Diary: A Trip to see my Grandchildren in North Dakota

 

A child becomes a fellow laborer in the vineyard (1) – Helmets and bicycles (2) – Passel of children and grandchildren, passel of troubles (3) – A Lapse of Memory along the Way (4) – Twin chiropractors and a canceled celebrity (5) – Invitation to a Brawl (6) – There is no there there (7) – Semen stains in the 2nd worst motel in North Dakota (8) – Fear & Loathing in Fargo (9) – Toilet bowl insomnia (10) – Bees attack a diabetic child (11) – An allegedly blind baby (12) – Bad Father on Unlucky 13 (13) – Glacial (14) – Haunted Hollow (15) – Technicolor Serpent (16) – A Pisgah View (17) – Home of the Red Men (18) – Deadly Blizzards (19) – Potholes (20) – An Abandoned Place (21) – Rape and Murder (22) – Etymological Detour from the Politically Correct Straight and Narrow (23)

– The WPA picks on a Brawler (24) – A lawsuit about a Casino (25) – The White Buffalo and a member of the Tribal Bar (26) – Wherein I attempt to escape seduction (27) – Pock-pock-pock (28) – The Beautiful City in the Sky (29) – Granite (30) – Competing narratives, competing monuments (31) – Mission at The Lake that Speaks (32) – A Forgotten Republic (29) –“Rocks, caves, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death” (34) – Farther & Gay Mansion (35) – Mission (un)Accomplished (36) – The Stations of the Cross (37) – “Original or Crispy?” (38) – Paul Klee: “Drawing is taking a line for a walk” (39) – We stand still to pose for a photograph but life goes on around us and the wind is always moving (40)

1.  PASTOR BEN

came around the corner of the house, skidding a little on the backyard’s dewy grass.  He was wearing a suitably sober black mask, a clerical collar, and puppy-brown loafers.  Pastor Ben greeted us and cast an eye on the little table set up on the grass.  There was a silver basin on the table and a big white column of candle with a butane lighter on the white cloth next to it.  The child was almost two years old, dressed in her baptismal gown, squirming in the arms of her father.

After Pastor Ben surveyed the scene and saw that all was well, he went back around the corner of the house to his car.  He brought a brass stanchion on a tripod, a metal pole with crossbeam that stood a little taller than his height.  Cloth banners were draped over the stanchion, one of them marked with the name of the little girl, Noelle.  

After the baptism, we ate cake.  Noelle saw an ant that interested her and she threw herself on her belly on the concrete patio to inspect the little creature.  Pastor Ben said that he had been raised in Brazil’s rain forests.  His parents were Lutheran missionaries.  

My errands for the day were just beginning.  A single toadstool had sprouted through the grass and its cap was marked with wedge-shaped blemishes, rows of pale emblems like cuneiform script. (Someone with a good eye and an ingenious temperament could certainly decipher those characters.)  Baptism is momentous and the big candle, supposed to be lit each year on the anniversary of the sacrament, will last for a very long lifetime, probably several lifetimes, but the morning was warming with the heat and humidity on the rise and I had hundreds of miles to drive before the end of the day.  I set aside my plastic fork and plate on which crumbs of cake were resting and walked beside the house toward my car parked at the curb.  A bunny, startled by my approach, scampered out from a tuft of flowers almost underfoot and fled across the lawn.  

2.  AT THE ROCHESTER TARGET

I walked all the way to the door, a hundred steps, before remembering that I had forgotten to don my mask.  I went back to the car and put on the mask and, then, went inside to the customer service desk.  Two bicycles, not yet assembled, were waiting for me.  They were in long boxes with suitcase-like handles.  There was also a sack with sleek-looking, streamlined helmets.

I put the bicycles and helmets in the back of my Honda CRT (red) and drove from Rochester to the St. Paul suburbs.  

3.  THE PLAN 

was improvised at the last minute.  My daughter, Melissa has two children, Hannah, who is six, and four-year old, Lucas.  Melissa lives in Fargo, North Dakota.  This city is also the home of my ex-wife, Jean, my oldest son, Martin, and Melissa’s twin sister, Theresa.  In April, Theresa had a baby whom I hadn’t yet seen and, so, my plan was to drive to Fargo over the Labor Day weekend, visit the children and deliver gifts to them, most notably the two bicycles.  The situation was complicated by the baptism of stepdaughter’s child on Saturday morning and, further, problematic because Melissa is a drug addict, has been in lots of legal trouble, and suffered termination of her parental rights by the court in North Dakota.  (She scarcely defended herself and has been homeless, as far as I know, since the hearing – she doesn’t need a place to live because the two children are not with her anymore.)  Hannah and Lucas live with their grandmother, Jean.  Theresa doesn’t like Melissa anymore, although they are twins, and will not spend any time with her.  Martin, my son, refuses to associate with either of my two daughters because he despises the men with whom they have had babies.  (Melissa’s baby-daddy, as he might be called, is an elderly and illiterate Mexican alcoholic – he’s apparently my age, and I am 65.)  Jean has MS and is not well.  Methamphetamine has extracted all of Melissa’s teeth and she’s been beat up repeatedly in Fargo bars – those places from which she hasn’t been banned.  Martin told me that her nose is all smashed and crooked and that she’s scarcely recognizable.  A coil of cold dread rested in my belly.  I’ve been to Fargo many times and nothing really good ever happens there or, if things seem relatively settled and placid, this is just an illusion, the calm before yet another storm.  And, my son, Jack suffered a mental breakdown in St. Cloud, a place that is on the road to Fargo, and, also, a source of dire associations and much anxiety for me.  If I thought about the trip, and the hours ahead of me, my head ached and I felt feverish, as if I had already been infected with Covid, and I could only make my way north if I didn’t think about the trip or its stages and concentrated only on the traffic on the highways, the landscapes (green and flowering), the music on the radio and the newscasts.  

 

4.  THE LUSH LANDSCAPE

rushed by and I reached Minneapolis after driving about seventy minutes.  I jogged a little to the east, crossing the Mississippi near Kaposia, the old Dakota camp in the riparian homeland near where the South Saint Paul stockyards were later built.  The stockyards have been gone for twenty years, replaced by an industrial park, mostly vacant lots, with a few brick walls retained in memory of the millions of sheep and pigs and cows that were killed here.  Of course, Little Crow’s Kaposia was not even a memory when the stockyards were built, the Indians all gone, deported after the terrible war to the Dakotas.

I followed freeways around the east of the cities to 694 and, then, veered north and west.  Traffic was light and the day was bright and sunny: you could see forever, to things that didn’t exist and into both the past and future.  Normally on my trips north, I joined Interstate 94, the freeway that runs to Fargo and, then, west to Bozeman and Seattle, by skirting the city on its west side, zooming through the remote suburbs now spilled far out into the country, an urban corridor bridging the farmland up to St. Cloud.  But on this trip, I passed St. Paul on its east side, then, drove through the northern suburbs, including New Brighton where I lived when I was a little boy.  I watched the signs for exits and noticed one that said Silver Lake Road, a place that somehow seemed familiar to me and I was shocked to recall that this was a landmark from my early childhood, a place about which I had often thought and dreamt, but that was now so remote from me, that, for a moment, at least I didn’t recognize the significance of the place – it was just a name with a metallic glint.  Nothing looked familiar in New Brighton.  When I was growing up there, the new freeway had just been finished, a mint-new expanse of road running in a naked groove between the hills, every tree for several hundreds of yards back from the pavement plowed into oblivion so that the edges of the neighborhoods were all bald and muddy, construction sites with puddles like oozing sores and heaps of pea-stone gravel next to freshly excavated basements.  But the freeway has now been complete for more than 55 years and the trees planted along the right-of-way are grown tall and dangle ragged branches and vines over the beige fortifications meant to keep freeway noise out of the tracts of modest lower middle-class housing, and the little stucco-fronted home where I lived for eight years or so, was hidden behind huge trees that loomed along the edges of the freeway like a rain forest in Brazil.

Since I had drove onto 94 north from a different point of access – that is, the north suburbs of St. Paul and, then, Brooklyn Center – the highway seemed subtly different to me, framed in an unfamiliar landscape, with strange accents and distances that were distorted, either too long or shorter than they should be.  Things didn’t settle into my imagination, distressed I suppose by my forgetting the meaning of Silver Lake Road, until I reached the St. Cloud exits.  I stopped for sandwich.  It was surprisingly hot.  The road north now was familiar again, but dull.  

5.  THIRTY MILES NORTH

of the exits to St. Cloud (the town is too far from the freeway to be visible), I passed alongside s several villages where I had once attended a wedding.  This was fifteen years ago, or more, and I wasn’t sure if the ceremony had been in Albany or Melrose or New Munich.  A woman working for my law firm had married a chiropractor.  The chiropractor had an identical twin.  Both men were very handsome, big and strong.  The twin had tears in his eyes and he sang very beautifully.  He seemed sad at the wedding as if bidding his twin brother farewell.  

A sign points the way to the Lake Wobegon trail, a scenic byway among the little towns in the farm country north of St. Cloud.  People here are staunch German Catholics and, every mile or so, there is a billboard that reminds us that abortion is evil and kills a baby in the womb.  Lake Wobegon is a the fiction creation of Garrison Keillor, a famous radio personality, who began his career broadcasting with public radio at Collegeville, a monastery town where, as the name tells us, there are several Catholic schools.  A few years ago, Garrison Keillor, also a best-selling novelist who was awarded the Mark Twain prize for humor (recently bestowed on Dave Chapelle), was accused of sexual harassment.  He was immediately canceled, his popular radio show suppressed, and, I suppose, in a hundred households in the liberal suburbs, his books burned or discarded.  A few months ago, Garrison tried a come-back, posing for an anguished photograph on the cover of Minnesota Monthly, the public radio magazine – he’s almost 80 and was never photogenic even when he was much younger and, so, the picture seemed marginally monstrous, an old goblin with protuberant eyebrows and a leathery, haggard face.  The come-back didn’t get any traction and, so, Minnesota’s most famous celebrity, remains in eclipse and, no doubt, will stay there until a decade after his death when the very real merits of his work will be revived.  

6.  A LITTLE CONTRETEMPS

occurs at the Hansel Lake rest stop, somewhere north of Alexandria.  I come from the toilet, my mask steaming my glasses, and go up to my red Honda CRT.  As I try to open the door, I see a startled man inside the car, sitting behind the wheel, with black sunglasses.  He raises his forearm as if to parry some sort of blow he expects from me.  What is he doing in my car?  Then, I see that my SUV is parked a few feet away, a car that is the identical twin to his vehicle.  I point to my identical car and the startled man gives me a thumb’s up.  

On the freeway, the vehicles are all going the same place.  We fall into a caravan of five or six vehicles, each traveling about five car-lengths apart.  The vehicles in the caravan are moving the same speed, so the gap between cars doesn’t increase or decrease.  Although we are all driving at 75 miles an hour, no one seems to be really moving – it’s as if we are parked on the freeway, stationary, with the landscape sweeping by.  

7.  I’M LOST

in Fargo.  This seems odd – everything is visible in Fargo.  The city is an abstract grid of immensely wide roads superimposed on a perfectly flat plain that extends in all directions to a perfectly flat horizon.  The place is like the Platonic ideal of a city, each structure stationed in a vast, limitless space, seeming almost to levitate in a geometrically-constructed void.  Gas stations occupy acres of flat, paved lot.  Trucking firms with featureless office buildings like concrete bunkers sit at intersections that seem as wide as a football field.  An arena is centered among miles of empty parking lots. Terminals of huge round gas and oil tanks sprawl across the landscape and everything is horizontal, avenues aimed at the edges of the earth that are impossible distant, a flat rim over which little clouds, like the vacant thoughts of the sky, bubble up.  How can you get lost in such a place?

