So I stopped at the museum. A retiree was sitting behind a glass case with old eyeglasses and moustache cups that looked straight from a set of "Music Man." If anyone knew, he would, museum-guy, a resident. Nope. "Monuments?" he said. "Big ones?"
I got back in the car, took off east, and there, at the side of the road was a postage-stamp that said, "Monuments," in I'd-rather-not-bother-you lettering. I pointed the car up into the maple trees, got to the top, and there they were, a pair of tall monuments, constructed in the era of monuments at the end of the 19th century. There they were in a tousled apron of knee-high weeds and empty Bud Lights.
Okoboji's biggest monument is almost invisible, swallowed by the oaks all around the Abby Gardner cabin. That big monument takes deliberate effort just to see.
If you've not seen the War Eagle Monument, it's up high on a hill above the confluence of the Missouri and Big Sioux. You gotta wanta see it. It's like the Prospect Hill monument--still there, still kept up, but few ever see it.
"The Spirit of Siouxland," right there on the river, is impressive and beautiful and includes a statue remembering Iowa National Guard Lt. Col. Dennis Nielson's rescue of a three-year-old. If you want to see it, get off I-29, and out of the car.
No one in car or truck or on a Harley, no one, north or south, can miss the 122-year old Sgt Floyd Monument, an arrow, a rocket being shot into a prairie sky, our own miniature Washington Monument, which isn't by a long shot "miniature" at all. The Sergeant Floyd Monument lords it over our own expanse of Big Muddy. Those who pass it every working day may miss it, but no one else can. It's a presence that's outlived even the cattle yards.
Why is it here? All Sergeant Floyd ever did was die here. He didn't hold off a war party or crawl up from Kansas. He just died, some gastric thing, nothing particularly heroic. That monumental rocket is just for him--really?
Not really. Read it for yourself.
Let's come clean here: the Lewis and Clark Expedition didn't accomplish its number one goal, didn't find a northwest passage to link the oceans. Find it? Nope. There isn't such a thing.
"Consolidate the fur trade"--how about that? Not really. Once gold was discovered in faraway California, who really cared about beaver pelts. "Work for peace among the tribes?" When Clark died, Plains Indians owned most of the Missouri River. Soon, there'd be endless land takeovers and white folks moved west.
But imagine being here in 1804. When dawn lights the eastern sky, you and your buddies muster yourselves because you're facing yet another experience even your imagination can't even create. It's all new. Every turn of the wily river, every cottonwood grove, every endless grassy landscape--it's all excitingly new.
For our First Nations, nothing was new, except the strangely dressed white men trolling the river. The lives of their children would never be the same--never, ever.
The huge monument high above the river is a reminder for all of us of our history, about not forgetting who was here and why, of unimaginable adventures--and simultaneous destruction, a reminder of what we not always were but also what we can and should be.
The Sgt. Floyd Monument is just plain huge. You can't miss it and you shouldn't. It's for a 23-year-old Corpsman named Charley Floyd, the only man who didn't return.
But his monument is ours, a reminder of our very precious story, fraught as it is with glory and honor, but also with complexities that should never be dismissed or forgotten.
All of that is in our towering monument.
__________________
The last of four months' worth of stories for KWIT, a series that followed Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery through this region of the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment