1.
Not one of the 332 miles between Austin and Fargo was without rain. The day was grey, cold, wet. Distances receded into veils of mist. Rain hid the ends of roads.
2.
I thought it would be, perhaps, preferable to spend my visit indoors. Was there a museum in Grand Forks that we could visit? Bismarck and the State Historical Society were too remote – three hours away in the fog of falling rain. Maybe there was a movie that would amuse my grandchildren, Hannah and Lucas. But nothing interesting was playing. My son, Martin suggested that we visit some battlefields from the Indian War of 1863. The places weren’t marked on a map but he said that he knew how to reach them.
3.
Next to my hotel: a flat vacant lot with lagoons of melt-water goose-pimply with falling rain. Shoals of garbage and ruts around the dumpster, more ruts squeezing up parallel columns of black mud in the puddles, plastic bottles, fast food sacks melting in the water, horizontal slabs of featureless grey sky fallen to earth as reflected in the shallow lagoons.
4.
Pelting rain on the way west on I94. Roadside ditches brimming over with water in long estuaries running beside the freeway. Fenceposts peeping timorously above the flood. At Valley City, the Sheyenne River has overflowed its banks and a community of sheds and outbuildings are all swamped – obscure outflows and eddies and whirls in people’s drowned backyards.
5.
West of Jamestown, the freeway skirts glacial potholes, lakes standing between barren hills, always one of two of these bodies of water in view from the highway. The prairie is naked between the ponds and narrow water-filled slots in the hills. Braided white-water rapids pouring down the sloping ditches next to the road.
6.
Medina Rest Stop – mile marker 224, seventy miles east of Bismarck. The rest area occupies a triangular spit of land between two lakes or, perhaps, the lobes of a single body of water. The lakes are green, agitated, pushing up water to their edges, pulsing as if anxious to overwhelm the fringe of reeds encircling them. Cold wet wind blows in the copse of trees sheltering the brick toilet building. The storm has energized the landscape, made it active and tense, coiled like vibrating spring. Put all these lakes together – each about three-hundred yards long and a hundred wide – and you have a tremulous inland ocean. Sheltering in shallows next to the reeds: ducks of all species, geese, loons like miniature battleships bobbing on the turbulent water.
7.
On June 16, 1863, Henry Hastings Sibley, commanding 2050 men, left Fort Ridgely in the Minnesota River Valley, marching West into Dakota Territory. A year before, the Dakota had risen in an insurrection against the Federal government. The Indians massacred the settlers living around the Minnesota River, abducted women and children, and laid siege to the fort from which Sibley’s force departed in 1863. Of course, the rebellion was short-lived and after some intense fighting, the hostiles who had killed the most pioneers fled north to Canada. Captured warriors were hanged and those Indians unable to flee the State were marched cross-country to a prison camp on the cold flats under Fort Snelling where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers come to a confluence. Sibley’s 1863 summer campaign was to strike westward with militia troops, and some units of federal troops recruited from within Minnesota, pursuing the hostile Indians remaining south of the Canadian border. Bands of aggrieved Sioux still roamed the border between Minnesota and the vast prairies of the Dakota Territory and, in fact, settlers had been killed even after the mass execution of warriors at Mankato. Since the raids continued, Sibley’s objective was to drive the Lakota-speaking tribes across the Missouri. The army column also would interdict the Sioux bison hunt, deprive the Indians of sustenance, and, if possible, starve them to death.
8.
Henry Hastings Sibley was born in 1811 in Michigan territory near Detroit. He was educated at a frontier academy and learned some Greek and Latin. His father urged him to study law but the young man found the discipline “irksome” and he joined the American Fur Company as an agent. In 1834, the 23-year-old Sibley was appointed manager of the Company’s Mendota agency. This was a fur trading operation located in the shadow of Fort Snelling in the Minnesota territory. Sibley established cordial, and mutually profitable, relations with the Mdewankanton band of the Santee Sioux living in the rich river bottoms where the two great rivers joined. Indeed, his relations with the Sioux were more than cordial. He married a chieftain’s daughter, Red Blanket Woman “after the Dakota manner” and had a daughter with her, Helen Hastings or Wakiye (“Bird”). A couple years later, Sibley married a white woman, Sarah Jean Steele with whom he had nine children (only four survived the rigors of the frontier). Sibley remained close to Helen Hastings and, in fact, participated in her marriage much to the chagrin of Sarah Jean. (Bird died a year after she was married and Sibley was said to be grief-stricken, although he never legally acknowledged the young woman as his daughter – alliances based on kinship were common in the fur trading enterprise and most of the successful agents were involved with native women or mixed race themselves.) Sibley became wealthy, invested in dry goods stores, saw mills and steam ships and, indeed, was Minnesota’s first governor, serving a two year term between 1858 and 1860. When the Sioux Uprising occurred, Sibley led militias against the Santee band involved in the conflict. He was an inept commander, timid and indecisive and he moved his forces at a snail’s pace. Nonetheless, he achieved some victories in the field, liberated prisoners held by the Santee Sioux, and received some acclaim, albeit limited, for his success in the 1862 rescue campaign. Sibley was a handsome man, although engravings in the 1860's show him with a perpetually astonished look on his somewhat soft and cherubic figures. He had good posture and his ramrod-straight carriage on horse-back looked impressive. When the second governor, Alexander Ramsey, after the 1862 conflict, vowed to drive the Sioux “forever beyond the borders of the State”, Sibley, although not much of soldier, was the available man. He was commissioned to lead the summer offensive against the Indians in 1863. Someone might have asked Governor Ramsey, after the manner of dialogue in Rio Bravo: “A former fur trader and small-time merchant with no military experience except wrangling vengeful pioneers into a rag-tag command, a poor tactician and worst strategist – is that all you’ve got?” To which, of course, Ramsey would have responded: “It’s what I’ve got.”