I have to consult my cell-phone.

8.  I’M WARNED

by the bicycles shackled to utility poles in the Super-8 motel parking lot –take it from me: you don’t want to stay in a motel where there are a half-dozen battered-looking bicycles chained to the parking lot posts, each pole equipped for engine plug-ins during the brutish winters in this place.

The desk clerk is a fat girl wearing flip-flops and smoking a cigarette next to the door to the lobby.  

Somewhere, the Red River of the North threads its way through the huge flat metropolis, a linear gaggle of trees stooping over a water-course that is narrow (you can easily chuck a stone across from North Dakota to Minnesota) and flowing only about six inches below the crumbly black loam banks.  This de minimis river, a terrifying torrent during snow-melt, is the boundary between the states and the raison d’etre for the town, a presence that serves as the watery spinal column for the the twin cities of and Moorhead, Minnesota on the opposite bank.  The motel district where there is a mall, West Acres, at the intersection between Interstate 29, straight north and south, and I-94, equally ordinal east and west, spreads out along the cross-hairs of the freeways and, even here, miles from the Red River there are big, steep-walled indentations gouged into the black soil, holding ponds into which lanes of the river can be diverted during flood season, but now grassy, enigmatic sunken plazas at the dry end of summer. It’s hard to imagine the tide of the flood penetrating this deep into the country but there is no high ground anywhere – the loftiest hills here are places where the roads have been raised to let rail tracks run under the viaducts.  If you look in any direction, the city is flat with water towers twice as tall as the brick steeples of the churches and here and there ramp-mounds over which bridges run above train tracks.  (Trains hoot and bellow mournfully all night long.)  

The fat girl puts out her cigarette and, at the front desk, presents me with intricate contracts by which I agree not to smoke in the room ($250 automatic cleaning cost) and certify that I don’t intend to smuggle a pet into the room.  On a coffee-stained lay-out diagram, she shows me a remote wing and a door (D) through which I can enter the motel from its back side.

Three motels, all of them equally featureless and dowdy, enclose a sort of parade-ground of empty parking lots, the asphalt studded with posts with engine heater hook-ups to which bikes, as I have noted, are shackled.  On the fourth side of the enclosed space, as broad and wide as a football field, there is grim-looking Mexican restaurant, the Acapulco, painted the brilliant yellow color of marigolds that you might see in Oaxaca on the Day of the Death, some sinister-looking dumpsters behind the place and a tall fence enclosing a patio in front of the restaurant.  The place looks dead, closed, maybe, even abandoned.  

Door “D” is under a tin arbor with some garbage cans lined-up next to the entry.  Inside, the air smells vile – it’s a mixture of mildew, chlorine, all overlaid with the medicinal scent of some strong disinfectant.  Probably, the carpet is rotting and I see a ladder tilted against a wall at the end of the short corridor ahead of me.  The worst of the stench comes from the pool facility, a locked chamber in which I can see through a window in the door the big, empty bathtub-shaped tanks of the hot-tub and the pool itself, a dismantled diving board leaning on some broken furniture, and, it seems, about six inches of frothy brown water, a bit like raw sewage, in the bottom of the turquoise-colored cavity – there are more bikes parked in the locked pool room, some mattresses rotting on the tiles next to the detached diving board, a broken mirror that reflects light crazily, demonic faces grimacing between the shards of glass.  The Super 8 motel is built on two levels, one of them about four feet above grade and the other about six-feet below the level of the parking lot, a peculiar way of stacking rooms atop rooms as if space somehow were at a premium here -- something that is manifestly not the case since the city is all pocked with vacant lots and every road seems to be about a quarter-mile wide.  By putting rooms atop a semi-basement, the motel designers have managed to create the worst of all worlds – the motel is labyrinth of foul-smelling corridors, some of them that seem to be in a cellar and other reeking hallways about ten feet higher, that is just slightly raised above the stained and cracked carpet of the asphalt parking lots.  This plan makes the motel seem half-underground but without any compensatory height – the upper story is only slightly raised above the parking lot and, also, feels flat and squashed down close to the surface of the terrain.  Of course, this perverse design necessitates lots of steps scattered at intervals throughout the building and, so, as far as I can see, none of the place is handicap- accessible except the lobby which hovers six steps above the basement and six steps below the upstairs corridors.  You can reach the lobby from my room, but, every time, I try to make that trip, I get lost and find myself in dead-corridors and, anyway, the air outside is fresher and easier to breathe. 

I’m in a gloomy semi-basement room.  When I flick on the lights, nothing happens.  One of the lamps near the bed has been ripped off the wall so that the fixture dangles down and the wire to the half-amputated lamp has been sheared into two live leads.  The other lamp also stays dark – it’s cord has also been transected down to the copper wire.  The Tv doesn’t work and when I sit down on a big couch in the corner of the room, I can see under the bed where there is a nasty-looking sack, something like a body-bag, some tangles of torn paper, a nail, and a blue-green mask.  The bathtub looks as if someone used it to wash a hunting dog.  The air is stale and stinks.  When I turn on the air-conditioner, it makes a sepulchral rattling sound.  I pull the curtain and see that I am sunk hip-deep in the parking lot.  On the window, someone has smeared semen or some other yellowish white effluent.  The smear consists of seven fingers, each showing a whorl of finger and thumbprint at the top, and, then, streaking down about six inches to coat a quarter of the window with this mark.  I hope that it’s outside, but when I tap at the mark, I can feel the scum encrusted on the inside of the window.  There’s a dowel set in the window’s runner-groove – it’s for security to keep criminals from trying to bust into the place through the conveniently accessible window inset at (and below) ground level.  A printed sign helpfully says that, in the event of fire, the dowel should be removed so that you can open the window and crawl out onto the parking lot.

Peering through the part of the window that is not smeared, I can see a broken-down car and an old rust-rotted pickup truck with a big camper top mounted over the cab.  Someone is living in the camper, a hermit with a Fu Manchu moustache and a neck beard who seems to be wearing a machete knife in a holster around his waist.  From time to time, he crawls out of the camper and empties big buckets filed some sort of soupy liquid onto the asphalt.  

I don’t recall ever being in a worse room.  The situation is puzzling to me.  This is supposed to be Super 8 motel, but clearly the conditions are such that the place would lose it’s franchise if its amenities were to be reported to the chain.  But, I suppose, that I can soldier through one night in this shit-hole and so, I decide to do nothing except report the broken lamps and shredded electrical cords – those might be a hazard.  

9.  MY SON, MARTIN

comes to the motel to pick me up so that we can eat supper together.  He tells me that I have chosen the second worst motel in Fargo – the worst is the Grand, under the same ownership, across the plaza of parking lots to the north.  Martin knows motels – for some years, he supplemented his income by delivering pizzas and he has been in all of these place and met their habitues.  “These places are infested with drug-dealers,” Martin tells me.  “The drug dealers favor the Super Eight.  The Grand is where the crack-whores hang out.”  (My daughter, Melissa and her alcoholic boyfriend, lived with her two babies in the Grand for part of the Winter two years ago – this was before the children were taken away from her by Court Order.)  

We drive around town.  Many roads are closed for construction. The sun is setting.  A grain elevator here casts a shadow that is miles long. 

Martin tells me that his two sisters are feuding and can not be in the same place together.  He is concerned about the Covid virus because he has asthma and has been hospitalized for respiratory trouble.  We pass nondescript churches, enormous barren-looking playgrounds, and, several times, cross the low concrete bridges passing over the river from state to state.  

Downtown, a cluster of old buildings made from dark, sooty-looking brick stand set back from the unpredictable river in its flat channel.  A federal courthouse occupies a square block and there are the instruments of civilization: bars, churches, jails.  Lots of college kids are enjoying the mild evening and the street-side cafes and bars are crowded.  No one seems to do much social distancing and, of course, no masks are evident.  Martin is well-known in this part of town and a couple of people greet him.  

We eat pizza in a joint a little off Main Street.  Cars are parked tightly in slant-stalls off the sidewalk and on the side streets.  

Martin tells me that he thinks that Theresa’s baby, now about four months old, is blind.  He says that he has waved his hands in front of the infant’s face and that the child doesn’t react.  A Tv flickers soundlessly in a corner of the room and a door at the back of the restaurant opens into a green and blue room where people are playing pool as if at the bottom of an aquarium.

Now, it is dark outside, a final ribbon of yellow-blue pulled taut across the flat western horizon.

10.  AT THE SUPER EIGHT

the Pakistani owner is now on-site, standing behind the counter with the fat girl beside him.  She says that she will move me into another room.  But the Pakistani has his doubts.  He has a shaved head and seems belligerent.  “Just go back and see if you can improve things,” he says to the fat girl.  I recall many times when Melissa was about to evicted from one of his motels and I had to talk with him by telephone to provide my credit card to make payment for another couple nights lodging.  

We hike through the maze of the motel, ascending and descending steps to come at last to Room 145.  I unlock the door and show the woman the smudges on the window, the debris under the bed, the torn wires on the lights and the stained bathtub – “that’s not dirt,” she says, “just staining.”

She calls someone on her cell-phone and a man with dreadlocks appears.  The man has a perforated his face with silver studs embedded in his eyebrows and along the sides of his nose.  He’s wearing a tie-dyed shirt and is barefoot.  The man says that, at least, one of the wires is energized and that the room can not be rented.  “Put it on the do-not-rent list,” he says.  

I lug my duffel-bag and books across the noisome hall into Room 146.  This place seems much better maintained.  But, here, there is a problem as well.  At ninety-second intervals, the toilet recharges – the faint trickling in the bathroom becomes a gush that continues for a minute or so before subsiding.  I tinker with the toilet tank but can’t fix the problem.  

And, so, all night, I am awake or, at least, partially awake, listening to the trickle but awaiting the gush of water, the sounds like a waterfall, and, then, its subsidence, a complicated enough series of noises to engage the brain and keep you alert exactly when you don’t want to be alert.  People howl in other rooms and heavy footfalls sound overhead.   I am haunted by the thought of a tiny infant that is blind.  Then, it’s dawn and my head is pounding and the room is cold, but the corridors are warm and humid.  Outdoors, the plain and its horizon are enormous and the wind is stirring in the little embattled trees planted along the streets and sun’s beams spill down, lighting everything brightly so that my eyes, burning, are stunned.  

11.  THE MEETING

that Martin coordinates is for about 10:00 am.  The idea is that we will buy some food at a Perkins near the intersection between the freeways and, then, go to a city-park to eat.  I will transfer the boxed bicycles to Martin’s car with the helmets.  

Martin appears on time with the children strapped into car seats in the back seat.  Hannah is very talkative and immediately announces to me that she is a Type One diabetic.  Lucas is more quiet.  We lug the bicycles from my car into Martin’s trunk.  The children are unstrapped from their car seats and we walk in circles around the Perkins, a place that seems very busy this Sunday morning.  Hannah points across the desolate parking lot to the barge-shaped fortress of the Grand Motel.  “I lived there with my mommy and daddy,” she tells me.  When the food is produced, it is shoveled into styrofoam containers that Martin brings back to his car.  We, then, drive downtown to a big park, a couple of very slight knolls on which tall trees stand.  In the green distance, beyond the broad corridors framed by the oaks and elms, there are some tennis courts.  A sidewalk leads from the playground, an oval of sand on which there are erected some red plastic towers with slides, to a small plinth where famous Norwegian poet stands, the metal an odd oxidized color a bit like the skin of an Egyptian mummy.  The poet is strangely featureless, as if his visage has been polished away by the persistent winds of North Dakota.  We sit at a picnic table to eat our breakfast, but the air is full of bees that dart here and there and that harass us.  We have to eat standing up so that we can hustle from one side of the picnic table to the next to avoid the golden bees that buzz everywhere.  The children are eating pancakes on which we have sprinkled chocolate chips in a drizzle of honey.  Oddly enough, the bees are uninterested in the honey, even, perhaps, repelled by it.

