Trobriand, Dylan Thomas, and Dakota

Friday, September 27th, 2002

​Thank you, all you dear friends who have been calling and writing - and thank you for taking time to read what, I fear, may almost approach the turgid, at times - but, hey, these are somewhat "titty chimes," so to speak.

The past day or two I've had another look at Philippe Régis de Trobriand's Military Life in Dakota. His is the text for today - with a few others. About fifty years old when he came up the Missouri in 1867 to serve on the Dakota military frontier, the French-born Trobriand spent a couple of years at Fort Stevenson, located where Garrison, North Dakota, is today. Garrison is home of a big plastic walleye at the entrance to a fine park, an annual Dickens Christmas celebration, and a web press - BHG - that prints many of the newspapers for towns in central North Dakota. Just off the eastern edge of Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, on the northern shore of Lake Sakakawea behind Garrison Dam, Garrison didn't make very much of the 1860s fort that sat between Fort Berthold to the west and Fort Totten (at Devils Lake) to the east in the past, but they there's going to be a new interpretive center in a replica of a guard house at the site - well as close as they can get - the original fort is under water.

Trobriand had served in the Civil War. He became a United States citizen in 1861 when he joined "the ranks of these volunteers marching to fight for a cause which had immortalized Lafayette." He came to Stevenson at a time that the Army was still disbanding following the end of the Civil War. Moral was not good - there were drunk commandants and officers at Fort Totten and Fort Buford. By the army's count, there were about 26,360 Native Americans in Dakota - a territory in 1866 that had finally been dwindled down to the present-day states of North and South Dakota (once Montana and Wyoming were part of the Territory as well). The native folk did not always get along with each other back in the 1860s and the years following (Custer came to Dakota in the 1870s and rode west in 1876).

Trobriand lived long and prospered - in fact, he lived to be over eighty years old. After his retirement in 1879, he spent summers in Paris and winters in New Orleans, where he died in 1897.

Trobriand's journal gives us an extraordinarily honest look at the place no one in the world thought was particularly good for anything back in the 1860s. Curiously, his early impressions of the place - and it was a warm late summer and early autumn when he came in 1867 - 90 degrees F. late in September at Fort Stevenson - his early take was of a place that was something of a "No Man's Land" - especially the fifteen-mile stretch between Fort Stevenson and Fort Berthold. He says (references are to a 1951 edition published by the Alvord Memorial Commission in St. Paul, Minnesota: Military Life in Dakota: The Journal of Philippe Régis de Trobriand translated and edited from the French original by Lucile M. Kane. The University of Nebraska Press edition, 1982, is out-of-print. It shouldn't be!) -

Trobriand, page 80:

". . . The country is far from being without character; on the contrary, it has a very distinct stamp, but somber, inexorable, it grips the soul much more than it pleases the eye.
"The plains are not like this. They give a different impression. More than anything else, it is an impression of immensity, of open space, and of an individual left to his own resources in the midst of nature where nothing belongs to anhyone and everything belongs to everyone. Nothing here suggest limitation or division of the common land. It belongs to whoever crosses it, the white man as well as the red man, the buffalo, the wolf, the bear. Against personal dangers, the protection of government is a myth; the only real protection is in a steady heart and a good carbine. But although these badlands have a bad reputation because of the facilities they provide for an Indian ambush, the danger is but an uncertain eventuality and does not change at all the feeling of freedom under the sky that almost always exults one."

Well, there are times that Trobriand is less than exulted - he was not totally happy on August 22, 1867, when the temperature rose to "+ 110 degrees F. in the shade during day." But he quickly goes on to praise the relative comfort of this place: "However, I do not suffer as much as in a temperature of 85 to 90 degrees in New York. Why is that? It is not because of the light breeze that usually blows on the edge of the water. Rather, it must be because of the atmospheric condition. The air is very pure and dry; the sky is clear and spacious. There is always fair weather. Here it never rains from the months of June to the month of November. To make up for this, there are terrible windstorms from time to time. Last week the whole camp just missed being blown into the river. Almost all the tents were knocked down, the furniture was upset, the dishes were broken, and a sheet-iron stove was rolled up to the foot of the plateau by the storm. All that in the midst of terrible whirlwinds of dust, and not a drop of rain. Yesterday the weather was stormy; we thought there was going to be a deluge, but there is still nothing but violent wind. This time, at least, all the tents held down."

