Just one story--Mrs. Dow of Little Falls

In the days of the first settlers, a woman named Mrs. William Dow, along with her husband and children, lived in a town that would become Little Falls, Minnesota, but was, in the 1850s, still the land of the Chippewas. 

When the Dows first came, she says she watched an Indian woman emerge from a tipi with a newborn and, with little seeming concern, take that baby down to the river, hold it by its heels and douse it, then reverse the hold by grabbing its head and once more giving the child a bath. She tells that story in a memoir of her life, describes it with as much ordinariness as that which the Chippewa woman bathed that baby. But she remembers. She didn't forget.

Once, she says, she saw Mr. Hall, a neighbor, milking his cow in a pasture, surrounded by a rail fence. Across the field and behind his back, she claims, a couple of the Chippewas were stretching brand new scalps they'd taken somehow from their enemy Sioux. They were stretching them, as if they were muskrat pelts. When they finished, they celebrated with the kind of screaming joy that echoed off the trees all around. Mr. Hall never saw them, but the moment they started screaming Mrs. Dow saw the cow bolt and run, mid-milking. Mr. Hall, she says, without ever turning around, out ran that animal back toward the lean-to. She tells the story in a tone that grins, as if it were a cartoon.

Those were the days of war in the region, Little Crow's war, the Dakota uprising, the 1862 Dakota War--Minnesotans still aren't sure exactly what to call it. For several months, life in Little Falls was lived on fearful edge, even though Mrs. Dow and Mr. Hall lived with the Chippewas, and not the Sioux who'd been those who'd gone to war. 

Nonetheless, when she felt things get treacherous, she listened to her friends and took her kids and herself to the sanctuary of St. Cloud, where they'd be safe. One day, she says, she met someone who told her they'd been by her place and couldn't help notice that someone had moved in. "'Well,' said I, 'if anyone can, I can." And she moved back. Home, you might say. 

There was, remember, war all around. Her husband was gone down South, fighting the Rebs with some Minnesota outfit. She was alone with her kids, as was her neighbor, an Indian woman named Mrs. Salome, who'd married a white man. He too was gone to the war down South. 

So together, the two of them, neighbors and friends, used to sit some afternoons and write letters. Mrs. Salome had no writing education, so Mrs. Dow says she would write Mrs. Salome's husband for her, tell him all the things Mrs. Salome wanted her soldier-husband to know. When the letter was finished, Mrs. Dow says, Mrs. Salome "would sign them with her cross." That's a priceless picture, don't you think?--two women, one white, one red, writing their husband's together.

When the Dakota people started resistance, Mrs. Salome looked at Mrs. Dow and said, "Kinne sagas?--meaning, "are you afraid?" Mrs. Dow says she did not reply, but Mrs. Salome said, "If you are, I will hide you." 

Very good reasons exist to explain why people no longer tell stories about settlers like Mrs. Dow. The inescapable fact is that people like the Dows and Halls, often unwittingly, brashly displaced those who'd lived on the prairie and along the woods for generations. That plain fact of history can not be denied. 

Still, Mrs. Dow's story deserves not to be buried with her. Her story--their stories--are simply too good to lose.

Just One Story--Friedrich August von der Heydt

It would be his last command. It's difficult to believe he didn't see it that way himself; after all, he and other high-ranking officers in the German army knew--or believed anyway--that Hitler's time and rule had come and gone. Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was no quitter; he'd won an Iron Cross for his heroics during the Wehrmacht's battle for the island of Crete.

It was his friends--and his cousin, Count von Stauffenberg --who had been at the center of Valkayre rebellion, the attempted and failed assassination of Der Fuhrer on July 20, 1944.

Six months later, when Hitler gambled big-time, midwinter, at the Battle of the Bulge, he sent von der Heydte out and his paratroopers out behind Allied lines to put a squeeze on the few American troops along what was called "the ghost front" because there were so few GIs. Von der Heydte was promised a crack unit, but what he was given was 150 recruits, many, if not most, of whom had never jumped from an airplane.

On December 16, 1944, his command in the surprise assault could not have gone worse. While troops from the Third Reich were advancing against scattered Allied forces all around, von der Heydte's paratroops who survived were scattered through the woods, many injured, more than a few dead from the jump itself. Von der Heydte himself had suffered a painful wrist injury.

Long before he jumped that night, he believed Hitler's dream for reversing the course of the war was hair-brained. But he fought anyway, led his men into agony--and for what?

"Pen and paper if you please?" he asked of a man and his son who answered his knock on their door one dark night in Belgium, war raging in the forest all around.

"I'm a Hitler youth," the little boy said, proudly.

Von der Heydte wrote a note out with his bad hand. "Take this to the Americans," he told the boy. "I'm surrendering."

Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was there when blitzkrieg roared into Poland, then France. His outfit landed on the island of Crete, then he was sent to Rome, where, a strong Catholic, he had an audience with the Pope. Eventually, he was returned to France, the western front. But that night, December 18, 1944, he was done. Finished. Tired. Sick. Wounded. Soul weary.

Even before the failed assassination the rebels called Valkayre, even in the thickest fog of war, he'd seen the end coming, knew the idiot gambit Hitler had dreamed up, in his madness, was just another deadly chapter in his idiot plan to rule the world. In Battle: The Story of the Bulge, John Toland says that night, right then, von der Heydte, war weary, sat down and "prayed it would soon be over for everyone."

Iron Cross, German Cross, Knights Cross and Oak Leaves--what on earth or in heaven did all of that mean right then? 

One million Allied troops were there at the Battle of the Bulge, exactly 75 years ago, half of those American. Six hundred thousand Germans, von der Heydte among them, opened up a bloody series of attacks nobody saw coming on an eighty-mile front.

Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was just one story at the Battle of the Bulge. Is it any wonder why men and women, no matter what side they on, found it so difficult to talk about what no one who hadn’t been there could describe? 

Picture him there, sitting on a chair, in a strange home in Belgium, his arm heavily bandaged, waiting for an end he'd known was coming for months, but now, when he was there, he couldn’t really imagine. Allied forces retreated, then regrouped, and finally retook the Bulge. Hitler was finished. 

Von der Heydt was one of a more than a million who were there, 75 years ago. His is just one story. 

[von der Heydt being lifted into an Allied ambulance]