by Abbot Anthony of the Prairie Saint
Anthony of the Desert Abbey Powder River, Montana November 15,
1926
What an extraordinary blessing! God is
never in a hurry to divulge His secrets! To bestow His gifts! He
has all the time in the world on His hands!
For over a half century I have known
of the survival of the preceding journals. But I have told no one.
Three days ago they were brought to me at my abbey not far from
where the events of these final pages took place. They were
delivered here by a young Cheyenne man named Harold Wild Plums, who
lives on the nearby Tongue River Indian Reservation. I have known
Harold since he was born. I baptized him when he was a child. He is
the grandson of the author of these notebooks—May Dodd Little
Wolf—Mesoke, as she was
known by the Cheyennes. Harold is son of the one the Cheyennes call
Ve’keseheso, Wren, or
Little Bird.
Over fifty years! How very different
the West is today than it was in 1876. I pray that I am a different
man, that I have given up some measure of the pridefulness of youth
and in so doing have been blessed to draw closer to God in my old
age. I am ill, nearly blind, and I do not have long to live. I wait
with a heart full of joy and love to go at last and sit for
eternity at the feet of my King. He calls to me. I am blessed to
hear His voice, to see His hand in all things.
Truly I have been blessed with a
perfect life of prayer and toil, of reading and study. With the
sweat of my brow, the labor of my hands, the love of my God, I have
been blessed to carve out this humble abbey in the hills above the
river. Here I began my hermitage those many years ago in a simple
hut upon a hilltop. Here I am blessed to live still, surrounded now
by twelve other quiet men of humble mind who have joined me over
the years.
For over half a century I have been
blessed to walk these hills. I have studied the plants and animals.
I have lifted rocks from the Earth and planted my garden. I have
been blessed to receive my visitors with a hot meal, a warm bed,
and a fresh loaf of bread to take upon their journey. I have
prayed.
Fifty years ago I was blessed to come
here as a young anchorite with May Dodd and her friends among a
band of Cheyennes led by the great Chief Little Wolf. Fifty
years!
“Is your mother well?” I asked Harold
Wild Plums on the day he brought these journals to me. “She has not
been to visit me in many months. I have been thinking much of her
recently.”
“She is not well, Father,” Harold
said. “She is dying of the cancer.”
“I shall walk to the reservation to
see her,” I answered. “For I am old and nearly blind, but I am
blessed to be able still to walk, and I can still find my way
there.”
“No, Father,” Harold answered, “my
mother asks only that you read these journals and then write down
the rest of this story in the last one that still has blank pages.
She asks that I come back next week and pick them up and return
them to her.”
“Tell me, my son,” I said. “I have
been blessed to know your mother, Wren, since the day that she was
born. But we have never spoken of these journals before. Has she
always known that they survived the fires of that
day?”
“No, Father,” Harold said. “They have
been kept all these years as a sacred tribal treasure with the
Sweet Medicine bundle. Only a few elders knew about them. Old
Little Wolf himself kept them in his possession until he died in
1904, but he never told my mother of their existence. He kept them
secretly and illegally for twenty-five years after he was exiled by
the People for killing Jules Seminole and was stripped of his
position as the Sweet Medicine Chief. After his death they were
placed in the Sweet Medicine bundle and only recently, because she
is dying, were they given to my mother to read.”
“And thus after all these years your
mother learns the true identity of her father,” I said to Harold.
“And you, my son, learn the true identity of your
grandfather.”
“Yes, Father,” Harold said. “We know,
and now my mother wishes for you to write down in the last notebook
that is not yet full the rest of the events of that day so that she
may die knowing the whole story.”
“You’re a fine boy, Harold,” I said to
him. “Your mother must be very proud of you. I am blessed to do as
she requests. Come back next week, and my work will be
finished.”
