MBTI Type: ISTJ

Maggie is a sensible, level-headed woman who earns her living ranching and tending to folks’ medical needs. She knows a great deal about medicine, about setting broken bones, removing rotten teeth, and is the person everyone goes to whenever they face a problem. She is also not about to let a bunch of bad guys haul off her oldest daughter and sell her as a slave across the Mexican border. Though she carries a lot of bitterness about her father from his childhood abandonment of her family (leading to her mother and brother’s eventual death), Maggie still trusts him to help her get her daughter back. As they forage rivers, attempt to purchase Lily, battle off Indian curses, and encounter all manner of sinister new things she has never before encountered, she works through her emotional problems and hang-ups in a genuine desire to reconnect with her father. She doesn’t always forgive easily, or talk about her past (her daughter knows “something real bad happened to mama,” but not that she was raped), but she believes in her children behaving appropriately, she uses what she knows about them to reinforce her decisions (“I know my daughter; if we left her behind, she’d just follow us”), and she can easily put aside her personal feelings (the murder of the man she loves and their hired hand, the loss of her father, the absence of her daughter) to do “what needs done.”

Enneagram: 1w2 so/sp

Everyone says that Maggie “does her duty,” and it’s true. She doesn’t want anything to do with her father when he turns up on the ranch, but still doctors him because he needs it, then refuses the money he tries to give her for her children and tells him to “get gone.” Many of her patients aren’t able to pay her for doctoring them up, but she still does it out of a sense of moral obligation to her fellow man. She will help her father with his busted ribs, but not feed him supper, because that goes beyond the nature of her “duty.” Maggie knows that she wants her daughter back, and is willing to compromise to make it happen, by allowing her drifter dad back into her life, temporarily. She can sometimes be cold and unfeeling, such as when she refuses to let her daughter wear moccasins her grandfather gave her, because they belonged to his “other” family. But the more she gets to know him, the more she starts to forgive him for abandoning them, and the more interest she takes in his life, his suffering, the loss of his Indian wife, etc. She just needs to understand him, to forgive him, and make peace with him.