Before she can eat, Hannah has to take a large syringe that Martin has prepared, roll up the shirt over her belly, and inject herself with insulin.  She has a worried look on her face and grimaces when the needle pierces her.  “Does it hurt?” I ask her.  “A lot,” she says.  But, after a minute or two, she has recovered and is now romping on the red tower with its slides.  On a sidewalk, a hundred feet away, a young man is walking a cat on a leash.  The cat pauses sometimes to roll on the grass, among the acorns that have been stripped from their shells by energetic squirrels that are everywhere, spinning around trees as they pursue one another.  

The children are very well-mannered and friendly and, of course, now I have obligations toward them since I have actually seen and spoken to them, something that I find daunting.  (Shouldn’t they be baptized as well?)  They aren’t abstract any longer.  The little girl wincing as she injected herself with insulin troubles me – it’s unfair for pain and illness to stalk a small child.  I push the kids on the swingset.  Martin seems anxious for the encounter to end.  Joggers skirt the edge of the park, many of them running with happy-looking dogs.  There’s a tree nearby with a hollow at its base and I probe that fissure with my toe, then, pretending to jump back as if something has bitten me.  “There’s a creature in the tree,” I say.  The two children seem concerned – they don’t exactly believe me, but, of course, what I say just might be true: you can’t tell with grown-ups.  

Martin tells me to call Theresa.  He says that she would like to see me.  I have a gift for her baby, a little elephant with animatronic ears that flop back and forth as the doll speaks and sings.  He puts the children back in their car seats and, then, we drive back to the Super 8 where my car is located.  I have a bag full of recent National Geographic magazines and picture periodicals about archaeology.  We put the magazines in their sack in the front seat of the car – these are for the children to study.  I say goodbye to my grandchildren and Martin drives away.  

12.  THERESA CALLS

and tells me that she has just awakened and that I should wait until 12:30 to come to her apartment.  She lives in West Fargo on a stretch of wide boulevard that passes a huge gas and propane terminal, a vast tract of land studded with white tanks.  The terminal has its own roads but those are closed-off today and the sentry checkpoints seem deserted, the gates all padlocked shut.  Dispatch towers for fleets of trucks stand over the flat land like the elevated thrones from which lifeguards might survey a beach.  An airport is somewhere near and the road leads past various new buildings, cheaply constructed one-story places with metallic facades – “consulting firms” it appears, probably something to do with the oil rush that is now mostly defunct.  A fast food place marks the edge of town where the highway speeds increase and the blacktop is flung like a lance at the treeless and remote horizon.  On the sidestreet, a church has finished its services and tall Africans, the men in business suits and the women wearing brilliantly colored dresses and elaborate hats emerge onto the sidewalk under the drooping cottonwood trees. Cicadas sing.  The Africans are very happy.  They shake hands with one another oblivious of the pandemic and crowd together at street-side, laughing and waving to one another.  A bell tolls in a steeple somewhere. 

Theresa is standing outside a long brick building that looks like an old dormitory on a campus.  She leads me into a utilitarian hallway to her room.  As Martin has represented, she is, in fact, living in a single room.  There’s a bed in one corner and, across from that bed, a sink and a little gas cook-stove and a waist-high fridge.  The apartment is smaller than the motel room from which I have come.  Somewhere, I suppose, there is a toilet – perhaps, behind one of the doors in the room.  Theresa’s boyfriend is present and he plays with the baby.  The child is robust and smiles at me and, certainly, shows no sign of being blind.  In fact, if anything, the little boy is alert and watchful – he trains his eyes on me.  I hold the child for awhile as Theresa tells me that she has been working long hours.  The covid virus has been a business opportunity for her employer, an industrial cleaner.  The pandemic wiped out most of the competition and, so, now the cleaner has many more customers and more lucrative business.  Theresa has just come from three days cleaning a new building in Mandan about 200 miles away.  She apparently spends nights in a motel there between 12 hour work days, preparing the freshly finished office building for its tenants – although with the virus still raging in this State, who knows when the people will be able to move in to occupy their offices.  

The baby giggles when the doll sings to him. The little elephant flaps her wings.  I take a couple pictures of the child with my cell-phone and, then, Theresa poses holding the baby on her lap.  After about a half-hour, I leave.  The big boulevard running westward is empty and silent.  Some old trees cast a green wriggling shadow on the lawn in front of Theresa’s apartment.  The wind is increasing and some leaves flutter, falling through the air.   

13. AND, THEN, MELISSA

calls, just as I exit I-94 about twenty miles west of Fargo.  My plan is to follow back roads south and a little east to Sisseton, South Dakota, a village about 115 miles away.  Melissa sounds groggy on the cell-phone and says that she wonders if I am still in Fargo.  I tell her that I have left now and am driving back toward Minnesota.  “I will see you next time I come to town,” I say.  And, of course, it is my resolve that I will visit my grandchildren in North Dakota more frequently now that they are old enough for me to interact with – but I have made this resolve before and it’s a punishing drive from Austin to Fargo, six hours, more or less, and even more arduous if you pass through the Twin Cities any time proximate to rush hour when the traffic is snarled in the suburbs and, sometimes, comes to a dead stop on the freeway and good intentions are, probably, not sufficient, although I can always try to do better.  (Someone in my wife’s family says that trying is lying since good intentions don’t often amount to much of anything.)

The situation with Melissa is tragic and it’s probably disloyal for me to write about her difficulties in this essay.  I’m honest, of course, and am not exaggerating any aspect of these circumstances, but what good does it do to expose her unhappiness to the eyes of outsiders.  In that regard, I suppose that I am flattering myself that anyone will read these words – who cares about my road trip?  Or about my family’s hardships?  Everyone has suffering of their own, breached relationships, people to whom we feel we owe something but can’t ever quite pay the debt.  Nothing much happened on this trip to North Dakota, no wisdom was attained and nothing was revealed.  If you stop reading in this paragraph, assuming you have forged forward to this point, will you have missed much of anything?  

I’m tired and the two-lane road south crosses table-top flat country with distant shelter belts that seem black on the horizon and that, only, gradually show green as the road comes closer to them.  At twenty mile intervals, I pass through towns, usually on their outskirts: Main Street with its half-dozen brick or clapboard commercial buildings is off on a dog-leg to one side of the county highway; a grain elevator walls off one quadrant of the settlement.  The churches in this part of North Dakota are deep in the country, at the end of gravel lanes among the corn and the soybean fields. A river runs in a shallow valley and the sky is lit by sun wrapped in high white clouds so that a uniform, cloying luminousness shines everywhere.

14. AT THE SOUTH DAKOTA BORDER,

I see a high shelf of pale blue-green prairie running ruler-straight along the western horizon.  This is the so-called Coteau des Prairies, a two-hundred mile escarpment that runs from Sisseton on the north to Windy Mound south of Sioux Falls.   The ridge marking the eastern rampart of the coteau (‘hill’) is about a thousand feet high and, from a distance, seems sheer, a terrace on which I can see some wind turbines, serrated tree-lines, and a broadcast tower.  Wooded ravines spill down from the plateau and fan out over the flat prairie to the east of the formation.  After driving for ninety minutes over flat and featureless plains, the coteau is striking and, even, exerts a kind of attraction – what is up atop that long swelling wave rising over the grasslands?

Joseph Nicollet, a French explorer and cartographer, survived the Napoleonic wars to trek across the grasslands and forests of the upper Midwest.  He was the first to survey the land-form in 1839, hence the French name. Viewed from a satellite, the coteau is shaped like an arrowhead with its point turned to the northwest.  The plateau is most broad toward the base of the lance-point where the coteau ridge divides into several lobes, Buffalo Ridge in Minnesota and the highlands south of Sioux Falls.  

Glaciers plowed up the earth during the last forty-thousand years and bulldozed debris into the great  ramp of plateau and the sediment comprising the coteau is layered with gravel and cobble, terrain soggy with aquifers close to the surface, a patchwork of underground water that emerges in thousands of pothole lakes.  Originally, the heights of the coteau, where there is perpetual wind, were treeless.  But now invasive woods line some of the lakes and the gulches that creeks have cut into the sides of the rampart – the trees are most box-elders.  The long ridge extends as far as the eye can see and imposes a certain raw poetry, an kind of landscape order, on the topography and, of course, I feel that a detour is warranted to drive to the top of the coteau.

  

15. SICA HOLLOW

is a heavily wooded cup-shaped gouge in the side of the coteau, probably about 350 feet from the crest of the plateau.  The county road rolls west toward the escarpment, climbing some grassy pitches and, then, hopping hill-top to hill-top, each higher than the next to where the trees fill the gulch and the asphalt tautens to a steeper grade.  A side-spur runs to the hollow where there are some log shelters, people forming a caravan on horse-back and some picnic tables in a clearing in the woods.  This is a fee zone and costs eight dollars per vehicle for day-use.  I don’t have any bills smaller than twenty and, so, South Dakota gets a twelve-buck tip in the iron post holding the money bucket.  Indians are barbecuing and other family groups push strollers on the road that angles deeper into the woods.  

A parking lot marks a trail head and I walk into the woods.  The shade is humid and warm, but glittering with leaves upturned as the wind sweeps down from the heights.  Sica is Lakota for “bad” and the hollow between the hills is reputedly haunted, a domain of evil spirits.  This territory has always been contested land – the woodland Minnesota Sioux, the Santee, conducted Spring and Summer buffalo hunts on these heights, apparently, cooperating with their western cousins, the Sisseton Lakota who laid claim to these prairies.  But huntsmen from the West, Ogalalla and Cheyenne, occasionally ventured into this terrain and, even, Chippewa raided along the coteau from time to time.  At the south end of the great escarpment, the Catlinite quarries at Pipestone were sacred to many tribes – pipes fashioned from the soft stone have been found in Ohio and Alabama and as far west as the Pacific – and the mining pits ranged along a low ragged cliff of raw red Sioux quartzite are many thousands of years old.  (Presumably, a truce between warring tribes – and in prehistoric America everyone was always at war – prevailed at the quarries.)  The plains Indians thought of heights of land as sacred and the coteau was said to be the domain of many spirits, some of them hostile to men.  It was ambush territory, where a solitary hunter or a small group of hunters, could become prey themselves to other Indians or strange creatures hiding in the dells and ravines of the great ridge.  “Bad” (Sica pronounced She-sha) Hollow was haunted and most of those traversing the territory stayed away – a few miles downhill, where the wooded ravine widens into water-meadows, the Sisseton erected summer camps and held dance ceremonies, but it was bad medicine to ascend the gulch into the hollow.

I can’t see anything malign about the hollow.  It’s damp at the bottom of the cup with a tangle of brush covering a bog.  The hillsides are densely forested and some of them make giggling sounds – it’s water streaming from the aquifer to form tiny rivulets that dance down the hillside, crisscrossing between the trees and sliding under groves of sumac.  A sign informs me that in early Spring the volume of water increases so that the hill seems to be moaning and the gas built-up under the ice in the bog belches through the ground-cover, making a pock-pock sound like a hollow tom-tom being tapped.  Will-o-wisps wander the bog when weather conditions are just so and, thus, there is enough in the way of odd phenomena in the hollow to scare (or, at least, interest) people passing through this place.    

16.  RUSTIC STEPS

ascend the hillside to a point above the water oozing out of the tangled brush and trickling down the hill.  A few paces above the top of the steps, the tree-line suddenly opens and there is a slanting meadow rising toward the heights.  A brilliant, neon-colored snake darts through the tall sun-burned grass at my feet.  The serpent is some sort of spirit but doesn’t seem hostile in any way.

