Great Plains (19 page)

Near Crawford, Nebraska, I stopped at the site of the old Red Cloud Indian Agency. Nothing is left of it now but a few foundations. The plain below where the buildings once stood is as empty as when Crazy Horse surrendered there. In this part of the state, the sandhills give way to John Ford–type scenery—open prairie with moving cloud shadows, lines of green winding along the creek and river valleys, splintery buttes rising from low uplands dotted with pines. Above the buttes, the mile-high white clouds were as flat on the bottom as paperweights. Fort Robinson, where Crazy Horse died, is just the other side of the White River. The fort is a state park now. Cottonwood trees buzzing with locusts line the old parade ground. The feeling is like that of a small-college campus. In Crazy Horse's day, the fort, just a few rows of buildings, had no trees at all.

In the library of the Fort Robinson Museum, as I was going through the Crazy Horse file, a young man with brown hair and green eyes and a white shirt with the cuffs rolled up asked me what I was doing. I told him, and he said I should be careful to believe only eyewitnesses on the subject of Crazy Horse's death. He said his name was Ephriam Dickson III and he was working at the fort for the summer as a historian. He was a junior in college. Ephriam Dickson had read everything ever written that contained a mention of Crazy Horse. We walked over to the adjutant's office, which has been reconstructed on its original site, and talked for three hours about whether Dr. McGillycuddy's account is reliable, when exactly General Crook left the fort on the day before Crazy Horse was killed, whether Crazy Horse was stabbed with a regular bayonet or a trowel bayonet (regular, Ephriam Dickson said), who Frank Grouard really was, and whether Agent Lee later lobbied unsuccessfully for the Medal of Honor for bringing Crazy Horse to the fort from the Spotted Tail Agency (Ephriam Dickson agreed that he had). He also said that he was sure William Gentles was not the soldier who bayonetted Crazy Horse, and that he was going to look through more military records until he learned who did. I said that until now I had thought I might be the only Crazy Horse scholar in the world. Ephriam Dickson smiled and said, “No, you're not.”

On to southeastern Wyoming, to the horse and cattle ranch of Alan and Lindi Kirkbride. Lindi Kirkbride is an anti-war activist who once took a trip to the Soviet Union sponsored by a group called A Run for Peace with other Western ranchers and farmers to promote reduction of nuclear weapons. I had read about her in the newspaper and wanted to meet her. She has auburn hair and freckles and a good laugh, which she showed when I asked her if many Russians wear different-color socks. The Kirkbrides work a ranch started by Alan's great-grandfather in 1889 and live in a brick house on a rise with a six-mile view from the living-room bay window. Lindi Kirkbride gave me good directions over the phone and met me at the door. She said, “This is our way to travel—to have you guys come here and visit us.” Then she asked me to sign a guest book, where I saw the names of reporters from
The
London
Sunday Times, People, The Progressive,
a Japanese newspaper, an East German film crew, and CBS News. We sat on the couch and had peanut-butter Girl Scout cookies and tea while her four-year-old daughter, Anduin, kept us company. “Which do you think is the most white on me, my white on my dress or on my shoes?” Anduin asked.

Lindi Kirkbride told me that from the plane Moscow didn't have near as many lights as New York, that they met the head of the Soviet state farms and lots of other bigwigs, that they were on TV many times, that an NBC News crew followed them, that she hated breakfast because it was just some awful pieces of salami, that the Moscow subway had the longest escalators she'd ever been on in her life, and that she met a schoolteacher who told her, “We have the kindergarten so well under control, we're now working for a cure for the common cold.” She said that the Russians really snowed her and that when she came back she was much too glowing. She said the trip made her understand how really really special living in a democracy is. She said it made her like the Russians both more and less. She said, “The people at A Run for Peace thought sending farmers and ranchers would be a good idea, because of our closer relationship to the earth—yes, Anduin, you can write your name, but
not on the couch!
”

