Pilgrimage II, Postscript – Why It’s Important

 Not only was I uncertain why I felt called to take this pilgrimage, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I departed for it. I knew I would encounter very difficult accounts that would trouble heart and soul. And that did occur. But I also discovered reasons to hope, people who have endured atrocities and yet continue to fight for the soul of our world. I find them inspiring. And they have much to tell us that we need to hear.

The question I am left with is what to do with what I have learned. I am a pretty decent story teller and writer. I’m told I’m a pretty good preacher as well. There are places where I can bring to bear my education, my experiences and my talents to raise our consciousness regarding the way we see ourselves, each other and “this fragile earth, our island home.” (BCP) My primary concern now is identifying where that engagement should be.

In another week I will begin my third and final pilgrimage this summer, this one the most intense, beginning in Warsaw, Poland, and ending in Munich, Germany. I will be diving into the heart of the Holocaust (visiting three camps) and the destructiveness of WWII. No doubt, there will be much more to consider by the time of my return. As always, your prayers and positive vibes are shamelessly solicited.

 

Pilgrimage II, Postscript 1 – With Gratitude for Wise Teachers

I came to seminary on my own. My home diocese, Central Florida, then (and, sadly, to a large extent, still) was stuck in a common confusion of revealed religion and a common social prejudice. The commission on ministry here would never have sent a gay man to seminary, much less agreed to ordain me. But my calling would not go away. I knew I was called to become a priest.

And so it was up to me to go to Berkeley on my own, find the funding to attend (I would pay off the last of my student loans just before I retired) and find a parish and diocese to allow me to enter its ordination process. And in August 1991, I drove across the country and began study at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) in Berkeley, CA.

In talking with classmates about where I could go to begin making the necessary connections to enter the ordination process, one of my classmates said, “Harry, I think the only parish in this area that will work with you is St. Philips, San Jose.” So, I began to drive the 56 miles south to San Jose to attend church there. Soon I was adopted as a parishioner and would eventually be sponsored for ordination.

Saint Philips, a parish which sadly no longer exists, was an intentionally multi-cultural parish where the Gospel was read in up to five languages on a given weekend reflecting the diversity of its membership. I learned very quickly there that there was no “common sense” to default to regarding theology, liturgy or human interactions. The learning curve was steep. But the rewards were enormous.

There was a distinct American Indian congregation at St. Philips which met with us for social gatherings. Some of their members came to weekly eucharist. It was from them that I learned the Beauty Way prayer (“In beauty may I walk…”) and the phrase “all my relations” which would come to shape my understanding of the Holy.

Sherri and Hank LeBeau were among the leaders of that community. They were devoted parishioners who later would be ordained themselves and gracious in their willingness to teach the rest of us the stories of their people and the history of their resilience in the face of unimaginable suffering. Indigenous people had always inhabited the Bay Area but many American Indians had been “relocated” to the Bay Area during the 1950s under the sometimes less than subtle pressure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The LeBeaus had come from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. And it was those stories we learned from them.

Pine Ridge is near the site of Wounded Knee, a massacre of Lakota people who had engaged in a Ghost Dance ritual, frightening the US soldiers there who had no idea what they were doing. The result was a slaughter that would leave up to 300 Lakota men, women and children dead.

Sherri once wept as she related the story of Wounded Knee, speaking of the sound of babies’ heads popping as they were smashed on stones by the soldiers. That image has never left me. And I could feel it viscerally as we stood among the graves there at Wounded Knee last week.

It was at Wounded Knee that I and my travelling companion, Deidre Jordy, who had also known the LeBeaus, would take our stones we had brought to the cemetery to remember the deceased, say our prayers, and leave them atop the monument to the Wounded Knee dead. Those prayers would begin with our gratitude for our teachers whose wisdom had guided us to this place.

We left Wounded Knee for the nearby town of Pine Ridge where we would visit a Jesuit/Franciscan school, Maȟpíya Lúta, once named Red Cloud for the chief who survived Wounded Knee. As we spoke with the tour guide who told us the story of the school, we mentioned the LeBeaus. Suddenly she lit up, saying everyone in Pine Ridge knew them and they were widely loved and respected.

At the end of the tour, we ascended the hill where the cemetery on the campus was located. As we stood at the foot of the monument to Red Cloud, Deidre noticed the LeBeau name on a cross just across the path from us. It was their family plot. I felt chill bumps on my skin. We had come to pay our respects. And the LeBeaus had met us there.

Sherri was the teacher who taught the parish the sacred practice of smudging. It became a regular part of our eucharists and we were instructed on how to use our hands to bring the sacred smoke over and around us to purify ourselves before taking communion. At my diaconal ordination in 1994 at St. Philips, Sherri had given me an abalone shell and some local cedar for smudging. She had also given me sacred tobacco packets tied in swaths of colorful cloth. I still have those today.

At the end of the liturgy on the Overlook at Sand Creek, participants were given the opportunity to be smudged and anointed. I readily engaged both. But as I walked away from the smudging at Sand Creek, I found myself in tears. I realized as I it was the first time I’d been smudged in a liturgical setting since my days at St. Philips.

Sherri and Hank had been with us this whole week. And they had shown up to say goodbye as we left Sand Creek.

This day I am grateful for good teachers who so generously shared their wisdom, their culture, their history, their spirituality, their lives. May you rest in peace, Hank and Sherri. Your presence continues today among those of us to whom you so graciously gave yourselves.

All my relations.

  

Pilgrimage II, Postscript 2 – The Church Takes Notice

I am encouraged that the national church found it important enough for its newsletter to cover the gathering at Sand Creek. This is the beginning of a long process of dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery and its ongoing destructive impacts on vulnerable peoples and the Earth itself. As Sarah Augustine has taught us, telling the truth about ourselves and listening to the truth tellers is just the first step. But we are taking it.

