I Was Wrong

The George Smith Public Library

     The librarian at the public library in my hometown introduced me to the Kansas Collection. She withdrew a key from her desk drawer and led me to an oak-paneled reading room. I had seen the room a few times, although its door was usually closed. Rare books were kept there in glass-fronted cabinets. Now I too was invited inside. Turning the key in the lock, the librarian opened a cabinet and withdrew a book, which she handed to me, an undersized volume titled Indians of Kansas.

     The librarian stood about five feet five inches, just under my height at the time. Although I don’t recall her name, I do remember she was always dressed in a skirt and blouse or a belted dress, her hair pulled back into a tight bun. To me she seemed as ancient as the library itself. She had been present every time I checked out books, stamping the return date on the flap inside the back cover, and telling me it was due in two weeks. She must have realized that I had read almost every book on American Indians from the library’s general collection. Now she handed me this rare jewel that in its faded blue cover seemed as precious as a sapphire. I could borrow it for two weeks.

     The librarian had plenty of chances to know me as a reader since, as a younger child, I had visited the library every Saturday. While Mom got her hair fixed at My Lady’s Beauty Salon, we kids would spend our time upstairs at the library. When we had selected and checked out our books, we’d descend the wide oak stairway into the building’s common hall, from which we could enter the back room of the salon through a screen door. Greeted by the sharp smell of chemicals, we’d make our way to the front, walking past a row of patrons having their locks shorn and styled. Others were sitting under beehive hair dryers—Mother often there perusing a fashion magazine or preparing her Sunday school lesson. Waiting for Mom, we’d begin reading from our week’s selection of books or sort through the variety of women’s magazines on a table by the front window.

     By my junior high years, I had read every Indian book in the children’s section, having taken them home Saturday after Saturday, memorizing their illustrations and, sometimes, the text. Then I started checking out the adult books, reading the Dewey-Decimal “970s” on Indians, their histories, tribes, and customs. I ventured into the American history section, reading about the Indian wars and studying maps and photographs from the Nineteenth Century. I read anthropological studies of Cheyenne culture, academic summaries of troop and tribal movements at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, handbooks on Indian crafts, and collections of Indian myths and legends. I even discovered a few biographies of Native American leaders.

     Although I read a lot, I was more taken by the pictures in books. Some photographs became like old friends who greeted me from the pages of several books I checked out often. To this day I love to come across historic photos of Sitting Bull dressed in a muslin shirt, an eagle feather in his parted hair, or Little Wolf wearing his otter turban with its silver cross, or Wavoka sporting his black felt hat. I am still moved by a candid shot in a National Geographic publication picturing a modern sun dancer with a plumed eagle bone whistle in his mouth. I shudder at the photograph showing the frozen corpse of an emaciated old man killed at Wounded Knee and am saddened when I see a familiar view of a line of Ghost dancers in a trance, stomping their earnest prayer for a new age that would bring sufficient food and an end to war. These photographic images burned their realistic impressions on my memory.

     Through books, I also started to recognize the world as seen through native eyes: the fear of antelope rushing from a prairie fire as painted by Black Bear Bosin and the grace of a deer leaping as depicted by Woody Crumbo. Interesting historical insights came from unknown artists who recorded tribal experiences and heroic deeds in ledger books and on animal skins. I studied their detailed paintings, available to me in library books, and discovered an unusual cultural and artistic sense of perspective, one that fostered my sympathy for Native American cultures and peoples.

     The books took me beyond themselves, helping me understand the stone artifacts found at my grandparents’ farm. They prepared me to enjoy the Indian powwows I attended in northeast Kansas and in Oklahoma. Their instructions and illustrations helped me create authentic costumes that decorated my bedroom walls. They helped me appreciate the Native American collections at the Kansas Historical Museum and the Denver Art Museum. The books gave me a growing view of the world as well as an appreciation of things past.

     The day the librarian handed me the small blue volume marked a change in my intellectual experience. I learned that some books were prized for their antiquity and rarity, others for their information. This book presented both. Being rare, the book was kept locked up, safe from candy-sticky hands. I was impressed by its Nineteenth Century publication date. Entrusting the book to me, the librarian warned me to be careful when I turned the brittle, yellowed pages.

