Chapter Two
First
Inhabitants
[From
conclusion of Chapter I: Endings] Abruptly, Terry stood up, turned the wooden
stop that fastened the loft door shut, and pulled the door around to the right,
its rusty hinges creaking. Our eyes squinted in the sunlight, but soon we could
see for miles across the brown and green and yellow patchwork plains, the
orderly roads meeting at perfect ninety-degree angles, over and over again. The
white dome of the courthouse rose out of the cluster of trees that was
The
bidding done, the cars began their snail-like procession north, growing smaller
and smaller until they disappeared into the trees. Soon, we knew, my family
would also be heading north, beyond
Nearly
fifty years after my mother’s death, Terry and I walked up the hill on my family
land. Grey-tinged cumulus clouds pillowed the azure sky, and the Indian summer
sun challenged the chill northern breeze. As we reached the top, Terry looked
west to where he grew up, one mile across the section from my home place.
Unlike many of our former neighbors’ farmsteads, his small, white frame house, weathered
barn, and shelterbelt, standard government issue of cedar, mulberry, and elm,
still stood its ground against the
So much had happened since I had left the farm that I felt altered, too, and I needed to appraise my life. Maybe it was turning sixty, gaining four grandchildren, and losing my aunt, making me the now eldest generation. Maybe it was my reunion with Terry after nearly forty years, rekindling childhood memories. Maybe it was the aching emptiness created by the loss of my mother and my father. Or maybe I simply felt an archetypal yearning to understand where I stood in the ever-evolving yet revolving pattern of life. I realized that no life exists alone, and to understand my story, I had to learn the stories that influenced my family and, thus, shaped me. I needed to start at the beginning, to reconnect with the land that had nurtured my family for four generations.
“Remember the trail we wore between our two farms?” I asked. Terry nodded. “I still can’t believe that your Dad let us cut right through the middle of the wheat field.”
Through the years, my sister and I had worn our own horse trail that began at the end of our driveway and headed south along Highway 10. At the half mile line it intersected with the one from the west where Terry would often meet us when he didn’t have to help his father in the field. Then, we would spend lazy afternoons exploring.
Our favorite destination was the hill on the east side of our property that had been terraced to stop erosion. As we climbed the gentle slope, our eyes always scanned the ground for arrowheads. The butterscotch and sienna colored pieces stood out in contrast to the grey soil. Usually we just found broken bits, but Dad, who worked every inch of the 160 acres, always found the best points, collecting them in a bucket in the little porch off of the kitchen where we hung our everyday coats. Although we spent many afternoons as young children walking the fields searching for these arrowheads, it did not cross my mind back then that others centuries before us had walked and ridden on this same land. I didn’t make the connection between the arrowheads, heaved up by the earth in the spring and washed down the furrows after heavy rains, and the living beings who crafted them. “Pawnee” was only a word in my history book.
“Let’s look for arrowheads,” I said, and started through the cornstalks, kicking aside the rustling husks. But even the laterals between the sections of corn yielded nothing.
“I
remember when Mom and Dad asked the historical society to visit, probably back
in the 1950s. They thought a major battle might have been fought on this hill. Turns
out that nothing important had ever happened here, that our place was probably
only a campsite used regularly by the Pawnee on their trips to and from the
flint hills of
Terry
and I tried to envision the land when prairie grasses undulated in
uninterrupted waves as far as one could see. Even now, it was hard to visualize
the complex societies who once dominated the
I couldn’t imagine the Little Blue that I grew up with capable of cutting so deep a ravine. I didn’t even remember much water in it except runoff during irrigating season.
“I remember when I was a kid that there was a deep ravine on the creek toward the north end of that quarter my dad farmed that had a pool that was big enough to attract ducks,” Terry continued. “I used to hunt there. I even caught some fish, although they were only carp, and I always threw them back. It’s gone now since farmers cultivate every inch of tillable soil. But dad was a hunter, too, so he left it natural. That would have been a good place for the Pawnee to water their horses.”
I
squinted my eyes and looked out the restricted openings, struggling to erase
the highways, houses, grain elevators, and center pivots that neatly divided
the land into circles and squares. 
Lately,
I had been delving deeper into the mystery of the arrowheads for a more
adventurous story and discovered that, indeed, our land was right in the path of
a traditional trail once used by the Pawnee returning north to their
reservation on the Loup River from hunting and flint harvesting expeditions in
My imagination took over. I could see a warrior, sitting cross-legged on a patch of curly buffalo grass on this exact hill guarding the women and children from possible attack from all directions. He would be patiently waiting for the sunrise, and as the sky would begin to lighten in the east, he would hear scurryings in the grass—gophers, mice, and rabbits beginning their dawn foraging. Morning Star, father of the first Skidi woman, would glimmer in the eastern sky. Little bluestem and pockets of big bluestem and switch grass would be gently swaying in the warm, southerly breeze. As the orange sun slivered above the horizon, he would open a beaded leather bag that contained his flint knapping kit and begin shaping an arrowhead.