TBTG.

https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2025/05/28/colorado-episcopalians-study-sand-creek-massacres-legacy-during-pilgrimage-to-historic-site/?fbclid=IwY2xjawKtpq9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFoWnZ0dW1Mak1zN2hkQkRzAR4cdw-mPkDUaghaGclrp7yXWuVS4gOL-IdMSzZOzkKT1Ss76C-s1pYOYt8dRw_aem_KGSm5l15u52lEm_FbezlTw

 

 

Pilgrimage II, Postscript 3 – Why It Matters – When a Virus Becomes a Plague

On our guided tour of Maȟpíya Lúta, the Jesuit/Franciscan school once named Red Cloud for the chief who survived Wounded Knee, our tour guide stopped by a small medicinal garden and adjacent greenhouse. There she told us the story of the COVID pandemic at Pine Ridge.

While Americans from coast to coast were effected by the pandemic, the impacts on Pine Ridge were far more severe than most of us knew or could even imagine. The death rate on the reservation was twice that of any other population group, the highest per capita mortality in the country. The lockdown, in turn, caused additional nutritional deficits in this food desert (the closest supermarket is a three hour trip) in the 46th lowest per capita income county in the country and exacerbated pre-existing health problems.

The Reservation lockdown happened overnight. This would help protect the residents from exposure from those outside the reservation in a state whose governor refused to close down public sites, shunned masks and criticized those fighting the pandemic at national health agencies. A motorcycle rally in Sturgis, SD, would draw thousands of unmasked riders to that town after which COVID cases statewide rose six-fold. Six celebrants would later die.

Pine Ridge residents would be heckled and jeered at when they finally began to depart from the reservation wearing their masks to buy badly needed supplies. And the lockdown itself had serious ramifications for the reservation which saw a jump in teenage suicide attempts and deaths.

But the greatest loss from COVID, according to our guide, was among elders who proved particularly vulnerable to the disease. “We were losing our stories of who we were, our wisdom, as they died,” our guide said. When the people began to appeal for help from the ancestors, they were told “you know what to do already.” That led to the creation of the medicine wheel herbal garden and a return to the health ways of the ancestors.

I lost four friends to the COVID pandemic. At a very basic level, the message from the privileged who held power was that this disease would only impact vulnerable peoples – elderly, those already suffering from compromised health conditions, and the poor. In other words, those who were disposable. Like my friends. And the elders of Pine Ridge.

That is why this pilgrimage matters.

 

 

Pilgrimage II, Postscript 5 – A Hymn to Peace

Both our Zoom preparatory gathering and the assembly the day before going to the Sand Creek site began with this sung prayer. It is quite beautiful. I will always remember this pilgrimage when I hear it. Have a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw0gMW6gk0w&fbclid=IwY2xjawKtp2BleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFoWnZ0dW1Mak1zN2hkQkRzAR5yZoAg1zYK3KU-3nT3husdbth23eq5-zx2XqaIGc0Bd90d75yDlat3ma__qA_aem_36U5K9yArpPqBqRs4ouC0Q

 

Pilgrimage II, Postscript 4 – Why It Matters – Apache Stronghold

Within days of my return from this pilgrimage, a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court provides tangible evidence of the ongoing damage from the Doctrine of Discovery that continues to be inflicted on vulnerable peoples and the Creation itself. The SCOTUS refused to grant certiorari to hear the case brought by the Apache Stronghold to stop the destruction of a Native American sacred site.

As a recovering attorney, I find myself disappointed in the refusal of SCOTUS to hear the case though in this day of courts stacked with Federalist Society ideologues I don’t know why I would be. I do find it a bit amazing that I resonate with the dissent offered by Neil Gorsuch, with whom I rarely agree but who is spot on in his arguments here. But he was right.

The Court here and at the Appeals Court level is relying on a decision in which the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is being interpreted as applying to constraints on an individual’s beliefs alone. This is a very limited vision of religious freedom. Gorsuch hits this nail on the head when he notes the analogy of the Apache Flats religious site with the site to a cathedral where religious rites are conducted. How does one exercise religious freedom (ultimately a First Amendment right) when the very place where that exercise would occur has become a strip mining crater?

This vision of the Creation as simply a supply source of natural resources for an ever greedy capitalist machine is a death sentence, ultimately. It’s not just Native Americans, the de facto, perhaps last gasp, defenders of the Creation who are at risk, it is all of us. We need to reconsider many aspects of our lives, from our vision of a religion based solely in cognitive belief systems to the peoples who inhabit sites with natural resources in demand as mere obstacles to profit. Most of all we must reconsider notions of “progress” which feed into an addictive cycle of ever increasing demands of “this fragile earth, our island home,” a cycle that is increasingly pointing the lifeworld as we know it toward extinction.

As my teacher, Sarah Augustine puts it, “I am so hungry. Starving. Hungry for justice.” Justice for vulnerable people. Justice for those of us who care about them. And justice for the good Creation itself. May that hunger be sated.

[Image: Arizona Republic, May 14, 2024]

 

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 Harry Scott Coverston

 Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

       © Harry Coverston, 2025

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Pilgrimage II, Day 5 - Entering into the Wound

After a week of preparation, it was time to enter into the place of the wound to which we had been summoned. The Sand Creek Massacre site was our destination. And after an afternoon series of presentations and reflections, it was time to go to where the wound still lies open.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 4 – Entering With a Context

It is the day before we are to go the Sand Creek Massacre site for our vigil and liturgy. To ensure that we are able to engage this in its full context, Native American scholar Sarah Augustine and Episcopal priest Joe Hubbard provide an afternoon of discussion about the Doctrine of Discovery.

