Small Wonders

To much of the world, Nebraska, alas, is fly-over country, even if you're in a mini-van, so boooooring because the landscape is so featureless. . .until you come up on petrified natural monuments like Chimney Rock, a site that pumps the traveler’s heart with pioneer hope.

All those old west Nebraska rock formations are something. They’re sandstone and hard clay, changing even as we speak. But when you're coming up the Trail, east to west, you get close to Chimney Rock and you can't help feeling you're getting somewhere. 

The endless prairie all around is so bereft of people and buildings that coming up on St. Stephenie Scandinavian Church from any direction is a joy, even though the old church is but a shadow of its former self. It's hard to imagine the neighborhood teeming with Danes and Bohemians and Virginians, a Great Plains melting pot, each family--eleventy-seven kids--trying to make a go of it on 80 acres of lousy land. There had to be a time, maybe early June, when you could stand beside the old church and hear the music of children's voices rising from homesteads miles around.

Jim Schaap of Small Wonders and Siouxland Public Media's General Manger Mark Munger bring stories of Christmas to lighten our load in these difficult days.

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Okay, maybe this isn’t about Christmas, but Christmas is the season for sweetness, so I’m hoping you’ll let me tell a story that fits, even if it’s set so many years earlier in a land that seems ever so far away.

There’s a baby in it. It’s short a manger and a posse of shepherds; but I can’t help thinking this little story is related.

There must be a thousand stories like this—more, in fact, stories about shady first impressions suddenly turned to gold. Here goes.

There weren't all that many people--three or four dozen. Most, like me, were on the far side of fifty. But a pandemic is raging, and being out at all is something of a risk.

In 1870, Luxembourgers came to this corner of the state, the only region of Iowa not yet homesteaded. For the record, forty of them unloaded their wagons and cut through virgin prairie.

She made a scene.  She could have simply left when told to, but she refused. She made a scene. She should have known better.

Her name was Emma Coger, and the reason you've never heard of her is that her story is so old hat that it shouldn't be news at all. But it is.

Emma was 19 years old and a teacher--middle school, sixth grade, maybe seventh, not much older than her students. History doesn't say whether or not she was on the road to be a master teacher. What's essential background material--is her age, her occupation, and her race.

To be sure, there was a good reason for the Poncas to cut the deal they did with the strange emissary who showed up one day from Washington. He’d come to let them know  that “the Great Father” wanted the Poncas to move from their homeland on the Missouri River, to Indian Country, what would become Oklahoma, to a place where, he claimed, they’d be safe from raids by larger and more warlike neighbors.

The prairie grass was very tall, spread wide as the eye could see, an immense, shaggy hide over undulating hills, grass so tall and thick that it was a hazard for those white folks who determined to settle the land here. The only way to be sure you knew where you were going, should you want to walk with the family, was to hold hands and not let the kiddos get lost in the mess. Such things happened. In those first weeks and months, the only way to be neighborly was to dig trenches between the soddies.  

It’s near to nine, the evening of May 2, 1879. The courtroom is standing room only. It’s the second day of a trial that pits a weary band of indigenous people against a massive law-and-order government. 

The Omaha courtroom features the famous Indian fighter, Brigadier General George Crook, who often took to the military field in buckskin, civilian togs. But today he's donned his full-dress uniform. Just three years earlier the nation’s celebrations at its own big centennial commemoration were muted by bloodletting at Little Big Horn. 

“Warm County,” the Poncas called it--Indian Territory, what would become Oklahoma—didn’t sit well for the Poncas, didn’t feel at all like home, and offered no rest for the weary, just another hard-core stretch of hunger and sickness. Weary and hungry when they arrived, they stayed weary and hungry for months.

Forget every cavalry vs. Indian show you ever saw—get it out of your consciousness. The Ponca story is not like them.

There’d never, ever been a hostile problem with the Poncas. They’d signed a treaty sixty years before, so when the mounted cavalry from Ft. Randall came riding into the Ponca villages, no Ponca had ever seen the army before. Can you imagine?

The wailing that whole night was robust. No one wanted to leave. The next morning, in come these fighting men with guns and swords.

To be sure, there was a good reason for the Poncas to cut the deal they did with the strange emissary who showed up one day from Washington. He’d come to let them know  that “the Great Father” wanted the Poncas to move from their homeland on the Missouri River, to Indian Country, what would become Oklahoma, to a place where, he claimed, they’d be safe from raids by larger and more warlike neighbors.

On a single visit to Lemmon, South Dakota, you can see the whole world. Seriously.

You want joy? Once a summer they put a tent up in Lemmon—a beer tent—for a town festival. A whole lot of people celebrate with a whole lot of beer, so many people and so much beer the town sells souvenir t-shirts with “I got bent in the tent,” across your chest.

You can buy that t-shirt any time of year, too. It’ll stop traffic. Even if people don’t ask, they’ll wonder. “I got bent in the tent.”

J. P. Morgan was the richest man in turn-of-the-century America. Edward Curtis, the largely uneducated son of a tub-thumping preacher, entered his Morgan’s office timidly, hoping for a contribution because the focus of Curtis's life was floundering, even though he’d already bagged the backing of President Teddy Roosevelt.

As late as the 1930s locals still found bones right here, on a flat spot of ground in what was once a wide river bed.  Bones--the skeletons of ponies that had belonged to Black Kettle's Cheyenne people. 

Listen, this is Believe It or Not stuff.

But first an old story you might have heard.

There's a guy, an old soldier maybe, some poor soul left behind on an otherwise deserted Pacific island (swap oceans if you'd like). Poor guy's been on his own for fifty years, sole occupant of this tiny unmapped island. 

