It took us another three months of wrangling and red tape to get Duncan Stuart off the reservation in Indian Territory. I think he would be there still, if I hadn’t started the first of several trips through the years to Washington, D.C. In all my pregnant glory, I confronted the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was rebuffed, then turned to a senator that the Union Pacific, through my father, had bought and sold many times.

The senator was more helpful, but the clinching deal came through an unlikely source, General Nelson Miles. He heard of my plight through that senator and invited me to dinner. General Miles and his equally ambitious wife, Mary Sherman Miles (aha, now you see another useful connection) listened to me with sympathy and much more.

I learned that night that Mary Miles’s Uncle Tecumseh Sherman, then commanding general of the army, had overruled her husband’s and General Howard’s initial promise to return the Nez Perce to their ancestral homeland. “Uncle Cump regretted that decision,” she told me over asparagus. “Let me see what I can do.”

I quickly saw what she could do, especially since her other uncle was Senator John Sherman of Ohio. Nelson (yes, we were now on a first-name basis), had to return to his command of the Department of the Columbia, General Howard’s old roost, but I was in capable hands. A few conversations, a few tears, and I had secured my husband’s release to return to his homeland. Mary Miles and I were friends until her recent death. I owe her so much.

We arrived at what is now called Hawk Ranch shortly before our son David’s birth. Duncan delivered him, because by then the white citizens of the region knew we had pulled a fast one, and no doctor would attend me. That ugly cabin burned down a few months later, but we lost nothing of value. When you are Duncan Stuart and lose everything except your life at Bear Paw Mountains, what is an old cabin?

For the next ten years, we had to drive fifty miles to find a merchant who would trade with us. Again, this was no particular hardship. We had good gardens and livestock. I was able to teach our children, and they learned to play together. After David, we had three more children. I tell Duncan that he should hang out his shingle as a baby doctor.

We also had the beginning of a herd of spotted horses, thanks to Fair One, brought to us with her son and daughter by Henry Watkins, a.k.a. Muskrat, who stayed long enough to help build a new cabin and visit friends on Lapwai Reservation, then leave us with full hearts.