Immaculate Conception, Pawhuska

"What places do I absolutely have to see when I'm here?" I asked her. 

"You have to see our church," she told me from behind the desk at the Osage visitor's center. She was clearly herself at least part Osage. I liked the way she had pushed the church at me, as if it was simply not to be missed--"our church," she said. I knew she meant the tribe's. 

"Our church," is Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a red-brick cruciform built in 1910 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

When I got there, all doors were locked. A sign on the office door posted a number I called. A woman with a pleasant voice told me it was closed for the holiday weekend, but she'd meet me anyway. That was nice of her, and I told her so. 

By the time we got inside the church, a half-dozen others had joined us on the tour, a family from Colorado on their way to a college football game. Thought they'd stop, they said. So there we stood in the middle of the church ready to begin. 

Our silver-haired docent introduced herself by saying she was linked to the region by blood, by DNA. She was part Osage herself, she said, but born and reared in Dallas because her grandma had left Osage County a couple generations earlier, scared to death of being murdered. 

I knew at least something of what she meant. 

"You know the story?" she asked the folks in football jerseys. 

They shook their heads. She turned to me. I'd met her only five minutes earlier. "You tell them," she said. Not a question, a command. She wasn't kidding. 

Blew me away. "Me?" I said. Made no sense, I thought. She was the guide. 

She nodded at me, then smiled. 

The truth was, I did know the story--so I told them. 

For the record, this February, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, right there in Osage County on Osage tribal land, will welcome Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DiNiro, Martin Scorsese, and a score of other Hollywood headliners, who will be filming the story told in David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon, the complicated story of a grisly rash of unsolved murders in the early 1920s, multiple deaths of Osage men and women who had suddenly become unimaginably wealthy when oil gushed from wells drilled into their land. In 1925, Pawhuska, Oklahoma had a Rolls Royce dealership, but it also had dozens of dead Indians. The story she wanted me the Colorado visitors who didn't know is horrifying.

When I finished, she told me with yet another smile that I'd done well. 

Immaculate Conception's claim to fame is a colorful stained glass rendition of a Dutch-born priest named Father John Shoenmakers bringing the divine light of Christ to the Osage, who were, back then, in southern Kansas. The story she loved to tell herself was that the Osage needed the special approval of Rome for that particular window because it featured Native men and women who were still alive and were therefore, by some papal edict, not supposed to be so gloriously honored in stained glass. The Osage won that fight; so today, if you visit, someone will point at the north window with great pride.

The Colorado bunch had to get to the game, they said, so they left, thanking her for the tour; but she had more to show me, she said, and I was more than anxious to listen. We went up in the balcony where she showed me the window celebrating the Immaculate Conception itself. 

And then she showed me this.

A dedication at the bottom of one of those gorgeous German-made wonders indicated this particular window honored the memory of a woman named Sybil Bolton. "She was one of them," she told me. What she meant, I knew, was that Sybil Bolton was one of the murdered Osage women.

Then we walked out back to the new chapel built to honor Tekakwitha, a Mohawk, the very first and only Native American saint.

My tour guide was gracious and animated. Clearly, she loved her church--and her people.

Sybil Bolton, I found out later, was a young Osage woman who learned to play the harp at an exclusive East Coast boarding school. Then back home, at the age of just 21 years old she died mysteriously with her baby at her side and was buried here in an ermine coat. 

The silver-haired docent had said very little of that, only "She was among those who died." 

The undying horror of the Osage "reign of terror," is that the community still lives with it. The great-grandchildren of killers attend school with the great-grandchildren of victims. In the 20s, when the FBI began to work the case, they were foiled in every way by white and red alike. Fear and shame kept mouths shut. 

That's at least part of the story Martin Scorsese will soon be telling. That's the story she asked me to tell.

Immaculate Conception is still there, welcoming guests like myself. "Our church," the woman at the visitors desk had explained. "You have to see our church."

Pawhaska is a touristy place today, home of Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman. You can shop at all kinds of specialty stores in the old downtown and buy all kinds of nice things you didn't think you needed. But like the woman in the visitor's center said, don't miss Immaculate Conception Church. That guide I had was terrific, gave a wonderful tour.  

But she seemed to appreciate it if I handled the bad stuff. I can't help but think the burden is still, a century later, almost too heavy to carry. For her, the whole tour was less of a load if I was the one who told the story.

The novelist William Faulkner lived a half a continent away, but in Pawhuska at least, "the past isn't dead," he memorably said. "It isn't even the past."

Small Wonders--Acculturation

I'm thinking there had to be a whole lot you didn't know. I'm sure some homesteaders read up on what they could, listened to the tales of whoever came back from the frontier to say hello or, sorrowfully, to admit that being the first white folks to live anywhere west of here required a whole lot more than they'd bargained for. But they couldn't know it all.

Isolation drove some of them around the bend, as it did Beret, Per Hansa's long-suffering wife, from Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth. Not long after arriving out here Beret falls into a grand funk and determines not to wish homesteading on anyone. She'd come along a dream fueled by her husband's visions. But what did they know, really--those crusading homesteaders? They were pioneers all right, sometimes prisoners of their own naivete. 

And while many thousands left when they faced odds they knew darn well they couldn't win, some stayed; some held on despite the learning curve, some rolled with the punches and came up smiling. Mrs. LeRoy Sampson, for one, who came to Minnesota in 1854 with six other families from Rhode Island, ended up that first night in a flimsy cabin shared by all those people. She says she didn't sleep a wink that night, in part because the man who'd driven them out there hadn't either. He kept himself awake in a manner that they others simply couldn't miss.

Some woeful noise out in the wilderness all around kept them awake, some baying they all believed the hungry wails of some prowling beasts--probably wolves, they thought, because they'd heard about wolves, packs of  'em, hungry, ravenous wolves, jaws dripping blood. "We none of us slept that night in the windowless cabin," she wrote, on account of all that incessant horror. 

It took some daylight hours before they realized all that noise came up off the lake they'd parked beside, from a bird, a duck-like thing whose cry was more mournful in the first light of morning than it was threatening. Minnesota didn't become a state until 1858, and it would take another whole century before some bird-er declared the loon to be the state bird. But Mrs. Sampson and all those Rhode Islanders woke up to the fact that, "In the morning noise of the loons on the lake that had kept us awake." 

Mrs. Anderson came to Minnesota that same year, 1854, never, ever having met or even seen what she might well have called "an injun'" until one of the neighborhood natives walked into her cabin and, in silence, took a seat at her table. He was, she said, "hideously painted" and likely half naked. What's more, what hung from his belt was a knife so menacing it seemed destined for terror. 

She froze. Literally. "I was overpowered in fright, and for a few minutes," she says, "I couldn't do anything. Her husband was somewhere in the field, and her two little children were asleep behind a curtain hung in the one-room cabin. She said she determined that she needed her husband. She walked out as if the man's presence was terrifying, and then ran about a quarter mile down the path to the field, when "her mother's heart," she says, let her know she absolutely could not leave her precious children alone with that man."

Here's the way she describes what she found: "Entering, I saw my little two-year old boy standing by the Indian's side playing with the things in his belt, while the Indian carefully held the baby in his arms."

The first thing she did was bring out some bread and milk, and thus, with food, began a long friendship.

It happened, in the wild wilderness, out on the frontier. You can't help but think that some stories don't get told often enough.

Small Wonders--A Prayer-bad Plague

Seriously, look at one up close. Screw up your courage, but go ahead and grab one when you can, and get up-close-and-personal. They're not animals; they're machines, I swear it. They Transformers, Civil War gunboats insects, smothered with steel plates. Even though there's no spot of muscle on those legs, they've got superhuman bounce. Still, their landings almost always flop. Nothing about them is beautiful--or graceful. They're not poetic.

They're machines. Grasshoppers are inconsiderate gluttons who'll eat anything--beets and onions right out of the ground. They'll go in after them, eat 'em raw, then attack pitchforks and hammer-handles. They'll devour this weeks's wash right off the line, eat a five-dollar bill right out of your wallet, then take on the wallet itself.

About 150 years ago, they showed up throughout the Upper Midwest, and when they did thousands of people pulled up stakes and went back east because Rocky Mountain Locusts made farming a waste of time and space, and rendered life out here plain miserable.

How bad was it? In an odd, hyphenated word, it got "prayer-bad." In 1877 Minnesota's Governor Pillsbury inaugurated a state-wide Day of Prayer. A few years before that already, people here started supplicating for the spiritual aid they wanted badly, help they believed could only come by way of miracle.

In the northern heavens something rises

from the horizon—clouds maybe,

or smoke billowing so far up into the sky

it takes my breath away, so high,

it seems the wind has wings.

Oh, my God,

they swarm as countless

as the sand on the shores of the sea.

The fields all around,

the hopes of every farmer here,

will go up like smoke and vapor,

consumed by locusts whose appetites

will not be filled ‘til everything is gone.

That's supplication, a prayer for relief, for the love of the Creator. Today, if nothing else, it pushes the imagination along to a point that we can begin to feel that those grasshopper clouds were no joke. They could--and did--wipe out a family's fortune in a half hour, then casually move along to the neighbor, ten miles an hour some claimed through their own crying eyes.

Can you see my tears, Lord? --

will you hear my voice?

I lift my soul to you on high:

Must all of what we have be lost?

So reads a translation of the prayer/poem of Jelle Pelmulder, Orange City's first schoolteacher. Estimates of what the grasshoppers cost the area run as high as 220 million, which is--take a breath--115 billion today. Out east, relatives sent missionary barrels of second-hand clothing to starving Siouxland relatives. 

Grasshopper Cross, Jefferson

In 1876, in Jefferson, SD, Father Pierre Boucher announced after Mass one Sunday morning that he would lead a processional of prayer for relief from the horrors of the plague. Dozens, even hundreds of Catholics and Protestants alike Protestants showed up and walked for six miles of country roads, erecting crosses at four places in a pattern that was itself a cross. 

Next time you're in Jefferson, ask around. Still today, those crosses--replicas, of course--are known as "the grasshopper crosses."

In Cold Spring, MN, you take a ride out of town where you can still find amid the hardwoods, a chapel with a frontice piece that features Mary, Mother of Jesus, with blessed arms outstretched over two huge Rocky Mountain Locusts. You've found Cold Springs' "Grasshopper Chapel." It's not to be missed. 

In the 1870s, all over the blessed region, the only thing more incredible than the plague of hoppers, those thieving scoundrels, were the prayers of the people. 

How bad was it back then? It was bad. It was prayer-bad.

Small Wonders--Suckow Park, Earlville

One of the cement plates standing in the park holds an image the house she lived in here in Earlville, a little white house long gone, although things likely haven't changed much in the small town where Iowa novelist Ruth Suckow once lived. Today, what's there is a little commemorative park someone keeps up. Doesn't require much, I suppose. 

An old-fashioned merry-go-round sits just beyond the picnic tables, the kind of thing that scared me, long ago, when I was a boy, and some big kid would push and push and push until we'd sail around so fast I started to believe that if I didn't fly off, my stomach would. 

There's almost nothing of a path around it, where a perfect circle of deep ruts ran around the one in the park I remember. Not so here. It looks unused.

Behind it, barely visible, is an old pump just waiting to find its way into a lawsuit. It might well have been the very pump Ruth Suckow used to get water a century ago on this street, in this place. 

Here it is. There's no handle. To say the poor thing is useless seems somehow unfeeling. Once upon time it had identity. Today it's a stubborn, iron thing city workers might just as well jerk from the well beneath it. 

The Ruth Suckow park reminds me of a Suckow story that nobody who's reading this ever read or heard of--"Home-coming." It's about a woman named Bess Gould, who'd grown up in a town named Fairhope and returned for a reunion of first settlers, having been gone for most of her life. In a way, the whole story is here in the Ruth Suckow Park, Earlville, Iowa.

"Home-coming" exquisitely captures the bittersweetness when childhood reminiscences return in lingering pastels. At first, Bess is delighted, lost in the unending parade of old-timers, each of whom prompts a memory she can't help but think might otherwise have been lost. 

Then, unexpectedly, she runs her "old flame," Charlie, a man no longer the young man without whom she once could not have imagined her life--or any life at all. For a time, Bess moves almost hopelessly back in time to a homecoming meeting that is something she hadn't planned or anticipated. 

Charlie's wife happens to be gone, which conveniently gives Ruth Suckow some space to develop what it is she wants to examine: the sheer delight of nostalgia; even more, the near impossibility of ever really forgetting first love. Bess is drawn back into a blessed childhood relationship completely and forever gone. And she knows it. But she loves it, relives it with equal doses of childhood joy and adult sadness. She knows it's all fantasy. 

But she also knows that those childhood memories are hers alone and therefore somehow sacred. Fairhope has not forgotten the initial chapters of Bess Gould's life--including her childhood Charlie; and all of that is something her loving husband will never know or understand. "She felt lost and all alone," Suckow says at the end of the story, "and her heart was wildly begging [her husband] to come. . . ."Take me away with you," she demands of him in the dream she creates in her mind. "Be everything. Make it up to me. Don't let me die away from home." 

"Home-coming" ends with Bess's painful assertion that she is not home in Fairhope, even though something very close to the heart of who she is and will always be quite magically remains along the crick where she and Charlie fished for minnows. Childhood Fairhope is a blessing and a treasure no one else knows, not even her husband. 

But, how does one care for a precious thing no one else will ever know? 

In Earlville, Iowa, Ruth Suckow's little park reminds me of that story somehow, and of Ruth Suckow herself. To sit at one of those picnic tables felt like a "home-coming," even though I'd never been there before. It was a return to Suckow's small-town Midwest realities, most of which have lost their savor among today's reading public. H. L. Mencken, her first editor, claimed to discover her and was first to publish her stories. For a decade or more, she was a Book-of-the-Month Club star, even anthologized.

But that glory is gone now. What's left is a little park in Earlville, Iowa, and, here and there perhaps, a copy of a novel or two. Aficionados like me can still sit right here on a bench on a warm summer day and read a story or two or three or four--maybe more, right here where she drew water a century ago.

Even though I'd guess I'd be alone if I did, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a joy. 

Here's the Suckow story as her park tells it:

"Ruth Suckow loved the Iowa countryside near this site. The rolling farmlands, woods, streams, and wildflowers. She called the little house that stood here, "My house." Ruth was unknown when she came to Earlville in 1920. By 1926, she had published two novels and many short stories and was recognized in this country and abroad as the author of a fresh kind of realism. Her work tells in rich detail the life of middle-western communities in the earlier part of the 20th century. The family gatherings, church suppers, holiday celebrations, school commencements. Born in Hawarden, Iowa, on August 6, 1892, Ruth died in Claremont, California, January 25, 1960.

It's not a very big park. But then, neither was the lot, I suppose. Still, it was good to sit there for a time, sit and think through the kinds of thoughts that can't be shuffled quickly through, thoughts of numbering our days.

If you're coming across Iowa, it's two minutes off Highway 20. Won't cost you much time. Who knows? You might like it. Might even like her.

'Do me a favor. If you stop, give that merry-go-round a spin, okay? Put some ruts in that thick grass. Make the place look lived in.  That'd be nice.

Small Wonders--The Todd House

Religious visions were everywhere in the years preceding the Civil War. Boom towns out west here may have been hell holes for a time, but they were also peopled by starry-eyed believers who claimed their marching orders came from on high.

Tabor, Iowa, sits on a bluff far above the Missouri, the highest point of Fremont County. The place is not in terrific shape today; but Tabor has an epic past, created when fiery abolitionist Congregationalists set up camp here, just across the river from Nebraska.

The Reverend John Todd House, in town, was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, often a port of entry to runaway slaves who weren’t free until they could be protected from slave-holders and vigilante northerners looking to make a buck from substantial bounties. There was money to be made: slaves were property, after all.

In the 1850s, slavery was under attack, and Rev. Todd was a soldier in God’s army.

Truth is, he got into trouble before there even was a Tabor. A discussion about slavery aboard the steamer he came up on became heated. Once other passengers detected an abolitionist, they wanted his scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. Todd says he learned later that man was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."

Both Iowa Congregationalists and Iowa Quakers thought the institution of slavery an abomination. What separated the two faith communities was a commitment to violence. The Quakers said no. Rev. John Todd and his Congregationalists said yes and became a prototype for an abolitionist preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

The manse of the Reverend John Todd sits right on the square in Tabor--don’t expect a palace. But the old house still has an tiny door leading down to a dank basement. John Todd was no more than a shim over five and a half feet tall, so what’s downstairs is more his size, a cave really, not inviting.

But if you stop by, don’t not go downstairs. At one point in time that basement was an armory full of guns for the war he thought about to begin in "Bleeding Kansas."

What's there today? Nothing. No cement floor, just dirt, a humming dehumidifier, random stones, bricks. That cellar was was never meant to be lived in. It was a place to hide when the prairie sky turned foreboding.

At the request of none other than fiery John Brown, who stayed right there in Tabor, Pastor Todd stocked his house full of guns because he simply could not abide the sin of slavery. Slaves, he and his friend John Brown claimed, had a more righteous reason for rebellion than did patriot colonists a century before.

In his own memoir of that era, Todd described himself and what happened this way:

The parson had one brass canon on his haymow, and another on wheels in his wagon shed. He had also boxes of clothing, boxes of ammunition, boxes of muskets, boxes of sabres, and twenty boxes of Sharps rifles stowed away in the cellar all winter.

The preacher took up arms. His eyes had seen the glory.

You'll have to get off the beaten track to find Tabor, and you’ll have to call ahead to to get in the house. Not many Americans stop there anymore, if they ever did.

But the basement still beckons, and the memory of that time and place and the war it begat somehow seems more real when you stand beneath ancient beams on a dirt floor, where once a preacher readied himself for a war that God meant to happen, a war to free the slaves.

Small Wonder(s)--the Soddie

I used to say there weren't any great old songs about soddies because no one went all rhapsodic living in dirt. A sod house may well have kept out heat and cold in remarkably efficient ways and not once blown away in billowing prairie winds. What's more, sod houses sure as anything were a shelter in the time of storm. But as far as I knew, nobody ever penned a melody that found its way into the American soul--not about soddies. No siree.

Then I found one. Just yesterday. A song about a soddie. Let's be plain here: it's not got the lyrical staying power of "Home on the Range" or "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds," but it's there anyway. So here's a song about soddies: 

When we left our home back yonder we had all that mortal needs:horses, cows and tools abundant, household goods and gardens seeds,
covered wagon full to bursting, Bob and Betty full of glee;
going west to take a homestead, happy kiddies, Kate and me. 

Soon we landed in Nebraska where they had much land to spare,
But most ever since we've been here, we've been mad enough to swear;
First, we built for us a 'sod house' and we tried to raise some trees;
But the land was full of coyotes and our sod house full of fleas.

I know you're saying there's nothing about that ode that's in the least bit celebratory. Whatever sod-buster penned it wasn't much taken with his earthly abode. There's no wide copper bowl of sky above or endless miles of black-eyed susans waving their arms before the Almighty. That ditty is no tribute.

But then, how can anyone be nostalgic about snakes winding out of the ceiling, about ever muddy floors and thick, semi-darkness mid day. Twas a blessing to have a window. Sometimes the only hole in the soddie's three-foot walls was covered in muslin, to keep out. . .well, everything, but at least leave a light on in what otherwise would be abysmal darkness. The only memory this little song musters is forever fleas.

The very first earth dwellings in much of Sioux County, Iowa, weren't even soddies. They were dugouts. Didn't cost a dime but labor, of course, and a dugout, a fox hole, got you out of the wind. It turned you into a worm maybe, but at least you didn't freeze to death in January. Even tornadoes were mostly powerless. Dugouts and soddies were an insulator's dream, but they never came clean. How could they?--they were dirt. 

They required constant maintenance because when the dirt settled--which is always did--you had to fill the holes with something. Not fun.

But you could put 'em up in just a few days, especially where the earth took kindly to be losing its skin. Cost?--five bucks at worst, and whatever it might cost you for a window. Efficient, yes. Ecological?--to a fault. Environmentally attuned?--perfect. Frank Lloyd Wright must have had soddies in mind when he designed his places because they sure as heck fit faultlessly into grassland landscapes.

Not many homesteading Iowans started out in soddies because east of here, sufficient trees made log cabins the much-preferred real estate. But out here trees went as a premium because rivers weren't abundant. If you wanted to homestead much of Sioux County, take possession of some of the best farmland on the continent, your first move was to start cutting sod. 

Nobody stayed long. If you wanted to prove up the claim, you had to make your 160 acres look like it was producing in every way, including the domicile. Average stays in the sod, people say, were about five years. I'm guessing when they were abandoned, no one shed a tear.

No romance either. Most were just one room for the whole family. Not far from here, one immigrant family took in another, so the whole bunch slept in eight-hour shifts. There just wasn't room. 

That hymn to the prairie, up top, is the closest I've ever come to someone actually sitting down, pen in hand, to write out a memory of a way of life once upon a time all around us here, but never, ever beloved. 

The soddie. For some here, it got us by. Thanks be to God, it got us by.

Small Wonder(s)--Fur Trappers descending the Missouri

I'd say it's morning, mid-summer in the calendar year. You know the type: a slight haze lies over just about everything. All seems veiled, the horizon barely discernible. What shrouds everything isn't fog, but a wet glaze you can feel against your face. I'd say, likely as not it's July.

Two men sit in a cottonwood canoe, in no particular hurry. They're toting a bundle of furs downriver, right here on the Missouri. A slight wind carries smoke from the man's pipe out behind him in a silver ribbon. 

The man's not dressed like a trapper. His flouncy pink blouse makes him look more of a dandy than a mountain man--and that hat would be a joke if history didn't tell us it had a name and a story. It's "a freedom hat," a stocking cap--a toque, this Frenchman would call it, that at one time--at his time--veritably proclaimed his assertion of liberty. It's a "liberty hat," circa 1820, its roots in rebel gay Paree, and it's worn with pride, here, on the American frontier by an icon, the fur trapper.

The canoe rides low in the river because the catch has been substantial. A kid is hanging over the bundle, smiling happily, and why wouldn't he? It's a golden summer morning, their trek into the wilds has been successful, and the two of them are bound home or somewhere to sell the bounty. A tranquil July morning on the Missouri River. You know the type.

Fur Trappers descending the Missouri is without a doubt George Caleb Bingham's most famous painting. It catches river trapping lore as fittingly as a coonskin cap or a Bowie knife. Bingham's famous painting rode the back cover of the American Lit anthology I used through twenty years of teaching. Always loved it because it seemed so, well, home. Those two are right here, after all, on our Missouri River.

But the painting wasn't always named that way. Bingham titled it Fur Trader, Half-breed Son, a title thought by some to be scandalously un-p.c., the word half-breed not to be spoken in mixed company. Fur Trappers descending the Missouri is far more heroic than Fur Trader, Half-breed Son, and vastly less embarrassing.

But I think it's helpful to know what George Caleb Bingham intended. He meant that kid in the middle of the canoe--he gave him jet black hair, after all--to be the son of Native American woman, the Frenchman's wife maybe, then again maybe not. While the term half-breed and the original title risks offense, it also defines the moment in 19th century river history when Euro- and Native Americans got along in almost every way--royally, if I can use that word in a painting all about liberty. 

And then there's the third canoe character, the cat, a black cat, ears perked, watching the artist maybe, and seemingly not in the least nervous or worried about being aboard a cottonwood canoe with nothing on either side by Missouri River. A cat. I wish you could see it. A black cat on the Missouri canoe.

Now you might think--I certainly did--that there was no excuse for George Caleb Bingham to put a cat on the canoe, no reason but one: Bingham was a cat-lover. 

Whether he was or not is immaterial. Turns out Sioux City, Iowa, likely had a multitude of cats back then because every last steamboat to come up river needed mousers lots of them. River vessels of all types and sizes hosted mice and rats by the dozen, even hundreds, enough to chew up through cargo and push the ships belly-up. 

Even fur trappers needed cats because mice could hide in indiscernable cracks and destroy a year's furs without breaking a sweat. Cats were put to work, even canoe cats. They weren't doled handouts. Bingham's jet black feline looks arrogant up there in front of the canoe, but then most cats are. 

And they had a right to be. If those two guys behind were all about liberty, someone, after all, had to remind the viewer that liberty didn't come without cost. Someone had to tend the bounty, be sure all those goods made it home. 

It's all there in a famous old painting, an image that feels at home right here, despite all the years and the change. Somehow, it's still right here in the neighborhood. If you want to be particular, Bingham's particular school of painting is called luminist, because its landscape is so tranquil in the generous morning light. 

Maybe. But who cares? We know that morning is neither unique or rare, because Bingham's particular morning is still here, still ours.

Small Wonders--Land of the Cottonwoods

Cottonwood, LaFrambois Island

Maybe you've heard. As unlikely as it seems, trees may be our saviors. Researchers somewhere have determined we could plant 2.5 billion acres of new trees without losing an inch of farmland or even cutting back on urban sprawl; and those billions of trees--deep breath here--can sweep up and away 200 gigatons of the carbon we create, carbon that's warming us dangerously. As Margaret Renkl said in a recent Times Opinion piece, "Planting trees. . .could go a long way toward saving us from ourselves."

If that's true, and if we do start, then I hope--I really do--that more than a few are cottonwoods.

Now, I know some people--farmers mainly--think cottonwoods are just xxl weeds. I get that. Cottonwoods grow as fast as hybrid corn, yield a wood so soft it's hardly worth burning, leave yards full of trash in almost every season, and, out here at least, sometimes look martyred to the wind, their branches broken and bent, victims of never-ending Great Plains weather wars.

In winter, they're naked as jay birds, looming giants in the grove. Speaking of winter, cottonwoods haven't a clue about seasons--they snow in summer, leaving fussy cotton-ny trash over everything. They're messy as two-year olds, even the ancients, the ones so barrel-chested they take up the whole yard.

Whether, as a species, they Hoover-up carbon is a question I can't answer, but in many ways cottonwoods were long ago already our saviors out here, where, often as not, they were the only tree--the only visible outline of anything--like a huge upturned buoy in an ocean of grass. Native people turned cottonwood groves into prayer rooms. Wherever two or three poplars are gathered, wagon trains considered them rest stops: there had to be water nearby.

Cottonwoods do best near water. A friend of mine who knows such things, once told me that cottonwood seeds require a good soaking to germinate, need floods in fact, do well in them, can't live without them. On LaFrambois Island, east of Pierre, you can't miss dozens of newly-planted, three-foot cottonwoods, each preciously fenced in. Ever since the Missouri's dam system controls flooding--mostly--those baby cottonwoods need to be planted, not created as they'd been for thousands of years.

Did I mention the bark--amazing stuff, beautiful in its own gruff way, thick and ribbed and rumbly. Woodcarvers peel it away from dying cottonwoods because it carves up sweetly, soft as clay almost, I'm told.  

Big blue stem doesn't reign over Siouxland as it once did. Today, corn and soybeans cover the earth. Nothing that grows up from our blessed Loess soil is as thoroughly native as our cottonwoods, the trees that tower above farm groves, the stand-alone giants ones that look like royalty across otherwise empty fields, the broken figures whose battered branches best tell the stories of the plains. They're heroes.

Buffalo loved rubbing their sides up against that that unmistakable furrowed bark. Sometimes lonely cottonwoods in all that prairie land would be flooded by a moat of buffalo fur three feet deep, what was left behind when an endless herd rubbed up against it.

There's one growing in our flower garden right now--three feet tall maybe, a single buggy whip of a tree, a little quaking aspen cottonwood. Really should go. Really should get pulled. It's not supposed to be there. Really, it's a weed.

But it's a weed with a history, a weed that wants a chance to grow. And we need trees. Researchers claim they're our best shot against global warming. Besides, look at what they've done for us. 

Might as well hold back the wind. Might as well draw the curtains on all that open sky. Might as well let that little cottonwood alone. Let it be, just let it be.  

Small Wonder(s)--The James Gang

For the record, the Rock Island Express the boys hit that night was eight cars long--four coaches, two sleepers, and two baggage and express cars. It had left Council Bluffs late afternoon, at five, on a run to Chicago. Oddly enough, the last sleeper was full of Chinese students on their way to colleges out east. It was July 21, 1873.

The thing is, no one had ever even imagined the idea that a bunch of tough guys would stop a train, stop it in its tracks, shoot up a storm with the guns in their hands, get on board, and go from seat to seat demanding people's cash and whatever else they spotted. What happened that night, 65 miles east of Des Moines, was the very first train robbery in American history; and it happened just outside of Adair, Iowa, at a spot you can visit yet today, a place where an immense railroad engine wheel is set in the earth in memory of a wild and nasty thing that happened right there that night.

The sun's going down at 8:30, but there's plenty enough light for an engineer with his wits about him to spot a line of track that's bent out of shape by someone or something. When John Rafferty saw trouble coming, he threw that monster into reverse and stopped all that tonnage as fast as he could, thereby playing into the hands of the James boys.

Just one word explains a scrapbook full of wild west 19th century behavior. It's four letters long, and names a bright and shiny object that stole a nation's attention--gold. Frank and Jesse James got the word that the Rock Island was carrying lots of it from Colorado. Gold is what they were after that night.

But it was coming later. Wrong time. Wrong train. 

No matter. That heist, right down the road, stunned locals and shocked a nation. Who would have believed "six large, athletic men dressed in KuKlux style" could bring a monster railroad to a stop, rob it blind, and kill good men? It happened. Engineer Rafferty died that night, thrown out when the engine ran into a bank and flipped. 

There was no gold, but when the James gang tallied the loot, they'd still grabbed a couple thousand and change, not bad for more fifteen minutes of violent crime. And they'd made history, put "the James Gang," all caps, across the covers of a dozen dime novels. Stopping that Rock Island Express put them on a fast track to mythic glory, Robin Hood and a prairie band of merry men.

There's more to the story. Jesse James was a kid still learning to shave when Bloody Bill Anderson's gang of Confederate guerrillas committed unspeakable atrocities in western Missouri. Jesse was of one of 'em. He was in it when Bloody Bill slaughtered Union soldiers and sliced them up like butchers do. Little Jesse James a bushwhacker who carried out unspeakable atrocities in a place where the Civil War created conflicts that were always neighbor against neighbor. 

The greatly fabled Jesse James was raised bloody, sired in conflict, reared by war. He'd learned to rob trains long before even he had the idea. When he should have been in Sunday School, he was scalping the enemy. 

For years Jesse James got more ink than almost anyone out west, but people rarely read the whole story.

When Robert E. Lee handed his sword to General Grant at Appomattox, the war ended, but not all the violence did. Some washed up here, outside of Adair, in July of 1883, when a gang of thugs stopped the Rock Island Express. 

No one could have guessed.

Small Wonder(s)--Jedidiah Smith

Don't know whether he actually carried the Good Book through the west in those early years. The story goes he took carried a copy of the Journals of Lewis and Clark, but whether or not he lugged the scriptures along may not be all that important. What nobody doubts was that Jedidiah Smith forever carried the Good Book in his heart, which made him peculiar among fur-trappers who traveled the Great River Trail, circa 1820.

He didn't carp about religion, didn't hound people like some old parson. He just kind of lived it, selfless. Everybody knew it.

Jedidiah was born in 1799, at a place called Jericho, New York. Of his parents' fourteen kids, he was number six. Like others, Jedidiah Smith got a taste for the west, for the wilderness beyond. When he spotted a fur company ad looking to recruit men, he left Jericho for St. Louis, wild and lawless. 

If you think I'm lying, stop by the Sgt. Floyd River Boat Museum and look for a beaver hat--not coonskin, beaver. They’ve got one. Millions of Europeans went beaver hat-crazy. If you wanted to be someone, sir, you needed a beaver hat, which made the trapping beaver one of the best ways to make a life.

Jedidiah Smith joined a crew of fur trappers that came that passed this way  up the Missouri, I'm sure, on their way north and west. But this Jedidiah wasn't just another adventurer. What he pocketed went back to Jericho. His aging parents had nothing. "It is that I may be able to help those who stand in need that I face every danger," he told his brother in a letter, "--it is for this that I traverse the mountains covered with eternal snow--it is for this that I pass over sandy plains in the heart of summer. . ." Then he wrote, "Let it be the greatest pleasure that we can enjoy to smooth the pillow of [our parents] age and as much as in us lies, take from them all cause of trouble."

This Jedidiah Smith was straight-up good.

Didn't take long for myths to build. He made his reputation when he stood fast in a firestorm, a surprise attack by several hundred Rees on ninety trappers in the employ of the Great Missouri Fur Company, an attack that did not fare well for the Company.

It was Jedidah's first trip up the river. It wouldn't be his last, but it would be the trip that created an aura because he stood fast on a sandbar, protecting horses they'd traded. As everyone who survived saw with their own eyes, Jedidiah Smith was the last to leave.

What the boss understood once his boats pulled away far enough to escape the rain of bullets was that his crew would need help. He asked for a volunteer. Guess who raised his hand--a young guy who'd never been anywhere near the Missouri before.

Jedidiah had fought to the bitter, bloody end, then volunteered to chase down river and bring help. All of that didn't go unnoticed.

And then there was this. Twelve men died in that bloody fight; of the eleven more wounded, two would die soon. They'd seen one of their friends sliced up horribly. Now, the dead had to be buried. Whatever else his steadfast faith gifted him to do, he had a level of peace that went way beyond mot fighting mountain men. "Then let us come forward with faith," he wrote in his journal, "nothing doubting, and He will most unquestionably hear us."

That he would step forward at the burial of the company's dead that day makes all kinds of sense. Jedidiah Smith volunteered to stand up in front of the others, hands folded, head bowed, to offer a prayer, a prayer Hugh Glass later described with these few words: "Mr. Smith, a young man of our company made a powerful prayer which moved us all greatly."

People like to say, that funeral out in the wilds was the first act of Christian public worship anywhere near the Upper Missouri. It wasn't the end of Jedidiah Smith's fur-trapping adventures on the Missouri River, only the beginning.

Small Wonder(s)--The Missouri River Trail

The Sioux City Boy Scouts were there to lead the assembly in the Pledge of Allegiance. And the school band from Central High offered some fitting selections. The Sioux City Journal claims there were 300 folks in attendance at the dedication that Sunday afternoon, a goodly crowd of citizenry in 1929.

The whole enterprise, the dedication of a brass plaque on a monument marking the old Missouri River Trail, was undertaken by the local Martha Washington Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It was a community-wide event; everyone was welcome to celebrate the history of region, a time long before white men came north up the river or west from across the state.  Two great-granddaughters of pioneer Sioux City families had the distinguished honor of unveiling the monument.

Sioux City celebrated its own history. In 1929, the city's western hills still wore the visible memory of that ancient trail, a passage up and through tall grass prairie that ran over the river's massive shoulders, a roadway laid down there by innumerable moccasins and a countless number of travois pulled along dogs and horses.

Sioux City's old Missouri River Trail was more ancient than anything left behind by the Corps of Discovery, centuries older than Sgt. Floyd's grave. Once upon a time it was a thoroughfare for First Nations from the entire region, Omaha and Yankton, Osage and Ioway, all of whom at one time or another had moved north or south beside the Missouri.

And part of that long trail was right here. You could see it on Sunday, May 26, 1929, when people climbed the hill close to what was then War Eagle Park, and circled up around "a large granite boulder of irregular shape being six feet through at the widest part," or so that stone was described in that year's DAR minutes, a boulder that's still there today.

And now, the big story. The plaque, the stone, the celebration, and that trail, the Missouri River Trail, were completely forgotten, not by a few but by all. The whole event and what it celebrated, the ancient, storied thoroughfare through Sioux City's hills was gone from the city's collective memory until Marta Nelson, a Vice Regent of today's DAR, happened to page through the old minutes and discovered a dedicatory program dated May 26, 1929 for something called "The Missouri River Trail."

Through almost endless detective work, and with the help of the city's most dedicated historians, all of that story--save the trail itself--came slowly back into focus. The Journal had chronicled the event; and their stories were there, easily accessible. Still, no one knew anything about a six-foot wide granite rock somewhere in the neighborhood of War Eagle Monument.

The hunt began. A note went out in the paper, and just a day later someone responded. He thought he walked past that odd stone daily when he walked his dog. Didn't know for sure if it was the same stone, but it was an anomaly where it sat, up on the hill, all alone. No plaque, he said, at least nothing he'd ever seen.

That stone wasn't hard to find, and there on its northern side were four drilled holes that matched the exact size of the plaque the committee had created for the 1929 commemoration.

You can find it yourself. Just follow the little gravel road off the path to the War Eagle monument. There's a sign. In truth, it's not much to see, but the drilled holes are clearly visible.

It's in the woods, woods that wouldn't have been there 200 years ago. Prairie fires had a mean habit of burning down pretty much everything in sight. Try as I might, I couldn't see a path or trail through the trees.

But don't let that stop you. That stone is off the beaten path. Likely as not you'll be alone. Just stand there for a while and imagine. Think of processional of Native people, whole families, come up throug the trees, smiling and laughing, an occasional whinny or nicker from those horses. Maybe a dog will bark--don't mind it. A whole troop, dozens--men and women, old and young.

Just watch. Stand there at the rock marking the spot, stand there and listen.

Small Wonder(s)--A Fort Randall family

There's no fort there anymore. Unlike Laramie or Robinson or Scott or Wingate, where you can still almost hear the history, Ft. Randall has only a busted-up chapel and a long, thin graveyard. If a state highway didn't run right by, no one would ever stop; no one would know, and only a few would remember. 

Fort Randall's great claim to fame is having held Sitting Bull and his people when they returned from Canada some time after Little Big Horn. Once upon a time, Sitting Bull was detained, incarcerated here. 

Sitting Bull and his wife at Fort Randall

Unlike Fort Robinson, where Crazy Horse was murdered and the Northern Cheyenne made a mad and bloody dash north for home; and unlike Fort Laramie, where not one but two vapid treaties were signed--neither of them worth much; Ft. Randall has no memorable storied history. Beauty?--yes, nesting as it does in those broad hills just west of the Missouri. Once upon a time it must have bustled, the only place west of Yankton where you'd find enough people for a parade. 

Today there's a dam there, one of several on Old Muddy. What's more, there's a sparkling lake and perch and walleye and bass galore, fishing tournaments just about every summer weekend. But if you have the time, stop by the graveyard just up the hill from the old chapel. Take a walk around the place--it's not all that big and the graves are all marked. 


If you do, look for these three. I googled the name, but came up with nothing, in large part, I suppose, because none of them really ever amounted to much--"DAVID DEZAIRE," the first in line says, "Indian Interpreter." He died May 8, 1875, a year before Little Big Horn. Doesn't say why or how. Ft. Randall is far enough east that it stayed out of danger during the Great Sioux Wars, so I'm guessing DEZAIRE died right there at the fort. 

And I'm assuming he was Native--or part Native. The name doesn't suggest a racial or ethnic flavor, although it might be French, which would not be strange. Like so many other "mixed bloods," his genetic code may have carried the DNA of some rough-hewn French-Canadian trapper. Chances are he was of mixed parentage, although he might have been white, might have been raised on the reservation, a missionary kid. Still, even google can't locate the name.

And then there's his wife, Ashotia. Don't know how to pronounce the name really. The stone is helpful--it says she was a "colored citizen." Is that simply what somebody charged with writing on the stone wrote in, or does the designation have meaning? And why citizen? And why no date of death? 

Their daughter Sophie has one, after all--December 22, 1876, a year and a half after her father died, and three days before Christmas. If Mom was Black, Dad was Indian--maybe mixed blood--in the 1890s, Sophie likely would have had a low ceiling for possibilities. Fifty years before, Washington had designated a reservation on the Nemaha River, south on the Missouri, just for mixed bloods. That's true. 

Even though we don't know them, their being buried here beneath stones that still bear their names makes them privileged people. Translators weren't dime a dozen in Dakota Territory, especially if you were worth your salt, trustworthy, responsible. These three stones suggest a family unit intact. 

But the DEZAIRE family is long gone, along with their stories. Maybe they weren't among "the least of these" here at Ft. Randall. Maybe they had their own kind of standing. Here's Sitting Bull's people, incarcerated at Ft. Randall after "Custer's Last Stand." They look diminished. If any of them died, I doubt they got stones in the fort cemetery. 

When, after the Dakota War, the Fool Soldiers brought the Shetek captives they'd rescued to Ft. Randall, some rescuers were killed. People say that some of them dug their own graves, then fell into them when soldiers gunned them down. They were only Indians. I'm guessing those graves aren't marked.

But this family, somehow they were respected, even appreciated. They got stones. They must have had a place. Still do. Even if their stories are gone, their names remain--all three together. Someone even left descriptions. 

When you get out of the boat, clean the fish, put 'em on ice, and then drive across the dam to the west side. You'll see the chapel. The graveyard's harder to spot. But go find it, because even if that's all you'll see, those three stones are worth your time. Stop by and pay your respects to mom and dad and their little girl, Sophie. 

Ft. Randall chapel