     I carried the treasure home, where I looked first at the illustrations, line drawings that didn’t interest me much. To teenaged me, they seemed like poor substitutes for the photographs in modern books. Then I read the sections about the Plains Indians, my favorite tribes. The book revealed that the first group of Pawnee Indians to make their way north into Kansas were called the Skidi-ra-ri. My mind made a connection between that text and a small town just south of my grandparents’ farm. Surely Skiddy, Kansas, was named for the Skidi Indians that had camped there and planted their summer crops. As I read on about Pawnee life, the creek valley of my imagination filled with Native inhabitants raising beans, squash, and corn, holding harvest ceremonies in late summer, and returning to their permanent, winter camp about ten miles downstream to prepare for the fall hunt. Never again would I see the farm in the same way as before, never hear “Skidi” without seeing braids and feathers, never hold one of the arrowheads Grandpa gave me without wondering who had made it.

     I recall Skiddy itself. Grandpa drove me there in his dark green Chevy pickup, with running boards on the sides, gearshift on the floor of the cab, and dogs, Coalie and Jack, in the back. I went with him to pick up some part for a machine he was repairing. There was a store, a smithy, and a gas station. I saw a few old houses, not much. And that was fifty years ago.

     I started wondering about the place when I began writing these portraits. I searched the indices of a number of books at the Denver Public Library. Next, I tried their computer catalogue. It kept asking me to check my spelling. Finally, after several tries at titles, subjects, and words, I made a potential hit with a title about ghost towns in Kansas.* The book was located in a full-reserve stack. The librarian brought it to me to peruse in a huge reading room. Its paneled walls and old pictures reminded me of the reading room in my hometown library, but this time I couldn’t take the book home.

     I eagerly checked the index for Skiddy and found a reference. I was wrong. Long-gone Skiddy was not named for early Pawnees but, rather, for a wealthy entrepreneur who, in the late 1860’s put up money to route the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad through the village. In return, the residents promised to name the town for him. Skiddy flourished for a number of years as a farming and shipping center, but a newly constructed bridge moved road traffic away from the community, and their bid to get the Rock Island Railroad to come through failed.

     I imagine my sisters thinking this article should have been written years ago when, in their estimation, I was almost always wrong. They didn’t like my know-it-all ways. I was a curious young student but, apparently, too eager to share what I had learned. My siblings’ criticism was the occasion of lots of kidding and irritation, but it probably did help me monitor my enthusiasm when I was in school.

     Discovering that my junior-high logic was incorrect didn’t discourage me, but it did clarify why I couldn’t find direct Pawnee-related information in archaeological literature. In the late 1930’s several digs were made in the creek beds of the area, including Clarks Creek, but references to the finds were generalized as being of Hopewellian or Plains Woodlands groups rather than Pawnee or Caddoan. Fitzgerald’s article on Skiddy preserved local traditions of Natives in the 1860’s and 1870’s and mentioned a near-by spring where the tribe’s women and children often stayed when the warriors were away hunting. The written history of Clarks Creek places the Kansas there; reason concludes many of the relics from the Indian past were from the Kansa tribe. Surely the Skidis traveled through on their long journey north in prehistoric times, and other tribal groups roamed the area for hundreds of years before them. I still see braids, as it were, when I hear of Skiddy, but now they are on Kansa Indian heads, and I wonder if the spring where families camped and the fields they tended were on my grandparents’ farm.

     Libraries still call to me, intriguing me with information that enriches my understanding. I visit the 970’s now at a library that has more books with that number than the total number of holdings at the public library of my childhood. I love reading the shelves, glancing through books, stopping to look at pictures. In response, my imagination runs free with hints from them, ideas and images that bring alive the facts I read. Imagination enlivens the figures in illustrations and sends a deep thrill through my body as I join living scenes from the past.
Denver, 2004

* Daniel Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997.

