This handwritten story was in an old chest I bought at an auction. There are many corrections and many notes stuck between the pages, and the ink and pencil are faded and often difficult to read. I have had to guess a few times and hope I haven’t done too much harm to Mary's intent.
Many changes were made in punctuation, spelling, paragraphing and chapters, and I’ve updated a few words, like Black Feet to Blackfoot. She made a few mistakes I did not correct, like mixing up the locations of the Little Blue and Big Blue rivers.
The name Mary Faraday Huntington does not appear in any of the old records. Whoever wrote the words shamelessly talks about things rarely mentioned in stories of the Wild West. Her story is the way it was long ago,…show more content… When I asked why there were tears in her eyes, she said she was remembering a night long ago, sitting around a fire. Her father, a Blackfoot medicine man, came over, looked into her eyes and then at the others around the fire.
A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell.
From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go.
What is life?
It is a flash of firefly in the night.
It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
When I started to blossom Jennie took me to a little pond not far away and we gathered a big bunch of cattails. And she taught me how to use my body with a man and how to stop babies. Osgar kindly demonstrated how to drive a man crazy. The big, smelly apes can be a lot of fun but most are pretty dumb. Suckers for sex.
The horny guys coming to Polly’s Paradise pretty much left me alone unless I invited them because they’re afraid of Polly and Jennie. But one night a guy from out of town didn’t know no better and pushed me into the alley next to Polly’s. The fat idiot died quick. I got a fine pocket watch, pulled two gold rings off his fingers, and cleaned his