L and C and me--Sgt. Floyd Monument

Once upon a time I went monument hunting in a town called Morton, Minnesota. Very small town, very large monuments, but I couldn't find a thing.

So I stopped at the museum. A retiree was sitting behind a glass case with old eyeglasses and moustache cups that looked straight from a set of "Music Man." If anyone knew, he would, museum-guy, a resident. Nope. "Monuments?" he said. "Big ones?"

I got back in the car, took off east, and there, at the side of the road was a postage-stamp that said, "Monuments," in I'd-rather-not-bother-you lettering. I pointed the car up into the maple trees, got to the top, and there they were, a pair of tall monuments, constructed in the era of monuments at the end of the 19th century. There they were in a tousled apron of knee-high weeds and empty Bud Lights.

Okoboji's biggest monument is almost invisible, swallowed by the oaks all around the Abby Gardner cabin. That big monument takes deliberate effort just to see.

If you've not seen the War Eagle Monument, it's up high on a hill above the confluence of the Missouri and Big Sioux. You gotta wanta see it. It's like the Prospect Hill monument--still there, still kept up, but few ever see it.

"The Spirit of Siouxland," right there on the river, is impressive and beautiful and includes a statue remembering Iowa National Guard Lt. Col. Dennis Nielson's rescue of a three-year-old. If you want to see it, get off I-29, and out of the car.

No one in car or truck or on a Harley, no one, north or south, can miss the 122-year old Sgt Floyd Monument, an arrow, a rocket being shot into a prairie sky, our own miniature Washington Monument, which isn't by a long shot "miniature" at all. The Sergeant Floyd Monument lords it over our own expanse of Big Muddy. Those who pass it every working day may miss it, but no one else can. It's a presence that's outlived even the cattle yards.

Why is it here? All Sergeant Floyd ever did was die here. He didn't hold off a war party or crawl up from Kansas. He just died, some gastric thing, nothing particularly heroic. That monumental rocket is just for him--really?

Not really. Read it for yourself. 

Let's come clean here: the Lewis and Clark Expedition didn't accomplish its number one goal, didn't find a northwest passage to link the oceans. Find it? Nope. There isn't such a thing. 

"Consolidate the fur trade"--how about that? Not really. Once gold was discovered in faraway California, who really cared about beaver pelts. "Work for peace among the tribes?" When Clark died, Plains Indians owned most of the Missouri River. Soon, there'd be endless land takeovers and white folks moved west. 

But imagine being here in 1804. When dawn lights the eastern sky, you and your buddies muster yourselves because you're facing yet another experience even your imagination can't even create. It's all new. Every turn of the wily river, every cottonwood grove, every endless grassy landscape--it's all excitingly new.

For our First Nations, nothing was new, except the strangely dressed white men trolling the river. The lives of their children would never be the same--never, ever.

The huge monument high above the river is a reminder for all of us of our history, about not forgetting who was here and why, of unimaginable adventures--and simultaneous destruction, a reminder of what we not always were but also what we can and should be.

The Sgt. Floyd Monument is just plain huge. You can't miss it and you shouldn't. It's for a 23-year-old Corpsman named Charley Floyd, the only man who didn't return.

But his monument is ours, a reminder of our very precious story, fraught as it is with glory and honor, but also with complexities that should never be dismissed or forgotten. 

All of that is in our towering monument.

__________________

The last of four months' worth of stories for KWIT, a series that followed Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery through this region of the country. 

Morning Thanks--a human thing

   

What she told us last night, among other things, was that she was much despised among some members of her community. What they wouldn't really forget, she said, was that she wasn't born among them, had spent her first several years a long ways away, and had a spirit that was, they claimed, well, different than what they were. What she told us was that some in her community don't like her or were afraid of her, even though she'd come to love their customs, their traditions, their means of making meaning out of life itself--traditions which are, by the way, hers too.

What she told us was that others thought that she acted too much like people from the world, people from outside the community, people among whom they didn't feel comfortable. What she told us was that some, at least, didn't trust her because, by their perceptions, she'd had no faith in the way things had always gone; yet today, she told us, they accuse her of abandoning her identity because she isn't doing things the old way, the traditional way.

She told us much more too--much, much more--and she never acted like--nor played--the victim. Not once did she attempt to secure our sympathy or pity. She just told us what she thought life is like right now, even for her. She told us the truth.

Our guest last night in class is Native American, just as Native as her community.

After that night's wonderful presentation, it was a joy to recognize that the phenomenon she described--the skeptical sneer of traditionalists, the distrust of those who don't want to change--isn't just a Native thing. It's a human thing. All  too often it happens in my community too: distrust and antagonism created by the sometimes-rough-and-tumble push-and-pull of tradition vs. change.

I'm thankful, really thankful, for the many colors we humans come in because we're blessed by our glorious diversity. But I'm even more thankful to have seen once more that, somewhere beneath those coats of many colors, we're all powered, for better and for worse, by a human heart that operates much the same.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

"The wicked plot against the righteous

and gnash their teeth at them."

 

For at least three reasons, the contemporary persecution of Christians demands attention: It is occurring on a massive scale, it is underreported, and in many parts of the world it is rapidly growing.

That’s how Paul Marshall, of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom began an article he wrote for the Weekly Standard a decade ago. Just two years ago. Christianity Today started an article this way: "Every day, 13 Christians worldwide are killed because of their faith. Every day, twelve churches or Christian buildings are attacked. And every day, twelve Christians are unjustly arrested or imprisoned, and another five are abducted."

Sitting here in my basement in northwest Iowa, that kind of persecution is almost impossible to believe.

For its 25th anniversary, Open Doors released an analysis of persecution trends over that quarter century--where persecution is a daily problem. The top ten nations were: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Maldives, Yemen, Sudan, Vietnam, and China.

I am far less a citizen of this world than I should be. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine a place in which one’s faith could be the sole cause for bloody persecution and death. But there are places where it is—and where David’s assertion in this psalm rings as true as it did for him, plagued as he was by those who would bring him down. There are places in the world—and there are many—where the wicked plot against the righteous, their teeth gnashing.

A quarter century ago who could have guessed the world would spin into the direction it has today? The Enlightenment is history, some say, very much behind us. The assumption that religious faith was a remnant of our barbarism and would eventually fade into oblivion was dead wrong. Yet, today, the world’s most incendiary battles are religious in character today. Look for yourself. Even politics in these United States are infused with religion, a specific kind of Christianity.
David’s sense of things sounds sadly familiar in some places around the globe.

There are those among us who would say that verses like this one should grab our attention because we may well be coming to a time during which the idea seems not a wit old-fashioned or silly—as it certainly is not in many places.

I remember a preacher friend saying to me, years ago, during a particularly upsetting situation in the church where he was serving, that after ten years in the ministry, nothing really surprised him anymore.

