From
Chapter Four
“I Look into the History of West Tree”

 
When I was seven or eight, I asked my mother how the Wagon River had gotten its name. At that moment, she happened to be lifting sheets from a wicker laundry basket and pinning them to the lines to dry. The day was warm and filled with sunlight. The Wagon River got its name, she told me, because once years ago, before there were any bridges, pioneers crossed the river on their horses, or in their wagons, and one time, for a reason no one knows or remembers, one of the pioneer farmers had to abandon his wagon in the water when he was only halfway across. There the wagon stayed. And that was how the river got its name.

As with any prairie river, the depth and swiftness of the Wagon’s flow varied with the seasons. It was equally capable of widely overflowing its banks in the spring as it was of dwindling to little more than a trickle in dry autumns.

In my own life with the river, I came to think of its most perfect state being its typical late-summer form: when it flowed languidly over its shallow bed between high-cut banks of farmland, now and then-­especially downstream from West Tree-­disappearing into the cool shadows under stretches of trees.

Not only is my mother gone now, but so is my family, our farm, and all of West Tree, including its history, which of course disappeared along with it. Only the river itself remains, though the story of its naming no longer exists, no more than does the wagon that was left behind. Still, for whatever time is left me, or for whatever time I am able, I will keep the image my mother gave me that day by the clothes line over half a century ago. I will continue to see an old grain-wagon standing halfway across the river, far from any house or farm. The wagon’s tongue slants down into the water like the head of a drinking horse. Its weathered gray planks have warped one way and the other, pulling away to leave wide gaps here, overlapping one another’s edges there. The prairie sun rains down warmly all across the fields of grassland that reach away from the banks of the river. Whenever I see this image in my mind’s eye, the level of the river is the same, always just high enough so that the wooden-spoked wheels of the old wagon are immersed to their hubs in gently moving water.

Excerpted from The End of the 19th Century © Copyright 2012 by Eric Larsen. Reprinted with permission by The Progressive Press. All rights reserved.