Questions:
Standard for Wm Thomsen, Rev., Bill, William.

41º 33.066'N, 96º 09.752'W 

GPS Coordinates to Old Faithful Inn check in:  
44° 27.605 N     110° 49.881 W 

1977 The park shelter was completed in the shape of the Hoop of the World.  The sidewalk loop joins the four mosaics, depicting the four corners of the universe, circling from the west, to the north, east, and south.

1985  the exercise trail is dedicated

1987 - the Tower of the Four Winds is dedicated

Thomsen Painting Transferred to Mosaic on Pedestal

from the 1997 10th anniversary Program  (yellow page)

The 65-year-old story that has brought us here.

Black Elk (1863-1950) had a vision at the age of nine; so filled with light and universal love that this Oglala Sioux became a healer among his people. Even though he was forced to suppress it as a young man, he carried his vision with him through broken treaties and warfare. As an old man living on the reservation, he never spoke to anyone of his vision, believing that he was a failure, that the sacred hoop of his people was broken.

After his interview with Black Elk in 193 I , Neihardt interrupted his writing of the Cycle, and focused on writing the remarkable visions and stories that were published as the book, Black Elk Speaks in 1932.

F W. "Bill" Thomsen (1906-199 1), professor of religion and art at Dana College and founder of the tower and park, and his wife, Orpa, entertained Neihardt when he visited Dana in Blair to lecture and recite from his poetry and Black Elk Speaks. Neihardt so admired Thomsen's artistic talents, that he asked him to illustrate scenes from Black Elk's visions.

In less than a year, Thomsen produced ten illustrations, including his own interpretations of Native American spirituality with Christian concept4 and themes from other world religions, thus showing the universality of Black Elk's visions.

Neihardt and Thomsen presented a combined program at Dana in the fall of 1972. This relationship built more than a friendship. In 1973,

the Black Elk - Neihardt Park Corporation was formed with the following as incorporators: Rev. Robert D. Bee, Dora Coffey, C.C. Madsen, Earl R. Mezoff,

J. Hilton Rhoades, FW. Thomsen, and Frank Wolff, Jr.

John G. Neihardt (188 1-1973) interviewed Black Elk for research to complete his epic poem, The Cycle of the West. Instead of answering Neihardt's questions directly, Black Elk responded after a long silence, "What I know was given to me for (all) men and it is true, and it is beautiful. Soon I shall be under the grass, and it will be lost. You were sent to save it, and you must come back so I can teach you."

Upon hearing the plans being made to build the park and tower, Neihardt wrote this letter to Thomsen in 1973, "For the past 40 years, I have been engaged in furthering the humane teaching of the Sioux Indian seer, Black Elk. Its influence has been great and I am sure that will be enhanced b y the proposed magnificent monument. This will be one o f many inspiring signs o f a new social ascent. Black Elk longed for this day to come."

from the Blair Enterprise  Thursday, June 26 1997

BY JULIE CONNOR

Assistant Editor

In her book "Black Elk am Flaming Rainbow: Persona Memories of the Lakota Holy Ma; and John Neihardt," Hilda Neihard wrote: "It was May 10, 1931, ane I wonder now if anyone in ou~ group fully realized the historio importance of the interviews tha would take place during th, succeeding days. The book tha would come out of those talks wa. destined to go around the worlc and be and inspiration to many, a: well as a storehouse of Natiw American culture used by Indian; and whites alike.

"But let us not waste timo wondering: the important thin! now is telling what happened."

Her book - published in 199: - captures the excitement of ; girl's experience after a lifetime o reflection. Until it was printed there was no first-hand account o how "Black Elk Speaks" came u be.

And as the 10-year anniversary o: Black Elk-Neihardt Park nears, the daughter of Nebraska's poe laureate is still telling the amazinF story. Saturday she will recitE stories and prayers at the anniversary celebration.

In a recent interview with the Enterprise, Neihardt answerec questions about her father and he memories of meeting with Lakou Holy Man Black Elk and hi; family.

"My father was so impressed with the profound beauty of (Black Elk's) vision," she said. "He didn't have any fear about writing it because he knew it was the truth. He wrote the only truly Indian book that has been done."

