MINNESOTA RIVER MATRIX: “non-discursive” alignments of immigrant churchyards on center lines in a New Norwegian Landscape, ca 1870-1900 DRAFT March 2017 Dennis Doxtater [email protected] 51,360 words excluding References Cited 1 INTRODUCTION NORWAY • Evidence of abstract conceptions of “cosmos” in prehistoric Norway • The imposition of churches on the Scandinavian landscape • Cross symbolism and ritual practices in Norwegian farm life • Social structure of the farm landscape • The discourse of Lutheranism and Nationalism in 19th century Norway and America MINNESOTA RIVER • An eastern meridian: Palmyra – Fort Ridgely • A cardinal west from Palmyra? • East - West Norwegian Synod division 1872-76 • Formalization of the far West after 1878 • New congregations in the Yellow Medicine “Sogn” • The Hawk Creek – Rock Valle meridian in the eastern domain • Balancing the greater Hawk Creek Township center line: a second eastern meridian • Extension of the Hawk Creek-Rock Valle meridian south? • The Granite Falls meridian: a final center of centers? • Metrics of the Minnesota River Matrix INTERPRETING THE MINNESOTA RIVER MATRIX • “Discursive” and “non-discursive” processes in late nineteenth century Norway • Township center lines, meridians and cross points as New Norwegian Landscape • Integrative effects of the play between “discursive” and “non-discursive” EPILOGUE 2 Introduction “Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section lines, Mr Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mr. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the proprietary intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence—the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.” (My Ántonia; Willa Cather 1918:118) The autobiographical narrator in this novel is “American”, and the newly immigrant Shimerda family Bohemian, yet they farmed near a substantial Norwegian community around the 1870- 1880’s in Nebraska. The only consecrated cemetery in the vicinity at the time of Ántonia’s father’s tragic suicide was Norwegian Lutheran. It wasn’t however, because of any doctrinal conflict with these Catholic Bohemians, per se, that Mr. Shimerda was denied a plot in hallowed ground, but rather because of the sin of taking one’s own life. Thus denied, Cather describes the family decision where to locate the single grave. From the quote above one realizes that the point chosen was an abstract intersection of north-south and east-west cardinal lines--actually the very corner of section property--a point wholly undefined as yet by section roads, plowed fields, fences or any other artifact except for subtle survey marks in the still natural or “wild” prairie landscape. Cather poetically renders the formation of a new cultural landscape where religion and particularly death must be located in some shared spatial frame. These ritual acts almost universally involve some sort of abstract geometry to help facilitate location and practice that transports humans to the spiritual realm. What is the difference between this kind of effect in locating a burial site at an abstract intersection point in a still natural landscape--and performing the ritual-- and thinking about some future reverence for the site when section roads are built and people drive by? The grave’s location right at the cross point with no room for future roads 3 suggests greater consideration of the former than the latter. Cather’s story mentions Bohemian superstitions about burying suicides at cross roads (Cather 1918:113), also speaking more about spiritual power of the geometric point as connector to the other world, than as a remembrance sign. In a European survey of crossroads folklore, Puhvel (1976:172) describes the practice in Wales when the corpse was carried from the deceased’s house to the church; the “bier” was set down at every crossroad, where the entourage knelt and the minister prayed. Puhvel speculates these acts were to “protect the dead from the demonic powers associated with cross-roads”. Traditions in latter 19th century Norway embraced a wide range of concepts about “cross” symbolism, farmstead layout and iconography of folk artifacts (not readily associated with things “Christian”) essential in controlling contact between human and spiritual worlds. Cemeteries and their churches are themselves “cross” loci, though most often socially controlled in a manner different from crossroads. Literature about related practices in the New World is scant given the wide range of topics covered by histories of immigration and particularly attention given to the evolution of Lutheran doctrine once liberated from state control in Norway. At least one publication, however, describes spatial aspects of burial practice in a Norwegian-American congregation in Western Minnesota. Again, the issue is where to bury people who commit suicide. Ostlie (1992:7) describes a woman’s self-inflicted death by arsenic and the decision by congregation members to have the funeral service at home rather than at the churchyard. But where would she be buried? From Ostlie: “some Norwegian Lutheran churches would not allow the casket of a suicide to be carried through the (churchyard) gate, but allowed it to be lifted over the fence and then buried in the cemetery. Others strictly forbade the body to be placed in hallowed ground, a place reserved for those who had died a “good death”; suicides had to be buried outside the fence”. Historically, however, the farm dwelling in Norway before the Reformation used to be the principal location for rites of passage, i.e. birth, marriage and death, before the ritual focus shifted to the church and churchyard. In these times not taking the casket through the church gate occurred during funerals as a way of not reversing the transformation from human to spirit which occurred first at the dwelling threshold. But these customs say little about how the churchyard locus becomes hallowed in the first place. Beyond the need to be consecrated by a priest, does the location in the landscape contribute to its power to transform between worlds, not unlike crossroads? 4 The suicide burial of Francis Sadliek (Mr. Shimerda) in My Ántonia exists today as a Nebraska state historical site. It no longer is the complete crossroads site observed by Cather; no north-south road exists, and the east-west road runs straight through the intersection point of the four sections. The grave was apparently moved north a short distance to accommodate the modern road. The original grave was likely located a few meters from the section intersection stake, just on the southwest corner of Sadliek land (quite possibly a typical quarter-section). At the time of burial, no cultural artifact, save for a surveyor’s mark of some sorts, would have been seen from this location in the rolling hills of native prairie grass. Nor did farmers possess any kind of drawn or printed survey map of neighboring areas, only legal descriptions in terms of section numbers and latitudes and longitudes of these lines. In their heads of course, immigrants undoubtedly formed conceptions of how section lines and farm boundaries mapped out along cardinal axes of the grid. Certainly this knowledge was shared, creating collective conceptions of space useful beyond the internal control and functioning of the farm. Did Mr. Sadliek’s burial location have some larger cultural landscape meaning, beyond its cross symbolism as section intersection point? St. Stephanie (or Dane), the still standing Scandinavian church that refused the burial, is also listed as a Nebraska historical site. Placing ourselves at the “wild” Sadliek site, back in time, where in some possible collective immigrant map is St. Stephanie located? It lies due east along the same section line, also at a section cross point; though only one section or mile away, the church cannot be seen from Mr. Sadliek’s burial point. St. Stephanie’s churchyard location is also at an abstract intersection point, dispelling Cather’s idea that cross (roads) burials were only associated with suicides. Created several years prior to Mr. Sadliek’s death, the church cemetery was apparently positioned for other reasons associated with cross symbolism. In the minds of the Sadlieks, the location of the suicide grave could have involved this other meaning, i.e. they may have been aware that the grave is cardinally connected with the church cemetery to the east. Not only does his grave formally integrate with the churchyard where he was denied, but East is the universal Christian direction of heaven, nominally symbolized by the location of alters at that end of church naves. Did Mr. Sadliek, therefore, symbolically pass through St. Stephanie’s thresholds on his way to the other world? But this early cultural landscape “frame” also connects west of the suicide cross point.