Free One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus Page B

not as yet know the lucky gentleman’s name, I do know that he is an Indian of the Cheyenne tribe. Yes, well, I can only make this admission in a letter which even if I knew how to reach you, I would be forbidden to mail. This is all supposed to be very secret, though of course it is not … And while it may sound insane to say so, I felt that I had a duty to write to you, to tell you this news … even if I cannot post this letter. Having discharged my obligation, I remain, if nothing else …
    The loving mother of your children,
    May
    17 April 1875
     
    After a week here at Fort Laramie, I shall be happy to be under way at last. The boredom has been unrelieved. We are kept under virtual lock and key, prisoners in these barracks, allowed only an hour to walk around the grounds in the afternoons, escorted always by soldiers. Perhaps they fear that we will fraternize with the agency Indians and all of us have a change of heart. I must say these are every bit as abject as those at Sidney—a sorrier more disgraceful group of wretches could not exist on earth. Primarily Sioux, Arapaho, and Crows we are told. The men do nothing but drink, gamble, beg, and try to barter their poor ragged wives and daughters to the soldiers for a drink of whiskey, or to the half-breeds and other criminal white men who congregate around the fort. It is all unsavory and pathetic—many of the women are themselves too drunk to protest and, in any case, have very little say in these vile transactions.
    Yet we must keep heart that these fort Indians are in no way representative of the people to whom we are being taken. At least so I continue to maintain for the sake of the child Sara and my friend Martha. As I pointed out to Martha, even in the unlikely event that her husband were to trade her to a soldier for a bottle of whiskey, it would only mean that she would be free, relieved of her duty, back among her own people. Ah, but then I had forgotten that dear Martha’s heart is now firmly set on finding true love among the savages, and thus my attempt to comfort her with the possible failure of her union had quite the opposite effect.
    The only other diversion in our otherwise tedious stay at Fort Laramie comes during the communal meals held in the officers’ dining hall. We have been, presumably for reasons of security, isolated from the general civilian population at the fort, but some of the officers and their wives are allowed to take their meals with us. Once again the “official” version of our visit here is that we are off to do “missionary” work among the savages.
    Today I had occasion to be seated at the table of one Captain John G. Bourke, to whose care our group has been assigned for the remainder of this journey. The Captain is aide-de-camp to General George Crook himself, the famous Indian fighter who recently subdued the savage Apache tribe in Arizona Territory. Some of our ladies had read about the General’s exploits in the Chicago newspapers. Of course, I did not have access to such luxuries as newspapers in the asylum …
    I am very favorably impressed with Captain Bourke. He is a true gentleman and treats us, finally, with proper courtesy and respect. The Captain is unmarried, but rumored to be engaged to the post commander’s daughter, a pretty if somewhat uninteresting young lady named Lydia Bradley, who sat on his right at table, and tried to monopolize the Captain’s attention by making the most vapid conversation imaginable. Although he was most solicitous of her, she clearly bores him witless.
    Captain Bourke was far more interested in our group, and asked many penetrating, if delicately phrased, questions of us. He is clearly privy to the true nature of our mission—which is not to say that he approves of it. Having spent a good deal of time among the aboriginals during his former posting in Arizona Territory, the Captain prides himself on being something of an amateur ethnographer and seems quite knowledgeable