Brass plaques abound. Free standing or more often embedded in some structure even more permanent, such as a basalt boulder or a twenty-story steel and granite building, plaques serve a rhetorical not an architectural purpose. Their military colors, sharp edges, and upper-case hieratic fonts make two pronouncements about the site or the building: appropriation and origination. They shout that this place belongs to X because X did Y first. A brass commemorative plaque is the metallic equivalent of the planting of a flag. It is not surprising that in terms of truth-statements plaques are often tissue thin.

In January of 1807 Zebulon Pike and ten men crossed the Sangre de Cristo Mountains from east to west, probably using what today is called the Medano Pass west of Pueblo, Colorado. As he notes in his journal, coming down the west side of the mountains they saw the Great Sand Dunes, which pile up against the mountains on the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley (the photograph captures something like the view). It was a picturesque moment in the middle of a disastrous expedition, sandwiched between failing to discover the headwaters of the Red and the Arkansas rivers, trekking in circles through the wintry Colorado Rockies, unsuccessfully attempting to climb what we today call Pike's Peak, leaving exhausted men without food behind in the snow, and being captured by the Mexican military and sent under guard to Chihuahua and eventually turned over to U. S. authorities in Natchitoches.

None of this is mentioned by the Chipeta Club of the Native Daughters of Alamosa, Colorado, who commissioned the plaque pictured above. It stands at the western head of a trail that follows Mosca Creek from the Great Sand Dunes up to the top of Mosca Pass--which Zebulon Pike probably did not travel. It also sanctifies Pike as "the first American to record his impressions of the Great Sand Dunes." This is a blatant act of appropriation and origination. It disregards, for instance, other Americans--native Americans--who had in their own rhetorical ways recorded their impressions of the Great Sand Dunes for centuries before Pike and his companions saw them in 1807. The Utes called the Dunes sowapophe-uvehe, "the land that moves back and forth," and the Jicarilla Apaches called them ei-anyedi, "it goes up and down." Also the Spanish had been exploring, trading, and settling in the San Luis Valley since 1692, giving them a century of opportunities before Pike to record their impressions of the Great Sand Dunes, which are visible from any part of the Valley on a clear day. The only reasonable claim to origination with Pike's journal entry is if we read "first American" to mean "first Anglo U. S. citizen" and "record" to mean "inscribe in English on paper that has survived and is known to historians." Even that claim could easily be untrue.

Indeed, it is a claim that probably will not survive as long as the brass plaque planted at the foot of Mosca Canyon by the Native Daughters of Alamosa. For a delightful exposé of the inaccuracies perpetuated in commemorative sites in the USA, see James W. Loewen Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: New Press, 1999). The Indian names for the Great Sand Dunes I found in the National Parks website. Incidentally, Pike's entry reads, "Their appearance was exactly that of a sea in a storm, except as to color," which the plaque slightly misquotes.

RH, August 2008