Bird was not her given name, but everybody called her Bird because they said she was just like that, light and long of neck and attention-getting beautiful.  From the time she could walk, it always seemed as if at any second she was going to lift up to her tiptoes and start flying, that’s how excited she was about life.

When Bird was 12 years old, she and her older brother, Cam, were playing with a group of children in a park at the foot of the remote mountain in Colorado where they lived.  A gang of men appeared out of nowhere and abducted Bird at gunpoint.  Cam escaped and made it back up the mountain.  Bird’s abduction was all over the news, but she could not be found, and after awhile, everyone assumed she never would be.

For three years, the gang held her hostage.  She was made to do menial labor and was raped repeatedly by men twice and three times her age.  The gang eventually sold her to a Canadian man who was in the fur business, and wanted her for his mistress while he was on business trips.  At the age of 16, she was pregnant with the Canadian’s child.

She named the baby Jay-Bee.

When Jay-Bee was six months old, Bird accompanied the Canadian to a business conference in Iowa, where he crossed paths with Bill and Lewis, managers of a real estate syndicate acquiring and developing raw land west of the Mississippi.  The Canadian could sense that Bill and Lewis were major players, connected at the highest levels of government and the intelligence community.  He also sensed that they were enamored of Bird, who it turns out had a gift for languages and knew a surprising lot about raw land west of the Rockies.  The more Bird contributed to the conversation, the better Bill and Lewis liked the Canadian.  So he let her talk.  And sure enough, they invited the Canadian to join their company.

The Canadian turned out to be a miserable employee, capricious, and ill-suited to the relentless pace of the real estate business.  On top of it, he was a raging alcoholic.  Worst of all, he abused Bird and the baby.  When Bill caught a glimpse of this behavior one day in the company parking lot,  he fired the Canadian on the spot.  Lewis, a lawyer, arranged for Bird to get a divorce.  After the divorce, she got her real estate license, whereupon, to her surprise, Bill and Lewis invited her to join the company.

She brought Jay-Bee to work with her every day, and he soon became the company pet.  Bill, who at that time had no children of his own, took a particular shine to the boy, and nicknamed him ‘Pompous.”  She never told anyone about her life before the Canadian.  She couldn’t.  She had no memory of it.  Somewhere, during the time she’d been held hostage by her abductors, she had perfected her ability to forget.

A number of years later, Bill and Lewis asked Bird to join them on a business trip.  They didn’t tell her where they were going.  They took the Gulfstream, landed on a private field at night, got into a waiting limo and checked into their hotel.  In the morning, when Bird looked out the window of her hotel, her heart fluttered like it had wings.  There, in front of her, like a childhood dream remembered, was the mountain where she had grown up.

Still numb, Bird went with Bill and Lewis to a meeting of local officials, and at the meeting, representing his town council, was her brother, Cam.

It took them a second to recognize each other, but the instant they did, she flew across the room to him and they  hugged and cried.  The meeting wasn’t much of a meeting after that.  It was, instead, a celebration that didn’t end for two days, a big dance around a brother and sister and members of their clan who couldn’t stop crying and smiling at the same time.  Bird’s memories of her happy childhood came back to her during those two days.  She remembered that when she was a child, her very favorite thing was to look at a flower, a bird, anything beautiful, and ask of it, “Who made you?”, and that this is what she had been doing when she wandered off from the other children on the day she got abducted from the park.

Bill and Lewis made a killing on their real estate deals, of course, and Bird played an important role in their success.  Lewis went on to become governor of Louisiana and Bill and his wife, Julia, moved to Washington, where he held a number of high-ranking positions in government.  My suspicion is that Bird and Bill were in love.  We will never know for sure.  What we know is this:

We know that Bird gave away whatever money she’d made to charities that supported the poor rural community on the mountain where she had grown up.

We know that on the ten-year anniversary of its founding, Bill invited everyone who’d ever worked for their real estate company  to join him in Washington, D.C. for a big party.

We know that Lewis, driving alone from Louisiana to D.C. for the anniversary party, stopped at a motel in Tennessee, put a gun to his head and killed himself.

We know that Bird, who was living in Iowa at the time, brought Jay-Bee, who was twelve years old, with her to D.C. for the anniversary party.

We know that during this bittersweet trip, Bird visited Bill and Julia at their large home on the Potomac and ask them to let Jay-Bee live with them and their son, Lewis (named after Bill’s partner) and take care of his education.  We know that Bill and his wife raised Jay-Bee as their own son, and that Jay-Bee himself became a prominent player in Washington, advocating for his mother’s causes.

We do not know for sure what happened to Bird.  Some stories say she died of a broken heart soon after returning from D.C..  Some say she died an old alcoholic, alone, broke, and on the streets.  Some say she lived to an old age, doing social work for her community until the end of her days.

We know that today she is commemorated on a gold American one-dollar coin and that her given name was Sacagawea.

And we know that whoever made the flowers and the birds and anything in beautiful in nature, made her, too.