This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMoeu.

They kept discovering her over and over. Reporters mostly, but historians too, and travelers,

exploring what little forest primeval remained in her corner of Massachusetts, who came searching

for something ancient and authentic. They came more often as things started heating

up in 1920 ahead of the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the arrival of the pilgrims

in Plymouth. The calendar was filled with events, lectures, monument dedications, choral

performances, stuff like that. All culminating during a period in the summer when the tides

would be perfect for a naval demonstration and the dramatic arrival of a replica mayflower.

A three-day extravaganza, with parading veterans of World War I which had just ended a couple

of years before. A reenactment of first contact between the Wampanoag and the English, speeches

by local dignitaries and by the president of the United States himself, in the unveiling

of a statue, a ten-foot tall mass of soyid, the friendly Indian and the Thanksgiving story.

A noble savage in bronze by way of Michelangelo's David, muscle bound and stoic in a loincloth

in beads, a single feather in his headband, and a piece pipe cradled in the crook of his

arm. They drove up the dirt road until their cars couldn't go anymore, then walked the winding

path dappled by sunlight through the shushing pines toward a clearing, and the clappered

house, warped in weather-worn at the edge of the water, to call on the princess.

The articles in travel logs these visitors would write afterwards, all told essentially

the same story. Charlotte Mitchell was the last of mass of soyid's line, the last living

descendant of the Great Sage. The king of the Wampanoag people at the time when the pilgrims

settled in a place they decided to call Plymouth.

Charlotte Mitchell's great, great, great, great, great grandfather was the one who got them

...