Who knows, really, what the future will bring? Someday this verse may sound the same to me as it does today some weary saints in Vietnam or Indonesia—in Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Check out that list again yourself.

May the Lord our God be with us. May he bless us all with peace.

Being there

I've been here a dozen times at least, in all kinds of weather. Once, I happened to be here when the tribe's bison were all in a bunch on that hill on the horizon. I've not been so lucky since. 

But you've got to love this picture of the monument, in great part because it involves even the heavens. The image here--the monument itself--just wouldn't be the same if the sky were crystalline. 

The monument, on the Yankton Reservation, commemorates the 1858 Treaty and includes the names of a number of the signers, including Struck by the Ree, the most famous of the old Yankton headmen. 

Here's his grave--same day, same sky. It'd be a wholly different shot on a grey day, with a big orange dawn behind him, or yet another crystalline sky. Here, the tempestuousness of the sky is even more evident, or so it seems to me; but it's less ego driven. This sky doesn't make demands on the picture. On the treaty monument picture above, the rumbling sky isn't just backdrop but the story itself.

Yesterday, I was enlisted to take my grandson to the Omaha airport, the kind of job my family knows I'd covet if someone else did it. I packed the camera, thinking that maybe, just maybe.

I'd been to the Union Pacific Railroad Museum before--a nice place--but I thought I'd run back and look around a little. I did. Outside, it was a gorgeous day, the sun just above the treetops when I came out in old Council Bluffs. I thought it possible to get to DeSoto Wildlife Refuge before dark. 

The GPS told me the place would close before I got there, but I wasn't thinking of going into the building. I wanted to get a chance to take a shot or two of the Missouri River, and I knew that the Refuge took me right down to the banks.

One huge cloud spread itself over the sky, a massive tablecloth; but behind it, at the edge of the horizon, the sky was clear. It was not hard to see that real possibilities were there, the sun lighting up that cloud as if that tablecloth were afire once it emerged. 

I left I-29 at Missouri Valley, turned left toward DeSoto, the sun so bright I was afraid I'd miss the park entrance altogether.  In fact, I had to pull over on the right when I got to what I thought was the sign. There wasn't much traffic.

Photography is all about light and all about being there. I'm thrilled to say I was there when the light was a miracle. Look--

It's the same look as the Yankton monuments, but the foreground is even brighter because when a dusky sun is low atop the horizon, it picks up whatever dusty materials are in the air and turns everything gold. Late in the day, the sun is King Midas. 

What makes the picture attractive is the light and the time. I was there. You want good pictures, some experts say, you gotta be there. 

I wish I could say that it's my expert skills that sacked this shot. Nope. It's just that I took my grandson to the airport and figured, maybe--just maybe--I could take some pics of a million ducks and geese. I saw about a dozen, but who cares?--what I saw was a light show, a gorgeous display of heaven and earth.

What about the river? Didn't I think I could get a good shot or two of the river? Yes, and I did. The skies move quickly in hard winds like yesterday's, and the setting for a shot like the one above exists at best for only a couple of minutes.  Or less.

But down the road south from those miracle trees, the river flows up from the west and north, and while it took a little scrambling, I think I found a good spot to get some nice river shots. You judge:

They're not stunning, but they'll do to add to the Missouri River collection.  And this one may be the best--taken with my phone!!

Yesterday, the story was the sky. I mean, the river's always here. On some desolate, late morning, it'll be looking the same. It has no Sunday clothes. But the sky, King David says, the sky does the preaching--"the heavens declare. . ."

Morning Thanks--a familiar voice

Some time ago, I unearthed an old cassette tape that held a sermon my grandfather preached in December of 1951, in Oostburg, Wisconsin, the town where I was born and reared. Years ago, my uncle gave it to me, a man who himself has been gone for decades.

I knew that sermon was delivered in my hometown, the church where I spent my first seven years or so; I knew where he was preaching when, halfway through the exhortation, a train went by on the tracks two hundred yards west. It was an evening service. I may have been there--I was only three years old.

I plugged it into an old Walkman when I took a walk. It was terribly cold out, but I walked almost three miles, warmed by an ancient sermon that sounded almost exactly like I would have guessed it might have. I never heard my grandfather preach, at least not that I remember. He baptized me—that much I know. I was six when he died.

But the moment I heard his voice, I recognized it. Honestly, somehow, I knew that voice as his. I have no clue where the reservoir of memories lies in the brain or how wide and encompassing it is, nor what function stands guard to let what specific memories in. But the pitch and timber were there somehow. Very strange. Almost eerie, a voice I'd almost never heard, but remembered completely.

My grandfather was no stemwinder. Had he lived in the days of the megas, his name would have been well down the list--"Minister of Visitation" maybe. Still, I don’t think I could have enjoyed that hour more than I did, listening to a worship service three quarters of a century old, led by an old preacher, a Dominie, holding forth in a voice I recognized, in some ways, to be, well, something of my very own.

And for that, this morning, I’m thankful.

MAGAs lose

For the record, we voted yesterday. I went only at my wife's insistence. She's not given to outrighteous me, so her devotion to the task was a little unnerving. There was a ballot, but there were no choices. Really.

Up and down the single page, where there were openings, there were only that number of candidates: two new members of the school board? Okay, there are only two names. You could write in candidates all you want, but that's sputten, that's trashing the whole idea. So we went, scratched little circles, didn't write our own names in, fed the ballot in the machine, and left. No lines, no waiting. 

No drama either in the district last night, no late-night parties, no tearful concessions. Voting rolled away on steel wheels. Our participation was a rarity, I'd imagine. Poll workers had a long and quiet day.

Across the country, it was an off-year election. Participation set no records in tons of places, I'm sure. But there were a few hot contests, and I'm glad to report--anti-MAGA that I am--that once again the Dems fared well, better than expectations. 

Fox News likes this story: "Republican on verge of flipping Democratic seat in AOC's backyard," but that story is parked right beside the long face of a former Virginia congressman. The title reads "Former Virginia congressional candidate reacts to Democratic election wins: Not 'what we hoped for.'"

Grins, for MAGAs, were few and grim. Those evil, left-wing radical communist Dems (Trump) are smiling this morning, even giggling, while Christian MAGAs (that's not an oxymoron) are licking their fricking wounds. 

Why? A-b-o-r-t-i-o-n. The line is cliche, but it's so good, pardon the repetition: so when the dog finally caught the car, he hadn't a clue what to do with it. Roe v. Wade went down by way of Trump's hand-picked Supreme team, but abortion didn't, and it's not going to.

In 2008, my grandson, then a kindergartner, crawled into my lap and told me, forthrightly, that Obama was a baby-killer. When good Christians of every age give  their vote to a position on a life-and-death issue that can be spouted by a five-year-old, you can't help thinking the true believers are going to get their due. Abortion is bad, even evil, but there are times. Welcome to the world of nuance. It's bigger than you like to think. 