17.  ON THE HEIGHTS, 

the road twists up to a windy prominence. In the deep ravine below, there’s a horse-camp.  The hill top is blonde prairie overlooking the ravine running down from the crest of the coteau to the cultivated fields several miles to the east.

18.  SISSETON

is a small town that is the commercial and trade center for the reservation that stretches away in all directions.  The boundaries of the reservation, no doubt precise enough on paper, are unclear on the ground.  The old agency is to the south, about eight miles from Sisseton on a BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) highway.  Sisseton, itself, is the county seat, a village that occupies a deep fold in the prairie with the courthouse rising over the indentation in the land where the town has been built.  The courthouse seems pretentious from a distance, too big for the surrounding village which is a modest affair of mostly Victorian era houses, some brick buildings at a crossroads where the valley in the hillside is deepest, a rodeo grounds on a hilltop and, below, on a ledge-like terrace an athletic field where the REDMEN, the reservation football team plays.  

The Super 8 motel in this town is better managed.  The lobby smells of curry, an odor that reassures me that this place will be kept clean and that all amenities will function.  The desk clerk is also an Indian, albeit one from the subcontinent – his last name is Chaudary.  

19.  THE SQUAW HILL MASSACRE SITE

is 34 miles from Sisseton, west on a state highway that crosses the Coteau.  I have a couple of hours before the sun sets and so I set off to find that place.  The highway climbs from Sisseton 800 feet to the crest of Coteau.  These rises are gradual to an automobile and you don’t experience the height unless you look in your rear-view mirror and see the prairie plunging into the cultivated valleys behind you.  At the crest of the long ascent, there’s a truck pull-off, presumably a place for vehicles laboring up the long hill to rest or for heavy semi-trucks descending to equip themselves with chains and courage before dropping down onto the plains below.  At the truck pull-off, two dilapidated semi-tractors hauling what seems to be scrap iron heaped on flatbed trailers are pulled to the side of the parking lot.  The truck drivers are tinkering with their vehicles, both men with cigarettes gripped in their teeth.  The wind pours over the top of the big hill and makes a sound like a jet engine.  It’s still hot and humid and the sun is bright.

Apparently, this point of access to coteau highlands is called Hangistad Pass.  This area is famous for its blizzards.  In January 1903, two girls, Maxine Hangistad (15) and her sister Theoline (13) were returning to Sisseton after a visit to relatives on the coteau.  The girls were driving a sled and hit a boulder that wrecked one of the runners on the sleigh.  A blizzard overtook them on the hilltop and both were frozen to death.  In 1937, two young boys were hiking home to the reservations school after a Christmas party at a farm on the hilltop.  They too were lost in the white-out of a terrible storm, but the old man at the Hangistad farm near on the ridge-top, patrolling his fence-lines found the boys and saved them.  (The homesteaders, Tobias and Bertha Hangistad, are credited with a number of winter-time rescues in the area.)  In November 1958, Clarence Gray and his brother Joseph Gray were checking traplines in a ravine atop the coteau.  Both of them were war veterans and one was a decorated World War Two hero.  They couldn’t outrun and sudden blizzard that toppled across the coteau, vanished in the storm, and were not found until May, the two bodies huddled together under two lonesome pine trees at the head of the ravine.  The brothers were old-time Indians, good dancers and hunters, and they spoke to one another in Lakota.  People passing by the twin pines say that they can hear a faint drum sometimes, a sound like pock-pock-pock, and voices chanting in Lakota.  

The truck drivers glare at me as I read the South Dakota historical signs, three of them side by side at the edge of the pull-out.  The wind rattles in the twisted metal on their flatbed trailers.  

20.  LAKES

are everywhere, filling up each pothole in the coteau.  The highlands are wrinkled with ridges and hollows, a bit like bedclothes crumpled after strenuous activity – here the plateau is 60 miles wide and there‘s no sense of being on an elevation raised above the neighboring countryside.  The land is windswept prairie with trees rimming some of the lakes or marching, single file, up ravines toward the hilltops.  From every hilltop, you can see three or four lakes, grey-blue expanses of water that seem to simmer in the incessant wind in their pots of bare, rolling hillside.  The lakes are encircled with reeds, the sedge like eyelashes, but the open water is big enough to be stirred by the gale and to kick up a surface of white-shingled waves.  In some places, the road simply runs as causeway across the center of the lake, spray cast up by the wind and darkening the asphalt surface of the highway.  From the causeway crossing these lakes, the water seems slate-grey, completely free from algae or duck weed, and very cold.  Some fowl bounce up and down on the water.  The hillsides drooping down to the marsh encircling the water are mostly treeless and so the landscape seems huge and open to the sky.  It’s an impressive terrain and vacant.  Most of the lakes lounge in their potholes undisturbed.  In a few places, there are some cabins in thickets by the water.  Some of the lakes are large enough to have islands in them, plantations of evergreen with palisades of drowned forest wrapped around them – the dead trees are bone-white and point in an accusing manner to the sky.  The country is too broken up for row-crops and the only industry that I can see is ranching – some cattle strewn about the ridges and hills folded upon hills.  At ten mile intervals, there are crossroads where you can get gas or buy bait or drink in a brick bar without windows.  Because of the ubiquitous lakes, the asphalt byway is the only road.  Here and there, a gravel stub runs down to the water and a beach of pinkish gravel sloping down under the waves.  

21.  FORT SISSETON

hovers on a hillside, some groves of dark trees binding together old stone buildings, cobbled together from field boulders.  A parade ground sits between the long narrow structures, the trampled tall-grass prairie now planted in the sort of sod that you have to mow from time to time.  Because the fort is in a place that is very remote, it wasn’t torn down – indeed, its buildings were built to last and remain remarkably solid.  Therefore, the administrative structures and the barracks, the clapboard officer’s quarters with mansard roof, and the little stone blockhouses for gunpowder and provisions are all perfectly preserved, embedded in the amber of this remote and lonely place.  

The fort is closed as I pass, a pick up at the caretaker’s cottage but otherwise no one is around.  Below the fort, double lakes with a isthmus of sedge between them catch the wind so that the water is kicked up into waves.

The cavalry built the fort in 1864, when the Lakota Sioux from Minnesota were expelled across the border in the horrific wake of the big uprising in Minnesota – the so-called “Minnesota Massacre”as it was, then, called.  Originally, the place was named Fort Wadsworth but this was a problem because there was already a fort with that name in New York – one doesn’t want to confuse a fort near the East Coast with one located in the Dakota territory.  In 1876, when Custer was west-bound across North Dakota to the Little Big Horn, the encampment was re-named Fort Sisseton. For a few years, African-American buffalo soldiers, mounted cavalry, were stationed at the fort.  It was abandoned in 1889, a couple years before the final slaughter of the hostile Indians at Wounded Knee.

22.  THE NAME IS NO LONGER APPROVED

in polite society, not politically correct, and, indeed, possibly never anything more than an ethnic slur, and so I can’t locate the historical marker for the Squaw Hill massacre.  Perhaps, I am in the wrong location but, more likely, someone has removed the sign, either officially or unofficially, or vandalized it out of existence.  We are in the epoch of racial reckoning in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and, probably, some local vigilante chopped down the sign for the Squaw Hill massacre and threw it in one of the grey, cold lakes that everywhere dot the landscape.  Or, perhaps, I’m simply construing the map wrong – it could be that I haven’t driven far enough to find the sign, but I need to get back to Sisseton before it gets too late because I want to buy some supper at the grocery store in town and, of course, I don’t know when that place closes and, so, after looking at a roadside marking telling about Fort Wadsworth, the original name of the site from which I have just come, I point my car east and head back toward the village in the ravine 800 feet below the coteau. The historical marker is probably still on a windy hilltop somewhere – this part of the world doesn’t seem too politically correct as the name of the Sisseton football team reminds me.  

The WPA guide to South Dakota, available, at least, in part on line tells me about the massacre.  In the 1850's, a half-dozen Sisseton girls were collecting berries on the coteau.  The youngest girl had the reputation for being excitable: she was easily frightened and always seeing things.  As she stooped to pick berries, the excitable girl let out a squeal.  The others rushed to her side and asked her what was wrong.  She pointed to a grove of trees in a twisting ravine that corkscrewed down to a pothole lake.  “I saw a man there,” the girl said.  The eldest girl had been posted as a kind of lookout atop the hill overlooking the thicket where the berries were ripening.  She said that she had been watching in all directions and had seen nothing.  The young women made fun of the girl, but she insisted that there was a man lurking in the shadows of the trees lining the ravine.  In fact, she was so frightened that she crossed over the top of the ridge and wandered down the hillside to the edge of another oval pond where the reeds grew thick along the waterline.  A couple minutes later, the excitable girl heard screams and, so, she slid into the thick sedge and squatted there, shivering with her haunches in the cold muddy water.  When the last cries had ceased, she heard men’s voices and saw a war party of Ojibway crossing the hilltop against the sky.  All of the other girls had been raped and killed along the ridge.  This is the origin of the place-name. 

23.  THE WORD ‘SQUAW’

is now considered derogatory and racist.  “Squaw” is first recorded in 1622 in Mourt’s Relation, an account of the founding of the Plymouth Plantation.  In that pamphlet, the phrase “sachem squa” appears – that is, “female chief.”  Squa is an Algonquin word for “woman” and known to the first European colonists through theit interactions with the Narrangansett and Massachuset tribes, both speakers of that language.  Initially, the word was neutral and not regarded as offensive.  Of course, Native Americans consist of innumerable tribes and cultural groups, encompassing many separate dialects and language families. (The Apache language is more remote from Algonquin than Finnish is to English.)   “Squaw” gradually declined into a term of derogation when it began to be widely used for any Indian woman, regardless of her tribal affiliation.  This broad extension of the word’s use occurred mostly in the 19th century, and most notably in the latter half of that period.  Early silent films used the term “squaw man” to mean either a man who chose to perform women’s work or a Caucasian married to an Indian woman.  

The first assertion that “squaw” was not only derogatory but obscene dates to the writing of E. Pauline Johnson (1861 - 1913), the daughter of prominent Canadian mixed-blood Mohawk and English  missionary families.  Johnson, born on a reservation in Ontario, was famous as an actress and, later, poet, novelist, and feminist.  Around the turn of the century, she wrote that “squaw” had obscene connotations and meant something like “Indian whore.”  (Later, scholars tried to show that “squaw” was related to Iroquois words for “vagina”– but this etymology has been discredited.)  As the tribes have gained political power, in many cases on the basis of casino money, they have demanded that places using the term be re-named and this has, recently, occurred in many states.

 

24.  ASA SWEETCORN

was born in a village in what is now North Dakota.  Sometimes, he went by the name Esau Fastbear.  In 1933, the WPA guide to South Dakota mentions him as a well-known, if notorious, local farmer living near Sisseton.  According to the WPA guide, Sweetcorn was a huge man and a mean drunk.  He reputedly wore a size 21 collar and had been classmates with Jim Thorpe, the famous football player at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.  Sweetcorn was said to be a running guard and, supposedly, was good friends with the famous Thorpe.  In Sisseton, Sweetcorn cadged drinks by a stunt that he performed – he would bet people that he could ram his head through a barn door.  The other boozers would put up some cash and Sweetcorn would oblige them by smashing his skull through a barn door a couple blocks from the tavern.  When the WPA writer visited Sisseton during the Depression, he was shown a barn door in town that had no fewer than six skull-sized holes smashed through it.  These were the handiwork (headwork?) of Sweetcorn.

A later account, written in 1970 describes alcohol rehabilitation programs on the reservation.  The scope of the alcohol problem was measured by Asa Sweetcorn reported to have been a vicious bar-fighter and trouble-maker.  Sweetcorn’s exploits with the barn door are recorded in the article that was published in a Sunday supplement to the New York Times.  Incongruously, Sweetcorn is said to have strongly supported his alma mater and that, in 1935, he toured the country with Jim Thorpe raising money for the Carlisle School that had then fallen on hard times. The story is reported by Sally Jenkins in a book her recent book about the Carlisle Indian School football teams. 

