Prairie du Chien

The Winnebago are right down the road, the Omaha a stretch farther. The Santee across the river. The Dakota up river in South Dakota. But was it always that way?

 For the record, the very first white men to set foot on the place people know of today as Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (flip Iowa, and you'll run into it) are a couple of names familiar to people over there on the Mississippi, Louis Jolliet, a fur trader, and his side kick Father Jacques Marquette, a missionary who rather liked the sightseeing and exploring that came with his travel package.

Again, for the record, the year the two of them came down the Wisconsin River to its confluence with the Mississippi was 1673, which makes Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, a little river town that sits right there today, the second oldest white colony in the Badger state. “Well,” you ask, “who was number one among the Cheeseheads?” The Packers, of course, or at least Green Bay, just a couple of decades after the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower and on Plymouth Rock.

Okay, you say, but what has that to do with us? Well, anyone who wants to know anything about the region's most awful 19th century horror, the Spirit Lake Massacre, which took place in 1857, way over here, hundreds of miles west of Jolliet and Marquette. And now you're wondering what the heck Inkpaduta, a Santee Wahpakutee, a Dakota Sioux and his warriors were doing at Lake Okoboji, a century before the roller coaster. How'd that murderer get here to the neighborhood anyway? He and his warriors just arise from the ground like poison sumac.

The answer has to do with that little Wisconsin town, Prairie du Chien. In 1825, almost 200 years after Jolliet and Marquette, a slew of Native people pitched their tents for talk with the white men in blue coats. “Who?” you ask. Easy: Sioux, Chippewa, Menominee, Winnebago, Sac & Fox, and Ioway, in other words, oodles of teepees.

And why right there? Because, like Sioux City, Prairie du Chien sits close to the confluence of two wonderful hi-ways: the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. 

And what was discussed? The future. Specifically, from a white man's point of view--how to stop the Injuns from killing each other? The answer won't surprise you: We'll keep them out of each other's hair. We'll give them each a homeland--not a reservation (that would come later), but give them each their own place to hunt buffalo and fish and trap beaver, or so the white men promised. 

So once upon a time in 1825, at a place that would someday be called Prairie du Chien, the whole upper Midwest--from eastern Wisconsin to western Iowa got segmented, not into states, but into regions where each tribe ran its own affairs.

Fair enough--right? Keep all those wild Indians racing horses, chasing buffalo, and out of each other’s hair. For the record, here's the segments drawn up by the gang at the signing of the 1825 Prairie du Chien Treaty: most of what is Minnesota goes to the Sioux (think Inkpaduta); most of Wisconsin to the Chippewa or (today) Ojibwe; most of Iowa to the Sac and Fox (think Black Hawk) and (wait for it) the Ioway.

The land where I'm sitting today, and the land where it's likely you are, was, at the time of the Spirit Lake Massacre, meant to be in possession of the Sac and Fox and Ioway, not the Sioux.

So then where were the Ioway when Inkpaduta and his band were way down south and west on the Little Sioux River?

 They were putting down roots in eastern Kansas or Oklahoma, on something people started to call “reservations,” where you'll still find some of them today.

My goodness, "reservations"? you ask. Who on earth came up with that idea? 

Need a little hint? Wasn't them. 

My first Ash Wednesday

Fifteen, maybe twenty years after I left the southwest corner of Wisconsin, I went back to look over the land, something I hadn't done while I lived and worked there. I'd been to Galena, IL, at night, only to scout some opposing basketball team; I had no idea that the old river city would become one of Illinois' finest tourist attractions.

I had no idea that the kids who sat in my classes could well have been great, great grandchildren of the original "badgers," thus named for their profession--the iron miners who dug out pits that still, here and there, litter the region. I sort of knew that those miners were a tough crew, a whole world apart from the Dutch Calvinists among and from whom I grew up. A number of those kids came from family-owned cheese factories that turned out the Swiss and brick I learned quickly to love, gifts for this young Turk teacher, still wet behind the ears, barely older than their kids. But I'd never taken the time to see where they'd come from. I was writing a novel. . .