Yesterday, legalized abortion won big. Republicans lost. Outcomes were "not what we hoped for," if you were hoping Republican. The big story was Ohio, where voters created a constitutional amendment making abortion legal, and the vote was not close. 

Virginia's Gov. Youngkin, who some thought might come riding into the Presidential primaries to sweep the floor, lost both legislative houses to Democrats, suggesting he carried much less appeal than he had or did when he won the election three years ago. Call that vote Democratic too (upper-case D). 

And a new face, a Democratic governor from the deep South, as amazing as that may be, a gov named Andy Beshear, Kentucky, won far more comfortably in a race that he barely won last time around. He beat a man Trump backed. I'm guessing you'll hear the name Beshear bandied about more often now, especially if things get desperate for the aging Pres at the top of the 2024 Democratic ballot.

There was no drama here in our forever Republican neighborhood, but nation-wide the night belonged to the Dems. Sorry, locals.

Oh, for Republicans, the big news--and great news--was our governor throwing her election support to Florida's Gov. DeSantos. That's big. That's huge. That's wonderful. Nothing could be healthier for the American soul than the Big Orange getting squashed into pulp. I'm no Republican, and I don't particularly like DeSantos' silly passions about CRT and LGBTQ; but count me among those who truly believe Trump is an ever-present danger to American life. 

Governor Kim Reynolds, my governor, did a very, very brave thing, and I'm greatly thankful for her wisdom. She's done much, much more than Randy Feenstra and Charles Grassley. She said no to Trump. Praise be.

Provenance v

It takes all of nine hours to get to Emo. If there were shortcuts, we didn't know 'em and didn't take 'em. We taught what classes we could before leaving, and figured we'd be there about nine. When we pulled into town, we turned right at the church sign, wondering if anyone would be around after the visitation. It was late, but there were lights and cars.

We had motel reservations, but the cars prompted us to park alongside somewhere and walk into the church--which we did. It was late. The only folks around were family. The coffin--handmade by the boys--was still open.

"We waited to shut it because we knew you were coming," one of the Veldhuisen boys told us. We hadn't raced, hadn't even calculated making it in time for the visitation. We were surprised, shocked even, that our arrival was so specially anticipated. They'd waited to close the cover of the coffin until we would arrive. A significant moment in the entire ritual of mother's dying was put off just so we could "pay our respects." And we did. There she was, same long hair, same patient smile.

I don't know that in my life I ever felt quite so privileged. They'd waited for us to arrive before they shut the coffin. We had no idea. 

We stayed around, talking. It was a big family, and somewhere amid those conversations, I remember saying to one of the Veldhuisen girls--they were women then, of course, and mothers themselves--I couldn't help saying what was on my mind right then, that in my life Nick and Johanna Veldhuisen were firmly implanted pillars of virtue (I didn't use that language, I'm sure). I told her that a weekend retreat long, long ago, staying at their house, was, in a way, life-changing. 

She smiled. I told her I remembered Dad ladling out breakfast porridge, sitting down at a breakfast table with twenty people, saying little, just smiling and praying. 

"Well, he could be stubborn, you know," she said, the confession of a daughter, not just some carpetbagging writer there for a weekend. 

I didn't want to believe it. "You're serious?" I said. "About what kinds of things?"

"Like music," she told me. "Like what we sing in church."

I couldn't believe it, didn't want to. "Orthodox, schismatic, Dutch, rural, staunch, and dour: the Christian Reformed stereotype lacks freedom and joy," Stanley Wiersma claimed in a blurb on the back cover of the Family Portrat book. He admired the stories I'd written, he said, because they "shattered the stereotype permanently."

I didn't want Nick Veldhuisen to be something neither Stanley Wiersma or I wanted him to be.

"For instance?" I said.

She told me about disagreements, fights, in fact, the girls, who sang duets and trios in church, would have with their father about what music was fitting for worship. Nick Veldhuisen was old school; his daughters were not. They'd argued hard, she told me, to be able to sing some songs they'd loved, "like 'In Christ Alone,'" she told me. Her Dad had to be convinced that nothing unseemly was being sneaked into worship by way of all that contemporary stuff. 

"And?"

"And he was. We'll sing it tomorrow, at Mom's funeral."

He let it go, even for his precious wife's funeral.

Twice last Sunday, I sang that contemporary piece, once at our church, once at a Reformation Day service at another, not lustily either, but thoughtfully--"In Christ Alone," a contemporary hymn approved even by Mr. Nick Veldhuizen and sung, memorably, at his blessed wife's funeral the next day.

Ever since Johanna Veldhuisen's funeral, that whole story spreads out across whatever sanctuary I'm in when we sing "In Christ Alone"--Mother at the clothesline, the innards of the cow, the bears in the bush, that heavy wire drawn tight over the pews of the old church, mixed-gender soccer, a dance, that gorgeous lake down the road, more than a few Veldhuisen kids in Iowa, breakfast porridge and brown sugar, even "rural, staunch, and dire." 

Sometimes I envy the Roman Catholics. They've got the saints, after all. The Reformation--Calvin, Luther--wanted no part of that, and neither would Nick and Johanna, had they had the option. It's impossible to imagine that either of them would have allowed me to call them "saints." 

I'll honor that. Nick could be stubborn, "staunch and dire." 

We are what we are finally, irrepressibly human; but somewhere in each of our souls is a presence that's almost impossible to define. And it's there in Emo, and here in Siouxland, and wherever two or three are gathered. It's in all of us, hard as that is to believe or maintain. It's called "the image of God."

And it's own blessed way, that image alone makes us saints.

Provenance v

It's impossible to avoid the inherent deception of the interview process. You've got split loyalties. At once, a writer needs to buddy up with subjects. If you want a great story, you're not going to get it by berating the subject or treating him or her like chopped liver. You have to like your subject, even if it isn't easy. And he or she has to like you.

Every time you turn on the tape recorder or the voice recording app on your phone, you announce that whatever is now going to happen isn't solely a friendly visit. You make clear it's not just him or her you're after; you've got more in mind. You wear two hats, and you 're always a carpetbagger. You ride in on flashy white horse--the writer!--by hook and by crook, you grab what you can in the time that you got, then you get back on that horse and get out of town. You're a carpetbagger, who needs to do and say most anything he or she can to get the story, because finally, when all's said and done, what you want out of interview is the story. It's always number one.

I don't know that I would have said what I just did when I was in Emo that weekend for a youth retreat--and dance. I don't know because it was something I had to learn through the course of the interviews I did. If there's an edge to what I just described, it results from the inherent guile of the process. I was always after the story because I had two masters--subject and story, the people I interviewed and the readers I served.

For years after that series ran and were collected in a book, every Christmas there would be a card from an elderly woman whose story I did because it seemed to me that every church had someone like her, an unrelenting prayer warrior, an ancient really, a saint. For years after I did that interview, this wise and gentle lady in a head scarf would send a card that always included the same note--"stop by for coffee sometime." She meant it.

She lived a day away. I could have made a three-day trip out of it, but I honestly didn't have that kind of time. I was teaching full-time, writing when I could, and trying to be a husband and father. I can't help thinking that if you're doing the kind  I did, you can't help but fall for the subject, or him or her for you. 

It's understandable. How many times in 75 years are people given three or four or five hours to piece together the story of their lives? If ever, not often. I'd enter people's lives, notebook in hand, and ask men to give me everything they could of themselves. If they did, what happened was often rich with intimacy.  

I didn't get back to the lady who sent cards, but I did get back to Emo, generally to speak for some event going on just above the border. Once one of the Veldhuisen boys, now a man, took me out in a boat to watch the local tribe pull walleye from gill nets, legal because the fishermen were Native. I went to a lodge where a barrel or two were delivered and men were cleaning them in the light of a few naked bulbs. 

Once three of us from Iowa went fishing, rented a cabin and a boat and went out on nearby Rainy Lake, a gorgeous place, had a great time that probably couldn't have been better had any one of us knew anything about fishing. Somewhere I have three pictures, one of each of us holding the same walleye, the only one we caught. We visited church on Sunday, and met once again some of the kids who still lived in the Emo area and were no longer kids. Always, the welcome mat was out. 

There were Septembers when Nick and Johanna would come to Iowa to bring another of their kids to Dordt College. Sometimes, they'd stop by. Once in a while I'd look a new class roster and spot one of the kids or then, eventually, grandkids. 

It may well be that of all the people who gave me their lives, their stories, I saw the Veldhuisens, the originals, more than any others. They were first, after all, and I don't think any of them ever forget seeing their mother on the cover of the Banner.

I don't remember how it was I found out about Mom and Dad Veldhuisen's deaths. Nick died first, Johanna sometime later. But when Mom died, I couldn't help feeling that with everything they'd given me, I should head up north again to attend the funeral. Should carries the crisp edge of guilt, as if my going back to Emo was something someone required of me. It wasn't. I honestly wanted to attend. Let me use the old line because it fits snugly--"I wanted to pay my respects." 

When I told a good friend and colleague, a man with an immigrant Canadian boyhood, a man who'd been to Emo, he insisted. So we went, the two of us. I called or sent a note--I don't remember which--and told them we'd be coming. We reserved a room in a local motel and left.

_____________________ 

Tomorrow: the Visitation.

 

 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“But the meek will inherit the land

and enjoy great peace.”

Christian piety is, by the standards of some, never good enough. “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me,” Jesus told a rich young CEO. The guy, Harvard-trained, went back to the office. Some claim Christ was more than a bit hyperbolic. I think that’s true.

The injunction to righteousness can be crippling, because the heart-felt desire to do good is normally never good enough anyway, as Luther himself observed on bloody knees. We’re saved by grace, not works, and the combined good deeds of all the Eagle Scouts of the world won’t make a difference. Thus saith the Good News.

I find lines like this verse sort of scary, declarations of the glories of a piety that’s so grandly unattainable. Maybe it’s all the fault of my Aunt Meek.

Honestly, I knew her only silver-haired. Physically, she was, like all the Schaaps, small and square. As did most of my father’s brothers and sisters, she had an adolescent giggle, a little warble that eventually rose into an off-key falsetto. Sitting in a room of Schaaps was like being surrounded by seagulls. Her name was Marie, but everyone called her “Meek.” Even as a child I associated the biblical word with her character, so that my own aunt somehow got her own Beatitude. Wow.

One other thing about my father’s family—they were all good, good people. A cousin told me that a marriage counselor once told her that her own marital problems were caused by having too good of a father—my uncle. What a curse.

Aunt Meek’s children can probably recount moments when she fumed, when she flashed hot bolts of anger. She could not have always been as soft and gentle as I knew her to be. But the fact remains, that if Aunt Meek is the model for biblical meek, then I feel crippled by a standard I can never reach. Humble, kind, and sweet, she was among the kindest of human souls.

And what about me? There were times, I admit, when, frustrated by the administration of the college where I worked, I rose to speak in a faculty meeting and roundly accused the brass of lousy leadership. Some lauded such speech; others felt it a violation of whatever defines “community,” Christian at that. But what’s clear to me—as I remember—is that I wasn’t acting in the least like Aunt Meek. I was abrasive and, even arrogant in my desire to lay a glove on honchos. Will I not inherit the land? Are God’s blessings not mine?

Good question. Will peace be the blessing only of those who don’t rock the boat? Does “servanthood” imply servility? I know this much: those speeches of mine did not grant me peace. I spent sleepless nights wondering if I’d said too much, gone too far.

The only way I can begin to answer the questions I’m asking is by opposing meekness with its opposite—pride, the kingpin of the Seven Deadlies. If rising temperature and volcanic behavior is created by pride—my desire, my will, my personal sense of injury—then I’ll always be a renter and never fully inherit God’s roomy blessings.

Pride always goeth before the fall. That truth I need to bring into my heart. How?—well, meekly, I’m sure.

Provenance iv

 

What follows is the rest of the Veldhuisen story, written and published more than forty years ago, a story all about what I thought to be a wonderful wilderness family, but also a story that documents a faith driven by confession and a fellowship created, at least in part, by wooden shoes and other ethnic affinities, a one/two punch, for better or worse, that likely no longer exists in the recognizable  quantity or quality. 

~*~*~*~

(continued from yesterday's post)

And the Veldhuisens feel the conflicts in the church. The Young People have scheduled a dance for this spring retreat. They’ve asked for politely, the churches have been contacted, the consistories approved (some very reluctantly), and now the first Young Peoples dance will go on. Nick and Johanna wonder if their Mennonite neighbors and Baptist friends won’t be sure now that the Dutch Reformed are waning in righteousness. They wonder why it is that the children can't create their own entertainment, plays and skits--the way it was always done in the past. They wonder if some of the old ways aren't being sacrificed for something new, something with nothing of the old distinctiveness. And they wonder if the Lord really approves of the dance. It is not an easy issue in Emo; they don't need a synod to tell them that much.

Dance or no dance, the spring retreat goes on, and lohanna prays for clear, warm weather. Nick, knowing the land needs rain, teases her for her personal piety. Jo says she will pray for the needed rain again when the retreat has ended. Nick just shakes his head. It is an old argument. Husband and wife openly admit their differences. The battle will continue.

And then there's this business of evangelism. The Emo church has a considerable number of non-Dutch members who find it hard to understand the old concerns about Sabbath observance, about dancing, about the necessity of the second service, about so many things that the Veldhuisens, and so many of us, have accepted as part of the confessional heritage of the CRC. The Veldhuisens know Christ's mandate to go out and preach; they know that ethnicity has nothing to do with sanctification, but they feel reluctant to concede those old concerns, and who they are, who they always have been, and who they truly feel they should be, in a kind of accommodation to accept and minister to those who don't understand. It is, for the Veldhuisens, and many of us, a struggle.

One hundred chicks run freely over the yard, next season's source of eggs. Peter, the youngest boy, says they often get extra chicks because the dealer "can't count a hundred of the little squirts so close." Same thing happens with the turkeys, he says. Peter is thirteen, but when he looks up and says that an extra turkey is worth almost a week of meals to his family, his eyes light up with a mature sense of unmerited blessing far beyond his years. It's a gift from his par­ents, this familial love and joy. And it's born out of a closeness that seems almost tangible on this dairy in the bush. There are no quiz shows here, no "Sesame Street," not even "The Waltons"-there's no televi­sion. The rest of us must decide whether the Veld­huisen family warmth, generated in the coldest area of the North American continent, is a characteristic com­mon to or different from the typical CR family.

Breakfast ends with a reading from Today. Nick prays again--for rain, for blessings, for forgiveness of sins, for continued good health. The younger children, as is their custom, echo his amen.

~*~*~*~

I was on leave back then, a graduate student in Wisconsin, teaching half-time, writing a novel, and trying to be a dad to two pre-school blondies. 

I don't remember when I sat down to write the Veldhuisen story, but it wasn't long after I returned from Emo. Sometime back then I decided I'd try to describe what I'd experienced at the Veldhuizen home because I was sure--where that compelling confidence came from, I don't know--that lots of people would like to Emo and the Veldhuisens. Send the story to The Banner, I told myself. Tell them you'll do more.

It's hard to believe I was that gutsy.

But I was so I did. I sent them a note saying what today seems to me to be wildly arrogant--how about I do a whole bunch of these stories, stories of men and women, of families of all kinds, all of them members of the denomination? How about this--you send me around the continent to find CRC folks and tell their stories?

The Banner staff bought the idea, and right there at the top of the page is Johanna on the cover, hanging out her dishtowels. The Veldhuisens, Emo, were the first in a series that would run for close to a year.

I don't remember going to Grand Rapids to talk about it, but I do remember talking through the idea with people at the denominational building.

"How about this?" Editor Andrew Kuyvenhoven said. "You do thirty stories or so, we'll run them in the Banner. We'll give you $6000 for expenses and tag on only two requirements--you must get a story our two from Rehoboth, New Mexico, and one or two more from Southern California."

I don't remember ever telling myself what they wanted from me was something I simply couldn't or wouldn't deliver. A bunch more Nick and Johanna stories would be too blame much fun. And they were.

But there's more to the story.

Provenance iii

Yesterday, I included the first paragraph of a narrative I wrote fifty years ago, when I returned home after a long weekend in Emo, Ontario--my first out-of-town speaking job. I've been calling this whole story "Provenance," a word I've known only since working at a museum. What I'm writing is the provenance of a story I wrote 40+ ago. What I'm telling you is the story of the story.

Today, a large chunk of the published story.

~*~*~*~

Brown sugar melts quickly into the ladleful of por­ridge Nick Veldhuisen slaps down in the bowl of anyone who happens in for breakfast. The coffee is hot and strong-Canadian strong; it can barely be swal­lowed black. The eggs are fried in a broad iron skillet, and the children eat their eggs on toast like their father, cutting it up into a hot sandwich, lightly pep­pered. The raw milk is cold and thick, just brought in from the cooler in the barn. The toast is store-bought, but the light gold honey is from the hives, the same hives that attract the bears. The bears catch the scent of the fresh honey and wander in from the "bush." The bush is the wilderness, and the wilderness sits like a stubborn landlord all around the Veldhuisen dairy.

The Veldhuisens are not an ordinary Christian Re­formed family. There are, for instance, seventeen of them in all, including Mom and Dad. Margaret Ger­trude came first, in August of '54, and Wilma Jeanette was last, in November of '71. Fifteen children, all healthy, all strong. "Three times," Nick will say, "three times we had to rebuild the kitchen table." To­day the rectangular giant stretches the entire width of the kitchen, but there's wasted space at the end. Al­ready seven children are gone-five are married, three of those taking the step in one year. Nick remembers the sudden change and laughs. "Just over j20 percent," he says; "hardly even noticeable." His dark hair is combed back over his head. After morning milking a few long strands drop toward his ears. He prays beautifully and, when he concludes, the younger children repeat the amen.

Like so many other Canadian Christian Reformed, Nick and his wife, Johanna, "came over" penniless fol­lowing the Second World War. They came first to Win­nipeg; then, following an ethnic railroad of sorts, they arrived in Emo, Ontario, a tiny river town whose "Front Street" faces the Rainy River, borderline between Canada and the States. Today their pennilessness has evolved into a 450-acre farm on the edge of the wilder­ness-the "bush" as they call it in Emo. Yet only half their land is workableable to yield the necessary hay for the dairy.

Backpacks and orange nylon tents have made the word wilderness quite fashionable these days, but there's little romantic about the bush of northern Ontario. The land is beautiful but not especially hospitable. Moose wander through the cedar swamps. Occasionally, a timber wolf, three feet high at the shoulders, appears from the thin white birch during the long winters, and black bears make startling appearances when the plums ripen in the orchards. Beavers are constantly damming the waterways; the deer and elk make their home in the muskeg, the strange, cushiony soil that feels like an immense waterbed beneath your feet. Red ants build sharp hills that rise from the meadows like Indian mounds. Gerald, the fifth of the boys, says the ants are mean. He steers the tractor between the ant hills on his way to the bush, the loader filled with the innards of a young bull Nick had butchered the night before. "The ants will clean the meat off a carcass in just a few days," he says. Veldhuisen's bush is not a Walt Disney wilderness. Gerald says the bears will rip up what's left of the bull by tomorrow. He dumps the remains no more than a half mile from the house. The Veldhuisens are a wilderness family of seventeen.

And yet they are no different from the rest of the CRC. As strong are as it is, the Veldhuisens have to stretch to cover its generation gaps. They milk thirty cows, keep dozens of chickens, and maintain what most romantically can be referred to as a “family farm.” There are three hoses, three geese, a turkey or two, dogs, cats, and one bull. But a new Massey Ferguson stands in the shed, a new baler and a new disc seem somehow out of place. Johanna Veldhuisen smiles defensively when  she sees them, remembering many a summer when such luxuries were too extravagant even to covet.

