Dakota Eclipse

It happened. I'm not making this up. 

We don't know his name. Doesn't matter really because we're talking about something of a staged event that happened 150 years ago on the western banks of the Missouri River, in what is today south-central South Dakota. Tomfoolery really. Some might call it abuse, but the good doctor's goofing around had a point. 

Okay, okay--I'm not being sensitive, but it seemed like a great trick, a kind of heavenly practical joke. He was trying to convince the "loafers," the Brule Sioux who pitched their tipis right there around the agency, that his medicine, which is to say "white man's medicine," was vastly superior to anything of theirs. 

The doctor had an almanac. It was that easy. He knew what was coming, read about it when he was paging through, how the moon would pass directly into sun's perfect brightness and create the eerie darkness eclipses always do. And he knew when. Exactly when.

So the good doctor told the loafers he knew something very, very strange was going to happen right before their eyes. He got them together in preparation for this scary show, lined them up with appropriate smoky glass, and waited.

They would be in awe of his cosmic powers, he told himself. Thereafter he'd rise in their estimation, as would his medical expertise. He was the Whetstone Agency doctor, and his job wasn't easy because convincing people his weird methods were to be believed was no picnic. 

So he put on a show. He'd act as if he were a captain of the universe, responsible for a heavenly event that would leave them speechless. He'd take advantage of their naivete--for good ends, mind  you, to convince them to forsake traditional healers by becoming something of a witch doctor himself. Simple.

And it worked. Sort of. 

The assembly who gathered to witness the event fell perfectly silent. The wide open prairie skies afforded an spectacular amphitheater. There they all sat in stunned silence as gradually, mid-day, the afternoon fell into ghoulish shadows. They looked at their hands, their feet, each other, and knew very well it was beyond creepy; and the white man, the medicine man, had somehow done it.

But then, the animals. They knew something was befuddled. The horses shied, the dogs wouldn't stop whining, even the donkeys wailed. It was weird. It was scary. It was dangerous. So right there at the agency, in the grip of the darkness, fought back with the only arms they had or knew. They raised their rifles to the sky and unloaded in a fusillade meant to ward off some wretched evil spirit and a catastrophe they believed was either happening or certain to come. 

What's more, they did it at exactly the right moment, when the moon began to move off the face of the sun so that, to them, their gunfire put a righteous end to whatever sick darkness the white man's witch doctor had conjured. They'd done it with their hands, their rifles. Their gunfire ended the menacing spell of whatever evil spirit had threatened them. They'd done it, so when they rode away, they did so as warriors, proud, more sure of their own power. 

The good doctor's great show had failed. He'd simply have to show his powers in the old fashioned ways.

Here's the story: two cultures collide in a monumental, staged event, and neither of them change one iota. 

Sort of like politics.