The Rendezvous -- Hugh Glass (3)

Clear as a friend's heart, 'twas, and seeming cool--
A crystal bowl whence skyey deeps looked up.
So might a god set down his drinking cup
Charged with a distillation of haut skies.
As famished horses, thrusting to the eyes
Parched muzzles, take a long-south water-hole,
Hugh plunged his head into the brimming bowl
as though to share the joy with every sense.
And lo, the tang of that wide insolence
Of sky and plain was acrid in the draught!
How ripplingly the lying water laughed!
How like fine sentiment the mirrored sky
Won credence for a sin of alkali!
So with false friends.

Pretend this is Lit 101. Okay, what on earth is going on in what you just read?

If you know some history you might have a leg up. This parched soul is named Hugh, and he's alone and in tough shape. If you remember the violence of The Revenant (2015), your nightmares might just lead you to think "Hugh" is the bear-torn hero of that movie. He is.

But the rest of the class may need some background.

Hugh Glass has been left for dead. If you saw The Revenant or read the novel or read Lord Grizzly, by Frederick Manfred, you know the story of Hugh Glass, beaver trapper, circa 1830, left for dead after being mauled by a she-bear.

In the odd poem I just read, Hugh Glass is really thirsty; but what's with those "parched muzzles. . .thrusting"? And what kind of "lying water laughed" anyway?--and "ripplingly"? Seriously? "The sin of alkali" does a ton more than suggest that the crystal bowl so long-sought (Oh my goodness, I'm picking it up myself) turns out to be "acrid in the draught!" It ain't good--that's for sure. But isn't the whole thing a little ridiculous?

"The Song of Hugh Glass" is an ancestor to Manfred's Hugh, as well as Punke's and Leonardo DiCaprio's. What we're reading is the verse of John Neihardt, himself a legend in Nebraska, and subject of a state monument in Bancroft. Neihardt penned his version of the Hugh Glass saga in an epic poem that sounds for all the world like Shakespeare or John Milton. That sound is a long haul from Bancroft.

When Neihardt took Lit 101 right here at Wayne State, what he learned was that true literary stardom, a readership across the ages, needed to be penned in something called "epic poetry." Think Homer--The Iliad and Odyssey. Maybe Beowulf?

So right out here in our backyard, John Neihardt figured the Hugh Glass story was just as great as any ancient Greek legend—and just as central to a nation's identity.

"Why not?" Neihardt must have told himself. "What America needs is its own Epic of Gilgamesh or Divine Comedy. Why not start with a wilderness man like our own indomitable Hugh Glass?

You got to love the aspiration, don't you? John Neihardt argued for world-class heroism right here on the Plains.

Plunged deeper than the seats of hate and grief,
He gazed about for aught that might deny
Such baseness: saw the non-committal sky,
The prairie apathetic in a shroud,
The bland complacence of a vagrant cloud--
World-wide connivance.

Amazing. Amid his hunger and thirst, Glass looks to nature for sweet solace and gets "the prairie apathetic" and a "vagrant cloud” because, dang it!—it seems to him that no one cares.

Okay, let's be blunt. A full century after Neihardt wrote the Hugh Glass story in Shakespearean English, it somehow seems dead wrong, doesn't it?

Maybe. But you got to love Neihardt the bard. What he was doing was something we may well need more of--cheerleading. Neihardt believed our stories ranked with anyone's anywhere in time and space.

And he was right. A decade ago now, The Revenant was awarded three Oscars. Wasn't the same Hugh Glass saga that Neihardt loved, wasn't even set in Siouxland; but Neihardt was, without a doubt, on to something when he sang "The Song of Hugh Glass," something that began here, a story first written in Siouxland.

Catherland

It was a long, long trip, but I don't remember once thinking it wasn't worth my time. What's more, I don't remember ever feeling boredom in my students or seeing it in their faces. Once we'd get there, it seemed the topography had changed--and it had. We live, here, on the emerald edge of the Great Plains; northwest Iowa is not the Great Plains. Willa Cather's Red Cloud, Nebraska, is. At the right time of year, the grasses around the region seemed red, just as she says in My Antonia so beautifully. 

