My Saturday Morning Catch

 I must have a dozen different poses of this particular tree, an oak, I believe, although I've never been close enough to see for sure. It's out there alone on just one of the rolling hills above the Little Sioux River. It's what I was thinking about actually, as I went out there Saturday morning. Even though I've photographed it time and time again, there's something about its prominence on that naked expanse that's just plain compelling. But, this time, this was the best I could do.

It was the morning of the first frost. That didn't mean everything was sugar-coated--temps never tumbled down that low; but it did mean that the air and the views were vivid and clear. It's harvest time here now, and last weekend just about everyone who had business out there was in the field doing corn or beans. Lots of dust, but the season's first northwest wind--strong northwest wind--had done much to clean up the sky. It was, I'm saying, a gorgeous morning, brimming with color.

Look, I'm not blind. The fact is, we've got nothing on the Big Woods, and, truth be told, it would have been really sweet to wake up somewhere up north last weekend, where there's real color. But, that having been said, when the sun finally emerges from the horizon, the yellowing grasses (it's October!) all around turn to gold, which is, I'd maintain, no small delight.

The Midas touch of dawn is nothing to shake a stick at.

Stopped out at the buffalo. I can't really head back without at least checking in. Once upon the time, the whole spacious valley belonged to them. I figure I owe them a little attention.

It was a gorgeous Saturday morning, and, as I started west toward home, I told myself it was a wonder really to be out in the middle of all that bronze beneath the radiant rule of early morning.

An old adage rules landscape photography--or any kind of photography for that matter. There's only one stedfast rule about all of that, and it's only two words long: "be there." If you're not, there's no image. Be there.

I got to thinking old man thoughts too--how that particular morning would never again be repeated. Next October 7, the trees may be shorn of leaves, there may be mist from the river, the skies may be gray. Whether or not I was able to get any showy shots last Saturday morning, the fact was, I was there for a show that will never take the stage in the same way again.

What a privilege. Felt really wonderful. 

Got what I came for.

Telling the Wiseman story

For some time now, I've been unable to determine what to do with the Wiseman story. I ran into it when I read the name printed on a map. The specifics have all but disappeared, even though five miles east and one north of a little burg named Wynot, Nebraska, you'll find a wildlife management area named for the ill-fated pioneers. But even if the name is not dead, the story is all but gone, which I can't think anything but wonderful. For weeks, I didn't know whether the Wiseman saga should even be repeated. But no more. 

Some months before the attack, Henson Wiseman had enlisted into the local military to punish the Santees in the wake of the Dakota War of 1862. Wiseman was far from home when the events occurred, and Phoebe, his wife, had been waylaid in town by a summer storm, preventing her quick return. That left the kids. Alone. The stone says it was July 24, 1863. 

When she returned, she stumbled over the body of her son Arthur, 16, then heard muffled voices behind her and ran, assuming the murderers were still there. About that she was wrong.

But they most certainly had been there--a band of warriors, history suggests some of them Yankton and the others Santee. For unknown reasons, four young men had decided the Wiseman children should die. 

If I tell the Wiseman story, how should it be told? The specifics are too awful to repeat. The children were not merely put to death; they were butchered. More than that I'd rather not say.

Phoebe, pregnant when the attack occurred, birthed a child born significantly deformed because of the drugs she took while trying to recover. When, a month later, her husband heard the news about his family and returned--he drove his horse, non-stop, for almost two weeks--Phoebe was not to be found. For 27 days, he searched before finding her, inconsolable, seated alone on a river bank staring at the water.

Today is Thursday. Any day now, it seems that thousands more will die in the Middle East. Netanyahu will withhold nothing, and he'll do so with the consent of most all of the Israeli populace because it's one thing to attack military installations, it's quite another to slaughter children at a music festival or in their beds. In the days since Hamas mounted the attack, the word barbaric is everywhere, while more than 100 hostages anticipate an unthinkable fate.

"But you must know the context," advocates assert, citing the erosion of human rights on the Gaza Strip, or the mass hanging of 38 Santee warriors at Mankato in December of 1862. Try to outfit what happened with some bit of effort to understand at least. It's very difficult.

War is evil, but flashing bloody human horrors on social media is what?--vile, heinous, wicked? There are no words. What all of Israel sees when videos picture lines of captive Jewish people--women pulled by their hair to the joy of the assembled crowds--is Auschwitz. More ghastly suffering. 

This week we have seen far more horror than anyone should. For years after the death of his children, people say Henson Wiseman regularly picked up his rifle, found a place in the hills along the Missouri River, and shot Indians indiscriminately as they passed in their canoes.

Those who murdered his children were never found or identified.

For weeks I wondered how to deal with the Wiseman massacre, whether the story should simply be left to die. Maybe we should just let it alone like an imprecatory psalm. Then, Saturday, Hamas blew into Israeli homes, murdered grandparents barely out of bed, children right in front of their parents, caught the action on their smart phones, and put videos up for the world to admire.

An old friend of mine, now passed on, told me proudly of her ancestor, a Lakota warrior named Charger, who, with a few other "Fool Soldiers," gambled his life and those of his friends to bring back suffering hostages taken earlier during a massacre in that same 1862 Dakota War. We were in the car, driving somewhere on Cheyenne River Reservation land so far and wide all around that the horizon seems barely there at all.

"Some say the Fool Soldiers were traitors to our people." Clearly, she left the question hanging wondering what I'd say. I don't know that I responded. I didn't think it was my place to answer. 

What I did tell her later was there were too many world religions, including, traditionally, that of her own people, that considered human life to be sacred. Surely what Charger and his warrior society did in the cold of winter of 1863 was a good thing, a moral thing, a blessed thing. 

There really is no good way to tell the Wiseman story. But even if we don't tell it or remember it, this torturous, this killing week reminds us of the same vile humanness, of how evil we can become--all of us, each of us.

Look at these Nazi military and friends, having fun while millions of deaths created smoke that floated peaceably above the camps. 