Trobriand's August entry (page 24) is among the earliest - but not, certainly, the first reference to the hot air and wind - real and metaphorical - of my Dakota home. Fact is, there's an almost puerile preoccupation with flatulence around these parts, but that's another story. Except to say, it does go with the territory, it goes with the territory, as the Music Man said. There are great Sioux tales that could be told . . . and will, I suspect.

What Trobriand found here was place elemental - beyond the unnecessary trappings of much of what we call civilization. In July 1868, after nearly a year in Dakota, Trobriand writes (page 317),

"Last night, the body of Col. Powell, which his brother came to claim in the name of the family, was disinterred to be put in a metal coffin, hermetically sealed. Disgusting! I do not understand people who, in order to have it near them, are so set on raising from the ground a thing as foul and disgusting as a body in full decay. The operation was most sickening. The details I got the next day are enough to turn the stomach. Who in the devil can find sentiment in that!

"In contrast," Trobriand continues in his journal entry fro July 26, 1868, a sunny Sunday in Dakota, "a wedding was celebrated tonight a eight o'clock, a simple and primitive ceremony in keeping with our country and our position in the desert. A musician named Hantz married a young girl, sister of one of the laundresses of Company I. She was in the employ of Mrs. Walborn, in whose home the wedding took place. When the officers were gathered in the main room, and the adjutant took his place a little in advance of the group, prayer book in his hand, the future husband entered, offering his arm to the future wife, and both took their places facing the official. Then, addressing the couple: 'Do you, of your own free will, take for your legitimate wife this woman?' 'Yes Sir.' 'Do you, of your own free will, take as legitimate husband this man?' 'Yes Sir.' 'Join hands. All right, I now pronounce you man and wife in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.'

"After this, everyone shook hands with the couple, and cakes and refreshments went around. The company drank to the health of the newly-weds, who then withdrew into an apartment prepared for them for the night by one of the traders, at the request of the officers. And that was all. After a few gay remarks and insinuations, required by the event, 'everyone went home,' as did Marlborough. It is certainly possible to reduce the celebration of a marriage to a more simple form. A formula pronounced, and everything is said: but Hantz and Annie Noble are just as legitimately and firmly united as if priests, ministers, magistrates had taken part in it, with all the pomp of ceremonies and all the solemnity of formulas, masses, prayers, readings from the law, speeches, etc. It is the same with most things in civilization. A great many complications and useless things. One must come to live in Dakota to get things back to their real value and primitive simplicity."

This bears repeating, or, as my friend Jim Ronda likes to preach, "Let me read this again (and here's a little larger type to help you, friends)" -

"It is the same with most things in civilization. A great many complications and useless things. One must come to live in Dakota to get things back to their real value and primitive simplicity."
It is not an easy place, sometimes, and, perhaps, more years than not. This is a bad one for many ranchers. Dry. Damned dry. One of those years when Trobriand experience rings true, for there's been no rain in some parts since long before June, and there's not a lot in sight. Trobriand writes of similar times in July 1868 (pages 312-314). After he distributes food among visiting Indians from Fort Rice to the south stop for provisions on their way to hunt the buffalo on the Yellowstone. Trobriand honors an old treaty (1820) by distributing, among seven chiefs of 300 lodges, twenty-two boxes of biscuits and a pound of coffee, two pounds of sugar, and piece of salt pork for each of the seven chiefs. He doesn't address the problem of the extra box of biscuits - seven for each of the seven bands, but then what? Must have been something akin to trying to divide up a couple of loads of hay send west from generous eastern farmers - how do you divide up too few of those big, round bales?

