From the Homestead (5)--The Last of the Buffalo

"Now, boys, is our time for fun." That's what the hoity-toity artist said when he saw a mass of buffalo Comstock, the rancher, had spotted along the Republican River just a few miles east of Red Cloud and west of Superior, the last prime buffalo hunting ground anywhere in the States in 1863. "Our time for fun," the artist told them.

Albert Bierstadt, whose paintings hang in dozens of American art museums today, was on his way back east from California when he stopped in Nebraska. He and a newspaper man traveling with him stopped at the Oak Grove Ranch when he decided to try his hand--not at hunting buffalo but painting them. Comstock and his men armed themselves with rifles; Bierstadt packed brushes.

What fun? Bierstadt wanted to see an angry buffalo. "I want to see him so mad that he'll bellow and tear up the ground," Bierstadt told Comstock.

That kind of rage might take some doing, Comstock thought, might even get them killed. But the rancher aimed to please his famous guest. He told Bierstadt that for his own benefit, he should put up that easel of his on a knoll east of the herd, a sweet spot for him to sit and create the long drawn prairie background Comstock was proud of, his land, the place he'd chosen to live.

Once that landscape was down on canvas, Comstock said he and son and a neighbor named Eubanks would create the kind of scene Bierstadt said he wanted to capture. The three of them would pick out a bull and wound him hot-blooded, then get him to pose. That was the plan.

All of 170 years later, this whole business sounds beastly and wasteful; but it is, after all, 170 years later. At the time, killing buffalo was no less rare than killing cattle for Big Macs. Besides, this killing had a lofty mission--this whole thing was being done in the cause of art.

Eubanks, the neighbor, would shoulder his rifle from a draw near Bierstadt and his canvas, should the mad beast decide for some strange reason not to sit still for the portrait. Comstock determined the best way to get the action the artist wanted was for him--for Comstock--to wound that big fellow with a .45, then get him more steamed by waving a red flag right in front of his fat face. Once that bull was on fire, Comstock figured to give him a round with the rifle and steer him out toward that knoll where he'd soon enough attain eternal life as art.

Plan worked perfectly. The wounded buffalo spit and spun and bellered, just as predicted, and charged Comstock, who was aboard a horse so expert he eluded the mad charge, all the while circling bloody animal and aiming him toward the artist.

But the story goes that Comstock played it out just a bit too close and, a good 300 yards away from that knoll, got himself beside the buffalo where that angry old bull couldn't see him. Just like that, that buffalo raised his huge shaggy head like a dying king and looked straight up the rise at Alfred Bierstadt, whereupon he started pawing and bellowing--the buffalo that is.

Bierstadt cried out for help and took off running faster than he himself ever thought he was able, and that insane bull made short work of the easel, bits and pieces flying all over the prairie. A couple of seconds later, he took off after the artist.

Now nobody can prove this part, but what Comstock remembered, he used to say, was -Bierstadt the artist running so fast his swallow-tail coat flowed out behind him so straight and hard the whole gang could have played a couple hands of euchre right there on the table that fancy coat became.

But why Eubanks didn't shoot that big fella was something Comstock couldn't help wondering. Then, finally, with that bull right there taking aim at that artist's behind, that rifle cracked and the buffalo met his end and fell in his tracks. For years, Comstock told people who'd listen to his storytelling that Bierstadt fell over himself, wiped out, but saved from "a fearful death."

Several days it took for him to recover, during which time he started in another canvas that ferocious image in front of him, in his mind and heart. He did everything he could to get it right. He was an artist, after all.

And that's the end of story, at least the Lost Creek part. But there's more.

In 1998, the U. S. Postal Service created a series of commemorative stamps to celebrate American art. One of them featured a massive painting (six feet tall and ten feet wide), wide as the prairie itself, by an artist named Albert Bierstadt, a truly American epic painting titled The Last of the Buffalo. You may have seen the stamp. May even remember it. In case you missed it, here 'it is.

There's more. Already a century before, Bierstadt's painting, The Last of the Buffalo, was put up for sale at the Chicago Exposition. It sold--hold your breath--for $75,000.

And no, that's not Comstock riding the majestic white horse; it's something like a a bare-naked cigar-store Indian deliberately chosen and outfitted to make rich Easterners drool.

If you look close, that landscape's not Nebraska either. No Cornhuskers can claim anything close to mountains like those in the background.

Albert Bierstadt knew how to paint sprawling landscapes and he also knew how to sell what he committed to canvas.

But Comstock, the rancher?--that man knew the real story, and was more than happy to tell it, right up to his grave.

Sunday Morning Meds--Still a smile

“All our days pass away under your wrath; 

we finish our years with a moan.” Psalm 90:9

A friend of mine sent me a poem. She's been thinking about Rahab the harlot, loved by men of God—several maybe—and God. Definitions aren't exactly the same, of course; but the voice of this poem--and it's a woman's voice--asks if all Rahab’s men used her, or if maybe there were some who did not: “did not some/come to love/her?” the poem asks.

