Not sure but I think this was a springtime happening. I do remember the news was huge and shocking. Few Indians had a telephone back then, or had access to one nearby. Matter of fact, I think the only phone folks down our way had access to was at the church but when something like this happened, who needed a telephone? Gossip has its own fuel. It seems to grab hold of an invisible current that carries it racing from one end of the reservation to the other end in a matter of minutes. Reservation citizens didn’t do smoke signals so I can’t say that is how gossip spreads so quickly, and anyway that smoke signal stuff is a tedious endeavor. The twins were the only Indians I knew who  experimented with smoke signals.  They attempted to send up smoke signals to no one in particular, but that ended with the gunnysack they were flapping up and down burning to a crisp and Mama yelling at them. I was an innocent bystander, I must say. Anyway. People were shocked when the news reached them. Quite an assembly, comprised mostly of men folk, got themselves over to the canal to check out what had transpired. Standing on top of a flatbed trailer, we kids could see a multitude of cars, trucks, and tractors lining the roads and people moving around on the banks of our canal. Yeah, it happened in our canal. The canal we swam in from sunup to sundown during the hot days of summer, only the tragedy happened a bit farther down, maybe a mile or two down the way. We were thankful for that because if it had happened at our swimming place, we’d more than likely have to move to another canal. You see, we thoroughly believe in haunted everything and in time, I’m quite sure we’d have convinced ourselves that it was now haunted and that there was a real possibility of us sharing the water with the dead, and we’d have to don our reservation swim gear–worn Levi cutoffs and ratty t-shirts–and make the trek over many fields to the main canal. A tiring inconvenience since it was kind of a long way from the house. And then after tiring ourselves out swimming, we’d have to make the hike back home. Not something we wanted to do.

       To this day I do not know if the man was married or not, if he had children, but the man was known on our part of the reservation. It was speculated he was drunk at the time of the tragedy, which could be true since he did drink, but as for him being actually drunk that day? Maybe, maybe not. Was a blood test done to check? Was he autopsied? Did the authorities care or did they simply accept supposition? I don’t know. However, I do know he had been on his green John Deere tractor, riding on ditch bank which was nowhere close to his field. 

       A ditch rider found him in the canal, under water, pinned down by his tractor. Tire tracts showed the tractor moving closer and  closer to the edge of the bank until it apparently slipped to far over and down it went. The Indian police were notified and they eventually arrived with light flashing and sirens blaring. Dad said that everyone there became instant accident experts, craning their necks this way and that way, offering up their opinions on what had probably happened. I can guarantee you, Dad was right there doing the same thing. The police concluded that the deceased had no chance or time to jump off the tractor as it slipped off the bank and into the water. But could he have? Perhaps. John Deere tractors are big pieces of machinery, with huge back tires. Police didn’t know exactly when he went into the water but they were thinking sometime the day before. Somebody claimed to have heard his family saying they had gone looking for him when he didn’t show up for supper the night before and when they couldn’t find him, they figured he probably gone up to town. Some of the onlookers believed that he had been in the water for quite some time since his body was bloating. Seeing the body bloating kind of killed all desire for anyone to volunteer to dive in to see what could be done to get the deceased out. Eventually, and reluctantly, the Indian cops were forced to enter the water to analyze the situation. The crowd on the banks offered up encouragement and some of the less superstitious ones got in to assist. I don’t recall my father telling us how, or with what, the body and tractor were removed from the water, but I do know the water had to be shut off and lowered so that the tractor could be hoisted out. 

       The mortuary guy was there to carry the deceased away. A funeral was held but only the adults went. We kids were familiar with his name but that’s about it. The day of the funeral, the twins and I did walk up to our swimming hole to check it out, to make sure everything was A-okay. Summer was on its way and we had to make sure we still had a safe place to swim. We did, but we were relentless in scaring each other with the ghost of man who drowned in our canal. No judging, please. We were just kids.

 

Note: In the photo the water looks brown and muddy but when we were young, the canal water was clear and unpolluted. We swam with our eyes open and could easily see the fish that shared the water with us. Good times! No eye infections!