Must we be reminded? Must we hear the stories? Maybe so. 

Spirit Mound makes me smile

 

The very first time I stopped at Spirit Mound, just north of Vermillion, SD (see the Dakota Dome on the horizon, an inch or so from the top right border of the shot) cattle were grazing where I'm standing right here, up on top. Years ago, cattle owned the place. I can't imagine people didn't occasionally climb to the top anyway; while it may not be as challenging as Pike's Peak, it creates, so high above the prairie floor, a similar desire: we want to see what we can see if we get way up there atop of things. 

Scale is sometimes hard to get in the flat world of a photograph, but if you look closely, you can see the trail cut thoughtfully through the prairie grass, a massive recovery effort. It snakes through the flatland, and if you look very closely on the right side of the shot, you'll see a party of seven or eight people, who happen to be leaving, on their way to the parking lot, in front of the closest battery of trees. 

Speaking of snakes, Barbara had to be reminded that the two of us have never seen one, even though the sign. . .

. . .is more than a little handy with its introductions. 

For much of my life, Calvinist compunctions kept me from taking Sabbath afternoons off of communal worship. Since retirement, the compunctions have lost their sting, although I still measure my Sunday behavior by the old ruler. I've come to believe our yesterday's sweet pilgrimage out South Dakota "counts," as we used to say. The day was gorgeous, all around us, harvest in full swing. No matter if the fields are full or empty, they were, yesterday, nothing but gold. And always, from the top of the mound it just seems you can see forever. Something about that big, wide view strikes me verifiably "religious." 

Down here beneath, renewing the prairie requires the patience of Job. The flatland beneath the peak is starting to look more like grassland, but it's taken years and years to tease back some semblance of its coat. For thousands of years no farmers poured anything onto the soil. Spirit Mound is an entire section of prairie, but bringing back what was takes time and effort.

Of course, you can't bring back Lewis and Clark, and the few men who braved August heat to see what the Native people told them were little 18" devils up top (or so the story goes). Funny, I don't think about Lewis and Clark walking that trail up the hill or leaving again, without capturing a little 18" devil and stuffing it for President Jefferson.

What I see our there is the very first herd of buffalo. L and C had seen a single buffalo the day before, but when they were here in 1804, what they laid their eyes upon from the top of the mound was a couple hundred great American bison. Took their breath away. Made them forget the stiff August heat. I'll bet they couldn't take their eyes off them.

Sadly, they're long gone now. Once, they ruled out here. Once, they went where they wanted, when they wanted. 

When we're up on Spirit Mound, we're an hour from home, at best. I think it's a blessing to think of the Yanktons and the Omahas and the Otes and the Poncas all doing their thing out here once upon a time. And I like knowing that long ago a bunch of white men, in uniform even, marched up Spirit Mound in search of little Devils.

But what pulls me back to Spirit Mound time after time is the idea that for thousands of years, not all that far from home, whole herds of buffalo roamed, like the song says, coming through these very grasses. See 'em in the background here?

These guys called it home.

 Makes me smile.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

 

I don’t think I could go back to life without the internet this unimaginably huge storehouse of information that sits somewhere mysteriously beneath my fingertips, a few keystrokes from the confines of my basement office.  I use it constantly, really. And now, with AI, it will even write my posts.

 Computers speed things up—I could red-pencil my students’ papers faster because of “word processing,” even though I used neither red pencils nor paper.  I can and do communicate instantaneously with hundreds of people, no matter where they are in the world, as long as they’re on-line. Our lives should be less hurried because of the instantaneous reach of technology, but we know better.  The computer has made those who use it frequently more, not less busy.

What’s more, it knows and works our very human weaknesses. 

Years ago, some friends asked me to pull off some schtick at their children’s wedding. I did. People thought it was funny, but apparently not our friends—well, apparently not the father, who sent me a blistering e-mail a day or so later, a note he typed out with the kind of vengeful glee we feel as we vent.  Slap some keys and punch send.   

 Why point these fingers?  I’ve done the same thing more often than I care to admit.  In my entire life, I don’t remember ever sending nasty snail mail.  But e-mails?—don’t I wish I could have some back.

 A computer doesn’t facilitate waiting.  If I’m typing along—as I’m doing now—and suddenly it occurs to me to check on some deal I’m working on elsewhere, I can minimize this screen and flick out a note to Zambia. It'll arrive in seconds (if everything is working). 

I can’t speak for others, but the sweet advice of this verse of Psalm 37, "Rest patiently. . ." seems to me to be far easier said than done in the information age.  I wonder if my own expectations of God’s almighty hand—what he could and even should do in my life—aren’t in some ways predicated upon a sense of time that’s in part defined by the instantaneousness of a machine that falsely promises more but often enough delivers, somehow, less.

When my father died, a poet friend sent me a poem he’d written at the death of his own father.  That poem offered the most startling picture of timelessness, of eternity, that I’ve ever considered—specifically, that those who die before us don’t sit around in some heavenly café, awaiting the arrival of the next bus, hoping it will include loved ones. 

Because the dead exist outside of time, they don’t miss us; via their clocks, we are, in a way, already there. Waiting is a time thing, not an eternity thing.  I love that idea because I don’t like to think of my father waiting, even though, of course, we do.

 Waiting is a this-world job.  God almighty doesn’t punch a time clock.  There isn’t such a thing in eternity.  His time isn’t time at all.

Which makes patience almost heavenly, doesn’t it?  Maybe that’s why this verse seems so easy to say and difficult to accomplish. Patience is a virtue to be practiced, something I need to work at. . .he said, his fingers bent over the keys.

Lord, help me breath easily.        

Immaculate Conception, two of them, St. Helena

It's not a nice thing to say, but Ian Frazier's Great Plains makes clear, even if he doesn't state it outright, that the Great Plains is the world's biggest open-air museum. So much of what once was is still there, but is no more. 

