Category: History

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The Arctic 2012: A View from Above

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One of the Tweet-worthy current events items I’ve come across in the last couple of days is news that climate scientists say the Arctic ice pack has reached its lowest extent since the satellite records began in 1979. The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado says the Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a season minimum this past Sunday, September 16, of 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). That’s half the average seen in the years 1979-2000 (and above, that’s a graphic from the NSIDC showing the sea ice extent for September 19).

What does it mean? Here’s a decent summary of the basic thinking from today’s PBS NewsHour:

The ice is younger and thinner than it was in the 1980s. Of the ice surveyed this summer, the majority was one to two years old and three to five feet thick on average. That’s down from 10 to 13 feet thick in 1985.

Losing sea ice also has immediate impacts on Arctic wildlife. Walruses that normally rest on the ice while hunting ocean fish moved ashore by the thousands last year. Arctic seal populations have already declined as a result of disappearing ice. And a 2009 United States Geological Survey estimated that by 2050, the world could lose two-thirds of its polar bears as their ice-dwelling food sources disappear. The ice is also home to delicate microorganisms, which, if lost, could upset the entire Arctic food chain, Meier said.

Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at NSIDC, said that changes in the Arctic’s ice and snow are making the Arctic warmer, which may mean major weather and climate changes for the rest of the planet. Sea ice reflects the sun’s rays, which helps regulate the planet’s temperatures, especially during the summer. Losing the reflective ice surface causes temperatures to rise. If the North Pole is not as cold as it used to be, that has the potential to change wind and weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

“But a wider impact may come from the increased heat and moisture that the Arctic is adding to the climate system,” Scambos said in a press release yesterday. “This will gradually affect climate in the areas where we live…We have a less polar pole–and so there will be more variations and extremes.”

Having read some of the accounts of the sea ice retreat yesterday, I went looking for images of what the Arctic looks like. A favorite resource: NASA, which publishes a bunch of cool images of various Earth features every day. One of the services, called MODIS(MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), includes daily mosaics of the Arctic snapped by NASA satellites. Every time I see these images of Earth from space, the thought that seizes me–or maybe it’s more of an emotion–is what an incredibly beautiful place this planet is.

Looking at the Arctic day to day, I wondered whether I could turn the images into a “movie.” Well, I could, sort of. I downloaded 185 days worth–from March 20 through September 20–then turned them into a slideshow, saved that as a movie, and uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is:


I will say up front that while the view is breathtaking, the Arctic weather screens the view of precisely what’s happening with the ice. It’s not as stark as you might expect (and of course, this is just one season we’re looking at; there’s nothing here to give a comparison to how this scene unfolded 30 years ago).
One note of orientation and explanation: The North Pole is near dead center in the images. Greenland is clearly recognizable at the lower left; Iceland is at the lower center, and Scandinavia and the northern coast of Russia are at the lower right. Siberia dominates the right side of the map (these images show weeks of heavy smoke from fires there). At the top margin, the Bering Strait, where Siberia nearly meets Alaska, is just left of center. Alaska appears inverted at the left, with the Gulf of Alaska at the top left corner.

One more video: This year’s Arctic ice melt as presented by NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Laboratory:

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Journal of Airliner Seat Photography 2

The Byron Generating Station in Ogle County, Illinois, on July 26,, 2012.

Further notes on my occasional hobby/obsession with snapping pictures while strapped into an airliner seat: The scene above shows the Byron Generating Station (a nuclear power plant) in Ogle County, Illinois, about 70 miles west of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The view here was taken July 26, 2012, from American Airlines Flight 1661, to San Francisco, about 12 and a half minutes after takeoff (we lifted off the runway at 6:43 p.m. CDT, about two hours late). The view here is north/northeast. The Rock River is at the left, and the town of Byron is at the upper right, about three miles from the plant; the town of Oregon, Illinois, is just outside the frame’s lower left corner.

