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Holy Ground, Healing Water

Cultural Landscapes at Waconda Lake, Kansas

Texas A&M University Press

Introduction

WHEN WE FACE the past, we pick out from the endless string of days certain ones to mark the passing of one era and the beginning of another. Sometimes we remember the precise day—the fourth of July in 1776—sometimes just the year—1066 or 1492. I would like to offer a new date for consideration: July 6, 1870. On that day, a Mr. Charles DeRudio paid two hundred dollars to the clerk in the land office in Junction City, Kansas, and under the provisions of the Preemption Act, he obtained ownership of the SE1 / 4 Section 25, Township 6 South, Range 10 West. This is on the north bank of the Solomon River in north-central Kansas.

On the face of it, this was a very mundane event. Settlers from all over the eastern United States and from a growing number of European countries had been obtaining title to land in the West for decades. And it was not unusual for someone to pay the two hundred dollars; the Preemption Act had been around for nearly three decades by the time Mr. DeRudio laid down his cash. By 1870, claims under the Homestead Act were certainly more common, as they required cash payments of only nineteen dollars. Instead, the claimant had to live on and work the land for five years, making improvements to it.

When we look more closely at the date, the significance of the exchange becomes clearer. Euro-Americans had been trying to settle the area around Mr. DeRudio's land since 1864. But natives of the region, Pawnees and then Cheyennes, Arapahos and Sioux, defended their territory fiercely. The years 1867 and 1868 had seen raids on the Saline, Solomon and Republican rivers, in which some settlers were killed, others kidnapped, their cabins burned and their livestock slain or taken. After 1870, however, raids were reduced to isolated nuisances, and natives were no longer an enemy to be feared but a rarity and the subject, when seen, of idle curiosity.

It is true that the people who survived the raids did not soon forget the fear and hatred that reigned in the 1860s, but they were soon far outnumbered by newcomers who had no direct experience of the hostilities. For 1870 marks the beginning of a renewed wave of settlement that soon pushed far west of the forks of the Solomon—all the way to the plains of Colorado.

So 1870 was not just any year, at least in this area. And Charles DeRudio was not just another settler. He was Lieutenant Charles C. DeRudio, commander of Company G of the Seventh Cavalry. His military career in the United States began in 1864 when he joined the Union Army as a private in the Seventy-Ninth Highlanders New York regiment. For bravery he was later promoted to second lieutenant and assigned to the Second U.S. Colored Troops regiment, stationed in Florida. Then in 1869 he was assigned to the Seventh Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer at Fort Riley, Kansas.

But this was DeRudio's second career, or, rather, his second life. He was born Carlo Camillo di Rudio, son of Count Ercule di Rudio and Contessa Elisabetta de Domini on their estate about forty miles north of Venice, a region then under the control of the Austrian Empire. As a young man, he became a revolutionary, fighting with Calvi against Austrian domination and then with Garibaldi against the French and the Papacy. Always on the losing side, he had to flee Italy and ended up in Paris, where he fought on the side of the revolutionaries against Louis Napoleon. Once again he had chosen the losing side, and once more he fled, first back to Italy and then to London.

There he became involved in an assassination plot against Napoleon III. When the assassination attempt (in an opera house in Paris) failed, the conspirators were brought before a court of law. Two of the four (or five, according to di Rudio) were sentenced to death, while di Rudio and one other man were sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. He escaped from the island prison and made his way temporarily back to England only to take his final refuge in the United States.

Apparently, Carlo Di Rudio, now calling himself Charles DeRudio, regaled the members of the Seventh Cavalry with stories of his earlier escapades. In so doing, he drew the ire of Custer, who brooked no competitors for fame and glory. As a result, DeRudio apparently became aligned with Captain William F. Benteen, who had little use for Custer.

Jumping ahead in time for a moment, DeRudio fought at the battle of the Little Bighorn and managed to survive. He was with Major Marcus Reno's unit at the beginning of the battle but became separated from it early in the fighting and spent a day and a half hiding in the woods on the opposite side of the river from Reno's defensive position on the bluff top. DeRudio's account of his part in the battle was published on the front page of the July 30, 1876, edition of the New York Herald. One suspects that Custer rolled over in his grave. DeRudio remained with the Seventh Cavalry and was promoted to captain in 1882. He retired in 1896 and died in 1910.

Returning to the fighting in Kansas in the 1860s, DeRudio was with a detachment from Fort Zarah on the Arkansas River under the command of Captain Benteen. They rode north to the Solomon Valley in the wake of the raid that occurred in August 1868. En route, they chased a group of Cheyenne warriors for ten miles or so, and in so doing they unknowingly caused the Cheyennes to abandon two young captives, Maggie and Esther Bell, who were later rescued. In 1869 and again in April 1870, Lieutenant DeRudio and Company G were stationed on the north bank of the Solomon in the vicinity of his claim.

