sammy wrote:
I hope you get a little rain soon...not TOO much though!
We're supposed to have rain for the next few days... Which means that it will probably flood now. (Go figure.)
Sandy wrote:Oh My...not a cloud in the sky in that last photo! Please let it rain! I imagine the farmers have had a rough go of it this season! when I think about what you went through with your own garden...theirs probably the same but on a much grander scale.
I have a question, Flint. Who is the Indian in the statue depicting?
Love,
Sandy
The 44 foot statue was created by Native American artist Blackbear Bosin...(Kiowa/Comanche) it was donated to the citizens of Wichita in 1974. It was a bicentennial project and it marked the confluence of the little Arkansas river and the Arkansas River which is sacred to the Wichita & Pawnee Indians. This is where Wichita was founded. It's also a place that has something called, "council circles." (Which is not exactly known what they were used for. but they are circles built around a central circle. They are either some sort of defensive structure that was built or maybe some sort of ritual gathering site.) There were a lot of wars between the Indian tribes. But the Wichita Indians were not really bothered too much probably because they out numbered enemy tribes. (Scholars think that there were at least 200,000 of them (in the 1700's)in the Midwest. (about 3500 in Wichita.) There are less than 2000 descendants living today of this tribe. Most of them died from imported foreign diseases.
Anyway the statue is called, The Keeper of the Plains... It MAY be symbolic/ or representative of the the "giant " plains Indians that were discovered in Quivera...the plains Indians Coronado met while exploring America. (The Wichita) The Indians would travel between what is now known as San Antonio, Texas, and Great Bend, Kansas to hunt buffalo and farm. They would tattoo their faces like raccoons. They lived in in grass domed huts that were 30' in diameter. They are the ones that Coronado thought had gold, but found that they didn't have any of that. Instead they had large amounts of stored food and were skilled hunters and good home builders.
(In that river where I took the photos, they have found chain mail armor and helmets and other old stuff.)
Have the temps become more normalized now as fall approaches? 
