Mothers from the Great Plains, Fathers from Europe: An Ode to Our Native American Fore-Mothers

By Keith B Zacharias

This is the third book to be written and published but the beginning book of the trilogy Tales of the Sheyenne, which sequences the lives of four generations of an Indian maiden, Little Feather, who married a Danish fur trapper turned farmer, Hans Olufsen, in the 1850s. The principals of the stories lived along the Sheyenne River Valley near what is now Kathryn, North Dakota.

I grew up on the family farm near Kathryn, North Dakota, homesteaded by my great grandfather. I and my three brothers worked on the farmthe fourth generation to do so; two of them still farm it. After college I moved on to computer programming and worked as a computer auditor for Texaco and later for ABB. I led my group of programmers to develop world-class audit software that essentially audited the company databases, looking for exceptions and errors. These jobs took me to many places in the USA, Europe, South and Central America, and the Middle East.

Retired in Houston, I now have time to write, travel, and visit family and grandchildren. My wife, Claudia, and I have taken cruises around much of the world including Asia (2008) and South America and Antarctica (2009). Also, in years past, we have been to the Baltic States, Russia, Greece, the Caribbean, and the countries bordering the Black Sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462033232

Keith B Zacharias

Keith Zacharias was raised on a farm in North Dakota, has a bachelor's degree in business from the University of North Dakota. A Certified Computer Auditor and Certified Financial Auditor, traveled throughout the world on audit assignments. He has published several other books on travel and on family history from the 1850's in the uper-midwest. he is married and has five childern and seven grandchildren.

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Contents

Introduction

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1:

Growing Up a Peasant in Scotland

Chapter 2:

The House of Selkirk

Chapter 3:

A Family Loss, a Family Gain

Chapter 4:

Harry Meets Lord Selkirk

Chapter 5:

New Man in the House

Chapter 6:

A Little Ship, a Gigantic Ocean

Chapter 7:

Landing at Hudson Bay

Chapter 8:

Winter in the Cabin

Chapter 9:

Preparing for the Voyage

Chapter 10:

Starting Up the Waterways

Chapter 11:

Fort Douglas Is Founded

Chapter 12:

Winter in Pembina

Chapter 13:

The Colony Starts Up

Chapter 14:

The Colony Splits Up

Chapter 15:

In Sickness and in Health

Chapter 16:

The Winter Camp

Chapter 17

Going Home

Chapter 18:

First Baby

Chapter 19:

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Chapter 20:

More White Settlers

Chapter 21:

Winter Grounds Occupied

Chapter 22:

A Fateful Trip to the Trading Post

Chapter 23:

Mourning and Matrimony

Chapter 24:

Attacks and Tragedy

An Eighteenth-Century Tale about

How the Midwest Was Won

Keith Zacharias

The First Book in the

Tales of the Sheyenne Trilogy

Introduction

Starting in the sixteenth century and continuing well into the eighteenth, European men flocked to the Americas, the New World, to claim land they heard was endless—and just there for the taking. Overpopulation and a closed patrician system of land ownership in Europe had all but eliminated land proprietorship for the masses, and this drove men, in spite of the dangers, to cross the ocean in search of opportunities and plots upon which to start new lives.

These adventurers, for the most part, came without women; however, the New World was already populated by huge numbers of indigenous people—the American Indians—who always seemed to have an abundance of women. Then, as in the tale of Pocahontas and Captain Smith, interracial liaisons became common—especially as these women could easily be bartered for guns or whisky; so, boys being boys, they were. Women in the European culture were treated with much higher regard than in the Indian culture; to wit, there were no women butchers in European cultures and no men butchers in the Indian culture—the women processed the killed buffalo. So, girls being girls, they were more than willing to go with these pale-faced strangers from over the great waters.