9.
Inkpaduta was a Lakota-speaking war chief and Sibley’s adversary during the 1863 campaign in Dakota Territory. He was a big man, very ugly, and, probably, about 70 years old during the fighting with Sibley’s forces. Inkpaduta led a band of Dakota who roamed northwest Iowa as “wild” Indians – in other words, his clan wasn’t signatory to any of the treaties with the Whites. Being a “wild” Indian in the 1850's was perilous – Inkpaduta’s people were outside of the law and the victims of all sorts of egregious injustice. Members of his family were killed by White militias and his brother’s head was nailed over the door of a prosecuting attorney’s office near Fort Dodge, Iowa. During the severe winter of 1857, Inkpaduta’s band was starving. The Indians raided settlements at Spirit Lake, Iowa and killed 38 Whites. Some columns of militia cavalry were sent to punish Inkpaduta, but he fled west into Dakota territory and escaped retribution. (Some historians think that Inkpaduta’s success in killing settlers and eluding punishment emboldened the Minnesota Sioux’s insurrection in 1862.) Inkpaduta was the senior war-chief when Sibley marched west into the Dakotas. Among his warriors was a young Hunkpapa brave named Sitting Bull. Inkpaduta never surrendered, was never taken into custody, and, in fact, died in Manitoba in 1881, probably about 84 years old. He was at the Little Big Horn and saw Custer’s force rubbed-out. A single photograph purports to show Inkpaduta (like Crazy Horse he didn’t like cameras and the picture is obviously taken without his consent.) Inkpaduta is an old man with a huge nose and little slit eyes – the photograph is not sufficiently clear to show the small pox scars that disfigured his face.
10.
Martin says that the 1863 battle sites are north of the Tappen exit off I-94. We have come to within about 70 miles of Bismarck, now 130 miles west of Fargo. Sheets of icy cold rain are falling. The exit sluices down off the freeway where the blacktop highway ends at the end for ramp. A grim-looking gravel road, running along a section line, I assume, angles to the north. If there is a town somewhere around this place, it’s invisible to me.
11.
In fact, Tappen is tic-tac-toe grid of streets on the south side of the freeway, a tavern, post-office, and an abandoned school. In July of 2021, 215 people lived there. The place is so small that on the north side of the interstate, where 397th Street runs through the prairie between frigid lakes, there are no services of any kind, no gas station, no convenience store, no trace at all of the tiny habitation on other side of the interstate. It’s just naked prairie, rain-sodden and windy. This is Kidder County, pop. 2394 (in 2018), 1,433 square miles of which 82 are water.
12.
Northeast of Tappen, water fowl gather in great flocks at the glacial pothole lakes. These lakes are part of several wild life refuges and, therefore, monitored by state authorities. In 2004, a population of 29,000 white pelicans simply vanished. One day they were on the lake, the next day they were gone. (Birds have wings and they fly, but, apparently, the sudden disappearance was alarming to those who study such things.) The next year, 2005, the birds had returned albeit in lower numbers – the estimated population of the flock was 19,000. The birds nested and produced chicks. But, for some reason, the chicks all died, probably about 8000 of them. Authorities suggested West Nile disease, but the cause of the die-off wasn’t established. Natural Resources officials also noted conspicuous die-offs in the cormorants nesting the the wild life reserves. Sea gulls also frequent the glacial lakes area and they also seemed to be dying in great numbers. What was happening?
13.
In October 2005, a cattle rancher living near Tappen lost a cow and a big suckling calf. He said that the animals had “overeaten and bloated”. The dead cattle had fallen in a gully a few hundred yards from the ranch house, a small compound of buildings with a long metal shed located in an old shelter belt. Normally, coyotes and other predators cleaned up dead livestock and so the rancher, Torrey Briese, just left the animals where they had dropped.
Six months later, Briese was surprised to discover that cow’s carcass was completely intact, apparently untouched by birds and coyotes. By contrast, the dead calf had been stripped to its bones by predators and the bones, scattered across the ravine, had been gnawed apart. The intact, mummified cow still rested in the bottom of the gully. When Briese inspected the animal in April 2006, he found that incisions, seemingly cut with a scalpel-sharp blade, had been made in the hide covering the beast’s shoulder. The incisions outlined a wedge-shaped pattern on the animal’s hide, this figure criss-crossed with a grid of straight-line cuts. Briese had never seen anything like this and, so, he took several pictures with his cell-phone.
On April 6, 2006, Evan Briese had a couple of cows that were ready to calf. Evan was 16 years old at that time, the eldest son of five children in the household of the rancher, Torrey Briese. It was midnight and with his cattle-dog, Buster, Evan walked out into the corral near the house. The cattle were fine. Then, Evan saw some blue lights flickering behind a hill in the pasture. With his dog, he ascended the slope and look down over the rolling praire to a “dug out” – that is, a manmade pond – located about 140 yards away. From the hilltop, Evan saw a round triangle-shaped form resting next to the “dug out”. (There was a pig corral in that area.) The triangle-shaped vessel had three oval apertures from which bright blue lights were flashing. The lights didn’t seem to follow the normal laws of optics. The beams bent over hills and turned corners, slowly sweeping over the adjacent landscape “as if searching for something.” Evan’s dog was startled and sat quietly for awhile. Then, the animal began to bark and ran toward the wedge-shaped vessel with the blue lights. The triangle-shaped craft lifted into the air without making any sound at all and, then, flew away over the Briese’s homestead, blue lights raking across the fields and outbuildings.
Torrey Briese, Evan’s father, was startled by a “rushing noise” – apparently, now, the blue triangular vessel was no longer silent. Gazing out his bedroom window, Torrey saw the blue light sweeping over his compound.
A few days later, while Torrey Briese was working with some friends on a car, the flying wedge appeared again and its beams searched the prairie. Several people witnessed this event. Torrey and Evan Briese were convinced that the “etching” on the dead cow’s hide was a representation of the strange flying triangle; a “calling card” they said. It seems peculiar that extraterrestrials with advanced technology would announce their presence by inscribing an image of their craft on the hide of a petrified cow. But the world is full of marvels.
14.
Between Friday, July 24 and Tuesday, July 28, 1863, Sibley’s forces fought the Sioux three times in the hilly, lake-dotted prairie north of present-day Tappen, North Dakota. These encounters have been named the battles of Big Mound, Dead Buffalo Lake, and Stony Lake. The fighting resulted in about a half-dozen dead on Sibley’s side. Sibley estimated that the Indians lost 150 warriors in this combat. But Indian-fighters were always prone to over-estimate enemy casualties. One of the combatants, Standing Buffalo, counted 13 Sioux killed in the fighting. The armed forces on the two sides engaged in these battles were about equally matched in manpower. Sibley’s expeditionary force had far superior fire power, including the two mountain howitzers, weapons that the Indians feared. This was before the Wagon Box fight in the Powder River War five years later and before Fetterman’s forces were wiped out by Dakota armed with sophisticated repeating rifles. Most of the Sioux were armed with bow and arrow and war clubs. Further, the Indians were hampered by the fact that they were fighting rear-guard actions to cover the retreat of non-combatant women and children. Sibley’s strategy was to squeeze the Indians between his forces marching westward and General Sully’s army ascending the Missouri to cut off the Sioux retreat. But the Spring and Summer had been hot and dry and Missouri River was very low; Sully’s expedition made slow progress northward, often having to unload the troops and tug the steamers upriver over muddy shoals, and so the army approaching on the Missouri was nowhere near the theater of battle when the fighting occurred.
15.
On Friday, July 24, 1863, the day was humid and storms threatened. The air was still but distant thunder could sometimes be heard. Patrols in advance of Sibley’s column sighted large numbers of Indians fanned out in a crescent formation in some high country between two big, somber lakes. Marshes everywhere impeded Sibley’s march and there was always water in sight – the troughs between the treeless hills of the tall grass prairie were full of lakes, some of them long fingers of water, others oval or polymorphous with many little inlets and bays. In some places, narrow causeways of marsh separated adjacent lagoons. The columns movement across the country was through labyrinth of water.
Sibley was never anxious to rush into battle; his style was timorous and hesitant. His column stopped its advance a few hundred yards from a knuckle of grass protruding from steep, broken prairie ridges. The hostiles seemed to want to parley. Sibley sent his Indian scouts, friendly Sioux themselves, forward to meet with their counterparts, enemy scouts who had been directing the Dakota movements. A few advance elements of Sibley’s force hunkered down near the round knoll where the two groups of scouts met, the so-called Big Mound.
16.
It’s not entirely clear what was discussed between the scouts during their conversation atop the mound. The friendly and hostile scouts would have known one another and, likely, been kin. No doubt, they wished to avoid a battle. The Sioux were retreating toward the Missouri and surely intended to cross that river. It was obvious Sully’s force was nowhere near and couldn’t cut off the Sioux hostiles at the river. So what would be the point of fighting? The Indians were going, more or less, where Sibley wanted them to go. The stakes at this parley were higher for the Sioux than for Sibley. Sioux warriors were under no compulsion – you fought if you wanted. By contrast, Sibley could have recalcitrant soldiers flogged over, even, hanged. Each Indian was a free agent and made his own decisions.
17.
An army surgeon named Josiah Weiser was watching the parley on the hilltop. He recognized some Indians among the hostile scouts with whom he had been friends. Probably, he had gone hunting with them and likely provided medical services to their families when he was stationed at one of the forts near Indian encampments. The Sioux looked hungry and disheveled so Dr. Weiser brought some hardtack and tobacco with him as he walked uphill to where the Indians were conferring. A photograph of Weiser shows a man of about 35 dressed in military uniform with impressive black whiskers. Dr. Weiser greeted the Indians that he knew and shook hands with them. He distributed the hardtack and tobacco. Then, he turned around to walk down the hill. A hothead from among Inkpaduta’s people shot Weiser in the back. Gunfire erupted from the opposing forces, although the combatants were at long distance from one another. Inkpaduta’s warriors were the most aggressive. They had killed many White settlers five years earlier at Spirit Lake, taken women and children prisoner (and, then, slaughtered their hostages when they couldn’t keep up with the march), and all of Inkpaduta’s braves knew that, if captured, they would be hanged. Probably, the young man who killed Weiser was afraid that any settlement between the opposing forces might result in his arrest. In any event, the die was now cast and fighting ensued.
18.
The shooting lasted about three hours. The Indians made some desultory charges in the cover of grassy ravines splitting up the soldier’s position. Sibley’s six-pound howitzers cleared these avenues of attack. The guns were tugged up to the top of the Big Mound, possibly called MacPhail Butte today. The sky darkened and falling rain blistered the surfaces of the lakes. Lightning began to strike and probe at the skirmish lines. A bolt of lightning crashed down on Colonel Samuel MacPhail who was directing the artillery fire and he was killed. There was more rain and lighting and, in the storm, the fighting ceased. Weiser’s body was retrieved from the slopes of the Big Mound and carried to camp where it was buried that night. MacPhail was buried where the lightning killed him, on the high point of the ridge.
19.
The aliens weren’t done with Evan Briese. In September 2006, the 16 year old boy got up at 1:20 am (by the kitchen clock) to go to the toilet and get a drink of water. A window over the kitchen sink opens onto the farmyard where there was a steel pole barn and a hog corral partially walled by tall strips of corrugated steel. (In the pictures, the steel panels look to be cannibalized from a defunct grain bin.) A yard light cast its rays over the hog corral and Briese saw some figures amidst the pigs. Briese picked up his loaded .22 and went out to investigate. The figures were unearthly, very tall and slender with long arms and hands bearing black talons. Two of the figures were clawing at the pig. The animal seemed to be dead – at least, it wasn’t squealing or making any noise. Briese was appalled that the creatures were “screwing around” with his pet pig. This was docile female, very friendly, who came to Evan’s call when he went out to the corral to scratch her ears and belly. Evan Briese raised his .22 rifle to his shoulder and shot one of creatures. It emitted a high-pitched howl, an alien sound unlike the noises that people make “when they are hurt.” Then, something grabbed Evan from behind and he blacked-out. When he awoke, he was alone in a pasture, running toward the house where his sister lived with her fiancee. Several claw-marks had slit open his black Adidas tee-shirt. Amazingly, the long, hooked talons on the creature’s hand had not cut open his skin. A couple of tiny scratches were visible on his chest under his clavicle. Authorities were called, but the sheriff’s deputy was afraid to enter a stand of shelter belt trees behind the hog corral. The pig that the aliens had been clawing vanished without a trace. A couple days later, a dead ram was discovered on a neighbor’s farm. The animal wasn’t wounded in any way except for a surgical incision in its scrotum – one testicle had been removed. Evan was traumatized. He was angry that he hadn’t been able to save his pet pig. He said that God had made many planets but only one Earth. Jesus had come to save the people of the Earth and God “didn’t care” about the other planets. So the creatures that had attacked Evan’s pig were without the benefit of the Gospel. Evan was haunted by the notion that his pig had been tortured or somehow otherwise abused. He said that the creature’s bodies were shiny but he didn’t know whether this was their skin or some kind of armor. The extra-terrestrials had large black eyes. In order to recover memories from his close encounter with the aliens, Evan was hypnotized and interviewed while under that influence.
20.
A few days after Evan Briese shot the pig-molesting alien, a hypnotist sought to retrieve memories of the encounter. There is a name for this procedure: regression hypnosis. Briese was hypnotized “after a long period of relaxation” at his home near Tappen. His mother and father were present as well as two representatives of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). The hypnotist was Craig R. Lang from Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. An eighty minute transcript of the hypnotic session was recorded and, then, typed.
Evan doesn’t change his story and, in fact, adds only a few details. The hypnotist tries to lead him to claim that the largest alien (said to be 6'11'’ in height) levitated into the air – there seems to be some aspect of confirmation bias as to the size of the creatures; obviously, Briese’s interlocutors think they are too tall to match other similar accounts. Briese recalls the big alien standing one terrra firma. The hypnotist repeatedly questions Briese about what he recalls after he was dragged backward and hit his head. The young man stolidly refuses invitations to recall some sort of diagnostic encounter with the creatures when he was unconscious. He repeatedly tells the hypnotist that he was “knocked cold” and can’t recall anything after hitting his head on the ground. The hypnotist applies various ploys to “recover” Briese’s memories during the time that he was unconscious: he tells him to “freeze-frame” the memory or to imagine himself disembodied and hovering over his unconscious form. Evan is unimaginative and simply says that he doesn’t remember anything from the time that he was knocked-out. (Hypnotists frequently recover lurid accounts of aliens penetrating human subjects with metallic probes – aliens access our insides through the rectum or vagina; it’s not clear to me why they wouldn’t put a probe down their victim’s throat, and, perhaps, this is alleged to happen also. There’s a curious parenthetical remark interposed in the hypnosis transcript – a woman in Colorado describes being vaginally and rectally probed by space creatures who tell her that it is for the good of mankind; she responds that “you should have asked my permission first.”)
Evan tells the hypnotist that he shot one of the creatures in the side and that “it limped” after that injury. The other creatures, he said, “bowed to (him), sort of kneeling.” So the space invaders have come across eons and light-years to find themselves bowing to a North Dakota teenager. He describes the creatures as having “lifeless” black eyes. They are tall with slender shoulders and tendril-like hands with black “metallic-looking” talons. Around their mid-sections, they are a little more “wide.”
Evan repeats essentially the same story, at least, three times. I don’t have access to the full transcript and so I can’t tell what efforts were made to guide the young man’s account during portions of the interrogation that are not provided. The parts of the 80 minute interview that are reproduced are impressively consistent with Evan’s first account – but, of course, I don’t know what he says in the parts of the transcript not provided. When Evan revives, his head is aching and his “brain feels two sizes too big for his head,” a curious detail that is cited to imply that the space creatures may, indeed, have tinkered with the young man’s physiology. Evan recalls running to his sister Trista’s house. We aren’t told where this place is located in relationship to the family’s humble compound within its shelter-belt. When he reaches the house, at about 2:00 am, Evan screams “they’ve taken her”. This alarms everyone although less so when it’s revealed that he’s referring to the pig. Evan’s sister, boyfriend, and their child are sleeping on a couch in front of the TV, a chair, and “on the floor.” This seems to concern the hypnotist. What kind of earthlings are these? Don’t they possess beds? “Is that how they usually sleep?” “Yes,” Evan responds.
21.
After the fight at Big Mound, Sibley spent a day regrouping in camp. Then, on Sunday, July 26, 1862, he marched southwest and, around noon, established a new camp on the shore of Dead Buffalo Lake. The body of water was large, shallow and brackish-looking, irregularly shaped with a half-dozen inlets surrounded by marsh. Presumably, Sibley selected the place to protect the encampment from attack from the north and west, the directions into which the Sioux had retreated on the 24th of July. But the Indians had come around to Sibley’s south and east and appeared on the hill tops. They had a few rifles and began sniping at the encampment. Sibley sent out skirmish lines to clear the Indians from the high country to his east and the howitzers dropped some shells behind the low, rolling buttes. A mule train had lagged behind Sibley’s advance to the new camp and, for a few minutes, the column of mules and wagons was encircled. The Indians pressed toward the mule train. Sibley’s picket lines, ultimately came up behind the rear of the attacking Sioux and they melted away. During this fight, a young Indian rode his horse through the supply column and, dashing up to a muleteer, struck the man with a sort of riding quirt. The Indian could have killed the mule-driver but didn’t bother – he was satisfied with counting coup on him. This warrior was Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa acclaimed for this exploit among this people. Mid-afternoon, the soldiers were still firing volleys at the places where the winds ruffled the prairie grass. But the Indians were gone. This was the Battle of Dead Buffalo Lake.
