Potawatomi Ghost Towns of the Oregon Trail

My non-fiction article, "Uniontown and Plowboy - Potawatomi Ghost Towns: Enigmas of the Oregon-California Trail has been published in the Winter 2014-15 ed. of Kansas History.  Get your copy from the Kansas Historical Society Store online.  

Abstract

Uniontown is a ghost town of the Oregon-California Trail near Topeka, Kansas. Tom Ellis illuminates the enigmatic history of this ill-fated community founded in 1848 where little physical trace of the town exists today.  The influence of Kansa Indians, French traders and ardent missionaries is reflected in the precursors to the Uniontown story. Uniontown was also the last effort of the government to unify separate bands of the Potawatomi people into one community. It was an important commercial center and it was also an ill-fated attempt to force together the Potawatomi who were pushed from place to place by the government.  Uniontown was an artificial unification of the Potawatomi at a commercially essential location on the Oregon-California Trail. At Uniontown the tribe was plagued by cholera, corruption and economic predators.  Uniontown was never embraced as the unifying center of Potawatomi life. After attempts to unify the Potawatomi the government changed course and pursued a policy that divided them. Competition for commercial activity on the Oregon-California Trail moved to other prospering towns in the area and Uniontown withered. 

The Falcon

During the early winter months we have had a small falcon – often referred to as a sparrow hawk – routinely visit an oak tree in our back yard.  He perches on a limb arm’s length above ground and close to our glass patio doors.  Between the house and his perch are several bird feeders.  Our raptor stalks the bird feeder and makes his living flushing birds into panicked flight. Invariably, blinded by terror and the sun’s reflection from the glass doors, one of the small birds will fly headlong into the windows and flop unconscious onto the deck.  A heartbeat later our falcon scoops up the unfortunate and returns to his limb for lunch. Using the glass doors to defeat his prey is hunting behavior this falcon has learned.  Finches and juncos are the usual victims along with occasional fat turtle dove that was not smart enough to migrate with the others.  Unfortunately, the sparrows that throw all the seed on the ground seem too smart for this trick.  Today our falcon sat on the limb near the feeder.  The small birds fled except for one bright red cardinal cornered deep in the middle of a shrub denuded of its leaves.  The falcon’s perch was only a few feet above the cardinal and the falcon looked intently before he dove into the thick brush and climbed his way through the thicket to the cardinal.  While the falcon was tangled in the limbs the cardinal dropped out of the bottom and flew for a thicker hedge nearby with the falcon inches behind.  We don’t feed birds to see harm come to them but without the feeder we would never see the falcon.  We have come to accept this life and death drama.  Nevertheless, we enjoy the cardinals and I walked the yard looking for red feathers.  There weren’t any.  

Potawatomi Story in Kansas Inspires Study

For the past year I have become captivated by the stories of the Potawatomi in Kansas. The Potawatomi story is not just a Kansas story. It is a history of European influence, migration and removal from Nova Scotia to Oklahoma. It is a story of missionaries who competed with one another, delivered education and discouraged Potawatomi culture. Epidemics were common on the Oregon Trail and the rivers transporting folks into the places the Indians lived and the Potawatomi joined the suffering. It is a history of commerce and politics trumping the self-determination of people. It is about livelihood and homes found, lost, taken and found again.  

The Potawatomi figure prominently into my newest novel, Twisted Cross currently in pre-publication. The Potawatomi stories add to the gripping complexity, humanity and entertainment value of the novel. The Potawatomi history became so compelling I spent months researching the factual history of Potawatomi ghost towns on the Oregon Trail for an article which will appear this winter in Kansas History published by the Kansas Historical Society and Kansas State University. History is full of details, personalities, dates and places, but I also want to understand the lives of those who endured that history.  

Writing a fictional story led to researching and writing a detailed history which led me back to distilling what I could of the life of a Potawatomi elder in a poem called "The Potawatomi Uniontown Lament". I am honored to have my poem "Potawatomi Uniontown Lament" published in November issue of Hownikan You may read at http://www.potawatomi.org/images/Hownikan_Nov2014_Final.pdf … It appears at the bottom of page 14.

Plum Creek Massacre - Reflections on the Tragedy

I recently stood at a small cemetery surrounded by Nebraska corn fields.  The modest plaque briefly explained the history of the Plum Creek Station. The day, August 7, 2014, was the 150th anniversary of a massacre of white settlers by northern plains Indians. It occurred early in what are regarded as the Indian Wars of the post-civil war period. Plum Creek is a massacre site but the story begins decades earlier.

By the early 1840s the Oregon-California Trail was a busy highway.  The Indian tribes of the plains had generally been helpful and welcoming to the trappers, traders, and travelers who traipsed across their hunting lands. Two decades later the travelers and traders had become a flood of Anglo Americans who like chickens, "wandered everywhere and roosted where they pleased."  Americans negotiated treaties promised to be respectful of Indian's way of life but broke treaties when convenient, abused natural resources like buffalo and timber, and delivered plagues of smallpox, cholera and typhoid that killed tens of thousands of Indians.

The Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux had been willing trading partners but as their way of life became more threatened, traditional, mostly younger warrior elements, driven by desperation, decided to fight back and formed a confederation that simultaneously attacked American interests across the Plains in an effort to drive settlers out of the areas necessary to traditional Indian livelihoods.

          Plum Creek was a tragedy.  Freight wagons were attacked by Indian warriors and their drivers killed. Then settlers at one of the small ranches along the Oregon-California Trail on the Platte River were attacked and unarmed men cutting hay in the fields were killed. A young mother and other unrelated children were taken hostage.  Because telegraph lines to Ft. Kearny were operating from nearby stations, warning of the attacks and word of their aftermath was recorded at the Army post and within weeks shameful retaliation occurred when nearly 200 mostly women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho settlement at Sand Creek, not part of the hostile elements responsible for Plum Creek, were massacred by the U.S. Army.