Didn't someone love her? Just one maybe? A lovely, painful question.

My first memorable sexual experience happened when I was just a kid. It seemed to me—I may be wrong—that the event was delightfully mutual. She was by reputation more willing than most. Regardless, the two of us didn't do anything awful or unseemly. From the vantage point of all these years, it seems to me we merely played. Right now, honestly, I smile to remember.

I was attracted to her that night, in part, because she seemed offering something. Her tank top was a triangular shift of cloth, orange, pulled across her chest and fastened with two pair of cottony strings over a naked back. It's amazing that I remember, then again maybe not.

A certain inevitability led our flirting to a darkened backyard away from the crowd at the city park, where we lay together in the damp grass. It was, I swear it, Fourth of July. Soon enough, she let me slide my hand beneath that tank top.

Basically, that's the story. A year or so later we went to the same high school but ran in different circles.  I didn't lust or chase after her. Never really talked to her at all that I remember.

A couple years later, in college and alone, I went back to her, even made our relationship public enough to prompt my older sisters to take me aside and tell me the word on the street was that their little brother was slumming, seeing that girl. Soon enough, I went back to college.

That's the whole story. She was no Rahab, but I'm quite sure there were more of me. Still, what I remember about my relationship to that girl is that it was physical. I honestly believe she enjoyed it all as much as I did. Nothing untoward happened. I never tried to push things. 

Today she's probably a church-going grandma, 65 years old and loved by God, I'm sure. It would be nice to be able to be able to tell her an answer to what the poem asks—that I was one who loved her, love itself being the kind of elastic word it is. 

That old story comes back to me now because I often feel the darkness this particular line from Psalm 90 prompts: "All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan." Ouch. 

Sometimes I really do feel my age: indigestion has been a plague all week; I don’t sleep well; my back kills me in the morning; I fade by 10:30, out like a light. My life as yet is not a moan, thanks be to God; but once in a while I feel a bellow welling up within my soul. 

I'm sure this whole memory is little more than a fantasy that offers lost innocence and the thrill of playful fleshy conquest. Truth be told, it still makes me smile.

It wouldn't be proper, of course, but maybe I'd like to tell that grandma, wherever she is, that some of the boys who played with her loved her--I mean, sort of--me among them because I'm guessing I'm not the only one with memories that in these days that are passing away still bring with them a smile.

The Savior

I am not putting up another picture of Donald Trump

His is not a rags-to-riches story. Anything but. He was 25 when he was given prominence in his father's real estate company, where he made money by selling properties--except not to African-Americans. Yeah, well, so did everyone else at the time, his people say. 

For several years he directed beauty pageants, was accused by one contestant of groping, and made it very clear--all of this is documented--that the contestants would not include African-American women. Well, sure, but there was a ton of racism back then.

When he built the Trump Tower, he imported Polish workers, illegally, and paid them less than $5 an hour, then threatened them with deportation if they said anything. Hey, he was just making great deals, all right? He's a mover and a shaker, and that's the American way.

Trump casinos do not have the kind of balance sheets that would make anyone think their owner was some brilliant financial wizard. Far from it. No pain, no gain, right? At least he's not squirreling his money away. It's out there. Besides, the casino business is cutthroat. Lots of people go under. Try it yourself.

The last time Donald Trump released his tax returns, he'd paid no taxes at all. Zero. Now, he won't, claiming he's being audited, but the IRS shrugs its shoulders. So who doesn't try to get by as cheap as he can, right? If the guy's got the bucks for high-cost lawyers, then what the hell? It's the way things operate in the good old U. S. of A. Besides, you know he forks out big bucks to politicians, right? That's legal.

He's had three wives and that two of them were left behind when he rather publicly carried on tabloid affairs with the curvier young things who subsequently replaced the losers. Yeah, well, there's something rattling around in everyone's closet if you just look around.

I'm plagiarizing a bit here, following the outline of an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in yesterday's NY Times. Kristof often writes about otherwise nameless people in faraway places where there's far too much suffering, people who are somehow persistently making a difference. Or trying.

Yesterday not. Yesterday for Nicholas Kristof, it was Donald Trump.

"Whether in his youth, in his business career or in his personal life," Kristof says, "Trump’s story is that of a shallow egoist who uses those around him."

And then he ends the piece this way:  

"His life is a vacuum of principle, and he never seems to have stood up for anything larger than himself. Over seven decades, there’s one continuous theme to his life story: This is a narcissist who has no core. The lights are on, but no one’s home."

That's how it ends, but none of it will lay a glove on the Donald. Nada. Nothing. To his disciples, he's the savior.

From the Homestead (4)--What's Proverbial

"What the f... were you doing?" the old guy said, climbing out of the old maroon-ish Buick, crawling maybe better describes it. My first thought was that he was drunk. The spew of anger didn't quit once he sort of got to his feet. 

