This morning I'd like to share with you an Icelandic folk story with a modern addition - more or less as it was told to me.
Demographers estimate the population of Iceland to be 288,000 people, but many Icelanders believe the population to be much larger because of the hidden people. Here is the story of the origin of the hidden people.
Once upon a time God Almighty paid a visit to Adam and Eve. They greeted him warmly, showed him all around their house, and presented their children to him. God thought they were very promising children. Then he asked Eve if they had any other children besides those he had met. She said no. As it happened, however, Eve hadn'’t quite finished washing some of her children and she was ashamed to let God see them that way; for that reason she concealed them. This was not unknown to God, and he said, "Whatever must be hidden from me, shall be hidden from people."
The unwashed children then became invisible to human eyes, and they lived in sacred places in hills and mountains and rocks. From them the hidden people are descended, while humans are the descendents of those of Eve'’s children whom she presented to God Hidden people can never be seen by human beings unless they want to be. They, in turn, can both see humans and make themselves visible to them.
In this modern age no one takes such folk tales seriously. Especially practical people such as the engineers who designed a new highway so that it ran through what many local people regarded as a sacred place where the hidden people lived. When the road building machinery was brought to this place and construction was about to begin, none of the equipment would start. Mechanics worked feverishly on the equipment, but it still would not start. The construction foreman, concerned about delays and not knowing exactly what to do talked with the local people. The local people said they thought they could help and sent a young man to the site. The young man walked out into the field and was seen to be talking and gesturing with his hands for some time. When he came in from the field, he said that he had talked to the hidden people who had agreed to move to a nearby hill and that the road could now go through. Suddenly, all of the road building equipment started normally and the road was completed as planned.
My first recollection of any talk of moving or living anywhere but where we were, was the folks setting at the kitchen table one night, it must have been in 1906. Mother was fidgeting with something or other on the table, listening to Pa read from the weekly Danish publication … with a bright, faraway look in her eyes; and when he had finished, she said: … should we We kids sat around, I for one, with open mout sensing something special was in the wind, and when the word Montana was mentioned, -- MONTANA!! Montana to me was a magic word! That's where Falsbuts’ were going to go! And Falsbuts’ boys had thorough briefed me on what could be expected there: buffalo, cowboys, and wild horses – Oh boy! Free land, homesteads, Montana and the West! No on has any idea of what those magic words could conjure up in a 10-year- old boy's mind.
As I have grown older, I have often wondered what prompts the pioneering spirit in some people and leaves others completely devoid of it.
As the folks became serious about the matter, the idea crystallized, as evidenced by the preparations such as a new cookstove, a swell big kitchen range, new harnesses, etc. It was now “for sure” thathe big adventure was about to become a reality. But it was not until the spring of 1908 that all the difficulties of such an undertaking were overcome. Selling the farm, auction sale, getting the cash, etc. We didn'’t sell much - everything was stuffed into the immigrant-car, (special homeseekers rates) and when I say “stuffed” I mean just that! Cows and calve chickens, pigs, horses, dogs, (no cats). All household goods, all the farming implements, wagons, mower, hayrake, and hayrack. The hayrack was used to double-deck the chickens above the cows.
I have often wondered what Pa'’s reactions were to all this. He never showed anything, outwardly. I remember when we left the farm for the last time, and we were about to get into the wagon. He was buttoning his coat with one hand and with the other reached down to stroke the big old gray tom-cat, which was to be left behind; and he said, “Kitty, Kitty!” I was dumbfounded, for I had never seen him do a thing like that before. He straightened up and looked around at the good new house and big new red barn; and in his slow, easy-going and deliberate way, climbed into the wagon. I have often wondered what his innermost thoughts were at that moment. But like so many thousands who have pulled up stakes for the unknown future in the West, he left little room for sentiment. In tribute to my father, I think this was his staunchest moment. Of course, the die was cast; the decision had been made some time before, which also took courage – but the final look at the fruits o 12 to 14 of his best years brought no outward sign of regret. To turn his back on all this, against the advice of well-meaning neighbors and friends; and at the age of 51 years, take a family of eight children into the un-tracked prairies fifty miles from the railroad and “nowhere” wi measly small capital, took courage and fortitude, to say the least. That kind of spirit and courage, I’m afraid, is fast becoming a thing of the pas in these United States.
Wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and Vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the accumulations of wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. It is an almost hopeless task, for there is rarely a day when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over. ‘Visibility’ approaches zero and everything is covered again with a silt- like deposit which may vary in depth from a film to actual ripples on the kitchen floor. I keep oiled cloths on the window sills and between the upper and lower sashes. They help just a little to retard or collect the dust. Some seal the windows with gummed-paper strips used in wrapping parcels, but no method is fully effective.