As it happens, Kate and I were driving in this area last week, and when I saw the plant’s cooling towers in the distance I started looking for a place to stop and take a picture. We found Razorville Road, which runs north-south about a mile west of the plant, and pulled off. The roadside was studded with “No Trespassing” signs, and I was careful not to stray beyond them. I half expected armed guards to show up, but none did. I got my pictures, and we drove off to another local attraction, the Black Hawk statue at Lowden State Park.

The Byron Generating Station’s cooling towers, Ogle County, Illinois, in September 2012.
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‘A Private in Uncle Sam’s Army’

It’s my last night in Chicago for a while — now early morning, actually. I’ve stayed up way too late looking through a collection of letters Dad wrote when he was in Army basic training. That was in 1946, after World War II ended. The story we heard growing up, and I’ve got no reason to doubt it, is that he tried to enlist at the outset of the war but was rejected and rated “4F” because he had a punctured eardrum. That condition gradually healed, and he was rated fit to serve and drafted in late 1945 and inducted into the Army in January 1946.

Part of his parents’ legacy that I heard about growing up was a collection of more than 100 letters my grandfather, Sjur Brekke, wrote my grandmother, Otilia Sieverson, during their courtship and early marriage in the first decade of the last century. (The courtship started at a Lutheran parish in Chicago, where he was a visiting minister in training and my grandmother’s family were charter members. Sjur was a smooth operator. We have a note he wrote to Otilia on the back of a business card; the subject was a couple of volumes of commentary on scripture he had “taken the liberty” of loaning her. He also offered to hook her up with more such volumes if she liked the first two.)

Sjur died in 1932, when Dad was 10, and he said his mother not only hung onto all those letters, but read and re-read them. She numbered them and kept each one in its original envelope; she wrote key phrases from each letter on the envelopes, apparently her way of prompting herself as to the contents. When she died in 1975, the letters passed on to my dad. They’re among the papers he left behind. (If you’re wondering about my grandmother’s letters to my grandfather, well, so do we. She destroyed them at some point after he died.)

What I didn’t know, though, was that my grandmother kept a second letter archive. She saved all the correspondence Dad wrote during his year-plus in the Army, starting with a postcard from Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago, the day he arrived for processing.

“Dear Mother: Here I am, a private in Uncle Sam’s Army,” he began. I’m guessing the postcard was something the Army had its new inductees do to reassure the home folks they were OK.

There are about 75 of these letters in all — 20 or so from his time in basic training, which took him to Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, and another 50 or so from his time serving in the occupation of Germany.

Leafing through the basic-training letters the other day, I felt like I was getting to know a person about whom I had only heard vague accounts. One thing comes through very clearly: the Army wasn’t really for him. He was interested in learning what he could in the ranks — he was being trained in a field anti-aircraft battery — but he had his own agenda, which always seemed to come back to music and whether he could finagle a way into an Army band (he couldn’t and didn’t). He also loved the opportunity to see a part of the country, dry, desolate West Texas, that was completely new to him.

I read a few of the letters aloud the other day to my siblings. One in particular delighted us. Dad describes a trip up to an artillery range to fire anti-aircraft and machine guns at aerial targets. It sounds like he enjoyed that somewhat. But he also liked the chance to camp out:

“Monday nite we slept under the stars on the New Mexican sand. The sand retains the heat pretty well and I had warm blankets along, so slept very comfortably. In fact it was a lot of fun. 4 or 5 of us slept near each other and sang songs and ate cookies and candy far after dark.”

Sounds like a kid at camp. He was also thrilled to go without shaving or bathing and said the grime made him “look as dark as a negro” (of whom there were none in his unit, of course). I’m not sure he ever really had any significant outdoors adventures before this. His parents were older and given to recreations like attending revival meetings. During an extended stay in Los Angeles in the early ’30s, their idea of a Sunday outing was to take Dad to see Amy Semple McPherson preach at her Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

The scan of the full letter is below.