I took his abuse manfully because no matter what shade of death he looked like, I. Hit. Him. His car, that is. His old mostly maroon pinto Buick.

I'd been looking around southeast Nebraska, wandered into a town whose name I didn't even know, rumbled down a brick-laid Main Street past a dozen shuttered businesses, then turned west. When I missed a turn toward an old gas station that could have made a Depression-era postcard. I stopped, put the Explorer in reverse, and bang! hit him. I had no idea he was behind me, never checked a mirror, just backed into that Buick. 

Bang. Slap an exclamation point on because it wasn't a nudge. I thought there would be something approaching major damage. Until I saw the old guy's car.

I was saying he crawled out. Maybe I should put it this way--he spilled out. Wasn't pretty. Hair like Bernie Sanders on a bad day, two day's beard, suspenders working hard to tug up blue jeans with a waist big enough for another him. When he leaned over the grill, he was all heinder. Depression-era gas station? This guy was Depression-era. He could mouth a cigarette--little cigars actually, one after another--and never stop cussing.

None of that altered the bare facts. Whatever happened was my fault. His old Buick didn't hold more than six inches of original paint job in any single spot. The front bumper was banged, and the truth is, there really seemed to me to be nothing new. 

Except what he found."Look at this," he says, pointing as if there were gold in them there wrinkles. "That's new--that's new." A kind of split lip on that aluminum strip around the bumper. "Sure, that's new," he said. "That'n never was there before." Here and there an exploding expletive. 

I told him I'd write down my name and address, but he says he's got to call in the police. 

The cop is shouldered like an ex-Husker defensive end, all of 300 pounds. Somehow, even though I'm white as a snowman, I tell myself I've fallen into the Twilight Zone and an episode of In the Heat of the Night.  Huge cop takes my license and registration, then the old guy's, then retires to his all-terrain vehicle and snaps on the flashing lights, dramatics we really didn't need. In town, me and the old guy and our old cars were the whole story that afternoon.

I don't need to hear any more of the old crank's spittin', so I go back to the Explorer and wait while the he creeps around that Buick looking for collateral damage. I can see a bill coming my way, a thousand dollars on a wreck I could probably take off his hands right then for a song.

But I'm not mad because my Calvinist soul tells me the straight up truth: I'm guilty as heck. I never looked. Couldn't have been going more than four mph, but I never checked the rearview.

The burly cop is doing his paperwork, so I figure I might as well talk to the old guy, whose now on his fourth cigarillo. 

He's got both elbows up on the rear fender, that smoke between his fingers. "May just as well take a load off," he says inviting me to lean up against the Buick. 

I nod and tell him I'm too old to stand up too long--feet hurt. He hurrumphs, and I wonder for the first time--I really do--if I'm actually older than he is. He still seems a little drunk, but the cop made nothing of it. Besides, I'm the idiot here, the one at fault.

"Whatcha' doing here anyway?" he says, as if the cosmos didn't approve of all this.

"Tourist, sort of," I say, then again, "sort of." I'd just read a book that told me an old Oto village used to be just down the road, I tell him, 1880s or so. "I wanted to go look," I said, "--see if I could find anything."

"Over to Barnston?" he says. "There's an old school there, mission or something," he says. "You see it? Somebody said they're still keeping it up."

"Where?" I said.

"Right there on 8," he says.

"You're kidding."

"You didn't see it? Just up the hill there. Still standing, I think."

Now I'm mad. I'd driven all the way out, scouted around an old burg even more in shambles, looking for some sign of the Oto-Missouria, and I missed it completely. "Don't tell me I just didn't go far enough," I say.

"Think so," he says. "What the hell you doing out there anyway?" But, listen, there's a difference now. He's asking. He's no longer mad.

And so we talk. And so by the time that Husker-shouldered cop gets out of his car, the two of are buddies. Seriously. "You know that gas station you were aiming to see?" he asks me before the cop gets to us. "Used to work there myself." He points up the street.

"No kidding," I say. "How many years back?"

"Don't know," he says.  "Thirty?"

Fact is, soon enough we're fast friends.

Big cop walks up. "We don't write tickets if there's less'en a thousand dollars damage," he says, giving us both slips. He points at the note he's given a man I can now call Richard. "You got Mr. Shaaap's address there if you need to get hold a'him," the cop says, pointing at the foreigner.

He's got that name, right there in his tar-and-nicotined fingers. And so it went. 

I'm hoping he doesn't need to or want to, of course. I'm hoping he doesn't have some old drinkin' buddy into body repair, someone to write out a bill that'll cost me a couple hundred. I'm hoping it'd cost him way too much bother to tumble out of that old Buick or let it sit in some woebegone garage getting prettied. I'm hoping he'll tell himself that the bald f___er in that Explorer wasn't really a shyster anyway, just wanted to have a look at the mission in Barnston and that old station on the corner where he used to work.

That's what I'm hoping. "A soft answer turneth away wrath," right? That's biblical.

Last month we just got the bill for our garage door. Hurts me to admit I didn't look. 

The Bible is one thing, but doggone it, next time I got to remember to check the mirror. 

Lord knows there'll be a next time.

From the Homestead (3)--History lessons all around

Columbia

Not everyone in these United States thinks the Homestead Act of 1862 is worth celebrating. If I were Native, I don't know that it would thrill me to remember how the U.S. Government deemed it their privilege to give away land they considered, well, empty. vacant.

Lighting candles for the Homestead Act is like making Columbus Day a holiday: isn't it wonderful that Columbus "discovered" the Americas? After all, nothing was here before the Nina, Pinta, and the Sante Maria beached on the Bahamas.

Millions of white Americans (not all, but a vast majority), got their starts in this new country by way of land divvied up from millions of acres simply assumed to be the public domain (use the word public with an asterisk). Dozens and dozens of states were drawn-and- quartered for Yankees and all kinds of European white faces (here and there a black one too).

Willa Cather's novels wax nostalgic about life out on the frontier of the Great Plains with more foreign neighbors than Switzerland. The ground beneath my feet here in central Nebraska was likely more multi-cultural in 1870 than it is today. Great-great grandchildren of those Euro-American pioneers have cause to celebrate because making a life out here on the Great Plains was no Laura Ingalls Wilder picnic.
  

Daniel Freeman

The  National Homestead Monument is here because this very 160-acre plot of land was the very first such piece of American soil to be given away to someone seeking "free" land, a man named Daniel Freeman, Civil War vet who filed a claim within minutes after midnight to get his order in first. And he did. As we speak, I'm sitting on what was Freeman's land (a phrase that has its own kind of  ring).

Mr. Freeman may well be a hero here, beginning the march to unify the Americas of the two coasts, a movement far more spiritual than moral, something we still call "Manifest Destiny."

Yesterday, Native people stopped--for how long, no one knows--construction of a pipeline through reservation land. If you don't think that event is connected to the Homestead Act and Manifest Destiny, you're kidding yourself.

But Freeman himself, or so the story goes, had to work hard to be heroic. He never saw a fight he didn't like and made history in another famous way--or infamous.

An old man pushing his wife in a wheelchair was the first museum guest I spoke to yesterday. He took a look at the sign on my desk and told me he too was a writer. "No kidding?" I said, hoping to engage him a bit. One of his eyes had an annoying habit of moving away when he spoke. I'm guessing maybe 85 years old.

He told me he'd been writing congressmen and women all over the nation, telling them about humanism and Karl Marx and America on the road to perdition. "Is that right?" I said, and he reached in his pocket, took out a quarter-fold single piece of paper, and handed it to me as if to authenticate his claim. He wasn't making converts, only proving he was a writer. Then he left.

The letter quoted the American Family Association at great lengths. We've turned our backs on the gospel--that was gist--in schools especially. Single-space, single-side, every inch in print.

Freeman School

I didn't tell him that once upon a time this very same Daniel Freeman walked into Freeman School, just up the road from the monument (that's  it right there), and discovered the teacher using the Bible to teach the kiddos English.

He didn't like it. She'd asked the school board, she told him; and she wasn't about to turn her back on the Lord. Freeman told her it was wrong because non-English speaking kids would be better off learning the language from Mcguffy Readers than Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in the KJV. In fact, he took the school board to court, right here in Beatrice.

And lost.

He was a scrapper, old Freeman. So he kept going, argued his case before the Nebraska Supreme Court in Lincoln, who ruled in his favor in Daniel Freeman vs. John Scheve, Et. al. 1902. What's more, the U. S. Supreme Court in a series of decisions starting in 1948 (McCollum vs. Board of Education) used that ruling, begun right here, to argue for a distinct line between church and state in schools like this one.

Here at the museum, that story barely rates a footnote in the celebration of the Homestead Act, but it could be argued that the issue Daniel Freeman, the first homesteader, raised in the school bearing his name is just as significant an issue in American history as Lincoln's signing of the Homestead Act.

When the the woman who was in the wheelchair her husband had been pushing walked by (she was pushing it--I don't know what happened), I told her to tell her husband I'd read his letter. "He's quite a writer," I said. "You can tell him that the writer says he knows how to wield a pen."

"You read it?" she said, somewhat surprised. "He's quite a conservative." She looked at me, not as if to be excuse him, only to say he was, for better or for worse. Then she smiled. "He'll like that you said so," she told me.

Sort of amazing. Serendipitous, in fact. There I sat, staring at a life-sized image of the bearded Daniel Freeman, who might well have received a copy of that guy's letter 150 years ago. 

And it's worth noting that just yesterday, a band of wild Indians held back a dozen massive caterpillars looking to lay an oil pipeline through sacred land. "The past isn't history," as Mister Faulkner used to say. "It's not even the past."

