The Land of Standing Bear

There's a bridge out there, barely visible from here. It's far right, half way up the picture. "The bridge to nowhere" some call it because it is, very little population on either side. It's given name is The Standing Bear Bridge.

What's before you is the Missouri River, at a place I've grown to love, where the Niobrara River runs into Big Muddy. Right here, in the vicinity of Niobrara, Nebraska, the longest river in North America looks more like it did before the dams than it does anywhere on its course to St. Louis today. This is the Missouri of Lewis and Clark.

That's an Episcopal church down there at the river's edge, the Church of Our Most Merciful Savior, built here in 1884, when a significantly bigger mission enterprise burned down. 

It's in remarkably good shape, although showing its age. The Santee people who live on the reservation consider it theirs--and it is. It's been here since the Santees left Crow Creek and moved here, a hundred miles south to the river's edge, leaving little but suffering and death behind. The Santees gained most-hated status in Minnesota after their own "uprising" in a bloody month-long war, "the Dakota War of 1862." Many of the Santees ended up here, where those gorgeous sandstone cliffs along the Missouri greeted them with every dawn. 

This is the land of Spotted Tail, the Ponca chief who went to court to argue for the right to be a human being under the law, and that's Spotted Tail, standing in the Statuary of the Capital in D. C.

In The River and I, John Neihardt narrates his long trek down the Missouri in a canoe, accompanied by his brother. He cannot help but note what he sees when h e comes by a place not unlike Running Water, South Dakota, where these proud sandstone bluffs stand royally along the river.

In the lazy heat of the mounting sun, tempered by the cool river draught, the yellow sandstone bluffs, whimsically decorated with sparse patches of greenery seemed to waver, as if seen through shimmering silken gauze. 

I stopped reading right there and told myself that while I hadn't seen what Neihardt did from the river's edge, I've been blessed with the imagination to see it as he did. I know what the river looks when it gathers offers anyone who cares to look little more than sheer awe. I know.