A small butte in South Dakota

Mr. Schaap, I just finished (for the second time) your book “Touches The Sky”. It brings tears to me eyes because your story seems so real to me. My name is Karla Walkling, my great grandparents homesteaded in Purewater (Lakeview) now on the Rosebud Reservation. My father, John Walkling, and mother, Yvonne (Markus) Walkling, live on a centennial farm just 1/2 mile from the butte that you mention at the end of your book. Thank you for writing Touches The Sky, it is a beautiful book.

It's not every day a note like that arrives at the door of your heart. That she loved the novel--she's read it twice--is one precious gift, but that she recognizes that the very site where the novel ends is pure blessing. 

More than a decade ago, I decided to try to write a novel that would bring together my interests in my own Dutch-American heritage, as well as my growing love for Native American history, a particular dalliance that began, oddly enough, with Ian Frazier's Great Plains. In it, he calls the Ghost Dance "the first American religion." He may have overshot a bit, but my deeply religious self became fascinated by what was swept through Native people all over the western half of the continent in the late 1880s. I wanted to know more. 

One cold November day I went out alone to the Pine Ridge Reservation, specifically to the broad and open plain where remnants of Custer's old Seventh Cavalry massacred Big Foot's band at a creek called Wounded Knee. The weather wasn't nice, and I was very much alone. My thanksgiving visit to Wounded Knee was one of the most meaningful moments of my life.

All of that led to a plan for a novel that would be set somewhere out in South Dakota, where the Lakota and Dutch-Americans were neighbors. I knew something about a tiny little church adjacent to the Rosebud reservation, a church whose ethnic origins were in tulips. The address of that church was Valentine, NE. I decided to investigate, went to Valentine, and started hunting. No CRC. I stopped in a convenience mart and asked. The young woman behind the counter told me she'd never heard of a Christian Reformed Church. Valentine is no metropolis, but Christian Reformed? Nothing.

I asked her if I could see a telephone book, and she obliged. I looked through the yellow pages for churches but didn't find it, so I made the most obvious next move--I looked under the Vs for familiar Dutch names, found several, chose one, and called. A man answered. I told him I was in Valentine, looking for Lakeview Christian Reformed Church. He knew, of course. I needed to take fifteen miles of gravel roads north and west of Valentine because Lakeview was out in the country. 

He seemed obliging, so I asked him another question--was there someone from that church, someone old, someone who'd been around the neighborhood for a long time, maybe a member of that church who I could talk to about how life was lived out there, fifteen miles north and west of Valentine, Nebraska. "Mrs. Logterman," he said without giving the question much thought. 

"Would she talk to me?" I asked.

He told me I could ask, so I did. I called this Mrs. Logterman, introduced myself in a tribal way: "My name is James Schaap. I teach at Dordt College. I write in the Banner. . ."

She said she knew the name. She obliged, told me how to get to her trailer.

I spent more than a couple hours with her. Blessedly, she gave me a tour of the area, telling me where Rev. Leonard Verduin had grown up, where the original church was, where the school was, and where the village was. Off we went, a grand tour over really difficult country. "This is not an easy place to live," she told me. 

I didn't record that interview. I wish I had. I hadn't gone to Valentine to interview anyone, hadn't prepared, I guess. But she promised me a copy of her local history of the church and what was once a village, Purewater, South Dakota.

"And what about the Indians?" I asked finally. Lakeview CRC is on the Rosebud Reservation, just a few minutes from St. Francis Mission.

She didn't say much. I know enough about the Dutch--I am one--to know that when they immigrated, like other Northern Europeans, they tended to congregate. We too can be very tribal.

"There's a butte out here," she told me, "where the Sioux people go to do their worship." More than a bit of condescension was deliberately planted in that line. "We let them go up there and see their visions and what not," she told me. 

I stopped the car and got out the camera. If I still have that shot, I wouldn't know where to find it. But the woman who wrote that kind note, Karla Walking, included a picture in the note she sent me on Messenger.

Is this the butte in your book? My sister and I were on top of the butte 9/2019 and took the photo of our Walkling farm which is in the background. Dad planted trees on top and below to preserve its integrity & keep it from blowing away in the Dakota wind. LOL

The picture she sent sits at the top of the page. 

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Tomorrow: the end of the novel.