On the Wakonda Spring

　

　



　

　

　

Waconda is a town described in fabulous detail in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion. As Melville reminds us: "it’s not on any map, real places never are." In Kesey’s book, Waconda stands in for any number of small towns on Oregon’s Highway 101 facing seaward at the mouths of short, violent rivers churning down from the rain-sodden coastal ranges. When Paul Newman adapted Kesey’s book into a movie, he imagined the town to be at the mouth of the Siletz River somewhere between Florence and Lincoln City, northwest of Eugene. Newman was a rip-roaring stud of a movie star in those days, long before his autumnal stint as the chairman of a charity manufacturing pasta sauce and salad dressing bearing his name. Places like Depoe Bay and Newport invite visitors to taverns where Newman allegedly got drunk – in one of these places, legend has it that the pool table was too high for Newman and he used a chainsaw to cut its legs down to size. Notwithstanding the local color, Waconda is an imaginary place; indeed, Kesey tells his readers that it is generic and represents any number of villages similarly situated alongside the great and ferocious ocean.

Waconda, often spelled "Wakonda", refers to the Great Spirit (or chief divinity) in the Siouan languages – the word exists in Omaha, Osage, and Ponca vocabularies. It’s not clear how the word migrated from the Missouri River Valley in Nebraska to Oregon. The Indians indigenous to Lincoln County, the area where Kesey stages the events in his book, spoke Suislawan, an "isolate" language, extinct by the time the novel was written. The Indians now living in the county describe themselves as the Siletz confederation – they have a number of parcels of territory comprising 5500 acres in the coastal range. Previously impoverished, they now support themselves primarily with gambling money acquired through the Chinook Winds Casino located in Newport. (Indian Jenny, a character in the book, must have been imagined as either a Coos, Siuslaw or Kuitsch Indian.) Kesey’s Waconda is not to be confused with the mythical sub-Saharan kingdom of Wakanda, the home of the Marvel super-hero, the Black Panther.

Similarly, Waconda in Sometimes a Great Notion should not be confused with Waconda or Great Spirit Spring, a place located about 40 miles south of the Nebraska border in the arid country midway between the east and west boundaries of the State. (The place is near modern-day Cawker City in Mitchell County, Kansas. Cawker City pop. 470 is the home to the largest ball of sisal twine, a great brown globe more than 12 feet in diameter and wound by Frank Stoeber. This ball of twine competes with the great twine ball in Darwin, Minnesota, pop. 350 made by Francis Johnson – as a loyal Minnesotan, I assert that our ball of twine is bigger than their ball of twine. But who really knows?)

Waconda Spring, a place that no longer exists, was an interesting natural phenomenon ultimately destroyed by its own success. Here is what is known about that spring.

Waconda Spring was a natural artesian well located about 500 yards from a bend in the Solomon River. The spring was bubbly with mineral-impregnated brine and overflow deposits had built a roughly conical mound of salt said to be forty feet high. The spring itself was completely spherical, about 30 feet across. Early engravings show a steep-walled volcano-shaped formation with veins of water trickling down its stratified sides. Several small figures seem to be excavating at the top of the rock formation. The Solomon River flows picturesquely along side the strange turret of rock and, in the background, there are gentle rolling hills with trees nestled in their folds. In fact, this engraving of so-called Wakonda da, Great Salt Spring is immensely exaggerated. Early photographs show an acre of blistered-looking salt deposits rising almost imperceptibly to a crater filled with water. Although scale is hard to determine, it seems unlikely that the salt crater cradling the spring rose more than ten or fifteen feet around the surrounding landscape. Some barren hills are visible in the background with trees occupying some of the gulches leading down toward the river-bottom where the salt spring is located.

The Pawnee or Kanza named the spring and, supposedly, had a legend about it. Warring tribes fought over the verdant Solomon River Valley. One day, a maiden strolling along the river saw the spring and approached it. She met a warrior from another tribe bathing in the brackish water and fell in love with him. She and her lover enjoyed trysts by the spring, but, when her father discovered the illicit romance, he tracked her to the salt water well and, with a single shot of his bow and arrow, transfixed the enemy warrior. He fell backward into the spring and, crying out his name, the young woman dived after him. Of course, neither was ever seen again because the spring was bottomless. Indeed, early white settlers claimed that the spring rose and fell with the tides and that it was, in fact, fed from sea-water passing through the earth in labyrinthine and endless tunnels. Maids and their demon lovers are common around artesian wells: Coleridge imagined such a place in his fragment Kubla Khan and the spring fountaining forth in that poem is also connected by subterranean channels by a mazy river running to the sea.

