Authors: Jan Morris
It is hard to escape the spell of such a gay and resilient society. Nevada has its hideous aspects, its rows of garish neon signs, its dubious citizens, its occasional hypocrisies, its willingness to live on human frailties
and temptations. But it has its likeable excesses, too, and many kindly people among its bars, mines and ranches. And however mild your temperament, cherished in Cheltenham or in shady Norfolk vicarage, you will scarcely evade some small tingle of excitement, like a giggle from the corner of the garden, as you drive through the desert for an evening at the Golden Nugget.
N
evada is so predominantly desert that much of it is uninhabitable even by animals; but if you drive northwards, towards the Great Plains, you can sometimes imagine what a paradise of animal life the West must have been before the eastern Juggernaut rolled in. Occasionally you may even still see the buffalo (or the bison, as he should really be called). “Keep your eyes open on the left,” said the warden of a reserve in Wyoming, “and you may see a few of them near the road. Don’t go near them, now, they turn nasty sometimes.” Sure enough, there they were, not in the endless black seething herds that the old plainsmen hunted, but pottering about in twos or threes, with their hunched shoulders and matted hair, looking bored and brainless. Some were strolling through the clumps of trees scattered about the open plain, and rubbing their thick hides on the trunks; some were sitting about like cows, chewing.
A restaurant beside the road offered “buffaloburgers” for lunch, and I stopped to ask how it was that these animals, so scrupulously preserved from extinction, should be available for this sad metamorphosis. I was told that they are restricted to a few small reservations, and since they breed fairly prolifically and cannot roam elsewhere they are outgrowing their limits; so for an unfortunate minority, whack! and there is a crate of buffaloburgers. This is an astonishing fact, for in 1889 the original mighty herds of buffalo, which positively blackened the Great Plains during the migratory season, had been reduced to 541 head, and most of those were in zoos or private preserves. Thanks to the American strain of historical romanticism, the beast has made a remarkable recovery, and there are now about 9,000 bison in the United States, most of them as free, and all of them as stupid, as the ones we saw in Wyoming.
Apart from their physical presence, the heritage of the buffaloes is always alive in the West. In the Great Plains you may sometimes see a big dusty depression in the ground that is pointed out to you as an old buffalo wallow. After rain, when these holes were filled with water,
the buffaloes used to splash in them and roll about in the mud at the bottom—not for the pleasure of the exercise, but because they wanted to cake themselves with a covering of dried mud to form an armour against the attacks of insects. Then there is a cliff in Colorado that is shown to the inquiring traveller as the scene of a great disaster in the heyday of the buffalo herds. One day, it seems, a vast concourse of buffaloes was moving slowly and relentlessly forward in the face of a terrible blizzard. They could see practically nothing, so thick was the driven snow, and when the first animals of the herd reached the edge of the cliff they were unable to stop in time and plunged over it, to be killed at the foot of the precipice 50 feet below. So tightly packed together were the other creatures, and so inexorably moving, and so blinded by the blizzard, and so slow of intelligence, that one by one their ranks reached the edge of the cliff and were pushed over it. For years their bones lay there, several feet deep, and it is said that 100,000 buffaloes died in the tragedy.
Indeed, the very roads you drive along, and the railroad tracks, were probably originally stamped out by the buffalo herds. The first white men to cross the Allegheny mountains found a way through them by following the trails of the buffaloes; for the herds apparently wandered regularly across the hills, the last wild bison east of the Alleghenies surviving until 1801. Farther west the buffalo herds had known for generations where best to cross the big rivers, and they had done so in such countless multitudes that they had worn smooth passages down the bluffs to the fords—gentle enough, very often, for the unwieldy covered wagons that followed them. When the transcontinental expresses travel beside a western river (as they frequently do, most colourfully, on the railway posters) they are often following a buffalo route; the bison liked to journey within reach of a river, and they were skilled at finding short cuts between streams, which were later useful to pioneers making portages.
It is difficult to conceive nowadays, in the empty prairies or among the scattered survivors of the buffalo population, how many of these animals lived in the Great Plains in the days of their prime. Some experts believe there were about 60 m., most of them forming one huge herd which wandered from Texas to Canada. A traveller in the 1870’s encountered a group of bison which was 50 miles long and 25 miles wide; he thought there were probably 4 m. animals in it. Often the prairies were black with them, and they held up traffic on the railways and occasionally, by swimming in the rivers, seriously delayed the passage of steamboats too. Buffalo families (led by a cow) wandered widely within the loose society of their herd, especially in the summer when
they were looking for fresh grazing grounds. They often travelled 400 miles or more for good pasturage, gathering again for safety and for comfort when the winter came. Thus before its settlement the American West was alive with these creatures, sometimes in herds of unbelievable size, sometimes in small groups, travelling the length and breadth of the prairies, crossing mountain ranges, beating out routes, fighting off wolves and coyotes, breeding hardily and unaffected by the severe fluctuations of the western climate. But it took only half a century to reduce them to a handful of pathetic survivors.
