An intro to an often-asked question

I was born and reared on the west coast of Lake Michigan, a healthy day's travel from the Great Plains. For the last forty years or so, I've lived on the emerald edge of those plains on land that begins to resemble the barren beauty of what's out there where, all too regularly, less than twenty inches of rainfall blesses the far more arid land. 

Yesterday, I was even closer to line, out following the Missouri River where it makes a gradual turn north and begins to cut the state of South Dakota in half. For reasons that are far beyond me, I've come to love its ruggedness, its immense beauty, probably because its stories carry so much of the history of the nation, of the continent. Up on a Nebraska hill not all that far from here, Lewis and Clark found the 40-foot skeleton of some kind of prehistoric sea monster. Imagine that. Imagine this: must have shocked them silly.

People often ask, even today, where did all of that come from, all that interest, all that energy. There is no easy answer--the photographs of Dorothea Lange maybe, who has created images as powerful as Steinbeck's novels. Some fascination with Native populations, about whom so many of us know so very little. Part of it too is the fact that hoards of colonials, like my own ancestors, amassed into and over the plains actually believing they could attain a kind of freedom they'd never see in County Cork or Friesland or Alsace-Lorraine, nor, for that matter, in upstate New York or Ohio or even eastern Iowa. Many of those are long gone. Today, outside my window, a section of land may well be inhabited by three or four farm places, only one of which actually runs an agricultural operation. 

I fell in love with the Great Plains in great part because of they are not any more, a playground of enthusiasm, of energy, of wins and losses, of life's great dramas, no less rich with humanity than any vastly more populace place on the land.

Native America? That deep and sustained interest was created by a book titled, easily enough, The Great Plains, by Ian Frazier, who wrote back then for the New York Times. By the end of that wonderful book, Frazier turns into the old German Reformed preacher his grandfather was when he claims that what he'd discovered in random travels between Texas and North Dakota was that the place has always been a playground. 

It's a questionable thesis, especially if you're Native and the 19th century is cited, but I liked the assertion, even though I didn't believe it. Even Custer--even at Little Big Horn, Frazier says--was having fun. Something of a questionable assertion, however, but not all wrong. Many of the neighborhood's first settlers were "pups," boys of the English gentry shipped over to this empty land just after the Civil War to learn about something called work, but to have fun doing it. 

Imagine fox hunting through Sioux County prairies if there was no one around. The first electrical wire in LeMars, Iowa, was the one strung from the dorm-type dwelling where the "pups" stayed, to the tavern downtown in the village, a mile away.

What really drew my attention was something called "the Messiah craze," a ritual Native people called "the Ghost Dance," a dream vision of a Piute named Wovoka, who, as you might expect, saw a vision and let every other Native within hearing distance know what he'd discovered. Ian Frazier calls it, really, the first really American religion. Whether or not it's true is up for grabs. What we know is that, as a religion, it had many thousands of adherents. 

The Ghost Dance. I could take you today to a place less than two hours away with the Yanktons held their very own, not all that far away from a Dutch settlement of orthodox Calvinists in a place where my own great-grandparents thought they could live comfortably off the land. 

More than ten years ago, I thought I'd write a novel that would include at least something of the Wounded Knee Massacre. I'd never been out there, far west in South Dakota, and I knew I needed to be. I went by myself, in one day, if you can believe it--out and back. I was there alone. It was cold and slightly rainy. The Wounded Knee battle ground is not on the interstate. You have to want to go there. People don't just stumble on it.

But I went, and what came from that experience--a solo visit to the site of unimaginable death--eventually became a long essay published in a magazine that no long exists, a journal called Books and Culture.

I thought I'd run it here on my blog for some time. It's certainly something I would consider not only as accomplished as anything I've ever written, but also as formative. That little trip sharpened my most pointed interests. 

On Monday, I'll begin with "A White Man Goes to Wounded Knee."