It was My Antonia that drew us out there. Maybe ten years after I'd begun teaching at Dordt, I inherited the American Novels course that had been on the books ever since I'd been a student. I don't know how I ever noticed it, but somewhere along the line Ms. Cather's Great Plains started to feel something of a cousin to what we could see around as the eastern edge of all that open space. 

When I did, I probably looked on line for a place called Red Cloud, thinking it might be worthwhile just to check. Even then--35 years ago--what's left of Red Cloud, Nebraska, was just about a full-time chamber of commerce for Nebraska's most favorit-est writer, Willa Cather. I was sure that if anyone in town could prove that young Cather had visited there house or lot, they'd get a commemorative marker to put in the ground. Back then, Red Cloud, Nebraska could have been Cathertown, maybe should have been.

We'd meet at the old Cather Center--books, coffee cups, t-shirts, you know--where we'd meet our assigned tour guide. In the old bank museum, we'd get our first-hand bio of Willa Cather. Then, it was on to the old railroad station (now redone), the Catholic church up the block, the Episcopalian church (Cather's), a little spin around town, and finally the Cather home, just off Main. 

We'd have lunch in one of the town's greasy spoons (there were only two, only one choice), making quite a show of ourselves, the old guy--me--with at least a half-dozen coeds (all blonde), and, one year, just two guys, both of whom happened to be African-American. Strange combo we figured those Red Cloud-ians up at the counter must have whispered. 

There was more, too, lots more, especially if the tour guide--always a local woman-- was good, best if she didn't just follow the straight-and-narrow. Inevitably, and with maybe a little coaxing the $64,000 question would emerge. "So, tell us--what do people in Red Cloud say?--was Willa Cather gay?"

Generally, back then, my students were squeamish about it--I doubt they would be so guarded today. Being gay--in those first years out there--was still not something to be bantered about lightly. Sometimes, our hosts would mutter some line to get the class off the subject, but once in a while our genial host would sit up in front of the van we'd be in and wind a story that would often satisfy me, at least, the guy in charge.

One year, she drew the answer from a discussion she must have had years before, with her grandfather who was old enough to remember an adult Cather, who lived in New York City, not Red Cloud, but came back home often enough for her visits to be remembered.

That guide's Grandpa had once told her that long, long ago, his father before him had told him that when he was a boy, his Red Cloud father (three generations back), had set the kids down formally. Cather went on to Lincoln, to the University of Nebraska, after graduating as valedictorian of her high school class--just three in the class; but her graduation picture caught her in the way she wanted to be seen at that time in her life--not as a girl, but short-haired as a boy who signed her name "William."

With Willa Cather, the most famous of the Great Plains novelists, there were some gender issues throughout her life. The guide's grandfather claimed that his father had told them not ever to make fun of Willa because, she said, her great-grandfather had told his kids that Willa, unlike the other kids, was very, very special.

I'll never forget that answer, that story, because it so wonderfully handled every last comment. She's not weird; she's special--small towns, early 20th century, at their best. I left, proud.

Besides, who cares, really? What we had, in hand, was a wonderful novel, a beautiful tale of life on the open prairie, always the students' semester favorite. Somewhere here I've got a brick I dug from the ground her grandparents homesteaded. 

And I've got that story. "She's 'special.'" 

Six hours out, six hours back home. Twelve hours together in a van, me driving.

Worth every minute.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—

where does my help come from?” Psalm 121:1 

I wasn’t sure where my daughter’s question came from, and I was busy thinking of something else at the time.  That’s why I didn’t give her a very good answer, not a fatherly answer anyway. 

 “When you were my age,” she said, sort of laughing, “did you ever think that the world was just going to come to an end?” 

 My daughter was 30 at the time, the age I was when my wife and I had her. Truth be told, right then I couldn’t remember ever thinking the world was in imminent danger of coming to an end.  I smiled and said no, rolled my eyes, and turned back to the computer screen.

 Later, I couldn’t sleep.

 I was a kid, but I remember learning to crawl under my school desk should nuclear holocaust come to Oostburg, Wisconsin.  I grew up in the Cold War, when the Soviets were capable of pushing the wrong button or pushing the right one wrongly. 

 I remember walking on a football field during the Cuban missle crisis and having a profound talk with a kid about whether or not we’d ever play a game.  We both knew football was a metaphor; we were talking about the end of the world.

 I remember the comet Kahoteck and Y2K.  I remember a number of primitive eschatologies—Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, for instance—that numbered our days by manipulating ancient calendars vaguely suggested in the odd visions of minor prophets.  End-times theology does well often. Not long ago, everyone and their pet hamster wanted not to be Left Behind.

 If you ask me—and she once did--I believe her generation lives in more fear than mine did. I was reared with more freedom than her kids will ever see.  When I was ten, my friends and I took our bikes down to Lake Michigan and lost ourselves and our inhibitions in endless lakeshort woods. Today all that land is private property; but today, no parent would allow a ten-year-old kid that kind of freedom. 

 The change in parents’ attitudes toward their children was immense in the years I was a teacher. Loving, helicopter parents, moms and dads who ask more questions about college than their children do, visited campuses every spring for the last two decades already, lugging their children with, most of them far less interested than they were. I never visited the college where I enrolled. Come September, my parents drove me there—500 miles—then left. That was it.

As I write, the Brits have suffered several vicious attacks of terrorism. Our President uses their tragedy to urge the implementation of his orders to shut the door to immigrants from certain Muslim countries. Some object, but fear is a motivator, and a political motivator too, to be sure. Fear sells.

 So, my daughter, this is a better answer than my eye-rolling:  yes, I’ve felt as if the world was about to end. I’m guessing we all have. We’ve all been afraid.  Even the psalmist. 

 While the psalms tell us bountifully about God, they’re even better at telling us about ourselves. “I will lift up my eyes to the hills,” he says in verse one of this faith-heavy psalm, “—where does my help come from?” There are times we all feel there’s no one out there to hold back the horror.

 You’re not alone. But that’s divinely true, isn’t it? It’s a joy to know you’re not alone.

The Rendezvous (2) -- James Beckwourth

That famous ad William Ashley in Saint Louie used to fish for recruits for his Rocky Mountain Fur Trade brought in men, even young men, who weren't choir boys or  ever would be. Hard as it is to believe in 1824,  Ashley was an equal opportunity employer. How can we know that? Because we know one of his recruits, at least, was African-American. 

James Beckwourth's father, using an old English family title, went by name of Sir Jennings Beckwith. Sir Jennings coupled with one of his slaves who gave birth to James Beckwourth, a multi-racial kid who was treated by his father, the old sources say, like a son, not a slave--which is to say educated and, in general, pampered.

Okay, but then how on earth did a Black man fare with a cast of mountain men, rough-an- tough hooligans who held less-than-charming prejudices? James the Black man didn't get drummed out of the corps. 

Why not? Sir Jennings' son James carried along a deed of emancipation that declared his freedom. He couldn't be cashed in like some runaway. So here's a word that's fallen out of use--manumission. One word, manumission, a word used to describe how freed slaves were granted, by their owners, their freedom. Once manumitted, we might say, James Beckwourth was free as a bird.

And he flew--did he ever. Once freed from his apprenticeship to an ornery  St. Louis  blacksmith, Beckwourth read the ad and signed up to be one of Ashley's rugged wilderness crew, where he spent most of the next decade as one of the original mountain men, taking a wife or two or three from the Crows, where he became the chief's adopted son and lived, quite comfortably in fact, while fighting the Crow's traditional enemies, the Blackfeet. 

There's oh-so-much more. He left the Crow people and became a commodities trader at places like Bent's Fort,  Sante Fe, and Taos, and in 1842 put up his own business at a lonesome place that would someday be named Pueblo, Colorado.

During the Gold Rush era, he went to the bank with his what he knew about the untraveled west, leading wild-eyed fortune seekers to the places they thought to make a fortune. 

And everywhere he went he fought Indians--Seminoles in Florda, renegade bands in California, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho back on the plains. When finally he grew old, he met a man named Thomas Bonner at Beckwourth's own country hotel. Bonner listened to Jim Beckwouth tales and wrote them down into a book, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians (1856).

