Vegetarian Settlement Company

Allen County, Kansas

By Pete Dulin

Concern loomed like a thunderhead in this untamed place. Miriam Davis Colt, her family, and other settlers intended to make their home in the Vegetarian Settlement Company, a planned community within Octagon City envisioned to become a city “of considerable wealth and importance.” Colt’s family arrived on May 12, 1856, at the proposed site in the Territory of Kansas, south of present-day Humboldt.

With the Missouri border in her wake, Colt beholds the vast Kansas Territory and its potential: “A broad green sea of prairie is spread out before us, and in the distance large mounds stretch themselves along the horizon.”

Soon, however, Colt realized the settlement was not developing according to plan. Six years later, she published a detailed memoir titled Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to that Fairy Land, and Its Sad Results.

I drove two hours southwest from Kansas City, Missouri, to see this Fairy Land. A roadside historical marker divulged no secrets. Vegetarian Creek, woodlands, and grassy fields refused to gossip. Time, heartbreak, and death have eroded the imagined potential of this land.

Promissory plans for the Vegetarian Settlement Company originated in 1855 in New York City. A circular proclaimed that morally pure families could raise and educate children at the settlement away from “vice, vicious company, vicious habits of eating and drinking, and other contaminations of old cities.” Colt’s family and other investors sent significant funds, life’s savings for some, to underwrite the development, based on the circular and correspondence with company directors.

Unspoiled prairie and woodland suitable for settlement, farming, and investment near the Neosho River was only part of the allure. Colt believed her family would find community “with people whose tastes and habits will coincide with our own.”

Colt, her husband John, their young son and daughter, her sister, and her husband’s parents departed in mid-April. Traveling weeks from upstate New York led them to Kansas City. Oxen pulled supply wagons ten days toward the promised land. Arriving at nightfall, Colt’s rain- soaked party encountered men and women at the site cooking supper over a campfire and living in tents and wagons.

“The ladies tell us they are sorry to see us come to this place; which plainly shows that all is not right,” wrote Colt. Their lament was a harbinger of struggles ahead.

Settlers found no purported development or shelter from “furious prairie winds” and “terrific storms.” They ground corn with hand mills. Without a sawmill, they cut timber to fashion crude log cabins.

Summer’s blistering heat and plentiful mosquitos battered the spirits of these starving settlers. The river and creek yielded scarce, undrinkable water. Fever caused by malaria led to illness and death. Foraging, subsistence farming, and the generosity of distant neighbors provided meager sustenance. Colt wrote that Osage tribe members took tools and housewares and raided field crops. News of Kansas-Missouri border ruffians to the north spurred concerns.

Colt and her family abandoned the stillborn community four months later. Her sister and in-laws remained behind and died within months. Colt wrote on September 2, 1856, “We start out upon the world again. Many a dark shade has passed over us since last Spring.”

When I visited the settlement site, spring was still a month away. Bluebell, bloodroot, and prairie larkspur have yet to bloom. This soil was once fertile enough to plant dreams. What happens when fragile hope withers and roots immersed in the prairie do not take?

Colt’s experience prompts wonderment at my own mother’s uprooting and journey.

She met and married my father, a U.S. soldier stationed at a base near her home in central Thailand. Mom left her family, friends, and rural village in the early Sixties and emigrated to Kansas City, Kansas.

Love, hope, and opportunity do not fill an immigrant’s pockets. Wayfinding in life involves unexpected outcomes and consequences. Bearings may be lost along the path chosen.

Mom arrived at an unfamiliar place. Routines formed with each word spoken and decision made, and the fog of how little she knew slowly lifted. Understanding bloomed, its tender roots sunk into non-native soil.

She gradually learned English, earned citizenship, and acclimated to American customs. My parents eventually moved out of my grandparents’ home, bought a house in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised four children.

What happens when dreams exact unthinkable personal cost?

Colt and her beleaguered family stopped in Boonville, Missouri, en route to the “known world.” Her husband John, 40, and son Willie, 10, suffered from fever, malnourishment, and likely malaria. Willie died on September 24, three weeks after leaving the settlement. John perished on October 4, cradled in the “cold embrace of death.” Colt buried them, returned to New York, and bought a five-acre lot.

My mother remained entrenched despite life’s unpredictable storms – divorce, the death of a son, tangled family ties near and far, and health issues prompting thoughts of her mortality and legacy.

What happens when choices and consequences become uneasy cousins?

Colt and fellow settlers faced stark choices. Shed the weight of sunk costs, sever the cumbersome tether of hope? Colt sharpened her survival skills against the grindstone of trial and trauma.

