Great Plains

Great Plains

Notes from a six-thousand-mile ramble through America.

By Ian Frazier The New Yorker

February 19, 1989

One day, on the street in front of my apartment building in New York (this was before I moved to Montana), I met a Sioux Indian named Le War Lance. I had just been reading a study of recent economic conditions on Sioux reservations. The authors seemed puzzled that so few Sioux were interested in raising sugar beets working in a house-trailer factory. As I waited for the light to change, I noticed that the man standing next to me resembled many pictures of Sioux that I had seen. I said, “Are you a Sioux?” He smiled and said, “I’m an Oglala Sioux Indian from Oglala, South Dakota.” He said his name and asked for mine. He had to lean over to hear me. He was more than six feet tall. He was wearing the kind of down coat that is stuffed with something other than down—knee-length, belted around the waist, in a light rescue orange polished with dirt on the creases—and bluejeans lengthened with patches of denim of a different shade from knee to cuff, cowboy boots, and a beaded-leather ponytail holder. His hair was straight and black with streaks of gray, and it hung to his waist in back. After I saw him, I never cut my hair again. In one hand he was holding a sixteen-ounce can of beer.

“Your name is Lou?” I asked. “Lou War Lance?”

“Le!” he said. He pronounced it kind of like “leh” and kind of like “lay.” He said it meant “this” in Sioux. I had never met anyone before whose first name was a pronoun. Next to him was a compact woman with straight auburn hair. I had not thought they were together. “Do you know each other?” Le asked. She recoiled just perceptibly. “Oh,” he said. “Noelle, this is—” I said my name.

He and I talked through several changes of the “Walk” signal. I gave them directions to Astor Place. Back in my apartment, I took out my Lakota-English dictionary and paced up and down. It had never occurred to me that there might be a Sioux within twenty yards of my front door. I called several friends and told them about the encounter. I paced around some more. Then I went up to the store and bought lamb chops for dinner. On the way back, at the triangle made by the intersection of Greenwich Avenue, Christopher Street, and Sixth Avenue, I saw Le again. He was just standing there, like a man waiting in line at a bank. He was still holding a sixteen-ounce can of beer. I went up and said hi.

“The girl went home,” he said. “She had to go back to New Jersey.”

For a few moments, we considered this. Then I said, “Le, would you mind telling me if I’m pronouncing this right? Hehaka Sapa.”

Le’s eyes saw me for the first time. “What?” he said. “You mean Hehaka Sapa—Black Elk? Black Elk was a great holy man. He was Oglala, like me. ‘Sapa’ means black. ‘Hehaka’—elk.” He said the second “h” back in his throat. The word even sounded like an elk.

“How about Tasunke Witco?”

“Hoka hey!” he said. “Tasunke Witco—Crazy Horse!” He took my right hand in the power handshake. Nobody had stood this close to me in weeks. “I can see that we were meant to run into each other again today,” he said. “Crazy Horse was my gran’father!”

“Really?”

He smiled and nodded in my face. Then I started asking him questions about Crazy Horse: Before battle, did Crazy Horse streak his pony with dirt thrown up by a burrowing mole, and touch a little of the dirt to his hair, so that the mole’s blindness would make him and his horse harder to see? Did he wear a medicine bag around his neck containing the dried heart and brain of an eagle mixed with dried wild-aster seeds? Did he wear a round, flat rock on a buckskin thong, always keeping the rock between his heart and the enemy? Did he always dismount to shoot, so as to improve his aim? Did he always give his captured ponies to the needy boys of the camp? Was he always by himself? Did he have a wild coyote that followed him around like a dog? Did bullets and arrows vanish before they reached him? Did he never wear white man’s clothing? Did he say that after his death his bones would turn to rock and his joints to flint? Was his bay war pony the fastest on the plains?

Le War Lance smiled and nodded. Occasionally, he exclaimed “Hoka hey!” or “Crazy Horse was my gran’father!” When I asked where Crazy Horse’s name came from, he said, “ ’Twas a vision!” A drizzle started to fall. I cradled the bottom of the paper bag containing my lamb chops. Taxicabs were screaming at one another. People streamed past us on all sides. I asked if it was true that Crazy Horse never painted his face for battle. “Crazy Horse painted his face blue with white hailstones,” Le War Lance said.

Unlike most Indians who had won names for themselves during wars with white men on the Great Plains, Crazy Horse never visited New York. In fact, of all the famous plainsmen in history Crazy Horse was the only one who neither came to the plains from somewhere else nor ever left. As a teen-ager, he once went along on a raid against a village of Omaha Indians in what is now eastern Nebraska; other than that, as far as anybody knows, he lived his entire life between the hundredth meridian and the Rocky Mountains. Crazy Horse was probably born in 1840 at the foot of Bear Butte, near where Sturgis, South Dakota, is now. He had sandy-brown hair, and his parents called him Curly. During his boyhood, bands of his tribe often camped near Fort Laramie, which was on the Oregon Trail in present southeastern Wyoming. In August of 1854, he saw thirty soldiers kill a chief named Conquering Bear and several other peaceful Sioux with cannon in a dispute that had begun over a lost or stolen cow belonging to a Mormon emigrant. He also saw the Indians respond by killing all the soldiers but one. When he went on the raid against the Omaha, he killed an Omaha woman, and authorities at her agency wanted him arrested. From his late teens on, he fought many battles against the Crows, the Shoshone, and the Army. After a fight with the Arapaho in which he charged the enemy alone, took two scalps, and came back wounded, his father gave him his own name, Crazy Horse. In 1866, he was one of the hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne who besieged Fort Phil Kearny, in present north-central Wyoming, and so enraged the defenders that an officer named William Fetterman, who had bragged that with eighty men he could whip every Indian on the plains, rashly chased a few decoy warriors into an ambush where his entire party—about eighty men, as it happened—was killed. Crazy Horse was one of the decoys.

“I will tell you about one of the war stunts that Crazy Horse pulled off that I thought was great,” a Sioux named Short Buffalo said to an interviewer years later. “It was in a fight with the Shoshones in which the Shoshones outnumbered the Oglala. Crazy Horse and his younger brother were guarding the rear of their war party. After a lot of fighting, Crazy Horse’s pony gave out. Crazy Horse turned it loose and the younger brother, who did not want to leave him, turned his own pony loose. Two of the enemy, mounted, appeared before them for single combat. Crazy Horse said to his brother, ‘Take care of yourself—I’ll do the fancy stunt.’ Crazy Horse got the best of the first Shoshone; the other one ran away. He got the horses of the two Shoshone and [he and his brother] caught up with their party. They had saved themselves and their party and got the two horses and the scalp of the Shoshone who was killed.”

Surviving a Lynching

At the Battle of the Rosebud River, in June of 1876, Crazy Horse led a thousand or so warriors against a force of eleven hundred soldiers commanded by General George C. Crook, and inflicted on that distinguished Civil War veteran the most galling defeat of his career. Eight days later, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse was at the head of the attack that pinned and later wiped out Custer on the ridge of the famous Last Stand. In the intense military campaigns that followed Custer’s defeat, Crazy Horse managed to stay ahead of the Army until January 8, 1877, when General Nelson Miles attacked his camp on the Tongue River. Crazy Horse and most of his band managed to escape. In the spring, relatives and friends who were already living at Indian agencies came to his camp and urged him to stop fighting and return with them. They said there would be presents and rations and no trouble. Crazy Horse was at first so opposed to the idea that he killed the ponies of those who decided to go. But finally he gave in. The Army would certainly come after him again. Staying out would mean leaving his home territory and going to Canada, as Sitting Bull had done. Crazy Horse said he would go into the agency if that was what everybody else wanted to do. On May 6, 1877, he led eight hundred and ninety-nine people, including two hundred and seventeen warriors, with a two-mile-long train of camp equipage, to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, where they surrendered their guns and their herd of two thousand ponies to the Army.

Le War Lance and I stood talking about Crazy Horse for a long time. My grocery bag started to fan apart, so I held it under my coat. Le War Lance also told me about himself: that he once took part in a march for Indian rights that began in Alcatraz, California, and ended in Washington, D.C., and he wore out many pairs of boots on the way; that he was born June 14, 1942; that he rode a horse to school for first and second grades; that he and a woman named Joni were the only ones of twenty-two in his grade-school class still alive; that he served time in prison for a theft involving a lard bucket full of coins, which turned out to be a coin collection, which theft he did not commit; that his father’s name was Asa Walks Out. He said, “I’m getting hungry. Come and eat with me. I’ll make us some beans and ham hocks.” I said I had to get home. We exchanged telephone numbers. He wrote only his first name, in script—a big loop connected to a smaller loop. I told him that I hoped someday to learn how to speak Sioux. He took my right wrist and pressed his thumb tightly against my pulse and then spoke a sentence. The sound of Sioux is soft and rippling, like something you might hear through a bead curtain. I asked him what he had said. “I said, ‘If your pulse speeds up, then I will know that you are lying, and then I will have the right to kill and scalp you.’ ” Then he smiled a sunny smile that turned his mouth and eyes to crescents. A few minutes later, I started to leave, and he stopped me to sing me a song. He closed his eyes and chanted in a high, wavering voice. He finished one song and started another. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the Sixth Avenue masses hurrying past with shopping bags. “Immigrants!” he shouted. He shook his head, and said, “Pasta!” Did I hear that right? Yes; in tones of exasperation, as if this was really the last straw: “Pasta!”

So thoroughly did Crazy Horse avoid contact with white people away from the battlefield that history records the name of the first white man ever to shake his hand. Lieutenant J. Wesley Rosencrans was among the party of soldiers and Indians from Fort Robinson and the Red Cloud Indian Agency who met the Crazy Horse Indians about a day’s journey from the fort with ten wagons full of presents and a hundred head of beef cattle. Apparently, Lieutenant Rosencrans’ party wanted to make sure that Crazy Horse came in to Fort Robinson and did not decide to go to the Spotted Tail Agency, which was about forty miles northeast of Fort Robinson. General Crook (late of the Battle of the Rosebud) had promised, through emissaries, that Crazy Horse and his band could go on a buffalo hunt in the fall. This gave some of the Crazy Horse Indians the impression that they would have to stay at an agency for only a short while and then would be allowed to return to their campgrounds on the northern plains. When they were a few miles from the fort, more soldiers came out to hold council with them, and that was when the Indians realized that they were expected to surrender. The New-York Times (it had a hyphen then) reported, “The surrender was made as impressive as possible. As the Indians entered the broad valley of White River, near the point selected for the camp, the warriors formed in five bands, 40 in each band, and filed across the stream, chanting songs suited to the occasion.” Several observers remarked that the band looked more like a victorious army than like one laying down its arms. Crazy Horse himself surrendered three good Winchester rifles. The surrendered ponies were given to Indians from the Red Cloud Agency “as a reward for their coöperation in subduing the hostile bands,” the Times said. There was no formal written surrender agreement. Crazy Horse never signed anything. He was never officially enrolled at any agency. In one of his first meetings with the soldiers, Crazy Horse was promised that he would soon be able to choose a place for his own agency. He said he would like his agency to be on Beaver Creek, west of the Black Hills (now eastern Wyoming). For the time being, he was to stay at the Red Cloud Agency. Like every other Indian at that agency, he was now forbidden to travel farther than three miles away or to stay overnight without special permission. He moved more than the three miles he was allowed, and pitched camp at the junction of Little Cottonwood Creek and the White River.

At that time, Indian agencies had Army posts nearby. The Red Cloud Agency was three-quarters of a mile from Fort Robinson. The Spotted Tail Agency was near Camp Sheridan. Indian agencies were under the supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was (and is) part of the Department of the Interior. The agencies were to distribute goods and promote the Indians’ welfare. The Army posts were to keep the Indians in line. The Indian agent in charge of the Red Cloud Agency was James Irwin. The Indian agent at the Spotted Tail Agency was Lieutenant Jesse M. Lee. Red Cloud, the Oglala chief who got credit for driving the Army from the northern plains in a series of engagements (including the Fetterman fight) later known as the Red Cloud War, was the most important chief at the Red Cloud Agency. At the Spotted Tail Agency, his counterpart was Spotted Tail, a Brulé Sioux chief famous as an orator and a diplomat. Spotted Tail was the most persuasive of the emissaries sent by General Crook to get the Crazy Horse band to surrender. Both Spotted Tail and Red Cloud had signed peace treaties and moved to their agencies some years before, and neither took part in the Custer fight or the other last battles between the Sioux and the Army.