Trobriand continues, "Another incident occurred during the day, which I cannot leave out here: the heat was overpowering; the thermometer went above 105, F., or from from forty to forty-one degrees centigrade. Around noon, clouds of grasshoppers began to show up in the sky. A multitude of these fearful insects flew skimming along the ground, and the layers seemed to thicken as they rose in the air. In the direction of the sun, these innumerable multitudes, more visible to the naked eye, looked like a thick dust of white specks which drifted, passed each other, and multiplied in the air. Finally, the last and fatal symptom, a great murmer like the steady rumble of far away carriages filled the air all around. It was the droning of this traveling ocean of winged insects. Our gardens and pastures would be all gone if this cloud came down to earth. Two or three hours would be enough for complete and absolute devastation; everything would be devoured, and nothing could prevent it.

At this tme, a black storm began to come up on the horizon to the north. Heavy clouds mounted one on the other, lighted by brilliant and repeated flashes of lightning, which were followed by rolling thunder, nearer and nearer. The noise of the grasshoppers seemed to be its feeble echo. When the storm came up almost above our heads, blasts of violent wind began to blow in squalls, sweeping everything before them, and great flashes of lightning rent the air. Then all that winged dust which was making the sky white passed over us rapidly. Carried by the storm, it crossed the Missouri, and scattered far out on the plains. Our gardens and pastures were saved, at least this time.

"The storm, before reaching its zenith, went east, and swept around far toward the south, where it finally disappeared, without moistening the soil of Fort Stevenson by a drop of rain, although it fell in torrents in other places. Great blasts of wind, fierce bolts of lightning, one of which killed an Indian mule grazing on the prairie; finally, a great roar of thunder; all the storm did for us was to drive away the grasshoppers, but it did not water our vegetables."

By the time Trobriand showed up in North Dakota, the thriving cultural centers of the Mandan/Hidatsa at the confluence of the Knife and Missouri Rivers had moved, reduced to a fraction of their population by small pox, and turned into what Trobriand considered nations of beggars who were starving because they refused to work. The Indian men preferred to hunt. And Trobriand was outraged that women had to do all the work (he wasn't around later when the settlers and ranchers came to Dakota - the comparative work load of men and women in immigrant farming culture was bad enough, but, the fact is, folks, there's not a single ranch that would be operating were it not for the women). On June 15, 1868, Trobriand was supervising the unloading of supplies at Fort Berthold (pages 301-302):

The chiefs, who had been in this way warned of my coming and of the cargo that the boat was bringing, immediately came to meet me in full regalia, some of their warriors being painted with black, a sign of war, because of their recent victory over the Sioux. While the men were unloading the cargo, which consisted of flour, biscuits, pork, plows, wagons, a forge, iron, farm tools, and implements, I went to the fort to estimate, approximately, the amount of oats to be loaded. I quickly saw that with ten men and three six-mule wagons, it would be a several days' job. In order to cut the time down as much as possible, I asked for sixty women, twenty from each nation [Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara], and immediately I had more than eighty of them to load and unload the wagons. However, since the work was going too slowly, I hired a trader's cart for the next day. The interpreter did more than I would have asked. He had the strongest squaws carry the sacks of oats themselves. Now the weight of each sack varies from 130 to 160 pounds, and the distance from the fort to the boat was not less than five or six hundred yards. These Indian women are so accustomed to hard labor, particularly to carrying loads, that tiring as it was, especially under a scorching sun, they did not seem to consider the task too hard. So, single file, they went down the hill on which the fort is located, following a rather steep path, bent over under the burden which was held on the back by a double thong of buffalo hide, fastened around both the forehead and the upper part of the chest. For this hard work, I promised only to feed them while they worked. It lasted two full days (Saturday and Sunday), three hours Friday afternoon and two hours this morning, two days and a half in all, during which time 4,039 sacks of oats were taken from the storehouses, loaded on the wagons, and hauled to the wharf. The crew of the steamboat took charge of loading them. I have distributed to the squaws three barrels of biscuits and three quarters of bacon, weighing forty-four pounds each. Then, when the work was finished, I had divided among them thirty sacks of damaged oats, the canvas having rotted and the grain molded. But what is not good enough for our horses and mules is still all right for the Indians, who even now are cooking oat cakes. They consider this a piece of good luck, for want is so common among them."

