The story of Amanda is too sad and too depressing to tell, so I won’t attempt it.  Instead I’ll remember my walk through woods today to a spot in what seems wilderness but in reality (which is the state in which I live most of the time) is only a few hundred yards from busy highway 101 south of Yachats.  At the end of the walk I came upon a stone statue, ritually adorned, which was standing with great dignity beside a great clump of fern. It was Amanda.  

In the same year that the American Civil War was winding down in the East under the heavy weight of suffering on both sides of the conflict, a blind Native American woman, guilty of nothing more than having been married to a white man who abandoned her, was forced to walk with a few other Indians north to their internment at Yachats.  She was prodded barefoot through almost impenetrable wilderness in what is now the state of Oregon.