Because thousands of agency Indians did take part, Congress had recently given the Army final authority in running the agencies. The officer at Fort Robinson who superintended the Crazy Horse Indians’ surrender was Lieutenant William Philo Clark; the Indians called him White Hat. Keeping an eye on Crazy Horse was Clark’s special responsibility, and he often visited the Crazy Horse camp. The commanding officer at Fort Robinson was General Luther P. Bradley. His immediate superior was General George Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, with headquarters in Omaha. Crook’s superior was General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Department of the Missouri, with headquarters in Chicago. Sheridan’s superior was General William T. Sherman, General-in-Chief of the Army. Soon after Crazy Horse surrendered, Sherman wrote to Sheridan, “If some of the worst Indians could be executed I doubt not the result would be good—but that is impossible after surrender under conditions. . . . Rather remove all to a safe place and then reduce them to a helpless condition.”

The first thing Crazy Horse did after arriving at Red Cloud was to request that a doctor from Fort Robinson treat his wife, Black Shawl. Assistant Surgeon Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy went to the Crazy Horse camp on horseback and discovered that Black Shawl had tuberculosis. Dr. McGillycuddy returned often to bring her medicines and note her progress. Eventually, he got to know Crazy Horse perhaps better than any other white man did. He thought that Crazy Horse was “the greatest leader of his people in modern times.” He asked several times to take his photograph, but Crazy Horse always refused. Crazy Horse asked him, “My friend, why should you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?” D. F. Barry, a well-known photographer of Indian life, said he often tried to bribe Crazy Horse to sit for a photograph, without success. Crazy Horse’s name was magic all over the plains and beyond. The Times referred to him simply as Crazy Horse; no further identification was needed. Red Feather, the brother of Black Shawl, told an interviewer in 1930, “All the white people came to see Crazy Horse and gave him presents and money. The other Indians at the agency got very jealous.” Not long after Crazy Horse came to Red Cloud, he took a second wife. Her name was Nellie Larrabee, and she was the eighteen-year-old part-Indian daughter of an Army scout at Fort Robinson. She may have been a present herself, engineered for Crazy Horse by Lieutenant Clark.

In June of 1877, at the solstice, the Indians from the Red Cloud Agency and the Spotted Tail Agency held the biggest Sun Dance in history at Sun Dance Creek, about halfway between the two. Twenty thousand Indians were there. On July 1st, Agent Irwin, at Red Cloud, informed his superiors that he did not have enough flour to make the week’s issue, even at half rations. At the time, most of the annuities and supplies owed the Sioux by treaty were being sent not to the Red Cloud Agency but to a new agency on the Missouri River, where Congress and the Army had long wanted them to move. None of the western Sioux had lived on the Missouri for generations, and they had no desire to now. They protested the planned move in councils with Indian agents and the Army. For many hundreds of Indians confined at Red Cloud, this was the first time they could remember being hungry in the summer. In August, the Indians met with General Crook and Agent Irwin, who renewed the promise that everyone who wanted could leave the agency for forty nights to hunt buffalo. After the council, followers of Red Cloud told Irwin that if the Crazy Horse band went to hunt buffalo they would never come back, and would use the guns and ammunition to kill whites.

That same summer, the Nez Percé, a Rocky Mountain tribe that had never killed a white man, resisted being sent from their hunting grounds to a small reservation in Idaho, killed some settlers, lost thirty-four people in one battle with the Army and eighty-nine in another, killed two vacationers in the newly created Yellowstone National Park, and, at the end of August, escaped onto the northern plains. Perhaps because this put them in the vicinity of the Sioux buffalo grounds, perhaps because of Red Cloud’s warning, Agents Irwin and Lee withdrew permission for the hunt. The Sioux were disappointed. But right away Lieutenant Clark got the idea of taking Crazy Horse and sixty other Sioux north to fight the Nez Percé. Some of the Sioux, who were still getting used to the idea of never going to war again, found Clark’s offer confusing. Touch the Clouds, a seven-foot Miniconjou Sioux from the Spotted Tail Agency and a friend to Crazy Horse, told Clark that he felt like a horse with a bit in its mouth being turned first one direction and then another. Crazy Horse said that he had come in to the agency for peace, and that he had promised not to go out on the warpath anymore, but that if the Great Father wanted him to fight the Nez Percé he would go north and fight until not a Nez Percé was left.

Clark’s interpreter at this council was a man named Frank Grouard, one of the strange characters of the plains. No one knew for sure whether he really was a Sandwich Islander brought to America by Mormons, as he often claimed. His half sister said that he was the son of an American Fur Company employee named John Brazeau. (John Brazo, you may remember, was the man hired by Kenneth McKenzie, bourgeois at Fort Union, to shoot a man who had threatened his life.) Grouard had lived with the Sioux. Apparently, Sitting Bull had once saved his life. To his biographer Grouard made many bizarre claims; he said that he had once owned a piece of buckskin which he got from Crazy Horse’s father and which detailed the history of the Sioux nation for the past eight hundred years, and that he had also once owned a huge “scalp cape” made from the scalps of the white victims of Sitting Bull, but that both these objects had been destroyed in a fire. He also said that he and Crazy Horse were closer than brothers. (“I never had any use for Grouard,” Dr. McGillycuddy said.) For some reason, Grouard mistranslated the end of Crazy Horse’s speech to Clark, to the effect that Crazy Horse would go north and fight until not a white man was left. At this, Clark became angry, the interpreters began arguing, Grouard walked out, Crazy Horse got fed up, and the council finally fell apart. Crazy Horse did not try to learn what the trouble had been about; even before he came to the agency, he was not much for councils. The rumor that Crazy Horse was going on the warpath caused great excitement at both agencies, and Agent Lee, who managed to get the story straight after talking to Touch the Clouds and others, rode from the Spotted Tail Agency to Fort Robinson to explain to Clark. Lee later wrote that Clark “seemed positive that there was no mistake.”

In the midst of these events, General Crook arrived at Fort Robinson. Clark had conveyed his fears to General Bradley, who had telegraphed General Sheridan, who ordered Crook to look into the situation. All the Indians at the Red Cloud Agency were told to move their camps to a central spot for a big council. Crazy Horse did not want to go to the council. He was afraid that there would be trouble. General Bradley and another man had that afternoon given him presents of a knife and two cigars in a way that made him nervous. All the Indians at the Crazy Horse camp who wanted to go to the council were told to move from one side of Little Cottonwood Creek to the other. He Dog, a childhood friend of Crazy Horse who lived to be a hundred years old, told the other Crazy Horse Indians, “All who love their wife and children, let them come across the creek with me. All who want their wife and children to be killed by the soldiers, let them stay where they are.” Later, in Crazy Horse’s tipi, He Dog asked if moving across the creek would make him Crazy Horse’s enemy. Crazy Horse laughed in his face and said, “I am no white man! They are the only people that make rules for other people, that say, ‘If you stay on one side of this line, it is peace, but if you go on the other side I will kill you all.’ I don’t hold with deadlines. There is plenty of room; camp where you please.”

Soon after, as General Crook and Lieutenant Clark were on their way to the council, a Sioux named Woman Dress came up to their interpreters and said that Crazy Horse planned to kill Crook at the council. Woman Dress told the interpreters that a man named Lone Bear had said that a man named Little Wolf had said that Crazy Horse was going to grab Crook when he shook his hand, and that sixty of his followers would then kill Crook and all the people with him. Crook asked the interpreters—William Garnett and Baptiste Pourier—if Woman Dress was reliable, and Pourier, whose wife was Woman Dress’s wife’s first cousin, said he was. Crook said, “I never start anyplace but what I like to get there.” Clark said the Army had already lost one irreplaceable man in General Custer. Crook asked what excuse he could make. Clark said he’d take care of it.

Crook turned back, and Clark sent William Garnett to the council to tell the Indians that a message had come for Crook and he had to leave. Neither Crazy Horse nor his followers were at the council. Clark also gave Garnett a list of Indians to summon to the fort. Then, in General Bradley’s apartments at the fort (Bradley himself being absent), Crook, Clark, Grouard, Pourier, Garnett, and thirteen Sioux, including the chiefs Red Cloud and American Horse, plotted to kill Crazy Horse that night in his camp. Clark offered three hundred dollars and his fast sorrel horse as a reward to the man who did it.

In the conductive atmosphere around the fort, General Bradley immediately found out about the plot. He said that he would not countenance such an attack and ordered Clark to call it off. Crook outranked Bradley, but since Crook’s participation in the plot, and the plot itself, was unofficial, Clark obeyed. Crazy Horse found out almost as quickly as Bradley did. He had given his gun and gun case to Red Feather, and so awaited the attack in his camp armed only with a knife.

Sometime the same day, Crook gave Bradley orders to capture Crazy Horse, jail him, and send him east under guard on the railroad. Crook then left. Before sunup the next morning, eight companies of cavalry and two hundred and fifty Indian scouts—about eight hundred and fifty men in all—assembled at the fort and then rode in two columns to Crazy Horse’s camp to make the arrest. When they got there, they found that Crazy Horse, Black Shawl, and others of his band had left for the Spotted Tail Agency. (Crazy Horse’s second wife, the eighteen-year-old Nellie Larrabee, had stayed behind.) Clark offered a reward of two hundred dollars to the man who caught Crazy Horse, and fifteen or twenty Indian scouts rode fast in the direction of Spotted Tail. Crazy Horse and Black Shawl arrived at Spotted Tail in the afternoon, just ahead of their pursuers. The scouts finally caught up and asked Crazy Horse to return with them, and he said, “I am Crazy Horse! Don’t touch me! I’m not running away!”

Agent Lee had warned Clark not to let Crazy Horse get away from the Red Cloud Agency, and Clark, who had many spies among the Indians, had said that Crazy Horse couldn’t make a move without his knowing. The sudden arrival of Crazy Horse at Spotted Tail struck Agent Lee “like a clap of thunder.” It also caused near-panic among Crazy Horse’s many friends there. In the camp of the Miniconjou—most of whom, like Crazy Horse, had only recently come in to the agency—all three hundred tipis came down in an instant as the people prepared for flight. If more experienced agency Indians hadn’t talked them out of it, they and Crazy Horse might have taken off across the prairie, with a new Indian war the likely result.

Instead, a force of three hundred armed Miniconjou then rode with Crazy Horse to the office of the post commander. Crazy Horse had come to the Spotted Tail Agency to get away from the danger and intrigue at Red Cloud, and he wanted permission to stay. At the post’s parade ground, they were met by an equal number of armed Brulé Sioux loyal to their chief, Spotted Tail. Before this multitude, an Indian named Buffalo Chips called Crazy Horse a coward and demanded that the authorities hang him in Crazy Horse’s place. The commanding officer laughed, and said, “We don’t want to hang you. We don’t want to hang anybody.” Then Spotted Tail made a speech to Crazy Horse about how peaceful this place was and how great the power of Spotted Tail. He concluded, “If you stay here, you must listen to me! That is all.” Crazy Horse then went in the office and met with Agent Lee. “He seemed like a frightened, trembling wild animal brought to bay,” Lee said later.

By messenger, Clark had asked Lee to have Crazy Horse arrested when he arrived. Saying nothing about the arrest order, Lee told Crazy Horse that he must return to Fort Robinson to talk with General Bradley. Crazy Horse was ready to agree to anything at that point. Lee told Crazy Horse to come back at nine the next morning to leave for Fort Robinson, and the post commander made Touch the Clouds responsible for his safekeeping during the night.

