On the Ruins of North Dakota

 

Half-cocked

People say that you shouldn’t go off half-cocked.  But I did.

Pedantry

(Old flintlock firearms were designed with a trigger that could be positioned at “full cock,” that is, ready to fire, and at “half-cock” or on safety so that the weapon can not be discharged.  However, the first recorded use of the phrase refers to someone being drunk – this is around 1733 in an English novel.  The idiom later came to mean acting impulsively and without proper preparation.  This was the predominant meaning for the phrase by the end of the 18th century.)

Itinerary

If you don’t have a coherent itinerary for your travels, you are apt to go off half-cocked.  But I had a plan: I would travel to Minneapolis and stop at the Walker Art Center (WAC) to view the new exhibition of paintings by Julie Mehretu.  Also, I would attend a screening in the WAC’s Benton Mediatheque of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, a film that has interested me for most of my life but, hitherto, been inaccessible.  Then, I would depart WAC and travel to Fargo, North Dakota to visit my son, Martin, and my grandchildren, Hannah and Lucas.  We would eat at a restaurant and, then, next day drive to see the Biesterfeldt archaeological site and, then, historic Fort Abercrombie.  Mid-afternoon, I would depart Fargo and drive back as far as Montrose, about 25 miles west of St. Cloud on Interstate 94.  On Sunday, I would drive the remaining three and a half hours home to Austin.  

Soon, the weather will turn cold, and, then, very cold and the fields will be either drowned in snow or empty, frozen and windswept.  Travel to North Dakota will be difficult, in fact, probably impossible, for much of the season and, of course, there is also the problem of the weather changing unpredictably and stranding travelers either on the whited-out freeway or at some rest stop crowded with truckers pulled off the highway to wait out the blizzard or, perhaps, in some little town in a fragile, stick-built motel on which the gale hammers like an anvil.  Therefore, I thought that this would be my last trip to Fargo for a few months.  

Amos Vogel

was born Amos Vogelbaum in Austria in 1921. His family was Jewish and fled Europe just before the Anschluss by which Germany annexed Austria.  Vogel was an old school Marxist-Leninist, an admirer of the Abraham Lincoln brigade in its adventures in Spain, and and a man of the Left considerably to the Left of the Left’s mainstream.  Vogel was contrarian by nature, a born rebel, and a knee-jerk advocate of opposition to mainstream culture.  In this capacity, he curated films that were radical in content and form, ultimately operating a theater with his wife that he called Cinema 16.  (People bought memberships in the enterprise; one web site proudly displays Susan Sontag’s Cinema 16 application – she paid $27 for two memberships.)  Vogel wasn’t a subtle fellow.  His prose was agit-prop of the simplest and bluntest nature and I always thought there was something naive, awkward, and, even, hectoring about his lack of nuance.  As far as Vogel was concerned, if you showed on film someone defecating, you were a noble, important revolutionary, an enemy to bourgeois standards that were strangling the life out of the culture.  Vogel was a moralist: subversion was good by definition and conformity was evil.

In 1974, Vogel published a book that became famous among cinephiles, Film as a Subversive Art.  The book had a red cover bearing a mildly salacious image from Dusan Makaveyev’s WR, the Mysteries of the Organism.  Inside, Vogel indexed 600 films that met his rather loose and reactive definition of subversion – if a movie contained images that could not be shown in a Hollywood production, that film, Vogel enthusiastically, argued was brave, extraordinary, and the harbinger of a brave new world.  (I’m not exaggerating – Vogel was an optimist; the engine of Marxist historical dialectic would one day grind down the bourgeois capitalists and all would be liberated in a utopian classless society.  But this could occur only if there enough films showing sex, revolutionary violence, and other basic bodily functions.)  Of course, for a 20 year old film enthusiast, the book’s primary attraction wasn’t Vogel’s cartoonish prose but the stills that graced each page:  pictures of orgies, naked corpses, all manner of sex acts, as well as images of people masturbating, vomiting, urinating, defecating, and rolling in filth.  

One of Vogel’s heroes was a gay filmmaker named Jack Smith.  Smith was the director of a movie shot in 1963 called Flaming Creatures.  Vogel enthusiastically described the movie as a weird concoction comprised of androgynous figures in outlandish costumes, bangles and sequins and the features of exotic birds, sodomy filmed from various angles and a melange of “flaccid penises.”  Vogel seemed most impressed by the flaccid penises – to him, they were the red banner of the Revolution and the instrument of our liberation.  A blurry picture printed next to Vogel’s thumbnail description of the film showed a man with dead, drugged eyes gazing out from under a feathered headdress against a frieze of naked extras displaying the flaccid penises from which the Revolution would soon enough spurt.  

Of course, I wanted to see Flaming Creatures but the film was never screened anywhere to my knowledge – perhaps, there was some kind of problem with its soundtrack that may have been appropriated without attribution from pop songs and operetta arias.  (Generally, copyright problems are more effective in getting a film banned and withdrawn from circulation than overt sexual content – if you don’t believe me, try to get a gander at Todd Hayne’s The Karen Carpenter Story, suppressed for forty years on the basis of his soundtrack and use of Barbie Dolls as dramatis personae.)  You couldn’t buy a DVD of the picture and no one was streaming Flaming Creatures.  Vogel proclaimed the film a masterpiece but there was no way to see it.  Jack Smith was no help – he was an early victim of the AIDS epidemic, killed by virus-related pneumonia in 1989.  

Of course, I was excited to learn that the WAC intended to screen Flaming Creatures in its Mediatheque auditorium (just behind the entrance desk) beginning on October 12, 2021.  So I planned to see the picture on Friday, October 15 on my trip to Fargo.

Pedantry 2

(When Jack Smith died in 1989, he left in his apartment his archive of films and raw footage, together with a great trove of feather boas, gold lame tunics, spike high heels and other drag queen memorabilia.  Before his last hospitalization, Smith had decorated his apartment to serve as an elaborate, campy set for a film that he planned to shoot, Sinbad in the Rented World.  A friend and performance artist, Penny Arcade (a self-described “fag-hag) took possession of the apartment, planning to preserve its tawdry, bespangled splendor as an installation piece.  This enterprise failed.  Penny Arcade then allied herself with the Village Voice film critic Jim Hoberman to develop a foundation to preserve Smith’s works.  Unfortunately, this effort ran afoul of Smith’s sole surviving heir, an estranged sister, Sue Slater, who despised the artist’s films on moral grounds.  Litigation ensued.  Smith’s sister sued to oust Hoberman and Penny Arcade from their control of the deceased film-maker’s ouevre.  They were suspicious that Slater intended to acquire Smith’s artworks only to suppress and, possibly, destroy them.  Whatever her motive, Slater’s rights were clearly superior to those of Penny Arcade and J. Hoberman so that the New York Surrogate’s Court ruled in her favor in 2003.  Hoberman and Penny Arcade appealed and refused to turn over possession of the property to Slater.  More negotiations ensued and, at last, in 2008, the apartment and its decaying contents were sold to the Gladstone Gallery so that Slater’s interest could be cashed-out.  

But the Gladstone Gallery, representing the Estate of Jack Smith, doesn’t seem any more forthcoming that previous parties controlling the artist’s work with respect to dissemination of Smith’s films, particularly his signature work, Flaming Creatures.)  

Julie Mehretu

is an Ethiopian-born artist.  The WAC owns a small painting by Mehretu that I found immediately compelling when I first saw it about a year ago.  The canvas was cluttered with a spiral of marks, abstract but beautifully occupying the painting’s field, a map, it seemed, of the apocalypse.  

Since I am a member of the WAC, I received periodic mailings and emails.  (In fact, I pay enough money annually to be regarded as a donor with some rights.) These messages invited me to attend the gallery opening for a big retrospective of Mehretu’s work, a show that interested me.  Of course, I didn’t plan to attend the gallery opening.  This was a party featuring a DJ, dancing, hors d’ouevres, and the sort of stylish, upscale, multi-ethnic crowd of people that I find intimidating.  Therefore, I more or less ignored the party invitations.  I simply couldn’t picture myself fraternizing with hipsters, particularly at my advanced age.

Nonetheless, I looked forward to seeing the Mehretu exhibition.  But, in this regard, I’m afraid that I went off half-cocked.

The Party

celebrating Mehretu’s retrospective show was scheduled for the 15th of October, the very day that I commenced my trek to Fargo.  Of course, I intended to be asleep in my hotel near the Sanford Medical Center on 17th Street SW in Fargo when the DJ’s tracks really began in earnest in the gallery.  (I wonder what a party of that kind is like –aren’t the museum administrators afraid that someone will get drunk, stumble, and splash a million dollar canvas with red wine or, even, worse spackle the thing with deviled egg?)    

I threaded my way through mid-morning traffic and reached the Art Center at 11:05 just a few minutes after the gallery opened for the day.  Flashing my membership card, I entered the lobby and was met by a masked man, not a guard so much as a greeter.  At the head of the steps that the man was protecting, I saw a big screen drawn over the gallery entrance.  The screen bore the name JULIE MEHRETU.

The young man in the mask said: “The first three levels are all being prepared for a new exhibition.”  

I nodded.

“The galleries above those floors are open, but you should take the elevator to the top and come back down,” he recommended.

“Isn’t the Mehretu show already underway?” I asked.

“Oh no,” the young man said.  “It will open tomorrow.”

I was tempted to tell him that I was a big donor (not exactly true but approximately correct) and that I had an invitation to the Opening Night Party with DJ KEEZY and Annie Mack.  (Oddly enough, I know a little about Annie Mack; I met her once when she was performing the Blues at a show in which my stepdaughter, Sena Ehrhardt, was also on the roster.)  

But I didn’t say anything.  

Later, from another gallery, I looked into the closed space and saw several large canvases, fifteen or twenty feet tall, decorated with mushroom clouds of black marks, like pottery shards.  It was intriguing but I didn’t want to be accused of peeping and, so, I returned to the front desk to find out if I could see Flaming Creatures.  

Benton Mediatheque

Features concealed by a plaid mask tautly defining nose and jaw, the young man nodded as I approached.  I had already found the toilet in the basement and spoken to him about Julie Mehretu and, so, I suppose he was baffled by my return to where he stood sentry next to the steps leading up to the closed galleries.  But if he was puzzled or, even, irritated nothing was visible in his eyes or posture; the rest was concealed by the mask.

I asked him where the Benton Mediatheque was located although I knew very well that the ramp down to the little theater was only a few steps away.  For some reason, I expected him to read my mind, to know that I was anxious to see Flaming Creatures and that he would provide me with directions to that effect.

The masked greeter gestured to the ramp and entry into the screening room.  

“How does it work?”

“You just scroll down to pick the film that interests you.”

“So it’s like a juke-box?”

His voice was accented, but, I think, he knew what a juke box was.

“Sorta,” he said.

I turned toward the screening room.

“Enjoy,” he said.

A Music-Video by Bruce Springsteen

was playing to a darkened empty room, a half-circle of benches covered with carpet and facing down toward a large screen.  Bruce Springsteen is wholesome, progressive, family-friendly.  Flaming Creatures is perverse, chthonic, offensive.  A familiar tune sounded in the room, one of Springsteen’s hits, “Bad Lands,” I think, loud but not too loud.  Wholesome, progressive-looking music video dancers danced outdoors and the landscape was generically pleasant and scenic.  (It’s always baffling that Springsteen’s anguished songs about small-town losers, criminals, drug addicts, and wannabe suicides are perceived as wholesome, progressive, family-friendly, and, even, patriotic.  It must be something intrinsic to the presentation and Springsteen’s athletic good looks.)  

I found a display screen laptop-sized on a sidewall and scrolled through the video offerings.  They were listed alphabetically.  There were no listings under “F”.  I tried “S” – for Jack Smith and the video accompanying Flaming Creatures, a short subject called “Sex Fish.”  Then, I looked under “J”.  Nothing.  

Pretty clearly, Flaming Creatures wasn’t available as a selection.  If the film was part of this video juke-box, it was coded somehow, hidden and occult.  True to form, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures again eluded me.

I’m no pervert

and didn’t want to appear in that guise and, so, I was reluctant to approach the handsome masked man, with his elegantly stylized profile of cloth-outlined nose and cheek bones and jaw, so as to inquire with him about Flaming Creatures.  Most likely, he wouldn’t know what I was talking about – after all, he’s just a worker at the WAC and not a docent or curator and, probably to his credit, knows little or nothing about homosexual drag pornography circa 1963.   Probably, he would ask me to explain my request and, then, I would have to provide a description of the film, or the artist (a somewhat demonic-looking fellow with piercing eyes and a Mephistophelean goatee) and, likely I would blurt out something about flaccid penises and transvestites in feather boas and spangled gowns and the young man would look at my hunched shoulders and my white beard and my watery cataract-smeared eyes and wonder about my unseemly and prurient interest in such things, as I am, after all, a man less alive than half dead : “Unwieldly, slow, heavy, and pale as lead” as Shakespeare would say.    

This is, as often asserted, no country for old men, particularly when it comes to flagrant homosexual pornography, and, so, ashamed of myself for my interest in the film, and ashamed of my shame, and, also, shamed by my cowardice, I hurried out of the gallery, paid $4 dollars for the privilege of having parked my car for ten minutes, and drove to Fargo.  

BDS Books

I bought a book on the internet for my grandchildren.  This is a recent translation of Reynard the Fox by Anne Louise Avery published under the imprint of the Bodliean Library in 2020.  The book is a handsome volume with the cover decorated with the portrait of an impassive, sly-looking red fox. An interesting introduction precedes the translation that is about 350 pages long.  At the end of book, there is an index of principal characters, all of whom are beasts of one sort or another.  

Since I am visiting two grandchildren, I decide I should buy them another volume.  Upon reaching Fargo, I search the internet for used book stores and find that there is a place in West Fargo, probably about forty blocks from where I am staying.  It’s called Ferguson Books and has branches in Grand Forks and Bismarck as well.  

West Fargo is a featureless suburb, well-to-do and mint-new.  (Except for the downtown and strip malls along the freeways, everything in Fargo looks as if it were built in the last ten years.)  Houses are big with lawns in which trees haven’t quite taken hold.  Since the terrain is perfectly flat and landscaping with trees hasn’t yet been established, it seems as if you can see for miles across the naked suburbs, house after house casting identical shadows and lane after lane, an utter absence of anything eccentric or unusual or, even, noteworthy.  

Ferguson Books is also brand-new, a store-front on the ground level of what seems to be a retirement condominium.  Next to the bookstore, a coffee shop sells pastries and some pickups are drawn up to the curb where sunny concrete handicap-ramps lead up to the businesses.  Six or seven people are sitting at round tables in the coffee shop, but the bookstore is empty.  No one is stationed behind the counter at the entrance.  The store seems to sell about fifty books, all of them bestsellers in colorful hardcover editions.  The books are stacked in big piles on tables next to wall-shelves on which the books are displayed, set sideways to show off their dust-jacket covers.  The place is completely silent, not even a whisper of classical music on public radio and no one seems to be staffing the place.  I’m in the bookstore for 10 minutes and no one greets me and there are no other customers.  A door at the end of the shop is marked private and there must be a toilet in a closet somewhere but, otherwise, the long narrow room, so spotless that even the beams of late afternoon sun have been purified of dust motes and gleam on the book covers like austere, broad laser beams, is empty and antiseptic.  Somehow, the books for sale seem to hollow out the place even more, the same few novels and and books of young adult fiction in identical iterations ranked on shelf and table.  Clearly, this is a front for some kind of criminal enterprise, a simulacrum of a bookstore, but not the real thing, possibly an emporium for clandestine narcotics or sex trafficking or an enterprise that peddles pornography of a particularly loathsome kind from under the counter (or from the locked backroom labeled “private”) or, perhaps, a gateway to some other facility hidden in town where one can buy fragments from endangered species, rhino horn and tiger penis, ceremonial eagle feathers, ivory, and prohibited poisonous reptiles, vipers and Komodo dragons.  A wave of panic overcomes me – perhaps, this bland, empty place is habituated by Fargo’s flaming creatures.  I hurry out of the store and back to my vehicle and the sun is stretching long shadows out from the impeccable, newly built structures along the avenue and everything seems briefly uncanny.

There’s another bookstore downtown, near the radio station from which Martin broadcasts his hard-core rock and roll show.  I drive to that place.  West Fargo is bounded on the north by an enormous tank farm, miles of squashed-looking round silos full of oil and fuels.  Then, there are railroad yards and train crossings and tiny, derelict-looking strip malls with chow mein places and Vietnamese fingernail shops.  BDS Books, as it is called, is on a street, right off a main thoroughfare, but among small, nondescript warehouses and city desks selling hardware and linoleum out of dismal-looking storerooms.  

At first, I can’t figure out how to get into the place.  There’s a door off the curb where I’ve parked, but it seems blocked by teetering cardboard boxes brimming with disheveled-looking books.  At last, I determine that this passage between hip-high stacks of unsorted books, some of them fallen in brown-grey avalanches all over the floor, is the only access to the interior.  So I thread my way into the store, slipping sideways between boxes of books and other volumes that are just piled in haphazard heaps.  A middle-aged guy with grey hair sits on a metal stool behind a wall of books.  He nods to me.  

The place is huge with wooden shelves reaching from floor to ceiling, all of them lined with old books of various kinds – there are leather-bound series, Victorian collections of the works of Dickens or Carlisle or Emerson, different variants on the Great Books beginning around 1880 and, then, continuing down to the present with authors alternately finding favor or falling out of currency depending upon the age of these sets of books.  Every possible kind of book is gathered here, in intimidating multitudes, thousand upon thousands of volumes.  Cardboard boxes piled atop one another make the already narrow corridors between the shelves even more difficult to navigate and one ducks and bobs to get through the masses of books everywhere blocking the way.  It would take a month to learn how this place is organized, if, indeed, it is organized at all, something that seems doubtful to me.  In the cardboard boxes, I can see indiscriminate mobs of books: cook books of various sorts (Italian, Mexican, French) dog-eared Harlequin romances, chemistry and physics textbooks, a museum guide to the Hermitage in Leningrad (when the city was still Leningrad), an expensive volume depicting Bernini’s sculptures and fountains, ten best-sellers from forty years ago, an operator’s manual for a pressure cooker, three comic books, a set of children’s Little Big volumes that are probably collector’s items and very valuable, the complete novels of Henry James bound in green and one volume of the old two-volume translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time when the book was known as The Remembrance of Things Past, a lawbook on torts, a volume on the history of Williston, North Dakota, and a copy of Windows for Dummies.  These things haven’t yet been put on the shelves because there is no place for them.

A bell tinkles: another customer.  A woman has a brown grocery bag full of mangled-looking paperbacks.  The whole lot cost four dollars.  She asks the owner if he has any books about raising rabbits.  He goes off in search of the books.  I can hear him clawing through piles of ragged volumes in some remote corner of the shop.  Then, someone else comes through the door and threads his way through the mess at the entrance.  He asks if the owner has a copy of Dune.  

“They’re flying off the shelf,” the owner says, but says that he has one left.  

“Are you going to see the picture?” the customer asks.

“Oh yes,” the proprietor says, “But I’ll wait until the library gets the DVD and, then, check it out.”

I’m looking at the books of “North Dakota Interest”.  There are a dozen volumes by North Dakota’s most famous novelist, Larry Woiwode, short-listed for a National Book Award many years ago for his novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and the State’s poet laureate.  Most of the Woiwode books on the sagging shelves are autographed.  There’s brand new copy of his nonfiction book Aristocrat of the West: a Biography of Harold Schafer.  (Harold Schafer was a North Dakotan who founded the Gold Seal Soap company and advocated for the restoration of the packing plant ruins at Medora and the establishment of the National Park there.)  It’s a handsome volume, with a big fat autograph smeared over the frontispiece and, for a moment, I’m tempted to buy it, but I’ve got too many books and, indeed, as this ruinous archive shows, there are already too many books in the world, too much writing to which I am contributing with each keystroke, “many books” as it it said, “much evil...”

In fully half of the hundred used book stores that I have inspected in the course of my life, there’s an earnest young man at the front of the store debating the merits of Ayn Rand with the owner.  This place is no exception.  A burly-looking kid with an unruly moustache framing his lips asks the proprietor if he should read The Fountainhead having just completed Atlas Shrugged.  

“I don’t agree her with her politics,” the proprietor says, “but she is a wonderful storyteller.”

They discuss the question of “Who is Jack Gault?”

I’ve picked up a copy of book of Rilke’s poems translated by Robert Bly and The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling for the kids.

Kipling

The proprietor puts the conversation with the solemn young man about Ayn Rand on hold.  I hand him the books, and he prices them.  Then, I give him two twenties.  This place is by no means cheap.

The owner asks me about the Rilke translations.

“I’m interesting in seeing what Bly does with them,” I say.

“Oh yes,” the owner tells me.  Then, he says: “The owner of this place, the guy I bought it from, had two favorite jokes.  Do you want to hear them?”

“Sure”.

