On a Sabbath morning--i

Sunday, October 15, we went to church. The wind was then blowing wildly, but this became worse further along in the day. When we got out of church we saw smoke in the distance, because the prairie was on fire. 

It is November, 1871, and Harmen Jan te Selle, an immigrant homesteader from Lancaster County, Nebraska, is writing home, to the old country, to "Much beloved Mother, Brothers with wives and children," writing them from a sod house amid grasslands he knows his family back home could not have imagined because he himself could not have imagined the immense, roiling sea of grass he was trying to call home.

All that grass, he tells them, "is still unoccupied." He might have well have said "untamed." He knows he's among those who are trying to do just that, which is part of the reason te Selle's letter home begins with a record of their harvest: "First of all, what concerns us is the crops. It is this year quite good." Then the particulars: "Corn is very good; of this we should, I believe, have 800 or 900 bushels," which is to say, things go well in America. 

Not until the end of the letter does he tell the story of the prairie fire. When the grass is high and dry, he says, "it can stir up a big blaze." They have no idea. Neither did he until he saw it with his own eyes. "It can burn for miles away," unimaginable miles all around. For him, Nebraska is unimaginably huge. "When the grass is gone, then the ground is bald. The soil does not burn."

He's probably sitting in a sod house, a lamp beside him as he tries to determine how to relate horror. "So I wanted to say," he says, almost as if he's lost track of the story. He hasn't. What he needs to say is difficult. 

"So what I wanted to say, that when we got out of church, we saw the fire," the kind of fire, remember, that "can burn for miles away." The story must be told.

A man, named Niklaas VanderVelde saw that the fire was not far from his house. He was in church with his wife and two children. Three children were at home; a girl of 11 or 12 years, one of 8 and the other of 5 or 6. So he ran as quickly as he could to reach home, but what did he see? His house lay entirely in ashes.

Nothing could have prepared Harmen te Selle for what happened that Sabbath morning in a prairie fire he and his fellowship of immigrant homesteaders discovered to be a holocaust. Things burned for miles around.

"High standing grain and 4 pigs were all burned, but not the worst," he writes, still hedging, still trying to determine how tell his loved ones what they'd all witnessed after worship in the endless grasslands. 

He saw in the distance something white lying on the ground, thinking it was a calf. But when he got closer he saw it was his oldest girl lying burned on the ground, and upon investigation, the other two were in the house, entirely burned. Thus a tragic situation for that man.

All of this tragedy narrated at the end of the letter. "Also," he tells his old country family, " there were some more misfortunes caused by that fire, and at many other places. There were big fires and many fields entirely burned down," he says.

And then this: "Beloved, the paper is too small to write more." And then "Greetings from us all."

It's difficult for me to imagine that Harmen teSelle didn't sit there for a moment and read through that letter, this time picturing his "Mother, Brothers with wives and children" sitting and standing all around in a house he knew so well he could have painted it--everything, even the wall hangings. That last time through the letter, he watched them read the story he'd told, saw their eyes and read their silence. And then, "Write soon again," he added at the bottom, to remind them.

I'm guessing he put that letter of his down, took a breath or two, prayers really, and went out to the lean-to to milk and do chores. Still shaken and humbled in that vast sea of grass and the scorched fields all around, he returned to what he knew had to be done, as somehow all of us do.