For the
record, Mssrs. McGregor, Lockhart, and Clark were their names, although Mister George
Clark was no shirttail relative of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame.
George Clark was among the first white men to set foot on the far corner of our
fair state, but he didn’t fare well here—he was drowned in March of 1863, when
the Big Sioux had one of its frequent flooding fits.
Mr. Clark
was, however, preceded in death by Mr. Lockhart, who took an arrow from a band
of Dakota who were 80 miles away from the Minnesota River valley where their
kinsmen determined not to take the abuse they were suffering and rose up to
begin the 1862 war. The arrow that Mr. Clark took was a glowing ember from a
far bigger fire.
That left
McGregor, who found himself quite alone in a desolate prairie, where he didn’t
trust bands of Injuns (his word) coming by. McGregor picked up his arms and
trotted back east with enough tales to enchant any barroom gang.
Those three
men might well have found as many as 76 stone circles and dozens of mounds
along the Big Sioux, odd protrusions of the earth, different sizes and shapes,
a whole acre of honor they could have guessed had to be left behind by
some long gone marauding savages—"one huge Injun’ cemetery maybe,” they
might have surmised. Their surmising would have been right.
In, say,
1725, a century before those mountain men were here, they would have had to go
1500 miles east to Boston, to find as big a city as the one that once existed
right there where these three tough guys stood, just south and east of Sioux
Falls, SD, which was back then an interminable sea of tall grass. As many as
5000 people (researchers call them Oneida people) lived on the dusty pathways
of the city. Five thousand residents doesn’t seem like overpopulation, but New
York was New Amsterdam back then; Chicago wasn’t even there when this city of
indigenous people was thriving.
It seems
impossible that about the time when wave after wave of immigrant Englishmen and
women were stepping down on Plymouth Rock, this city, people have taken to call
Blood Run, was pulsating with
life and trade.
South
Dakota has done a wonderful job of celebrating the once-here thriving city of
Blood Run. Just follow the signs to The Good Earth State Park, where pleasant
and informative Visitor’s Center tells what can be told, what can be explained
about the Onieda people—some Sac and Fox, some Sioux and Omaha, some Ojibwe.
And take the kids—there’s all kinds of interactive things that’ll catch their
attention.
The city of
Blood Run was down the steep hill and across the river from the park, in a
place we call today, Iowa. If you’re from Dakota, you have every reason to be proud
of the way the state has honored what once stood just across the Big Sioux.
But if,
like me, you’re an Iowan, you’ll be disappointed, even embarrassed to discover
that across the river, where once so very long ago a city of 5000, give or take
a couple hundred, stood a city bigger than almost city in North America.
And there’s
nothing there because decades of King Corn has flattened the mounds and filled
the empty spaces. And there’s nothing there because Iowa, dragging its
harrowing feet, really needs to do more than McGreegor, Lockhart, and Clark.
