“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.

 

“Your grandparents started out right over there,” Tobe Zweygardt said, pointing to a farmed hillside in the distance. It amazed me how much information Tobe, an elderly retired farmer, stored under that billed cap he wore. I knew my father had spent his early childhood in Cheyenne County, but until then hadn’t known where.

The terrain along Cherry Creek was what my father used to refer to as desert “scrub,” the kind of land I loved—all jutting boulders,

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“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.

It “…was the worst blow ever struck at any tribe in the whole plains region, and this blow fell upon friendly Indians.” That is how one survivor, George Bent, begins his description of the massacre that took place on November 29, 1864 in southeastern Colorado. Bent was the son of Owl Woman, whose father was a prominent Cheyenne chief,

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“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.

I’m not sure why this never dawned on me when I was a kid, but not until well into my adulthood did I put two and two together and realize that Cheyenne County, just north of our Kansas farm, was—duh!—named after the tribe that used to live there. Indeed, the 1851 Horse Creek treaty, signed at Fort Laramie,

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“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.

My cousin Mark Jones ranches in eastern Colorado on what were once the headwaters of the Arikaree, a tributary to the Republican River. Mark calls it the Ricaree. “Was there water here in the Ricaree when you were a kid?” I asked him.

“Oh yeah,” he said.

“Is there ever water in it now?”

“Hardly ever.”

We sat in his windowless dining room,

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“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.

 

When we were kids, my brother Bruce had a knack for finding arrowheads on the pasture hills surrounding our family’s farm. Once, he even found a point resting in the grass at the base of a neighbor’s light pole. I would drag sharp edges of flint of chert against my palm and imagine braves racing bareback over our once unfenced pastures.Continue Reading »