Josephine Donovan's Black Soil -- i

Tonight the Dutch-American Heritage Museum (DAHM)will host a discussion of Black Soil (1930), Josephine Donovan's novel of early Sioux County, a book full tales of the very first of the Euro-American pioneers to create a life right here between the Big and the Little Sioux Rivers. This review (tomorrow too) appeared here three years ago, but still covers the subject. The truth is, I enjoyed Black Soil even more this time through. 

The DAHM has a few actual original corn stalks
from those early years.

You sometimes wonder—or at least I do—if there will come a time when Sioux County, Iowa, has enough hog confinements. Industry is the name of the game here; the descendants of all those Dutch Calvinists could write primers on how to work, how to farm, and how to make money.

Confinements sit on every available hill, more than any other adjacent county, but then agriculture is a huge business here, empowering everything, keeping life afloat and a culture intact. It’s difficult to imagine the region in its wild, pristine state, almost impossible to think of the natural world as an antagonist. There’s hail and even a tornado or two; there are still almost unendurable winters, like this one may be; and torrid summers still create hot winds that once upon a time laid standing corn to waste in just a few days.

But to think of this world outside my window itself as some untamed wilderness, as a powerful force to be conquered is simply not possible in day when the best cabbed tractors are steered through the fields by satellite technology. In many ways, we’ve subdued the earth and done the Lord's bidding.

Maybe that’s why it took me half a novel to determine the central conflict when I started into reading Josephine Donovan’s Black Soil, her engaging rendition of the perilous settlement of this corner of the state, a region Fred Manfred named “Siouxland.” It’s just hard, 150 years later, to think of what she calls “the prairie” as a bleak and pitiless enemy.

But once upon a time, it was. Once upon a time, grasshoppers darkened the sky and devoured just about every living thing, engorging whole sections, mile after mile of farmland, making the earth seem to crawl. Once upon a time, the devastation they created brutal poverty no descendent can begin to imagine. Once upon a time, prairie fires ritually consumed the region. Once upon a time, life-and-death drama occurred on October stages all over the region. Once upon a time, white folks were scared to death of the Native people their own new homesteads unkindly dispossessed.

If you’ve read Giants in the Earth, the Rolvaag classic, nothing in Donovan’s Black Soil is going to be new or visionary. The gender differences are classic in what some call “Middle Border Lit”: men like Per Hansa and Tim Collins love the adventure, love opening the earth and making it abundant with row crops. Meanwhile, in a whole series of novels about homesteading, women felt abandoned beneath the eyes of a gargantuan sky on a land so bare there seemed no place to hide. What’s more, frontier life required abandoning families back home, meant endless sweat and none of the blessings of life in established communities back east.

Nell Connors, the woman at the heart of this 1930s novel, is just such a pioneer woman. She’s neither Dutch nor Luxembourgian, traditional Sioux County ethnics, but, oddly enough, Irish Catholic and a Yankee. Her roots are back east in Massachusetts, where she remembers visiting the most honorable Dickinson family in Amherst, including the ethereal Emily, whom she remembers as a poet.

Nell Connors is married to Tim, a wonderful man with a huge heart, a man not well suited to build the farming life at the edge of the frontier. He doesn’t lack ambition, but he’s not dedicated to making the work—or farming--as a profession. His eye is elsewhere. More than once I’ve heard old Iowa men talk about brothers who were sent off to school for the ministry or education once it became obvious to Ma and Pa that they didn’t have the wherewithal to farm. Tim Connors doesn’t either.

But it’s not her husband’s skewed predilections or laziness that brings Nell Connors grief; it’s the unspeakable realization that her children are walking off to school in bare feet and, once they get there, receiving a third-rate education, at best, in a world where it's far more important to milk than read poems.

It’s the sheer force of “the prairie” that she fights, that makes her wonder if Siouxland can ever become a home. When she sees a boy with artistic talent return from working cattle “out west,” swaggering as if he were little more than a chaw-spewing cowhand, she feels and fears the overwhelming power of open spaces. “A sadness came over Nell Connor as she walked back to the house,” Donovan writes. “Does the country make the man, or the man make the country?” Nell Connors’s fear is for what her children won’t have, what they’ll never experience, what they’ll miss out here on the hard-hearted Siouxland prairie.

The Dutch fare well in Black Soil. The novel is set somewhere near Primghar, where the locals watch Hollanders arriving in hoards at the western reaches of the county (“the Dutch are coming in thicker than hops!” someone reports). The Dutch, Nell says, are exceptionally clannish, more so than the Germans and the Luxembourgians; but they keep their towns and themselves clean and tidy, just like their farms. They work hard, and, in the novel at least, the occasional Hollander who wanders away from the colony and into foreign Siouxland regions always makes a good neighbor.

(More of Black Soil tomorrow)

Me and L and C--vii

It's -5 right now. The cold somehow finds a way to creep in. I'm in a fleece vest over a long-sleeve shirt, my warmest pair of sweat pants, and heavy wool slippers. Behind me, the furnace is roaring. Soon, I'll grab a coffee and light the fireplace.

