On Walter B. Stevens (1933 - 2024)

1.

A couple years ago, members of our book club visited Wally Stevens in Minnetonka at the assisted living facility where he lived with his wife, Pat.  For about twenty years, Wally hosted our meetings in his big house on the 4th Street in Austin.  But his vision failed and old age made him frail and, so, he had to depart from his home and move to the west suburbs of Minneapolis.  One of his daughters, herself a prominent politician (Democratic representative to the House of Representatives, District 49A) lived in the vicinity.  I was raised in Eden Prairie, an adjacent suburb, about two miles from where Wally found himself living – my mother still resides in the house where I grew up.  Because I lived near Wally’s place in Minnetonka, I thought I knew the area.  But things had changed in the 45 years since I was familiar with this neighborhood.  Nothing endures.  

The assisted living condominium was to the east of Interstate 494, the old loop highway and bypass to the metropolitan area.  Of course, the freeway is now embedded in a sprawl of suburbs that makes a great, diffuse halo around the Twin Cities.  This part of Minnetonka is full of steep hills and, in fact, Wally’s daughter lives on the wooded knoll that is the highest point in the county.  When I was growing up, the terrain around the straight bore of the interstate beltway was difficult and had not be developed.  The hills were cratered with hollows full of wetlands and small spring-fed lakes, cold slate-grey water cupped in yellow depressions between the ridges.  Where the country had been cleared, staked fields of raspberries were planted.  A straight-edge of railroad tracks clung to an embankment that arrowed through acres of woods where you could still hunt for deer in the nineteen-seventies.  Along the winding country lanes, sinister-looking driveways barred by rusty gates led across barren, scabby places to gravel pit.  Bee hives that looked like limestone tombstones stood in clearings and old dairy farms with ancient lathe barns were tucked up against the sheer, brush covered moraines.  It was a sort of wilderness where the steep slopes and the swamps repelled development, at least during the time I lived there and, then, for another decade thereafter.

But it’s all built up now and Wally’s townhouse stood among residential cul-de-sacs and big glass-walled office buildings adorning the tops of the hills – these business places are called “campuses” now and the handsome corporate headquarters rose over shady jogging trails with picnic tables scattered among the oaks and maple trees.  Some of the rugged, wet terrain remained ungraded, undrained, pits full of bog water enveloped in brown marsh.  From Wally’s dining room, I could look down and see a boardwalk floating on the bog, a walking path that looped around the swamp.  Birds flickered below, darting from place to place in the marsh.  It was a pretty view, the distant corporate buildings at the end of winding roads mostly masked from view.  An escarpment of new high-rise apartments hung like a pale glass and steel curtain over the swamp.

“It’s such a nice view,” I remarked.  Wally was leaning on his silver tripod-shaped cane attending to something in his dining room.

“How would I know,” he said.  “I’m blind and can’t see anything.”

Members of our group arrived and we ate some cheese and crackers and, then, discussed the book.  I no longer recall what it was.  Wally had a good memory and he kept track of the books we had read over the twenty years that we met at his house.  He wrote down the names of these works and their authors.  The document looked like a spread sheet.  Wally was trained in accounting and, during his career, he worked at Hormel Foods as the chief executive in its financial department.  He liked keeping track of accounts and managing the company’s money.   Once, he showed me a spread sheet that he had constructed to monitor the cost of energy in his home – he had his utilities calculated to the penny per kilowatt hour.  

2.

The first time I was introduced to Wally, we quarreled about Bob Fosse’s movie adaptation of Cabaret.  Wally was an expert on musical theater and a particular admirer of Stephen Sondheim.  He liked Cabaret as well.

We watched the movie as part of a Summer supplement, as it were, to the Great Books program in which I participated.  I remember the room at the Community College where we screened the picture.  I came to the showing armed with Pauline Kael’s dismissive review of Cabaret which I parroted in the discussion after the movie.  I didn’t know Wally, even by reputation, at that time.  Pretty quickly, he began to dispute what I was saying.  He didn’t suffer fools gladly and felt that I was overbearing and pretentious and mistaken in my assessment of the film.  There was a sharp exchange.  You had to be careful with your diction when talking in Wally Steven’s presence – you couldn’t use “unique” with any sort of qualifier without earning his rebuke; if you used “hopefully” as an adjective instead of a adverb he called you on it.  The encounter was memorable – you didn’t forget a debate with Wally Stevens.  It was like plowing into a deeply rooted tree or running into a wall.

3.

A little later, after this inauspicious first encounter, I had another brush with Wally.  At that time, I was serving on a Board that directed Community Education in Austin.  This organization underwrote Summerset Theater, a community enterprise in which local people performed under the direction of the instructors in theater arts at the two-year community college.  One of the shows had gone far over budget and there was a hue and cry afoot about wasting the Community Ed money, funds that had some connection to the School District, and, so, a proposal was bruited about dissolving the theater group and returning it’s activities to the college.  This was a controversial measure and, at the meeting before the vote, Wally appeared with several other people who had performed in Summerset shows.  Wally made a pitch to retain the theater as a community amenity.  He introduced himself with a slight tincture of false humility as a “mere spear-carrier” and a “supernumerary” in the plays presented by Summerset.

Despite his arguments, the Community Ed board voted to dissolve Summerset Theater.  But, a few years, later the teachers at the Community College no longer wanted responsibility for the arduous summer programming, three shows distributed between late June, July, and mid-August.  So I was called-upon to reincorporate the endeavor again and restore the program to operation under its own non-profit board.  So Wally’s side of the argument had, as it were, the “last laugh.”

4.

Wally must have forgiven me for my misdeeds.  When the Hormel Company and the research facility, also operated under that name (Hormel) by the University of Minnesota, wanted to bring internet to Austin, Wally was part of that organization.  The non-profit was called Southern Minnesota Internet Group, also known as SMIG.  Wally asked me to join the Board of the non-profit and, of course, when an eminent fellow like Walter B. Stevens, an important executive at a Fortune 500 company, asked you to serve, you didn’t turn him down.  

SMIG was successful.  At first, the enterprise had a monopoly with respect to internet access and services in Austin and Mower County.  Subscriptions accounted for a budget that approached a half-million dollars.  I had incorporated the Company and, acted in a de facto capacity as its legal advisor.  But I’m primarily a litigator, specializing in the defense of fire and explosion cases, employment law, and personal injury.  So I doubted my competency to advise a non-profit internet carrier that had become, in effect, a big business – “big”, that is, as far as I was concerned.  Wally and his colleagues on the Board weren’t intimidated by the numbers that I found daunting.  They were used to thinking in large sums of money.  But, after a few years, when SMIG was, at its height, my term on the Board lapsed and I didn’t ask to remain as a Director.  SMIG continued for twenty or more years, gradually losing customers to the larger, more competitive, internet providers that had entered the market.  About four years ago, one of the first directors, a research scientist at the Hormel Institute (an internationally famous laboratory that studies cancer) contacted me and asked that I dissolve the company.  There were still a few dollars in its accounts, money that reverted to the State of Minnesota when the non-profit was dissolved.  Corporations like human beings have lives with a beginning, middle, and an end.  I brought SMIG into existence by incorporating it and developing its by-laws and, in the end, I filed the papers brought the non-profit to an end.

5.

Wally lived in a distinctive white house on 4th Street.  The street leads from the cemetery on the outskirts of town, across the interstate, and, then, past several mansions near the public high school (and the Catholic school), fronting St. Augustine’s, the parish church for downtown Austin, and, then, running south to the riverside park with the bandshell and, across the water, a small concrete ballfield.  This is the center of things in Austin, at least, as once construed and Wally’s place was at the center of the center.  

The home faced 4th Street with a facade dressed-up like a mansion house on an antebellum plantation.  The white porch sported white columns and there was a bulls-eye oculus in the attic above the upper story. Wally had renovated a broad garage built into the side of the structure into a library, a warm and inviting room on a lower split-level below the home’s kitchen.  It was in this room that we met.  The place felt spacious with a high ceiling and walls lined with built-in bookshelves and, atop those shelves, in a conspicuous zodiacal band running around the upper perimeter of the room, Wally’s wife, Patricia, displayed her collection of fine china, bone-white delicate vessels on which were traced faint floral patterns.  These pale ceramics, glazed to a mirror-like sheen, were an emblem for Pat, who was herself, similarly, pale, delicate, and elegant.  

It had been an elite neighborhood before the new Company executives, arriving 20 years after Wally built their McMansions around the town’s periphery.  4th Street near downtown was where you lived in the forties so that you could walk to work at the Plant Headquarters or, if you were a physician, walk to the hospital and clinic about three blocks away.  Some of the homes lining the street were old with little carriage houses at the edges of their lots or renovated stables along the back fence-line.  There was one home constructed like a outsized British cottage, a vast and heavy shingled roof threatening to swallow up the whole structure.  This place was a gift to the bride of a Hormel executive, a member, indeed, of the family that had founded the slaughterhouse business and, later, a famous local doctor lived in the home.  Two or three blocks to the north of Wally’s place on 4th Street, there was a grim nursing home, a thing of darkness, occupying the manor where the famous poet Richard Eberhart had lived when he was a boy.  The house had brick walls and stood apart from the street facing into a neighborhood with a little grassy sward in the middle of the street, a diminutive boulevard, and other Victorian-era mansions surrounding the quiet lane.  At one time, the Eberhart estate occupied 40 acres there with woods and ponds and a river – the estate was called Bur Oaks, the name of the poet’s first published volume of verse.  

Eberhart’s boyhood friend, Roger Catherwood, lived in another mansion a block or two south of Wally’s home, an elaborate home, also with white facade, anchored by a round tower.  Roger Catherwood, whom I knew slightly as a young man, was a real estate lawyer and a poet himself – he wrote sonnets and other highly formal verse – one of his sonnets was read at his funeral.  Samuel Doak Catherwood, Roger’s father, was George Hormel’s best friend and the company’s lawyer.  He was a figure that you might imagine in a novel by Booth Tarkington, courtly and distinguished and, probably, a bit stern – in those days, lawyers didn’t specialize: Samuel Catherwood tried cases, was elected to be County Attorney, filed taxes for his clients, and worked as Hormel’s corporate attorney. The children of the elite in Austin before World War Two attended Ivy League Schools: Eberhart went to Dartmouth and Harvard; Roger Catherwood attended Yale or Harvard (I don’t know which).  Roger Catherwood’s correspondence with his boyhood chum, Richard Eberhart is preserved in the Dartmouth archives.  

In the old days, 4th Street was called Kenwood and it was the best address in Austin and this was where Wally lived.  Before he left his home to live in Minnetonka, Wally invited us to his library where he gave away his books.  I chose a volume by Richard Eberhart, published in paperback by New Directions.  During his long life (he died at 101),Eberhart won every prize that a poet could win.  He wrote cautious, conventional modernist poetry, most famously “The Ground Hog,” an estimable poem about death – the writer comes upon a decomposing ground hog in the midst of summer’s abundance: the verse ends with a flurry of allusions including “Montaigne in his tower / St. Theresa in her wild lament.”  That poem along with “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” were once much anthologized and, when I was a young man, often taught in college or, even, high school.  The volume of Eberhart’s “Selected Poems’ was rather cheaply printed and the book was old with brittle paper.  After I read it, the pages detached and fell from the volume like leaves from an autumnal tree.    

6.

After a few years, the participants in our Great Books group sat in a certain configuration – it was as if we had assigned seats in Wally’s library, although, of course, no one had made any formal designations.  I sat to the right of Wally.  He occupied a throne-like chair.  I think he tooled-up for our meetings with an after-dinner drink.  When our discussion of the book petered-out, he would, then, sip another couple of stiff drinks.  Wally drank scotch, more or less neat, cooled by an ice-cube.  He had a curious glass, built like a puzzle, so that the container and its fluid seemed to be sloping away from his lips and, even, in danger of spilling out on the floor – it was an illusion managed by the shape of the vessel.  

In his later years, Wally had a little difficulty managing the steps leading down to the library from the level of his kitchen and the elegant rooms on the first floor of his house.  It was easier for him to ask someone to replenish his drink.  I sometimes did this for him as did other members of our group.  Pat was almost always present, watching over Wally.  She disapproved of too much drinking and, so, we had to be prudent and circumspect when we filled Wally’s peculiarly shaped glass.  If the dose was too much, Pat would view us as contributing to Wally’s delinquency – it was not that she said anything, but her disapprobation was obvious if you knew her.  Certainly, she was too polite and discreet to say anything overt – she and Wally were always the perfect hosts for these gatherings.  

We didn’t know the rest of the house.  One of our members, Jim McDermott, was a plumber and he had seen other places in the home.  But I had no sense of the residence’s lay-out. Once a year, at Christmas time, we were given a short tour of the formal dining room and the front part of the home’s ground floor so that we could see the tasteful, and elaborate, display of holiday ornaments and decorations and Wally’s pale, flocked tree.  My impression was of long drapes, muted carpets, expensive furniture with arrays of tinsel and icy blue lights in the white-dusted foliage.  

7. 

Once when we were in Wally’s library discussing a book (Celine, I think, Death on the Installment Plan), we heard a wild, panicked wail.  It sounded like a damned soul crying out from the depths of the house.  I asked about the cry and Wally said that he was watching a dog for one of his children and that the poor beast, a poodle mix of some kind, was blind and demented.  The dog was exiled to the cellar and it was distressed, whining and howling.  I was curious and asked to see the dog.

The steps down to Wally’s basement were next to the refrigerator stocked with his scotch in the kitchen.  The cellar had old walls and perilous-looking steps and, on the concrete floor, I saw a shaggy dog, trotting in a tight circle around a drain in the floor.  The dog was crying out in anguished tones that could be mistaken for a baby’s wail or the sobbing of a small child.  The dog ran in circles and trembled, circling in the light of a naked bulb overhead.  

“Can anything be done for him?” I asked.

Wally shook his head sadly and said that, after a while, the dog would get tired of chasing its tail and, then, quiet down. The animal had to run in circles because it was blind and would otherwise bang into things.  

We went back to the library to finish our discussion.  Wally had his post-conversation drink.  I don’t recall if the dog quieted down or not.

8. 

Most of all, I remember Wally as being solid.  He was a big man and stout.  His head was square, a broad, meaty expanse with a bulbous nose.  He wore glasses and retained most of his hair.  He seemed immoveable – probably this was the reason he had played center in college when he attended Grinnell College in Iowa.  You couldn’t budge him.  

And nothing really changed about him.  At Wally’s funeral in Edina, I saw poster-boards covered with his favorite cartoons from The New Yorker – he apparently cut out the cartoons and kept them.  Of course, there were many pictures of Wally, including some taken when he was a three-year old child.  An alarming picture showed Wally scowling at the camera, showing his “war face” like a Maori warrior.  In that photograph, Wally looks like a menacing brick wall, big and rectangular with hard edges wearing his Air Force uniform.  Wally didn’t really age.  He was instantly recognizable in every photograph whether taken when he was a pre-schooler or made in the year or two before his death.  There was something unyielding and obdurate about him.  

This same quality was reflected in the tributes spoken about him at the funeral celebration.  It was obvious that everyone was describing the same person, a man with qualities and characteristics that were obvious to anyone who encountered him.  The sense I had was that the speakers were describing a mountain peak or a waterfall – the focus was a little different with each speaker and the perspective varied but the man under consideration was indisputably one thing and not another.  Often at funerals, one has the sense that the eulogies are somehow false or contrived.  This was not the case at the obsequies for Wally Stevens.  The force of his personality was only a little dimmed by his death but unmistakably clear.

9.

Wally’s ethnic stock was Mitteleuropaisch – Latvian or Lithuanian or Estonian, something on that order.  He was a “square-head” from south Chicago.  It’s not surprising that he became a top-ranking executive in a meat-packing company.  There was a very slight whiff of the Chicago stockyards about him.  At the funeral, I learned that Wally’s mother worked at a tavern on the south side, on some desolate stretch of one of the city’s endless north-south avenues.  In Chicago, you can stand in the middle of a street running north and south and look as far as the eye can see, down the flat broad avenue to the grey vanishing point on the horizon.  It’s all open and the perspective is like some kind of experiment in disciplining space, an endless recession of intersections, stop lights, and squat brick buildings running away from you to the edge of the prairie buried under the city and suburbs.  Wally lived above the tavern where his mother worked and, when he was a child, he pulled beer and served sandwiches on the weekends to the working men who frequented the bar.  I imagine the place under Chicago’s humid, murky skies, gutters always running with dirty water and patches of soiled snow lining the sidewalks.  

Wally’s mother must have been indestructible.  I recall that she was oldest person in the world to survive West Nile disease, a mosquito born illness.  She came down with that sickness when she was 99 or something on that order.  Wally was thinking about mortality when he told us about his mother’s bout with West Nile.  He filled out a form in my presence that night, after discussing the book we were reading.  The form donated Wally’s body to medical science.  I witnessed Wally’s signature on the document as did my close friend, Terry Dilley, the man who had founded the book club.

I told Wally that his body would be a boon to medical science – “Undoubtedly, you will be their finest specimen.”  Wally sipped his drink and was momentarily silent.  But, then, his characteristic high spirits returned and he became once more the wise-ass and jovial Chicago city-slicker, practical, sardonic, and plain-spoken, that was his ordinary persona.  

10.

Terry Dilley and I used to marvel that Wally, a man of sophisticated taste and culture, had been imprisoned for his whole career at the Hormel Company.  I don’t think Wally thought about his work for the meat packing company in those terms and he would undoubtedly protest this characterization.  But the Hormel Company, which butchers hogs and puts their meat in cans, was not a place so much hostile to intelligence and culture as indifferent to those qualities.  I understand Wally a little through the lens of my own father, a man who was three years younger than him: my father was born in 1936; Wally was a 1933 baby.  These were tough guys who did their duty and drew a grievously sharp distinction between work and their private lives.  They went to their jobs, concentrated on the tasks required of them, and didn’t let their families or personal lives interfere with their role in the world – which was to be a worker, a bread-winner, a cog in the industrial army.  My father loved Dixieland jazz, stamps, and watching television – he watched TV late into the night, mostly alone, eating a Totino’s frozen pizza that he had cooked for himself with a bottle of Coke.  Wally was an admirer of Broadway musicals, who attended the Minneapolis Symphony on a subscription basis, subscribed as well to The New Yorker (as did my father) and read history for entertainment.  Terry and I imagined that he must have felt out-of-place at work.  But, in those days, you left your tastes and interests at home when you went to your job.  You checked your culture and taste and sophistication at the door before you trudged to your desk in the corporate headquarters.  So it didn’t really matter, I suppose, on a day-by-day basis that Wally labored, I would suppose, among other executives who didn’t share any of his interests (except baseball maybe) and would have been surprised by the sorts of things that interested him. Without a doubt, Wally knew about the hard labor in construction or on the kill floor or digging ditches and was pleased to work in a business suit with a white collar.

In some respects, Wally led a divided existence – corporate executive versus big-city guy, even gad-fly and dilettante with sophisticated urban tastes – he liked Robert Benchley and Thurber, knew a score of poems by Ogden Nash by heart and read e.e. cummings (a taste he shared with my father).  Marx imagined that, after the class wars were won and the proletariat had triumphed, men would be free of the burden of dehumanizing labor – they would write poetry at dawn, tend their sheep in the afternoon, and engage in dialectical criticism in the afternoon before going to the theater or a concert or (today) watching TV.  Wally lived long enough to enjoy a little of this Utopian existence.  When he left the Company and retired, it seemed that he shut off the switch that powered the diligent and aggressive corporate executive and spent the last part of his life in different pursuits.  I admired the fact that he seemed to have made a clean break with Hormel, although who knows what effect that packing plant had on the shape of his life and the possibilities that he imagined for himself.  He didn’t seem to be a man with any regrets and, so, our solicitude for Wally’s life spent as Walter B. Stevens, a financial officer in a highly responsible job at Hormel Foods was not something that he shared – no one was farther from self-pity and its indulgences than Wally.   

