Today I drove from Sheridan back to Casper, where my journey started and where I will spend the next few days trying to pull things together. On the drive down the middle of the Big Horn Valley, I stopped at Fort Phil Kearny State Park, where I learned more about the US Government's efforts to protect explorers and settlers along the Bozeman trail after the discovery of gold in Montana. The fact that these expansions violated the treaties that had been made with the Indians did not seem to matter.
One of my most faithful blog readers - in fact, probably the most faithful one, my son Daniel - observed to me that my entries seem to have, on the whole, a dark edge. He wonders if I am depressed.
On consideration, I acknowledge the dark edge, though I will not concede the light. This journey has made me more aware of three things. First, the light has shown itself supremely in the stunning beauty of the American west, especially as I have encountered it in Wyoming. Second, I have been able to experience the persistent and generally warm-hearted efforts of Presbyterians in Wyoming to be faithful to the gospel and to their tradition, despite changes that are to some of them profoundly welcome but to some others are not only unwelcome but profoundly wrong. The pain involved in this conflict is as apparent to me as the promise. And - third - I have become aware in a completely new way of the cost - to native Americans and to our own sense of national integrity - of the American expansion in the west, so that my earlier inattention to this subject, tinselled at it was by the general theme of inevitable American progress, has been tarnished. What I had known in a superficial and purely academic way has become much more real and experiential. And it is not a noble subject. I had not known, for example, anything about the Sand Creek massacre - a dreadful act of deliberate and unprovoked violence that continues to cause understandable ripples of distrust and anger through our nation's history. If you know nothing about it, look it up and weep - and ask yourself why you never knew about this before. It is easy both to know something and to ignore it. This trip has made me more aware of the beauty and the ugliness. I don't think the blog can only communicate the beauty. And, of course, I have continued to grieve the death of my friend.
This is a start in trying to pull things together.
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