So the transfer occurred at a significant point in time—when the land was permanently wrested from native control—and the new owner was by no means out of place in the frontier population: immigrant, nationalist, would-be assassin, escaped felon, and soldier.

On top of all this, the piece of land was not just any quarter section. It was the land that contained Waconda Spring, a Native American religious shrine. This was a large mineral spring that flowed from the top of a travertine mound. The native peoples considered it to be a spot where it was possible for humans to communicate with the animal spirits that lived in the underworld, and it was sacred to all of the nations of the region. Apparently it was a place where no fighting was supposed to occur.

It is clear, however, that Lieutenant DeRudio did not choose this quarter section because he shared Native American religious beliefs or even respected them. Instead, a mineral spring was a chance to make money. In the years that followed, a company was formed to try to make salt from the waters of the spring, but that venture never came to fruition. Then water from the spring was sold as a cure for various ailments. Later still, a spa grew up on the site and remained in use until the federal government bought the land when it created Waconda Lake. In 1870, then, the meaning of the landscape changed, along with concepts of ownership. Although native nations contested control of the region, no one owned the land until DeRudio claimed it under the new regime that he helped to establish. Thereafter Waconda Spring was seen as an economic resource rather than the home of powerful spirits.

This book deals with the landscape around Waconda Spring, not primarily as a physical or even an ecological entity, but as a cultural and historical force. People invest the land and features of the landscape with meanings particular to their own cultures and their own histories. And those meanings have force in everyday events; they mold history and culture. Today, many of those meanings have faded, and landscapes have tended to lose their force because we have divorced ourselves from them. We are an indoor nation now, linked to the world more frequently through electronic means than through direct experience. Only a lucky few get to spend significant amounts of time with their boots on the ground, experiencing their environment directly rather than driving through it.

Today, the Solomon River valley is a pretty ordinary place. The landscape is dominated by Waconda Lake, built by the Bureau of Reclamation for flood control, irrigation, water supply, and recreation. The region around it is farming country that does not loom large in the nation's imagination and certainly not in that of the larger world. Yet it was not always so, and July 6, 1870, marks a turning point, a change in inherent meaning, a new way of looking at the land.

In the nineteenth century, the Great Plains of North America was considered one of the most romantic spots on the face of the earth. All sorts of people braved hardships and danger (or, in later years, traveled with a modicum of luxury) to visit them. There was Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Württemburg, in the 1820s; Charles Augustus Murray, from a noble Scottish family, in the 1830s; Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied, also in the 1830s; Sir St. George Gore in the 1850s; and Grand Duke Alexis of Russia in the 1870s. Painters dramatized the landscape, and writers eulogized it: Samuel Seymour in the 1820s, and George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, and Alfred Jacob Miller in the 1830s provided indelible impressions of life on the plains through their art, while writers such as John Treat Irving, Washington Irving, Friedrich Wislizenus, and Joseph Nicollet, all in the 1830s, did the same in words.

Yet today Americans consider this one of the most boring spots they can imagine. That is, they do so when they think of it at all. Even its natives tend toward an inferiority complex, imagining that life on one of the coasts or in the mountains or just about anywhere else must be more interesting. In Cawker City, Kansas, at the center of the region discussed in this book, the biggest tourist attraction (other than Waconda Lake) is "The World's Largest Ball of Twine." It competes with "The World's Largest Hand-dug Well" in Greensburg and even with another "World's Largest Ball of Twine" in Darwin, Minnesota.

Part of the problem is that modern-day Americans spend most of their time indoors, and even when they are outside, most residents of the plains end up spending their time in the cultivated places, among orderly rows of corn or milo, in spaces sliced by section-line roads and power lines. There is very little romance to be had, nor much in the way of adventures to be experienced.

This book seeks to look back from the humdrum present through the romantic haze of the nineteenth century to an older landscape, one that is more wonderful by far than what the modern imagination can conceive. It is the cultural landscape of the original inhabitants, people who carried no inferiority complex about the land that was their home. They created trails that led to sacred sites, to natural resources, and to the villages of friend and foe alike. One of these thoroughfares, the Pawnee Trail, influenced the Euro-American history of the region well into the nineteenth century.

