July 4, 1803

 

Stephen A. Ambrose says, in Undaunted Courage, that the Fourth of July on the Missouri River began with shooting off "the canon." Comes as a shock almost. Lewis and Clark, et al, packed that kind of heat?--an actual canon on board? Sheesh.

Yes and no. Simply making headway through the wily Missouri River' sandbars was enough trouble. With three or four ways of moving upstream, against the flow, the men had their choice; but none were particularly easy. Two of them--using lodge poles to pole the beast up, or else pulling the boat and pirogues upriver with ropes—were truly back-breaking. Pulling that thing against the current while marching along the river's edge had to be enough to make some of the men consider alternate professions. And then, on top all of that, they lugged along a canon?

John Ordway, as others, calls it a "Bow piece." That's a mite better than "canon" methinks. What ornamented (and that's not far from the truth) the front of "the boat," as the men described the biggest vessel of their armada, was anywhere from 18 inches to 36 inches long--not that humongous.

Still, the canon was meant as a weapon of war, should war break out. It sounds a little vainglorious to say it this way, but it's true: war was not the intention; peace was. Lewis and Clark--unless they lied their way through their own journals--were embarked on a business venture. First and foremost, they were explorers in the best 19th century definition of that word; Jefferson wanted to know everything about this unmapped chunk of land he'd bought from the French.

But L and C were also out there on business. The fur trade was big money, and the French were in it, as were the English, both big-time. They were all making money on beaver and an occasional buffalo hide, and Jefferson wanted to secure control of the business already going on out west in his new country. That might be best accomplished, he thought and thusly directed L and C, by meeting with the Indigenous and letting them know that there was a new Great Father in town, and that Great Father wanted to work with them, not against them. And by telling them that the near-constant warfare between some of the tribes wasn't good for anybody's pocketbook.

Amazing as it may seem, no matter what you call it, that cannon on the keelboat never took aim at any human being, not up or back, not for two long years. Still, even though nobody shot at anybody, lugging that "bow piece" along turned out to be immensely useful. Hunting and scouting parties went out frequently, looking for game, looking for Native people. After a day or two absences, the men couldn't help but wonder where the others might be. Voila! the canon. Boom! --a welcome call home.

It's been American military policy almost ever since: we avoid war by arming ourselves to the teeth. Sounds like idiocy, but it's worked, often.

Besides that, that "Bow piece" went off for celebration too. On July 4, "we fired our Bow piece this morning & one in the evening for Independance of the U. S." says John Ordway, and then, same sentence, no end punctuation, "we saw a nomber of Goslins half grown today." Wasn't much of a celebration, but it got a half sentence in Ordway's journal."

You can keep this information to yourself, but the men were given a double shot of whiskey that night on the occasion of the birthday of the United States of America. Prost.

I'm not at all sure if Ordway wrote this last sentence before or after that extra gill of whiskey (about four ounces), but the what he says about what he saw is sweet, whether he was a little holiday happy or not: "One of the most beautiful places I ever Saw in my life, open and beautifully Diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the River."

That extra gill of whiskey and a couple of rounds from an 24-inch cannon constituted the very first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. By all accounts, it was a good day.

Grandma's Blue Dress

 

"When you get to the visitor's center, check out the blue dress--it belonged to Judy's great-grandma," she told me, referring to a friend, yet another maintenance worker at St. Lebre Mission. "Both our great-grandmas were there."

With that send-off from the two women who had given me a tour of the place, I drove west for an hour to the immense swath of prairie all around the battlefields at Little Big Horn. 

The Fourth of July should be big this year—it’s a birthday, our 250^th as a nation. Less heralded certainly but no less memorable is another: the 150^th anniversary of  “Custer’s Last Stand,” the most celebrated battle of the Indian wars, a huge win that, ironically, secured their eventual defeat.  

Just exactly why Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his men all died on a hill above the Little Big Horn may never be known. His flamboyant personality long ago gave rise to the theory that, in taking the 7th Calvary where he did, when he did, he was looking for headlines. Then again, maybe he simply made a disastrous military blunder.