Made me angry, being back there, driving past the high school, looking in the windows where I used to hold forth, disappointed with myself,  I hadn't really gone off-road during the two years I spent in Lafayette County, WI, whose claim to fame was having no stop lights. I hadn't gone up and down gentle hills authored by countless rivers in a hurry west to the Mississippi, Dubuque little more than a half hour away.

In those two years, even though I lived a half-hour from school, I'd never taken the time to see where my students came from. I mean, I knew that some kids were milkers and some cheesemakers, but I'd never seen the dairies where they'd spent their childhoods, storybook places in those rolling hardwood hills of America's Dairyland.

Truth be known, for me, at least, it was a hard sell to think of them as Christian believers. When your origins never wander all that far in a sturdy corral, defining characteristics are as bold as they are clear. It's not a surprise, I suppose, that on Ash Wednesday, when the Catholic kids came back from lunch with dirt rubbings on their foreheads, I had no idea what was going on and trouble not bringing the matter up. So many strangely dirtied.

"What's goin' on?" I must have asked someone or another, pointing up at my untouched forehead.

And it had to have been a treat to one or two of them to field that question, put the teacher in a desk and strong-arm the podium. "Can you imagine, Mr. Schaap has no idea it's Ash Wednesday." 

If I'd have unloaded on them, quoted from my catechism, done a Calvin thing, or simply rehearsed the reasons for the glorious Reformation, I'd have convinced them that I was nuts. I could have done that, but instead asked for their forbearance and that they not consider me as dingy as I must have seemed.

Some, as I remember, didn't wipe off the dust, so it stayed there all afternoon for me to see and judge--my Calvinism made me good at judging--and I remember thinking Bobby Westgaard?--the baddest kid in town has a dirty cross up there on his noggin? You got to be kidding. What kind of hocus-pocus religion would offer him the sacrament?'

In truth, I wasn't much older--four years--than they were, just as much a kid, maybe more. I was 22 years old, in love with my students, but innocent as Young Goodman Brown. 

Last night, that whole first Ash Wednesday and its scrapbook of memories came back as I watched my fellow congregants receive the imposition of ashes, as the action is traditionally called. 

I'm not bragging about this, but the imposition my students left on their foreheads fifty-some years ago, and my own naivete, my idiocy about it, left its own indelible mark, something I couldn't help but remember as people left the front of the church, the same dirty old cross on their foreheads. 

Fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, I went back to southwest Wisconsin in part because I wanted to see up close where they lived, where they came from. 

There was so much I had to learn. 

"Something there is. . ."

 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Thus begins one of America's all-time favorite poems, "Mending Wall," by one of its all-time favorite poets, a New Englander named Robert Frost, who wanted to sell an image of himself as a country bumpkin, when he wasn't an "awe-shucks" sort of guy. He was cagey as a red squirrel, tricky and quick enough not only to take on something as formidable as a stone wall, but wily enough to start with a dorky pun.

"What, pray tell, "doesn't love a wall" but "sends the frozen-ground swell under it"?

Why "frost" of course, as in upper case "Frost." Not funny? Okay, but maybe the most beloved pun in American literature.

Neighbors get together annually to rebuild the stone fence that separates their yards, to replace the stones that have fallen throughout the last year. The teller of the tale, Frost, can't help but wonder whether the world wouldn't be a better place without fences, while his neighbor stoically repeats a maxim he likely inherited from his grandpa: "good fences make good neighbors." If we don't know where you start, and I end, we got trouble in River City --"good fences make good neighbors."

Stone fences are a rarity in our neighborhood. About 150 years ago, barbed wire became all the rage--no annual rock replacements had to be made after all, and once the barbed wire is up, that's it--aside from occasional repairs. A bundle of barbed wire isn't all that comely, but the lousy stuff did more than its share to win the west, even though it didn't show up until after the Civil War. 

Not until 1874 did an Ohioan named Joseph Glidden patent an invention which became the industry standard, twisted wire with locked in barbs. Barbed wire made it possible to section off the unending cattle range the Great Plains once were, a space so wide-open cowboys used to wonder whether the world had an end. Barbed wire kept cattle and the neighbors both in--and out. 