 

11.

Wally was full of names and dates.  He had a prodigious memory which never deserted him even in his old age. He knew the sequence of battles in the Civil War and names of the generals who had fought in those battles as well as the political and strategic context and consequences of those fights.  He knew innumerable toasts, jokes, puns and witticisms.  One of his favorite toasts was to wish “ Here’s to champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends,” an example of the rhetorical figure of a chiasmus.  (At Wally’s funeral, the toast was quoted but with hasty apologies to the effect that, of course, the dear departed would never have wished “real pain” on anyone.)  He knew by heart some soliloquies from Hamlet as well as many aphorisms.  In the best and, most accurate, use of the term, he was a “know-it-all,” someone who always had a bon mot for every occasion.  I think he knew the capitols of every state in the Union and, of course, was proud that he had set foot in all fifty states as well.  Like my father, when he attended baseball games he carefully filled out a scorecard and thought that only a slacker would watch the game without scoring it.  He knew the presidents and their vice-presidents in chronological order.  He admired Stephen Sondheim and had carefully considered opinions on each of that composer’s musicals.  He liked to rank things by order or date or quality.  Each evening that we spent with him, Wally invariably reverted in conversation to his salad days at Grinnell College and the courtship of his wife – Pat had been a cheerleader and Wally wooed and won her after a notable game in which he had been slightly wounded: he had an open cut under his eye when he importuned her for a date.  It certainly seemed that the most memorable moments in Wally’s life and the recollections that he most treasured occurred when he was in college.  But he wasn’t trapped in the past.  My father once returned a kick-off for a run of 102 yards at a high school football game played in Valentine, Nebraska.  Photographs published in his small town’s local paper in Albion, Nebraska proved that this heroic event had, indeed, occurred and, sometimes, as children we pored over the printed accounts of my father’s great kick-off return.  But my father also had read Irwin Shaw’s short story “The Eighty-yard Run” and made his children read that work as well, expressing his concern about nostalgia and living in a world in which your best days were behind you.  Wally knew that story also – I think all men of his generation who had been athletes (and they were all athletes of one kind or another) knew that story – and was similarly cautious about the past.  He preferred to dwell upon the accomplishments of his grandchildren, a topic that faced the future which he favored (I’m afraid) at tedious length.  All his grandchildren were scholars and sportsmen and remarkably accomplished – they were chess masters and world champion spellers and award winning in every endeavor in which they engaged, handsome people employed by top-notch law firms as top-notch lawyers.  It was more than a little annoying but an old man must be indulged and we listened patiently as Wally sang their praises.  He didn’t like gossip or malice; I never heard him say anything unkind about anyone, preferring, it seemed, to pass over the crimes and misdemeanors of others in silence.  Despite our inquiries, he kept the Company’s secrets.  No doubt, he knew a lot of scandal about the operation of meat-packing company, but he never said a word about these things, never expressed any overt criticism of management or for that matter the rank-and-file work force.  He had taken the company’s wages and his name was on its paychecks and, so, he would have regarded it as disloyalty or, even, treason, to murmur a critical word about his former employer.  The Company had made him rich, at least, as far as the aspirations of a kid who had once pulled beer at a tavern on South Kedzie, and Wally seemed grateful for his station in life. 

I’m told that on every Fourth of July, Wally played the Broadway cast album from the musical 1776.  In later years, I suppose he and his family watched the video of that show.  There was a scrawny old man who worked out at a gym that Wally sometimes frequented.  He was a nondescript old man, unimpressive so far as I could see, but Wally knew that the man had fought in the retreat from Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War and he revered the old soldier.  At Wally’s funeral, several grandchildren, dressed in their Boy Scout uniforms, marched to the front of chapel where we were gathered.  The children earnestly set on the table an American flag folded as per official protocol 13 times into a triangular pillow.  Next to the boxed triangular flag, they set down a dark blue and yellow can of SPAM.   

12. 

Wally’s daughter, Christy asked me to speak at his funeral.  Here is what I said:

“I must confess that I didn’t know Walter B. Stevens very well.  By reputation, he was a corporate executive, a captain of industry, prudent, cautious and diligent.  He took care of the company’s money.  His name was on the payroll checks that funded our town.  No doubt, Mr. Stevens was an excellent fellow but a bit remote, even Olympian.

The man I knew called himself Wally Stevens.  For two decades, our great books group met at his house on 4th Street, maybe 30 times a year.  We discussed literature in Wally’s library, among his books and under the gleaming display of Pat’s fine chinaware placed beyond the reach of our slightly inebriated and negligent hands.  Wally and Pat’s hospitality was unfailing and generous.  It’s a mundane observation, but important: you can’t have a successful book group unless you have a welcoming and reliable place to meet.  And Wally together with Pat bestowed that gift upon us – the group probably wouldn’t have survived but for the generosity of our hosts.

But, beyond this gratitude for the warm and inviting library and the drinks and hors d’ouevres, I want to recall Wally’s indomitable presence, his provocative comments, his occasional combativeness, and the wealth of ideas and memories that he shared with us.  As you all certainly know, Wally was a rarity, not only in my packing plant town, but everywhere else as well – he was a man of true culture; he was civilized and tolerant, broad-minded with eclectic tastes and interests.  Like the best people, I think, he inspected the world from a slightly askew perspective. 

Wally contained multitudes – he owned every book written by the humorist Peter Devries, knew Broadway show tunes, and could regale us with soliloquies by Shakespeare – sometimes, he would astonish us by declaiming “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” – he made those vowels moan and roar.  He was like a wit at the Algonquin club and had by heart, perhaps, too many off-color poems by Dorothy Parker.  

And, of course, Wally was a great student of history: he remembered the generals who had led troops in battles in the Civil War, was an admirer of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, and could list the names of every American vice-president in the order in which they had served.  Wally told us that when he was unable to sleep, he would number the VeePees and list them one after another until slumber claimed him. Who would have imagined that a lullaby could be composed of the names of dead politicians. 

At a moment like this, it’s best to honor Wally by recalling the great gift of his conversation, his penetrating intelligence, and his kindness.  He was a blessing to us.  In his honor, I would like to summon that perfect repose, that sleep unvexed by dreams by naming for you Adams and Jefferson, of course, vice-president Adams and vice-president Jefferson and Aaron Burr and George Clinton and Elbridge Gerry and all that semi-illustrious company of vice-presidents, but I don’t know their names and could never list them in the right order.   So rest in peace, my brother.  Rest in peace, my friend.”    

 

13. 

I have always been deferential to older men and sought their praise.  This may have something to do with the way I was treated by my father.  He told me that I was an idiot and a fool and that I would never succeed at any endeavor that required courage or fortitude.  He said that I would certainly fail as a lawyer because I wasn’t sufficiently competitive.  In his world, men competed with one another for wealth and prestige.  Weaklings and losers were afraid to throw their hat into the ring.  It was okay to get into a fistfight and lose, but despicable to avoid fighting.  Wally was reared in the same world but he seemed to me to be kinder and more tolerant of the many different ways that a person might choose to be in his or her life.

Once, after a meeting of SMIG, Wally invited me to go with him to Torge’s Bar.  This was a small sports bar with signed pictures of athletes, mostly from the University of Minnesota, on the wall.  The bar was empty.  In the adjacent room, some middle-aged couples were finishing their steak or walleye dinners, but there was no one in the tavern except the Korean-born waitress who stood silently behind the bar watching us drink. Wally ordered top-shelf scotch.  He told me that he appreciated that I had incorporated the Southern Minnesota Internet Group and was willing to serve as a director of non-profit.  He bought me several drinks.  

A couple years later, Wally asked me to go with him to the Country Club to sample various types of scotch.  I don’t have trained taste-buds and so I couldn’t really distinguish between the different malts on offer.  Wally was very jovial and happy.  He shared with me some of the things he knew about scotch and joshed around with the young woman who was pouring the samples.  It was a nice experience.  

These experiences made me very happy and I remember those occasions with great warmth and gratitude.  

13.

Like many men of his generation, Wally was stoic and didn’t talk about his infirmities.  Perhaps, he was slightly ashamed of them.  Both he and Pat were cancer survivors.

Wally told us one night that a few years earlier he was undergoing some kind of cancer treatment that was dangerous to his eyes.  He had to endure the treatment wearing a blindfold.  He said that the darkness made him feel afraid and lonely.  Then, a nurse came and held his hand.  Wally said that this made all the difference in the world and that the feel of her hand cheered him up immensely.

October 17, 2024  

On Two High Plains Capitols and Crow Creek

1.

One week after I returned from the Dakotas, I discovered four lesions on my left leg.  Each sore was about the size of a quarter, dark purplish in color, a bit like a bad bruise, with a scab the size of a pencil point at the center of the oval mark.  The appearance of these lesions puzzled me.  I didn’t recall anything biting my left leg, although it was obvious that some bug had marked me in this way.  The skin and flesh around the sores itched intensely but was not discolored.

At my age, injuries of this sort seem dire to me, portents of inevitable bodily dissolution.  Things fester, suppurate, do not improve.  The injury, it seems, has seeped into my mind and poisoned it.  I am like the Grail King, Amfortas, afflicted with a wound that will not heal.  The only remedy, it seems, is to write myself out of the injury by making the thing a metaphor and applying pretentious allusions to what are, after all, merely infected mosquito or spider bites.

Perhaps, the marks on my left leg are a map of my travels.  Most proximate is the lesion on my thigh, signifying, perhaps, Fargo.  The three more remote sores represent Bismarck, North Dakota, Pierre, South Dakota, and the Crow Creek massacre site, a few miles from Chamberlain on Interstate 90 about mid-way between Sioux Falls and Rapid City.  At least, this is one possible interpretation of the marks on my leg, inflamed and itching even as I type these words.

2. 

Main Street Fargo, built along the Red River of the North, is four miles away from the actual center of enterprise in the city.  That center is the intersection between I-94 westbound from Minneapolis to Seattle and I-29 running down from the Canadian border across both Dakotas through Sioux Falls and ultimately south to Omaha and Kansas City.  Where the two freeways intersect in Fargo, there are shopping malls, warehouses, high-tech start-up companies, hospitals and medical clinics, and, of course, many amenities for weary interstate travelers, that is, restaurants and a dozen or more motels.  If you are going to stop in Fargo, you will inevitably stay in one of the freeway motels near this big, desolate crossroads.  Here, there are fast food places, sports bars, and lodgings, all built to the same plan, lining the wide, nondescript four-lane thoroughfares that make a grid cast over the utterly flat and featureless terrain around the freeway intersection.  This is no country for pedestrians – the neighborhood is spacious, without sidewalks, and boulevards run out to the level horizons where trains tugging ten-mile long strings of freight cars are clattering across the plains.

The motels in Fargo are always compromised in some way.  When you check-in, the desk clerk will warn you that the spa is broken, the hot tub’s jets inoperative, the pool closed due to infection, the restaurant no longer serving food but only open for drinks.   In the winter, the engine heaters lining the parking lots don’t work.  In the summer, the air-conditioning is wonky and the elevators have temporarily failed.  What applies to the lodgings is equally apparent at the restaurants – something is always wrong: there are no waitresses or the cooks have gone missing or the beer pulls are broken.  Fargo is a boom-town, constructed with shale-oil money, and stores and restaurants are always going out of business.  If you haven’t been to Fargo for six months, you are apt to find everything changed, new high-rises sprouting from the black earth, new strip malls where previously there were car-washes or trailer houses around the intersections.  

The pool in our hotel was partly closed and the water smelled like dead fish and the hot tub was a bacterial stew.

An air show was underway with the Blue Angels flying in cobalt-blue formations, sutured together by invisible bars, it seemed, as the jets rotated through the hot blue air.  Sonic booms drummed at the taut skin stretched across the heavens.  On the freeways, drivers slowed to gawk at the squadrons of jets roaring overhead, fin-shaped wings pivoting above the interstates with a motion like a big door being pulled shut.  The planes shot up into the sky from the Air Force base, a strategic air command installation, to the northwest of the city.  This also is not unusual.  Like the broken pools and defective air-conditioning at the motels, and like the restaurants without staff or food, air-shows are always underway at Fargo and the sky thunders with war-planes.  

 

3.

Westward on I-94 to Bismarck: Jamestown is Peggy Lee country – billboards advertise herds of bison and, under portraits of the singer (1920 - 2002), an inscription says: “Catch the Fever!”  Glacial pot-hole lakes pit the terrain, rolling prairie with distant grey-blue ridges at the edge of the world.   This is where space invaders stalked the small towns, isolated under the huge stormy skies.  An overpass in Jamestown is labeled with the words “Hidden Wound bridge”, a reference I think (or hope) to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  North of the freeway, an exit shows the way to Spiritwoods, a grim-looking palisade of cottonwood trees enclosing a stubby steeple and grain elevator.

4.

When I drove this freeway last time, the first week of May 2023, a blizzard had blown over the plains a couple days earlier.  Snowdrifts were decaying in the ditches and the creeks meandering over the flat land were flooded, muddy fields with lagoons around rotting corn stubble reflecting the grey skies.  The pot-hole lakes in their barren cups of prairie were wind-whipped, fretted with white-caps.  On this transit, it was warm, mist rising from swamps and dissolved by the humid sun into gold vapor.  

5.

I was traveling with Angelica and, so, we stopped at the Menoken village site.  A couple years before this expedition (August 2024), I had paused at this place, a grassy acreage like a rural cemetery pressed between a fence and disheveled line of bur oaks and cottonwood.  Woodland Indians had built a village on the site, bounded on three sides by a seasonal creek dog-legged around the settlement under thirty-foot clay cliffs.  Clearly, there was war on the plains.  The Indians who built this place, an unknown people probably precursors to either the Mandan or the Arikara or the Hidatsa, erected a palisade on the fourth side of the village not shielded by the high dirt banks above the creek.  The wooden stockade was built overlooking a deep ditch or moat around the village and, at intervals, there were bastions atop  earth mounds.  The elaborate nature of the defenses (ditch was over 800 feet long) implies serious conflict, although no one knows who the combatants were or why they were fighting.  Like most defensive walls, the system of stockade, moat and bastions seems to have been unavailing – probably no better than Trump’s wall on the southern border for staving off invaders (not a fair characterization of the immigrants on our southern border but it will have to stand.)  The earth lodges built over shallow pits, when excavated, showed signs of having been burnt.  Historical society markers at the site describe archaeological tools such as ground-penetrating radar with displays about trade routes implied by Yellowstone obsidian, Knife River chert tools, and marine beads found in the pit houses.  The place was occupied between 1100 and 1300, burnt down around the time of the Crow Creek incident.  

When I stopped at this place in September of 2021, the creek bed was bone-dry, a pale, dusty pathway under the clay embankment covered in sand and pebbles.  On this occasion, the bend in the stream was overflowing with green, stagnant water.  Dragonflies hummed there, below the steep hillside, and some lotuses were floating in the lagoon.  In the dew-wet grass where the village lodges had once stood, we found a fat, emerald-colored frog, dancing with leaps and bounds across the meadow.  Angelica caught the frog and cradled it in her hand.  The animal’s dark eyes gazed out from the cage of fingers in which she held the frog.  The sun was bright and hot.  When Angelica put the frog on the turf, spiny with small encrustations of cactus, the creature seemed baffled and was motionless for a minute or two before hopping away.  

6. 

The State Capitol in Bismarck is about eight miles to the West.  The capitol building, shaped to invoke a grain elevator, lies below the high ridges running along the Missouri River.  The river, at this place about 150 yards wide, divides the urban landscape into two sister-cities, Mandan on the west bank and Bismarck to the east.  The Missouri’s flood plain is too unpredictable for construction and the river is a mud-brown torrent, spinning off ox-box lakes in groves of half-drowned trees, derelict islands in the stream and ribs of white sand showing in shallow places jammed with snags and flotsam.  North of the freeway, there are hospitals and shopping malls and new housing developments on sunburnt hills above the river.  The old town is south of I-94, terraces burdened with humble houses descending to a brick downtown where the major thoroughfares run parallel to railroad tracks.  The white shaft of the capitol is between the downtown and the more lofty terraces flanking the freeway.  Exiting from the freeway, you look down to the capitol and several pale marble buildings near the tower, a green mall tilting down and away from government structures.

The exterior of the capitol is plain, a vertical slab of tower with white walls rising 21 stories above the elm-lined quadrangle.  (The capitol is the tallest building in North Dakota.)  Descriptions of the structure say that it is built in an Art Deco style.  This is misleading since Art Deco buildings typically are adorned with ornamentation of some kind, usually bas relief friezes above courses of windows or entryways.  In Saint Paul, Minnesota, for instance, where the Ramsey County Courthouse is Art Deco in design, elaborately carved lintels depict the history of the State and idealized mechanics and farmers loom over the entrance to the structure. Inside, there is a black onyx chamber, a sepulchral gallery that seems to be far underground in which a lance-shaped deity, a Lakota god symbolizing peace, stands in a pool of white, glistening light – the god is carved from highly polished, semi-precious catlinite (pipestone).  There is nothing of this kind at the North Dakota capitol.  The building’s exterior is scrupulously austere, pierced by courses of windows hooded in shadow in the bright prairie sunshine.  The top of the towers is flat without any ornamentation – the building just ends in mid-air.  To me, the impression produced by the capitol, “the skyscraper of the plains”, is monolithic and fascist – the structure reminds me of certain Roman administrative buildings erected during the Mussolini era; the colonnades are square-cut and not arched and the blank windows are simply punched into the bare walls.  These are brutalist buildings, signifying the unadorned will of the people, structures stripped of any ornament and expressing a collectivist ethos.  (North Dakota’s first 1883 territorial capitol with a 1903 wing burned at the dawn of the Depression, that is, in 1930.  The new building was erected at a time when intense prairie Popularist tendencies were in full flower – at that time, the State had annexed the grain and banking industries, banishing competition and controlling tariffs through a North Dakota governmental grain exchange and a North Dakota state-owned bank.  Thus, the square, blocky, collectivist architecture embodied by the State House.)

The entrance to the structure is through a four-story wing, similarly unpretentious extending from the tower, its front wall bulged out in an inconspicuous rounded facade, a very flat semi-circle that apparently contains the senate and house chambers.  The doors opening into the complex pivot into a block of black onyx, another slab of polished stone extruded from the administrative wing under the skyscraper.  Inside, there is a monumental hall with golden columns rising about 25 feet above the white, tiled floor, The columns are also unadorned and Doric in form, free-standing in front of another jet-black slab of onyx decorated with the State’s Great Seal like a target displayed in the center of dark, reflecting stone.  The gold color of the columns rhymes with huge vertical chandeliers, similarly gilded and shaped a bit like fixtures you might find in a Frank Lloyd Wright structure – the chandeliers are supposed to resemble wheat bristles or awns, although I couldn’t really see this form; as with Frank Lloyd Wright’s ornamentation, the vegetal shapes are highly stylized.  Elevators running in black stone grooves provide access to the offices in the skyscraper.  A band of bronze worked into low relief depicts images of pioneers stooped over their plows and soldiers and cowboys and Indians decorate the ledge above the openings into the elevators, four, I think, on each side of the lobby.  Each elevator shaft is adorned with an image of a pioneer with rifle fighting an Indian carrying a big, bulbous club.  