What resulted was a last disastrous stand on a little hill where his whole 7^th Cavalry were killed by warriors from a collection of different tribes united by the anger created by losing their world.

Capts. Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen, distinguished Civil War vets, somehow failed to come to Custer's aid. Neither were afraid of a fight. Reno and his men were battle weary. They'd already lost forty or more troops, a catastrophic number if it hadn't been for the 210 men who went to their deaths with Custer. 

Reno chose not to help Custer, even though once the guns were silenced in his own venue of the battle, he knew something was happening to the north because all that smoke and dust meant something was going on. 

But Reno didn't go. Why not? Good question. His uniform was blood-spattered from the death of a Crow scout who took a bullet to the head right beside him. Maybe he'd simply had enough killing.

Some say Reno didn't go to Custer's aid because he simply couldn't imagine his famous battlefield boss could possibly lose a fight with a bunch of wild savages; the great white general losing to hostiles was far beyond his imagination. Reno didn't go, some say, because it never dawned on him that half-naked hostiles could defeat a famous general--they were just Indians.

It was January, not June, when I stopped at Little Big Horn battlefield. I’d been there before, but this time it felt different because I’d met a woman whose great-grandma was actually there, a Cheyenne woman in a blue dress that, I was told, was still on display in the visitor’s center. They were there, across the river with thousands of others.

I couldn't get in to the Visitor’s Center see that blue dress that January morning. No one could. Covid shut the place down. I looked in the windows, but I couldn't see Judy’s great-grandma’s blue dress. I would have loved to.

But I felt a strange species of pride that great-grandma in the blue dress helped me feel. Even though I was out there on the battlefield alone, my having met the great-granddaughter of a Cheyenne woman in a blue dress who was there 150 years ago made this visit bigger, wider even than the spacious forever plains all around the battlefield.

Just a little more on Doc Saville

[Just a little more on Dr. Saville, the Civil War doctor buried in Sioux City's Floyd Cemetery--see yesterday's post.]

There'd been gunshots, more than a few, buzzing bullets all around but, or so the agent argued, nothing yet to get angry about. J. J. Saville had what some thought to be an extremely high boiling point, so high no one in the neighborhood had yet seen it. Some claimed his dealing with Red Cloud and his people nothing less than cowardice; some called it weakness; others believed the new agent to be worthless as Sandhill sand, Saville himself a walking/talking example of the idiot silliness of President Grant's new Indian policy. 

Just one of the nutty changes involved was who would be sent to the reservation as the agent. Saville had never been administrated anything; he was a doctor, for heaven sakes, a Yankee medic who'd served on the far reaches of the Civil War's western front. Dr. J. J. Saville was chosen to be "Indian Agent" by President U. S. Grant. Saville hailed from Sioux City, Iowa. 

Grant chose Dr. Saville for the testy, even dangerous job of Indian Agent at the Red Cloud Agency because the the Episcopal Church had forwarded his good name. For a time in the 1860s, theory morphed into a new policy constructed on the determination that the needs of Native populations would be more humanely met if the agents were missionaries and not robber barons. 

Dr. Saville understood only too well that the job the President had asked him to do was not Sunday School superintendent. By 1870, intercontinental railroads had burst their way through traditional Native lands bringing thousands of eastern foreigners west, seeking their fortune on land they'd assumed to be unoccupied. Red Cloud and his people were not amused.

The Lakota were not alone; dozens of Native bands were not thrilled at the invasion of white folks, especially when they realized the whites weren't at all convinced all those trespassing strangers should be nice to what they considered savage redskins. A decade of conflict would still have to pass before Custer and 300 of his men would die on a hill above the Little Big Horn. During the early 1870s, the whole region was a tinder box.

Dr. Saville, who might have built a solid medical practice in Sioux City, chose otherwise and took the job offered him as administrator of the Red Cloud Agency in a region of the Great Plains where acts of violence occurred with perilous frequency. Saville leaped into a hot spot because he and the progressives believed that bringing Native people into the American family would occur most smoothly if Sioux and Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapaho would just learn to be cowboys and farmers, would herd cattle and forget the dang buffalo, who were rapidly disappearing anyway.

Easier said than done, of course. Saville was a liberal, a progressive. He tried everything  to bring real change to the Native West, including erecting a flag pole to fly the red, white, and blue, thereby proclaiming it's sovereignty. To Red Cloud's people, making that case was a stretch. 

So, at noon the day Saville had his people ready to raise the flag over what became Camp Robinson, as many as 50 mad-as-heck warriors rode up to Red Cloud Agency in blankets and waistcloths, armed to the teeth, and wasted no time in cutting that brand new flagpole down.

The flags were meant to portray what they meant to Saville and an entire brood of white American westerners--proud and youthful nationhood--let freedom ring! 

But on that October 23, before those beloved colors had cleared the ground, Lakota warriors and their hatchet-toting friends had cut those new flag posts up like firewood because to them the stars-and-stripes were a battle flag, nothing more than a symbol of white man's aggression, and in all likelihood, for them at least, a prelude to much larger war. In the autumn of 1867, Sioux City's own Dr. J. J. Saville, lasted only two years in the office of agent of the Red Cloud Agency before he was shown the door.

Fair or not, Dr. Saville was shown the door for his failure to understand the people he'd been appointed to serve. 

What we did on our 54th anniversary

Just for the record, we spent our anniversary this year in an ancient Sioux City cemetery. Seriously.

As anniversaries go, we've done well in celebrations, at least by my estimation. I think it would challenge the boundaries of good taste to count the ways, so you'll just have to take my word for it, generalize like I did, and simply say that, far more often than not, our anniversary retreats have been memorably and passionately sweet. Last week, on June 27, we celebrated our 54th. 

I'm serious--54 (!), many of them celebrating the special charm somehow given to bridal couples, some of our "celebrations" less "festive," I might say, than others, certainly more memorable.

Saturday--our anniversary--we ran off to Sioux City, no summer night of passion on our agenda, maybe just a good dinner. I've been wanting to find a Sioux City cemetery, the Floyd Cemetery, where, I've read, a man was buried way back in 1910, a man whose story attracted me when I recently ran into it. Dr. J. J. Saville was a medical doctor in the Civil War, a bloody horrible job. Somehow (the case is not clear), although he had a medical practice in Omaha and returned there after the war, he is buried in Floyd Cemetery, Sioux City.

I wanted to find his grave--it's that simple, but not easy. Finding the Floyd Cemetery was difficult enough. It's a big place where I spent a lot of time on Saturday afternoon, alone, nobody else came through. In fact, if you google it, there may be no answers to his remains' whereabouts other than the cemetery at Sioux City's Floyd Monument. I knew he wasn't buried there.

Anyway, it took me--and eventually Barbara too--most of the afternoon to find it, but we did (on our 54th wedding anniversary). You'll think I'm nuts, and maybe I am, but it was a thrill. Barbara found it--its location from AI was off--the entire section was backwards--but she found it.

Saville had to have been a strong believer because in the early 1870s his church--the Episcopal Church--recommended him for a position on one of the newly created Indian reservations, an offer Dr. Saville took. Wasn't a cakewalk either. He was assigned to the Red Cloud Agency, where all sorts of things, dangerous things, were happening both before and during his short tenure.

There can be no doubt he was qualified for the position of Agent. Not only did his Civil War experience recommend him, but that experience included advocating for better conditions for the men wounded in battle. What little I've read about his Civil War experience makes clear that his candidacy for the headman at the Red Cloud Agency had substantial grounds. He was a good man.

His candidacy, forwarded by the Episcopal Church, came at the request of President Grant, who argued, with others, that the deplorable situations (graft and violence) on newly created Indian reservations needed to be changed--graft was everywhere. If Christians were to run the agencies, not crooks--or so the argument ran--relations with the nation's Indian peoples would certainly improve.

Whether that argument holds water or not is questionable and worth pursuing. What little I know is that this Dr. J. J. was chosen to be Agent at the Red Cloud Agency in western Nebraska because he was a member of a Christian church deeply involved in Native missions.

It wouldn't be hard to argue that he failed miserably. History does more than suggest that's true, but it's a judgment I can't make--I don't know the story well enough. But only two years later, Saville got in a wagon and went back to Omaha. What he left behind would require others to put in order.

He's buried here--this man whose personal story carries with it endless stories from American history. He's buried here--that's what I knew.

I just wanted to find him, and I did--or Barbara did. It's there.

And that's the story of our 54th wedding anniversary. We spent our anniversary getting an army of chigger bites walking through the grass of a huge old Sioux City cemetery, no one else around. 

I was thrilled.

Seriously, we could have done worse.

SUnday Morning Meds--from Psalm 32

 

“Do not fret because of evil men 

or be envious of those who do wrong. . .”

 

The only fret I have is whether or not I do enough frettin’.  

 Take my mother, for instance—she’s sure that the world is slowly sinking toward a moral morass, some iniquitous black hole that will eventually suck most all of us in, until, gloriously, the Lord, in glory, comes again.  She frets about the life’s seamy appearances, and her continual frettin’ affects her mood.

 She’s old enough to deserve my respect no matter what her views or how much she frets; besides, she’s my mother.  But I’m not taken by the way she flirts with such obsessions because I don’t think she should spend the last years of her life frettin’.

 We live in strange times.  I don’t think it’s possible to locate an era in the last decade or so when spirituality in general and Christianity in particular was ever quite so popular.  The vast majority of Americans, unlike citizens of any other nation, claim to believe in God.  A significant majority go to worship frequently.  Crime is down, as is drug use, as is teen-age pregnancy.  Even abortion rates are lower than they were.

 On the campus where I teach, just about every student wears a t-shirt with a Bible verse.  Students flock to praise-n-worship gatherings voluntarily and exude a piety that existed only among the most devout just twenty years ago.  Lots of parents tell me their kids are far more spiritually mature at 18 than they were at that age. 

 Politically, the U. S. government is in the hands of Republicans, my mother’s party.  Many politicos and pundits claim the last Presidential election was a wake-up call to many opinion-leaders who never took Christians seriously.  Most major newspapers now concede that for too long they didn’t have a clue about what was going on in the hearts and heads of an huge segment of their own readership—American evangelicals. 

 It’s difficult to argue, I think, that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, although sometimes I think my mother would like to think so.  Specifically, what troubles her is that this Christian nation is becoming secular, forbidding prayer and tolerating abortion, tossing the Ten Commandments and, in its place establishing, “political correctness.” 

 I think she’s frettin’ way too much.  She thinks I’m worse—liberal. 

 When Black Sunday came to the Great Plains, when clouds of dust arose from recently plowed Oklahoma land and swept all the way up into South Dakota like a murky blizzard, lots of good people presumed the world was at end.  Not long ago, a woman told me that she had a childhood memory of looking up at the preacher in the little country church she attended and, on Black Sunday, seeing only the preacher’s white collar.

When things got dark, good people thought we’d finally come to end times.  It’s understandable, but it didn’t happen.  Most believers I know plot out the trajectory of our lives in the same direction—things are just getting worse and worse. 

 Maybe not.  But then, as I said, maybe I just don’t fret like she does.  Maybe I will in just a few years.

 But I know this—both Mom and I can take heart from verse one of Psalm 37, which says, in a nutshell, “don’t do that.”  The enemy—whoever they are—aren’t worth my time or anxiety, nor are they worth hers. 

 Next week I’ll quote that verse to her.  Maybe it will help. 

 Probably not.  She’ll probably still think I’m a liberal.     

On political parties

It's a used car, not new, but it's our new car, as distinguished from our old Subaru. This one is a cherry red Buick, and it's become Barb's car. She's the one who drives it.

And she'd warned me: "there's not much gas in the Buick." Her warning stuck. I knew. What's worse, new cars won't let you forget: signs with warnings appear all over. What I'm saying is, I knew the Buick was low on gas; I'd checked the gauge myself. But the needle hadn't sunk to no-man's land so I figured I could get up on top the hill, hardly a half mile away.

