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MuseumAuthor(s): Raymond AbbottSource: The North American Review, Vol. 273, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), pp. 60-63Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25125008 .
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FAMILIAR MATTERS
Museum RAYMOND ABBOTT
The outside of the Schmidt home stead didn't tell me much, but I hadn't thought it would. It looked about like any small Dakota ranch or
farm, for it was, I soon discovered, both a ranch and a farm. The Schmidts ran cattle for a few years and at the same time had crops like
winter wheat.
There was the usual clutter on the
outside of the place, perhaps a little bit more than the average amount.
Farm equipment mostly, and some of it not used in a long time. And there
was an old wagon missing a wheel and an ancient Packard. I am old enough to remember what a Packard looks like. There were chickens every
where and a large barking dog as big as a German Shepherd but not a
shepherd. I had come to know the Schmidts
because of a book I wrote, a novella, about the Sioux Indians who lived
nearby on a reservation. It was a con
temporary story that appeared and I am afraid disappeared without much notice from anyone. There were
almost no reviews, and so when many
months went by and I began to get letters about the book, and book
orders accompanying these letters?
sometimes for as many as ten hard
cover books at one time from a place called the Schmidt Library?natu rally I was curious who were the Schmidts and where in the middle of nowhere was their library? Soon I was
corresponding with them, and at first I admit to a certain unease with their letters for they were full of contempt and anger and, I suppose, hate for their Indian neighbors, the Sioux. I realized the Schmidts saw the Indi ans as overly pampered wards of the state. Too protected by a benevolent federal government and recipients of a misplaced sympathy by a naive
white populace east of the Mis
sissippi River. My very realistic story about reservation life, the Schmidts told me, was how it really was, and
they were giving friends and rela
tives, some away from the region,
copies of my book. "This is how it
really is out here," they told the peo
ple. "This man's got it right." That kind of report didn't
especially agree with me in the
beginning; then I thought about it some and decided to permit them to find what truth they wanted in what I wrote. I knew they would anyway. I didn't write the book to put down
Indians, I knew that much. I was
simply telling a story with as much
honesty as I could muster. It was not the entire Indian story, and I had
never said it was.
Shortly after my arrival, Richard Schmidt said, "You know, it looks like rain and we sure do need it in the
worst way. It is mighty dry out here. Course if it rains some the roads will
muddy up pretty bad and be all but
impassable for a few days." Was he having fun with me? I
wondered. Did he know that staying for a few days at the old homestead
simply wasn't what I looked forward to? As it was, it was quite enough to think in terms of one night in the
place, and I knew because it was so late I would stay the night.
As I had expected, the first floor of the house was primitive, but I just knew that where I would be asked to
sleep would be much rougher some how. It isn't that living crudely with out amenities bothers me. It doesn't, or it didn't once. Twenty years earlier I had lived not forty miles from this
spot and I lived then without water or
plumbing, although I did have elec
tricity. What I was seeing now wasn't so
different from those days. But in those earlier years I had more control over my living space and by that I mean I had a lot to say about the extent of the clutter in my life, and the first thing that struck me upon entering this farmhouse was the incredible amount of junk they lived
with. There were literally paths, crawl spaces almost, between the
boxes and papers and paper bags they kept. And I had no good reason to
think things would improve on the second floor. Clearly there wasn't any
place for me on the first, so it had to be the upstairs, I figured. It was a
powder-dry year. There had been a
drought on for months and this place was a fire waiting to happen.
Dinner was in the kitchen?on a small corner of a metal table that had been cleared of still more junk to
make room for my plate. I think I had ham and eggs, and Richard and Eleanor didn't eat. Instead, they talked of what was going on on the reservation. It was, as I said, Indians and the reservation and the life out there that had brought us together.
That plus my curiosity to see their
library, for I knew not just anybody would have a library out here in the middle of nowhere, and I was right about that. The Schmidts weren't
just anybody. They had a love of books and they collected books on western themes and housed them in a small shed. And years before, Rich ard told me when we were alone,
they published at their own expense a history of the two neighboring counties. Richard said how Eleanor did most of the writing and they shared the research job, but he
arranged for the book to be printed. And he told me how difficult it had been to pay back the bank loans he had taken out to cover the costs of the
printing. But not only did they buy and
collect books, and even write a cou
ple together, they read them to each other at night and they were the first
people I'd met in my life who read to each other except, I suppose, for par ents who read to their children. Once
reading aloud was commonplace, but I guess with TV it is a mostly forgotten practice. Richard read mostly to
Eleanor, for her eyesight wasn't at all
good. She has diabetes and it is not that well controlled.