“What is the only book ever written by a foot?

“What?”

"Uncle Tom’s Cabin – it was written by Harriet Beecher’s toe.”

“Great,” I say.

“Do you know what the blonde co-ed said when she was asked if she liked Kipling?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been ‘kippled’.”

The proprietor looks a little disheartened.

“Oh you know that one,” he says.

“It’s an old joke,” I reply.  

Last supper in Fargo

Since I didn’t intend to return to Fargo until next Spring if I am still alive at that time (Winter can be dangerous – I might slip on ice, fall and freeze to death or be disabled by a fractured femur or pelvis or die of the flu or a Covid variant or pneumonia for that matter or simply perish by aneurysm, car crash, heart attack, suicide), I called my son Martin and made plans to take him and my two grandchildren to an expensive (relatively speaking) Japanese grill near the hotel.  

We arrived early at the restaurant, a huge place with a horseshoe-shaped sushi bar, and dim banqueting rooms stretching out in all directions to the far horizon of the walls, all of them ornate with gilt filigree and windowless as a casino.  Here and there, tables were occupied by large parties, eight or nine diners, and chefs in white toques patrolled the hall, brandishing cleavers and, sometimes, setting fires that flared as high as the ceiling, little transient tornadoes of flame dancing in the darkness.  The entrance to the restaurant is faux-grandiose, arched foot bridges over concrete ponds swarming with koi, chest-high pagodas standing in plots of raked gravel, a shapely hostess wearing a mask like a ninja with a fierce-looking dragon in sequins on her chest, the beast’s jaws opening and spitting embroidered fire like the little spiral pillars of fire jetting above the tables.  

The children enjoyed the place, stabbing at their teriyaki chicken with their chopsticks.  I told Martin that I planned to drive to the Biesterfeldt site, a place probably difficult to locate, and, then, look at Fort Abercrombie.

“I don’t think there’s anything at Fort Abercrombie,” I said.

Martin replied that he had been there and my assessment was correct.

On the way out of the restaurant, the children stooped over the little grey channel where the koi mottled bright orange and white, pie-bald blue and silver, big as kittens tilted their heads upward to the surface of the pond water, curious to look at the little boy and girl who were looking down at them and, I suppose, wondering if it might not be time for feeding.

Cold

The bedclothes were light and I couldn’t figure out how to adjust the thermostat in my room and so I shivered through the night, sleeping fitfully and, then, awaking as is my custom at 4:30 am with an uneasy mind groping toward an ultimate idea ill-defined but fearsome, slipping in and out of dreams in which I wandered through familiar landscapes but, nonetheless, was lost, looking for something that I couldn’t quite name.  

Drone Weather

The next morning, we drove West on I-94.  It was cold, frost on my windshield at dawn, and the sky was a huge blue bowl overhead, cloudless to all horizons.  Martin had his drone with him, packed in a sort of brief-case with many pockets and zippers.

There was no wind.  “Excellent drone weather,” Martin said.

Martin’s Itinerary

Because he didn’t want to go off half-cocked, Martin developed an itinerary touring historical sites near the Biesterfeldt location.  First, we planned to see Standing Rock Hill, then, Fort Ransom, the Biesterfeldt site east of Lisbon, North Dakota, and, at last, Fort Abercrombie in the Red River Valley.  The route was 192 miles and well-designed, I thought.

A Perilous Passage

Even if you can’t see the film, it’s comforting somehow to know that Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures exists, although concealed from you in thickets of censorship, litigation, and benign (and not so benign) neglect.  North Dakota’s historical society seems to have a similar attitude about some of its most important historical sites, particularly the Biesterfeldt village.  These places exist and can be visited, but you must undergo certain trials in order to find them and, in fact, the State seems bent on concealing these locations from anyone but the most persistent and well-informed traveler.  

Standing Rock Hill is an example of North Dakota’s weirdly passive-aggressive approach to some of its monuments.  The place is marked by a tiny sign posted to a utility pole and invisible from a car traveling at highway speed – and highway speeds in N. D. are high – on the adjacent road.  Martin’s cell-phone warned him that we were approaching the place and so I slowed, but couldn’t see the sign.  We drove a quarter mile past the inconspicuous lane up to the monument and, so, had to reverse directions, proceeding back down the highway slowly to find the little gravel track running to the south along a storm-battered shelter-belt.

The road is nothing more than two ruts in the hillside, tracks covered with a scatter of gravel and with high green weeds tufted up between them.  The first quarter mile of the lane is level, but, then, the track climbs steeply up to a little parking lot under the brow of the hill.  It’s a high place overlooking a geometry of cultivated fields to the north, land broken by glacial moraines covered with trees running in linear formations toward the horizon.  The fields dip and tumble into one another and the country is uninhabited, some steel grain bins at the end of lonely driveways but no houses or villages in sight.  This part of North Dakota feels abandoned.  No one is home. 

The track skims by underneath, the grass between ruts tickling the bottom of my car.  It seems a dangerous ascent to the level gravel terrace next to a big cairn of field stones cemented together announcing the site.  

Misinformation

The field-stone cairn cradles a brown metal plate embossed with letters.  The hill rising above the parking lot is 1490 feet high, but the terrace lies near the summit and the trail through the high prairie grass to the hill top is short and not too steep.  The view from the crest of the ridge is said to be the “most sightly and historic” in North Dakota.  The place is named Inya Bosendata in Lakota, a phrase that means “Standing Rock”.  The Indian words are misspelled – the proper name is Iya Bosdata in Santee Sioux.

Lat. 46.6233581 / Long. -97.9084396

are the coordinates for Iya Bosdata.  At the top of the hill, a four-foot high spear of grey-blue stone stands upright among some smaller prostrate boulders cemented together to keep vandals from knocking over the little megalith.  People have trampled down the grass around the standing rock poised at the high point on a rounded conical hill.

To the south, the land drops gradually through several cultivated fields to a distant ridge running parallel to a deep valley.  The trough of the valley and its hillsides are covered with trees and the land is broken, split into steep ravines that drop down to the Sheyenne River that runs in the gorge.  Tableland rises beyond the river valley, flat-topped hills also incised with wood-lined ravines.  

Questions

The conical mound surmounted by the splinter of pointed rock is not natural.  In fact, it is a burial mound so large that it could be taken for a naturally occurring knoll.  Several smaller mounds are nearby, within a stone’s throw of the upright column.  The mound immediately to the east of the big pyramidal shaped hill is very apparent, well-defined in the morning sunlight and casting a shadow across the cold meadows.  There are two other conical mounds here according to information on the Internet but I can’t see them.  A linear mound runs along the south side of the hilltop, also difficult to discern.

Another plaque supplies additional information.  The mounds date to nomadic forest dwellers in what is called the Early Woodland era and the earthworks were built between 100 BC and 600 AD.  There are no big stones anywhere around this hilltop and, so, the presence of standing rock is enigmatic.  Did the mound-builders drag the rock here and set it on their earthen rampart?  This seems unlikely to me.  (Mound-builders were artists in earth and didn’t drag megaliths around the terrain.)  So who put the rock pillar on the hill?  When?  For what purpose?  What is the source of the arrow-shaped standing rock?  Is it sacred to someone?  Was it quarried or found somewhere else and, then, laboriously dragged up to this height of land?

The Internet says that the site has not been excavated but that a large mound of this size could contain as many as 35 burials, spaced over a period of a thousand years.  The mounds here are said to be the farthest West in the United States, although this seems a matter of definition and, perhaps, questionable. It seems that the Iya Bosdata has not been really investigated and that very little is known about it.  

A cold breeze

is trembling in the tall grass on the hilltop.  Martin dispatches his drone over the cultivated hillsides dropping down to the distant rise of ridge overlooking the valley.  The ridge that obscures the more remote wooded slopes descending to the Sheyenne River is 1500 feet away – the drone measures and displays distance at Martin’s joy-stick control.  (The ridge is negative 50 feet from the launch site on the hilltop that the drone regards as ground level.)  The camera on the drone reveals a field of Indian burial mounds just beyond the ridge, but not visible to us from the hilltop.  Martin takes the drone up to 1200 feet.  Meanders of the Sheyenne River glint in the valley but it’s hard to see the screen display because of the brilliant sunshine.  

John C. Fremont & Joseph Nicollet

camped on this hill on August 12, 1839.  They were exploring Dakota Territory as part of the Corps of Engineers.  Although they didn’t make any notes about the standing rock, their hydrogeographic chart published in 1843 shows the site so, obviously, they identified it as a local landmark.

Supernaturals

haunt the place, dead Indians, I suppose, and the spirits of shamans.  The wind whispers in the grass and shakes leaves off the shelter-belt below the hilltop.  On the naked rock under the upright lance of stone, a big earthworm, pink and fleshy suddenly appears.  This is despite the icy wind.  The earthworm writhes against the base of the megalith.  It has materialized out of nowhere and was not apparent a few seconds earlier.  The beast twists and turns as if the involutions of its motion are a cipher of some kind, a code like the Inca khifus made from knotted string.

Then, an antler, bleached pale and a little scuffed, appears on another stone on the back side of the rocks cemented together under the dolmen.  Hannah picks up the antler.  It seems to be an offering of some kind and we agree that she should put it down next to the granite and schist of the upright stone.  

A geodetic badge

is implanted in the soil next to the standing rock.  It provides coordinates for the place and was dug into the hilltop in 1953, a year before I was born.  

A website about North Dakota ghost towns

mentions Standing Rock Hill.  Twelve comments are recorded beneath the entry for the place.  Six of them debate nomenclature for American Indians – one writer maintains that these people self-identify as “Indian” or “American Indian” and that “native American” is a misnomer.  “Native American” merely means “one born in the United States”, something that is technically correct I suppose, but meaningless.  (Apparently, the person who protests calling the site “Indian” is using a pseudonym that names a character in the TV show The Big Bang Theory. The debate quickly devolves into insults.) One commentator praises the beauty of the place.  Four comments discuss the demise of a nearby small town, a place that is now abandoned but that was once the home of the one of the writers.  “It is very sad,” the person says who once lived in the abandoned village.  Everyone in North Dakota knows everyone else.  There aren’t that many people in the State.  Several of the messages establish who is related to whom and through what lineage.      

Down in the valley

the road winds along pastures above the curving dirt-walled trench where the Sheyenne River flows, a stream-bed that is very tightly meandered with compressed loops and bends of water crammed together under ancient cottonwood trees.  

The shortest Ski-lift in America

climbs a slope from which trees have been cleared, a half dozen rickety towers from which equally decrepit chairs dangle over weeds and encroaching brush.  The ski run adjacent to the metal stanchions supporting the lift is about five-hundred feel long, a gentle incline down from the bluff above.  A scuffed gravel and macadam parking lot spreads out next to a long wooden shed at the base of the hill.  The shed bears a Coca Cola sign inscribed with the legend Ribs, Rods, and Rock ‘n Roll.  No one is around, no traffic on the winding road, and no one among the scatter of buildings at the bend in the gravel lane ahead.

According to the most recent census

the town of Fort Ransom has 85 residents,but none of them are abroad this morning.  A naked flag pole juts above a white school house, recently painted it seems, and bright in the sunlight.  Some cottages stand along the road and, in the ravines above the valley, a few wooden granaries are half-hidden in the brush.  On the side of the road, next to the flood terraces made by the river, ribbons of land studded with pale, deluge-drowned trees that step down to the Sheyenne, a big white church thrusts its steeple above the faded cottonwoods.  A historical marker in front of the church tells passers-by that the building dates from 1883.  The year before this congregation of the Norwegian Lutheran Church was founded and named after the Sioux standing rock, but there was no building – members met on Sundays at their farmhouses.  When a prominent congregant died, the farm wife of a founder, there was no place for the body to be displayed before burial and, so, the people took up a collection to build an actual church.  The structure has reddish-brown shingles, a high steeple with miniature steeples as finials to the four corners of roof from which tower springs.  A gabled roof next to the steeple tower is surmounted by a bare white cross and, then, a smaller steeple rises over the barn-like shed of the Sunday School.  It’s an intriguing place, plain, but, nonetheless, more imposing than the rest of the town, a village that has no grain elevator and, of course, no train station because it is buried in the river valley in an elbow loop between meanders.  

Bugs

A thousand box-elder bugs with orange stripes on their abdomens decorate the door leading into the church’s Sunday School wing.  The bugs seem comatose and don’t stir, even as I climb the white-washed steps where they are clustered.  To my surprise, the door is open and we can enter, Hannah and Lucas a bit skittish because of the mob of bugs spattered across the door and steps and bleached facade.  

Inside, another door opens into the sanctuary.  The morning light is caught in the amber stained glass and fills the room with honey-colored light.  The wooden pews gleam as if dipped in gold.  At the front of the room, an old altar frames a picture that is now too dark to be legible, some brown and russet stains painted in sooty, blackened oil and a faint, faded halo, lemon-colored but now dimmed to beige-orange.  Who knows what the picture once represented: John the Baptist and Jesus at the Jordan River, the annunciation to Mary, an orgy of flaming creatures, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemene, or Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana, either a martyrdom or a bacchanal? The altar is militant with spiky points and angles and ecclesiastical turrets trimmed in ornate tracery, wood worked into lace, and all of it painted the rich color of vanilla ice cream.  

A modest, but imposing pipe organ sits next to the communion rail.  The sun gently suffusing the room through the dawn-colored stained glass paints yellow the metal pipes.  It’s odd that such a small rural church would own so illustrious a pipe organ.  (Installed, I find in 1911, a Hook & Hastings instrument, Opus 2280 with 9 ranks, 518 pipes, two manuals, 17 registers – ad majorem Dei gloriam.)  A wood frame on which numbers can be displayed reads: Register of Attendance and Offering – Attendance Last Sunday: 11 – Attendance today: 15.  There’s no figure cited for the “Offering Last Sunday.”  Obviously, these numbers don’t count the multitude of box elder bugs piously gathered outside. 

We pass through the silent congregation of motionless bugs.  The town is still completely deserted.

There would be ruins except there are no ruins

The road spirals up a ravine and out of the river valley to the rolling prairie overlooking the Sheyenne.  Markers locate building sites in a meadow enclosed by a fence.  Fort Ransom was located on this flat hilltop between 1867 and 1872.  Two hundred soldiers served here, fighting nothing but mosquitos during their tenure at this outpost.  (Historical accounts describe the mosquitos at the Fort as being particularly relentless, worse, it was said, than the swarms in the Everglades or the forests of Minnesota.)  Only five people associated with the fort died during its existence: three soldiers were killed by sickness and two Indians deputized as mail carriers were caught in a blizzard between this place and Fort Abercrombie, freezing to death on the open prairie.  (The mail was sent east by courier to Fort Abercrombie, then, carried across the Minnesota prairie to St. Cloud where there was a railhead.)  As far as I can see, there’s no trace of the fort remaining.  The grassy field is bare and featureless.

Drone archaeology

Martin sends his drone straight up over the fort site, ascending to a height where it is invisible to our eyes, about 750 feet above us.  The camera on the drone pointed straight down at us reveals the outline of buildings clearly etched in the sod.  We can see the ditch and palisade wall and the long structures of barracks, infirmary, and commissary, all shadows inscribed in the meadow.  None of this can be seen at ground level.

Writing Rock

Another historical marker says that beyond a ridge to the West, a glacial erratic is inscribed with strange pecked marks, grooves and gouges that some interpret to be a message carved in stone 9000 years ago.  A picture of the rock shows a boulder with a flat, altar-like top surface that is etched with small pencil-wide grooves, some of them terminating in curious patterns of cup-shaped indentations.  Fancifully interpreted, the marks engraved in the rock seem to suggest fragments of animals and marks in an unknown alphabet – the register of grooves is a bit like the staves on a musical score.  Perhaps, the rock is supposed to sing when properly interpreted.  Kill-joy geologists attribute the odd markings to a glacier writing the history of the rock’s movements as it was dragged over other stones beneath a vast river of ice.  I would like to hike over the ridge to see the rock but we have other destinations today and there’s no clear path leading westward to the boulder.

A small gravel driveway drops to a pond between the road and the ridge concealing the writing rock.  Some cows are grazing among other glacial erratics strewn on the grassy near side of the ridge.  A little fishing dock extends into the water lined with stoic-looking reeds and cat-tails.

Legends

The Indians who once lived here said that a spirit rose from the Sheyenne River each night, drifted across the grasslands, and, somehow, inscribed messages in the writing rock boulder.  The messages might signify the man that a maiden would marry or the fate of a warrior in an upcoming raid; in any event, the messages were erased nightly, like an etch-a-sketch, and, then, renewed with different content each dawn.  When the White people came, the spirit retreated into the stream bed never to emerge again and the rock was left with its final message, possibly something about the destruction of the Indian people or, perhaps, a warning about global climate change, appropriately inscribed on a boulder dropped by a long vanished glacier, or, maybe, just the elaborate name of the river spirit signed in the stone, in any event a final inscription that no one now can read.

A little to the north of here, where another road dips down into valley, a big conical bluff is called “Pyramid Hill.”  Old Norwegian farmers around Fort Ransom thought the sandy formation was the world’s largest Indian burial mound, an enormous tumulus full of bones and treasure.  But no bones were found and no treasure.  Beliefs die hard and the Norwegian antiquarians, then, declared that the mound was built over where a famous chieftain had fought and died, raised before men had treasure when all were equal.  (Kill-joy geologists again ascribed the curious looking mound to merely natural phenomena.)  Someone erected a bronze statue of a Viking on top of the mound, although no one believed that the Vikings had anything to do with the pyramidal hill, said to be ten-thousand years old.  A storm knocked the Viking off the pointed peak of the hill.  He was restored to his position of prominence, but damaged by the gale, he now tilts backward as if forever being blown by the winds of time into the past.  The figure stands on private land.  If you trespass, someone might take a shot at you. 

A Google Maps Error

Martin is following directions dictated to him by his cell-phone.  We are on his itinerary.  We pass through the village of Lisbon, said to be near the Biesterfeldt site.  (On Main Street, there’s an ancient marquee for the SCENIC theater, founded in 1911 and the oldest continuously operated movie place in North Dakota.)  The Sheyenne River seems to be on all sides of us, encircling the village and the roads, running in a flat, featureless sheet through the little town and, then, making its serpentine way across the hills and valleys to the great level tongue of the Red River Valley.  As we drive East toward the Red River, we seem to pass landmarks near the Biesterfeldt site, but the computer tells us to continue toward Fort Abercrombie.  This seems intuitively wrong to me but it’s best not to challenge instructions rendered by the infallible agency of a computer.

In fact, we have overshot the archaeological site, something that becomes apparent when we reach the big north-south slash of Interstate 29.  So we have to retrace our path to the turn-off to the Biesterfeldt excavation.

Jack Smith

I mention to Martin that I wasn’t able to access Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.  “No problem at all,” Martin says.  He looks at the WAC web-site and says he will send my email a link to the movie.  He taps the code into his phone.

“Do you have it?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

“What does it look like?”

“Someone with a dick on their shoulder,” he tells me.

Sheyenne,

the name of a river tributary to the Missouri in southeastern North Dakota, sounds like “Cheyenne,” the famously predatory and equestrian Indian tribe.  The Cheyenne now live on reservations in south central Montana and Oklahoma.  They were among the tribes allied to “rub out” Custer and the protagonists of the famous 1878 escape from the arid Indian Territory (Oklahoma) reservation by Dull Knife and his band that resulted in a 1500 mile running battle with the United States cavalry and a desperate last stand at Fort Robinson, Nebraska.  To most Americans, the Cheyenne are the archetypal warrior Indians of the High Plains.  

The Sheyenne River is named after the Indians who once resided in earth lodge villages along its banks.  The Cheyenne speak Algonquin unlike the Siouan and Caddo language-families that were prevalent on the great plains.  Originally, the Cheyenne were sedentary, farming Indians, villagers who dwelt in the Midwest with settlements along the Wabash in Indiana.  (Indian tribal groups fought constantly and displaced one another from ancestral dwelling places – these migrations, that seem to have been endemic for thousands of years, were accelerated by the expansion of European settlement.  As Europeans moved westward, their incursion into Indian lands triggered a violent game of “musical chairs” with displaced tribes, often armed with firearms acquired from the invaders, pushing other groups farther and farther to the West.)  The Cheyenne were driven by other tribes out of Indiana westward to Minnesota where they built villages and farms along the Minnesota River, occasionally clashing with the Dakota (Sioux) but most, often, allied with them against the Assiniboine and Ojibway tribes.  More wars ensued and, by 1750, the majority of the Cheyenne had moved to villages along the river named after them in North Dakota.  Cheyenne contact with the Mandan taught them how to make earth lodges and, so, their dwellings along the Sheyenne River took that form.  The largest of these Cheyenne habitations was Biesterfeldt Village, the archaeological site for which we were looking.   