Many of the Europeans who came to the New World were of low economic status and probably could not afford to marry in their own civilization. This new culture offered a man not only financial opportunities, but a wife—the gatherer of the hunter-gatherer Indian culture—who could literally live off the land. She made her own clothing and shelter from animal hides and preserved game meat so that they could live on it all winter along with the vegetation she gathered from the wild. The taking of such a woman often meant survival since many men perished for the lack of these skills. These marriages were largely successful—especially once a child was produced, strengthening the bond. By the end of the eighteenth century, these couples with their mixed-blood or half-breed offspring formed huge communities throughout the land. These communities exist today in places such as Pembina and Wahpeton in North Dakota, the area where these events took place.

Despite how prolific these interracial marriages were, little has been documented about them. The ever-encroaching European/Christian culture that eventually moved west across North America frowned upon these marriages. The Indians were considered savages and not human. The women were condescendingly called squaws, the men squaw men, and the offspring half breeds. In doing the research for these books, I was told by more than a dozen individuals in Texas, New Mexico, and the Dakotas that they had a great-grandmother or a grandmother that was some percent American Indian. These admissions generally came only when people, usually women, found out that I was researching my own heritage. That was when they felt comfortable—even compelled, in some instances—to disclose their Indian ancestors. Several women, I thought, felt it necessary to defend the honor of their foremothers for the discrimination foisted on them during their lifetime. Some talked extensively about the tribe that they came from; one had pictures and another claimed relationship to Sitting Bull, the great Sioux chief.

On the Great Plains, a watershed event in the relationship between the whites and the Indians took place in 1879. General George Armstrong Custer of the US Army’s Seventh Calvary, and some two hundred of his troops, were massacred, by a large gathering of the remaining tribes that resisted going to reservations and had gathered in eastern Montana near the Little Big Horn River. Custer, determined to wipe out these tribes and force the rest to move to reservations, arrogantly rode into the huge group of warriors … to his demise. After that fiasco, Indian women—even those married to whites that had been accepted to some degree as members of white communities—had to go to reservations with their children. The only exceptions were communities with a majority of mixed-blood couples. These settlements stayed to themselves on their homesteads, raised their families, and lived out their lives with little or no interaction with surrounding communities—often for more than a generation.

Preface

This is the third book to be written and published, but it is the beginning book of the Tales of the Sheyenne trilogy. The trilogy sequences the lives of four generations of an Indian maiden, Little Feather, who married a Danish fur trapper turned farmer, Hans Olufsen, in the 1850s. The principals of the stories lived along the Sheyenne River Valley near what is now Kathryn, North Dakota.

This book’s prologue briefly covers the life of Little Feather’s grandparents: John Paul Verendrye, a French fur trapper and explorer who married an Arikara Indian maiden named Chumana. The couple joined Chumana’s tribe, which lived on the banks of the Sheyenne River in the end of the seventeenth century.

This book chronicles the life and times of Little Feather’s father, Harry Bowen, who was born in Scotland and initially emigrated to the wilderness of what is now Manitoba, Canada. He was with a band of some forty Scotts who struggled mightily, but the settlement failed. Harry tried to live as a hunter, but nearly died of exposure. He was mercifully rescued by two Indian hunters who took him back to their camp where a young woman, Birda, who Harry later married, nursed him back to health.

The stories of this trilogy are sequenced as follows:

•   Mothers from the Great Plains, Fathers from Europe: Little Feather’s grandfather and father

•   It Just Didn’t Happen: Little Feather’s life with Hans Olufsen

•   Life after Little Feather: the lives of Little Feather and Hans’s children

It Just Didn’t Happen is the love story of Little Feather and Hans’s life together starting in the 1850s. Their lives climaxed in the battle for Fort Abercrombie in the 1862 Indian wars, in which Hans utilized his skill in cannonry that he had learned in the Danish army to successfully defend the fort. After these events, they proceeded to live out their lives first as hunter-gatherers until that lifestyle disappeared for the lack of wild fur-bearing animals. Then they converted to agriculture to sustain themselves and their three children.