Long, long ago, it is said, the people didn't have any such comfort. In fact, on mornings like this one, some died from cold, just froze to death--often the elderly and the very young. The people loved the world they lived in--spring, summer, and fall-- but winter meant death and disaster. They counted their years in winters.

Although they were unaware of being watched, someone outside of their circle saw the children and the old ones dying, and determined that the beings he knew of on top the mountain, those beings, dangerous as they were--the Fire Beings--were gifted with what the people needed, something warm and deep, whose rich voice and bright colors would even be of benefit. The people needed fire. He resolved to get some.

Who was that silent friend? It was Coyote. That's right--coyote. He could be reckless and even dangerous, as some of them knew, but he was somehow just the one who could save the people.

So Coyote climbed the mountain until he found the Fire Beings. There they were, seated comfortably around the flames--monsters, vicious and terrible. Coyote knew that if he were to grab some of that fire, he'd have to do it when they weren't suspecting him. He waited and waited, studied their behavior until he figured he'd have the best chance--the moment they were changing guard. When next that happened, Coyote grabbed a lit stick from the roaring blaze and took off running. He ran and ran and ran though forest and valley, through endless trees and flowing creeks. He tore down the mountain, the Fire Beings in a pack behind him, so close they singed his tail. Even today, the very tip is sooty black. 

But Coyote had friends, like Chipmunk. So when it became clear to him that he could run no farther and no faster, he handed that stick of fire to Chipmunk, who took off like a meteor. But the Fire Beings didn't quit. When they got up close to Chipmunk, one of them drew his clawed hand over Chipmunk's back which explains those dark lines down Chipmunk's body.

When Squirrel got the firestick, the Fire Beings bent its back and tail with their strength, but Squirrel passed it along to Frog, who soon lost his tail. Still, Frog got it to Wood, where the Fire Beings stopped on a dime because they couldn't grab the fire from Wood.

And that's how Coyote stole fire from the Fire Beings and saved the people from dying in winter. 

On August 12, 1804, the Corps of Discovery spotted a four-legged they didn't recognize on the west side of the Missouri. Clark called it a Prairie Wolf. A couple men went to shore to try to get it--but didn't. Couldn't. They couldn't find him-- blame thing got away. 

That was the first time any Euro-American had seen the real wily coyote.

Native people knew all about them, of course. The coyote were wily, and you didn't want to cross them. Still, sometimes they did really wonderful things, like the time, you know, when they brought fire down the mountain to the people who were dying in winter. 

In ten years out here on the edge of town, we've seen only one coyote. But we know they're here because sometimes at night, when the windows are open. . .well, you know, they're out there.

Sunday Morning Meds--Dust to Dust

“You turn men back to dust, saying, 

‘Return to dust, O sons of men.’” Psalm 90:3

 

I received a note, five years ago now, from a couple who claimed they wanted my help. She was dying of ovarian cancer. She’d kept a journal throughout her life but had continued to write during her affliction, thinking about issues she was facing immediately, issues of life and death. She and her husband wondered whether I might help her—and them—bring something together in book form. Lots of people appreciated her e-mail reflections, they said; many urged her to collect them. “They should all be in a book,” people told them.

The cancer was terminal. Since the verdict had been handed down, the two of them—with a little help from a financial benefactor—had decided to do their own “make-a-wish” adventure and travel to places they’d always dreamed about. They’d had four kids—two of them were in college, all of them in their late teens and early twenties. Extensive travel hadn’t been an option earlier in their lives. They’d chosen to live frugally, in a fashion they would have called, themselves, “stewardly.”

But Sharon was dying, and there were things she wanted badly to see, places she’d always wanted to go. So for a year or so they’d lived almost nomadically, and she’d kept that journal, pages and pages long.

Would you help us? they said. Her reflections would make a good book.

I get dozens and dozens of such requests, and it’s always painful to have to tell people that I can’t—or won’t help. I could have spent every moment of my writing life helping people with their own great stories or writing those stories myself. I could have done that and never once seen a publication or made a buck. Everyone has a story—everyone. But most of us don’t care to read everyone else’s.

But something about this story seemed especially compelling, so I told them I’d like to meet them and have a look. I did, and I took the job on. That was six years ago, and finally, maybe a month or two from now, the book will be published.

That it’s taken a long, long time is attributable, in a way, to the fact that the project is—and has been from the very first scribbling—a labor of love. I don’t want to appear angelic, but it’s unlikely that I’ll ever make a dime on the book. Nor will they.

And that’s understatement. Sharon is gone, of course. Three years ago already, her cancer took her. The book includes her final jottings, as well as the detailed plans she’d made for her own funeral. Sharon’s earthly musing is history.

Last week, while we were on vacation, another e-mail note appeared in my in-box, a note I didn’t read until yesterday. Sharon’s husband, Dennis, has cancer himself—I knew that. I didn’t know how bad. Yesterday’s e-mail made clear that his condition is terminal. It’s lung cancer, a killer. He never smoked in his life.

