Galaxy Literary Journal

Bay Area Writers League


BERLIN

Second Place 1999 Bay Area Writers League
Conference Poetry Contest

The wall had just come down
and every bar was full of
those anaemic girls,
their gap-toothed smiles wide as
children's eyes.

All night we walked wearing
Russian army caps and fur-lined
boots, the city there for the taking
it's freedom shocking us back
to your sub-zero apartment
so that by dawn

I told you why I'd come here,
face frozen to your skin
just so you'd remember (later on)
the time, the place, the moment of

my hands, the hysteria
and the dust.

By Carolyn Strickland


NIGHT CACTUS

"Do I look old?" you ask me
sun on your face
so that every line of
your questioning
begs my words, like fingers
to smooth away
Time's chafing.

Answering from true heart
would, I know
plump your skin; ripen the
sour fruit in your
laughter, should I
choose.

But my silence sends you
staggering, blindly as if
l'd agreed that it was so.

Only later to think of you honestly
like night cactus
surprising itself into flower.

By Carolyn Strickland


NORWEGIAN IN TEXAS?
WHOEVER HEARD OF SUCH A THING?
By Charles Russell

In 1867 the last band of Comanche to raid central Texas carried off a fourteen-year-old blue eyed, blond haired Norwegian boy named Ole Nystel from Clifton west of Waco. Years later Nystel wrote of the experience with fervent thanks God for his survival, underlining his gratitude with copious biblical quotations. He had gone with Carl Questad, a fellow Norwegian, to cut poles from a cedar thicket a few miles from home. Just as Questad started to work and Nystel was unhitching their mule team several yelling Comanche in full war paint rushed them from the brush.

Questad had been in Texas sixteen years and knew that Comanche raiders would immediately kill any adult male they came across. Terrified, he made a frantic run for home, escaping a pair of pursuers at one point by leaping off a thirty-foot cliff. He reached safety torn and bloody from thrashing through the bracken.

Young Nystel was instantly disabled by an arrow shot through his right thigh. Taking him prisoner, the Comanche stripped and clothed him in a ragged old coat for the three-week bareback ride to their village in central Kansas. On the trail he was treated with extreme brutality, but in keeping with the Comanche custom for young prisoners they spared him for adoption into the tribe. At the village they offered him a choice of several marriageable girls, a tender he rejected without malice or any apparent offense to his captors.

He made two escape attempts - both easily foiled - whereupon the Comanche decided he would make a more valuable ransom than reluctant tribe member. They arranged with Eli Bewell, owner of the

trading post at the Big Bend of the Arkansas River, to swap the lad for $250 in trade goods. (The federal government fixed $250 as the standard payment for freeing captives. Nysters account listed the valuables exchanged for his person as blankets, tobacco, flour and sugar, a little money, and, incongruously, brown paper.)

Bewell and his wife liked the boy so they forgave him the ransom payment and for two months tried to hide him from Col. Leavenworth, the federal Indian agent.

When Leavenworth finally found Nystel he talked to him privately and learned that he was eager to get home. With that he immediately secured the boy's release by paying off the ransom. The Comanche then came up with a scheme to make a second profit - they tried to enlist Nystel into resettling with the tribe in order to share with them in collecting another ransom payment. Unwilling to comply with the scam, Nystel escaped after firing a pistol in a potential captor's face. Once away he fell in with a government supply train heading for Cherokee country in Oklahoma and there linked up with an ox wagon driver going to Texas. He trudged alongside the man's wagon for 300 miles and reached Clifton after being gone six months. His family joyfully learned he had survived only when friends discovered him just a few miles from home.

While striking in itself, Nystel's and Questad's misadventure raises an intriguing question: what was a pair of Norwegians doing in central Texas in 1867 anyway? Everyone knows that Norwegians settled in the northern plains states Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, the Dakotas, and Nebraska - but why leave the cool, moist climate of Norway for the sweltering heat and semi-arid earth of Texas? The answer lies with three individuals - Johan Reined Reiersen, Elise

Waerenskjold., and Cleng Peerson. Nonconformists, they preferred Texas to the northern plains.

Reiersen was the first of the three to reach the state. Son of a clergyman, he had a checkered career involving dismissal from the University of Christiania (Oslo) for a "youthful indiscretion," followed by a stay in Denmark where he absorbed sweeping democratic principles favoring poor people. Returning to Norway filled with egalitarian zeal, he founded a highly successful newspaper, The Kristiansand Post, to promote liberal causes.

Before long he seized on emigration to America as a way to solve the problems of the poor. For himself he dreamed of America as a place to escape the numbing influence of aristocratic European government. In 1843 with the help of funds contributed by friends he sailed to New Orleans and up the Mississippi to tour the northern plains states.

In New Orleans on his way home he met the Consul from Texas (not yet a state, Texas had been an independent nation since its revolutionary breakaway from Mexico in 1836) who pointed out that potential farm sites on the southwest prairies would be easy to reach. Attracted by this possibility, Reiersen made a side trip through Nacogdoches to the Texas capital in Austin. There he conferred with Sam Houston, president of the Republic, who enthusiastically approved Reiersen's suggestion for a Norwegian settlement.