Lost Without the River Read online

  My mother and father had been married for two years when my mother’s sisters, Marian and Mabel, who lived in the capital city of Pierre, decided to see this farm their sister described in long letters. When word got out, friends wanted to join them in the adventure. So, on a beautiful weekend in July, six unexpected guests arrived at the farmhouse. There was only my parents’ bed and one single bed in the house, so for the first night the city folk slept in the barn, lying on the haymow floor. Blankets helped cushion their backs just a bit. The next night, my mother insisted that they sleep in the small hotel in town.

  Although that story was retold over the years—how the first guests of the new couple had slept in the barn—I grew up unaware that the only remarkable feature of our simple house was a legacy from my parents’ predecessors, the first settlers. It was a panel of stained glass in the living room window, just to the right of the front door. It was placed above a larger portion of clear glass and was defined in rectangles of golden yellows and pale greens with small triangular inserts of deep blue. I’ll never know how those believers came up with enough money to purchase the glass, or where the glass was manufactured, or how it was transported safely. All I have is my imagination: I see the small congregation standing in our living room, heads bowed in a halo of soft color as the morning sun filters through.

  The house was painted white, but by the time I was born, that white had become a scarred gray, weathered by years of wind that carried, according to the season, icy snow pellets or bits of dirt that became embedded between and in the boards.

  A large unenclosed porch ran the width of the front of the house; its door opened into the living room, adjacent to the stained-glass window. That was the view of the white house that visitors saw when they drove around the bend at the bottom of the hill. Only once do I remember any guest entering or leaving by that entrance. So unusual was the occurrence that the picture is etched in my mind: the late-afternoon sun falling on my mother as she stood by that door, saying goodbye to her cousins who had journeyed from Pierre—a city, after all, a place where they used front doors.

  No, everyone—family and guests—used the side entrance that opened into the kitchen. Even traveling salesmen did not hesitate before knocking at the right door. Months would pass, and our front door would be used only once a day.

  Year in, year out, my father turned on the radio at ten o’clock each evening to hear the news. Through all those years, after he listened to sonorous voices announcing the collapse of the banks and the economy, Germany marching into his father’s homeland, Denmark; the battles of the Pacific, where the neighbor boys fought and died; Korea and Vietnam; the launching of Sputnik and man’s first flight into space; Kennedy’s assassination, he would turn off the radio, open the front door, and step out onto the front porch to check on his most important concern: the weather. Each night, he would look up at our patch of sky, hemmed by the faint outline of hills and trees, and predict what the sky would offer him the next day.

  A few miles from us, neighbors’ fields stretched out flat. Section lines divided the county into square miles. Originally, these roads were set on the diagonal, but by the time my father was a boy they had been changed to a square grid pattern. Most fields were a quarter of a section and were interrupted only by barbed-wire fences and an occasional swamp, and, in warm months, rivulets of spring water. But our land was broken up by the twists and turns of the river, so that the South Forty—not large, as its name suggests—was our biggest field. Our other fields were carved from small pieces of flatland situated between woods and hilly prairie and the river. Those irregular fields, the river, and the woods were our livelihood and were precious to us, in part because of the variety of botanical offerings they provided.

  I find it remarkable that in the late 1880s, a time when, in some parts of the state, mail was still being delivered by stagecoach and wagons, there was a functioning legislature and a court system.

  Laws and record keeping were somewhat flexible then. In 1879, Big Stone City was named the county seat by Grant County’s board of commissioners. However, in 1881, when the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway was extended west, a new town named Milbank was established. The founder of that new town pledged money to build a courthouse. Which town held the rights?

  A county election was held to settle the issue. But Milbank fell just short of the required two-thirds vote and challenged the outcome. The matter was sent to the court.

  While the judge was trying to make a determination, Milbank civic leaders decided to take matters into their hands and seize the records from the repository in Big Stone. But these residents had been tipped off—and they were ready. Farmers arrived with pitchforks and guns. Some texts report that Indians (the word everyone used at that time) with powder-and-ball muskets from the nearby Sisseton Wahpeton reservation joined the fray. That story gains some validity when one learns that a portion of Grant County had been under the jurisdiction of the reservation. In addition, the Indians had strong ties to Inkpa City (which had been one of three small settlements incorporated into Big Stone City).

  Together the Big Stone loyalists held off the invaders, all to no avail. Two years later, after more legal complications, the judge, armed only with a pen, declared Milbank the seat of Grant County. It remains so to this day.

  When I was young, decades after that raid, old-timers in Big Stone still clung to their resentment. They recognized that they’d lost the economic value that being the site of the county courthouse would have brought them. In 2010, Milbank had 3,300 residents, Big Stone City, 460.

  Growing up, I just accepted the fact that Indians had lived not long ago on this land. My father and brothers found several rock war clubs and a grinding stone on our property. My mother used them to outline the small flower garden at the side of the house. We never found any arrowheads, but our neighbors had unearthed several when they plowed their fields.

