PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  —T. H. Gladstone,

  The Englishman in Kansas (1857)

  An Indian is a more watchful and a more wary animal than a deer. He must be hunted with skill.

  —Colonel James Carleton,

  U.S. Senate report, “Condition of the Indian Tribes” (1867)

  It seems as though the D—l had changed his residence, gone to Kansas, for certainly no such atrocities [as the dispossession] could be committed without his leadership.

  —John Farwell,

  Letter to Board of Indian Commissioners (1871)

  The [Kaw] tribe is now nearly extinct. All authorities will tell you that it is as impossible to civilize them as to tame a wolf. These men will not work: when you shake hands with them their long fingers feel just like the paw of an animal with a softness like hair.

  —Cornelia Adair,

  My Diary (1874)

  Staple food sold to Indians—such as sugar, coffee, tea, and flour—are the worst that can begot, of course.

  —Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg,

  “Across Kansas by Train” (1877)

  [c. 1878] let me give you my opinon off the indians as some off the amairkans call them. My opion is that iff the amaricans was drove from one coast too the other that we would be worse than the indians have bin.

  stop & think, when america was Discovered, the indians was hear. How did they come heart i belive that our maker put them hear, you se that there was sevelr difernt tribes a) there was some diference in the tribes, the same as an ingles man a) an irsh man. my openion that theour maker gave them this country, but we was enlighten enough had the pour too keep Driving them back, and i know by experience that the indians woudent bin hallf so bad iff it hadent off bin for the white men that wood get with them and they could plot for them, that would give these white men a chance to plunder, i know this too bee the fact in severl cases, gest look at the indians. they was ignorent too our ways, but yet they undr stode one another, & some one must off gave them this [knowledge], for they all had a way of worshiping the master, i belive that god gave them that enteligant, for God says i will right my law up on your harts & in your minds, i will place them so all sail no Me, from the least to the greatest, and i blave that is where the red man got his knolej from, they all have a way off worshiping the lord, but you wil say that they are saveges, for they fight amoung them selves; and this is true, but dont all of the americans do the same, and not only that, they have gred arsnells manurfactoring guns And amunition all the while. now iff you can see the difference i should like too kno.

  —Matthew Flint Clarkson, Jr.,

  “The Matthew Clarkson Manuscripts”

  (transcribed 1927)

  The common saying that the island of Manhattan was “purchased from the Indian inhabitants for the value of twenty-four dollars in traders’ goods” is not true. It is not true for the reason that the Indians did not and could not think of the possibility of conveying property in land. What the Indians of Manhattan did conceive was the idea of admitting the Dutch settlers to live in the land with themselves as neighbors, to share its benefits. But they had no idea of selling the land for any price. No Indians of Manhattan or elsewhere entertained at any time any such idea. Indians always said in opposition to such proposals, “We cannot sell the land, for it belongs not to us in this generation only, but to all our people for all time. . . .” [The Indians] thought of the goods given by the Dutch as being merely presents given as a pledge and token of good will and neighborly relations. The idea of alienation of the land was never in their minds.

  —Melvin R. Gilmore,

  Prairie Smoke (1929)

  [Black Elk said:] The Wasichus [Caucasians] came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of Wasichus; and it is dirty with lies and greed.

  Drinks Water . . . dreamed what was to be, and this was long before the coming of the Wasichus . . . and he said: “You shall live in square gray houses in a barren land, and beside those square gray houses you shall starve.”

  Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.

  We got more lies than cattle, and we could not eat lies.

  Only crazy or very foolish men would sell their Mother Earth. Sometimes I think it might have been better if we had stayed together and made them kill us all.

  I looked back on the past and recalled my people’s old ways, but they were not living that way any more. They were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own.

  —John G. Neihardt,

  Black Elk Speaks (1932)

  The Kaws are among the wildest of the American aborigines, but are an intelligent and interesting people.

  —Lewis Henry Morgan,

  Ancient Society: Researches in the

  Lines of Human Progress from

  Savagery Through Barbarism to

  Civilization (1878)

  The Kansa believe that when there is a death, the ghost returns to the spirit village nearest the present habitat of the living. That is to say, all Indians do not go to one spirit village or “happy hunting ground,” but to different ones, as there is a series of spirit villages for the Kansa, beginning with the one at Council Grove, where the tribe dwelt before they removed to their present reservation in the Indian Territory, and extending along both sides of the Kansas River to its mouth, thence up the Missouri River . . . (near the state line), thence down the river to the mouth of the Osage River, and so on, down to the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers.

  —James Owen Dorsey,

  A Study of Siouan Cults (1889)

  We, the sons and daughters of the pioneers, are proud of the work of our fathers and mothers. They came to Kansas to help free it and reclaim what was known, when they came west, as a desert.

  —Vice President Charles Curtis,

  Unpublished autobiography (c. 1930)

  Kansas, which was originally conceived as the red man’s home, was rapidly becoming his grave.

  —William Frank Zornow,

  Kansas: A History of the Jayhawk State (1957)

  Few Americans are devotees exclusively of the aboriginal; many are fond of the merely old.

