At Fort Belmont

 

My daughter seemed unwilling to believe her parents used to travel back and forth--western Iowa to eastern Wisconsin--on a two-lane road. I don't know why she thought that impossible, but the plain truth is I'm a good bit older than Interstate 90, old enough to remember Hwy 16 that ran through hill and dale down at the foot of the state of Minnesota.

Personally, I go back even further, my very first trip undertaken in 1956, when I'm guessing I-90 may have been little more than someone's dream. Back then old Hwy 16--I get nostalgic just typing out the numbers--jig-jagged through what seemed endless miles of boring farmland until it began to spaghetti through the hills west of the Mississippi. 

Occasionally a river valley would break the endless miles of prairie. Already at Jackson, old 16 snuck down into the woods along the Des Moines River, dipped into the shadowy darkness wrought by honest-to-goodness woods, and passed a tourist trap on its way into town--Ft. Belmont, the signs said, a shady spot on the prairie that--or so I couldn't help thinking--had designs on, in the days before Visa, loosing you from whatever you had jingling in your pockets. 

We never stopped. We were on our way home after all, miles to go before we'd sleep. Ft. Belmont stood up and out from the trees right there where somebody would be glad to sell you a little war bonnet or a rubber tomahawks or a full set of bow and arrows. "Trading post"?--sure. Most everything made in Japan, I thought.

Along came I-90. Ft. Belmont was off the beaten path, so the chamber of commerce (or something similar) made haste to move it all--store and reconstructed fort a mile or so north to a nice big spread along the interstate, easy access on and off. Eventually they put an old Lutheran church there too, and a school. 

The new Ft. Belmont keeps hours only between Memorial Day and Labor Day, so the whole place was shut down last Saturday, when finally I stopped by. What's new now is I know something about Ft. Belmont. I know Inkpaduta and his outlaw gang of cold-blooded Santee killers moved north after the desolation they left on Lake Okoboji in March of 1857. I knew that they kept up the slaughter when they came up river north to here. 

I knew all of that, and that's why I left I-90, hoping I could at least walk up to this good old phony Ft. Belmont. What I didn't know was that during the 1862 Dakota War more local men and women and children were killed here, slaughtered by yet another outlaw gang of killers. I didn't know that, had to read it off a memorial.

Believe me, I know the historical context, the required background. I know the Santee Sioux were losing their homeland to newcomers named Ole and Britta and Lars. I understand their loss of homeland, but if you call those Santees "freedom fighters," then you better do likewise with the Hamas killers who swarmed into Israel one early Sabbath morning in October. There's no pardon for slaughter. Murder is murder.

Three women tried to escape the horror here near Jackson by bringing their children with them and climbing into a hole in the ground beneath the cabin. One child could not be stilled, so one mother took it upon herself to leave the cave so the others might be saved. She did, and she and her baby were immediately slain. 

On Saturday I stopped at Ft. Belmont. No one was around. I stood a hundred yards from the tourist-y fortress facsimile, alone in a little cluster of historic buildings that still felt tourist trap-y, just as the original had when years ago it was clustered down the hill at the edge of town, surrounded by trees so otherwise foreign on the prairie we'd travelled.

I stood there, in a way, to apologize. The sight isn't sacred. That monument you see, set there in 1909, is in a city park downtown. You have to hunt to find it. Sure the new Fort Belmont is touristy. You can't miss it from the highway. It's huge, and, sure, its more than a little silly. 

But this time, when I had the time and actually stopped, like I never did sixty-some years ago, this time I stopped and remembered the suffering I now know something about. I stood there alone, just off the interstate, and nearly bawled because I know the brutal stories and because I couldn't help but think, once again, how blasted unredeemable we can be before God, but how, despite whatever arrows befall us, whatever roads we travel, He is somehow never all that far off the highway.