And so God in His infinite Grace and
Wisdom has set me this final task to complete on Earth at the end
of my own life. He has blessed me by placing this great gift of
journals in my temporary care. I read them before, many years ago,
when old Little Wolf brought them here to me, to read to him, for
he never did learn English.
Now as humble scribe I am blessed to
take up the last of these notebooks to write this codicil. One side
of the notebook is soaked with the dried blood of May Dodd. I press
my lips to it in blessing. I write around the brown, burnt edges of
the bullet hole that passes through each and every page, to
disappear in the flesh of my friend’s back.
On the day the soldiers attacked I did not run to the hills with those fleeing. I ran toward the village. There I walked amid the slaughter and burning. In my habit the soldiers did not harm me. God protected me on that day as He has every day of my life, before and since, so that I might spread His Word and offer His Gift of Mercy to all who would accept it.
I tried to protect those who could not
flee, the old and the infirm, from the wrath of the attackers. I
tried to help those who ran to effect their escape. Where I could I
put coverings on the naked children and women. I ministered to the
wounded, and offered Last Rites and the Lord’s comfort to the
dying. I walked amid the death and destruction, the fires of Hell
on Earth.
Many died in the village that day, cut
down by the soldiers. The Englishwoman, Helen Elizabeth Flight, an
extraordinary young woman, died defending her home. The last time I
saw her alive, she stood before her tipi, with her feet spread,
calmly charging her muzzle loader and shooting at the invading
soldiers. She held her pipe in the corner of her mouth. One of the
soldiers shot Helen through the forehead and killed her. Later all
of her beautiful bird paintings were consigned to the flames. It
was a great loss to the world of Art. Helen would have been quite
well known had her work survived. All that remains of it are the
few sketches included here in May’s journals.
The Negro woman, Euphemia Washington,
also died that day. She died fighting, but killed many soldiers
first. She fought like a demon and terrified the young soldiers.
Many of them were just boys. Euphemia had a great calm, but she
also had a great anger in her heart. I believe that God would have
tamed her anger, for she was a spiritual woman. But He had other
plans for her. I remember Phemie less for her anger than for the
slave songs of joy, sorrow, and freedom that she used to sing.
Sometimes when I am gardening, or baking, or just walking in the
hills, I still find myself humming one of these songs. Then I am
blessed to recall Euphemia—Mo’ohtaeve’ho’a’e, Black White Woman, the
Cheyennes called her—and later Nexana’hane’e. Yes, the Cheyennes still
recall the warrior feats of Kills Twice Woman in their old-time
ceremonies. I am blessed by the Lord to recall her
songs.
By the time I came upon Gretchen
Fathauer she was still alive but mortally wounded. She held her
dead daughter to her mighty naked breast and wept great sobs of
sorrow. Her husband, No Brains, had run into the hills at the
beginning of the attack, leaving his family behind to perish.
Gretchen was a dear child of the Lord. I covered her and the infant
and tried to make her as comfortable as possible in her last
moments. “He left his baby,” she sobbed. “De bick ninnyhammer forgot to take
de baby wit him when he run away. I tried to save my
little Sara, brudder
Antony.”
“Of course you did, my sister,” I said
to her. I was blessed to administer Last Rites to Gretchen and her
child and as I did so I broke down and wept myself.
“It be OK, brudder Antony,” Gretchen said trying to
console me through her own sobs of grief. “Yah, it be OK. Me and baby we go to live
with Sara and God in Seano.
Tings be OK dare. Yah, you’ll see.” There amidst the brutality and death,
God revealed Himself to me in Gretchen’s goodness. He gave me
strength for the coming ordeal.
The soldiers were by now largely
finished with their grim business of destroying the camp. A
mournful keening had arisen from the contingent of Shoshone scouts.
They had discovered the Cheyennes’ grisly trophy bag of babies’
hands and had identified these as their own. Their cries of grief
were terrible to hear. I stopped on my way to try to comfort them.
I did not speak Shoshone, but I blessed the bag and I prayed for
the souls of the children.
