Bleeding Kansas, bleeding Congressmen

The famous caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks on the floor of the House of Representatives, May 22, 1856. The misplaced apostrophe aside, the caption (though quietly sympathizing with Sumner) is pretty accurate. Image found here.

People don't hurl invective like they used to.

Partly because it's the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and partly because it comes so highly recommended by Ta-Nehisi Coates (who for the last three years has been conducting a sustained and very in-depth discussion of the war, what led to it, and its aftermath--here is the list of posts), I've picked up and begun reading James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. What I like very much about it so far is that it provides considerable historical context before getting to the election of 1860, yet it reads so easily and smoothly.

Anyway. McPherson is very good about mostly staying out of the way and letting primary sources convey the heat as well as the substance of the debates of the time (which, just to confirm, for Southern representatives to Congress really did all come back to the protection and expansion of slavery--there's simply no other way to understand their own words). It's that heat and substance that leads me to present to you the image that's here on this post: Something I don't remember knowing, if I ever knew it at all, was that the speech (two days long!) that Sumner delivered that led Brooks to assault him was about the horrific events then taking place in Kansas Territory. Those events included not just the guerrilla warfare between pro-slavery people and Free Soilers, but also blatantly-rigged elections, territorial constitutions not ratified by the electorate before being sent to Congress as mandated by law (the conventions were stacked with pro-slavery types, but a majority of the population was by that time anti-slavery), two territorial governors driven out because they could not either of the two legislatures (yes, there were two existing at the same time, there for a while) to even really acknowledge the governors' authority, much less come to any sort of agreement, etc., etc. Sumners was outraged by all this and so took to the floor of Congress to speak against it.

I think of our political rhetoric these days as more heated than it should be, but it's positively milquetoast compared to Sumners' description of the Missourian "border ruffians" crossing into Kansas: "Murderous robbers[, . . .] hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization, [committing a] rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery" (McPherson, 149). (It was Sumner's characterization of South Carolina's Andrew Butler--a "Don Quixote who had chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who . . . though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight--I mean the harlot, Slavery."--that caused Brooks, Butler's cousin, to assault him, Sumner not being socially-elevated enough to be dignified by challenging to a duel.)

I have to admit that I laughed when I first read all this and joked to myself that it's too bad for KU fans that "drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization" would be hard to work into a stadium cheer. But in the very next instant I reminded myself: Living in the Kansas Territory during that time and standing for whichever principle literally was a matter of life and death; meanwhile, for the nation as a while, by 1856 it had become increasingly clear that the South would be content with nothing less than the national government's affirmation and promotion of slavery, no matter the will of the majority of the people. The Dred Scott decision, which would come the following year, would only fan the flames and all but assure Lincoln's election, which, in the eyes of the South, was the final straw. Before Lincoln was even sworn in as President, seven states had seceded.

As I said here a while back regarding my own relatives during the time before and during the War, it's hard to remember, in the wake of all those years, just what that world and time were like for people living in the midst of them. Hard, but important. While I'm glad that we've not had Congressmen assaulting each other in the House Chamber for a long time now, I need to be a bit less glib about that time when, on occasion, such things did happen. McPherson's book is so far proving to be an admirable guide through that time.

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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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