          At the little cemetery, I could only think about all the families, both Indian and white of the Nebraska prairie who, in the 1860’s desired little more than to make a life for themselves and their children.  Settlers wanted land because they did not have any other on which to produce; the Indians were trying to keep land that guaranteed their way of life. Often the greedy and powerful manipulated everyone. Eventually the economically desperate Indians conflicted with establishment and the side with the power of technology won.  It is the history of the world and repeated often by those leaders who do not understand its dynamics.  Human tragedy is always left in the wake. You can stand in a Nebraska cornfield and hear ghostly screams from long ago or turn on CNN and hear those screams only hours old from some other tragedy in the world.   

  

Historical Thriller - TWISTED CROSS

My next novel is on the way.  Here is a taste.

Alone, Jonathan Thomas buries his family along the Oregon Trail.  In Twisted Cross Jonathan encounters hopeful emigrants and abused Indians facing a plague of cholera.  The hardships of life on the frontier are intensified by encounters with scurrilous opportunists and profiteers with murderous intent. Victimized and stalked, Jonathan struggles to survive. Potawatomi Indians who own the trading posts, ferries, and sawmills at Uniontown give him work, and Clara, a French half-breed girl living in both worlds, gives him reason to return.  He earns a living with the Army on the Oregon Trail and with missionaries building Indian missions on the Santa Fe Trail all the while haunted and hunted by those who would kill him.

Watch this blog for more information about this and other projects.

Western Writers of America conference followup

I just returned from a week in Sacramento at the Western Writers of America annual meeting.  I am a new member and a first time attendee of the conference but in the true fashion of our American West I was treated like an old friend.  This is the same organization where giants of western literature including Louis L'amore, Tony Hillerman and Don Coldsmith welcomed today's luminaries of western writing.

Dusty Richards with 145 books published presided over the group with gracious good humor.  Chris Enss, an authority on women of the west was a whirlwind volunteer and instructed on the finer points of book marketing. Johnny D. Boggs demonstrated the energy it takes to be the editor of the Roundup Magazine in addition to authoring his own novels.  I enjoyed interacting with historians Rod Miller and Will Bagley both of whom publish important non-fiction histories.

It was heartwarming to find publishers who were generous with their time. Anyone who writes a book should appreciate how difficult it is to be a publisher in today's business environment.  I found my conversations with Tiffany Schofield from Five Star Publishing and Gary Goldstein from Kensington Publishing to be enjoyable and illuminating.

This is a fun bunch of folks to be around.  The WWA is a group of authentic, friendly, helpful and fun-loving people who make the serious and solitary business of writing and publishing appear effortless. I suspect  the WWA convention will become an annual pilgrimage.

Humorous Springtime Problem to Solve

Spring

The robins understand winter is over and are chirping like crazy. Yesterday’s fresh cold rain cleaned winter’s dust from the budding daffodils. Road salt has finally been rinsed from the streets.  Ah, the blissful promise of spring!

Wrong.  The certain promise of backache.  My wife, just like a chirping robin, has started the mate’s call to yard work and home improvement.  I’m thinking a brief spring vacation in a tropical place and she is thinking I ought to build a deck while she sits in a warm place just inside the patio doors smiling with encouragement.

They don’t call them patio doors for nothing.  We have a patio.  My wife doesn't like the patio.  My wife thinks it would be nice to have a deck that is one foot above a perfectly acceptable, if not somewhat cracked and uneven, slab of concrete. As far as I can tell the deck will function solely as a leaf strainer.  The rain and dirt will go through the gaps between the deck boards and the leaves will blow across the deck through the deck door (read former patio door) and onto the carpet.  Dirt will collect on the patio under the deck and ooze out as fetid muck. 

You don’t just get a pile of wood and build a deck.  It takes planning.  Specifically planning the new tools you need to buy before you are ready for wood.  I’m going to need a new computer program for deck design, a twelve-inch chop saw to go with my table saw, a new cordless deck screw driver, a laser level, a new two-wheeled utility trailer to haul tools and materials and a new SUV with the appropriate trailer hitch.

But first, I need to invent a fetid muck removal system.  I’m thinking battery-powered, remote-controlled, toy monster truck with a functioning toy snow (read muck) plow to drive around under the deck.  To have perspective for operating the muck removal technology (read remote controlled toy truck) I’m thinking the deck needs to have a place to mount an operators control platform – like a hammock.  From the hammock I should be able to see the little lights on the muck removal device (note to self, don’t forget to get lights for the toy truck) while it whirls around under the deck. 

Nothing is worse than a half-baked idea.  So, this afternoon, in the spirit of design development, I dashed off to the toy store and bought this really cool remote controlled, four-wheel-drive, monster toy …er… muck removal device on sale for only $150 bucks.  I put it on the winter-browned lawn between the trees supporting the old canvas hammock I found in the attic.

 Things were going pretty good.  I am twisting and turning the monster muck remover in the yard and twisting and turning my tubby little body trying to keep an eye on it from my hammock control platform.  The monster muck truck did a graceful pirouette in the mud and I did a reclining Triple Lutz Combination in the rotted canvas hammock along with it.  When the canvas ripped I was too hog-tied in the shredded fabric to extricate myself from on top of the muck truck that kept spinning its little studded snow tires against my spine.

 That is how spring equals backaches and it’s all my wife’s fault.  Now I have to add one of those cool lumbar back support belts to the tool shopping list.  There will be time for buying tools when I finish recuperating in my new nylon hammock.