The senate and house chambers are entirely unpretentious – there are no murals or elaborate ceiling details; the only concession to civic pride is the rich, polished cherry wood veneer on the walls and legislative desks.  In the lower level, about 25 paintings depict North Dakota luminaries.  The portraits are all the same size and format (in this State, no one is any better than anyone else), brightly painted with easily recognizable faces and figures depicted against backgrounds signifying the dignitary’s claim to fame.  For instance, Peggy Lee is shown in front of a radio, a smoky cabaret with a gaunt microphone over her shoulder; Lawrence Welk bows obsequiously to the viewer with a small town behind him and a ghostly orchestra in the blue shadows of a ballroom.  The shapely Angie Dickinson shows off her glamorous crown of blonde hair; pictures of the star as a TV police woman poised to fire her service revolver are behind her.  Roger Maris is posed as if about to hit a home-run; there’s a ballfield full of fans to his rear.  The current governor, Doug Burgum, is shown on a factory floor, grinning at his workers.  (I would like to tell you that the Trump-supporting Burgum is shown sodomizing a goat while naked employees inscribe computer code into tablets with bleeding fingers – but this would be unfair to the Governor.)

The North Dakota Supreme Court is somewhere in the building but I couldn’t find that room.  The halls were empty, a few young women wearing lanyards and high-heels clip-clopped over the glassy tile floors.  The heat from outside was scratching at the facade and windows, trying to gain access to the building.  The air inside the mortuary of the Capitol smelled of subterranean puddles of water and lobbyist perfume and you have the sense that the cooling capacity of the system was taxed to the utmost – the stale refrigerated air seemed only tentatively cool.  An observation deck atop the building looks down over the quadrangle and its beds of bright red and yellow flowers.  The river is half-hidden in a glowing heat haze shrouding the small buildings along Main Street downtown.  Nearby, a bronze statue of Sacagawea, a papoose strapped to her shoulder, stands twice life-size on a wrinkled stone atop a marble plinth..  She looks like a paleolithic lance-point aimed at the zenith.  In her shadow, there is a corroded iron sculpture of a buffalo.  The heat is suffocating and cicadas buzz in the elm trees.  

7.

The North Dakota State Historical Society’s museum sprawls horizontally in the lap of the Capitol tower.  The shadow of the skyscraper transects the rather shapeless pavilion, an acre or so in extent, crouching on the edge of the quadrangle.

These galleries are a nice respectful museum, a polite place that doesn’t even aspire to the title of “museum” – it’s called something like “Cultural Heritage Center.”  You don’t go to this sort of place to gaze at artifacts from the past, but, rather, to be massaged by the displays, nudged by the civility of the labels into a state of numbed contemplative tranquility.  There’s nothing ghoulish about this institution – no fragmentary human corpses or skulls, no implements of torture or execution, no spooky corridors with masks clinging to the walls and war-clubs under glass.  I count four hangar-like enclosures: one full of agitated fossils mounted to gesticulate at the visitor, one representing landscapes sacred to the indigenous people, one containing exhibits on the Native American history of the State, and, at last, a gallery containing pioneer garments, Bibles written in Icelandic and Norwegian, some wagons and barrels and lanterns on a platform simulating a general store next to cases full of military uniforms.  North Dakotans like firearms and so there are racks of carbines and muzzle-loaders stacked against the wall, enthusiastically inspected by a couple of burly men when I visited, two huntsman, it seemed, expressing admiration for the ingenious weapons on display and speculating how they might be used to take down a deer or pheasant in flight.  It’s mildly interesting but without the morbid frisson that accompanies many museums.  I suppose you could learn a lot here if you read all the signs and examined each object but, then, who visits a museum to learn things – you enter such places expecting to be shocked, astounded, and appalled.

North Dakota has badlands along it’s western border with Montana and, where there are badlands, one expect to find fossils extruding the wreckage of extinct species from the eroded hills. The paleontology exhibits are impressive, if you like that sort of thing, and, indeed, invested with a operatic intensity lacking in the rest of the museum.  Sabre-toothed tigers rear up to maul some sort of lumbering, armor-plated quadruped and there are monster turtles, stooped eight-foot tall sloths, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex stalled mid-lunge on its iron stanchions.  The lighting is dim and the prehistoric monsters rage and cower in the shadows.  In the corridor outside, a dinosaur about the size of a schoolbus  – it’s painted on the wall – in encased in a crystal block; the creature died in a swamp and sunk into anaerobic mud so that its skin, transformed to chalky-looking stone, is preserved.

A big gallery on sacred landscapes exemplifies the Cultural Heritage Center’s serene approach to anthropology.  Big panoramic photographs depict various places claimed as sacred by the Native peoples in the area.  Headphones allow the visitor to access voices explaining in soft whispers why the landscape is holy and what it means to those who worship in these natural cathedrals.  The exhibit is so respectful as to be meaningless.  Obviously, the Native Americans who revere these landscapes don’t want them trampled by the White man and, so, the actual location of these sites is “restricted” – that is, there is no information as to where these places are to be found.  The rites conducted in these landscapes are also sacred and, so, no details are provided as to what sort of mysteries are celebrated in these places.  Some ambient pan-flute is tremulous in the air and canned sound effects simulate the wind blowing over dry grass or stirring in the pine ridges.  The sacred spaces consist of nondescript, horny-looking buttes, ravines slippery with fallen pebbles, a pond between several pine trees, a ridge dissected by stony gulches – it’s not spectacular by any means.  The gods invested in these sites are not melodramatic; they conceal themselves in terrain that you might not even notice from the highway.

As it happens, I’ve been to one of these sites, a standing stone on a knoll in southeastern North Dakota, probably about 50 miles from Fargo.  When I visited the place, we drove along a rutted field track to an opening in a barb wire fence and a short trail up through the brown dry grass to the rock.  The sacred monument is a small square pillar of rock, an upright stone sliver no larger than four-feet tall incongruously rising over the hilltop.  In a picture in the gallery, a Native American woman sits at the base of the stone, caressing it like a toddler.  (The display says that the stone column was once a woman who was petrified at this place.) When I visited the site, a year or so ago, there was no one around.  Some fragmentary bones were scattered in the grass under a little heap of flat boulders holding the rock upright.  I recall a snake slithered through the grass.  In the larger-than-life photographs in the display hall, the rock looks bigger and more impressive than when I was in its actual presence.  From the hilltop where the pillar is posted like a sentry, you can look across the green and yellow prairies to where they become blue in the distance – a river flows among trees in a shallow valley and there are birds of prey circling overhead.   

8.

A display case outside the gallery devoted to Native American history presents recent museum acquisitions, that is, artifacts donated to the Cultural Heritage Center.  There are some vintage toys in their original boxes, a derringer and a few spear points and an EZ-Bake oven sold under the auspices of the Girl Scouts of America.  The past is not the same as history.  The past is a scatter of objects in a random array as if dropped from the skies.  History builds stories about these things.

In the Indian galleries, there are some charismatic artifacts.  A Winter Count (that is a pictorial chronicle) made by a Lakota man named High Dog shows events from 1798 to 1906.  The object consists of small cartoon figures, really just pictographs as an aid to the memory, arranged in rows like the cars in a freight train.  The insignia are painted on a yard-wide sheet of tanned bison hide empty at its center.  A printed key guides the eye to some of the more memorable images: a bison sitting like an obedient dog but inverted memorializes the year that Sitting Bull was murdered; a little figure polka-dotted with red blisters signifies small-pox.  A tally marking seven next to a nondescript quadruped documents a year when the Sioux killed seven cougars in the Black Hills but on land claimed by the Crow; when the Sioux rode back to their lodges, they were ambushed and seven of them were killed in retaliation for the slaughter of cougars.  One picture shows the Sioux’s last buffalo hunt – this was in 1883, a hunt conducted under the auspices of the Indian Agent on the Standing Rock Reservation, a man named McLaughlin.  If you could decipher each of the little pictographs painted on the hide, you could trace the fate of the great Lakota nation from its ascendancy around the time of Lewis and Clark through its wars and decline – the chronicle seizes up and stops midway on the vellum-like bison skin – for the Lakota around 1906, history, more or less, stopped: the tribe was broken, the sacred hoop torn asunder in the bloody mud and ice at Wounded Knee, and the people were impoverished and demoralized.  Half of the buffalo hide is simply an empty void.  Of course, this wasn’t the end, but it felt that way to High Dog in 1906.

The Sioux warrior tradition is evident in several objects.  Another painting on bison parchment shows many soldiers in dark blue coats.  At their center, Sitting Bull is shown by his customary sign, a crouching bison, here inverted and thrust through by a knife-blade: the man who painted this image, showing the Holy Man’s assassination at the hands of the Indian police, was present when the killing occurred – he was a Hunkpapa soldier named Stone Man.  Another warrior named No Two Horns fought at the Little Big Horn.  In the volley of gunfire from the doomed cavalrymen, No Two Horns had his horse shot out from under him, but was not otherwise harmed.  In recognition of his close call, the warrior made an image of the horse, a shaggy totem with staring eyes called something like Ta Sunka Ka Opi Wokiksuye – that is, “Sacred Memory of His Horse killed.”  The thing is a combination of a doll and a braided riding crop.  In an adjacent display, there are photographs of Woodrow Wilson Keeble, a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton tribe, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for valor in some nameless skirmish in the Korean War.  When his unit came under fire, Keeble crawled forward and killed all the men in three separate machine gun emplacements: in an interview, Keeble said that the battle haunted him all his life – “(But) fear did not make a coward out of me although the terror in me was so strong that I could feel idiocy replace reason.”  Keeble died in Wahpeton in 1982.  Another painting on bison hide dates back to an event in 1837.  A warrior named Poor Wolf, a Hidatsa, rides his horse into the brick wall of a woman in full regalia brandishing a knife.  The picture is called “Poor Wolf, a Hidatsa, challenged by a Sioux Woman.”  The outcome of the confrontation is uncertain.  What is important is that the Hidatsa cavalryman, dressed in warlike apparel and astride a beautiful, spirited horse charged at a woman who did not retreat but, in fact, threatened him, an event that still startles 187 years later.    

9.

One day, the State Park south of Mandan at Fort Abraham Lincoln will be a monument to the Civilian Conservation Corps.  History progresses through changes in emphasis.  Already, exhibits at the park imply this future transformation in theme: at this moment in time, perhaps, it is easier and more politically correct to celebrate the accomplishments of the CCC than to continue to remember that dewy morning in 1876 when Custer and his columns of cavalry rode over the western bluffs here to their doom.  

CCC workers were paid $30 a month on the condition that the government could remit 25 dollars of that pay to the worker’s families and home farms.  The visitor center at Fort Abraham Lincoln is extravagantly monumental, built of shaggy-looking red ashlar blocks that each must weigh a thousand pounds.  The structure seems modeled on some of H. H. Richardson’s train stations, particularly the five small buildings erected for the Boston and Albany Line in Massachusetts.  Like those stations, the visitor center clings to the ground, small but mighty, more like a geological formation than an erection contrived by human hands.  (The density of the building give it the aspect of an outcrop of red granite, pierced by grotto-like entrances to an impenetrable interior darkness.)  Like Richardson’s train stations, the visitor center has a steeply pitched shingled roof, also, it seems, a thing to which darkness clings.  The structure is L-shaped and unadorned.  It’s a monument to the back-breaking labor required to make such a building.  A dozen or so yards behind the building, the CCC spanned a ravine ripped through the hillside and cut down to the river with a similarly huge, heavy, and grandiose ashlar bridge.  That structure is concealed beneath a wooden frame-bridge built, for some reason, over the CCC structure.  When Angelica and I visited the place, we noticed the old CCC bridge only because there was a sick cat mewing at passers-by from the leaf-strewn bottom of the draw and, looking in that direction, we saw the heavy-set ribs of the old structure.  

The sense that the visitor center has been built to protect a dense, mysterious darkness, a zone of shadows guarded against the bright, scalding sun, is echoed by the reconstructed Mandan earth-lodges beyond the bridge, five of them built in a rough circle on the terrace overlooking the Missouri.  These structures are also simplified geometric forms, elegant circular domes clad in packed dirt with cottonwood timbers framing square entrances.  Inside, a sort of vaporous light falls athwart the benching and hard-packed earth floors surrounding a central fire-pit.  The light emanates from an oculus at the apex of the dirt rotunda, probably about thirty feet above the fire-pit.  The sky seems to press down against the round opening, magnifying, it seems, clouds caught in that crosshairs – this effect is a bit like the way the heavens are exhibited in the skylights in viewing stations by James Turrell.  The earth lodges are surprisingly spacious, certainly capable of housing thirty people or more and the interior architecture is elegant: massive beams frame the rotunda and those supports rest on huge, squat wooden pylons.  These dwellings are made to be cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  Under the hot, relentless, North Dakota sun, the earth lodges, three open to the public, were cool as a mausoleum made from marble, full of fragrant shadowy darkness.  Powdery dust kicked up from the floor rotated under beams of sunlight falling through the overhead vent above the fire-pit.

The terrace where the earth lodges were reconstructed represents On-a-Slant Village as it was later named – it’s not clear what its inhabitants called the place. (Like Menoken Village, the site was selected because defensible – the terrace at this location bulges into the river as a peninsula with sheer cut banks, protecting the dwellings on three-sides; a big palisade was erected on the side of the bluff overlooking the On-a-Slant. The town existed for about two-hundred years beginning around 1550 and was abandoned after the first great small pox epidemic in 1781.  It was in ruins when Lewis and Clark passed through this area and the lodges had melted back into the sod when Custer lived in the cottage a half-mile away in 1876.  By 1803 - 1804, the surviving Mandan had moved their villages a hundred miles north to the area around the confluence of the Knife River with the Missouri.  On-a-Slant was built where the Heart River flows into the Missouri, the center of the Mandan world and, of course, for these people the center of their Universe as well.  

“On-a-Slant” was the southernmost of nine closely associated earth lodge villages. This urban complex likely housed about 10,000 to 15,000 people.  Eighty-six earth lodges stood at On-a-Slant.  Mandan society was matrilineal and the women built the lodges and, then, passed them down to their daughters.  Cultivated fields surrounded the towns.  A hereditary caste of corn priests preserved the sacred knowledge as to when to plant as well as how to grow and harvest the crop. The names of the corn priests were remembered by oral tradition and these technicians of the sacred were the repository of the prayers and songs integral to the cultivation of maize. The dissolution of Mandan society under the pressure of small-pox threatened all of its institutions including the brotherhood of the corn priests.  In the early 20th century, the last male corn priest died.  Since the Mandan still cultivated corn, a woman named Scattered Corn assumed the office of corn priestess – the first and only female corn priest in Mandan memory and, in fact, the last as well.  Scattered Corn was born 1857 and, when she was twelve, elders taught her how to build and consecrate an earth lodge.  She applied this specialized knowledge to supervise the reconstruction of the five earth lodges located at the State Park, labor accomplished under her direction by the redoubtable Civilian Conservation Corps workers.  Folklorists collected some of the sacred songs and prayers from her and have preserved them.  Scattered Corn died in 1940.  A photo shows Scattered Corn as an old woman in a polka-dotted calico dress with a short hoe tipped over her shoulder; the hoe looks like axe-handle with a sharp iron blade attached to its end.  A frieze in the Visitor Center shows the Corn Priests in ceremonial regalia displayed in a long row, the last of their number identified as Scattered Corn.

In late October 1804, Lewis and Clark visited the Mandan and Hidatsa villages at Knife River, another large urban enclave notwithstanding the small-pox epidemic a quarter century earlier.  The leader of the Mandan was a chief named Shebeka who received the explorers in the Tepinxe, the ceremonial lodge larger than the other residential dwellings and built next to the town plaza.  Shebeka was an imposing figure and, at that time, his people were wealthy in the role as brokers of horses and guns along the upper Missouri.  Shebeka traveled to Washington, D. C. to parley with the President, Thomas Jefferson.  Shebeka’s wife, Yellow Corn, traveled with her husband.  She was taken to the theater and it is said that she thoroughly enjoyed the show.  

10.

George Armstrong Custer isn’t a villain in North Dakota, at least not at the State Park above the Missouri where his house as commanding officer has been reconstructed.  The structure stands on the prairie below a huddle of bare hills about three-quarters of a mile from the Fort Abraham Lincoln visitor center and the earth lodges at On-a-Slant. The two-story bungalow has five brick chimneys and a wide porch running across the front of the building.  When the military post was decommissioned, local farmers on this largely treeless prairie sawed the house apart for timber.  It was rebuilt fifty years ago based on period photographs atop the field-stone foundations of the cellar still buried in the prairie grass.  The footprints of other structures excavated in the fields around the parade ground are visible as rectangular tracts of tall, unmown grass.

It costs 8 dollars to tour the house.  The guide was a young woman dressed as one of the laundresses employed at the Fort.  Custer, as she characterized him, was a mischievous rapscallion, a prankster, and, of course, a devoted husband to his wife Elizabeth or “Libby” as she was called.  This portrait of the general, in fact, is an artifact of Libby’s books about her life on the plains.  After her husband died at the Little Big Horn, she didn’t remarry and devoted her six decades of widowhood to consecrating George’s memory.  Libby recalled George Armstrong as affectionate, fond of pets and his horses. She and her husband corresponded when he was on campaign and their letters are heavily inflected with sexual innuendo – for instance, Custer refers to “something” that Libby has that she is to bring to their reunion since he has not “tasted it for a long time.”  Libby wrote of “a soft spot on Somebody’s carpet” that could be assuaged only be “sitting tomboy” and “riding” awhile.  (It should be noted as well that Custer was a famous womanizer, incapable of fathering children because of an infection of venereal disease, and that his relationship with Libby was also often tempestuous – on occasion, they each accused the other of “flirting” and there were some spectacular rows.)   Custer was supposed to have kept thirty dogs as well as wounded birds and a cougar cub.  The tour guide told us that Custer had the finials from the top and bottom of the home’s staircase banisters removed so that he and his brother could slide down the stairs.  Family life in the house is described as idyllic, a chronicle of picnics, hunting expeditions on the prairie, and musical soirees in the home’s sitting room.  Custer’s cook was a Black woman, Eliza Brown, that he had freed in the aftermath of a Civil War battle and she was used to caring for the young soldier, the “boy general” as he was then called, and cooking for him.  Eliza accompanied Custer at all his posts.  The laundress docent told us that shortly after her marriage, Libby and Eliza Brown quarreled over Custer – there could be only one mistress of the house.  Apparently, by the time Libby joined Custer in Dakota territory in 1875, the two women had reached some sort of understanding.  A photograph shows Custer in a broad brimmed hat standing proprietarily over Elizabeth, clad in a tight bodice that shows off her hour-glass figure (she wears white gloves and holds a riding crop) with Eliza Brown seated nearby. The servant, wearing a flat bonnet, sits on a stool just slightly lower than the imperious Mrs. Custer. At the Fort, Custer and his brother Tom, who had been badly scarred by a bullet in the Civil War, spent most of their time outside, fishing in the river, running their dogs, and hunting antelope and deer. As a commanding officer, Custer was apparently easy-going and his soldiers liked him.  

