Great Plains (28 page)

The Comanche fans made of scissor-tail flycatcher tails I saw on display in the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas.

 

The list of Indian foods comes from a number of sources already named. E. T. Denig (pp. 50–51) gives this recipe for goose, as prepared by the Arikara: “They smear over the goose a thick coat of mud (this is over the goose as it is killed with feathers, entrails, and everything entire) after which the fowl is put in a hot fire and covered over with live coals. Here it is left until the clay covering becomes red hot, then sufficed to cool gradually until the fire dies out. The shell is then cracked with an axe, the feathers and skin of the goose come off with the clay, leaving the flesh clean and well done.”

Larpenteur (p. 352) says that Indians thought pork was disgusting; the fear among Indians that the federal inspection stamp on pork was a tattoo is in
New Sources of Indian History 1850–1891,
by Stanley Vestal, pp. 196–97.

 

The tribe which killed fourteen hundred buffalo and traded the tongues for whiskey were Sioux, as observed by the painter George Catlin; see
The Great Buffalo Hunt,
by Wayne Gard (Lincoln, Neb., 1968), p. 30. The Indians who shot buffalo on enemy hunting grounds were Crow; see
Indian Fights and Fighters,
by Cyrus Townsend Brady (New York, 1904), p. 205. Sir St. George Gore, a baronet from Northern Ireland, was perhaps the most famous of the British noblemen who came to hunt. He spent three years and half a million dollars hunting the plains. He burned all his supplies on the ground near Fort Union and threw what wouldn't burn into the Missouri when he could not agree on a price for Mackinaw boats to take him downriver (Brown, p. 109). Russell McKee, in
The Last West
(p. 237), says that the word “gory” is derived from St. George Gore; every dictionary I've read disagrees.

The Kansas Pacific built west from Ellsworth, Kansas, in 1867; the Northern Pacific crossed the Missouri in 1881. The years in between are when most of the early track laying on the plains was done.

 

Good books about the buffalo and their destruction are
The Great Buffalo Hunt,
by Wayne Gard;
Heads, Hides, and Horns,
by Larry Barsness (Fort Worth, Tex.; no date); and
The American Bison,
by Martin S. Garretson (New York, 1938).

I conclude that buffalo leather made excellent buffing rags from the following statement in
The Border and the Buffalo,
by John R. Cook (Chicago, 1938), pp. 194–95: “[Mr. Hickey, a hide buyer] said that all of Loganstein & Co.'s hides went to Europe; that the English army accouterments of a leather kind were being replaced with buffalo leather, on account of its being more pliant and having more elasticity than cowhide; that buffalo leather was not fit for harness, shoes, or belting, but for leather buffers it could not be excelled.”

Prices for buffalo hides come from “The Buffalo in Trade and Commerce,” by Merrill G. Burlingame, pp. 282–83.

 

The term “buffalo runner” is discussed in
The Buffalo Harvest,
a good firsthand account of buffalo hunting by former hunter Frank H. Mayer (Denver, 1958), p. 26. Buffalo hunters' kneepads are mentioned in Gard, p. 121. Specifications for Sharps buffalo rifles are in Mayer, p. 40. The custom of buffalo hunters to work in parties of four is in Dodge, p. 134.

In
We Pointed Them North,
the cowboy “Teddy Blue” Abbott says of buffalo hunters, “You would see three or four of them walk up to a bar, reach down inside their clothes and see who could catch the first louse for the drinks.” (I am assuming that the last one to catch a louse lost and had to buy.) He also says, “Buffalo hunters … would sleep with women that cowpunchers wouldn't even look at” (p. 121).

 

General Sheridan's speech about the buffalo hunters and the Indians' commissary is one of the most oft-quoted in the history of the plains. In Cook, it appears on p. 164.

For use of the terms “festive cowboy” and “festive revolver,” see the contemporary newspaper excerpts quoted in
Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns,
by Nyle H. Miller and Joseph W. Snell (Lincoln, Neb., 1967), pp. 53, 202, 205, 206, 281.

Much of the information on the longhorns comes from
The Longhorns,
by J. Frank Dobie (Boston, 1941). The fact that there were six million longhorns running loose in Texas is in
The Cattlemen,
by Mari Sandoz (Lincoln, Neb., 1978), p. 54. The sewing-the-eyelids-shut trick is in
From the High Plains,
by John Fischer (New York, 1978), p. 9.

