Man on the Move

A brain tumor ended one career but gave birth to an even more extraordinary life of service

By Jim Moriarty     Photographs by John Gessner

Sometimes great events are measured in centimeters. A couple of them turned up 13 years ago.

Dr. Robin Cummings, who is now the chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, was on his rounds, looking in on patients at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital. It was an early winter evening, full darkness by 7 o’clock. He had performed two heart bypass surgeries that day. Walking alongside his colleague and friend Dr. Carl Berk, an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon, he mentioned he was having trouble hearing in one of his ears. Dr. Berk asked him a couple of questions. They diverted to radiology, where Cummings had an MRI. It revealed a two-centimeter acoustic neuroma located roughly where the brain stem meets the brain.

“It was a benign tumor, which is good,” says Cummings. “Most brain tumors are not.” Surgery was performed successfully a few weeks later. His hearing was preserved to a large degree, though even that has waned in the intervening years. But the surgery also affected his fine motor skills. Cummings knew that would happen before the doctors in Raleigh made the first incision. “Where it was located, you could not have put it  in a more key place in my body to affect my livelihood,” says Cummings. After the surgery he tried to hold an instrument and focus. “My hand would shake. So, I said, ‘I’m not going back.’ I quit. I retired early.”

Sort of.

It wasn’t just a livelihood Cummings lost that day. That’s the dispassionate, the clinical word for it. What he’d lost was a life. An all-consuming occupation, his mission, something he’d trained for from the moment he saw a beating heart in a chest, something he practiced with consummate skill. Something that defined who he was had been taken from him by the very capriciousness of life he dealt with every day he put on surgeon’s scrubs.

“It was like going through a divorce, going through a death,” says Cummings. After he retired, he and his wife, Rebecca, would join friends for an evening and he discovered he had nothing to talk about. “I really couldn’t carry on a conversation,” says Cummings. “No exaggeration.” Normal things, the gritty stuff of day-to-day, had eluded him. Turned out, the skill set of the highly skilled was also highly limited.

“It really was about six months of going through some depression,” he says. “I remember sitting in our kitchen one day and Rebecca wasn’t there and I was just, I was screaming and shaking my hands. I don’t understand this. Why can’t I operate? Why did this happen? God-why-did-you-do-this kind of thing.”

His self-prescribed therapy was to move. Just move. Do something. And he hasn’t stopped since. It led him to the hospital’s board of trustees; to being the director of Community Care of the Sandhills; to manage North Carolina’s Office of Rural Health and Community Care; to oversee the state’s Medicaid program, delivering health care to 1.8 million people with a budget of $14 billion; and, ultimately, back home, back to Pembroke, back to Robeson County, back to the place where it all began.

Dr. John Dempsey, the president of Sandhills Community College, is a longtime acquaintance of both the Cummings. “I wrote my master’s thesis on the subject of power in the works of Ernest Hemingway,” says Dempsey. “Most of Hemingway’s characters are people who have lost one power, had it replaced by another and were far the better for the experience. And, I think in truth, that’s Robin’s situation as well. As he lost one ability, he gained others.”

Cummings grew up on a 25-acre farm in Robeson County’s Union Chapel Community, roughly three miles from the chancellor’s house on the campus of UNC Pembroke, where he now lives. His father, Simeon, was a Methodist minister. His mother, Maude, and the couple’s nine children — Robin is the second youngest — worked the farm to keep the electricity on.

“Tobacco. Corn. Cotton. Soybeans. And cucumbers. Later on, we got into cucumbers,” says Cummings. “I’ve picked cucumbers, man, I’ll tell you. If you want to work hard, pick cucumbers.”

Or tobacco.

“Sunday Dad would preach — Sunday morning, Sunday night. Then Monday was our day to put in tobacco,” says Cummings. Snapping leaves off the stalks by hand, working from the sand lugs, the dirty, heavy bottom leaves, up on each successive Monday. Beginning as soon as it was light enough to see, getting wet from the feet up with the morning dew, then from the head down with the sweat of the afternoon sun. Their allotment was 1.5 acres. “Usually you had about six croppings,” he says. “We would get up at 4:30 on Monday morning, go to the barn, unload the barn — it’s been curing for the past week — put it in the pack house and then by 6:00, 6:30 we go to the field crop and do our acre and a half.”

Cummings’ mother graded the tobacco in the pack house, A for the golden leaves, then B and C. “She would put those in different piles and we would wrap each pile in a big sheet,” says Cummings. “One of the worst whippings I ever got was when I was jumping on the Grade A tobacco.”

When Cummings was in the 8th grade at Pembroke Middle School, he met a little 7th grader, Rebecca, who lived in the Harpers Ferry community. Both are members of the Lumbee Tribe. Rebecca’s mother worked in Converse’s Chuck Taylor plant; her father drove long haul trucks from one end of the country to the other. “She grabbed on and wouldn’t let go,” Cummings says, laughing. Now they have have four grown children of their own.

Simeon Cummings, the minister at what would become the largest American Indian church east of the Mississippi, Prospect United Methodist, was also a member of the first four-year graduating class at Pembroke, getting his degree after returning from World War II where he served — of all things — as a medic. Education was a family value. Robin Cummings went to UNC-Chapel Hill and graduated with a degree in zoology but knew he wanted to go to medical school. He took a year off when he and Rebecca were married. They also bought a car. He still has the bill of sale.

“It was a Chrysler LeBaron,” Cummings says. “My dad gave me a Toyota Celica to get through school, which broke down all the time. I took that Toyota Celica, and went down to the Lumberton Chrysler place. I didn’t know what I was doing. The salesman played me like a yo-yo. He pointed out this brown LeBaron. ‘I bet you want that car right there. Here’s the sticker price, son. That’s what it costs.’ I remember laying in bed that night and Rebecca says, ‘What are you thinking about?’ I said, ‘I can’t believe we just borrowed $4,000.’ To me, that was the beginning of our life.”

Cummings spent that year working in a dye factory, second shift, at something nudging minimum wage. “It was my first exposure to factory kind of work. What I saw that really upset me was the way the upper level people treated the folks down on the floor. I’m not talking about a racial thing. We’re up here, you’re down there. It really was caste kind of thinking. That second shift, it helped me fill out those applications and get into medical school, boy. Don’t waste time.”

The Cummings farm, most of those 25 acres, is still in the family, but the only part Robin owns is a memory. Financing for medical school came from multiple sources — loans, scholarships, what have you — but one of the pieces came from his father, the minister with the four-year degree. In the original movie The Magnificent Seven, the Mexican villagers tell Yul Brynner they’ve collected everything of value in their town in order to hire him and he replies, “I’ve been offered a lot for my work, but never everything.” One weekend back from school, in the home place on Union Chapel Road, his father handed him a check, small in the grand scheme of things but everything in other ways. “My dad took my part (of the farm) that he was going to give me and sold it to one of my other brothers to give me money to go to medical school,” says Cummings. “He was so proud.”

From Robeson County to Chapel Hill to Duke to operating rooms in Moore County to another one in Raleigh, where instead of giving the care he was receiving it, Cummings found himself back in Raleigh again, only this time finding a way to help 1.8 million people.

“My two years in Raleigh prepared me so well for this job,” Cummings says of his position leading UNC Pembroke. “When I went into work as Medicaid director it wasn’t what fire do I need to take care of today, it was what fire is burning hottest that will burn me up if I don’t take care of it today. Anyway, it prepared me. I dealt with bureaucracy. I dealt with politicians. I dealt with a big organization. I tell people it was a Harvard grad school education for two years, hands-on, trial-by-fire kind of stuff.”

Lacking a background as an academic administrator, Cummings was an unconventional pick to be Pembroke’s chancellor. Turns out convention isn’t as vital as leadership. It isn’t a matter of where UNC Pembroke was as much as where he wanted to take it.

“UNC Pembroke was a teachers’ college when it started. We added a school of business. We have a fairly strong arts and sciences school now. Nursing has come on. How do we retool ourselves for the future? What are the degrees that UNC Pembroke should be focusing on? How does this university serve this region? Here’s this great, wonderful university, yet we’re located in the poorest county in the poorest part of the state and we’ve been here 129 years. That doesn’t make sense, folks. This is this region’s university. Look at Buies Creek. Take Campbell University out of there and what would it be? Imagine if we could put that kind of machine here in southeast North Carolina. We would change the dynamics of this region in an incredibly good way.”

The university has developed a dual degree program with the North Carolina State University College of Engineering. The recently passed educational bond has earmarked $23 million for a state-of-the-art school of business. The building will actually cost $36 million, but Cummings views the fundraising challenge as another opportunity. They hope to break ground next year. They’ve created a program in collaboration with the NC State School of Veterinary Medicine, one of the hardest post-graduate programs to access in the nation.

“The honest truth is, of all the things we are for our institutions,” says Dempsey, “probably foremost among them is cheerleader. I think Robin is a great cheerleader for UNCP. He understands the political process because he worked in Raleigh. He does understand, I think, what it means to deal with very strong personalities. He is nominally in charge but just as the real work at the hospital is done by the doctors and nurses, the real work at the university is done by the professors and counselors. He is learning that you lead these institutions by cajoling rather than by declaring. Not ever to underestimate the importance of a cardiac surgeon, but the hearts and minds that Robin is touching now at UNC Pembroke are certainly equal to those that he touched in his career as a surgeon. I couldn’t be more impressed. He’s always upbeat. He’s always looking to the future.”

And still on the move.  PS

Jim Moriarty is senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at
jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

March Books

By Romey Petite

Eveningland: Stories, by Michael Knight

An American treasure, Michael Knight’s Eveningland is not so much a compilation of short fiction as it is a multi-part portrait of Mobile Bay and the lives of its people. It chronicles the days, from mundane to mythic, leading up to the arrival of a hurricane — a storm that will tear their private worlds asunder. With place as the framing device, the Alabama Gulf Coast inlet hosts a total of seven interlocking stories (like the Vietnam War in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried). Throughout Knight’s prose one hears the voice of a raconteur’s playful spirit — alternatively honest and abashed. His characters are memorable, familiar and genuine. Still, in crafting their private fancies, Knight never fails to incorporate another essential element in Southern fiction — what Flannery O’Connor (to whom the author gives thanks in the acknowledgments) called the grotesque. While the individual stories certainly invite themselves to be anthologized and the format invites each delicacy to be digested a tale at a time, think of it as celebrated storyteller Daniel Wallace of Big Fish meets the format of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). The author will be signing copies of his upcoming collection at The Country Bookshop on Thursday, March 9, at 5 p.m. — an event you’ll want to make sure to mark on your calendar

The One Eyed Man, by Ron Currie

The author of Everything Matters! and Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles returns with this lampoon of literalism. K. is a widower who has awoken one day to find himself unable to accept metaphorical language — preferring only simple, blunt, even crude explanations. In seeking someone who will be honest with him, he finds a confidant in Claire, a grocery clerk (at a thinly veiled Whole Foods parody), when he argues with her over incorrect fruit labels. Slogan by slogan he rejects the comfortable padding of the world that surrounds him, even quibbling over the semantics of a bumper sticker. K. becomes an unlikely hero when he’s thrust into a delicate situation, choosing between being a bystander or foiling a robbery in progress, and is turned into the object of society’s fascination — the star of a reality show — and eventually a target of the brutality that asking the wrong questions may beget.

Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfar

When a mysterious comet passes within the vicinity of Earth it turns the night sky strange swatches of purple. Jakub Prochazka, the orphaned son of a Communist Party informer, becomes the country’s first astronaut when he undertakes a dangerous mission offering a chance at both heroism and atonement. What he doesn’t anticipate is that while encased on the eight-month journey into deep space, he will long greatly for his wife, Lenka. There, pining for his beloved, and floating in the unknown, he encounters an eloquent spiderlike entity. Kalfar’s debut novel, evoking a Homeric epic, is an exceedingly pensive odyssey.

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid, international best-selling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and a PEN/Hemingway finalist for Moth Smoke, returns with a love story verging on magical realism. Against the backdrop of a fractious unnamed country on the fault line of an impending civil war, Exit West tells the tale of the romance between Saeed and Nadia. In a land of escalating violence, they hear rumors of doors that will allow them to escape, making a dangerous and costly journey into an uncertain future. They leave their old world behind and struggle to hold on to each other and their sense of who they are.

One of the Boys, by Daniel Magariel

Though a short read, One of the Boys is no small feat, nor a novel for the faint of heart. A confessional, deep-cutting debut novel told from the perspective of the younger of two sons, it grapples with the grim subject of abuse. Two boys leave their mother behind, siding with their father, the parent they consider the lesser of two evils. The youngest boy even conspires to fabricate evidence against his mother to permanently ensure she will never receive custody. In being manipulated into crafting such a scheme, he finds himself culpable in his father’s crimes. As both boys begin to see a different side to their dad — his negligence, addictions and violent temper — they realize they are obeying him not only because they love him but fearing for their lives. Once you’ve glimpsed past the shuttered windows of this broken family, it will be impossible to look away.

Born Both, by Hida Viloria

The upcoming Born Both is a memoir detailing Hida Viloria’s experience of gradually coming to the realization she is intersex — and subsequent endeavors to spread awareness of it as an individual identity. It’s also about trust, consent and what happens when it is betrayed. Growing up, Viloria struggled with a hyper-masculine father and this book is very much an exorcism of that toxic figure. Being an activist in LGBTQIA rights, Viloria has appeared and been interviewed on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Tyra Banks Show, ABC News, and has also penned articles for The New York Times, CNN.com and The American Journal of BioEthics. Her book’s publication is timely, considering that Hanne Gaby Odiele, a runway model, recently revealed that she was intersex in hopes of spreading awareness and doing away with taboos regarding non-binary bodies. Fans of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex may find that this intimate and jolting account speaks to them in ways fiction, perhaps, cannot.

Sonora, by Hannah Lillith Assadi

Hannah Lillith Assadi’s coming-of-age story, Sonora, is a noteworthy, dreamlike debut. Ahlam, a late bloomer, is the daughter of one world in the Middle East, but two separate visions. Her parents come from both sides of a fault line — Ahlam’s mother is from Israel and her father is a refugee from Palestine. Raised on the barren outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, Ahlam has known little of the conflict, save for the news her father blasts during dinnertime and the stories he tells to remind her of how lucky she is. Unpopular in school, Ahlam finds a friend and kindred spirit in Laura, a maverick whose mother is from a local reservation. Laura awakens the dormant and shy Ahlam to her womanhood — encouraging her to experiment with drugs, boys and witchcraft. Together, they form a pact, eventually fleeing to New York, where they find there are certain troubles you cannot run from — those you take with you.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS By Angie Tally

Birds, by Kevin Henkes

Just in time for spring comes this lovely new edition of Birds, called the “Perfect book for young readers” by the New York Times Book Review. A little girl watches birds from her window and observes their sizes, colors, shapes, and the way they appear and disappear. She wishes she could fly as they do, but celebrates the one big thing they have in common: singing. Ages 2-4.

This House, Once, by Deborah Freedman

A picture book artist/author and one-time architect, Deborah Freedman presents this absolutely stunning portrait of a house from the ground up. A door that was once a tree; a foundation built of rocks once underground; windows once blowing sand — this a perfect coffee-table-type gift for families moving into a new home or budding architects everywhere. Ages 3-6.

Magic Tree House: World at War, by Mary Pope Osborne

The Magic Tree House books, long staples on beginning readers’ shelves, have gotten a new look and are now presented in three divisions: Magic Tree House titles for beginning chapter book readers; Merlin Missions for more advanced readers; and Fact Trackers for nonfiction fans. Additionally, this newest title in the series World at War is the first Super Edition and is Jack and Annie’s most dangerous mission in the scariest time the world has ever known, World War II. No reader will want to miss this longer story with additional facts and photographs. Ages 7-10.

Grandpa’s Great Escape, by David Walliams
and Tony Ross

Grandpa is Jack’s favorite person in the world, but has become confused and believes he is back in World War II where he was an ace fighter pilot. Jack is the only one who understands him anymore, so when Grandpa is sent to an old folks home, it’s up to Jack to help Grandpa plot a daring escape. As their adventure spins out of control, they will need Grandpa’s fighter pilot know-how and Jack’s real world common sense to get home. Ages 8-12.

Genius, by Leopoldo Gout

Three international teenage coding and hacking geniuses who have created an online presence called the “Lodge” find themselves involved in a high stakes competition arranged by a computer genius who may have more than a game in mind. With detailed illustrations and STEM connections, this book is unlike any other for science-minded fiction readers. Ages 12-16.  PS

Surprise! Surprise!

Forget the turnips, Pisces, because life’s about to turn around

By Astrid Stellanova

Time for March Madness and Gladness, Star Children! St. Paddy’s Day on the 17th, and then we give Ole Man Winter the boot on the 20th. Get green. Thaw out. Get on down. Shake the winter funk off and get your good time groove on, Wild Things. Ad Astra — Astrid

Pisces (February 19–March 20)

Honey, times ain’t so bad. Don’t go all Scarlet O’Hara, scrounging in the dirt for turnips and cutting up the living room drapes. For your birthday, you have a consolation prize you are going to like. Oh, it’s a gen-u-ine humdinger, and faster than you can say twiddle-dee-dee, you get the biggest surprise in the tee-nine-siest package.

Aries (March 21–April 19)

You’ve outdone yourself recently, getting yourself prime placement in the Pissing-People-Off Hall of Fame. Have you lost your ever-loving marbles? Don’t try and blame all your woes on Jesus, carbohydrates and the mean girls on the cheerleading squad! This is a great year to come clean about the fact that you pitched a fast-ball that was just damn lucky and stop pretending it wasn’t a fluke. Go work on your game, Child.

Taurus (April 20–May 20)

Remember, class is subjective. Even paper towel can be called common white trash. But not only is that white trash useful, it absorbs a whole lot of other people’s spills. Don’t try and keep up with the Joneses, because, honestly, they are not all that and a pack of Nabs anyway. Your past does not define you.

Gemini (May 21–June 20)

Your self-mastery has taken a back seat to your need to know what all your closest friends are doing, where, and whoever they are doing it with. Throw it in reverse my Twin, and resist the urge to track your nearest and dearest like a bloodhound. You may feel insecure, but in the coming months you will get a boost that will make you wonder why that was ever true.

Cancer (June 21–July 22)

You have been laid up nursing a bad case of the poor pitifuls. Unsure how to get some perspective and back up on your feet? Here’s what you need to know. Honey, life hits us all hard. But you think you fall from some kind of a greater height than the rest of us, right? Not. At. All. The sun is about to break through the clouds, Sunshine.

Leo (July 23–August 22)

Sugar, everybody’s dee-lighted you are feeling in fine fettle. But, honestly, spell “overconfident.” A pack of dogs can chase a car and a fast one will dang nearly catch it, but not many of them can change gears and drive the thing. You have got a learning curve before you slide behind the wheel. Hit the books.

Virgo (August 23–September 22)

It’s been a dry spell for you in the social department. Don’t worry, dishes, no one did me either. But actually, you are about to have a good times breakthrough and you will be irresistible to somebody that used to give you the coldest of cold shoulders. Meantime, Poor Thing, you finally get credit long overdue.

Libra (September 23–October 22)

You’ve been working hard on an image that you privately consider to be artsy. There ain’t much distance between eccentric and crazy. And I don’t think anybody believes that wearing a beret makes you an artiste. In the meantime, be careful about leaning too much on a confidant that happens to have a very big mouth and a weak backbone.

Scorpio (October 23–November 21)

You share everything lately, dontcha? Especially the check. The road to frugality started out as a good thing and then you took a turn toward Crazy Town. Relax, Sugar. You have savings in the bank and more sense than most when it comes to turning a dollar. This month, splurge a little and live a lot.

Sagittarius (November 22–December 21)

You have the wattage of a very big star, but your lights went on low dim due to some mean-spirited body who always makes you feel a little foolish and a lot outclassed. Snap out of it, Sugar. They are envious of your God-given talents, and they wouldn’t bother to throw shade at you if they weren’t.

Capricorn (December 22–January 19)

Put that Sapphire-Chase-Supreme-Big-Spenders-Club plastic in the safe, put it under the floorboard, or just get the scissors out and cut it up. You know you didn’t need that new credit card, and nobody cares if it’s the same one that the Spending Hall of Famers pack in their wallets. You know it is a royal temptation, so skip the coronation.

Aquarius (January 20–February 18)

When Twain quipped that cauliflower is cabbage with a college education, Darling, he was thinking of your chief critic. Maybe this uppity someone is an alum of Cabbage College and now they think this makes them better than you. They can think again, Honey. You’ve got big talent and all they have got is a big head — of cabbage. So skip the Tom Dooley act and don’t go hanging down your (much nicer) head. PS

For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.

World on a Shelf

An encyclopedia of adventure

By Bill Fields

I pulled a volume off a shelf in a spare room and placed it on a table in front of my mother. Red with blue, gold and gray accents and fraying corners, it is seven years older than I am.

The World Book Encyclopedia, 1952 edition. I didn’t go to kindergarten, but I had our World Books, 18 volumes of information and entertainment, early childhood education without realizing it.   

“They were a good investment,” said Mom, who couldn’t remember how much they cost on an installment plan those many years ago.

Whatever my parents paid for them, it was a fair price, and I think my mother has long forgiven me for the stray crayon marks and torn pages in the “Farm” and “Fire” entries.

For my older sisters and me, the World Books were a window to the world far beyond our neighborhood, our school, our community, our state — although once I could read and not just look at the pictures, I did get a charge out of the “North Carolina” entry and seeing Southern Pines, population 4,772, among the rundown of the Old North State’s cities and towns.

But the real joy was in discovering things I didn’t know — that would have been almost everything in elementary school and earlier — and there was something on nearly every page. Thanks to the World Books, a housefly wasn’t just a pest to swat but a creature whose body parts were diagrammed. “Thorax” remains one of my favorite words. Before I saw a live tadpole, I’d seen “Life Story Of The Frog” in the encyclopedia.

Much of the set was in black and white, which made the bright four-color maps of American states and foreign countries stand out and seem special. When I flew to Great Britain for the first time, in 1988, it was to a country I initially had seen in Volume 7 of our World Books, when the longest trip was in a car for a couple of hours to the beach. The encyclopedia’s maps triggered an early interest in geography. At filling stations in the days when they gave away highway maps, if one was on a shelf I could reach, I took it for my collection.

Some of the World Book maps look silly more than six decades later, freeze-dried coffee in a Keurig Cup era. There is no Soviet Union, and many countries in Africa have different names. To see the “French Indochina” entry that was published years before the Vietnam War is a jarring reminder of history.

Being fascinated by balls and games from the time I was a toddler, I pored over the sporting entries. The football helmets shown were leather and without facemasks in 1952, which had drastically changed by the early 1960s when I first started poking through the World Books. A football field, however, was 100 yards long then and now.

The same can’t be said for the “Golf” entry. The diagram showing “distances a very good player should get with various iron clubs” indicates a 5-iron going 150 yards, something that hasn’t been so for decades, thanks mostly to the construction of balls and clubs.

That golf chart was only one example of how the World Books presented information. A country would be superimposed on a map of the United States to show its relative size. A pie chart displayed the food elements in a grape. The leading tobacco states were denoted by illustrated rankings, North Carolina at the top of the heap! There was a two-page spread highlighting “French Literature” from the 1400s to the 1900s, something I bet my sisters looked at more than I did.

Along with school texts and library books, The Pilot and The Greensboro Daily News, the 1952 World Books were what I read until I was in the fourth grade and it was decided our encyclopedias needed to be updated. There was debate over whether we would stick with World Books or switch to Encyclopedia Britannica, sort of a Ford or Chevy thing.

I remember a saleslady coming to the house one night extolling the virtues of the 1968 World Books, handsomely covered in white and green. She was a good closer, and before long the original set had been retired. But never forgotten.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved North in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Almanac

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. –Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Worms on the March

March is here and the world begins to soften. Some six feet underground, the earthworms are thawing, and when their first castings reappear in the dormant garden, so, too, will the robin. You’ll hear his mirthful, rhythmic song on an otherwise ordinary morning, pastel light filtering through the kitchen window where the sleeping cat stretches out his toes and, slowly, unfurls.

Cheerily, cheer-up, cheer-up, cheerily, cheer-up.

In other words: Spring has arrived.

All at once you notice flowering crocus, catkins dangling from delicate branches, colorful weeds dotting sepia toned landscapes. You watch the robin trot across the lawn, chest puffed like a popinjay as he pinballs from worm to fat, delicious worm. Soon he will gather twigs, feathers and grasses to build his nest.

Cheerily, cheer-up, cheer-up, cheerily, cheer-up.

As the kettle whistles from the stovetop, the aroma of freshly ground coffee warming the sunny room, a smile animates your face with soft lines.

Spring has arrived, you think.

And the world stirs back to life.

The Goddess Returns

The Full Worm Moon and Daylight Saving Time both happen on Sunday, March 12.  Because maple sap begins to flow in March, Native Americans deemed this month’s full moon the Sap Moon. You won’t want to miss it. And while you may miss that hour of sleep after turning the clocks forward, the longer days will make up for it in no time — especially when the field crickets start sweet-talking you into porch-sitting past supper.

Although the lusty robin may have announced the arrival of spring weeks ago, Monday, March 20, officially marks the vernal equinox. Greek myth tells that Demeter, goddess of harvest and fertility, celebrates the six-month return of her beautiful daughter, Persephone (goddess of the Underworld), by making the earth lush and fruitful once again. 

International Day of Forests and World Poetry Day fall on Tuesday, March 21 — a day after the start of spring. Celebrate with a poem by your favorite naturalist, and if you’re feeling inspired, try reading a few lines to a favorite stand of oak, maple or pine. 

In the spirit of Saint Patrick’s Day (Friday, March 17), why not spread white or red clover seed across bare patches of the lawn? One benefit of this flowering, drought-resistant legume is that it attracts pollinators and other insects that prey on garden pests. Plus, if you find a four-leaf clover — supposedly there’s one for every 10 thousand with three leaves — it’s said to bring you good luck. Give the shamrock to a friend and your fortune will double.

According to National Geographic, one of the “Top 7 Must-See Sky Events for 2017” will occur on March 29. On this Wednesday evening, Mercury, Mars, and a thin crescent moon will form a stunning celestial triangle in the western sky, with Mercury shining at its brightest to the right of the moon and Mars glowing above them.

Each leaf,

each blade of grass

vies for attention.

Even weeds

carry tiny blossoms

to astonish us. –Marianne Poloskey, “Sunday in Spring”

 Bald Facts about Daffodils

The daffodil — also known as jonquil, Narcissus and “Lent Lily” — is the birth flower of March. Synonymous with spring, this cheerful yellow flower is a symbol of rebirth and good fortune. And a little-known fact: Medieval Arabs used daffodil juice as a cure for baldness.  PS

Gold Rush

Deep in the Sandhills, a lingering legacy of dreams

By Bill Fields

On a January morning that would soon warm up so that a sweater was plenty for a hike in the woods, I was off to look for gold — or at least look for a place where men used to look for gold.

My guide, Donnie Reeves, who has studied and explored Montgomery County’s gold heritage for more than three decades, led me in his pickup to a pull-in for the Uwharrie National Forest north of Troy. At the urging of his father he had wanted to seek his fortune in Alaska but never made the long trip. Instead, after becoming fascinated with the story of gold much closer to his native Alamance County, he made a much shorter journey.

“I lived in an old school bus for two years — me, my wife and children,” Reeves says.  “My mother and daddy bought themselves a school bus and they came right behind me. We lived in that bus for two years and prospected when we could. We loved the area and never left.”

As I parked my rental car next to Reeves’ truck a few miles from his current home down the road from an old Methodist Church, I was not only excited about my forthcoming tour of the site of the former Russell Gold Mine, but also thinking about how my roots intersected with North Carolina’s 19th century gold rush, which predated California’s and was the exclusive supplier of domestic gold for the United States Mint from 1804 to 1828.

Many people were drawn to the Carolina slate belt, a series of rocks 25 to 70 miles wide extending from the South Carolina to Virginia borders for the potential riches — or more realistically, a job — in the 1800s. Lockey Arnold Henderson, my great-grandfather, who was born in 1818, left Chatham County on horseback as a young farmer. He headed for the Montgomery County village of Eldorado, the Old North State’s twist on El Dorado, the mythical “Lost City of Gold” in South America. (Locals pronounce a “long a” in the one-word version.) In the Uwharries, great-grandpa found work in the gold mines, settled and had a large family, including my grandfather, B.L. Henderson, who was born March 28, 1861, less than a month before the Civil War began.

“The first gold mining in North Carolina may have been by the Indians in Cherokee County before white settlers arrived,” P. Albert Carpenter III wrote in a 1993 North Carolina Geological Survey. Carpenter also notes reports that explorer Hernando de Soto attempted to mine gold in 1540 near Murphy, N.C. There were accounts of mines operating in Gaston and Mecklenburg counties before the Revolutionary War, and of the U.S. Mint receiving gold from North Carolina as early as 1793, according to Carpenter.

The frequently cited and “first authenticated discovery of gold” in North Carolina — and the U.S. — according to the state report, occurred in 1799 by a boy fishing in a Cabarrus County stream. But three years went by before the child’s father, John Reed, a German immigrant farmer, took the yellow, 17-pound nugget that had been used as a doorstop to a second jeweler for evaluation. Swindled by the jeweler, who paid him only $3.50, Reed eventually figured out the scam and reportedly received approximately $3,000 for Conrad Reed’s find. Reed’s Little Meadow Creek, where the first nugget came from, turned out to hold more gold and the rush had begun.

Capitalizing on the proximity of the valuable mineral, the Charlotte mint opened in 1837, producing $1, $2.50 and $5 gold coins — issuing more than $5 million worth — until it closed at the outset of the Civil War. During the 19th century, gold was discovered in a third of North Carolina’s 100 counties, with 345 mines open at one point according to state records, although other sources place the number at more than 600 during the peak years when gold mining trailed only farming as North Carolina’s biggest industry.

“Hundreds weren’t listed because they were really Mom and Pop operations,” says Reeves. “Farmers would operate them during the wintertime when they didn’t have crops to work.”

Montgomery County and Moore County each had about 20 mines, the former more of a hotbed of activity. Most of the Moore County mines were located north of Highway 24/27 southwest of Robbins. A “Gold Region” post office existed in that area from 1844 to 1866, then was renamed “Carters Mills,” for one of the mines, and operated until 1932. A “Gold Region No. 2” was open from 1877 to 1879.

A 1903 advertisement in the Pinehurst Outlook for “real estate and hunting grounds” offered by R.L. Burns of Carthage noted “fine farm, trucking peach, grape and berry lands . . . Also GOLD property.”

Moore County’s gold caught the eye of inventor Thomas Edison when he visited North Carolina in 1890. “(He) is in Moore county on a prospecting tour,” The Evening Visitor of Raleigh reported on June 25. “He is said to have taken options on large bodies of lands, rich in gold. Mr. Edison will soon form a syndicate of English capitalists and commence work, and the purchaser contemplates turning the water through it for gold-washing purposes.”

A “Gold Mine Pit” is even denoted 1 mile northeast of the Village Green on an 1897 map of Pinehurst and vicinity — likely a “prospect” where a tiny bit of gold was discovered. “They probably found a little bit of gold when they dug down but there wasn’t enough to keep digging,” Reeves says. “There are thousands of those places. More than likely, that’s what happened there.”

There were no such false starts at the Russell Mine. By the middle of the 19th  century it was the biggest gold mine in Montgomery County and the subject for a detailed 1853 report from the Perseverance Mining Company projecting millions in revenue over the course of a 60-year lease on the 40 acres of mineral land.

“More than likely your great-grandfather worked in this mine,” Reeves says as we walk into the national forest and see the first sign of the Russell operation, an old 100-foot shaft with bars installed at its entrance to keep out the curious. “There were homes and shacks where the workers lived. Hundreds of people lived here. There was a general store and a hotel across the street. Forty-some miners worked on a shift, and they’d run 24 hours.”

Some gold extraction was done through placer mining, a process in which miners washed eroded ores of rocks containing gold with pans, rockers and sluices (a grated rectangular box). The other type of deposit was found underground and in open pits dug by the miners in the form of gold veins often embedded in quartz. The largest excavation on the Russell property was “The Big Cut,” a pit 300 feet long, 150 feet wide and 60 feet deep.

The ore was crushed by 190-pound “stamps” that fell the height of a man or more, pounding the gold into a fine substance. The equipment allowed a mine to process 20 to 50 tons of material daily instead of just a few tons.

“You could feel the ground shake a half mile from here because of the many stamp mills,” Reeves says, a jarring observation on such a peaceful winter day. “You could hear it miles away.”

We walk farther into the forest and encounter “The Big Cut,” now cluttered with trees and other vegetation that make it seem smaller than its working dimensions. Miners would earn less than a dollar a day for their dirty, exhausting labor. Some miners went west when gold was found in California in 1849. Many of the mines closed as they became less profitable. Most closed down for the duration of the Civil War with the exception of the Silver Hill Mine in Davidson County, which produced ammunition for the Confederate Army. Some of the bullets were not only lead but included gold and silver because wartime wouldn’t allow for a costly and lengthy separation process.

“Lot of the Yankees who came down here had gold pans strapped to their saddles. They thought they were going to come in here and get rich,” Reeves says.

Following the Civil War there was a revival in North Carolina gold mining that continued, with intermittent lulls, into the first quarter of the 20th century.

“This portion of Montgomery County is a vast gold bed,” a correspondent for The Weekly Observer in Raleigh reported in 1878 while visiting the Swift Island mine. “Many pieces of gold weighing from one to two and three pounds have been found. We saw the hole in the ground from which two pieces were taken that weighed exactly a pound and a quarter each, each piece looking just like a frog.”

Thirty years later, the Asheboro Courier noted: “Bud Morgan found a valuable nugget of gold weighing 20 ounces near Eldorado.”

The Coggins Mine, a mile northeast of Eldorado on the road to New Hope, operated off and on from 1882 to 1934 as one of the busiest in the area. It was the scene of tragedy on Jan. 15, 1914 when three miners, eager to leave work on payday, hopped into the ore bucket for the 350-foot ride to the surface instead of climbing a ladder.

“They wanted to beat everybody else out of the mine,” Reeves says. “When it got to the top, the bucket hung on a ledge and flipped over and they fell to their deaths.”

Lizzie Sanders, wife of one of the three men, Walter Sanders, was in her home at the time. “The whistle at the mine started blowing,” Lizzie recalled decades later in an interview with the Montgomery County Historical Society. “Sometimes, they’d just give it a puff or two. But this time it just kept on and on.” Presently Lizzie found out how serious the accident was, fainting upon hearing the news.

According to the N.C. Geological Survey, total gold production in the state is approximately 1.1 million ounces, worth an estimated $25 million at historical prices. At current prices of $1,230 an ounce, it would be worth $1.24 billion.

“In the 1980s and ’90s I worked for a number of gold mining companies that came in here and investigated, trying to see if any of the old mines were worth mining,” Reeves says. “We did rock samples, but it would be too expensive to mine. We know there is over 20,000 ounces in the ground, but those companies were looking for a million-dollar deposit.”

Scores of people come to Montgomery County annually to pan and sluice for gold. Reeves has spent a lot of his time educating the recreational panners how to do it. While we were talking in his kitchen, Reeves gave me a small water-filled vial containing about a dozen small flakes and a nugget the news of which wouldn’t make the newspaper. This gold came from a nearby creek.

“When it gets to the size of the biggest one in there and you drop it in your gold pan and it you hear it go ‘clunk,’” he says, “it’s a nugget.” My gold is only worth a few dollars but he warns me not the shake the vial. “That gold is heavy enough to knock the bottom out,” he says, providing another example why so many went through so much for so long in pursuit of the element.

After our trek to the former Russell property, I had one other request of Reeves. There was another mine site in the Eldorado area I wanted to see.

We arrive at a 21st century general store and ask the owner if she can contact the owner of an adjacent parcel of land. A call is made and permission is granted. In a few minutes we’re maneuvering through trees and dead leaves about 100 yards east of Highway 109.

“There it is,” Reeves says, when we come to a clearing and a water-filled hole of about 10-by-10 feet. “That’s the Henderson Mine.”

My middle name, possibly some of my relatives.

Nearly a century ago, it had been a working shaft of 40 or 50 feet deep. Now, there was the reflection of the blue sky on the accumulated water. The way the light was hitting the old mine, there was a bit of a golden hue on the surface. I took a few photographs and began walking toward the car.

“Just a hole now,” Reeves said.

This mine was history, maybe even some of my own.  PS

Horse Heaven

Sliding comfortably into its horse country surroundings an interior decor of memorabilia harkens to an equestrian heyday

By Deborah Salomon     Photographs by John Gessner

Heirlooms often grace Southern homes: Grandpa’s desk, Auntie’s slipper chair. “We started from scratch. Our furniture’s from Pottery Barn,” says Chrissie Walsh Doubleday, granddaughter of legendary equine trainer Mickey Walsh, founder of Stoneybrook Steeplechase.

“I put it together,” adds husband Peter Doubleday, internationally known horse show manager/announcer and, by the way, descendant of Abner Doubleday, the apocryphal inventor of baseball.

Yet, beyond a standard sectional sofa and some-assembly-required tables and chairs, Doubleday House at Little Squire, the Doubleday’s Adirondak-style lodge, is a veritable bulletin board chronicling two fascinating lives: photos, posters, paintings, stuffed animals, ribbons, figurines, saddle pads, books, awards and, marching atop the kitchen cabinets, 100 beer bottles with interesting labels.

Peter nods an affirmative: “I drank every one.”

Fifty plants, bathed in light from oversized bare windows, provide a greenhouse effect. One precious photo shows Mickey Walsh riding pony Little Squire, sans saddle or bridle. Dominating another wall is a painting of Walsh (who died in 1993) by local artist Dani Devins; this was returned to the family after being auctioned off at hunt balls.

What some brand as clutter, Chrissie calls history.

Chrissie belongs to the land surrounding their home. She grew up in a log house within sight, later lived in a nearby cabin. Her father’s veterinary office was yards away. She, her four siblings and 29 cousins knew every rock, rail and puddle in the compound. Beyond the equestrian life, Chrissie taught chemistry and coached track and field for 28 years at Pinecrest High School.

Peter, from snowy Syracuse, New York, lived down the road when he met Chrissie at a Christmas party. “I knew of the family, of course. They were famous . . .” he says. In 2005, soon after they married, her parents sold them five of their 17 acres for a house. Subsequently, they purchased another five and added a small barn.

Neither had any architectural experience, which didn’t stop Peter from scrawling a plan on a napkin at O’Donnell’s Pub. They liked the work of Southern Pines architectural/interior designer Denis McCullough who translated the napkin into a home unlike neighboring showplaces.

Little Squire defies labels.

Chrissie: “I wanted (the interior) to be a semi-circle and the outside to blend with the trees.” This meant angled interior walls which give the rooms irregular but interesting shapes.

Peter: “I saw a picture of a house with cedar siding, hunter green and blood red trim, like houses in Lake Placid.” The clapboards and shingles also reminded him of “cottages” in the exclusive Hamptons, where he announces events.

Multiple roof pitches and a cupola topped by the weathervane from Stoneybrook complete the rustic appearance. The Irish flag honors immigrants Mickey and Kitty Walsh who arrived in America in the 1920s — and in Southern Pines in 1939.

Chrissie was adamant about layout. “I wanted everything in one room.” That living room-dining room-kitchen-bar with wood-burning fireplace stretches nearly 50 feet facing outward to the terrace, paddock and barn. A long refectory table fills up fast at Thanksgiving and Christmas, since Chrissie’s sister and niece also maintain houses on the property. From the open kitchen in a far corner, the cook stays part of the action. Black granite countertops are covered not with cooking paraphernalia but photos of “good people,” Chrissie says. “We wanted pictures and themes everywhere to reflect horses and racing.” Peter’s artifacts contribute the broadcasting dimension, which include the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. “Peter’s a collector. He just kept putting stuff up and I said  . . . whatever.”

guest suite with separate entrance at one end of this panoramic great room offers privacy. Adjacent to it, a combination “entertainment” room and office. Peter loves music; a wall of CDs covers every genre but classical. “Vinyl’s coming back,” he says, pointing to long-play albums. The opposite wall of shelves displays Chrissie’s books and in the middle, a throne-sized red leather chair and ottoman. On hot afternoons, after barn chores Chrissie retreats here to read. The master suite with small terrace and second wood-burning fireplace — Chrissie’s lifelong dream — occupies the opposite wing.

Their outdoor environments include a small screened porch on the front and a larger one between the house and the patio which, by spring, is filled with flowers and often with guests. The Doubledays have no trouble fitting 100 friends and colleagues inside and out. “Our guests feel at home as soon as they open the door,” Peter says. They especially enjoy the DIY bar with tall vinyl-topped bar stools and well-stocked shelves.

A small pool built long before the house cools hot and dusty riders.

Nothing formal, everything practical and intensely personal. Floors throughout are low maintenance tile brightened with area rugs. Wide, handsomely framed doorways ease the flow from wing to wing. A coffered ceiling buffers noise. No palette unites the décor, although every hue found in nature appears here.

Chrissie got her wish: from a distance, the house melts into the woods.

A piece of Chrissie’s heart beats faster in the small barn, shelter to Guac, a retired racer with a speckled coat called flea-bitten gray. Surprisingly, “I’ve ridden all my life but this is the first horse I’ve ever owned. He’s taught me a lot in the saddle and on the ground,” she says. “They test you. I’m supposed to be the boss but we’re still working on that.” Chrissie feeds, grooms, rides and cares for him — and Burrito, his adorable donkey companion — herself. She’s in the barn by 7 a.m., takes a break around noon, out again at 4 p.m. and to “check on things” before bed.

These are happy hours. “I spent a lot of time with my parents before they died,” she recalls. “Afterwards, things sort of fell apart, family-wise. I needed something to fill the void.”

The Doubledays’ luxury is not in antiques or professional-grade kitchen appliances but in living a continuity. “It’s just the two of us; we didn’t need a monster house,” says Peter, although as arranged, the 2700 square feet appear larger. Its location allows the couple to bike into downtown for First Fridays or a pub evening. But mostly they like to stay put. Peter, who travels many months a year, answers to homebody.

“I need a crowbar to get Chrissie out,” he says.

She responds: “I’m just very proud to still own this family property,” which honors her parents and grandparents. “They worked hard to create the farm, and Stoneybrook. It’s the only home either of us has ever built . . .”

And, Peter concludes, “We plan to stay here forever.”  PS

The Right Words

The art of talking, or not

By Renee Phile

Lately I have been trying to keep my boys talking, you know, to keep the conversations going. With Kevin, who is 8, it’s absolutely no problem, but the older one, the 13-year-old, well, his word count has decreased in the past year. Sometimes he will excitedly chat about wrestling or football, or a teacher who he thinks is funny, but all too often his answers are just a few words.

“My day was fine.”

“I learned about prepositions.”

“Yes, I ate the lunch you sent. Yes, the carrots, too.”

Fair enough, but sometimes I just really want a conversation, so I ask the question, “Do either of you have anything you want to talk about?” Most of the time a topic is not given, but comments are.

“We need to get Chinese food.”

“Can we get Little Caesars tonight?”

“Did you get a video of me pinning that guy at my wrestling match?”

Sometimes conversations begin about 5-7 minutes after the boys are supposed to be in bed for the night. Ironically, this is the time frame when suddenly more meaningful topics emerge.

“Mom, do you know what I’ve been thinking about? God. Is He real or not?”

“Mom, you know. I have been wondering. How did I get here? Like, really?”

“Mom, there is a kid at school who is mean to me.”

Yes, of course there will also be the occasional urgent, “Mom, I forgot to tell you that you need to sign this permission slip before tomorrow. Yes, I know I have had it in my book bag for two weeks, but I just remembered. At least I remembered before tomorrow!”

“Mom, I forgot to tell you about the solar system project due tomorrow. I have everything I need except I need help painting Neptune. We didn’t have the shade of green I need for the rings. Can we run to Walmart real quick?

Sometime, though, mornings are when I like to talk. After all, we have a 15-minute drive to school and yesterday morning I asked a question, and here is what I got.

“Does anyone want to talk about anything while we’re driving to school?”

David: “NO.”

Kevin: “Oh! I do!”

David: “No, Kevin, I can’t handle it.”

Kevin: “But I need to tell you something!”

Me: “Go ahead, Kevin.”

David: “UGH!”

Kevin: “David, stop with your attitude!”

David: “Be quiet.”

Me: “What do you need to tell us, Kevin?”

David: (makes disapproving grunts, sighs, and other 13-year-old noises.)

Kevin: “I really want to talk about why quesadillas are better than tacos.”

I mean, what else is there to say? Best topic ever.  PS

Renee Phile teaches English composition at Sandhills Community College.

Hawk

Driving to work, I spotted

the red-tailed hawk perched on the stop sign

at the corner of Courtland & Adams.

Surveying the suburban yards

for his next meal, he looked in my direction,

then turned away, disinterested. 

I lowered my eyes to check the time

and when I looked up again he was gone,

leaving me alone in the warm comfort of my car,

delighted by what I’d seen,

desperate for his return.

—Steve Cushman

Trail of Tears

The sorrowful history of Western expansion

By Stephen E. Smith

During the early-to mid-19th century, an unknown Native American warrior documented his life in pictographs on a buffalo hide. His early years were happy. He owned horses, took two wives, fathered children. Then white-faced figures appear pointing sticks that spit fire. Later, he painted his family dying of smallpox. His last pictograph illustrates the arrival of Jesuits in their black cassocks. There the narrative ends, suggesting, perhaps, that Jesuits are deadlier than smallpox.

Whatever the cause of the warrior’s demise, there’s no denying that the 19th-century collision between Native Americans and westward migrating peoples of European descent was one of the most shameful and tragic chapters in the history of the continent. Peter Cozzens’ meticulously written and thoroughly documented The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West is the latest offering in a spate of recent books that graphically detail how shameful and tragic the winning of the West truly was. (An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, both published in the last year, are also well worth reading.)

Most of these recent Indian histories owe their perspective, at least in part, to Dee Brown’s 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a best-seller that transformed the attitude with which Americans regard indigenous people. Published three years after the founding of the American Indian Movement, Brown portrays the government’s dealings with Native Americans as an ongoing effort to eradicate their culture and religion. Cozzens adopts a slightly more balanced and analytical view of the Indian wars, taking into account the misjudgments and barbarism prevalent on both sides of the conflict.

From the opening chapter, it’s obvious the story Cozzens has chosen to tell is ghastly beyond the power of words. Government policy dictated that indigenous people be concentrated on reservations of ever decreasing size until their will to fight was broken and their cultural cohesion destroyed. The wholesale slaughter of the buffalo was intended to deny food and livelihood to the tribes, and with the arrival of the railroads, the hunting grounds native people had occupied for millennia were opened to white settlement. What resulted was a fight to the death in which the tribes had no chance of prevailing. For white politicians, soldiers and settlers, the primary motivations were greed and racism. Native Americans stood in the way of wealth and progress, and they were perceived as a subhuman species to be dealt with as quickly and as expediently as possible. Even generally peaceable tribes such as the Modoc and Nez Perce were treated ruthlessly.

“The whites were coming now, in numbers incomprehensible to Indians,” Cozzens writes. “They assaulted the Indian lands from every direction. Settlers rolled in from the east, while miners poked at the periphery of the Indian country from the west, north and south and simply overran it when new mineral strikes were made. In Westerners’ parlance, Indians who resisted the onslaught were to be ‘rounded up’ and rendered harmless on reservation land too miserable to interest the whites.” But Cozzens also notes that whites were not solely to blame for the dissolute loss of life and property. “. . . tribes had long battled one another over hunting grounds or horses. Indeed, fighting was a cultural imperative, and men owed their place in society to their prowess as warriors.”

The subjugation of Western indigenous people took place during the 30 years from 1861 to 1891, as the U.S. Army, acting under orders from Eastern politicians, pursued the policy of “mollification and eradication.” Beginning with the Dakota uprising in Minnesota and ending with the tragedy at Wounded Knee and the 1891 surrender of the Oglala Lakotas at Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, the story is one of unremitting atrocity, suffering and death.

Former Civil War generals found themselves incapable of adapting to erratic and uncoordinated tribal uprisings. No less a national figure than William Tecumseh Sherman was inept at managing Indian affairs, and Winfield Scott Hancock, the hero of Gettysburg, found himself unable to negotiate with the Cheyenne and burned their villages in central Kansas. Phil Sheridan, who had swept the Shenandoah Valley clear of Confederate troops, found himself incapable of placating the tribes and conducted the Red River War, the Ute War, and the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, which resulted in the death of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and a sizable portion of his command. (For all his faithful service during the Civil War, Sheridan is best remembered for having said: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”) President Ulysses S. Grant, whom biographers portray as a friend to Indian people, convened a secret White House meeting to plan strategy for provoking a war with the Lakotas. In the late 19th century, the government, in an effort to eliminate further uprisings, outlawed Native American religious ceremonies, and altruistic white civilians established boarding schools where Indian children were required to speak English, study math and religion, and where they were punished for use of their native language and the exercise of their tribal beliefs.

Insofar as it’s possible to condense a 30-year period of national misadventure into 460 pages of carefully crafted text, Cozzens has produced an exemplary history that’s commendably objective, a reference book for the Indian wars. Beyond the intrinsic value of acquiring historical knowledge for its own sake, thoughtful readers may well gain a perspective on contemporary Native American issues — public health, education, gambling, discrimination and racism, the use of sports mascots, and the desecration of tribal lands. More than 100 years after the surrender of the last Indian tribe, suicide, alcoholism and crime remain serious problems on reservations.

Positive edifications notwithstanding, The Land Is Weeping, for all its detachment, allows for only one conclusion: The 19th-century sweep of “civilization” across the territories west of the Mississippi created for the Native American tribes who inhabited the region the cultural wasteland we now call peace.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.