22.
Two days later, Tuesday July 28, 1863, Sibley was moving again, cautiously creeping over the broken prairie toward the Missouri River. Again the Indians encircled Sibley’s advance column and there was more fighting at a place called Stony Lake. The advance stalled and the column deployed its howitzers to shell the hillsides and ravines ahead of them. The Indians set the prairie afire and made a few attempts to stampede Sibley’s livestock. After some more long distance sniping, the Sioux retreated beyond range.
23.
On July 31, Friday, most of the Dakota had crossed the Missouri and occupied the rugged rock and sand buttes looming over the west side of the river. (The west banks of the Missouri are badlands, much more broken and wild than the gentle river terraces on its opposing shore-line.) Sully was nowhere near. A rear-guard of Sioux warriors fired at long range at the advancing skirmish lines. The troops shot back but no one hit anything. Sibley’s artillery shelled the Sioux as they were massing for an attack and three Indians were knocked off their horses by a round, apparently stunned but not otherwise injured – they crawled off to hide in the tall grass. The Indians then swam across the river. Three soldiers cut off from the main force were found to cut to pieces in a gulch overlooking the river. Both sides thought that they had been successful. The Sioux were now driven beyond the Missouri, Sibley’s immediate mission (although he hadn’t been able to trap them between his army and Sully’s force so that they could be exterminated). The Indians had successfully evacuated their women and children west across the Missouri where the white soldiers couldn’t harass. A barge dragged upriver over the shallows came too close to the Sioux defending the rough country above the Missouri’s west bank. The Indians attacked in force and killed everyone. Twenty-two Whites were slaughtered in this sortie – more casualties in the massacre than in Sibley’s entire campaign. General Sibley was alarmed by the barge massacre and his supplies were running low – the country was empty and desolate and there were no resources to provision his men. So, he turned around and returned to Fort Abercrombie on the Red River about 160 miles to the east.
24.
Sully reached the ruins of the Mandan villages decimated by small pox, a location about 30 miles north of present-day Bismarck. No one was around. Scouts told Sully that Sibley had returned to the Red River Valley. Sully moved west, chasing the hostiles. Sibley’s army, reprovisioned, again marched into Dakota Territory. In September, 1863, the two armies acting in concert raided a large hostile encampment at the base of Killdeer Mountain, a long wooded ridge that rises about five-hundred feet above the prairie and badlands country around the Little Missouri. This was a large encounter involving desperate fighting as the Sioux defended the retreat of women and children who scrambled up the wooded mountain side while the men fought off the soldiers in the gullies and ravines around large village. Probably around 200 Indians were killed, mostly noncombatants who had been shot down in the encampment. The attack was not without significant cost to the two armies of White soldiers – twenty-two soldiers were killed and 38 wounded. After the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, the Sioux retreated into the Powder River Country where there was more war in 1868, a conflict that Indians won. The government ceded the Black Hills to the Indians but the discovery of gold in that mountain range led to further settler incursions into Indian country. Fighting began again culminating in the Battle of the Little Big Horn and, finally, the defeat the Dakotas after protracted guerilla warfare at Wounded Knee in 1891.
25.
In a way, the world is a battlefield and we are all soldiers.
Torrey Briese, Evan’s father, died at home on March 6, 2021. He was 61. No cause of death is stated. The Briese farm, where space aliens murdered a pig, is said to five miles northeast of Tappen, North Dakota. Briese had farmed the place with his parents before taking over the ranch in the 80's. Torrey Briese drove grader for Kidder County, worked sometimes as an aide at a mental health facility, and bred (and exhibited) livestock. He served on the school board. With his wife Myra, he had five children – Evan, to whom the aliens bowed and kneeled, was born in 1990. Today, Evan Briese works for Bauer Built, a firm that supplies tires for trucks hauling long-distance. He lives with his wife in Bismarck. He managed the Tappen Oil and Tire Company for two years before moving to Bismarck to work for Bauer Built. Evan Briese is presently 31 years old.
A photograph on Linked-In shows a husky young man wearing black sunglasses. He has a beard and long hair. Torrey Briese’s photograph accompanying his obituary shows a burly man with a red, flushed face. He is handsome with long hair. The obituary says that he had a side business, manufacturing home-made ammunition for special use shooting. His customers included the U.S. government and law enforcement as well as big game hunters. I wonder about his death.
Torrey Briese and his son, Evan, liked to watch shows about UFO encounters. But they always scoffed at those programs. You can laugh and mock until it happens to you.
The Mayor of Tappen was asked about the alien encounter. He said: “I’m not saying it didn’t happen.”
