MARPIYAWICASTA MAN OF THE CLOUDS, OR “L.O. SKYMAN” “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Man of the Clouds HDT WHAT? INDEX MAN OF THE CLOUDS MARPIYAWICASTA 1750 Harold Hickerson has established that during the 18th and early 19th Centuries, there was a contested zone between the Ojibwa of roughly Wisconsin and the Dakota of roughly Minnesota that varied in size from 15,000 square miles to 35, 000 square miles. In this contested zone, because natives entering the region to hunt were “in constant dread of being surprised by enemies,” game was able to flourish. At this point, however, in a war between the Ojibwa and the Dakota for control over the wild rice areas of northern Minnesota (roughly a quarter of the caloric intake of these two groups was coming from this fecund wild rice plant of the swampy meadows) , the Ojibwa decisively won. HDT WHAT? INDEX MARPIYAWICASTA MAN OF THE CLOUDS HDT WHAT? INDEX MAN OF THE CLOUDS MARPIYAWICASTA This would have the ecological impact of radically increasing human hunting pressure within that previously protected zone. I have observed that in the country between the nations which are at war with each other the greatest number of wild animals are to be found. The Kentucky section of Lower Shawneetown (that was the main village of the Shawnee during the 18th Century) was established. Dr. Thomas Walker, a Virginia surveyor, led the first organized English expedition through the Cumberland Gap into what would eventually become Kentucky. The Ohio Company hired Christopher Gist to explore Kentucky. HDT WHAT? INDEX MARPIYAWICASTA MAN OF THE CLOUDS 1794 In that region of the Louisiana purchase which would become Minnesota, a son was born to Tacankuwaxte His Road is Good at his village on the south shore of the Minnesota River some eight miles above present-day Mendota Mouth of the River, Minnesota. This son would be known, eventually, as an adult, as Marpiyawicasta Man of the Clouds and as “L.O. Skyman.” This man was to attempt to follow the road of pacifism, and so he would die in a racial concentration camp in Minnesota in the winter of 1862-1863, and so I do not have a photograph to show you. It seems he was not considered important enough to photograph. But perhaps this is HDT WHAT? INDEX MAN OF THE CLOUDS MARPIYAWICASTA a daguerreotype of his mother Kankuwastewin:1 Maybe Kankuwastewin was Marpiyawicasta’s mother 1. A nonscholarly source I have seen alleges “about 1780,” but I don’t believe it as it seems to be off-date also on ascertainable things such as the year in which Captain Seth Eastman assumed command of Fort Snelling, etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX MARPIYAWICASTA MAN OF THE CLOUDS The town stocks which had been set up beside a whipping post “as a terror to the disorderly,” behind the 1st Parish meetinghouse in Ipswich in 1638, were at this point dismantled. In Philadelphia, a Market House was erected in the middle of 2nd Street that would extend from Coates Street (Fairmount Avenue) to Popular Street. During this year and the following one, in London, Philip Astley having created the architectural arrangement of the modern circus (that is, a ring placed in front of a theatrical stage), similar amphitheaters for equestrian performances were being constructed in Boston, in New-York, and in Philadelphia. In the early 19th Century, in such structures, conventional plays would be interspersed with traveling circus acts, many of which would be equestrian (horse galloping in circle while acrobats perform stunts relating to it). The USS Constitution would be under construction at Edmond Hartt’s shipyard at the mouth of the Charles River from this point until October 1797. HDT WHAT? INDEX MAN OF THE CLOUDS MARPIYAWICASTA The Springfield armory was created by act of Congress, on a site originally recommended by George Washington not only for its abundant water power, but also for its strategic blocking of a main New England route for an invading army, and for the fact that the Connecticut River was shallow enough by this point that seagoing vessels would never be able to bombard it. FIREARMS NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Man of the Clouds “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX MARPIYAWICASTA MAN OF THE CLOUDS 1805 John Caldwell Calhoun was attending law school in Litchfield, Connecticut and had no idea at all that a lake was going to be named in his honor. Lake Calhoun was previously called Loon Lake, and near it lived a village of perhaps 500 Lakota Sioux referred to as Kay-yah-ta Otonwa “a village whose houses have roofs” or “Cloud