It’s tempting to see this as a quaint idea one might study in world history, no longer of any great relevance to our world today. But the Doctrine of Discovery, rooted in the papal bulls of the European conquest of the two thirds world and adapted into American jurisprudence through a series of decisions of John Marshall’s Supreme Court, has taken on various guises over time. From Winthrop’s City on the Hill to O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny to 21st CE notions of “nation building” of the Bush era and the predatory Washington Consensus of the IMF and World Bank, all of these paradigms are simply variations on an ongoing theme – colonization.

In America’s past, colonization has meant that Native Americans were seen as obstacles to America’s westward movement. Discovery of gold in the west meant a flood of “settlers” - the European descendants’ generous self-description (there are other descriptions beginning with “invaders”) – began to stream across the western plains. The indigenous residents would be seen as impediments to “progress,” not the least of which was the construction of the transcontinental railroad. In the end, the bison, their sacred animals and source of food, clothing and shelter, would be decimated, plummeting from an estimated 60 million prior to the arrival of European descendants to only 1000 by 1900.

Like the bison, American Indians would be first “removed,” forced onto “reservations” (reserved by whom and under what authority? Reserved for whom and for what reasons?) and later hunted down and slaughtered, much like their sacred bison. This was what my travelling companion and I had come to learn about, to hear the painful stories of the descendants of the massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, to engage in a rite of repentance, and to take what we would learn back to our own communities to engage in truth telling, the first stage of dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery.

That Doctrine plays out today in the ongoing removal of indigenous peoples from their lands around the world, a process which inevitably includes extraction of desired natural resources and contamination of those natural resources which remain - water, air, soil and biota. With a sense of entitlement it provides its beneficiaries to act without regard for those impacted by these actions, the Doctrine of Discovery continues to harm vulnerable peoples around the world and increasingly poses an existential danger to “this fragile earth, our island home.” (BCP)

 [Images: Joe Hubbard, Episcopal priest; Sarah Augustine, indigenous scholar, Doctrine of Discovery]

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 5 – On Repairing the Breach

On Friday morning, we would head out to the site of the Sand Creek Massacre. Simply encountering the grisly realities of this wanton slaughter would be difficult enough. Learning how to process what we would encounter and beginning to consider what we do with these new understandings was the last part of our preparation.

The term “reparations” is so loaded with political baggage that it is often difficult to get past initial concerns about money in a society in which “In God We Trust” appears on its money, the god we actually trust. Reparation is a derivative of the word repair and the goal that the Episcopal Church has set is to find ways to repair the breach. That involves a long process in which any monetary considerations are actually the final step.

Reparation draws into question the notion that the pain and suffering of a people can somehow be commodified and compensated for through payments. In 2011, the Sioux of the Black Hills region were offered a $1.3B compensation package as a result of a successful lawsuit whose verdict was ultimately affirmed by the SCOTUS. But they refused a payoff. “The land was never for sale,” they said. What they sought was much more dear, much more valuable, and much less easily attainable in a post-conquest world. They wanted the land to which they belong – and not vice versa – back.

Monetary compensation also allows the inheritors of the value of that stolen land to assuage their consciences once the check has been cut. It’s a cheap out, ultimately. It comes nowhere close to dealing with the suffering that these events entail. Whatever else it might do, it does not serve to repair the breach.

To do that requires a lot more hard work that Sarah Augustine says comes in five steps:

First, we must tell the truth about what has happened to bring us to this point. That requires both truth tellers and those willing to listen to the truth.

Second, because the result of conquest is always damage to those invaded, the ongoing damage from that conquest must cease. That includes the continued shrinkage of tribal lands and the extractions that render them damaged while leaving the surrounding environment ruined.

Third, there is the need for those who have caused the systemic harm to take responsibility for it. That includes those of us who are the beneficiaries of that harm.

Fourth, repair requires dialogue led by those who carry generational trauma. The goal at this stage is the creation of relationship.

Only then does stage five arise – Asking forgiveness. This has to be last. And it is the most expensive thing anyone can ask from people who are the victims of atrocity.

This is not a process that can be accomplished in a short time. It doesn’t result from a weekend retreat or a Lenten series. Sarah Augustine, whose numerous works are referenced here, puts it this way: We don’t need help, we need relatives. We’re in this work together for a whole lifetime.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 5 – Where a Massacre Occurred

The pilgrim to the Sand Creek Massacre site must be intentional about visiting there. It is not easily accessed, lying at the end of 8 miles of a washboard dirt road, 23 miles from the closest town. The site includes only a small shop, bathrooms, picnic facilities and a series of guided trails.

There is a peacefulness about this place that belies its bloody history. The overlook to the site by Sand Creek where the Arapaho and Cheyenne were camped provides a wide view of the area. As one looks out at the plains, lush with late spring grasses and flowers (and buffalo gnats!), brisk winds blowing rainclouds into formation, it’s hard to imagine an atrocity ever occurred here.

In 1864, the attack was led by John Chivington, a Methodist minister and would-be politician. His regiment had been hastily assembled by John Evans, Colorado’s territorial governor, also a Methodist layman who had assisted in the founding of the church’s Northwestern University prior to coming to Colorado.

In the moral panic that arose in Denver with the killing of a settler family, Evans exploited their fears by ordering all Coloradans to “go in pursuit of all hostile Indians [and] kill and destroy all enemies of the country." (Whose country, one wonders) He would call together an ad hoc cavalry called the Colorado Volunteers led by Chivington even as he offered sanctuary to “friendly Indians” at nearby forts, an offer that soon was revealed as hollow.

When the Arapaho and Cheyenne reported to Ft. Lyon as Evans had ordered them to do, they found nothing to eat or drink there. In desperation, the tribes decamped to Sand Creek, a site within the Arapaho and Cheyenne territory according to the treaty then in effect, to wait for provisions. The warriors had gone out to find food.