Once upon a time in Cedar County, Nebraska, a thousand Native people lived and roamed--Pawnee, Ponca, Santee, Yankton. No more. Once upon a time hundreds of white "squatters," dreaming in a smorgasbord of languages, moved out to the good arable soil west and south of the Missouri River to build new lives for their families. Today, many of their kin are long gone. Cedar County isn't empty, but St. Helena, once the county seat, is home to something less than 100 people. 

St. Helena (NE) Immaculate Conception

Once upon a time, a thankful community invested everything they had and more into a marvelous cathedral, a European marvel in Gothic Revival, a cathedral that seems far out of place and time within a community that is no longer prospering, but a community--or so you can't deny--that still believes in its church, a place that holds the mystery, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Immaculate Conception's steeple towers above a broad Missouri River landscape the way European cathedrals come to define towns a mile away, make them identifiable, here, within a broad land of cattle yards and center-point irrigation.

Another Immaculate Conception, a miniature without elegance or fuss, this one, pocket-sized, sits at the entrance to the top-of-the-hill Immaculate Conception cemetery. Just a few miles from town, on gravel. You'll have to hunt for it, a squat frame structure kept up lovingly, a graveyard chapel. 

Inside--Catholic churches are always open--the short nave offers six rows of benches, four more along the side walls. An alabaster altar up front stands behind a short fence, as if guarding the elements. The Holy Mother and Child dominate the right corner up front for purposes of adoration.

It was the virgin who reminded me of yet another Immaculate Conception, this one in Rome, and not a cathedral but a huge wall in the Vatican Museums, where a 19th century fresco filled with angels and human beings galore you might well yearn to know--if the tour offered you a whole day to look. My guess is it sticks with me because of its eternal busyness, before creation and ever after.

Next to the Vatican Museum, this little chapel of the same name feels like a miniature, a toy. But when you walk in the gate and then step in, time seems someow negligent. A confessional stands front and left, not much bigger than a grandfather clock. 

When you stand there alone, a woman, a farm wife, maybe in bibs but all by herself, comes in to meet the priest who's already on the other side of the black, cardboard separation. It may be a ritual for her, a good one, something done weekly or monthly. She's not here for some bloody  transgression; she's is here to receive forgiveness. It's a sacrament. She holds beads. Don't listen in. What she's saying is none of your business.

Her determination is obvious. What she wants is absolution, forgiveness. Sure, it's all in your imagination. You're in a museum within a museum. It seems impossible that the ancient telephone-booth confessional still hears transgressions. People don't stop by very much anymore. Some old folks shake their heads at what Cedar County is coming to. Still, the strange old place still speaks.

The benches that crowd the sides offer their own memories: prominent men and women, community leaders, suddenly leave the neighborhood, their mortal coils returning to land more dusty than Great-grandpa thought when he left to be closer to heaven than he'd ever been in sorry old Germany. 

Kids too. There's been no shortage of little ones mourned in this tiny place, then left behind in the cemetery outside. Epidemics--influenza, scarlet fever--and seasonal farm accidents, far too many. Take a bench for a moment. Take a seat in a little frame place hardly big enough for a John Deere mower, but don't try to count the tears. You know there were moments when every last person on these hard, wooden benches was weeping. Epic funerals people still talk about, precious old hymns in the German tongue.  

If you stay for a while, alone, the walls disappear, and a tiny old chapel feels as spacious as the prairie horizon all around. 

Local history claims the chapel stands on the spot where the very first house of worship was built, when the colonizers arrived. That structure was slapped together quickly because a place of worship simply had to be created, no matter how small, no matter how unfinished, just a shack that would be replaced soon with a log cabin, and, some decades later, a church, a real cathedral just like back home. An organ too. That's what we're working for. That's what we need.

That big one in town is an amazing testimony to the first settlers' faith. This one, nothing quite like it I've seen, remains a shelter in the time of storm, even on a day when there's nothing but blue sky. There's not much to see for a mile in any direction, but there at the door of the Immaculate Conception chapel, looking over a range of musty stones, you can't help but think nothing really ever dies.

There's a yellowing school notebook just inside the door. The pages bulge with summer humidity, but there's a pen there, a good one, for your convenience. 

Go up the list a bit--my name is there. Tell the committee who cleans the place that you stopped by, thank them for keeping it open, for keeping the place, like faith itself, alive.

My crystal ball

I'm sure I'm not the only weary Democratic traveler, but it's fair to say that I'm among a minority here when it comes to distaste for Donald J. Trump, a man who has so poisoned the culture that it's difficult to imagine anyone doing anything worse. Not that long ago I stumbled on his remarkable resemblance to Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost, an archangel who, tossed from realms of glory, looks almost sympathetic as he determines to live as if he weren't a million furlongs from grace. Readers love his willful waywardness.

But he is Satan.

We're at yet another moment when Donald J's allure is not only crumbling but festering. New York courts say he's swindled the government. His vast holdings have been put into jeopardy. He may have to cough up enough filthy lucre to finance city government. Yesterday, his mild-mannered judge screamed and slapped a gag order on him after he published the name of an officer of the court.

He faces indictments too numerous to mention. The Orange king will be in court more than on the front nine, near future. Not that any of that will darken or dampen his misplaced adulation among the MAGAs, no matter what he opines or who he impugns.

Let me tease out something from my crystal ball, which is, I'll grant you, little more than a wish list. In January of next year, Sioux County, a bastion of the political right, is going to dump Trump. 

Call it creeping senility or dream-gazing--call it what you will. I'm saying there are enough good people in this county who know the last thing this nation needs is four more years of madness, especially when those years could be led from behind bars. My neighbors will choose someone else--Scott, Haley, Pence, DeSantos--hopefully not Vivec, or the deal is off.

I'm thinking (not betting) they're going to take Trump down. Days like Tuesday's mad dysfunction in the Republican Party will take a toll. The thousands of dyed-in-the-wool Republicans in the neighborhood are smart enough to realize that if eight blowhard Trumpites can bring about pure chaos, the party ain't a picnic. Kevin McCarthy went down, the first time in American history a House of Reps sent a speaker packing. He went down because eight Trump loyalists ran him out--eight MAGA nut cases.

