Prologue - What's Got Into Lena?

Prologue

In 1780, there were about 60 White Mingoes left In Ohio and West Virginia. They were a branch of the proud Iroquois and were known for their stealth and treachery in battle which is how they got the name Mingo, meaning 'treacherous one.' The white man had persecuted and stalked the Mingoes, and not many were left who knew the old ways. The Ohio and West Virginia winters and white renegades claimed most of those who remained.

A drunken, ugly Irishman named Barnabus rode into their camp early one morning, shot a few of the Mingoes for sport and rode off with the chief's daughter, Nikotai, prounounced Nik-eh-tie. There's no need to go into Barnabus' history. He was a no-account, a lazy man who hadn't accomplished one good thing in his feckless life. Three days after taking Nikotai from her father's teepee, after raping and beating her nearly senseless, he was killed in the street, in the dirt in a drunken brawl by an outlaw with a big iron on his hip.

A French man with one arm took Nikotai home with him to help take care of his seven children, his wife having died of the fever the year before. Nikotai knew no English, and the French man didn't know much either, but they managed to get along. The French man rarely beat her, and she was busy mothering his children and the four daughters of their own. If Nikotai had dreams, they died with her. The French man had no time for dreams, working from dawn to dusk raising crops and tending animals. The daughters, 'breeds' they were called, dark haired, dark eyed replicas of their mother, beautiful of face and form, eventually married other hard-working farmers and time meandered on.

Before Nikotai was dragged from her village and as the chief lay dying, he mourned his daughter, and he laid a curse upon any white man who bed her or any of her daughters or their daughters or their daughters until the spirits failed to roam in the higher worlds. Nikotai didn't know of that curse although she heard many curses before Barnabus died, taking her childhood with him.

Many generations of Nikotai's daughters passed away, but another lived in Mingo County, West Virginia in 1942, just a few miles from the Scioto River where Nikotai last saw her father. This daughter, big with child, was not happy, nor was the man who bed her nor the one who had bed her mother. It was 12 degrees outside in cold, wintry, barren West Virginia.

The daughter of the Mingoes, descendent of the chief who cursed, Lena, was on the war path, and this is her story.

This is a work of fiction and no character in this story is named after or resembles any person, living or dead.