A solitary figure cast a dark shadow in the light of the hut’s doorway, before suddenly leaping towards something pure, plump, sweet-smelling and alive. Laura Anna Pratt’s new babe—delivered at Fort Arbuckle during her husband’s continuing military campaign across the Washita Valley to Fort Sill—had just been freshly-outfitted in her first perfect dress and laid down upon the bed, lovingly, by her father. But now the baby girl was in the embrace of a ‘hostile’ native. It was hard for Captain Richard Henry Pratt to believe the events unfolding before him—as if in slow-motion and he paralysed—that on such a fine and crisp spring morning of 1868 a miserable Indian squaw was parting him from his first innocent child.

Pratt did not reach for his weapon, but wrested the infant from the stranger’s arms. Something about this woman required closer examination—her eyes spoke to him: she was not in fact trying to hurt his child, but love her.

The poor miserable woman looked at me in the most pitiful manner, then gathering up the corner of her blanket she held it as one would hold a sick infant, at the same time crooning a mournful cry, she made a sign that her baby had died, and to tell how great her grief, she showed she had cut off her little finger at the second joint, which was one of the extreme mourning customs of the Kiowas. She also pointed to the deep gashes on her breast and arms, not yet healed. Tears ran down her cheeks and my sympathies were so moved that almost unconsciously I replaced our baby in her arms.

Notes: This short was inspired by my final year literary review.

Pratt was involved in the post-Civil War ‘Battle for the Washita’ of 1868; a famous campaign for possession of the Great Plains led by Lt. Col. George Custer. The cultural collision between Indians and whites manifested itself in open warfare. Colonists sought Indians’ land by forcing them on to reservations, and while some tribes accepted this, others such as the Cheyennes, Kiowas and Comanches did not.

Italics has been used to denote Pratt’s own words. See Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904 by Richard Henry Pratt, p. 57-58.