Such couldn't happen in the twenty-first century in North Dakota, of course. We are more than a century past such exploitation. In some ways, we are nearer to the first peoples of this place than Philippe Régis could be - we daughters and sons of immigrant farmers. For example, Trobriand was flabbergasted with natural childbirth among Indian women (page 146-147):

". . . I might mention a peculiarity of Indian women which should have had a place in the account of my visit to Berthold: the extraordinary way in which they bring their children into the world. The fact will seem unbelievable to our civilized ladies, but it is strictly and absolutely true. The Indian women, burdened, as we have seen, with all the rough work that among other peoples is left to the men [not all 'other peoples', Philippe Régis, not all], do not stop any of their activities during their period of pregnancy. Up to the last moment, they go after wood, carry the burdens, and take care of the horses. When the pains come, they stop and give birth to their child wherever they are, wash themselves and the baby if there is water near by, and return to the lodge, carrying their papoose upon their load. The next day they take up their work again as if nothing had happened. If the thing happens in the winter, they will break the ice to proceed with the washing of the child and themselves in the ice water, and the mother and the child seem to be only the better for it! The fact is so well known, so well authenticated, that there can be no doubt of it. This is what mother nature does for her children. Let us compare this with what civilization does for hers: long torture, medical attendance, intervention of chloroform, puerperal fever, two weeks in bed, thirty days in the bedroom, and such precautions. And the indispensable cares! We have made for ourselves in society not only a conventional life, but an artificial constitution. Physically and morally, we have corrupted the work of nature, and our women sometimes die in childbirth and are always martyrized. The Indian woman gathers up her baby on the prairie and goes on her way.

The children do not seem to be affected by it, for they are generally robust and well informed. It can even be contended with some degree of certainty that infirm or crippled children are much more rare among the Indians than among us. . . ."

There's nothing so astonishing about the practice to a boy from Oliver County, North Dakota. When I was growing up in the 1950s, I recall the story told of Old Man Sk___________, a German patriarch who ruled his household like Otto von Bismarck. He left for town one day - and as he drove away, he yelled to his wife, who - in spite of being full-term with child - was hoeing the potatoes in the hot August sun. "Try to get it done before milking this time, woman," said he. "I'll be back by about 9:00 tonight." When he drove up just before 9:00, he saw his wife in the potato patch, just two rows over from where she was when he left. "What the hell have you been doing, woman?" he demanded. "The baby came," said she. "But I got the cows milked right on time, anyway - but I might not get the potatoes hoed until tomorrow, because I have to feed the baby and show Gertie (the oldest daughter) how to take care of him." "I'm hungry," said he, "what's for supper?"

Trobriand, like that more famous French-speaking observer of American culture, Tocqueville, was convinced that American Indian culture and American Indians themselves would disappear. He writes, on February 4, 1868 (page 231),

"But the race of American Indian seems to have had its day and to have fulfilled its fleeting mission in the march of humanity. Its resistance to any assimilation with the whites is a seed of destruction which the race carries in itself and which grows with great rapidity. The American aborigine, no longer protected as the African race has been up to the present by the vastness of impenetrable deserts, will be the first to disappear from the great human family. It will die out in the age of man just as so many created beings have died out in the ages preceding this one, even after having been dominant on the face of the earth. And to take its place in the chain of eternal progress, some other race will rise in a future time, as superior to the Caucasian of today as that race was to the American which is now dying out."