Next January, I'm saying a majority of the neighborhood's generational Republicans will tell themselves (in privacy, I'm sure) that four more years of Donald Trump is not a good idea, then dump him in the primary election, and, on their way home, stop at the cemetery and explain to the staunch Republican ancestors rolling over and over how it was necessary.

Siouxland voters will crash Trump's 2024 party. That's the blessing I'm hoping for. We've suffered through 80-20 here for too darn long. People know better. The man's a creep and a charlatan, and certainly not "a baby Christian."

I say, it's going to happen. In the 2024 Presidential Primary, Trump gets whacked and whacked good when votes are tallied here in Sioux County, I hope he's fourth.

Impossible? Just let me dream.  

By the bye, The Hill says it too, although they claim that when Trump goes down, he'll take President Biden with him. They're mortal enemies, but they're also fraternal twins--i.e., the only way Biden can win another term is if he's running against Trump, and etc. You can read it here.

Stuff

A whim brought that shirt to our place--clearly a waste of money, some might say. I was remembering my dad's working life, where it began--at least when I was old enough to understand where it began: a foundry in Oostburg, Wisconsin, where he'd lived since his father, a preacher, took a call to that little burg on the western shore of Lake Michigan. He'd come with his parents, gone to high school there, fell in love with Jeannie-with-the-light-brown-hair, got married, even fathered a daughter before--as he would have said--"the Japs" attacked Pearl Harbor.

When he returned from the South Pacific 1945, there was another angelic little girl he'd fathered just before he'd left for the service. But the war was behind him--and them--and his war-time experience as a scribe made him a bookkeeper at a place named Gilson, right there in town. He could bike to work, or walk.

Here 'tis, in fact--Gilson Manufacturing, Oostburg, Wisconsin, 1946. That's Dad, second from the right, front row. 

I remember the office where he worked, and the foundry behind it, where a couple dozen sweaty men (a glass vile on the wall beside the pop machine held salt pills) made cement mixers for all those vets who, like him, were building houses and families.

Sorry to say, through the years Dad became progressively less taken with his Gilson job. The ownership changed hands, as such things do. Eventually, he was the only Dutch Reformed guy in an office full of Luxembourgian Roman Catholics, whose codes of ethics were not sculpted by synodical warnings against cards, dancing, theater--and what-not else. 

A couple of decades later, he was offered a job in the Oostburg State Bank, a position he had no trouble accepting. Gilson had moved to Fredonia, Wisconsin, a half-hour drive south and west. Whether or not it was true, he considered himself a minority in the office there and often felt put upon. The old Oostburg Gilson had been almost totally Dutch-American, a bunch of ex-GIs whose work and lunch-time horseshoe tournaments made them close as a family.

That's the Gilson I remember, the one in the picture. When I saw this t-shirt on-line some years ago, I bought it for him really, even though he was long gone and never wore anything larger than a medium. Pure nostalgia. Nobody in a half-day's travel would recognize the insignia or name. Only my sisters would understand and neither of them ever laid eyes on it. I bought it for him because I couldn't resist an orange t-shirt with the Gilson trademark, even though Gilson, bought out by Toro, is itself history. 

That orange T-shirt was part of my wardrobe for maybe ten years. It was never something I'd wear around town, so it was relegated to the work shirt pile, which explains the fade and the cut-off sleeves. Truth be known, it likely never left the yard, but put in some considerable hours just outside my window.

For a couple of years now, I've been trying to hold myself to a "replacement theory" of my own: if I buy a new T-shirt, I toss one of the old ones. So last week I came home from Oklahoma with two off a Goodwill rack, one to wear around town, another--an Oklahoma State beauty--to wear to the gym. Now, two T-shirts must go. My wife and I are 75 years old; we don't need more "stuff."

The Gilson shirt--which I alone valued and has seen its better days--goes into the trash barrel this morning, then pushed out to the street for pick up, all of which suggests this is its retirement party. Maybe so. 

Long, long ago, I started a blog to keep myself writing. I used the title that's still here--"Stuff in the Basement." The idea was to write about "stuff" with which I'd surrounded myself at the desktop where the big, old Dell stood, "stuff" that had a story. Today I'm in a different basement, but still here where I started. 

This morning, my Gilson T-shirt is going to go.

Not to worry, a shelf of the library behind me holds a 4 x 6 snapshot of Mom and Dad. It's not like they'll be forgotten. 

All of this sounds so very funereal, but sometime this morning that oft beloved T-shirt will end up in a landfill. Just thought I'd let you know. 

Such is life, I guess. 

Sunday Morning Meds--"inherit the land"

“For evil men will be cut off, 

but those who hope in the LORD will inherit the land.”

 

I don’t know that this line sounds right out here in farm country.

           

My father-in-law was what used to be called a “small farmer,” in the days when there was such a thing.  My wife grew up on a farm like Old McDonalds—little of this, little of that. 

 

Well, I got news.  Out here, those kinds of farms simply don’t exist anymore.  Farming has become agri-business, and everything has changed. 

 

My father-in-law bought some land when he was farming, nowhere near enough for a young farmer today.  But he owns the land, enough of it that my wife’s inheritance is significant.  We could come heir to it, but then he might just give it away, to church or school. 

 

But let’s say his land comes to us.  Let’s say we keep it, and even though we don’t live on it, we might just drive by once in a while.  We’d likely rent it out to the cousin who now farms it.  Eventually, however, we’d pass land ownership on to our children. 

 

Now there is a possibility that our children will live in the neighborhood someday, but that certainly isn’t a given.  So, it’s possible that eventually the land her father bought as he slowly built his own farm will end up in the hands of absentee landlords. 

