Scarlet Plume, Second Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

leader of the traders replied scornfully that if the Indians were hungry they should eat grass, outraged members of the tribes began to plan for war. It broke out three days later and the head trader was among the first to be killed. When the body was found, the mouth was stuffed with grass. Manfred knew that story well and used it to depict the end of Charlie Silvers, the trader at Skywater who tells the Christianized Indian Pounce, “You and your whitewashed bunch can go eat grass.”
    For a month bands of Indians ravaged the frontier. Then, on September 20, government troops under General Henry R. Sibley won their first considerable victory. Near the Upper Agency a force of two thousand men with cannon crushed a quarter that number of Indians. The negotiations that followed led to the surrender of some fifteen hundred warriors and the return of more than two hundred prisoners, nearly all of them women. Sibley’s report describes the terrorized state of these poor wretches, and in telling Judith’s story Manfred drew heavily on the account, as well as on General Sibley’s letters to his wife. Sibley speaks of the scanty clothing, the dumb stares, the wild weeping, and the desperate insistence with which the rescued girls and women pleaded to be taken to safety. Many had been chosen as wives by leading warriors, but most had been passed around like property, and the psychological effect on them had been devastating.
    While there is no evidence that the atrocities were widespread or typical, Manfred was able to discover in the histories of Minnesota enough eyewitness accounts to provide him with the details he needed in Scarlet Plume : reports of the mother and infant chased down by braves who stabbed the baby while the mother struggled to protect it and who then crushed the skulls of both, of the discovery of the mutilated bodies of whole families, and of children wandering aimlessly through deserted settlements and driven so wild by fear that they had to be hunted like animals by their rescuers. There were also reports of dramatic escapes by captives, and their accounts and those of the returned prisoners were especially useful. He says: “I checked all the records and read all these captivity stories and went into the Civil War. . . . Then I ran across this letter from General Sibley to his wife about this woman. That caught my mind. From that point on I began to drop the historical-looking and went more in for the character-looking.” 1 Manfred excerpted several passages from the Sibley letters as a historical preface to Scarlet Plume .
    Although he had read widely in preparing to recreate the suffering that some captives had undergone, many of the facts had of necessity been of his own contrivance: the rape-murder of Judith’s daughter Angela and of the pregnant Mrs. Christians, and the abuse and murder of Maggie Utterback and Theodosia Codman. To his surprise, however, after Scarlet Plume was essentially complete, and at a time when he thought the violence might be overdone, he came upon an account that outdid his wildest imaginings. At Tracy, near Lake Shetek, he witnessed an unusual celebration, the centennial of the return of the captives of the 1862 Uprising. There he heard from a newsman of the existence of the medical reports on the women who had been brought back. Manfred was able to read the account in full, a two-hundred-page typescript made by the physician attached to General Sibley’s staff who interviewed most of the returned prisoners. When he had finished reading the report, Manfred realized that what he had imagined in Scarlet Plume —while accurate in the main—was tame by comparison. What he did discover and did add to the draft of the novel was the fact that, in the case of this particular group of prisoners, the worst offenders were the supposedly Christianized Indians. They had cast off the weak restraints of their new faith and the half-forgotten rules of their old and committed the