An old friend of mine once told me her preacher/father loved to do funerals because he felt he never held people’s attention so fully as he could when he read Psalm 90 with a coffin—open or closed—set conspicuously in front of the sanctuary. “Dust to dust the mortal dies,” the old song says. Not just Sharon, but now, shockingly, Dennis too—and, lest we forget, you and me. What is inescapable about Psalm 90 is inescapable about life: it ends, for all of us. That’s everyone’s story.

_______________________ 

This one appeared here not long ago, but I'm working through Psalm 90 and decided to run it again. It's in Sixty at Sixty. 

Morning Thanks---The flutter of snowbirds

Two degrees outside right now, but no wind. I just gave my morning, bird-seed  blessing, both hanging feeder, as well as a couple of handfuls down on the snow. Soon enough, the action will begin.

I'm not sure where they all hang out when they're not battering each other for their fair share of food, but in five minutes or less they'll flock down here for breakfast, juncos always first. They fly in first and sit in a wiry bush a few feet away from the feeder. They're the only ones who dare come that close when the humanoid is still out there dishing out goodies. 

Juncos are an odd member of the several bands of birds that will soon show up because they are, for reasons all of their own, the least intimidated by me--I can sit up close to the window to snap a picture, and they don't immediately take wing--no big deal. While I don't seem to be of danger to them, they're forever intimidated by their cousins, the sparrows who always come in a bunch. As Shakespeare may have said it, "they come not as spies but in battalions" (that's Hamlet, and it's about sorrows, not sparrows). 

The juncos are the only bunch (save blue jays, who clear the deck when they arrive) with clearly distinguishing features. They come by puffy, round sugar cookies, the vanilla frosting covering their feathery bellies. Something in their constitution forbids scrambling for a position on the feeder; they're land bound, only scavenge down beneath on the snow, so I leave a couple handfuls primarily for them, even though they're quickly shooed away by the more hostile tribes.

Some people call them "snowbirds" (not to be confused by temporary residents of Arizona) because, hard as it is to believe, their presence here outside my window is occasioned by the cold weather most all of us despise. They nest somewhere up north, I'm told, which doubles my reason to care. On the other hand, researchers have determined that they're well-prepared for winter--adding feathers that increase their almost incidental weight by a full thirty per cent. 

Who counts such things, I don't know, but those who do speculate that there are 600,000+ of them extant in the US of A. When a bunch is around, you can call them any of a variety of plurals--a chittering, a crew, a flutter (which is more than a little onomatopoetic)  or maybe just a host, although their numbers outside my window is not sufficient to earn that last title. Maybe a dozen or so--a flutter. 

They're trusting little souls really. You gotta love 'em. I'm a world away from St. Francis; I doubt they'll be alighting on my shoulder any time soon, or, Disney-like, chirping on my ear, but they're sweet to have around and I hope they hold the same regard for the humanoid. 

This morning--and just about all these winter mornings--I'm thankful for the snowbirds, and, I'm humbly guessing, they're quite similarly thankful for m

"Ohio"

Mementos of the era

There's much about it that's mythical, that goes beyond the memorable syncopation and opening guitar riffs and into something much bigger, so big, in fact, that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young undercut their own hot item, a song titled "Teach Your Children," by releasing "Ohio" as quickly as they did. 

They put it on the market when "Teach" was still climbing, virtually assuring the earlier cut would never reach the heights it might have if they hadn't released "Ohio" when they did. Whether or not they ever actually sat down and decided to release "Ohio" as immediately as they did isn't clear, in part because "Ohio" was, well, epoch-making--and they seemed to understand it themselves, even as they made the recording. "Ohio" was, to them, and to millions of others, including, back then, a much younger me, something more than music. 

The story is worth retelling. In the most hideous confrontation between the National Guard and the anti-war movement, four seemingly innocent Kent State students were shot dead when the Guard opened fire at a campus protest. There was, in early May of 1970, a sense, at least among some young people--including me--that the anti-war folks were gaining ground. The war simply had not been showing signs of ending. Body bags by the score were still coming back from a place most American people couldn't have pointed out on a globe. The anti-war movement was growing.

So the story goes that David Crosby, who died just last week, showed Neil Young the duly famous picture of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of a kid who was shot just then, a picture as famous as any of the era or even of the century, for that matter. 

Young took a look at the picture, grabbed his guitar, and went out into a stand of trees somewhere close. In an hour he created a line of music, or so the story goes, and brought it back in to Crosby, who immediately--seriously, immediately--reserved studio time yet that night. Thus, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young created, released, and marketed an anthem that became something even more than music, a lyric that, like the iconic photograph, came to embody the entire era, the era in which, I confess, I grew up. 

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We're finally on our own
This summer, I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio

"Ohio" didn't mess around. Nixon is right there, first line, just before "four dead in Ohio." They didn't try to be artful. If art requires allusion--something more than meets the eye--"Ohio" isn't art. "Ohio" is testimony.