Neihardt said she remembers well the interviews that resulted her father's book, " Black Elk Speaks." Her sister, Enid, served as the stenographer. Hilda was designated as the official,observer.

The family lead to get permission from the Secretary of the Interior to conduct the interview, Neihardt said.

Communication during the three weeks of interviews was tedious, she said. Black Elk spoke no English and her father only spoke a few words of Sioux. Black Elk's son, Ben, translated for them.

The talks sometimes went on late into the night. Neihardt said she remembers seeing her father's and Black Elk's backlit shadows in the teepees that they lived in.

Neihardt said the truth was very important to Black Elk. He wanted his story to be believed so that it could help his people. He took measures to ensure that the truth was told. Five of his best friends listened in on the interviews.

"The truth mattered to Black Elk," Neihardt said. "He wanted his life-long friend Standing Bear there so (may father) would know he wouldn't be making up stories."

There was a great rapport between the two men, Neihardt said. It was due partly to the fact

v v that her father had known. the Indians for 30 years before this

interview with Black Elk.

Not all of the talks between the two men were in interview form, Neihardt said. Her father once asked Black Elk why he was telling the world about his vision. "Because my children have this world," Black Elk said.

"That had a very profound effect on my father," Neihardt said. "He thought he was a very great man."

Much of Neihardt's experience as a was about living with the Indians, she said. She remembers that they were very polite and kind. They ate meals and played together.

Neihardt said she doesn't see how Black Elk's message of human unity and meeting life's hardships detracts from Christianity. She said she has seen people of different religions come to the same conclusions about life's journey. The idea of a good road and road of difficulties crossing is the essence of religious ideas, she said.

Thinking about Black Elk's message, she said, gives her courage to forge ahead through life's difficulties.

"If it is true, different people will get to that place," she said. " (Spirituality) is a part of life, not just something on Sunday."

Neihardt remains close to members of Black Elk's family. She is working on a book about them.

"I had that experience at a young age when I was very impressionable," she said. "But I was old enough to appreciate it,."

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because

the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.

In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came

to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken,

the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and

the circle of the four quarters nourished it The east gave peace and light, the

south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty

wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer

world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.

The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so

are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests

in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes

down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the

seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where

they were. The life of a person is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so

it is in everything where power moves. Our teepees were round like the nests of

birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many

nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

~~ Black Elk
Black Elk Speaks

Battlefield

Fredericks
http://www.svsu.edu/mfsm/exhibitions/armature/

http://www.ci.birmingham.mi.us/home/index.asp?page=1156

http://www.vmfa.state.va.us/

http://www.stiefeltheatre.org/contact.html

http://www.vinegrowers.co.za/index_e.htm

Neihardt@gpcom.net
Neihardt  offices  email address. (John G. Neihardt Historic Site.) director Nancy Gillis

http://www.ku.edu/visit/maps.shtml

This park is named after Black Elk, a Lakota Sioux Indian chief and John G. Neihardt. Neihardt, Nebraska's 'Poet Laureate in Perpetuity,' wrote about Black Elk in his epic "Black Elk Speaks." The park includes many reminders of the vision of Black Elk, most prominent being the Tower of Four Winds. This tower stands 45 feet high and includes a tall cross featuring a mosaic composed of approximately 50,000 pieces. The large mosaic features a messiah figure with outstretched arms, while smaller mosaics are located throughout the park. This monument stands as a reminder of Black Elk's vision of peace and unity for all people.

Our Mission Is … to promote the ideas embodied in the Tower of the Four Winds, which depicts the ideas of universal love for all peoples as told to John G. Neihardt by Black Elk, Oglala Sioux, and interpreted by the late Wm. F. "Bill" Thomsen, Blair artist and professor of art emeritus at Dana College.

http://blackelkspeaks.unl.edu/toc.htm

Black Elk
Oglala Lakota holy man
Born: 1863
Birthplace: Little Powder River, Wyoming

Black Elk's life encompassed the U.S.-Sioux wars, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. As a young boy he had a vision and later became a medicine man. He left the reservation and toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Europe, returning in 1889. He converted to Catholicism in 1904 and became a catechist on reservations for several decades.