           

That phenomenon is happening all over the rural Midwest, prompting people to ask whether so much “absentee landlordism” is going to be good for the health of communities.  That question goes to the very heart of the quality of life out here on the far western edge of the cornbelt.  What exactly is our future if people in faraway cities own the land we live on?

 

To promise, as the NIV does, that those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land sounds, in this region, like a pipe dream—and it is.  Good people don’t inevitably win in the quest for land ownership.  The mid-80s’ “farm crisis” made that perfectly clear. More often than not, good, hard-working people got flattened. Sorry, David—perhaps that nay have been true in old Israel, but it’s not true—nor should anyone promise it—in the rural areas of the Upper Midwest.

           

The KJV says, more metaphorically perhaps, that the righteous will inherit the earth. In our present context, I much prefer earth to land.  If I lived in Toronto or New York or Los Angeles, I wouldn’t much care which word is used; but here, where the future of rural life is dependent upon land ownership, I much prefer “the earth.”

 

Earth spiritualizes richly. It suggests that those who hope in God inherit the concept of earth; they inherit the true (which is to say, spiritual) riches of this earth, not the ground itself, not the back forty, the neighbor’s thousand acres. Cold hard cash is not at issue here and neither is good black dirt. 

 

Calvin says that what David means with this line is that those who hope in the Lord “shall live in such a manner as that the blessing of God shall follow them, even to the grave.”  That blessing may well include a thousand acres, but you can’t take that promise to the bank. 

 

It probably goes without saying that what David is promising is a far better than the flattest, blackest land in all of Sioux County, Iowa. But out here, where land ownership is so important, it probably needs to be said.

 Eventually, my wife will inherit the land. More importantly, and by grace alone, she—and her husband and our children and all of those we love, those who hope in the Lord--will inherit the earth.    

White Man goes to Wounded Knee (v)

That afternoon, when the shooting ended, Army personnel loaded 39 of their wounded into wagons, along with their dead, 25. Fifty-one wounded Sioux were located, 47 of them women and children, some of whom—like six of the cavalry survivors—would soon succumb to their injuries. The Sioux dead were left on the field and in the ravines, but exactly how many had been killed will never be known. Native people consider 300 a fairly just estimate.

That night, a blizzard came in on the wind and laid a gossamer veil over the carnage—some say mercifully; some think the hand of white man’s God was simply covering their sin. Wounded Knee was the final military action in the Plains Indians Wars, the horrid, bloody conclusion of a cultural and religious confrontation that, from my vantage point, a white man at Wounded Knee, looks even today like something obscenely inevitable. Millions of white people—my own Dutch immigrant ancestors among them—went west for cheap land they assumed the Sioux didn’t value. After all, where were the improvements, the tree lines, the fences, the buildings, the cut sod? Millions of white people—my own ancestors among them—thought our holy book to a pagan people was a generous gift for the millions of acres those people had once roamed in freedom. My own family included, we wanted to own what they wanted to honor.

But the Lakota people lost far more than those buried on the hill where we’re standing. They lost what the cavalry and the government called “the battle”; they lost the war; they lost their way of life. “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard,” Black Elk says. “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

There’s more. You must have noticed because you can’t have missed what’s right in front of us—what’s been there the whole time we’ve been watching what happened. Be careful as you walk around on that promontory because a crumbling block foundation, scattered with crumpled beer cans and trash, marks the outline of what was once a Catholic church, right there where those Hotchkiss guns rained death on the council circle. It’s crumbling, as things do that are not preserved.

The church that once stood here was destroyed in the 1973 Wounded Knee conflict, when, once more, violence occurred not far from where we’re standing. Men and women who held radically different views of Native dignity squared off against each other in this very valley. That dispute brought in U. S. Marshalls and turned deadly, when armed wasicu, here, once again, dug in like the cavalry. For many, those government marshalls were here to defend tribal leaders some thought violent, despotic men who’d long ago sold their souls for fools’ gold.

It isn’t pretty—this crumbling shell. There’s nothing to suggest that what once stood above ground here represented—even offered—the Prince of Peace.

In Coventry, England, you can walk within the skull-like remains of a cathedral destroyed by Nazi bombs during World War II, a remarkable memento of Brit suffering during relentless air strikes. Coventry Cathedral is what much of Europe looked like after Hitler. That foundation is immense, its walls rise and fall jaggedly. But its perimeters are festooned with plaques and flowers and all kinds of memorials neatly commemorating suffering and heroism.

No walls still stand on the foundation half-buried in the crest of the hill where we’re standing. No memorials—just graffiti—decorate what’s there. No one keeps the place up, so what’s left deteriorates in the abusive hands of changing prairie seasons. You can walk into that foundation, if you dare. The empty shell of the church that once looked over the field where hundreds died is nothing at all like the monument at Coventry.

And yet it is. It’s just not sanitized. But then, nothing is at Wounded Knee. Today, there is very little to mark the spot, beyond the sign on the road and the old monument behind us. There is a circular visitors’ center down the hill to the east, the pit toilets stand just outside. The center itself is black, and it’s likely you’ve parked beside it before you walked up the hill to the burial monument. In the summer, the place is open. You can wander into its dark confines, where various displays will tell part of the story. But most of the year you’ll find a padlock on the door, which means you’re on your own at Wounded Knee.

Now look down at the sign where the reservation roads cross, three hundred yards from where we’re standing. In summer, you might see a car or two. Go ahead. Walk down. People there beneath a brush arbor—Sioux people—will be happy to sell you some keepsake from your visit.

I have one—a little cowhide drum, two inches across, decorated with beaded fringe and hand-painted on both sides—on one, the image of a red drum; on the other, the words “Wounded Knee” painted in above a single eagle feather, two dates, one on either side—“1890” and “1973.”

Cost me twenty dollars. I bought it from an angular man in a Western shirt who had three of them strung over his hand when he showed me his goods. His dark, expressionless face was pockmarked, his eyes blood-lit. I am sad to say he looked far too much like the caricature some of us hold of reservation people today.

