Will

Finally got started writing about Will again. I did it because I was so dreadfully stuck on my fantasy. It worked. Will is totally in-history, real, a part of the living condition. It makes me happy to talk about him.

He was born right after the Civil War in northwest Illinois, but grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and then went to high school in South Dakota. He went to Hillsdale, loved literature, married Julia Reynolds, and headed west.

They made Council Bluffs their home, and that's why the book is called Bluffs Leveretts. His son James was my grandfather; his grandson James Jr. my father; all three were Bluffs Leveretts, as was his sister, and of course the women they married. Because he had only one son, who. himself only had one son, Leveretts are pretty thin in our line, His brother Fred had maybe six or seven and a lot more Leveretts came out of that.

Nevertheless he will be of interest to. lov ers of history and of how events and people can shape it. When he got to Council Bluffs it was still the early years and everyone had great hopes for its future, and that of Omaha, right across the river. Little did they know a big depression would hit from which that section of plains would never quite recover. Omaha never outgrew Chicago, never became the center of the known financial universe, never took over economically. The Panic of 1893 did it in because it did in the railroads which were just reaching Omaha and beyond, just stretching into South Dakota and the eastern part of those plains states which could fool you with their productivity. I say fool you because it dries out pretty much a third of the way into Nebraska, South Dakota and even Kansas, they just don't produce that much after a while. In the western part of those states it takes hundreds of acres to support even a handful of cows, so it's not like the breadbasket would ever have been able to take itself from Chicago and plant itself in Omaha. This was something that was destined not to happen.

Will and Julia made Council Bluffs their home for their entire life, even after my grandpa and father gave it up and moved to Des Moines sometime around WW II. I never met him though he lived to know of my arrival in 1954; my brother however did get to meet him, or so he says.

Really his contribution to the world, or at least to Council Bluffs, was as a historian. When he got out there, he looked into the fact that the Bluffs was in Pottawattomie County, and lo and behold found that the Potawatomie (many different spellings) had been extinguished from their homes in Michigan, Illinois and Iowa, and were now, what was left of them, holed up in Kansas. Sure enough this was true of many indigenous tribes, cleared out from Illinois and Iowa, anywhere back east, and now holed up on useless land down in Oklahoma (Indian Country) or thereabouts. Some people wondered about keeping track of these tribes. Who were their leaders? What did they have to say about what had happened? How many had died in the "Indian Wars" and the clearing of the west of all its buffalo and natural sources of food?

Will was on the side of the genuine historian, who simply wants to record the facts and be respectful to all the players. Then as now not everyone was as respectful. Many said, who cares, or, glad to be rid of them, since they fought with hatchets and never could wear a suuit. RAcism was rampant. Will was a minority.

The rest of us rely on them, though, for getting the facts as straight as they can, and what we know today, we know because people like Will did keep records and record what people had to say about what had happened. That era saw the clearing of the indigenous tribes throughout west, almost as thorouughly as they'd been. cleared from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Will attracted historical writing; he published it; he cultivated an awareness of where Council Bluffs/Omaha had been, who had passed through it on their way beyond.

I think my account may lean into the American historian's general dilemma, which is that even a factual account of such a huge massacre sounds overdramatic and is in some ways too much to read. I found this when I borrowed "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" and was unable to finish, too gruesome.

Maybe that's your fate if you have empathy, or some respect for your fellow humans.