In the old cellar of the structure, visible from a trapdoor opening onto a steep ladder, tourists can see barrels of provisions, packing trunks, and a stuffed cougar cub.  At the time of the expedition west to fight Sitting Bull, Custer’s long hair was no longer flaxen but was described as reddish in color.  Custer had been ranked 34th among the 34 students graduating as West Point.  He was a poor scholar but an aggressive and fearless soldier – at age 23, he was made a Brigadier General in the Union Army.  The house is full of photographs of Custer and Libby as well as pictures of the servants and Custer’s brother, Tom, always turned so that the deep gouge in his cheek is not visible to the camera.  Custer was 37 when he rode over the western ridge with his column of cavalry and supply train.  

After the Battle of the Little Big Horn, President Ulysses Grant laid the blame for the debacle squarely on Custer’s command.  Custer had been renowned for his recklessness in combat in the Civil War – he had led several cavalry charges on his own initiative and, probably, contrary to orders.  In each case, Custer emerged victorious and unscathed.  At Gettysburg, one famous charge killed almost every one of his troopers – Custer was said to have nine-lives.  But Grant disliked the “boy general” during war between the States and was quick to publicly accuse the dead man’s imprudence for the 1876 defeat. Libby, then, embarked on her campaign to rehabilitate her husband’s memory.  She wrote three best-selling books about her life with Custer and criss-crossed the country delivering lectures praising him.  She lived to be 91, died in 1933, and was buried at West Point next to her husband.    

After the tour, from the porch of the officer’s quarters, the stocky little tower of the State Capitol is visible across the river.  Heat haze hangs over the wooded hollows in the hillsides on the opposite bank and the capitol skyscraper is partly dissolved in the humidity.  To the West, storm clouds are gathering.  

11.

The storm held off until supper-time.  The sky was congested over the river and downtown Bismarck and, when we came off the high bluff where our hotel was located, rain spattered the streets and slapped hard against the windshield.  On the main commercial lane where we planned to eat at an Irish pub, downpour flooded the gutters and reduced visibility to a couple of blocks, then, one block, then, to nothing more than the lit lances and bubbles of neon glistening on buildings above the drowned sidewalk.  The pub was called The Blarney Stone and, as I rounded the corner at that address, pellets of hail filled the air.  We parked a block and a half from the pub, but couldn’t make the distance in the rattling hail and hard, pelting rain.  After waiting in the car for fifteen minutes, I gave up and we drove slowly back up the hill and out of downtown where the hail had ceased falling, but the rain continued as a deluge filing intersections with pools of agitated water.  I had the odd sense that I was bilocated – that is, viewing the thunderstorm enveloping the city from across the river at On-a-Slant with the tombstone of the Capitol building melted to a pale rectangular shadow crushed under the immense turbulent sky and, at the same time, navigating the rapids flowing down from the motel hill on the curving road that led down to the city center.  The storm made me disassociate a little.  At the hotel, four motorcycles were parked under the porte cochere and the riders in their leather jackets and pants were standing under the awning at the lobby entrance.  Thunder wracked the sky and, then, the clouds blew apart and blue sky foamed overhead.  

We went back to the Blarney Stone.  The streets were less crowded by this time.  Happy hour had come and gone.  In the pub, I ordered some cabbage mashed into potatoes with bangers.  Angelica had Shepherd’s Pie. I make Shepherd’s Pie on special occasions for Angelica.  In my version, browned hamburger is flavor-deepened by beef bouillon with chili sauce and cooked with green peas.  I make mashed potatoes separately and thatch the meat and peas mixture with them.  This concoction is cooked at 350 degrees for half an hour.  In the last ten minutes in the oven, I spill cheddar cheese across the potato topping to the dish. At the Blarney Stone, the Shepherd’s Pie was just a crock of Irish stew with fingernail-size cuts of roast beef cooked with carrots, onions, and some green peas.  The stew wasn’t roofed with potatoes; rather, a dollop of mashed potato was dropped onto the top of the stew to complete the presentation.  This wasn’t Shepherd’s Pie, at least as I imagine the dish.  

It was twilight when we left the restaurant.  Bismarck’s night life is limited and the wet streets and sidewalks were empty when we went outside.  Up at the hotel, darkness was rising from moist bushes.  The freeway in its concrete channel echoed with traffic, trucks west-bound to Billings and Bozeman and Seattle.   

12. 

The next day, we rose around dawn and drove south on North Dakota 1806 along the west side of the Missouri River.  About 18 miles south of Bismarck and Mandan, a peculiar pyramid-shaped butte rises over the river on the west side of the road.  The butte has sharp edges and steep sides.  Perhaps, the early morning light, raking across the prairie, made the formation seem more uncanny than it was, but, approaching from the north, the hill looked man-made, some sort of monument erected for reasons now long forgotten. Under the blocky square prominence, a intersection divides some derelict buildings into four ramshackle quadrants: shacks and an abandoned gas station – this is Huff, pop. 15.  A half-mile to the west of the cone-shaped butte, an escarpment of bluffs rises to the plain above the river, a knobby badlands where barn-shaped hills are clumped under the crumpled, bare heights.  Deep shadow lingers in the slot canyons and gulches cut into the hillside.  Apparently, there’s a ski resort somewhere among these eroded bluffs, an improbable-looking landscape called the Huff Hills.  Not exactly Vail or Snow Mass, the ski resort boasts a vertical height of 425 feet with three lifts and some snow-making machines.  Periodically, the resort goes bankrupt and, then, is resurrected by investors under different names.  Once, the ski-hill was called Twilight.  

A little farther south along 1806, the road passes a small parking lot and the fenced enclosure at the Huff Hills Indian Village historical site.  About 1500, a neatly organized town was built here, 103 long-houses of roughly rectangular shape, ranked in exact rows inside a palisade.  For some reason, these Indians, apparently ancestral Mandan, didn’t built round earth lodges but instead erected wooden houses with gabled (and shingled) roofs.  Wood must have been once more plentiful here, probably stands of cottonwood and cypress growing in the imbricated landscape of the Huff Hills.  War of a particularly savage kind was apparently endemic here.  The town was defended by a stockade with bastions and look-out towers at intervals around the perimeter.  A outer ditch defended the palisade.  To the east, access to the village was barred by the wide, expanse of the river.  Tightly spaced post holes show that the palisade consisted of more than 2500 timber poles.  The enormity of this project, cutting and hewing posts from trees with stone tools, dragging them to the edge of the river, and, then, digging holes with bison-scapula spades implies levels of serious carnage in the area.  Archaeologists think that warfare in this period, aggravated by climactic change and failed crops, was waged between the different farmer groups in their sedentary villages in the river valley.  Tradition suggests that the people in Huff Village were ancestral Mandan engaged in warfare with the predecessors of the Arikara tribe.  In the oblique light, the field where the village once stood is scored and dented with rectangular pits.  The stockade was built ruler-straight with three corners and dimples in the sod where the bastions once stood.

The road runs toward the border with South Dakota.  The hillsides marking the river valley are full of bruised-looking shadows and creases lined with pine and cottonwood trees.  In the Fall of 2016, there was trouble along this roadway where the highway crosses into the North Dakota lobe of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.  This was the epicenter of Native American protests against he Dakota Access Pipeline.  Originally, the Pipeline was supposed to angle through the outskirts of Bismarck but there were concerns about pollution of drinking water and, so, as often happens in the West, the conduit wa re-routed to pass over the Indian reservation.  The Lakota (Hunkpapa Sioux) opposed the Pipeline built to transfer sweet light oil from the northwest corner of the state across the Dakotas and Iowa to Patocka, Illinois.  Activists chained themselves to heavy equipment mobilized to construct the pipeline.  The situation deteriorated into violent conflict between the Morton County Sheriff’s Department (where the pipeline crossed ND 1806) complicated by the presence of the United States Corps of Engineers supervising the work on federal land, the agency with authority over the Missouri River where it is impounded into Lake Oahe.  The upper reaches of Oahe are in North Dakota near the Cannonball River tributary to the Missouri.  ND 1806 was shut down and there were a serious of confrontations resulting in several hundred arrests.  Water cannons were used to knock down protesters, flash-bang grenades were fired, and “bite dogs’ attacked people in the camps built along the route of the pipeline over the Standing Rock Indian Agency.  In December 2016, 2000 former veterans appeared at the encampment prepared to fight the federal and state authorities.  It was bitterly cold and, after a few weeks of stand-off, the protest faded away.  After the fighting, litigation ensued.  The United Nations councils as to indigenous people issued decrees and the protest assumed an international complexion.  At one point, a Federal Court shut down the pipeline.  But it was re-opened and oil flows through it today.  

These events occurred along ND 1806 between Highway 24 and the so-called Backwater Bridge, another span over a tributary creek that was damaged by fires set by the protesters.  With the bridge shut down, the protesters were bottled up along the highway to the extent that even emergency vehicles like ambulances were blocked from entry into the conflict zone.  Nothing marks the location of these protests although the encampment middens and debris fields, covered with human waste, around the encampments reportedly cost 22 million dollars to clear.  I wasn’t aware of this history when I drove the highway toward the South Dakota border.  For three months, National Guard troops in armored personnel carriers shuttled back and forth on this nondescript, winding two-lane highway.  Thousands of protesters clashed with law enforcement and excavating machines were sabotaged.  Vans full of big city reporters with their cameras and sound-crews hustled to barricades under the grey, cold skies.  Presumably, the journalists were shell-shocked by the vast landscapes and the huge skies full of unpredictable and foreboding clouds, turbulent formations in the heavens that mirrored the disorder on earth.  Flashbang grenades burst and savage dogs bayed and protesters chanted and sang, but the wind has blown away all those sounds and a vast silence now broods over the broad river valley and the ravines and muddy cut-banks and the swamps full of green and brown fuzzy cattails.  This recent conflict is too raw for there to be historical markers and, so, there is no trace, no mark inscribed on the land by which to remember these events.   

13.

Every day, I suppose, people walk over the place where Cain killed Abel.  Probably, there’s a highway nearby and, on a hill the color of bronze, some cell-phone towers above white high-rises.  There ought to be a monument, a pillar a mile high made from crashed bombers and jets, tanks welded together, destroyers and aircraft carriers tilted upright and encrusted with howitzers and missile launchers, acres of ossuaries spread out beneath the tower in a landscape shell-pocked and leprous with craters and land mines.  But there is nothing, no trace, not even a whiff of corruption on the breeze nor any sense of disquiet and sadness.  The insects and the birds and the small mammals don’t care what happened here and, perhaps, we shouldn’t either.  The landscape is indifferent to the atrocities committed on it.

14.

A hillside blocks the highway and the road curves up a barren gulch clogged with sand and fallen rocks.  Rows of pines stud the ridges.  The road rises to the top of the long escarpment and a sign says that we have crossed into South Dakota although the Standing Rock Reservation straddles the border and this is still Indian land even on the other side of the line.  The country is deserted and mostly flat, tilting very gradually down to the blue-grey tentacles of lake sprawling between brown hills.  Far away, a bunker-shaped butte hovers over pale drifts of ground-fog.

15.

The road curves down to the highway bridge at Mobridge, South Dakota.  Lake Oahe, flooded back seventy miles from the dam on the Missouri to the south, fills the valley, a blue, rippling expanse where tiny white waves like the wings of doves flicker far below the bridge deck.  The crossing exploits a barren island, the bridge making a dog leg over the heap of hills standing in the midst of the water.  The old river bottoms are all under fifty feet of water and the town sits above the eroded shoreline on a promontory.  Some Indians are ambling across the bridge with a couple dogs and there are people on foot staggering around the place where the deck drops down from its suspension girders and lands among the small frame houses and brick buildings of the village.  The gas stations all offer bait.  Lake Oahe is famous for its fishing and, below the sun-struck knoll occupied by the town, boat-landings slope into the water between cut-banks of yellow and greenish-grey clay.  Far from land, a motorboat shreds the placid surface of the lake imprinting the water with its white frothy wake.  

Sitting Bull was born near what is now Mobridge.  A monument marks his alleged grave on the west bank of the lake atop a hill visible from town.  It’s uncertain exactly who is buried there.  The Sioux leader and holy man was killed by Indian police at Fort Yates in North Dakota in December 1890.  Reports to the Indian Agent at Fort Yates suggested that Sitting Bull intended to leave the reservation to join the ghost dancers in the pine ridges near the badlands at Wounded Knee.  A posse of police was sent to the log cabin where Sitting Bull was living and there was a fracas at dawn in which the chief was shot and killed.  He was buried near where he died, but, almost immediately, the grave was disturbed – people doubted that Sitting Bull had been killed (perhaps, he couldn’t be killed; ghost shirts were said to repel bullets) and, apparently, his bones were disinterred more than ten times between 1890 and 1900.  The grave site was neglected and remote.  I drove past the road to Fort Yates on my way to Mobridge, 57 miles to the south, and didn’t know the significance of the place.  The town has 150 residents and its just a disorderly rabble of government-built homes, half of them, it seems, abandoned, on a naked point-of-land above the lake. I didn’t see any school or tribal headquarters buildings or, even, a gas station in the hamlet.  Wrecked cars line some dirt roads and, down the hill from the village, a pebbly bar of black sand fringed with driftwood juts into the water of the lake.

On April 8, 1953, in the darkness before dawn, a group of men from Mobridge used a backhoe to dig Sitting Bull’s bones out of the North Dakota gravesite.  One of the instigators of the exhumation was Clarence Grey Eagle, a relative of Sitting Bull by marriage, although also more directly descended from one of the Indian police who gunned the chief down.  The Mobridge gang was connected with that city’s chamber of commerce and they wanted the chief’s cadaver to promote an annual event, the Sitting Bull Rodeo. Clarence Grey Eagle had a letter from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in South Dakota stating the Sitting Bull’s surviving relatives should be granted the authority to determine where the holy man would buried.  (There was apparently contrary authority from BIA officials in North Dakota).  Five months after the theft of the bones, the State of South Dakota erected a monument over the new grave site on the west bluffs of the Missouri River at Mobridge – the grave is marked with a horrible-looking bust of the chief sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski, the artist who devised the quixotic Crazy Horse monument, a carved mountain, in the Black Hills.  The bust of Sitting Bull looks like a hulking gorilla with the features of the Indian on the old buffalo-head nickels – it’s monstrously ugly.  

Civic boosters at Fort Yates claimed that the idiots from the Mobridge Chamber of Commerce had disinterred a heap of horse bones from the site in North Dakota and left the dead leader intact in the ground.  No one knows whether this is true or not.  Litigation is supposed to have resulted in a bone fragment being exhumed from the Mobridge burial.  The rumor is that the bone was tested and determined to have come from a woman.  But this also seems like disinformation.  There are now competing Sitting Bull burial locations, at Fort Yates and Mobridge, and, like many things in Indian country, the truth of the situation is now blurred beyond any recognition.  

16.

Down the road from Mobridge, in the farming country to the east and south, some German Catholics erected a big church in their village.  Chartres in France had a population of about 30,000 at the time the cathedral there was built.  The so-called Cathedral of the Prairie at Hoven, South Dakota is an even more improbable endeavor.  The big church made from rust-colored corbeled brick stands in a town of 371 people.  When the church was constructed with its double 140 foot towers, only about 271 souls resided in this remote place.  The Romanesque and neo-Gothic structure, completed in 1922 cost $500,000 – that’s 8.68 million dollars in 2024 currency.  

An ambitious fire-plug of a man, Monsignor Anthony Helmbrecht bullied and cajoled local farmers and merchants to contribute to the project.  Photographs of the priest in the church show a pugnacious little man, barrel-shaped in his clerical garb.  He has a shock of black hair and slit eyes that give him the appearance of an Asian or, perhaps, one of the Lakota Sioux who lived in this region.  His lips are turned down and his jowls fuse his neck with his shoulders so that the priest looks a little like a pit bull or bull dog.  Enclaves of Roman Catholics in the Dakotas were surrounded by a sea of Lutheran Scandinavians.  Literature about the Church and its erection suggest that there was more than a little tribal sentiment involved in the project.  The Catholics here felt embattled, surrounded by hostile Protestants, and, therefore, contributed generously to the construction of this monument to their particular species of faith.  

Approaching Hoven over the airplane-runway flat plains, a tower swims in the blue air over the village.  This turns out to be the hard secular spike of a grain elevator.  The two towers of St. Anthony of Padua are smaller, more delicate, and more beautiful – twin arrowheads standing over the edge of the green island of trees on the prairie.  The exterior of the church is plain, but dignified – the big towers are nicely proportioned and don’t seem exceptionally out-of-proportion with the little houses and brick commercial structures huddling at their feet.  Between the towers, the brick veil is penetrated by a lacy rose-window.  Gargoyles with bemused, staring faces surmount the columns in the entrance alcove.  The gargoyles are benign and they face Corinthian-style capitals adorned with stylized sunflowers, an emblem of the prairie setting.  The interior of the church is polychrome, with mosaics made from gilt and agate and lapis lazuli colored tesserae.  Huge stained glass windows in gothic pointed fenestration admit shards and shafts of colored light.  The figures in the stained glass images are fashioned to resemble Bavarian peasants.  Helmbrecht was from that part of Germany and Joseph, for instance, wears the broad-brimmed hat of a Bavarian farmer.  (German artisans were brought to the village to detail the church which was erected by a contractor from Dubuque, Iowa, another conspicuously ecclesiastical city – this is the place where my Lutheran forebears were educated for the ministry at Wartburg Seminary.  The architects who designed this church hailed from the German community in Milwaukee.)

The town is empty and has never, it seems, risen to the challenge of its mighty church.  The fortress of the towers overlooks broad lanes and avenues separating small houses and mercantile enterprises from one another, but there is no one around.   A kiosk near the sidewalk in the shadow of the church laments the death of unborn infants by abortion.  Along the back wall of the nave, its surface glittering with mosaics, thirty or so panels are arranged like the pages of a book that can be turned by visitors, an array of plastic tablets on which photographs and archival material recount the history of the parish and its church.  Among these materials, a gloomy photograph shows the man who labored as the church’s janitor and maintenance worker for many years.  The picture shows a dwarf-like, malformed figure, a torso like a beer vat with stubby legs and small flipper-like arms.  The man wears glasses over his myopic staring eyes and his jaw is contorted in what he supposes to be a grin.  The gnome is precisely as you would expect him to be, a denizen of the lower depths of the cathedral, someone squatting by infernal fires in the boiler room, engaged in some solitary task, self-abuse, perhaps, or whittling an enigmatic fetish.  (He’s like Henry Darger sweeping and mopping and cleaning up messes at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chicago and, then, returning to his tiny flat in Wicker Park to continue work on his  titanic novel In the Realms of the Unreal, almost 16,000 pages long, a copiously illustrated account of a war involving child slaves in an uprising led by the “Vivian Girls.”) Who knows what depths are concealed in even the humblest and most disregarded?  There is cathedral where it doesn’t belong, a strange and combative Bavarian priest, a silent custodian laboring in the darkness, and the summer sunshine, warm and immense this morning, falling through panes of stained glass veined with lead like the wings of cicada.   

17.

