The Marigold Plate: Encounter on the prairie

A backward glance to an ill-starred summer, beyond the reach of living memory. Here the poison seed was planted from which the city of Dormition grew.

In the beginning, in the very beginning, was the crime.

August 15th, 1853:

A band of Kiowas summering on the banks of a river — a river that had a name centuries old, but would soon have another. Their extermination transpired in a single hour of gentle sunlight. Thirty-three men, women, and children (that primeval trinity, invoked in all atrocities) shot, hacked, and burned to death by a late season wagon train. There were reasons, but no one remembers them. Like the victims themselves, they were swallowed up in unrecorded history — the great forgetfulness of time.

For another day the westward trekking pilgrims lingered, picking through the ruins for salvage (one brass teapot, six arrowheads, three bone handled knives, a be-sooted bowler hat adorned with partridge feather), dragging the corpses and the scorched remnants of the camp off to a nearby arroyo, covering them with grass and branches and a few shovelfuls of stony soil. Even savages deserve some shelter from the coyotes. That, or something like it, they mumbled as they lugged the bodies. Rationales of the conscious mind. What really drove them — trudging back and forth through the tall grass and the leaden heat — was a motive old as their first ancestors. The urge to hide what they had done. The evil deed: if it could just be covered over, concealed from the sky, then it would be as if it never happened… and Heaven would not take its vengeance. The oldest of superstitions.

Then the pilgrims hurried on, for time was against them. The great chronometer of the ecliptic clicked forward every day, toward winter and the closing of the passes. Once snow fell in the High Sierra, California would be locked away. But they never made it that far. Five hundred miles west of that August hour of gentle sunlight they perished, waterless in an alkaline desert — the dream of California stopped like a clock in the nameless desolation of late summer. Motionless wagons, wind-snapped canvas, corpses mummifying in the heat, mouths curled in leather grimaces, dead-eyes staring past the world into a godless vacuum.

Later came the outpost on the river, erected on the same scorched earth where the Kiowa once camped. And later still: the settlement, the town, the city. But of that mid-August massacre no memorial existed: the murdered and the murderers devoured by death and time. Only the grass remembered, silent witness to the whole affair. The tall grass, still watching from the fields…

biding its time