Strongheart

The third and final installment of the One Thousand White Women trilogy weaves together nineteenth-century journals and a contemporary frame narrative. JW Dodd III, editor-in-chief of Chitown magazine, explains that his late father published the first journals of May Dodd, a woman sent west in 1875 as a bride to the Cheyenne. A young Cheyenne woman named Molly Standing Bear later brought JW a second bundle of journals but withheld the final pages. JW drove to the Tongue River Indian Reservation in Montana to persuade her to release the rest, agreeing to let Molly serve as sole editor and annotator.

Molly takes over as narrator, offering a critique of white colonialism and describing her childhood connection to JW, who visited the reservation summers with his father. She identifies herself as a shape-shifter and member of the Strongheart women's warrior society, descended from a band that splintered off after the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn and never surrendered. She reveals she is the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Molly McGill and the warrior Hawk, two central figures in the journals. An ancient medicine woman named Buffalo Woman guarded the ledger books her entire life, recognized Molly as the intended recipient, and died peacefully after handing them over.

The historical narrative begins with Molly McGill's journal at the Little Bighorn battlefield, where she wakes disoriented in a tipi. Her friend Martha explains that Phemie, a formerly enslaved warrior, and Pretty Nose, an Arapaho war chief, rescued Molly as she fell from a cliff while soldiers transported her. Martha delivers devastating news: The Kelly twins, Meggie and Susie, two Irish women from the original brides program, rode unarmed into battle in a deliberate suicidal charge, unable to go on living after their babies died. On the battlefield, Molly finds saddlebags containing a young soldier's diary and his mother's letter, as well as, inside Meggie's medicine bag, a torn page from May Dodd's journal.

That page reveals the novel's central revelation: May did not die in the cave where everyone believed she perished. Her Cheyenne husband, Little Wolf, sent the medicine woman Woman Who Moves against the Wind to care for her. Wind extracted the bullet, nursed May through 48 days of paralysis, and taught her to hunt, fight, and survive.

May and Wind leave the cave and become horse thieves. May adopts the alias "Abigail Ames" to sell horses at frontier settlements while Wind stays hidden. Their career begins after capture by the Three Finger Jack gang, led by the outlaw Jules Seminole, who violated Wind and her twin sister as children. Wind devises a plan: Each woman seduces and kills her captor, and they flee with the gang's horses. They go on to steal from wagon trains, cattle drives, and an Army supply camp, distributing most horses to Indian bands.

May meets Chance Hadley, a young cowboy with Comanche ancestry, when she steals his horse and kisses him. He tracks her to their camp and joins the women. May and Chance fall in love, but when Seminole's reconstituted gang captures May and Wind again, Chance appears in Comanche war paint and kills the outlaws, though Seminole escapes. May confesses her complicated past, including her Cheyenne marriage and a daughter by an Army captain, and Chance rides away in fury.

Meanwhile, Molly McGill's band flees across the plains, led by Pretty Nose and guided by a blind medicine woman called Holy Woman, who claims she can find "the real world behind this one," a paradise from Cheyenne creation stories. The band absorbs orphaned children and displaced families. Molly is reunited with her husband, Hawk, who arrives dragging a travois, a horse-drawn drag-sled, carrying his dying grandmother. The old woman dies peacefully, and Molly, now pregnant, enjoys a brief honeymoon before May and Wind ride into camp.

May meets Molly, and their bond is immediate. At the main band's camp, May is reunited with Martha, now a fierce Strongheart warrior; with Phemie, whom she believed dead; and with Horse Boy, a young Cheyenne boy who was her first friend in the tribe and whom she had believed killed during the Army attack. Gertie, a plainspoken muleskinner, arrives with Lady Ann Hall and her maidservant Hannah Alford, who abandoned their journey to England: Ann found life empty after her companion Helen's death, and Hannah wanted to rejoin her Cheyenne husband. Chance also returns and reconciles with May.

The band breaks camp during a sudden blizzard under Holy Woman's direction. When the storm lifts, they emerge into a beautiful autumn valley rich with buffalo, and Holy Woman falls dead, having fulfilled her vision. A visiting Shoshone party challenges them to friendly war games. At the final feast, the Shoshone reveal they know nothing of white soldiers or wars; these exist only in cautionary tales about "the dead world behind this one." The band realizes with shock that they inhabit the alternate world of Cheyenne legend.

The band splits. May and Chance plan to return and reclaim May's children in Chicago. Pretty Nose and her warriors want to resume fighting. The band's chaplain, Christian Goodman, along with Lady Ann, Martha, and Astrid, one of the remaining white women, also choose to return. Molly and Hawk stay, as do Phemie and her husband, who face persecution as formerly enslaved people, along with Gertie, Lulu, a French actress and performer among the white brides, Maria, a Mexican woman of Indian heritage also from the brides group, and Hannah. Holy Woman's granddaughter announces that a storm is coming. After emotional farewells, the travelers ride into the blizzard and vanish.

The departing group emerges in familiar Montana Territory. Pretty Nose orders a raid on a nearby Army camp. While May and Martha guard the horses, Seminole, now a scout for Colonel Mackenzie, discovers them with Crow warriors. He seizes Martha at knifepoint, but Ann, Astrid, Chance, and Christian charge in on horseback, killing the scouts. Martha tackles the fleeing Seminole, May stabs him, and Martha uses the blunt side of her tomahawk to drive a sharpened wooden stake through his heart. Wind had prophesied that Seminole, whom she considered a sorcerer, could only be killed this way.

At Little Wolf's winter village on the Tongue River, May faces the novel's most wrenching moment. Little Wolf asks her to leave their daughter, Wren, with the tribe. The People believe the white baby is a divine gift to the Sweet Medicine Chief, the Cheyenne's most revered spiritual figure, and taking her would destroy their hope. May kisses Wren, lets a drop of spittle fall into the baby's mouth, and hands her to Feather on Head, one of Wren's caregivers. She entrusts the journals to Wind and announces she will marry Chance and travel to Chicago to find her other children. Her final entry reads: "May Dodd, still alive."

In the contemporary frame, Molly Standing Bear's relationship with JW deepens. She reveals her own troubled past, including abuse at a boarding school, addiction, and recovery, as well as her dangerous work rescuing missing and murdered Indigenous women. She shows JW the hidden location of the journals and announces her plan to infiltrate a sex trafficking ring in Denver by allowing herself to be kidnapped.

In the epilogue, JW reports that eight months have passed with no word from Molly. She left before dawn with a letter granting him permission to publish everything exactly as written. That morning, JW woke to find a mountain lion with Molly's blue-green eyes sitting beside his bed before it trotted out the trailer door. Molly's postscript reads: "Sorry about leaving the trailer door open, but I had to let the lioness out." JW publishes the journals unchanged, sends monthly boarding checks for his horse to Lily Redbird's ranch, and always asks about Molly. There is never any news.