Traveling Around

Johnny Cash sings a line about how he’s going to be “breathing air that ain’t been breathed before” after he leaves his so-called bad-mouth woman. I’m yearning to breath fresh air while wandering around in wide open spaces, too, but not for his reason. Since we can’t move around in public I have places in mind where I will do just that after all the snow melts and mud dries. 

For now I’m reading books to satisfy my needs, and while we haven’t traveled a great deal over the years, we’ve managed to see forty-nine states (not Delaware), so I’m roaming through my travel notes, too. This  one dropped out of a notebook from November of 2012. We were in Waikiki touring Pearl Harbor and rode a navy launch to the USS Arizona Memorial where we spent a few moments in reverent silence.  Since that time in Hawaii, every time we see that Geico commercial with the little green gecko, we remember times in Hawaii’s outdoor cafes when those quick little critters crawled around the railings beside us and watched us eat.

In 2004, we ate in a Basque cafe in the Star Hotel in Elko, Nevada. The Basque culture figured in the sheep herding industry of the West. Besides, they know how to cook a meal - baked chicken for me, lamb for Mary. A few days before Elko, we’d spent time in Vancouver, BC, rode a ferry to Victoria Island and toured the spectacular Butchart Gardens.

I found notes from this trip in January, 2013 when we stopped in Roswell, New Mexico to tour the museum commemorating the supposed crash of the alien spacecraft and concluded it was a hoax to sell tickets to tourists. A couple days later we arrived in Tombstone where Wyatt Earp was big and read from my cafe placemat - “Tombstone Funeral Home. Ask about our layaway plan.”

A trip in 2005 with North Dakota Farmers Union Tours was so good we repeated it in 2010, the Northeast Fall Foliage Tour. The theme of the trip was a bit of a misnomer because the beautiful color of fall leaves was really a secondary attraction. We drove into the heart of cities and historical regions: Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, Gettysburg Battlefield, and Amish communities. In NYC we visited Grant’s Tomb where across the street is the largest Gothic church in the world that’s been now converted into a hospital during this raging pandemic, the Twin Towers, the Statue of Liberty, and so much more.

Then we headed on to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont with its pure democracy style of town meetings to make decisions. Covered bridges, Dartmouth College, the Erie Canal, Niagara Falls all blend into the total tour package. Those two occasions fulfilled a lifetime of yearning to visit those sites.

One other trip comes to mind. We wanted to celebrate our 25th anniversary by doing something big, so in 1999 we boarded a ship for a cruise to Alaska. I’d always wanted to return and Mary had never been there and we came away well satisfied with our experience. The weather was fine, the mosquitoes hadn’t come out yet, and we rode the White Pass railroad born of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897.

One other memory floats to the top. When in Kalispell, Montana we witnessed a tragic emotional scene where a family had gotten word their daughter’s plane had crashed in the nearby forest. It turned out well, though several days later we read a news article reporting she had hiked out of the crash site, battered and bruised but alive.

Strange Things Done in the Midnight Sun

This article showed up on my facebook as a memory from three years ago. It was published in "Roundup," the Western Writers of America magazine.

One of the Horsemen

This line from literature haunts me, “I’m not going with you this time — ride on!” Katherine Anne Porter wrote it in her book PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER after personally experiencing the severe illness brought by the flu pandemic of 1918. The title is in reference to one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seen in the Book of Revelations. In her feverish nightmare she sees this indistinct shadowy horse and rider moving in beside her while she mounts her own horse.

Porter’s book, somewhat autobiographical in that she did fall ill to the flu, is one of the works of literature inspired by the pandemic. I’ve been wondering what literary works will be inspired from our experiences with coronavirus.

My wife and I sit more or less sequestered from the outside world and I know others are doing the same. One of our neighbors ventured out and graciously asked if she could pick anything up for us from the grocery store. Well, butter, eggs, and bananas would be appreciated, so here they came to our door. 

As we busy ourselves indoors, the windows to the outside world become important, enough so that I cleaned them. The view through them reveals a definite cutback in auto traffic but an increase in dog walkers. Wildlife maintains a presence. A flock of partridge wanders back and forth on our lawn, and geese find comfort in scattered puddles of snow melt. There aren’t many places open for a person to drive to, so we can’t go to the coffee shops, bookstores, theaters, and other places where we enjoy spending recreational time. Consequently my billfold remains closed, but then I can count unspent dollars.