From the Homestead Monument (2)--Our myth-making

There were horses. Stolen horses. That’s what’s important in this delightful old western myth recorded by Dr. Anna Robinson Cross in Nebraska Pioneer Reminiscences a century ago. There were horses, and the Crows had them and Sioux didn't, and the Sioux wanted them. Badly. Badly enough to fight.

But then, truth be told, fighting wasn’t rare among those two warring tribes. The Lakota were not fond of the Crows, and the feelings were bloody reciprocal. Warriors from both tribes created and maintained their places in society, in part, by showing courage, prowess in battle, not spelling bees or the orderliness of the corn fields.  They fought.  Hard.  For keeps.

And this time there were horses, money in the bank. In both tribes, if you were rich, you had horses; if you had horses, you were rich. Everyone wanted horses.

This time the Crows had them, the Lakota did not. As valuable as they were, the stolen goods slowed the Crows down so they decided to break up the band and send some warriors back with the booty, while others stayed behind to slow down the horse-hungry Sioux. That rear force scaled Crow Butte, a 300-foot high miniature mountain in western Nebraska, and armed themselves to hold off the Lakota. 

'Twas a noble effort that made the rear guard subject, sadly, to the deprivations of a siege. For a time, the fighting ceased, but the suffering of those who scaled the butte certainly did not.

They were safe but so dangerously isolated that they determined the younger warriors would descend in the dark of night and hopefully escape--which they did. Meanwhile, those who remained--the old ones--kept up their music, their singing, as if nothing had changed. What was left was, to be sure, something of a suicide mission.

The story goes that those older ones sang themselves, quite literally, to death. Without food or water, their strength dissipated, but they kept up the drumming and the singing, a subterfuge of course.

And now the story ascends into the miraculous. When finally the music died, the Sioux, down below, saw billowing clouds in the form of huge, sky-sized birds descend onto the top of the butte, then slowly lift, as if messengers from the heavens had floated to earth to take those aged warriors home. 

So struck were they by the phenomenon that the Sioux determined right then and there never again to fight the Crows again.

That's the story, told by white pioneers like Dr. Cross.

Probably pure myth. 

History records no such peace alliance, and it's painfully clear that the Sioux and Crow fought again. And again. And again.

But it's a story worth retelling, as most myths are, really, because they tend to show us for what we are--myth makers. We like our stories to carry meaning and appeal. We like our stories to say what we wish them too because they can drive us to hate and despair when they fail to bring us where we'd much rather go.

It's unlikely any Native people ever told the Crow Butte story, but white folks did. 

Hope springs eternal.  

From the Homestead Monument (1): Music of the Spheres

Imagine this--just a few scrappy, three-foot cuttings sticking up from front yards in front of a half-dozen houses in a settlement called Broken Bow. That's it--the only trees for miles around, a bunch of upright buggy whips. A man named Mr. Taylor, a school board member who lives in the back of a his own ramshackle shop, sends his hired man around to take you to the Talbot's sod house, about a mile out of town, he says.

It's 1888, and you've never been this far west, never seen a community in its infancy, things just starting to form on a landscape that's perfectly endless. It's hot, very hot, but there's a breeze--feel it? It's the only thing keeping you from sweaty suffocation. 

This place is not home. You've just come out of Normal School in Iowa, all ready to be a teacher; you determined you'd go west like so many others, so you did, and now that you're way out here, you wonder if somewhere along the line you simply lost your mind.

The Talbot's are kind people. They take you in sweetly, Mrs. Talbot offering a level of reassurance that there is yet some humanity here, some love, some comfort. 

The next morning after a remarkable breakfast, you take the hand of one of the Talbot's little girls, then leave the sanctuary of the sod house for the school, yet another soddie. It's just twelve feet by fifteen feet--that's it; and it's the place where you're going to be a teacher. You're going to be a teacher in a soddie so small it's little bigger than a kitchen.

Brush and weeds cover the thing so loosely that you try not to look up because when you do it's blue sky almost all over. You step back outside and look around at nothing but grass flowing in the wind as far as you can see. One of the Talbot girls is there with you, but you can't help thinking that no one else is coming because no one--absolutely no one--is anywhere near. Where would they come from?--you ask yourself.

In a half hour, you realize you were wrong. 

Your name is Mrs. J. J. Douglas, and this is the way you remember that very first day or two in Broken Bow and the tiny schoolhouse that was your world that very first year out there on the frontier. You're remembering now, all of it coming back years later as if in a dream because it seems so museum-like that the whole story is almost embarrassing, and it would be if just remembering all of it weren't so blessedly wonderful.

"I found in that little, obscure school house some of the brightest and best boys and girls it was ever my good fortune to meet," she says in a memoir she titled "Reminiscences of Custer County." And then this: "There soon sprang up between us a bond of sympathy." Sympathy? "I sympathized with them in their almost total isolation from the world," she says, as if each of the kids in that 12x15 foot sod schoolhouse were suffering. 

She may have thought that, but somehow I doubt that they were.