“My wife makes them,” he told me slowly, handing me the one that now hangs on my wall. He pointed into an old Ford parked just ten feet away. I looked into the interior where she was sitting on the passenger’s side. She didn’t move, her head bowed as if she were asleep. Maybe it was my own sinful prejudice, but I couldn’t help think the worst.

I picked a crisp twenty out of my billfold and handed it to him. He took it and left. I suppose the next day he would return with the other two he’d shown me.

I don’t know that I can unpack the whole meaning of that single twenty-dollar transaction—what percentage of what I gave him may have come from pity, what percentage from blood guilt, what percentage from the very real desire to take some icon home to remember Wounded Knee. I honestly cannot interpret my own motives, in part because I don’t know that I want to look that closely into my own heart.

But I’m happy that little cowhide drum is here beside me as I write these words, not because it’s cute—it isn’t. I have no doubt that some enterprising wasicu could create a kiosk and churn out Wounded Knee kitsch far more marketable—refrigerator magnets, ball-point pens with pinto ponies that run up and down the shaft. But there’s something about the people who sold it to me that I can’t forget, just as surely as the tawny prairie landscape all around and the entire awful story that gives the valley its ghostly life. Mystery and the sadness are here in my little buckskin drum, a drum that really doesn’t sound.

Mostly, at Wounded Knee, there is silence. When you visit, you won’t read or hear many words at all. If you’re white and you want to understand, you’ll have to look deeply into your own heart, stare into your deepest values, listen to the songs you sing, examine the history your family has lived and the faith you celebrate.

Maybe it’s best to simply to simply stand in awe at Wounded Knee and pray with your silence. That’s not easy. We’re not good at lamentations. White folks would much rather see Wounded Knee as a battle than a massacre, as we have, officially, for more than a century.

Look up. Somewhere in that vast azure dome a jet will be cutting a swath across the openness. Inside, three hundred people are sipping Cokes, reading Danielle Steele, watching a movie. Some are sleeping. Some are traveling home.

Do the math. Count them yourself—the thousands each day that only incidentally glance out from corner-less airplane windows as they pass over the spot we’re standing. Then look around and see how alone you are up here on the hill with four silent Hotchkiss guns.

Maybe we’d all rather not know. We’d all rather fly over Wounded Knee.

Visit sometime. Leave the kids at home. Welcome the silence. Stand here for an hour until the keening, the death songs, rise from the ravines as they once did. Look out over nearly a thousand ghosts assembled in space so open it’s almost frightening.

Stand here alone for a while, and I swear that what you’ll read in the flow of prairie grasses and hear in the spirit of the wind is that, really, despite the tracks of those jets in the skies above and the immensity of silence all around, once upon a time every last one of us was here.

White Man at Wounded Knee (iv)

 

Somewhere on the peripheries of the council circle stands a man variously described as half-crazed or desperate. He was, by all accounts, a man of faith, a medicine man, who considered it his duty to advise the men in council circle of their dignity and their calling. One account describes him this way: “. . .a grand figure. . .with green-colored face and a yellow nose, terrifying to behold. He wore with pride his floating crown of eagle feathers, while his costume was a wonder of wild adornments.” Some name this man Yellow Bird, while others claim Yellow Bird was nowhere near Big Foot’s camp. Whatever his identity, his eccentric look and behavior calls upon the dignity of Lakota history and culture. What he espouses is at least something of the doctrine of the Ghost Dance. He tells the men not to fear. As Crazy Horse, by legend, once exhorted his men before Little Big Horn, this man reportedly cried and sang to his people, told them this was a good day to fight and a good day to die. He promises eternal life.

The sound produced in Native songs and chants begins in the front of the throat; for centuries, white musicians have been exhorted to sing from the diaphragm. The difference is startling. To white folks unaccustomed to the keening, me among them, the sound produced seems more like a shriek than a hymn. As you stand there, those Hotchkiss guns poised just beneath you, listen the medicine man’s seemingly mad music and try to stop your fists from tightening.

“The men are hiding guns,” an officer says.

It’s December, still early in the morning, and the Sioux men are wrapped in blankets. A search follows. In a pile in the middle, almost seventy old rifles lie over each other like fallen branches.

Then, something happens—nobody knows exactly what. The bluecoats draw their rifles and swords. Rifle magazines click open and close; guns are brought into position to fire.

A single troop—who knows who? —tried to wrestle Black Coyote, one of the Sioux men. Some say he was deaf. At the same moment, the medicine man gets to his feet, picks up a handful of dust, and throws it at the soldiers, his shrieking exhortation continuing in the Sioux language. The soldier and Black Coyote wrestle for the possession of a rifle, while down the line another soldier begins struggling with another for a rifle wrapped in the blanket covering one of three young men standing close together. The medicine man keeps telling his people white bullets will not harm them.

One shot. Whose was it? Did it come from Black Coyote in the struggle? No one knows for sure. But in a moment all hell broke loose, and, for less than a half hour, what follows is a fierce and bloody battle waged hand-to-hand in a council circle soon choked by dust and smoke, and thick with bullets, most of them from army issue rifles, bullets that flew indiscriminately, killing many of the Sioux in the middle, as well as bluecoats on either side. That the cavalry could have avoided shooting each other at such close quarters seems impossible, despite claims to the contrary in military hearings conducted later.

An old woman who used to live down our street claims that out here on the prairie we get only about ten sweet days a year. Prairie cold locks life in its frigid jaws; the heat wilts anything that grows; and always, the wind blows. In the summer, it’s capable of sand-blasting your face; in the winter, its bite is not only dangerous but deadly. But that morning, December 29, 1890, the wind stood still. When you look down now, from the promontory where the First and Second Artillery have been firing those Hotchkiss guns into the horror beneath them, imagine a cloud of dust and smoke so thick as to stop breath. In seconds, in the very middle of the fray, combatants cannot see each other, but blindness doesn’t stop the killing. Seventeen miles away, at the Pine Ridge Agency, people claimed to hear the firing.

