Lakeview, SD

I don't remember exactly how I found this place, and if I say that I stumbled over it, that wouldn't be totally true. I knew it was there---somewhere in the vicinity, an old Christian Reformed Church set down right in the middle of the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota. Because its street address is Valentine, NE, some dozen or so miles away, I thought Valentine, NE, was where I would find it. A wonderful old saint I once knew, a pastor named Leonard Verduin told me stories about his growing up there, how unique it was--directly on the Rosebud Reservation.

In Valentine, I looked for Dutch names in the little phone book the young lady let me use in the Casey's in town, then asked the young man who picked up the phone if he could recommend someone in the community for me to talk to in order to get some sense of history--"Mrs. Logterman," he said, unhesitatingly. Then I asked him where I might find this Mrs. Logterman, and he explained where, "from the church." 

"And where is the church again?" I asked, or something as facile, trying to hide my ignorance. 

He told me--maybe a half hour north of town, said I couldn't miss it.

He was right.  I knew I was getting close when suddenly the natural world turned green and not dusty, and where for the first time, a mailbox held a Dutch name. Suddenly, in the middle of the desolation of the reservation, there was an island of emerald where the Dutch had laid claim to reservation land.

I'm not proud to say that it would take me some years to discover the roots of this whole odd phenomenon--how it is that an entire colony of Dutch Reformed people ended up in a place named after something totally unseen--"lakeview." It would take me that long because I'd never heard of the Dawes Act, or certainly hadn't heard of it before that very first visit to the church and the neighborhood. 

The General Allotment Act or Dawes Severalty Act went into effect in 1887, when Washington decided that the best way to deal with the Indian problem--how to get them out of the way--was to give each and every one of them a plot of land, then give or sell what land remained to whatever white folks wanted it. 

The Dawes Act was a disaster for Native America. Free land was a clarion call in the late 19th century, so some Dutchman--and many others--figured it was too good a deal to pass up and took what was offered. A community grew up around it, both a CRC and a RCA, as well as a Christian school, all the rudiments of a Dutch Calvinist colony, even the infighting.

All of which means that that little church in the photograph at the top of the page remains, to this day, the heart of a community of almost totally white people, in the middle of the Rosebud Reservation, just up the road from St. Francis Mission.

There was still so much for me to learn, but I can't really easily explain how thrilled I was with discovering what I did. There I was in the parking lot of the Lakeview CRC, Lakeview, South Dakota, in the middle of American history.

There's more.