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‘The Smallest Minds … The Cowardliest Hearts’

Current reading: “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” by Wallace Stegner. It’s a biography of John Wesley Powell, known popularly for making the first boat trip through the Grand Canyon (in 1869), for being among the founders of the U.S. Geological Survey, for his thorough and sympathetic study of Native Americans and their culture, and for promoting a rational approach to the settlement of the arid West. (Among other details I didn’t know, Powell was also a faculty member at the college that became Illinois State University, in Normal, and lived in Bloomington).

Anyway, at one juncture, Stegner stops to contemplate federal government policy on the West. He quotes Mark Twain’s “portrait of the Congressman: ‘the smallest mind and the selfishest soul and the cowardliest heart that God makes.’ ” Harsh, but apt for our time, I thought (and sure, there are some who would say it’s a description with eternal currency).

I wanted to know the source of the quote. One’s first Google search turns up the fact it’s widely cited (to express disgust with today’s crop of solons) though the source is hard to come by. The closest you can get is along the lines of “an 1891 letter to an unknown correspondent.”

Twain died in 1910, and in 1912, someone named Albert Bigelow Paine came out with a massive biography that reprints the letter in full (or nearly full–there’s no salutation, thus the name of the recipient, if any, is unknown, and it begins with an ellipsis). The letter appeared five years later in a collection of Twain’s letters. The subject is the Twain’s real-life experience and how it has fitted him for the profession of novelist. Here’s the paragraph that’s the source of Stegner’s quote:

So, the quote was more expansive and changed somewhat as it passed through the many hands between Twain, Paine, and Stegner. Or maybe not. Stegner cites an edition of “The Portable Mark Twain” edited by his friend and mentor, the historian Bernard De Voto, as his source, and De Voto’s quote was identical to those printed earlier. Stegner appears to have cleaned it up and narrowed the context to fit his needs.

In any case, the original message was: Those lawmaker-government types–they’re all bums.

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War of 1812: A Quiet Bicentennial

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President James Madison’s proclamation of war against Great Britain. (Library of Congress. Click for larger image.)

I’m not hearing a lot about the 200th anniversary, on Friday, of President James Madison asking Congress to declare war on Great Britain, opening the way to the War of 1812. The president’s message outlined the provocations that led to war, and it reads like a musty reminder of junior high history class: impressment of American sailors into British service; British interference with American commerce and a naval blockade of U.S. ports; Britain’s insistence that the United States repudiate its diplomatic and commercial detente with France; and British support for Indian raids on the American frontier. The president concluded on what today is a foreign-sounding note:

“Whether the United States shall continue passive under these progressive usurpations and these accumulating wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defense of their national rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events … is a solemn question which the Constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of the Government. In recommending it to their early deliberations I am happy in the assurance that the decision will be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, a free, and a powerful nation.”

“Foreign-sounding” because—well, when’s the last time a president treated the legislative branch as if it had a real role in deliberating whether the nation goes to war or not? That’s despite living in an era of one war (or conflict, or police action, or retaliation, or high-level drug bust) after another. Since the last time a president deigned to go before Congress, we’ve fought in Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Libya (Reagan edition), Panama, Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya (Obama edition). The only question is who’s next.

Oh, yes: Congress is still a convenient fig leaf for a determined chief executive. A recent president, addressing the nation on the need to go to war to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in a foreign land ruled by a former ally, noted that “recognizing the threat to our country, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly … to support the use of force.” The president didn’t see fit to mention the campaign of lies and half-truths he and his underlings waged to persuade the legislators and the people that the danger was imminent. That wouldn’t become universally understood until later. But the president left no doubt about his view about where the sole responsibility for committing the nation’s blood and treasure lay:

“Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed. The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security. That duty falls to me as commander in chief by the oath I have sworn, by the oath I will keep.”