  —David Lowenthal,

  “Not Every Prospect Pleases” (1962)

  There has to be [an] interval of neglect, there has to be discontinuity; it is religiously and artistically essential. That is what I mean when I refer to the necessity for rums: ruins provide the incentive for restoration and for a return to origins. There has to be (in our new concept of history) an interim of death or rejection before there can be a born-again landscape. Many of us know the joy and excitement not so much of creating the new as redeeming what has been neglected, and this excitement is particularly strong when the original condition is seen as holy or beautiful. The old farmhouse has to decay before we can restore it and lead an alternative life style in the country; the landscape has to be plundered and stripped before we can restore the natural ecosystem; the neighborhood has to be a slum before we can rediscover it and gentrify it. That is how we reproduce the cosmic scheme and correct history.

  —J. B. Jackson,

  “The Necessity for Ruins” (1980)

  The sense of the historical past, the awareness of history and of histories, has always led a relatively precarious existence here. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century genteel snobberies about our American culture desert and historical vacuum had this much point: that the monuments, the detritus, the archives, the material leavings of the past—all the visibilia that dot and clot the European landscape—were simply not to be found here and were therefore not part of a world that Americans internalized. . . . Americans were and are quite capable of devouring historical romances and seeing limitless numbers of historical movies while at the same time believing with Henry Ford that history is the bunk.

  —Steven Marcus,

  Representations: Essays on Literature
and Society (1990)

  [Arrowheads] were chiefly made to be lost. They are sown, like a gram that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth. Like the dragon’s teeth which bore a crop of soldiers, these bear crops of philosophers and poets, and the same seed is just as good to plant again. It is stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones. His bones would not prove any wit that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does. It is humanity inscribed on the face of the earth, patent to my eyes as soon as the snow goes off, not hidden away in some crypt or grave under a pyramid. No disgusting mummy, but a clean stone, the best symbol or letter that could have been transmitted to me.

  The Red Man, his mark

  —Henry David Thoreau, The Journal (1859)

  No buried nations sleep in the untainted [Kansas] soil, vexing the present with their phantoms, retarding progress with the burden of their outworn creeds, depressing enthusiasm by the silent reproof of their mighty achievements. Heirs of the greatest results of time, we are emancipated from all allegiance to the past.

  —John James Ingalls,

  “In Praise of Blue Grass” (1875)

  I realized the chauvinism of the act of digging up [the Indian] graves as if our time, our reality, and our culture, is the real thing and what we live now is all there ever was and all there ever will be.

  —John Hanson Mitchell,

  Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand

  Years on One Square Mile (1984)

  The patterns made by the historian are never complete There is always something lacking, a residue, fragments suggestive of other patterns which might be formed if one only knew how to put them together or where to find the missing parts. The quest for the whole truth ends in the “innumerable puzzles, problems, mysteries, one is eternally stumbling against.”

  —Walter Prescott Webb,

  The Great Plains (1931)

  It must be added of words that they are the most inevitably inaccurate of all mediums of record and communication, and that they come at many things which they alone can do by such a Rube Goldberg articulation of frauds, compromises, artful dodges, and tenth removes as would fatten any other art into apoplexy if the art were not first shamed out of existence.

  —James Agee,

  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939)

  No doubt, Sir,—there is a whole chapter wanting here—and a chasm of ten pages made in the book by it—but the book-binder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy—nor is the book a jot more imperfect (at least upon that score)—but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it.

  —Laurence Sterne,

  The Life and Opinions of Tristram

  Shandy, Gentleman (1761)

  In the Quadrangle:

  Wonsevu

  On the prairie, upright sturdy things, like fenceposts, acquire an importance they rarely have in wooded country. Out here they become reminders that you are, despite having seen no other person for a couple of hours, not entirely alone: a fencepost implies a landowner, someone somewhere nearby to look after it and whatever it protects. Barbed wire across miles of open country is not so desolate to a traveler as an empty road because a fence bespeaks the continuing presence of ownership; it says, “See me or not, I’m here. This is mine.” But an empty road says, in the words Spanish explorers carved in rocks of the American Southwest, “Paso poi aqui,” “I’m passing here.” No place is emptier than the one where someone has been and will not return to. A county road lies in nearly perpetual silence, but a four-strand barbed-wire fence can whisper in the wind like the strings of an aeolian harp, as if the Wind People themselves are asking after their land, “How goes it?” although a fence was a foreign, even abhorrent thing to them.

