. If you were to see him in the video I made of the interview, if you were to hear him speak, watch him nod, see his gestures, you would not read shock or anger in his demeanor. Pong seems, well, at ease.

Why? “I have God in my heart to help me,” he says with joy.

This really brand-new believer claims the Bible tells him what’s really going on in his life and in all of our lives—specifically, that God’s love is a feast. It’s God in him that makes him smile, he says, even though his wife’s leaving has brought great pain.

This is what he told me: he’s learned forgiveness from the master teacher, the God who has forgiven him. The word of God is encouraging him to go on, he says. The Holy Spirit strengthens him even more, he claims. Even though he has seen his wife with another man, he can still smile and offer forgiveness. “It’s very difficult to understand for someone who doesn’t have God,” he says.

How about this? I think I know the Lord, but I too find his apparent peace baffling.

Through these months of separation, he says he and his mother-in-law have together grown closer to the Lord. In their sadness and anger, God has blessed both of them with hope and joy. The emptiness of his wife’s absence is real, but he does not despair. God almighty has given him hope, and that blessed hope makes him smile.

Pong’s enemies—and he knows it—are anger, grief, and even hate; the smile on his face—you should see it, really—is a kind of feast, a celebration of joy and hope and love in company of darkness that threatens him as dangerously as enemy David ever feared.

Patience, forgiveness, and joy—that’s the meal God has prepared for Pong. That’s what he’s learned, he says, and that’s what he told me and taught me, the skeptic.

Abbie's Story -- v

 

The monument at the Gardner cabin

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

Evidence for the spiritual power of her conversion, not just in soul but in body and strength, seems to me to be evident. Perhaps 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 if she’d done more to fulfill expectations of the story of her captivity undoubtedly held; but, as she maintains, finding God changed Abbie Gardner, made her story less terrifying, and therefore less marketable. Read instead as what we might call something of a traditional Christian testimony, the whole story feels different. After her conversion to “the living Christ,” Ms. Gardner’s attempt at a dramatic climax begins with her rescue by three Dakotas, three “farmer Christians” [see note], but it doesn’t conclude there, or with her return to “civilization.” The story doesn’t end with Abbie being freed.

The climax of the story, what she herself might call the eternal climax of the story, occurs when she travels to Flandreau, South Dakota, where what she might have considered an impossible reconciliation happened, an event that would not have happened without war, but neither could have happened without both sides—Ms. Gardner and the Santees--wanting to reconcile, or at least, in the language of her own Christian conversion, wanting peace in their hearts

Early photograph from Flandreau, South Dakota

__________________

"Farmer Christians." One of those rescuers, a devoted Christian Dakota man named John Other Day, played a significant role in ending the captivity of hundreds of homesteaders—most women and children—whom Dakota warriors similarly captured in the 1862 rampage they created throughout their reservation, the Dakota War. Gardner describes him in the story and tells a significant part of his story, even explaining how he was mistreated by his own people after undertaking her release from Inkpaduta and his band.

Abbie's Story -- iv

Why? For what reason would Abbie Gardner Sharp hesitate to do what she might have done in her own book?--create another "captivity narrative"? It seems clear, by the way, 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. The 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 destination. 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.

Abbie Gardner admits her experiences prompted 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.

Without a doubt, I read her book 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

Mary Baker Eddy

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 a newfound Christian faith. She says Jesus Christ granted her spiritual, healing powers she discovered 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”: she believed 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 a different Abbie created a subsequent and different edition. That Abbie claimed to have been healed and blessed, even forgiven by that same “living Christ.”