She chose how to lead the remainder of her life, persevering to raise her daughter Mema, publish her tale for income, and establish a home and farm. Her memoir closed with a prayer to “have grace to bear all the remaining reverses that may come in my pathway.”

Footsteps from the past can no longer be heard. The settlement represents more than the sum of broken dreams. Their unrealized vision still exudes the faint residue of reality, a premise to ponder on our journey.

The territory is not new, only our presence on it. Leaving this land and thirsty creek bed, I deposit questions like seeds in soil foreign to me.

What remains when we depart a place? The lips of John and Willie offer no answers. Perhaps my mother knows.

Colt’s story implies that we eventually abandon the place we sought to settle. We will exit the land and return to earth. Death awaits, an assured outcome.

Until then, I am a vessel of my own making. I choose what to carry, what to leave behind. No oxen in sight. My wagon bears hope and conviction, fear and wonder, loss and what remains, grief, sorrow, some fortitude.

Our words and our will, they form within us, born of the same substance, depositing, eroding, ever shifting.

February wind blows against me. I head in that direction and return home, unsettled.

Pete Dulin is the author of Expedition of Thirst: Exploring Breweries, Wineries, and Distilleries Across the Heart of Kansas and Missouri, Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland, KC Ale Trail, and Last Bite, and is currently working on his next book. A professional writer for more than 20 years, Pete’s work has appeared in many print and online publications. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

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Rock Springs Ranch

Junction City, Kansas

By Macy Davis

Niki Smith never names Kansas in The Golden Hour. She doesn’t need to. Every page of the 2021 graphic novel shows Kansas. It starts with the cover, which looks through wheat in the foreground to kids on a hay bale, the county fair in the background, a golden sunset lighting the scene. A few pages into the book, a Kansas state highway sign brings the reader directly into northeast Kansas. Many chapters end with landscapes dotted with cattle. A girl from Eudora wins the bucket calf event at the county fair. The main character, Manuel Soto, even fills out a form which clearly names “Douglas County” at the top. But the linchpin in this Kansas story is when Manuel and his friends go to agriculture club camp at White Springs Ranch.

The real-life White Springs Ranch is called Rock Springs Ranch, and it’s the Kansas State 4-H Camp, owned and operated by the Kansas 4-H Foundation. As a 12-year Kansas 4-H member, that last 15 miles of the drive, after you turn south from Junction City, was always the most exciting for me. My county extension agents hauled vans full of kids across the state, and even with a stop in Junction City, we were ready to be out of the car for good as we drove that last stretch, leaving behind the relative flat-land of U.S. Highway 77 to dip down into the creek bottoms. This small change made Rock Springs feel just different enough that you could forget you weren’t that far from home. When I read The Golden Hour for the first time, I gasped when Manuel and his friends got off the bus at camp. Then I immediately recommended this book to many of my 4-H friends, because Smith’s White Springs Ranch is clearly Rock Springs.  The name White Springs alone convinced me, but my favorite detail is the illustrations of the rings of cabins surrounding picnic tables and a bathhouse sheltered by trees. I felt like I should be unrolling my sleeping bag, tossing on a swimsuit, and getting ready to chow down on s’mores.

Manuel and his friends don’t spend long at White Springs, just a few pages really. Manuel ends up leaving camp early after the sounds of gunfire from the rifle range trigger his PTSD from witnessing a school shooting. Throughout the book, Manuel uses photography to ground himself in moments of anxiety. Often, he photographs the Kansas landscape, but the photos he captures of camp primarily focus on his friends and the fun they’re having.

The camp photos are on a two-page spread, highlighting the joy of the experience without a trace of the black and white shading or fractured yellow line work through which Smith indicates Manuel’s panic. For Manuel, camp represents freedom and friendship, which are both big steps after the trauma he experienced. To go away to camp for four days, Manuel worked with his therapist and his mom to determine he was ready. Even with its less-than-ideal ending, Smith captures just how meaningful a few days at 4-H camp can be.

Summer camp offers kids a space of freedom. It’s a place rife with new experiences and activities, and one full of new people who don’t know you. At camp, you can test boundaries and try out new elements of identity without the oversight of your family. That makes any camp special, but 4-H camps are unique, not least because their typically shorter sessions mean they serve far larger quantities of campers than the average overnight camp. It’s estimated that 1.5 million Kansans have camped at Rock Springs since the 1940s.

Graphic novels have a unique burden of proof in depictions of setting, particularly when representing real places, because they can show the whole picture, rather than just relying on the reader to supplement written descriptions with their own imagination or prior knowledge. It’s either right, or it misses the mark. Smith’s White Springs Ranch captures not just the look of Rock Springs but the feeling of being a camper there.