Some Cheyennes lived that day and were
spared by the soldiers and others escaped into the hills. Later
that morning I came across Martha Tangle Hair, wandering dazed
through the village, holding her baby son in her arms.
“Help me, Brother Anthony,” Martha
begged when she saw me. “My baby is so cold.”
I had gathered a small pile of
blankets saved from the fires. I wrapped one of these around her
child, and another around Martha.
“I must find Captain Bourke,” she
said. “Please help us, Brother. May is wounded. She needs help. I
must find Bourke.”
“Can you show me where she is,
Martha?” I asked. “I will help her.”
“May is very cold, Brother, she is
shot.”
Martha led me into the bluffs above
the camp, but she had some difficulty finding the place again. At
last we came to it. It was a shallow cave in the rocks. I still go
to that place. I have been blessed to make of it a small shrine in
May Dodd’s memory. There my fellow monastics and I sometimes say
our liturgies and there we sit in contemplative silence. The
Cheyennes believe that everything that ever happens in a
place—every birth, every life, every death—still exists there, so
that the past, present and future live on forever in the earth. And
so I, too, have come to believe.
I called out to May on that terrible,
frigid morning, but no one answered. When I entered the cave, I
found her alone there, dead, sitting up against the rock wall.
Quiet One, Feather on Head, and Pretty Walker were all gone, as was
May’s baby, Wren. In that cave, I administered the Last Rites to
May Dodd and from her frozen fingers I removed the pencil. Her
notebook, this notebook that I am blessed to hold now in my own
hands, was also gone.
I led Martha back down to the
smoldering village, and there I personally handed her and her
infant over to the care of Captain John G. Bourke. It was the first
time that I was to meet this man. But I would come to know him well
later. He came often here to my hermitage over the years to pray,
and I was blessed to help him do his penance.
The night after the attack the mercury
dipped below zero. With everything destroyed by the Army, the
Cheyennes had no protection from the elements and hardly any
clothing. The survivors fled toward the village of the Lakota chief
Crazy Horse, who was encamped on the other side of the mountain. I
followed and did what I could to help and comfort the
survivors.
It was a two-day journey of
unimaginable hardship and suffering. Eleven Cheyenne babies froze
to death in their mothers’ arms the first night, three more the
following night—including all of the remaining white children, with
the sole exception of May’s daughter, Wren.
Perhaps some scholars of religion
might be tempted to find here a lesson in the vengeful hand of God.
But God is not vengeful, my children. God is full of Grace, Light,
and infinite Mercy. God did not kill the Shoshone babies. Nor did
He punish the Cheyennes in retribution by killing their babies.
Misguided men on both sides slaughtered the infants. And God took
the souls of His children to His Kingdom.
Daisy Lovelace and her son, Wesley,
God bless them, succumbed to the cold the first night. To them,
too, I administered the sacrament of Extreme Unction under a cold
full moon, and Daisy and her child went bravely and in peace to the
Kingdom of our Lord. The little dog, Fern Louise, lay curled
shivering beside the frozen body of her mistress. I put her beneath
my habit and she survived. Fern Louise lived with me for several
years before dying peacefully of old age in her sleep.
The Kelly twins, Margaret and Susan,
lost both of their sets of twins in the course of the two-night
march. The anguish of their grief was a terrible thing to behold.
They cursed me, and they cursed the Lord in His Heaven for taking
their baby girls.
They were a sprightly pair, Meggie and
Susie. Besides Martha, they are the only white women of whom I am
aware to have survived the ordeal of Mackenzie’s attack and its
aftermath. After the death of their infants, they went quite mad.
They joined various bands of marauding Cheyennes and Sioux and
fought like demons against the whites in the final days of the
Indian wars. They are reported to have ridden with the warriors
when Custer and his men were killed later that summer at the Little
Bighorn, and to have taken themselves grisly trophies of war there.