It was at this point that Colonel Chivington ordered 700 cavalry troopers to attack Black Kettle's peaceful encampment, when most of the men were away. They slaughtered 28 unarmed men and 105 women and children and wounded many more during the massacre. A few Cheyenne, including Chief Black Kettle, who had been a main negotiator with the settler authorities, were able to escape. Many of the survivors were children whose families buried them in the wet sands along the creek bed, surviving an assault by Chivington’s forces using cannons to drive the survivors out.

The soldiers would mutilate the bodies of the deceased Indians, taking grisly “souvenirs” and dragging the mutilated bodies back to Denver to parade them through the streets to the delight of the citizens inflamed by the moral panic. Governor Evans would decorate Chivington and his men for their "valor in subduing the savages." But a later Congressional hearing would find Chivington guilty of a massacre in large part due to the testimony of Captain Silas Soule, a Union army officer stationed in Colorado to prevent Confederate encroachment from the west during the Civil War.

Soule had refused to let his soldiers participate in the massacre and testified that the Sand Creek engagement had been nothing less than a massacre of unarmed people. Evans would be accused of a coverup by the committee and he was forced to resign as Governor in 1865. Thereafter, both Evans’ and Chivington's political ambitions were ruined. Soule would be shot dead in the streets of Denver days after offering his testimony. To this day, some still see Chivington as a hero. But among the Cheyenne and Arapaho, it is Soule who is the saint.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 5 – The Immeasurable Value of Good Public Servants

Tim Jobe is one of the rangers at the Sand Creek National Historical Site along with his wife, Terri. While Terri worked the park shop, Tim provided a very thoughtful discussion of the events at Sand Creek to the participants in our pilgrimage.

He began by noting that the term “settlers” was somewhat self-serving on the part of the European descendants moving into the Great Plains. “There are other terms. Trespassers. Invaders. Colonizers,” he said. Jobe laid out the events of the massacre beginning with the observation that John Chivington, who led the assault, “undeniably knew that these people were unarmed.”

He noted that territorial governor John Evan was a Lincoln appointee who had been an Indian agent even as he knew little about Native Americans “and cared even less. He was in a position to create stability but he [went] out of his way to create bloodshed.” Evan declared that Colorado was at war and authorized groups to murder Indians at will, a part of Colorado law until rescinded in 1921.

The deaths of the Hungate family outside of Denver was the spark that would set off the massacre. Their bodies, allegedly killed by Indians, were disinterred and put on display in Denver. Evans would say, “The Indians can expect no mercy.” He did little to dispel rumors that the Indians to the east were moving toward Denver and said that the city should “brace for an attack.” Evans would recruit an entirely new regiment whose job it was to kill Indians. When the Indians made peace offers, Evans rejected them. What was he to do with this Third Regiment he had recruited?

By this time, John Chivington’s troops were moving on Sand Creek. He knew they were unarmed. He knew they saw the troops as bringing the food they so desperately needed, living into their agreement with the US forces, thus they saw the appearance of soldiers as good news. But Chivington was bent on attacking them, saying “Damn any man fit to be a soldier who shows mercy.”

Chief Black Kettle would approach the soldiers under the white flag below the American flag as he had been told by the framers of the peace treaty he was claiming. He soon knew he had been betrayed and would run for the river to escape. He would continue to work for peace only to die four years later during an attack on his village at Washita River by George Custer.

The looting of the vanquished camp and the mutilating of the bodies would continue for two days. “Only demons and human monsters could have done this,” Jobe said.

This place of massacre lay unclaimed for over a century. In 1991, the site was identified by archaeological teams from the National Park Service, Dept. of the Interior BLM, Colorado Historical Society, and Native American observers who found significant evidence of the massacre, including period bullets, camp equipment, and other items confirming the site's accuracy.

Northern Cheyenne Ben Nighthorse Campbell, U.S. Senator from Colorado, helped usher through bills which created the American Indian Museum within the Smithsonian Institute in D.C. and established the Sand Creek National Historic Site. Jobe noted that as such, the Sand Creek site held an equal status to the national historic site at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “Independence Hall reflects America’s greatest ideals – life, liberty, pursuit of happiness; Sand Creek reflects a moment when America fell incomprehensibly short of those ideals.” He also noted that the Methodist Church had acknowledged the role of its own servant, John Chivington, in this atrocity, has repented of that evil and engaged the long process of repairing the breach. The Christian tradition could learn much from this example.

We live in a time when public servants are reviled, abused and cut off from their vocations by partisan politics. But it’s precisely servants like Tim and Terri Jobe whose dedication makes it possible for us to know Our story, all of it, warts and all. We are in their debt. And we must strongly resist any attempts to cut the National Park Service funding. These are America’s parks. And we Americans badly need those who serve them and us, perhaps now more than ever.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 5 – Elegy for All the Lost Souls

Simon Ortiz is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and storyteller. He is a member of the Acoma Pueblo people and has taught creative writing and Native American literature at a number of institutions in the U.S. and Canada, currently on staff at Arizona State University.

His 1981 book, From Sand Creek, Rising in the Heart Which is Our America, (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1981) is a collection of poetry and prose offering a beautiful elegy to those lost at Sand Creek, the defenseless victims, the souls of their attackers and the ghosts of those lost which continue to haunt us today. I bought a copy of the book and offer some excerpts below:

Repression works like shadow, clouding memory and sometimes even to blind, and when it is on a national scale, it is just not good….

Buffalo were dark rich clouds moving upon the rolling hills and plains of America. And then the flashing steel came upon bone and flesh.

Thunder rolling across the plains is a beautiful, valorous noise, but the train that became America roars and cries.

Pain and death did not have to be propagated as darkness and wrong and coldness; they could have listened and listened and learned to sing in Arapaho.

Who stole the hearts and minds of the humble, hard-working folk until they, too, became moralistic and self-righteous: senators, bishops, presidents, missionaries, corporation presidents?

Colonel Chivington was a moral man, believed he was made in the image of God, and he carried out the orders of his nation’s law; Kit Carson didn’t mind stealing and killing either.

The blood poured onto the plains, steaming like breath on winter mornings; the breath rose into the clouds and became the rain and replenishment.

The land and Black Kettle took them in like lost children, and by 1876 land allotment and reservations and private property were established.

Women and men may be broken and scattered, but they remember and think about the reasons why. They answer their own questions and always the truth and love will make them decide.

Dreams are so important because they are lifelines and roadways, and nobody should ever self-righteously demean or misuse them.

You can’t help but be American, not a citizens or a shadow but a patriot and warrior for land and people even when insignificant and lost.

There is an honesty and healthy anger which will raze these walls and it is the rising of our blood and breath which will free our muscles, minds and spirits.

There is a revolution going on; it is very spiritual and its manifestation is economic, political and social. Look to the horizon and listen.

The future will not be made with loss and waste though the memory will be there; eyes will become kind and deep and the bones of this nation will mend after the revolution.

I have always loved America; it is something precious in the memory in blood and cells which insists on story, poetry, song, life, life…..

[I am indebted to Simon Ortiz for this elegy. The prose above is a small portion of the total content of his book and each assertion was accompanied by poetry. I bought my copy at the massacre site but it is available at Amazon. The painting is by Robert Lindeux, Sand Creek Massacre (2002)]

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 5 – A Work of and for the People

The conclusion of our two day pilgrimage to Sand Creek was a Liturgy of Remembrance. Liturgia is a Greek word meaning alternatively work of the people and work for the people. In this case, it was the work of those gathered to express the sorrow of our hearts, to acknowledge the evil that had occurred there, to remember the dead and the dispersed, and to ask for strength, courage and guidance in answering the call to be instruments of peace and healing. It was also a work for the people lost in this day of human depravity and for the devastating impact on the descendants of the targets of that depravity.

We convened on the top of the overlook, a small rise from which the plains below leading down to the river bank were fully visible. In 1864, this was the site of an atrocity.

The liturgy began by remembering “the more than 230 chiefs, elders, women, men and children of the Tsitsistas (Cheyenne) and Hinono;eiteen (Arapaho) nations who were attacked in their homes and murdered near here on Nov. 29, 1864. We remember, too, the hundreds who survived and their many living descendants.

Today we reject both the dehumanizing systems, narratives and doctrines that led cavalry here, and the greed, arrogance, racism and violence that drove U.S. citizen-soldiers to kill, steal and destroy here in the name of Christ and country.

Today, we lament this massacre for the unspeakable suffering it inflicted on those camped peacefully along Sand creek, for its reverberations across the Plains and through eight generations to today, and for its grotesque demonstration of our long, continued failure to prioritize and sustain safe, interdependent and just communities for all G-d’s image bearers….”

This opening was followed by the reading of the names of the “family heads” of those present at Sand Creek to which the assembled participants responded “We will remember…”

The closing prayer including these words echoing words from Christian and indigenous traditions:

Good Creator, make your face shine upon them and be gracious to them, lift up your countenance upon them and give them peace. Great and Holy Spirit, mark this place on our hearts and in our collective memory. Compassionate One, who suffers with us and calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves, lead us toward conciliation as individuals, as members of congregations, and as a nation of many nations.

The response was simply: May it be so.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 5 – Saying Goodbye

With the liturgy finished, it was time to leave. The final exhortation of our liturgy was the familiar Episcopal dismissal: Let us go in peace to love and serve the Creator.

I felt a sense of peace as we departed. The anguish of that place, which I intensely experienced in a vision of the massacre during the honor song offered to the chiefs who died there, was still present. No single rite could ever dispel the agony rooted in that place.

But I felt our earnest prayers of repentance, our honoring of the dead by naming those whose names we knew, and our prayers for strength, courage and guidance to go from that place to work for the justice that continues to elude the peoples involved in this massacre had all been accepted by the dead and by the Creator. That was, as Francis of Assisi had called his followers, what was ours to do.

Now it was time to go.

Days before, behind the motel where we had stayed in Alliance, Nebraska, I had picked up some sparkling pink quartz stones to leave behind at our visits to Wounded Knee and Sand Creek. I had learned that practice of leaving stones at gravesites and shrines to show one’s respect on my trips to Israel. When the liturgy had ended, Deidre and I retrieved the stones from our car, walked back up to the Overlook, said our prayers, and placed our stones there on one of the large boulders that lined the public space there overlooking the massacre site.

It was my prayer that we not forget what we had experienced here at this place of death and sorrow. I prayed that we would be guided on our path to take these new understandings our pilgrimage had provided us to others and that we would know where those understandings needed to be shared. I prayed that our efforts might make a difference in ending this pattern of domination and dehumanization that continues all these years after the first waves of the conquest began 600 years ago. Finally, I prayed for peace to those who still rest here, those who carry the generational trauma from this place, and peace to our souls, so deeply disturbed in just coming to be present for this story.

On the way back to the car, Deidre noticed a purple flower alongside the path. I don’t know what it is, but I felt my heart light up when I saw it. It seemed to embody the hopes that I held in departing from Sand Creek.

Poet Simon Ortiz describes that hope in his book From Sand Creek, Rising in this Heart Which is America. In his closing words, he says, “That dream shall have a name after all, and it will not be vengeful but wealthy with love and compassion and knowledge. And it will rise in this heart which is America.” I am not a particularly optimistic person but I am a hopeful man. These words speak of a hope which is indispensable as I see it. Without hope, we are bound to despair.

But it was the opening words to his book that spoke to our departure from Sand Creek and they had been used in the closing of our liturgy. Ortiz says, “This America has been a burden of steel and mad death, but look now, there are flowers and new grass and a spring wind rising from Sand Creek.”

Look, indeed.

 

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 Harry Scott Coverston

 Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

       © Harry Coverston, 2025

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pilgrimage II, Day 4 –Patterns That Continues to Emerge

The day before we headed out to Sand Creek, we visited a Japanese-American concentration camp near the massacre site. It was one of eight such camps during WWII. Here we saw a dominant white population willing to use its power to remove those who did not look like them and did not share their culture from their residences, businesses and farms and place them in sites far removed from their homes. It was the same pattern we saw in the Plains as first the bison and then the indigenous people were removed from the lands that gave their lives meaning.

There is a common presumption among the dominant group of an entitlement to dispose of other people and their properties, to disregard the impacts of the dominant culture’s activities on their lives and to do so with impunity. The Doctrine of Discovery has long tentacles that reach through the centuries to the present day.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 4 - American Concentration Camp

Concentration camp and American are not concepts we Americans often mention in conjunction with one another. But in the early heat of WWII, a racist “yellow peril” gripped the Pacific Coast in the wake of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. An executive order by President Franklin Roosevelt at the request of California Governor (and future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice) Earl Warren would result in the round up of 120,000 Japanese descent residents, more than two-thirds of them U.S. citizens. They would be placed in 10 camps strung out across the western U.S. One of them was Amache, near Granada, Colorado, which housed 10,000 inmates.

Called relocation camps by those wishing to avoid the implications of the actual prison conditions of these camps, scholars and Japanese survivors would rightly call them America’s concentration camps, literally sites where non-combatants are imprisoned during a time of war. President Roosevelt regularly referred to the camps as concentration camps. These were not death camps like those operated by America’s Nazi foes conducting a Holocaust, but they were more than relocation camps which fails to reflect the fact that these Japanese Americans were removed from their homes and forced to live under surveillance by armed guards. They also were not internment camps which points toward the imprisonment of enemy combatants.

The Japanese heritage residents made the best of it, growing sugar beets, creating artwork and traditional silken clothing. The school built there over the objections of resentful local residents’ would field high school sports teams and sponsor festivals. Most would survive their three year imprisonment. But they would return to homes and businesses confiscated by strangers, their rich pre-war lives now only a memory.

In 1980, Congress created a commission to study impacts on Japanese citizens and in 1988 a series of bills providing financial reparations began to be approved. But how can money ever buy back three years of life? 

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 4 - Amache: Life in Stasis

For three years the 10,000 incarcerated residents of the Amache camp would seek to live as normal a life as possible under difficult conditions. We see that in the artistic depictions of camp life created by internees and artifacts later donated to the Amache museum by its former residents.

But life in Amache was always cramped, confined. There were always limits to whatever privileges camp life might provide. And the ever present guard tower never let those within the barbed wire enclosures forget their ultimate reality.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 4 - Gifts to Their Captors

In 1943, a racially segregated regimental combat team composed of Japanese Nisei men and women, second generation American citizens, would leave their families behind in concentration camps like Amache to serve in the war efforts of the same U.S. government that held their families captors. That team would include 953 men and women from Amache who would serve in infantry, military intelligence, the Women’s Army Corps and the Nursing Corps.

At the far western end of the Amache site is a cemetery where those who died while in captivity there were buried. While many of the remains would be moved to sites from which the internees had come after the war, nine still remain today. Amidst the headstones and small ornamental pagodas, a grey granite memorial stands to the 31 Amache soldiers who gave their lives to save the very same country who held their families captive, their survivors mourning then in funeral rites behind the barbed wire of Amache. The list of names includes Kiyoshi K. Muranaga who received the Medal of Honor for his courage and self sacrifice. Pilgrims to this site continue to leave origami peace cranes at the foot of this monument to pay their respects.

In perhaps one of the greatest ironies, a Nisei unit would be among those who helped liberate the Nazi death camp at Dachau. The concentration camps that held their families back home were never death camps. But they evidenced the same pattern of fear driven prejudice that drove dominant groups within their respective countries to dehumanize designated scapegoats onto whom the collective Shadow of that dominant group could be projected.

Every year, Amache veterans and their descendants gather at Amache to remember the gifts of these captives to their captors. An American flag signed by these veterans is on display at the Amache museum.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 4 - Amache: Owning Our Shadow

Within months of the end of WWII, the Amache concentration camp would be dismantled. Some structures would be relocated for reuse but most were simply razed. Clearly, America had other things on its mind when the fighting in the Pacific ended, not the least of which was rebuilding the lands of former foes devastated by American firepower. But it’s hard not to imagine that this expeditious sealing off of the memory of this dark chapter in American history was motivated at least in part by a need of the victors to repress this piece of its collective Shadow.

Even the best of ends never justifies the use of any means, particularly when the sacrifice of human beings and human dignity are the means utilized.

In the Granada museum created by community volunteers and surviving Amache internees and their descendants, a speech by Franklin Roosevelt justifying the creation of Nisei military units is displayed. In it, the President said:

“No loyal citizen should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship regardless of his ancestry. The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is a matter of the mind and heart. Americanism is not and never was a matter of race or ancestry.”

Noble ideals indeed. But Amache reveals a very different reality. The truth is, the Japanese Relocation Act embodied an undeniable racism. America was at war with an Axis composed of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy in addition to Hirohito’s Japan. No German or Italian immigrants or their descendants were rounded up and incarcerated during the war. Only Japanese heritage people were targeted. Of the three Axis powers, whose descendants’ loyalty could have been doubted, only those who were racially identifiable were targeted.

Amache is a little known chapter of our history. But its volunteer run museum, staffed by the National Park service, and the podcast self tour of the Amache site - where the recreational hall and a barracks have recently been relocated and reconstructed - offer those willing to descend into America’s collective Shadow a chance to own all of who we are as Americans. That process of acknowledging our dark past, owning our collective Shadow and balancing it against the bright, white persona of American ideals is critical to a country whose need to become conscious in this time of crisis is pressing.

We are in the debt of those dedicated volunteers at Granada and a National Park Service which provides opportunities to hear all of our collective story unfiltered (and whose very existence is now in jeopardy because of that) for their essential roles in that desperately needed journey to consciousness. The first step in any process of redemption and repairing of the breach is to foster truth telling and being willing to listen to those stories even as the unsettle us. Particularly when they unsettle us.

 

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 Harry Scott Coverston

 Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

       © Harry Coverston, 2025

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - Hope in the Face of Tragedy

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - Wounded Knee, America’s Shadow

The site of the Wounded Knee massacre is desolate. A handful of vendors seek to sell dreamcatchers, swarming around newly arriving visitors holding their wares, swearing to their authenticity and value. A couple of thin dogs roam the parking lot where the large red signs lay out the details of the horrific events which played out here in 1890. At the bottom of the sign, a spray painted protest demands LAND BACK.

There is a sadness about this place, a heaviness which is palpable. This is where America’s Shadow is unable to hide. As desperate as it is, this is a place all Americans should visit, a story all Americans must learn. The wounds are still fresh in this place. There are stories to be told and heard, grief yet to be expressed.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - Whispers of the Dead

The cemetery at Wounded Knee lies atop a small hill overlooking the massacre site. We would later be told by a tour guide at Red Cloud School that Indians bury their dead on hills to replicate a more ancient practice of platform burials, removing their bodies from predators on the ground and placing the deceased closer to the sky where the relatives could speak to them.

The cemetery is still an active burial site and American flags for the upcoming Memorial Day observance could be seen at a number of graves. The Lakota were a warrior people. Ironically, these latter day braves would serve in the same military that decimated their peoples over time, the Wounded Knee Massacre one of the darker moments of that sad history.

In the center of the cemetery is a granite monument to the dead containing some of the names of the massacre’s victims. All of the names are male adults though women and children were among the dead, their resting places elsewhere among the graves here in mostly unmarked burial sites.

I spent a good bit of my time here praying. A lament flowed from me unbidden. I could feel the immense grief all around me, the unhealed wounds, the pain of the Lakota people whose generational trauma plays out in a number of pathologies from diabetes rates to suicides. But it also plays out in the disowned darkness of the soul of an America who has never come to grips with its immense and complex Shadow. Whatever else this is, it is a part of our story as a people. We are all implicated by the depravity of the events which occurred here.

I hear my own words within: I am sorry. This was wrong. We must repent. This can never happen again. But I also know that before anything remotely resembling healing can occur, we must first own our Shadow.

These words cannot touch the yawning black hole of pain and degradation that is still present in this place. But being aware of it and willing to be present with that discomfort is a first step.

 

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - When Art Speaks Pride and Hope

In Pine Ridge, South Dakota, at Maȟpíya Lúta (formerly Red Cloud School) an art project has provided a means for its Lakota students to insist upon the dignity they deserve and express the hopes they hold. A summer art program provided them cameras to create images they found powerful, a darkroom to develop negatives which then used photo-sensitive cloth to create large quilts displaying their visions.

The result is stunning.

There is a reason authoritarian systems almost immediately shut down artistic expression and schools willing to look critically at their own societies and imagine a better world. Maȟpíya Lúta reminds us why both are essential to a healthy people.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - The Holy in Its Many images

At the MAHPÍYA LÚTA (Red Cloud School) on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, a chapel at the campus center offers a vision of the Holy in which two different cultures meet. Founded by the Jesuits and staffed in part by Franciscan sisters, the 135 year old school, once a Catholic residential school, offers a cultural immersion approach to education in which its lower grades are currently taught in the Lakota language. The goal is to have the entire K-12 taught in Lakota by the time the current 8^th graders graduate.

This cultural richness is also reflected in the Holy Rosary Chapel. Images of the Virgin Mary and the Stations of the Cross are distinctly indigenous. The stain glass windows bear Lakota symbols. And the circular confessional shares the round shape of the nearby sweat lodge. Both spaces provide purification to those who enter.

Our tour guide, a graduate of the school and now its public relations officer, described herself as a Lakota Catholic. Not either/or, both. I wonder how many of us can relate to this blending of all of who we are as human beings in the expression of our faith.

The image of the Creator is everywhere we look if we are willing to see it. That it would be portrayed through the cultural lens of those create sacred spaces is hardly surprising. And when two cultures come together to engage such undertakings, the result is often quite beautiful.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - An Unlikely Shrine

Just outside Alliance, Nebraska, the passerby might note an unusual collection of familiar objects. At first glance, it looks much like the Stonehenge monument on the Salisbury Plain in England. But this isn’t the Motherland. And these aren’t sarsens or bluestones standing erect and balanced atop one another.

This roadside attraction is called Carhenge and the entire display was created out of old automobiles. At a very basic level, it’s a shrine to our consumer culture’s love affair with the automobile. With all due respect to its creator, it does actually replicate the placement of its inspiration’s stones including its orientation to the solstices. But who would have guessed you’d run into this in the middle of the rolling hills and cornfields of Nebraska?

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 Harry Scott Coverston

 Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

       © Harry Coverston, 2025

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pilgrimage II, Day 2 – Crossing the Great Corridor

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 2 - The Great Corridor

The region between the Arkansas, Platte and Mississippi Rivers served as a broad corridor stretching from the Rockies in the northwest to the Mississippi River valley in the southeast. Across this corridor the herds of bison moved along with peoples for whom the bison were sacred. The Arapahos and Cheyenne called this region home.

As we drove across this region today headed east from Cheyenne headed toward the Agate Fossil Bed Site in northwest Nebraska, I was taken by how beautiful the rolling hills were. I kept trying to imagine this place teeming with bison and dotted with camps full of tipis. I could see why these indigenous peoples loved this place, a land to which they and the bison belonged, not vice versa.

