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.