Zebulon Pike sighted the Spring in 1806. While crossing the plains, he learned from Indian informants that there was a sacred spring in the Solomon River bottoms. The Pawnee regarded the spring’s waters as medicinal and brought sick people there to be healed. On occasion, the spring was the site of Indian powwows and intertribal gatherings. The Indians said that the spirit of the maiden lived in the spring – this sounds like the pagan European notion that springs are haunted by seductive water nymphs. My guess is that these legends are later accretions, like the deposits of salt built up around the shimmering lidless eye of the spring, probably invented for marketing purposes.

Early settlers staked some claims near the spring, alarming the Indians. They made some desultory raids on wagon trains, without much success, it seems, and, then, captured three White women. By this point, the tribes understood that interfering with White women was a recipe for swift and sure disaster and, so, they returned their hostages unharmed the next day. The course of empire in this part of America was swift and sure and the Indians were soon displaced. But, as we will see, a connection to Native Americans, so long as there no real Indians involved, can be a commercial boon. Later advertising for water pumped into bottles from the Spring asserted that the natives had defended the area with such vigor and ferocity because of their desire to preserve the salubrious, life-giving and healing spring. Waconda Water marketed as a "gentle but sure" natural laxative, was peddled in bottles bearing as a mercantile emblem the profile of a beautiful Indian maiden wearing a single eagle feather in her hair and seeming to wink over her graceful shoulder at the consumer.

With the Indians driven away, a hotel was built near the Springs and a town platted a mile south. Initially, efforts were made to harvest salt from the deposits near the Springs – this effort, I think, eliminated the florid-looking salt terraces around the water and flattened the terrain. But the project failed. At first, however, the village of Waconda Springs flourished. By 1872, the town had 250 residents and an eccentric medical doctor, a Canadian named Chapman. Chapman worked to promote the health benefits of the Springs, planned to vivify the economy with silk production, and established a small museum containing interesting mineral specimens and other oddities he had collected in his spare time. (The silk culture plan failed to win investors – another town in Kansas, prosaically named Silkville, complete with ailanthus trees and a cocoonery, collapsed into barnkruptcy around the same time.) Unfortunately, another nearby town competed with Waconda Springs for businesses and residents – this was Cawker City, still in existence, located about two miles north. Both villages offered incentives to a local merchant to build a large general store in their town. Ultimately, Cawker City prevailed, the big general store was erected on its Main Street, and Waconda Springs withered on the vine. By 1880, most of the town was in ruins except for the public school that had been built eight years earlier. But that structure also collapsed and was gone by the time the Depression gutted the arid county in the dirty thirties.

At the springs, a resort hotel was built, followed by an actual private sanitarium. Promoters of the hotel and, then, sanitarium, said that the springs were as sacred to the local Pawnee as "Jerusalem" and that the water flowing from the "crater of the volcano" was invested with miraculous medicinal powers. The crater impounding the wonderful water was described as "bottomless." There was some truth to these claims. The local Pawnee had certainly regarded the Spring as a kind of holy site – it was one of five locations where tutelary animals, the nahurac, sent by the Great Spirit resided. (The Pawnee where divided into five gens or clans – each affiliated with a feature in the landscape and an animal totem. The gens living near the Spring seems to have been the "beaver" clan – this is surmised by a large geoglyph cut as an intaglio relief into a bluff about two miles from the spring: the intaglio is made from curving trenches shaped into a four-legged animal, most probably a beaver. The people who made the intaglio geoglyph maintained and renewed the image over a period of, at last 200 years.) Divers sounded the spring to the depth of 30 feet and didn’t find bottom. The water itself seeps upward through 600 to 700 feet of porous sandstone to create the formation.