Dancing with Indians

     At a park in Wamego, Kansas, the old park with the Dutch windmill, I became a Pottawatomie Indian. Bob Waters, a friend of my dad and grandpa, had taken his red-headed son and blond-headed me to an Indian dance slated to be held in honor of the town’s anniversary. He sought permission for us boys to costume and join in the dancing. We were invited in and with deep joy danced war dances and round dances alongside Indian women and men. With the rest of the crowd, we sat on benches to watch several Pottawatomie dances we didn’t know. Then the announcer called for an adoption dance and signaled the two of us to join them.

     As I recall it, the dance was a follow-the-leader affair, kind of like a snake dance. I carefully emulated the leader’s movements: stepping in time with him and the drum, turning my body left and right like his, stopping when he stopped, and dancing when he danced. The experience was more than doing steps learned from a book written by a White man. Here I learned movements of hips and arms, the position of the body, the interaction of dancer with dancer. I was encouraged by the approving nods of the Indian folk with whom I was dancing. I was thrilled to be learning a new Indian dance, but truthfully, I don’t recall at the time feeling anything related to being adopted.

     Later, as we drove west along US 24, back to our homes in Junction City, Bob reprimanded us boys for dancing the adoption dance. “It’s not appropriate to join a tribal ceremony,” he preached. “You didn’t even know the dance.”

     “But they asked us to,” we protested in whining junior high and grade school voices.

     “Okay, that’s fine,” Bob conceded, “as long as they invited you.”

     Due to Bob’s questioning, I started to wonder if I really was adopted by this tribe that had been relocated to Kansas a few years before my forebears imigrated there from Europe. Even though at the time I didn’t make anything of it, from then on I felt welcome when visiting on the Pottawatomie Reservation or dancing with various other Native groups in Wichita, Horton, Pawnee, or Ponca City. I enjoyed the hospitality of these Native folk, learned some of their traditions, copied their costumes, listened to their jokes, and ate their fry bread. Eventually I read Helen Hunt’s 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, her stinging critique of US government treaty breaking and underhanded misuse of tribal goodwill and ignorance, and pledged myself never to take advantage of Indians for my own gain and their loss. I was serious in my resolve even if the Pottawatomi’s gesture of adoption was only a simple kindness to children or a goodwill symbol between the Native and White communities. Whatever happened there was fine with me, for in my mind I did become an adopted child of the tribe. From then on, their interest was my interest.


Denver, 2008

Native American dancers, photo I took when a boy.

As a junior high student I met a number of older Native American men with whom I danced as in the story above. These particular men pictured here were participants in a Kickapoo powwow at the Armory in Horton, Kansas. I took their picture with my Brownie camera, very interested in their costumes. Although the Kickapoo tribe was Eastern woodland in descent, these costumes show plains influence. I recall studying the black beaded vest that I used as a kind of pattern for a similar vest I made and beaded. 
I no longer remember which man is which but wrote on the back of the snapshot the following names: George Allen, Hamilton, and Sacqua. I was aware of and appreciative of their kindness toward me.

Indians on the Creek

Warrior from a Kansas petroglyph
Acrylic washes on paper by Phillip Hoyle

     By the time I started visiting the farm, its former Native American residents were a dim memory already generations old. I doubt my grandfather ever saw Indians there although his parents certainly did. They had arrived in the late 1860’s from Germany and Sweden eager to homestead in the fertile Clarks Creek valley. The Kansa Indians, the immediate former inhabitants, had lived until 1873 on a reservation a few miles away, just over the divide, on the headwaters of the Neosho River. Soon after my forebears’ arrival, the U.S. Government re-negotiated treaties with the Kansa tribe and accomplished their removal to Indian Territory far to the south. Seventy-five years later, when I went to my grandparents’ farm, the Kansa were only references in a few stories.

     The Indians left behind marks of their residency: arrowheads, knife points, grist mills, and corn grinders. These materials were a meager reminder of a rich tribal experience, but they were adequate to set my mind afire with imagined campsites, farming, ceremonies, and warriors. The place seemed alive with their lore and legends. I thought, “Isn’t it possible a lone Indian might still linger in the woods across the creek?” It seemed so to me, a kid who could imagine himself living away from his irritating sisters and sensible parents, enjoying the country solitude. Accompanied by my dog, I too could live by my wits, reaping the land’s bounty of rabbits, fish, and grapes. And, “If I were an Indian, I’d know a lot more. I could do it.” It seemed possible.