Black Shawl was sick with a swollen arm, and Crazy Horse left her in the care of her mother, who was camped with Spotted Tail’s band. When he met Lee the next morning at nine, he said he had changed his mind about going back. He said he was “afraid something would happen.” Lee said that no one would hurt him, that he owed it to his band at Red Cloud, and that he should return peaceably. Crazy Horse finally agreed to go if Lee accompanied him on the journey. He also asked that neither of them take arms, that he be allowed to explain the interpreter’s mistake to Bradley, and that he be transferred to Spotted Tail. Lee promised everything except the transfer, and they and an interpreter set out with an escort of Indians—some friends to Crazy Horse, some not. Lee asked him to ride in the ambulance (a closed wagon for carrying troops), but Crazy Horse said he preferred to ride horseback. He said riding in the ambulance made him sick. By the time they were about halfway, over forty Indian scouts from Spotted Tail had joined them. Crazy Horse may have realized then that he was a prisoner. At one point, he suddenly galloped away over a ridge, and in the next valley met an Indian family. He stopped and talked with them, and they may have given him a knife. The Spotted Tail scouts quickly overtook him. Lee then told him to stay behind the ambulance. The rest of the way, Crazy Horse was closely watched, and seemed “nervous and bewildered,” Lee said.

When they reached Fort Robinson, Lee left Crazy Horse in the adjutant’s office and went to ask General Bradley that Crazy Horse be allowed to speak to him. Lee and his interpreter were afraid that when Crazy Horse was jailed the Crazy Horse Indians would kill them for bringing Crazy Horse here. On the parade ground, Lee met Dr. McGillycuddy and said, “I’m not going to be made a goat of in this affair.” But General Bradley told Lee that Crazy Horse must be locked up, and that not even General Crook himself could change the order. Bradley knew, because he had wired Crook asking to have the order revoked before Crazy Horse arrived. Crazy Horse’s fate had been decided by someone farther up. According to the Times, “it was the intention of General Sheridan to send him to the Dry Tortugas and keep him there.” The Dry Tortugas are a small atoll in the Gulf of Mexico about seventy miles due west of Key West, Florida. The Army had a fort and a prison there, with cells that were holes dug in the coral with bars across the top.

Agent Lee came back and told Crazy Horse that it was too late in the day for General Bradley to talk to him. He said that he would have a chance to talk tomorrow. Then he repeated the only order that Bradley had given: Crazy Horse was to go with the officer of the day, and “not a hair of his head should be harmed.” Crazy Horse’s face lighted up at this, and he warmly shook the hand of the officer of the day, Captain Kennington. Little Big Man, an old friend who had ridden next to Crazy Horse at the surrender, walked by his side. Agent Lee then went to join his wife, who was staying with friends at the post.

Frank Grouard, the interpreter who had helped create this mess, watched as Crazy Horse crossed from the adjutant’s office to the jail. “I could tell by the way he walked into the guardhouse that he did not know that he was to be placed in confinement,” Grouard said later. Noticing Dr. McGillycuddy, Crazy Horse half nodded. In front of the guardhouse, a sentry was marching up and down. Crazy Horse, Captain Kennington, Little Big Man, and several Indians passed the sentry and went through the door. Crazy Horse had never seen the inside of a jail before. When the Indians with him saw the bars, several shouted “It’s the jail!” and came running out. From under his blanket Crazy Horse drew a knife and began slashing back and forth in an attempt to get out. As he came through the door, his friend Little Big Man pinned his arms behind him. Crazy Horse cut Little Big Man across the base of the thumb and the base of the forefinger, and tried to stab Kennington. Little Big Man began to howl, an eyewitness said, “as though he was half killed.” Hundreds of Indians on horseback and on foot were now all around the outside of the jail. They were yelling. Some were trying to grab Crazy Horse. The leg irons of the white prisoners inside were clattering. Kennington was shouting, “Stab the son of a bitch! Kill him! Kill him!” The sentry, possibly a forty-seven-year-old private from County Tyrone, Ireland, named William Gentles, unshouldered his rifle and stabbed Crazy Horse twice through the abdomen with his bayonet. A third thrust missed and stuck in the doorsill. Crazy Horse turned completely around on his left foot and fell over backward. He said, “He has killed me now.”

A guard of twenty soldiers made a ring around Crazy Horse. His father was one of the first to get to him. “I felt awful sorry for the old man, for he loved that son,” a member of the guard said later. On either side, pro- and anti-Crazy Horse Indians shouted and sang war chants, “bending and swaying like crouched tigers ready to spring at each other’s throats,” according to one eyewitness. The sound of shells being chambered and hammers being cocked was everywhere. Another member of the guard later said that it was lucky Crazy Horse was stabbed, and not shot, because a single shot would certainly have started a fight. Dr. McGillycuddy said, “I wedged my way in between the guard and found Crazy Horse on his back, grinding his teeth and frothing at the mouth, blood trickling from a bayonet wound above the hip, and the pulse weak and missing beats, and I saw that he was done for.” Captain Kennington tried to lift Crazy Horse by the shoulders and return him to the guardhouse. Unanimously, the Indians stopped him.

Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse’s seven-foot Miniconjou friend, asked that Crazy Horse be allowed to die in an Indian lodge. Dr. McGillycuddy carried the request to General Bradley, adding that violence might result from putting Crazy Horse in the jail. Bradley said, “Please give my compliments to the officer of the day, and he is to carry out his original orders, and put Crazy Horse in the guardhouse.” Dr. McGillycuddy relayed this to Kennington, who tried again. American Horse, who had recently conspired against Crazy Horse’s life, protested that Crazy Horse was a chief and could not be put in prison. Dr. McGillycuddy returned to Bradley and told him it would be death to try a third time. Bradley finally agreed to compromise and allow Crazy Horse to be taken to the adjutant’s office, a small room with a desk, a kerosene lamp, and a cot. Several Indians carried him in a blanket and set him on the floor. He refused to lie on the cot.

It was then about five o’clock in the afternoon. Dr. McGillycuddy gave him a shot of morphine. Also present in the adjutant’s office were Captain Kennington, another officer, an interpreter, Touch the Clouds, and Crazy Horse’s father. All other Indians were ordered to leave the fort by sunset. The only light in the adjutant’s office came from the kerosene lamp, which smoked. About ten o’clock in the evening, Crazy Horse asked to see Agent Lee. Still thinking that he might be killed, Lee looked at his wife for advice. She nodded yes. Over the protest of their friends, he went. Crazy Horse told Lee that he did not blame him. The first shot of morphine wore off, and Dr. McGillycuddy gave him another. Crazy Horse said that his people preferred hunting buffalo to living at the agencies, that they fought the soldiers because they were attacked, that he only wanted to be let alone, that he had come here just to talk. He was conscious and unconscious again. His father said, “Son, I am here.” Crazy Horse said, “Father, it is no use to depend upon me. I am going to die.” His father and Touch the Clouds both cried. Crazy Horse tossed back and forth. At eleven-thirty, after a final struggle, he died. Touch the Clouds went over to the body lying on the floor and pulled the blanket over his face. He pointed to the blanket and said, “That is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” Then he said, “The chief has gone above.”

Almost instantly, news of the death spread to the Indian camps. The sleepless people at the fort, and the eight-hundred-man garrison, which had been ordered to stay on the alert all night, heard the death wail rise all at once from the darkness for miles around. Frank Grouard, William Garnett, and another interpreter went to wake Lieutenant Clark, who had asked to be told if anything happened during the night. Clark was sleeping so soundly that they had to take him by the arms and legs and swing him; Garnett suspected he had taken something to make him sleep. When Clark heard the news, he said, “You go to bed. You are all played out. You are all afraid of him.” Garnett answered that the soldiers were all afraid of him. In his diary, Agent Lee wrote the next day, “My part in this transaction is to me a source of torture.” He also wrote that when he talked to General Bradley, “He did most of the talking. I felt so miserable that I could scarcely say anything. . . .” Lieutenant Clark filed an official report saying that in the opinion of the physicians Crazy Horse must have stabbed himself with his own knife—an opinion that Dr. McGillycuddy, for one, certainly did not hold. The report filed by General Bradley gave a similar impression. No one ever received the two-hundred-dollar reward offered for Crazy Horse’s capture; the Army ruled that Crazy Horse had not been captured.

Later that fall, the Army started moving the Sioux east to the Missouri, and finally got them there the following spring. After a couple of months, the Sioux turned around and came back west without permission. The Spotted Tail people stopped at what is now the Rosebud Reservation, and the Red Cloud people stopped at what is now the Pine Ridge Reservation. Private William Gentles died that following year of asthma. When he was dead, the Army may have found it convenient to name him as the man who stabbed Crazy Horse, in order to draw attention from someone else. Dr. McGillycuddy became Indian agent at Pine Ridge, and began a long series of feuds with Chief Red Cloud. A man named Crow Dog shot and killed Chief Spotted Tail to advance his own political career, and served four years in jail for the crime. Nellie Larrabee was remarried, to a man named Greasing Hand, who then took the name Crazy Horse. Black Shawl never remarried, and lived until the late nineteen-twenties. Sherman turned down several chances to run for President. Lieutenant Clark died suddenly in Washington, D.C., in 1884; he was thirty-nine.

Nine or ten years after Crazy Horse was killed, the interpreter William Garnett found out that Woman Dress had lied about Crazy Horse’s supposed plan to kill General Crook at the council. Baptiste Pourier found out, too, and he told Woman Dress, “You are a liar and you are the cause of a good man’s death.” To this accusation “Woman Dress said not a word,” according to Garnett. When Garnett ran into Crook in 1889, he passed this along. “I ought to have gone to that council and I should not have listened to Clark,” Crook said. “I never started anyplace but I got there.”

Wailing, Crazy Horse’s parents took his body by travois from the adjutant’s office all the way back to the Spotted Tail Agency, the place he had hoped to move. There they put it on a platform on a hill within sight of the post. They remained beside the grave for three days straight. Agent Lee’s wife made up a basket of “good food and a bottle of hot coffee,” and Lee took it up to them. He also brought a carpenter and some posts and rough planks, and built a fence to keep the wolves away. Later, Crazy Horse’s body was moved. Some people say he was placed in a crevice in a bluff and buried with a rockslide. The list of his alleged burial sites is long. Because he possibly said that his bones would turn to rock and his joints to flint, Indian boys used to search the hills for his petrified remains. No one knows for sure where Crazy Horse’s bones lie.

In the Black Hills, near the town of Custer, South Dakota, sculptors are carving a statue of Crazy Horse from a six-hundred-foot-high mountain of granite. The rock, called Thunderhead Mountain, is near Mount Rushmore. The man who began the statue was a Boston-born sculptor named Korczak Ziolkowski, and he became inspired after receiving a letter from Henry Standing Bear, a Sioux chief, in 1939. Standing Bear asked Ziolkowski if he would be interested in carving a memorial to Crazy Horse as a way of honoring heroes of the Indian people. The idea so appealed to Ziolkowski that he decided to make the largest statue in the world: Crazy Horse, on horseback, with his left arm outstretched and pointing. From Crazy Horse’s shoulder to the tip of his index finger would be two hundred and sixty-three feet. A forty-four-foot stone feather would rise above his head. Ziolkowski worked on the statue from 1947 until his death, in 1982. As the project progressed, he added an Indian museum and a university and a medical school for Indians to his plans for the grounds around the statue. Since his death, his wife and children have carried on the work.

