Poor guy. To this day, I don't know what it was, but a tiny mound of flesh, a fat little chimney maybe sat up there atop Abe's bald head. His comb-over didn't help. Whatever it was, to me, a boy in church, that strange little growth was a thing of wonder, a real curiosity.
Not unlike Spirit Mound really, save in size. Drive a couple miles north from Vermillion, and there it is, growing as if out of nowhere, towering above an endless stretches of crop land in all directions, a sweetly climbable hump of earth with no reason whatsoever to be there, there stands Spirit Mound as if the entire grade school decided to build a massive model volcano.
It is, honestly, a most wonderful curiosity, as it was to the Corps of Discovery, who'd been told, one scorching August day in 1803, that there was, not far distant, a most unusual little hill in the grassland, "Concluded to visit a High Hill Situated in an emence Plain three Leagues N. 20° W. from the mouth of White Stone river, this hill appear to be of a Conic form," so thus recorded Capt. Meriweather Lewis.
It was devilishly hot, and they were a long way from the Oregon coast, but you can hardly blame Lewis and Clark for taking a day to check out the story because what they'd heard from the locals was far too fascinating.
"Supposed to be a place of Deavels or that they are in human form with remarkable large heads and about 18 inches high," Lewis wrote. And, after all, one of the purposes of the trip was to record every last thing they found along the way, including, to be sure, any 18-inch killer devils. The Natives claimed those odd beings to be "very watchfull and. . .armed with Sharp arrows with which they can kill at a great distance." And more,
they are said to kill all persons who are so hardy as to attemp to approach the hill; they state the tradition informs them than many indians have suffered by these little people and among others that three Mahas Souix Ottoes and other neibghouring nations believe this fable that no consideration is suffiecient to induce them to approach this hill.
Seaman, their huge Newfoundland with all that heavy fur, was the only smart one. In the nine-mile hike the Corps took that hot afternoon, Seaman threw in the towel before anyone else, turned around, and went back to the pirogues at the river. You can't help thinking his good animal sense was telling him this whole hot escapade just wasn't worth the effort.
Yet today, packed in with all this history, the hike up Spirit Mound is a great joy. If anyone, anywhere, has been torn up by those sharp arrows flying from the top, they've not recorded their bloody injuries anywhere along the trail. I've looked. I've been up and down a dozen times or more and never yet encountered a corpse. Big heads? 18-inches? Sure.
I met a man on the trail a couple of years ago, and the two of us got to talking. He was bountifully informed about Spirit Mound. He said he and his dog made the trip up and down quite often, in fact. I asked him about those all those little devils with their tiny bows and arrows.
"I'll tell you what I think," he said, halfway up and halfway down. "I'm thinking some Omahas spent that hot day under a tree somewhere along the river, and I'm thinking that when they thought of those white men chasing out to the mound in all that heat, they could hardly stop from laughing. That's what I think."
I loved it.
It's not what you read, of course, and this man and his dog didn't put a footnote on his spin of the yarn. He might have been launching his own little arrows. Whatever you do, don't assume what he told me to be capital-T TRUTH.
Spirit Mound is a wonderful curiosity, a joy and a blessing. A hike up and down is worth a morning or afternoon almost any time of year. And if you ask me, the story of the place is only more wonder-laden if you put up a tipi in your mind and just imagine a bunch of Otoes in the quiet shade somewhere along the Vermillion River, a whole band who, try as they might, just can't stop giggling.
Go ahead and visit tomorrow. Just the thought of that kind of tomfoolery will make you smile, up and down.
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