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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619026889 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 136 |
| File size: | 276 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Problem
In 1992, the people of the Americas acknowledged and celebrated Spain's entrada into the New World half a millennium ago. Few remembered that half a century after that event a young crew of Spanish adventurers were dispatched into the heart of the North American continent to locate the mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola. They penetrated the continent to what is now central Kansas. The trek of these young conquerors amounted to the establishment of a line that would divide history and prehistory.
The Coronado expedition of 1540-1542 began when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado left Compostela, Mexico, and headed north toward Culiacán with his troop of 336 Spanish soldiers, plus the wives and children of a few of those soldiers and several hundred Indians. The march to Culiacán was a preparatory shakedown. When the army left Culiacán, 250 of the Spaniards were on horseback, and more than a thousand horses and mules were packed with baggage, arms, provisions, and munitions. There were six companies of cavalry, one of artillery, and one of infantry, and several friars who walked. The expedition marched off northward in February of 1540.
A year and a half later — in June of 1541 — Coronado and about thirty of his men reached the Indian kingdom of Quivira. By early August they achieved the northernmost point of their march, the northeasternmost village of Quivira in what is now central Kansas. Coronado had hand-selected this smaller group of men for this side trip. They were mostly in their twenties; Coronado himself was only thirty-one. All were irritated that they had not found the rumored wealth they sought when they finally arrived at Cíbola, now the Zuni Reservation in Arizona. They had been enticed off on this second wild goose chase into what is now Kansas by the lies of an Indian slave who wanted to get home to his people, the Harahey, a people who resided in either northeastern Kansas or southeastern Nebraska. The Spaniards called this man the Turk. He had deceived them with one major lie and buttressed it with a series of lies concerning the great wealth of the kingdom of Quivira. Quivira had plenty of people and good land. They were tall people; one stood six feet eight inches. But the houses of Quivira were built of grass and sticks. There was no gold. Even Chief Tatarrax wore only a copper ring on his neck.
Coronado finally, reluctantly gave in to the pressure of his angry subordinates. They were allowed to strangle the Turk. Thus young noblemen from some of Europe's finest families were responsible for the first murder of an Indian by whites in Kansas.
Frustrated and out of sorts, the Spaniards turned back. The kingdom of Quivira seemed too small and poor to deserve their conquest. Something behind their European eyes prevented their seeing what was before them. The Quivirians were skilled workers in stone. Their pipes, many carved from Minnesota pipestone, were graceful and finely polished. They were great traders; worked stone not native to their location was present. They were armed with bows and arrows, lances, spears, clubs, tomahawks and slings. The best bows were made of horn. Arrows were made of dogwood and hickory.
On the basis of evidence from dwellings and villages that have been excavated, and that from written narratives by those who accompanied Coronado or came into the region later, archaeologists have estimated that "within the confines of Rice County [Kansas] there were well over 25,000 people," or about thirty-five natives per square mile. In 1927, Rice County had just under 15,000 people. In 1980, 11,800. In 1988, 10,800. In 1990, 10,400.
Why this huge decline in numbers of people? Were the natives more sophisticated at providing their living than we are? More than 25,000 people are now being supported in cities outside the county by Rice County soils and water, by steel produced in Gary, Indiana, and by fossil fuel. We know that nearly all of the young people who want to stay or who leave but want to return would bring the population to well over 25,000. Why can't they stay or afford to return?
A neighbor of mine, Nick Fent, has recently written up the seventy-year history of 240 acres (three contiguous eighties) fifty to sixty miles north of old Quivira. Nick and his wife Joyce now own those 240 acres. The topography, the rainfall, and the soils are comparable to those in old Quivira. Nick Fent used courthouse deedbooks in his research. The three eighty-acre tracts were originally deeded to three settlers who had come west to establish new lives for themselves and their families. Nick Fent describes how "buried in the legal abstracts is the depressing struggle of these transplanted families who had bet mortgages against drouths, dust storms and grasshoppers. The documents recording the satisfaction of mortgages are always preceded by those recording another mortgager of larger debt." In 1891, a woman living on this land went insane, and her husband, "owing to [his] extreme poverty," could not transport his wife to the asylum at Topeka. Nick Fent continues:
Subsistence farming on the center 80 acres had been subjected to drouth, when crops failed completely; wet years, when the creek bottom corn fields were too soft to work; and plagues of grasshoppers that ate everything from cornstalks to hoe handles. Burdened with increasing debt, it had passed through 14 owners from the time of its presidential patent deed No. 1, in 1885, to our ownership in 1955. Through 70 years, owners Dell, Hawkins, Decious, Crowel, Minor, Carnal, Curtis, Loughridge, Scholl, Haley, Ashman, Wetchel, Walker and Mills tried, through their struggle with the elements, insanity, death and taxes, to eat, educate their children and pay the interest on their debts.