In 1930 Black Elk met the poet John Neihardt, a meeting that resulted in the book Black Elk Speaks (1932). Black Elk dictated his autobiography to Neihardt and recounted Lakota history and traditions in an effort to preserve them. The book received little attention at first, but the 1961 reprint ignited a new interest in Lakota ways and spirituality. Controversy has swirled around the book. How much of the book is Neihardt and how much is Black Elk? Was Black Elk a believing Christian or hiding his true Lakota spirituality under a Christian mantle to appease white culture? Or did Black Elk embrace the Lakota and Christian religions in a blend of both?

During the 1930s and 1940s, Black Elk performed reenactments and was a speaker on Lakota life. He told Joseph Epes Brown the details of several rituals and Brown published The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Oglala Sioux in 1953. A fall in 1948 invalided him and he died in 1950.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0909621.html

http://www.svsu.edu/mfsm/aboutmfmore.htm

http://www.neihardtcenter.org/

Black Elk-Neihardt Park
Shauna Gerke, Treasure
777 Skyline Dr.
Blair NE 68008
402-426-9229
Shauna_Gerke@cargill.com
 

Please register the following domain names:

BlackElkNeihardtPark.org
BENPark.org
Tower4Winds.org

All domains should point to the same site.

Also, please setup web and mail hosting for them too. I will be doing the development, so I’d like FP extensions. Please setup one mail box for now --- mail@benParkr.org. I’ll add others later.

All poems and prefatory are from "Lyric and Dramatic Poems of John G. Neihardt". University of Nebraska Press. Lincoln

Prefatory Note to the Bison Book Edition
The present collection brings together most of my lyric poetry that appeared originally in three separate volumes (A Bundle of Myrrh, Man Strong, The Stranger at the Gate), and two dramatic poems (Eight Hundred Rubles, Agrippina), formerly published together under the title Two Mothers.
All of these poems were written before 1912, when, at the age of thirty-one, I began to work on my Cycle of the West.
Any reader who may take a serious interest in this collection should note that the three volumes of lyrics chronologically presented here constitute what may be called a spiritually progressive sequence, beginning with the experiences of groping youth and rising to the self-fulfillment of parenthood. When the poems were being written, there was, of course, no thought of such a sequence-only of precious, passionate stuff of life as it was being lived. The progression was in the living.
In addition to the foregoing, there are miscellaneous poems that carry the spiritual progression onward to the sense of self in cosmic awareness.
It should be observed that the two poems of social revolt, "The Red Wind Comes" and "Cry of the People," were written and published some years before the Russian Revolution and are not, therefore, to be regarded as expressions of contemporary opinion. They expressed a young poet's response to the social injustice of his time, when a good man would work a hard, ten-hour day for a dollar or less, if he could only find work to do. There was no lack of bitter personal experience back of those wrathful outcries! We idealistic youngsters who were "radicals" then could not foresee the tremendous, peaceful social revolution that has taken place in our country since those days and is still in progress in the good American fashion.
But, in view of what has been, and is, happening throughout the world, was there not a definite prophetic note in those poems? Surely the "Cry of the People" is heard more and more around our troubled planet.
John G. Neihardt
Columbia, Missouri
1965

XXVII

LET ME LIVE OUT MY YEARS

Let me live out my years in heat of blood!
Let me die drunken with the dreamer's wine!
Let me not see this soul-house built of mud
Go toppling to the dust-a vacant shrine!

Let me go quickly like a candle light
Snuffed out just as the heyday of its glow!
Give me high noon-and let it then be night!
Thus I would go.

And grant me, when I face the grisly Thing.
One haughty cry to pierce the gray Perhaps!
O let me be a tune-swept fiddlestring
That feels the Master Melody-and snaps!

EASTER

Once more the northbound Wonder
Brings back the goose and crane,
Prophetic Sons of Thunder,
Apostles of the Rain.

In many a battling river
The broken gorges boom;
Behold, the Mighty Giver
Emerges from the tomb!

Now robins chant the story
Of how the wintery sward
Is litten with the glory
Of the Angel of the Lord.

His countenance is lightning
And still His robe is snow,
As when the dawn was brightening
To thousand years ago.

O who can be a stranger
To what has come to pass?
The Pity of the Manger
Is might in the grass!