Just exactly who fired first might never be established, but there is no question whose rifles ended the massacre. With the first shots, hundreds of Lakota women and children run away into that ravine you see just beyond the fighting. With dozens of their own down in the middle of the madness, Forsyte’s men are in no mood to take prisoners, so for several hours after the bloody combat that began in front of Big Foot’s tent, scattered gunfire continues as far as three miles away, up and down the ravines that cut through the tawny prairie around the creek called Wounded Knee. What began in intolerable heat ended in cold-blooded murder.

If you’d like, perhaps you could walk down into those ravines, no more than a half mile from where we’re standing. There are no markers anywhere, like the ones at Little Big Horn, no whited stones to mark the spots where people fell. But even in their absence, ghosts linger.

White man goes to Wounded Knee (iii)

Today, right behind you, you’ll see fenced-in enclosure where a granite monument, nine feet tall, lists the names of a few of those killed here. “Chief Big Foot,” it says, and then lists “Mr. Shading Bear, Long Bull, White American, Black Coyate, Ghost Horse, Living Bear, Afraid of Bear, Young Afraid of Bear, Yellow Robe, Wounded Hand, Red Eagle,” and just a few more. Estimates vary on the number of dead buried where you’re standing, but most think 150 or so frozen bodies were dumped into the mass grave beneath the cordon of cement. No ceremony—Native or white. Just a dump.

On the other side of the stone there’s an inscription, still visible seventy years after the marker was placed where you’re standing.

This monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Ogallala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in Memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre Dec. 29, 1890.

Col. Forsyth in command of U. S. Troops. Big Foot was a great chief to the Sioux Indians. He often said “I will stand in peace till my last day comes.” He did many good and brave deeds for the white man and the red man. Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.

As Harry W. Paige says in Land of the Spotted Eagle, this isn’t the grammar, the syntax, or mechanics of an Oxford don. What it is, he says, is “writing that weeps.”

But what exactly did happen on the morning of December 29, 1890?

With nothing to stop it, sound travels easily on a landscape this barren. So imagine the bleat of reveille cutting through the morning cold. It’s eight o’clock, and the sun rises magnificently, albeit late, winter solstice just a few days behind. Many of the women, some of them singing, are packing for the 17-mile trip to Pine Ridge, where they anticipate meeting relatives and friends. Children play innocently around the ragged tipis and wagons, and for the first morning in many, most have eaten well.

By Indian messenger, Col. Forsyte, the commanding office, calls the men of Big Foot’s band to come to parley directly southeast of us, at the spot where the chief’s tent stands, maybe 300 yards down the hill. Spread around the entire encampment like a huge lariat, even beyond the dozens of Indian ponies just west of Big Foot’s camp and the ravine behind it, 76 unmounted sentries, equally spaced, watch the movement. On the rise beyond the ravine and set against the horizon, a long line of mounted bluecoats wait menacingly, just in front of them, some several dozen of the cavalry’s Indian scouts. From the vantage point of the soldiers, the field seems well in hand, the position geometrically arranged to prevent escape. There is no chaos, yet.

As they were commanded, something close to one hundred men—no one knows for sure—from Big Foot’s band take their places in the council circle. Behind them, those lines of bluecoats move quickly to separate the men from their women and children.

The command is given to disarm. In the face of such untoward odds, the Sioux men are wary—not only does the positioning all around them seem ominous, but to a culture created on institutional violence—a boy becomes a man by proving himself in battle—giving up one’s means to fight is giving up oneself. What’s more, they’d been promised the day before that they could keep their arms until they arrived at Pine Ridge.

Troops are dispatched to search and seize what arms they can turn up in the encampment behind them. What happens is not pleasant. The women do not take kindly to their mistreatment, the sometimes brutal ways the bluecoats plunder their selves and their possessions. When the soldiers return, they have more guns, but also axes, knives, bows and arrows, tent stakes, even beadwork awls.

It is early winter, remember, but there is more than enough emotion in the air to ignite the landscape. Fear, prejudice, a history of deception, mutually defiant cultural values, and nothing less than hate lay beneath us here like so much kindling, waiting for the pop of a flame; the whole place is combustible. What exactly happened next may be debated forever, but the trajectory of events is no more debatable than the outcome.

White man goes to Wounded knee (ii)

It would be dead wrong to assume that that belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890.  Others are far more prominent:  the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other.  When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic. 

Here we are.  Look around.  If you stand on this promontory in the summer, the heat can be oppressive; but on a good day you might be surrounded by a couple dozen tourists.  That’s all.  Wounded Knee doesn’t exactly border the Black Hills, and it’s not on the way to Yellowstone.  It’s not on the way to anything, really.  Right now you’re in the heart of fly-over America, many millions of Americans never coming closer to this shallow valley than, say Chicago.  Any time of year, the twisted vapor trails of jets on their way to LAX or LaGuardia float like ribbons in the genial sky. 

  

In the late fall or muddy spring or cold mid-winter—like that December day in 1890—it’s likely you’ll stand very much alone at Wounded Knee.  Cars and trucks navigate the reservation roads that cross almost directly at the point of battle, but for most of the year a visit here is unlike a visit to any other North American historic battlefield. 

Gettysburg National Military Park offers an aging but impressive Cyclorama, a remarkable circular painting, 356 feet by 26 feet, that puts visitors at the heart of the battle.  Little Big Horn’s visitor’s center sells helpful interpretive audio tapes to use as you tour several miles of battlefield from the air-conditioned comfort of your mini-van.  But if you want to know what you can about Wounded Knee, the only storyteller there, all year round, is the wind. 

Just imagine the encampment before you, and keep in mind the despair, the poverty, and the hopelessness of the dancers.  “To live was now no more than to endure/The purposeless indignity of breath,” says John G. Neihardt in The Twilight of the Sioux.  Millions of buffalo once roamed here, the staple of existence for thousands of nomadic Native people, the soul of their culture and faith.  By 1890, they were gone. In North Dakota’s horrible winter of 1996, while thousands of cattle died in the monstrous cold, it is reported that only one bison perished.  