''My son says that someday she there will a new barn here in the pasture," she says. There’s an obvious skepticism in her voice, a skepticism fostered by the rigors of the Canadian immigration experience. She remembers summers when there was no hay to put up. She remembers pennilessness as if it were yesterday, and when her own young men see visions and dream dreams, she shows her instinctive protectiveness. “We never believed in buying on credit,” she tells me and remembers only too well those few times when borrowing was the only way to hold on to a fragile dream. That new blue Harvestore her son talks about remains only a dream in his mind. The dairy changes slowly; the new red baler still looks out of place.

_____________

Tomorrow, the original story continues.

Provenance ii

That one is, I believe, among the most beautiful portraits I've ever taken, and it wasn't the least bit posed. A smile is breaking across her sunlit face from some thought. She's hanging up dish towels to dry, and the weather is fine for the retreat. 

Sometime during my stay in Emo, at the Veldhuisens, an idea came to me--why not tell what I could of their story? What seemed to me a beautiful family--15 kids!-- bears for neighbors out in what Canadians still call "the bush," an immigrant Dutch-Canadian couple, passionate about faith and so selfless that their medium-sized farm house, just down the road from town (just as Jake described), was two-story house big enough to put up all those kids, the retreat speaker, and a half-dozen kids from Thunder Bay--why not try to tell their story? The Veldhuisens were big people, not physically but in every other measurable way; and I was blessed--and I knew it even while I was there--to stay with them for these few retreat days.

I remember little of the retreat, but two images come immediately to mind. One has to do with play--it was rough-and-tumble and totally sexless. In the afternoon's free time, the whole bunch played soccer, men and women. Jake turned out to be as rangy as he'd sounded on the phone. I remember him tackling--tackling--one of the girls when she had the ball. No big deal. She got back to her feet, never gave him a look, and went back to the game. When I thought back to church stuff when I was a kid, what came to mind was "winkum," a dinky parlor game, not soccer, no-holds-barred. These were immigrant Dutch-Canadian kids, and very few of them were 13. Some were, but Jake was old enough to drink beer, and likely did.

The other image was an inescapable feature of the old church, something I'd seen only in my dad-in-law's grain bin. Emo CRC stood just across the river from the States. By any measure at all it was nothing fancy. A firmly cinched steel cable right over the center pews held the walls together. It was no cathedral, but I remember being nervous when I looked over a big crowd in such a little place. I hope what I did and said was memorable in some way--I have no idea.

What I do remember is that it was a joy to be there for just a couple of days, to share life with a beautifully devout wilderness family. 

Sometime while a was there, the emerging writer in me began whispering that hundreds--maybe even thousands--of others would be greatly blessed if they too could visit a farmhouse in the bush filled with all these people and this impossibly gregarious couple. "You ought to tell their story," that writer's voice kept saying. "This is really something. This is wild. This is great."

I must have taken a camera along because I took pictures, not of the retreat but of the Veldhuisen place. Hence, that portrait up at the top of the page. If I say I admired Mom and Dad Veldhuisen, it gets nowhere near describing how they stirred my soul. What emerged from that Emo weekend was a story that starts like this. I'll reprint it all tomorrow.

Brown sugar melts quickly into the ladleful of por­ridge Nick Veldhuisen slaps down in the bowl of anyone who happens in for breakfast. The coffee is hot and strong--Canadian strong; it can barely be swal­lowed black. The eggs are fried in a broad iron skillet, and the children eat their eggs on toast like their father, cutting it up into a hot sandwich, lightly pep­pered. The raw milk is cold and thick, just brought in from the cooler in the barn. The toast is store-bought, but the light gold honey is from the hives, the same hives that attract the bears. The bears catch the scent of the fresh honey and wander in from the "bush." The bush is the wilderness, and the wilderness sits like a stubborn landlord all around the Veldhuisen dairy.

When I read that opening paragraph over forty years later, I can't help but remember how super-confident I was, totally inexperienced, but a true believer that recreating the Emo experience was blessed. 

More of the story tomorrow.  

Provenance i

Twice, Sunday, we sang "In Christ Alone." Morning worship at our own church. Evening service, with a pile of other churches at a Reformation Day special. Twice "In Christ Alone," and both times, for me, a long and blessed story emerges from that contemporary hymn. 

Seems amazing that "In Christ Alone" is only 20+ years old. Stuart Townend wrote the lyrics, Keith Getty the music, their very first collaboration, and it became a world-wide hit. Those with more musical knowledge than I have claim that "In Christ Alone" has a distinctively Irish folk tune feel, which it surely might, given that Townend and Getty call Ireland home.

In some circles at least, its immense popularity was helped along by a rip-roaring doctrinal fight, created when the PCUSA, the quintessential "mainline" denomination in North America, decided against giving it a place in their hymnal. They couldn't handle one particular line: "Till on that cross as Jesus died/the wrath of God was satisfied." The Presbyterians hated even a whiff of the idea that God almighty was responsible in any way for his son's own death, so they tried alterations. Townend wouldn't buy them--it's got to be what he wrote. 

The last thing I'd care to do is mix it up in a theological brawl--I'll stay out of that ring. Besides, that's not the story that rises from in my soul whenever I get anywhere near that music. That's a story that begins with a telephone call.

"Jake Mulder, Emo," the voice said--period. Masculine, young but not a kid, forceful, so sure of himself that it never dawned on him the man he was calling might not know exactly what an emo was. I withheld the giggle, but I'm sure I smiled. What I knew in an instant was that I'd have to solve the mystery of "emo" through whatever content was a'comin'.

They were having a retreat, Jake said, the young people of the church (Emo was a town with a Christian Reformed Church), and they were wondering whether I'd be interested in coming up (okay, it's in Canada) and be their speaker. 

I'm guessing I'd been teaching at Dordt College for two years, hadn't yet entertained requests to speak anywhere that I remember. Going to this place--this "Emo"--sounded like a trip--especially if the rest of the kids were anything like Jake Mulder. He sold me. I don't think he doubted for a moment that I'd say yes. Who would, after all? It's Emo we're talking about here. 

It took another call or two to get the arrangements down. Emo was pretty much straight north in northern Ontario, he told me, even though the town itself is pretty much right on the river that divides the States from Canada, which would seem to me to be "southern" Ontario--I mean, you can't go too much farther south. He had the trip all determined for me-- part of it in a little single-engine lightweight that landed on a grassy field. 

Sometime along the line I asked about the crowd. It would include kids from Thunder Bay to Winnepeg, a bunch, he told me. I told myself to find out where Thunder Bay was. High school age? "Sure," he said, as if they studiously avoided discrimination, "and older too." In Canada, as in the Netherlands back then, a young people's society included 20-somethings. You left the fold only when you got yourself a spouse. 

"We got a place for you right down the road from town," he told me, "the Veldhuisens." I had no idea what I was in for. One of the Veldhuisen girls had taken a class with me. She's the one who said they ought to get the Dordt guy to come to Emo. 