Biesterfeldt 

misspells the word "Biesterfeld"without the final percussive “t”.  Biesterfeld was the family name of a German farmer who owned the pasture above a relict bend in the Sheyenne River, a terrace overlooking a hook-shaped marsh, where the Indian village was once located.  The village occupied the site from about 1724 to 1780 when the earth lodges were finally abandoned.  Biesterfeld acquired the land a hundred years later in 1880s and plowed up some of the village to plant wheat and corn, although traces of, at least, 65 or so earth lodges remained on the grassy terrace in 1908 when the first surveys were made at the location.  More excavations occurred in 1938 and 1971.  Biesterfeld’s heirs sold the remnants of the village site to the Archeological Conservancy, a private non-profit that maintains and protects archaeological sites.  The Conservancy restricted access to the Biesterfeld village site by keeping the location of the property confidential – until 2016, the village site was “address restricted”, meaning that the location was not published.  In that year, the Federal government, recognizing the importance of the archaeological traces there – it’s the type-site for a pre-equestrian Cheyenne village – bought the meadow from the Archaeological Conservancy.  The NHL (National Historical Landmark) agency of the federal government published the site’s location, located in Ransom County near Lisbon, North Dakota. 

GOOGLE maps makes another error   

locating the “Biesterfeldt site” to the immediate west of 140th Avenue SE, a rather tenuous gravel lane that runs parallel to the old oaks and cottonwood thickets lining the Sheyenne River.  In this area, the river flows as a lead-colored twisting stream, only intermittently visible between trees and sumac underbrush.  It’s not easy to reach this location – an asphalt road runs south from State Highway 27 about a mile and a half and, then, a gravel country lane (70th St.) runs westward to dead-end at shabby-looking woods above the river.  Here the north-south track paralleling the river tightens to a couple of sandy ruts, someone’s driveway it seems, that pass through a farmyard about 300 years south of the intersection with 70th Street.  A modest cottage of indeterminate age crouches next to the road, supervising a few tin-roofed sheds.  The place is defended by a heroically sized German shepherd that lunges from the undergrowth, fangs bared, and, then, trots along my Honda CRT barking with the hysterical, high-pitched tenor of a dog that is frightened and, therefore, not to be interfered with.  The dog’s range is about a hundred yards and, after I have passed that mark, the animal squats behind me in the sandy ruts bellowing bloody murder.  

There’s nothing promising along the increasingly faint trail and, so, I turn around in a copse of cottonwoods bent over the river and retrace my way, again activating the dog who pounces toward the car and, then, runs alongside for the obligatory 100 yards comprising its territory.  It’s a handsome-looking beast, but dangerous, I think.  

According to the map, the village site should be right next to the road in a clearing, I suppose, between the dirt lane and the dense brush along the river.  

Drone Disaster

Sumac lines the road, but there is an oval-shaped clearing about 250 feet long and a hundred feet wide.  The clearing is stubbly with yard-high stalks that are woody and very sharp.  Beneath these brown spears, the grass seems to have been burned.  A fence line has been ripped open, presumably to allow access to the historical landmark – at least, this is my surmise.  Metal rungs are stapled into the side of an old oak tree that is shedding yellow and brown leaves.  The ladder looks like something improvised for a diving platform.  At the top, there’s some sheet metal arranged around a plank platform.  It’s a deer stand.  Ominous-looking trespass warnings are tacked to some of the trees adjacent to the clearing.

The archaeological site, probably nothing more than imperceptible ripples in the grass, must be concealed under this spiky growth of dead woody stalks.  A mown trail arcs toward the denser foliage overlooking the river.  Below the terrace with the oval clearing, the ground tilts gently toward another lower shelf above the river.  This lower terrace, closer to the river, is clogged with dead fall and mummified flotsam drifted up against tilted, moribund-looking trees.  Another step below this tangled shelf, the river scoots by between mud and clay banks.  

At the north end of the clearing, the trees arch over an old corncob granary, porous with open slats and a slumped shingle-roof.  Hubris causes Martin to send his drone gliding through the collapsing structure.  But there are wires stretched across the inside of the granary, a dilapidated dangerous-seeming place and the drone gets hung up.  There’s a loud rattle and, then, the robot-helicopter drops onto the lathe floor.  Martin has to gingerly creep into the ruinous granary to retrieve the drone.  The machine isn’t badly damaged but one of its propellers is smashed and will have to be replaced.

Returning to the car parked along the rutted lane, we get off the trail and have to push through chest-high sticker bushes.  It’s some kind of loathsome burdock and my cloth jacket is coated with the big, spiky burrs, stuck tightly to my coat as if adhering by velcro.  When you pull these burs off your garments, little needles stick in your fingers, embedding themselves in your skin.

Biesterfeld or Biesterfeldt

Remember that the farmer who once owned the village site was named Biesterfeld.  Later, we discover that the Google Maps application has sent us to Biesterfeld’s home site, apparently somewhere near the old granary.  (Some heaps of rubble are visible between the ancient trees and there’s a suspicious glade of evergreens among the deciduous trees, probably planted a hundred years ago by the farmer.)  We are at the Biesterfeld farm location.  But this is different from the Biesterfeldt (with a “t”) archaeological site.  

Adirondacks to Cascades

A conspicuous trail runs next to where my car is parked.  A metal post supports a small sign that says that this is the North Country Trail, a path marked by signs shaped as blue diamonds.  The North Country trail starts in Vermont, snakes through upstate New York, and, then, crosses through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and eastern North Dakota.  (The trail is planned to cross North Dakota, Montana, northern Idaho and end in the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, but, apparently, the path hasn’t been completed much to the west of the Sheyenne river where, at this time, hikers find themselves blocked by the little stream in its modest valley – for the time being, the end of the road.

The Expedition is pretty much a bust

and, bristling with burrs on the laces of our tennis shoes, pants’ cuffs, and jackets, we return to the car parked amidst the tall grass on the side of the lane.  The North Country Trail crosses the road a few feet from the back fender of my vehicle.  A couple burr bristles are embedded in the fingers of my right hand and they bother me when I grip the steering wheel.

We drive up to the intersection with 70th where the cartway turns from the river toward the rolling prairie.  Where the roads are sutured together at a patch of scuffed gravel, I see a little sign, 18 inches wide, tacked to a pole.  We stop to inspect the little marker and find that it identifies the pasture next to the intersection as the Biesterfeldt Village site.  The place is on the east side of 140th on a gently sloping meadow.  A lone tree stands at a fence-line, bare with supplicant branches reaching into the blue sky, but, otherwise, the fields are without foliage, nests of matted prairie grass where deer, I suppose, or antelope have rested overnight.  The North Country trail, a trampled footpath about six feet wide, slips sideways over the pastures.  Now and then, the trail uncovers little cobbles of field stone where animals have burrowed into the sod.

Biesterfeldt is a historic site,

as opposed to a place that is prehistoric.  Fur traders who plied the upper Missouri remarked that there was a big Cheyenne village on the tributary that came to be named (not surprisingly) the Sheyenne River.  Some of these traders visited the village but didn’t leave clear accounts as to its location.  Only one village was known on the river, on the property of the Biesterfeld farm.  (An aerial survey conducted in the mid-1950's didn’t locate any other sites – although the survey was done by examining pictures with a magnifying glass, aerial photographs taken at a scale that made their inspection difficult.)  Since only one village was known to exist in the area, by a process of elimination the historic site mentioned by fur traders was correlated with the earth-lodge indentations and ditches on the Biesterfeld land.  

An old oral tradition collected from Cheyenne elders in 1914 recalled that a large war party set out from “the village on the river” on an expedition against an enemy tribe.  In the middle of the day, the sun went black and the warriors were terrified, regarding the eclipse as a bad omen and returning in panic to the village.  Astronomical analysis confirms that there were three total eclipses in the area in 1679, 1724, and 1811 respectively.  1679 is too early – at that time, the Sheyenne were still living along the upper Minnesota River near Big Stone Lake.  The 1811 eclipse occurred after the village was deserted.  Therefore, the date that the sun darkened in the middle of the afternoon must be May 22, 1724, suggesting that the village existed at that time.  

In 1840, an old trapper recalled a story that he had been told many years earlier, probably around 1798.  An Ojibway chief told him that his tribe had lived in peace with the Cheyenne for generations but coveted the produce from their gardens.  From time to time, the young men suggested that a war party be mounted against the Cheyenne to loot their caches of produce.  However, the older men rejected these ideas until a hunting party of Ojibway vanished in the area of the Sheyenne River.  The younger men argued that their hunters had fallen prey to the Cheyenne and that they were obliged to retaliate.  A sortie was organized and the “village on the river” was attacked.  The informant Chief told the fur trapper that the Cheyenne were caught by surprise and slaughtered except for three women who were captured.  The Ojibway chief, named Sheshepaskat (“Sugar”), said that a number of horses were stolen from the place and that the earth lodges were set afire.  The trapper in 1840 thought that this event had occurred in 1740, but this was inconsistent with the age of Sheshepaskat who claimed to have participated in the attack and was about 60 in 1798 when he told the story.  

Biesterfeldt village was burned.  All of the earth lodges excavated on the site had charred timber supports.  Furthermore, horse bones were found around the village corroborating the idea that the Cheyenne then possessed horses.  The Cheyenne didn’t have herds of horses until after 1743 – the first horses appeared west of the Missouri around 1739.  This means that the attack that destroyed the village must have occurred after 1743, probably around 1775.  (Of course, there may have been another village on Sheyenne as yet undiscovered where these events occurred.)

There are variants on Sheshepaskat’s account.  In some versions of the story, most of the people in the village had departed to chase a herd of nearby bison and, so, only a few old women were found in the village when the attack occurred.  As of 1840, when the old fur trapper Cadotte, the source of these stories. was interviewed there was yet living a woman raised in the Rainy River House of the Ojibway in far northern Minnesota who was said to be a descendant of one of the prisoners taken in the raid on Cheyenne village. 

The Cheyenne had a different story about the encounter with the Ojibway.  According to their account, an old woman was walking at night outside the palisade protecting the village near the bluff on the west side of town.  (This is where the terrace on which the village is built drops down to an old abandoned river meander where there were some “living springs.”) The old woman saw Ojibway warriors crouched in the reeds.  She threw her torch down at them and raised the alarm.  (In a variant version of the story, Ojibway skulking next to the palisade saw the old woman, gave chase, and, when she threw the torch off the bluff, followed it tumbling down the steep escarpment where they were easily slaughtered.)  The Cheyenne rushed out of the village and killed the Ojibway, acquiring from them “a great quantity of steel knives” and some firearms – the first such instruments known to the Cheyenne.  The thwarted attack alarmed the tribal leaders and they decided to abandon the village and move farther to the West.  (Earth lodge villages were sometimes burnt when they were deserted and this may account for the evidence of fire at the site.)