Those students were shot on May 4. Just a few days later, the call went out--May 10, --to gather in DC for a huge student protest. I was still in bed, my last semester in college, listening to early morning news on a clock radio my parents had given me before I left for college four years earlier. What I heard was that student protest groups were calling kids from campuses around the nation to come to the nation's capital on the tenth of May for a giant anti-war protest of what had gone down at Kent State University, four kids shot dead. There'd been no protests at Dordt College, in the heart of a region that was and still is impossibly Republican. There'd been a gathering in Central Park in support of Nixon--he was, after all, the President, almost a divine right thing.  

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

When I heard the story about a gathering in DC of college students from the entire nation, I told myself I had to go, and so I did--three of us left in a VW bug for a trip that would take us half way across the continent and far, far away from northwest Iowa, literally and figuratively. No college funds were spent. I don't know that the three of us would have had the backing of any other souls on campus. But we went.

All of that was 1970, more than a half-century ago. I'm almost 75 years old these days, but when I hear those almost savage opening lines of "Ohio," I can't help but think that my decision to go, back then, was just as driven as any in the wake of Kent State, just as immediate as Crosby, Stills, Nash to Neil Young's inspired tune. 

It would take two years before Tricky Dick went down in infamy via a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Just before his demise, he shellacked the South Dakota peacenik, Sen. George McGovern, winning all but 18 electoral college votes in the 1972 Presidential election. Then Nixon's Presidency unraveled. The whole era returned last week, with the death of David Crosby.

That death returned all of us who remember to what truly seemed the anti-war's own battle hymn, the days when America's Vietnam War efforts were ending. Neil Young's "Ohio" simply is the age. It simply is.

It runs for three minutes or so. You don't have to listen to it all, but for my sake tune in to those first verses. You're not just hearing music, you're hearing history. 

The Calliope Raid II

The return of the Orange City roughnecks in one of the oft-told tales from Sioux County's past. My mothere-in-law, who was old enough to know him, used to tell me that you had to take anything Charley Dyke wrote with a grain of salt. 

Anyway, I'm reading from Charley Dyke's telling of the story in The Story of  Sioux County. If you don't like the story, pick a fight with him, not me--I'm only the voice.

 

 

The Calliope Raid I

Among those Sioux Countians who like stories from the past, an all-time favorite is the how a bunch of Hollanders from all over the county--Orange City, Hull, and Rock Valley too--got together early one winter day, January 22, 1872, took their sleighs across the county, strong-armed a safe containing the fledgling county's organization papers, and brought the goods to Orange City, where, today, the wonderful County Courthouse stands and all the official business goes on.

Was it all legal? My word, no. It was an insurrection, a heist--not a bank heist, but a armed rebellion that worked.  

Was it righteous? Depends on who you ask.

All of that was almost exactly 150 years ago, time to lament or celebrate--depending on your point of view.

A world of alabaster

For about a week, this square inch of Siouxland where we live has seemed a fairyland. We pride ourselves in having really good ground out here, the best in the state. Our work ethic plays second fiddle to no one, and we're close enough to the Plains to land some of the most beautiful skies on the continent. But for plain old raw beauty, you look elsewhere, right?

Not so. 

The place has been almost heavenly for most of the week--seriously. Deep morning fog envelopes everything in ermine, cottony fluff, so much so that there's nothing left unredeemed. And it stays. It's very fragile, but it's just as beautiful the end of the day as it is in the morning.

 Sunlight has been rare, but lack of color lends its own fairy-like mystery to things. 

Meanwhile, everything is bearded. Wherever you look, there's Santa Claus. . 

 

It's a fairy-land, all right. Just a touch of sun or wind and the whole fantasy is felled. 

That kind of deep frost has kept us in its favors for almost a week, enough so that a man or woman can almost forget what's real--the world all around, a wonderland of alabaster. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Our Dwelling Place

C.C. and Neeltje Schaap

I'm going to stick with Psalm 90 for a while on Sunday mornings, sometimes new meds, sometimes old. This one is old--I don't remember what the nature of the journey was that takes such a strong role in this meditation. I'm happy to say that, and that I can lends credence to the comfort of this great psalm.

~   *   ~   *   ~   *   ~

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place 

throughout all generations.” 90:1

Today we start on a journey. We won’t be gone long—only two days—but it’s perilous, and the stakes are high. We’re trying to affect a change, again, in a battle we’ve been fighting for years. We’re hoping that this journey will change things, nudge aside the woeful indecision that so often accompanies depression.

My wife and I are both afraid it won’t change anything, that this new venture, like others, will be a sordid failure; but we’re confident that what we’re doing—or trying to do—is what we should be doing because it’s a step that has to be taken.

Right now—amid all the fear—both of us are blessed by this assurance: we know—scared as we are—that right now, right this moment, we’re doing the right thing.

This morning, that’s the perilous nature of my morning thanks—that as risky and futile as it might be, our little journey together is, doggone it, the best thing, if not the only thing we can do. We don’t have a choice, really. We’re hoping and praying, as always, for a real blessing.

When you walk through this first memorable verse of this famous psalm, it’s no wonder why Psalm 90 has brought the peace it has to so many for so many years. The affirmation of this first line sweeps along with such force that I feel as if I can ride on the eagle-winged glory of its affirmation, even today on our own perilous journey.