The Cawker City historical society maintains images of the spring and the adjacent hotel. These stereograph pictures show that the terrain beyond the Spring on the opposite side of the sanitarium descends steeply to the Solomon River terrace. In this area, the landscape is broken into stratified cliffs of white sandstone, approximately 8 to 12 feet high. Apparently, water seeps through this formation and there are pockets of brine entrapped in these badlands. Some photographs show groups of pioneers with their wagons gathered atop the cliffs – it is from these images, I surmise, that the more picturesque engravings of the Springs were derived. (One stereograph labels the obviously sedimentary layers of rock comprising the low escarpment near the springs as "Lava Cliffs", a nod to the notion that the water itself occupied a "volcano crater.") Viewed from certain angles, the oculus of the Spring does seem to bubble out of the crest of a rugged steep hillside. On the sanitarium side of the Spring, the slope up to the water is imperceptible, a gentle rise in what looks like an alkali flat (I presume the white deposits are salt) to the brine-filled crater. The hotel on this more temperate side of the spring, the crater squashed down as it were into the ground, is a large building with a wrap-around porch sporting a shapely woodworked balustrade. In 1884, the original hotel building was two stories, about 80 feet long, with six gables in the attic and a big flagpole on one end of the building. I am attempting represent this landscape in some detail for a reason – none of this is visible today.

One picture shows a cowboy and woman sipping water from a mug in the sandstone cliffs. In white handwriting, someone has inscribed the picture: Fountain of Youth, Waconda Springs. Some photographs made inside the hotel show a dining hall with pretty plates and porcelain teapots arrayed on shelves. Another picture shows men playing billiards in a pool-room on the premises. By this time, the Springs were entirely fenced with a wrought-iron barrier with the tips of the stakes shaped like arrowheads.

Apparently, the hotel was successful. Pictures show that it grows larger around the turn of the century and several outbuildings have been raised. By the turn of the century, the sanitarium is made of red brick embedded in a thick matrix of white grout. An orchard occupies part of the property. Some of the salubrious water seems to have been impounded in a small irregularly-shaped lake. Outbuildings by the lake are presumably bottling plants. At the St. Louis State Fair in 1904, bottled Waconda Water received a special blue-ribbon prize for its medicinal property – "there were very few ailments in the world," advertising touted, "that this water could not heal."



In 1907, a man named Abraham bought the springs. He made additional improvements on the property including installing piping that conveyed Waconda Water directly into the hotel. At that time, the taps ran with the stuff. Pictures show a man decked-out in a lugubrious-looking deep sea diving gear. This was 1908 when a diver was sent down to explore the spring’s depths. Photographs show a row of local citizens, some of them in black suits, peering down earnestly at the diver bobbing in the middle of the round aperture of waters. The diver, not surprisingly, emerged from the Spring with the report that was, indeed, bottomless and that the shelves of stone in its seep chimney were laden with Indian beads and arrowheads, some of which were displayed to the public. By this time, the hotel had 48 rooms, a majestic brick facade, and there were horse- and dog-tracks adjacent to the property as well as a small casino.

After the Great Depression, people no longer had money or time to "take the waters." The sanitarium failed and was shuttered. The Abraham family petitioned the Federal government to have the site purchased by eminent domain and transformed into a national monument. Pictures show signs announcing the forthcoming national monument and there was a plaque erected at roadside. But floods ravaged Topeka a few years later. Some of the flood waters were traced to the Solomon River. Authorities decided to dam the river for flood control. This measure, the Glen Elder dam, ultimately inundated the Springs as well as the site of the ghost town of Waconda Springs and the place where the sanitarium had been built. The Abraham family protested but without avail. The Army Corps of Engineers issued studies calling Waconda Springs a "mud puddle." The world is now disenchanted. An army diver sounded the Springs and determined that it was 115 feet deep.

Bulldozers knocked over the remnants of the sanitarium and its buildings, plowing them into the Spring. Then, the dam was built and the Springs vanished under the water.

A local entrepreneur erected a half-scale model of the springs near Cawker City, a steep conical hill with a concrete-lined pool at its center. There are plans today to re-name the Solomon River valley according to its old Indian appellation – Nepahoola ("Water-on-a-hill" in Kanza). With the Indians gone, we can afford to name places after them. Local opinion as to the facsimile spring is divided: some think the artificial hill made of packed dirt and the concrete-lined pool is poignant tribute to the vanished Waconda Water or "Great Spirit" springs; others, find the place unconvincing and tacky. Soon enough, the controversy will vanish just like the formations and hotel foundations drowned in modern Lake Waconda – there will be no one left alive who can recall what the old springs were like.