November 21, 2002

Plains Folk: Leonid Meteors

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

I’m lying on my back in the bar ditch at 4:30 a.m., and it’s not what you think. This morning of Nov.19, 2002 I set an alarm for 4 so as to dress and get outdoors in time for the Leonid meteor shower.  Since most of the shooting stars are coming from about 11 o’clock high in the eastern sky, I have flopped down in the matted brome to gaze at them.

It’s a good show, with shooters appearing every few seconds, often in groups, some of them with pheasant tails. Worth losing sleep for, that’s for sure--but nothing like the greatest Leonid show of record, which made a notable mark in the recorded history of the plains. That was the meteor shower in the early morning dark of Nov.12, 1833.

White Americans awoke to a shower of stars so fantastic that many, predictably, declared the end of the world at hand. From the plains Josiah Gregg, Santa Fe trader and author of The Commerce of the Prairies, reported his neighbors feared the "extraordinary visitation" was a sign of God’s displeasure for their mistreatment of Mormon immigrants.

The event made a terrific impression, too, on the Indians of the plains. We see this in their winter counts, that is, the picture-calendars they painted on bison robes, one signal event for each year or winter.  A collector named Garrick Mallery gathered these calendars, and because of his bulletins published by the Smithsonian Institution, we know they depicted the meteor shower of 1833.  The Dakota rendering of the event is realistic, with shooting stars zinging in all directions as they would have appeared in the sky.

The great ethnologist James Mooney documented another collection of calendars, those of the Kiowa, which were drawn on paper. In the picture-record of Set-t’an, the most notable Kiowa calendar-keeper, the Leonid event of 1833 literally marks the beginning of time. Above the dark post marking the year in his chronicle, he draws himself as an infant, born just the previous summer.  Over his head are four prominent stars with four points each. This Kiowa drawing, then, is more stylized than the Dakota.

This year was, the Kiowa said, the "winter that the stars fell." Wrote Mooney, "This winter takes its name from the memorable meteoric display which occurred shortly before daylight on the morning of Nov. 13, 1833.  It was observed throughout North America, and created great excitement among the plains tribes.

"The Kiowa say it occurred in the winter season, when they were camped on a small tributary of Elm fork of Red river, within the present Greer county, Oklahoma.  The whole camp was asleep, when they were wakened by a sudden light; running out from the tipis, they found the night as bright as day, with myriads of meteors darting about in the sky. The parents roused the children, saying, ‘Get up, get up, there is something awful going on!’ They had never before known such an occurrence, and regarded it as something ominous or dangerous, and sat watching it with dread and apprehension until daylight."

I see nothing so spectacular this morning, except in my mind’s eye. That is the wealth of knowing the stories of this place we call home. It is edifying to spend a quiet hour spying a couple hundred shooting stars.  It is richer still to do so recalling the Kiowa spilling from their lodges and to feel them shivering alongside me--they quaking with unease, and I from the chill of the northern plains.

Now the coffee is steaming I cannot reel slumber back in, and so I settle into my great-grandfather’s chair with Mooney and Set-t’an. Soon enough I must return to 2002.  For now it is the summer of the Red-bluff sun dance, the winter that War-bonnet-man was killed, the winter the woman was frozen.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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