The Pawnee Trail ran past two very different sacred sites. One was Waconda Spring, an enormous spring issuing from the top of a hill. Even to the secular mind, it was an extraordinary thing, a pool a hundred feet in diameter sitting at the top of a hill rather than on low ground, and occasionally overflowing the brim and running down toward the river. For the native peoples of the region it was also a giant lodge, with the pool of water in the place where a smokehole should be. The residents of the lodge were the spirits that animated the species of land animals. And the pool was a giant mirror that on clear nights drew the spirits of the stars—that is, their reflections—down to earth.

Nearby was a different kind of sacred site, one created by human effort. It was the figure of a giant serpent carved into the earth. Exactly what its purpose was and what ceremonies were conducted there we do not know, but it was probably created by the ancestors of today's Wichitas, who made similar monuments elsewhere.

Finally, we will turn from the native landscape to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the connection between people and the land had not been severed by modern luxuries such as air conditioning, central heating, and the ubiquitous blandness of television. This was another time in our own cultural tradition, when the landscape was not just something to be traversed or to be exploited, when special places allowed people to establish contact with the world of the intellect and of the spirit. At that time, there were special places in our own cultural landscape that have now fallen into disuse. Lincoln Camp and Waconda Spring are two of them. We will trace their history to their ultimate destruction in the modern era.

This book is the result of an archaeological survey of the federal land around Waconda Lake, a Bureau of Reclamation reservoir in north-central Kansas (Figure 1.1). My students from Wichita State University and I surveyed the land around the lake and reanalyzed the collections from excavations that were done before the lake waters rose to cover many of the sites there. We found a good many sites but knew that others, including Waconda Spring, had been covered by the waters of the lake. Indeed, except at the very headwaters of the lake, most of the ground where one might expect to find ancient sites was flooded. Many of the sites we did find were old farmsteads, and all of them had been bulldozed after the land had been purchased for the lake, in order to remove safety hazards. The same had been done to structures at Lincoln Camp, which had been the site of a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and prisoner-of-war camp. The Sage site, a figure carved into a ridge top south of the lake, had been partially destroyed by farm activities long before we recognized it as a feature created by humans. Another site was quite simply invisible. It was the Pawnee Trail, a native trail that ran down Limestone Creek, crossed the river and continued south across the Blue Hills. Because it was a route followed only by pedestrians and horsemen, there were no wheel ruts that cut through the sod, making portions of the trail visible today. In contrast, the most readily visible aspect of the cultural landscape around the lake was the old fence lines, made from limestone and strung with barbed wire. They were everywhere, and we also found some of the quarries where the fence posts had been cut from the top of the Greenhorn formation.

Once the survey was complete, it was my job to analyze and report the findings, both for professionals and for members of the general public. One set of prehistoric sites, farmsteads that had been occupied between about AD 1000 and 1250, stood out. They had been the focus of investigations by the University of Nebraska when the reservoir was first being constructed. Collections from the sites, most of which are now under water, were transferred to Wichita State University, and I wrote a monograph about them that addressed the interests and concerns of professional archaeologists.

This volume, in contrast, is intended for the general public as well as professionals, and it addresses all of the sites at Waconda Lake, regardless of age or cultural affiliation. They are a mixed bag, but all of them have something to tell us about how people relate to landscapes that they have modified and have imbued with meaning.

Native Americans at Waconda Lake

THE NATURAL LANDSCAPE around what is now Waconda Lake began to take form deep in geological time, long before humans came on the scene. All of the bedrock in the region is Cretaceous in age, dating to about one hundred million years ago, but within that time frame there is an east-to-west progression from older to younger deposits. The land to the east is marked by knobby hills that are capped by deposits of Dakota sandstone (Figure 2.1a). The sand was deposited by rivers that fed a great delta at the edge of an ancient continent. In the spots where the hills are today, the sandstone became tightly cemented with iron oxides, inhibiting erosion. At Waconda Lake, the Dakota Formation is overlain by shales and limestones, called the Greenhorn Formation, that are somewhat younger in age. These formed on the bed of a shallow sea that rose over the former delta and covered all the center of what is now North America. When these rocks were later exposed, the flat-lying limestone proved to be more resistant to erosion than the shale, and the flat-topped hills and ridges are underlain with limestone deposits, while the slopes are composed of shale (Figure 2.1b). The topmost layer in the Greenhorn Formation is an eight-to-twelve-inch-thick bed of hard limestone called "the Fencepost limestone" for reasons discussed in chapter 6. Given its geologic position, it outcrops at the ends of the ridges near the lake and is covered with only a fairly thin mantle of soil.

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Excerpted from Holy Ground, Healing Water by Donald J. Blakeslee. Copyright © 2010 Donald J. Blakeslee. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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