As a children’s librarian, I’m well aware of the underrepresentation of nuanced experiences of rural life in children’s literature. Urban and suburban kids are oversaturated with depictions of their lives, while rural kids may only see historical fiction or books that tell them the places they’re from are places to escape. I don’t feel like I ever saw Kansas or my lifestyle represented in contemporary fiction when I was a kid reading everything I could get my hands on. As much as I love historical fiction, it’s not the same.

The scholarship of children’s literature often relies on Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s argument that children should be able to find mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in literature. Bishop explains, “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” The growing rural-urban divide makes it essential that representation of rural areas be presented with depth and compassion. Smith’s graphic novel counteracts outdated, negative images and depicts rurality as it is.

My favorite Rock Springs memory is when one of my friends from a different county and I made up goofy choreography to the song “Pour Some Sugar on Me” at the Kansas Youth Leadership Forum when we were in high school — choreography we continued to utilize through college when we both ended up living in Alpha of Clovia 4-H Cooperative Leadership House at K-State. Manuel’s friendships and experiences in agriculture club remind me of my own experiences as a 4-H member embracing spontaneity and forming relationships that continued beyond the boundaries of Rock Springs.

Smith is a former 4-Her herself (even naming Manuel’s hometown after her 4-H club), and her use of Rock Springs as part of Manuel’s story offers rural youth positive representation that speaks to a specific experience while nonetheless representing a broad audience. After all, there are approximately 15,000 4-H members in Kansas. If this is a story that I, an adult almost 10 years removed from my 4-H experience, felt seen by, I can only imagine how young readers will feel. Even with the trauma Manuel experiences, he finds stability in the landscape, making The Golden Hour a love letter to a Kansas childhood.

Macy Davis is a proud Kansas 4-H alumna, Boston-based children’s librarian, and poet. She holds both a Masters in Library and Information Science and a Masters in Children’s Literature from Simmons University. Her work has been published in the I-70 Review and Wizards in Space. She spends her time reading, writing, planning storytime, and starting too many craft projects.

 Photo courtesy of the Kansas 4-H Foundation.

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In the first of eight essays, Menkedick writes of the travel and experience that defined her twenties: trekking across South America, teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Réunion Island, picking grapes in France and witnessing a revolution in Mexico. In later essays, she explores how this period of willful rootlessness gives way to a longing for a more internal mapping of self, family and the drive to create. This transition, and consequent personal transformation where her life “flops outside in,” is catalyzed by a return to a 19th century cabin on her family’s farm in Ohio, and her pregnancy with her first child. Surprised by her own longing for the comfort of the familiar, Menkedick makes sense of her experience by referring to the homing instincts of other living beings: loggerhead turtles, spiny lobsters, cats and even dung beetles. This quest for home is conveyed as inevitable and innate; the result of an indefinable but irresistible wholeness that home offers.

The moment of transition between youth and adulthood can be challenging ground to tread without descending into tropes or essentialisms. Menkedick accomplishes this with a keen awareness and a sincere voice that captures the internal dilemmas of a generation of women carving out family, professional and artistic roles in a “post-feminist” world. This means shaking off the baggage of fixed gender roles and maternal martyrdom, and coming to understand motherhood as a radically intentional identity rather than a compulsory one. In Menkedick’s words, it is an act of “transcendence rather than capitulation,” where family and home mean an expression of, rather than the sacrifice of, one’s “entire life and self.”

This attention to the quotidian, and where it fits in the larger universe of humanity’s desires and questions is a front on which Menkedick exercises a strong feminist voice that does not shy away from its own critique. Her reflections are suffused with the writing of other authors and spiritual philosophers such as Louise Erdich, Annie Dillard, and D.T. Suzuki, whose words offer a cadence to her own learning of self and wholeness.

It is possible to feel this contemplative space emerge on the page, just as one feels the changing of Ohio seasons, and the prayer-like comfort of daily walks through the woods. Menkedick’s attention to the nuances of landscape mirrors the internal terrain she traverses in her work. In the early essays she writes of the way that ideas about self and purpose are reshaped through the experience of pregnancy – at once transformative and completely ordinary. In returning to her husband’s home in Oaxaca, Mexico she comes to recognize Ohio as her own Motherland, made in “ritual, attention and affection.” In other essays she reflects on the experience of pregnancy as a “wilderness of waiting” in a state of altered attention, and her relationship with her grandmother, whose life speaks to the nature and meaning of the stories we tell.

In the early pages Menkedick does make some assumptions about the universality of her experience of home, going as a means of coming of age. Certainly not everyone is able to circle the globe before an inevitable return to the nest, nor does everyone have a nest to return to, nor does everyone “couple up, go to graduate school, launch careers.” But despite these problematic generalizations, Menkedick engages with the most enduring and mysterious of questions (life, purpose, art) in beautifully wrought, deeply embodied prose. Among the revelations of motherhood is a new respect for women’s knowledge, “for all of the seemingly tiny, insignificant tasks women have performed throughout thousands of years in relationship with the world around them in the sustenance of life… a knowledge carried in the bodies of women.” Within her essays, home for Menkedick emerges in these experiences of motherhood, the unrelenting physicality and present-ness of which strips away much of the internally imposed pressure to continually assert herself as untethered; belonging everywhere and nowhere.

She accomplishes this though without fetishizing the domestic, and with an honesty about the contradictions she finds herself constantly negotiating: home versus the road, the daily work of mothering versus single-minded devotion to her craft. Rather than professing a bleary-eyed and blissful transformation and transcendence, she is attentive to the ways that the daily rituals of motherhood imprint themselves on the body, and accompany the steady emergence of a knowledge that is at once spiritual and profoundly material. Motherhood is a means by which she is able to situate herself and her experience within the broader world.

The final essays are the most compelling, with the birth of her daughter, her early experiences of mothering and the way that the total immersion of parenthood makes her see her father, who raised her, in a new and tender light. These essays are haunting and evocative. Here, as in the rest of the book, she wrestles with essential questions without providing myopic answers.

The text as a whole resonates with the sense of “heady, dreamy immersion” Menkedick says she’s come to seek in her work over a more rigidly defined purpose. Indeed, she herself offers the best synopsis of Homing Instincts when she writes in her final essay, “I want to feel the world called up, depicted in its contradictions and coincidences and complex schemas. I want to merge with it, with its mystery.”

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H House

Comstock, Michigan

By Lisa DuRose

The Kalamazoo River flows right through the center of Comstock, Michigan, behind the library and township hall and the 24-hour gas station. Past Merrill Park where people feed bread to ducks. It floods every spring, drowning the playground equipment. Comstock was never on my “must see” list, but Bonnie Jo Campbell convinced me otherwise.

As Bonnie and I trudged through the late spring mud, twisting through tall oaks and cherry trees, we arrived at the site of Bonnie’s childhood home, where her mother, Susanna Campbell, greeted us. Built in the shape of an H (to represent the first letter of Bonnie’s maternal grandfather’s last name, Herlihy), the house appeared like a spacious cabin, set in the deep woods. Once inside, we sat on an enormous worn couch, an occasional leaf poking out behind cushions, the artificial boundary between the outside and inside blurring in the springtime afternoon sun. The high ceilings and huge wooden beams accented the 4-by-10 picture windows, one of which overlooked a creek. Susanna entertained us with stories about her house (the expansive ranch-style cottage was built by her father in 1947), her animals (milk cows, horses, donkeys, pigs, goats, and chickens), and raising her five kids as a single mother. Stacks of magazines, books, and newspapers occupied a large portion of the room, which was warmed by tongue-and-groove wood paneling, a limestone brick chimney, and a wood-burning stove. Susanna seemed to know everyone in Comstock — store owners, local contractors, township officials, the postmaster — her connections stretching as far as the creek beside her house.

While the rural aspects of Comstock felt unfamiliar to me, having grown up in a working-class urban neighborhood in Saint Paul, Susanna’s stories rang true. That walking tour and Bonnie’s deep connections to the place evoked a sense of home in me during a time of pervasive homesickness. I was attending graduate school at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, just a few miles west of Comstock, and, when I arrived in August 1993, I couldn’t have been more disappointed.  Everything felt lackluster and limited — the restaurant choices, the bookstores, the queer community.  I was a 22-year-old snob from the Twin Cities who disguised my homesickness in the veil of cultural arrogance. And so, it was easy for me to dismiss the appeal of a place like Comstock. I suppose I just needed the right tour guide. 

One day in 1995, in the hallway outside my office, Bonnie appeared — a six-foot tower of cheerfulness and good humor. She struck a deep contrast to the rest of our graduate student flock, panicking over workshops and papers and commiserating about difficult students.  Bonnie had just abandoned her sensible plan to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics and — with the encouragement of her mathematics professor — decided to pursue her life-long passion to write.  She had already shed her doubt and misery, crying over mathematical proofs. Now here she was, confidently landing back on the familiar soil of southwest Michigan. Bonnie would spend the next three years in Western’s MFA program, transforming family stories, town legends, and her razor-sharp observations on Comstock into her first major publication: Women and Other Animals (1999), a collection praised by Publishers Weekly, for its portrayal of “misfits in middle America’s economic and social fringe with subtle irony, rich imagery and loving familiarity, describing domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread.”

Getting a glimpse into Comstock — its modest, sometimes dilapidated homes, occasional dirt roads, ponds, woodlands, and railroad tracks — and meeting the formidable Susanna, any observer could see that the spark and material for Bonnie’s writing lay right in front of her, ready for her to harness.  A passage from her 2011 novel Once Upon a River demonstrates how carefully she depicts the impact of local industry upon the rural beauty of southwest Michigan: “They all fished the snags at the edge of the river for bluegills, sunfish and rock bass, though they avoided the area just downstream of the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, where a drainpipe released a mixture of wastewater, machine oil, and solvents into the river — some of the fish there had strange tumors, bubbled flesh around their lips, a fraying at their gills. On certain windy days, the clay-colored smoke from the shop wafted along the river, reached them on their screen porches, and even when they closed their windows, the smoke entered their houses through the floorboards and the gaps around their doors.”

Decades since her first publication, Bonnie has remained steadfast in her devotion to write accurately and lovingly about places like Comstock and the people who occupy these rural spaces. Her novels and short story collections, including the National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009), are inspired by Comstock’s landscape and industry. And nearly every character she has crafted, including those from her forthcoming novel The Waters (W.W.Norton, October 2023), emerges from a rural Michigan terrain.

On a recent trip to Comstock, I would have astonished my 22-year-old self: nostalgia washed over me. I arrived in late spring, into the lush green Michigan landscape, lodging at the Campbell homestead, guarded by donkeys Jack and Don Quixote. The presence of Susanna Campbell, who died of cancer in September 2020, still presides. H House, as Bonnie now calls it, has undergone some major cleaning and restoration. She hopes to transform the house, and its eight-acre lot, into a retreat for writers, musicians, and artists. A few yards from the house, just under a patch of pawpaw trees, Bonnie has set two memorial stones, one for Susanna and one for Susanna’s sister Joanna, who died in 2019. “She loved & was loved & she read a lot of books” is inscribed on Susanna’s stone — so fitting for a mother who inspired a writer who sings the songs of Comstock and its people.

Lisa DuRose is the co-editor of Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell (MSU Press, 2023) and a faculty member at Inver Hills Community College where she teaches in the English department. Despite earnest efforts to become a New Yorker in her twenties, she resides in Saint Paul, just two miles from where she was born. She now visits Comstock annually and is writing a biography of Campbell.

Photo by Christopher Magson, a Boston native who moved to Michigan for the parking and wildlife and stayed for his wife, Bonnie.

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River Cabin
Blackhawk Island, WI

By Shanley Wells-Rau

I was the solitary plover

a pencil

______for a wing-bone

What more solitary place than a small off-grid cabin on an island that’s not really an island jutting into a lake that’s not really a lake. The cabin was a writing sanctuary for Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), said to be America’s greatest unknown poet, who will forever be linked to Blackhawk Island in southeast Wisconsin.

Look at Blackhawk Island on a map and you’ll see it’s actually more of a peninsula that points into what is called Lake Koshkonong, an open water area that is really just the Rock River being messy all over its flood plain. The river likes to outstretch itself and in its flood-prone ways created a recreational haven for boaters and fishers.

Placed less than 100 feet from the Rock River, Niedecker’s cabin was bought as a kit from a catalog and assembled by her father in 1946. He sited it closer to the road than the river in hopes of preventing displacement during the regular floods of spring. Elevated on concrete feet, the 20×20 one-room house hovers over four cement steps. The front and only door faces east, away from the river, as if to shrug off the idea of annual flooding. This one room contained her life: bed, books, table, typewriter, sink, pencils, hand-held magnifying glass. With no running water, she hauled buckets as needed from her parents’ house across the road. That was the house she grew up in. The house she needed to escape.

Her father, a congenial carp seiner and fisherman’s guide who was inept with finances, was carrying on an affair with a married neighbor close in age to his daughter. This neighbor and her husband were milking Henry Niedecker of property and money. Her mother, Daisy, had lost her hearing after her only child’s birth and turned her head away from her husband. Her “big blind ears” couldn’t hear what her eyes couldn’t see. A lifetime of fighting flood mud, “buckled floors,” and increasing poverty seem to have settled around her like a mourning shawl.

Niedecker left the area a few times—for college until the family’s finances made her quit (early 1920s), for artistic and romantic companionship with a fellow poet in NYC (early 1930s), for work as a writer and research editor for the WPA in Madison (1938-1942), and finally for Milwaukee in 1963 when she married a man who lived and worked there. But that spit of land brought her back after each exodus. Once married, Niedecker and her husband, Al Millen, returned to the river every weekend, eventually building a cottage riverside just steps from her cabin. They moved into the cottage for good in 1968 when Millen retired. Niedecker lived there until her death on Dec. 31, 1970.

In the opening lines of her autobiographical poem “Paean to Place,” Niedecker submerges herself deep inside a location she said she “never seemed to really get away from.”

Fish

____fowl

________flood

____Water lily mud

My life

____

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

_________________born

____

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

Painted green when built, the cabin today is chocolate brown. Sturdy wood, unfinished inside. A brass plaque by the door shines with the lines: “New-sawed / clean-smelling house / sweet cedar pink / flesh tint / I love you.” Her signature is embossed below. When I visited, it was hot and dry. The riverside window was open, allowing a breeze to push stifling July heat into the plywood corners. A lovely space. I could see myself writing there. I told myself I could even manage life with “becky,” as she called her outhouse.

It’s not hard to imagine the constant cleanup from the river’s yearly ice melt and flooding. Tall maples and willows accustomed to watery life block the sun over a dirt yard that would easily mud with rain. The only access to sunshine seemed to be on the riverbank or in a boat on the river itself. The tree canopy jittered with life, a “noise-storm” as Niedecker once wrote to a friend. I looked to see what birds were holding conference, hoping to meet one of the famous plovers so linked to her work. I saw none. Just movement, shadows, and chittering, and I thought of her technique to overcome her own failing eyesight by memorizing bird song. She could see birds as they took flight. Sitting still, they were invisible to her except through their calls and conversations with one another.

I grew in green

slide and slant

_____of shore and shade

Neighbors saw her walking, always walking, stopping to peer in close at some flowering plant. She bent in—nose distance—to see past her own bad eyesight. Before her marriage to Millen, she worked as a hospital janitor in Ft. Atkinson. Her failing eyes required that she work with her body, no longer able to serve as a librarian’s assistant as she did in in the late 1920s or a magazine proofreader as in the late 1940s. Her eyesight wouldn’t allow her to drive. If a ride wasn’t available, she walked the four miles to work. Four miles home again.

Out-of-place electric guitar riffs float past underbrush the afternoon of my visit. Someone is listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” seemingly not at peace with bird song or tree breeze. The blaring music makes me think of Lorine’s struggle with disrespectful vacationers and rude neighbors. She persisted in centering poetry inside her hardworking life in a community slowly turning blue-collar loud. Her neighbors didn’t know she was writing her way into the poetry canon.

The current owners are descendants of the couple who bought the property in 1986 from Millen’s estate. They kindly allow poets on pilgrimage, and they seem to care lovingly for the property. As I walked to the river to meet it up close, the owner appeared with a genial greeting. He asked if I’d noticed the 1959 flood marks on the wall inside the cabin. I hadn’t. Eagerly, he guided me back to Niedecker’s “sweet cedar pink” to show me that and other details. After friendly conversation, I decided to head back to town. I didn’t need to meet the river up close. I’ve already met it many times in her poetry.

After a career in the oil industry, Shanley Wells-Rau earned her MFA in poetry at Oklahoma State University, where she served as an editorial assistant for Cimarron Review. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming in The Maine Review, Bluestem Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and Plants & Poetry, among others. She teaches literature and writing for OLLI and OSU and lives with her husband and a clingy dog outside town on a windy hill, where she wanders the prairie to visit with native flora and fauna.

_____

For further reading, digital archives, and more, please visit the Friends of Lorine Niedecker. Special thanks to Amy Lutzke, who spent a very hot day driving me around and showing me Niedecker’s personal library.

Photograph by Jim Furley, April 1979. Permission granted by Dwight Foster Public Library.

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Smith Lake Camp
Herman, MI

By Ray E. Boomhower

Writing about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in his classic regional history Call It North Country (1944), John Bartlow Martin described the expanse as “a wild and comparative Scandinavian tract—20,000 square miles of howling wilderness on the shores of Lake Superior.” Like numerous fishermen, hunters, and hikers before him, Martin was attracted to the UP by its “magnificent waterfalls, great forests, high rough hills, long stretches of uninhabited country, abundant fish and game.”

From his introduction to the region in the summer of 1940, selecting it as a suitably remote site for a honeymoon, to Martin’s death in 1987, the reporter, freelance writer, diplomat, and Democratic presidential speechwriter found himself drawn, again and again, by the UP’s quirky charms. As he warned would-be tourists: “You will have to do nearly everything for yourself. The region is not geared to make your visit painless.” The lack of modern conveniences and the clannishness of the locals could be maddening, he pointed out in Call It North Country (tattered, well-thumbed copies of which can still be found on bookshelves in many UP cabins), but if an outsider adjusted his thinking and fit into the region’s ways, he could find “no better vacation spot.”

The UP, however, became more than just a regular tourist stop for Martin. In January 1964 Martin and his wife, Fran, purchased a 180-acre site outside of Herman, Michigan. Not far from the water’s edge on their property they discovered the ruins of an old trapper’s shack, which they used as a temporary shelter. They constructed a camp (as cabins are known in the region) on top of a high, granite cliff sixty feet above the lake. Enormous white pines towered over the hemlocks located on the cliff, sheltering and shading the cabin.

Martin oversaw the construction by Finnish carpenters of a thirty-foot by thirty-foot log cabin with a large living room, kitchen, bedroom, indoor bathroom, and an enormous fireplace built out of fifty tons of native rock. As Martin’s son Dan noted, his father and mother loved “the wildlife, the remoteness, the sense that they were in touch with nature.” His family remembered that Martin did not believe in cutting down trees or their branches on his land, even if they interfered with the view of the lake from the cabin. “If you want to see the lake,” Martin insisted, “go get in the boat and see it.”

During his family’s summer stays Martin fished, tried his hand at carpentry, did some writing, and relaxed in a sauna that later featured the front page of the New York Times announcing the resignation from the presidency of his longtime political foil Richard Nixon. “No television, no telephone, once a week to town for mail,” he said of his routine. The cabin also became a sanctuary for Martin, a place where he could retreat to when tragedy, as it often did in the 1960s, struck, as when his friend Robert F. Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet in June 1968. At night, Martin, when troubled, could look up and see the Milky Way, appearing like “a white river,” with every star “blazing” as he witnessed “man’s satellites slowly tracking across the firmament.”

I decided while working on a biography of Martin that I needed to visit his Upper Peninsula retreat to get a better sense of what this wild place had meant to him. Martin’s daughter, Cindy Coleman, graciously offered to show me the cabin on a visit I made in September 2013, just before it was shuttered for the upcoming winter. I knew I was in the Upper Peninsula when, upon stepping out of the truck to open a gate so we could proceed along a rugged former logging road to the cabin, a large black fly saw its opportunity and delivered a vicious bite to the back of my neck. The spot still hurt when we passed a small, wooden sign with white letters affixed to a tree near the road that read: “J. B. Martin / Smith Lake.”

Reaching the end of the road, I could barely make out Martin’s cabin, nestled as it was among the trees. Although I did not stay long enough to hear coyotes howling in the night as Martin had done, I sat on the screen porch attached to the cabin, enjoying its dark-wood floor, sturdy beams, and simple, rustic furnishings. Relaxing in one of the wooden chairs, I was stunned, at first, to see that, with Martin’s death, there now was a clear view to the lake through the trees. Watching the waves from the porch as the wind rustled the branches of the nearby trees, I reflected that Martin had made all the right choices when it came to his cabin’s location, but maybe, just maybe, had been wrong about the lake view.

Ray E. Boomhower is a senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. He is also the author of more than a dozen books, including Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam, John Bartlow Martin: A Voice for the Underdog, and Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. His next book is about Malcolm Browne, Associated Press Saigon bureau chief in the early 1960s, and his famous photographs of the burning monk.

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Tallgrass Prairie Preserve
Osage County, Oklahoma 

By Mason Whitehorn Powell

“Three ridges roughly boat-shaped push their prows south into the sea of prairie.” The opening lines of Talking to the Moon by Osage author John Joseph Mathews describe the land where he would build a sandstone cabin in 1932 to live out the remainder of his life. Published in 1945, Talking to the Moon is an intimate reflection on the landscape, wildlife, occasional tribal affairs, and seasonal changes that he experienced across this decade.

Mathews named his one-room cabin The Blackjacks, moored by those eponymous native oak trees and harbored by a sea of prairie. The cabin was abandoned after his death in 1979, and his grave remains on the property, which is now surrounded by a fence to keep roaming buffalo off the grounds. The Blackjacks and the land surrounding it were purchased from Mathews’ descendants by The Nature Conservancy in 2014 and, during summer 2020, I toured the cabin digitally, in a virtual event hosted by TNC and the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.

I may have never seen the Blackjacks with my own eyes, but I know the world he describes because I was cut from the same cloth. After serving as a pilot during in World War I, studying at the University of Oklahoma, obtaining a degree in Natural Sciences from Oxford, and roaming around Europe, Mathews grew travel weary and was drawn back to the lands he knew intimately and loved. He returned home to allotted land on the Tallgrass prairie north of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, his birth town.

His words are familiar to me, as an Osage having the same blood quantum as Mathews, raised in Osage County, pulled between tribal traditions and the white influence upon my own life. I also studied in Europe; I met my wife there and lived in Italy for a time before returning to reside in an even older native sandstone building in Hominy, Oklahoma with family allotments not too far from Mathews’ cabin. 

Mathews writes, “My coming back was dramatic in a way; a weight on the sensitive scales of nature, which I knew would eventually be adjusted if I live as I had planned to live; to become a part of the balance.” Structured by and depicting the four seasons, Talking to the Moon is subdivided according to the traditional Osage calendar: moon phases. Everything is structured as so — one only has to look. I write this as the Yellow-Flower Moon fades into Deer-Hiding Moon. Heat enters through my window and I notice that the yellow flowers growing in my yard have closed up. Behind my grandfather’s house, a doe and fawn are beginning to stir on cooler evenings, but the bucks have already vanished as hunters ready themselves.

Under this same moon, Mathews writes of driving to Hominy to meet with the old Osage men, Claremore, Abbot, and Pitts, to have their portraits painted by an artist with the Public Works of Art Project. These portraits are still on display in the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, which Mathews established in 1938. From 1934 to 1942, he sat on the Tribal Council on that same hill rising above downtown Pawhuska, where my mother also served for two terms as an Osage Congresswoman.

My grandfather never met Mathews but tells me about my family’s encounter with him:

“About half those books were given to him by your [great-great-] aunt Magella. When he’d run out of things that weren’t in a book somewhere he could study, or come out of the Catholic Diocese or wherever, then he’d have Magella tell him what had really happened. Where they came from. What families you were talking about.”

He summed up the conversation: “My dad told my aunt, ‘Don’t you be giving him any more information.’”

Mathews and my blind aunt Magella Whitehorn were speaking after the “old ways” were laid to rest during her father’s generation. Mathews and Magella were both born in 1894 in Osage Indian Territory, twenty-two years after our final relocation. She was a full-blood and among the last of those born onto the ground and raised with a bundle, observing the ancient Osage religion.

In the posthumously published autobiography Twenty Thousand Mornings, Mathews writes of his childhood bedroom, from which he “could look down into the valley.” From this vantage point, he could hear Magella’s father and other elders rise before dawn to greet the sun with prayers, which sounds he recounts as “the scar” of “a precocious memory.” Mathews writes, “The prayer-chant that disturbed my little boy’s soul to the depths was Neolithic man talking to god.”

In her youth, Magella was sent to boarding school and pressured to relinquish her traditional Osage identity and status grounded in our ceremonial rites. She did so because her elders said to, and it must have felt like entering an oblivion. Even though Mathews spent a career wrestling with his precocious memory of Osage mysteries — a lifelong attempt to capture and confront the past with words — there remained a painful tension between those who had to leave the old ways behind and those raised to inherit the new world. For Magella, this was a tragic episode. And her brother Sam Whitehorn, my great-grandfather, told her not to speak with Mathews because he viewed her knowledge of the past as family business.

The land speaks in indescribable ways, and our history is mysterious in its abandonment as we are adopted into a new world. It is evident in his writings that Mathews experienced a different Osage County than I know, but my generation still faces many of the same concerns, will pass down similar traditions, and can still fully experience that immutable landscape. A cabin is just a building. That was never the point—rather that it is centered, grounded, embraced by land that knows and accepts us, that is our inheritance despite ongoing changes. Lost traditions survive in both Mathews’ books and family stories such as my own. Mathews knew that Osage history must be preserved, just as land must be conserved, because the two are inseparable.

The more I learn from the rolling hills around me, the more I know about myself. Any time I drive north from Hominy towards Pawhuska, crossing a sea of prairie and islands of blackjacks, I feel at home and overwhelmed by acceptance. I haven’t needed to visit his cabin to know these things, only to truly see nature here, and to listen. When the world allows and in-person tours resume, I hope to step inside Mathews’ cabin. Until then, I have the Osage landscape and my connection to Mathews in our shared culture and his books: “with word symbols as my poor tools, to sweat at the feet of a beauty, an order, a perfection, a mystery far above my comprehension.”

Mason Whitehorn Powell is a freelance journalist based in Oklahoma and Rome, Italy. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, his work often explores Indigenous arts and representation. 

Photo courtesy of Tallgrass Nature Conservancy.

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