As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
Two of my pets of history are General and Mrs. Miles, as they are the perfect Plainsmen, as much as George and Elizabeth Custer were in being their chosen friends.
General Nelson Appleton Miles was one of the right things about America in being not only brave, an intelligent combat fighter of Confederates, Indians and Spaniards, but he was a military genius, who captured Geronimo by first using mirror signalling stations on points in Arizona to track the Apache in their terrorism.
An idea probably born out in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War by the Confederates to keep track of General Sheridan's Cavalry.
The Miles were the nicest of people. It was in that I found after the death of General Custer, that Libby found Mrs. Miles in sunny California among all the beauty, weather and bloom there. It was at that moment of the last northern plains campaign that Mrs. Miles mentioned something in this statement.
" Bear Butte seems now the most beautiful thing I ever saw."
Elizabeth Bacon Custer. Following the Guidon
Bear Butte is the first butte east of the Black Hills where Mount Rushmore is enshrined. Libby Custer knew Dakota Territory as she has been at Bismark, and knew it was just more of western Kansas blowing in a gale of scorching or Arctic wind.
I have not researched all the forts in Dakota Territory, but I have been to Bear Butte and it reminds me more of the brooding Black Hills, and wonder if the 'fort' Mrs. Miles was stationed at was Fort Meade, which is now sort a military hospital and burial ground like Arlington being a national cemetery.
Mrs. Miles was a Plainswoman, even beyond the rigors of what Libby Custer played at constantly in campaign as a Cavalryman's wife. Nelson miles was Cavalry by nature, but was in command of Infantry at Fort Hays when they met the Custer's and became friends and compatriots.
She understood the people and land of the plains which Libby still referred to as the Great American Desert as most did. There was longing in her, for once that region infects a heart, that heart is forever there in the restless longing of that prairie ocean.
Mrs. Miles would die with her children in a house fire from what I have read, and General Miles hair would turn white over night from the tragedy of this event, but it was all the great plains and that encompassing grass blanket which brought comfort to a soul in all that land meant.
Nothing was easy out there and for the most part nothing is still easy out there. There are now these welfare vistas of succor which provide a nipple of nursing to worthless types flushed out of the rural areas, whose sins are nurtured to immoral evils, as they think they are beyond God now, but God is still there and so is that nature just waiting to kill those who dare to intrude from their ivory towers.
Much has been made of the mountain man, but for a much greater period of time and still of today, there are Plainsmen, who are a race of people like Mrs. Miles. They lurk there and if displaced to some urban area, they study like a wolf these creatures on two legs and long to return to the den which beckons them home in memories like Mrs. Miles of the most beautiful place they have ever been.
They are the kindest and most trustworthy people in the world, but will not be wronged. They scorn the inferior races of the east and with disdane sneer at those creatures of the west coast. Those of a town of 90 people are mocked for their weakness as a city of 2 million, for theirs are paths of asphalt and not of the hidden trails of where the birds traverse the skies.
I have the keenest affection for these praire people as they have a sharp edge upon their nature and not like the brooding rock club of the backwoodsmans psyche.
This is the flyover country and those peoples mocked by the patricians inhabit here. They are all that is left of America and most probably why God has not not sent fire and brimstone on all the sodom America is for their last Christian Virtue housed there in them.
North Dakota in oil boom will destroy that vestage now. It is like the big winter which killed all the buffalo in the center of America and made a north and south herd. All that will be left are the American transplants into the Canadian plains and the peoples south from South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska and Western Kansas.
I only hope that God's Judgment comes and kills off the masses so that this part of America sprouts from this isolated herd to repopulate the pollution which is the east and west coast.
nuff said
agtG
