Margaret in the Wilderness

My story of Margaret Erskine is finished. The woman shown here in her late eighties had long since returned to her home in Union, West Virginia, and her life with the Shawnee years earlier was left behind. She’d told the story many times when her children and grandchildren plagued her for it, but she was tired and now she told her nephew Alan Caperton that she would only tell it once more, and then she would say no more.

Alan had the good sense to write down what she told him. It is the only first-hand record of her life from 1789 to 1793, the years Margaret had spent with the Shawnee in their various camps in the Ohio Country.

She did not give Alan many details. As in the life of Doris Duke, from the other end of the spectrum, which I recreated in The Silver Swan, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2020, I was inspired rather than frustrated by the blanks in Margaret’s story. Both women had their reasons for withholding details about what seems to me to have been the crucial years of their complex lives, Margaret’s years in the Ohio wilderness, and Doris last years with Chandi at Shangri La in Hawaii.

I like to find room to imagine. Of course the results depend on my years of research into the historical records of the periods—the many excellent accounts of the Shawnee and the histories of white colonialism in Hawaii. To this I add my long years of reading and thinking about the lives of women, especially independent women not understood in during their lifetimes.

Doris, who died in 1991, is an easier subject because her life is closer in time. Margaret, who died in the early years of the nineteenth century, is distant in language, customs and choices. But I’ve come to believe over the years that there is a core similarity that connects the lives of all women. I think it is our ability to adapt.

This is dramatic in Margaret’s case: with the Shawnee, she witnessed horrors—the murder of her infant daughter and her husband, and later, the burning at the stake of Colonel Crawford. Hunger and exhaustion required adaptation, too, but she had known hunger and exhaustion before in the Greenbriar Settlement. Watching Colonel Crawford suffocate in the smoke from the fire at his feet, listening to his pleas for help, Margaret may not have thought of the death of her infant and her husband, but the determination to survive through adaptation that had carried her through that agony must have benefitted her, too, with Colonel Crawford.

Because we as a culture over-value softness in women—for example, our gift of empathy that sometimes makes us victims—Margaret’s strength will be laid down to hard-heartedness. But I think it is something else: a precious understanding of the nature of reality, red in tooth and claw.

Doris’ adaptation was less successful. Protected by privilege, she expected reality to conform to her wishes. Of course it did not—it never does—and when in the last years of her life she seems to have found a lasting love with Chandi Heffner, she could not overcome her frustration with the young woman’s greed—given so much, Chandi wanted even more—and she fled.

Many years from now, another writer may find a way to interview Chandi and write more fully about her, but I was prevented by the silence imposed on Chandi after Doris’ death.

So be it. The point, for me, is to relish every chance I am given to imagine women anew. We are in a different age in our understanding of women. Surrounded by disasters of every kind, we are seeing the great strengths of our extraordinary adaptability, valued and valuable as it has never been before.

Now, in the women returning to Ukraine to fight or give aid, we see it again. Women who have lived elsewhere in Europe, perhaps enjoying pleasant lives, are streaming back over the border, offering to fight (women do fight), offering to work in bombed hospitals, offering their lives to the war. It is what we do. Not only in such frightful situations but in every maternity ward and delivery room, in every hospital overwhelmed by the unvaccinated, in every school that has lost its teachers due to illness, frustration, poor pay. Even when I see, here in Santa Fe, the long line of cars, gushing fumes, lined up to wait for the children coming out at the end of the day from our neighborhood public school (hardly neighborhood, since no child walks or bikes), I say, with some irony, “There we go again.”

Yes, this service seems trivial but it is also essential—there are no school buses, no one else to do it—but the patience and stamina required are the same qualities that carried Margaret through her ordeals and allowed Doris to outlive scandal.

And we all have those abilities, we are the true warriors of our benighted world.

In Women, Writing Doris Duke The Silver Swan Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee Ukraine