And this: ". . .and they sympathized with me in my loneliness and homelessness."

I don't know why, but I don't believe that the sympathy moved equally in both directions. I'm guessing the kids didn't think of themselves as suffering, but their 19-year-old teacher did.

The kids were the sweethearts, and that's really what she remembers. They were singers, she writes, "so many sweet voices," especially two little girls who seemed "remarkable," she says, "for children of their age.

Mrs. Douglas's school memory ends with a darling, almost heavenly image. One bright day, having dismissed her scholars, she stood outside that sodhouse door and watched the kids walk into the horizon by way of a path that led into a stretch of big blue stem so tall it hid them completely. 

But what that prairie grass didn't hide was their music. "I could hear those sweet tones long after the children were out of sight in the tall grass," she says, a moment she says she often recalls because "I shall never forget how charmingly that music seemed to me." A blessing.

She doesn't say it, but I will. I wonder whether that music wasn't created just for her, music of the spheres for her "loneliness and homelessness," sung by the angels.

I think that's how she remembers it.
_______________________________

For a couple of weeks, I'm at the National Homestead Monument, just outside of Beatrice, NE, doing an art residency, writing some things, like this. For that time, look for more stories retold of pioneer life, many of which will come from Nebraska Pioneer Reminiscences (1916), a fragile old collection of stories which this year is celebrating its own 100th birthday, a good time to take it down from the shelf for another look.

Sunday Morning Meds--To Laugh

"For the despondent, every day brings trouble; 

for the happy heart, life is a continual feast." Proverbs 15:15

"Sister Gabriela is here. She works beautifully for Jesus--the most important is that she knows how to suffer and at the same time, how to laugh. That is the most important--to suffer and to laugh."

Up beside my office desk there stands a picture of the Reverend Bernard J. Haan, founder and first president of the college where I taught for 37 years. That picture is seventy years old, from Time magazine, in fact. The parson is outfitted in his finest swallow-tail coat, holding forth in front of the pipe organ, no pulpit in sight.

It has to be posed because I can't imagine that a professional photographer--some worldly guy from Time or Life--would have been allowed to wander up the aisle during Sunday worship to shoot umpteen photographs of the Dominie opening the Word of the Lord. Wouldn't have happened. 

"I'd like to have a picture of you holding forth," some New York photographer must have said some weekday morning. The fiery young preacher must reached for that swallow-tail coat. Reluctantly? Maybe. Or maybe proudly. Who knows?

I didn't know the Reverend Haan when he was a young preacher, but I've heard enough about him to be able to guess that he hammered that pulpit, beat out his strongest points on the massive Bible that sat up there back then. He was young, opinionated, and charismatic. Within a few years, he created a discipleship so wide that his followers determined to start a college out here in the middle of rural America. A goodly part of that following grew from his passionate work keeping a theater out of Sioux Center, Iowa--the story Time and Life were covering back then.

A couple of decades later, by the mid-60s, he was a genial old codger, capable of measured self-reflection, a fiery preacher who could--and did, famously and to the delight of his audiences--laugh at himself.

By the time he retired, he could actually "do" himself in self-parody that became legendary. He knew so well what the crowd expected of him that he could play himself--with style and grace. And success. B. J. was great at playing B. J.

Late in life, he told me that when he looked back through his year in ministry, he wished only that it hadn't taken him so long to learn that the way to find a place in the human heart is by way of a smile, a laugh, some sweet joy. He regretted not learning that lesson earlier. I keep that old picture of him around because I liked him, respected him, appreciated him; and because that old Time photograph helps me remember what he says it took so long for him to learn.

I don't know that the Rev. B. J. Haan suffered--or how, but I'm confident he did because all of us do. And I don't know anything about Mother Teresa's friend Gabriela' suffering either--how she might have grieved for the sick and dying there on the streets of Calcutta. I can't compare her suffering with his; but then trying to match my suffering up against yours or anyone else's is zero sum game. Suffering is suffering.

But I think Mother Teresa wasn't wrong about laughter. Not to smile is to suffer ceaselessly. There is something like grace in what she says here--"what's most important" is to suffer and to laugh.

Down at the bottom of that assessment is paradox: laughter without suffering is silliness; suffering without laughter is horror. Life is a high-wire act between the two.

"For the despondent, every day brings trouble; for the happy heart, life is a continual feast. You can't help but wonder today, the day the Roman Catholic Church will canonize Mother Teresa, whether that smile, her smile, isn't a part of the radiant glory with which Mother Teresa's and life's work has been crowned.

_________________________

This departure from the series of meditations that appear every Sunday is occasioned by the canonization today of Mother Teresa. Back to Psalm 90 next week. "To Laugh" is #13 in my book of meditations on the life of the saint, Reading Mother Teresa.

Who's out back at River Bend? (6)

It's a stretch, I know, but as long as we're in the neighborhood this woebegone chapel is such a significant part of the story that it bears mentioning . The church is only a mile from the cemetery, just outside the gates--and there are gates--of the Flandreau Indian School across the street. St. Mary's chapel is not part of the history of the old River Bend Church--and it is, too.