     A few years after my grandpa’s death, I spent several weekends camping at the creek with my Boy Scout troop. We set up our tents in a tree-sheltered area with the creek on three sides, just across the stream from the place that Grandpa claimed was an ancient ceremonial ground. During our campouts, I kept my eyes open for relics of the Indian past but didn’t find even one arrow point. Still, I wondered if an Indian family had camped in the same place and if their kids had smoked grape vines on the sly like we did. One fall afternoon we collected dried corn from the field above our campsite and that evening parched it over a small fire. Had a Native cook done the same years before? We studied the stars that guided the Indians across the plains at night, camped by the same creek, and probably dove into the same swimming hole. To my junior-high fancy, we seemed to share a lot.

     My imagination was fueled by my reading of Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest in which, Johnny, an Anglo boy was reared from early childhood by Indians. His return to the white world as a teenager left him longing for his former life among the Delawares, yet when he tried to return to it, realities of race and family intervened. The young man was left without a sure home among either people. I really wanted to experience Richter’s scenes of this sixteen-year-old boy and his Indian cousin living alone in the wilderness. No tribal or personal history dampened their weeks of utter delight in the bounty and beauty of the woodlands along the river and in one another. The young man’s life, caught as it was between tribal and white societies, matched some feelings I had as a teenager straddling my idealistic imagination and the reality of carrying out groceries at the store. Although, normally I attended classes at school, sang in the church choir, and lived at home, I longed for an existence in the woods along the creek, an Indian reality of my imagination. The Boy Scout outings at least got me into the woods and to the old campsite. But too soon, Sunday afternoon would arrive and we would pack up our damp tents, sooty gear, and mud-splattered clothes. Life resumed when we got back to town. There, alone in my room, images of the creek loomed as I recalled other passages from Richter’s tale or descriptions from James Fenimore Cooper about the tall grass prairies and the adventures of old Leather Stocking. I wanted an adventure.

     I imagined that one of the warriors who showed up at my great-grandparents’ homestead would scratch on my tent wall some weekend and invite me to follow him on his journey. I pictured him as a muscular, lean man, walking before me in buckskin moccasins and leggings, a blanket draped across his shoulders. His head was nearly without hair except for an old-style scalplock pulled back into a single braid. Beads strung on leather thongs hung from his pierced ears and swayed with the easy rhythm of his gait. He turned his dark eyes toward me and simply nodded, indicating that we should cross the creek and enter the primal arena of the crescent moon with its traditional rituals and mythical stories.

     He told me how his ancestors received the corn they planted in this valley. A warrior found red, blue, and white kernels of something that looked valuable to him. He hid them in a mound of dirt and some weeks later came back to see if they were still there. Instead, he discovered a cluster of green stalks growing atop the mound, and on each stalk, ears of fruit in the three colors. He took one ear of each color for himself and shared the rest with the people of his tribe. The next spring, they planted the kernels in mounds as had the warrior, and at summer’s end, harvested a multi-colored crop of the life-sustaining gift of the Waconda. As my Indian teacher knelt by a small fire, I noted his strong legs and the red wool of his breechcloth. The blanket dropped from his shoulder as he handed me some corn. I studied the tattoos on his shoulders as I ate the food. I didn’t understand the meanings of the designs, but they helped him appear fierce. I enjoyed the corn, which tasted better than what we scouts had parched, and I knew I had found what I wanted: a life that would take me far from the city, back in time to a carefree existence, and into a friendship with this wild man who seemed so beautiful. Then I recalled the stories of the devastation met by the very Indian people who formerly lived on this creek and realized I preferred to experience this idyllic existence as only an exercise of my imagination.