A barbed-wire fence gave the property dimensions and kept the sheep out of the tomatoes and raspberries. During World War I, barbed wire demarked those bloody trenches in France. Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belzen, Dachau--they were all drawn and quartered by barbed wire. 

Today, it's coming down. Confinements and feedlots have replaced pastures. Sioux County, where I live, is the #1 hog producing county in the U. S., but you could take an all-day ride around here and not spot a pig even though there are as many as two million.

Robert Frost was right about there being some ambiguity. This morning, as I sit here over the keyboard, the wind is howling. The sun is shining, so there's no blizzard a'comin'--not right away at least; but I just finished reading David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard, a painful recitation of the stories of the children caught in crisis in a monster blizzard, right here, throughout our very region in January of 1888. Hundreds of children were out in that blinding blizzard. Many never returned home.

But some of those that did, like their parents who went after them, stayed upright and kept chugging through impossible winds and snow because as they crossed their fields to find their kids, they kept hold of wire, of barbed wire, confident that if they held fast to the prickly stuff they'd often enough strung themselves, they'd eventually stumble their way to something that offered safety. Gives new meaning to "Good fences make good neighbors."

Dang Frost doesn't tell you what he thinks. He follows these two gents as they repair their stone walls, while arguing--not strenuously or angrily--about limits, about traditions, about the privacy of private property. 

Something there is that doesn't love barbed wire--it's ornery and prickly and twisted, but once upon a time, in a storm, it was a blessing.

 

Today--on my birthday

That's my father. He's holding me. I'm not a reliable judge of such things, but I was likely six months old or so, maybe less. I discovered this picture a week ago or so, while sorting through the flotsam and jetsam the flood left behind, the flood that sent us fleeing from our country place and into the senior housing fortress where we now live. 

I don't recognize the background, so I'm guessing it's somewhere close to where we lived in the spring of 1948. My two sisters were already creating havoc in the neighborhood when I came onto the scene, exactly--today--78 years ago. 

His tie is a little bold, don't you think? --almost Native looking. I don't think Dad ever walked into a room and overwhelmed the place, not that he would have wanted to. He was mild-mannered and thoughtful, by nature not judgmental, just about as good a father as I could have wished. At his funeral, a dozen people--maybe more--told me my dad was a saint. They weren't kidding. 

He's been gone for a decade or so, passed without great drama, in a quiet, saintly fashion. As a believer, he was top-notch without being showy--that tie isn't like him. I think it's fair to say that he honestly tried to be the best human being he could because he believed with all his heart that's what Christ wanted of him and all of us. 

We split loyalties when it came to politics. Where his ardent Republicanism came from, I'll never know. He was inescapably conservative but never mean, never Trumpian. I was in high school when I met a housewife from Madison, WI, whose husband, she told us, was in Selma, marching for racial justice with Martin Luther King. It was 1965. That revelation just floored me because she was so ordinary, probably in her fifties, no commie radical. For me, that iced it--MLK wasn't the leftist enemy Dad thought he was. There was more to the story.

Dad lived in a world where one's lot in life was determined by personal responsibility. Those who sweat through it, succeeded; those who didn't, did not.  I don't know that Dad ever had a sense of what "Jim Crow" meant, or the legacies of slavery. He probably knew more about Calvinist theology than he did about American history.

It's sometimes hard to admit that I have become him far more than I once might have guessed. Even when I thought his shadow wasn't around, it was--and still is. I'd love a trike right now--something I could ride through the trails all around our new place. On Saturday, I went out to a bike shop with such specialties, got myself an intro to biking for people with my infirmities. When we talked price, I balked--after all, what would my dad think of his son putting that kind of money into a fancy trike with an electric motor? He wouldn't have said no--he wasn't judgmental; but his hesitancy had its own language. He still has a hand in every major decision I make. 