The trill of a nearby meadowlark punctuated the stillness, and a response echoed from the bottom of the hill. “I wonder what that meadowlark is telling us,” Terry asked, breaking my reverie.
The bird’s yellow breast with its bold, black “V” flashed in the sun as it perched on a corn stock. “Dad told me they were asking, ‘Have you planted all of your wheat yet?’” I replied. “I always thought the bird was wondering, ‘Where do you want to play today?’ Their songs aren’t always the same, so maybe we were both right.”
“More likely he is warning us out of his territory,” Terry smiled. “Get out of my space and leave me alone!”
“That’s too many syllables,” I joked. “Anyway, I’m hungry. Let’s go home.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I
had learned a lot about the Sioux, Osage, and even Pueblo Indians from the
Native American Literature classes I taught at the university, but all I knew
about the Pawnee was what I had learned from watching Dances with Wolves.
They were the bad guys. I was ashamed that I didn’t know more about the
original people who had inhabited our very land, so I decided to do some
reading. I discovered that for centuries the Skidi and their Pawnee relations, the Chaui, the Kitkehahki,
and the Petahauerat, had roamed the
vast grasslands of the Great Plains, their territory once ranging from the
Arkansas River in
As
I knew from studying other tribes, white encroachment would drastically alter this
traditional Pawnee way of life. It did. The Otoe and
As
I researched more, I learned about the we-tuks,
or what the Pawnee called the “scary times.” I wondered how it could be any worse
than what I had already discovered. In addition to the raids from the south by
the Plains Apache, the Dakota, pressured out of their more eastern homes,
attacked from the north. Worse, they brought with them the dreaded smallpox
that had resulted from their contact with the white traders, and in 1740 over
one-fourth of the Pawnee died.[5] In
1780 the Osage pushed the last of the Pawnee bands, out of
Life
for the Pawnee only continued to worsen. In 1831 and 1832 smallpox againraged
through the villages like a prairie fire, reducing their population again, this
time by half.[7] Oglala
and Brulé, taking advantage of the weakened Pawnees, raided incessantly,
attracted by their thousands of horses. Finally, desperate and unprotected, all
of the Pawnee agreed in 1833 to relocate north of the Platte and ceded thirteen
million acres of land for $148,200 worth of goods and services—about one cent an
acre. However, this treaty was written on sand, for neither the promised guns nor
army protection materialized. With their families starving, the bands began to demand
gifts from the emigrants on the
During
the Sioux and
Meanwhile
back at the reservation, the Pawnee continued to be harassed by the Brulé and
Oglala, the
As
I read on, I became even more distressed at the plight of the Pawnee, although
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After the Pawnee had agreed to live on their
small reservation, they had also endured constant hardship caused by the white
people flooding their land like the
The
Pawnees’ traditional enemies, I learned, also continued to terrorize them. On
August 5, 1873, approximately one thousand Brulé and Oglala warriors attacked a
hunting party of two hundred fifty men, one hundred women, and fifty children
in southwestern
That
fall, 485 Pawnee left for the Wichita Agency in
This
wasn’t the stirring adventure I had wanted to find about the early inhabitants
who left pieces of their everyday lives on our ground. I can imagine their last
hunt. As they left their camp on our land, they would have traveled north to
the Platte River over fairly level groound, except for a few rolling hills they
would have had to cross before reaching the fertile valley. Although travel on
the
Ironically, people like my grandparents, who believed that if a family owned land, they would never be hungry, caused the starvation and removal of its native inhabitants. I struggle with guilt over the displacement of our original farming communities, who asked only to be left alone, who cooperated with and even aided the American government, and who were lied to, stolen from, and then forgotten. Just who were the bad guys? The history of our 160 acres, I was beginning to discover, was a complex story of the struggle for survival.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Just as I did not appreciate the sacrifices of the Native people in the ownership of our little piece of the earth, I could not fathom the hopes and the dreams plowed into the rich soil of our farm. When I was a child, abandoned farms dotted the countryside, and we passed by many of them on our horseback rides, obeying our parents’ edict not to trespass on other peoples’ property and to beware of abandoned wells, tottering buildings, and barbed wire tangled in matted grasses.
Just
like the Pawnee, we had our own traditional trail on our summer food-gathering
expeditions. Our first stop was the
Refreshed, we headed farther east to the Jorgenson farm. The highlight there was a mossy cement water tank that held dozens of gold fish. When Mrs. Jorgenson wasn’t busy, she would come out with pieces of dried bread to feed the fish and, if we were lucky, more cookies. Their house was on the corner, too, and as the road continued east beyond their driveway, the county no longer maintained it with gravel, and the soft dirt, with a strip of grass between the two tire tracks, made it a great place to race our horses—a forbidden activity. Terry usually rode Tony, a roman-nosed sorrel gelding who was part Belgian, but sometimes his neighbor, Ernie Jensen, let him borrow his old race horse. Then the dust would fly! Our hearts beat as fast as their hooves on the hard dirt road. Afterwards, we had to be especially nice to my sister, left behind on her pinto pony, so she wouldn’t tell on us. Racing, my father believed, would make the horses unruly and unsafe for us to ride. My mother, of course, would have worried about the danger of galloping full-speed while riding bareback. We were seldom allowed to use saddles; Mom had watched too many cowboy movies. Without stirrups, she reasoned, at least we wouldn’t be drug to death. Broken bones would heal. Unbelievably, we never did fall off—while racing, that is.
