Walking

Horses were an unintended gift from Coronado or DeSoto, when one of the Spanish invaders left a gate open some sleepy night in New Mexico, and thus changed life forever among Native tribes from sea to shining sea. Imagine you're a 16th century Arapaho. You go all slack-jawed when one day some Comanche comes riding up on the biggest dog you'd ever seen. What a joy for a nomadic people. What a unexpected blessing.

I dare say there are more horses per capita on reservations than there are in any suburb of the nation, despite the fact that very few horse owners make a dime on 'em.

Still, you know you're on a reservation when you see random people walking--on state roads, county blacktops, or low-maintenance gravel. All those horses notwithstanding, First Nation folks just walk a whole lot more than white folks, it seems. Wealth has something to do with it, I'm sure, and some people just don't have cars. But reservation culture appears to smile at pedestrians: no one disdains men and women and children who walk to town, despite the significant distances. 

There was a time when Natives weren't the only pedestrians. When a gang of Hollanders left the lakeshore in Wisconsin and struck out for the Nebraska grasslands, they were happy to leave an axe or two behind. The only way to the conquer Wisconsin woods was to fell trees. Then fell more. Then fell even more. Then dig up roots--back-breaking work. Only when you got out the trees could you put in a crop.

Nebraska, people said, was a miracle, treeless, nothing but an ocean of grass. Here and there a few cottonwoods sprouted from some wayward creek or river, but basically the world all around was as open as it was free. When some Hollanders got to a place called South Pass Precinct, they'd walked, dozens and dozens of miles. 

Soon after the Civil War, a man named Huizenveldt looked to homestead Nebraska land around a new Dutch colony, only to find all kinds of stone piles marking claims others had already made. So he kept going, west, until all that land seemed free. Ten miles west of the colony he found the spaces open. The next morning he walked to Lincoln to register it as his--25 miles or so--then returned to the colony, where he was staying. Then, for a long time, he dug out a place for his family in the land he wanted to work. People in the colony were nice enough to put him up, but his claim was ten miles away. No matter. Every day he walked. There and back. Every day. Let me do the math--that's 20 miles a day.

A man named Alco Vandertook (yes, to me too the spellings seem wrong) became a good friend of a preacher named Dominie Huizenga and another man named Den Herder, both of whom were looking for Nebraska land. When Brother Alco found railroad land he thought his two friends might like, he walked to the courthouse at Lincoln to make it his--for them. That was, as I said, 25 miles. The thing is, he was so determined to get that land that he showed up at dawn. 

Simply to imagine that is painful. 

J. H. TeSelle left Wisconsin to homestead Nebraska prairie, determined to open up the virgin soil beneath grasses that had grown there since time began. Thing is, TeSelle lacked a plow. Blessedly, his neighbor had one, a neighbor who claimed he'd be happy lend it. Only problem was conveyance. TeSelle had no choice, so he carried it, a whole breaking plow, for the several miles that separated him from his neighbor. 

In order to invest as he wanted, one father and husband worked as a hired man, walked twenty miles on Monday morning to work, then didn't return until Saturday. But before he'd come home at the end of the week, he'd pick up the groceries--flour, potatoes, what not else--and lug it all on his back to his wife and kids, twenty miles.

Alright, I'll admit it. This summer, more than once (but not more than thrice) I've taken the four-wheeler to the mailbox, which is less than a block away. That only happened after a long day out back or two-mile walk on the gravel roads all around or the Puddle Jumper, a mile away in Alton (and, yes, I take the car to get there). From our old place we would occasionally walk to the post office, a mile or so south; but that's it. 

You can't help but wonder what it might have been like to walk 25 miles over open prairie, not a light on anywhere but the sky, the world a moonscape in the semi-darkness.  

Sounds as beautiful as it must have been mystifying, but I think I'd take the four-wheeler.