One of the things that nag at you when you drive along any highway a lot is those signs that announce "Red Haw State Park," or "Antique Airflight Museum." Something inside tells you that you are too busy if you can't ever stop at those places. And sometimes you're driving along that same road, not really in a hurry for once, and you finally break down and pull off the highway and go looking for the featured attraction.
That happened to me on the road between Ottumwa and Fairfield, a trip that I have probably taken over fifty times. Ottumwa has a better selection of movies than Fairfield, plus it's on the way home to Des Moines. So I had driven by the sign reading "Chief Wapello Memorial Park Historical Site" many times. It's just east of Agency on Highway 34, and I turned south off of the highway and drove the half mile or so to the burial site.
It's now a little triangle of land, right by the railroad tracks, not really in Agency, but hanging out there like a fragment of history that civilization briefly walked over and then forgot. The park has a number of monuments and kiosks that tell the story of Chief Wa Pel Lo and his friend, Joseph Street. Both are buried there, as are various relatives, including Street's wife, Eliza.
I enjoyed getting out of the car in this little park that holds so much history. I enjoyed reading about how Street and Wa Pel Lo became friends. Great friends, as a matter of fact, since when Wa Pel Lo was dying he asked to be buried next to Street.
Wa Pel Lo was what the white men may have called a "good" Indian. At least he was more cooperative with the white settlers than his contemporary, Black Hawk. Black Hawk's idea of a good time was to ride on down the east side of Iowa and attack Fort Madison, since it was known as a pushover fort, due to it's setting, layout, and the number of defenders. And Black Hawk pushed it over a number of times before finally burning it.
But the subsequent Black Hawk War resulted in the loss of the west bank of the Mississippi by all of the Native American tribes, even those not involved in the conflict. And Wa Pel Lo, with the Sac and Fox tribe, relocated first to what is now called Wapello, Iowa, and later moved to the Ottumwa area.
Wa Pel Lo was basically second in command of the group that ended up in the Ottumwa area. The number one guy was named Keokuk, and he gave his name to an Iowa town, too. Wa Pel Lo had decided to move from the area that is now Wapello to Ottumwa because he heard that Street was setting up the agency just east of there.
Street and Wa Pel Lo had met years before when Street ran another agency and a school for Native Americans in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, which is just across the Mississippi from the northeast corner of Iowa.
Street was born in Virginia, and originally worked as a deputy sheriff, then in business, before studying law and joining in a law practice With Henry Clay. He co-published a newspaper called "The Western World," in which he became caught up in controversy when he accused Aaron Burr of conspiracy against the fledgling U.S. government. He experienced attacks on his life at that time, and later migrated farther west, working as a clerk of court, postmaster, and eventually was appointed to various positions as an Indian agent.
While it's obvious that Street felt that the Native Americans had something to learn from the white culture, he seems to have treated the Native Americans with respect, and he gained their trust.
When he got to Agency, he felt free to teach the natives "agriculture and his family domestic economy, and give him, by experience, right notions of individual property."
The cultural prejudices implicit in that statement are obvious, and yet he did succeed in educating his Native American friends about the white man's notions of property, at least to the extent that the Native Americans learned how to "buy" land the white way. This became important years later.
His stay in Agency was only to last two years due to his death in 1840. When he died his body was going to be shipped to Prairie du Chien, but Wa Pel Lo led a group of Sac and Fox who requested that Street be buried in Indian Territory. The delegation promised that they would give Street's family an area of land of their own surrounding the burial site. Street was then buried in the garden of the Agency. Two years later Wa Pel Lo followed him into the great beyond, and his last request brought his body by ox cart to rest beside Street, a man Wa Pel Lo called his "white father."
Wa Pel Lo's death put the Territorial government on alert, and they again approached the Sac and Fox to try to buy the rest of Iowa. Wa Pel Lo had been one of the main opposing parties in the previous attempt to buy the Indian territories, saying, "This is the only country we have left and we are so few we cannot conquer other countries."
But after his death there was a big council at the Agency site which lasted for about a week, with over four thousand people in attendance. It resulted in an offer to buy most of Iowa for 1000 boxes of silver, about $80,000, which was about 12cents an acre. The Sac and Fox agreed to move farther west for a while and then eventually move off to Kansas. Which they did.
But not before specifying in the final agreement that 64 acres be set aside for Eliza Street and Joseph's surviving family. The Sac and Fox kept their word, even paying for that land out of their own money.