On some of the websites discussing the 2006 events, photographs show round fields irrigated by center-pivot watering systems. The implication is that the aliens were attracted to Tappen by the strange, completely circular forms of their soybean and corn fields.
Craig R. Lang, the licensed hypnotherapist who performed regression hypnosis on Evan Briese, operated a clinic in Anoka, Minnesota. The internet listing for his clinic says that it will be open today (Friday, May 6, 2022) from 1:00 to 5:00 pm. This seems unlikely because Lang died in 2018. Lang had a day job as an engineer working in the field of bio-medical devices. He was a past-president of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) and was an expert in alien encounters. His obituary photograph shows a youthful man with the big hair and whiskers of a seventies disco hustler. He wears steel-rimmed glasses.
It’s interesting that Evan Briese and his father, Torrey, didn’t seek out MUFON. As it happened, the president of MUFON was attending a funeral in Tappen at the church where Torrey and Myra had been married. This was only a couple days after the encounter. Torrey and Evan spoke with the MUFON president at the dinner after the funeral and that was how the case came to the attention of the UFO investigators.
26.
Ten days before we drove to the battlefield at Dead Buffalo Lake, the gravel road would have been buried in snow. Two-and-a-half feet fell here in Kidder County and some patches of the stuff lurked on the north-facing sides of the flooded ditches. Cold rain splashed on the windshield. The gravel under my wheels was soggy and ripped up by agricultural vehicles in dark black ruts. It was a bad place to be driving and I wasn’t anxious to spend time on remote gravel roads in this empty country.
27.
A brown sign with white letters on the west side of the road marks the battlefield. A map shows where Sibley camped south of the lake shown as a white cephalopod-shaped splotch on the diagram. I can see the open water of the lake beyond a shelter-belt running inexplicably north-south about forty yards west of the road. (What is the shelter-belt sheltering? Who planted it? There are no houses or farm buildings anywhere in sight.) On the map, the lake looks like a skull that has sprouted tendrils or an Indian wearing a complex feathered headdress or a round orb that has caught fire and extrudes flares from its upper surface. Some arrows and dotted lines show where the Indians advanced over the prairie and the route of the beleaguered mule-train. The wind feels bitterly cold and the rain that slaps our faces is icy.
28.
The shelter-belt opens a little so that someone on foot can walk through the trees and stand on the drowned edge of the marsh. The grass here and the reeds in the swamp were all bent double by the weight of snow and they haven’t yet recovered. The grass is sodden under foot as if it’s a mere web of straw is floating over a bog. The lake edged by several hundred feet of marsh shows white under the rainy sky, a big flat expanse stretching to the north and west. The wind sweeps across the open flat terrain around the lake and reeds in the marsh are bent over in the turbulent air. Rain and patches of snow shivering in the drizzle and the gusts of wet wind make the scene seem wild, desolate, eerie. Of course, except for the sign, there’s no trace of the skirmish fought here.,
29.
In this country, the ruled grid of section roads is law. The straight-line of the gravel road passing the Dead Buffalo Lake actually transects a lagoon extending to the west of the main body of water. The gravel doesn’t deviate but runs with lunatic rigor right through the lake. The water slops around a few inches before the gravel road surface resentfully. Puddles cover the gravel where tires have gouged out craters and the edges of the road are flooded.
30.
We drive for a long time looking for the marker at Big Mound. It’s not where its supposed to be on the map. I’m increasing querulous about the gravel road which shrinks sometimes to a mere muddy track between black-rimmed puddles. A half-mile ahead of us a stationwagon marked with the logo of the United States Post Office splashes through puddles and half-drowned parts of the roadway. It’s not clear to whom the postal carrier is delivering mail. There aren’t any houses anywhere in sight, no farmsites, no agricultural buildings. The road rises up and down, cresting hills from which we can see into the fog for a few hundred yards – the country ripples with dune-shaped knolls like waves on a sea. It’s treeless as far as your vision extends which is not that far in the rain. Deep vee-shaped ravines flowing with floodwater cut through hillsides. In the mist, lakes fill up the low places in the terrain, cold-looking and austere, like lake-diagrams drawn by six or seven year-old children.
31.
A perfectly triangular black cairn shows atop a tall hill. This must the marker at the Big Mound Battlefield. The road climbs steeply to the hilltop and trucks struggling for traction have shredded the layer of gravel over slick black mud. I’m afraid of getting stuck. Another pyramid appears behind the first – what is this? Two historical markers in the rain? On the steep hillside, someone has abandoned a house-high furnace for drying grain. The furnace is bright yellow. Other debris is rusting in the drizzle and the first pyramid turns out to be nothing more than a big evergreen, conical in shape, next to an abandoned farmhouse. The structure is a little bungalow with a row of broken windows across its facade facing the road. The door is open and flaps in the wind. Some outbuildings squat among a few more trees and a drive-way that hasn’t been used for a decade – some saplings are growing along the access road and the grass is chest-high. The second pyramid is just the outline of another evergreen. In the hollow below the ruined farmstead, a long narrow lake stretches across the countryside. The postal carrier has reached the end of the road, or, perhaps, a place where the water has washed away the right-of-way. Windshield wipers hiding the person driving, the car reverses and comes toward us where we have parked to turn around on the hilltop. Is this Big Mound, unmarked except for this decrepit farmhouse?