Man’s village.” The Lakota village was renamed Eatonville in honor of Secretary of War John H. Eaton when, in this year, the lake and surrounding territory became part of Fort Snelling Military Reservation. Later the lake would be renamed Lake Calhoun in honor of Secretary of War Calhoun. The army gave a couple of white missionaries permission to build a cabin on the reservation in 1834, and the headman Cloud Man (Makh-pea Wechashta), Man of the Clouds (Ma-hpi-ya-wi-ca-sta) (L.O. Skyman) helped them select a site on the bluff to the east of Lake Calhoun. The cabin would stand until 1839-1840, when the village was abandoned during conflicts between the Lakota and the Ojibway tribes. In 1849 the land would be claimed for farming, although we suspect that the white family that staked the claim did not live on this farm south of Minneapolis for any great length of time because we know their children attended a city school at quite an inconvenient distance HDT WHAT? INDEX MAN OF THE CLOUDS MARPIYAWICASTA from Lake Calhoun. HDT WHAT? INDEX MARPIYAWICASTA MAN OF THE CLOUDS 1815 Wakaninajinwin Stands Sacred (or, Stands Like a Spirit) was born, a daughter of the headman Marpiyawicasta Man of the Clouds. She would be baptized as “Lucy.” LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Man of the Clouds HDT WHAT? INDEX MAN OF THE CLOUDS MARPIYAWICASTA 1819 October2: Marpiyawicasta Man of the Clouds was a Mdewakanton Santee Dakotah by birth and had become in his youth a Mdewakanton war chief entitled to wear six eagle plumes because he had killed six times in tribal warfare. He was thus on his way up the Dakotah social ladder, but while he was out hunting bison during the autumn bison season, he was surprised by one of those sudden snowstorms3 after which it is quite impossible to walk any distance, because it is utterly exhausting to lift your knees high enough. “The Buffalo Hunt” by Horace Pippin He lay in his bison robe covered by snow for three days, and evidently while lying there he thought to 2. One non-scholarly source which does not seem to have a lot going for it (but surmise) has asserted that this occurred about a decade later. 3. Based on the known lifestyle and migrations of the American bison, the 1st season for buffalo hunting would have been from the middle of June through July, and the 2d season during the months of September and October. HDT WHAT? INDEX MARPIYAWICASTA MAN OF THE CLOUDS himself: “Hey, man, get a life!” That is, he went on the equivalent of what in his culture was known and honored as a “vision quest,” and had occasion to reflect that six people had had to be killed, so that he as one person could wind up shivering and bored and starving on the white waste of the great plains. It was disproportionate, it didn’t make sense, it clearly wasn’t worth it. What he did was transform his life into that of an agriculturalist and pacifist.4 Much later, a white racist Minnesota observer of this would describe Marpiyawicasta’s involuntary vision quest, and the conversion to nonviolence which it had induced, in the following demeaning manner:5 According to the story usually told, Marpiyawichasta, or Cloud Man, war chief of Black Dog’s band on the lower Minnesota River, was caught in a blizzard on the plains while buffalo hunting. During the storm he indulged in some serious thinking upon the problem of food supply and determined to try agriculture. [Page 137 of a special issue of The Minnesota Archaeologist (Volume XI, #4, October 1945) put out by a racist named Willoughby M. Babcock, curator of the Minnesota Historical Society’s museum] Also in the American wild west, a lake near Fort Snelling was renamed “Lake Harriet” in honor of Harriet Lovejoy Leavenworth, the white wife of the white Colonel who was then in charge of the fort.6 This is a detail from “View of the site of Fort St. Anthony at the confluence of the Mississippi and St. Peters River.” “Green’s Villa” is nowhere mentioned in any of the documentation I have seen of this period although, intriguingly, it seems to have been on the exact site on which, later, the Pond brothers built their famous “first habitation in Minnesota” at the suggestion of Marpiyawicasta, when they came to “minister” the Dakotas of the Eatonville community. What, you may ask, was a fort doing at this location? There was no significant river traffic, since the idea of the steamboat would not come along for years, and then after the idea came along, it would be even more years before an actual steamboat sailed up to Mendota, the conjunction of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers.