"You are a scrawny brown guy!" "No, you are a scrawny brown guy!": Lamb and the Jesus of History

Christopher Moore. Official website. Image found here.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.

This is the first Christopher Moore novel I've read. It comes recommended to me by two people: the Mrs., who is a long-time fan; and my pastor. Talking with them both about both Joseph's absence from the Gospels after the scene with the boy Jesus in the Temple and about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas led both of them to recommend Lamb--the Mrs. because Moore's book covers that territory and because she thinks Moore is funny; my pastor because "it contains some serious Christology." And because he thinks it's funny. Indeed, he told me that if it weren't for the book's profanity, he'd not hesitate to use it as a teaching resource. More on that idea in a minute. As to its artistic merits, I'll just say here, Art this ain't. But it did make me think, which is why I'm posting on it.

As you may have divined from the full title of Moore's book, Lamb is comedic in nature. But the writer has also done his homework so that, in his Afterword, he can tell us what parts are more or less historically/culturally accurate and what parts are more like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Thus, the plot--Biff tells about growing up with Jesus (here, named Joshua or Josh), who is aware that he's the Messiah but has only the vaguest understanding of what that entails (God remains silent on this matter), and so embarks on a journey to India and China to find and obtain some enlightenment from the Wise Men who visited him--is filled with some decent silliness. Examples: While in China, Biff and Josh invent a kind of unarmed self-defense that comes to be called "Jew-do;" also while in China, the boys celebrate Josh's birthday by eating Chinese food, thus establishing another old tradition, this one for Jews if not for Christians.

However, as I read it I was reminded of something one of my college English teachers was fond of saying: "Comedy is deadly serious." And indeed, as I told my pastor, what kept me reading was the fact that Moore explores a question that gets acknowledged doctrinally via the Creeds but is at best glossed over if not simply ignored in the Church: We understand as Christians that Jesus is God's only begotten son, but what are the implications of Jesus' humanity for us in this world? Just how slippery is the slope when we think, for example, Well, Jesus was fully human, so that means he could be tempted to sin--that, for example, he was a man and so, we can assume, felt the desire for physical intimacy with women; or that, when a child he had not only those powers we assume God to have but also a child's tendency toward rash, impulsive behavior when angry. (Regarding this latter, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas assumes those tendencies as givens in the boy Jesus, and one doesn't have to read for very long before one sees why it's not in the canon.) These questions make many of us uneasy: we don't want Jesus to have had a sordid inner life like the one we all have. We say, doctrinally, that he was fully human, but I daresay we don't really believe that (or don't want to believe it, perhaps) because to do so would call into question, even to the point of cancelling out, his divinity. The same is true of the world into which he was born and in which he lived. We tend not to dwell at Christmas time on the fact that, never mind what the Gospels say, Mary's pregnancy had to have been a scandal. It clearly was for Joseph, at least initially; and in the sermon on Mary's visit to Elizabeth and the Magnificat that I heard on the Sunday before Christmas, the pastor said in passing, "And we understand the reason for that visit--the unwed pregnant girl being sent into the country to live with relatives," to which one can only say, Yes: that had to have been the case.

Sometimes it can seem as though we're more comfortable with the fact that Jesus died than that he lived.

Lamb is, it seems, very comfortable with the fact and implications of Jesus' having been a flesh-and-blood human being. It presents the reader with a "Josh" and a world that don't pretend to absolutely rigorous historical fidelity to what we know of the place and time of Jesus' life, but it is not at all shy about dramatizing the general messiness of human life as experienced by all mortals--yes, even the fully-human Son of God, too. Indeed, his life, as imagined by Moore, seems much messier than ours. Moore has Josh remain celibate throughout his life, but he imagines, quite reasonably, that Josh struggles to resist the temptations of various women--in particular, his childhood/adolescent friend Maggie (better known as Mary Magdalene). Moore also has Josh say to Biff that he (Josh) feels he need to know something about sin, the better to preach against it. Josh's solution: to have Biff narrate some of his sexual encounters with women. (Biff, you will not be shocked to learn, is only too willing to oblige.)

Lamb, in other words, is filled with scrawny brown guys (and girls), just as the world of the Jesus of history was. One character, who is blond, is referred to as a "freak" by some of the other characters. Josh's early childhood isn't a beautifully-painted creche. Sure, there's some bawdiness in this novel, but there are also lepers and dogs and dust and Roman soldiers and Pharisees who must be avoided or appeased . . . and a little boy who senses that he is God's son and not Joseph's and therefore has been set apart but has only the vaguest notion of what that means for his life. Joseph knows this, but there's only so much he can do for this boy whom he loves but who exasperates him so much: "You go with Joshua," Joseph tells Biff. "He needs a friend to teach him how to be human. Then I can teach him how to be a man" (17).

I should make clear that Lamb makes no doctrinal claims--that is, the Christ of faith is not its subject. Some events are indeed miracles, in that they aren't explained away, and some are given explanations . . . of a sort. Here, for example, is the walking-on-water scene:

"Master, you're walking on the water," said Peter.

"I just ate," Joshua said. You can't go in the water for an hour after you eat. You could get a cramp. What, none of you guys had mothers?"

"It's a miracle," shouted Peter.

"It's no big deal," Joshua said, dismissing the miracle with the wave of a hand. "It's easy. Really, Peter, you should try it."

[snip]

Then Peter stepped with both feet onto the surface of the water, and for a split second he stood there. And we were all amazed. "Hey, I'm--" Then he sank like a stone. He came up sputtering. We were all doubled over giggling, and even Joshua had sunk up to his ankles, he was laughing so hard.

"I can't believe you fell for that," said Joshua. He ran across the water and helped us pull Peter into the boat. "Peter, you're as dumb as a box of rocks. But what amazing faith you have. I'm going to build my church on this box of rocks."

"You would have Peter build your church?" asked Philip. "Because he tried to walk on the water."

"Would you have tried it?" asked Joshua.

"Of course not," said Philip. "I can't swim."

"Then who has the greater faith?" (390-391)

One could quibble with some of the particulars here, but I'd argue that an attentive reading of the story as told in Matthew reveals no harm done to its essence as a story not of a miracle, but of faith.

In his Epilogue, Moore says something curious in the midst of a paragraph in which he discusses his book's mixture of real and invented scriptural passages and whether or not he should have distinguished them from each other in some way: "The problem arises, however, that if the reader knows the Bible well enough to recognize the real references, there's a good chance that he or she has decided not to read this book" (442). I suppose that that is a fair characterization of some Bible-readers, but I'd hope that it doesn't describe all of them. And in any event, I'd hope that of all the books toward which one might become complacent, the Bible would/should be waaay down toward the bottom of that list. A book like Lamb, though no one will mistake it as a work of serious historical or theological scholarship, nevertheless takes seriously the idea that Jesus really lived and was a human being, and that he lived in a three-dimensional world, an exceedingly complicated one whose complexity the canonical gospels don't always reveal. Reading it, and works like it, makes me less complacent about the Bible and make Jesus feel, well, human even as he wrestles with the burden of knowing that he is also divine. And, for me at least, thinking more about Jesus' humanity makes me feel his divinity all the more powerfully.

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"My own louts": An excerpt from John Graves' Goodbye to a River

Having grown up in Texas, and grown up hearing his name, it's hard for me to gauge how well known John Graves (b. 1920) is outside Texas. The fact that he's been nominated twice for the National Book Award, though, would suggest that he has a reputation in some circles. Anyway, while I was in Austin, the Barnes & Noble I visited happened to have a copy of the book which established Graves' reputation, Goodbye to a River; I don't think I'd ever even seen a copy of it before, so I grabbed it. It's been my bedtime reading for a few days now.

The book's plot is a simple one. In the 1950s, the government proposed a series of dams along 200 or so miles of the Brazos River south and west of Forth Worth, a stretch of river that Graves grew up along and knew well as a boy and a young man. Graves wants to see that stretch one last time, before the impounded water floods the canyons and sand bars and still-untouched stands of oak and elm, so in November of 1957 he loads up a canoe with provisions (more than he really needs--he occasionally uses Thoreau to reproach himself) and a "not very practical" six-month-old daschund and heads downstream. As he relates the incidents of travel, the changing weather and the folks he meets along the way, he also tells the stories he knows about the flora and fauna (both presently there and long gone), the bends and crossings and landmarks.

