![[Image]](images/PrairyErthADeepMap-32.jpg)
A lot that goes on out there is invisible to us. Some of it’s visible to science, some of it’s visible to mystics, some of it’s visible to local inhabitants, but much of it is unreachable, uncontainable. I think of it as having authority because its order is, at least in some places, still innate. It’s part of what we call “God.” It is the face of God.
—Barry Lopez,
“An Interview,” Western American Literature (1986)
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.
—Abraham Lincoln,
“Annual Message to Congress” (1862)
Without a living past, we have only an inert present and a dead future.
—Carlos Fuentes,
National Arts Club speech (1988)
How will we know it’s us without our past?
—John Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
(Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age!
But damn that which spends itself with no thought of the stain, pains, dismay, feebleness, it is bequeathing.)
—Walt Whitman,
“By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (1881)
Dusty, grim, and slow.
—Vachel Lindsay,
“On the Road to Nowhere” (1912)
When you sit in council on the welfare of your people, you must council with the seventh generation in mind.
—Onondaga Chief Oren Lyons,
Long Island University lecture (1990)
The land belongs to the future.
—Willa Cather,
O Pioneers! (1913)
Possunt quia posse videntur. [They can because they think they can.]
—Chase County High School motto in
1908 [Vergil, The Aeneid, 19 B.C.]
Chase County High entertained an old jinx last Friday night when Hope invaded the home field. For a number of years now, Chase had a very difficult time winning from Hope. Friday night was no exception, but this time it was the many penalties that made victory difficult rather than the opposition on the field. Every time Chase would make a long advancement, a penalty would nullify the gain.
—Sports page,
Chase County Leader-News (1955)
The Gladstone 4-H Club met Monday, May 5, 1987, at the Methodist Church basement. Five members and two leaders answered roll call of “your favorite flower.” Mary Jones led us in the song “An Austrian Went Yodeling With Plenty of Action.” Mary M. taught us how to play “Passing Grapefruits.” Even parents participated in this exciting game. The meeting was adjourned to refreshments of melted marshmallows on fudgegrahams brought by ferry fones.
—Marcy Griffin,
Chase County Leader-News (1987)
County life in Kansas is not entirely monotonous.
—Charles Moreau Harger,
Original source unknown (1902)
—Leo E. Oliva,
“Kansas: A Hard Land
in the Heartland” (1988)
We all know that our country is economically stagnant and losing ground in population and maintenance of basic services. Ranchers and farmers who already have a guaranteed occupation and business and professional people who already are making a living should be joining forces to insure there will be some room or some reason for anyone else to want to be left in Chase County in the decade ahead. Maintaining the status quo means our country will die. It’s that simple. And those arguing for that might as well get out their shotguns and put ol’ Chase County out of her misery now.
—Editorial,
Chase County Leader-News (1990)
A people living with nature, and largely dependent upon nature, will note with care every natural aspect in their environment. Accustomed to observe through the days and the seasons, in times of stress and of repose, every natural feature, they will watch for every sign of impending mood of nature, every intimation of her favor and every monition of her austerity. Living thus in daily association with the natural features of a region some of the more notable will assume a sort of personality in the popular mind, and so come to have place in philosophic thought and religious ritual.
The cottonwood [the Plains Indians] found in such diverse situations, appearing always so self-reliant, showing such prodigious fecundity, its lustrous young leaves in springtime by their sheen and by their restlessness reflecting the splendor of the sun like the dancing ripples of a lake, that to this tree they ascribed mystery. This peculiarity of the foliage of the cottonwood is quite remarkable, so that it is said the air is never so still that there is not motion of cottonwood leaves. Even in still summer afternoons and at night when all else was still, they could ever hear the rustling of cottonwood leaves by the passage of little vagrant currents of air. And the winds themselves were the paths of the Higher Powers, so they were constantly reminded of the mystic character of this tree.
The Sacred Pole of the Omaha was made from a cottonwood. This was an object which seems to have had among that people a function somewhat similar to that of the Ark of the Covenant among the ancient Hebrews.
Uses of Plants by the Indians of the
Missouri River Region (1919)
[Prayer before cutting the sundance lodgepole:] Of all the many standing peoples, you O rustling Cottonwood, have been chosen in a sacred manner: you are about to go to the center of the people’s sacred hoop, and there you will represent the people and will help us to fulfill the will of Wakan-Tanka. You are a kind and good-looking tree: upon you the winged peoples have raised their families: from the tip of your lofty branches down to your roots, the winged and four-legged peoples have made their homes. When you stand at the center of the sacred hoop you will be the people, and you will be as the pipe, stretching from heaven to earth. The weak will lean upon you, and for all the people you will be a support. With the tips of your branches you hold the sacred red and blue days. You will stand where the four sacred paths cross—there you will be the center of the great Power of the universe. May we two-leggeds always follow your sacred example, for we see that you are always looking upwards into the heavens. Soon, and with all the peoples of the world, you will stand at the center: for all beings and all things you will bring that which is good. Hechetu welo!
We choose the cottonwood tree to be at the center of our lodge (because) the Great Spirit has shown to us that, if you cut an upper limb of this tree crosswise, there you will see in the grain a perfect five-pointed star, which, to us, represents the presence of the Great Spirit. Also perhaps you have noticed that even in the very lightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit, for not only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him continually in differing ways.
—Black Elk (recorded by Joseph Epes
Brown),
The Sacred Pipe (1953)
In almost any other portion of the country the cottonwood would be the least desirable of trees; but to the Indian, and, in many instances which have fallen under my observation, to our troops, the cottonwood has performed a service for which no other tree has been found its equal, and that is as forage for horses and mules during the winter season, when the snow prevents even dried grass from being obtainable.
In routing the Indians from their winter villages, we invariably discovered them located upon that point of the stream promising the greatest supply of cottonwood bark, while the stream in the vicinity of the village was completely shorn of its supply of timber, and the village itself was strewn with the white branches of the cottonwood entirely stripped of their bark. It was somewhat amusing to observe an Indian pony feeding on cottonwood bark. The limb being usually cut into pieces about four feet in length and thrown upon the ground, the pony, accustomed to this kind of “long forage,” would place one forefoot on the limb in the same manner as a dog secures a bone, and gnaw the bark from it. Although not affording anything like the amount of nutriment which either hay or grain does, yet our horses invariably preferred the bark to either.
—George Armstrong Custer,
My Life on the Plains (1872)
These appearances [of cottonwood] were quite reviving after the drairy country through which we had been passing.
—Meriwether Lewis,
The Journals (1805)
We cannot visualize what the cottonwood [once] meant because we are too far from it all.
—C. M. Older,
“The Cottonwood” (1938)
The white man does not understand America, a red man wrote. The roots of the tree of his life have yet to grasp it.
—Amy Clampitt,
“The Prairie” (1990)
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“The Over-Soul” (1841)
Wherever one is, the place has its conscious genius. Man has lived there and brought forth his consciousness there and in some way brought that place to consciousness, given it its expression, and, really, finished it. The expression may be Proserpine, or Pan, or even the strange “shrouded gods” of the Etruscans or the Sikels, nonetheless it is an expression. The land has been humanized, through and through: and we in our own tissued consciousness bear the results of this humanization. So that for us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery—back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.
Sea and Sardinia (1923)
You have to have nerve to live in Kansas.
—Pat Reid [Floyd M. Gurley],
White Thunder God (1947)
The facts are available to all, but the patterns they form depend upon the point of view of the observer. Surely the patterns are as valid as the facts themselves, because they make rational and comprehensible a way of life which has too often been considered erratic and strange. They are merely a diagram of functional processes, a reconstruction of folkways. Though the pattern is made up of facts, it differs from them as an assembled machine differs from a dismantled one.
—Walter Prescott Webb,
The Great Plains (1931)
History is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
—Robert Penn Warren,
Brother to Dragons (1979)
From gossip the book-writer sucks a goo called information to cement edifices of assertion with
—Hugh Kenner,
Historical Fictions (1990)