The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,40

My notes are full of dead ends and uncertainties, whispers and rumors, and even my most careful reports are full of unanswered questions hovering like gray angels in the margins.

Consider the Platte River door. Ade’s iridescent trail led back up the Mississippi and westward and eventually to a gentleman named Frank C. True. When I spoke to Mr. True in 1900, he was a trick-rider in W. J. Taylor’s Great American Double Circus, Huge World’s Museum, Caravan, Hippodrome, Menagerie and Congress of Wild and Living Animals.

Frank was a dark-haired, flint-eyed man whose charm and talent expanded his presence far past the bounds of his own small frame. When I mentioned Ade, his performer’s smile turned wistful.

“Yes. Course I remember her. Why? You her husband or something?” After assuring him I was no jealous lover come to claim a decade-old slight, he sighed back into his camp chair and told me about their meeting in the hot summer of 1888.

He saw her first in the audience of Dr. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition, where Frank was wild-westing as a Genuine Plains Indian for a dollar a day. She was conspicuously alone on the wooden benches, tangle-haired and grimy, dressed with a scavenger’s abandon in oversized boots and a man’s shirt. She stayed through the bloody reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand, cheered during the demonstration of mustang lassoing even though the “mustang” was a round-bellied pony no wilder than a house cat, and whistled when Frank won the Indian Race. He winked at her. She winked back.

When Dr. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition rolled out of Chicago the following evening, Ade and Frank were both crammed in his cubby in the performers’ railcar. In this way Ade suffered precisely the sort of fall from grace her aunts and grandmother most feared, and in so doing made a discovery: fallen women are afforded a species of freedom.6 There were certainly social costs—several of the women performers refused to speak to Ade at the lunch tents, and men made unfortunate assumptions about her availability—but in general Ade’s horizons expanded rather than shrank. She found herself surrounded by a bustling underworld of men and women who had each fallen in their own ways through drink or vice or passion or the mere colors of their skin. It was almost like finding a door within her very own world.

Frank reports a few weeks of contentment, rattling up and down the eastern United States in the blue-and-white painted cars of the Rocky Mountain show, but then Ade began to grow restless. Frank told her stories to distract her.

“Red Cloud, I said, now, have I ever told you about him? I swear I never met a woman more in love with a good story.” Frank told her about the valiant young Lakota chief who brought a new and terrible hell to the U.S. Army and the Powder River garrisons. He told her about the chief’s uncanny ability to foresee the outcomes of battles using a handful of carved bones. “Now, he never would say where he got those bones, but there were rumors that he’d disappeared for a year as a boy, and returned carrying a bag of bones from some other place.”

“Where did he disappear to?” Ade asked, and Frank recalled that her eyes had grown round and black as new moons.

“Somewhere up the North Platte River, I guess. Wherever it was, maybe he went back there, because he disappeared after they found gold in the Black Hills and broke the treaty. Heartbroke, I guess.”

Ade was gone before dawn. She left a note, which Mr. True declined to share but which he still possesses, and the oversized boots that fit Frank better anyway. Mr. True never saw or heard from her again.

If there was a door someplace on the North Platte, Nebraska, I never found it. The town when I found it was brutally poor, wind-scourged, bitter. An old man in a dingy barroom told me flatly that I ought to leave and not return, because if there was any such place it certainly didn’t belong to me, and he couldn’t see that the Oglala Lakota had ever come to any good showing off their secrets to strangers. I left town the following morning.

This was merely one of dozens of doors Ade discovered during her hungry years. Included below is a partial list of those that have been confirmed by this author:

In 1889 Ade was on Prince Edward Island working for an aged potato farmer