by J. Will Dodd
Chicago, Illinois
February 23, 1997
Chicago, Illinois
February 23, 1997
Abbot Anthony of the Prairie died on
the morning of December 7, 1926, just two weeks after he completed
the preceding codicil to May Dodd’s journals. The Saint Anthony of
the Desert Abbey which he founded in the hills above the Powder
River is still an operating monastery. It was there,
propitiously—perhaps even miraculously Abbot Anthony would surely
say—that I began my search when I first came out to the
reservation, bearing my own family letter of introduction—the one
link that I had between my great grandmother, May Dodd, and the
Cheyennes.
The monks at the abbey were very
interested in my last name—joyously so—for they know well the
legend of May Dodd, and the brothers still say their liturgies and
hold their contemplative silences in the rocks where she died.
Through them I was put in touch with ninety-six-year-old Harold
Wild Plums, said to be the oldest living descendant of the great
Cheyenne Chief Little Wolf.
Harold lives with his granddaughter,
named, not coincidentally, May Swallow Wild Plums, in a concrete
block HUD house in the town of Lame Elk, Montana, on the Tongue
River Indian Reservation. Like many such reservation towns in
America, it is a bleak place with a distinct third-world feel to
it. On an abandoned gutted building across the street from Harold’s
house, emblazoned in dripping blood red spray paint, is the ghetto
legend—Fuck Tha
Police.
I had already learned from the monks
that as a young man Harold had attended college off the reservation
and had gone on to become a well-known attorney in the Native
American community. For many years he worked on the reservation,
representing the Cheyennes, often without pay, on a variety of
Native American issues.
The letter I brought to Harold Wild
Plums, of course, was the one I had discovered in my own family’s
archives, the letter that had fueled my initial search, and the
rumors of which had haunted mine amd my brother Jimmy’s childhood.
It was the only surviving correspondence from May Dodd to her
children Hortense and William in Chicago.
The letter was written in coarse lead
pencil, much faded, on a sheet of yellowed paper that had been torn
from a bound notebook. It was dated 10
June 1875 below which date was written,
“Somewhere in Nebraska Territory North
of the Niobrara River.”
According to my own family research,
on June 10, 1875, Hortense and William, who was my grandfather,
were living with May’s parents at their home on Lake Shore Drive in
Chicago. May herself, by all family records, was still living in
the Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum, a private facility for the insane
in the countryside on the banks of Lake Michigan thirty miles north
of the city. This institution is still in existence, having
undergone several name changes over the years in keeping with the
fashions of the times, and presently known as “Serenity Dunes.” Of
course no patient records from the 1870s survive there, but
according to the official family history, May would die in the
asylum the following winter of undisclosed causes. She is buried in
the Dodd family plot in the Lake Forest Cemetery, or at least she
has a stone there. Like all of Chicago’s old, monied families ours
is a large one, by both birth and marriage, and I have often, over
the years, been to the plot for the burials of relatives, including
that of my brother, Jimmy, after he was killed in Vietnam. His own
grave is not far from that of our great grandmother, May
Dodd.
Neither my grandfather William Dodd,
nor his sister Hortense, would read their mother’s only surviving
letter to them until many years after it was written. Not wishing
to frighten the children with this mad missive from their mad
mother, of whom they knew little—except that she had died when they
were infants—May’s family kept the letter in a safe deposit box,
the existence of which was not revealed to the children until after
the death of both May’s parents. By then William and Hortense were
young adults themselves. Their mother’s letter, then, took some
twenty years to reach them—slow mail delivery even by the standards
of the day. It is a short letter, as if hastily
written.
My Dearest Children, Hortense and William,I have entrusted this letter to my good friend Gertie McCartney, known infamously and variously on the western prairies as “Dirty Gertie” or “Jimmy the Muleskinner.” I do not know if this will ever reach you. And if it does, I do not know if you will ever read it. In this way, I feel that sending this letter is much like putting it into a bottle and throwing it into this great sea of grass, all the while hoping desperately that it will wash up one day on your shores.Even more fervently than that wild hope, I hope and pray daily that you are both well, and that we shall all be soon reunited. I have neither time nor space here to tell you of all that has happened. I am keeping a detailed journal of my journey here so that you may one day know the full story of your mother’s life. I can only day now, briefly, that I was unjustly taken from you and committed to an asylum. My love for your father, Harry Ames, was deemed to be my “madness”—of which you are both the cherished result. For that I have no regrets on any score. I do not know what bad become of your father. Only perhaps your grandfather can explain this to you—if he bad the courage.Presently I am living on the western prairies with a band of Cheyenne Indians … oh, dear, how insane that must seem to you … I am married to a man named Little Wolf, a great leader of his people … Good God, perhaps this letter is not such a good idea, after all, and will only confirm in your minds that your mother is, indeed, “crazy as a hoot owl,” as my friend Gertie would put it. Well, too late for such worries … I am with child by Little Wolf, and will give birth to your brother or sister next winter. There are others with me here—by that I mean, other white women. We are members of an important government program, of which you will one day learn. I hope then that you will be very proud of your mother. I cannot here day more.Please know that you are both kept close to my heart, that not a moment passes when I do not think of you, or long to hold you again in my arms. One day soon I will do so—I will come back to you, I promise you that, my dears. Every fiber of my being lives only toward that end.Please remember me as your loving mother,
May Dodd
Harold Wild Plums was blind but still
keen of mind and his granddaughter, May, read him the letter as I
sat on the edge of his ratty, stained sofa. Hearing it read out
loud, I understood again how “going West to live with Indians” had
become the euphemism it had in our family for insanity. It was a
tale for impressionable children, and I think possibly my brother
Jimmy and I alone in the family ever actually believed
it.
But all I could think of now looking
around this bleak concrete block house, a child of privilege
myself, was how far away I was from my own world, and how far away
my great grandmother must have felt on these prairies. And it was
then that I suddenly knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the story
was true.
Harold smiled as the letter was read
to him, and nodded. “Yes,” he said when she had finished, “those
are grandmother’s words. Do you recognize her handwriting,
May?”
May was an attractive woman in her
late thirties. “Yes, Grandfather,” she said. “It is the same
handwriting as the journals, and the same paper. I’ll bet I can
find the very page where it was torn out.”
“You’ve got the journals?” I asked in
a low voice of wonder.
“May, go and fetch Grandmother’s
journals from the Sweet Medicine bundle,” Harold said to his
granddaughter. “Our guest is a relative. He is the grandson of my
mother’s half brother, Willie. He has finally found us.” And then
to me Harold looked with his milky blind eyes. “I often thought
over the years of searching for my white family,” Harold said. And
he shrugged. “But I was very busy with other matters. Does your
grandfather, William, still live?”
“He died of cancer over thirty years
ago,” I said.
“Ah, yes,” Harold said, nodding
thoughtfully. “My mother, Wren, also died of the cancer when she
was too young. I do not know why I have lived as long as I have.
Perhaps to give you these papers now. That’s what Father Anthony
would have said.” And Harold smiled. “Father Anthony would have
said that I am blessed to give you these journals.”
At that moment, May came back into the
room carrying a stack of old cracked leather-bound notebooks, tied
together in a bundle by rawhide thongs.
“Yes, perhaps you would be interested
in reading these journals, Will Dodd,” Harold said to
me.
And very carefully May Swallow Wild
Plums placed the bundle in my hands, and with long graceful fingers
untied the thongs that bound it.