Today, the day lilies planted around the place are mostly a weed patch. The dried up front door cries out for paint, the cross at the peak just above it is awkwardly akimbo, and an electrical cord from inside dangles over everything, suggesting that if you want juice inside, you better set up a generator on the badly pitched front step.

A young woman from the school--I talked to her just across the street--smiled strangely at me when I asked her if I could go in. You know the look--"why would you want to?" St. Mary's chapel looks like a place so long ago left behind that what's inside could be nightmarish. It's best years are memories. If that.

"Today it belongs to the tribe," she told me, meaning not the school. The two are separate in the small town of Flandreau, oddly enough, separate in the way things can be separate in small towns, as in walled off.

The chapel is named after Mary Hinman, whose story--what can be known of it--is something I've told before. She was the dutiful wife of the Rev. Samuel Hinman, who was a dreamer, a prophet, a mover-and-a shaker, a tireless Episcopalian priest who suffered the tribulations of the Santees with the Santees after the Dakota War, buried 300 of the people he served on a bloody path that led from the Lower Sioux Reservation in Minnesota to Ft. Snelling to Ft. McClellan, to Crow Creek, and finally, after torturous negotiations, to a strip of land along the Missouri River in far northeast Nebraska. 

Whether Hinman had time for a marriage amid all that work is a good question. For years, he and his wife, Mary, were miles and cultures apart. He was building an empire, a mission dedicated to the suffering Santees, a compound that included a school and a hospital right there on the brand new reservation, along with a home for his wife and children, all of it with funds from well-heeled donors back east, men whose favor he had to curry.

Then a tornado came and destroyed everything. It flattened the house he'd built for his wife and sons. She died, sometime later, of injuries from which she never recovered. The stone in the cemetery at the Santee Reservation boldly testifies to her love for the people she and her husband served.

Eventually, some of those Santees left their Nebraska reservation for the big bend of the Sioux River in what would become South Dakota. The Presbyterians built the original River Bend church in 1867. Some time later, some of Hinman's Episcopalians came north and east too, sans their pastor/dreamer, who, now a widower, was embroiled in scandals, sexual and financial, whose recital still makes you weep.

This old place, The Church of St. Mary, is named after the preacher's long-suffering and compassionate wife, a woman back then held in "AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE" by "THE SANTEE WOMEN." Even untended as it is today, it's a blessed memorial to respect and love and Christian mercy.

Honestly, I'd like to pull those weeds out of the day lilies, scrape and paint that front door, get rid of that noose-like electrical cord, and straighten that old akimbo cross on the door. I'd like to tell the world about Mary Hinman's love, but that won't happen. Truth is, I'd settle for telling just the good smalltown folks of Flandreau, South Dakota, what kind of treasure is right there among 'em. That's not likely to happen either.

Sometimes the very best we can do resembles something akin to that akimbo cross.

The dea(r)th of Christian intellectuals

Now that I think of it, we were--or at least I was--very definitely "movement-oriented" in the late 60s. I can't say I was ever a real card-carrying Kingdom seeker, a Dooyeweerdian, as we used to say; but I hung around with them, listened to them, was fascinated by them, even, at times, wished I was more steeped in their language and thought than I was, more significantly part of the movement.

And a movement it was, a particular intellectual movement. Once, a thousand years ago (it seems) I rode along with a van full of them to a philosophy conference at Wheaton College, where one of them from some other institution delivered a Jeremiad of a presentation our van full of adherents considered clearly epoch-making. When we drove back to Iowa, we felt--honestly, I did too!--as if I had witnessed something that would shape the world.

It didn't. In fact, one of its signature ideas--the idea of worldview--did find a place at the heart of American evangelical intellectualism, where it became its own kind of shibboleth. Today, that word is employed most openly by Christians who find their champions in the James Dobson, Franklin Graham, and the religious right. 

That wasn't what we were thinking on the way to--and certainly on the way back--from Wheaton. Not at all. It was 1969, the Woodstock Era, and the worldview we had in mind included, even featured, a biblically-based critique for U. S. involvement in Vietnam. Our worldview led us far closer to Eugene McCarthy than Barry Goldwater.

No matter. My point is that the movement with which I most identified was an intellectual movement, and that world-and-life view not only gave me a place to stand but also the basis for hope in the future. Even though our triumphalism now seems remarkably penny-ante stuff, it supplied ready quantities of inspiration. I was a Christian and I had a worldview that offered a real negotiable vision. 

In a thoughtful article in the September Harpers, Alan Jacobs, who teaches at Baylor after many years at Wheaton, discusses in thoughtful detail the demise of what he and others call "the Christian intellectual." The names frequently associated with the now almost-forgotten phenomenon include Reinhold Niebuhr, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Dorothy Sayers, thoughtful believers of various fellowships, intellectuals capable of defining contemporary life in ways that unequivocally included reference and adherence to a Christian view of this world, Christians who created an audience in America's most thoughtful quarters.