A good story couldn't be im
proved upon, he said, telling me fic tion was their favorite. Frederick
Manfred was one of their favorite
60 September 1988
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writers. He also told me my short novel was basically a good story but he found a flaw or two. For one thing he said I didn't have the characters
stop to eat or relieve themselves in more than 24 hours of sustained action. I hadn't thought of that
before, and he was right, I said. He smiled approvingly when I told him this. He liked being told he was right.
The museum is not my name for the room in which I was to sleep that
night. It was one of two upstairs rooms, each padlocked?for what
reason, I don't know. I didn't get to see the inside of the second room, but I assume it was full of storage junk from a lifetime of collecting. To
get upstairs, as I did about 8 p.m. (farm couples, even retired farm cou
ples, go to bed early), required climb
ing a narrow but short stairway made
narrower by empty egg cartons piled along the steps. Richard sold eggs to a
nearby elementary school. There was
barely room for one person to put one foot in front of the other, let alone turn around. Richard went ahead of
me. Because of her crippling arthri
tis, which like most arthritis was bet ter one day than the next, I doubted that Eleanor had been above the first
floor in years.
At the top I stood and took in the scene. Richard was already moving
more boxes out of the way and paper bags, too, and telling me to step care
fully. I feared there might be a hole in the floor the way he picked his way around that space. There wasn't,
however. If anything, there were more boxes and tools and farm imple ments up there than were on the first
floor, and I had thought that quite impossible until I saw for myself.
And everything looked burnable and I was glad my wife Mary wasn't with
me. She was a smoker and could
never have stayed there the entire
night without a cigarette, and if I feared one thing at that moment it
was fire and being trapped. I could see the newspaper: Man Trapped in
Museum Fire. The museum had the lock off the
door, but nothing more that I could determine had been done to ready the space. There was an inch of dust on everything and the bed no less
dusty. The mattress sagged until it
nearly touched the floor. And before Richard left he handed me a coffee can and explained what it was for: if I had to urinate in the night I should use this can rather than trying to find
my way down the stairs (he did give me a flashlight) and deal with a dog who had already seemed not
especially happy I was staying the
night. The animal, I was thankful, wasn't allowed inside. I would use
the coffee can, I knew, because there
wasn't any way that I would risk pass ing that large dog for any purpose
unless there was an emergency, and
the emergency I could imagine was a
fire and then that dog would see noth
ing but a blur as I passed by on my way out of that fire trap.
Richard had cranked up, es
pecially for me, he said, a gasoline powered generator outside and behind the house. He said it would
give me a good two hours of light from which I could read in case I couldn't go to sleep right away. I was
tired, but to sleep in this room and in this house and at 8 p.m.? There was no way, I knew.
Reading was exactly what I wanted to do. I had a book with me in
my suitcase and Richard had given me a couple more, including one
large one by Frederick Manfred. It was a gift, he said, and a gift I have
yet and still am unable to get inter ested in it. It is slow going. It didn't
matter because I found I couldn't concentrate. Not on reading anyway. I felt as if I were sitting on top of a
haystack and that at any time some
body below might strike a match and
poof, that would be the end. Frankly, I think a hot fart might have set that
place ablaze. So I spent the first half hour in the room mapping out an
escape route. There was a window
behind the bed but the glass was
cloudy as if it might have been smoked from an earlier fire, although I knew that had to be quite impossi ble. There had been no little fires in this place. It would be all or nothing in here, I was certain. Probably it was
dirt or soot on the glass. Anyway, the
view out was obscured and the win
dow itself didn't open. I didn't force
it, for I could see that a good push would cause the entire window, cas
ing and all, to fall onto the roof that
gently slanted toward the ground. Thankfully it wasn't far to the ground below. I could see that much at least.
