Dedicated to the Sac and Fox people of the Algonquin Nation
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Author Admission
Have ya ever read Moby-Dick? To recall, its author, Henry Melville, splashed between its hopefully waterproof covers, everything there is to know about 19th-century whaling. The mash-up is part history, part fiction, part horror story, part adventure story, part travelogue, part textbook, part essay or allegory—argggg! the reader never knew what the hell was going to be on the next turned page!
Bob Dylan, in his 2017 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, cited Moby-Dick as one of the three books that influenced him most. His words concluded with the acknowledgment: “that theme, and all that it implies, would work its way into more than a few of my songs.”
My feeble attempt to channel Melville or Dylan is not about whales, or blowin’ in the wind, or obsessive sea captains (on second thought, yeah, there’s one of those here), but about a small town in the mid-Mississippi River Valley. Truth mixed with bullshit mixed with opinion—just like today’s cable news.
Quashquame’s Last Stand unfolds like the river itself—one never knows what might be around its next meandering bend or caught in its angry undertow. Enjoy the sloughs and rapids, and thanks for reading. CraigE
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This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or are based in truth and used for dramatic effect. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely incoincidental
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When your people came to our land, it was not with open arms, but with Bibles and guns and disease. You took our land. You killed us with your guns and disease, then had the arrogance to call us godless savages. If there is a Heaven and it is filled with Christians, then Hell is the place for me. Unknown Native American
To see those, those monkeys from those African countries, damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” California governor, Ronald Reagan in an audio-taped conversation with President Richard M. Nixon, disparaged African delegates to the United Nations. (In response, Nixon laughs.)
White people founded this country. This country wouldn’t exist without white people. And white people are done being bullied. If America ceases to be this people, if America ceases to retain that English cultural framework and the influence of European civilization, if it loses its white demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ, then this is not America anymore. Nick Fuentes, a participant in the 2017, “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and Holocaust denier, in a speech at his second annual forum, the American First Political Action Conference.
The End
In 1804, a sham treaty declared that the eastward lands that watersnaked the Mississippi River from northern Missouri to southern Wisconsin was now American soil. Four years later, Fort Madison, the first garrison on the upper half of the arterial waterway, was constructed in Iowa territory, where Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri currently meet. US troops commanded by Lieutenant Alpha Kingsley were ordered to remove the Sac and Fox from their eastern homeland to make way for the coming influx of white, European settlers. The ragged remnants of the indigenous men, women, children, and babies living along the westward hump of Illinois were funneled towards the fort, westward into Iowa, then into Oklahoma.
Stories were told, then quashed, about the forced relocation. It was said, then denied, that Kingsley’s men began the purge at the Illinois River, in what now is Cass County, doing most of their work at night, either slinking into Indian camps of a few families and bayonetting the faceless heaps underneath the blankets or bashing their brains into beans in the darkness with the butts of their Harpers Ferry 1803 rifles. From sucking infants up to warriors, they were left lying there mutilated, to rot, or to be eaten by native carnivores. Sometimes, the rumors went, the troops lit a ring of fire around their dry wooden wigwams, cooking the alive inside. The added incentive of an extra ten cents a day and a gill of whisky was awarded to each man for doing this work. To further hasten their demise along, early settlers were given a dollar for every redskin scalp brought to them.
The few hungry stragglers left alive were centralized into their last sliver of homeland a stone’s throw across the Mississippi from the fort. Yet, they were still not safe from the soldiers’ drunken duties—trapped between the river’s muddy shoreline and the limestone bluffs above, they were sitting ducks for target practice.
This second-hand tale was told in jest: one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk and perfectly naked, was toddling behind his parents in the weedy shoreline muck when a soldier stationed up on the bluffs drew up his rifle and fired. He missed the child. Another man came up and said, “let me try the son of a bitch! I can hit him.” He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.
The remainder of a proud and noble people were flatboated across the Mississippi, and sent off to begin their new lives as American refugees.
Chapter 1
Dallas City, Illinois, 62330--a stone’s throw across the Mississippi River from Fort Madison, Iowa--is tucked away under limestone bluffs and lays along its weedy eastern shoreline. Established forty years after Illinois became a state, the small town that sits on one of the few stretches of the river that flows east to west has a Huck Finn-meets-Mr. Rodgers vibe to it.
Slow-paced and stuck in time, it’s populated by a thousand good, moral folks not too keen on change and not too far removed from Mark Twain’ observation of its county, Hancock, which he described in his book Roughing It as “a place where a brick courthouse with a tin dome and cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe.” In 1920, some 10,000 Hancock Countyians came out to watch an airplane piloted by two Frenchmen touring the country fly overhead. It remains flyover country.
Like most villages across America, most everybody knows most everybody else because they’ve been together since kindergarten; still, much of the kinship is through hearsay and innuendo. “Well, I heard” could be the city motto painted on the signs that greet passers-through as they drive down 2nd Street, the main highway and only thoroughfare through town and one of only five streets that define the village’s width.
Dallas City is a place where well-manicured lawns are an obsession and light beer flows freely; where American flags fly from light poles the entire two miles of 2nd Street; where people wave from their cars and pick-up trucks to absolute strangers. There are plenty of churches and an equal number of taverns, but no traffic lights--only a four-way stop-sign at the intersection of highways IL 9 and 96. Should a visitor in town be looking for a local they could stand at the crossroads and simply yell for them.
In 1848, the unincorporated area, once home to the exiled Sac and Fox people who were centralized here for their exodus into Iowa, was cleared of them, as were the thickets of brush, oak, walnut, and mockernut hickory trees, and was rectangled off. Ten years later, Abraham Lincoln, running for a seat in the United States Congress, spoke here (in fact, the town was incorporated because planners and platters got enough signatures on a petition from the citizens who came to hear Lincoln speak that day in 1858 to grant a city charter). Soon, a sawmill and lumber yard were constructed (a boon from all the timber floating down from the raping of Wisconsin virgin forests); a flour mill and a whisky distillery soon followed.
Because it was located on the great American watery interstate, all types of river transports were debarking here; soon, Dallas City was a growing, rambunctious little town, especially when boat crews debarked to “relax and have a good time.” Like so many villages that were springing up on the wild frontier, especially along the rivers, lawlessness, drunkenness and debauchery was common. Many locals drew their curtains, barred their doors, and fettered their daughters whenever a barge, steamship, or other transportation vessel pulled in to dock.
In 1890, the Burg Buggy Company (later retooled into Burg Automobiles) and a button factory (the discs were drilled from freshwater mussel shells that littered the shores) opened as more and more Americans made their home here. In 1895, a high school was built from locally quarried limestone in the style of a citadel on the Rhine, a shout-out to the old country by local German stone masons. A stately structure dwarfing the smaller brick businesses on Oak Street. Swift American progress came with electricity in 1908, telephones, and a city water system. A sewer system was installed in the 1930s--no more outhouses near the alley causing a retreat to the front porches because now they could actually use their backyard, sans stench. A newfangled game of croquet, anyone? Dallas City--and America--were on the move upward and forward thanks to the promise of Manifest Destiny!
Manifest Destiny—the widely-held 19th-century cultural belief that proclaimed Americans were meant to expand across the continent, guilt-free—propagated by Presidents Andrew Jackson and James Polk, contained three sacrosanct parts: 1. the virtue of the American people and their institutions; 2. the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the United States; and 3. the destiny under God to do this work.
Manifest Destiny was a racist, destructive policy that had serious consequences for Native Americans, since continental expansion implicitly meant the occupation and annexation of Native American land, sometimes to expand slavery. This led to confrontations and wars and massacres with several groups of native peoples and their eventual removal.
The United States of America--under God--was a white man’s world, by God!
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