This is the truth, Lord, says Moses, the writer to whom the Word itself gives credit—this is plain and undeniable fact: you, God, have been our only comfort, you’ve been the place in which we’ve lived, throughout all generations.

When I stumble through this verse (it’s humbling, I think), I think of generations of believers in my own family. I may well lack the bouncy joy of a brand new convert, but I’m ever thankful to be the descendent of generations, literally, of faithful believers. As far back as I can trace my own family tree, the Christian faith has been a part of my heritage.

But, big deal. Today we start on a journey. We won’t be gone long—only two days—but this journey is perilous, and the stakes are high.

I know. I’ve said that before. But this morning—a Sunday morning, in fact—I am, as I’ve already said, deadly afraid of failure that is very, very real.

About an arm’s reach away from where I sit is a portrait of my great-grandfather, a preacher. Back behind me is another picture—a wonderful South Dakota homestead portrait of my great-grandparents on another side, believers too, a family who came to the Great Plains of South Dakota fleeing religious persecution in their native Holland.

I can’t take those people along on this journey we’re taking this morning. Their pictures will do me—and us—no real good because those good folks are dead and gone. And I don’t think they’re asking the Lord this morning for a blessing for us, great-grandchildren none of them ever knew nor could imagine. I may be wrong.

But it’s great joy to read these words. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.” It’s a joy because I know a great cloud of witnesses, in peril, has trusted, have believed, have invested their confidence and their joy, just as I am, in the same Lord God, the same deliverer, the same eternal Father.

You’ve been there for generations, Lord—that’s the truth we’ll pack along.

Morning Thanks--everything. . .in its own way

Come January, what you've got to work with here is a snowy quilt, occasional azure up above, dusky grasses the color of buffalo calves, and almost horrifying bare-naked trees thrown up center stage. If you didn't know that line of trees are in a seasonal dormancy, they'd appear as bolts of sable lightening shooting up from a demonic storm deep in the earth. 

What I'm saying is that, right now, for someone who packs a camera and takes home landscapes, this time of year where I live doesn't offer much to shoot--and things only get worse as we stumble into "Farch," that disappointing hobgoblin of a time when weather makes landscapes either sad or bad. That picture up there is the best I can do mid-winter, and it'll be Easter before any gift of green arises to spell the boredom. That time will come--it always does. Still, it's a heckuva long way off, so right now you shoot what you can because you gotta work with what you got. 

There's no real subject in that picture, no immediacy, only a composition of broad elements that don't compete for a resolution. But I can't help but think--and hope you agree--that something beautiful abides even here in the mundane cold. The snow over the grasses isn't fresh; it's humped by its own poky melting. Still, there's movement: the ground seems to flow toward the center of the picture, as if there's something there to honor, or even worship. 

Behind the tree line, a huge Nike swoosh sweeps over all that lovely blue sky, and its delicacy awakens something lively within, despite winter all around. 

Against that lava-like snow and the almost worshipful penmanship of the sky  you've got that thorny stand of trees, alive enough to shake a bit in the wind, but generally dead to the world, even though down there beneath the surface, you just know there's enough life to start anew in a matter of months. 

Sometimes I hear a melody when I walk out to the river--"Everything is beautiful in it's own way"--a silly hippie lyric, or so I tell myself when I'm on a walk, even though there's some truth in it. For a Calvinist like me, the rerun is a stretch, especially after a rash of untimely deaths we've suffered as of late--a funeral Monday, as a matter of fact, others too. 

"Everything is beautiful in its own way?" 

Really? Give me a break--after all, she's left her husband alone. Nothing winsome about that. But their story is unique--still is, despite her passing. Forty-six years ago he asked her to marry him and she said he didn't know what he was saying--he was just a kid. He insisted. She consented, and they had all those gloriously happy years together. She's gone now. He sat alone in the front bench at her funeral. 

But her passing doesn't negate the precious life they had together, not for a moment. All you had to do was listen to his testimony of their loving  years together. It was a joy. And more, what he said was uplifting.

Everything--even a prairie landscape in January--or Farch, for that matter--is beautiful "in its own way." 

I don't deliberately sing that song when I'm out there along the river on a Sabbath walk. I don't choose that tune from some in-my-mind hymnal; dang thing just plays, whether or not I pull it up, even and maybe especially in January with a pallet of just three colors amid a storm of funerals. 

Some tape player in me simply insists that even when I'm out there in a cold, in an almost colorless world, there's some truth to that old hippie ditty--everything is beautiful in its own way. 

That line keeps keeps playing somehow, as does another persistent line, this one from none other than John Calvin: "There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice." 

Tough sledding though sometimes, no matter what time of year.

Me and L and C -- vi

Watermelon.

You'll think I'm making this up. 

Way back in the days when Meriweather Lewis was living with Thomas Jefferson, long before the journey was underway, when the two of them, talking in front of a roaring fire about what this Louisiana purchase might look like, exchanging what they knew about Native people of the Plains, it was a case of the blind leading the blind. Neither had a clue what they were talking about, nor did William Clark really.