In Madison’s case, asking Congress for a declaration of war was more than a gesture undertaken by an executive who took it for granted he could do whatever he pleased. Congress had never considered such a request before. And it took nearly three weeks before they approved. When they did, it was with plenty of opposition: the House passed the resolution 79-49, the Senate went along, 19-13.

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Bridge Expedition

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Filbert Street steps, San Francisco.

Last night, we went on an expedition over to the city (or “The City” to conform to the old San Francisco Examiner stylebook) to watch the Golden Gate Bridge 75th birthday fireworks. It was Kate’s idea, and I was lukewarm to it at first mainly because I figured there’d be a huge crowd with attendant problems getting to and from the event. But we came up with a plan: to go to Coit Tower, on Telegraph Hill, which would probably have a decent view of the fireworks and not be in the thick of the mob. We’d be able to take BART over, walk up to the tower (about a mile) using the stairways on the eastern side of the hill. To make the evening complete, we discovered that our boat, the Oakland-Alameda ferry, is running on a summer schedule and that the last trip back to the East Bay would leave the Ferry Building at 10:45.

So: We drove to Oakland, left our car near the ferry, walked to Oakland West BART (getting stopped for a few minutes on the way by an Amtrak train that pulled across the street in front of us and stopped), raced through the tube under the Bay to Embarcadero Station, then hiked north to the Filbert Street steps, just west of Levi’s Plaza. The beacon drawing us on: Coit Tower, bathed in “international orange” light (in honor of the GG Bridge’s paint job).

I have worn out the sidewalks and shortcuts across other parts of the city, but this is a piece of the urban landscape I rarely visit. It’s one of the older settled places in San Francisco, and it feels that way, maybe because of the many fragile-seeming older masonry structures along Front and Battery streets. And when you head up the steps, you enter a different world altogether: a warren of narrow paths and alleyways crowded by garden yards and lined by a jumble of cottages, apartment buildings old and new, humble and spectacular. Every little bit, the tower would reappear, closer and redder, above us.

When we got to the drive winding up to the Coit Tower parking lot, the sparse procession of people we’d been among heading up the steps joined a crowd converging on the hill’s summit. Traffic was stopped. Around the base of the tower, people were staking out positions to watch the show. We found a space looking west toward the bridge through an opening among the branches of a eucalyptus tree. Maybe 40 or 50 people, a mix of people, were perched at the same spot: some families with kids, some younger folks, some older folks. The mood was restrained until the fireworks started with a cascade of white fire along the entire length of the bridge. “I love this city!” a woman next to me said. (Later, she said, “What a great show! She deserves it.” “Yeah,” a friend of hers said, “she didn’t go down 20 years ago (during the Loma Prieta earthquake).”

And then it was over. On the way back down the steps, I was impressed by how steep and long they are–especially the last pitch (pictured at top), which is flung down a sheer drop at the base of Telegraph Hill above Battery Street. Kate said that section made her a little nervous, and steep as it was I could see her point, especially with blackberry shoots making a bid to reach across the handrail and snag you.

We walked down the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building and waited for the boat to Oakland. It was a little late because it had to negotiate some heavy traffic with hundreds of small boats heading back to marinas along the bayfront and across the bay. The boat wasn’t jam-packed, but it did have an unusually large Sunday night crowd. We got off at Jack London Square, picked up our car, and came home.

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Titanic on the Sea of Unawareness

Item: Some among us apparently are not aware that the story of the Titanic was a real, honest-to-goodness, true-life historical event as opposed to a James Cameron “King of the World” extravaganza. (The evidence: a string of Twitter posts from users expressing surprise that the Titanic existed outside movies. The list appears to be real. Checking the accounts of some of the Twitter users who appear there, some seem to concede that they were ignorant of the Titanic’s existence (though some say they were in doubt about the reality of the love story depicted in the Cameron film). In fact, most of the people on the list have gotten pounded with responses pointing out how dumb they are.