The County Seat is at Gettysburg, South Dakota, twenty-two miles from Hoven. Three times the population of Hoven, Gettysburg is, nonetheless, a small place – about 1100 people live there.  Entering town, one passes a big sign showing the silhouette of a Civil War soldier and the slogan: Gettysburg where the Battle wasn’t.  (The town’s other motto is equally unprepossessing: Come play on the Prairie!)  The town park, an acre of sun-scorched grass centered around a small pavilion shading picnic tables displays a cannon and, at one time, both the American and Confederate battle flags – after George Floyd was murdered, the Southern flag was removed; by strange coincidence, George Floyd’s uncle, Selwyn Jones, was a resident of the town and successfully advocated for the removal of the ‘Stars and Bars.’  According to local lore, some of the pioneers who first platted the town were veterans of the Civil War battle. 

The village is tidy, comprised of small single family homes occupying a grid of very wide streets radiating away from a central crossroads where two State Highways intersect among some brick and concrete commercial buildings – there are a couple of banks with modest sculpted facades, a downtown hotel that has been remodeled into low-rent apartments, a café and three bars.  The super market with its small parking lot is two blocks from the steel trap of the police station (employing two officers) and a grain elevator crowned with metal millwork stands like an upthrust storm cloud over piles of # two yellow corn heaped up under the awning of a metal shed. 

An annex to the public library, a one-room affair with a stuffy office, a dozen metal bookshelves and an interior corridor, contains the Medicine Rock. When Angelica and I arrived, about 11:45, the annex displaying the Medicine Rock was closed, a sign dangling crookedly over the glass door telling us to return at 1:30 pm.  Visible through the window, the rock rests behind a low picket fence intended to keep people from clambering on it in a room that is a little like the showroom for a small car dealership or implement vendor.  We contented ourselves with pressing our faces to the glass, cupping hands around our eyes to expel reflections, and peering through the window at the pock-marked surface of the stone, a flat pier of boulder that is ten feet wide and eighteen feet long.  (It’s fairly obvious that the structure, called The Dakota Sunset Museum was built around the mottled pale rock, apparently a glacial erratic of the type improbably strewn around the landscape as mysterious monuments to long-gone rivers of ice.)  The shape of the rock is a bit like a squashed school-bus.  We are on our way to Pierre, about 40 miles distant, and so, I’m not willing to wait until the small museum opens after its curator returns from her lunch.  A few paces away, the public library is open and we go inside to use the toilet.  As it happens, the rest rooms are located next to a hallway that turns out to lead directly into the museum. (The museum and library share the same rest rooms.) So Angelica and I are able to venture into the museum, even though it is officially closed, to inspect the boulder.  It seems a stroke of good fortune.

The museum’s rooms are airy with big windows bright with sunshine.  Some garments, pioneer wedding dresses and military uniforms, lurk in glass cases and there are displays of rifles and, of course, some old carts and wagons and a toy-like red fire engine.  But these are in a room, like the inside of a pole-barn shed behind the Medicine Rock.  The Rock itself reclines like an odalisque in its bright chamber that is decorated with a cartoonish mural of an Indian raising some kind of feathery offering to the sun rising over green rolling hills.  (A artist named Del Iron Cloud who had been painting murals at an Indian casino down the road made the picture for the Medicine Rock display over a period of six days in May 1995.)  Several other landscape paintings overlook the boulder and an artificial Christmas tree posted in a pot stands behind the rock.  Some castings made from the intaglio indentations in the stone are shown on a table – the plaster casts are a little like forms supposedly depicting Yeti footprints that I have seen in eccentric side-show attractions elsewhere in the country – disembodied feet with blunt, short toes; the plaster-casting process is only approximate so that the toes seem to be webbed together.  

A state-sanctioned historical marker stands outside the Dakota Sunset Museum.  The marker is embossed with an inscription that explains that the rock was moved to Gettysburg from its original location on a hillside overlooking the Missouri River about 12 miles to the west.  The marker advises that the place where the boulder was embedded in the hillside is now inundated by the waters of the Oahe reservoir – the dam is forty miles away near Pierre, a huge embankment that runs as a 150 foot tall manmade ridge across the broad river valley.  A lot of legend embellishes the boulder’s history.  A mimeographed hand-out implies that the glacial erratic was seen by the French explorer LaVerendrye in the middle of the 18th century and, then, surveyed by Lewis and Clark in 1804 – both statements are untrue and speculative; in fact, LaVerendrye and the Corps of Discovery might have seen the boulder but they left no written record indicating an encounter with the rock.  The first actual note describing the Medicine Rock is an entry in an official report prepared by participants in the Atkinson - O’Fallon expedition, an 1824 - 1825 incursion into Indian Country on the Upper Missouri by a large group of soldiers under the command of General Henry Atkinson and the government superintendent of Indian Affairs, Benjamin O’Fallon.  Records show that the rock was half-buried in a hillside at the confluence of the Little Cheyenne River and the Missouri.  All tribes in the vicinity regarded the stone, imprinted with footprints, a palm print, and the clawed mark of a bear, as sacred.  Of course, the story was that these marks were made when the stone was soft clay and have survived over the millennia as a monument to ancient times.  This is patently nonsense and wasn’t believed by either the Indians or the White explorers.  The Medicine Rock, in Lakotah Inyan Phezute, is comprised of fragile, and readily worked, limestone.  The hand and foot prints in the boulder are clearly pictographs, pecked into the stone probably three or four-hundred years ago.  (Marked rocks of this kind are not uncommon along the upper Missouri – a 15 to 20 ton rock farther to the north was similarly marked, but too large to be moved and probably now lies at the bottom of the resevoir.  The indefatigable Richard Pettigrew, who own finger prints are all over Sioux Falls, South Dakota had a three to four ton glacial erratic, with hand and foot indentations chipped into its surface, dragged to the corner of an intersection in the middle of the city.  It’s still there today behind an iron fence with several pygmy-size handprints cut into the rock.)

An Indian agency was built where the Little Cheyenne pours its water into the Missouri and, with the passage of time, US Highway 212 was constructed linking some of the villages at fords on the Missouri between Pierre and Bismarck.  This was before the dam upstream of the State Capitol was built.  The town at the bottom of the valley near the Medicine Stone’s original hillside location was called Forest City.  It’s now also drowned beneath the black waters of the Oahe reservoir.  Highway 212 passed by the Medicine Rock and travelers paused to inspect the boulder, vandalizing it and chipping off pieces of the rock.  An iron enclosure was built around the stone to protect it, but the boulder was in a remote location, on an empty stretch of highway, and the fence didn’t dissuade vandals.  A roadside café, the Medicine Café, was erected near the rock to exploit the tourist attraction and the tourists who were rapidly disassembling the big tongue of pale limestone extruded from the grassy hillside.

I’m not convinced that the inundation of the valley in this area motivated the good people of Gettysburg to move the boulder into their town.  Photographs of the rock in situ show it well-above the river-bottom.  It’s my impression that the erratic may have been hauled away from its Forest City bluff, primarily because the town, itself, was about to slip under the water.  The inundation of the village would have left the rock stranded on a deserted stretch of highway running parallel to the lake shore and, presumably, of little value to anyone.  In any event, in November 1953, as the valley was filling up with water, the 40 ton limestone erratic was dragged to Gettysburg, the limestone cleaned to remove graffiti, and the foot- and hand-prints, with the grooves made by a bear’s claw, were refurbished a bit, and their outlines renovated by someone chipping at the rock’s surface with an iron chisel.  The erratic was moved again, closer to the center of town and next to the public library, where the Dakota Sunset Museum was built around the boulder to house it. 

According to some published accounts, Custer on his way to the Little Big Horn paused to admire the boulder where it was embedded in the hillside at the confluence of waters.  He wrote to his wife, Libby, and she later quoted his observations as to the Medicine Rock in the condition in which he found the limestone boulder in her book about her husband’s 1876 ill-fated campaign against the Sioux.  (The Medicine Rock exerts an eerie force-field that distorts history around it and creates error.  In fact, Libby and George Custer together visited the Medicine Rock in 1873 as they journeyed up the Missouri to Fort Abraham Lincoln – accounts suggesting that Custer stopped at the rock in 1876 are mistaken; the rock certainly doesn’t lie anywhere near the route take by Custer to the Little Big Horn.)

The best anecdote concerning the Medicine Rock is also the most macabre.  Johann (John) Feilner was from Bavaria, but immigrated to the United States and, in 1856, enlisted in the Army.  Feilner was an educated man and rose through the ranks to become topographer, surveyor and mapmaker.  In fact, Feilner’s eye was so good and his powers of observation so precise that he was charged with collecting botanical and animal samples, minerals, and other specimens as he campaigned in the field. In 1864, Feilner accompanied General Alfred Sully in his pursuit of bands of Santee Sioux alleged to have been involved in the Minnesota massacre two years before.  Sully didn’t distinguish between the different Indian clans that he encountered and seems to have made it a practice to attack the wrong people – his two battles, at Kildeer Mountain and Whitestone Hill, were apparently fought against bemused nomadic Sioux who had little or nothing to do with the atrocities in Minnesota.  As Sully’s column on his second expedition across the Dakotas approached the Missouri, Indian scouts told Feilner that there was an interesting rock nearby inscribed with prehistoric petroglyphs at the place where the Little Cheyenne River flowed into the Missouri.  Feilner (who is identified under the misnomer “Fielner” on  South Dakota historical markers) took two assistants and rode across the prairie a half dozen miles from the main force to inspect the rock.  When he found the boulder, Feilner and his colleagues dismounted, picketed their horses, and began their study of the limestone erratic.  This was hot work (it was a scalding day in late June 1864) and the three soldiers decided to walk down to the water to get a drink.  Three Sioux warriors concealed in the river bottoms saw the cavalrymen and ambushed them as they approached the bank above the stream.  Feilner was shot dead, but his helpers fled.  The Sioux, who had hoped to take the horses, were not rewarded for their efforts.  The horses that they were trying to steal broke free from their pickets and plunged headlong across the prairie returning to the column slowly advancing over the broken country on the east side of the Missouri.  A number of horse-soldiers were dispatched to pursue the Dakota raiding party who were on foot.  They were surrounded and shot to pieces by soldiers.  Sully was incensed at the loss of Feilner who was, by all accounts, an excellent trooper and experienced cartographer.  Feilner’s body was wrapped in canvas and sent back down the river on the steamboat, the Yellowstone.  The mangled Sioux horse-thieves weren’t treated so well.  The three corpses were unceremoniously beheaded with a butcher knife and their heads tossed in a gunny sack.  Sully ordered that the heads be impaled on stakes set on the hilltop above the Medicine Rock, a warning to other Indians who might pass by the sacred stone.  (By this point, Sully frustrated by the chimera of Sioux warriors who perpetually evaded him, slipping away into the dusty distance of the bad lands or the rough buttes and gullies, decided that he would “shoot everything that wears a blanket”.  But to kill Indians, you have to find them and Sully wasn’t very good at this.)

Some of the soldiers involved in this affray sent letters back to their families in the East, enclosing gory snippets of hair hacked from the dead Sioux.  One of the soldiers told his parents that they could wash the blood off the knot of hair in the letter if they so desired.  

18.  

A plump middle-aged woman is typing at the check-out desk in the Gettysburg Public Library.  I hand her a ten dollar bill as a donation.  It’s for the use of the toilet, but, more importantly, for affording us, inadvertently, access to the Medicine Stone.  She’s baffled by my donation and tries to hand it back to me.  There probably isn’t any administrative mechanism in place for her to accept donations.  But I insist that the library keep the money.

19.

Like Bismarck, Pierre, the capitol of South Dakota, stands on the east bank of the Missouri River, facing a twin city, Fort Pierre, on the western side.  Mandan, North Dakota just over the bridge from Bismarck is a smaller, shabbier place that the capitol city, mostly known for the several state correctional facilities near the town.  Similarly, Fort Pierre is smaller and more desolate than Pierre with the barren, crumpled-looking hills overlooking the river valley closer to downtown, some bluffs encroaching on the little grid of city streets next to the levee.  On one of the nearby buttes, historical markers designate the place where the so-called LaVerendrye plaque was found in 1913.  The small hilltop park, a very hot place when we visited (there are no trees), contains several monuments and overlooks the twin cities below, Pierre, across the water, occupying several level steps or terraces rising over the river.  The Missouri bends here and there is an island in the stream overgrown with willows and cottonwood above green waterside thickets and, downstream, the sliver of river spreads out across the valley, the upper reaches of yet another big lake backed up behind the dam at Chamberlain.  It’s an impressive view, blonde dappled hills, lines of trees and the bright broad lake – the narrow dome of the State Capitol is across the valley, an eminence midway between rotunda and tower, rising against a backdrop of placid-looking and leafy residential neighborhoods.  

In February 1913, three schoolchildren were playing on the hillside where the monuments are located.  The weather was clear and bright and one of the periodic thaws opening up in the South Dakota winter had melted the snow and water was trickling down from the heights in little mud furrows.  (The chinook winds blow down from Alberta and Saskatchewan here and they are warm and dissolve the fields of snow left by the blizzards.)  An edge of lead protruded from a bank eroded away on the side of the hill.  The kids kicked at the lead plate and, then, unearthed it.  The artifact was about the size of a sheet of typing paper, but a half-inch thick and very heavy – it was embossed with letters in Latin.  The children left the plaque where it was exposed, but came back later to excavate it from the wet soil.  Their plan was to sell the lead slab to a local newspaper where metal of that kind was melted and formed into type.  But Pierre is the capitol city and the schoolchildren ran into some State legislators on their way to the newspaper print shop.  The legislators recognized that the plaque was historically significant and contacted the director of the State Historical Society, a famous historian named Doane Robinson.  Robinson identified the plaque as being an object mentioned by the French explorers, the La Verendrye brothers who had passed through this area in March of 1743.  

Pierre Gaultier de Varennes sieur de la Verendrye with his brother Jacques-Pierre established trading posts in 1726 along the north shore of Lake Superior.  The brothers, later, explored the area around Lake Winnipeg where they built a number of additional forts and outposts.  By the 1740's, Pierre la Verendrye with his brother and his three sons (a fourth had been killed by the Sioux near Rainy Lake) embarked on a series of ambitious expeditions hoping to discover the so-called “River of the West” – that is, a river-route to the Pacific Ocean.  La Verendrye thought the Missouri was a candidate for that river and so advanced up its valley, probably as far as the confluence with the Yellowstone.  (One of his expeditions may have reached the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming, but the route of La Verendrye’s explorations remain disputed.)

La Verendrye wrote in his journal that the upper Missouri was densely populated, the river lined with large, well-planned villages of earth lodges.  The towns reminded La Verendrye of villages in France and he reported the Indians were civil, civilized and, in fact, behaved in all respects like Frenchmen.  On the hilltop near the modern-day Pierre, La Verendrye extracted an embossed lead plate that he had been carrying on this journey, an object inscribed with words claiming the territory for France.  La Verendrye buried the plaque under a cairn of stones, not mentioning to the Indians that he had secretly placed the proprietarial plate in that monument – this was, as stated in his journal, on March 30, 1743.  In the intervening 170 years before 1913, people had sporadically searched for this artifact but without success.  This was due in part because of uncertainty as the expedition’s route.  Prior to carbon-dating, in the 1940's, the Indian village unearthed at Menoken (on the freeway east of Bismarck) was thought to be one of the villages, built like places in Normandy, that La Verendrye had visited – in fact that village is now known to have been destroyed five-hundred years before the French explorer reached the area.  The three schoolchildren playing on the steep hillside in 1913 were the lucky discoverers of the the lead plaque marking the Frenchman’s proclamation that all of the Upper Missouri was part of New France.  

One of the kids who found the plaque was Edith Parish, playing with Hattie Foster and a boy named George O’Reilly.  Edith was the son of homesteaders who staked their claim to prairie near Pierre.  She recalled raising coyote pups as pets (until her father killed them) and, in her old age, still, remembered a few Lakotah words that she had been taught as a child by visiting Indians – she could count to ten in Lakotah when she was 85.  Curiously, Edith dropped out of history for most of her life and wasn’t given credit for her role in discovering the La Verendrye’s lead plate.  She married as a teenager and moved to the tiny hamlet of Vilas, South Dakota east of Pierre in Miner County.  Her husband ran a general store there and she served as the postmaster.  The iconic picture showing the children who discovered the plate was taken a few years later after Edith had left Fort Pierre.  (In the picture, an adult stands next to George O’Reilly and Hattie Foster, both of them now apparently teenagers and dressed in their Sunday best.)  Edith isn’t in the picture; her name had changed due to her marriage and, so, she was, more or less, forgotten.  Hattie Foster and George O’Reilly attended commemorations of the finding of the La Verendrye plaque on 1933 and 1943. (George had been paid $500 by the State Historical Society for his part in the discovery of the lead plate; Hattie received only $200 although it was her toe that was first stubbed on the artifact.)  No one knew Edith’s whereabouts and she wasn’t invited to the celebrations nor was she paid anything for her role in the discovery.  But in 1989, when she was 90, a reporter tracked her down and recorded on tape her recollections as to the discovery of plate.  A picture taken at that time shows an old woman proudly holding a replica of the artifact.  She has perfectly straight, white teeth exposed by her grin.  I suspect that her teeth were dentures.  She died the next year.   

20.

Pierre is a small town.  About 14,000 people live in the South Dakota capitol.  (If you consider Fort Pierre, across the Missouri, as part of the urban area, the total population is still less than 16,250 residents.  The smallest state capitol in the United States is Montpelier, Vermont with about 8000 people; Pierre is the second least populous capitol, followed by Augusta, Maine boast about 19,000 citizens.)  From the hilltop at the LaVerendrye find-site or from the highway coming down into town from the eastern bluffs, you can see the entire place in a glance.  The river shears the settlement into two neighborhoods sutured together by the staple of the Missouri Bridge.  The State capitol rises from a flat shelf in the hillside five blocks uphill from the river.  The capitol building’s proportions are ungainly – it’s a short, squat little building masquerading somehow as a soaring edifice.  The gables over the legislative wings and surmounting the structure’s classical portico are gun-metal black and the dome sits atop this dark armature like a derby hat incongruously crowning a brawny torso or like some sort of constricted piston raised above the city streets.  A park-like district surrounds the capitol building, grass lawns under colonnades of shade trees with small marble pavilions scattered around.  These mausoleums are administrative buildings that manage to be both pretentious and dwarf-like at the same time.  An acre of artificial lake sits between square-cut berms to the rear of the capitol and sidewalks wind through the leafy grounds.  Life-size bronze statues of famous South Dakotans, most politicians as far as I can determine, are distributed around the park grounds – the bronze men and women are caught in motion, waving metal hats in the air or squawking into microphones and, since they stand rooted to the pavement, without plinths or pedestals, the effect of these figures is also muted; the bronze statues look like dark pygmies, somehow diminished by the fact that they stand on the level earth just like you and I.  

21.

I park the Honda a quarter mile from the capitol dome.  For some reason, the streets around the building are crowded with parked cars.  There’s no official lot as far as I can see.  It’s informal here – the legislators park wherever they can locate a space.  (There are a few reserved spots under the rampart of the capitol building, probably for the governor and a couple other top officials.) 

It’s hot and the sidewalks along the boulevards are suffocating in the humid air.  Where the pavement emerges from under the shade trees, the sun blazes down and inflicts pain on pedestrians.  Chrome glints and the little, rectangular lake reflects the hot sky full of white light.  Flags flicker like tongues of flame.  In a stone sarcophagus, a bulb of water white as cauliflower rolls over itself, flashing in the sun and endlessly scrolling down into the lagoon trapped in the basin.  (This is an artesian well fed from layers of water-bearing sandstone 1300 hundred feet below –the well water spurts out of its orifice in the granite box bearing with it natural gas.  If you toss a match onto the water, the gas vapor will burn brightly, an effect best seen at night.  For twenty years or so, the weird combination of bubbling, pressurized water and evaporating natural gas was kept lit as a spectacle commemorating the service of South Dakota veterans.  But, ultimately, keeping the flame lit proved to be too expensive and the plume of fire was dangerous as well so the fountain splashes away in its granite-lined pool without its crown of orange fire.)

The Governor’s mansion is across the avenue from the constricted piston-shaped dome of the capitol.  The big house, a typical suburban McMansion, stands next to a large garage, protected by the sort of wall that Donald Trump threatened to build at Nogales and Tijuana – it’s a handsome dark structure, with fin-shaped metal pillars and slatted iron pickets, twelve-feet high and ventilated sufficiently so that you can look into the compound from outside and, conversely, the compound’s guards can peer through the fence at you.  Some black SUVs are pulled up at the front of the house, beyond mechanical gates and sentry boxes, and a flagpole shudders with banners stacked one atop the other.

“That’s where Kristi Noem lives,” I tell Angelica as we scurry along the fence around the mansion.

“If I see that bitch, I’ll punch her in the nose,” Angelica tells me.

We enter the cool, clammy belly of the capitol.  Some weary-looking security guards wave us through the metal-detector and into the marble basement corridors of the building.

One of the guards says that the place is crowded with journalists and politicians.  

“Their having a press conference,” the guard says.     

   

22.

Is the capitol building supposed to be air-conditioned? If so, the system isn’t functioning.  The mass of marble and masonry and the big black dome overhead insulates the rotunda and, perhaps, it’s ten or fifteen degrees cooler than the air outside.  But on the lawn, there’s breeze and the air is moving; under the dome, the heat is humid and the confined air smells of the cologne and body-wash of the lobbyists and the sweaty young reporters, on-air talent have dark patches on their garments – they are sweating through their suits.  About 150 people are crowded together on metal folding chairs under the rotunda.  A podium has been set up and a row of politicians and consultants are waiting to speak, shifting from foot to foot in the warm air.  So far as I can determine, the press conference marks the launch of a new computer security system protecting the data and secrets of the people of South Dakota. Everyone looks hot and uncomfortable.  When I crane my neck to look up at the rotunda dome, everything blurs and swims around me; the heat and the entombed air claws at my eyes and I feel dizzy – it’s some kind of positional vertigo.  Big allegorical figures gesture from pedestals in the corners of the central rotunda.  Paintings of Indians and fur traders, soldiers and pioneers, line the walls, a mural frieze running above the stately doors to the legislative chambers and governor’s office.  Lunettes above transoms opened for ventilation depict the Black Hills and blue and silver rushing streams near Deadwood and the lurid, orange clays of the Badlands.  The speeches from the podium are dense with dollars and cents, data about megabytes or redundant systems.  People are fanning themselves with xeroxed information sheets and slick-looking hand-outs.  

South Dakota, Governor Kristi Noem, is seated in the front row at the press conference.  She is next to the aisle, presumably so that she readily reach the podium.  Angelica and I enter the rotunda from behind the speaker and so we are facing her.  She is demure and seems much smaller than life-size.  Television, I think, tends to make people look larger and adds pounds to their frame.  She looks like a trinket, something made from ebony and silver and cloisonne.  Her surface is enameled, smooth, a faceted mirror in which, I think, you might see yourself.  She has several fans among the people lurking behind the speaker – a stout young man and a blonde woman who looks like a ranch-wife.  Some bored cub reporters, journalists fresh from college and, so, assigned Pierre as their first beat, lean against the marble-veneer walls – the heat makes them look numb and drowsy.  Several cameras on black tripods sit disregarded in the wide stone-faced corridor.  

After the press conference, Angelica and I climb the steps to the galleries overlooking the rotunda.  Kristi Noem doesn’t mingle.  She poses for photographs with the blonde ranch-wife and the stout young man.  Then, with her posse, she vanishes.  The ranks of chairs are emptied and emerge from beneath the sweating buttocks of the people in attendance.  In an out-of-the-way gallery, near the toilets, a photo-journalist in a brown suit is stationed next to his tripod-mounted camera.  He’s idly scrolling through messages on his phone.

“Saw your governor,” I remark to him.

“She’s something, isn’t she?”

“Yes, really something.”

23.

For posterity, I suppose, that I am obliged to remind my future readers about Kristi Noem. I doubt that she will ever have the notoriety that she briefly held between 2022 and 2024.

Governor Noem was born in 1971 at Watertown, South Dakota near the Minnesota border.  She was raised on a farm that was subsequently revamped to include a small resort and hunting lodge.  In High School, she was elected Snow Queen.  She went to college in South Dakota but dropped out when she became pregnant.  (She later completed a degree when she was about forty years old.)  In 2006, she was elected to the South Dakota House of Representatives.  She served two terms in Pierre and, then, won an election to the Federal House of Representatives in Washington.  She was re-elected to this seat for four consecutive terms, generally winning these contests with more than 65% of the vote – she seems to have become increasingly popular with voters with each term served in Congress.  In 2018, she ran for governor and was elected to that office in a close election (51% to 47.6%).  She has been a popular governor – she won her 2022 election by a much larger margin (62% to 35%).  

Noem is a hard-right Republican and her politics reflects the inclinations of her constituents.  She is broadly opposed to abortion and in-vitro fertilization, denounces American interventions in international affairs (with the exception of dogmatically supporting Israel), wants everyone to carry a concealed handgun, demands prayer in public schools, had prohibited transgender surgery involving minors, and attempted to deploy the South Dakota National Guard to the southern border to protect against the “invasion” that she described happening in that place.  (Gov. Noem persuaded some gullible billionaire to commit to financing this expedition which was, ultimately, banned by federal authorities.)  Noem kept South Dakota open for business during the Covid 19 pandemic, a luxury that the State could afford since it has almost no people and, therefore, a low rate of communicable disease transmission – however, it must also be said that she invited 500,000 out-of-state bikers to Sturgis for the annual motorcycle rally, spiking Covid infections in the State and, indeed,,the nation.  She picks fights with federal agencies – for instance, she defied the National Park Service by implementing fireworks at Mount Rushmore during a historic drought posing a severe fire hazard in the area and she tried to establish a RV park in the Black Hills on land that was otherwise protected by law. She vehemently supports Donald Trump and publicly announced that she would accept his invitation to become vice-president in a heartbeat.  Like her master, she is a liar – for instance, she claimed to have met the dictator Kim Jong Un in some secret parley; in fact, she’s never been anywhere near the Korean tyrant.  (She similarly lied about canceling a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron because he was “too pro-Hamas” – referring to the Palestinian terrorist group; of course, there’s no evidence that any meeting with Macron was ever scheduled.) Her imprudent remarks on immigration have resulted in her being banned from entry onto 20% of South Dakota’s land; the Indian tribes in the State have prohibited her access to reservation land because she asserted that the Native Americans were in cahoots with drug cartels and involved in fentanyl smuggling into their own sovereign territories.  Like Trump, she is casually corrupt – she tried to bully State officials into granting a real estate license to her daughter; she performed in ads touting the services of a Texas dentist who had, supposedly, fixed some of her teeth.

Noem maintains a residence in Washington D.C. and frequently travels to that place.  (Her husband and family remain on the farm near Watertown.) She is alleged to have embarked on an extra-marital affair with Corey Lewandowski, a spectacularly venal and belligerent henchman for the Trump campaign.  Lewandowski is the kind of guy who shoots off his mouth without thinking and never retracts or apologizes.  It’s believed by some that he was instrumental in (inadvertently) scuttling Governor Noem’s prospects as Trump’s running mate.  In 2018, Noem who could be counted on for picturesque hard-right sound bites on Cable News, demonstrated some aspirations for higher office.  To that end, she published an autobiography called Not My First Rodeo – a book said to unbearably dull. She wrote a sequel to that volume, expressing perspectives that she thought would endear herself to Donald Trump.  This book was called No Going Back and it was released in 2022, possibly with editorial assistance from Lewandowski, a fellow who fancies himself a PR whiz.  No one paid much attention to the book until Trump said that Governor Noem was on his short-list (four candidates) for vice-president.  Then, pundits, perusing her book, came upon a chapter entitled “A Bad Day to be a Goat”.  Although most of Noem’s prose is considered unimpressive and formulaic – she’s a dull and incoherent writer, “A Bad Day to be a Goat” was said to be the exception, a gripping little anecdote with characters and a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. Unfortunately, this chapter involved Noem’s boastful account of executing a dog named Cricket, said to be an untrainable and boisterous 14 month old puppy, and a goat that the governor shot for being smelly.  She carried out these executions in a gravel pit and botched the slaughter of the goat.  She left the dying animal wounded in the gravel pit and, apparently, had to go home to get more ammo.  Governor Noem seems have misconstrued the appeal of this nasty little parable – she thought publishing the story would show her to be decisive, hard-headed, aggressive, and tough enough to be president or, at least, president-in-waiting.  (If you can blithely kill a goat, of course, you’re tough enough to launch airstrikes on Hamas.)  In fact, the story appalled most readers and Trump said privately that Noem’s admissions disgusted him – so that was the end of Kristi Noem’s brief foray into presidential politics. I don’t know the truth of allegations that she was romantically involved with the horrid Lewandowski.  But Lewandowski is also a scoundrel in the mold of his boss, Donald Trump, and one suspects that his erotic interest in Governor Noem has waned in a manner proportional to her reversal of fortunes as a vice-presidential aspirant.  

24. 

“Oahe”is Lakotah for “a place to stand upon.”  This was the name of a Mission to the Sioux founded by Thomas Riggs in 1877 at Peoria Bottom on the Missouri.  When the Oahe Dam, named after this Mission, was constructed between 1948 and 1962, the historic chapel in the valley at Peoria Bottom was sawn off its foundation and hauled onto huge embankment overlooking the reservoir.  The structure, the largest rolled earth dam in the world, runs as a grass-covered ridge a thousand yards long spanning the valley from bluff to bluff.  The dam is six miles northwest of Pierre and impounds the waters of Lake Oahe, the ninth largest lake in the country, a huge expanse of deep water filling the rivr valley for a distance of 250 miles – the body of water extends from the dam just above Pierre to the southern suburbs of Bismarck, North Dakota.

The rolled earth embankment damming the Missouri is so large that it appears to be a natural feature in the landscape.  The State Highway runs along the top of the ridge, 250 feet above the grassy valley, vibrant with the taut cord of the river, gurgling wetlands and small copses of trees, and leafy islands in the stream.  A big power plant towers over the spillway through which the Missouri burrows under the dam.  The plant has huge towers and naked concrete walls; enormous surge tanks (standpipes) stand over the rapids running into the powerhouse – the surge tanks look like colossal pillars in a pipe organ.  One can imagine the bellows of the river pouring through the place playing Bach or ein’ feste Burg on this vast instrument.  The embankment looms over the power plant like a mighty curled wave of compressed earth.  Although the plant is huge, it is dwarfed by the scale of the dam, rising as an artificial mountain against the throat of the river.  

Where the embankment ridge fuses with the neighboring east hillside, some stark, treeless bluffs billowing upward above lake, you can park your car, admire the chapel from Thomas Rigg’s mission and gaze out over the expanse of waters, a blue estuary extending to the horizon between the naked high-country, water here and there whipped into froth by the wind, sun-spangled and radiating light.  About four-hundred yards from the embankment, some concrete silos linked by cement causeways stand isolated in the reservoir waters.  These are intake channels that scoop up the river drowned at the bottom of the reservoir and channel it through caverns bored through the dam down to the spillway on the south side of the dam.  A boat that looks fragile and tiny rocks in the cradle in the lea of the intake towers.  Fishing is good in that place.  

Angelica and I have arrived just as the National Park Visitor Center on the high terrace overlooking the lake is closing.  The attendant thinks we have come to use the toilets and, so, he opens the doors for us that he was about to lock.  He’s surprised that we actually want to hear him explain the dam and its history and industrial infrastructure of intake valves, the spillways, and the power-plant in the valley.  After he has guided us to some historic pictures and spoken his piece, I ask him: “Is it eroding?”

“Not really,” the man says.  “They estimate it will last for at least 500 years.”

The park service employee is off-the-clock, but he’s gracious.  He leaves, locks the doors behind him, and departs in his pick-up truck.  A semi-truck is crawling like an ant up the ascent to the roadway spanning the embankment’s crest. The river was wild, and turbulent, and it still flexes it muscles sometimes, concealed under the sea of impounded water.  A second group of spillways, four-hundred feet wide stand a half-mile from the power-plant – these are sluices to relieve pressure on the dam during winter run-off.  An asphalt lane runs diagonally along the south face of the ridge and we drive down to look at the power plant, fortified by high fences and barbed wire, and the run-off spillway.  Nothing is flowing today and big mouths of the tunnels are dry and the sun bakes on the white prongs of concrete 200 feet long nosing out from under the rolled earth ridge.  Some stagnant water is cradled between the concrete piers and a lagoon covered in algae extends down the valley to where the watercourse joins the main bore of the Missouri River.  Someone is fishing in the lagoon in a row boat.  The huge mound of earth tilts uphill to where another semi-truck is coursing along the embankment’s crest.  The scale of these things defeats the eye. 

 

25.

The markers near the Oahe chapel have been lifted from where they were originally stationed in Peoria Bottom, once about 600 yards from here.  Then, the markers have been revised by additional markers, bronze tablets with golden letters embossed in them.  Then, new markers have been prepared to revise the two sets of older markers – and, so, it will go, I suppose until the face of the embankment erodes into the lake and the river runs free in another 500 years.  Each marker is slightly more critical of the project to tame the Missouri and impound its waters.  In another hundred years, perhaps, another marker will be made to commemorate the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.  (The pipeline runs under the reservoir to the north in the vicinity of the old confluence with the Cannonball River.)

The founder of the Mission, Thomas Riggs was born in 1849 at the Lac-qui-Parle Mission to the Santee Sioux in what is now Minnesota.  His father was Stephen Return Riggs, an important missionary in Minnesota history.  When he was six, the Lac-qui-Parle Mission burned and Stephen Riggs moved the compound to a place downstream on the Minnesota River, the so-called Hazelwood Mission.  Stephen Riggs was an ambitious man and he proposed that the Hazelwood Mission and the Sioux encampments around it should comprise an independent sovereign entity, the so-called Hazelwood Republic.  Stephen Riggs and his wife, Mary, were prominent missionaries to the Dakota Indians and linguists: they translated the Bible into Lakota.  In 1862, the entire utopian scheme exploded into blood and horror.  The Santee Sioux rebelled against the strictures imposed on them by corrupt Indian agents and the reservations system.  The Indians killed as many settlers as possible and war parties roamed the hills and valleys threatening the Mission.  With the assistance of friendly Sioux converts, notably John Other Day, Riggs and his family fled across the prairie, narrowly escaping massacre themselves – at the time of this calamity, Thomas Riggs was about 13 years old.  

Thomas Riggs later attended college in Beloit, Wisconsin and, then, spent a year in Mississippi after the Civil War teaching reading and writing to freed slaves – the Riggs family were staunch abolitionists.  He, then, attended a seminary in Chicago and, after ordination, went west to establish the mission at Oahe – the name of the place was Ti Tanka Oahe (“where God stands or has his foundation.”) Riggs married and his wife joined him at the Mission where an encampment of 300 Sans-Arc and Brule Sioux also lived on Peoria Flats, a river-bottom on the east side of the Missouri.  The hardships of the frontier killed Riggs first wife – she died of complications of child-birth – and he remarried in 1885.

The chapel now on located atop the dam was built by a carpenter brought to the territory in 1877.  Later, Riggs built an vocational school next to the church.  He lived in a nice bungalow built for him by his Sioux parishioners.  Riggs primary objective was to teach the Sioux to read and write in Lakota. He lived until 1940 and was locally famous – he also bred and sold pure-bred Hereford cattle, speculating in land, and became the first president of the South Dakota State Historical Society.  The bell hanging in the spartan wood-frame tower of the Mission is inscribed Wakan Tanka Ohala Po (that is “Praise ye the Lord!”) Riggs was buried in the so-called “Little Enclosure” at the Oahe Mission, a small graveyard cut from the prairie next to the chapel.  Today, the “Little Enclosure” with the remains of Riggs and his wives and some of their children, as well as many Sioux faithful, is submerged under 80 feet of water.    

26.

Thomas Riggs is buried in a grave drowned by Lake Oahe.  What else is under the waters of lake?  The river valley was heavily populated with Indian villages during the period before Lewis and Clark – about 350 prehistoric sites are under water, including the large Dodd village with its 60 foot long houses built from massive cedar timbers.  Also underwater is 300,000 prime acres of farm land and marshes owned by Cheyenne River bands of Sioux; 160,000 acres of riverside land cultivated by the Standing Rock Sioux clans were also submerged in North Dakota.  Drowning this land impoverished the Indians.  When someone asked why there were so few elders on the Cheyenne River reservation, the answer given was that the old people had died of grief and sorrow when they saw their ancestral homelands and the graves of their people vanishing under the chill, dark waters of the lake.  Sacred rock circles and places rich with medicinal plants were swallowed up by the lake.  Eagle Rapids at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers was submerged.  The rapids were huge, a hillside covered with foaming water and at the place where the rivers collided there were spinning whirlpools.  The force of the current turned boulders around and around, abrading them into smooth balls that looked like cannon shot.  All of this was inundated by the river as well as many hamlets including Forest City, a wild west cow town, where people shot it out in the street – there was a celebrated gun fight there in 1901 – and the village had a “Boot Hill” filled with men who had died unnatural deaths.  But it’s all under water now.  

  

27.  

The sun is hot overhead.  Angelica and I walk across a vacant field north of Fort Pierre.  A trading post was located here almost two-hundred years ago, but nothing remains.  Grasshoppers flee, spraying out from underfoot.  The fur trading operation was named after one of its first agents, Pierre Choteau.  Probably, the stockade and buildings were near a meander in the Missouri River, but there’s no water anywhere nearby today.  A line of trees two-hundred yards away marks a watercourse that also seems to be dried-up.  At the end of the trail through the grass, there’s a cairn of field stones cemented together with some names and dates on it.  Near the gravel road leading to the site, a shelter protects several informational markers.  The heat makes your skin feel prickly and, I suppose, that this is where some kind of infernal insect crawled onto my shoe and, then, began to attack my ankle, boring holes at three locations before ascending to sting my thigh.  But I don’t notice the bites when I am standing in the sun-scorched yellow grass along the trail to the cairn.  Later, I imagine the insect to be some kind of amber crab-shaped arachnid, a creature with turquoise-colored eyes and an abdominal sting like a hooked dental instrument.  This is fantasy – in fact, I have no idea what the insect was that marked my left ankle and thigh with its bites.  And I can’t say for sure that the bites happened on the barren field where the trading post was located.

One of the markers under the metal awning says that the last herd of bison were partially domesticated on a ranch across the county highway.  All bison living today are supposedly descended from this remnant herd managed by a local cowboy and entrepreneur early in the 20th century.  The cowboy’s grave is said to be in a cemetery a half mile away and, so, we drive to the place, also navigating a scarred dirt road that leads to graves interspersed with cypress trees shaped like green flames.  The cowboy’s grave is easily located, right next to the rutted access drive and behind a low iron fence.  There are withered weeds here also, clumps of cloth and plastic flowers, and, perhaps, some sort of grave-dwelling scarab attacked me there – I don’t know where I acquired the bug-bites.  

28.

The county highway, 1806, winds north of Fort Pierre, tracking the river hidden in wooded and swampy bottom lands to the east.  On the gravel lane to the site of the old trading post, but pitched close to the two-lane blacktop, a curious building stands amidst excavations and construction debris.  The structure is large with cylindrical pillars faced in shiny metal.  A big red wedge droops over the side the round silo-shaped columns.  The architecture is extravagant and it’s my guess that I am looking at a tribal casino that has been half-built and is awaiting completion.  Some loaders and utility vans are parked near the unfinished building.  

Letters on the front of the structure (although the concept of “front” and “back” is a bit obscure) tell me that this is the Waka Sica Reconciliation Place.  No one is around.  The metal facets of the building glint in the sun and big plate-glass windows inserted between the columns are opaque, as if smoked with soot.  I suppose the strange structure carries symbolic weight as evidence of political dysfunction and broken promises in Indian Country.  The story is strange and intricate, a saga of unrealistic aspirations.  Back in 1999, the members of the Tetonwan Oceti Sakown (“the seven council fires” of the Dakota Sioux Nation) decided that infighting between the tribal groups was impeding the economic and cultural progress of these native people.  A man named Mike Jandreau, the tribal chairman of the Lower Brule band, proposed that a reconciliation center be built just outside Fort Pierre.  The concept was to construct a cultural center with meeting rooms and exhibition galleries – it was anticipated that artifacts held by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian would soon be repatriated to the Dakota and the Waka Sica was designed to display those things.  Two wings were designed: one to house the museum and meeting rooms and, another, similarly configured structure for tribal offices and a justice center with courtrooms.  At the time this work was proposed, Tom Daschle, a Democratic congressman from South Dakota, was a powerful legislator and he engineered the passage of a legislative enactment in December 2000 authorizing the construction of Waka Sica complex.  The design for the Center’s two parts featured immense eagle wings, one per building, enfolding the structure.

But, as often happens in Indian Country, good intentions aren’t enough.  For some inexplicable reason, no funds were appropriated for the Waka Sica project, work that was budgeted at 18.2 million dollars.  Daschle thought he could get earmarks on grants to the tribes that would insure the erection of the Reconciliation Center.  But, in fact, the tribes were poor and they found it difficult to justify directing money to the project.  The earmarks were controversial and never came through.  In the face of these uncertainties, however, construction was commenced and, by about 2005, the exterior of the cultural center wing was largely complete – the big red wedge draped over the facade of the building represents one of the eagle wings.  But, then, money ran out – about six million had been spent.  The chief proponent for the project Mike Jandreau died and no one else had much interest in spending money that might be allocated to tribal infrastructure and programs to address methamphetamine addiction on the reservations to the quixotic reconciliation center. (Daschle lost his senate election in 2004 to John Thune and wasn’t able to further support the Center.)  So work stopped on the project.  Not much has been accomplished since 2005 – enough money exists to heat the inside of the building to keep pipes from freezing but there’s no staff at the Waka Sica, no repatriated relics, no art, just a big empty concrete and metal shell.  Foundations were never laid for the Justice Center and, at present, the project seems indefinitely stalled.  With each passing month, estimates as to the cost for completing the project increase – in 2015, it was thought that the work would require another 30 million dollars.  Who knows what completion would cost now, after another nine years has passed?    

29.

Angelica and I are staying at the Clubhouse Motel near the bridge over the river.  It’s a place that caters to visiting politicians with high ceilings in the lobby, an elaborate fitness facility, and a “Happy Hour” offering two free drinks on the basis of coupons provided on check-in.  Another motel is on the second terrace above the river within walking distance of the capitol.  This motel looks like a stalled-out freight train, box-shaped rooms running in a straight row along the edge of the drop-off to the lower terrace just above the river.  The downtown motel has seen better days, but it still dominates the central part of the small city, a sort of wall or barrier between the built-up commercial district by the water and the parks and artificial lake enclosing the capitol.  You can’t avoid this eye-sore as you navigate the downtown area – it looks like a place to which police squad cars are frequently summoned, dismal identical rooms lined-up like convicts marching to their execution.  The place seems not only shabby but, somehow, corroded – it’s like a linear modernist project by Eero Saarinen gone badly wrong.

A wide gulch running at a diagonal to the Missouri seems to have reverted to nature.  There are some distinguished Victorian houses at the edge of this feature, spook-houses with turrets and intricately shingled gables, and the long hill, folded into itself as a crease in the bluffs rises to the high ground overlooking the valley, a park-like expanse of savannah with swards of yellow prairie interspersed with trees.  Along the higher reaches of the gulch where the hillsides tighten together, a sleek curved facade, shaped like a boomerang, is set into the hillside.  Some orange utility vehicles are parked in front of the half-buried building and the curved loop road leading to the doors is blocked with saw-horses and barricades.  This is the South Dakota Cultural Heritage Center, the State’s historical society with museums and archives, but it’s closed for renovations.  The underground facility is supposed to invoke Arikara earth-lodges and, indeed, there’s a bronze Indian standing near the entrance doors.  

The political spectrum today admits three names for institutions of this sort.  First, the place can be called a “Museum” – a term that signifies a collection of relics and artifacts, haphazardly collected and, probably, tainted with colonialist aspirations; museums are conservative and posit that their visitors as, by and large, spectators and, therefore, passive.  “Museums” are conservative institutions.  By contrast, a “Center” proposes that the place is an intersection for various political (and liberal) causes.  “Centers” imagine their visitors as active, studious, prepared to carry lessons learned on-site into the real world.  Institutions that designate themselves as “centers” are politically progressive.  And, then, there are “heritage centers”, a curious amalgam – these places are radically conservative in the sense that “heritage” is a concept that denotes tradition and tribalism.  One’s heritage is the burden of one’s tribal identity with the understanding that there are many different tribes, including cowboy and pioneer tribal groups.  Both the North and South Dakota historical societies operate exhibitions that are identified with “heritage” – that is, with something like ethnic identity.  However, these institutions also suggest that ethnic identity and heritage are the intersection of our politics and ways of living.  Heritage understood as a living process applying the past to the present, therefore, requires that it be celebrated not within the dusty confines of a museum but in a “center” for activities and outreach.  

The road past the Heritage Center rises to the ridge line affording views of the far-off hills and the river below.  A couple of neighborhoods of houses built in the mid-sixties, little brick and lumber cottages, occupy the high point on the bluffs.  Here the views are breathtaking but Pierre is small, humble, and without ostentation.  In another city, the houses up on these heights would be million-dollar manors with terraces and hanging gardens and swimming pools.  This kind of wealth doesn’t exist in Pierre (or, if it does, like the Heritage Center is hidden underground).  From a cul-de-sac surrounded by some heaps of gravel, you can see for miles.  Some stucco has detached from a little home where someone is ripening tomatoes on a vine.  Dogs are barking.  

The new part of the city is a mile away, some car dealerships and strip malls on the backside of the bluffs.  A hospital sits on a knoll overlooking the plateau and a rabble of ravines rolling down to the eastern prairies.  Angelica and I go to a sushi place in one of the malls.  It’s strange to eat this sort of delicacy in a steamy little restaurant on a hilltop in South Dakota.  When you emerge from the mall, a light is flashing over an intersection in a broad boulevard snaking along the bluff and the open land with a thousand small grassy hills like a vast herd of sheep extends out to the horizon.  

30.

I think most hauntings arise from deaths that occurred about three to five generations before the present.  The memory of the recently deceased is too raw and painful to coalesce into ghostly figures – after all, a ghost is an abstraction of a dead person and it’s hard to form an abstract conception of someone whom you recall seeing and touching and smelling.  In the popular imagination, ghosts appear to commemorate indefinite tragedies that our grandparent’s parents may have experienced.  My brother-in-law once refuted the concept of ghosts with the comment that people have died, in tragic or violent circumstances, for a hundred thousand years.  So, he remarked, where are the ghosts of these hunter-gatherers?  Why don’t we encounter at night, pale and desolate apparitions of Indians who starved during the “Hungry Moon,” little groups of ragged tribesmen congregating around dangerous river crossings or seashores?  Why aren’t there spectral revenants re-enacting their deaths at various “leaping rocks” where braves testing their courage plunged to their deaths or where dusky Indian princesses dived into the abyss out of unrequited love?  The fact is that ghosts tend to arise from calamities dimly remembered, but, still, embedded in the collective psyche – most apparitions are about 100 to 250 years old.  Once the dead are wholly forgotten, obviously, they are no longer available to the imagination.  

But the question remains: do landscapes and places bear an imprint of the terrible things that may have happened there?  

31.

Out of curiosity, I asked my cell-phone to guide me from Pierre to the Crow Creek historical site. Nothing remains of the archaeological excavations at Crow Creek, but I wondered where the place as located.  For some reason, my phone seized my inquiry, figured out the route and mileage from Pierre to the site, and, then, kept flashing in the middle of the night.  When I opened my eyes at two in the morning, my phone was illumined, sending me a prompt: directions to Crow Creek.  I adjusted the phone and went back to bed.  Around four in the morning, the screen on the phone was lit again and pointing the way to Crow Creek.  Again, I erased the screen prompt and tried to sleep.  Around dawn, the phone was up again and telling me how to reach Crow Creek.

32.

It’s sixty miles from Pierre to Fort Thompson, South Dakota.  The route is scenic, the two-lane highway winding along the bluff tops above the broad Missouri valley.  In the slanting early morning light, the hillsides on the other side of the river looked quilted, pleated heaps of bluff and ravine with dark stands of forest in the seams of the landscape.  The river is a meandering sky-mirror grey at first and foggy with mist, but, then, brightening as the sun comes over the eastern bluffs and lights the water on fire.  When the road turns away from the river valley, it crosses lofty folded hills, bare at their summits.  Sometimes, the highway, entirely empty, angles toward the very highest point in a ridge, climbed to conquer the heights and, then, toboggans down into broad hollows where tributary streams meandered through wetlands whispering with birds and gassy water.  

33.

I’m sorry to say that there’s a toilet problem along the rural “blue highways” in this country.  People traveling on the interstate highways are accustomed (at least in the upper Midwest and west) to encountering rest stops about every forty miles.  For instance, there are two rest stops between the Iowa border and Minneapolis on I-35 northbound and, correspondingly, two servicing the southbound lanes – this is a distance of about ninety miles.  But the rural two-lane system of roads is, as one might say, “no country for old men.”  The better State and County highways are thoroughfares that don’t trifle with the small towns along the way – generally, these roads pass by adjacent towns and villages at a distance of about one to two miles.  This means that you have to make a detour to access the villages near the main road and, of course, this is also a wager – if you don’t know the territory, you can’t reliably predict that there will be a public toilet or operating gas station in these little places.  Sometimes, there are gas stations and truck stops at major intersections between State highways but this is also not always the case. The result is that when you drove cross-country, eschewing the freeways, you may find yourself in a state of dire need.  Of course, a roadside ditch might offer itself for this occasion or you might drive a hundred yards off the main road along a gravel lane.  But, this is risky business as well and embarrassing if you have a companion in the car and, it’s my experience, that the moment you stop to answer the call along a roadside or, even, a gravel lane, a procession of pickups will suddenly appear over the closest knoll or some farm house-wife with a pair of yapping dogs will wave at you from the backyard where she is hanging up laundry to dry.

34.

There were no towns to speak of between Pierre and Fort Thompson.  The intersections with other two-lane blacktop roads were barren places, marked with a stop sign controlling the empty highways.  I planned to use the toilet at a gas station in Fort Thompson, a place that seemed to have about 1500 inhabitants.  

The highway enters Fort Thompson from the north.  The village is diffuse with small government houses standing on naked dirt and weed lots.  No businesses are visible, at least from the two-lane highway and the ugly little dwellings seem to repel one another, standing at intervals on the prairie among the cast-off husks of cars and pickups.  Entering town, we pass White Ghost Road and Comes Flying Lane.  The gas station is some sort of tribal coop standing alone at the place where the road suddenly makes a sharp bend to the east, a right-angle turn away from the wretched village.  I stop and buy some gas.  There are ten or twelve stray dogs, some of them injured, prancing around the pumps and a gang of a half-dozen men are loitering across the street under a single dilapidated shade tree.  The sun is pitiless and the debris scattered around the place, mostly beer and malt liquor cans, glints in the unforgiving light.  Needless to say, there’s no toilet functioning in the gas station.  The enterprise combines shelves packed with booze and groceries, mostly overpriced canned goods, packages of ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese in cartons.  You can buy milk in the upright cooler next to the cashier.  Cases of cold beer and six-packs of malt liquor crowd the plastic bottles of milk.  A guy, clearly blind drunk wobbles around the premises, patrolling pointlessly until he finds a forty-ouncer of Colt 45 Double Malt that he cradles in his arms.  A couple of Indian women with small children are shopping in this hopeless place.  Outside, the drunks under the shade-tree are quarreling and the dogs nip at their heels.  Some of the drunks are bandaged up with surgical gauze and several of the men have their heads twisted on wrong so that they seem to be continuously looking over their own shoulders.  A fat kid is pushing a broken bike along the edge of the road and the drunks call out to him and he mutters something in reply.  

I’ve been in some bad places: south Chicago, Camden, New Jersey in the early ‘90's, burned out slums in Baltimore near the federal-era row house where Poe once lived, Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and other similarly impoverished neighborhoods.  Fort Thompson isn’t the worst place that I’ve seen, but it’s pretty awful.  And I add to the malaise by walking around to the bare side of the concrete bunker C-store and pissing on the side of a reeking dumpster.  The dogs yip and the drunks are engaged in a listless scuffle.  The Indian women with children in tow emerge from the gas station store, carrying plastic sacks of provisions, and hike off in the direction of the Community Health Center, a single-wide trailer with a handicap ramp along its side.  The town doesn’t make any sense.  I don’t see any center or commerce, just small houses isolated along the grid of narrow roads.  It’s all out in the open, treeless, and barren, an embodiment of hopelessness and despair.

35.

Fort Thompson, the tribal headquarters of the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation (Mdewakanton Dakota with some Santee and Yankton members) is inhabited by desperately poor people.  According to government data, 70 % of the population lives below the poverty line.  Most of the numbered government houses (there are about five-hundred) are in bad condition and some of these small shacks have as many as 15 to 20 people sleeping in them.  Apparently, 21% of the housing stock has neither electricity nor indoor plumbing.  The town sits on a terrace above the Big Bend Dam, a concrete wall that impounds a twenty-mile reservoir called Lake Sharpe.  There’s good fishing in the lake and some boat launches below the bluff.  I could see a couple of bait shops among the ruinous cottages.  

The place has been cursed from the very inception of the reservation (and probably for hundreds of years before that time.)  In the aftermath of the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, the Mdewakanton Dakota were evicted from the State and forced into a concentration camp on the river flats next to the Missouri near Crow Creek.  Earlier, these Indians had been imprisoned on Pike Island near Fort Snelling in January 1863, occupying a crowded encampment behind a wooden stockade, a place where the pestilential cold fog from the river overflowed into the teepee village and shanties within the walls.  The Sioux died in great numbers in that place, the victims of malnutrition and disease and, as soon as Spring arrived, the tribe was marched west to Crow Creek where the dying continued.  At the Crow Creek camp, people died at a rate of three to four per day for months.  Although the river bottoms where this murderous interment occurred are now drowned under the reservoir, the remnants of the tribe were settled around Fort Thompson.  In the fifties, when the big dams were built to tame the Missouri, the village had to be moved onto the hilltop above the river.  The Crow Creek tribe lost all of its best and most arable land to the lake that flooded the valley behind the dam.  

As it happens there are two branches of the Mdewakanton Dakota.  During the Minnesota massacre, one group of friendly Indians guarded the missionaries at Hazelwood, the Upper Agency on the Minnesota River where Stephen Return Riggs had his chapel and schools. Led by John Other Day and Chief Taopi, the friendly Sioux escorted the missionaries, including Thomas Riggs who was then 14 years old, along with their Dakota congregations, across the prairie to safety.  In recognition of this heroic service, Other Day and Taopi’s clan were granted an allotment of good farm land at Prior Lake just south of Shakopee in what is now the suburbs of Minneapolis.  This reservation was largely assimilated into the surrounding population of farmers and, in the sixties and seventies, was more a notion that a reality.  However, with the advent of tribal gaming, the Prior Lake Mdewakanton built a huge casino on their reservation land and all the members of the tribe, a tiny group more than a hundred years after the Dakota conflict, became multi-millionaires.  But the great majority of the Minnesota Mdewakanton had joined with the Santee council fire to make war on the pioneers and soldiers.  This part of the tribe was exiled to South Dakota and ended up interred at Crow Creek. (It would be interesting to know to what extent the Prairie Island Mdewakanton band shares its booty from the casino with its poor kinsmen at Crow Creek.  On the evidence of Fort Thompson, it appears that little or no money from the lucrative gambling operations in Minnesota reach the reservation at Crow Creek.)

In the late 19th century, conditions at Crow Creek were so bad that other tribal groups also confined there, simply left the reservation and went elsewhere.  The Winnebago (or Hochunk) who had been confined to Crow Creek left the place, walked south and ended up on their own allotment near Omaha, Nebraska.  The Santee also abandoned the reservation and moved to Kansas.  The Mdewakanton remaining at Crow Creek fell into ever-increasing poverty and were further made paupers by the destruction of their best farming land when the mid-century dams on the Missouri were built.  

In 1998, the tribe bought 7000 acres of ranchland near Fort Thompson.  A few of the tribal leaders had money, albeit probably embezzled from the band, and they were able to acquire the big grazing range, property that was owned and operated by Crow Creek Tribal Lands, Inc.  The ranch employed a number of workers, raised cattle, and seemed successful.  But there was a lurking problem: the tribe was not deducting employment taxes, FICA, or social security contributions from wages paid.  Indians, despite being members of sovereign nations, are also American citizens – therefore, they are obliged to pay federal taxes.  The Crow Creek administration, however, didn’t engage in income withholding.  Pretty soon, members of the tribe who had worked on the ranch found themselves in tax trouble.  Ultimately, the IRS sued the tribe for back taxes in the amount of 3.6 million dollars.  The tribe, under the guidance of Tribal Chairman Brandon Sazue, hired lawyers to defend the case.  Sazue claimed that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had told him and other tribal leaders that the ranching corporation was exempt from tax withholding.  This defense was unsuccessful whereupon Sazue had the tribe’s lawyers counterclaim against the government for damage to Crow Creek’s water rights when the dam was built and the tribal lands flooded.  Sazue also claimed that the Army Corps of Engineers had promised free electrical power to the tribe from the current generated by the Big Bend dam and its hydroelectric turbines.  These counterclaims also failed.  Sazue held a press conference and told journalists that the government was engaged in a cynical land grab, breaking treaty obligations and, once again, seizing Indian land.  (The ranch territory, however, had been purchased by the tribe in 1998 and didn’t really count as ancestral land.)  Sazue also asserted that the IRS was not a part of the United States government but, actually, an agency of the International Monetary Fund and somehow managed by the Jewish businessman, George Soros.  Sazue said that he was going to camp on the ranchland in his trailer and RV and squat there until the government relinquished its claims.  He raised the hue and cry in Indian Country for people to come to his aid and set up an encampment in protest on the disputed ranch land.  But only about twenty protesters showed up and, then, for just a weekend.  Sazue had a teepee built to dramatize his claims that the government was once again stealing Indian land.  None of this availed.  The IRS seized the land and sold it at an auction.  The Crow Creek Land Company, then, redeemed the property by paying the auction price and some additional money to the government to settle the tax claims.  