That's the plot. Here's the book's ethos in a nutshell (the ellipsis is Graves' own):

Nothing that happened in this segment, [during the time of the Comanche raids] or later, made any notable dent in human history. From one very possible point of view, the stories tell of a partly unnecessary, drawn-out squabble between savages and half-illiterate louts constituting the fringes of a culture which, two and a half centuries before, had spawned Shakespeare, and which even then was reading Dickins and Trollope and Thoreau and considering the thoughts of Charles Darwin. They tell too--the stories--of the subsequent squabbles among the louts themselves: of cattle thievery, corn whisky, Reconstruction, blood feuds, lynchings, splinter sectarianism, and further illiteracy.

Can they then have any bearing on mankind's adventures?

Maybe a little. They don't all tell of louts. There was something of a showing-through; meanings floated near the surface which have relevance to the murkier thing Americans have become. It didn't happen just on the Brazos, certainly, but all along the line of that moving brush fire. There's nothing new in the idea that the frontier had continuing impact on our character, or that one slice of that frontier, examined, may to some degree explain the whole . . .

But in truth such gravities were not what salted the tales I could read, looking off over the low country from the point atop the bluffs. Mankind is one thing; a man's self is another. What that self is tangles itself knottily with what his people were, and what they came out of. Mine came out of Texas, as did I. If those were louts, they were my own louts. (143-144)

Only three of the dams were built--due in large part, many say, to this book.

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The "ideology of form" and Go Down, Moses

Hosam Aboul-Ela’s book, Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, begins at the same place Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi does: that it might be useful to read Faulkner not as a Modernist or American writer, but as one whose region has much in common with those of other colonized places of the world, what Aboul-Ela calls the Other South. But whereas Glissant limits his discussion to Faulkner as a Caribbean (or Plantation) writer, Aboul-Ela’s range is more global and more overtly materialist in orientation. He uses the work of Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), a progenitor of (economic) dependency theory as a starting point for articulating a theory of postcolonial experience that originates in those regions rather than in Europe or the United States. He devotes a little over half his book to laying out the resulting “Mariátegui Tradition” before moving on to reading Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) and Absalom, Absalom! through this critical lens.

Given the orientation of the intellectual tradition of the Other South that Aboul-Ela outlines, it’s understandable why he chooses these works to discuss at length: they are the Faulkner novels that lend themselves most readily to such readings, driven as the plots of each are by the arrival in Mississippi of outsiders and their getting and controlling of property and wealth and the attendant power to the benefit of the Few As Possible and the detriment of local folks. But a chapter section entitled “The Ideology of Faulkner’s Form,” his lead-in to his reading of Absalom, Absalom!, made me curious, in connection with some comments I made here, what Aboul-Ela might have to say about the ideology inherent in Go Down, Moses‘ form. So, I once again mount my GDM hobby-horse.

More here.

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A stretch of river L: Navel-lint-gazing. On a brick and a TV show

Richard Estes, Telephone Booths, 1967. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Click to enlarge. Image found here.

I greatly admire photo-realist paintings on an intellectual level: though not a painter myself, I deeply respect the technique and attention to detail--indeed, to the act of seeing--that such paintings require of their makers. But in the end, for me there is something a bit emotionally-chilly about them. They are, by their very nature, dispassionate, closely-, even clinically-observed moments put down on canvas that, in their attention to the scene's surface empiricism, tend to crowd out my attempts to feel an emotional connection to the scene depicted. I don't feel a human face in these paintings--or if one is present, it's turned away from me like those of the callers in Estes' painting. For me, these paintings ultimately are about themselves, their renderings of surface, their getting the plays of light and shadow just so, so it'll look just like a busy row of phone booths somewhere in a Western nation in 1967. While that's fine, when I look into these depictions of halls of mirrors that so many photo-realist paintings are in their essence, I don't see myself in any of those reflecting surfaces, no matter how hard they work to create the illusion that I should be able to.

On the floor by my desk, there's a brick that I occasionally stub my bare toes on. This is not metaphor or allegory: it is there. If I were a touch-typist, I'd be able to look at it as I write these words. (Yeah, yeah: You'll have to trust me on this.) It has made me feel everything from anger at myself for not remembering (again) to move it out of the way to curiosity about its past. For now, I'll put aside considerations of my shortcomings as a housekeeper and concentrate on the latter.

It is one of the thousands of bricks that, along with other fill and debris, was used to build levees and build up low spots along the shoreline of the Little Arkansas over 100 years ago when people began to build residences in this area. One morning this spring, I brought it home with me as Scruffy and I returned home from our walk. My intent was to see if I couldn't find out something, anything, about the brickyard that produced it and see if I couldn't prattle on here about what I found out.

Several toe-stubbings later and with it being almost August, this morning I finally got around to doing a bit of Googling around for an area brickyard, extant or not, with the name Mesch in it. No luck. I have my suspicions that it was used as a paver--it's very heavy for a brick its size (paving bricks are made to be much more dense than bricks used for buildings); one side is smooth and mortarless, and on the other, the name and two raised ridges bracketing the name on either side, along with some traces of mortar (a standard procedure for laying street bricks is/was to set them in mortar)--but beyond that, I cannot make it yield any more information. It is a messenger from the past that, in and of itself, bears no message from that past other than its materiality, its weight and mass, and the place where I found and from which I removed it--which itself is a sort of message (the brick's original intended use, I think it's pretty safe to say, was not levee-building).

None of that is invention. It is attention to these matters, in conjunction and combination with other matters from the past, that are at the essence of what we call History or, as Paul Ricoeur briefly defines it, "reconstructions of the past. . . . [Historians] owe a debt to the past, a debt of recognition to the dead, that makes them insolvent debtors" (Time and Narrative, 3.142-143). This one brick, if I just knew a bit more about it--its maker, the street (or building, as it may be) where it was originally laid, the circumstances that rendered it useless in its original purpose but useful in another--that knowledge would go far in aiding me, an occasional (very) casual historian, in reconstructing the history of my little section of the city of Wichita (once known, I just learned today, as the Peerless Princess of the Plains). This brick, in its small way and many, many degrees of separation later, in part helped make it possible for people to build a building on this site hard by the river from which I can write stuff about this same paving brick's having eroded out of a levee and--oh, the presumption!--presume that you still reading this have decided that that brick might be worthy of a bit of your attention as well (what Ricoeur calls the trace as "sign-effect" (3.120)--the trace in this case being the brick).

So: I look at this brick, grow curious about it, try to find out some things about it, make some reasonable guesses about it, and along with all that drag in a little Ricoeur. Navel-gazing on my part, sure, but I'm also hoping (again, if you've read this far) that some of this might resonate with you as well at some level.

All this brings me to the TV show: Mad Men

It may doubly disqualify me from commenting on this series that I've never seen an episode of it and have no real interest in seeing one. I hasten to add, though, that that's not a judgment as to its quality. But in my meanderings about the blogosphere I keep bumping into commentary on it; and I'm struck by how the topic of discussion in these pieces is, in so many words, "Aside from its fastidious attention to the material and socio-cultural details of the early '60s what does this have to do with me?"

Consider these two observations on the show which I bumped into this morning. The first is by Lance Mannion:

Mad Men is not about the time it's set in, 1960 in Season One, 1962 in Season Two, which begins tonight at 10 EDT on AMC.. The fashions, the trappings, the historical references, the depictions of the, to us, crazy social mores and ridiculously rigid but cartoonish gender roles, the glimpses at the pop culture and fads of the time are meant to place us in an alien world. The Madison Avenue and suburban Ossining are like thos planets on Star Trek where the inhabitants are living as if in Chicago of the 1920s or as if Nazi Germany won World War II or as if the Roman Empire never fell. All the attention to period detail is a trick. We're meant to think of Mad Men as a period piece but creator-producer Matt Weiner and his writers and designers and directors are inventing their own universe in which their are no real people. There are only roles for people to play.

Brendan Bernhard of the NY Sun (via James Wolcott), states things another way:

After all, how many times can you watch the show's star, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), furrow his brow, smoke an herbal cigarette while pretending to smoke a real one, and take a long, pensive pull on a fake alcoholic drink, and convince yourself that this is real drama as opposed to a televised version of an interior decoration magazine?

Yes. I would have said "photorealist painting" instead of "interior decoration magazine," but the ideas is the same: Cultural references as discreetly-deployed throw-pillows. Surface is all. If my meditating on a paving brick is navel-gazing, I get the feeling that watching Mad Men is akin to looking closely at the fibers and colors of the lint collected from the navels of these '60's-era folks. "White cotton! How very early-'60s!" But to what end? If, as Lance says above, it's the intention of "creator-producer Matt Weiner and his writers and designers and directors [to invent] their own universe in which their are no real people," then the makers of Mad Men aren't reconstructing the '60s--they are constructing it, which isn't the same thing as "a debt of recognition to the dead." The show ends up being a celluloid trompe l'oeil that no one contained in it is interested in examining and interrogating (which is, like, you know, what thinking human beings do to their environment from time to time) and thus leaves nothing for the viewer to do but admire. That, of course, is something, and not to be dismissed lightly either. But after a while, I'd think it wouldn't be enough.

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Semi-tangentially, Zunguzungu has a thoughtful meditation on his recent bike-trip along the C&O Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage and the (re)constructions of history he observed along the way. Well worth a visit over at his place, if you have some time to spare.

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Telling choices: Some musing on the writing (and reading) of history

A grass house typical of Wichita Indians, painted by George Catlin, 1834. Image found here.

Some of you may remember this post, now almost a year old, in which I compared and contrasted the contents of two brief paragraphs from different sources that cover those years in the 1860s in which the Wichita Indians began their dealings with the first white settlers in this area: the years that led to the founding of Wichita. While I hadn't forgotten about picking up the tale, I just hadn't gone back to it.

Today, though, while Googling about for something entirely else, I ran into the Official Site of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. It has a page devoted to the history of the tribes, from which the text below is taken.

Although a reservation and agency were established, the Wichita people were not able to remain in this land [west-central Oklahoma]. In 1863, they were forced by Confederate troops to leave their reservation and flee north to Kansas. While in Kansas from 1863 to 1867, the Wichitas had no land to farm and few friends to help them in their time of trouble. Many people starved. Others suffered from smallpox and cholera epidemics that swept through their villages. Only 822 people returned to Indian Territory in 1867.

The "musing" part is below the fold.

With this third text we can set up a continuum of the descriptions, their placement determined by their respective contents' emphasis on Indian-white relations. The City of Wichita site's text is focused more on the early white settlers in the area, chiefly on "their" first industry of the cattle trade. The tribe's account focuses on the Indians, in particular on its forced removals to and from the Wichita area and on its hunger, impoverishment and disease--though in some ways (such as not mentioning the plaque's detail about Skeleton Creek) it is muted in its recounting of that suffering. The plaque in the park occupies the middle position, though--unsurprisingly, given that the plaque is titled "Wichita Indians"--its frame of reference is more Indian-oriented. The tribal history and the plaque both mention that suffering; the plaque and the city's history both mention the cattle trade.

Three narratives of the same short span of time and small space which do not agree with each other in all particulars. I have no way of knowing which of these narratives provides the truest account of those years; and even if I did know, I'm not at all interested in playing a game of historical "gotcha." Also, it's obvious that it's not the intention of any of these accounts to offer exhaustive narratives of that time. Still, here in miniature, we can see something at work: what to include or leave out, and why, are the two basic questions all historiographers must constantly confront when writing history (and, for that matter, every blogger who decides to say a little something about his or her day or childhood or what have you). Michel de Certeau, in his book The Writing of History, describes that dynamic in the Introduction:

In the past from which it [that is, the "present" in which a historiographer works] is distinguished, it promotes a selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present intelligibility. But whatever this new understanding of the past holds to be irrelevant--shards created by the selection of materials, remainders set aside by an explication--comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies: "resistances," "survivals," or delays discreetly perturb the pretty order of a line of "progress" or a system of interpretation. These are lapses in the syntax constructed by a law of a place. Therein they symbolize a return of the oppressed, that is, a return of what, at a given moment, has become unthinkable in order for a new identity to become thinkable. (4)

de Certeau's putting things thusly drives home something that it can be easy to forget regarding the production of historical narratives: that, being narratives, their writers have to make decisions not only on what to include or exclude, they also must decide how to talk about that which they include. As just one example, the two texts that refer to the cattle trade talk about it in very different ways. Why their authors made those choices in their respective tellings, I cannot say, beyond that those choices are just as interesting to speculate on as why the Wichita tribes' website makes no mention of the cattle trade.

Just as Mark Twain famously wrote that the man with one watch always knows what time it is but that the one with two watches is never sure, I find myself today, having acquired a third brief paragraph describing the same material in very distinct ways, being still more uncertain as to the truth of that time. Is that truth not in any one text but in the accretion and distillation of their contents and that of others I will find and read? Well, yes. But as de Certeau points out by implication, a history by its very nature cannot be all-inclusive, or it will be unintelligible. Therefore, to be true to one's subject (broadly defined), even that historiographer most desirous to be an honest broker must, inevitably, commit numerous betrayals.

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A stretch of river XXXVIII: In which Scruffy and the Meridian read some history, with an assist from Richard Slotkin

Keeper of the Plains, which stands on the point where the Little Arkansas empties into the Arkansas

History sleeps all around us here on the banks of the Little Arkansas. Some of it is prettied up for us--case in point is the sculpture you see here, now the center of a beautifully-landscaped plaza and located just a hairpin bend in the Little Arkansas away from where I write these words. Some is not as pretty but intriguing nonetheless, like the old brick I noticed the other day gradually eroding its way out of the raised embankment on the top of which Scruffy and I walk our daily walk; it led me to wonder what downtown building had met its demise well over a century ago, it must have been, judging by the size of the trees that grow out of the embankment now, in order to contribute to the greater good of safeguarding the houses along the river from floods.

Well--maybe "sleeps" isn't quite the word. It's more like, History is here, but those managing it have done their best not to call attention to it, lest it unsettle us unduly. The new plaza celebrates Indian culture but makes almost no mention of the coming of the Spaniards and, later, Americans: it is Chamber-of-Commerce-friendly, touchy-feely History, made physically easy to consume as well by virtue of the two pedestrian suspension bridges spanning each river to convey people to the plaza. Riverside Park has a 1/4-mile running track with plaques at various intervals that denote milestones in the park's history beginning in the late 1870s--it quite literally is white people's history. However, in a reach back to prehistoric times, the park also has a working solar calendar¹. But you won't find any direct mention of the Indians in the park except for a marker of 171 words which, though writ small, nevertheless bridges the historical void created by the reticences of the plaza, the park's history and the solar calendar.

I'd made note of that marker before here at good old Blog Meridian and even promised to return to it, but other things led me away from it. But a few days ago I read this over at Jimmy's place, The New York Minute, and the memory of that marker stirred in me--so much so that this morning Scruffy and I actually did a little of what one could call Research on our walk. In my mind, I invited Richard Slotkin to join us. Slotkin, I think you'll find, is a most appropriate companion for this initial journey into the history of my little stretch of domesticated river.

Below the fold: What we encountered, on foot and online, as we searched for the Encounter.

Here again is the text of the marker:

In 1864, about 1500 Wichita Indians, favoring the Union, returned to their ancestral lands and settled along the Little Arkansas River which offered protection from the Confederate tribes until the Civil War ended. The Wichita Indians (consisting of Wichitas, Wacos, Towacanis, Taovayas, and Kechis) are credited with the founding of Wichita. Aside from lending their name, which means "scattered lodges," it was their supply needs that brought traders and eventually settlers. Because of the war, food and supplies for the Indians were meager. This lead [sic] to an illegal yet profitable cattle trade and the development of the Chisolm Trail to connect Wichita and Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). When the Civil War was over, the Indians were ordered to relocate to Oklahoma in October. They were not given ample supplies and their trek was devastating. So many died along the way that Skeleton Creek was named after them. In 1927, the Wichita Indians built a grass lodge on Mead Island (near 13th) as an expression of goodwill to the citizens of Wichita.

I still vividly recall the sensation of reading that last sentence and feeling pulled up short, frankly not sure whether to laugh or weep. You don't have to be an especially attentive reader to note that, apart from their being permitted to resettle in the area during the Civil War, the previous sentences are pretty thin on expressions of goodwill toward the Wichita. All this seems especially bitter given the fact that the Wichita's presence here is given credit for being the reason the first cattle drives began--a period of history that this part of the state still invokes with enormous pride. But in all that invocation, at least that which I have heard over the years, the Wichita merit nary a mention . . . except on this marker--and (here is the bitterness) then only to serve, pretty much, as capitalistic cannon-fodder.

To be fair to the first white settlers, the Wichita were, by the 1860s, already in serious decline as a people, as the Wikipedia article makes clear. But I think it's accurate to say that events of the latter half of the 1860s made more precipitous that decline.

In doing some further reading after we returned from our walk, I came across the "Wichita History" page of the City of Wichita's official website. What follows is the paragraph that covers the span of time covered by the marker in the park:

The first recorded permanent settlement was a collection of grass houses built in 1863 by the Wichita Indians. Due to the tribe’s pro-Union sentiment in the midst of the Civil War, the Wichita moved north from Indian Territory (Oklahoma) under the protection of the U.S. government. J. R. Mead, among others, established profitable businesses trading with the Wichita and supplying the government agency charged with their protection. When the region’s native peoples were "removed" to Indian Territory in 1867 to open the area for white settlement, the trading business followed them, using the Wichita site as a base and establishing the Chisholm Trail as a route of transport.

A little comparing and contrasting of these two city-sanctioned texts reveals some intriguing interstices where the joins between them are less than snug:

*The marker calls the cattle trade with the Indian Territory, established during the war, "illegal yet profitable;" the city's website describes trading with the Indians as "profitable" but doesn't mention the cattle trade until after the Indians' were "removed" (curious, those quotation marks, which are on the page itself, by the way) in 1867.

*The marker says the Wichita were "ordered to relocate" in October of 1865; the city's website, as mentioned above, gives the date as 1867. I don't (yet) know the reason for the difference in dates.

*In any event, the marker gives a sense of the horrors of that relocation; the website has them disappearing over the site's textual horizon, traders following them and thus establishing the Chisholm Trail, and white settlers moving into the area.

I have no further details than these. Still, I don't think one has to be terribly PC in one's thinking to see the story here, in between the combined, not-quite-contradictory lines of the marker and the website page: Once the first inhabitants of this land and then ordered into Indian Territory, the Wichita were (I assume) graciously offered sanctuary in Kansas from the Confederacy-allied tribes to the south. After the war, though, with land to be settled and, more crucially, money to be made through the now-legitimate cattle trade, the Wichita became competitors to be disposed of. "Thank you for establishing this community. Now git th' hell outta Dodge. [As it were.] Oh--and mind if we use your name for this community?"

One last thing, to be picked up in a future post: J(ames). R. Mead (the namesake of the island mentioned on the marker and credited as Wichita's founder) has now become a Person of Interest for me--especially after learning that it appears he is the author of a two-page article entitled "Camps of Prehistoric People in Sedgwick County, Kansas," published in 1889-1890.

Hunting that article will have to wait for another day. But if I'm lucky, his article might double the word count of the marker and that one paragraph from the website.

Also later: more about the Wichita as I learn about them. I hope, though, that readers who happen across this post and know more about any of this will share what they know via e-mail or in the comments section.

¹I learned in my reading today (but had forgotten to add until just now) that archeologists estimate that the land where the Little Arkansas meets the Arkansas has been inhabited for at least 11,000 years.

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