Miles With Moxie: Lewis & Clark & Malcolm X

(Editor's Note: Illinois writer Doug Kamholz refuses to abandon his quest for little-known travel gems, particularly of the archaeological variety, Now he's surveying outposts along America's longest river in a report that connects the dots between Malcolm and the Corps of Discovery. Note that William Clark, not Doug, was the poor speller).

by Doug Kamholz.

From Thomas Hart Benton’s shocks of corn to one Black Power shocker, the western edge of Iowa has those plus very weird dirt and a jaw-dropping Lewis and Clark story. With apologies to 1959 and the late Frankie Ford, Won’t You Let Me Take You on a “C” cruise? We start at the lower end in southwest Iowa, swoop down and left, just touching Omaha, then shoot up to Sioux City and finally make a last arc back east.

Harlan is a small town with a couple stand-out features. My friend Ted envisions Harlan as rows of modest bungalows, each with a gigantic mailbox out front since it seems half our checks for magazine renewals get mailed there. More personally Harlan is home to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, designed by Proudfoot & Bird in 1900. Finely detailed and lovingly preserved, this intimate house of worship is the oldest structure deemed by Iowa architects as one of the 50 best - five per decade – from the 20th Century in the Hawkeye State. (It took a dozen years for me to see them all.) Sweeping an hour or so to the southwest, my wife Sheila and I were checking into an over-the-budget hotel in Omaha just across the Missouri River border into Nebraska a few years ago. At the desk she was perusing one of those cartoonish city maps drawn up for tourists. This one had a big empty swath, about in the middle of town, with one historical note: Birthplace of Malcolm X. Malcolm X!? In Omaha? Who knew? Malcolm Little (the slave surname he changed) was born almost a hundred years ago, on May 19, 1925. His whole neighborhood has long been demolished and left empty, but the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation has a place next to it. That address wasn’t on the cartoonish map so we just drove into the area and spied Aframerican Book Store, whose owner set up our visit. Here's a funny thing: To fund the Foundation, they sold about six vertical feet of soil to a local bank that needed fill, but, hey, it’s still the ground that was under Mr. X’s boyhood home. Back into Iowa and heading a hundred miles north, every inch under our feet is part of the world’s largest deposit of a fairly rare soil called loess (pronounced “Luss”). It is an aeolian (windborne) dust mixture of sand and silt with a bit of clay. All along Iowa’s side of the Missouri River, western desert earth blew in and piled up over tens of thousands of years. By now erosion has sculpted gentle 200-foot hills, some bordered by sets of wide terraces called cat steps. Tooling along the Loess Hills Scenic Byway makes a day of smiles. To see a lesser version of these deposits, you could go to China, where the color of loess gives the Yellow River its name.

Just a few miles south of Sioux City is a double monument to Lewis and Clark's 1804-1806 Corps of Discovery Expedition. High on a river bluff stands a literal monument, a 100-foot sandstone obelisk, centerpiece of a 23-acre National Park Service site. It marks the final resting place of Corps member Sergeant Charles Floyd, Jr. He died on August 20, 1804. Leader William Clark wrote: “Serj. Floyd died with a great deal of composure. Before his death he said to me, ‘I am going away.’ This man at all times gave us proofs of his firmness and determined resolution to doe service to his countrey . . .“ The second monumental sense is this: Sgt. Floyd’s was the one death among about 40 Expedition members over 28 months and 8,000 miles to the Pacific and back. [A personal digression: Lewis and Clark’s travels are historic inspirations for going on the road. But for me it was my unmarried aunts. Dee Kamholz was my dad’s younger sister. Margaret Glave was the daughter of Fred, the widower my grandmother married years after my dad’s dad died. Margaret and Dee had jobs and vacationed together in the 1950s. When they got home they would haul their slide projector and screen around to relatives’ homes. They showed us Bryce Canyon or ocean shores or towering sequoias or somewhere far. I couldn’t wait to grow up and go.] Now it’s on into Sioux City for art plus two stunning architectural wonders of the Midwest. First let’s go play in the park. The Missouri River runs the south edge of Sioux City, Iowa, from west to east so one is generally headed uphill moving north through town. At the entrance to Grandview Park there is still a rise blocking any view of a deep amphitheater beyond. But as you top that rise, more and more arcs of a gleaming pure white rainbow appear. It is the Band Shell, a 6,000-seat Streamline Moderne beauty opened in 1935 with a stage big enough to showcase a hundred musicians.

Downtown is Woodbury County Courthouse, often called the largest Prairie Style building in the world. There is not an inch of this 1918 masterpiece that is less than thrilling (and that includes a cramped walk through the former combined jail and morgue, spots probably not on the regular tour). In its stunning interior rotunda, four 50-foot murals by Illinois artist John Norton celebrate civic duty and life. Next your eyes move to gleaming white terracotta, exacting brickwork, a bright tile mosaic fountain backsplash and up to an artglass dome. It never stops and is one of the half-dozen most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. Another gem of the Midwest gets its own room over in the Sioux City Art Center. Iowan Grant Wood (1891-1942) is most famous for his 1930 American Gothic; it stars at the Art Institute of Chicago. But his championing Regionalism, the Midwest’s only major art movement, burst on the scene with Corn Room, a multi-canvas wide sweep across rich farm fields and now across three quiet, calming museum walls. (And for an echo of last month’s “Miles with Moxie,” Wood ran Iowa’s Federal Art Project for part of the 1930s.)

On the last long curve it’s up and out of Sioux City heading over the top to the upper end of our “C.” What we once called folk art is now vernacular art, and enough vernacular art in one place is an art environment. Art environments are often a mix of obsession and inspiration. West Bend, Iowa, has a big one. The Shrine of the Grotto of Redemption covers city blocks. Father Paul Dobberstein began piling up rocks and gems and statuary in 1912. He didn’t stop for 42 years. Then he died. It took others another 50 years to finish the place. But there it is, always open, always free. To paraphrase Mr. Dylan, now everybody can get stoned.

-30 - Postscript: To see a companion photo album of 12 shots featuring some of this month’s location, those of you with access to Facebook can search for Douglas Kamholz, then click Photos (next to Posts, About and Friends) and click again for Albums and then one last click on the one entitled MOXIE SKIRTS THE MISSOURI. Alternately, you can see a magazine-layout version on this piece accompanied by a few photos by going to newbaybooks.com and finding the Forum section. All my “Miles with Moxie” works are there.