Most people would not consider north central Kansas' Waconda Lake to be extraordinary. The lake, completed in 1969 by the federal Bureau of Reclamation for flood control, irrigation, and water supply purposes, sits amid a region known--when it is thought of at all--for agriculture and, perhaps to a few, as the home of "The World's Largest Ball of Twine" (in nearby Cawker City).
Yet, to the native people living in this region in the centuries before Anglo incursion, this was a place of great spiritual power and mystic significance. Waconda Spring, now beneath the waters of the lake, was...