Alan Kirkbride came in from somewhere he'd been working. He is tall, blond, with black-rimmed glasses and tan arms. The name over the pocket of his cutoff Army shirt was his own. He cocked his head and looked at me. We talked for a few minutes. Then he said, “I like you.” He took me on a drive around his ranch. He stopped the truck and said, “Let's take a look at these grasses. This tall one here is bluestem. This'll grow eight feet high if it gets enough water. Bluestem is what used to grow everywhere farther east, in places like Iowa. This low, skinny grass here is prairie sandreed. If cattle graze this in the summer, they'll take it right out. We graze it more in the winter. This is threadleaf sedge. It's the first thing to green up in the spring. I've seen this greenin' up the tenth of March. Once this was up, the Indian ponies had something to eat, and the Indians could travel. This is little bluestem. Cattle don't eat that so much. This is eriogonum. Technically, it's not a shrub or a grass—it's an herb. It's green in the spring, gold in the summer, and red all winter. This is Indian ricegrass. Stock loves this, but it isn't a real abundant grass. This is blue grama grass. It's a low-growing little grass, but it's nutritious. The whole plant, seeds and all, cures over the summer and makes great winter feed. Grama grasses are what the fifty million buffalo ate. That tall plant over there is soapweed. Cattle love to eat soapweed blossoms. It's a member of the yucca family. That copper-colored bush growing up in the rocks has a great name—mountain mahogany.”

We got back in the truck and drove to the lip of a canyon. Sometimes it is hard to believe how many ups and downs such a flat-looking place can have. The Kirkbrides' ranch includes some of Horse Creek, a stream almost small enough to jump across, which has carved a broad canyon several stories deep in places. We drove down a coulee to the canyon floor. From a one-lane bridge I could see small trout holding in the tea-colored water. “I only do this once or twice a year,” Alan Kirkbride said. “But let's take a look at the golden-eagle nest.” We went along the canyon a ways and stopped within sight of an eagle nest of sticks and branches built into the rock wall. The nest had enough wood in it for a football-rally bonfire, and it extended from the rock in a sketchy half sphere. In the middle of the nest we could just see the top of the eagle, looking out like a man in a cupola. “He stays around here all winter,” Alan Kirkbride said. “Sometimes I see him when it's twenty below with a forty-mile wind, and he'll be all hunkered down on top of a phone pole, waitin' for a prairie dog or somethin'. I respect the hell out of that.”

The Kirkbrides asked me to stay to dinner, but by now I was addicted to driving. I went on north until I got tired, and stopped on the banks of the North Platte River, not far from Register Cliffs, a big hump of rock sticking from the prairie where travellers on the Oregon Trail sometimes wrote their names as they passed by. There are hundreds of names on the rock, some carved, some lettered in a mixture of hog fat and tar used to lubricate the wooden wagon axles. In the morning I walked around the rock reading the names: “J Foreman” “I R Kennedy May 19 1850 Dubuque, Iowa” “Thyrza Hoe Pelling 1859 Wagon.” Francis Parkman, who made a trip along the trail in 1846, described the emigrants as “a crowd of broad-brimmed hats, thin visages, and staring eyes … Tall, awkward men, in brown homespun; women, with cadaverous faces and long lank figures…” They “tormented” him with questions about what his name was, where he was coming from, where he was going, what he was doing. Francis Parkman was Harvard '44, of an old Boston family; one gets the feeling that people named Thyrza Hoe Pelling were not exactly his speed. Some of the 140-year-old printing on the rock looks only slightly faded. Hog fat and tar may be a medium for the ages.

From there I took some highways and then a little road running thirty-five miles across not much of anything just to see the town of Bill, Wyoming. It was a Saturday afternoon. The one store in town was closed, as was the post office. I did not see a single person in Bill, Wyoming. All along the road, mile after mile, long trains of coal cars rolled by at a steady twenty-two miles per hour. The machine that fills the coal cars does every one exactly the same, piling each load into an identical little peak. In the whole landscape, the coal train was the only moving thing.

When I crossed into Montana, I felt I was almost home, even though I still had five hundred miles or more to go. By now I was getting kind of burned out from driving so much. To pass the time, I was reduced to thinking about things like what would I do if I had a hundred million dollars. Suddenly I entered the land of grasshoppers. They started whirring up all around like little firecrackers and ricocheting off the windshield by the dozen. All along the windshield wipers they got wedged under with legs and wings in disarray. We have been the scourge of many Great Plains species, but we haven't made a dent in the grasshoppers. About the only condition they can't live with is damp. They like to sun themselves on pavement too hot to walk on in shoes. No car had come down the road for a while. The hoppers would wait to jump until I was right over them; then they would bounce off the bottom of the car. It sounded like I was driving in a popcorn popper. This went on for hours.

