What's still there and what isn't

This one I'm going to put on canvas.

I know, I know--it's not a stunner, but I loved the image before I ever saw it on the screen of my phone and snapped the picture. I wanted to get a shot of it from the minute I was told that out there in the field across the road was a chunk of concrete that once formed the stairway into an old Catholic church. Today, a battle-worn tree almost obscures those lop-sided steps, but then life is demanding out on the plains, a landscape that created millions of dreams, millions of which died there just as surely. 

Something about the image seems to say exactly that. So much of  the fascination I feel for "the Great Plains" is right here in this little iconic spot of Dakota ruins.

Rev. Leonard Verduin, a man I revered at a moment in my own life when I probably needed him, grew up here long ago and used to talk about the neighborhood with the kind of reverence we reserve for home. He wasn't at all shy about treacheries he told me he would never forget, including the sins of his own people, the Dutch Reformed who bought inexpensive reservation land once the Dawes Act turned what once was the Great Sioux Reservation into 160-acre plots and opened them up for white settlement. We're in Spotted Tail's country here, on the Rosebud reservation, among the Brule Sioux.

People dreamed great dreams here, Lakota people, Dutch Calvinists and Roman Catholics alike. I had no idea there'd once been a Catholic church right across the road from a Lakeview Christian Reformed Church. What's left today is a tree determinedly growing from a stairway leading nowhere. And it seemed little more than that, but I've been reading. . .

A man whose life I've researched once lived somewhere near here. He listed Lakeview, SD, as his hometown when he enlisted in Army sometime during World War II. He returned from Europe without his legs, lost them when a German tank came up suddenly and took out his foxhole. He had graduated from high school at the mission of St. Francis and was in all likelihood, Roman Catholic. It seems inevitable that once upon a time a disabled and decorated war veteran named Eugene Robideaux walked up those steps into church.

What the priests at St. Francis Mission did a century ago is establish satellite parishes throughout the reservation, tiny places to do mass and distribute the Holy Eucharist when priests could get there. Many times--most often in fact--churches like the one that once stood here--were run by catechists, Native men empowered to teach the Christian faith as they practiced it as a new way of living, a Catholic way of living, for a people whose culture and language had been destroyed by the white man.

It's not only possible but probable that once upon a time right here in the old Catholic church, Black Elk preached the gospel, the Black Elk, the Ogalala holy man who begat, so some historians say, a kind of Lakota Great Awakening during the era of strong Black Robe missions on Sioux reservations. Today, Black Elk, who was there at the Little Big Horn as well as the massacre at Wounded Knee, is being considered for sainthood, a holy man. 

At some moment during Leonard Verduin's boyhood, it's entirely possible Katharine Drexell, the heiress whose immense fortune constructed so much on Native reservations throughout the country, may have been up those steps too. She and her sisters loved visiting the out of the way places like this around the turn of the century. Decades ago, the Vatican determined Katharine Drexell was a saint.

Almost certainly other "religious" visited this little church, many of them immigrant Europeans who had no idea what life was going to be like on an American Indian reservation right here on the Great Plains. One of them, an Irish postulant, wrote this to her mother: “This is real prairie land—something you could never envision. Trees are miles apart and very sparse. Hills and valleys do not exist here, and one is often awakened at night by howling of the prairie dogs and coyotes.” 

To me at least, all of that is somewhere here--and there, just across the gravel road.