* * * * *

     Mother told me that friends used to kid my great grandfather, saying the reason he immigrated to the United States was because he didn’t want to march the goose-step in the Kaiser’s army. For whatever reasons, surely including a hope for adventure, he and other settlers moved to Kansas, a move that represented homes lost and found. As immigrants, they replaced Native Americans and re-lived the experience of barely making a living from the corn and other plants they harvested and the meat they took from herds they found or raised. Their life was always a challenge, with a few fat years and many lean ones. Although my relatives were pleased to be farming, they worked endlessly and didn’t even get to go on month-long buffalo hunts like the Kansa Indians. They had to stay home to milk cows and gather eggs daily. Still, the land sustained their lives on the creek, and they, too, thanked their maker for the gift of corn.

     Although the farm was homesteaded in the late 1860’s by my ancestors, it had already been a farm for hundreds of years. It remains a farm. As an adult, I cannot imagine living there, either in the woods or in a house, but I still feel a strong emotional connection to the place, to its traditions of farming and family rearing, and to its power to evoke memories of the past and to bring a sense of reality to the present.

Denver, 2002

Photo by my dad

As a young child I loved being at the farm with its old buildings, animals, crops, hills, paths, ravine, and creek. I loved being there with my grandparents the times I got to stay over and once when I spent more than a week alone with them. I liked when our family went out there for dinner or holidays as in this summer picture in summer when the wagon was being outfitted to serve as a hay wagon. Pictured here are my two older sisters and me probably watching barn swallows make their arced swoops hunting bugs in the sky of the barn yard. Simple pleasures. 

Cowboys and Indians

Author in Estes Park at age four playing the part.

     I was a cowboy before I became an Indian. Emulating my cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy, I wore square toed riding boots, western cut shirts, and bolo ties long before I donned a feather headdress. As soon as I ate breakfast and drank hot chocolate from my Hoppy plate and mug, I’d mount my stick horse to gallop around the house and yard. Out at the farm I sat on Grandpa’s wagons and gazed longingly at his huge horses. I rode a saddle pony at an Estes Park resort, round and round the ring, and was convinced I was a cowboy.

     From early on I heard Grandpa’s stories about Indians who had lived across the creek from the farm and who occasionally showed up to trade after Great Grandpa settled there. I was hooked, imagining myself meeting those strange and exotic folk dressed in skins and feathers, me wearing my cowboy duds. When I discovered books about Indians at the public library, I entered a world that gave new content to my childhood fantasies. Then I imagined being an Indian, not a cowboy. I saturated the new life with images from every Indian book I could find: the texts, illustrations, photographs, and maps from all the children’s books and then the adult books of history, anthropology, and biography. I especially loved volumes on how to make Indian clothing and crafts and began creating costumes, jewelry, war clubs, spears, shields, and the like. I ordered 78 rpm records of war dances and round dances and learned to dance them wearing my costumes. In matters of justice I took up a preference for Indians over the very settlers from whom I derived. The complexities of my Indian interest grew. I think I wanted an Indian hero.

     “Cowboys and Indians” was also a game we played as children. We would sometimes wear costumes, but mostly the game consisted of running around, lassoing one another with ropes, shooting play guns and arrows tipped with rubber suction cups, and arguing over who got killed. The deaths were agonizing dramas with great writhing and moans and eventual relaxation. We also played Army or Cops and Robbers, but Cowboys and Indians remained my favorite. It meant more to me than the other games.

     As my observations about Indians became more sophisticated, I realized they were not one but, rather, a lot of different tribes with contrasting reactions to the European invasion of their homes. Cowboys were latecomers in the conflict. They followed streams of farmers, land grabbers, state builders, and governmental representatives who often swindled Indians out of their homes. Settlers were more the focus of the conflict: the farmers, miners, and ranchers. Cowboys, by contrast, were a group of hired hands out in the late nineteenth century Wild West where cattle herds replaced the failing buffalo population. They had interaction with Indians, sure, but during their few years of driving Texas longhorns up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene or to some other railhead, most of the fighting with Indians was carried out by the US Cavalry or state militias. Still the historically suspect Cowboy and Indian pairing stuck in my mind as if it represented warring factions within me.

