Sharp-eyed readers may note that the sharpshooting little girl in this story is based on real-life crack shot Annie Oakley, who said, “I ain’t afraid to love a man. I ain’t afraid to shoot him either.” While Annie was famous for being able to shoot a cigarette from a person’s lips or a playing card edge on, she learned to be a crack shot at a very young age in order to provide her family with meat. They couldn’t afford to waste bullets, so if she missed, she went hungry. With such motivation, it’s little wonder she learned to shoot well.
After the Civil War, many teachers were female. They typically had a cursory education from a “normal school,” a school or college that trained teachers, and they could be as young as fifteen years old. Rules for female teachers were strict, commonly including a mandate that the woman not marry while teaching, and teachers had to uphold a very strict moral code. For all that, an average teacher’s salary for a woman was around fifty dollars a year. A male teacher received around seventy dollars per year. Subscription schools were not rare in the mid-to late 1800s and were in fact the model used to develop the first school in Wyoming.
The author would like to gratefully thank Louis L’Amour’s books and her father for inspiration and information.
THE PROSPECTOR ACROSS THE TABLE smelled of horse manure and two long months of summer sweat. I wished to tell him that his dead business partner wanted him to go back to camp with a bar of lye soap and soak in a hot bath, but I suspected any business partner of his wouldn’t have been much for hygiene either, and the prospector’s glare told me he was already skeptical enough.
“The spirits not always come,” I explained as I lit the incense sticks. “But ask your question and we will hope.” I spoke slowly, using the broken cadence I mimicked from my uncle and neighbors, even though I’d been born in San Francisco and was one of the few Chinese in the Badlands fluent in both languages. The miners valued the heavy accent. They seemed to think it made me a more authentic descendent of the Celestial Kingdom — their exotic word for China — and more connected with the spirits that spoke through me.
At least, on a good day they spoke through me.
“When you say spirits,” the man said, watching my hands with suspicion, as if lighting incense were a dangerous pastime, “you mean just the one, right? I just need to talk to my partner. None of your pagan gods or nothing like that.”
I pressed my lips, barricading my pride against the affront. “I invite your partner but cannot choose who answers.” I lit the candle on the table and shook out the match. “You have gift for spirits?”
He snarled, showing yellowed teeth surrounded by grizzly whiskers. “Like a sacrifice?”
I stared at him over the flame, long enough that I hoped he understood he’d asked a remarkably stupid question. Finally, I responded, “Or perhaps a cup of rice.”
He slowly sat back, but his glower didn’t lessen. “What’s a cup of rice gonna do?”
“Is customary to give gifts to the dead, as a sign of respect, and so they might have sustenance in the next life. If you do not have gift, we have spirit money for purchase.” I gestured to the front room, where my uncle ran his laundry service.
The prospector spent a moment rocking on the wooden stool, then reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a pre-rolled cigarette. He tossed it into the brass bowl on the table. “He can have that. But just one. I ain’t got more to spare.”
Jaw tightening, I scooted the bowl to the side of the table. “His name?”
“Thomas Manning.”
“Think on the question you would ask Thomas Manning.”
He drummed his fingers on the table while I did my best to concentrate. Sitting back, I shut my eyes and let my breathing calm. I imagined the drumbeats I had heard a hundred times during my mother’s rituals, back when she was a respected wu-shaman in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
I did not have high hopes that Thomas Manning would make his presence known today. If I’d been partnered with this man in life, I wouldn’t come back to visit him either.
Which meant it was time for a performance.
Sometimes my patrons had simple requests — a fortune told by the wrinkles of their palm or a question answered by the kau cim sticks.
But usually they came to me because they wished to speak with the dead.
When my uncle first brought me to Dakota Territory, I refused to take for granted the traditions my mother had begun to teach me before she too became an honored spirit. I would light the incense. I would burn spirit money and paper effigies. I would sink into my trance so the spirits might use my voice to speak.
But I had never finished my training to become a true shaman, and too often my patrons left disappointed and angry. The rough-edged men of Deadwood had little patience for our traditions, and they didn’t like being told that the spirits did not wish to speak with them.
After a week with sparse patronage and a threat from my uncle that he would soon have me scrubbing linens in the laundry, I dared to fake my first trance.
It had gotten easier since then.