The Black Hills, long sacred to the Sioux and the Cheyenne, are now filled with T-shirt stores, reptile gardens, talking wood carvings, gravity-mystery areas (“See and feel cosmos—the only gravity mystery area that is family approved”). Before I went there, I thought the Crazy Horse monument would be just another attraction. But it is wonderful. Ziolkowski, in all his years of blasting, bulldozing, and chipping, removed over eight million tons of rock. You can just begin to tell. There is a rough outline of the planned sculpture on the mountain, and parts of the arm and the rider’s head are beginning to emerge. The rest of the figure still waits within Thunderhead Mountain—Ziolkowski’s descendants will doubtless be working away in the year 2150. This makes of the statue in its present state an unusual attraction, one that draws a million visitors annually: it is a ruin, only in reverse. Instead of looking at it and imagining what it used to be, people stand at the observation deck and say, “Boy, that’s really going to be great someday.” The gift shop is extensive and prosperous; buses with “Crazy Horse” in the destination window bring tourists from nearby Rapid City; Indian chants play on speakers in the Indian museum; Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, local residents, and American Indians get in free. The Crazy Horse monument is the one place on the plains where I saw lots of Indians smiling.

Korczak Ziolkowski is not the only person ever to feel strong emotion at the thought of Crazy Horse. Some, both Indian and non-Indian, regard him with a reverence that borders on the holy. Many others do not get the point at all. George Hyde, who has written perhaps the best books about the Western Sioux, says of the admirers of Crazy Horse, “They depict Crazy Horse as the kind of being never seen on earth: a genius in war, yet lover of peace; a statesman, who apparently never thought of the interests of any human being outside his own camp; a dreamer, a mystic, and a kind of Sioux Christ, who was betrayed in the end by his own disciples—Little Big Man, Touch the Clouds . . . and the rest. One is inclined to ask, what is it all about?”

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn’t end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on train, slept in a boarding house, ate at table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because, although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as Red and Spotted Tail as Spot, they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena that our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. Crazy Horse was a slim man of medium height with brown hair hanging beneath his waist and a scar above his lip. Now, in the mind of everyone who imagines him, he looks different.

I believe that when Crazy Horse was killed something more than a man’s life was snuffed out. Once, America’s size in the imagination was limitless. After Europeans settled and changed it, working from the coasts inland, its size in the imagination shrank. Like the center of a dying fire, the Great Plains held that original vision longest. Just as people finally came to the Great Plains and changed them, so they came to where Crazy Horse lived and killed him. Crazy Horse had the misfortune to live in a place that existed both in reality and in the dreams of people far away; he managed to leave both the real and the imaginary place unbetrayed. What I return to most often when I think of Crazy Horse is the fact that in the adjutant’s office he refused to lie on the cot. Mortally wounded, frothing at the mouth, grinding his teeth in pain, he chose the floor instead. What a distance there is between that cot and the floor! On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, “ours”: an object of pity, an accident victim, “the noble red man, the last of his race.” But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still. On the floor, he began to hurt as the morphine wore off. On the floor, he remembered Agent Lee, summoned him, forgave him. On the floor, unable to rise, he was guarded by soldiers even then. On the floor, he said goodbye to his father and Touch the Clouds, the last of the thousands who once followed him. And on the floor, still as far from white men as the limitless continent they once dreamed of, he died. Touch the Clouds pulled the blanket over his face: “That is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” Lying where he chose, Crazy Horse showed the rest of us where we are standing. With his body he demonstrated that the floor of an Army office was part of the land, and that the land was still his.

Crazy Horse was my gran’father!

Notes from a six-thousand-mile ramble on the plains:

Stopped to fish on Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Couldn’t find lake at first—drove past the turnout. Went back and saw little hand-lettered sign: “Mission Lake.” Long way down dirt road. Wind at my back so strong that my dust trail was actually in front of me. My van full of dust—dust gritting between my back teeth. Parked, set up fly rod, put on waders. Whitecaps on lake. Waded in—whitecaps splashing against me. Hard to cast. Two Indians appeared on bank carrying two shopping bags. They took out Bud tallboys, opened them, took out hand line wrapped around empty beer can, started whirling the line bolo-style, casting into lake. One Indian walked over to where I was, asked, “What’re you using?” I said, “Well, right now I’ve got on a weighted hare’s ear nymph in size twelve tied with olive dubbing instead of brown and a little gold ribbing around the body. What’re you using?” He said, “Leeches.”

Caught nothing—no strikes. Gave up. Back on the highway, truck in front of me missed gear, stopped suddenly on incline. I hit brakes, said, “Jesus Christ!” Stopped close enough to read his bumper sticker, which said, “We Are One in the Spirit.”

Stayed in the Bell Motel, in Glasgow, Montana. Ate at a restaurant called Sam’s Supper Club: two cold Rainier beers in bottle, relish tray (hot peppers, celery), prime rib (fatty and excellent), potatoes in a cheddar-cheese sauce with chives, homemade maple-walnut ice cream for dessert. Wind blowing grit into the intersections in waves. Trains behind the motel at night. Horrible yellow European Bathing Gel in motel shower.

Next day, drove to Fort Union. Ranger leading tourists around the fort site. One woman tourist to another: “I had so many clothes in my closet I broke the closet rods!” Group standing around the ranger half attentive, dreamy. Girl in peach shorts and a white top raised a baby to her shoulders and held him there, white arms in a classical pose.

Sat in park overlooking Missouri-Yellowstone confluence a long time and thought. Wind whipping across sandbar on opposite shore, sand blowing across water. Pelicans (!) flying in roller-coaster formation over water. Lone deer grazing across the Missouri, very red in setting sun. I clapped hands; a second later, hearing me, he looked up. Ate sandwich. Prairie dog pestering me.

Left after sunset, intending to camp in Teddy Roosevelt Park, since camping at Yellowstone-Mo. not allowed. Crossed bridge over Mo., one-lane railroad bridge with boards for cars to drive on alongside rails. Van’s wheels trolleying. Buttes lit up by sun, about the height of a cruise ship, blue sky and mare’s tail clouds above. Soon after bridge, came upon oil-drilling rig in full operation, nine-thirty at night. It was tall and lit with bars of fluorescent light to top. They were pulling pipe from well. Foreman had the kind of whistle that people who can really do it are born with and have been showing off since grade school. Piercing, piercing whistling rasping through teeth, could easily be heard over engine. Two, three guys would hook cable to end of pipe, foreman would whistle, cable would pull pipe up, men disconnect section, whistle, move section, whistle, section deposited with other sections in huge rack on rig. Then pull next section. Men working hard-absorbed, mobile. Clouds of diesel smoke blowing back from engine’s stack over all the men in the wind.

Campsite unfindable in dark. Drove up and down same road five times. No light anywhere but my headlights. Finally pulled over, slept. Kept parking lights on. Every half hour or so, a car would go by singing like a sewing machine. Next morning, woke and saw campsite across road.

Bright sun. Cottonwoods just starting yellow in the valley of Beaver River west of Wibaux, Montana. Wibaux once greatest primary shipping point for livestock in West. Population now: 740. Everywhere, wheat fields. Coming over rise on dirt road near Beach, N.D.—all you’d need to paint landscape would be gold for wheat and blue for sky. Strips of summer fallow stencilled on the side of a butte all the way to the caprock. From a car, summer-fallow strips on rolling earth wave like stripes on a flag.

Badlands along Little Missouri River. Land cut vertically as many ways, in as many shapes, as erosion can cut it North Dakota State Highway 22—a road so straight and empty I set a book on the steering wheel and read. Bear Butte State Park, South Dakota: Crazy Horse born near here. The Black Hills: winding roads, motor homes, smell of gift-shop candles. Eastern Wyoming. Grass long and mussed by wind. Clear water in creeks. Horsehead oil pumps pumping. Storm clouds piling up against Black Hills to east. Searchlight beams of sun coming through holes in clouds. Above the plain, a perfect double rainbow. Sign on bridge: “Beaver Creek.” This is where Crazy Horse wanted his agency to be.

I talked to:

Gas-station attendants. Whenever I stopped for gas, I always asked the name of the local high-school team. I never found a person working in a gas station, a convenience store, or a truck stop who didn’t know. In Deer Lodge, Montana, the team is called the Wardens; Deer Lodge is the home of the state prison. In Havre, Montana, the team is the Havre Blue Ponies. In Newcastle, Wyoming, it’s the Newcastle Dogies. In Brush, Colorado, it’s the Brush Beet Diggers. Beaver, Oklahoma, has the Dusters; Oakley, Kansas, the Plainsmen; McCamey, Texas, the Badgers; Matador, Texas, the Matadors. Colby, Kansas; Eads, Colorado; Hondo, New Mexico; and Pecos, Texas, all call themselves the Eagles. Chappell, Nebraska; Rush, Colorado; and Chugwater, Wyoming, all are the Buffalos. At a gas station near an Indian reservation in Montana, a white gas-station attendant told me that Indian basketball teams are easy to beat. He said all you have to do is punch one guy and then the whole team will attack you and get kicked out of the game.

A Hunkpapa Sioux woman named Doreet. I picked her up hitchhiking with another woman and two men. Doreet sat in the front seat and told me that her brother had recently found a stone serpent head while diving in the river, that she had a young son named Eagle on His Journey, that a medicine man had predicted that Journey (his nickname) would be born either retarded or dead, that the medicine man had been wrong. In the back, Jason, Derek, and—I didn’t get the other woman’s name—talked in Sioux and sometimes asked me questions like, “So, bro, what do you think of the Sioux people?” Of a nearby butte Doreet said, “That’s Devil Butte. High-school kids go up there and try to arrange these white rocks to spell out their initials, but by morning the rocks always rearrange themselves into the shape of a devil’s head.” Doreet was big, pretty, with scars up both arms. She was wearing a Cornell T-shirt. I asked her, “Did you go to Cornell?” She said, “Where’s that?” I pointed to the name on her shirt. She said, “Oh, probably—I’ve been all over the country.”

Two young guys named John and Tom. They gave me a ride to the site of Sitting Bull’s cabin in Tom’s red four-wheel custom de-luxe Dodge pickup. (I had been to the site before, but I wanted to go back, to make sure the trees over the monument were actually bur oaks.) It was pouring rain. As I looked for the turnoff, my van slid off the road. John and Tom drove up, regarded me in silence, helped me get unstuck, and told me they’d take me to Sitting Bull for some money. I got in their truck. I asked them what they were doing out here.

John: “Drinkin’ and driving around.”

Tom: “Nothin’ else to do when it rains like this.”

J.: “What do you want to go back there for, anyway? It ain’t that much different from anyplace else.”

T.: “We take people to Sittin’ Bull all the time. People like you, come back here in their two-wheel-drives, get stuck—”

J.: “Indians down in Bullhead give ’em directions, don’t say nothin’ ’bout gettin’ stuck.”

T.: “Indians don’t care about gettin’ stuck. They got nothin’ to do anyway. Government pays ’em just to lay around.”

J.: “Last winter, some guy in a Cadillac all the way from California gave us a hundred dollars to take him to Sittin’ Bull. Snowdrifts were ten feet deep. He just wanted to see it, take a picture.”

T .: “We make a lot of party money takin’ people out to Sittin’ Bull.”

The floor of the truck was shin-deep in beer cans. They finished the twelve-pack, pushed the box out the window. The truck roared and ripped down the last descent to the river valley. The front wheels threw fist-size pieces of prairie through the windows. John and Tom rolled the windows up. In some parts of the flatland along the river, water came above the wheel wells. Grasses waved in the wake the truck left. “This ain’t tough—not for my pickup,” Tom said. We sped right up to the Sitting Bull monument, I hopped out, walked over, plucked a leaf from the bur oak above it.

My old friend George Scott. He is a rancher who lives southwest of Casper, Wyoming. George and I became friends in college. In the riots in the spring of 1970, he and I ran from the cops together, and later went to the Red Cross first-aid station and pretended to have been teargassed, so that the beautiful hippie-girl volunteers would bathe our eyes with cool compresses. Summer, 1970, I worked as a hand on his family’s fourteen-thousand-acre ranch. Today, George is married and has two children. With his older brother, Charlie, he runs a second, much larger ranch, which his family bought in 1971. George is tall, red-haired, freckled, with deep squint lines at the outside corners of his blue eyes. He drinks six or seven Pepsis a day. All the men in his family stick their tongues out to one side and bite them when they concentrate, like boys building models in old-time illustrations.