Alan Jacobs says such men and women are largely gone--or are simply unable to fill those shoes. If a Christian makes the cover of Time (which surely isn't the ordeal it once was), it's likely a comic figure. Jacobs says Marilynne Robinson may well be the person closest to the tradition of national Christian intellectual, but she neither works at nor wishes for an audience among those folks who sit, week after week, in the pew. (Wasn't it Nieburh who famously maintained that all he ever knew about Christianity was in the chorus of "Jesus Loves Me"?)

Father John Neuhaus, Jacobs said, worked hard at trying to be the descendent of the tradition during his lifetime, created his own magazine, First Things, as an attempt to reinvigorate the Christian intellectualism. But Jacobs suggests that Neuhaus's attempt at an alternative network is itself proof of the fact there is no place anymore for what once was a truly national and intellectually robust Christianity. 

How did that happen? That's the question that haunts Alan Jacobs in the essay, a question that, he admits, has no obvious answer. The closest he comes, or so it seems to me, is the changes in culture created by the late Sixties, especially legalized abortion.

It was the Sixties that changed everything, and not primarily because of the Vietnam War or the cause of civil rights. There were many Christians on both sides of those divides. The primary conflict was over the sexual revolution and the changes in the American legal system that accompanied it: changes in divorce law, for instance, but especially in abortion law.

Opposition to abortion, Prof. Jacobs says, simply took Christians out of the orbit of American intellectual life. The American public, he says, stopped hearing the music older Christian intellectuals were capable of providing within the national culture, and, he says in the last line of the piece, Christian intellectuals stopped playing it.

It's a sad story finally, at least I think so. 

I think it would be interesting to know if, fifty years later, Christian college and university students leave philosophy conferences as headstrong as we did, whether they even conceive of themselves as prophets, priests, and kings. 

I hope so. 

The legacy of Lewis Leary

Lewis Sheridan Leary 

For his attack on Harper's Ferry, in 1859, John Brown had assembled a dozen assailants to undertake, with him, a muddled pipe dream of an attack meant to incite a rebellion that would arise like a righteous wind from Virginia and throughout the South, meant to end the heinous sin of slavery. Several of his accomplices were African-American. One of them was this man, Lewis Sheridan Leary.

Leary's devotion to the cause of abolition is evident simply on the basis of his having left his wife and six-month-old child to take up arms with Brown and his men. Leary had been born to a freedman, the son an Irish father and a mom who was white and black and red.

Like so many others of his time, Leary took up the cause of abolition with a vengeance from his schooling at Oberlin College. It's difficult to imagine today what it must have been like to be at Oberlin in the 1850s, when the cause of abolition was carried on high, when men and women, whites and blacks united under the banner of freedom--and at almost any price.

At the very end of Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, a marvelous biography of fierce old Calvinist, Tony Horwitz tells an incredible story about Lewis Leary that enlarges a tale already at the heart of the American experience. After her husband's death, Mary Patterson Leary, herself an Oberlin grad, was nobly given a few hundred dollars for support and in anticipation of her children's education. Someone also gave Mary Leary a bullet-ridden shawl her husband had worn on the raid. Because of the wounds he'd sustained in the assault, Lewis Leary died a week or so after the raid, Brown's plan having failed in logistics but not failed to the many whose "eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." 

Mary Patterson Leary remarried after her husband's death, her second husband chosen, like her first, from the Oberlin abolitionists. Charles Henry Langston, the man she we, had given a powerful speech at the trial of accused Oberlin insurrectionists who had taken on a U. S. Marshall in a runaway slave rescue. Some say Langston's speech in their defense was so moving the judge handed out very light sentences.

Charles Langston and Mary Patterson Langston eventually moved to yet another abolitionist stronghold, Lawrence, Kansas, a town slavery advocates had tried to destroy during the period known as "Bloody Kansas," when slavers and abolitionists fought for control of the brand new state. In 1872, Charles and Mary had a daughter they named Carolin Mercer Langston.

Here's the precious story. Carolin Mercer Langston, once she married, had a boy she nursed while he was wrapped in her grandfather's Harper's Ferry shawl. That boy would eventually become one of America's foremost poets, Langston Hughes. who wrote, among a host of others, this famous poem:

Harlem 

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I'm guessing that, as a teacher, I used that poem in class a thousand times. Once upon a time, when I was the only white guy in a graduate class in African-American lit, we talked about "Harlem" for most of an hour. I've always been struck by the way all those lined-up similes end with a metaphor that threatens to be much more than poetic flourish. The italics are his, not mine.

Today, thinking about that Kansas baby wrapped in a ripped-up shawl that belonged to Lewis Leary, the child's own great-grandpa, I can't help but think that the dire reflection of that very famous poem somehow makes even more sense, or so it seems to me.