Born and raised on a farm, I know what solitude and isolation mean. As much as I wanted to escape it when I grew up, that is what I yearn for again, but the years have taught that we must accept reality. The economic expansion of recent years manifests itself here in south Fargo with many strip malls filled with little startup businesses or empty space not yet filled. I fear many of them will fail after this viral outrage passes.

Fortunately, there are unread books on my shelves plus the big world wide web to wander through and Netflix and Roku programs and videos to watch on the television. And I’ve spent the last several years writing about this and that even if I don’t know much about it. Eisenhower pretty well summed up the ignorant writer, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” 

There have been a few times when I wrote something that did not prove accurate. My organization of western writers published one of my articles in which I describe how the Roosevelt library would be built in Dickinson. That plan did not survive; it will be built in Medora. There I was “a thousand miles from the cornfield.” I could name a few more flubs, but I like to forget them.  

The successful writer is much to be admired, but if a person wants to know isolation, then become one. Robert Caro is presently at work on his fifth volume in his series about Lyndon B. Johnson which he started writing over forty years ago. The books total over 3000 pages, not counting the length of the fifth.

I’m reminded of Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Digging” which tells of his admiration for his father and other hard working people like him who dug in the earth to make their living. Heaney says, “I’ve no spade to follow men like them/ Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I’ll dig with it.”

Scale Model Wagon

Years back I used to build scale models like this in 1/12 scale. All I have left are this wagon and a Napoleonic type Civil War cannon. A few others have ended up in a little country museum near Marmarth as well as with other collectors. These wagons figure strongly in the pioneer era of North Dakota. If you’d put bows on it and stretch canvas over them you’d have a covered wagon… A party of immigrants tipped one over and spent a cold wintry night under it where a lady traveling with them gave birth… A cowboy working on a roundup became badly injured. A doctor came from town to operate using an overturned box… Numerous referen

ces to hauling lumber from a rail head to build the first buildings occur… Two boys delivered their parents’ grain to a flour mill and coming home decided to make the oxen plod faster by shooting a Roman candle in their rear ends. The boys ended up walking, the wagon lay in pieces in a coulee, and the oxen were last seen stampeding over the hill… And so many more…

Grimm's Fairy Tale?

IS THERE A GRIMM’S FAIRY TALE HIDDEN HERE??? With lots of time to search out good stories, I turned to Mary’s ‘Grant County history book’ a couple days ago and found this little anecdote that still lingers. - The year was 1926. A family was moving to a new farm with their loaded Model T and a couple of wagons pulled by horses, driving 54 head of cattle, a Fordson tractor, plow, and other machinery. It took them from Sunday until Friday to reach their destination. On top of one of the wagonloads sat a crate filled with chickens, and on top of it rode their pet coyote, most likely salivating all the way.

Thoughts in Isolation

A couple weeks ago the topic of this column was about  taking things for granted. Well, that idea ran up and kicked me in the pants because right after those words appeared, the country started shutting down in the name of coronavirus. No longer can we take our old lives for granted.  Where we’ve regularly visited churches, restaurants, libraries, theaters, malls, city offices, even each other, the doors are closed. It’s our new normal, at least for awhile.

Personally, we’ll cope all right since there are many books and materials at our residence to read or re-read. While flipping through some old files, I ran across an interesting newspaper article my mother-in-law clipped from The Carson Press of December 22, 1983. The headline stated, “Fred Schones Remembers Cowboys and Folks in Shields.” I enjoy tales of the old days told by someone who experienced them, so I kept reading the article.

Schones, a barber, remembered some of the interesting characters whom he shaved and cut hair with a hand clippers during the wild and woolly days of early settlement. One of them was William Wade, the subject of the first book I published. He told Schones that the horse “Comanche” wasn’t the only survivor of the Little Big Horn because he’d seen in Canada lots of horses with the U.S. brand on them. It stands to reason, because when the fighting started at the battle, I’d imagine many army horses broke away and ended up in the Indians’ herd. Sitting Bull had led his band to Canada after the battle to avoid another fight with the army.

The barber played poker with Turkey Track Bill Molash and Ott Black. (Local residents may remember a one-time area resident Larry Sprunk who portrayed the character of Turkey Track Bill in a chautauqua show he wrote and presented around the state.) Molash and Black had come north on one of the last big trail drives from Texas. Black married the woman named Mustache Maude, a one-time madame in Winona, a little entertainment town across the Missouri River from Fort Yates where soldiers frequented. 