I spent four nights sleeping in my van in George’s driveway. His driveway is long, dirt, with ruts that keep redefining themselves to one side or the other. After leaving his house, it passes his brother Charlie’s house, the bunkhouse, other houses, an equipment barn, a horse barn, and long, low cow barn with a green roof. Alongside the driveway are tractors, pickups, a three-wheel motorcycle with a shovel strapped across the back, tanks of gas and diesel for ranch vehicles, bent pieces of irrigation pipe that somebody ran over by mistake, horse trailers, kids’ bikes, stray hay bales, sleeping or running dogs, and an old sheepherders’ wagon, which looks like a mini covered wagon. Beyond George’s house, the driveway crosses an irrigation ditch and heads off into fields of alfalfa and Sudan grass. Nights I spent there were quiet except when I bumped the inside of my van in my sleep and started the dogs barking.

George’s wife, Milcey, made us breakfast at six, and he and I were usually off driving somewhere by seven. The ranch’s homeplace is the capital of tens of thousands of acres stretching in a patchwork for more than fifty miles. We drove through pastures big enough to have their own rainfall pattern. Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie. I saw a golden eagle the size of a building ornament sitting in a field doing nothing. Across the plain, a herd of antelope ran, and then pivoted all at once like a school of fish. A single antelope stood in the line of a shadow of a telephone pole. George did a lot of work through small bird-watching binoculars. He would drive to a ridge, look for cattle, drive to another ridge, look again. Near a cabin where a hay hand named Eggleston killed himself one winter, we stopped and fished for brook trout in the Little Medicine Bow River. The spot was so ancient that I wondered what its name had been eight thousand years ago. The windowsills of the cabin were piled up to the second pane with worked pieces of stone—choppers, grinders, scrapers, points—that had been found around there. Then George drove to a place where he wanted to build a three-hundred-yard fence to keep cattle from drifting, and met with an agent of the Bureau of Land Management, who had to O.K. the fence before it was built; like a lot of rangeland, this pasture is on long-term lease from the federal government. George wanted to build a four-strand fence, but the B.L.M. would allow only a three-strand fence, because a B.L.M. biologist had ruled that this land was primary antelope habitat, and four-strand was too liable to cut antelope up. At the side of the road, leaning against their vehicles, George and the B.L.M. agent discussed this, and also maybe ten other topics. The sun rose higher and crossed their faces. George applied and reapplied chapstick to his lips. Lip cancer is something ranchers worry about.

Another day, George rounded up some yearling calves for sale. He told me he had a wild horse for me to ride at the roundup. I said, “That’s just fine—I’ve stomped down many a bronc in my day!” Russell Brown, George’s nineteen-year-old top hand, laughed. We went to the corral and caught and saddled the horses. I wasn’t much help. The horses did not want to get in the trailer. Russell mounted his horse, rode off, and rode back at full gallop toward the trailer. At the last second, he jumped from the saddle and swung onto the trailer roof as the horse went in. The others followed easily after that. George’s kids, Jessica and Chris, rode along in the back seat of George’s crew-cab Ford pickup. Chris: “Dad, Jessie keeps repeating my words!” The truck was working hard to pull the loaded trailer up hills. Suddenly—whompf!—the radiator hose blew. All the coolant hit the engine block in a tumult of steam. We got out and ate our bologna sandwiches on white bread and drank our Pepsis by the side of the road while George called Milcey on the radio. The wind blew so hard the bread got stale in our hands. Then we listened to oil-rig workers placing nervous requests over the radio for Oil Sorb, a product used to soak up oil spills. Milcey came with a new radiator hose and jugs of coolant. Soon we drove on.

George and Russell were talking about a whiteface yearling that had run off earlier in the summer. They hadn’t seen him in two months, but they’d heard from a neighbor that he was in the vicinity. As we came over a rise, in the road ahead was a whiteface calf. “That can’t be him,” George said. He took out his binoculars and read the number of the calf’s ear tag. “I don’t believe it!” Russell and George opened the horse trailer, took out their horses, unlimbered their ropes. Whiteface stood in the road with a dawning sense of dread, then turned and ran. George and Russell took off like a drag race. The calf dodged, cut back; George threw his loop, missed; Russell came whipping through sagebrush, threw, stopped short, the rope twanged, the calf’s hind feet flew up in the air. The roped calf was up instantly, bawling hoarsely, shaking his head. George rode over and roped him. It took two horses to move him, stiff-legged, crow-hopping, bellowing, to the trailer. Russell held him while George backed the trailer up to the side of a bank so the calf could walk in. They maneuvered the calf to the door. George undid the rope from his saddle horn, and the calf dodged around the other side of the trailer and pulled Russell’s horse up against it. George grabbed the calf and Russell undid his rope. The calf bellowed, bucked, kicked the outside of the trailer. George had him by the head, then he only had him by the foot, then the calf was loose and running across the prairie, this time trailing two ropes. Russell borrowed Jessica’s rope and chased him again. After another big struggle, the calf was in the trailer. He stood there panting, eyes crazed.

We reached the place for the roundup and unloaded the horses. Russell and George were instantly gliding up this hill and that, collecting little black specks of cattle into a bigger and bigger mass. Jessica, Chris, and I rode along the creek bed looking for strays. My horse did nothing I wanted. Finally, I went back to the corral and got off and left him as if he were a car. George and Russell brought the yearling herd and its cloud of dust into the corral. Later, two cattle trucks came, and the drivers put brown coveralls over their regular clothes and hazed the yearlings into the trucks. The drivers poked with cattle prods and shouted, “On the bus! Git on the bus!” Then all the yearlings, including the whiteface that almost got away, were taken to Torrington, Wyoming, and sold at auction to a feedlot for sixty-five cents a pound.

Another morning, stopping the truck occasionally for me to get out and open fence gates, George said, “The cattle in this field are our best herd. We’ve been trying for a long time to come up with a way to select our best cows and put them in a pasture with our best bulls, and this bunch Charlie finally selected with a new computer program he wrote. We’ve got two computers on the ranch. I hardly do anything with them, but Charlie spent three hours every morning—he got up at five—and then he’d work two or three hours every night, and he finally came up with a program that would tell us which cows produced the best calves. Each of these cows has her own computer card. The software companies sell several different ranch programs, but none of them really do what we wanted. We think the program Charlie wrote is better than any you can buy. See, the commercial programs all rate calves in terms of weaning weight—that’s the calf’s weight at about six months. But we wanted a program that used weight gain per month instead. That’s what’s important in a calf—how fast he puts on weight, rather than how much he weighs at any one time. Our ranch is a cow-calf operation. Most cattle ranches in Wyoming are. We raise one- or two-year-old calves for sale to feedlots, which fatten them up to market weight. What’s really hurt the beef-cattle industry is this recent idea that red meat is bad for you. I agree, actually, that corn-fed feedlot beef has too much fat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it caused some of that stuff they say it does. But that’s just a result of the feedlot system in this country, along with the fact that people nowadays want meat so tender you don’t have to chew it. That type of meat is not what beef is, really. We eat a cow of ours about every other month, and it’s not tender. Grass-fed beef is good, but it’s tough. Charlie wants to start a campaign to get people to eat grass-fed beef as a health food. It’s got all the protein, but the cattle haven’t been eating antibiotics, and the meat isn’t fat. That’s the kind of project Charlie likes to work on—that, and computers, and irrigation systems, and machinery. He does that, and I work with cattle. I like beating on things and making them do what I want.”

We turned down a fence line through high sagebrush. The truck drove over bushes as high as the hood, and the smell of crushed sage rose. Suddenly there was another smell, very strong. George hit the brakes. “What was that?” We got out. Right next to the fence was a dead calf. Its lip was up off its teeth, and its side was a metropolis of maggots. George bent over and noted the number of the calf’s ear tag in a green notebook. Then he got back in the truck. He said, “One fact you learn in ranching is that things have a tendency to die.”

Other people:

A guy working in a wheat-storage yard in Limon, Colorado. He was standing in the doorway of a warehouse with wheat spilling out around his ankles. Above him, wheat poured from a long pipe-on-wheels into the back of a grain truck. I watched him work for a while. Then I asked him what the pipe-on-wheels was called. He said, “A grain auger.” He chinned himself on the side of the truck and looked in to see how full it was. He told me, “A grain auger is like a conveyor, only it uses a screw instead of a belt. We’re moving wheat from this warehouse to that elevator. We just loaded out all the wheat in that elevator. That’n holds two hundred and eighty thousand bushels. This warehouse holds two hundred and fifty thousand. Right now, wheat is two dollars and sixty cents a bushel. So in here we got between half and three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of wheat. This is hard red No. 1 wheat. This’ll go to a bakery. Some of this wheat is five years old, some is six years old, some is eight years old. Some is even older—Russian-grain-embargo wheat that we didn’t sell to Russia back when Carter was President. If you watch it carefully, wheat will keep indefinitely. The way we watch it is we have temperature sensors that go down into the wheat, and we make sure the temperature stays right at forty to fifty degrees this time of year. When it goes above that, you know you’re getting rot or insects.” He turned and waded back into the wheat and chopped at it with a shovel.

A table of coffee drinkers in a Colorado café. They were wearing Cenex caps, khaki work shirts, black rubber boots. One guy had a T-shirt that said “Peter Marshall Golf Classic.” Another guy was leaning back in his chair and swatting here and there with a flyswatter.

“I just got done shingling the doghouse roof. I’m exhausted.”

“Did you see here in the papers where Billy Dawson”—thwap!—“well, he wasn’t angry, but I guess you could say he didn’t like it too much that these people were goin’ through his pasture and litterin’ and so forth. Seems to me we never used to think a thing about people goin’ through our pasture, lookin’ for arrowheads or just walkin’. Jake, did you ever think you shouldn’t go into somebody’s pasture, or did you ever think if you didn’t ask they might get mad?”

“Noooh! Why, I’d just walk in and—”

“It’s these damn antelope hunters. I don’t mind feeding the antelope half as much as I mind the damage those antelope hunters do.”

“You know, I went to Meet the Teams at the high school last night and I really enjoyed myself. I hadn’t had a chance to see the new band uniforms. My, they are nice.”

“Seems to me we didn’t ever have to worry about people abusin’ our pastures until all these”—thwap!—“Texans came in here with their big hats and their belt buckles . . .”

“. . . and the suitcase farmers. They’d come in and plow up a bunch of ground, and when it didn’t rain they’d pack up and leave the dust to blow on the rest of us.”

“Hey, Dad? Dad? Dad!”

“Yeah?”

“My gum’s pretty good.”

“. . . all these Texas farmers that moved in here in the forties and started plowin’ up the prairie and borrowin’ money . . .”

“I was just talking to Stancil down at the bank and he said they aren’t lending money for hay. Of course, right now that’s what everybody needs to buy. So I suppose that means that they just aren’t lending money, period.”

“. . . these big farmers that came in from out of state and started borrowin’ money—a twenty-thousand-dollar tractor, a forty-thousand-dollar combine, a hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar house—and then anytime it went a couple years without rain they’d be cryin’ for the government to help, and they’re still doin’ it today.” Thwap!

In the West of the Pecos Museum, in Pecos, Texas, I met a woman named Phyllis. She showed me the bullet holes in the doorsill, the floor, and the wall of what used to be a saloon before the museum took over. She said, “Of course, there were many more shootings in here besides just the famous ones. There used to be some pretty raunchy characters come in this saloon. There was an old sheriff here named Louis Roberson, and if they got too raunchy for him—why, he shot ’em. Most people know Pecos as a cowboy town. They also know us for our cantaloupes. The sun and soil here grow the sweetest, best cantaloupes in the world. Used to be, farmers all around Pecos raised cantaloupes and shipped ’em out on the Southern Pacific to California or back East. Then about fifteen years ago everybody’s wells just started to dry up. All the well water came from the Ogallala Aquifer, which is a big natural reservoir that’s been there underground for millions of years. It stretches from here up through the Texas Panhandle to Kansas all the way up to South Dakota. Farmers and ranchers all over who used that water had to sell out—they couldn’t afford new wells, or they couldn’t afford the power to pump up from so deep. There’s not nearly as many cantaloupe farms here as there used to be, and the creek beds are dry most of the year. Some people say now that the Ogallala Aquifer may be coming back up, that it’s not so bad as we thought. But here in the Orient Hotel courtyard there’s an artesian well that used to have enough pressure to pump up to the third floor. I don’t believe we’ll ever see that again.”