Contrary to many published reports, a good many people had left this country either temporarily or permanently before any rains came. And they were not merely ‘drifters,’ as is frequently alleged. In May a friend in the southwestern county of Kansas voluntarily sent me a list of the people who had already left their immediate neighborhood or were packed up and ready to go. The list included 109 persons in 26 families, substantial people, most of whom had been in that locality over ten years, and some as long as forty years. In these families there had been two deaths from dust pneumonia. Others in the neighborhood were ill at that time. Fewer actual residents have left our neighborhood, but on a sixty mile trip yesterday to procure tractor repairs we saw many pitiful reminders of broken hopes and apparently wasted effort. Little abandoned homes where people had drilled deep wells for precious water, had set trees and vines, built reservoirs, and fenced in gardens, -- with everything now walled in or half buried by banks of drifted soil, -- told a painful story of loss and disappointment. I grieved especially over one lonely plum thicket buried to the tips of the twigs, and a garden fence closely built of boards for wind protection, now enclosing only a hillock of dust covered with blue-flowered bull nettles which no winds or sands discourage.
Naturally you will wonder why we stay where conditions are so extremely disheartening. Why not pick up and leave as so many others have done? It is a fair question, but a hard one to answer.
Recently I talked with a young university graduate of very superior attainments. He took the ground that in such a case sentiment could and should be disregarded. He may be right. Yet, I cannot act or feel or think as if the experiences of our last twenty-seven years of life together had never been. And they are bound up with the little corner to which we have given our continued and united efforts. To leave voluntarily – to break all these closely knit ties for th sake of possibly greater comfort elsewhere – seems like defaulting on our task We may have to leave. We can’t hold out indefinitely without some return fro the land, some source of income, however small. But I think I can never go willingly or without pain that as yet seems unendurable.
We long for the garden and little chickens, the trees and birds and wild flowers of the years gone by. Perhaps if we do our part these good things may return some day, for others if not for ourselves.
I return to my native Kansas twice a year, spring and fall. After a flight to Kansas City International Airport, the short drive west across the Missouri River into Kansas often leaves me feeling a little disoriented. The landscape and the culture have changed abruptly with no proper preparation. Words from the dust jacket of William Least Heat-Moon's book, PrairyErth, often come to my mind, "Most American readers know three things about Kansas: it is flat, it has something to do with The Wizard of Oz, and the events of In Cold Blood took place there. Three illusions: the first is a lie, the second a fairy tale, the third a nightmare."
The words I just spoke are the very same words that I used to start another sermon. I want to talk about another of these trips this morning and the words reflect the fact that these trips all start in nearly the same way. Every trip is unique too, and on this trip I came armed with some new facts. I invite you to travel along with me this morning while I reminisce about this trip.
Crossing the Missouri River also has some legal niceties to be observed. In case you ever travel to Kansas you should keep these things in mind: The use of mules to hunt ducks is prohibited. Rabbits may not be shot from motorboats. Pedestrians crossing the highways at night must wear taillights. And last, as matter of safety and good public order, if two trains meet on the same track neither shall proceed until the other has passed.
I have known since childhood that my family had a farm in Kansas. I had envisioned my Great-Grandfather, Henry Milham, as one of those mythical pioneers standing staunchly alone against everything that that this prairie land could throw against him: isolation, unyielding ground, tornadoes, heat, cold, drought, grasshoppers, illness, and even death. Now I knew that homesteading was a family enterprise: Henry and four of his brothers, James, Joseph, William and George had settled in the Dickinson County area. These five brothers and their families had come to this area – one by one -- between 1870 and 1875. My family didn't have a farm in Kansas; my family had five farms in Kansas
Historians recognize this is as a specific example of a general pattern for these early settlers: They tended to move as family, kinship, ethnic or religious units and to live close together in order to support one another. They came for land and opportunity, but they also came to form families and communities. They came searching for home. And their family structures were more complex than our modern families. The families were large and often included stepchildren, grandchildren, in-laws, and grandparents. Henry was the only one of these five brothers to arrive in Kansas unmarried. When he married Eliza McGlothern Murray in 1876, he became the stepfather of Eliza's three daughters from a previous marriage. Henry and Eliza had an additional four children of their own. By 1880 there were twenty-seven related people living in five Milham households in three adjacent townships – Holland and Wheatland townships in Dickinson County and Eureka Township in Saline County.
As an aside, let me say a little about the US Public Land System and townships. It's a little boring, but then again it probably won't stick out too much from the rest of this sermon. A township as laid out in the US Public Land System is a square tract of land 6 miles on a side, which is further divided into 36 sections of land each 1 mile by 1 mile. In many public land states, such as Kansas, there is a grid of roads running east- west and north-south called section lines, which define each section or square mile of land. What early settlers in the West usually got was 160 acres or a quarter of a section of land.
Like the early settlers I continued doggedly west toward Abilene, the county seat of Dickinson County, where I hoped to find records related to my family's homesteading; and, I thought, if I really get lucky, I'll find Henry's old homestead. Many historians and writers of the American West regard crossing the Missouri River as entry into the West. Certainly Abilene played a large part in the history and fiction of the 'Old West.' From 1867 to 1872 Texas cowboys drove cattle north on the Chisholm Trail to Abilene where the cattle were shipped by rail to the eastern part of the country. In Dickinson County the Chisholm Trail passed right through the area where my family was to settle: through Holland and Wheatland Townships, through the towns of Carleton and Mole Hill, then on north to a crossing on the Smoky Hill River, and east a few miles to Abilene. Wild living by cowboys at trail's end in Abilene is a well-known part of the history and fiction of the 'Old West.' Through books, television, and movies we've all been exposed to a mostly fictional approach to the 'Old West' the cattle town era in Abilene.
It is this fictional spirit that resonates strongly in the American psyche to this day. I had enough of this spirit of the 'Old West' in my blood that my feelings about this trip could be summed up by paraphrasing Otto Jorgenson from the first reading: buffalo, cowboys, and wild horses Oh boy! Free land, homesteads, Abilene and the West! No one has any idea of what those magic words could conjure up in a 65- year-old boy's mind.
Since we are all so familiar with western fiction, perhaps a few facts are in order. About Cowboys: Did you know that 25% of cowboys were African American and another 12% were Mexican or Mexican- American? Some trail outfits were made up entirely of African Americans. About settlement: Does it surprise you to know that Kansas was settled long before Thomas Jefferson's Virginia or Lord Baltimore's Maryland? Native Americans settled North America, moving from west to east, millennia before Europeans landed here. We use settlement almost exclusively to mean European settlement. In a wonderfully revealing essay the historian, Elliott West, describes how three families over a period of 700 years settled and survived on the land in Kansas. West makes the case that for both Native American and European settlers it was an interconnected family structure that was needed to survive on the land. Finally, it might interest you to know that there was a Universalist Church established in Abilene in 1870. The church was small but influential: The congregation was lay-led by a man who was also the founder and editor of the Abilene Chronicle, a newspaper that is still being published today. Unitarians and Universalists had a lot to with the early settlement of the Kansas Territory, but that's another sermon.
I’m still traveling west and passing over the Nemaha Mountains, whose shear eastern face once rose thousands of feet in the air and barred travel to the west. The Nemahas subsided some three thousand feet below the surface about 400 million years ago. So now you can just drive over them. Soon the Flint Hills loom ahead. The prairie wind is strong today as it usually is. At the top of these hills the roadway is cut down into the hill so that the wind is cut off as the car reaches the hilltop and returns with force as the car passes the crest. One needs a firm grip on the steering wheel in these hills as the car whipped by the wind currents tries first to lurch to the left and then to the right. At the top of a very high hill I can see that the road passes over a washboard of lesser hills and vanishes in the distant horizon. Overhead, the wind is even stronger and is blowing a collection of puffy white clouds very rapidly across the sky. The sun angle is such that as far as the eye can see there are shadows moving across the land turning patches of the prairie landscape dark and light, light and dark. There are shadows on the land.
It's a mesmerizing scene, a pictorial metaphor that reminds me why I am here: to seek out hidden people and sacred spots. I ache to know my family who came to this land searching for home and to find the places in this vast prairie where they made those homes. At the moment they seem out of sight living in sacred spots under dark patches of clouded prairie. But these shadows can turn to light – a beacon of hope for me.
There must be many reasons that we seek to know our family history: to feel connected, to share in the glory of some famous ancestor, for the intellectual joy of solving a puzzle or, perhaps, for religious reasons as the Mormons do. For Unitarian Universalists our principle of the interconnected web of all existence would seem to be religious motivation for seeking out our human connections to the past. It’s usual to think of this principle in a passive sense: a principle that reflects the nature of things and operates independent of any human action. But it can also be an active principle when we seek either to make ourselves aware of connections or actively seek to create connections.
Much of my personal motivation for researching family history comes from my birth family's relationship to my father's family. My father's family was Protestant, my mother's Catholic. This religious difference created a great family divide. My mother, who had grown up in a completely Catholic environment, had a profound distrust of Protestants and shunned my father’s family almost totally. This created some strange situations. We often traveled hundreds of miles to visit with my mother’s family while we were oblivious to members of my father’s family who were being born, marrying, working, aging, getting ill, and dying in our very midst. In childhood I knew very little of my father’s family or their life struggles. Now, I feel that I missed something important in these relationships that never were—something that I’m trying to recoup with my family history research.