In fact, you can see a picture of Asa Sweetcorn on the Carlisle Indian school web-site and his report cards, which seem to have been average, have also been scanned.  Sweetcorn was admitted to the school as student of promise on September 1, 1909 – apparently tribal elders and the government agent had to vouch for you to gain admission to Carlisle.  He was on the campus for only about a year and a half (and spent July and August “on leave” back in Sisseton).  Sweetcorn, apparently, got into some kind of trouble at Carlisle and may have been expelled.  A photograph shows a handsome, gaunt-looking Indian who seems to be wiry and not, at all, a big man.  In fact, records show that he weighed 160 pounds and was relatively short.  Jim Thorpe played for Carlisle in 1907, 1908, and 1909 and, then, 1911 – this means that the one year that Sweetcorn was on the school football team, Thorpe was absent.  It seems highly improbable that Sweetcorn toured the country with Thorpe to raise money for the school a quarter century later.  Because he was small, opposing teams beat up the feisty Sweetcorn.  After one game with Navy, Sweetcorn had been pretty badly mauled and he asked the medic to send for a “medicine man”.  “Better get a priest instead,” the medic told him.  In this photograph, Sweetcorn’s football jersey seems to be torn.  

The Writer’s Guide to South Dakota mentions Sweetcorn primarily because he is the punchline of a joke.  In a brawl in the twenties, Sweetcorn wrestled a man to the ground who, then, escaped his clutches by biting off Asa’s ear.  The Sisseton newspaper reported the incident under the headline: EAR OF SWEETCORN CHEWED.   

25.  IN INDIAN COUNTRY

treaties get broken and contracts are breached.  In most cases, the fault lies with the White officials and authorities engaged in transactions with the tribes.  But, there are also examples of sharp dealing on the part of the Indians.  Tribal politics are dynastic – this means that when one clan or family group achieves power, the rulers often install their relatives in well-paying positions, award contracts to their businesses and, generally, engage in nepotism.  (This behavior is normal – avoiding nepotism in human affairs is abnormal, even, unnatural.)  One of the first acts of a new administration in Indian Country is to renounce, and, even, renege on the agreements made by the former administration.  Those commitments are condemned as inimical and, even, calamitous to the well-being of tribe.  (Trump has done the same thing.)  The result is that a contract or treaty that was enacted by previous tribal leaders runs the risk of being denounced by the new regime.  Continuity of institutions on reservations is, often, fragile – a lot depends on the hand-shake of a “big man” who may be out of power a few years later.  The great Dakota conflict in 1862 arose in part due to a new tribal administration expressing vehement discontent with the political accommodations made by leaders a decade earlier that were disavowed by succeeding chieftains.  The first act of every new administration in Indian country is to condemn the agreements negotiated by the preceding rulers as demonstrating weakness.  

The last time I was at Sisseton, now twenty years ago or more, I had come as a lawyer in the context of a dispute of this sort.  One of clients, an architect, designed a casino for the Sisseton-Wahpeton tribe located near the Hankinson exit off I-29 in South Dakota.  Farmers are intrinsically gamblers.  They gamble that seeds planted in their fields will survive drought and hail and flourish.  They gamble that prices for hogs and cattle and milk commodities will remain steady or, even, increase.  Every load of corn or beans brought to an elevator represents a gamble of sorts – farmers are always trying to sell when the market is best for their products, an endeavor that necessarily involves a wager on the economy.  As a consequence, farmers and people in rural areas also like casinos – gambling runs in their blood.  The Sisseton-Wahpeton tribe, accustomed to running games of chance (bingo at Catholic parishes), decided that it would wager on building a fine casino to attract people in the vicinity to this tribal enterprise.  Initially, the tribe ran its casino out of a nondescript pole-barn.  But, later, when revenues increased, the tribal administration decided to build a more inviting casino and, therefore, retained my client to design the facility and supervise its construction.  The architect and his minions spent time on the reservation, wined and dined the tribal officials, and inked a contract with the Sisseton-Wahpeton providing for their professional services to be compensated at a premium rate.  

But, then, the family running the reservation fell out of favor and lost its power in a tribal election.  One of the new administration’s policy planks was to rescind the allegedly disadvantageous contract with the Minnesota architect, my client, and cease further payments to his business.  So the tribe simply stopped making progress payments, argued that my client was compensated in full, and refused to honor the contract.  Negotiations with the tribe were unavailing and so I initiated a lawsuit.  The tribal lawyer pointed to a provision in the agreement requiring mandatory arbitration.  After many procedural snarls, and much contentious discovery, we tried the arbitration.  The tribe lost and was determined to owe my client about $80,000.

At this point, an infuriating problem arose.  The tribe refused to pay the arbitration award that had been reduced to a judgment in the Minnesota courts.  Tribes are supposed to afford full faith and credit to the decisions of state courts of competent jurisdiction.  Indeed, if I so much as suggested that the Tribe was not playing by the same rules as other litigants, the opposing attorney, a White man with a pony-tail and dream-catcher dangling from his rear-view mirror in his car, would loudly accuse me of racism.  Of course, the Tribes must affirm that they will abide by their contracts with the outside world or no one would agree to do business with them.  Accordingly, the Tribes in general, and the Sisseton-Wahpeton in particular, respond with outrage when an assertion is made that it is risky to do business with them because of tribal sovereignty.  This notion, that the tribes make their own laws and that you do business with them at your own hazard, is rejected violently by both tribal officials and their legal counsel.  “We have courts just like yours,” Indians will tell you.  “And you don’t need to fear doing business with us because we believe in fairness and comity just as much as everyone else.”  But, in fact, the moment you secure a judgment against a Tribe, the officials refuse to make payment, argue that the judgment issued in a State court is invalid, and assert that you will have to enforce the decree on the Rez – and good luck with that.  And, so, the moment, I had the judgment against the Sisseton-Wahpeton tribe, contrary to their assertion that they would afford it “full faith and credit”, the tribal lawyer told me that in Indian Country “different rules apply” and the judges of tribal court would never agree to enforce the decree.  I was told that I had best abandon my attempt at collection.  

The duplicity of the Tribe’s position was stunning.  First, they abused me for suggesting that they might not give “full faith and credit” to the arbitration award – a procedure to which they had agreed.  And, second, they denied that the decree was enforceable on the reservation because detrimental to tribal sovereignty.  I brooded about this for several weeks.  The only way to get the Tribal Court to acknowledge the decree would be to file the case at the Old Agency courthouse seven miles south of Sisseton, that is, on the reservation and at the tribal headquarters.  To make this filing, you had to be licensed as an attorney before the bar of the Sisseton-Wahpeton nation.  So I decided to acquire this licensure and, actually, proceed with efforts to enforce the judgement in the Indian Courts.

26.  THE JUDGE OF TRIBAL COURT

was a corpulent bespectacled Indian, hailing from the Turtle Mountain (Ojibway and Assiniboine) reservation up on the Canadian border, and a graduate of North Dakota’s school of law at Grand Forks.  He wore a robe and sat on a bench in front of a large painting of a majestic white buffalo.  The judge was very courtly and welcoming and he seemed happy to have a spectator in the gallery during the hearings that preceded my admission to the Sisseton-Wahpeton Bar.  A few weeks earlier, I had paid my registration fee of $25 and filed a petition for my admission to the Bar.  In that petition, I averred that I was a person of good character, never charged with any felonies, and duly admitted to the Minnesota Bar both State and Federal.  I also averred that I would make myself familiar with the laws and court procedures adopted by the Sisseton-Wahpeton nation.  The night before I had driven to Sisseton and stayed in the motel where, twenty years later, I spent the evening after seeing my children and grandchildren in Fargo.  I had come to the courthouse at 9:00 am and spent two hours reading the Tribal rules and their code of laws.  It wasn’t particularly daunting – the tribe simply adopted by reference the Federal Rules of Procedure.  The Sisseton-Wahpeton code of laws also adopted the statutes in the Century Code for North Dakota.  The only deviations from legal practices with which I was familiar were some oddities in the criminal statutes – apparently, Indian notions of private property are slightly different from those prevailing in White society and it is a defense to a claim of theft to assert that the thing misappropriated should have been offered for use as a matter of tribal ethics as to sharing – it appeared to me that this applied most often to cars and pickup trucks which were thought of as community property.  In many instances, the criminal code imposed restitution remedies on alleged wrongdoers and focused on rehabilitation as opposed to punishment of wrongdoers.  All things considered, the tribal laws seemed to me to be rationale and, even, enlightened.

For many years, I’ve appeared in rural counties in Minnesota and patiently waited for my turn, observing hearings involving minor crimes, pleas, and sentencing proceedings.  The business before the Sisseton-Wahpeton Court was indistinguishable from these types of cases.  A couple of men were in-custody for alchol-offenses committed over the weekend.  Relatives were present, vouched for them, and the men, looking disheveled and hung-over, were released on their own recogniscence.  The matter preceding the hearing on my petition for admission to the bar involved domestic abuse.  A woman was sitting with several other heavy-set Indian ladies in the front pew.  The tribal cops brought her husband into the room.  He also looked disheveled, hung-over, and very embarrassed.

The Judge asked the man, whom he called “Willie” – that is by his first name – if he had been “beating  on” Laurie.  Willie said: “I guess so.”  The Judge with the big white bison over his shoulder said: “Willie, you know, you can’t be doing that.”  Willie agreed with the Judge.  “You got to stop drinking,” the Judge told Willie.  Willie nodded.  The Judge asked him if he were still employed by the tribal highway crew.  Willie said that he was.  The Judge took Willie’s plea, fined him 45 dollars, and, then, released him into the custody of Laurie and her formidable-looking female relatives.

The Judge was very hospitable.  He welcomed me to his Court.  I vowed to faithfully implement the laws of the great Sisseton-Wahpeton nation and the Judge duly granted my petition to the bar.  

As I walked out to my car, parked in front of the little brick building where the Court was located, a couple of Indians approached me.  They were also very friendly.  They wanted to know where I was from and why I had an interest in becoming an attorney authorized to appear before the tribal courts.  One of the men said that the current administration was very corrupt and the tribal leaders were using their offices to enrich themselves and their kin.  The two men wanted to know if I was interested in taking on the corrupt office-holders.  I expressed mild interest, although, of course, this kind of crusade was the last thing in which I wanted to involve myself.

A week or so later, the tribe’s lawyer in Minneapolis offered to pay the judgement if I would take a discount of about 10,000 dollars.  My client approved the discount and the check was issued by the Tribe.  The last thing that the Minneapolis lawyer wanted was competition on the reservation for legal services that the tribe might require.  I was a duly admitted member of the bar and could, if I wanted, represent the faction out of power and my adversary lawyer served at the will of those currently running the reservation.  It was best to keep me out of Indian Country.  

27.  THE TEMPTATION WAS INEVITABLE

that I would relapse into my interest in the Dakota Conflict of 1862, a lifelong fascination that is probably unhealthy.  When I was in 4th Grade, I wrote a school report on the Great Sioux Uprising as it was, then, called.  With my father, we drove to see the monuments scattered around southwestern Minnesota marking places where there had been fighting.  I read several books, then, and later have also studied the conflict, both in old accounts and modern revisionist histories.  Of course, the historiography of the events August and September 1862 have changed over the course of my lifetime.  Initial accounts, published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, emphasized atrocities committed by the Indians and were staunchly pro-settler.  After the conflict, the Lakota Sioux, even those who had allied themselves with the pioneers, were put in concentration camps and, then, deported from the State into the Dakotas.  Indian rage spurred further fighting in the West leading to the battle at the Little Big Horn and, later, the slaughter at Wounded Knee.  In the last forty years, the Indians have become the righteous aggrieved party and the settlers murdered in Minnesota are, now, regarded as mere collateral damage with respect to their righteous cause.  History is largely lies that have been assigned the truth.  

