LIKE LOCUST OUT OF DIRT
Originally published as Like Grasshoppers in the Sky in Oyster River Pages 6.1
The U.S. Army threatens Dakota and Ho-chunk relations of a white fur trader circa 1827.
OWL’S MYTH
Weber: the Contemporary West Spring/Summer 2023
Mystical owls battle for the nature of the Mississippi River and America’s soul.
INDIAN PICTURES
HEArt Online: Human Equity Through Art August 15, 2013
Inspired by Seth Eastman’s paintings, his Dakota wife Stands Sacred and Doctor Charles Eastman at Wounded Knee.
RIVER SUN WARBLERS: A MYTH
Pushcart Nomination: American Athenaeum, Front Porch Edition Spring 2013
The animals and birds danced inside the core of the Earth, scorching their feet on hot crusty rock, thirsting, chanting in the dark. They rested, and Thrasher heard the sea seep from the rim way above. He sang the song of two tiny warblers, those we call the prothonotaries today…
The One Above the Bottoms
Pushcart Nomination, Prick of the Spindle Magazine, Vol. 7.1, March 2013
The river this late afternoon seemed to prove Nathan right, and the pilots, log rafters and keelboat men wrong. Mid-April already, and the channel looked smooth from up at the cabin, glistening a muddy milk-brown, silvery-blue, sunny, rosy-toned…
Eden Never Heard
Wilde Literary Journal Fall 2013
He knew of a bench of shoreline upriver in Minnesota Territory, a town-site opening, Sioux Prairie, and he said he needed men to preempt and hold claims until Congress ratified a treaty that would secure the Mississippi’s west bank from Dakota Indians.
My Fancy and Fuss
Magazine of History and Fiction Issue 4 December 2019
The fog swallowed the Mississippi thick as a forge’s smoke, and silent as the slither of the serpent that led me to my fancy and fuss—Spirit Moon, Chief Rattling Wind’s daughter. One moment the river yawned before us, a trail of blue-gold sunlight calling me to the fur post I was to open one-hundred miles upriver…
INJUN JOE AND PRINCESS WENONAH
Thirty-First Bird Review, Summer 2010
Crane gnawed at the skin of a dead bat, sucked the bones and fur, and Tom and Huck shouted outside the door, and Crane did not know if the boys were real, beguiling him…