 

Facts about the cowboys are from Miller and Snell;
Cow Country,
by Edward Everett Dale (Norman, Okla., 1965);
The Long Trail,
by Gardner Soule (New York, 1976);
We Pointed Them North,
by Edward C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott and Helena Huntington Smith (New York, 1939); among other sources.

Information about the rich cattle investors also comes from sources named above. The fact that actors invested in cattle ranches comes from a display in the Fort Benton Museum in Fort Benton, Montana. The fact that foreign interests controlled more than twenty million acres comes from
Heaven's Tableland,
by Vance Johnson, p. 36. Other references are from
The Cheyenne Club, Mecca of the Aristocrats of the Old-Time Cattle Range,
by Agnes Wright Spring (Kansas City, 1961).

Moreton Frewen, who married Winston Churchill's aunt, succeeded in winning her mainly because of his career on the plains. Clara Jerome had been wooed by the top society beaus of two continents—counts, dukes, millionaires—but it was Frewen's description of Wild West adventures which caught her attention when the two met in New York as Frewen was stopping on his way from his Powder River Ranch back to England. (See
Mr. Frewen of England: A Victorian Adventurer,
by Anita Leslie [London, 1966].)

For more on Teddy Roosevelt on the plains, see
Theodore Roosevelt,
by Carleton Putnam (New York, 1958).

Information on the Marquis de Morès is from D. Jerome Tweton's excellent biography,
The Marquis de Morès: Dakota Capitalist, French Nationalist
(Minneapolis, 1972). The fact that the marquise had left-handed and right-handed hairbrushes was told me by a tour guide named Julee at the Chateau De Mores State Historic Site in Medora, North Dakota. She also demonstrated the brushes.

 

The copy of
The Beef Bonanza; or, How to Get Rich on the Plains,
by General James S. Brisbin (Philadelphia, 1881), which I read in the New York Public Library was a first edition. Someone had highlighted the general's more farfetched projections of riches with a wavering, hopeful, faded line.

 

Most of the information on the vigilantes comes from
The Vigilantes of Montana,
by Thomas J. Dimsdale (Butte, Mont., 1915).

 

Accounts of the blizzard of '86–87 are in Howard, Sandoz, Abbott, and other places. Granville Stuart lost half his herd—more than nine thousand cattle—during a storm on January 9–19 (
Forty Years on the Frontier,
Vol. II, pp. 228, 235–36).

Teddy Blue Abbott says that sixty percent of the cattle in Montana were dead by March 15, 1887 (p. 217). A report in the February 25, 1887,
New-York Times
gives a similar estimate.

Leslie (pp. 84–85) says that £10 million of English and Scottish capital were lost in cattle investments in 1880–90.

 

After losing his ranch, Moreton Frewen's next enthusiasm was promoting a new invention for lubricating railroad machinery; see Leslie, p. 88.

Chapter 5

 

Lawrence Welk describes being hit over the head in
Mister Music Maker, Lawrence Welk,
by Mary Lewis Coakley, (New York, 1958), p. 67.

All the facts of Lawrence Welk's life come from that book or from
The Lawrence Welk Story,
by Albert Govoni (New York, 1966).

 

The story of Lawrence Welk's parents' emigrations is in Govoni, pp. 13–14.

 

David Emmons, in
Garden in the Grasslands,
discusses the efforts of the railroads and other Great Plains promoters to convince people to move to the plains. The disdain of the Burlington Railroad for the Italians and French is on p. 112. The pamphlet for the oppressed of Alsace–Lorraine is mentioned on p. 103.

 

Of the quality of land available for homesteading,
The Farmers' Frontier,
by Gilbert C. Fite (New York, 1966), p. 18, says, “About 40 percent of the land in Kansas was withdrawn from the public domain, removing it from homestead or preemption entry … In Nebraska … much of the best land in the Platte River Valley was owned by the Union Pacific.”