32.
Who knows how deep the puddles are on the gravel road? Some of them are unavoidable and, when my tire splashes through the rut, a great filthy wave of water floods over the windshield drowning the whole car which rocks on its chassis.
33.
At a corner where two roads intersect, Martin sees a great flock of white sea gulls rising and falling like flies on carrion. In the rain-spattered distance, the sea gulls hover over the black furrowed field, sometimes dropping down and, then, rising up to soar over the mud. There are hundreds of seagulls, dipping and soaring to feed on dead fish. The field beside the road is full of two-foot long fish, sprawled and ungainly atop the furrows. What can this possibly mean? We stop to investigate. Shoals of dead fish, a dozen or more in each group, lie scattered at intervals all across a field that is visible for perhaps five-hundred yards. At the far edge of the sloping field, a white slash shows another lake. But the lake is, at least, fifty feet below this hillside where the dead fish rest like strange finny garbage in the muddy furrows of the plowed field. The presence of more carrion fish, far away in the field, is shown by the swarms of seagulls that are swooping down to strut among them and peck at the corpses. It’s an uncanny sight. The fish seem fresh and some of them are bloody where the birds have pecked them partially apart.
34.
Martin suggests that the land was flooded a few days ago and the fish swam through the muddy water to this hilltop and were, then, stranded when the flood retreated back into the lagoon at the bottom of the hill. But this would represent a flood of truly Biblical proportions. Perhaps, the fish mistook the deep drifts of snow here a week ago for water and swam through them up to this hilltop. But this seems improbable to me as well.
35.
If you look up Tappen, North Dakota on the internet, you will find a link to an eerie video. Against a gun-metal blue wall-cloud, a translucent cyclone curves down from the sky. The tube of the cyclone spins on the ground. The caption on the video says that this is a “land-spout”, that is a terrestrial version of a water-spout over the sea. The vortex is so shapely and elegant that it seems fictional, perhaps, some sort of elegant CGI effect. It’s like the pale spiritualized ghost of a tornado. A couple of witnesses make some low-key nonchalant remarks. The land-spout, perhaps capable of plucking fish from water and transporting them elsewhere, whirls overhead, bent like a sinister rainbow in the stormy sky.
36.
I want to get off these soggy gravel roads and return to asphalt and concrete. But there don’t seem to be any paved highways anywhere nearby. We drive south toward where the freeway should be. The rain smears my windshield. Another sign lettered white on brown background labels a high point on a spine of ridge as “MacPhail’s Butte”. But there’s no access, no turn-off, and, later, I learn that the place where lightning killed Samuel MacPhail during the Battle of Big Mound is on private property, a boulder bearing a plaque screwed into stone marking the place. Barbed wire fences surround the site and it’s a quarter mile or more from the dirt road. From the crest of the hill, we can see a jumble of hills, some white oblong lakes in gulches, a crown of sea gulls soaring to the west over the battlefield littered with big dead fish.
37.
We rejoin the freeway on an empty stretch of highway to the west of the Medina rest-stop. Fargo is 130 miles away. The hillsides foam with run-off, white streams pitching down slopes.
38.
The rain continues on I-94 down to Melrose, Minnesota, the place where I stop for the night. The distant shelter belts look like low black cliffs, tangles of trees all blurred together in a dark, wet mass. It’s grey when I reach Melrose, the last light fading in a lightless day.
39.
A truck has pulled up to the Super 8 motel where I am staying. In his “Works and Days,” Hesiod counsels that if one desires to reap the benefits of Demeter, the farmer should “sow naked, plow naked, and harvest in the nude.” Perhaps, something similar has been commanded of truck drivers. The door to the truck swings open and a naked man wraps a blanket across his mid-section, feet clad in sandal flip-flops, padding across the puddled parking lot to the motel office. A woman emerges around the front of the cab, also swathed in a blanket around her shoulders and mid-section. I blink at the half-naked truck driver and his girlfriend. She’s wearing sober-looking eyeglasses. She blinks back at me.
40.
The next morning, at a rest stop near St. Cloud, I find the sidewalk all marked with big, blood-colored earthworms. The water has driven them out of the soil and, now, they writhe on the concrete. People had trodden on the worms and their crushed bodies look like letters in a foreign alphabet. The rain writes with earthworms but I can’t read its words.
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