Then there were flocks of birds—mountain plovers, mostly. They were olive and taupe-colored above, sooty-white underneath. They always took off in a way that showed the white. Sometimes they rose before the car by the hundreds in an endlessly opening curtain, like a scene from an African wildlife movie. The winter-wheat harvest had begun, and two-thousand-bushel grain trucks full to the top were spilling wheat along the roads. The birds came to eat the wheat. Lots of them had been run over, and rolled to parchment on the asphalt. No matter how flat they got, somehow one wing always remained upright to flap in the draft.

From the fields on the benchland, I drove down into the valley of the Missouri River, to the town of Fort Benton. Just upstream, the Great Falls of the Missouri begin; in the days when steamboats travelled the river, Fort Benton was as far up as they could go. At first, Fort Benton was a fur-trading post, and then in the 1860s it was the main shipping point for miners working the gold strikes in the mountains to the west. Some historians maintain that Fort Benton was the wildest town in the West. Unfortunately, unlike Dodge City, it had no newspapers during its early days, so nobody really knows. For river people all along the Missouri and Mississippi valleys, Fort Benton was the end of the line. It attracted the usual Wild West crowd; one historian says that on a Saturday night you couldn't see the wood planking of the sidewalks for the discarded playing cards. Army officers suspected that it was from Fort Benton's traders that the Sioux and Cheyenne obtained many of their bullets and rifles. Today the sedate center of a prosperous farming country, Fort Benton has about as many people as when it was a wide-open river town. Next to the levee where no steamboat will probably ever dock again, the Missouri still slides by. Downstream, where it disappears around a bluff called Signal Point, it is still backlit with the beckoning promise of a highway. Six dams now block the river between Fort Benton and St. Louis.

In 1882, the Grand Union Hotel in Fort Benton was the biggest and classiest hotel between Seattle and Minneapolis. Its linen and its china patterns are on display in the local museum. The turreted three-story brick hotel building still stands. At the time I was there, investors were planning to fix it up and reopen it. I looked through the glass of the locked main door into the lobby with its black-and-white tile floor and oak registration desk. One night when the hotel was new (according to a display in the museum), the night manager shot and killed a cowboy who tried to ride his horse up the stairs just beyond the desk. Now the scene of the shooting was filled with mattresses stood on one end, headboards, a handcart, a wooden chair taped with electrical tape, tread-worn snow tires, an oil painting of the hotel towering above the smokestacks of steamboats docked beside it, a vacuum cleaner, and a bouquet of different-length curtain rods in a green plastic wastebasket.

Up the street from the hotel was where the dance halls, hurdy-gurdies, and gambling parlors used to be—places with names like Mose Solomon's Medicine Lodge, the Occidental, the Break of Day, the Exchange, the Board of Trade, and Dena Murray's Jungle. On the site of the Cosmopolitan, run by Fort Benton's most famous madam, Madame Moustache, I found a clothing store called the Toggery. I tried on several pair of pants there and listened in the dressing room as a clerk and a customer talked about how they had decided to sell their ranches after thirty-four and thirty-five years, respectively. They didn't have any pants I liked. I sat by the river and swatted mosquitoes for a while. Then I drove up to Signal Point Golf Course, on the plains above the town. Almost no one was playing. “All the farmers are harvesting,” the girl in the pro shop said. I rented clubs, and sliced my tee shot about half a mile down the airport runway alongside the first hole. The fairways were a chalky brown, with big green circles where the sprinklers reached.

Fort Benton was my last stop, except for gas. The closer I got to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, the more crosses marking fatal car accidents appeared beside the road. In a convenience store on the reservation I got a fill-up and a microwave burrito. They made me pay for the gas in advance. About forty kids and teenagers were crowding around the video games. At the pump next to me was a pickup truck with a green armchair in the back, and a man asleep in the chair. Dogs were strolling around loose, and the rows of houses and trailers had board fences on one side against the wind. Past the convenience store, the road rose toward the mountains in the west until it turned up a canyon and left the Great Plains behind.