All I knew was I'd be staying at the Veldhuisens somewhere just down the road from a place called Emo, a very real place, in Canada, somewhere around another town called International Falls, wherever that was.

I'm quite sure they wanted me to read stories. If they'd wanted me to preach, hard as it would have been to turn down Jake Mulder, I'd have begged off--I've never been a preacher. 

Pence is out

Anyone who takes prayer seriously will take former VP Mike Pence's description of himself seriously. Last weekend he shocked everyone by officially dropping out of contention--I'm not sure he was ever in--to become the Republican nominee for President, did so "after much prayer and deliberation," he said. No one doubts that. It's not hard to imagine Pence on his knees beseeching the Lord for His good word on what must have been, for the former VP, a difficult decision.

His numbers were failing, and his coffers were empty. He was finished before he was finished.

I feel sorry for Trump's silver-haired, faithful sidekick.

Somewhat. 

He's not a victim. Given his ample religiosity, he must have known that Donald Trump's choosing him as VP was pure politics, an attempt by the Orange Man to harvest the Christian sheaves in the electorate, the immense evangelical base who had ample misgivings about a thrice-married bully who bragged about his sexual accomplishments. With Saint Mike Pence smiling at his side, Trump isolated his own piggishness enough to appear normally moral, which he, of course, never was. Pence pitched in, bringing in the pious the President needed. Remember those early days when scores of evangelicals loved to call Donald J. Trump a "baby believer"? 

From day one Mike Pence got used; but then Pence used Trump too. He had to have smelled the rat, but he took the job because he knew--or thought he knew--that any aspirations he ever had for the Presidency would be enhanced by his being VP, whether Trump won the 2016 election or didn't (in fact, preferably that he didn't).

But he did, Pence at his side, nodding and grinning like a stooge. You can't help wonder what Mike Pence said to the Lord after ascending to office. I'm sure he asked for God's blessing on the Trump administration, but you can't help feeling that Pence's penchant for prayer had to be altered. Did he pray to keep Muslims out of the country, to give significant revenues to the rich, money they didn't need? Did he pray for the Mexicans to pay for the wall?  

I'm guessing he prayed for the Trump. He'd have to, really--he was and is a believer. But you can't help wondering if he didn't ask the Lord, please, please to change the bully and his belligerence, to heal that forked tongue. What Pence asked about Trump is between the former VP and the Lord, but I'd love a transcript.

On January 6th everything changed. Pence knew very well what his boss wanted him to do, and, au contraire, what the boss's chorus wanted. He'd been coached. If he wanted to stay in office, he needed to act, to toss out the tally. After prayer, I'm sure, he did the right thing and chose the constitution over the great deceiver. He said nothing, thereby making a moral determination that preserved the rule of law but ended his Presidential aspirations, made him public enemy #1 for the 30 million cultic Trumpettes. When he chose to do nothing, his political aspirations went dead in the water--if they hadn't been before. 

He did nothing and therefore did everything. He chose the constitutionally-mandated dumb show job and not the slates of false electors. He did the right thing, undoing the wrong thing he'd done four years earlier in accepting the VP job in the first place, a job he was given because he was such an ardent public pray-er, a saint the Great Sinner needed to mount the support of millions of other pray-without-ceasing Trumpettes.

Life holds lots of opportunities to use this old maxim, but I haven't employed it for a long time, so I'll take it out of the attic because it fits. Goes like this: "He who sups with the Devil had best use a long spoon."

When a man who goes to his knees as often as Pence seems to say he does, the day he accepted Trump's offer to be his VP is the day he signed away his fate, not to the Lord but to the darkness. 

I do feel sorry for him. He's come to the end of the road politically. You would have had to be blind not to see that coming. More Republicans hate him than like him.

But Mike Pence was never a victim. Never was, and never will be. 

Sunday Morning Meds --from Psalm 37

“A little while, and the wicked will be no more;

though you look for them, they will not be found.”

 

More than thirty years have passed since a man known as the BTK Killer (“bind, torture, kill”) was sentenced to 175 years in prison. Dennis Rader, who for years had eluded police in Wichita, Kansas, even as he taunted them through a string of brutal murders, could not, legally, have received a tougher sentence.

 

It is sometimes as difficult to take to heart some of the sentiment of the Psalms as it is tough to stomach wholesale Old Testament blood-letting. Honestly, I have to think long and hard today to come up with people I’d associate—or certainly brand—with the word “wicked." 

 

Certainly, Dennis Rader is one, a serial murderer who carried out demonic crimes over a thirty-year period, while playing an evil game of cat and mouse with police. Married, with two children, Dennis Rader was a city official who enforced zoning and neighborhood codes and an active member of a local church, where he had been elected the congregation’s president.

 

He’d served his country in the Air Force, did time in Vietnam. Dennis Rader was a Jekyll/Hyde, someone occasionally characterized as so nondescript that his being BTK seemed totally impossible to those who knew him.  Would they were right.  In his home, police found folders of news clippings proudly documenting his crimes.

           

In a rambling 20-minute statement at the end of the trial, Rader thanked his defense team, his social worker, the members of the jail staff, and his pastor.  He called the murders “selfish and narcisstic,” and then, shockingly, as if he were, in all truth, the final authority on what to him was still a game, he listed the mistakes the prosecution had made in the case.  Madness that rational is just plain evil.

           

That the wicked Rader will never again walk the streets of Wichita or any town or city is an absolute blessing.  One plea on the part of the district attorney was especially memorable.  She asked that the judge limit Rader’s access to pictures of animals and humans and that he be allowed no writing materials, which, she alleged, he would use to continue his fantasies. 

 

It was denied—under First Amendment guidelines.  That’s a shame. The world does not need to hear any more about Dennis Rader, even what I’m writing.

           

I do hope, honestly, that the God he worshipped throughout his life forgives him; and if I know grace at all, I reckon it’s possible.  God’s love vastly surpasses ours.

 

Maybe in Dennis Rader’s case, what David promises in this verse from Psalm 37 has happened. Really, the initials “BTK” mean almost nothing to most of us today.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see every last detail of the monstrous life of Dennis Rader disappear from the earth, just as David promises, just as the Bible says?

 

King David dreams of a better world, as all of us do, a world without Dennis Raders.

 

Lord Jesus, he’s saying, come quickly.          

A Shoshone Miracle

[With this addition, my little trip up the Missouri will end. Honestly, I didn't need to say anything at all because it's almost impossible to imagine how much has already been written about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Library shelves overflow with books, and Google will supply any interested reader with endless sights.  

I wouldn't have written what I have if the KWIT radio weren't parked as close as it is to the Floyd Monument, Sioux City's own towering obelisk that commemorates the life and notes the death of Sgt. Charles Floyd, the only man who didn't return. He was just 23 years old. 