I made many inquiries on behalf of the Kelly twins over the years
and heard many rumors, but I was never able to learn what finally
became of those girls. God bless them both.
Little Wolf himself was wounded seven
times on the morning of the attack. He fought valiantly to protect
his People as they fled from the camp, and somehow survived. With
his wives Quiet One and Feather on Head, and his daughter Pretty
Walker, he led his ragged band of refugees over the mountain to the
camp of Crazy Horse.
The Cheyennes had nothing left, their
spirit was broken. Less than a month later many of them began to
straggle into Camp Robinson to give themselves up.
The government quietly arranged for
the white women who had gone with their Indian families into the
agencies earlier that fall to return to their own homes. Some took
their children and raised them in the white world, others left
their infants with the Cheyennes to be raised on the
reservation.
Martha Atwood Tangle Hair, the sole
white woman to officially survive the Mackenzie attack, returned to
Chicago with her son, whose Christian name was Dodd. I never saw
Martha again, but for many years after we kept up a correspondence.
She eventually remarried and had several more children. Except to
say in her very first letter to me that she had delivered her
friend May’s last message to John Bourke, Martha never mentioned
the affair again. Nor did I ever learn what arrangement she had
made with the authorities to purchase her silence. It is not a
monk’s business to ask such questions. But silent on the subject
she remained. Martha joined our Lord in His Kingdom three years
ago.
All know the tragic story of Little
Wolf’s last years. One day several years later he got drunk and
shot Jules Seminole dead in the agency store for making a lewd
remark to his daughter Pretty Walker. For this crime one of the
great men in Cheyenne history was stripped of his position as Sweet
Medicine Chief, renamed Stinking Flesh, and banished from the
People.
Little Wolf lived in exile for another
twenty-five years until he was well into his nineties. He took up a
kind of monastic life himself and went everywhere on foot with his
faithful first wife, Quiet One. I often used to see the two of them
walking across the hills together. Sometimes I was blessed to have
them pitch their tipi for a few days next to my hut. It was there
that the Chief first gave me these journals to read to him. I
always baked a loaf of fresh bread for Quiet One, and Little Wolf
would tease her with gentle mischief about the arsenic
incident.
Feather on Head had moved out of
Little Wolf’s lodge when the Cheyennes were required to give up
their practice of polygamy. Eventually she married a young man
named Wild Plums, and together they raised the child, Wren, as
their own daughter. Of course, the People all knew that the sacred
white child was the daughter of the white woman May Dodd and Little
Wolf—and the Cheyennes still referred to her in their secret
old-time ceremonies as Vo’estanevestomanehe—the Savior. They still
believed, as Little Wolf had always maintained, that the child was
Maheo’s, gift to the
People, that she had been sent by God to teach them the new life
that must be lived when the buffalo were gone.
Even though I had read all of May
Dodd’s journals to Little Wolf, and he knew about John Bourke, he
never gave up that faith. It was for this reason that he kept the
journals secret and never told his daughter of their existence.
Before he died he arranged with the keeper of the Sweet Medicine
bundle for Wren to be given the journals at the end of her own
life. He was a very great man, Little Wolf. I was blessed to know
him on Earth.
John Bourke became a great advocate of
Indians’ rights, and a harsh critic of their treatment at the hands
of our government. His outspokenness in such matters largely cost
him advancement in his military career. Eventually he married
another woman and had a family of his own. His health had been
ruined by those terrible years of Indian wars, and he died in
1896.
John Bourke never claimed May Dodd’s
child, Wren, as his own daughter. But he always secretly watched
over her and saw to her welfare as much as he was able. I know this
to be true, because I was blessed to be his agent in these efforts.
It was I, Brother Anthony of the Prairie, who prayed with John
Bourke, and who counseled him to allow these People, and himself,
the final miracle of the child’s birth. May Dodd was quite right,
the children were all that were left of this grand experiment … and
they are enough.
Blessed be the children of
God!