The sun was hanging low in the western sky as I left the interstate and turned the car south into Abilene. Soon I was in the center of town. An unexpected one-way street caused me to miss the visitor center, which stands just north of the railroad tracks. I was now traveling south of the tracks in an area of town that was known as the Devil’s Addition in cattle town days. It was an area given over to drinking, gambling, and prostitution. It’s a much more respectable area now. It’s the site of Dwight Eisenhower’s boyhood home and the Eisenhower Presidential Library. I got turned around and parked near the visitor center, which is housed in the old railroad station. It’s hard to imagine that the area around these railroad tracks was once open range where cattle grazed before being shipped east.
Once inside the visitor center I had a pleasant chat with the woman on duty. When I asked about family history for early settlers she told me I should talk to the director of the Dickinson County Heritage Center. The Heritage Center was about to close for the day, so I got directions and made plans to come back. Back in the car I drove on twenty miles west to my boyhood home, Salina.
Two days passed before I made it back to Abilene and found the Heritage Center tucked away in an unassuming building behind the Eisenhower Presidential Library. I was feeling pretty skeptical about getting anything real from this venture, but soon I was inside explaining to the director what I had come for. I was truly not prepared for what happened next. There was some rummaging around in a file cabinet. After which I was handed a pack of 3 x 5 note cards. In the upper left hand corner of each card was an entry that began: "“Milham" followed by a given name; and in the body of the card were entries for census data, newspaper articles, marriages, births and deaths. Staff researchers at the Heritage Center had already completed much of the hard work that I had anticipated doing myself.
Next we consulted property tax ledgers from the 1870s and 1880s looking for Henry’s homestead. After searching through the pages of these truly massive tax ledgers, the director then took me into the museum that the center maintains. There he showed me a large, freestanding, glass-encased map of Dickinson County in 1879. When I looked at the SE 1/4 of section 20 in Wheatland Township I saw written: H. Milham. The old homestead had been found. It was like discovering a long lost family member. Elliott West says: “Kansans whose lives are woven into this country through old stories and webs of kinship might learn to look on this place itself as one of the family. As we treat those closest to us around the Thanksgiving table, so we should treat the places that over time have become our close relations.
Sight unseen, this 1/2 mile square piece of Kansas prairie is very dear to my heart. It is a sacred place consecrated by the lives that were lived out on this homestead. Henry and Eliza came there to live after their marriage in 1876. Their first two children were born there. Their first son died there. When they were finally forced to leave this land, Eliza was again pregnant with a son, my grandfather. I’ll never really know the full dimensions of the joy and despair that they experienced in that place. I try to imagine their lives and struggle; yet they remain, to a large extent, hidden people. It is often said that to attain the spiritual one must give up earthly things. For me the love of this piece of land -- this piece of earth -- that I have never seen or touched is the work of the human spirit. Perhaps, many in our modern, urbanized society find this love of the land hard to grasp; but I believe that my pioneer forebears would have been in total harmony with these feelings.
I left the Heritage Center in a state of high excitement. I was clutching a map with roads marked to guide me to the old homestead. I went to bed that evening still excited and planning to drive out to the old place in the morning. I was awakened before dawn by thunderclaps, lightning flashes, and the sound of hard rain. I groaned. The country roads I needed to travel were unpaved and, judging by the intensity of the rain, were now impassable, muddy quagmires. The old homestead would keep its secrets for a while longer; my visit would have to wait for the next trip.
Otto Jorgenson says in the first reading that he thinks that the courage and spirit of the pioneer are vanishing in America. I understand how this feeling arises, but I’m not sure that it’s true. My family had a tradition of moving west: From Sussex, England to New York in 1817; to Morgan County, Ohio in the 1820s; to Hancock County, Ohio in the 1830s; to Livingston County, Illinois in the 1850s, and to Dickinson County Kansas in the 1870s. But the expansion of our country did come to a close and with it the tradition of moving west also ended.
Still Americans are a restless people. The settlement of the middle part of our country is being undone as people move to the coasts or the Sunbelt. We still go searching for opportunity and home. Perhaps the physical courage and stamina as required for 19th century pioneering is no longer an issue, but in the 21st century it’s the same pioneering spirit manifested in a different way. What’s really been lost, it seems to me, is that modern pioneering tends to split up families instead of forming family networks and communities as 19th century pioneering did. It’s in our nature to want these family relationships, and 19th century pioneers understood the primal place of family in their lives. We are the descendants and keepers of a grand American tradition of pioneering. Along with the spirit of adventure and courage, it is our task to pass on to our descendants the importance of family as a part of the pioneer heritage. May we ever strive to make it so.