The sun’s sickly pallid light was fading, receding from the forest floor as I proceeded north through the timber, following the line traced by a sandstone farm fence.
I was on the hunt for a place called Baker’s Bluff, which I knew was hidden somewhere nearby, though the armadillos and whitetails weren’t providing much direction.
One pink and banded fellow trundled along in the distance, too low to notice the wind, then scuttled away on my approach.
Breaking through the undergrowth into a clearing, I paused to watch the tall dry grass shift in the wind in places where it had managed to erupt around patches of red-orange stone on the surface.
It was as if each rock was its own smooth, flat island, which made movement across the field a dance as one moved from stone to stone.
At this point in the spring, the colors of Kansas had not yet folded forth, and rather than gold and blue and green, the scene was instead largely muted and dead.
Leaves from oaks and other species crunched and crackled beneath my boots, as I dodged beneath lichen-covered branches in my black wool hat.
I dreamed Baxter Baker there, wandering the woods beside me, on land for which he’d paid a mere $200 in 1877, perhaps with a rifle in hand.
I dreamed the way he moved, swaying and stealthy, still affected by his time training for Civil War battles with Company B, in the 119 Illinois Infantry.
As he floated forth with such loping grace, you’d almost not notice he’d taken a bullet to his left leg, after being set upon by a sharp-eyed Confederate May 18, 1864.
Baxter would eventually meet his end by bronchial pneumonia in Salt Lake City, though he’s buried in Yates Center, the place where he operated a very successful lumber yard. He first, though, was buried in Belmont, southwest of Yates Center.
Slowly winding my way up Sandy Creek, I couldn’t help but also be reminded of the thousands of Muskogee refugees who’d traced a similar path during the Civil War.
They, too, had been ambushed by Confederates, and chased north from Oklahoma Territory to eventually perish by the hundreds in the frigid Kansas winter.
They, too, would be buried in Belmont, though perhaps first unceremoniously scattering the frozen ground, producing a haphazard and hellish scene.
In the haunting shadows of the evening, then, it was clear I’d become surrounded by ghosts, whether the striking figure of Baxter P., or the destitute band of Opothleyahola’s innumerable dying people.
Such is Sandy Creek: a twisting spectral walk. A place where one is never alone. Where one traverses the uncertain line between the living and the dead.
