Lucky To Lost… And Back Again

My hope is that, after you read the progression of events to follow, you won’t blame me too much for taking sixteen months to offer my next installment.  My last segment was titled. Lucky Guy, and the good fortune has clearly not stopped.  Sit back, relax, and prepare yourself for a tale of much better luck than I deserve.

Things have gotten very busy since the Wrangler Award.  I had been working on a project related to the story that I’m writing. The project is called, The Northern Cheyenne Healing Trail. This three and one-half mile long interpretive trail is going to be built at Fort Robinson, (no relation) Nebraska. It is the second stage of a project that was started twenty years ago by a pair of Northern Cheyenne elders, Edna Seminole and Rosie Eaglefeathers, to commemorate the heroic actions of our ancestors who escaped Indian Territory in 1878, made a painstaking and heroic trek back to their homeland, and then escaped another tortuous imprisonment at Fort Robinson in 1879.

Many of the participants died in this effort which became the principal reason the Northern Cheyenne were allowed to regain a piece of their homeland and to continue to live in the northern plains today. In 2016 a monument was dedicated to them and, shortly afterward, the Healing Trail effort was begun. It is a true privilege to be a part of this effort and to work with my relatives to honor our esteemed forebearers and comemmorate their remarkable accomplishments.

But wait, there’s more.

I’d been doing research for book two long before book one was published. In doing so, I have traveled, and continue to travel, thousands of miles a year, to Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, where I get out on the trail taken by Little Wolf, Morning Star, and all those who followed them back home. I have been searching for where they were, both physically and emotionally, to try to better understand their experience. What I have found is that, try as I may, much of what they experienced is impossible to replicate or even begin to try to understand. It seems that I enjoy the benefit of far too many modern conveniences that they did not have and which make it impossible for me to truly “be where they were” emotionally.

That said, many of those conveniences have made it possible for me to have much greater success in finding where they were physically, and understanding, at least to some extent, what they went through. So, there’s a tradeoff. I want to tell you about the successes here, but I felt it necessary to qualify them before I began out of respect for the struggle and tenacity of my ancestors. While I have had great success at finding where they were, physically, I, nor anyone else, can ever truly understand where they were emotionally during this arduous journey.

The northern portion of the trail is pretty well identified with at least three of the locations along the trail hosting regular commemorative events that recognize the Northern Cheyenne Homecoming. Fort Robinson, NE, Oberlin, KS, and Scott City, KS, all host events, and have built monuments dedicated to the Northern Cheyenne trek home. Conversely, the southern locations have all nearly been forgotten, even by most of the locals. It is here where I have been lost myself, for the last sixteen months. It is also here where noteworthy events have passed, and noteworthy people have been encountered. I’ll share more about them in my next few posts.