But let us not be harsh. Let us say “credulous” or “unaware,” not “dumb.” Well, there’s unaware, and then there’s unaware. After all, we are the nation where:

  • Fewer than half of poll respondents were certain their current president was born in the United States–two and a half years after he took office.
  • Two in five poll respondents say God (yes–The God) created humans in their present form and one in six say we’re the product of evolution.
  • A 2006 survey of younger Americans (ages 18-24) found that seven out of eight couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia. (On the other hand, we do have some certified geography whizzes among us.)
  • A survey found “more than 50 percent … wrongly attributed the quote ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ to George Washington, Thomas Paine, or President Barack Obama, when it is in fact a quote from Karl Marx.”

As a service, we’re offering a brief lists of people and events that have appeared in movies, both recent and classic, that historians say are real (as well as a few that are in fact apparently fictional):

  • George W. Bush
  • Nelson Mandela
  • Bill Clinton
  • Prince
  • Frost and Nixon
  • Vietnam and Vietnam War
  • World War II
  • Seabiscuit and Phar Lap
  • Gandhi
  • World War I
  • Wild West, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp
  • Custer, Indians, Little Bighorn
  • The Civil War
  • Lincoln
  • Slavery
  • George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams
  • George III, Henry V
  • Pope Gregory–the calendar guy
  • Rome, gladiators, Claudius, Caligula
  • Egypt, Cleopatra
  • Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great

Jury still out on: Various religious figures, burning bushes, parting seas, Helen, Trojan War, Natty Bumppo, Ishmael, David Copperfield, Pip, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Man With No Name, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (and Liberty Valance), The Man in the White Suit, Sherlock Holmes, Elmer Gantry, Tom Swift, Tom Joad, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Quinn (Medicine Woman), Smiley, Miss Piggy, E.T., Tatooine, Endor, Luke Skywalker, Undercover Brother, Jason Bourne.

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Titanic on the Sea of Unawareness

Item: Some among us apparently are not aware that the story of the Titanic was a real, honest-to-goodness, true-life historical event as opposed to a James Cameron “King of the World” extravaganza. (The evidence: a string of Twitter posts from users expressing surprise that the Titanic existed outside movies. The list appears to be real. Checking the accounts of some of the Twitter users who appear there, some seem to concede that they were ignorant of the Titanic’s existence (though some say they were in doubt about the reality of the love story depicted in the Cameron film). In fact, most of the people on the list have gotten pounded with responses pointing out how dumb they are.

But let us not be harsh. Let us say “credulous” or “unaware,” not “dumb.” Well, there’s unaware, and then there’s unaware. After all, we are the nation where:

  • Fewer than half of poll respondents were certain their current president was born in the United States–two and a half years after he took office.
  • Two in five poll respondents say God (yes–The God) created humans in their present form and one in six say we’re the product of evolution.
  • A 2006 survey of younger Americans (ages 18-24) found that seven out of eight couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia. (On the other hand, we do have some certified geography whizzes among us.)
  • A survey found “more than 50 percent … wrongly attributed the quote ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ to George Washington, Thomas Paine, or President Barack Obama, when it is in fact a quote from Karl Marx.”

As a service, we’re offering a brief lists of people and events that have appeared in movies, both recent and classic, that historians say are real (as well as a few that are in fact apparently fictional):

  • George W. Bush
  • Nelson Mandela
  • Bill Clinton
  • Prince
  • Frost and Nixon
  • Vietnam and Vietnam War
  • World War II
  • Seabiscuit and Phar Lap
  • Gandhi
  • World War I
  • Wild West, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp
  • Custer, Indians, Little Bighorn
  • The Civil War
  • Lincoln
  • Slavery
  • George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams
  • George III, Henry V
  • Pope Gregory–the calendar guy
  • Rome, gladiators, Claudius, Caligula
  • Egypt, Cleopatra
  • Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great

Jury still out on: Various religious figures, burning bushes, parting seas, Helen, Trojan War, Natty Bumppo, Ishmael, David Copperfield, Pip, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Man With No Name, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (and Liberty Valance), The Man in the White Suit, Sherlock Holmes, Elmer Gantry, Tom Swift, Tom Joad, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Quinn (Medicine Woman), Smiley, Miss Piggy, E.T., Tatooine, Endor, Luke Skywalker, Undercover Brother, Jason Bourne.

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1940 Census: The Enumeration

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The west side of the 8300 block of S. May Street, Chicago, in the 1940 census (click for a larger version.)

A while back, it occurred to me I’d better start recording the basics of some of the “how we’re related” family stories I’d heard for a long time from my mom and dad. Not that the stories are terribly complex in my immediate family. My dad is an only child (translation: I have no first cousins on his side of the family). My mom was the only girl among six children; of her five brothers, four lived to adulthood, and all of them became Roman Catholic priests (translation: no first cousins, or rumors of first cousins, on her side of the family). A generation back, though, and there were lots of kids. Both of my grandmothers came from big families, and each of my grandfathers have four or five adult siblings. That’s enough to create some complicated relationships, and as my parents’ generation has passed on–my mom died in 2003, the last of her siblings followed just a few months later, and at 90 my dad has likely outlived all his first cousins–there’s no one left to explain how all those family members you happen across in a cemetery or family tree relate to each other.

So, I’ve become mildly proficient at sorting through census records, and when the 1940 census came out this week, I was interested in tracking down family members.

But the 1940 data has a twist: There’s no name index. Meaning that you can’t find your relatives by going to some nicely organized website, plug a name in to a search blank, and find them in the census (that will come later, after the Mormon-organized army of volunteer transcribers does its work). Instead, you need to know where your family lived–and the more precise the idea you have, the better. In the case of some of our Chicago family, I know my mom’s and dad’s childhood addresses off the top of my head. Those are places we visited as kids and have been back to, just to take a look at them, as adults. At some point over the last decade or so, I also figured out my mom’s mom’s parents exact address on the South Side.

The newly released records are organized by Census Bureau Enumeration Districts: the patches of territory assigned to the 120,000 census takers who recorded the 1940 population. An enumerator was supposed to be able to cover an urban district in two weeks, a rural one in four weeks. For city areas, that was at least 1,000 people, and an enumerator might fill out forty pages of census schedules (forty people to a page) while visiting every domicile in the district.

As I said, there’s no way of digging individual names out of the millions of pages of census records released this week. But through the work and technological savvy of a brilliant San Francisco genealogist named Steve Morse, you can find people if you have a reasonably precise idea of where they lived. Morse created a site called the Unified 1940 Census ED Finder, which is the front end for a database that apparently contains information on every block of every street in every U.S. community. If you know someone lived at West 83rd Street and South Racine Avenue in Chicago, Morse’s site allows you to plug that information in, along with other cross streets, and discover the enumeration district where your person lived.

In 1940, my mom’s family lived in the 8300 block of South May Street, a block over from 83rd and Racine. Morse’s site shows that was Chicago Enumeration District 103-2222. The enumerator, Bezzie K. Roy, filled out thirty-six schedule pages in visiting the district’s households. You never know when you start looking through those thirty-six pages whether you’ll find the people you’re looking for on the first page or the last–I think you’re at the whim of the enumerator, though maybe there was a method to the job (for instance, start at the west edge of a district and move east, or something like that). In this case, Bezzie Roy visited my mom’s block on page three.

The family lived in a two-flat building. My mom, who was 10 when the census was taken, lived on the ground floor with her parents and four brothers. Her grandmother — her father’s mother — lived upstairs with two of her grown daughters (such a deal for my grandmother, living downstairs from her in-laws). There they are, eight lines at 8332 S. May Street. That in itself seems to be a mistake. My mom had identical twin brothers, Tom and Ed, who would have been 6 at this time and who are not listed here. It’s hard to imagine my grandmother, who was the one indicated as having supplied the information, not listing everyone in the family. Where are the twins?

