Darn thing would have made a wonderful, a truly memorable monument. Maybe Sioux City has more than its share of monuments, but just think of it--a broken down wagon, its canvas cover torn into shreds and flagging in a light wind, all that wagon's sharded ends blackened by flames, just one kid, forlorn and crying, left alone on a path to nowhere.
If that monument, life-sized, were put up when first it was imagined and offered back in the 1870s, by now it would be right downtown--or maybe somewhere up on on the Hill. Hundreds of people on their way to work might well pass it daily, rain or shine, and simply assume it honors Sioux Citians ravaged by Indians way back when.
Dead wrong. That ravaged wagon in bronze or pewter or ivory wouldn't commemorate some long-forgotten Dakota massacre. That charred wreck of a prairie schooner would have stood as a reminder of government treachery not circling savages. Wasn't an Indian around when that wagon went up in flames. The government did it, burned up it and a dozen others out there in Nebraska, pure and simple, a U.S. Cavalry attacking a wagon train from northwest Iowa.
Dead wrong again. Sioux Citians like Charles Collins and John Gordon risked fiery attacks from unhappy Native bands as well as arrest by the U.S. Calvary, because the treaty signed at Fort Laramie in 1868, just seven years earlier, had unambiguously given the Black Hills to the Lakota in exchange for their granting safe passage to the Great Northern.
Men like Collins and Gordon, and hundreds, maybe thousands of less conspicuous others, wouldn't buy the 1868 treaty. They felt their good old American freedom was shackled by a court order that kept them out of the Hills for no reason other than the color of their skin--white.
Besides, everybody knew the Hills were full of gold, full of it. Try keeping gold-diggers out of creeks they shouldn't be panning. Not going to happen if there's gold in them thar' hills.
So when for the third time Sioux Citians created a wagon train that got up close to Indian territory, none other than General William Tecumseh Sherman--you know, of "Sherman's March to the Sea," of Civil War fame, said, "No, you won't, John Gordon," and when John Gordon did it anyway, fancying up one of the wagon's with a big sign which announced "O'Neill's Party," which was nothing more or less than a bald-faced lie. Have no doubt, they were on their way to find gold.
That's why the wagon burned. That's why the cavalry did it.
Back in Sioux City, you can only imagine the outrage.
So if there were a gorgeous ten-foot high memorial to the Gordon wagon train--everything beautifully drawn in bright and burnished bronze--I'll let you guess who would love it and who would hate it--and why.
1 comment:
I was selling sweet corn in Watertown SD. Two elders from the local tribe purchased much of my inventory. To my surprise, they liked my TRUMP hat and had stopped by to thank me for wearing it.
I am still waiting for my reparations for the way the Duke of York treated New Amsterdam.
The Comanche-Meusebach Treaty was one of the few treaties with Native American tribes in the United States that was never broken.
The FORTY-EIGHTERS who founded the Republican party and and posed a government were nothing but the first Bolshevik takeover.
FORTY-EIGHTERS were a group of four thousand to ten thousand Germans who immigrated to the United States as political refugees following the failed revolutions and social reform movements of 1848.
thanks,
Jerry
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