  My father enjoyed telling the story, which he’d heard from contemporaries of that time, of how the Indians used their familiarity and knowledge of our land to their advantage. In those early homesteading years, local settlers were perhaps more frustrated by than fearful of local tribes, who sneaked into farmsteads at night to steal chickens but never harmed a person. However, when a horse, the essence of the farmers’ livelihood, went missing, those men contacted the army at Fort Sisseton, some fifty-five miles north. A small cavalry unit, in full regalia, was dispatched. The troops arrived, located the Indians, and pursued them to the top of our hill, where they dismounted. When the soldiers charged down the hill on foot and tried to follow the Indians into the woods, they became entangled in thick, twisting ropes of grapevines. The Indians, safely beyond the vines, taunted the soldiers as they struggled. By the time the soldiers had worked their way free, the Indians had disappeared.

  A thousand years earlier, this region had been inhabited by Native Americans who were mound builders. The first Europeans to explore this region were French fur traders, who encountered Dakota Sioux in the seventeenth. The Sioux and the new settlers maintained friendly relations, trading and enduring mutual hardships for decades. A drawing made in 1823 depicts Indian dwellings on the shore of Big Stone Lake in a spot that I recognize.

  Anthropologists consider there to be nine tribes of Dakota Sioux. Those who lived on the shores and on the islands of Big Stone Lake belonged to the Sisseton Wahpeton tribe.

  Pipestone was—and still is—sacred to Native American tribes. It is a beautiful muted red color. Because the rock is soft, it’s ideal for carving and was used to make the bowls of peace pipes—not only by the Sioux but by other tribes as well. (The rock club that my father found, and that I now have on my desk, was chiseled, rather than carved, out of a lower grade of pipestone.) That stone runs in a huge vein near the surface of the land, about ninety miles southeast of our farm. Not just the stone, but all of the land where it’s found, is sacred. There was no warring on that ground. Enemy tribes put aside their animosities when they
encountered each other there.

  We understood why Indians would have chosen this land. In places the woods were still thick with wild vines and bushes, which provided cover. The vines were also a source of grapes. The woods were home to deer, squirrels, raccoons, and a few mountain lions. The fields provided food for prairie chickens, grouse, woodchucks, and gophers. Fish, turtles, and clams were abundant in the river, and mink and beaver lived near and in the banks. A swamp was adjacent to our property. It was home to muskrats, otter, geese, and ducks.

  The green of the woods and the meadows attracted songbirds. In the mornings and evenings, notes of mourning doves, blue jays and orioles, robins, swallows, and woodpeckers could be heard. On summer afternoons, the flutelike song of meadowlarks calmed the nerves, and great horned owls hooted as we closed our eyes at the end of a long day.

  In some places where the river ran quickly, the ice never froze hard, even in the depth of winter. The Indians would have had a reliable source of water, and, just as the low hills protected our farm buildings, they would have shielded members of the tribe from high winds.

  The last Indian uprising in the United States took place in northeastern Minnesota, two hundred miles from our farm. The Battle of Wounded Knee, some 460 miles west, is often given that sorry appellation, but it was at Leech Lake in 1898, in the Battle of Sugar Point, that the Pillager Band of Chippewa Indians fought government troops. This was only two years before my father was born. He grew up listening to stories about that battle.

  When I learned that the conditions that instigated that conflict—the despoliation of Native American land and the destruction of burial grounds—were the same ones that native people are still fighting today, I was shocked and dismayed. And with that realization I wasn’t surprised to learn that the probable reason this battle is little known is that seven soldiers were killed, whereas no Native Americans were. Obviously, that news did not make for good publicity at the time and was little noted beyond the immediate area.

  The continual presence of those first people on our property seemed real to Bob and me. We often played Indians and tried to move as silently as they did as we walked over twigs and fallen leaves. We never succeeded.

  I was in the garden, gathering potatoes, taking my time doing my assigned chore. It was certainly better in the garden than in the house, setting the table for supper. One of my brothers had already dug the plants from the earth. Awkward bunches lay upturned, big and little potatoes held together by their scraggly roots. All I had to do was bang the clumps of roots and knock the potatoes loose. Chunks of hard dirt flew, making miniature dust storms when they landed. Then I picked up the potatoes and tossed them into my pail. Thud. Thud. Thud. The pail began to fill up.

  There had been several heavy frosts, and the garden looked terrible. All of the bushy green plants had collapsed. They looked like they were very sick. But I loved the smell of dirt and fallen leaves mixed together. When I stopped banging and thudding and listened carefully, I could hear the river gurgle as the water flowed over and gently slipped between rocks.

  A horrible cry came from the north, just over the hill. It had to be Indians! I knew it wouldn’t help to run from them. Perhaps if I were brave, they’d show me mercy. And so, as the cries came closer, I didn’t run, I didn’t look up, but kept my head down and my hands clenched tightly around a potato plant. Only when I heard them passing me by, heading toward our house, did I raise my eyes. And there above, in the pale evening sky, I saw the gray V of Canada geese, my noisy warriors, heading south toward their winter feeding grounds.