In any event, the Biesterfeldt village was never really lost to historical memory.  Throughout the early 19th century, people periodically visited the abandoned town, apparently a place that exercised a strong claim on the imaginations of the Indians living nearby.  After the Dakota Conflict in Minnesota in 1862, the missionary to the Sioux, Stephen Riggs visited the ruins of the village on the Sheyenne in the summer of 1863.  At that time, Riggs was accompanying the United States army that was pursuing the  hostiles through the Dakota Territory and to the West of the Missouri.  Riggs visited the ruined village and found that several earth-lodges were “still standing, although dilapidated and in the (last) stages of decay.”  Riggs described the site as consisting or one or two acres densely settled with a town of earth lodges and some dwellings that he called “suburban” not so deeply incised into the sod beyond the “city limits.”  On one side of the site, there was a “swale” with steep sides that descended to a place where there “were springs of living water.”  Riggs counted about 60 to 65 earth lodges still distinctly visible within the perimeter of the village.  His account is an accurate description of the Biesterfeldt site as it later came to be known.   

The village site was described in scientific literature in 1890 accompanied by a sketch map of the ruins. The first formal survey of Biesterfeldt village was completed in 1908 resulting in a good diagram showing the fortification ditch, the bluff overlooking the old river bed on the north, and craters representing 62 earth lodges.  No formal excavation was authorized on the land owned by Louis Biesterfeld until the Summer of 1938.  At that time, archaeological work was supervised by a prominent scholar in Plains prehistory, William Duncan Strong.  Most of what we now know about the site derives from his work, not published, however, until 1971 in the series Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology (No. 15).  

The Dismal River People 

were an Indian tribe discovered by William Duncan Strong.  Strong’s publication of findings relating to this cultural complex made him in well-known in archaeological circles.  His best known book is an Introduction to Nebraska Archeology published by the Smithsonian Institute in 1935.  In that text, Professor Strong identifies villages in the Dismal River basin in Nebraska’s Sand Hills occupied by Athabaskan-speaking people who seem to have evolved into the Apache tribes known in the West in historical times.  (Athabaskan-speaking people lived throughout northern Canada and Labrador, places where Strong undertook much field work.  The Athabaskan proto-Apaches were entirely isolated from the kin in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, living in villages primarily in Nebraska and Kansas with some outliers in Colorado.)   Strong’s work on the High Plains represents the least exotic of his many field surveys and excavations: he worked extensively in Peru at the Nazca sites and at the Moche ruins north of Lima, dug in Mayan ruins in Mexico and Honduras (where he shot off his finger accidentally), and did field work in the Arctic where he studied the Frobisher colony site.  (Sir Martin Frobisher, an English explorer and privateer, established a colony northeast of Hudson Bay on Baffin Island which is now known as Qikataluk in Nunavit province in Arctic Canada.  Some ruins have been found at Frobisher’s colony and a mining pit.  Duncan led an excavation there in 1927 that unearthed three pieces of ceramic dating between 1575 to 1578.)

In the 1971 Smithsonian publication on the Biesterfeldt site, the author, W. Raymond Wood, says that the excavation in North Dakota was Strong’s last field work.  This is manifestly untrue – Strong continued to do field work through the forties and fifties, often in difficult and remote locations in South America and Canada.  

Strong is the chief proponent and one of the principal founders of the “direct historical approach” to archaology.  This strategy for understanding the past relies upon locating a site for study known in historic times.  All facts available as to the site and its people described through historical contacts are 

gathered and collated.  Then, excavation is undertaken to confirm historical data and, further, uncover evidence as to the evolution of culture at this site from inception to the period chronicled by historical records – the objective is to identify cultural traits linking historical and prehistoric people.  The study of the Biesterfeldt site published by Wood in 1971 exemplifies this approach, carefully documenting historical accounts relating to the villages on the Sheyenne and upper Missouri, gathering oral traditions, and, then, correlating this information with evidence excavated from the site.  The thrust of Woods’ work, building upon Strong’s field notes, is to identify the cultural evidence at the site as Cheyenne and, then, construct a history and “proto-history” of the people who lived at Biesterfeldt.  (This is the inverse of Strong’s methodology in discovering the constellation of cultural features identified as Dismal River or Dismal River Basin – in that work, Strong studied small villages in the Nebraska Sand Hills, determined them to have Athabaskan features, and, then, developed a proto-history and history linking the Dismal River people with the Apaches.)  

Strong was 39 when he supervised the field work at Biesterfeldt.  He had just begun his tenure at Columbia University where he taught until the end of his life.  Born in Portland, Strong did his undergraduate and graduate work at University of California at Berkeley, then, taught at the University of Nebraska from1927 to 1931.  He worked at the Smithsonian until 1937 when he began his work with Columbia.  Strong died unexpectedly in 1962, one day before his 63rd birthday.  

Strong’s obituary, published at pages 1102 to 1111 of the American Anthropologist (65, 1963), tells us that the deceased lived on Riverside Avenue in Manhattan and that he kept a notebook listing birds and other wild animals that visited the park that he could see from his apartment window.  He read “deeply” in books on natural history and had a summer place upstate where he also listed animal encounters.  Strong must have been a terrible public speaker.  His obituary notes that his lectures were not “by any means highly articulate or brilliant” – a gentle locution that suggests that his academic lectures were incoherent, inarticulate and likely uninspiring.  However, anthropology, like many other studies, is a discipline passed on by master-disciple relationships.  Strong was inspired by his teacher, the pioneering American anthropologist, A. L. Kroeber.  In turn, he supervised more than 40 doctoral dissertations.

A photograph shows William Duncan Strong (he answered to “Duncan”).  The archaeologist is bald with large, somewhat inert eyes and neatly trimmed beard with a very black moustache.  (Is the moustache dyed?)  His bibliography runs to three-and-a-half pages in tiny print.  Neither the obituary nor the bibliography mentions anything at all about his work at the Biesterfeldt site, field work that he seems to have mentioned only in passing in one paper published in 1940.  (The field work was a collaboration between the University of North Dakota and Columbia.)  The Sheyenne River valley near Lisbon, North Dakota can’t compare with the Atacama Desert or the highlands of Honduras or the frigid waters of the Davis Strait at Baffin Island.   

Field Work

Duncan Strong kept a field diary of activities at Biesterfeldt.  The diary entries are written in a spiral notebook.

Strong began work on July 8, 1938.  His team consisted of nine students from Columbia University.  Two students from the University at Bismarck also participated.  Strong writes that the camp at the site was finished during the morning hours, finishing construction of tents and “rain trenches”.  (I’m not sure what is meant by “rain trenches,” although I assume the phrase describes canals dug in the sod to channel water away from the tents.)  In the afternoon, the team worked to establish the boundaries of the village’s palisade trench, opened excavations on a house, and dug open a cache.  The soil was littered with heavy mussel shells, mauls and shards of pottery similar to contemporaneous Mandan and Hidatsa ceramics.  Everyone swam in the river in the evening where there was “hard” beach and “water about six feet deep.”  Swimming was a popular pastime – usually the archaeological crew swam around twilight.  

On Saturday, July 9, the crew went to Lisbon for the evening, presumably to drink at local taverns and flirt with the girls in town.  (The team, after all, was mostly comprised of young men.)  Mr. Biesterfeld made an appearance in the meadow, expressing concern that his heirs distrusted the crew and were concerned that the farmer was “wasting” the property to their detriment.  New excavations were deferred for several days until these concerns were ameliorated.  Strong agreed to backfill the craters that his team were digging in the field and, on the 15th, Biesterfeld authorized expansion of the work.  That night, the sky throbbed with a “fine display of the Northern Lights.”  The crew dined in Mlinor another nearby town.  On Sunday, July 17, the crew played baseball with the “local nine”.  The Columbia boys were winning until the ninth inning when they were “swamped” by the locals.  The ending score was “local nine” 24 and archaeologists 15.  The next week, a car failed and had to be towed to Lisbon.  Strong negotiated with Biesterfeld to excavate some grave mounds on property near his house.  Biesterfeld was reluctant and would not grant permission for this work – “Too bad but that’s that,” Strong wrote in his notebook.  

On Tuesday, July 26, Strong drove into the town of Fisher where he gave a talk to the village Kiwanis.  Apparently, someone at that club meeting told the newspaper in Lisbon about the excavation and, the next day, Strong met a newspaperman in that town and gave him an interview.  On the last day at the site, Strong went into the hills at the nearby Coteaus des Prairies, hiking the prairie with a local “collector” – that is, pot hunter (we would call him a looter today.)  The collector showed Strong many grave mounds and an old Indian fort surrounded by a circular ditch.  Strong wrote: “There is much work to be done here.”  

Features 

at the Biesterfeldt site are illustrated in photographic plates published with the Strong’s findings in the 1971 Smithsonian volume.  Plate five (p.83) shows a shirtless, lean-looking man with sloped shoulders and a flat chest and belly.  The man is holding a scale marker between his hands and poses looking down the trench cut into the sod.  The picture is labeled as showing the fortification ditch cross section, viewed with camera pointed northeast toward the north wall of the excavation labeled “Trench 1. The man is bald with tufts of hair projecting above his ears.  He wears scuffed work boots and black trousers.  I presume this figure is William Duncan Strong.  His eyes are hidden behind dark sunglasses. He casts no shadow from which I conclude that this picture was taken on a cloudy day when the sun was hidden in the sky.  I have examined the picture with a magnifying glass to see if the man is missing a finger, but the angle of the camera shows only thumbs and pointer fingers, all of which are intact.

Plate 6 (b) shows the same man, this time squatting at the edge of “excavated House 7; view north.”  Again the figure is shirtless, crouched in a peculiar posture with his legs bent and his forearms crossed.  The man’s head is tilted downward and he seems to be defecating as if in one of Amos Vogel’s subversive films, but this can’t be the case – another man is a few feet away, in front of the bald squatting figure wearing sunglasses; this second fellow is attired in shirt and a crumpled white hat.  (The man with the hat is visible on the preceding page, squatting in the middle of excavated House 16 – I wonder if this fellow isn’t Louis Biesterfeld).  In this picture showing House 7 (p. 84), the sun is almost directly overhead and seems very bright.  Both figures cast sharply delineated if very foreshortened shadows onto the earth shoved out of the House 7.

