by J. Will Dodd
As a child growing up in Chicago, I used to scare my kid brother, Jimmy, silly at night telling him stories about our mad ancestor, May Dodd, who lived in an insane asylum and ran off to live with Indians—at least that was the fertile, if somewhat vague, raw material of secret family legend.
We lived on Lake Shore Drive and our
family was still quite wealthy in those days, descendants of “old”
money—a fortune and a dynasty begun by our great-great-grandfather,
J. Hamilton Dodd, who as a young man in the mid-nineteenth century
began plowing up the vast Midwestern prairies around Chicago in
order to cultivate grain in what was some of the most fertile
farmland in the world. “Papa,” as he is still known by his
descendants, was one of the original founders of the Chicago Board
of Trade; he was friend, crony, business partner, and competitor,
as the case might be, of all the most prominent entrepreneurs in
that booming Midwestern metropolis—among them Cyrus McCormick,
inventor of the reaper, Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift, the
famous pork and beef packers, and the brothers Charles and Nathan
Mears, lumbermen who bought up and single-handedly destroyed the
great old-growth white pine forests of Michigan.
No one in our family spoke much about
my great-grandmother May Dodd. Among the wealthy, ancestral
insanity has always been a source of deep-rooted embarrassment.
Even these many generations later, when the razor-sharp
robber-baron genes have been largely blunted by line-breeding and
soft country-club living, by boarding school and Ivy League
educations, even now no one in our social milieu likes to admit to
being directly descended from a crazy woman. In the heavily edited
official family history, May Dodd remains little more than a
footnote: “Born March 23, 1850 … second
daughter of J. Hamilton and Hortense Dodd. Hospitalized at age 23
for a nervous disorder. Died in hospital, February 17,
1876.” That’s it.
But even old-money taciturnity—for
which there is no competition on earth—and the equally unparalleled
ability of the rich to keep dark secrets, could not completely
obscure the whispered rumors that trickled down through the
generations that May Dodd had actually died under somewhat
mysterious circumstances—not in the hospital as officially stated,
but somewhere out West. This was the story that fueled my and my
brother Jimmy’s imaginations.
By the time I was a junior in college,
our father had squandered most of the family fortune, which had by
then already been vastly diluted by a couple of generations of
unproductive heirs—what people used to call “wastrels.” Pop
finished it off with a series of bad investments in Chicago
commercial real estate just when that market was collapsing, and
then he managed to break a trust and drink away the last bit of
money that was to pay for his sons’ higher education. Partly as a
result of this Jimmy got drafted—which was almost unheard of in our
circles—and sent to Vietnam, where he was killed when he stepped on
a land mine in a rice paddy in the Mekong Delta. Less than six
months later, Pop drank himself to death.
I was luckier than my brother and
managed to stay in college, drew a high lottery number, and
graduated with a degree in journalism, armed with which I
eventually became the editor in chief of the city magazine
Chitown.
It was while researching a piece for
the magazine about the old scions of Chicago that I happened to
come again across May Dodd’s name. I remembered the tales that I
used to tell Jimmy, and I wondered where I had first heard the
rumor that she had gone “out West to live with Indians—which in our
family had become a kind of euphemism for insanity.
I started poking around in the family
archives, casually at first, then with greater and greater
interest—some might even say obsession. One letter, reportedly
written by May Dodd from inside the asylum to her children,
Hortense and William, who were just infants at the time of her
incarceration, had survived. Source of both the old family rumor,
as well as proof positive of how crazy May really was, this letter
was for me the beginning of a long, strange journey.
I took a leave of absence from my job
at the magazine in order to devote myself full-time to following
the convoluted trail of May Dodd’s life. My research led me
eventually to the Tongue River Indian reservation in south-eastern
Montana. It was here, armed with my family letter as proof of my
ancestry, that I was finally granted access to the following
journals, which have remained among the Cheyennes—a sacred tribal
treasure for well over a hundred years. I need hardly add that the
tale they tell of U.S. government intrigue cum social experiment has also remained one
of the best-kept secrets in Western American history.
The following prologue to the journals
briefly describes the historical events that led to May Dodd’s
story, and is based on several sources, including newspaper
accounts of the time, the Congressional
Record, the Annual Report
to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, correspondence
from the files of the Adjutant General’s Office in the National
Archives in Washington, D.C., as well as various materials
available in Chicago’s Newberry Library. The Indian point of view
pertaining to Little Wolf’s visit to Washington in 1874, and the
subsequent chain of events is based on Northern Cheyenne oral
history recounted to me by Harold Wild Plums in Lame Elk, Montana,
in October 1996.