The Americans are still idealists, and have developed an active conscience about the barbarities of their grandfathers; Indians are, as we have seen, one target of their repentance, and buffaloes are another. Though Buffalo Bill is still a popular hero, many are the virtuous who deplore his record of 4,280 buffaloes in eighteen months. And indeed the nineteenth century American hunted the buffalo with a senseless and insatiable appetite. It was true that for the pioneer, as for the Indian, the carcase of a bison was extraordinarily useful, providing staple foods and delicacies, hair for blankets, hides for tents, clothes and shoes. Later, too, there developed a great commercial demand for buffalo robes and heads. But often the creatures were slaughtered simply for a rather bestial kind of blood sport, and in the second half of the century the commercial hunters were able to kill them so easily, and worked so ruthlessly, that many herds were swiftly and totally exterminated. When buffaloes were plentiful, people shot them simply for fun; out of train windows, for example, as they crossed the Great Plains, with no hope of recovering the bodies, only the transient and dubious pleasure of seeing the animals fall. Later, when they were beginning to disappear, the professional hunters pursued the last herds mercilessly, standing watch at water-holes so that sooner or later the beasts would be forced to come within rifle-range. When the buffaloes themselves had gone, fortunes were made out of the bones which lay in almost endless profusion all over the prairies. Trainloads of these remains were shipped out of Dodge City, Kansas, the buffalo capital, to be made into fertilizer.
There were excuses for all this carnage. The bold plainsmen of the frontier times naturally did not think in terms of conservation, neither their temperament (to which we owe the opening of the West) nor their circumstances demanding any such caution. Certainly they felt no sentimental qualms about animal life, which, like themselves, must simply comply with natural laws about the survival of the fittest. (Though Americans in general have not inherited the frontiersman’s
realistic attitude towards animals, they have never become reconciled to mountains, which were fearful obstacles to the pioneers, and which are still to most Americans things to be avoided unless properly tamed.) Moreover, besides the economic value of dead buffaloes, there were some political arguments for killing them off. The Indians depended upon the herds for their sustenance, their homes, and to a large degree their continuing indigenous culture, because their ornaments and tokens were made from various parts of the bison. This was before the days of reservations. The Indian tribes were still fighting the United States Army in the field, and the American Indian Problem was as much military as social. There was therefore a school of thought in Washington, fostered by some of the generals, which believed wholeheartedly in the speedy destruction of the buffalo herds. The Indians would be deprived of their raw materials, it was argued; their warlike activities would be suppressed; their resilient peculiarities would fade; civilization would be greatly advanced. When a Bill for the protection of the buffalo was presented in Washington in the 1870’s (in one recent season 75,000 animals had been killed within seventy-five miles of Dodge City) President Grant refused to sign it. The sooner the buffalo vanished, the sooner the Indian would be forced into more reasonable behaviour.
Anyway, the American conscience has saved the buffalo. There are at least twelve times as many now as there were at the beginning of this century, and they still have their fervent lobbyists. Some livestock men foresee a new branch to their industry if the buffalo becomes readily available again. Its meat is good, and there are still uses for its hide and hair. People have already tried crossing the buffalo with the cow and the yak; they called the resulting organisms cattalos and yakalos, but they were not wildly successful. Now one enterprising rancher is trying to breed musk-oxen, having captured a few specimens during a determined campaign in the Canadian Arctic; and elsewhere in the United States reindeer are being bred. If these far-sighted venturers have their way, America will be populated with such great beasts again, and the wild buffalo of the past, so dominant a figure in America’s days of adventure, will graze quietly with improbable colleagues in many a peaceful field.