So one can imagine what kind of feverish anxiety they must have suffered when, on their way up from what is today KC, they were sure--every day!!-- they were about to meet their first, authentic Native Americans--the "Indians" they would have said.

It had to be somewhat anti-climatic when the first one to sally up was just an Oto kid, a boy just barely a man, who was out by himself. He promised he'd bring back the leaders, but then, once again, the whole Corps waited impatiently, I'm sure, as they paddled and poled and marched up river, entirely vigilant.

They knew their objective. They had strict instructions to avoid confrontation at all costs because the mission was intended to stir interest in the Indigenous in a new enterprise: the Great Father in Washington wanted them--all of them, every tribe and band--to work together, to gather furs and buffalo hides for the Great Father. Jefferson told them to tell the Indians to make peace with each other and to maintain that peace because everyone would profit from peaceful hunting and trapping. 

And there were gifts, a never-ending stream of gifts, some of them useful, somoe a little schmaltzy-- four dozen butcher knives, twelve dozen pocket looking-glasses, seventy-two pairs of striped ribbons, and eight brass kettles. Those pirogues and the big boat must have been loaded down because, they had to pack enough swag give away each time they met some band up and down the rivers. 

The Oto kid out hunting, the young man who had promised to bring some of the headmen came through at sunset on August 2nd, when a dozen or so Otos and Missourias suddenly appeared. Shocking. Slack jaws all around, I bet. Out came real gifts--a carrot of twisted tobacco, flour, meal, pork. 

Must have been a fine first course because they no more than presented all those goodies when the band offered their own gift to the men with white skin. What?--watermelon. I'm serious--watermelon. 

Egyptians cultivated watermelon 2000 years before Christ. Sweetened watermelon didn't really appear in the history of civilization until the time of the Romans. So how on earth could a band of Native folks, humbled into misery by successive plagues of smallpox, come up with a gift of watermelon?

Watermelons are not native. They were introduced by the Puritans who  deliberately sowed and reaped by 1629. In all likelihood, the Oto and Missouria got seeds in trade with other tribes and bands, and eventually learned on a hot day, a cold bite of fresh watermelon was like nothing else.

There's a little park high above Omaha, in Council Bluffs. It's quite a climb, but you can get up there easily if you follow the signs--they're small, but just follow 'em up. The place affords a gorgeous view of the city, but it's not where this very first meeting took place.

That's up river a couple of miles and totally indistinguishable today, the river being, back then, a wily snake of a waterway, cutting a new path whenever it darn well felt like it. 

It's comforting to know that that that much-anticipated first meeting was no big deal. Lots of smiles, lost of signing, and a promise from L and C that a bunch of them would come to their campfires the next morning to parley a bit. 

All went well, really. Eventually, the Corps would have their moments with those they met on the river. On the way back to St. Louis, Lewis went so crazy with the thievery of those blasted Chinooks--they stole his dog, Seaman, for pity sake!--that he gave the men license to shoot thieves. Blessedly, no one did.

All of that was ahead of them, of course. They'd have their moments, but during that evening and the next day too, their first meetings rolled right along like the river itself, just rolled along pleasingly, the whole bunch eating watermelon.  

Morning Thanks -- of my own

For the record, this was Sunday, an afternoon walk out to the river.

And, for the record, this was December, 2017--same place, same time.

ditto--late spring, 2019

I don't know that I dare to use the phrase--I mean, given my gender--because the line has such deep associations with Virginia Woolf's work and life. By using it the way I do when I take a walk to the river, I'm misappropriating it, because if I use it, I can't help but extend its meaning in a way that takes a bite out of its original intent. 

I'm talking about "a room of one's own," the title of a long, Virginia Woolf essay (1929) that argues that if women were kept from poverty and provided with space that is entirely their own, the world would have fully as many women writers as men. Today, without a doubt, they do. 

I have a room of my own, a spot on the river I visit every once in a while.

In June of last year, the path to get there was overgrown. I took a grass whip along and cut out the path I'd taken for more than a year already so that I could get right down to the river's edge to try to channel Thoreau at Walden.     

Hasn't happened, but I keep going back, and about a week ago, when the world was all marshmallow, I couldn't help but smirk when other people's boot prints ended where the park trail did and I set down the first recorded trip to the spot I like to sit, the place I can't help but think of as "a place of my own."

Almost always I bring a camera, even though there's nothing particularly gorgeous about the spot. I bring a camera because I long ago pledged myself to look for beauty when sometimes it seems there's so little of it (that's an old man talking). So, through the years, I've accumulated a ton of pictures that will undoubtedly pass away when the photographer does. Here's a couple from a place of my own.

plus a couple of geese.

. . .early summer, spring really, bedecked with flowers

same spot, December, 2021, the Floyd only half-frozen;

same spot, summer, plus a mudhen.

Last Sunday afternoon, from a room of my own.

I'm not alone, of course. It's the Floyd, after all, a river with a real history, but I'm still working at channeling Thoreau. 

This morning I'm thankful for a place of my own.

Small Wonders: Frontier justice

True story. 