     “When I was a child, I thought like a child,” wrote Saint Paul. Eventually I followed the Apostle’s lead and left behind my childish things—well all except a couple of suitcases of Indian collectibles I kept at my parents’ house. I went to a church college and studied the liberal arts, concentrated on theology and music, and took a church job. A few years later, I furthered my studies at a Texas seminary. While there I almost became a cowboy again. I was talking with west-Texas twang, drawl, and vocabulary. I had started shopping for ostrich skin cowboy boots and a Stetson hat when I realized I had to move back up north before I converted, took up Texan, or became a cowboy. If the cowboy was still in me, what about the Indian?

     In my zealous quest for maturity I had easily left behind children’s things, but I couldn’t seem to get away from them. As I pursued my career in the church, the Indians followed me. They started introducing themselves as Native American elements in religious education resources I wrote. Sometimes they’d swoop off the mesas of my mind encircling our wagons of Bible stories and craft activities, like the time Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Story from Bear Country” insisted on being told alongside the biblical stories of Joseph’s coat of many colors, vivid dreams, and sojourn in Egypt. And then a whole host of Indian stories swept down from the hills to surround and threaten. Perhaps I had read too many books in my childhood.

     I realize most cowboys were no more interested in Christian ways than were most Indians, but the cowboys were mostly whites, my people. Perverse me, I found the Indians more interesting, their difference more challenging, colorful, revealing, and frankly, they were better teachers. Their primal relationship to myth showed me a new way to read my religious tradition. They taught me that I had my own tribal connection, a biblical one that survived as an ancient memory. The Bible stories I so loved came from that distant past—some written long before Greek logic could be applied to them, all told and believed centuries before the advent of scientific thinking. These stories needed a new consideration, so I re-read the Bible and in so doing discovered that the defensive posture of my enlightened eyes wasn’t necessary. What was I defending? An eighteenth century philosophy? A nineteenth century insight? A twentieth century dedication to development and progress? Finally, like wagon master Major Seth Adams on TV’s “Wagon Train,” I realized the Indians on the horizon were friendly, and I yelled: “Spread the wagons. Let ‘em in.”

     The Indians challenged not only my thinking, but that of anyone else who noticed. I recall especially those folk who tolerated such themes in Boy Scouts but judged them inappropriate in Sunday school or church camp. My Indians didn’t care and eventually went to Sunday morning worship. At one service a lone Native visitor showed up in the children’s sermon; then an Indian scholar made his point forcefully in an adult sermon illustration. Later a group of them appeared as the choir and soloists in a French Christmas Cantata. Bedecked in leather, turquoise, and hundreds of feathers, they sang, played drums, and danced in front of the altar. Like their tricky Coyote God, my Indians caused confusion.

     This aging cowboy-turned-Indian carried that confusion for years. Still does. When I lived in New Mexico, where I learned cowboy two-step dancing, I noticed that almost every Indian man I met wore cowboy clothes. Eventually I too bought cowboy boots and that Stetson I’d wanted in Texas, and by the time I moved to Denver, I even danced in them with an Indian guy in a cowboy bar. A confused life at times, but like my Indians in church, it was more confusing to others—my congregation, my family, and my friends—than it was to me.

     The Apostle Paul also said something obscure about how faith elicits faith. So for many years cross-eyed Lakota Holy Man Sitting Bull hung on my church office wall as an overseer of honest interpretations, open attitudes, and inclusive deliberations. Perhaps the old chief was a kind of Indian hero for me, one I’d admired in my childhood. Hanging there years later, he reminded me that stories of talking animals, tricky ancestors, and face-to-face interviews with angels, heavenly armies, and the Almighty were features of my Christian holy book. And their inclusion in both the Bible and Native American mythologies is still as much a modern Christian confusion as an anthropological one.

     I had to learn to play with religious symbols so I could approach them with awe and appreciate their majesty. I finally learned the playful reality of the divine and lost my apprehension of what had always seemed to me a kind of forbidden magic. In short, my cowboy learned to live at peace with my Indian. It makes sense to me. And think about this: I read somewhere that by far most real-life, working cowboys in America today are Indians.

Denver, 2009

Author as young teen at home entertaining his sisters.

Front room war dances seemed better than temper tantrums.