Finds

included stone axes, bifaces, bone and wooden knives, chalcedony and chert flakes, bone abraders, bison scapula hoes, bone whistles and batons, manos and “milling stones” (Strong’s word for the metate used with the mano to grind corn).  There were stone and iron arrowpoints, and various trade goods including a brass trigger guard for a firearm, glass and copper trade beads and a porcelain teacup handle.  Strong remarked that the number of trade goods discovered at the site was comparatively small for the era, implying that the Cheyenne who lived in Biesterfeldt village were relatively isolated from the fur trade and other European commerce.  Large refuse pits full of bison bone and hammer-stones used to break open the skeletal material for the extraction of marrow were unearthed.  The earth lodges were configured with vertical posts against which “leaners” were poised.  The lodges were typical of the dwellings of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara on the upper Missouri, although, in some cases, slightly larger.  (In any event, the lodges were roomy, solidly built, and impressively proportioned.)  A ditch as wide as 20 meters enclosed the village tightly packed with lodges.  The ditch seems to have been built outside of a palisade.  (Historical accounts suggest that these ditches were dug by the tribe’s women and children.)  The ditch forms an arc enclosing the village and terminates at both ends on the steep bank dropping down to the elbow-shaped dry river bed.  Accordingly, the village was defended on all sides – either by the sheer bluff above the dry loop in the river or by the semi-circular ditch and palisade.  (The design of the village is very similar to the Menoken site near Bismarck where a much smaller towns was constructed at the bend of a dry creek bed and similarly equipped with a defensive palisade, however with bastions – no bastions were found at Biesterfeldt.)

More than 3000 shards of ceramic were catalogued.  The pots were typical Cheyenne gritware, grey utilitarian vessels incised with repeating chevron patterns and with thick cord-wrapped rims.  Several catlinite (pipestone) pipes were found in fragmentary form.  About 40 cache pits were mapped, most of them empty.  Two inhumations were uncovered in House 10 – these were bundle burials dug into the ground about three feet under the soil surface in the entry way to the earth lodge.  The burials represent two individuals, although the skeletal remains are incomplete: there were two skulls, femurs and long bones, ribs, and a foot.  A fox mandible pendant was discovered as well as a necklace made from fish operculum.  (Fish operculum are skeletal structures supporting the gills of bony fish – they have a pleasing leaf-shaped geometry and were often used in making jewelry for personal adornment; you can buy a fish operculum pendant offered for sale on the Internet as I write.)  Some smooth gaming stones were uncovered and Strong’s crew found several dense balls of colored clay in mollusc shells – apparently, these were pigment kits.  

A clearly defined lens of grey-white ash marked the burning of the village.  The beams and leaners in the earth lodges were charred and the vertical posts were displaced and mostly missing.  Lodge structure was defined on the basis of the post molds visible as darkened indentations in the excavation trenches.     

Strong remarks that the village was equivalent in form and material culture with an Arikara settlement.  He compares the site to a Ponca village excavated in east Nebraska, the so-called Na’za or Ponca Fort.  Without historic attribution, Strong observes that the Biesterfeldt site could easily be construed as either a Mandan or Arikara village.  We know the place was inhabited by the Cheyenne based on historical accounts describing a large village of those people in this area.  But Strong “reminds” us that tribal identification of these villages “must be approached with extreme caution.”

The North Country Trail

curves through the windy meadow.  The grass rustles in the breeze, but, otherwise, it is silent.  A couple of indistinct ridges protrude like ribs from pasture and I confidently identify them as middens or refuse heaps.  (I’m wrong.)  We continue a couple hundred yards to where the footpath ascends onto a knoll.  A bend of marsh runs along the base of the knoll beneath the 20 foot brow of bluffs.  It’s getting late and, probably, we should return to Fargo.  “Let’s go back,” I say.

But Martin has a sharp eye and says that we should walk another hundred feet up the slight grade onto the little hill.  I follow him and, suddenly, we are in the middle of Biesterfeldt village.  The steep hillside along the north and facing the Sheyenne is the sheer slope above the old river course, an elbow bend that is now filled with tall, dark brown reeds.  Indentations marking the earth lodges can be seen clearly, whole groups of grassy craters along the edge of the hill and extending up across the knoll.  The round pits are about two feet deep and vividly defined as patterns in the grass.  The defensive ditch cuts through the side of the bluff, an obvious gouge in the field.  Smaller pits perforate the meadow, some of them dangerously deep and dark, like the burrows of a large animal.  (These holes seem to be collapsed cache pits.)  The outlines of the lodges are remarkable clear and distinct and, in fact, the collection of round craters, ditches, and cache holes looks exactly like the map of the site made in 1908.

Once you see the village, it’s pattern is evident.  Unfortunately, Martin’s drone is disabled.  I would guess that the site would be spectacular from the air.  

We traipse around in the tall grass for a half hour.  The car is parked at the sign marker about a quarter mile away.  Some big birds soar overhead.  The roads and country lanes are completely still and there is no traffic, no visitors, not even any farmers about.  At intervals, we hear the crack of a rifle shot.  Hunters are around somewhere, but we can’t see them.

Supernaturals

As we make our way back up the North Country trail to the car, we come upon the fractured mandibles of some kind of animal.  The bones are bright red with blood, still wet with gore that hasn’t yet coagulated.  There are two matching lower jaw bones, each about eight inches long and rimmed with molar-shaped teeth.  A the jaw bones are resting in the center of the trail over which we passed about a half hour earlier.  A few yards down the footpath, the point of the lower jaw where the bones were sutured together lies on the ground.  The detached front of the jaw is without teeth and seems clotted with pale, creamy fat.  

How did we fail to see these gruesome-looking relics as we came down the trail toward the Biesterfeldt village?  And why are the bones covered in fresh, bright red blood?  And where is the rest of the creature from whom these bones were broken?

No doubt, there’s a natural explanation but the whole episode seems a bit uncanny.  

Devolution 

is a loaded word and, probably, not the proper name for what happened at Biesterfeldt village.  In the course of a generation, less than a half-century, the Cheyenne Indians living at this place abandoned their villages and earth lodges surrounded by gardens to become predatory equestrian nomads.  Before 1750, the Cheyenne hunted bison by swarming from their village, surrounding the animals on foot, and killing them with lances.  Twenty-five years later, the Cheyenne were wealthy with herds of horses and pursued the herds of bison as mounted hunters.  Of course, the Cheyenne later became famous as the highly accomplished light cavalry of the plains, engaging in hit-and-run combat with White settlers and the United States Army.  Mounted raiders struck suddenly, snatched loot, and, then, escaped on their swift ponies across the plains.  By 1800, the Cheyenne had completely eschewed their previous sedentary farming villages and become famous as lethal marauders.  

Henry Lewis Morgan thought that the history of the American Indians was the ascent from savagery through barbarism toward civilization.  Nomads became farmers who became confederacies of city-dwelling artisans and traders.  The Mandan, allied with the industrious Hidatsa and Arikara, for instance, were interrupted in this process at the very height of their ambitious trading economy when they were decimated by small pox.  What happened with the Cheyenne reverses Morgan’s developmental course.   The Cheyenne found it more efficient to hunt bison from horseback and, thereby, acquired the skills to become effective predatory brigands.  Farming and village life couldn’t compete with nomadic raiding.  The remarkable aspect of this adaptive process is that it occurred so quickly.  The Biesterfeldt village is a place founded by farmers and, ultimately, abandoned fifty years later when the people had become efficient, and fearsome, mounted warriors.

Ethnologists remark that the habits and traditions of the Cheyenne were, more or less, completely synthesized from the cultures of other tribes that they encountered on the Dakota plains.  The Cheyenne learned to be cavalry from the Sioux.  They borrowed their Sun Dance ceremonies from the spectacular self-torture practiced by the Mandan in their Ocipe rituals.  Their religious customs can be traced to contact with other tribes and the earth lodge dwellings at Biesterfeldt were clearly built on the model of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the upper Missouri.  

The Cheyenne weren’t able to establish a trading economy because that niche was occupied by the wealthy and numerous Mandan.  It’s probable that by 1775, the Cheyenne were ranging as far west as the Black Hills in pursuit of buffalo.  As time progressed, the villages along the rivers in what is now eastern North Dakota came under increasing attack by Sioux raiders and the Cheyenne, understanding that they couldn’t beat back the Dakota from their fortified towns, re-invented themselves as predatory nomads themselves.  Not all of the Cheyenne were willing to give up their sedentary farming life for violent raiding.  Mandan chronicles and oral tradition suggest that a number of Cheyenne migrated to their villages at Fort Clark and Knife River and were “adopted” by the tribe.  However, the majority of the tribe converted themselves to nomads and ranged west of the Missouri as far the Big Horn Mountains.  

Horticultural Indians reinventing themselves as the “fighting Cheyenne” proved to be beneficial to the tribe.  The Cheyenne that lived at Biesterfeldt village were part of a small group of Algonquin-speaking Indians, completely isolated from their eastern woodland kin.  Their prospects on the violent Great Plains would have been problematic at best.  But competition with the Sioux drove the Cheyenne westward toward the Black Hills.  When the first great wave of small pox swept the upper Missouri in 1781, cutting the Mandan population in half, the Cheyenne were mostly gone, ranging the prairie on horseback and far from the centers of infection.  Similarly, when the Mandan were, more or less, annihilated in the pestilence of 1837, the Cheyenne were no longer anywhere near the killing fields where the earth lodge Indians perished.  

As late as 1850, very old Cheyenne women were known to plant gardens of corn near their encampments, a fading memory of their former life as farming villagers.  Cheyenne elders said that the people had come from a river village where they ate nothing but fish.  The elders recalled that later the people moved to a place with reeds, that is, a marsh near a large and fine lake.  (The ancestral place with reeds is a constant in American Indian culture – for instance, the great civilizations in Mexico and Central America all had cultural traditions that their races had emerged from caves, a sort of womb in the earth, but, then, advanced to civilization at a “place with reeds and a lake,” Tula as it was called, the legendary home of the Toltecs, for example or Tenochtitlan at present-day Mexico City.)  The lake, the Cheyenne recalled, was long and narrow and, at its Western shore, there was a “fine prairie” teeming with bison.  On that prairie, the people tamed and rode horses and became great warriors.  

Paradise on Earth

A man named Alexander Henry the Younger traveled in the territory that is now eastern North Dakota in 1800.  He was a gifted writer and left a detailed account of the landscape and fauna in that country.  