In Turkey, Texas, I met a woman named Mrs. Homer Lang. Turkey is in North Texas just below the Panhandle, and it was the home town of the country-music star Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing. Turkey’s schools closed in 1973, when its district consolidated with nearby Quitaque, and today a few classrooms of the empty school building hold the Bob Wills Museum. Mrs. Lang was minding the museum and knitting. She told me, “Just look all you want to. Then sign the register.” I saw the original sheet music of the Bob Wills classic “Stay a Little Longer,” and a photo of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys standing next to a giant loaf of Playboy Bread, and a suit that once belonged to Bob Wills, and a photo of Bob Wills’ horse, Punkin. No one had signed the register for eight days. Mrs. Lang said, “Nobody calls me Mrs. Lang except people tryin’ to sell me something over the telephone. Most everybody around Turkey calls me Aint Zona. I never did know Bob Wills myself. I saw him when I was a girl. Now, Homer—my husband, he died three years ago this April—Homer knew him real well. He used to cut Homer’s hair. Bob Wills went to Amarillo and took a six-week course in barbering and then he come back here and worked at Floyce Ham’s barbershop in town. He was playin’ dances in Turkey when he was twelve. Never did go to dances when I was a girl, and when I got old I didn’t start. My mother always said you could make harm out of anything. Now, Homer did go. They used to clear out space next to the M System store and people would come from all around. The road was lined car to car plumb up to the hilltop. These days, everything in Turkey closes up on a Saturday night. My second son? He was the overseer on the roads? He always believed Turkey would come back on the map someday. Turkey used to have three hardware stores, three banks, three drugstores, three cafés, three lumberyards. Now there’s houses empty with the yards all gone back to shinnery-shinnery, that’s sandpiles, weeds, bushes, land not good for nothin’. I worked twenty years in a café in town. We didn’t have no radio, no television. Homer went to Fort Worth to enlist for the First World War and they turned him back. They said they had already signed the Ar-miss-tice. My kids was pretty good size before I ever got a refrigerator and they was up great big before I ever got an air-conditioner. I was raised up Democrat, but they ain’t no party now. I still vote straight Democratic ticket. Lyndon Johnson, they say he was wrong with Vietnam, and I don’t know about none of that, but he was for the poor people. I took a trip back East two years ago and I went to New York—that’s the dirtiest place I was ever in, but, then, I didn’t go down but one street—and then I went to Washington, D.C. I seen a lot of things. I saw the machine they set down on the moon. I saw the biggest bakery in the world. I saw Reagan’s apartment. Was never much for having people do for me, but they took me special through Mrs. Reagan’s kitchen. It was solid chrome. I don’t believe you should set down and study on yourself. I’ve made seventy-five quilts in the last three years. I knit lap robes like this here. I lack about a hundred and twenty-five of making fourteen thousand pies. Last night, I made apricot and apple. My daughter’s mother-in-law, she’s a member of Church of Christ, she told me, ‘Zona, the world is comin’ to an end.’ That was two years ago now. She talks to my granddaughter, and my granddaughter came to me and said, ‘Mawmaw was prophesyin’ that the world is comin’ to an end.’ I told her, ‘I don’t believe so, but it don’t matter if it is. You’re gonna set on your own bottom before the Lord no matter what.’ We don’t none of us know what’s comin’. We don’t have no i-dee.”

The radio:

Maybe, when you’re driving on the plains, you’ll tune in Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys singing “Bring It On Down to My House (Honey).” Maybe you’ll hear Roy Acuff doing “Fireball Mail.” Maybe you’ll hear “Reckless Love and Bold Adventure,” by Rose Maddox, or “Courtin’ in the Rain,” by T. Texas Tyler, or “Hang the Key on the Bunkhouse Door,” by Wilf Carter, or “Cypress Grove Blues,” by Doc Watson, or “All of the Monkeys Ain’t in the Zoo,” by Tommy Collins, or “I’m a Natural Born Gamblin’ Man,” by Merle Travis, or “You Don’t Know What Lonesome Is,” by the Sons of the Pioneers (“I’ve got all the lonesomeness that the common law allows / You don’t know what lonesome is till you get to herdin’ cows”). Maybe you’ll hear a good bluegrass song, like “Blue-Eyed Darlin’,” by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, that comes at you like a truckload of turkey gobblers. Or maybe a scary song, like “The Rubber Room,” by Porter Wagoner, or a funny song, like “Sink the Bismarck,” by Homer and Jethro, or a talking song, like “To a Sleeping Beauty,” by Jimmy Dean.

More likely, though, what you’ll hear is “Hold On to the Night,” by McGuffey Lane, “Hold On Hold Out,” by Jackson Browne, “Hold On to Your Love,” by Neil Young, “Hold On to My Love,” by Jimmy Ruffin, “We’re Gonna Hold On,” by George Jones and Tammy Wynette, “Hold On Loosely,” by .38 Special, “Holdin’ On to Yesterday,” by Ambrosia, “Holdin’ On to the Love I’ve Got,” by Barbara Mandrell, “Hold On (Don’t You Be Sad Tonight, Love Will Be There),” by Gail Davies, “Hold On,” by Santana, “Hand to Hold On To,” by John Cougar Mellencamp, “Baby, Hold On,” by Eddie Money, “I’ll Keep Holdin’ On,” by Jim Capaldi, “Hold On, Baby, Hold On,” by Kansas, “Hold On to Your Dream,” by Billy Thorpe, or “Hold On Tight to Your Dreams (Accroche-Toi à Ton Rêve),” by the Electric Light Orchestra.

Weather:

On the northern plains, a radio announcer said, “It’s going to get pretty windy tonight, so if there’s anything you don’t want to blow away you’d better tie it down.” Clouds sped across the sky, and their shadows kept up across every kind of terrain. In 1846, Francis Parkman observed that a herd of buffalo being chased by Indian riders was “like the black shadow of a cloud, passing rapidly over swell after swell of the distant plain.” Next to the road, horses grazed with their tails standing straight out in the wind, and dust devils spun across unplowed ground. Up ahead, in North Dakota, storm clouds came all the way down to the ground like an overhead garage door. Inside the storm, the ceiling was low, and the light was like the North Atlantic. Fifteen minutes of driving put me back under blue skies.

In a state park in southern Wyoming, I sat on a low sandstone ridge beside ruts made by travellers on the Oregon Trail. Next to the wide, five-foot-deep rut in the rock made by wagons and oxen is a narrow, three-foot-deep rut made by human feet. About three hundred and fifty thousand people travelled the two-thousand-mile trail from the settlements to the West Coast. About thirty-four thousand died along the way. I watched as a rainstorm moved down the Platte River valley from the northwest. When the rain passed, the limbs of the wet trees were darker and their leaves were greener. By comparing weather descriptions in the daily journal entries of thirty-four travellers on the trail in 1849, one scholar has charted the storms that crossed the plains from April to July of that year.

I drove south into Colorado during the night, and six or more thunderstorms followed me. Any direction I looked, there were flashes—like the Fourth of July in New Jersey seen from an airplane. A flash as far away as the horizon lit for an instant clouds behind clouds. Lightning in the distance straight ahead sent reflections shooting all the way up the tarry wheel tracks on the pavement.

In New Mexico and West Texas, the hard white sky is screwed onto the earth like a lid, and the wind is as hot as a gust from a blow-dryer. In Texas, the rate of evaporation makes twenty-two inches of rain there the same as fifteen inches at the Canadian border. Southward, the prairie grasses get sparser and sparser; sage, greasewood, prickly pear, and mesquite take over. Mesquite trees have eight-inch thorns, delicate leaves like a locust tree’s, and roots that go down a hundred and seventy-five feet. Longhorn cattle grazed on mesquite and dropped the seeds along the way on drives to the north. Today, you can trace the old cattle trails from the air by following the mesquite. When mesquite takes over a field, little else will grow. Around each low tree, the earth is brown and bare. I began to see oil wells here and there among the mesquite, and pipelines, and tall, narrow heater-treater tanks. On the far southern plains, the oil towns of Plainview and Midland and Odessa rise like offshore drilling rigs. In prosperous years, the push buttons of local pay telephones are smudged with oily fingerprints, and laundromats have “Do Not Wash Rig Clothes Here” signs. In bad years, you see a lot of yard-sale signs and plywood windows. Between McCamey and Fort Stockton, Texas, I passed buttes fading up into hazy sky, land as flat as a piece of paper, buzzards jumping up off the shoulder reluctantly, a hawk raising dust with his wingbeats as he chased something around a bush, heat shimmers dancing, and a spider as big as a hand crossing the pavement. In Fort Stockton, I stopped and ate some Mexican food and stayed in a Motel 6 where they charged extra for a key to turn on the television and I saw a flea. The next morning, I got into my van and headed back to Montana.

Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether I was on the Great Plains or not. Around the edges, it was hard to tell. In the Southwest, I figured that when the plants started looking too pointy I was heading into the desert. On U.S. Highway 64 near Cimarron, New Mexico, I passed a sign that said, “You Are Now at the Great Plains–Rocky Mountain Boundary. The Cimarron Range, One of the Easternmost Ranges of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains,” but I kept going anyway. I wanted to see the little town of Lincoln, New Mexico, where the outlaw Billy the Kid shot some people about a hundred and ten years ago. The roads went along mountain canyons, through old Spanish and mining towns one after another. Billy the Kid worked as a cowboy, but he was more a townie than a frontiersman. He was born Henry McCarty, possibly in New York City, possibly in 1859. His mother and stepfather ran a restaurant in Santa Fe. The shootings that made him famous by the age of twenty-one had mainly to do with a feud that developed between a lawyer and the owner of one of the general stores in Lincoln. In general, most famous Western gunmen were town people. They slept in boarding houses, not under the stars. Wyatt Earp, who served as a lawman in Dodge City and other places, owned saloons, operated gambling halls, and died in Los Angeles. After a career on various sides of the law in places like Ogallala, Nebraska, and Las Animas, Colorado, and Mobeetie, Texas, the gambler and gunman Bat Masterson spent his last years in New York City as a sports columnist for the Morning Telegraph, where he died at his desk of a heart attack. Western gunfights were alcohol-related, or else involved battles over gambling, prostitution, or political preferment. They were closer in spirit to drug wars in the Bronx than to duels of honor.

The main street in Lincoln is narrow, and the little houses are close together. The town is in a valley and has no place else to go. It probably looks much the same as when Billy the Kid was here. The feud, sometimes called the Lincoln County War, was between a lawyer named McSween, who lived on one side of the street, and a former Army major named Murphy, who ran a general store on the other side. Both were also incipient cattle barons competing for government beef contracts. Billy the Kid was among the McSween faction. From minor beginnings, the feud quickly grew through several ambush killings until finally the Murphy faction had their friends from the nearby Army fort surround McSween’s house with cavalry backed up by a twelve-pound cannon. The house was then set ablaze. Billy the Kid was inside along with McSween, Mrs. McSween, and a number of other McSween gunmen. He played the piano in the parlor as the flames burned closer. The attackers let Mrs. McSween escape to safety. Then the men came out shooting, except for McSween, who was unarmed. He caught nine slugs and died. Billy the Kid and a friend named Tom O’Folliard escaped unhit. A plaque in front of the site of the McSween house tells some of this story; charred beams and adobe bricks still lie beneath the grass.