It's 1907. Some guy shows up into Bancroft, Nebraska, and just like that a hundred people surround him, spittin' fire. They accuse him of murder, and they're fit to be tied. It's no Chamber of Commerce welcome. Poor guy knows nothing about the bloody deeds they're talking about, but he can't help thinking he's on a road to the graveyard.

Bancroft is seething. There's been a double homicide at the home of good, good people, the parents of seven kids--oldest, a girl, just 13. Mother and father murdered; innocent, God-fearing people, the Copples, gunned down right outside the front door of their farm home. 

Sometime later, the murderer got caught, the real one. He confessed, got himself a knuckle-sandwich in the process but confessed, and no one doubted he was the guy. Loris Hay Higgins was his name, but in Thurston County he'd gone by "Fred Burke." 

Was he guilty? Absolutely no one doubted it. He'd been the Copples' hired man.

Higgens--or Burke--got himself arrested some miles away in a saloon in Hooper, where he politely asked the arresting lawman if he might finish his drink before getting dragged off. Sweet, soft-spoken guy--the sheriff had some misgivings because he thought such a good guy could hardly be the fiend who did what he'd done just outside of Rosalie back .

But Bancroft knew the score. The whole town acted judge and jury, determined that this Higgins was an abomination. According to the Sioux City Journal of 27 August 1907--look it up, librarians will help you--the Copples' 13-year-old told authorities that before Higgins left that awful night, he'd raped her, more than once. The girl's little brother told the law Higgins had told his sister sometime before that someday he was going to run off with her. 

Liquor was involved--way too much of it. It would be a dozen years before Article would usher in prohibition, but horrors like the deaths of an innocent farm family would run saloons down Main and out of town.

You know what they say about the wheels of justice. In the case of Loris Hay Higgins, they ran even slower. To the good, good people of Thurston County, 116 years ago now, justice delayed sure as anything was justice denied.

So they took it up themselves. Loris Hay Higgins was a poor excuse for a human being, and there he was, down in Omaha, leading the singing in some jail church full of do-gooders, making people smile with his phony faith--a drunk, a thief, a rapist, a murderer. 

So when the train came through Bancroft, taking prisoner Higgins to an arraignment in Pender, when that train stopped at the station, a masked crowd was there waiting. 

Let's just say it this way: to those masked men, justice was done once Loris Hay Higgins was taken out of town and hung from the Logan Creek bridge, a mile east of Bancroft. The story goes that Higgins's last words were these: "I wish you would consider my mother." All reports claim he went as a lamb to the slaughter.

If you look hard on Ebay, and you're willing to shell out a few bucks, you can still buy a post card, created back then, that features an awkwardly bent figure at the end of a rope hung from a steel bridge. I'm serious.

The Sioux City Journal sent their people to Bancroft to find out what they could of the whole story. What they told readers was what the County Attorney had told them: "It was the work of the transient population of Thurston County."

Sure it was. 

And more: "Many good citizens here wish that the case had gone through the courts and that the criminal might have been disposed of legally. Personally, I greatly desired that the law might take its course." So said the County Attorney. But then he added what most people probably felt: "If anyone was ever to suffer mob violence, it was Higgins."

That, I suppose, is what some people might call frontier justice. But it's also a reminder that justice, often enough, is bigger and greater than even the will of the majority. 

For MLK Day* -- Rosa Parks

Yesterday, our pastor brought Martin Luther King into the sermon in a laudatory way, and rightly so. However, white churches need to be reminded of how much MLK was hated in 1968 by church-going white people. He was. In King's honor, on this his holiday, I'll offer these thoughts of mine posted here eight years ago. 

One can only imagine how annoyed white folks were on the bus that afternoon. After all, it was the end of another working day and nobody was making all that much money. They were all tired and weary, and a bunch of them had no idea what was on tap for supper--they'd still have to figure it out once they got home. "Get out of work and get on the bus and get home and put your feet up," was just about all there was to it that afternoon, 60 years ago, in Montgomery.

I'm betting no one even saw her get on, none of the white folks anyway. Why should they notice such things? They were busy too, had their own heartaches, they're own crappy stories. They didn't need anybody else's problems that late afternoon. 

Some of them didn't even like the blasted driver. He had a history of pissing people off--black people especially. Some people just got airs, you know? Some people aren't content with having it their way; they just want to do nothing more than poke a sharp stick in the eye of someone else, like that black lady especially. She wasn't breaking any law sitting in the middle section. The whole world knew it was "first come, first served." Stupid driver.

And, sure, it would have been right for that white guy to just give up the seat that lady had. After all, he was younger and she had a hard day too that day. I mean, you could see it on her face. She was beat, and he didn't have to make a point of lording it over her the way he did. The way most of the people on the bus saw it that morning, there wouldn't have had to be a dust-up at all. The whole mess simply wouldn't have had to happen.

She could have moved too. The other Negros sitting beside her had moved after all, when that white trash bus driver commanded them to. And he didn't have to speak that way either, truth be told. He could have just said it kindly, not screamed. He's an ass really, and I don't mind saying it. That driver is an ass. He bears a whole ton of responsibility for the whole bus boycott thing. Why can't we all just get along?