  In this land where openness can sometimes begin to seem like blankness, I found myself paying attention to fenceposts, especially old wooden ones of cedar and Osage orange so bent and crooked and knobbed that I could dream them into shapes the way ancient peoples saw bears and warriors and zodiacs in the night sky. Like stars, prairie posts came to guide me. In Chase, especially in the southwestern quadrangles where the hills appear to deflate from rounded fullness, where cardinal-direction gravel roads and the pastures can look one like the next, I began naming fenceposts that served me as guides: Old Scratch’s Walkingstick, Boomer’s Bent Dick (looked like one), Buns Brown (nicely steatopygic), Sam Wood (all shot up), Geronimo (last two letters of Chief Paints sign rusted away), Gipper Bonzo (top rotted off), Hester Prynne (orangish lichen-covered forked post supporting another to form an A). I even started keeping a list of objects countians hung from or set atop posts, and I came to see the custom as a response to isolation. Besides the usual auto tires painted NO HUNTING and the lost hubcaps, I found a pair of red long johns stretched over a post as if to warm it, and pulled over another a woolen sock like a nightcap, and a bleached aitchbone of a steer turned upside down to make a monster head, and an oval rock that looked as if an archaeopteryx had laid a big petrous egg atop a post.

  On days of grim weather, when I found nothing of interest and began feeling desolate—especially after coming across a fence-hung sign like KEEP OUT OR U WILL B SHOT and even one with a logic that should have amused me, NO TRESPASSING WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION—then those friendly and anthropomorphic fenceposts lifted me, in spite of my belief that this prairie is more beautiful without barbed wire hacking it up and declaiming ownership of something that cannot really be owned.

  The best fence object I came across was different from the others. One hot Indian summer afternoon, I was going down a county road north of Wonsevu (or what the Syndrome has left of the village) and finding little of interest. The topography here is much like the Cedar Point quadrangle. My canteen was empty, road dust stuck in my sweat and itched, and I was ensnared in a mean solitude. I saw something hanging from the top strand of a barbed-wire fence: it looked like a long-handled dipper, the kind to splash down into an oaken bucket of sweet well water. I walked to it. Swinging slowly in the dry wind was indeed an aluminum dipper, dented but not shot up by gunners like most things on fences. But why a dipper? Then I saw why: between it and the edge of the gravel road was a small conduit, and from it bubbled a cold outwash of clear water onto a little bed of watercress. An artesian well just above Coon Creek. I took the ladle, filled it, and drank from the neighborly thing. I’ve since used it often and learned the well was an accidental strike of an oil driller years ago.

  When I was down in the Wonsevu quad in my last weeks of roaming the county, for three days I poked around to find a worthy topic. (The village name is a corruption of the Cheyenne word for deer, vaoseva, which literally means “bob-tail high.”) All that remains now are three well-kept frame buildings: the 1885 school, a meeting hall, and a church. Finally, one afternoon, my anthropologist friend, Joe Hickey, and the geographer Charles Webb took me into a remote piece of the quad west of the village to a great stone circle on a hilltop. We looked the peculiar thing over, all of us hoping it was an ancient medicine wheel, but, we concluded, it was a geologic feature and not a grand artifact of aboriginal sky-watchers.

  I knew that when Zebulon Pike passed through just north of here in 1806 his Osage guides told him this was all Kansa hunting ground, and I knew that a branch of the old Kaw Trail passed by not far to the east, so I returned to the stone circle in hopes I’d missed something, but I found nothing. Then it came to me what I was overlooking was the Kansa nation itself, people who had made their slow way down the old trace after being dispossessed of their reserve to the north: the place to begin was not here but at the head of the Kaw Trail, across the line in Morris County. Archaeologists, to avoid what they call “redundancy of sampling,” rarely dig every grid of a big site. So, the next day, I didn’t go back to Wonsevu but went instead to Joe Hickey’s classroom and called him from Introduction to Anthropology and asked if he’d like to go up to the Kaw Agency. He looked out at the day and said,
I’m finished at noon.

  Joe, who grew up in Northport, Long Island, has lived with and studied the Fulani tribe in Africa and made several films about Great Plains Indians. Soft-spoken, with a keen memory and a Celtic wit (that is, he finds a sad humor in historic inevitabilities), he is deliberate, diligent, and dedicated. After ten years of research on the Thurman Creek settlements in Chase, he began looking into the Kansa, especially their twenty-six years on the reservation in southern Morris and northern Chase counties, an area the government moved them to when an 1846 treaty forced them to cede two million acres along the Kaw River where it cuts through the northern Flint Hills. In 1873 the government compelled them to move again, this time into the new Indian Territory—Kansas was the old I.T.—now Oklahoma.

  In the upper Neosho Valley in 1847, the Kansa set up three villages southeast of the Santa Fe Trail where it forded the little river, a crossing that became Council Grove. One village lay near the mouth of Big John Creek (Big John Walker was the member of George Sibley’s trail survey crew who carved the first sign naming Diamond Spring); the second village lay about six miles farther southeast, just below the present settlement of Dunlap, and the third a couple of miles farther south, along Kahola Creek near the Chase line. Toward the center of the Kansa Reserve, the government in 1861 built a two-story stone agency-headquarters, and also, along the Neosho and tributary creeks, 150-some rock cabins as permanent houses for the Indians, as well as a mill, mission, school, and council house. Only the ruins of the agency building and a few cabins remain in this valley where the people who gave their name to the state watched a ten-thousand-year-old way of life disappear, and with it their hopes for continuance.