Every historical account over-simplifies human experience and the story of the Great Sioux Uprising, largely forgotten for many years because it occurred at the time of the Civil War’s Battle of Antietam, is a formless, unsatisfactory narrative, not really a story but an unpleasant and troubling situation, consequential in all the wrong ways, and people have always projected their own grievances onto this tragedy.  It’s a river into which you can’t plunge and, then, removed unscathed – at least, this is true for me.  A glance isn’t enough and once you immerse yourself in the gruesome story, you suffer all sorts of emotional outrage.  Life is too complex and disappointing as it is lived for us to drown in the sorrows of another time.  I’ve invested too much of my life and energy in the Sioux Uprising and this time, I resolve, that I won’t dive into the conflict.  I’ll traverse it’s landscape and get away undamaged.  At least so I think.

But, then, what am I doing in Sisseton, planning to drive home the next day along the Minnesota river, the very cockpit of the Indian war.  Ostensibly, my plan is to see Ramsey Park, a 256 acre green space in Redwood Falls complete with a waterfall and other interesting features, said to be the “little Yellowstone of Minnesota”.  And I would like to look for the five-striped skink, a lizard said to live among the red granite cliffs at Blue Devil Valley (the creatures are sometimes called “Blue Devils”) and Swedes Forest.  These animals are said to be rare.  If I happen to encounter an Indian uprising site along the way, a historical marker, perhaps, at road side, I will just look the other direction.

28.  A BIA ROAD

wends south from Sisseton to the Old Agency on the reservation.  It’s early, a little before 8:00, and, as I near the village, a white pickup scoots out of a gravel lane that runs between a dozen stark-looking government houses, trailing me at a discrete, if ominous, distance.  Then, at the Agency, an Indian police car barrels down the road that runs to the tribal headquarters and the little brick courthouse where I appeared so many years ago.  The cop car also trails me. It’s the way things are done in Indian Country – there are eyes on you when you drive into these places in a strange car with strange license plate.  If you roll down your windows, you might hear a distant pock-pock-pock sound, a wood mallet thudding against taut leather.   The Community College occupies a group of several handsome buildings to the east of the BIA road.  At one end of the campus, a circular structure sports four tuberose-looking finials.  The finial domes are the color of red clay and they represent tribal singers with sticks upraised to beat a common drum, represented by the membrane of the building’s roof stretched between them.  The Indian drummers are colossal about twenty-foot high and loom against the grey, layered sky.  There’s a chill in the wind.  I stop in the empty Community College parking lot, take a couple pictures of the drummers bulging up from the top of the building and, then, drive slowly through the sleeping village:  barren yards and grim white houses at intervals with broken cars in front of them.  A group of men with ragged shirts who look like they’ve been up all night are staggering along the right-of-way.  The pickup slides sideways among the tract housing, but the cop follows me to the crossroads where I turn east toward the freeway.  

29.   A MIRAGE

seems to hang over the eastern horizon, a row of blurry-looking, squat high-rises that are suspended in mid-air over the blue-green rim of the prairie.  To the south of the mirage-city, there is a powerplant that pokes a big brown tower into the air and seems to be leaking fumes over the vast landscape.  I’m on a hill overlooking a valley twenty miles wide, a vast channel grooved into the coteau by the prehistoric glacial River Warren, now a patchwork of cultivated fields and rail-straight shelter-belts.   The highway drops down into the River Warren valley.  The roads are empty and, below the height of land, the air feels chill and windless.  The plume of the distant power-plant seems like a pennant painted across the lightless eastern sky where clouds cover the run that rose a half hour earlier.  

As I drive eastward, the mirage-city resolves into a row of cuneiform-shaped clouds, a script of square and wedge-shaped blue forms floating along the horizon.  The sky is dramatic under the pressure of the unseen sun – it’s as if the vapors might split and suddenly flood the huge valley with light.

Under the ramparts of the power-plant at Ortonville, I cross the green, turbid smidgen of river into Minnesota.  The town on the east bank of the stream is Big Stone Lake.  Both villages are tiny, a row of brick and concrete sheds along a main street that intersects with the State Highway.  A dairy puts up a square obelisk over the edge of the town.  Some houses cluster in the shadow of grain elevators along an abandoned railroad right-of-way.  Enormous hangar-shaped buildings with fiber-glass roofs sloping to low ridge-lines are built alongside the grain bins – this is where surplus corn will be stored.  No one is stirring.  

30.  VERTEBRAE OF PINKISH-GREY GRANITE

extrude from the earth, fins of rock and long low, cracked pedestals along an estuary also dotted with boulders that protrude from the shallow water.  The grey sky burrows into the water and it looks cold and acidic, some kind of chemical spilled into a groove in the prairie.  Perhaps, five-lined skinks live among tumbled cairns of granite, but it’s not a good morning for the lizards to sun themselves on the stones – there is no sun, just veils of grey silently coalescing and, then, breaking apart overhead.  It’s an interesting landscape, but colorless in the vapid gloomy atmosphere – I suspect that with the sun shining the pools of water would be vibrantly blue and the red rocks would glow like half-banked fires, but there’s nothing like that on offer this morning.  I hike around a couple of the rock formations and see some cactus with yellow flowers among the stones.  The strange, globular rocks sticking out of the silent lagoons look like the heads of inquisitive turtles.  A little byway leads to an overlook on the Minnesota River, here scarcely 20 feet wide and stagnant with algae.     

31.  LOST IN GRANITE FALLS

I pull aside into a small park on a knoll on the outskirts of the town.  The village is a circular patch of trees and houses around the Minnesota River with several iron bridges crossing the stream.  I’m looking for back roads that will run south and east to Redwood Falls where I plan to hike in Ramsey Park.  My maps don’t show me the way to Swede Valley or Blue Devil Valley although these places are undoubtedly within a few miles of this village.  So I need to consult the Google Maps on my cell-phone and, since it is illegal to drive while using a mobile phone, I exit the highway skirting the city and enter the little park.

It turns out to be the State Historical roadside park at Camp Release, a location of significance during the Dakota Conflict.  I’ve been here twice before – once when I was in High School shooting a super 8 documentary about the Indian war and, then, twenty years ago when I took my children to see the historical sites commemorating the conflict.  I didn’t intend to end up in this park, but, since I’m here, I get out to survey the monument and markers.

Places of this sort, the subject of intensely controversial historical events, are now littered with signs.  On a low hill, among oak trees (some of them now shedding their leaves), an agate-colored obelisk about 40 feet high pokes up through the canopy of leaves.  The obelisk is covered with names and commemorates a day in September of 1862 when the hostile Dakota released about 280 captives, most of them half-blood, that they had been holding hostage.  The war parties were probably happy to be relieved of their burden of women and children – it was in their best interests at this stage in the war to escape to the north and west, the wild country beyond the borders of Minnesota.  Furthermore, the Sioux were by no means united in their opposition to the pioneers.  The Indians at the Upper Agency, the so-called Yellow Medicine reserve, were, mostly, Presbyterian Christians and had adopted European-style agriculture during the preceding two decades.  These people saw no good outcome to the hostilities and slaughter of settlers.  So they hid the White pioneers in their villages and spirited the missionaries away to safety and, in fact, were prepared to take up arms against the war parties if they didn’t agree to surrender the captives to the Federal soldiers pursuing the hostiles.  The site of Camp Release, where the hostages were released to the militias and Federal troops, was a fairly large Indian village, an encampment near the Minnesota River.  This village was friendly to the Whites and encouraged their relatives in the war party to release the prisoners.  It didn’t much avail the friendly Indians – their allegiance to the local missionaries cost them their freedom.  In the end, the friendly Sioux were put in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling (where the international airport in Minneapolis is located) and, then, after being decimated by disease and famine, deported to South Dakota – in fact, to the Sisseton-Wahpeton reservation on the coteau.  None of this miserable history is told on the monument, although the loyalty of the friendly Christian Indians is commemorated.  A historical marker bearing the imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society corrects some of the jingoistic assertions on the obelisk which was raised here on the fortieth anniversary of the uprising, that is, in 1892.  On the other side of the loop-road around the obelisk, three detailed recent plaques, dense with writing and pictures show the Indians involved in the transfer of the hostages.  The chief’s daughter is shown with a legend noting that she was confined in a “concentration camp” before being exiled to South Dakota.

The air is still humid, as if with tears, and a strange silence lingers over the land.  

32.  LAC QUI PARLE

that is, “lake that speaks”, is, to my ears, one of the most beautiful place-names in Minnesota.  I’ve never been there before this trip and so I take a detour from the flat prairie toward the river.  A couple dozen miles from here, the Minnesota runs in a deep valley with terraced sides.  But here, the river is still just a meander on the landscape, a scratch on the wet prairie.  Lac qui Parle is a broad place where the river stretches out to lay in a shallow sheet between marshlands and trees.  There’s nothing at the boat landing and the landscape is empty.  But, two miles downstream, I encounter an old WPA dam and a sleek, glistening spillway apron over which brown water slides.  The dam carries the road bed across the stream and, along the river bank, there is a roadside park where many cars and pick-ups are gathered.  Fish must be abundant here because a number of anglers are casting lines from the causeway over the dam while other men are fishing from the sod banks next to the river.  The fishermen seem to be a mixture of Indians from the nearby reservation and Latino agricultural workers.  It’s Labor Day, of course, and so no one is on the job.

On the low hillside overlooking the river and dam, a small church painted dark brown sits atop a mound.  The church is a reconstruction of the Hazelwood Mission to the Dakota Indians, another historical site managed by the State.  Again, there is an old highway marker explaining the modest-looking mission building and, then, several revisionary plaques mounted along a foot-trail that leads to the wooden building. 

Two families of missionaries, the Riggs and Williamsons, came to this location in 1835 and, with the help of friendly Indians, built their church in the wilderness.  Both missionaries were husband and wife teams and they lived here among the Dakota until the Uprising in 1862, that is, for 27 years.  When the Indians at the Lower Agency about thirty miles down river began killing the agents and, then, local settlers, the Indians here protected the missionaries and, in fact, guided them across the open prairies to safety – the only photograph showing the great Sioux Uprising is a picture taken during that escape from the marauding war parties.  When I was a little boy, the picture always puzzled me because many of the people in the image seem to be Indians themselves – why were Sioux Indians fleeing from other Sioux Indians?  I now know that the politics of the Uprising were extremely complex and that half of the tribe refused to take part in the massacre – although I have noted that this earned the friendly Dakota nothing more than imprisonment themselves and, then, ethnic cleansing when they were forced into exile in the Dakotas.  Mary and Stephen Riggs as well as Dr. Thomas and Margaret Williamson founded the Lac Qui Parle mission after walking from Fort Snelling to this place where there were large, mostly permanent. encampments of Indians – the march was about 250 miles.  Both families of missionaries were staunch abolitionists, raised in the East, who then traveled to the frontier to convert the Dakota Indians.  Riggs and Williamson first had to learn French as spoken in this part of the northwest in order to communicate with the Sioux.  French fur traders had been active among the Indians and, indeed, many had taken Dakota wives “after the manner of the country” (a la facon du pays).  After learning French, the missionaries, then, set to work compiling a Lakota language dictionary and grammar.  With that labor accomplished, Riggs and Williamson, with their wives and children set themselves to the task of translating the Bible into Lakota.  