As is often the case, this begged further research, and I found she kept order in her place with a Colt six-shooter. After the town of Winona died, she and Ott Black headed west to Shields where Schones said they “brought Winona’s flavor to the Shields area.” We are left to guess what that means,  but the couple also ran cattle on a ranch west of Selfridge. 

After the couple separated, Maude continued ranching on her own but got in trouble by associating with a gang of cattle thieves. She confessed her guilt to North Dakota’s attorney general William Langer and appeared in court wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, a man’s shirt with a tobacco tag dangling from a breast pocket, and a short skirt. She beat the charge by turning state’s evidence after learning the gang had stolen 30 head of her cattle while she was in jail.

I saw Mustache Maude as a Robin Hood character in spite of her faults. Her obituary states, “Never was a neighbor neglected by Mrs. Black when trouble camped on his trail. A sick wife, or child, a shortage of feed in a hard winter or loss of stock brought the immediate assistance of this woman.” Another writer wrote that she “would drive miles to provide medical help for friends and neighbors. Best known as a midwife, she claimed to have spanked half the bottoms in the area.”

She died on September 12, 1932 in the Flasher, ND hospital.

Wounded Knee: From Battle to Massacre

A professional organization I belong to - the Western Writers of America recently published this in its April, 2020 edition of "Roundup" magazine.

In December, 1890, the Holy Cross Episcopal Church on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation beckoned Lakota converts to enter and find spiritual guidance. Under the direction of the Reverend C. S. Cook, a Yankton Sioux, he showed them how to decorate with some of the trappings of the holiday. Long strings of greenery, wreaths, and ornaments had been hung on the walls above the wainscoting, and a fir tree cut from the prairie stood in the middle of the floor. When finished, a serene seasonal atmosphere greeted worshipers entering the church.

The Episcopal bishop took advantage of an available Indian clergyman to send to the mission. In similar fashion, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had the wherewithal of  a newly-educated Indian doctor to serve this reservation, a Santee Sioux named Charles A. Eastman.  Dr. Eastman, a recent graduate of the Boston University School, was one of the first Indian doctors in the country.

The little church, the Rev. Cook, and Dr. Eastman will all play roles in an unfolding historical drama set in the place familiarly known as Wounded Knee. Rather than going back to the 1600s and the arrival of the first white settlers, imagine here in 1890 how the spreading white presence had squeezed this band of Miniconjou Sioux onto a small patch of land in South Dakota. Unable to follow their nomadic ways in search of the diminishing herds of bison, they were forced to rely on an inadequate dole of food and other supplies distributed by the Indian agent. 

Indians possessed no public relations representatives to present their plight to the general public, but instead suffered at the mercy of sensationalist yellow journalism that pictured them as savages. The 7th Cavalry’s defeat at the Little Big Horn fourteen years earlier had struck a deep chord still resonating in the country, and editors sent reporters out to write articles painting the Indians as bogeymen who must be eliminated. Publishers had discovered stories coming from this standpoint sold papers for them.

One headline proclaimed, “Squaws Swarming at Pine Ridge,” words the writer chose to express danger. However, one must read quite deeply into the article before finding, “Rations are being issued to the Indians again today, and the swarm of squaws about the agency storehouse is greater than ever.” In their state of despair, they wanted food for their families.

One paper, The Kimball Graphic in South Dakota, wrote this on December 26, 1890 about Sitting Bull: “In presenting to our readers the portrait of this ugly and merciless savage, it perhaps would be of interest to give a sketch of the Sioux Indian and chief, whose career has been so marked with deeds of treachery and blood.” The artist did his best to portray the intent of those words with his pencil.

Reporters from around the country, dispatched to the area in search of some rich stories, discovered a scarcity of news which prompted creativity in their writing. Remember L. Frank Baum and his classic story The Wizard of Oz. When we think of him it might be in terms of the wit and creativity he exhibited to conceive such extraordinary literature.

In his earlier days, Baum earned his living writing for the Aberdeen (SD) Saturday Pioneer where he wrote his thoughts about the death of Sitting Bull in the December 20, 1890 issue. “With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is exterminated, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.” He went on to call for their total annihilation writing, “…better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”

The figure of Sitting Bull looms large in the story. Friendly with Buffalo Bill Cody and a willing participant in his wild west show, he also understood his presence sold tickets for Cody when he toured. When Sitting Bull left the show, an appreciative Cody made a gift to him of the horse he rode in all those arenas.  

Upon returning home, Sitting Bull met the realities of life on the reservation with the government’s attempt to make farmers of them plus something else. A Paiute man named Wovoka had brought a message inspired by a vision in which he saw ancestors rising from the dead and the white culture disappearing from their lives if only they would don a special protective shirt that promised protection from bullets and perform the Ghost Dance. The destitute Lakota began to gather and dance.

The Indian agent James McLaughlin feared Sitting Bull would travel to Pine Ridge and encourage all-out participation in the dance and so ordered his arrest. In order to carry it out, McLaughlin sent 43 tribal policemen to Sitting Bull’s cabin on December 15 with the intent of arresting and removing him from the scene. Word had gotten to Buffalo Bill of their intention and was hurrying to the scene to defend the chief’s honor and settle tensions. Unfortunately, Buffalo Bill moved a little slowly that day because of a hangover and McLaughlin’s emissary, Louie Primeau, intercepted him and falsely directed him to a location far from Sitting Bull’s actual whereabouts.

Meanwhile at Sitting Bull’s cabin, a scuffle ensued as followers of the chief resisted his arrest, shots rang out, and the Indian leader fell. Witnesses stood shocked, but observed something of which they took note: the horse given to Sitting Bull began to dance and bow upon hearing the sound of gunshots. Some saw it as a symbolic gesture honoring the death of the fallen man. Authorities now became fearful of a violent reaction, enough so that troops received orders to travel to Pine Ridge, disarm the Indians, and contain the potential insurrection.

Colonel James W. Forsyth, leading a detachment of the 7th Cavalry complete with rapid-firing artillery, arrived at Wounded Knee Creek, a spot where the Miniconjou had gathered about 20 miles from the Pine Ridge Agency. He ordered the Miniconjou to surrender their weapons. One of them, a deaf man who was very possessive of his prized rifle, scuffled with soldiers, and the gun discharged. In that tense atmosphere, members of the 7th Cavalry opened fire on the mostly defenseless Indians, including the elderly, women, and children who had started running for their lives. Mounted soldiers easily caught up to the fleeing Indians and shot them at close range. One alibi stated for the indiscriminate killing was that while wrapped in their blankets, women and children couldn’t be distinguished from the warriors.

Even though twenty miles distant from this bloody incident, the church becomes important. Wounded people, Indian and white alike, needed to be taken someplace. Neither race wanted treatment by the other, instead wanting someone of their own skin color to care for them. Dr. Eastman stood available to care for the wounded and Reverend Cook opened the church to serve as a hospital. He found help moving furniture to the sides and spreading on the floor for wounded patients to lie on.

A winter storm had set in and three days passed before Eastman and a party of about 100 men comprised of about 85 Indians and 15 whites could go to the site and bury the dead. Almost beyond belief, they found some still living including a baby trying to feed at the breast of its dead mother. Eastman later wrote, “It took all my nerve to keep my composure in the face of this spectacle…”

The Indians received little sympathy for the affair. One reporter excused the tragedy and wrote in the Salt Lake Herald on January 14, 1891, “The papoose is innocent, but it grows to manhood or womanhood, then commences deviltry.” The army even awarded medals of honor to twenty soldiers for the valor they exhibited this day on the battlefield. One cynical historian has commented that during all of World War II only three soldiers from South Dakota received this honor. 

The tribes received partial solace in 1990 when the 101st Congress passed Senate Concurrent Resolution 153 which cited Wounded Knee as a massacre, not a battle.  While it did not render complete satisfaction it was a step. But to further compound modern Indian thought on the matter, one sharp-eyed observer spotted something. Bob Smith of the Oneida tribe attended a government agency’s annual award ceremony in 1999 and noticed the U. S. army color guard carrying a standard festooned with dozens of battle streamers. On inspection, he found one proclaiming “Pine Ridge 1890-1891.” To remove the streamer he discovered would take congressional and presidential action.


A large number of people, Indian and white, died at Wounded Knee from wounds and exposure. So it is not forgotten, a commemorative ride on horseback occurs each winter when a group rides 300 miles across South Dakota. Efforts to rescind the medals of honor have so far been unsuccessful.