Just for the record, we spent our anniversary this year in an ancient Sioux City cemetery. Seriously.
As anniversaries go, we've done well in celebrations, at least by my estimation. I think it would challenge the boundaries of good taste to count the ways, so you'll just have to take my word for it, generalize like I did, and simply say that, far more often than not, our anniversary retreats have been memorably and passionately sweet. Last week, on June 27, we celebrated our 54th.
I'm serious--54 (!), many of them celebrating the special charm somehow given to bridal couples, some of our "celebrations" less "festive," I might say, than others, certainly more memorable.
Saturday--our anniversary--we ran off to Sioux City, no summer night of passion on our agenda, maybe just a good dinner. I've been wanting to find a Sioux City cemetery, the Floyd Cemetery, where, I've read, a man was buried way back in 1910, a man whose story attracted me when I recently ran into it. Dr. J. J. Saville was a medical doctor in the Civil War, a bloody horrible job. Somehow (the case is not clear), although he had a medical practice in Omaha and returned there after the war, he is buried in Floyd Cemetery, Sioux City.
I wanted to find his grave--it's that simple, but not easy. Finding the Floyd Cemetery was difficult enough. It's a big place where I spent a lot of time on Saturday afternoon, alone, nobody else came through. In fact, if you google it, there may be no answers to his remains' whereabouts other than the cemetery at Sioux City's Floyd Monument. I knew he wasn't buried there.
Anyway, it took me--and eventually Barbara too--most of the afternoon to find it, but we did (on our 54th wedding anniversary). You'll think I'm nuts, and maybe I am, but it was a thrill. Barbara found it--its location from AI was off--the entire section was backwards--but she found it.
Saville had to have been a strong believer because in the early 1870s his church--the Episcopal Church--recommended him for a position on one of the newly created Indian reservations, an offer Dr. Saville took. Wasn't a cakewalk either. He was assigned to the Red Cloud Agency, where all sorts of things, dangerous things, were happening both before and during his short tenure.
There can be no doubt he was qualified for the position of Agent. Not only did his Civil War experience recommend him, but that experience included advocating for better conditions for the men wounded in battle. What little I've read about his Civil War experience makes clear that his candidacy for the headman at the Red Cloud Agency had substantial grounds. He was a good man.
His candidacy, forwarded by the Episcopal Church, came at the request of President Grant, who argued, with others, that the deplorable situations (graft and violence) on newly created Indian reservations needed to be changed--graft was everywhere. If Christians were to run the agencies, not crooks--or so the argument ran--relations with the nation's Indian peoples would certainly improve.
Whether that argument holds water or not is questionable and worth pursuing. What little I know is that this Dr. J. J. was chosen to be Agent at the Red Cloud Agency in western Nebraska because he was a member of a Christian church deeply involved in Native missions.
It wouldn't be hard to argue that he failed miserably. History does more than suggest that's true, but it's a judgment I can't make--I don't know the story well enough. But only two years later, Saville got in a wagon and went back to Omaha. What he left behind would require others to put in order.
He's buried here--this man whose personal story carries with it endless stories from American history. He's buried here--that's what I knew.
I just wanted to find him, and I did--or Barbara did. It's there.
And that's the story of our 54th wedding anniversary. We spent our anniversary getting an army of chigger bites walking through the grass of a huge old Sioux City cemetery, no one else around.
I was thrilled.
Seriously, we could have done worse.
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