The Canadian Civil War: Volume 3 - West to the Wall

Chapter 10

  DeSmet the Man

  I think I can sum up the next several days pretty easily. First, I found a clothing store the next day and bought layer after layer of warmer clothing, including a hat that looks like an animal is sitting on my head. I also discovered I could fit leather mittens on over my gloves. I thought my time in Green Bay had taught me how to deal with cold, but boy was I wrong. But I was learning now, and while I was never warm as I walked the streets of DeSmet, I got to the point where I did not feel my life was in danger if I walked more than two blocks (and yes, I was walking since my car seemed to be needing extra care).

  I did the usual professor stuff during the day, hitting the local museums, archives, and libraries, plus various government offices, all of which seemed plenty eager to help me. In fact I had some difficulty finding quiet time to read, since every office had numerous people who wanted to talk, and talk, and talk. They all had stories, they all had expertise, they all had great insights, and they all seemed to have limitless time. They brought me maps, and diaries, and histories long out of print, but they gave me little time to read any of them since they wanted to talk. These were either the friendliest people in the world, or they had gone far too long without seeing visitors.

  Evenings were a series of house parties. They were some variant of the dinner I had attended the first night – a dozen or so very friendly people, good food, a warm (if modest) house, and endless conversations. Mostly I did the talking, but I pushed back a bit and got my hosts to at least provide a little of the conversation as they described town events and local people. But often those local conversations turned to vacation plans and places they had visited that were warmer and or more highly populated.

  While the meetings and dinners occupied most of my time, my most significant impressions came during the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to scurry from one place to another. Some days the wind was more intense, some days less, but there was always a wind and always a coating of white as far as the eye could see. Given the constricted size of the town, I could see off to the horizon down every street, and the horizon was always very far in the distance, far off past an endless plain of white. I don’t know if I was made more cold by the temperature, or by the views. I know I shivered a lot.

  One afternoon I was walking from one government office to another when I just stopped and looked at the horizon. Two centuries ago men had walked this land headed west – west to the Wall. It occurred to me they bore huge risks before they ever got to the wall. Essentially the plains were a moat a thousand miles wide that exhausted them before they ever got to the wall. They walked, or rode horseback along small rivers, covering 20 miles a day. More correctly, they covered 20 miles when weather permitted. How often was that?

  One man who walked the plains and lived to tell the story was the man the town was named for – Father DeSmet. A Jesuit from Belgium, there was pretty good evidence he traveled over 180,000 miles during his lifetime of work on the plains. Being a good Jesuit, he started his career much as Marquette had, spending years learning tribal languages. Only after he had mastered half a dozen languages did he leave St. Louis to venture into the wild. There he met all the leading Indians of the time, including Sitting Bull. He must have been one tough priest, since he lived into his seventies.

  I thought about him as I was walking back to the hotel one afternoon. The wind was rising, the sun was setting, and my hands were cold inside two layers of gloves. Maps didn’t really communicate what his life had been like. Dotted lines along rivers and across the plains gave no sense for what it must have been like to spend even a single night out on the plains. 180,000 miles represented how many nights with fifteen or sixteen hours of darkness? How many mornings of breaking ice to find water to drink? How many meals that were partially cooked over flickering fires or missed entirely? How many returns to friends and the familiar, only to leave again for the unknown when the seasons changed or a tribe invited? I could read the biographies and study the maps, but I think I understood him best when I came out of a nice warm building and felt the icy wind on my face.

  Maybe it was my growing admiration for him and for the other French explorers that caused me to stay in DeSmet. I remember calling Elise one night and telling her I would be in town a maximum of three days, and then calling back a week later to explain I was still there. A few days later a man came looking for me. I was in the provincial archives reading an account of the Verendrye massacre at Lake of the Woods, when the man who had driven me back to my hotel my first night in town came through the door and sat down.

  “I heard you were still in town.” He took off his hat and opened his coat as he sat. He looked to be about the same age as his wife – mid to late 40s – dark hair and dark complexion – lots of Indian genes in there. He had a good face. “Open” seems an odd way to describe a face, but he seemed “open.” He looked directly at me as he talked, but there was no stressing of the face muscles. He looked perfectly relaxed, which had the effect of making me relaxed, as if we had known each other for years and could trust one another.

  “I keep finding new things to read.”

  “Reading will only take you so far.”

  “Interesting that you should say that. I sometimes think I learn more about this town by walking down the street and getting hit by a blast of wind.”

  “In the winter it is the wind, in the spring it is the prairie flowers, in the summer it is the sun that vibrates up from the ground. Those are the essence of Dakota.”

  “Yes, I should come back in the spring to see.”

  “How much time do you have before you have to go back?”

  “Classes start again in two weeks.”

  “Want to see a Sioux village before you go?”

  “Sure, but my car is out of commission.”

  “We can’t take cars there. We will go by snowmobile.” He followed up with a lot of detail on what to wear and what to pack and what gifts to bring, but the upshot was we would be leaving at dawn. I took a few notes – that’s what professors do – but mostly my mind was already racing ahead to the trip. A snowmobile? I had never been on one. How complicated would that be? And how far would we be going? And what would we do once we go to the village? And… well, I had lots of questions, none of which I could ask Marc. I concentrated on first things first – what I should pack and how I should pack it. It sounded like the first answer was “lots but not too much,” and the second was “carefully.”

  Then he was done and gone. I put away the book I was reading and headed out to Main Street to do some shopping.