The North's espousal of the 160-acre homestead is in Emmons, p. 16. From the start there were those who thought the 160-acre homestead was a bad idea. The geologist John Wesley Powell, who did soil and rainfall surveys of the plains for the United States Geological Survey, said in his
Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States
(1878) that farmers on the plains would need holdings of 2,560 acres to survive, that some parts of the plains might never support cultivation, that irrigation was vital, and that land use should consider the sod cover and the topography. He was attacked by mining and cattle interests, railroad promoters, etc. Time, drought, and economics eventually proved him right. See
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West,
by Wallace Stegner (Boston, 1953).

 

The fact that people were still filing first-time homestead claims on the northern Montana prairie through the twenties I learned at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.

 

Barbed wire and windmills are two subjects which Walter Prescott Webb discusses in detail in
The Great Plains.
Refinements in windmill design are examined on pp. 337–40.

 

For more on “rain follows the plow,” see Emmons, Chap. 6.

Self-described soil scientist Hardy Campbell was the author of the theory of “scientific soil culture,” which taught farmers to plow deep and cultivate and recultivate a “dust mulch” on the surface to conserve moisture. Campbell also happened to be a real-estate promoter and farm-equipment manufacturer. As it turned out, Campbell's methods did not take sufficient account of the problems of marginal land and soil blowing. See
Heaven's Tableland,
by Vance Johnson, pp. 82 et seq.

In eastern Weld County, Colorado, two generations of homesteaders had settled and then starved out by 1921. See
The Great Plains: Environment and Culture,
edited by Brian W. Blouet and Frederick C. Luebke, p. 158.

 

In the list of names quoted from
The Wonder of Williams
I have made occasional minor changes in punctuation and style.

 

The incident at the Pritchard farmhouse on U.S. Highway 83 was the first time Bonnie and Clyde ever made
The New York Times,
in a one-column AP story on page 4 (June 12, 1933, 4:3). The AP gave Mr. Pritchard's name as Steve, not Sam, and said that Pritchard's daughter-in-law (not daughter) was shot in the hand when she knocked on the door. Bonnie Parker was identified only as the “woman companion” of the Barrows.

A week later, the Barrow brothers wounded three Platte County, Missouri, police officers in a gunfight. On July 24, Buck Barrow and his wife were captured after a gun battle in Iowa from which Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow escaped. Buck Barrow died of his wounds. On January 16, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde sprang their partner Raymond Hamilton from the state prison at Huntsville, Texas, in a daytime raid on a work detail. On April 2, they killed motorcycle policemen E. B. Wheeler and H. D. Murphey in Fort Worth, Texas. On April 7, they killed a sixty-three-year-old constable named Cal Campbell who found them stuck in a mudhole near Miami, Oklahoma. On May 24, they were ambushed and killed. In a story on page 1, the correspondent for the
Times
described Clyde as “a smear of wet, red rags,” and said that the fingers of Bonnie's right hand were shot away. The
Times
was morally opposed to giving cute nicknames to murderers, as it stated in an editorial in the same issue; in headlines, it identified the pair as “Barrow and Woman.”

Other information about Bonnie and Clyde is in
“I'm Frank Hamer”: The Life of a Texas Peace Officer,
by H. Gordon Frost and John H. Jenkins (Austin, Tex., 1968). That Buck Barrow was four years older than Clyde is mentioned in
The Album of Gunfighters,
by John Marvin Hunter and Noah H. Rose (Bandera, Tex., 1951), p. 89.

 

Facts about Como Bluff come from
Marsh's Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff,
by John H. Ostrom and John S. Mclntosh (New Haven, 1966);
O. C. Marsh, Pioneer in Paleontology,
by Charles Schuchert (New Haven, 1940); and
The Great North Trail,
by Dan Cushman (New York, 1966).

 

Elephant hunters and bison hunters are discussed in
Prehistoric Man on the Great Plains,
by Waldo R. Wedel. Their carefully made stone projectile points, sometimes embedded in fossil mammoth or bison bones, have been found at a number of sites on the plains. The period called the Early Plains Archaic was from 6000 to 3000
B.C.
I identified the points from the rancher's glove compartment by comparing them to Early Plains Archaic points in the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne.

 

The Altithermal is mentioned in
The Great Plains: Environment and Culture,
edited by Blouet and Luebke, p. 12; a more extensive discussion is in Wedel, pp. 18–19, 254.