Understanding the white way with property paid off later, too, when the money that they got in that purchase enabled some of the Sac and Fox to come back to Iowa and buy their own land in the Tama area. And that land has stayed in the hands of Native Americans ever since. It's not a reservation, it's owned. So maybe Street had some effect, even posthumously.
It was great reading about Street, his history, his relationship with Wa Pel Lo, and how well it all turned out for them, despite the trying times. I was about to adjourn, get back in the car, and drive off, when I saw one last thing that lit up the whole story.
To understand what happened you have to suspend for a moment your skepticism about astrology. I'm assuming that you are skeptical. Everybody is. Even I am. There is one form of Indian (from India) astrology called jyotish which I do think is pretty interesting, but I'm not going to lay all that out right now. Suffice it to say that for someone who had his wisdom teeth cut out in the sixties, astrological insights still hold a bit of an allure. As a matter of fact, I tend to believe in almost everything.
What I mean is, I believe that there's an element of truth in all of the alternate psychologies, cures, diets, and world-views that make up the New Age thing. Some seem more accurate than others, but I pretty much think that everything about you constantly broadcasts who you are. Your astrology tells who you are, as does your numerology, your palm, your diet, your posture, your voice, your iridology (the patterns in your iris), your car, your house, your DNA, your clothes, your parents, your sibling position, your handwriting, everything. You are constantly pouring out information about yourself. As a matter of fact, you could easily be described as a highly concentrated body of information, especially from the DNA viewpoint.
There's plenty of information pouring off of everybody. The question is, who can read it, and what's the validity or reliability of that information? If you study the philosophy of science, you find out that there are very few things, if any, that scientists consider "proven." A rigorous scientist will rarely indicate that even his own pet theory has been proven, just that the research results seem to support his or her hypotheses.
So, it's impossible to prove that astrology means anything. But you can, if you are willing to suspend belief, note regularities that this or that alternate philosophy does predict accurately, and use the simple success rate of that prediction as a partial support for the validity of the original philosophy. In other words, if it works, don't knock it. There may be something to it. How much, we don't know for sure. But even though I know that astrology isn't scientific, in the strictest sense (except for that one variety that I referred to), I still read my horoscope in the paper, now and then.
Plus the descriptions of the predicted personalities that are associated with the astrological sun signs provide a convenient shorthand with which to describe distinct major types of people.
Which is all leading up to the fact that Street was a sagittarian. Which may not mean anything to you, but the birth date on his gravestone marks him as a member of a group of people that are quite inspirational to me, including Beethoven, Winston Churchill, and a guy named His Divinity Swami Brahmananda Saraswati Jagadguru Bhagwan Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math. All major leaders in their field. I'm sure that you have heard of most of them. Oh, and of course there's me, another sagittarian. Not as inspirational as the rest of the group, by far, but I kind of like him.
Sagittarians are said to be idealistic, outgoing, unconventional, altruistic people who tend to get involved in teaching or other humanitarian efforts. They are champions of the underdog, and can't stand dishonesty or injustice of any kind. They can be dreamers, however, and tend toward alcoholism and cynicism if they don't follow the step by step method of achieving rather than just dreaming their dream.
So, remembering that, I suddenly saw Street as a real person, with those real-life sagittarian tendencies that give the inner motives behind all of the history that is relayed in kiosk signs and stone carvings at the burial site. With the psychological shorthand of astrology, Street comes back to life, for me at least. Now I see him as a stranger on the western edge of a strange society. A man who left the intrigue and treachery of the eastern states. A man who was spreading the anglo society west simply by being part of it, and yet was not totally entranced with what he saw happening.
As a humanitarian, he must have seen Wa Pel Lo and his friends as human beings with divine rights that were threatened by Street's own people. And he worked to keep even more injustice from coming down on Wa Pel Lo and his tribe. Looks like a sagittarian to me.
It's okay, you can go back to skepticism now. But wasn't astrology a nice place to visit?
So was the memorial site, and I left intrigued by the story. It's a screenplay idea, no question. Something like "Dances with Wolves," with a Kevin Costner clone playing Street, and the Black Hawk story as a subplot. Remember, you saw it here first. Now if I could just get started on writing the thing, step by step. It's either that or I'm having a beer.
And it all started because I got off the highway and followed the signs.
Map of Iowa Index Page
Next Chapter, #14. Mt. Ayr