“Rivers and roads seem apt given my desire to swim through some drowned, forsaken town.  I’d like to will myself to dream of it tonight.”

            -J

 

Dear Friend, 

Tonight we sit together on the patio of a cabin by the lake.  It is perched atop a sandstone bluff overlooking this large man-made reservoir in what used to be the heart of the Muskogee Creek Nation.  The cooling of the earth after sunset has reduced the fierce prairie winds to a gentle breeze.  And it is intensely quiet save the occasional honk of geese out over the water.  It would be too dark to walk if weren’t for the brilliant luminescence of the Milky Way above our heads tonight.    

 

 

 

Just the other side of that tall bluff off in the distance, at the bottom of this deep lake, is a town forgotten to history.  But I know it’s there.   

Let’s go there tonight and walk through the darkness on a winding trail through dense blackjack oak forest.  Let’s climb to the top of that distant bluff and scale the immense sandstone boulders rimming the edge.  They seem out of place in this flat country, but they are the product of wide-spread flooding and deep bluff cutting during the Pleistocene when the glaciers began to melt.   

We’ll climb over and descend to the water’s edge on the other side.  Do you see that row of lights on the horizon?  That is a massive dam my grandfather helped build long ago.  This was the last of the dams to which he labored, dragging my grandmother and six children around the country in a tiny travel trailer.  That dam over there broke the will of three wild rivers (the north and south forks of the Canadian and the Deep Fork River) and also the will of my grandfather, descending into a pit of violence, drinking and an early death.   

 

My Grandfather and Grandmother

 

 

Take my hand, because it is here we enter the water, as we walk in the cool mud in the shallows and then swim for the depths.   There will be no need for air or light because we have the gift of air and light in our dreams.  Out to the middle we swim, deeper, until we reach the River Channel.  This is where we find old North Fork Town, where the aging Creek Chief Opotheyahola settled with his beleaguered followers after walking the Trail of Tears from Georgia and Alabama to this piece of earth, many hundreds dying along the way.   

The water is warm and pleasant tonight as we swim through time.  But unfortunately nothing remains of North Fork Town on the surface of the mud except for scatterings of ancient tree stumps, cut down by the Corps of Engineers to get ready for the flood of water in 1960.   

Even though nothing remains on the bottom of the lake, the bones of the dead are still buried there beneath the surface, fossilizing in the sticky red mud.  Most are Creek Indians, victims of small pox epidemics, the Civil War, and of heart break and homesickness.  Also lying down there are the bones of Creek slaves.  I once read a story about an African slave named Emma from North Fork Town.  She received 50 lashes on her bare back for asserting her belief in Christ.  Afterwards she washed her wounds at a nearby spring and then walked ten miles to attend a church to profess her faith again.    

Next to the cemetery is the old Texas Road.  It used to be an ancient Caddoan hunting trail before it was turned into a Military wagon road stretching from Missouri to Texas.  In the 1830s more than a thousand covered wagons rolled into North Fork Town each week on this road, as settlers moved from the east into Texas.  Take away this road, and there would have been no Texas, at least as we know it today.  It was also the main escape route of bandits and outlaws committing crimes in Indian Territory before escaping to Texas.  Several well know outlaws spent time in this town including Jesse James, Cole Younger and Bell Starr.  And then later several large Civil War battles were fought along this road.  Today the old road is a paved highway and the KATY Railroad, both elevated over this lake by bridge. 

And over there between the road and the cemetery, on that patch of high ground, lies what’s left of the old Creek Council grounds.  Back in 1842 there was a council there of over 2500 people, including members from the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Caddoes, Seminoles, Delawares, Shawnees, Piankashaws, Tawakonis, and also none other than General Zachary Taylor, who’d eventually become president.    

I know another special place nearby.  I used to go there as a teenager.  So take my hand and let’s go.  We’ll swim along the bottom and then rise up to surface where the steep granite cliffs meet the water.  These cliffs are very high.  We will climb them and jump together into the deep lake below, over and over again, and then sleep on a bed of grass under the Milky Way tonight.