Some of the other western animals still flourish, though the prairie no longer teems with an endless abundance of game. There are many antelope in the Great Plains, tame and placid for most of the year, for they are protected, suddenly and understandably shy when the first shot of the hunting season is fired. In some dry hills a few burros linger on, deserted by those unshaven prospectors, slung with shovels and knapsacks, who used to spur them so confidently towards the big
bonanzas. Black and brown bears are common enough. In some of the National Parks their commercial instincts have ruined them; for they line the motor-roads, bereft of grace and independence, begging for food like actors who have sunk through drawing-room comedy and music-hall to the chilly corners of Shaftesbury Avenue. Tourists are often injured because they insist on feeding these tasteless animals by hand, and it is amusing to watch the park rangers when a bear turns up, for example, on the terrace of a resort hotel; at once protective and educational, interrupting their discourses about feeding habits to shoo a child away and scold its blushing parents, and holding the audience in an obedient ring around the wretched animal—which, calmly gobbling a sugar bun, sits on its haunches in the limelight like a nasty old man out of the woods.
Occasionally in the West you come across a colony of prairie dogs. I had always imagined these to be coyotes until, in Wyoming, I was shown one of their cities. It was a warren of small burrows, each with a small mound of earth in front of it, spread over a wide area of flat prairie ground; and when, after a long delay, one of its inhabitants ventured to poke a quivering head out of its hole, I saw that it was a little rodent like a hamster or a dormouse, bright-eyed and alert. Such a city supports an advanced and sensitive society, presided over, it is said, by an individual animal to whom some nineteenth-century naturalists gave the Orwellian title of The Big Dog. Its inhabitants post watchmen on top of their mounds to give warning of any approaching dangers. When a peril materializes these sentries make a sort of whistling noise, “somewhat resembling,” as the explorers Lewis and Clark succinctly put it,
“tweet,
tweet,
tweet!”
before making a mad dash for the burrow and disappearing. “They’re friendly little things,” said our guide in Wyoming. “You wouldn’t believe it, but they have little owls living down those burrows with them, tiny owls, sharing their burrows. You wouldn’t hardly believe it.” He was right. I did not believe it. But later I looked up the prairie dog in my encyclopaedia, and sure enough tiny owls
do
cohabitate those burrows, subsisting mysteriously, so the book says, on “insects and crayfish”.
In relatively limited quantities (by the fabulous standards of the old Indian country) there is still a variety of game in the West. A hunting map of Utah, for example, shows the presence of bears, elks, mountain lions, bobcats, antelopes, deer, rabbits, quail, duck, sage grouse, geese, pheasant and mourning dove. Thirty-six different species of duck visit the State, and six species of geese. But it is no longer a hunter’s free-for-all. There are strictly limited seasons, there is sometimes a limit
on numbers, and many creatures are protected (in South Dakota they include frogs). In the deer season it is a common experience to be stopped by enforcement officers who want to see if there are any slaughtered animals in the boot of the car; and everywhere along the country roads cars pass by with loads of jovial hunters, and the carcases of deer affixed to their radiators, their haunches protruding on one side, their antlers, poignantly, on the other. So many men go shooting in the deer season, and so many of them are such abysmal shots, that rigid regulations are decreed to prevent accidents. Some States, for example, oblige hunters to wear red caps and red jerkins; others forbid the wearing of any chequered colours. The newspapers, with a saccharine piety not uncommon among the provincial American Press, join in the safety campaigns assiduously. One journal, I remember, published a photograph of a very stout Westerner in the middle of a forest clearing, laboriously stooping to tie up his shoelace. “Don’t shoot!” admonished the newspaper. “This is not a deer!”
But of all the creatures of the West, the horse is king. He forms so integral a part of the western pattern, and has contributed so powerfully to the western myth, that it is sometimes difficult to remember that he is not indigenous to the country, but was a Spanish importation. As Sir Thomas Browne observed: “How
America
abounded with Beasts of prey, and noxious Animals, yet contained not in it that necessary creature, a Horse, is very strange.” There are some wild horses in the West now, hunted by “mustangers” for conversion into dog-meat; and there are countless brave domestic horses, on every ranch and Indian reservation, haughtily carrying Paiute farmers along the shores of Pyramid Lake, or, gay and sweating, dashing across the churned mud at many a rural rodeo. Cowboys are everywhere still, often dressed (just like the pictures) in elegant shirts with tight sleeves and many buttons, and in high decorated boots. In the bars of almost any small western town you may find these handsome men, talking in their slow and dreamy drawl, or drinking alone, their hats on the backs of their heads, looking away into a non-existent distance with an expression of total and enviable vacuity. When they ride (with an easy and unorthodox grace) they and their horses are one; there is no master and servant relationship, no arrogance of breeding, no formalities of snobbery; the two animals, equal in rank and very similar in nature, simply perform as an entity.