Trobriand was wrong - about both the imminent demise of American Indians and about the superiority of white culture. But he was remarkably insightful about a great deal, including the influence of this place on one's very soul. It is a place that invites introspection, especially during those long winter nights. On the last night of the year, December 31, 1867, alone with journal, Trobriand wrote (200-202):

"The year 1867 has come to its last moments. In two hours, it will have ceased to be and will join in the abyss of the past some millions of other years of which only a few thousand have left on us their distinct marks and of which scarcely forty - a nothing - have their place in my memory. II have neither family nor friends around me to bid it goodbye. For me no clock will strike the twelve strokes of midnight at its passing. No familiar sound, no family celebration will mark the portentous moment when 1868 succeeds 1857."

Trobriand does an overview of his life by year, beginning with 1840, when he was twenty-four, and ending with "1868-Fort Stevenson, Dakota" and "1869-????-Who knows?"

Then, in something of the fashion of an older and more comfortable-in-his-skin visitor to this place than Meriwether Lewis writing the review of his much shorter life on August 18, 1805 at the Great Falls of the Missouri, Trobriand does a personal inventory:

And in going back over the thread of these dates, how many happenings, great and small, I find there! How many evolutions in the life of nations; how many sudden changes in my life! How pleasure is mixed with grief, light with darkness! How many clouds passed over the sun which seemed to be lasting shadows and which disappeared without leaving a mark! How many people met, how many things seen, how many thoughts provoked, how many ideas acquired in these trips from one world to the other; on one side across France, England, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and on the other across the United States, Canada, and the island of Cuba! And what a school in philosophy is four years in a gigantic war [American Civil War] to crown the experience and knowledge of a nomadic life of twenty years. But what do I know? After all that, in comparison to what I should still be able to learn, if life were not too short and if one did not forget with the years half of what is learned. The little Greek that I knew I have forgotten, I do not know when, since I never had a chance to use it. Latin-I lost it the day I learned Italian. I should have forgotten Italian while studying Spanish if I had not stopped myself in time. And now I am learning Sioux, which will make me forget nothing.

"How many things have I forgotten about history, mathematics, and ancient literature! So much that I sometimes wonder if the total of my knowledge acquired in thirty years is much greater than that which I have lost in the same period of time. In any case, what I remembered is a good deal more important and practical. This is what causes progress and improvement. Youth dreams about life; age achieves the practical. Age knows life thoroughly; youth hardly suspects it. With what a feeling of pity I take myself back today to that phase of my first youth and to those trivial things and vain illusions which then took up my time and fascinated me. . . ." . . . . Trobriand writes a magnificent tribute to his departed wife, and ends his New Year's Eve journal entry (202):

"The night is half clouded; the stars glimmer uncertainly, half disappearing behind the floating mist as if they were afraid of revealing the secret I am asking them. But when there is doubt, there is till room for hope-and hope which slumbers before death awakens after."

Don't know why, in particular - but I'm reminded of The Reverend Eli Jenkins' Prayer from Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, that great, profane, and at the same time, spiritual drama - the story of that fictitious Welsh town, Llareggub [spelled backwards of course, it's ?????????]

Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please to keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die.

And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!
Bless us this night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, good-bye-but just for now!

Sorry, Philippe Régis de Trobriand, but I simply do not share your easy dismissal of youth, nor can I dismiss those passions as trivial or those preoccupations "vain illusions" - and I don't regret for a single moment the time I've spent with such as Thomas' Under Milk Wood in a not-very-BBC-like production for a most limited audience on the campus of Colorado State University at Fort Collins back in 1967-68 - in fact, just about 100 years exactly after you wrote your New Year's Eve piece.

In fact, I'm not ready for the "practical that age achieves."

I'd rather say, with the Reverend Eli Jenkins, "Good-bye my friends, but just for now!" - Tomorrow - more tomorrow.
Ev Albers