Published in Folio, 1994 & Fireweed, 1994.

                  LAST WAGON WHEEL
 

          by Dorothy Blackcrow Mack

Near Macksburg, Oregon

            Last Christmas Aunt Gid gave me an heirloom,
            gray calico dress worn by a boy child buried in sod in l852,
            on a knoll by a stream somewhere along
            the Oregon Trail. On Day Twelve the Mack
            log book entry reads: "Cholera. Age 2."

            Aunt Gid tells me, "Poor little Landry! He
was crushed in Kansas, but no one could bear
to record it. Great-grandma Mack told me
Landry would play on the buckboard; one day
he fell into the dusty track; wheels smashed
his head before they could stay the oxen."

                           Near Oglala, Nebraska

            Once Aunt Shala told me while driving dirt
roads past a cattle ranch with U. S. flags
waving, its yard fence spoked with a hundred
wagon wheels each painted red, white and blue:
"All those wheels were once my dad's, Sam Blackcrow.
One year they fed our whole tiyospaye.

            "Back in the 30's when we were starving,
this guy paid a dollar each, so my dad
gathered all those broken wheels lying deep
in trail ruts for years, fixed the spokes and rims,
loaded them on the last wagon we had,
harnessed the team, took the whole lot up here."

                       At Camp Lakota, South Dakota

          Back home we find a wagon wheel hidden
in mud by the creek, rusty and warped but
whole, waterlogged tight to rims. We paint it
white, hang it between sun-bleached buffalo
skulls above the Sundance gate with flags of
sacred colors, red, streaming in the wind.

            tiyospaye = extended family, clan (Lakota)