Beckwourth didn't have to lie about the happenings in his life, but he did--or so say some historians. Sometimes it's hard to measure tall tales.

Late in life, he went back to the Crow, where he'd come son of the chief way back in the ancient past. No one knows how he died, or at least no one's talking about it. A rumor claims one of his ex-wives found a way to get back at him. 

Not nice, but it sort of fits, don't you think?

Was he here? Had to be. He was, in short, almost everywhere else. 

  

A Rendezvous (i)

 

When William Ashley, THE William Ashley of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, came back up to St. Louis from far up the Missouri, all the way to the Bighorn River that first time, the load of furs he took back with him was enough to blow out his pretty substantial pockets. It was 1824, and what Ashley had attended—he never trapped a beaver himself—was a celebration/festival/sales meeting of a hundred or more mountain men, his men, his employees, who had, like never before, gathered together near a fork in the Green River, somewhere close to where a town named McKinnon, Wyoming lies today.

It was Ashley’s idea to substantially alter the commonly held way in which fur companies gathered in the bounty. Instead of waiting for the trappers to get to St. Louis to bring in the county, it was Ashley’s idea to go get the furs himself, venture up the Missouri River to get to a place agreed upon for a “rendezvous,” the first of the famous rendezvous, rowdy celebrations, get-togethers of men who’d hardly seen other human beings for something close to a year.

William Ashley might have been a little scared of handling all that bounty, $50,000 worth, in fact, 1.5 million in pelts in today's cash, but then what he knew was that as long as he kept his head down, he wasn’t in imminent danger of being robbed. It’s not as if swash-buckling pirates roamed the Missouri back then. Few people were likely capable of imagining the wealth of what he had in the boat.

He must have worn a smile because his “rendezvous” idea was a winner he wasn’t about to abandon. All the way down the river, right here where the Big Sioux flows into the Missouri, he had to be thinking of what manner of vice and malefaction next year’s wilderness jamboree was going to entertain. If you stand up on the South Sioux City bridge, you can almost hear him cackle.

What he’d done, almost blindly, is hired some real ringers with an ad that ran, famously in an 1822 St. Louie newspaper: “One hundred enterprising young men… to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years,” which means, of course, that the winners all had to pass by our place at least once on their way up the Missouri River.

Who were the ringers? Well, Jim Bridger for one, who was 18 when he answered Ashley’s ad. He’d never been any further west than St. Louis. He spent the next 20 years wandering from the Canadian border to the Spanish forts of New Mexico, from Missouri to Utah. When he stumbled on the Great Salt Lake, he thought it was the Pacific Ocean. In fact, he may have been the first white man to Old Faithful blow its top.

Then there was Jedidiah Smith, the parson of the bunch, often credited with discovering overland routes that became major highways during the Gold Rush. Smith lost a scalp to a grizzly, but got it back when his buddies sewed it back on.

And who can forget Hugh Glass, mauled by a bear and left for dead, a man whose will to revenge kept him alive but sense of humanity finally conquered all those troubled demons in his memory, a legendary character still alive in the works of John Niehardt and Frederick Manfred.

How about James Beckwourth, an African-American who shows up almost everywhere across the continent, including a significant tour of duty with the Crows, serving, some say, as their head man.

Ashley’s home base was St. Louis, but when he went afield to pick up the good, he, like the others, passed right by the confluence of three river which became Sioux City. We can’t call them residents, but they were here, if not on the river then on the great river road you can still note with its brand new sign up on our Old Missouri River Trail.

Just go stand there sometime and imagine, with Ashley and his crew gracing our hills. Just imagining all those tough-as-leather mountain men, their wives, their donkeys, their furs—just imagining our story makes our world a bigger place.

Let's say, just for kicks, that our President suddenly gets the message that unless something changes, unless something makes an 180-degree shift, it's going to be lights out for him and his precious cargo-carrying administration come November. Let's just say, for sake of argument that reality looks him right in the eye, as Nathan did David, and says "you're the man," you're the cause of the absolute mess we're in.  You done it, not fake news or those lousy commie dems.