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The Gardner cabin today

Like several other Sioux headmen, Inkpaduta refused to buy into the treaty/reservation system, the white man’s view of how “Indians” should live. He despised the enforced settlement created by treaties. The Minnesota State Historical Society describes the Treaty of 1851, signed just north of St. Peter, Minnesota, just six years previous, this way:

At Traverse des Sioux, the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of the Dakota ceded 35 million acres. At Mendota, the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands ceded about 14 million acres. The combined payment was about $3,075,000. Most of this money was to be paid in the form of annuities. At Traverse des Sioux, Dakota leaders signed—some later said they were tricked into signing—the infamous “Traders’ Paper.” This agreement turned over most of the Dakotas’ cash payments to their mixed-blood relatives and to traders, who had allowed debts to mount over the years in expectation of tapping into the flow of the government’s “Indian money.

Treaty at Traverse des Sioux, 1851

Signing the treaty meant being forced to live and stay within the boundaries of a territory twenty miles wide along the Minnesota River. Buffalo hunts west of the Missouri River kept people in food for some time; more than that, however, the hunt had become a ritual with cultural and religious significance. Not being able to leave the reservation meant the death of a way of life. Inkpaduta was unwilling to cede that to the Great Father in Washington or the settlers swarming into a region they’d always considered free. Moreover, annuities were frequently late; some never came. Some were disgusting.

Inkpaduta had lost a friend and blood relative who had been brutally murdered along with his wife and children, all of them killed by a white man, a much-hated liquor peddler. After the murders, that man had gone farther west to avoid prosecution. When, later, Inkpaduta attempted to get justice from white man’s courts, he came away claiming he’d received nothing but indifference.

That the Waupekutes had cause to fight the new settlers is understandable: white people had no right to take land that had always been theirs. But the Wahpakutes’ brutality left pioneer families throughout the region repulsed and fearful and therefore vigilant. For hundreds of miles in every direction, new white settlers left their farms and circled up behind quickly constructed walls to escape the carnage they assumed was coming.

Abbie's Story -- ii

When their guests returned sometime later, they demanded flour. When Abbie’s father turned to get what little they had, one of them shot him through the heart. Her mother attempted to push a rifle barrel away and was clubbed, then dragged outside and killed “in the most cruel and shocking manner,” Abbie says. Abbie was little more than a child. In a few moments, both her parents lay dead.

That left her alone with three children. Two were her brothers, the other belonged to an older married sister who happened to be away. The Wahpakutes grabbed the children, dragged them outside, and clubbed all three to death:

After ransacking the house, and taking whatever they thought might be serviceable, such as provisions, bedding, arms and ammunition; and after the bloody scalping knife had done its terrible work; I was dragged from the never-to-be-forgotten scene. No language can ever suggest, much less adequately portray, my feelings as I passed that door. 

When Inkpaduta and his warriors left, the cabin was in flames.

What happened at the Gardner cabin was the first terrible act of a string of atrocities along the lakeshore, a string that, a day later, extended into the town we know today as Jackson, Minnesota.

The night before that attack, Abbie remembers seeing the same warriors dress once again for battle, her own family’s killers. They might have murdered all the residents had there not been a warning. Even so, Inkpaduta’s men plundered what they could and killed seven more settlers, including another eight-year-old boy. To say those victims were murdered unmercifully seems redundant, but consider it understatement.

In all, Inkpaduta’s band killed as many as 40 settlers in the three-day rampage and took four women captives, including young Abbie Gardner.

Memorial at Lake Okoboji

Any telling of the story cannot deny that the Wahpekutes had cause, as their descendants will explain; the existence of the tribe and their freedom as a people were at stake. From an indigenous point of view, what Inkpaduta accomplished was what they had set out to do: clear the area of white settlers, the illegal immigrants. That, they did—for a time.

Even before the massacre, Inkpaduta, the “chief” of the Wahpekute band, was considered dark as sin itself by white settlers—and for good reason. He’d committed his band to the area of the Little Sioux River, where he had managed to make few friends among the settlers. But the level of hideous carnage the band had reached that late winter day was new and beyond imagination.

The old man in this photograph is reputed to be the Dakota headman Inkpaduta. It is the only such photograph of the man