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Geographers have employed something called central
place theory
when they tried to figure why some
settlements grew and others withered away. Geographers of
the future may need a new paradigm to understand how we do
things today, and they may call it sacred place
theory.
Just in the past couple of weeks, I've encountered three
sacred place
arguments. Most prominent of these, of
course, is Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center
twin towers in Manhattan.
Until Sept. 11, the only time I had ever seen New York
City listed as a holy place in any respect was in one of my
favorite 19th-century works, The Devil's Dictionary,
by Ambrose Bierce, which contains this entry: MAMMON, n.
The god of the world's leading religion. The chief temple
is in the holy city of New York.
(For those of you who don't remember from Sunday School,
the American Heritage dictionary at hand defines Mammon as
riches, avarice, and worldly gain personified as a false
god.
)
But now that the last of the rubble has been hauled away
and decisions must be made about the site, there are many
who claim that nothing of substance should be built there,
since it has been transformed from commercial real-estate
into a sacred place.
Another sacred place
in the news lately is the
site of the Sand Creek Massacre in southeastern Colorado,
where 173 Cheyenne and Arapahoe, many of them women and
children, died after a pre-dawn attack by the Colorado
territorial militia on Nov. 29, 1864.
With congressional authorization, the area was supposed to become a National Historic Site. But negotiations had stalled between the National Park Service and William Dawson, the farmer who owned 1,465 acres there.
In stepped Southwestern Entertainment, Inc., a
casino-management company based in Minneapolis. The
company purchased the land, then donated it to the
Cheyenne-Arapahoe Tribes of Oklahoma. They will get
full access to land they deem sacred,
as the
Associated Press put it.
Up in the southwest corner of Natrona County in Wyoming,
just upstream from Devil's Gate on the Oregon Trail, there
is Martin's Cove, which to quote from the AP again, is
considered sacred ground by Mormons.
Indeed, the Latter Day Saints church wants to buy the 945 acres from the federal government; the church already owns a neighboring ranch which it has converted into a visitors' center. The sale is before Congress now; Utah's delegation supports the sale, while Wyoming's opposes it.
What happened at Martin's Cove? In 1856, Mormon missionaries did well in the British Isles, and the faithful converts were drawn to Utah. Ships and trains would take them only so far, and they lacked the means to buy wagons and oxen. So they built handcarts to carry their goods from Iowa across 1200 miles of Great American Desert to Great Salt Lake City.
The Martin party, named for its leader, was the fifth handcart company to venture west that year. There were nearly 800 of them, ranging in age from 73 to born-along-the trail. They got off to a late start -- they were still in Nebraska in late August. A blizzard hit in mid-October. They took such shelter as they could find between a sand dune and the Sweetwater Rocks, and 145 of them perished before the church rescue parties arrived.
There are at least three very different religious
traditions at work in the above, and yet they all claim
that certain parcels are sacred ground.
What do the
parcels also have in common? They're all places where
tragedies occurred.
Now, I might not share the belief, but I'd understand claiming that ground was sacred if people believed that a divine apparition or a miracle happened in a given place, like the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece or the shrine of Lourdes in modern France.
But this is something entirely different. What makes the place sacred in some eyes is not the manifestation of the holy, but a mindless early blizzard at Martin's Cove, and the deliberate application of evil at Ground Zero and Sand Creek.
And it seems more than strange that tragic death, especially wholesale slaughter, can sanctify a place.
When did this process start? At first I was tempted to
blame Abraham Lincoln for talking about this hallowed
ground
when he helped dedicate a military cemetery at
Gettysburg, Pa., on Nov. 19, 1863.
But a closer reading shows that he never used that exact
phrase, and instead pointed out that we cannot hallow
this ground.
The way to honor those who died in
repelling the Confederate army, he said, was to pursue the
Civil War.
So I don't know where the idea of making sacred places out of tragic sites came from.
As a history buff, I like them to be set aside, and as an American, I believe they help us remember events that ought not to be forgotten.
Isn't that enough? Why must they also be sacred,
too?
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