The sky was cloudless, passing from silver at the horizon to soft blue at the apex of the dome of the world.
I was sitting next to the grave of Doyle “Bud” Neimeyer in Belmont Cemetery, near the “new” Yates Center reservoir, watching the small orange and brown butterflies flit about in tiny eccentric circles.
Someone had placed a chipped red brick nearby, seemingly as a gift, that read: Standard Coffeyville Block.
And adorning Neimeyer’s final resting place, a quote from naturalist philosopher Aldo Leopold:
“A Thing is Right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the stability, and the beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
It’s an insight of immeasurable depth and caring, one that speaks to an ethics beyond anything white men have yet devised.
An ethics where all touches all, where nothing stands alone. Where nothing survives in isolation and without others.
An ethics wherein everything needs everything.
I only knew “Bud” as a child when I was a Boy Scout, with my pressed navy shirts and yellow patterned scarves, when he showed us such profound sites as the Native American petroglyphs at Dry Creek Cave.
He kneeled in the dirt pointing, and somehow I can still see him there, excitement effervescing out beneath his signature cap.
It can be no accident, then, as to why he is interred here, at what is perhaps the place of greatest historic significance in all Woodson County, at what was once the intersection of wagon trails leading from Humboldt to Eureka, Neosho Falls to Coyville.
X marks the spot.
JUST down Kanza Road at 70th is the Belmont Corner, once home to upwards of 600 pioneers and 20 cabins, a tavern and post office, blacksmith and hotel, and an agency where native women retrieved meagre government rations.
In a letter written by E.T. Wickersham in 1934, he recalled: “the squaws would ride up to the store, tie their ponies and go into the store, and come out with a sack of flour [then] put it on the pony behind the saddle.”
“They were all dressed alike with a small blanket that reached from their shoulders to their knees … So while they were tying the flour to the saddle they had to let go of the blanket in order to use both hands, and the blanket would drop down, exposing their naked bodies to the icy cold wind until they got on their ponies.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, of all things contained in the letter, it seems the young E.T. was deeply affected by the naked women and girls, but also the indigenous peoples’ haircuts, their methods of child-rearing and their homes made of grass and hides.
IN WOODS south of the cemetery lie the ashen traces of Fort Belmont, a modest militia holdout against the Southern Confederacy.