I can only imagine how violated they felt as European descendants began to stream across this corridor, many headed further west, slaughtering first the bison and then the peoples they were not able to remove from this land they claimed for their own. The story of noble white settlers courageously migrating westward in their Conestoga wagons, fighting off hostile Indians who attacked them, is what most of us learned in American history. But it is at best only half of the story, inevitably offered completely out of context. The rest of that story is, in the end, heartbreaking.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 2 - A Rich History

The Agate Fossil Beds near today’s Harrison, Nebraska, is rich repository of the remains of Miocene animals dating up to 20 million years ago. Discovered by one of the original European descendants to settle here, James Cook, he quickly called in a paleontologist from the University of Nebraska to observe what he thought were petrified horses.

The paleontologists recognized there was a wide range of prehistoric mammals here and enlisted help from the Carnegie Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and Yale University. Their work uncovered remains of evolutionary precursors of rhinoceros, horse and camelids.

The museum today provides an excellent display of the fossils, some reassembled into original form. These creatures lived after the dinosaurs but appear to have died fairly suddenly, perhaps from drought, perhaps, like Pompeii, from a wave of volcanic dust which buried them.

I was grateful for the opportunity to learn about this.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 2 - When The Humanity of the Other Is Recognized

Captain James Henry Cook left his military career behind to come live at the Agate Springs Ranch in 1887, just 14 years after Custer’s Last Stand. Cook saw the remaining indigenous peoples as friends, inviting them to the ranch for meals and long sessions of exchanging stories and smoking the peace pipe. Cook’s indigenous guests showered him with gifts from beaded moccasins to saddles, many of which now appear in the museum at Agate Fossil Beds Visitor Center.

This is an example of what happens when those we see as the Other are welcomed, who share their culture, their wisdom, their lives with one another. The result here was a rich cultural exchange from which all its participants benefitted. It stands in such stark contrast to the use of force to remove peoples from their lands, often by use of violence and atrocity. The bottom line here is the recognition of one’s shared humanity.

What might we learn from this example?

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 2 - Guideposts, Gathering Places

Along the North Platte River, visitors encounter a number of striking natural landmarks. Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, is a rugged series of bluffs, stone that withstood the erosive power of the nearby rivers over the millennia. A few miles to the south, a solitary stone tower named Chimney Rock can be seen. It was here indigenous peoples gathered over the centuries and later settlers following the overland trails to Oregon, California and the Mormon Territory would find their way.

These natural wonders draw us to them, amaze us, inspire us. They evidence natural processes that occurred over millions of years, reminding us that humanity’s recent arrival on this planet is but a drop in the bucket of time. On a good day, such realization might produce a humility not often displayed by a species that so often sees itself as the crown of creation.

[Images - photos by author, painting on display at Scott’s Bluff Museum by Tom Doroney]

 

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 Harry Scott Coverston

 Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

       © Harry Coverston, 2025

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pilgrimage II, Day 1 – Preparing to Encounter the Shadow

Pilgrimage II, Day 1 - Opening Considerations

At the Colorado History Center, the story of the Sand Creek Massacre is laid out in detail with time line, artifacts and stories passed down over the last 161 years.

It is a story of indigenous leaders who worked hard to achieve peaceful solutions, some traveling all the way to Washington to meet with President Lincoln to protect their people. Lincoln would award a silver peace medallion to one of the leaders, Chief Lean Bear. He would be wearing that medal as he approached the soldiers encircling the elderly, women and children at Sand Creek awaiting notification to move to their new reservation. He approached the soldiers under a white flag of surrender topped by an American flag, as Lincoln had instructed him. Before he could say a word, Lean Bear would be shot dead.

This event well reflects the betrayal these peoples The opening words of the exhibit asserted, “This exhibit tells the stories of the worst betrayal that ever happened to the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples as we heard them from our elders…”

“They wanted to wipe us out, but they failed. We are survivors and we remember what happened to our loved ones. We continue telling the stories the surviving victims handed down. We commemorate the family members who were killed that day, even as we continue living with the unresolved trauma the massacre left behind for Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples.”

The lives of the Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples would never be the same thereafter.

Today was the first day of this second pilgrimage. We have just begun our descent into our collective American Shadow. Saturday we will offer our prayers in the place where these atrocities occurred.  

Pilgrimage II, Day 1 - Making the Right Moral Decision

He was the leader of one of the five companies of soldiers dispatched to Sand Creek. Captain Silas Soule quickly sized up the situation and ordered his troops not to join in the massacre. He disobeyed orders in doing so but recognized the orders to be evil.

Soule would later testify before Congress that the victims of the massacre were slaughtered without cause. Two months later, Soule would be shot dead in the streets of Denver possibly out of retaliation for his testimony.

Soule’s grave at Riverside Cemetery has become a de facto shrine for indigenous pilgrims leaving stones on his tombstone along with flowers and American flags. He is an example of a leader faced with a difficult decision who found a way to make the right moral choice in the face of enormous pressure to acquiesce to evil.

Pilgrimage II, Day 1  - Downtime in a Cowboy Town

We would spend our first night of the pilgrimage in Cheyenne, Wyoming. After an intense introduction to Sand Creek, we were only too happy to arrive at the century old Plains Hotel. This town truly has a cowboy heritage. The desk clerk told us the small elevator was installed to prevent cowboys from bringing their horses up to their rooms, presumably to keep them from being stolen. It’s a quirky place with a long history.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 1 - A Quirky Pub and Grub

The desk clerk at the hotel recommended Stanford’s Grub and Pub. It proved to be just what the doctor ordered. In the heart of downtown Cheyenne, this quirky place offered 53 beers on tap, bison as a substitute for beef on any sandwich and a collection of antique that covered virtually every inch of wall and ceiling space. It’s been a good evening.

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 Harry Scott Coverston

 Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

       © Harry Coverston, 2025

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++