And let me just say this. I have no idea if it's still a good idea or not, but the warning is there, permanently, in my mind. "Ya' should, really, run a new car out of gas so you know where the needle means it when it points below the E." I didn't make that up. It's the kind of thing that seeps into your psyche when you're flashing your first driver's license--KNOW when and where you'd better believe the needle!"

I didn't. I ran out. Well, the Buick ran out. 

At least it was in a convenient spot, an empty parking lot beneath a housing development that's not there yet--thankfully, in no one's way. 

Let me begin by saying this. We live in senior housing, a place where everything outside the condo is managed, which means I got rid of every last lawn implement before we moved here. Hence, I've got no gas can. 

I'm out of gas--sure--but I'm also shit out of luck, as we used to say.

"Go to WalMart," I tell myself. (We've got two cars.) "Buy a new gas can, stop at Coop or Casey's or wherever, fill up that new gas can, get back here to the useless Buick at the top of the hill. No sweat, and you can always use a gas can."

My dad used to start the charcoal out back by splashing a little gas over the coals before dropping a match. Not until one of my friends saw him do it, did I think of what he was doing as risky. 

The one I grabbed off the shelf is a gas can, all red, cherry-red and round, but it's affixed with a spout that, for the life of me I can't operate. I'm an old man. I've been lighting charcoal fires for more than a half century, never with gasoline. I mean, I know there's danger; but this brand new gas can features safety apparatus which appears to be dysfunctional. I can't get the dumb thing to open the spout. It's obvious that it's there on the spout for safety sake. I get that. I can't lug a gallon of gas back to the Buick because I can't operate the gas can--are you kidding me? I can't do it.

 I put gas in the can by removing the whole spout and pumping a gallon in at the Coop, but when we get back to the Buick (now my suffering spouse of 54 years is here too), I can't get that gallon into the thirsty Buick because I can't operate the doohickey on the spout of the bright new gas can.

And neither can Barb, who's far more mechanically-inclined than her writer/husband, and neither can some other retired guy who's just arrived up on the hill to get his early afternoon walk in. I recruit him to try, offer him a kind of 'good Samaritan" thing. 

Some words were spoken that shouldn't have been--not as many as I uttered in London a decade ago when driving from the left side of the car was just as confounding as figuring out what on earth a roundabout was when you're in it. 

Frustration, sheer frustration creates a climate in which a few naughty words are tolerated, I think--or hope. 

We take the Subaru back to Coop, where Marv smiles befriendingly and lends us a great black funnel, which means we get the Buick going again.

But that blasted doohicky still pisses me off because it won. 

Now I'm normally proud to be a Democrat, even though as such I'm hen's teeth in the neighborhood. I can guess at the story of that doohickey on the gas can's spout. Some Democrats determined that a gas can without some safety mechanism risked bodily injury and even death, turning people like my dad, years ago, into a pillar of flame. "So let's just create a safety feature and make it mandatory on every gas can sold in this country," some lousy do-gooder told his lib buddies.

The whole story makes me think seriously about wandering over to the Republicans, where, rest assured, they're all as angry as I am about too many gal-durn safety regulations.

Anybody need a gas can? Used only once. . .

Missouri River, 07/06

The longest American river isn't all that far away. I've been playing around in its history for years now, developing stories from its treasured history. No matter where you go up and down its banks, it's stunning in its quiet beauty.

But all that beauty makes it difficult to photograph. No matter what you shoot, the Missouri River is bigger, and all that bigness doesn't easily fit in a camera, no matter what lens you're carrying. 

No matter how or where you shoot, what you go home with is small potatoes. I never learned my lesson, no matter how often I tripped the shutter: if there's any here, I click away.

On a day in July, a decade ago, beauty was all around, and I was arrogant enough to fire away, trying to get some of it on my memory card. Nothing here comes close to the level of stunning witnessable that day, all around.

Real actual beauty is legendary, always out of reach of the camera, but I'm thankful for what I can take home.