Charley Bowen’s recent death had been outwardly natural. To his widow and her friend, though, the voice of the Ouija said otherwise. The moving planchette spelled out the news that Sassafras Charley had been murdered and would wander in a spiritual netherworld until his killer was punished. Soon the messages named her: Clothilde Marchand, the slight, pretty white wife of an illustrator at the Buffalo Museum of Science. Her husband Henri Marchand had done some painting at the Cattaraugus Reservation, even using Lila Jimerson as a model. Her long-range maleficence, the board’s messages said, was behind other Cattaraugus deaths as well.
The Ouija—“the devil board,” as some call it—is not native to the reservation. Still, it is not strange that it would be found there and in use. The Iroquois are no supernatural snobs. They adopt any tools and techniques they fancy. What was strange was the coherence of the messages that came through on this one, naming and describing Mrs. Marchand and even giving her Buffalo address: 576 Riley Street, near the museum.
By the winter of 1930, an odd series of untraceable letters had been delivered to Sassafras Charley’s widow, all supporting the same conclusion. For weeks Jimerson and Bowen had been aiming traditional magic at Clothilde Marchand. Its failure must have convinced them of her power. On March 6, they took the next step.
The two women walked five miles to the trolley line and took the ride to Buffalo. The younger met Henri Marchand at the museum and got him to drive her around the city in his car. The widow went to his Buffalo home and met Mrs. Marchand at the door.
“Are you a white witch?” she asked
“Maybe I am,” said the artist’s wife, making a joke and turning to let her guestin. With a hammer bought that morning, the widow gave Mrs. Marchand a tap or two on the temple. Chloroformed cotton tamped down her throat made sure her life was done. Her twelve-year-old son found her body after school.
By the same time the next day, the two Cattaraugus women had been caught and charged. They readily admitted to the killing. Why not? She was a witch.
At first the motive seemed ludicrous. Most Buffalonians thought well of the suave French-born artist. They presumed Jimerson had a mad crush on him and had his wife killed to clear the way. The case was not simple to the government, which sent a high-powered team to defend the women.
Experts like Seneca scholar Parker have attested to the power of witchcraft in the Iroquois soul. One Iroquois would kill another, he said, if convinced that this would end a hex.
A Seneca crone led investigators to the graves of three mighty Seneca warriors. Jimerson and Bowen had planted whiskey and vittles among their bones. Found with those tributes were little white wood-and-cloth dolls, doubtless portraying the wife of the artist. One was even dressed with paper from one of those mysterious letters sent to the widow.
When a Buffalo newspaper printed some of the letters Henri Marchand had sent to Lila Jimerson, it was clear that artist and model had been more than friends. In fact, Marchand had had more affairs than he could reliably estimate. The scandal made headlines.
Sex and sorcery made for lurid newspaper reports, but Native American sovereignty and religion were the subjects of the trial—which became a lightning rod. Shouts of racism and conspiracy from the women’s defenders would be familiar today. The Jimerson-Bowen trial woke people up to supernaturalism on the Cattaraugus Reservation. Otherwise, it’s hard to understand why the two women were virtually acquitted, let off with little more punishment than the ordeal of the trial. The all-white, all-male jury clearly despised Marchand’s escapades and may have decided it was no mystery that something finally blew up. They may even have suspected that Marchand had a hand in the murder. (There were those anonymous letters in handwriting a bit like that of Henri Marchand.) The artist-widower did nothing to help his image, taking an eighteen-year-old girlfriend by the time of the trial.
Then again, the jury may have come to believe that a dead Cayuga witch had driven two women to murder.
The Last Act
(Tuscarora, Early Twentieth Century)
Nobody ever said much about Davey Roy’s background. He’d been adopted as a boy by Lulu Gansworth, a Christian, and raised with her brood in the farmhouse on Indian Hill on the Tuscarora Reservation. He grew into a shy, dark, good-natured young man whom Tuscarora author Ted Williams remembers as not the world’s alpha male. He had a girly throw with a baseball, for instance. He also had an Asian cast to his eyes that reminded Ted of the First Nations people he had seen from Georgian Bay. Davey Roy was a helpful, hard-working lad—maybe a bit too helpful.
One of Davey Roy’s adopted brothers was nicknamed Heavy-Dough, and these two used to trade off the chore of bringing the cows in and milking them every night. One early evening Heavy-Dough took his turn, setting off on the dirt road that curves around Indian Hill and leads to the back pasture. It was well out of sight of the Gansworth farmhouse, and a gigantic dead tree once stood beside it.
The stark form of that tree had fascinated Ted as a boy. He had spent many a moment staring at it, scrying it against the sky from various angles and weighing the impressions it gave him. That day, though, Heavy-Dough was in no mood for admiring. In fact, he came running back without a single cow. When he got to Davey Roy, he was almost too rattled to get his story out.
He was within sight of the herd when he noticed something bright and eye-catching in the sublime tree. Perched on a branch fifty feet over the road
