c. 1790–1837
She is born at the end of the eighteenth century, in what will be Idaho, just outside a Kootenai winter camp. She falls from her mother, who has walked and squatted, walked and squatted all night, and the frosty dawn air slaps her into a scream. An ordinary girl from the look of her.
The story is patchy, contradictory, a mixture of gossip from both white men and native people, fermented almost into myth.
When the time comes to marry, she is thirteen and big-boned, quick-tempered. She knows how to collect and prepare food, how to weave rush mats, how to do a hundred other things. But no man wants her for a wife. Spurned, she bores holes in the sturgeon-nosed canoe of the man she likes best.
A group of white men pass nearby, the retinue of the trader and mapmaker David Thompson, and in the night she leaves camp, makes her way through the forest.
In the morning, Thompson’s servant, called Boisverd, emerges from his tent and finds a native girl staring at him. At first, he’s afraid she might be a ghost, but she drops to her knees, crawls to him across the rocks and dirt. Boisverd has been waiting his whole life for a woman to do exactly this.
Boisverd’s new wife, the girl who came out of the woods, is no trouble in the beginning. She is eager to help in the camp, eager in Boisverd’s bed, never tires. When the men can barely keep trudging forward, she races high-spiritedly through the trees. She learns English quickly and some French. She laughs when the men shoot at animals and miss. When they have to cross a river, she strips off her clothing without shame and wades in, brazenly meeting the men’s eyes.
* * *
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Plenty of Thompson’s men lack wives, and Madame Boisverd proves to be generous and obliging, strong and tireless. Her raucous laugh comes from a different tent every night, even though Boisverd beats her for it, or tries to. She fights back, gives him black eyes and swollen lips to match her own.
She has to go, David Thompson says. He fears Boisverd might kill her and doesn’t want the hassle. She must return to her own people.
Again she walks through the forest. She doesn’t know where her people are, exactly. They take a bit of finding. With a gun she took from the white men, she hunts for food. Prowling among the trees, she imagines herself a warrior, and an idea presents itself. More than an idea—a truth, unnoticed before.
It turns out, she announces when she has rejoined the Kootenai, that white men have supernatural powers, and they have used those powers to change her into a man.
She starts dressing as a man. This man gives himself a new name: Gone-to-the-Spirits. He hunts and fishes, refuses to do women’s work. He gets a horse to go with his gun, invites himself along on a raid. The warriors tell him to go away, but he follows, camps in the darkness just outside their circle. In battle, he takes three horses and two scalps. Not bad at all.
A man wants a wife. Gone-to-the-Spirits starts approaching girls who know how to collect and prepare food, how to weave, but they don’t want him. He rants and rages. He claims that the white men’s supernatural powers have rubbed off on him, that everyone should think carefully before crossing him because who knows what punishments he might call down.
There is a word: berdache. Not a perfect word, not even close: French for catamite, meaning a young boy kept by an older man, derived through muddled Spanish and Italian from an old Persian word for slave. White trappers and traders and explorers, from the time of their earliest forays among the natives, had encountered people who weren’t quite men and weren’t quite women. What to call them? Some forgotten soul shrugged and offered a half-remembered insult his mother back in Montreal had spat at his older brother. The word spread, took hold.
Gone-to-the-Spirits flits in and out of the diaries of traders and explorers. He bestows prophecies on the native people. It starts as simple boasting. He tells them that not only did he change himself from a woman into a man, he has other supernatural powers, too. Like prophecy.
Then give us a prophecy.
Well, for example, some giants are coming. Soon. They will overturn the earth and bury all the tribes. Smallpox is coming, too. Again. White men are bringing it. Again. But, fortunately for you, Gone-to-the-Spirits can perform rites of protection. For the right price.
Warily, people give him gifts in exchange for his rites, but since they don’t like his prophecies, they don’t like him, either.
He becomes more popular when he starts foretelling a great white chief who is angry at the other, lesser white men, the ones they’ve met, because he’d told the white men to give away his treasures, not trade for them. He will soon be sending riches and gifts as an apology and will punish the others for their greed. Soon.