Little Sioux, Saturday morning

If it wouldn't be for the skeletal branches up top here, you wouldn't know that the land wears a ermine quilt, and the temp is well below freezing. The tufts of seed clumps might well seem like leaves. For a moment, I thought I might be witness to a sun stack, the kind of phenom when successive layers of clouds form burniing morning chimney. Didn't quite happen, as you see. 

The optical illusion here is created, I think, by the sense that the tawny background is vastly closer than it actually is. That's some kind of shelter buildiings for animals in the foreground; it's not a toy or something I photoshopped in. There really is that much snow on the ground. Because the trees are just now catching the sun, I stopped to shoot. Somehow it's a freakish shot. But the colors are blessedly rich and, check for yourself, oddly similar to these:

The O'Brien County Prairie Center keeps a half dozen buffalo, and I can't not stop to see if I can get some epic shot. That morning, I got this--the kind of picture people use for church directories, Ma and Pa nicely posed, hardly primpted. I'm always on the lookout for snowy bison and had hope on Saturday, but there these two sat atop an unseemly pile of stuff. Still, it's a nice background, and the two of them do look posed in a churchly sort of way.

This is close to what I wanted to get--the immensity of billowing white land right now. This isn't fresh snow--it's at least a week old; but a week of really cold temps keep it almost pure. In this picture, my trusty camera admits that truly big shots, no matter how hard it tries, are really hard to come by.  Here's another.

The hills along the Little Sioux River are elegant right now--or at least they were on Saturday morning; but this shot, like the former, doesn't show it. I still find it hard to capture the beauty of big land and big skies in a place like this. It's all really gorgeous, a bride of land. I just can't get it in the camera. 

And then there's this guy, in color, too, although you wouldn't guess. I must have a couple dozen shots of this old solitary oak, big as life, out there on the hood of the hill. Even when there is no color, its perseverance is worth recording. 

And this, finally, is what forms the area--the Little Sioux. I've spent far too much time with the Spirit Lake Massacre, 1857, a kind of beastly prelude to the Dakota War of 1862. This whole scene, this whole valley, was ruled by Inkpaduta, a Wahpakutee headman (Santee Sioux), who engineered a killing spree of pioneers on and around the Iowa Lakes.

He didn't want anyone to tell him what to do--white or red. He felt himself a victim of injustice because a white man had killed his brother and his brother's family, but there was no justice for such a heinous deed. Soon, in fact, there'd be a bounty for killing Indians.

That white people were moving into the neighborhood was no excuse for him to carry out the butchering he and his band did. Inkpaduta was not a nice man. No one should even try to assert he had his rights or whatever. There were other tribes and bands right here before his people arrived. They chased them out too. Other Santee bands wanted nothing to do with Inkpaduta even before his mad killing spree.

Anyway, this was his world, his land, his home. Even though I'm armed with nothing more than a camera, I'm always conscious of this being the world he loved, the land of Inkpaduta.