Prospects from Prospect Hill (1)

It wasn't upkept--I'll say that much. The grass could have used a trim, but the city is keeping it up adequately, as well they should. It stands at the very top of Prospect Hill, where once some obscure Sioux City history was created. The Prospect Hill Monument, as it’s called, remembers an event 152 years ago, an event that today wouldn’t get a Journal headline. 

If you stand beside it, then take a few steps southward to the edge of the bluff, the view is extraordinary—Sioux City bustling away in three states, each visible beyond the winding river and its interstate sidekick. The South Sioux bridge is right beneath you, and a couple hundred cars and trucks. Prospect Hill offers one busy cityscape.

You can see for miles. But nothing out there is the same as it was in 1869, when the “monumental” event occurred. Not even Old Muddy. Without a doubt, the river would have been more braided and far less drawn-and-quartered by upstream dams. It could be placid enough, I’m sure, mid-summer; but the longest river in America, rain-swollen, was often a dirty rascal.

Just a few hundred souls lived here then. Sioux City was a barely established frontier village, home to a French-Canadian named, rather impossibly, Theophile Brugeiur, who with his two wives—daughters of War Eagle—raised thirteen kids.

The story goes that another French-Canadian, Joseph Leonais, a trapper who’d run the river for fur companies so often he knew every inlet, the guy Leonais fell in love with the good land at the mouth of the Floyd.

People say Leonais knocked on the door of the only log cabin in the neighborhood and was delighted to find an old good-times-on-the-river buddy Brugeiur, who’d put down roots of his own nearby. Leonais wanted a chunk of that good land and made an offer--$100 for 160 acres. That land is downtown Sioux City.

The Sioux City Museum says what’s to come may be legend, but let’s just pretend I didn’t say that--the story is too much fun. Once the land deal was set, a party followed at which Leonias tipped some considerable homemade brew so when he left his host’s cabin, Brugieur wondered if his buddy would find his way back. Thoughtfullly, he sent out one of his thirteen kids to bring Leonais-the-plastered back safely.

As you can guess, I wouldn’t be telling the tale if it didn’t bring us to Prospect Hill, First Street and Bluff, right here in town. Leonais, three sheets to the wind, saw the kid coming and figured he wanted to race, so he kicked his trusty mount into high gear and took off—ON PROSPECT HILL.

Not smart.

Off the cliff he went, arse over tea kettle as Theophile might have said—or the French equivalent.

Miraculously, Joe had an unexpected encounter with a mulberry bush that saved his life, while his horse tumbled down the bluff and drowned in the shivery river below. 

Now, that monument up on Prospect Hill—it’s still there--has absolutely nothing to do with Joseph Leonais and Theophile Brugeiur, who sound like biblical characters, but weren’t, to be sure.

And that old alabaster monument, forgotten but not forsaken, has wholly different origins, as we shall see in a some upcoming “Small Wonder(s).”

That great forgotten monument is dedicated not to drunken pioneers and their mulberries, but three preachers who didn’t get snookered, but gathered right there on Prospect Hill to pray—that’s right, to pray.  

Seriously. That’s what the monument says. Climb up there sometime, have a look, read the print, wander over to the side of the bluff, take a few seconds to honor an imaginary mulberry bush full of Joe Leonais’.

There’s a monument there on First and Bluff, holy ground.

More to come. Stay tuned.