A couple years after his death, I was suddenly struck with the perception that he might never have quite understood his son's fiction, novels and short stories. Neither of my parents were readers; neither had any penchant for imaginative literature. Dad might have found it difficult, if not impossible to realize that when his son created a father in a story or novel, that father wasn't necessarily modeled after his own. I know he disliked Home Free, my first novel, because he believed people who read it and knew him somehow mistakenly figured the opinionated, crusty old Dutch immigrant father was somehow him. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So, I've been working on a collection of my stories, published through the years, a collection with plenty of explanations and sources, a collection that speaks to them, explains where ideas come from and how those ideas become transformed into the "felt life" of fiction. 

About heavenly libraries I know absolutely nothing, and they--Mom and Dad--are both long gone. How can I write it for them?

Like I say, Dad may have departed this life some time ago, but that doesn't mean he's left the scene. Nor Mom. There's a lot of her and a lot of him I hear when their voices sound within me. 

This morning--the 17th of February 2026, is exactly 78 years since I left Sheboygan Memorial Hospital adorned with this.

Long ago, birthdays stopped being "fun," but my getting another year and salvaging that old picture up top reminds me that today, as always, I have much to be thankful for.

For Presidents' Day

 

[An old Small Wonders piece celebrating President U. S. Grant. You can listen to the five-minute podcast here or read it below.} 

You'll find it just over the Mississippi, next door to Dubuque. The rolling hills all around hide the place, so when you drop down into Galena, Illinois, it feels like a discovery. It’s a 19th century gem where 85 per cent of the buildings are restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Galena, Illinois, the whole of it, is a museum.

Nine Civil War generals once called the place home--not bad for a stop on the river. Eight of them you'll have to Google, but the 18th President of these United States, 1869-1877, is a name you’ll recognize. His presidency is probably less memorable than his command of the Union Army during the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant fought Robert E. Lee and took sword at Appomattox, and promptly, boldly, and respectfully gave it back. As a warrior, he was a generous man.

As a commander he was indefatigable, as a strategist determined, relentless and disciplined. But when the smoke cleared, he championed charity and grace that was much harder for others to give than it seemed to be for him. He faced the horrors of war head on just as he faced peace once the war’s canons went silent. A lion and a lamb somehow co-existed in the soul of Ulysses S. Grant. Go figure.

Late in life, when he was suffering from throat cancer, President Grant became a writer when Mark Twain convinced him the world could be a better place if he’d sit down and record his memories. That was a dumb idea, but Twain wouldn't take no for an answer. When a few of Grant’s published essays brought rewards, Twain made offers he couldn't refuse. U. S. Pres number 18 put just about every bit of what strength he had left into the story of his considerable legacy. 

Not long before those memoirs were finished, the New York World published a story that claimed Grant's memoirs were entirely ghost written. While Grant's friends may be asserting that it's his work, the piece said, a nation should not be fooled by the "false idea. . .that he is a writer. He is not." 

In his massively detailed biography of U. S. Grant, American Ulysses, Ron Chernow refutes the charge by describing how hard Grant worked to finish that memoir, even though he was dying. 

Seems to me you need only to read a letter Grant wrote to the grandmother of James Birdseye McPherson, the second-highest ranking Union officer killed during the war. McPherson died at the Battle of Atlanta, and when General Grant, his boss and friend, heard the news, he fell hard into deep and reverent sadness. McPherson was beloved by his troops, a close friends. 

Our nation grieves for one so dear to our nation's cause. To know him was but to love him. It may be some consolation to you, his aged grandmother, to know that every officer and every soldier who served under your grandson felt the highest reverence for his patriotism, his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander. 

And then this: "Your bereavement is great,' he wrote, "but cannot exceed mine."

That's not just gorgeous style, that’s heart spilling hurt over the page.

Frederick Douglas, the most prominent African-American of his time, said this of our 18th President: "To him more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. . .He was accessible to all men. . .The black soldier was welcome in his tent, and the freedman in his house." 

If, like me, you thought President U. S. Grant was a hard-nosed general who never escaped the shadows of a bottle, a dim-witted President who didn't drain the swamp when he dang well should have, just drop by Galena, Illinois, sometime, a darling and remarkable old place; visit Grant’s home, spend an hour at the museum--little Galena has a thousand reasons to be proud of its most famous native son.