Henry noted accurately that Sheyenne river rose from a small marsh to the west of Lac du Diable (Devils Lake or “Spirit Lake” to the Dakota).  At its head waters the stream was very small and narrow, lined by a few willows but otherwise exposed on the open prairie.  The Sioux and Ojibway competed to kill off the grizzly bears that lived in the area – a man could achieve great fame either in war or by combat with one of the ferocious beasts.  But the area around Devils Lake was disputed territory – the Ojibway killed Sioux hunting parties in that territory and the Sioux reciprocated.  As a result, for a few generations, no one dared hunt around Lac du Diable, notwithstanding the abundant game in that area.  As a consequence, grizzly bears flourished at the headwaters of the Sheyenne in wetlands only 15 miles west of the big lake.  Travel could be dangerous as a result of the great numbers of huge bears and packs of wolves that Henry described as “numerous and insolent”.  

Farther to the south, the Sheyenne river was more broad, a serene stream dammed at intervals by beavers and full of snags.  The watercourse was not navigable except by canoe.  Henry said the Sheyenne was a “veritable nursery of bison and red deer (elk)”.  Raccoon tracks marked the mud beaches along the Sheyenne and the sky was full of waterfowl.  The bison were so numerous that the “bare ground was more trampled by these cattle than the gate to a farmyard.”  The isolated trees standing on the prairie had all their bark rubbed “perfectly smooth” by bison and, at the base of these trees, there were great tangles of “wool and hair.”  As the men paddled down the Sheyenne, they saw fat otters slipping into the water and the woods were full of furbearing fishers (marten).  At times, the prairie writhed with millions of mice that ate the expedition’s tents and, even, swallowed their beads for trade with the Indians.  Hawks and owls fired through the air like projectiles swooping down to feast on the rodents.  Grouse were abundant (Henry calls them “pheasants) as were ducks and geese and herons.  The herons ate sunfish that Henry calls “Bream” and the Ojibway showed the White men how to fish for sturgeon, catfish, walleye perch, pike and mooneye herring – all of which could be readily caught in nets.

Henry remarked that: “This is a delightful country and, were it not for the perpetual wars, the natives might be the happiest people on earth.”

Pedantry again

(Alexander Henry the Younger was a fur trader active in the old Northwest between Lake Superior and the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific coast.  Nothing is known about his early life.  He appears first in the historical record around 1791 collecting furs from the Ojibway and Assiniboine in the lower Red River Valley of what is now Manitoba and North Dakota.  (He was one of the original founders of the Pembina trading post.)  He kept a journal as to his “doings” that is an important record of Indian customs and interactions between native people and fur traders in the Northwest.  He seems to have had three children with an Ojibway woman “who was in the habit of living with (him) since 1792" – “reputed children” as he calls them in his Last Will and Testament.  Later, for political and economic reasons, Henry married the daughter of great chief of the Ojibway nation Liard Ah-ne-him-mish (Liard Little Shell Cottonwood).  This woman also had kin among the Sioux, thereby establishing an alliance between the fur trading company and both of the dominant tribal powers on the eastern High Plains.  Henry opposed the marriage but seems to have been forced into it.  He reports with “dismay” that he was unable to force his wife to “leave the bed chamber.”  In any event, he didn’t spend much time at home.

During his travels, Henry survived by trading rum for dried meat and pemmican.  In his journals, however, he decries the effect of alcohol on the Indians, causing them to “degenerate” from “their ancient customs and manners”.  He noted that the Indians were prone to drinking bouts resulting in internecine murder, a vice that he attributed to “intercourse” with Europeans.  Traveling up the Missouri in 1807, he was shown an American flag in the possession of the Mandan at the Knife River villages (25 miles north of today’s Bismarck).  The chief who showed him the banner said that he had been given it by Lewis and Clark.  

Henry worked for the North West Company.  At that time, the American Fur Company operated the trade concessions around the outlet of the Columbia on the Pacific.  When that firm sold its fort at the mouth of the Columbia River to the agents of the North West Company, Astoria (named after John Jacob Astor, the principal of the American Fur company) was re-named Fort George.  Henry was assigned operations at Fort George and worked with Chinook Indians to implement the fur trade along the coast.  In 1814, a sailing vessel, the Isaac Todd anchored near Fort George.  Henry with another agent and five sailors were conveyed on an open boat from the inlet at the fort to the ship.  The boat capsized and Henry drowned.  He was probably in his early 40's).  

Ditches

Henry’s description of the Mandan as being pale-skinned with blue eyes led to the belief that these people were descended from the Welsh.

In his journal, Henry noted that the Mandan and other earth lodge dwellers dug ditches in which their women and children would shelter during fighting with enemy raiders.  The Dictionary of Canadian Biography observes that the Metis followed this custom and, as late as 1885, this defensive tactic was employed to protect noncombatants during the Northwest Rebellion led by Louis Riel.  The Biesterfeldt site is notable for its deep and broad fortification ditches.  

Winter is hard

and, who knows if I will survive another cold season.  The Dakota measured time in “Winter Counts,” creating a pictograph for each Winter (or the events of the year in that “Winter”).  The Anglo-Saxons, also dwellers in a cold climate, counted years by Winters.  Anyone can survive a Spring or Fall or, even, the heat of Summer – but it takes luck as well as skill and preparation to make it through a Winter. 

I drop off the kids at the apartment where they live with their grandmother in Fargo.  There’s time to hug the little boy goodbye.  Hannah has been complaining about having to pee for an hour now and so she rushes into the toilet, shutting the door behind her.  An old cat sits on the couch and a dog with three legs hobbles toward me, wagging her tail a little uncertainly.  

This is my last visit for awhile.  The book about Reynard Fox sits on the kitchen table next to Kipling’s Jungle Book.

On the lonely prairie

at Standing Rock cemetery, the graves are scattered under shade trees mostly stripped of their red and amber leaves.  Under a headstone carved into lump of eroded lamb, these words are written: “Philip – How brief was thy stay / ‘Til Death called you away.”  The child lived only three months.  

Against the cast-iron fence, there’s a heavy bronze medallion leaning against the metal posts.  It’s an monument from 1883, intact in all respects but no longer affixed to the grave that it was supposed to mark.  Out here things can become untethered and lost.

Chili Relleno

At Montrose, on the way back to Austin, I check into the Super 8 Motel.  The Indian proprietor, probably from Mumbai, regards me with suspicion.  No one ever checks into his motel with good intent.

I eat supper at the Mexican restaurant across the parking lot.  When I order a cheese-filled chile relleno, the waiter (who is also the owner) tells me that he loves chile relleno and eats one every day.  When I hold my fork in my fingertips, a little thorn-like needle, the remnant of a burr, in my middle finger pains me.   

Mario Montez 

is a flaming creature.  He plays an exotic-looking flamenco dancer in Jack Smith’s movie.  Montez was born in Puerto Rico in 1935, but came to the United States when he was eight.  He was raised in Spanish Harlem.  

It isn’t clear how Jack Smith met the actor, then named Rene Rivera.  Both Smith and Rivera revered Maria Montez, the Latina actress famous for lurid roles such as Cobra Woman (1941) and dubbed “the Queen of Technicolor.”  Maria Montez, it is said, played all of her parts as a sort of drag queen even though she was a woman.  Smith said he would make Rivera into a star and cast him as “Mario Montez” in Flaming Creatures.  

Later, Andy Warhol made several films with Mario Montez.  In Harlot, Montez lasciviously devours a banana – it’s said to be the highlight of the picture.  In Warhol’s Screen Test #2, a sadistic director orders Montez to repeat the word “diarrhea” twenty times.  Montez wasn’t close to Warhol and, perhaps, even disliked him.  For most of the seventies, Montez worked in partnership with Charles Ludlam in the Ridiculous Theater where he performed in many plays, generally acting female parts.

During his time in Manhattan, Mario Montez worked as a civil servant and lived in fear that his mother and other family members would discover that he had appeared on-stage and screen in drag.  When Flaming Creatures became briefly notorious, with police regularly busting screenings and people lined up around the block to see the film, Montez was very concerned that his family and friends in Spanish Harlem would learn that he was featured in the movie.  Montez, himself, never used the word “drag” but called dressing as a woman “getting into costume.”  I use the pronoun “he” for Montez because the actor didn’t identify as a woman, but, rather, performed as a man in women’s garments – he is, perhaps, more akin to a Kabuki (male) actor specializing in female roles than a drag queen.  

For many years, Jack Smith worked on a film called Normal Love.  Mario Montez appeared in that film as a mermaid, but the picture was never completed.  Some beautiful sepia stills show Montez sinking into a froth of pale mauve foam.  

In 1977, Montez tired of the downtown scene.  He was losing his looks and decided to leave New York.  He moved to Orlando, Florida where he worked for many years in clerical jobs.  Presumably, none of his employers knew that they were in the presence of one of Andy Warhol’s most incandescent “superstars,” the most gorgeous of the “flaming creatures.”  Montez was very pious and, like Warhol, attended Mass almost daily.  He told Warhol that he was pretty sure that God didn’t approve of his acting but that the All-Mighty’s anger wasn’t so great as to “strike (him) dead.”  Therefore, he was confident that he would be forgiven his transgressions.

In 2001, film critic J. Hoberman published a monograph about Flaming Creatures.  Five years later, a documentary about Jack Smith, the auteur of Flaming Creatures was released to much acclaim – this film is called Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (directed by Mary Jordan).  The documentary revived interest in Mario Montez and he made the circuit of museums in Europe and the United States appearing at screenings of Flaming Creatures or The Destruction of Atlantis.  (He was one of the last participants left alive from the 1963 film.)  Montez retired to Key West where he seems to have lived happily with his domestic partner.  He died in the aftermath of a stroke in September 2013.  

Computer creatures

 Martin’s link to the WAC website lets me screen Flaming Creatures on my computer.  Here is the link: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2021/collector-playlist-flaming-creatures-and-sex fish   Flaming Creatures 

is mostly illegible, foggy with faces and lips faintly discernible under what seems to be the debris of ages.  The film was shot on distressed, Army Surplus Kodak stock and it was a ruin even when first developed and is, now, doubly a ruin, scratched and scraped and nicked and pecked as if dragged for aeons under the ice of a glacier.

Through the mist, you can see a penis wiggling like an earthworm exposed to the cold wind.  A breast wobbles and there are glimpses of pubic hair.  A figure dressed as a flamenco dancer bites a rose between her teeth as she whirls about with a creature wearing a fez.  Paramecium have infiltrated the chiffon and silk draperies and a fly is caught under layers of the half-translucent stuff.  Mouths open like pits, their rims smeared with lipstick and over-exposed figures, edges blazing into flares of light, writhe under a vase that seems to ejaculate a foam of white flowers.  I’m not sure what I’m seeing.  There are craters and ridges but they are indistinct, the suggestions of traces, fading memories of memories thrice remote, the wreckage of an era impossibly distant, an utopian community of drag queens and their admirers rendered as extinct as the Mandans by time and AIDS.  

October 31, 2021