But this wasn’t the end of troubles at Crow Creek.  It turned out that the director of tribal finances, Roland Hawk, Sr., had been systematically embezzling money from the tribe.  Hawk was diverting money to other family members including Tribal Chairman Brandon Sazue and his aunt, Roxanne Sazue.  (Hawk is what might be called a colorful character – he had 16 children by four or five women – and was a flamboyant big spender.)  Ultimately Roland Hawk Sr., Brandon Sazue, Roxanne Sazue, and two others pled guilty to theft and larceny.  Roland Hawk was sentenced to forty months in federal prison for his fiscal crimes.  Brandon Sazue was sentenced to a term of 17 and a half months in the penitentiary.  A year later, Roland Hawk Sr. was convicted of multiple counts of statutory rape – apparently, he had taken a niece to Las Vegas and repeatedly raped the 14 year old girl.  Hawk was sent to prison for 18 ½ years for statutory rape and other sexual assaults.  (More trouble was on the way for the Hawk family – in 2020, Roland Hawk Jr., then twenty years old, was sent to jail for a year for pistol-whipping a man when he was sleeping.)

If Fort Thompson and the Crow Creek Reservation looks like a hapless place, there are abundant reasons for its misfortune.  

36.

The hot wind is relentless, coursing over the tawny grass on the Crow Creek promontory.  A flat-topped bluff juts out into the man-made lake, a knob of treeless grass rising about 100 feet above the water.  Nothing marks the site – at least to my untrained eyes.  As with other prehistoric villages in this area, the people who lived here between six- and eight-hundred years ago used natural features as defenses.  To the north of the windswept terrace, steep hillsides drop into a watercourse where Crow Creek flows toward the Missouri; the trench between the hillsides in that place is congested with low brush, willow thickets, and marshes with tall, lance-shaped reeds, vegetation that mostly conceals the thread of flowing water.  Similarly, on the south side of the promontory, wet-lands pocked with lagoons of open water make the hilltop inaccessible – again, sheer loess cliffs hang over the swamp.  Of course, the west side of the terrace is guarded now by the man-made lake.  800 years ago, eroded dirt banks tilted sharply down to the flood plain where strips of dry land, a bit like islands stood over the marshes near the river.  The village was open to attack only on its east perimeter and this was where the people built an elaborate system of ditches, embankments, and palisades.  

Now, the wind sighs and moans over the hilltop, drying the dew out of the grass and causing the prairie to surge with brown waves where the gale knocks against the prairie.  In 1978, when archaeologists were digging in the bone-bed near the northwest edge of the bluff, the wind sprayed loess, itself a wind-borne soil, into the pit, blinding the workers.  The researchers camped on-site to protect the excavation from looting and, at night, the winds increased, blowing down the tents pitched near the excavation, pushing the cursing scientists out into the darkness next to the canvas nudged over to lie twitching on the prairie.  Some Sioux observers, concerned about the fate of the hundreds of skeletons in the bone-quarry, had pitched their round teepee a few hundred feet from the excavation.  Sioux teepees are designed to resist the wind that whips over the open country and the moving air divided around their conical tent leaving it intact.

I get out of the car to look across the ragged barb-wire fence into the site.  An old pick-up chugs along the asphalt highway.  Grasshoppers pelt against my legs.  The bright lake beyond the hill-top terrace is littered with white-caps that crawl across the blue water.

37.

The Crow Creek village was long known to exist as dimples on this hilltop, the faint shadows of pits dug for earth lodges and the trace of ditches indenting the approaches to the town from the higher bluffs to the east.  Identified as 39BF11, a salvage excavation at the prehistoric village was accomplished across two years, 1954 and 1955 – this was part of the River Basin Salvage project directed toward studying village sites and burial mounds imperiled by the rising waters of the Missouri created by dams in this part of the so-called Big Bend region of the river.  (The squashed bluff-top where the village is located in quite high above the river and it’s hard to see how the water impounded by the lake would have immediately affected that location.)  Nothing remarkable was discovered in the relatively small test-trenches cut into the bluff – in fact, the findings of this salvage archaeology project weren’t deemed sufficiently interesting to be published until 1976.  The village was a typical Initial Coalescent era assembly of earth lodges with midden heaps, occupying several acres atop the high terrace, a landmark visible for some miles from the river valley.  At its peak, the place was estimated to be home to about 1000 people living in 75 to 80 lodges (likely occupied by family groups of about 15 people per dwelling).  The site was heavily fortified, with a five-foot deep trench running across the eastern hillside access to the village.  The trench, about 20 feet in width, was lined with dirt embankments about five feet above grade and the palisade was interrupted at intervals with semi-circular bastions.  Pottery and other artifacts established that the villagers were corn farmers who supplemented their diet with bison and other game; the people seem to have been related to the Arikara language group, a distinct tribal entity recognized as living in this area during the fur trade era (1750 to 1830).

People had lived in this area for thousands of years and, before the small pox plagues, the river basin was densely populated.  To the north, within sight of Crow Creek, there was another abandoned village named “Talking Crow” by the Sioux who claimed this part of the river as their land after the destruction of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people who originally lived in the area.  A number of large villages lined the river bluffs and more than 700 burial mounds were also heaped up in the valley and along the hillsides.   These mounds date back as far 5000 years before the present and were made by other earlier Indians who lived here.  The Crow Creek villagers would have inhabited a landscape densely marked with enigmatic monuments made by earlier people.  The Arikara, who are members of the Caddo-speaking language family, immigrated upriver into this area from the over-crowded Mississippi basin, probably arriving around 800 A.D. 

On Memorial Day weekend in 1978, several members of the South Dakota State Archaeological Society were touring prehistoric village sites in the valley between Pierre and Chamberlain.  When they reached Crow Creek, they fanned out across the hilltop, walking among the shallow hollows where the earth lodges had been dug into the bluff.  When the group reached the western edge of the promontory above the lake, they looked down to the water, concerned to see that waves kicked-up by the wind on the reservoir were gouging into the hillside and undercutting part of the prehistoric village.  In one of the eroded funnels on the west side of the village, someone saw flakes of yellow and white protruding from the grey loess.  On closer inspection, it was evident that human bones were embedded in the dirt that was eroding to slip down into the lake.  The archaeologists made a note to return to the village for further investigation, but there didn’t seem to be any particular urgency – the hillside looked relatively stable.

However, word spread across the reservation that skeletons were exposed on the edge of the lake under the prehistoric village site.  Looters cut a shaft into the hill, found nothing but disarticulated bones (that is, no pottery or flint arrow and lance points) and, so, abandoned their diggings.  But it was obvious that the site was fragile and endangered by curiosity seekers and looters.  In July 1978, a team of archaeologists were dispatched to the feature, excavating to follow the vein of human bones discovered in the hillside.  

38.

The results of the excavation in the Summer of 1978 were spectacular and disturbing.  The bones were part of a mass grave, a fan-shaped jigsaw of shattered skeletons comprising a bone bed located about 25 feet below the present surface of the hill top.  The bodies, apparently ripped to pieces, had been shoved into part of the old northeast fortification trench and, then, lightly covered with soil. Ultimately, the remains of about 476 individuals were unearthed, photographed, and collected for forensic analysis.  The people in the trench had been violently killed and, then, mutilated in what was seems to have been an orgy of blood lust.  Hands and feet were cut off and skulls showed slash marks where bodies had been scalped.  Decapitated corpses had been strewn all over the landscape and the murderers also hacked open and split long-bones as if to keep the dead from walking.  Butcher marks disfigured the bones.  An entire village had been slaughtered at Crow Creek in a single episode of mass murder.  The skeletons included warrior-age men, middle-aged and older women, as well as babies and very young children.  Very few bones were consistent with girls between the ages of 4 and 18, suggesting that this demographic had been abducted and enslaved.  Similarly, older children were missing from the cohort of corpses in the ditch – presumably also abducted and adopted into the tribe that murdered the rest of the villagers.  After being systematically mutilated, scalped, beheaded, and hacked to pieces, the dead were left to rot on the hilltop among their burned earth lodges.  Predators, then, further disassembled the cadavers.  After a year, perhaps, some remnant of the people from the destroyed village, returned to the scene of bloodbath, gathered up the disjecta membra of scattered bones, and used the pre-existing fort entrenchment as a burial pit.  

39.

The Crow Creek hilltop was continuously occupied for about a thousand years.  Excavations showed that the pits in which homes were built showed evidence of dense congregations of post-holes – indeed, so many holes that, if all posts were standing at the same time, the entire pit would have been impassable due to a forest of supporting columns.  This proves that the earth lodges were built and rebuilt on the same site for many generations.  Structures were remodeled over hundreds of years.  Enormous accumulations of garbage, more than 30,000 tons attest to long periods of occupation.  As far as can be determined, the village was initially built without fortifications.  At some point, a 1200 foot trench was cut across the northern approach to the village.  Constructed with semi-circular bastions, the trench with its breast-high embankments was intended as a fortification.  But the danger motivating the inhabitants to build stockades and moats apparently lapsed at some points.  New lodges were constructed outside of the fortifications as the town expanded.  Garbage follows the past of least resistance – the lodges adjacent to the eroded hillsides dropping trash to the creek and the river bottoms, just pitching garbage over the edge of the bluff.  The lodges closer to the trench used it as a garbage dump and, after several hundred years, the moat was mostly full of trash, a stinking mess of bones, animal carcasses, and smashed crockery.  

Then, the plains became dangerous again.  Some of the skeletons in the burial pit showed evidence of previous wounds – cadavers were marked with healed fractures, embedded arrow points, and one poor fellow had been scalped but survived to be scalped again in the massacre.  The people decided to dig a new fortification trench, a hundred yards beyond the first inner trench that was now a garbage dump.  Disturbances in the soil show that this new longer trench was half-excavated when the lethal raid occurred.  The marauders, apparently, swarmed through the open prairie where the trench wasn’t yet completed.  Radiocarbon dating of burnt timbers in the wrecked earth lodges suggested that the massacre occurred around 1325 – at least, this was the prevailing date for the Crow Creek slaughter.  

40.

We have no way of knowing who led the attack on the village.  At first, the massacre was attributed to Sioux (Lakota-speaking) nomads who infiltrated the high plains, establishing their own cultural presence on the upper Missouri in the 16th and 17th century.  But the presumed date for the village’s destruction was too early to be reliably attributed to the Sioux.  

Forensic study of the bones chipped out of the cement-like loess in the newly dug entrenchment, converted from fortification to burial pit, showed pervasive malnutrition among the dead.  People had been suffering from anemia, forms of scurvy, and various famine-related aliments.  The most coherent explanation for the killings is that the attack occurred in the context of internecine warfare between the villages.  Simply put, the towns along the Missouri in the Big Bend area were too numerous, too closely spaced, and populous for the available resources.  Calculation as to the number of earth lodges thought to be located between present-day Pierre and Chamberlain, South Dakota support estimates of, at least, 8000 people living in that area.  (Not all villages in the area were discovered before the dams drowned the river bottoms – probably, the populations may have been considerably higher.) In the Upper Missouri valley, about one-third to a one full acre is required to grow crops sufficient to support a single person.  Calculations suggest that somewhere between 8000 to 12,000 acres would have been necessary to provide reliable food for the people living in the area.  The river bottoms are swampy and were heavily forested on the banks of the Missouri – clearing the trees and underbrush would have been very labor intensive and difficult.  Most likely, the land’s carrying capacity had been reached around the time of the massacre. (It’s been calculated that only 1533 acres of possibly arable land existed in the buffer zone between Crow Creek and the upstream village known now as Talking Crow – this would be barely sufficient to sustain the growing population of the two towns.) Flooding in the valley, a periodic occurrence, and migration of bison and other animals away from the river and into the less accessible dry breaks might have severely reduced the sources of nutrition available to the Indians.  It is surmised that these factors lead to murderous internecine warfare along the Upper Missouri.  Sioux or other nomadic raiders are not necessary to explain the slaughter at Crow Creek.  Most likely one village, or an alliance of several villages, people who were intermarried and spoke the same language as their victims, murdered the people in the town.  

41.

Events at Crow Creek were initially reconstructed as a devastating sneak-attack sometime around 1325, the slaughter of the entire village with the exception of abducted very young children and girls between 12 and 19, and, then, the abandonment of the site, a place ill-fated, even, cursed by the memory of events occurring there.  A generation or two later, population pressure led to the disbursement of the villages in the densely urban Big Bend area – the villagers moved to the north and set up villages far more broadly separated from one another along the Missouri in the area north of modern-day Bismarck.

This model has been contested in a study published in 2007 in The Plains Anthropologist.  In that article, dendrochronology (tree-ring analysis) supplemented by new and improved radiocarbon analysis propose a later date for the massacre – about a hundred years after the 1325 date initially established.  Further, new excavations at the village show that the place was not wholly abandoned as initially thought.  In fact, the survivors buried the scattered body fragments and, then, seem to have rebuilt parts of the town.  A number of new earth lodges were erected after the massacre.  From time to time, it seems that the villagers discovered human bones extruding from the soil.  These bones were painstakingly collected and, then, reburied in graves dug generations after the massacre.  The town at Crow Creek, although only a shadow of its former self, lasted another two-hundred years and the village site, favorably located on the windy hilltop over the river flats, was never totally depopulated.  

42.

Working with hundreds of bodies, systematically mutilated and dismembered, is dispiriting.  The heat in the bone quarry was suffocating and the wind howled over the hill top stripping loess off the shattered skeletons and whirling human dust around in the air.  After a few weeks, the archaeologists were a little spooked.  The more traditional Sioux living in the area stayed away from the excavation – there are wanagi, the Indians said, ghosts in the hot wind and they are hovering over the pit and creating havoc there.  People became inexplicably ill and fever dreams afflicted the archaeologists.  Then, one noon when the wind mysteriously ceased and the hilltop was silent, the scientist heard a long drawn-out eerie wail.  This was too much for the workers and they retreated from the bluff burning under the hot sun.  

A local Sioux holy man was invited onto the site.  He stayed in the teepee that his people had built and, with his own hands, wove a wicker frame for a sweat lodge.  When the sweat lodge was complete, he withdrew into the little blister-shaped wigwam; steam leaked out of the bottom of the lodge, around its edges, and from gaps in the animal skins covering the branch frame.  After an hour or so, the holy man emerged and said that he had experienced a vision.  The bodies in the trench had been buried with proper rituals, the Sioux priest told them.  The dead were at rest and there were no malicious wanagi hovering anywhere nearby.  And, so, with these reassurances, the dig continued. 

43.

The bones extracted from the pit were studied for three years.  Then, the skeletal fragments were reburied on the site in five concrete burial vaults.  Several Christian ceremonies were performed, a Sioux ritual, and a private Arikara rite.  The August 1981 reburials were the largest repatriation of skeletal remains in American history.  At the time, this was controversial – some thought that the bones had further tales to tell and should have been retained for further study.  

Nothing marks the location of the burial vaults at Crow Creek.  Apparently, the bones were placed in archaeological excavations holes where the village had already been disturbed by the work done in the 1950's.    

44.

The two-lane highway slips down a hill into Chamberlain.  On the bluff above the reservoir, a wide lake that fills the valley, flooding the lower eroded breaks, a residential Indian school stands.  Places of this sort have malign history, reputed to be brutal prison camps where teachers mercilessly abused their helpless pupils, laboring “to kill the Indian to save the man.”  This Indian School, named after St. Francis, is operated by the Catholic Church and has embarked on a decades-long publicity blitz aimed at promoting its reputation and earning donations from the White Man.  (If you have the misfortune to get on this place’s mailing list, they will besiege with monthly requests for money coupled with fat packages of greeting cards, dream-catchers, and note-pads, sent to you gratis in the hope that you will return the favor with your check.  My wife, Julie, donated a few dollars to them ten years ago and, since that time, they harass her without respite, sending gew-gaws and curios on spec to elicit funds from her.)  The dormitories flanking a small grassy lawn look pleasant and there are shade trees that glitter in the sunlight as their leaves flicker in the wind.  These hillsides are always breezy and the dappled shadows dance pleasantly, green shadows on the green grass.  A Madonna with vaguely Indian features hangs over the entrance to the chapel and there are neat bungalows for the priests and nuns and the teachers who work here.  In mid-August, the campus is deserted and the small parking lots tucked into the hillside are empty.

The St. Francis Indian School operates a fairly large museum and the exhibit, which is free, is worth visiting.  It’s a refined, enlightened sort of museum, mostly featuring art made by Indians during the last fifty years or so – a lanky Sioux boy sculpted from wood wearing a jersey and holding a basketball, landscapes, and some mildly satirical pictures spoofing White attitudes toward Indians.  A picture shows an old lady rebuking some mischievous Indian children: “Go away, Owl Spirit,” the old woman says, “we have only good children in this tipi.”  (Apparently, Owl Spirits were monsters that abducted misbehaving children.)   A buckskin honor shirt made 130 years ago shows Crazy Horse and Red Bull at the Fetterman fight, astride horses seized from dead cavalryman.  The cavalrymen, naked with their heads chopped off, decorate the hem of the shirt.  Some artifacts document the fur trade along the Missouri.  The Indians didn’t understand why the Whites were so avid to acquire beaver pelts. It was their surmise that the Whites believed that beavers were spirit guides and that, when a white man died, a beaver led him into the afterlife.  

Amos Bad Heart Bull attended school at St. Francis.  As an old man, he said: “When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten-thousand men to battle.”

45.

I have come this way before.  When I was a boy, the road west to Yellowstone ran through South Dakota.  From the Minneapolis suburbs, where I lived then, it was about an eight hour drive southwest to the freeway and, then, to Chamberlain where we would stay on the first night of our vacation.  In those days, the Indian School didn’t operate a museum.  On the hillside, there was a small garden with four paths leading in each of the cardinal directions, a representation of the Lakota cosmos.  Across the bridge over the impounded waters of the Missouri, the road rose a couple hundred feet to the tawny breaks above the valley.  The breaks were barren, with grey outcrops and treeless – here is where the West begins and I have never crossed the Missouri in this place without feeling my heart lifted up with a sense of exuberance and joy.  On the west side of the reservoir lake, a settlement called Dakota Shores, there was a big motel with a shopping arcade, a smaller version of the Wall Drug, located at the edge of the Badlands 150 miles down the road.  You could buy Western-themed gifts there and Indian curios.  Some real Lakota sold jewelry and blankets out of the backs of pick-up trucks in the parking lot.  

When my children were small, it was hard for them to ride in the car on a family trip for more than six hours.  And, so, when we went on vacation, we always drove to this motel across from Chamberlain on the first leg of trip.  In the morning, we packed the car and it was cool and bright on the hillside above the big, blue lake.  Rapid City, with its concrete dinosaurs on the mountainside, was four hours away.  It was six hours to Devil’s Tower.  The Big Horn mountains were beyond a desert basin and, if you drove fast, and didn’t stop you could reach Laramie where Fetterman was killed and, then, the alpine meadows under the snowy peaks in about eight hours.  In the cool of the morning, you looked up at the breaks above the motel, bluffs piled up in golden waves soaring above the freeway, and always expected a Sioux warrior on a small, fierce pony to ride over the ridge.  The doors of the West were open and the morning was glorious and the road beckoned.  

October 9, 2024