One day finally, someone drops by, first visitor in way too many years. The visitor is astounded at the place the old guy has built. He had nothing else to do for fifty years, I suppose, so he built himself an entire town.

She remembers sitting up on the wagon and hearing the cobs bang, remembers horses going up the field pretty much on their own as Ma and Pa picked ears and flung 'em off the bangboard. Remembers, she says, how the sharp edges of a thousand corn leaves could cut up your arm but good.

She remembers bringing a load home from the field at night, in the dark. She was just a girl, but she remembers one winter when they finished picking corn on New Years Day! Can you believe it?

Think Julie Andrews. Think "The Hills are Alive." It's unlikely the Sisters ever cavorted so sweetly amid the hills, but who knows? They loved their native Switzerland's shimmering mountain lakes and perfectly stunning peaks, so who knows what kind of dance they did when alone amid that mountaintop majesty.

It's huge. Created in the late '20s, during the heyday of memorial making, Bryant Baker's Pioneer Woman stands formidably just off one of Ponca City's main streets, right where Oklahoma oilman millionaire, Earnest Whitworth Marland, wanted it. It's bronze and it's big and it’s a lovely gift to the town, the region, and the entire nation really. 

Baker won the commission, a 1929 contest among some of the nation's leading sculptors, after a nationwide tour of the submitted possibilities. Hundreds of thousands of people voted. 

Big Bluestem.

Used to be, there were far more of them than there are of us. Tall and spindly, it grew up every 

summer from a thick bundle of shorter stuff at its base, like a grass skirt, a thicket that a host of critters thought of as home. Spindly and thin up top, Big Bluestem, the tallest of our native grasses, gets tossed around so mightily by gusty winds that not even a goldfinch can hold on. But the skinny stem doesn't break, it just waves, waves away, waves beautifully, waves like an inland sea. 

If you look closely into a single, little nook of the elegant, spirit-riddled Crescent Hotel, Eureka Springs, Arkansas, you'll see an arc, I’m told, a portal that’ll usher you right into the fifth dimension. I’m walking fearfully through the place.

“Look closely because at this very spot it frequently appears,” our guide told us, a true believer, giving us the tour. She jerked her arm sideways, in a motion I simply assumed was conjuration, and I took the picture.

I’ll show it to you sometime. You got to look hard, worse than hard.

Strange place to start, but let’s just go for it.

Ninety-five years ago, just about everyone in Sioux City would have recognized Mother Bloor, a 70-year-old wrecking crew who’d stormed into town from North Dakota just to agitate, to stir up a batch of trouble with mad farmers here, and there were more than a few because the whole lot of ‘em could do nothing but watch their operations slip-slide into receivership.

On the night of April 23, 1865, eight days after President Abraham Lincoln met his end in the Ford Theater, a young man named Silas Soule, a Civil War and Indian Wars veteran and a constable in a frontier town called Denver, Colorado, ran into two cavalrymen, late, who, presumably drunk, were shooting their handguns irresponsibly.  No one knows what was said, but in a matter of minutes, Charles Squier, a ne'er-do-well with a rap sheet and a venomous hatred for Abraham Lincoln, shot Silas Soule in the head.  Soule died almost instantly.

The Battle of the Bulge had not gone well for a California kid named Ralph Ellis, who, like countless others in the fog of war, had lost track of his outfit. He was in awful shape, as so many were when the Hitler sprung an immense December surprise and bullied their way through Allied lines in France and Belgium. Ellis was alone, wounded, frozen and famished, hiding out in an uninhabited house in a town pummeled--for the second time--by the Nazi advance. He thought he was dying.

Astonishingly, this gorgeous American folk song has no story, no source, and no author. For more than a century we've associated it with the battle-weary Civil War soldiers or flatboat rivermen--maybe even freed slaves, or lovesick sweethearts far, far, far from home. Maybe you’ve always thought its honey-coated saga, set somewhere in the mythical American west, starred a white man who fell in love with the beautiful daughter of Native chief.  "Shenandoah,” is an all-American favorite, and, oddly enough open book.

Cathedral of the Prairie

A couple of farmers don't just get together over coffee at the Coop and decide to build a cathedral like St. Anthony of Padua, Hoven, SD. Putting up a that sized cathedral requires a vision.
 

St. Anthony's visionary was a priest named Anthony Helmbrecht, who wanted a cathedral not unlike the ones he remembered from his Bavarian boyhood. In the early years of the 20th century he went door-to-door until he collected enough money to contract the artisans he wanted, who then began to build the "Cathedral of the Prairie."

So give me a home where the buffalo roam

Just get me the heck out of this sod house.

You know, I used to say there weren't any great songs about sod houses because no one went all rhapsodic about living in thick dirt. A sod house kept out heat and cold in remarkably efficient ways and likely never blew away. Let it be said—or sung—that sure as anything a soddie was a shelter in the time of storm. But far as I knew, nobody ever picked out a song about a sod house that found its way into the American soul. No siree.

On Thursday, October 17, 1918, the editor of the Maurice Times, Maurice, Iowa, had no idea what was to come. In just a couple of days, he would have loved to edit that off-base lynching reference and burn the evidence. Thousands died in October, 1918. No one pushed them to flatten the curve. 

There was a war in 1862, and it wasn't all that far away. As wars go, this one was short, over and done with in little more than a month. But it was very bloody. In no other war in U. S. history were as many civilians killed in such a short time.

Out in the middle of nowhere, an old white frame building is all that remains of a heart-felt dream that, as an answer to prayer, opened its doors in 1893 to a dozen kids who wanted an education not otherwise available in the Dakota Territories before the turn of the century.