  IN THE BEGINNING

  Whatever was my mother thinking when she married my father? She had to move from Pierre, in central South Dakota, 250 miles east, to a little farm a mile from a little town. She left her family, who, although not wealthy, possessed quality belongings and an innate graciousness. Her trousseau included sterling silver, fine china from France, and a dining table and buffet that, as of 2018, almost one hundred years later, have a place of honor in a granddaughter’s home.

  She must have realized that living in an isolated farmhouse would be difficult. This is a place where temperatures plunge to thirty-five below. Wind-chill calculations weren’t made in those days, but if we factor in high winds, it’s easy to understand how winter killed animals—and people—without a flake of snow falling. But, of course, snow did fall and fall and fall each winter.

  The house she was about to move into as a bride had neither central heating nor electricity nor plumbing.

  Those facts may have flickered through my mother’s mind, but she never would have been able to imagine the tragedy that awaited her less than a year away.

  My siblings and I know that our parents met at South Dakota State College (now South Dakota State University) in Brookings, a town ninety miles south of Big Stone City. My father was an undergraduate working toward a bachelor’s degree while my mother was enrolled in a two-year certificate program to prepare her for work in state government offices. But we were told nothing of how they met nor any specific details of their courtship.

  The year after graduating from college, my father, Roy, took a teaching position in the minuscule town of Ree Heights because it was only sixty-some miles from Pierre. That way, the two of them could meet more easily on weekends. My mother, Myrtle, knew he could do much better. He’d graduated at the top of his class. He planned to apply to teach at the Pierre High School in a few years. The salary would be better, and they’d be able to set up their household near Myrtle’s sisters and friends, and she’d keep her job at the State House, which she enjoyed. But because Roy refused to give in to the superintendent’s demands to raise the grade of an underachieving student, his contract was not renewed. Roy had no chance of finding another teaching position for the fall, and marriage plans were already in place, so his father offered his own farm to the newlyweds, and he and my grandmother moved to a smaller property west of town.

  My parents married in 1926. My sister Dorothy was born in 1927, and in the next ten years five more babies joined the family. Those years were concurrent with the Great Depression and the Great Drought. In 1939, I became the seventh.

  Photographs, novels, and films have highlighted the desperation of the families caught in the dual crises of depression and drought in the central plains and in Texas, but too little has been told of the hardships of those who lived on the northern plains.

  Pick one of those years—say, 1937, the tenth year of the drought—and imagine my father coming home exhausted after another ten-hour day working away from the farm. He would have gotten up at 4:30 a.m. in order to milk the cows before he set off to haul gravel with his faithful horses, Nellie and Babe, at the front of his wagon. He would have returned filthy and exhausted, the cows still needing to be milked, but grateful to have earned three dollars through a WPA project. Myrtle, always in the kitchen at that time of day, would have been waiting for him with her gentle smile and a glass of cold water. She listened and sympathized but didn’t tell him about her day, so my father never heard about how exhausted and discouraged she was after caring for Dorothy, ten; Helen, eight; Patt, seven; John, five; and Bob, a new baby. Nor would she have mentioned the terrible pangs of guilt she felt after she’d allowed her parents-in-law to take little Bill.

  She’d managed to keep him alive when he had a violent reaction to his smallpox vaccination at six months, and she’d done her best to nurse him during the other times he’d been sick as well. But finally she had to admit to herself—to everyone—that her mother-in-law, who had more time, could do a better job. My father, however, felt relieved, knowing that my mother’s workload would be lightened.

  Each of those ten years was similar. Very little rain fell, and the winds blew unrelentingly. I grew up on stories of how my family and their neighbors had managed to endure the 1930s, those dreadful years of drought and depression. For ten long years, the lowest proportions of normal precipitation were observed in five states, one of which was South
Dakota. These conditions created the legendary dust storm of May 9, 1934, which made both national and international news.

  Even so, it was a shock when I learned many years later that dirt from South Dakota had blown eastward, some 1,400 miles, to New York City.

  The powerful wind, blowing west to east, originated in Montana. It swooped down through South Dakota and continued full force all the way to the Atlantic seaboard. In New York City, a sunny day turned so dark that the streetlights had to be turned on for five hours.

  The New York Times said it was the greatest dust storm in US history.

  My mother told me how the chickens had gone to roost at noon one day because the air was so filled with dirt it appeared to be night. Could that have been that Wednesday in 1934?

  Perhaps not. Perhaps it wasn’t the same day; perhaps it was just another one of those endless days when my mother despaired of ever hearing the sound of rain again, of ever having anything free from dust.

  Still, these days when I walk the five blocks from my Manhattan apartment to my bit of green, Central Park, I wonder: Is it possible that below the dirt pathway, right beneath my feet, there might be a bit of my childhood farm?

  ALWAYS A STRUGGLE

  The Dirty Thirties. That was the expression used when I was growing up. But the cosmos doesn’t function by man-made units of time. The drought continued into the next decade. In 1940, there was so little rain it was almost impossible to measure.