I started at Kansas City and will finish with Sacajawea, who didn't get drafted into the Corps of the Discovery until the company was long gone from the neighborhood.

So she's last on the little tour I created. Hope you enjoyed it.]

~*~*~*~

What happened to her when she was a kid wasn't that unusual among nomadic, war-faring Great Plains tribes. When hers--the Shoshones--got into a bloody fight with another--the Hidatsas--she got herself kidnapped, lost her home, and was eventually--sad but true--sold into slavery. She was, then, only ten years old. 

All of that sounds awful today, and it was. On the other hand, it wasn't wildly unusual. What was unusual was the strange white men coming up the river, a whole number of them, sometimes dressed in ridiculous blue uniforms. It was the party of Lewis and Clark, who'd struggled up the Missouri in any way they could, bound for nobody knew exactly what--to find, those Native people must have figured, whatever it was they could at the mouth of the river, like the end of the rainbow maybe. Sickly-looking people too--so pale.

She'd got herself won in a card game after being kidnapped, both she and her friend Otter Woman, when a French-Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charboneau, who was hardly a prize, won both of them with a fair-to-middlin' poker hand, then got Sacajawea with child, this 16-year-old girl hundreds of miles from her family.

So when Lewis and Clark signed that trapper to do some scouting for them--they were up in what would be North Dakota at the time--Sacajawea was pregnant, plump as a plum. That baby, Jean Baptiste, was born mid-winter, February, 1805, while the whole party hibernated at Fort Mandan amid the Dakota icebox.

None of that happened anywhere close to Siouxland, but any string of tales told about the corps has to mention Sacajawea, without whom success would never have been anything more than a fantasy.

Let’s just be forthright, Sacajawea wasn't baggage, but a bona fide unforeseen benefit. Just 16 years old, she just happened to know her way around the neighborhood when the Missouri elbowed its way west into Montana. What's more, she knew the language! Good night, what a deal she was.

One could argue, although white people might find it hard to do, that without this girl, this kid, this teenage, unmarried mom, this Indian(!), Lewis and Clark and their much bally-hooed Corps of Discovery would never have made it to Oregon. Others would have, of course, because pale-faced folks were swarming west in numbers that seemed unending to Native people, white folks carrying diseases that would eventually wipe out tens of thousands, including most all of the Hidatsas.

In what had to be the most memorable public homecoming of the whole adventure, this young mom found herself in a Shoshone camp where she spotted, almost miraculously, her brother, Cameahwait, who was chief of the Shoshones. Astonishment—that’s what the entire corps must have felt right then.

Had Lewis and Clark made it no farther than Great Falls, there certainly would have been other explorers and frontiersmen to see the vast American riches in a country only recently purchased by a government in faraway Washington. Still, what the Corps of Discovery did was an accomplishment more impressive than any other back then, finding their way from St. Louis to the Oregon coast and the Pacific Ocean, then returning, all in a couple of years, a feat they could not have accomplished without little Sacajawea, who was carrying, for weeks of that trek, mile after mile, her own lively little bundle of joy, caring dearly for him during what months remained of the adventure. 

As remarkable an enterprise as the Lewis and Clark adventure was, and it was—their only loss being Sgt. Charles Floyd--they could not have done it without Sacajawea, that little Shoshone girl with the tiny baby, a woman who died just a few years later, in 1812, of some kind of fever.

It’s impossible to tell the story without giving her the attention she deserves. What she did must be remembered, and not just remembered either, but celebrated.

The Myth of Old Ree

It’s as much a grave as a monument. For more than 100 years, an obelisk has stood mightily atop a chunk of granite, rising twenty feet into the air, far above the Missouri River just west. It celebrates the Treaty of 1858, the Yankton Treaty, not the first among Sioux treaties, but right there among the earliest, and, like all of them a testimony to promises broken.

Across the face of the continent, undocumented immigrant aliens with white faces and hard-to-pronounce European names wanted good land occupied by Native people. Here in a town named Greenwood, it was the Yanktons who roamed and ruled a massive land triangle that began right here at the mouth of the Big Sioux.

Impossible as it may seem, the white man’s powers-that-be created a delegation of Yankton leaders and brought them to Washington, even though few of them had ever seen a town bigger than Ft. Randall.

What exactly those Yankton headmen did for four long months in the nation’s capital can barely be imagined, but history suggests that what kept them there couldn’t be classified as entertainment. Smutty Bear, one of the delegates was warned that if he didn’t sign the treaty, he’d walk back, a penalty Smutty Bear didn’t consider punishment.

Russell Means says their white hosts rolled out the barrels with uncommon frequency, trying to loosen up men who weren’t inclined to trade land for bib overalls. They loved buffalo, not pulling a share through Mother Earth.

Some say the Yankton headman Struck by the Ree finally signed the treaty when he was promised no white man would take possession of the red pipestone quarry where generations of Native people had dug stone for pipes and amulets, a sacred place.

For that—and the promise of $1.6 million over a fifty-year period--the Yanktons gave away (“ceded” is the historical term) 11 million Siouxland acres, some of it under your feet or your offices.

The name Stuck by the Ree is carved into the monument, a man, by legend, who was born when Lewis and Clark pulled the expedition over just down the hill at river’s edge. Suddenly, in the evening, the Yanktons brought a new baby to the counsel. The story—I must admit—is rooted in myth. No one wrote down what happened, but it’s been part of the Corps of Discovery story for more than a century. Here’s the good part: Lewis and Clark wrapped that baby in an American flag, then pledged that this favored child would be a leader of his people and a servant of peace.

Which, by the way, he was. He was a man of peace, but he hated the invasion coming through “the Yankton triangle.” Eventually, Struck by the Ree regretted the treaty he’d signed. “I am getting poorer every day,” he said. "The white men are coming like maggots. It is useless to resist them. They are many more than we are. We could not hope to stop them. Many of our brave warriors would be killed, our women and children left in sorrow, and still we would not stop them. We must accept it, get the best terms we can get and try to adopt their ways."

As you can imagine, Old Ree was half villain, half hero. Worship in the Catholic church would never begin until he was seated. But then there’s this: the old chief’s house was burned to the ground, his horses stolen by people who hated him.

Old Ree still cuts a vaunted figure. Just up the road from the monument, his cemetery stone is a tower, ten feet tall, most of it sculpted in his image. Makes him seem, still, the mayor of the place.

Old Ree grew up to be what the mythic Lewis and Clark predicted, a servant of peace. They had part of it right. Stop for yourself at the old cemetery and see the way he stands a head taller than the rest. What Lewis and Clark couldn’t have guessed what happened out here, or even their part in it.

But you have to admit it makes a good story—a little baby wrapped in a flag in the glow of firelight. Sure, it makes a good story.