At large, Billy the Kid moved beyond the confines of the feud to more general shootings and stock thefts. Pat Garrett, the Lincoln County sheriff, eventually caught him, and he was convicted of murder and taken to Lincoln to be hanged. Because there was no jail to put him in, he was shackled and held in Garrett’s office, on the second floor of the courthouse. One of the guards, Deputy Robert Ollinger, showed Billy the Kid the double-barrelled shotgun he would shoot him with if he tried to escape. According to one account, when Ollinger went across the street to the hotel for supper Billy the Kid worked free of his cuffs, grabbed a gun from a guard named J. W. Bell, shot him, and walked to the window carrying Ollinger’s shotgun. Ollinger came running at the sound of the shot, and Billy the Kid called, “Hello, Bob!” Then he shot him with both barrels. He said, “Take that, you son of a bitch. You will never follow me with that gun again!” Then he filed off his leg shackles and (he must have had a musical streak) danced on the balcony. Then he jumped on a horse, rode down Main Street, yelled “Three cheers for Billy the Kid!,” and galloped away.

Lincoln’s main street would be a good place to yell that from. It is barely bigger than a road on a stage set, and it disappears picturesquely around a bend. The courthouse still stands. There is a marble marker on the ground at the spot where Robert Ollinger fell. The second floor still has a balcony—wooden, recently painted, with a railing. It is the only balcony in the town, which it overlooks like a pulpit. I, too, went across the street and had supper. The menu featured home-baked bread and sole; New Mexico is like the Vermont of the West. Later, I had to drive miles out of town to find a gas station. All of the town of Lincoln is a historic district, which discourages new construction. Because Billy the Kid danced on it, the courthouse balcony endures.

New Mexico has towns over three hundred years old. None of them are on the Great Plains. The little towns back in the canyons were hiding from what used to be out here: Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche, mainly. As I came out of the piñon foothills, the flat openness still seemed to suggest swarms of screaming mounted warriors. For centuries after General Francisco Vásquez de Coronado first explored the southern plains, in 1541, the Spanish kept sending parties of soldiers and missionaries this way. Often they did not return; pieces of captured Spanish armor survived as heirlooms in Indian households long after the Spanish were gone.

Sucking on milkshake cups full of crushed ice, I drove north in the heat to Bent’s Fort, on the Arkansas River. The Arkansas runs for fourteen hundred and fifty-nine miles from the Colorado Rockies across the plains to the Mississippi. Traders from the Mississippi valley travelled up it on their way to the Spanish settlements of the Southwest. Bent’s Fort, built in 1833, with adobe walls fifteen feet high and seven feet thick, was to the southern plains what Fort Union was to the northern. Its builders, Charles and William Bent, of the mercantile firm of Bent, St. Vrain & Company, chose to trade here to avoid the power of the American Fur Company, to the north. Rather than sell the fort to the Army, William Bent blew it up in 1849; the National Park Service has since reconstructed it, including the cactus that once grew on top of the walls. The fort is not far from the present town of La Junta, Colorado. When I got there, on an afternoon in August, it was filled with men and women wearing buckskin and broadcloth and calico in styles that were common in 1850. They had come to Bent’s Fort for a black-powder rendezvous.

Black powder is the gunpowder old muzzle-loading firearms used. Black-powder people, as they are sometimes called, are hobbyists with an interest in black-powder guns—specifically, guns of the period between 1800 and 1860. For most black-powder people—they prefer the term “buckskinners,” or “skinners”—enthusiasm for that era extends to everything about it: clothes, tools, skills, trade goods, history, figures of speech. Some call each other “Hoss” and refer to buffalo as “buffier,” because trappers in 1840 supposedly did. Buckskinners number in the tens of thousands, and they hold rendezvous all over the country (although mainly in the West). The original rendezvous, back in the eighteen-twenties, were gatherings held in some Rocky Mountain valley where fur trappers met traders recently arrived from the settlements with pack trains of goods, and everybody traded and drank and gambled and brawled. A modern rendezvous is a family event. People sleep in tipis and purge the campsite of any signs of the twentieth century; at Bent’s Fort, the cars and trailers hid in a weed-screened lot a quarter mile or so away. Debates on what one may or may not bring to a rendezvous often include reference to historical texts. Powdered lemonade mix is O.K.; it existed in 1840, when it was known as “crystallized essence” of lemon. Mosquito netting accompanied the fancier travellers of the eighteen-forties, so it, too, is defensible. A person who prefers to sleep on an air mattress might cite this passage from “Up the Missouri with Audubon,” by Edward Harris:

We struck our camp on the River shore under 6 Cotton Wood Trees growing in a clump, and after making a good fire, Michaux and one of the Hunters started after Deer, having still an hour or more of daylight. We had hardly any time to refresh ourselves with a little bread and cheese, before they brought in a fine yearling Buck. . . . It was not long before some of the choice morceaux were roasting before the fire. . . . We all agreed it was the best Venison we ever tasted, and none failed to do ample justice to the repast. Our beds were soon blown up and wrapped in our blankets with our guns by our sides, we were soon fast asleep.

Audubon and company called their air mattresses “India-rubber beds.” The year was 1843.

In the shade of the fort’s walls, I talked to Bill Gwaltney, a seasonal Park Service Ranger from Texas, in charge of activities at the rendezvous. Bill Gwaltney was wearing a Missouri River boatman’s shirt with bloused sleeves, white cotton broad-fall trousers, from an Amish clothing-supply house in Indiana, and a strand of red and blue glass beads of a design about three hundred years old. “What’s so funny about being a buckskinner is the contrast between then and now,” he said. “If you go into a Wendy’s dressed in your rendezvous gear, people look at you like you’re crazy, when in fact you’re not. A black-powder rendezvous is a positive, out-of-doors experience—a family experience. It generates respect for Native Americans. The fur-trade period was fascinating for lots of reasons. The trappers who came west brought technology to the Indians, but the Indians gave the trappers spiritual and survival knowledge in return. The fur-trade period was an opportunity for us to learn from Native Americans, and in the end we turned that opportunity down. I prefer a rendezvous without any reminders of the modern era at all, but there can be some leeway. Take yourself, for example: your canvas shirt, blue-denim trousers, leather belt, notebook, pencil. About the only thing you wouldn’t’ve had back in 1840 would be the hard-rubber soles on your hiking boots. I am opposed to air mattresses at a rendezvous, personally. If you have to have them, cover them with a hide or a blanket. Same goes for coolers. And then there’s other things that are just ridiculous—rawhide beer-can holders, for example. People say the trappers would’ve used them if they’d had them. That’s a cute saying, but I don’t buy it.”

In the center plaza of the fort, venders had set out displays of black-powder items for sale on blankets: knives made of half a sheep shears, jugs, rose-pink hand-blown glass bottles from Mexico, riding quirts, strike-a-light bags of flint and steel and tinder, little knives like the ones Indian women used to wear around their necks in order to kill their attacker or themselves if they were about to be raped, hand-carved tipi pins, animal leg bones for making knife handles, turtle shells, door knockers made of deer hooves, bunches of sweetgrass for burning, tiny powder horns with silver stoppers for fine-grained priming powder, polished stones, porcupine-quill-work barrettes, and throwing tomahawks like the one Gerard Baker and I fooled around with when I visited Fort Union.

It turned out the guy with the tomahawks knew Gerard Baker. He said, “Shoot, 0l’ Gerard’s a park ranger at the North Unit of Teddy Roosevelt National Park now.” On the plains, that happened to me often; I ran into people who knew Gerard Baker all over. They’d say, “Gerard’s an old buddy of mine. He’s the fella that taught me how to jerk buffalo meat,” or “Gerard’s the guy that got me into flint-knapping,” or “Gerard and me are gonna trap an eagle this fall.” If anyone nowadays could be called genuine plainsman, it is Gerard Baker.

Men in coyote-skin hats and buckskin were walking around the plaza and hailing one another by their black-powder names: “Hey, Long Shadow, what you know good?” “White Eyes, how you been?” “Hey, Bijou, 0l’ hoss, how you makin’ it?” To talk, they often got down on their haunches and hunkered. A man with long gray-and-black hair hanging straight down, wire-rimmed glasses, a calico shirt, and stiff buckskin trousers was telling several listeners about a woman gunsmith of the eighteen-thirties named Anne Patrick. Then the discussion turned to the buffalo hunter Billy Dixon’s famous mile-long shot at the Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874, and whether the Indian he was shooting at was killed or just had the wind knocked out of him. After a while, I butted in to add that Billy Dixon’s hair was supposed to be almost nine feet long. Then the man with the wire-rimmed glasses, who gave his name as Moses McTavish, told me all kinds of things about buffalo hunters. He said they were always dying of skunk bites. With his knuckles he drew a map in the dust of the Staked Plains of Texas, a flat place with no landmarks where the hunters often got lost. He said that a lot of buffalo hunters were as dumb as a rock.

Moses McTavish asked me if I wanted to see his tipi. We went out the side gate of the fort, down along a gentle slope, and across a grassy depression where the Arkansas River used to run before it moved. On the other side, a grove of big cottonwood trees grew far apart, in what botanists call a gallery forest. The people at the rendezvous had picked this spot for their campground. Canvas tipis as white as water-cooler cups stood among the trees. A few tipis had blue smoke coming from their tops. In front of one, a round mirror hung from an iron holder shaped like an upside-down L. Others had cooking pots hanging over fires from tripods. Beneath a canvas awning strung between two trees, several guys leaning back on their elbows were passing a small jug. Here and there, picketed horses grazed. Little kids as barefoot as any in 1840 played in the trodden-down grass.

Moses McTavish and I ducked through his tipi door and sat cross-legged on buffalo robes around the fire pit in the center. Moses McTavish reached under a deer hide, lifted the lid of a cooler, and brought us out a couple of cans of Coke—Classic, of course. Then he filled his clay pipe with Prince Albert tobacco mixed with mullein weed for his bronchitis and lit it. He said, “This is a Crow lodge. Some people prefer Sioux lodges, some Cheyenne, some Comanche. I like Crow because of its shape—the tipi poles of a Crow lodge extend so far above the covering that the whole thing looks almost like an hourglass. You could tell the tribe from the shape of the tipis from miles away. Cheyenne tipis kind of angled forward to the door. Sioux were like Cheyenne, but they didn’t have two flaps above the door. Comanche tipis were more squat and conical. Indian women could take a tipi down in a few minutes and put it up in an hour. If my wife and I hustle, it takes us fifteen minutes just to unload it all from the trailer. It takes us two and half hours to get everything up and where it belongs. This tipi has I forget how many square yards of canvas, sixteen poles, fifteen pegs, twenty stakes, five different ropes, a canvas liner—that’s just some of it. You see those cords running along the inside of the tipi poles? Well, when it rains real hard, water will run down the poles, and when it gets to a bump or a knot on the wood it will stop there and drip on you. Those cords are so the water has something smooth to run along all the way to the ground.

“Tipis take on color from the wood you burn in your fire. Cottonwoods make poor firewood—they turn tipis kind of smutty brown. Willow gives ’em a nice soft yellow color. The Crows liked it because they took great pride in how light their tipis were. Pine burns pitchy and turns ’em black. You don’t ever go off and leave a fire burning in one of these. And you don’t want wood that sparks. At a rendezvous several years ago, a tipi caught fire and burned to the ground in a minute and a half, and one rendezvous person was killed.”

We finished the Cokes, and Moses McTavish put the cans away out of sight. “My real name is Lee Walsh,” he said. “I used to be a food chemist for Trenton Foods. Then I made printed circuits for Gulton Industries. I’ve worked as an anthropologist, classifying bones. Once, I worked on a skeleton with a stone arrowhead in his lumbar vertebrae. Now I do this. I go to eleven rendezvous a year. I spend three months of every year in a lean-to. My wife’s got a good job.”

On my way out, I stopped at the Bent’s Fort information kiosk, where a uniformed park employee with a name tag that read “McGee” sat alone. I asked if he was going down to the rendezvous. He said, “No, I’m not. I know what it is to chop wood and haul water and shit outside, and I don’t want to have a thing to do with it.”