The Dakota living at Lac Qui Parle were quite willing to consider agriculture as an option more productive (and less fickle) than the buffalo hunt.  Indeed, many of the Indians built cabins and became farmers after a few years of contact with the missionaries, but conversions were few and, even after several decades of labor in this vineyard, there were only a few hundred Christian Indians.  (One of them was Little Crow, a Presbyterian deacon, who was the leader of the war faction in 1862.)  The signs at the Lac Qui Parle mission are clear, informative, and relatively balanced.  This markers raise a question that had never previously occurred to me – what was the appeal to the Dakota Indians of farming?  Why were the Indians so quick to consider and, then, convert to agriculture.  The writers of the markers say that sharing of food was integral to Dakota society and a man who had a farm, and, therefore, a reliable source of food, could earn prestige by his generosity.  This sounds plausible, but is, probably, a little too politically correct to be wholly true.  In every society, there are people who are “early adopters” and, presumably, some of the Sioux were simply interested in the new technologies involving agriculture.  Furthermore, farming made men wealthy in comparison, perhaps, to the hunters dependent on the vagaries of the summer buffalo hunt that took place on the highlands of the coteau.  People are always interested in accumulating wealth.  

Down at the riverside, some men were catching lots of fish and others were having no luck.  A couple of fires were burning in pits and oozing some smoke into the air.  Except for me, no one was up at the old mission buildings with the little brown steeple overlooking the valley.  The dreams of the missionaries ended in blood and fire in August of 1862.  But, in their own way, Riggs and Williamson remained loyal to their converts.  Riggs accompanied the exiles to South Dakota and continued his mission work there.  Williamson preached to the condemned Indians in Mankato and, taking advantage of their miserable conditions, converted many of the most obdurate hostiles to Christianity.  At that time, the press reported that the Indians had murdered between 1000 and 1500 hundred settlers.  Williamson knew who was living in the vicinity where the slaughter began and said that, by his count, the toll was less than 400.  Many years later, a journalist and historian made his own count, using all available records, and concluded that the Indians had probably killed about 400 to 450 pioneers – so Williamson’s assessment was, more or less, right.

Riggs had a prominent hawk-shaped beak.  In the picture taken on the open prairie the Yellow Medicine refugees, Riggs can be clearly seen near the front of the photograph.   

33. THE HAZELWOOD REPUBLIC

arose from calamity.  On March 3, 1854, settlers at the Lac Qui Parle mission were preparing dinner.  To keep potatoes harvested the preceding year from freezing, the homesteaders had filled the cellar under the cabin with dry hay.  A spark lit the hay and, very quickly, the cabin was consumed by fire.  Wind blew embers onto the adjacent church building and ignited other structures.  The “fire-fiend” as Stephen Riggs called it, did deadly work in a few minutes.  The cabin was burned and the storage structures and the mission itself were reduced to ash.  Riggs and his wife, Mary, dug through the debris collapsed into the root cellar and salvaged as many potatoes are possible.  March is not a fruitful month in Minnesota and starvation was possible  A small adobe chapel on the hill below the mission was spared.  There had been no way to fight the blaze – the river is about 150 yards below the hillside where the Mission was built and water couldn’t be effectively carried up to where the fire was burning.

Riggs and Williamson decided to abandon Lac Qui Parle and move twenty or so miles downstream to a  place called Yellow Medicine.  Unburnt timber retrieved from the fire scene and some cut logs were rafted down the the river to where the Yellow Medicine creek flowed into the Minnesota.  At that place, a new mission was built.  Riggs continued to preach in Lakota at Lac Qui Parle.  In his book, he recalls that one evening, just after the Yellow Medicine mission had been completed, Mary fell suddenly ill.  Riggs writes about his “night ride over the prairie” from Lac Qui Parle to reach her bedside: “the shadows looked weird and ghostly – perhaps tinged by the mental state of the beholder.”  Mary survived and gradually was nursed back to health.

At Yellow Medicine, Riggs and Williamson helped the Christian Indians to found an enterprise called the Hazelwood Republic.  This was a congregation of about 400 Dakota who had agreed to cut their hair, live in stick-built houses, and farm the land.  The Hazelwood Republic was to be self-governing – every two years, the men in the community would elect a President who would lead the Republic.  The ultimate objective was for the Dakota to become United States Citizens, something that required the Indians to “abandon their savage way of life” and show that they were entitled to become full-fledged voting members of the Federal Republic.  (The mixed blood members of the congregation were citizens by birth.)  In practice, these requirements reduced to the notion that the Dakota Indians were to relinquish their native tongue (of which Riggs disapproved) and learn English.  Education was necessary to achieve mastery of English both spoken and written.  Accordingly, the missionaries established a boarding school for Dakota children at Yellow Medicine.  Jane Williamson, a “maiden” relative of Dr. Williamson, was responsible for managing education at the boarding school.  Like the other missionaries, Jane Williamson was an ardent abolitionist and had operated underground railroad “safe houses” to shelter fugitive slaves. (Her people in South Carolina were slave-owners and her entire life was a rebellion against the “peculiar institution” under which she had been raised.) Jane saw her work among the Indians as a ministry consistent with her anti-slavery positions.  She carried nuts and small cookies in her apron to entice Indian children into attending classes in English.  But she was fluent in Lakota and translated Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress into that language, a book that the Sioux were said to greatly enjoy.  It is said that the Indians were fond of her and many Dakota girls were named “Jane” as a consequence.

The utopian dreams of establishing a community of Dakota Christians with full citizenship and voting rights were destroyed by the conflict in 1862.  Riggs continued his translation work and completed a Lakota language gospel in 1870.  By that time, Riggs was stationed at the Mission on the Sisseton reservation to which the Minnesota Sioux had been deported.  It is paradoxical that Riggs, who detested Lakota as a “heathen language” and forbade the members of the Hazelwood Republic from speaking that tongue, nonetheless, is the author the foremost 19th century Lakota dictionary and grammar.  As an old man Riggs moved to Beloit, Wisconsin, wrote his book about his work among the Indians, Mary and I: Forty Years among the Sioux published in 1878 and died shortly thereafter.  Jane Williamson continued her ministry among the Indians in South Dakota until her death in 1895.  She was known as Red Song Woman because her preferred pedagogical method was teaching English by singing hymns with the Dakota children.  She is buried in South Dakota near the Reservation where she labored.

Today Mary and Stephen Riggs as well as the Williamsons are accused of “soul-murder.”  They urged Dakota Indians to cut their hair, dress like European settlers, and farm the land.  They felt that the Dakota religion was a thing of darkness, a form of satanic possession that mimicked in some respects the true faith but that was pernicious.  They separated children from their parents, encouraged dissension among the Indians by attacking those who cleaved to traditional religion and customs, and, although they preserved the Lakota language inadvertently by publishing the gospel (and Pilgrim’s Progress as well as several hymnbooks) in that tongue, they prohibited Dakota children from speaking their Muttersprache among themselves and to their families.  People will draw various morals from these facts.  My thought is simple enough: Judge not, lest ye be judged.  (Matthew 7:1).   

34. THE MISSIONARIES’ FLIGHT ACROSS THE PRAIRIE

through sloughs and chest-high prairie grass, crossing bogs and fens and creeks embedded in ravines, the horizon sometimes lit by flames and feathery plumes of smoke rising from burnt log cabins and bogs, the fear of horsemen on the rutted lanes or standing sentinel atop distant ridges – all of this exercises a powerful fascination on me.  I am becoming enmeshed in the old history of the Uprising again, something that I explicitly wished to avoid – I’m returning to that narrative like a drunk relapsing into his alcoholism.  I don’t want this to happen.  

I don’t want this to happen and it is unbecoming as well.  This diary is supposed to record a trip to Fargo to visit my children and grandchildren but things have now taken an alarming detour – I don’t know what I am writing about any more.  But, it seems, that the desperate escape of the missionaries mirrors what I am doing with this prose and, so, perhaps, show me a bad light.  I could be accused of running away as well. A neglectful father and  grandfather, I’m now entangled in a story that’s over a one-hundred sixty years old.  

I’m driving on a road unnamed on my maps, heading again toward the river to see the ruins of Farther-and-Gay manor.  Somewhere out in these flat field, a road passes the monument to settlers killed in Milford township, 53 people ambushed by the war parties, some butchered in their cabins or killed as they fled as refugees toward New Ulm.  I’ve seen the monument twice – it’s somewhere between Essig and New Ulm.  (Essig is a German word that means “vinegar.”) But I don’t know the road and just remember that the place is remote, on a lonely road going nowhere in particular.  

The Milford monument is odd, a pale angelic figure, almost life-size, standing next to a tablet on which the names of the dead are inscribed.  The angel stretches forth a hand in benediction to passers-by and she has smooth classical features – she is alabaster, the whitest of white women.  A big stone cross with a rusticated surface is erected over her shoulder and the monument is enclosed in a spiky-looking wrought iron fence.  Rows of corn stretching to the horizon tickle the backside of the heavy-looking pale granite cross.  I have always assumed that figure represents the Virgin Mary, but notes describing the monument tell me that this pale apparition, in fact, is a Roman goddess devoted to the safety of travelers.  The place is popular with kids – a garbage can next to the iron fence always seems to be overflowing with beer cans, some of which have fallen into the gravel of the little turn-off from the two-lane black top. I suppose over the years a lot of people have lost their virginity parked next to a memorial to a horrible massacre that occurred on a hot August day more than 150 years ago.  The last time I was at the monument, it was high summer and big wasps with torpedo-shaped abdomen were lazily encircling the beer cans heaped in the garbage – the wasps seemed a little drunk themselves, wobbly on their axes and the air was heavy with the smell of rotting hops and, I recall, someone’s underwear, tied in a knot and soaked by recent rains lying in the gravel.  The people who died on the country road here, of course, couldn’t have imagined that years later there would a goddess and a cross with a rough surface and names on a stone tablet, a parked car as well and kids petting there as a big, pale moon, like a pizza pie, soaring overhead.

I really don’t want to encounter the Milford monument out here with rain showing black skirts under the distant clouds and the trees in the shelter-belts all tropical with moisture and black against the horizon.  If you stare long enough at the angel, her tender expression begins to seem indifferent and, even, callous and you can almost hear her stone breath.

35.  AFTER THE ROAD DIPS INTO THE VALLEY,

there is a tee.  Here the river flows in the center of a broad concourse lined with low stately hills.  The bottom-land is fertile and cultivated with beans and corn.  At the tee, you can drive parallel to the river that seems to be about a quarter-mile away in a tunnel of trees.  The road along the river is gravel but paved with asphalt where it passes through old pioneer farms, five generation places, with a white iceberg of house and some bins with the lane running under the yard-light and right through farmstead.  The road runs right under the low bluff where trees are tangled together on terraces.

After a couple miles, there is wider place in the gravel lane and, another eighth mile of asphalt under the tires and, on the hillside, some ruins stand, big blocks of red quarried stone, probably perdurable Sioux quartzite.  The red walls stand chest-high and are backed up against the hillside where the undergrowth has been cut back and some sod making a pillowy-looking lawns surrounds the ruin.  This is what remains of the Indian Agent’s house named Farther and Gay Manor.

Joseph Brown built the big house in the Fall of 1861 and completed the interior carpentry and furnishing of the mansion in April of 1862.  Brown, the Indian Agent, was a entrepreneur and a sort of dreamer.  When he lived in Henderson, Minnesota (the town that he had personally founded) after the uprising, he owned several steam-powered cars and drove them on weekends, chugging around the village hugging the river banks in a deep valley fifty miles north of Mankato.  His interest in steam power probably saved his life during the Indian uprising.

