"The Cross of Snow"

That Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of America's very first great--which is to say "national"-- poet/treasures did not want you or me reading this particular poem of his is manifestly obvious. Longfellow never read "The Cross of Snow" publicly nor touted it for publication. I suppose it lay innocently among his papers, his letters and notes to friends--just another scribbled sheet of paper, where someone cleaning up his life picked it up and read it, then, probably immediately, wondered why no one on the face of this green earth had seen it before. 

Longfellow was an America-sized celebrity poet at a moment when great poets were lavishly celebrated. Everyone knew Longfellow and quoted him freely; but the sad truth here is that no one saw this particular poem, nor read it, until some relative, probably post-mortem, cleaned up his office and happened to find it where the great American poet clearly intended it not to be found.

No one familiar with Longfellow's work would call him or his poetry "excessive" or "overwrought," certainly none of his contemporaries. This particular poem, "The Cross of Snow," is so brutally honest that it's not difficult to see why America's favorite poet would not want it published: it painfully reflects upon grief--his grief-- at his spouse's accidental death right there at home. 

Fanny Longfellow died a frighentingly awful death when her dress caught fire. Just one day later, her heroic attempts to save her notwithstanding, his beloved spouse passed away. It's impossible to imagine his agony, but you can stand beside his grieving by reading his tribute to her in "The Cross of Snow," a poem America's  most famous poet never intended you or me to read.

When you do, you'll feel the grieving husband and see for yourself the immense cross of snow pitched up against the mountainside. A full 150 years later, the intense aching in Longfellow's soul is still here in the lines:

There is a mountain in the distant West
  That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
  Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
  These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
  And seasons, changeless since the day she died. 

Eighteen years after he lost her, the image of that snowy cross still brings Longfellow back to grief, as if she'd not left. His heart is still shorn, jagged and bloodied.

The photographer William Henry Jackson took the immense landscape photograph that wrought such intense emotion from Longfellow's grieving soul. Jackson is best known or remembered for his remarkable photographs of compelling Western landscapes like the landscape featured here in this remarkable image.

And there's a back story: Jackson had heard of a disappearing cross in a mountain view and determined to capture the image, if that could be done, a job that required more strength than sense--a huge camera, 10 x 13 glass plates, an armful of chemicals and equipment, all of it lugged up a mountain across a valley from the snow cross when the temps were just right for that cross. to be there at that moment that day. Hundreds of pounds of equipment got toted up an adjacent mountain to a spot Jackson judged to offer the finest perspective.

The landscape photo William Henry Jackson took in that place on that August day, 1872, prompted Longfellow's very personal but memorable response. 

The cross of snow is more difficult to see these days, erosion on the mountain alters the image with each passing season. Once it offered hope, like an old favorite hymn. Even today, for some at least, the story offers. The snow on this mountain has meant much more than just snow on a mountain. 

     

Wounded Knee -- vi

 

A souvenir

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 thousands ghosts assembled in space so open it’s almost frightening.

Stand here alone for awhile, 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.

Wounded Knee -- v

 

Aftermath

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.

_____________________

continued and finished on Monday. . .

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 121

 

The LORD will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life;. . .”

 

My father was an elder in the church, a watcher, a keeper, although I knew very little about what happened when he walked off to meetings on Tuesday nights.  Most of what went on, I know, he was sworn not to tell, and some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t tell me because the knowledge would have hurt me.  I was, after all, a child.

 

One part of his job, I remember, was tallying after communion.  He had to meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to tally who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements, or—even worse, I’m sure—who might have been taking the body and blood even though they’d been barred. I have no idea what the elders called that little gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met.

 

What those elders were watching for were stories, the people who were coming to the table with a checkered past—or in process of checkering their presents. When I became an elder, nobody watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know, what lies beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.

 

That post-communion tallying—as well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted sense I have that elders really should be Godly statesmen, dutiful, virtuous, and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other elderly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I was an elder, giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the kind of person who grows into the office of elder, having raised good kids and having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.

 

Some years ago I was served the sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many years, valued only their own skin. I took the bread and wine from people who, with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets, used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, they were leaving behind a childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.

 

I know them. I’ve walked into their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I know that those men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last night—were once so far gone in treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine some of the evil they’ve perpetuated.  Who’d have ever thought that someday they’d be doling out the body and blood of Christ?  Amazing.

 

But the promise of scripture, and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy thugs, and probably especially then. 

 

He knew them.  He was watching them, keeping them from harm, when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners. Those two guys fed me the body and blood of Jesus.

 

Amazing grace.  What a celebration.  Hallelujah, what a savior. 

Wounded Knee -- iv

 

(cont. from yesterday)

“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.

Death

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.

__________________

more tomorrow. . .

Wounded Knee -- iii

 

What exactly happened?

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.

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.

_________________________

more tomorrow. . .

Wounded Knee -- ii

 

continued from yesterday. . .

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.

The Scene before us

Here we are. Look around. If you stand on this hill 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, almost like watching wind on water. That’s what’s gone. To the Sioux, the hunt was a 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.

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.”

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more tomorrow