The Arkansas River used to be one of the most treacherous on the Great Plains, a multichannelled torrent of liquid sand that often drowned people and animals when it was in flood. Driving east along the Arkansas valley from Colorado into Kansas, I saw only trickles of water in two hundred miles. At Dodge City, where I stopped, cowboys sometimes spent days trying to coax their herds into the river. A Dodge City hotelkeeper called Deacon Cox owned a swimming cow, which he would lend to trail bosses with stalled herds. The cow avoided the slaughterhouse for years because of her willingness to jump in and lead the others across. Today, a swimming cow would be hamburger with a hidden talent. A person strolling through the bed of the Arkansas near Dodge City in summer might never guess at the river that had been there.

Dodge City has had at least three booms in its history. The first began in 1872, when it was the western terminus of the Santa Fe railroad and the center of trade for buffalo hunters on the middle plains. In 1872 and 1873, millions of hides and seven million pounds of buffalo tongues were shipped east from Dodge City. The second boom was a few years later, when Dodge became the destination of cattle herds heading for the railroad from Texas. Every business from barbershops to dance halls grew on Front Street, along the railroad tracks. Doc Holliday briefly practiced dentistry there after his escape from the Fort Griffin lynch mob. In the Long Branch Saloon, Cockeyed Frank Loving shot and killed Levi Richardson; in Webster’s Saloon, the cowboy Bing Choate was killed by the gambler Dave St. Clair; at the door of the Opera House, at the corner of Front Street and First Avenue, Mysterious Dave Mather shot and killed Assistant City Marshal Tom Nixon. Women named Mollie Hart and Lizzie Palmer and Sadie Hudson and Bertha Lockwood became involved in hair-pulling battles and stabbings. Bat Masterson, who was sheriff in 1877, appears in the town census of 1880 living with a nineteen-year-old named Annie Ladue, identified by the census-taker as “concubine.” In all the years of the cattle boom, fewer people were shot or stabbed in Dodge City than die violently in New York City in three days; what gave Dodge its fame, partly, was the fact that the town had several weekly newspapers chronicling each gunfight and its aftermath in detail.

Dodge City’s third boom began more recently, when the town was the fictional setting for several TV series, including “Gunsmoke,” one of the most popular series ever. Fans of those shows wanted to see what the original Dodge City looked like. By then, not much of old Dodge was left—a fire destroyed the buildings on Front Street in 1885—so the town built a new museum and reconstructed some of the old saloons and businesses on a nearby site. Much of the land where the dangerous part of Dodge City once stood is now under a long parking lot for visitors and tour buses. As I pulled in, a thunderstorm hit so hard that raindrops were bouncing back up off the asphalt. In the museum’s gift shop, a woman just off a tour bus undid her clear plastic scarf and said to a man, “Look, honey—figurines.”

Dodge City has lots of tourist attractions, including my favorite museum combination of all time: on Fifth Avenue, just across the street from the town’s old Boot Hill Cemetery, a single building houses the Kansas Teachers’ Hall of Fame and the Famous Gunfighter’s Wax Museum. (“Each, a separate attraction,” says the brochure that they also share.) The Kansas Teachers’ Hall of Fame is free, and contains portrait photos and short testimonials to honorees like Marie Harden Reynolds, a vocal-and-instrumental-music teacher from Pittsburg, Kansas, who inspired many of her former students to become music teachers, and Ward L. Kiester, a former principal of Basehor Rural High School, and Clare Kaufman, from Gridley, whose students remember her stargazing field trips, and Alice V. Tuttle, an elementary-school teacher from Garden City (“If we could bottle her patience and sell it, we would be very wealthy,” said a former student), and J. Harvey Douglass, a former industrial-arts instructor from Winfield, author of “Units in Woodworking” and “Projects in Wood Furniture.” In the other half of the building, the Famous Gunfighter’s Wax Museum (admission $1.85) has life-size replicas of Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, Clay Allison (“Alcoholic New Mexico cattleman who killed 32 men and died in a fall from a wagon while drunk”), Grat Dalton (“Member of the awful Dalton gang of killers and robbers”), and, on a purple velvet pillow, the severed head of Joaquín Murrieta, a California outlaw who “tied Chinamen together by their queues, made them dance to the tune of a pistol, and shot their eyes out.”

A three hours’ drive north of Dodge City is the town of Oberlin, Kansas. Years ago, I stopped in Oberlin to visit the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum, and met the curator, Kathleen Claar, a white-haired woman with a habit of shyly touching her listener’s elbow to point out exhibits she liked best. In 1978, I went back to write an article about the town’s celebration of the centennial of the raid. Indian descendants of the Cheyenne who killed about forty settlers on the prairie around Oberlin were supposed to attend the celebration, but at the last minute they couldn’t make it. The article I wrote appeared. Something I wanted to include in the article but didn’t get a chance to was a trip Kathleen Claar and I took to the site of Hawkeye, a now vanished town where she used to live. We met at an Oberlin café called Lindy’s, got in my rent-a-car, drove west on the highway, and turned off onto a gravel road. It was early fall. We passed a field of tall sunflowers with their heads all turned the same direction, like a crowd at a ballgame. The sky was an enamel blue.

“If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been down this road,” Kathleen Claar said. “It was my husband’s mail route, and I used to drive it all the time. Right over there was where his family’s land started. Old Henry Claar—my father-in-law—was a ladies’ man. What’s the word I’m looking for? He was overbearing. All the Claars were like that. My daddy Pickens farmed not too far from here He didn’t homestead. He farmed the homestead that my grandfather left him, but he had itchy feet and couldn’t stay in one place too long and out here he didn’t stick. One time I saw my daddy kneeling down in the field with his head in his hands and tears was streaming down his face and I said, ‘What’s wrong, Daddy?’ and he said, ‘We should’ve never come out here. Nothing goes right for me in this state. I hate Kansas.’ So, later, when I was living in Idaho and I met Lawrence Claar and he wanted me to come back here, I said no. See, I didn’t want to come back to the state that made my daddy cry.

“I lived in a sod house from when I was two and a half until I was four. It was just a one-room house made of blocks of sod cut from the prairie. I remember it—bugs and snakes and mice were always dropping down from the ceiling. The ceiling was made of brush, branches from the creek, fodder. You know what fodder is—like cornstalks, weeds, anything. Mama used to hang sheets over the tables and beds so that things wouldn’t fall on them. Then we got the idea of putting a big piece of muslin across the whole ceiling. We’d keep it up there for a year or so until it got too filthy and rain-stained and then take it down, tear it into strips, wash it, dry it, sew it back together, and put it back up. To decorate the windows we used to cut up red and green wrapping paper that Mama would save through the year—heavier-quality wrapping paper than they have now. We kids used to try to come up with the prettiest design. I was the youngest of eight in the family, and even today I’m still the baby when my older sister is around.

“In the middle of that field of milo is where Claar’s Roadhouse used to stand. It was like an inn and had stables and barns. It was a great big old three-story building. The people who bought the land some years ago tore down everything. Then they came to ask me where the well that old Henry had dug was at and I wouldn’t tell them. I said, ‘This place should have been a historic monument and you tore out all those trees that took years to grow.’ The soil around here doesn’t look very much like it used to. See those draws and washes? That didn’t use to be here. Didn’t use to be any gullies, or not as many as there are now. What caused it? Men’s greed. They wanted to plow up everything, put in wheat and other crops, and they ruined a lot of land that used to be good grazing land. During the First World War, the price of wheat went way up, and everybody thought they were going to be rich. Now a lot of the land is just wore out.”

At a corner where two dirt roads met, we stopped at a little cemetery behind a fence. A flock of sparrows burst from a row of pruned juniper trees as we went through a gate under a black wrought-iron arch that said “Hawkeye Cemetery.” The grass was mown and wet; someone had just watered. Beyond the fence, wheat and milo fields stretched away on every side. Kathleen Claar showed me the graves of her husband, his parents, her daughter, and her grandson. She said she had raised her grandson after her son and daughter-in-law divorced, and he was killed in a car accident in Trinidad, Colorado, while waiting to ship out for Vietnam in 1972. She said his death was the one she hadn’t got used to yet. She showed me a stone marked “Unknown Dead” on the grave of an apprentice boy who stole a horse up in Nebraska and was killed by pursuers who found him hiding in a nearby barn. She showed me the grave of an uncle of hers who loved California and whose last wish was that his ashes be buried in a California prune box. Then she led me to a marker all by itself on the other side of the cemetery. She said, “Did you ever hear about the last man lynched in Kansas? Well, this was him. His name was Rick Read. He was lynched in 1932 after he raped and murdered an eight-year-old girl. The Reads lived right next door to us, and I used to see him all the time when I was driving my mail route. He had these big long arms hanging down and sometimes he used to just come out of the bushes when I was driving on the road and come toward the car, and the lust on that man’s face! I used to drive away as fast as I could and not stop until I was a long way away and then get out of the car, I was shaking so bad. He was jailed in Colorado for a similar offense a long time before, when I was a schoolteacher there, and later when they paroled him I said, ‘We will all live to regret this day.’ After they lynched him, I didn’t want to visit his family, but we had to. They were friends—his sister still is a close friend of mine—and his poor old mother, her cheeks were so red from crying you could see the blood right through them. His dad was a member of the Odd Fellows lodge and so was he—he went through right before my husband—and his poor old dad said he wanted his son to have an Odd Fellows funeral. My husband turned pale and then another Read boy said, ‘Dad, you forget how he died.’ They wanted us to go in and look at him and, oh, Lord, I didn’t want to, but my husband said, ‘You’ve got to—they were good friends of your mother and father.’ So my husband took me by the hand and led me in and, my goodness, I’ll remember that sight as long as I live. They must’ve used a rope this big on him, there was a big purple groove around his neck. When they went to bury him, the people were so mad they would have dismembered the body and no preacher would preach the sermon, but at the last minute a preacher showed up who believed that every man was entitled to a Christian burial—he was a relative of mine, but I’d never liked him very much—and he preached the most beautiful sermon I ever heard. He said, ‘If you had a man in your community as crippled in body as this man was in spirit, you would all have so much pity on him you’d take him into your homes and care for him.’ All the women started to weep and I cried myself and some men cried, too, and you could feel all the hatred and violence just dissolve up into the air.”

This time, the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum was closed for the day when I got to Oberlin. I called Kathleen Claar from a phone in the Pizza Hut, but she wasn’t home. Being in a place I’d already written about felt strange to me, so I got back in my van and continued north into Nebraska. Later, I sent Kathleen Claar a postcard. She sent me a Christmas card. We talked on the phone. She said that we should go back to Hawkeye, and that she had a lot more to tell. Just before Christmas, 1987, at the age of eighty-seven, Kathleen Claar died, and joined her husband and family and the last man lynched in Kansas in the old Hawkeye cemetery in the wheat fields.

Islept in my van outside the town of McCook, Nebraska. The next morning, I went on, under Interstate Highway 80, across the forks of the Platte River (the first river with any water I’d seen for days), and into the west-central part of the state. I was now in one of the blankest spots on the American map—a big section showing almost no rivers or roads or towns. This is the Nebraska sandhill country, the original model for the mapmakers’ Great American Desert—a land of grassy rises receding into the distance like a sea in a heavy chop. There was so little to look at that when a crow flew past in front of me and dropped something from its beak I turned around and went back to see what it was: a fetal duckling, featherless, blue, with bulging sealed eyes and tiny webbed feet.

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 the 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 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 had given me good directions over the phone, and she 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 guestbook, 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 a schoolteacher she met 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 had really snowed her, and that when she came back she was much too glowing. She said the trip had made her understand how really really special living in a democracy is. She said it had made her like the Russians both more and less. She said, “The people from 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 sand reed. If cattle graze this in the summer they’ll take it right out. We graze it more in the winter. This is thread-leaf 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 rice grass. 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 broadbrimmed 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 hundred-and-forty-year-old printing on the rock still looks fresh. 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 café 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 that 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 ideas like what I would 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 hundred 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 eighteen-sixties, 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 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. The store 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 Club, 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 to get 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 teen-agers 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. ?