*  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *

We've made a hero out of Rosa Parks, even a Christian hero. People today, 60 years later, say she emitted some kind of "Christian glow" so present and so moving even white people in Alabama saw it, a kind of divine aura. Even if that's fantasy, it makes little difference because she's become what we've made of her, a saint. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a younger white man and thereby broke the back of certain kind of segregation in the Jim Crow South. 

She did it alone. She did it without violence. She did it without saying much at all. But she did it, took it upon herself to stand up for justice she saw violated every day of her life. That day, 60 years ago, she simply told herself and that white passenger that she wasn't going to take it anymore, and when that jackass bus driver insisted, so did she. She insisted on staying right there where she was. 

And that's what started it.

Sometimes white people like me don't realize or remember what a bother she must have been, what a squeaky wheel, what an "agitator," my father's favorite word for Dr. Martin Luther King. Before my father died, I should have asked him whether he'd ever changed his mind about MLK; it would have been a tough question, I'm sure, one he wouldn't have wanted to answer. 

He saw King as someone who just upset things, got people are riled up, raised cane, made trouble, put things off track when all any of us wanted was to make a living and provide for our families. What's the crime in that? My father didn't want to be bothered by black people's problems, dang it!--he had his own. Turn on the news and what do you see but people in the streets when they ought to be at work. That sort of thing.

To lets of white folks, "Black Lives Matter" gets tiring, doesn't it? Sometimes you just want to tell 'em all to go get a job somewhere, to go home and make a family or something, make something of yourself.

It's such a bother, such a mess. This is America, land of the free, home of the brave, a Christian nation. 

Sometimes our adoration of heroes makes it too easy to forget what made them heroic. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 90

An old friend of mine told me that her father, a lifelong pastor, used to say that as a preacher, funerals could be relatively simple to lead. All you have to do, he told her, is read Psalm 90, because at a funeral, every person in the sanctuary is listening.

It's been an awful week here. Five deaths have touched us significantly, even though none of the deceased were relatives or good friends. Three of those four deaths were not unexpected; two, awfully, were.

Our granddaughter, married just six months, lost a grandfather on her husband's side. She and her husband, just kids by my reckoning, have not had all that much experience with losses of that magnitude, so grandpa's dying is something somewhat new. She called my wife yesterday, something she hasn't done all that often, just to talk.

Another was the passing of the spouse of a man I know quite well, a man with similar interests, a man I've come to appreciate since moving out here to Alton. She was 90. Her death was not unexpected; she'd been failing. The two of them were childless, a fact I mention only because it seems her husband's grief may be more profound, his being so much alone.

The third, horrifically unexpected, can be attributed to weather. We've had a lot of snow, enough to keep roads treacherous. Ice, really, took the life of a young lady in an accident just a few miles north. She was returning for the second semester of her freshman year at Dordt University. Ten years ago, her father was killed in an accident; one can't help think of her mother's burdens today.

He would have been a senior in college if something horrible hadn't happened four years ago, some kind of brain tumor or cancer that slowly robbed him of most of what he once had. A death is a death, but this one might have been assessed as a blessing, an abatement to suffering. Still, the sheer extent of his suffering was immense.

And then, most unexpected, most unforgettable, that young man's mother was struck with a heart attack, in church, at her son's funeral--at her son's funeral. I don't know what can be said about that horrific end.

Those are death stories we've lived, none really immediate, but all of them consuming nonetheless.

That's why this Sunday's meditation is nothing more or less than Psalm 90.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. aBefore the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.

And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

1870 visions of what's underfoot -- Josephine Donovan

Josephine Donovan was born at the turn of the century a mile north of Granville, east of here, an area settled by German and Luxembourgian Roman Catholics. Sullivan’s Black Soil is a novel she wrote based on her father’s memories of breaking Sioux County soil, one of just a few Irish-American immigrants to attempt to set down roots on the good black soil of northwest Iowa.

Donovan also worked hard to create a portrait of the original prairie as beautiful as the land must have appeared to her pioneer father. Here's how she describes the land in her novel, Black Soil.

It was summer again, and the Iowa prairie was a study in green and gold and pink. Patches of ripened barley, oats and wheat were diminutive islands in the green sea of grass. Corn waved green fronds and nodded golden tassels. Sweet Williams vied with the wild roses in flooding the unbroken lands. And the summer sunlight, tempered by the ever-blowing south breeze, cast a sheen over the whole which dazzled the eye and gladdened the heart.”

A little later, little Margaret sits in the prairie grasses. “Margaret arose from where she had been lying in a patch of flowers. She had been listening to the murmur of the flowers as the wind blew through their petals. Her freckled face was flush with ecstasy, her blue eyes round with wonder. . .” “Bird songs; wind whispering to the flowers; insects on the wing; subdued murmurs of moving grass: voices of children—a prairie hymn.”

There is beauty in perfect rows of corn and whole sections of golden beans this time of year, but the native splendor is unimaginable. Just think of looking over endless fields of wild flowers dancing in the prairie winds on a swaying emerald floor.