The second book, Life after Little Feather, is about the lives and trials of Little Feather and Hans’s children and their families. It highlights the lifestyles during the late nineteenth century and the early troubles that farmers suffered—and continued through the next century.

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Early Discoverer Remembered

Prologue

John Paul Verendrye—Little Feather’s Maternal Grandfather

John Paul de Verendrye was twelve years old when he went with his father, Louis Joseph de Verendrye, to explore the interior of the North American continent, searching for a water passage to the Pacific Ocean. This 1755 expedition was comprised of relatives, neighbors, and friends who were determined to succeed in the quest started by John Paul’s famous grandfather, Pierre Gaultier de Verendrye, and his group twenty years earlier.

The Verendrye family home was in Montreal, Quebec, in eastern Canada. They were of French descent, and Grandfather Pierre had served in the French army in the early 1700s. In 1712, he came home to Montreal and married a daughter of the governor. He farmed and fur traded to support his family. Later he would travel west to explore and help establish trading posts, many of which were manned by family members.

Although John Paul and his father’s party of 1755 had proceeded much farther west than the elder de Verendrye, they still failed to reach the ocean largely due to attacks from warring tribes whose land they had to cross. They had lost three men in the last of those battles with four more wounded. Thus, their troop of thirty-eight limped back as far as the Missouri river at what is now Mandan, North Dakota. They were welcomed by the Mandan Indian tribe because two generations of their families had been friends; they spent the winter there.

In the spring, John Paul’s family requested that he go work at the trading post at Aberdeen, South Dakota, that had been set up by his family two decades earlier. In Aberdeen, John Paul met and courted an attractive Arikara Indian maiden, Chumana, who had escorted her father, mother, one other couple, and three of their children to the trading post. As was common in those days, people would spend weeks camped close to trading posts. They visited, traded, and smoked or drank with other hunters and trappers. They exchanged information about buffalo, the whites, the cavalry, and fur-bearing animals. Chumana’s group stayed three weeks and, before they left, Chumana convinced her father to let her marry John Paul. John Paul had not adapted well to working at the trading post and, by summer, other family members had come to work there. Since there was not enough work or income for all, John Paul and his new wife left with Chumana’s family. They moved upstream on the James River to what is now Jamestown, North Dakota, where the tribe had their summer camp.

The next quarter-century saw Chumana give birth to five children; the youngest was a daughter named Bird Woman who was called Birda. In 1795, John Paul went east to Montreal to visit his father’s family. With some other family members, he went to France to fight with the French against the British and their allies in the Napoleonic wars; he was killed in battle that fall.

The tribe had moved to its winter campground along the Platte River in what now is Nebraska before the news of John Paul’s demise reached Chumana. She was so distraught that, on a cold January night, she snuck out of the teepee and froze to death—a common way for Indians to commit suicide. The two oldest girls were married, but raising ten-year-old Birda and her two teenage brothers fell to Chumana’s maternal family, which consisted of two brothers and three sisters. Her brothers each took one of the boys and Flowa, Chumana’s sister, wanted Birda. Flowa and her husband, Three Feathers, had four grown sons. Since they had always wanted a daughter, Birda went to live with them. Their tribe’s summer camp was on the Sheyenne River close to where North Dakota State Highway #46 crosses that river.

List of Characters—Scotland Group:

Harry Bowen—Little Feather’s father

Gwendolyn—Harry’s mother

Lord Selkirk—Harry and Alice’s father (he never married Gwendolyn)

James—Harry’s stepfather

Poppy and Granny—Harry’s maternal grandparents

John, Girtie, Anna, and Kelly—Harry’s uncle, wife, and daughters

Andrew, Mary, Owen, and Andy—Harry’s uncle, wife, and sons

Brian—Harry’s single uncle

List of Characters—North American Indian Tribe:

Birda—Harry’s wife

Three Feathers—Birda’s uncle/stepfather

Flowing Stream Flowa—Birda’s aunt/stepmother

Birda and Harry’s family: