This also has been one of the dark places of the earth.
— Marlow on the Thames, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
I
Josias Redgate King won’t let me go. His bronze hands grip a bronze rifle high atop a column in a park near downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota, not far from my home, but his story has seized me. Once an unqualified inspiration, the city’s 122-year-old Civil War monument now embodies for me troubling uncertainties about historical representations in public spaces. Nothing about it, however, hints at anything beyond civic heroism.
History, as a historian friend likes to say, is an ongoing conversation between past and present. Conversations develop, new information surfaces, complicating insights emerge. The luster of unexamined glorifications dims. My own conversation with this statue, formally known as Minnesota’s Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, is fraught.
As it happens, this Civil War memorial features this specific Union veteran, an unusual aspect for such monuments erected in the North and South around the turn of the 20th century, during a “statue mania” in the United States that intensified as Lost Cause and Jim Crow ideologies grew and more old veterans were dying. For it is the face of Saint Paul’s own Josias King that gazes resolutely over the city. Photos exist of King at age 71 posing solemnly beside his larger-than-life likeness before it was lofted to its monolith perch on Cathedral Hill. Sculptor John Karl Daniels had faithfully rendered King’s features to fit the generic, mass-produced bronze of a soldier’s body standing at parade rest that was then in common use.
“The first man to volunteer in the First Minnesota Infantry,” a plaque on the monument’s base declares. “The first regiment tendered the government for the suppression of the rebellion.” What a surprise! The Union Army, Yankees — weren’t they a creation of the Northeast? I asked, looking up at King the first time.
Born and raised in western Pennsylvania steel towns, I had once lived near Pittsburgh’s Arsenal Park, site of the largest civilian disaster of the Civil War. Seventy-eight workers, most of them young women making rifle ammunition, died in a series of explosions at Allegheny Arsenal on September 17, 1862. I’d visited Gettysburg, too, soaking up details of how my home state was where the Army of the Potomac had defeated Confederate forces under the command of General Robert E. Lee, blocking a direct attack on Washington, D.C., from the north. Shouldn’t that first volunteer have come from Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts?
The King statue exposed my regional bias. But the truth is that Minnesota’s governor happened to be in Washington when Fort Sumter was fired upon, effectively starting the war in April 1861. Hearing Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers, he telegraphed Saint Paul’s Pioneer Guard, Minnesota’s frontier militia. King reportedly “bounded” to the stage where the militia had assembled, shouting “Here’s one for the war!” He couldn’t have known it, but he indeed was the first Union volunteer, nationwide. More importantly, he’d stirred his fellow Pioneer Guards, who became Company A of that First Minnesota Infantry Regiment celebrated on the statue’s base.
King’s U.S. military service was, by all accounts, dramatic. He fought at, and wrote about, the First Battle of Bull Run. He had horses shot from under him at Antietam and at Charles Town, now in West Virginia. By war’s end he was a lieutenant colonel; he then served at various other posts before mustering out of the Army in 1870. Returning to Saint Paul, he was later named inspector general of the Minnesota National Guard and remained a revered figure in the state until his death in 1916.
In the way of such monuments, King’s reaches for broader significance than the mere celebration of a single life. Another plaque on its base proclaims the “advancement of liberty” for which King and his brothers in arms had fought. Minnesota’s soldiers and sailors had “preserved the union of the states,” “abolished human slavery” and “established the national prestige.” All this, and at the outbreak of the war, Minnesota had only been a state for three years.
What curdled my early pleasure at this discovery was learning about another of King’s military actions. I’d occasionally mused over the First Minnesota’s tattered Gettysburg battle flag on display at the nearby state capitol, wondering what this bold young man must have done there. The regiment had been legendarily brave on the bloodiest second day of that three-day battle, during which it suffered 82 percent casualties.
It turned out King did nothing at Gettysburg, because he wasn’t there. Instead he was in Dakota Territory on temporary reassignment, preparing to chase down and attack Indians as an aide-de-camp to General Alfred Sully during a “punitive expedition” of the Army. That September, Sully’s force approached Whitestone Hill, a peaceful encampment of Dakota, Lakota and Blackfeet Indians hundreds of miles west of the Minnesota River valley where the brief U.S.-Dakota War had occurred a year earlier — one of innumerable “Indian Wars” conducted on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.
King wrote about that campaign, too, in terms that now unmistakably define genocidal slaughter. In 1914, he responded to a query posed by Orin G. Libby, a historian and founding secretary of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, with a 24-page account of his own actions. The document is a triumphalist glance back at his part in the violent settlement of Dakota Territory, “the Most Complete Thrashing” that caused the Sioux “more terrible losses in Killed [and] Wounded and in a greater destruction of their property than they had ever met with, or suffered before.” King describes the killing of animals, “some three or four hundred dead dogs laying around” as well as “two or three hundred ponies.” Sully’s orders had been to “destroy their transportation,” meaning that the animals used to drag the travois sledges that carried everything these Dakota owned had to die.
King mentions killing wounded Indians, too, of sending one “to the happy hunting grounds.” He writes of
burning and destroying everything that would be of the least use to the Indians. . . . burning up all their Tepee’s and the Tepee poles. Some four or five hundred. We chopped their Camp Kettles full of holes destroying everything completely, threw all their Old Axes & hatchets, after chopping their handles off — into the lake — we must have burned up some three or four hundred thousand pounds of dried buffalo meat that had been already secured and packed in their parflesh skins . . . their entire Supply of provisions for the Winter, and all of these severe loses on the Eve of a terrible and Cold Winter.
That’s a lot of meat they burned. King’s account, provided more than 50 years after the fact, shows no remorse, only the boast of supremacy, a gloating over that “Most Complete Thrashing.” The Indians were left without axes, kettles, tipis, dogs or ponies as they fled Whitestone Hill with little more than the clothes on their backs and the horses on which they escaped. Sully’s force remained three days on what King calls “the battlefield,” but which its former inhabitants had known as their summer village home.
II
My casual itch to see whether Josias King might have done something heroic at Gettysburg led to devastating discoveries. In the intimacy of reading King’s handwritten retelling of what happened at Whitestone Hill, I was fingering the pages of genocide.
I felt it in my gut. I photocopied what I’d read and resolved to visit his statue again. Tilting back on Cathedral Hill, I squinted up, wanting to see King’s face. Was his the look of a local war criminal? Sixty feet above me, his facial features were indistinguishable.
Later, when I learned a friend had photographed King’s face from an aerial platform to document its rebronzing, I searched the image as one gazes at Lincoln’s on the National Mall, looking for hints of honesty, or Harriet Tubman’s in Boston, to recognize defiant courage. What do war criminals look like? I wondered, as if genocidal evil left clues in human faces, a discernable quality, something “other.”
Studying my friend’s close-up of King’s sculpted face, I recalled the shallow moral fluidity of my own Army service a hundred years later. I would like to think none of us could have committed what we now call “crimes against humanity.” But I know better. A famous line of the Roman playwright Terence confronts me: “Nothing human is foreign to me.” To grapple with those words, I need only remember bayonet training.
“What’s the spirit of the bayonet?” the sergeant would roar. “Kill!” I roared back, making sure my voice was as loud as everyone else’s. “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
We yelled that word a lot during hand-to-hand combat training, shouting in unison or one at a time, lunging the blade, still sheathed, against a padded human figure. Then that withdrawal move: Plant the feet apart to pull the bayonet free from entangling ribs and uniform fabric, or the weight of an enemy body, and yank. Gotta get on to the next one — bayonet, barrel or rifle butt ready for use. It soon felt good, strong, manly, a scary thrill. I could do this if I had to. I could get it right, be a warrior. I was a man.
How rapidly I’d changed. A few months earlier, I’d thought of myself as a pacifist. Having departed minor seminary after six years, I was caught off guard by a letter summoning me to a draft physical. The recruiter’s words hit hard: “You’ll end up in infantry, armored or artillery.” He said I’d be in the January call. “Kennedy’s increased draft quotas. He’s serious about Berlin. You’re 1-A. You just passed your physical. February for sure.”
The Army had been nowhere on my horizon. My fierce, young Catholic spirit contained no secular radar. Instead I brimmed with St. Francis, Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ and the writings of Thomas Merton, who was then still alive. I’d read Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation and The Waters of Siloe in chapel and on days of recollection. Two seminary friends had joined the Trappists; one was at the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Merton was his novice master. Now, out in the world again, I wanted nothing more than to find my way to the Trappists, too. The recruiting sergeant noticed my hesitation, my squirming at what he’d called “the combat arms.”
“But with scores like these, young man, you qualify for every training we offer. If you enlist for an extra year, I can guarantee any Army occupation you want.” When he mentioned the medical corps, I leapt. What cinched the offer was his picking up the phone “to call Washington” on my behalf. That felt important. Suddenly, I mattered. He had a direct line to the country. I would soon be serving America. When my first choice, medical lab specialist, had no openings till midsummer, I agreed immediately to his next deal: operating room technician. At least OR tech was still medical, I reasoned, though it sounded less scientific. But I had achieved the important thing: No morally compromised combat for me. Thou shalt not kill.
My at-first-manufactured zeal in bayonet training grew incrementally as I did my best to fit in. I was never gung-ho, but I recall my pride at later being chosen to lead an 11-man rifle squad in a live-fire exercise on bivouac. I was scared, but I grew into it. Hmmm, maybe I could lead in combat. I was as determined as any other squad leader for our bullets to “kill” every pop-up, human-shaped target we spotted. Khrushchev’s Berlin Wall had wakened me from my postseminary stupor. Had I left the Capuchins a year later, I might have found myself a combat medic in Vietnam. How fortunate that I never had to decide whether to kill or die over the Cold War abstractions behind that war. Suppose I’d have come upon “our side” torturing prisoners or GIs I knew burning straw hooches?
Today, it’s not just recognizing my common humanity with both King and his Dakota victims that gives me pause. There’s something much larger to reckon with than “there but for the accidents of history go I.” The genocidal horrors detailed in King’s Whitestone Hill report belonged not to one man but to an ambitious, budding nation. King was just a minor actor in an unexamined colonialist script. Since the mid-19th century, the shorthand for that script had been “Manifest Destiny.” And no visual representation of the meaning of that phrase surpasses John Gast’s widely known 1872 oil painting, American Progress, mass-distributed as an engraving titled “Spirit of the Frontier.”
In it Gast encapsulates the secular underpinning of young America’s insatiable craving for the entire continent. A giant Caucasian spirit-woman, Lady Columbia, draped in a diaphanous white gown, floats above the American plains. Holding a “School Book” in one hand, she uncoils a telegraph line with the other. Her progress drives stampeding buffalo and a few fleeing Indians before her, all of whom are departing the frame toward dark mountains and, in the upper left corner, the Pacific Ocean. Like the Dakota in King’s Whitestone Hill report, these fugitives have almost nothing to call their own — three horses, two dogs, one travois. Three Indians are half-naked; all are in pell-mell flight. One Native man carries a bow with a single arrow: There can be no buffalo hunting. They have no weapons with which to defend themselves. No tipis or lodges appear in Gast’s version of sea-to-shining-sea. Lady Columbia has swept aside every trace of Native culture in her passing.
Nowhere in this gauzy, bloodless abstraction do we see cavalry or militia. The only long guns (I count three) belong to an orderly group of settlers and what appears to be a miner calmly trudging west. The miner smokes a pipe, his left hand casually rests in his pocket. He saunters. Not so the Indians. They look fearfully over their shoulders as they flee to the west, staring up at the giant specter of Lady Columbia. A lone, grimacing bear in the foreground does the same. Columbia does not even notice them, though it is her they are fleeing; she looks serenely westward.
American Progress suggests another “self-evident truth” than those acknowledged in Jefferson’s famous formulation, a seemingly divine one: North America is destined for Europeans and the institutions that follow Columbia’s lead. Trains, Conestoga wagons, a stagecoach — nature itself already being abstracted into “resources,” “property,” and “wealth” — these things are meant for white American progress. Columbia is not for Native civilizations. Even the bear gets it.
III
I don’t know what should be done about Minnesota’s Josias King statue, nor is it mine to say. A rebronzing initiative for the statue in 2016, 100 years after King’s death, brought its suppressed history to the surface. Minnesota Historical Society research historian Peter DeCarlo called Sully’s campaign “ethnic cleansing and genocide . . . meant to bring about the death of a people.”
“We’re looking at something that might have been seen in Hungary after 1939, when the Nazis came in and did not consider the people they were killing as human beings,” the journalist and Native activist Laura Waterman Wittstock told Minnesota Public Radio in 2018. “Taking down [the] statue would be the least we could do. But there needs to be a lesson told about why this statue is taken down.” Wittstock and DeCarlo agreed that such action should only come after public discussion that included Native Americans.
Such a discussion never developed, but two years later a statue of profound relevance to Native American history was taken down just a few blocks away — a statue of Christopher Columbus. That action was part of a negative statue mania that swept the nation and the world, detonated by the police murder of George Floyd on the streets of neighboring Minneapolis.
Wikipedia’s list of monuments and memorials removed in the wake of Floyd’s death runs to 67 pages and includes actions in 10 countries and the removal of 38 other Columbus memorials. While the majority of these statues and monuments were removed nonviolently, the ones most people know were — like Floyd’s murder — caught on camera and endlessly replayed on social media.
The removal of Saint Paul’s Columbus statue, which had stood nearly 90 years on the grounds of the state capitol after being proudly erected by Italian Americans in the early 1930s, was one of the latter, though it was not the result of spontaneous mob violence. Rather, it was an act of organized civil disobedience — a political, historical, moral gesture. It was also a statue-toppling with a long backstory. Since well before the 1992 Columbus quincentennial, Indigenous Minnesotans had demonstrated around it. Their actions included occasional paint or blood splashings. A bill to remove the statue, coauthored by Peggy Flanagan, a White Earth Ojibwe and Minnesota’s lieutenant governor since 2018, died in committee while she was still a member of the state legislature.
When Mike Forcia, chair of the Twin Cities chapter of the American Indian Movement publicly announced the group’s intentions to pull down the monument ceremonially on June 10, 2020 — 16 days after Floyd’s death — he was prepared to accept the legal consequences. Confronted at the scene by a captain from the Minnesota State Patrol, Forcia said, “We’ll help you pick him up, we’ll help you carry him into the capitol. . . . We’ll pay for any damage.”
For Forcia, the outrage of Floyd’s murder was hauntingly literal. “I have experienced the knee of a Minneapolis cop on my neck as well,” he later told writer and art historian Erin Thompson while awaiting the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the lead officer convicted in Floyd’s killing.
Thompson reported what happened on the day of the statue removal in her 2022 book, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments. As state police officers approached the crowd that had gathered around the statue, Forcia spoke. “We have so many missing women and murdered Indian women,” he shouted to the crowd, pointing to Columbus. “And he was the start of it all. I think our women should be in the front of that rope.” Some 20 women then put their hands on the two ropes fastened around the statue and pulled it to the ground.
A photograph captures the most telling moment in the immediate aftermath of the toppling. A Lakota activist, Gabriel Black Elk, whose brother had died at the hands of Denver police years earlier, knelt on Columbus’ bronze neck in what Thompson calls “a symbolic reversal of Floyd’s death.” Drumming began, a round dance ensued, banners were unfurled. Forcia joined the police captain in helping to disperse the crowd but told him the police didn’t need to use their sticks. “You just have to ask,” he said. He told the protesters to keep backing up so they could “move the trash [off] the sidewalk.” Later, after the statue was gone, Forcia surrendered to the police as he’d said he would.
Lieutenant Governor Flanagan was not at the protest, but told reporters the following day she was “not going to perform for folks . . . to feign sadness.”
I had seldom noticed this Columbus statue — a common response to highly visible public monuments, including King’s. But sometime after the removal, I went to check out the site. Quite a bit of the monument remains. Among the supplementary ornamentation and information chiseled into the Columbus pediment is an image of his command ship, the Santa Maria. Crusader crosses emblazon two of its billowing sails. The image reminded me of a Columbus biography my mother had given me after a church mission when I was 7, my first hardback. She used it to improve my reading. Its black and white illustrations helped my young mind to believe, mistakenly, that Columbus was a saint.
Clearly visible beneath an inscription identifying the now-absent “Discoverer of America” are four thumb-sized holes drilled into the granite. They mark the place formerly occupied by a bronze plaque, added late in the 20th century in response to earlier protests. In the awkward manner of compromised committee writing the plaque had praised Columbus for the “merging of the cultures of the old and new worlds.”
But the biggest tell on the remaining pedestal is the two heraldic eagles adorning the sides of its base. These majestically stylized birds, wings raised impossibly vertical, dig their horny talons into planet Earth. They claim it. A few powerful wingbeats, it seems to me, and each could carry their globe away, a possession. The colonizing hunger behind the mixed record of Josias King and General Sully, expressed so memorably in Gast’s image, was not confined to this continent. Europe itself, led by the king of Spain and the pope, had sent forth Lady Columbia’s namesake, Christopher Columbus, with material support and spiritual blessing. Those stylized eagles suggest the claiming of the whole world.
Monuments express a kind of witnessing. In New Orleans in 1891, 11 Italian men, mostly Sicilians, were lynched in mistaken retaliation for the murder of the city’s chief of police. It was the largest lynching in American history. The New Orleans tragedy, and the impending 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ first voyage in 1892, spurred the first celebration of Columbus Day in the United States as a way to placate Italian Americans who were pushing back in anger and anguish against widespread and violent discrimination against them. The Italian-born Columbus was their hero, their best avenue to a claim upon the American story.
The makers of the King and Columbus statues, and the people who commissioned them, wanted viewers to see their subjects in a certain way. Those who object to their removal or their recontextualization today believe history itself is being removed. But it’s human consciousness and conscience that construct history, monuments and art, which is why my historian friend speaks of his discipline as an ongoing conversation.
I’ve come to recognize my engagement with public monuments as an active one, a two-way street. The works we look at, even study, are also silently witnessing us. I’m sure I’d shed my holy card view of Columbus as a saint in my early adult years. I’m now embarrassed at how —when encountering Josias King for the first time in my 60s — I’d felt unalloyed pride at learning only what his monument’s base had to teach me.
Columbus has now been gone from his perch outside Minnesota’s capitol more than five years. Minnesota’s Soldiers and Sailors Memorial still stands. Josias King still faces the city skyline. Yet I wonder if the sight line of his bronze eyes, turned the other way, might have been high enough to “see” Columbus. No matter. I have learned much from what the gaze of those statues has generated within me.
James McKenzie, professor emeritus of English at the University of North Dakota, lives and writes in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His occasional essays for Notre Dame Magazine include ‘Involuntary Prayer.’