Beecher Island

Beecher Island is the site of site of an 1868 battle between Southern Cheyenne warriors and cavalry scouts from Fort Hays, Kansas. It was one of the legendary Indian battles of the old west, featured ficticiously in the 1936 movie The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper, and written up by Dee Brown in his book Action at Beecher Island.  

I wrote this poem after visiting Beecher Island in the the summer of 1975. I had just finished the Navy's Preventive Medicine School and was on my way to Camp Pendleton, California, which had just received 20,000+ Vietnamese refugees after the Saigon government collapsed. The weekend I arrived home, in Boulder, a former roommate got married and we all got trashed. After the hangover, I cajoled a friend and future brother-in-law to accompany me on a "fishing" trip to Beecher Island.  

Beecher Island is in the ultimate east of Colorado. In 1975 the Arikaree river contained enough water to make fishing plausible. Today the river bed at Beecher Island is silted in and grown over by wild grasses.


The prairie is more Kansas than Colorado here.
The road drops away from the corn stalks, grass,
and deKalb signs to a forgotten park.
We stopped the car to read the marker
and drop our lines in shallow water,
too shallow really.

We came here, leaving weddings and wars behind,
to say we fished, and drink beer,
and read the stone left behind in another year.
"I don't think we'll get a bite,"
Gary flicked his line and opened a Coors.
I left mine and heard a bee
and a young girl's horse crossing a wooden bridge.

Horses thundered and screamed, then,
and splashed through the shallow prairie river.
Fleeing Roman Nose, the white scouts holed up, here,
while the Cheyenne flung their arrows and youth at them.

Roman Nose and Sandy Beecher came to this place,
and an errand boy named Slinger, and fifteen men from Hays
and a hundred or so Arapaho who stayed
-- its all on the stone --
for nine long days.

And the horses clop on the bridge, the sun passes a cloud.