Let's just say, again, for sake of argument, that all of a sudden he gets it, maybe even gets real, honest-to-goodness faith, begins to understand that we all stand in need of grace, even him, that his hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I'm bringing up religious madness only because he seems to deal in it, criticizing the pope, running an AI pic that makes him into a savior, Trump bibles for sale--you know. 

But, just for kicks, let's try to get our minds around Donald Trump becoming a saint in any of the great world's religions--a Buddhist monk, a Native medicine man, a Muslim cleric. Let's just assume that suddenly he comes to an understanding of the fact that he's not his people's "retribution" (remember that speech?), but his people's humble servant.

Let's just assume that he is the blessed recipient of some kind of Damascus Road experience that leaves him mute, in furlongs of abject humiliation that he can't Truth Social his way out of.

Let's assume it happened, okay?

How does he communicate his redeemed soul? How does he comport himself for what's left of a largely ruined second term? How does he express that the dominating word in his vocabulary will from that day forward be love and not graft? 

How on earth could he proceed?

Well, easy, really. He'd have to make clear, in word and deed, that he is reversing course on EVERYTHING his agenda had formulated and acted upon. He'd have to start by being human, by hurting for and with the hurting. He'd have to reinstate USAID programs he cut with such relish. He'd have to back off his war in the Persian Gulf, call Putin the murderer he is, tell each and every one of his billionaire buddies to use their bounty to help rebuild medical care for all. He'd have to call of the uniforms and tell the nation that what we really need is a standardized program of immigration, then, with Congress, build it.

He'd have to either shut down Truth Social or else use it to broadcast meditations on the sacred words of whatever world religion has grabbed his attention. 

In short, he'd have to be something, someone he isn't. 

Could that happen? Even if he really wanted to, even if he came to see how perilous his rule is right now? Even if the impossible became possible?

Could that happen? Seriously, could that happen?

If you're a true believer in whatever world religion you or he might choose, the answer to that question is "Of course it could happen. The Almighty is all-powerful--nothing, no one stands beyond his love and rule. 

So could he?

"Lord, I believe," both me and the man with the possessed daughter said. "Help thou my unbelief."

The West

 

The West can still take your breath away, as millions of vacationers know when they head out every summer. There are untolled places in the American West that are just as untrammeled as they were in the late 18th century, when the only human residents were indigenous. 

One can only imagine the abject astonishment when any Easterner would arrive at vistas so wide open they seemed to swallow you.

There are some records, of course, like this passage from Thomas James, Three Years Among the Indians and Mexicans.

On the third day we issued from very high and desolate mountains on both sides of us, whose tops are covered with snow throughout the year, and came upon a scene of beauty and magnificence combined, unequalled by any other view of nature that I ever beheld. It really realized all my conceptions of the Garden of Eden. 

In the west the peaks and pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains shone resplendent in the sun. The snow on their tops sent back a beautiful reflection of the rays of the morning sun. From the sides of the dividing ridge between the waters of the Missouri and Columbia there sloped gradually down to the bank of the river we were on, a plain, then covered with every variety of wild animals peculiar to this region, while on the east an­other plain arose by a very gradual ascent and extended as far as the eye could reach. 

These and the mountain sides were dark with buffa­loes, elk, deer, moose, wild goats, and wild sheep; some grazing, some lying down under the trees, and all enjoying a perfect millennium of peace and quiet. On the margin the swans, geese, and pelicans cropped the grass or floated on the surface of the water. The cottonwood trees seemed to have been planted by the hand of man on the bank of the river to shade our way, and the pines and cedars waved their tall majestic heads along the base and on the sides of the mountains.

 The whole landscape was that of the most splendid English park. The stillness, beauty, and loveliness of this scene struck us all with indescribable emotions. We rested on the oars and enjoyed the whole view in silent astonishment and admiration. Nature seemed to have rested here, after creating the wild mountains and chasms among which we had voyaged for two days. Dougherty, as if inspired by the scene with the spirit of poetry and song, broke forth in one of Burns noblest lyrics, which found a deep echo in our hearts.