After the horses caught their breath and my sister caught up with us, we continued east. Sunflowers, powdery dust coating their leaves, and milk weeds, their prickly pods bursting with feathery white seeds in the fall, lined the road that lead to a rise where a lone cottonwood tree stood guard. Here we would stop to rest, eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches my mother had sent along, and gaze over the wide expanse of farmland. Clouds of dust marked where farmers were working the fields.
Next,
we usually rode through the wrought iron gates into the
On
our return home, we would stop by the
We couldn’t see much else, so we headed for the house. These doors were boarded up, too, but once Terry had discovered a loose screen where we could open a window. He would hoist my sister and me through the opening, and then scramble in by himself. In the kitchen, a broken chair lay on its side, and down the steps to the cellar—which no one dared to enter because of spiders and snakes, not even Terry—we could see shelves that held green-tinted Mason jars, or what was left of them after their contents had been weather-shattered. The mice had taken care of whatever had once been so painstakingly prepared and stored.
We stepped over piles of white plaster and wooden laths, which had once been the ceiling, into the parlor. I warned my sister to watch out for nails, or we would all be in big trouble if she stepped on a rusty one. Layers of wallpaper covered the walls, and we loved to peel them off, one at a time, to see the different colors and patterns. In the tiny room, with its white-painted woodwork, was also a funny-looking old couch, its springs jutting through the brittle and cracked leather upholstery, a fainting coach, I learned later. Most exciting was a desk with amazing drawers and compartments. Most of them stuck, all of them were empty, except for dead bugs and mouse droppings, and the roll top only went halfway down, but that didn’t matter to us. It was a treasure that only we knew about.
After crawling out of the window and securing our secret entryway, we walked out to the shelterbelt on the west site of the farmyard. Here old machinery, rusty iron skeletons, peeked out of the fireball weeds. Terry knew what most of them were once used for—mowers, hay rakes, binders, a one-bottom walking plow, and even an old Ford coupe with no doors or windows. The cows had made trails in the cedar trees, good for scraping flies off of their backs, shading them from the August sun, and shielding them against the north winds of winter, and we followed them to where they led to the dam. Mallard ducks flapped noisily as they rose from the little lake, their green heads almost florescent in the sunlight, while the drab mud hens quietly disappeared under water, leaving only ripples to mark their spots. Dragon flies hovered near the cat tails, and we laughed at the ones we thought were riding piggyback.
Our explorations over and suppertime approaching, we headed home. If we had time, we would ride Terry “halfway” to his place. In all, we probably only rode five to six miles, never straying more than a couple of miles from our house, but the world seemed limitless to us. Time stood still, even retreated, as we rode across the plains on our horses, barefoot and bareback, just as pioneer children had done only a half a century earlier.
During
our summer rides, we connected with the land, feeling intimately acquainted
with every gully, hill, tree, and pasture in our neighborhood. “Never sell the
land,” my father told me repeatedly, and I thought I understood his attachment
to the beauty and the complexity of the plains. But I know now that it was more
than that. He believed that if a man owned land, he would be able to support
his family. However, I have discovered, it is not that easy. Just as the Pawnee
struggled to survive, eventually giving up their land to newcomers,
homesteaders, too, followed the same pattern. The
The
earliest settlers in our area south of
Settlers
in
One
lazy Sunday afternoon in the spring of 2006, Terry and I drove our pickup over
the road that Charlotte and John might have taken on their way home from
four miles West of Franklin on a tributary that they named Lovely Creek. The towns of
As our pickup traveled north, farmers busily prepared the soil for planting soybeans, corn, and milo. Winter wheat, emerald green, contrasted vividly with the faded yellow stalks that littered the fields. Here and there, native pastures were slowly beginning to awaken from winter dormancy, the big and little bluestem and switchgrass matted in clumps by the winter snow drifts. In most of them, I could see parallel tracks where farmers had driven their pickups to check on the cattle. In early April, the tender green of these worn trails stood in sharp contrast to the dull tan of the native grasses. Such a road would have been easy for a homesteader to follow, even in the places where the sod was so thick that they would have had to guess at the path. They could always have looked ahead and picked it up in the distance, especially where it went up or down a hill, and the tracks had eroded into small gullies. Usually, wagons would detour to the left or right of the washouts, scarring the virgin plains like the bark of a cottonwood tree. The grass would have seemed greener there, too, just as it did after a prairie fire.
We
decided that Charlotte and John probably would have crossed Center Creek, stopped
in
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“
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