Brown was born in 1805 in Pennsylvania and went west to what was then called Dakota territoryh as a soldier around 1825.  Brown saw that the people making money on the frontier were Indian traders and, so, he went into that business, first in western Wisconsin, then, near Stillwater, and, finally, on the great Dakota reservation in southwestern Minnesota.  Brown’s method of business was simplicity in itself – he simply married the daughter of the local chief and used that relationship to further his profits.  His marriages seem to have been rather informal.  Twice he was married to Indian women, one a member of the Ho-Chunk tribe in Wisconsin and, then, an Ojibway woman in Minnesota.  Working primarily as a fur trader, Brown traveled around what is now Minnesota.  At some point, after divorcing the Ojibway woman, he married Susan Frenier.  She was the daughter of a French fur trapper and big man among the Sisseton Dakota.  A photograph shows a handsome, is formidable woman – as in many pictures taken of Indians, she is scowling fiercely at the camera and has eyes like obsidian knives.  (It is hard to imagine how she might have appeared had she smiled for the camera – in fact, she was, in fact, probably a great beauty.)

Brown parleyed his contacts with his wife’s relatives into a successful business and became a leading trader in the area near the headwaters of the Minnesota River.  Unfortunately, he had the tendency, shared by many successful businessmen, of over-reaching.  He legislated the so-called Trader’s Paper, that is, an agreement negotiated with the Sioux and approved by the Federal government that allowed Indian agents to put a lien on accounts owed by tribal people to the agency store.  The law allowed an agent to directly extract credit accorded to the Indians from their annuity payments, funds owed to the people in payment for their tribal lands.  As one might imagine, the Indians charged items exuberantly and ended up in deep debt to the agents, including Joseph R. Brown.  This meant that when payments of the annuities were issued by the government, the Indians often received far less than they expected, the lion’s share of the proceeds applied to pay off credit owed the traders.

For a few years, the Agents, including Brown extended credit, repaid themselves from the government annuities and the system seemed sustainable.  But by 1862, the tribal debt had increased to the point that the Indians, after extraction of the traders’ charges, had insufficient money remaining to buy staple products.  This led to anger and discontent.

Oblivious to the brewing storm, Brown began building his mansion in June of 1861, picking a commanding vantage on the river flowing through the pleasant green valley.  The house was three and half stories tall, built of solid granite, and boasted 19 rooms. There was a piano and chandeliers and beautiful windows and mirrors.  The place named Farther and Gay Castle was the pride of the valley and one of the finest houses any where west of the Mississippi.  

Brown was traveling and had gone to New York City to work on legal matters relating to his Steam Wagon business.  The Indians attacked his house, captured everyone in his family, and took the hostages to one of the villages upriver.  Susan Brown was seized as were the twelve children living in the household. The Dakota were related in Mrs. Brown and afraid of molesting her and, in turn, she was able to negotiate better conditions for many of the captives.  Joseph Brown returned to Minnesota post-haste and fought in several battles between the army and the Sioux, one of them the desperate affair at Birch Coulee in which the Dakota almost rubbed out a burial squad dispatched into the country to number the civilian casualties and put them to rest.  Susan Brown was one of the captives freed at Camp Release in Montevideo about six weeks later.

Some of Susan Brown’s children identified as Dakota and, when the tribe was deported to the Sisseton reservation, she traveled with them and lived in that place.  Joseph Brown realized that war was bad for business and, so, he took several trips to Washington, leading delegations of Dakota leaders to work out the terms of a comprehensive peace agreement.  This was finalized in 1867.  Brown, then, moved to Henderson and pursued his hobby of designing and building Steam Wagons.  On another trip to New York in 1870, he unexpectedly died.  Susan Brown outlived him by twenty years, but never returned to Minnesota –she’s buried on the reservation near Sisseton.  

Some of this story is told on the historical marker at the ruins of the mansion.  It’s a haunting place.  Across from the hillside, a county truck is parked on the road shoulder and two men wearing green safety vests use a machine to scythe the tall goldenrod in the ditch.  The machine operates from a gas generator that makes a stuttering pock-pock-pock sound.  A cold rain starts to fall, insistently now and more than a just a trickling drizzle.  The wooden steps in the slope are slippery with rain and the ruins seem particularly desolate in the grey, uncertain light.  Stone endures but people are transient.  The road crew shuts off the gas-generator and drives back onto the gravel road, departing through the falling rain.

36.  AT REDWOOD FALLS,

 

rain sluices down. It’s cold now, 49 degrees, and icy deluge blankets the land.  Standing in the cold rain, you sense the first signs of hypothermia – the landscape blurs and the mind is confused.  The river slopes through the town where the brick buildings rise atop a bluff.  There’s bridge with metal railings and a grey sprawl of water below.  It seems that several rivers flow together here.  A parking lot on a ridge opens onto a trailhead in Ramsey Park, the destination for this detour.  I get out of my car, but the rain is hissing down and my glasses are specked with droplets and I can see an unfocused mass of tree tops below in a valley that slants away into the fog.  An odd redwood deck is cantilevered out over a steep hillside, but I can’t see anything but the soaked crowns of the trees below.  

37.  WET BLACKTOP

takes me across the prairie toward New Ulm.  The table-land above the river is level with dark wet shelter-belts sometimes shoved into prominence as I pass them.  The outskirts of New Ulm are placid with several subdivisions of homes spreading over the prairie, softball fields, and a new High School with a stadium and running track.  The speed limits decrease and, then, the road catapults down from the hilltop to the lower river terraces on which the city stands under its canopies of dripping trees.  I don’t recall ever entering New Ulm by this route, east bound over the farm fields were corn stands in sullen, rain-embattled armies.  At the bottom of the hill where the first broad terrace extends parallel to the river, I see a bronze man on a low plinth shaking his fist at the sky.  I assume this is a statue of Martin Luther since there is a college that bears the Reformer’s name in this town and, in fact, I have passed some ecclesiastical buildings made of firehouse-red brick on the hilltop.   A small parking lot occupies a niche in the steep wooded hillside.  I park and discover that, in fact, the belligerent-looking man is a Catholic Priest, a German named Alexendar Berghold.  There is a garden planted around the little figure with some benches in Erinerrung, that is, “in memory of”, local worthies – New Ulm was a German-speaking village until the Second World War and the language is still evident in many places in the city.  A path leads along the face of the heavily wooded hill, along a shelf carved into the steep slope.  Stations of the Cross stand among the trees, each of them enclosed in a kiln-shaped brick vault with a glass window opening into the sculpted tableaux.  Below, through a screen of trees, I can see some big buildings under a high gloomy obelisk of smoke-stack – this is the local hospital, a charitable institution once staffed by nuns.  The Sisters strolled on the paved path among the trees and the macabre statues showing Jesus’ torture and death when they took breaks from their work among the sick.  The sculptures confined in the oven-shaped brick cases are of the finest quality – the polychrome statues were made in Bavaria and shipped to New Ulm for display here.  Each tableaux is labeled in German and English – for instance, Jesus begegnet seiner Mutter (Jesus encounters his Mother).  Jesus suffers obediently and his torturers have the faces of ravenous wolves.  Veronica wipes his brow.  The Virgin Mary swoons.  A man with the face of a mallet pounds a nail through the saviors palm.  Like a strip of uncooked bacon or limp saltwater taffy, Jesus is gently lowered from the cross.  Some of the cases are obscured with water droplets blurring the inside of the glass windows.  Some leaves whirl down onto the path.  At the end of the Way of the Cross, there is a chapel that I enter – it’s cold and the air smells of mildew and the light is wan, cast through stained glass into an interior that is white as the frosting on a wedding cake.  There is no one around.

Alexander Berghold was an Austrian from Steiermark.  He emigrated to St. Paul in 1864 and was appointed priest at the Church of Holy Trinity in New Ulm in 1869.  This was seven years after the Dakota Indians attacked New Ulm with hundreds of warriors and were beat back in a desperate battle that lasted for three days.  As was later said in Vietnam, the town had to be burned to save it – the defenders, who fought from behind barricades of beer barrels, created of fields of fire against the oncoming attackers by systematically burning the town to the ground.  The Dakota were defeated and exiled into South Dakota and the town was rebuilt.  But it was destroyed again in 1883, when a tornado swept through the valley and killed dozens of people.  The small rural hospital was swamped with victims and this led Father Berghold to raise funds for a new building.  The old wing of the 1883 hospital is directly downhill from the Kreutzweg.  Berghold had nineteen German-speaking congregations in the river valley and on the prairie.  He was a man of letters and wrote an account of the Sioux Uprising called The Indians’ Revenge.  In the decade before he died, he returned to Austria.  His statue shows a compact little man with resolute features cast in brown-gold bronze.  His bronze face is wet and his cheeks are streaked with tears.        

38.  KFC

has a franchise in Albert Lea and I stop there to get take-out.  It’s a busy place.  The restaurant dining room is locked against Covid-19.  People in pick-ups wait in queue to get buckets of fried chicken from the drive-through window.  So many are gathered here that it will be fifteen minutes before the next batch of chicken is fried – never enough fish and loaves.  In Albert Lea, the skies are dour but it hasn’t rained yet and the cold front, advancing slowly from the northwest, hasn’t arrived yet.  It’s 59 degrees and humid.  

A kid wearing a mask carries my chicken out to the car.  I’m still twenty minutes from home and it’s about 6:00 pm.  My body aches from the hours in the car.   

39. AS A BAPTISM GIFT,

I bought baby Noelle several books, including an alphabet showing pictures of stories from the Bible, one painting for each letter.  When I was a little boy, my favorite book was called Going for a Walk with a Line – the title derives, I know now, from something that the great Swiss artist Paul Klee once said: drawing is taking a walk with a line.  This children’s book was very simple, following a single line from page to page as it transmutes in famous paintings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.  One of the paintings is Klee’s image of a dog baying at the moon; another picture is Postman Rousseau’s image of a family out for a Sunday ride on a brightly decorated wagon – the famous image of the sleeping gypsy with the lion is also shown in the book.  The picture that fascinated me the most was a monochromatic (sepia-brown) painting made by Dali, a picture of an encampment of nomads in the desert.  Dali has drawn the silhouettes of the nomads and their tent in the landscape to simultaneously depict a staring face lying on its side in profile.  I was always amazed to see how the stark image of the nomads standing by their humble hut was also the figure of a watchful giant.  The nomads remind me of the refugees from the Hazelwood Republic congregated to have their picture taken on the desolate prairie.  Perhaps, if you looked at that picture long enough, you might dimly descry the features of a colossus peering back at you from the ancient photograph.  I have made that experiment but never been able to see the exact contours of the giant resting on his side – the visage is blurred and looks familiar but I can’t make out exactly whom it portrays.

I misremembered the title of the book: I thought that it was Taking a Walk with a Line or Taking a line for a Walk.  So I wasn’t able to buy the book for this grandchild.  Now, I know the book’s proper name Going for a Walk with Line.  It was published in 1959 and I think my parents bought it for me at the bookshop of the Museum of Modern Art.  We brought the book from Wannamassa, near Asbury Park where we lived in New Jersey to our new home along the great gouge of the new freeway that was being built alongside our neighborhood near Silver Lake Road in New Brighton, Minnesota.  I have ordered the book and will deliver it to Noelle for her birthday at the end of this week (late September 2020).  I have also bought two copies of the Dore-illustrated version of Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, one for Noelle and one for the children in Fargo, North Dakota.  Lucky the child whose parents read him this book when he is little.

40. THE REFUGEES

posing on the prairie all looked toward the camera to have their group portrait taken.  They were tired, but photography was a new, and fascinating, invention and, despite their fear and exhaustion, they were willing to sit still to have their image recorded.  It would have been ironic if an Indian war party had emerged through the high grass just as the missionaries were distracted by staring at the cameraman and his weird apparatus.  Exposures were long and the refugees had to sit still for a few seconds and, presumably, for that period no one was anxiously scanning the horizon for signs of murderous raiders? Was there someone standing watch outside the frame of the picture?  The picture was taken.  After an hour or so, the refugees continued their flight across the prairie.