Hello, I’m the Angel of Death…
Ruth Anne Dodge was the wife of General Grenville Dodge, Chief Engineer and Surveyor of the Union Pacific Railroad.
The angel sculpture at the Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial is said to be the translation of a dream experienced by Mrs. Dodge on the three nights preceding her death in 1916. According to the legend, Mrs. Dodge related to family members that she had a vision of being on a rocky shore and, through a mist, seeing a boat approach. In the prow was a beautiful young woman whom Mrs. Dodge thought to be an angel. The woman carried a small bowl under one arm and extended the other arm toward Mrs. Dodge in an invitation to partake of the water flowing from the vessel. Then, according to accounts later published by Mrs. Dodge’s daughter, Anne, the angel spoke twice, saying: “Drink, I bring you both a promise and a blessing.” The daughter wrote that the vision came three times to her mother and, on the third visit, Mrs. Dodge took the drink as offered and felt “transformed into a new and glorious spiritual being.” Mrs. Dodge died immediately after her supposed third vision, on September 5, 1916. She had died in her sleep at her home in New York. Her body was brought back to Council Bluffs where she was buried in a mausoleum in Walnut Hill Cemetery.
Mrs. Dodge’s two daughters, Miss Anne Dodge and Mrs. Frank Pusey, decided to build a memorial in the memory of their mother complete with a statue sculpted in the likeness of the angel that appeared in their mother’s dream. The memorial was commissioned in 1917 to Daniel Chester French, the same man who sculpted the statue of the Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts and the Lincoln Memorial Statue in Washington DC. The ten foot tall angel statue is made of solid bronze. The Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial is located in a small fenced-in park overlooking and adjacent to the Fairview Cemetery, not the Walnut Hill Cemetery where Ruth Anne was buried.
I’m very familiar with this statue as I grew up nearby. A boyfriend and I also crashed on his motorcycle riding down the wet brick street leading away from the cemetery after we’d spent most of the night at the foot of the statue, waiting for the mythical tears that supposedly flow from the Angel’s eyes…they don’t. The statue is pretty amazing though and gives off a bunch of spiritual energy.
So I became The Black Angel this Valentine’s weekend - the harbinger of death. The nurses I work with have dubbed me the Angel of Death because whenever I’m on it seems as if I hustle from one death bed to another. Of course, that’s what hospice nurses do…and I’m okay with it. Cuz, ya know, I got kilt in a horseback riding accident at sixteen and had a NDE - but came back because I wasn’t dead enough.
Anywhoo - if you happen to find yourself in Council Bluffs, Iowa, pay a visit to The Black Angel and try to swing by the totally - and really - haunted Squirrel Cage jail, check out the ghost residing in the former Carnegie Library - I’ve seen her a bunch of times, plus the Dodge House itself is way haunted as is the old Christian Home building. There’s even a section of the old Underground Railroad that stretches between two pre-Civil War era homes and walking that tunnel is one of the most memorable experiences of my life - the homes may be privately owned now and I’m not sure you can visit, but I’d ask around. Plus you can see where Abraham Lincoln stood and looked over the site of the Union Pacific Railroad, the Lewis and Clark Monument, where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark met with the local Native tribes and the Golden Spike Memorial, which is I think where the Eastern tracks of the UP met the Western tracks of the UP. Oh yeah, across the street and up the bluff from Abraham Lincoln High School, hidden behind a line of condos, is a forgotten cemetery - the stones are weathered and the inscriptions hard to make out, but it’s where the Mormons stopped and buried their dead - mostly women and children - on their trek out west.
Me and the dead - my next book. Love and Happy Valentine’s Day yesterday! julia