Once the buffalo ruled here.  In all the openness all around you, the Great Plains stretching out almost forever in every direction, try to imagine what it must have been like to stand on this promontory and look over herds so large you could see the mass ripple as they shifted slightly when detecting human scent, like watching wind on water.  That’s what’s gone.  To the Sioux, the hunt was not only manhood’s proving ground, but a celebration for the family, often opened and closed with prayer.  Few 19th century wasicu could understand that the disappearance of the buffalo seemed, to many Plains Indians, almost the death of god. I don’t believe I still can, try as I might.

   

But if I stand here on the promontory at Wounded Knee and remind all that is white within me of grinding poverty, the exhaustive dissolution of a way of life, and the seeming death of god, I can, perhaps, begin to understand the frantic hope inspired by the Ghost Dance.   

White Man Goes To Wounded Knee (i)

Think of it as a tawny ocean stopped in time, a vast landscape of grass, here and there mustache-like strips of trees darkening creek beds or running along the ridges like an old headdress unfurled in wind. Today, the place where the Wounded Knee Massacre took place looks remarkably similar to what it did in early winter of 1890, a featureless, shallow valley in a seemingly unending field of prairie grass that, on a gray day, weaves itself almost inconspicuously into the cloudy sky at its reaches.

On December 28, 1890, four Hotchkiss guns—the Sioux called them the guns that fire in the morning and kill the next day—stood on a small, whitecap hill amid this arid ocean, all four aimed down into the camp of a Minneconjou chief named Sitanka, or Big Foot. There, three hundred men, women, and children were camped, hoping to reach Pine Ridge Agency the next day.

 

More than a century later, it is almost impossible to stand on that small hill and look down into the valley of Wounded Knee Creek and imagine what the place must have looked like so full of people.

 
But try. Today, a single battered billboard offers the only available outline of the story, the word “battle” crossed out and “massacre” scribbled in roughly above it. Otherwise, there is little to mark the spot. But try to imagine what this yawning, empty space must have looked like, a couple hundred Lakota just beneath the promontory where we’re standing, their worn and ripped tipis thrown up quickly, campfires floating thin plumes of smoke. These folks have been hungry for days—and tired, having just marched hundreds of miles south towards Chief Red Cloud at the Pine Ridge Agency, where they thought they’d be safe.

But there’s more, far more. Across the ravine west—maybe a half mile away on another hill sits is a sprawling encampment of several hundred troops under the command of Colonel James W. Forsyth, the largest military encampment since the Civil War. The scene is remarkable. Doubtless, that many people assembled at this remote spot on the Dakota prairie has not happened frequently, if ever, since. If it’s difficult for you to imagine, just picture a campground of nearly a thousand people in tents, then cut down all the trees.

Big Foot’s people were dancers, Ghost Dancers, strong believers in a frenetic, mystic ceremony, a hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation. If they would dance, they thought Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering. When he’d come for them, he’d bring with him the old ones (hence, "the Ghost Dance"). And the buffalo would return. Once again, the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, a cloud of dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, all of them. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, desperation comforted.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

 . . .the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. . .”

Not an appropriate metaphor—not right now anyway. It’s been too blame hot.

Two days ago I decided to take a quick trip out west. Just two hours, the Missouri River, which has been turned into a series of reservoirs by the Corps of Engineers, winds its way north, cutting right through South and North Dakota before moving west once again.

The Missouri Valley, gorgeous and humbling, is huge, broad, wide, and frequently treeless. Standing alone out there, you somehow get to know your place in time and life. I wanted to get out to some out-of-the-way spot along the river and stand on a bluff at dawn, camera in hand. I did. But that has nothing to do with this line from Psalm 37.

I’m getting older—trust me, that I know—as is our car. We’ve got a sun roof, right?—and the car is white. I’m thinking I can save the old beast some wear-and-tear if, for two and a half hours, I forgo the air-conditioning. Besides, all around me are myriad overweight and balding Harley lovers on their way to Sturgis for the annual million motorcycle march. What kind of man am I if I sit like a sissy in air-conditioned comfort? It’s a guy thing.

So I turned the air-conditioner off. I did.

And I almost died.

Just a few weeks ago on the plains of South Dakota, the temperature reached 115. It wasn’t that hot while I was there, but 105 is hardly mellow. The whole world looked bleached and starved. There will be no corn crop this year out there, but that’s not unusual in central South Dakota. Fields are yellowed prematurely and sickly thin because weeks and weeks of heat often rode the back of a raspish south wind that will wither almost any living thing.

I had visions of taking photographs, but during the middle of the day it takes a pretty heavy polarizing filter to get anything but endless dry, shiny tawny-ness on the Plains. Out there, earth and sky meet, really—the world seems a dusty tarn in flat-out unremitting heat. On the Great Plains, there ain’t no trees, and thus no place to hide.

Heat wears you out. All along the way, my windows open, I marveled that road construction people could actually stand in that heat during the day—worse, work in it, pouring blacktop, of all things.

But I know what David means, even if, this morning, in the cool of my basement, I’m thankful to be out of the noonday sun he seems to admire.

The shoulders of the Missouri River are huge and husky, just a few rippling savannahs running memorably up their ample sides. When the noonday sun shines openly down upon its waters and those gargantuan bluffs, there are few dark corners and almost no hiding from that ball of fire.

King David’s take on that phenomenon is joy, however, because in bright sun there are no secrets and no prejudices. Righteousness shines, bare nakedly, in the wash of noonday. Everybody sees what they haven’t. They’ll all know because there it is.

There are times in everyone’s life when it’s a great thing to be out of the shadows, to be baldly open for all the world to see. That’s the promise, startling as it seems. No more repression, no more fear, no more enforced silence. God’s love creates for all of our humanness one grand out-of-the-closet noonday sun.