Undaunted by Decembers,
The sap is faithful yet.
The giving Earth remembers,
And only men forget.

APRIL THEOLOGY

O to be breathing and hearing and feeling and seeing!
O the ineffably glorious privilege of being!
All of the World's lovely girlhood, unfleshed and made spirit,
Broods out in the sunlight this morning-I see it, I hear it!

So read me no text, O my Brothers, and preach me no creeds;
I am busy beholding the glory of God in His deeds!
See! Everywhere buds coming out, blossoms flaming, bees
humming!
Glad athletic growers up-reaching, things striving, becoming!

O, I know in my heart, in the sun-quickened, blossoming soul of me,
This something called self is a part, but the world is the whole of me!
I am one with these growers, these singers, these earnest becomers-
Co-heirs of the summer to be and past eons of summers!

I kneel not nor grovel; no prayer with my lips shall I fashion.
Close-knit in the fabric of things, fused with one common passion-
To go on and become something greater-we growers are one;
None more in the world than a bird and none less than the sun;
Butt all woven into the glad indivisible Scheme,
God fashioning out in the Finite a part of His dream!

Out here where the world-love is flowing, unfettered, unpriced,
I feel all the depth of the man-soul and girl-heart of Christ!
'Mid this riot of pink and white flame in this miracle weather,
Soul to soul, merged in one, God and I dream the vast dream
together.
We are one in the doing of things that are done and to be;
I am part of my God as a raindrop is part of the sea!

What! House me my God? Take me in where no blossoms are
blowing?
Roof me in from the blue, wall me in from the green and the
wonder of growing?
Parcel out what is already mine, like a vender of stapler?
See! Yonder my God burns revealed in the sap-drunken maples!

MORNING -GLORIES

Distant as a dream's flight
Lay an eerie plain,
Where the weary moonlight
Swooned into a moan;
Wailing after dead seed,
Came the ghost of rain;
There was I a wild weed
Growing all alone.

Like a doubted story
Came the thought of day;
God and all his glory
Lingered otherwhere,
Busy with the dawn-thrill
Many dreams away.
Could a little weed's will
Filing so far a prayer?

O, the sudden wonder!
(Is a prayer so fleet?)
From the desert under,
Morning-glories grew!
Twined me, bound me
With caressing feet!
Wove song round me-
Pink, white, blue!

As a fog is rifted
By the eager breeze,
Darkness bro0ke and lifted,
Tossing like a sea!
Lo, the dawn was flowering
Through the maple tree!
O, and you were showering
Kisses over me!

ON FIRST SEEING THE OCEAN

And this is the dreamed-of wonder!
This-at last-is the sea!
Billows of liquid thunder-
Vocal immensity!
But where is the thrill of glory
Born of a great surprise?
This is the old, old story;
These are the ancient skies.

Child of the prairie expanses,
Often the soul of me
Hungered for long sea-glances;
And here-at last-is the sea.
Yon goes a sea-gull flying;
There is a sinking mast;
This is the ocean crying!
This is the rune of the Vast!

But out in my mother country,
Ever since I was born,
This is the song my brother Winds
Sang in the fields of corn.
And there, in the purple midnights
Sullen and still with heat,
This is the selfsame drone that ran
Over the heading wheat.

Ere Time, the mystical motion,
Mothered and cradled thee,
This was the song, O Ocean,
That saddened the soul of me.
And I long to be as the steamer
That dwindles, dissolves, in the Blue;
For mine is the soul of the dreamer-
And nothing to me is new.

L'ENVOI

SEEK not for me within a tomb;
You shall not find me in the clay!
I pierce a little wall of gloom
To mingle with the Day!

I brothered with the things that pass,
Poor giddy Joy and puckered Grief;
I go to brother with the Grass
And with the sunning Leaf.

Not Death can sheathe me in a shroud;
A joy-sword whetted keen with pain.
I join the armies of the Cloud,
The Lightning and the Rain.

O subtle in the sap athrill,
Athletic in the glad uplift,
A portion of the Cosmic Will,
I pierce the planet-drift.

My God and I shall interknit
As rain and Ocean, breath and Air;
And O, the luring thought of it
Is prayer!