Most of their personal struggles and disappointments were hidden in the quiet desperation of their lives but are reflected in the permanent record of escalating mortgages. One can still see a few piles of disintegrating horse harness in the corners of dying barns; old sandstone block building foundations; rock walled hand dug wells and cisterns and small rock quarries on the hillsides. Faint farming furrows can still be traced through now-forested small creek bottom fields. Old trails, cutting diagonally through the upland pastures, predate the rectangular road grids and show distinctly in the winter, when snow blows across the prairie to settle in the ancient ruts in white scars across the land.
Life on the adjoining two eighties was not very different. Nick concludes with this chilling sentence: "The families who devoted their lives to losing this land might have prospered elsewhere had it remained 'Buffalo Range.'"
Why did those families fail where the natives had been successful?
Harry Mason, an eighty-three-year-old friend, a former professor of psychology, describes weekend visits from college to the family farm at the county-seat town of WaKeeney, Kansas, in 1934. He tells how the dust drifted under the shingles and eaves to be deposited on the top of ceilings, which then fell through. The plaster and the dust were carted away to fill in a pair of remnant dugouts of failed settlers in an abandoned hog pen.
Harry Mason's father had helped establish the industrial revolution on this near-last frontier of the Great Plains, beginning in the 1890s. His father did custom work with his threshing machine. He farmed, went broke, started a garage business in WaKeeney, succeeded, and lived to witness the evolution and improvement of both tractors and automobiles. But more bad times came. The industrial revolution had every chance here, for it was helped along by the boosterism described by Sinclair Lewis. Here on the 100th meridian, halfway almost to the mile between Kansas City and Denver, two brothers ran the butcher shop and locker plant they had taken over from their father, who had come to the area under contract to butcher the bison that fed the workers building the Union Pacific. From bison to locker plants in less than one generation on the Great American Frontier! And what became of it all?
Harry came home for his father's funeral in 1944. His father had been found dead in his pickup. He had been drinking, a man who in his youth would take no more than a social drink, a tough old man who had refused to leave during the mass exodus of people and blowing dust.
In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry has written that "we came with vision but not with sight. We came with visions of former places but not the sight to see where we are." Out here, in mid-continent, our ancestors arrived with their humid area mindsets, relying heavily on subsidies from the distant East for a startup. But distant subsidies may not be the crucial distinction. Those 25,000 Quivirians whose dwellings were inside what today is Rice County, Kansas, did not do all of their shopping locally either. They traded from Minnesota to Mexico City. They relied on millions of bison calories each year, brought across the current county boundary to their grass huts, calories stored from short grasses grazed from New Mexico to the Canadian prairies. The hides and the horns and the shoulder blade scrapers came from the Great Plains commons.
Nutrients harvested by the bison over the prairie land that became WaKeeney's courthouse square were transported by solar-powered bison legs until they were within reach of those flint-tipped ironwood arrows. Set against the rawhide string of a bow bent almost to the breaking point, those arrows would penetrate almost to the feather. Here was the combination of land and cultural artifact that served as the source of the bones and sinews of Quivira's growing children. Here were the nutrients and here was the stored sunlight that sponsored the countless dives of naked young brown bodies into the deep holes of the Smoky Hill River. This is what sponsored the giggles and excited talk about the freshwater clam brought from the bottom and held high overhead, the wild-eyed excitement of having felt near the bottom of the dive what must have been a ten-pound channel cat slip by. The bison mowed down the green molecular traps set by such star-grasses as blue grama, hairy grama, big bluestem, Indian, and switch grass, unwittingly storing it for these children while chewing their cud as they nooned in the cottonwood's shade.
And so I return to my question: Why has our culture, which insists that we plant wheat where the grass huts of old Quivira stood, failed so miserably at finding ways to support as large a population on this land as the natives did? Why did fourteen families fail in seventy years on one piece of ground? Why do we still lose people when the rate of energy use and the rate of nutrient flow is at an all-time high? We have sent our topsoil, our fossil water, our oil, our gas, our coal, and our children into that black hole called the economy.
But I have already warned against a simple indictment of long-distance movement of materials and energy. The problem has to do with the nature of the outside subsidy. Those subsidies from outside Rice County that sustained the Quivirians were of a different order from what Rice County residents receive today. The calories stored in the meat and hides of the buffalo represented contemporary sunlight, not the ancient fossil variety. The bone and other materials that Quivirians used to create tools and clothing represented an acceptable use of nature. The age of the energy package they broke open, be it bison brisket or the sticks to cook it, were measured in tens of years or less. Most of the energy we use today is ancient; our fossil fuel comes from energy packages hundreds of millions of years old; the electricity from our nuclear power plants comes from packages of energy billions of years old — nearly as old as the universe.
With all of this ancient energy available, why are there 10,400 people in Rice County today? Why a consolidated Quivira Heights High School instead of Bushton High and Geneseo High and Holyrood High and Lorraine High? Why is it that so many young white people who love the land of Quivira can't make a living there?
CHAPTER 2Visions and Assumptions
Wendell Berry's classic The Unsettling of America describes the sequence of conquest and settlement. Natives, not "redskins," were living on this land to which European conquerors came. From the moment these natives became "redskins," they became surplus people; the "red-skin" designation validated killing them off or moving them off, making their land available for our settlement. Without realizing it, we established a precedent. In due time the descendants of those settlers also became surplus people — the new redskins, so to speak. The old farm families were removed and their rural communities destroyed as the industrial revolution infiltrated agriculture.
Just as the natives who became surplus could have shown us how to live harmoniously on the land, even with some of our European cultural modifications, so the surplus farmers now gone could have passed on their myriad cultural techniques, some developed here, others adapted from our agricultural origins in Europe. They never really had a chance. They were moved too abruptly off the farm, out of the small towns, into the cities.
The conqueror is nearly always from someplace else, as Wendell Berry says. In the old days he came as a seeker of gold or markets and sometimes as a mere pawn in European power politics. In the last round of conquest here, the market seeker came bringing the machines and chemicals and the agricultural economists who said "get big or get out."
Conquerors are seldom interested in a thoroughgoing discovery of where they really are. Three days after Columbus arrived in the New World, he wrote in his journal, "These islands are very green and fertile and the breezes are very soft, and it is possible that there are in them many things, of which I do not know, because I did not wish to delay in finding gold." Six days later he wrote, "The singing of little birds is such that it seems that a man could never wish to leave this place." But this man had a mission, and so he left. Missions of conquest seldom have much to do with natural "greenness," "fertility," "soft breezes," or "little singing birds." The man was looking for gold!
Fewer than fifty years after Columbus, Coronado was looking for gold, too. Like Columbus, he could not help but notice the countryside and comment on how handsome and bountiful it was — though merely as a side attraction. When the futility of his quest for gold in Quivira became apparent, he and his small crew of young noblemen turned their backs on the productive landscape that had touched a deeper human sense in them.
And therein lies the tragedy. We are still more the cultural descendants of Columbus and Coronado than we are of the natives we replaced. Now that we find ourselves in a cycle of transition from conquerors of "redskins" to settlers to sons and daughters of settlers who have become the new "redskins," we realize we must break the cycle. But even that will not be enough. This time, to become native to this place we will have to take measures to reduce the chance of ever becoming "redskins" again.
Professor Dan Luten, retired from the University of California Geography Department, has written that we came as poor people to what we perceived to be an empty land rich in resources; now we have become rich people in an increasingly poor land that is filling up. Our institutions were built on a former reality and don't do well in the modern context. A sobering question is: Does an experiment such as the one we Americans have wrought work only where there is the kind of slack that this yet unused-up continent once afforded?
On August 24, 1874, a party of six General Land Office surveyors led by a Captain Short were attacked eight miles southwest of Meade, Kansas, as they were laying out township section lines. All six were killed and three were scalped. This was called the Lone Tree Massacre because of a lone cotton-wood that stood on the spot until blown down in 1938. We don't know the motivation for the massacre. But the surveyor's instrument was symbolic of the difference between the two races.
Earlier I mentioned WaKeeney's courthouse square, how the bison must have freely roamed over that small piece of land, nibbling on the buffalo grass that helped support the lives of Quivira's children. Not far away stands a similar courthouse where the patent deed on the Fent eighty acres was processed. The township section lines became the basis for land distribution, including the Fent land where fourteen families failed over a seventy-year period. The Indians had no such lines. Nutrients and sunlight picked up by the bison in the neighborhood of the Mandan Indians of North Dakota, for example, were likely harvested by Quivirians in Kansas, and vice versa. "Holding" nature as a commons was a way of spreading the risk. It blunted the extremes of floods and drouths, cold and heat.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Becoming Native to This Place"
by .
Copyright © 1996 Wes Jackson.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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Table of Contents
Foreword. Richard C. Edwards,
Acknowledgments,
Prologue,
1. The Problem,
2. Visions and Assumptions,
3. Science and Nature,
4. Nature as Measure,
5. Becoming Native to Our Places,
6. Developing the Courage of Our Convictions,
Notes,