The other thing I’m struck by in seeing this simple list of names is how much it doesn’t say. Edward D. Hogan, my mom’s father, had been diagnosed with lung cancer by this point and only had about 14 months to live. Eight months before this census record, my mom, Mary Hogan, had survived a drowning that killed John Hogan, one of her older brothers. A month after that, my mom’s grandfather, Tim Hogan, who lived upstairs, died. I’ve thought a lot about what it must have been like in their household at this time. But as you page through the records of this block and all the neighboring streets, it’s certain that other homes harbored stories that simply aren’t visible in this enumeration.

Detail of 1940 Census, 8300 block of S. May Street, Chicago.

(Click the images for larger, readable versions).

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Guest Observation: More on Crazy Horse

I just re-read Ian Frazier’s “Great Plains.” I had forgotten that among the many subjects he focuses on is Crazy Horse, the Lakota Oglala chief (how times change: a generation ago, his predominant identification among the wasichu would have been Sioux. I digress. Back to Frazier …). He’s got a chapter that ranges from a street in Manhattan, where he encounters a man who says he’s the grandson of Crazy Horse, to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, where Crazy Horse was killed. Here’s the end of the chapter, which I love for the way he reaches beyond a recitation of facts and tries to bring into the open the sentiment and emotion and meaning the facts inspire for him.

“Some, both Indian and non-Indian, regard him with a reverence that borders on the holy. Others do not get the point at all. George Hyde, who has written perhaps the best books about the western Sioux, says of the admirers of Crazy Horse, ‘They depict Crazy Horse as the kind of being never seen on earth: a genius in war, yet a lover of peace; a statesman, who apparently never thought of the interests of any human being outside his own camp; a dreamer, a mystic, and a kind of Sioux Christ, who was betrayed in the end by his own disciples–Little Big Man, Touch the Clouds … and the rest. One is inclined to ask, what is it all about?’

“Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but was was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn’t end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on a train, slept in a boardinghouse, ate at a table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as ‘Red’ and Spotted Tail as ‘Spot,’ they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. Crazy Horse was a slim man of medium height with brown hair hanging below his waist and a scar above his lip. Now, in the mind of each person who imagines him, he looks different.

“I believe that when Crazy Horse was killed, something more than a man’s life was snuffed out. Once, America’s size in the imagination was limitless. After Europeans settled and changed it, working from the coasts inland, its size in the imagination shrank. Like the center of a dying fire, the Great Plains held that original vision longest. Just as people finally came to the Great Plains and changed them, so they came to where Crazy Horse lived and killed him. Crazy Horse had the misfortune to live in a place which existed both in reality and in the dreams of people far away; he managed to leave both the real and the imaginary place unbetrayed. What I return to most often when I think of Crazy Horse is the fact that in the adjutant’s office he refused to lie on the cot. Mortally wounded, frothing at the mouth, grinding his teeth in pain, he chose the floor instead. What a distance there is between that cot and the floor! On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, ‘ours’: an object of pity, an accident victim, ‘the noble red man, the last of his race, etc. etc.’ But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still. On the floor, he began to hurt as the morphine wore off. On the floor, he remembered Agent Lee, summoned him, forgave him. On the floor, unable to rise, he was guarded by soldiers even then. On the floor, he said goodbye to his father and Touch the Clouds, the last of the thousands that once followed him. And on the floor, still as far from white men as the limitless continent they once dreamed of, he died. Touch the Clouds pulled the blanket over his face: ‘That is the lodge of Crazy Horse.’ Lying where he chose, Crazy Horse showed the rest of us where we are standing. With his body, he demonstrated that the floor of an Army office was part of the land, and that the land was still his.”