As do we.

---

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

Do not be like the horse or the mule,

    which have no understanding

but must be controlled by bit and bridle

    or they will not come to you.

The University of Kansas Natural History Museum, Lawrence, Kansas, is, at least temporarily, the final hitching post for Comanche, a horse who, for decades, may have been America’s most revered and certainly was most recognized steed, despite being dead. 

What fresh troops discovered once the dust settled at the scene of the famous 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn was 200 of Custer’s men dead, and one horse, Comanche, still alive, a fourteen-year-old buckskin gelding injured and therefore not hustled off after the battle as so many others were by the conquering tribes.

 I’m not sure anyone ever thought of disposing of the injured animal—perhaps not.  Whether or not he could ever run again, Comanche was simply too stark a symbol.  So he was taken to Fort Riley, where he died, and was lovingly stuffed by the best taxidermist in Kansas, an employee of the museum where Comanche still (after a fashion) stands.

Thousands filed past him (his upright remains anyway) at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Rumor had it that Comanche was General George Armstrong Custer’s own mount (not true).  Custer’s favorite horse, Vic, either died on the hill where Custer himself did, or else was snatched up by the conquering foe.  Among Native Americans, legend has it that a Santee Sioux named Grey Earth Track ended up with Vic, a thoroughbred, after the battle. 

Should you care to visit Comanche, you’ll find him enclosed in glass and wearing his cavalry blanket and saddle.  In the century+ which has passed since the Columbian Exposition, visitors have dwindled to a trickle, I suppose.  So it goes with legends.  The case once had a brass plaque proclaiming “Sole survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn.”  In the Sixties it was, quite thoughtfully, removed at the request of Native Americans. 

That Comanche is still standing is understandable, given his legendary status—the last mount from an epic battle, the only thing left breathing at Little Big Horn.  He remains, I’d say, a symbol of the rough-hewn history of the American West, and he is what he was—a horse.  For more than a century, no animal was as significant to life on the Great Plains as the horse—to the Sioux, to the cavalry, to the settlers. 

King David had no idea that the horse would be as important to American culture as it was, historically.  Warring tribes he knew, but he had no notion of Sitting Bull or South Dakota.  Maybe we shouldn’t indict him for so unequally yoking the horse and mule in verse nine.  To old-timers who remember farming pre-John Deere, horses still hold special favor, after all.

I’m missing the point, of course.  Verse nine isn’t about horses; it’s about us, and animals, and what separates us—human understanding.  We’ve got it, and they don’t, despite our nostalgia, our tributes, and two or three centuries of Great Plains history. 

What makes us human—among other things—is understanding, the ability to think through our own actions.  What’s at stake is wisdom, not horse sense.  We’ve got to use it, but what the verse suggests is that too often we don’t. 

Custer didn’t.  But he’s not the only one.  All too often, neither do we.

That’s the point, I guess.

February Cold

In all the years I've spent traipsing around the neighborhood, I've occasionally got out of bed with the expressed purpose of trying to get pictures that will recreate sheer cold. They're useless, of course. Who would want to use a winter picture that makes people shiver? Put something like this up in your family room and guests will reach up to button their sweaters.

How about this one?--the sun coming up over the Big Sioux. Somewhere out there, not quite visible, sits Hawarden, shivering. There's something in the lay of the fog maybe that makes the point. It's very cold outside, and I've got my hunting gloves on, the ones with individual fingers.

By my estimation, this is the best short from the morning of February 15, 2010, although I don't think it sends chills--could have been taken almost any time of year.

It's always nice to have company, especially on forgettable, cold February mornings; but getting this crows well requires a wildlife photographer who's a quicker draw than I am. 

I don't believe that I was, this morning, thinking about trapping February cold in my camera. But it's hard to warm up to the record I came home with.

I don't need to say, it's here. You can like a picture like this one, but who on earth would like to have it up for months at a time. 

 

Today, 16 years later, the temperature will push all the way up into the low 50s. This kind of cold looks almost beautiful from a distance. 

From a distance.