The museum was quite another mat
ter. Here was a roorn literally packed with Indian crafts going back many years. Some of the pieces had to be
forty or fifty years old. There were
examples of beadwork and quillwork (made from porcupine quills), and
deerskin vests brightly colored with beaded designs, and moccasins of all sizes and shapes, and tomahawks and
peace pipes, some made from pipe stone (the newer ones) and some of rock. A showcase of Indian art work
was what it was, and there was more
under the bed and in the closet. "How did you come by all of
this?" I asked Richard before he left me to read and go to sleep. I didn't think to ask why he had accumulated so much. Later I would understand
why. If I hadn't known otherwise, I
might have suspected it was all stolen
merchandise, and I suppose because of the way it was accumulated some
people might call it stolen. I might have said that myself once a long time
ago. Now I am much less quick to
pass judgment. Richard's answer wasn't direct.
He laughed and said, a bit nervously, I thought, as if he wasn't used to such
queries, "Well, I will tell you we didn't exactly plan it this way, I can
guarantee you that. It began much smaller than what you see here, and
we never dreamed it would get so
big." He explained how until his last
heart attack two years before he and Eleanor had run their cattle opera tion, including leasing Indian lands, just like their neighbors did. Leasing Indian land was common in these
parts, necessary for survival since
most of the land was reservation land. "The Indians don't use their
land; most of them don't anyway," he said, not seeming to pass any par
ticular judgment on the Indians in
saying this. "So ranchers around
these parts lease the Indian land and run cattle. That gives the Indian some income for land they aren't
using anyway, and the cattlemen, men like me, they have more land to
graze their stock. Sounds good, don't
it?" He smiled again. "Only it don't
work that good. What happens is that the cattleman has to pay in advance for a lease. The tribe and the bia land office require this. The money we
pay goes to the family owning the land. Sometimes several families
own the same land and so what hap pens is the money gets parceled out and soon it is spent, sometimes
weeks after we lease the land, and then the Indians start coming around
looking for an advance on the next lease payment. That's right, an
advance. It don't matter none that
the lease is paid up for three years or
September 1988 61
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five years and no payment is due for months or even years. It don't matter
at all to them. They want some
money right away for the land they own, and that we are using.
"Now, legally speaking we ain't
required to pay them varmits any
thing, not one cent, but not too many
operators dare refuse them time after time. Maybe a few times, but not all the time, for an Indian is like an ele
phant; he's got a long memory, and the next time that good piece of land comes up for lease renewal you gonna
find your neighbor down the road has
got the new lease, and what you've done for improvements to the land, like I put up a dam once and lost the
lease, well, that don't count for noth
ing. You don't get paid back for
improvements you make and the next operator, he don't have to pay
you either. So it is in our own best
interest, I suppose, to try and get along with them natives. In the old
days it wasn't such a problem, for unless the land was real special nobody else wanted the land anyway.
Then the natives, they had to lease to us or not get any money from the
land, and there isn't one of them that doesn't want the money they can get for doing nothing but owning the land.
"So what do we do? We give them natives money some of the time
when they come around asking, and
they come around plenty. If we can talk them out of it, we do, but if we can't and they are drunk and getting ugly, we give them what we can
afford. After a while we decided to try to get something back for what we
give out, 'cause in truth that money
don't often get taken off the next lease payment. It should but it don't. It gets forgotten. We pay it to keep the relationship good, but sometimes
we ask for something for our money.
Something they got of value, or they think is of value. Sometimes it ain't
worth much, but we've been blessed in that the people whose land we leased had some pretty good craft
workers in their families, so we took in crafts in exchange for the cash. It
was usually understood that the
money we gave for the crafts was in
the form of a loan and they could come back anytime they wanted and
get back their stuff. But they didn't come back, as you can see. I can't
remember one of them natives that
came back in all the years we been
doing this. What you see here must be thirty years of buying. Paying is
maybe the better word." The bitter ness was obvious now.
"We've not sold much over the
years. We planned to in the begin ning, and there was a need, but I
guess we figured it would be just our luck for the natives to start coming
back looking for what we sold off and then we would have a real problem.
Then it got so we liked our crafts. It is
attractive, isn't it?"
I nodded my head that it was. It wasn't just attractive, it was superb, and very valuable, I bet. Probably
worth ten thousand dollars if a penny. Who could say? That kind of quality material was disappearing fast and had gone up astronomically since I lived on the reservation in the Six ties.
"Course not all of it was for advances or loans," he went on.
"Some of it we bought outright if we liked the piece and it came cheap enough. It's all mixed together now. Sometimes we just bought things to
get some drunk out of our kitchen.
Nobody around here, I can tell you, likes having a drunk native in his
house." He chuckled. "Besides, you never knew what they might do next.
They are damn unpredictable people when they get to drinking."
A dry, almost hot, wind howled all that night. I was sure it had started to rain and I almost prayed that that dry
wind didn't mean rain, much as I knew they needed moisture. Rain the next day, once I was out of there,
would be fine. When I was on the main road headed for the state capital I wouldn't mind a little rain, but not now. Not this night. I knew what it would do to the roads.
For a long time I sat up listening to the wind. The light had been good for two hours as Richard said it would and it didn't just go out; it faded out,
getting dimmer until there was no
light at all aside from iridescent paint ings hanging on the walls. I hadn't
noticed them in the beginning, not until the light faded and my eyes searched for light in the room and the
paintings glowed. There was not much light from the window, but even if the glass hadn't been ob scured there would be almost no light coming in from the outside, for there
were no street lights out there and no moon that night. In fact, it looked as
if it might storm and rain a plenty as Richard hoped it would, and I sat almost praying it wouldn't.
If anything, those paintings?
about a half dozen?made an already eerie room spookier, and except for
wind blowing outside there was no
sound, but I would almost swear I could feel the energy of the people
who produced that craft work. I bet it was an entire generation. People with names like Eagle Feather and Fast
Pony and Blue Thunder and Kills-in Water and many many more. I knew
a lot of them were dead too. I didn't know this from first hand information or even from hearing someone say they were dead. Still, I know that
many were gone, if not most of them, in spite of the lack of hard evidence.
The odds said they were dead, for of the many people I knew when I lived
on the reservation, an unusually large number were now dead, maybe half,
perhaps two-thirds. It made me sad to think about it; some were only children and few died from natural
causes, I knew. Most succumbed to alcohol related abuses. God-awful
multiple car crashes, knife fights, gunshot wounds, fires, all brought about by drinking. It is no exaggera tion to say that booze has killed far
more Indians than the settlers or sol
diers of the last century who drove the Indian off his land.
Somehow it seemed wrong for this energy and life and color to be held captive in virtual darkness, tucked away in an upstairs room in the house of a white ranch family who at best were neutral about how they felt about Indians, and at worst much less than neutral. I knew I was being ridiculous, but there was no one to
see the beauty or recognize the qual
ity of the craftmanship?a quality that was disappearing as the old mas ters died out. The young Indians
were not interested for whatever rea
sons in learning to do this work well. Who can blame them? There isn't a
living to be made doing beadwork. That isn't to say, in all fairness to
Richard and Eleanor, that there wasn't an effort to display the crafts in the room with dignity, with respect, or in a tasteful way. There was?or
had been once, but they were over
whelmed. There was too much of it for one room to hold. It was clear
Richard and Eleanor had given up, and the consequence was that fes
tively decorated tomahawks, for
example, were piled in a box under the bed to be seen by no one except the explorer, a curious visitor like
myself who was nosey enough to look under the bed.
#
62 September 1988
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The night was a long one, as all such
nights must be when you are waiting for morning, lying in a bed of sand
wondering what in the world you're doing there. The mattress almost reached the floor, and I knew that to
move around much meant to risk another cloud of dust in the air.
I tried getting undressed but the
grit was so unpleasant I quickly gave that up as a bad idea. So except for shoes I lay there fully dressed, listen
ing to the wind howl and trying to determine whether rain had started. For a while I was sure it was raining, but then I decided I just didn't know. If I were home in Kentucky and the
wind were blowing like this, surely there would be rain with it, but this
country wasn't anything like Ken
tucky. In fact the prairie was like few other places in the world. Some of the most frightening weather I've experi enced in my life was on the plains of the Dakotas, and that was a late
March blizzard that kept me inside for nearly three days, such was the
ferocity of storm outside. I sat in the dark trying to see the
Indian paintings and thinking how there had been considerable harshness and cruelty in the life of the plains Indian, a life I knew the
white man and Indian liked to roman ticize to a ridiculous extent. And there was a coldness about the paint
ings, too, a great distance, as if the artists were far removed from what
they were doing, and indeed this was
possible. They might well have been drunk when they did these, I knew. One painter friend from my time on the reservation frequently produced pictures nearly falling down drunk and then sold them to tourists to get
more money to get drunker. This art
ist often copied pictures from history books of plains Indians. The critics who saw them liked to say it wasn't art at all and, strictly speaking, they
were right, except when this fellow
copied these pictures he seldom got them exactly as they were. He made
small changes, sometimes ever so
slight changes, but always changes. And that of course changed the pic ture. At least I wanted to believe this
was true. In those days I wanted des
perately to believe something of value was in those copies, something that wasn't there before, if only the cold fierce energy or hatred I saw in the pictures hanging in the museum inches away from where I lay.
And some critics liked to tell local
artists, "You ought to paint what you
see around you, the life as it is being lived today, the people, the places, the houses. Never mind the last cen
tury."
Seldom, though, did local paint ers take the advice. I don't know
why. Maybe it was because what they saw around them they viewed as too common and not interesting to any
one, or maybe it was that it was too
painful to look around and see the
squalor and the death and hope lessness of reservation life as it is lived today.
The feelings that room stirred in me didn't make sleep a good bet even
if the mattress had been comfortable and not full of sand and God knows
what else. I suppose, too, I imagined one of those warriors jumping down from the canvas and selecting a color
ful tomahawk from the many there and conking me on my head in my
sleep?retribution for the wrongs the white man had done the natives, I
suppose.
With morning the wind had lessened
considerably, but by no means had it
stopped, and it hadn't rained, not one
drop, and I thought of suggesting to Richard and Eleanor that maybe they ought to consider making some
arrangements for the disposal of their museum when they were gone. I
didn't get very far in this endeavor, however, for immediately I was
being shown still other things they collected: rocks and can openers, even corn huskers. I realized then that the Schmidts had a passion for
collecting and as a coin collector
myself I knew something of the col lector's mind: Someday I am going to sell for a profit, except someday never comes.
I did ask, "What happens to all of this when you're gone?"
Eleanor didn't answer me, as if to
say, "That is none of your business, mister," but I knew she didn't mean that. She let Richard do all the talk
ing when she could. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "I don't think about that too much." It was much
too good a day to be talking about
dying, he was saying, and it was a
good day even though it didn't look much like rain.
If I hadn't known how they felt about the nearby reservation and
especially the Indian leaders who controlled everything, I might have braved suggesting the crafts be left to a reservation museum I had visited once or twice, but I was sure they
knew about the museum on the res
ervation. The materials could be
kept together, I pictured myself say
ing, and there would be a plaque tell
ing who it was that donated all these wonderful things. I didn't offer this
suggestion either, and it wasn't until I was on the road to the state capital that I thought I might have at least
suggested they be in contact with the curator of the state museum and
make tentative arrangements for the State someday to acquire this unusual collection.
And if I hadn't promised them to
keep to myself what I had seen in their home, I might have sought out the museum curator myself and told him what I knew was hidden away and urged him to investigate and try to persuade the Schmidts to donate the wonderful crafts to the State's
museum of history. I felt sure the
man, if he were worth anything as a
curator, would feel compelled to fol low up such a lead. But I didn't go to see him, if indeed it is a he. I don't even know that much.
Richard died a couple of months af ter my visit to his homestead. Eleanor is out there alone now, alone and like a
true pioneer says she is going to stay put?but with winter coming on I wonder how wise this decision is. I have to believe she would be far bet ter off, and certainly safer and more
comfortable, too, in nearby Big River
Junction where she has family and friends. But this obviously isn't for
me to decide; she is a determined, even stubborn, woman. For now, she
is where she is and, as she wrote me
recently, alone except for her Bible. And what of the museum? It is
still there, too. Covered with a new
layer of dust by now, I am certain. In time I suppose relatives will remember about what has been collected and
piece by piece each will get what he or she wants. But if Eleanor must move to town soon, and if this decision is sud
den, as with the onset of a life-threat
ening illness, and if the place is left
empty for any time at all, then van
dals will attack as vandals everywhere do. The rural setting won't make a
difference. They will carry off the museum. Maybe they will come back several times to get it all, and maybe the vandals will be Indians who see
the effort as a rescue mission. And where will the beautiful things go? Nobody can say, but surely back into the light of day, that much is certain, and such a development couldn't be all bad. D
September 1988 63
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