The next day was very cold, only 10°F at noon. It snowed all morning and Gerald came again, keeping the lane open by bashing through. The eagles sat calm and in their tree watching for fish below in a narrow strip of open water. The day ended with a sense of urgency. How long could Gerald keep the lane open? How long could I stay?
I made it down to the last days of December. It was 15°F below zero and the snow squealed when I walked on it. Late in the morning I saw the pair of golden eagles flying high over the cliff, playing in the frigid air. It began snowing again and I decided I would try to get out the next day. The lane was half-choked with snow and even Gerald couldn’t keep it clear much longer. If I didn’t go the next day I knew I could be isolated for a long time, jailed at the end of the impassable road. I packed the old Land Cruiser and fled to New Mexico.
So ended the first and only full year I was to spend at Bird Cloud. I returned in March and for several more years came in early spring and stayed until the road-choking snow drove me out, but I had to face the fact that no matter how much I loved the place it was not, and never could be, the final home of which I had dreamed.
Postscript
In April 2010 I returned to Bird Cloud to catch up on the lives of the avian population of the cliff. If you watch birds you soon realize how dangerous are their lives. Wyoming winter is a hard time for even these hardy creatures, but the snares and instruments of humans are more deadly than weather, and only rarely do you learn what has happened. There were no golden eagles at the big nest and no way to know why.
At the bald eagle nest—almost doubled in size—I could not see the head of an eagle sitting on eggs, although one or the other should have been there. One of the bald eagles sat on their favorite fishing tree and flew over when I first came out of the house, as curious as ever. But as the days passed I only saw that one eagle, never two. The nest looked empty. Then the single eagle was gone.
Gerald fixed the Bush Hog mower which had broken down last fall and decided to finish mowing the margin of the entry lane. He discovered the wing and corpse remains of an eagle on the TA side of the fence. It was under Bird Cloud’s new safer-design power line put up in 2004 by the local electric coop. Gerald thought it might be a golden eagle, but when I looked at what was left, there were so many shining white neck feathers caught in the tough grass that I knew it had to be one of the bald eagles. We do not know exactly what killed it.
Eagles waste no time on tears. The day after the lone eagle disappeared I saw in the sky far to the west two tiny bird shapes soaring, diving, touching, clasping talons and tumbling. I knew immediately that the lone eagle had found a handsome widow or a young unmated eagle. Just before dark the two flew to the cliff and it was obvious that the lone eagle was showing his domain to the new bride. Suddenly the new eagle took off, heading west, and the lone eagle pursued her. I assumed she didn’t like the place. But the next morning there were two eagles in the tree above the river. It was too late in the season to raise a family, the common wildlife situation of hope deferred.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annie Proulx is the author of The Shipping News and three other novels, That Old Ace in the Hole, Postcards, and Accordion Crimes, and the story collections Heart Songs, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Wyoming and New Mexico.
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1. Most of the older sources place the northernmost snout of the Rio Grande Rift in Colorado, but recent work from University of Wyoming geologists places it in south-central Wyoming.
2. Thomas Keneally, Outback (Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), 19.
3. Keneally, Outback, 19.
4. Luigi Pirandello, “La tragedia d’un personaggio” [A Character’s Tragedy], in Eleven Short Stories, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1994), 149.
1. Jack Kerouac, letter to Yvonne Le Maitre, a critic-journalist who wrote for Québec publications, September 8, 1950. I am indebted to David Plante for the quotation, and to Isaac Gewirtz of the New York Public Library, who tracked down the source.
2. Hiram Martin Chittenden, History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River: Life and Adventures of Joseph La Barge Pioneer Navigator and Indian Trader for Fifty Years Identified with the Commerce of the Missouri Valley (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1903), 1:3.
3. Ibid., 1:2.
4. Charles L. Camp, “James Clyman,” in The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, ed. LeRoy R. Hafen (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark Co., 2003), 1:244. The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, written from his own dictation by T. D. Bonner (New York, 1856), 63.
5. Chittenden, History, 1:23.
6. For the best information see Chittenden, History, vols. 1 and 2. Paul O’Neil, The Rivermen (Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1975), confuses the father, Joseph Maria LaBarge, with his son, the steamboat captain Joseph LaBarge. The result is snappy adventure rather than carefully checked history.
7. Father Hoecken, after ministering to stricken passengers, died in 1851 on board the St. Ange during a cholera outbreak. Father De Smet who was also on board and ill with “bilious fever” survived.
8. “Father of Forty, Monsieur Brisson, the French-Canadian Patriarch in Foster,” Providence Sunday Journal, June 3, 1903.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Windham County Transcript, November 19, 1903, 4.
12. Richard De Gruchy to Annie Proulx, May 6, 1996.
13. Richard De Gruchy to Annie Proulx, November 25, 1996, 1.
14. Thomas J. Laforest, Our French-Canadian Ancestors (Palm Harbor, Florida: Quintin Publications), 3:216.
15. Ibid., 217.
16. Without knowing this I went for several summers to attend the famous Montmagny accordion festival while doing research for the novel Accordion Crimes.
17. Laforest, Our French-Canadian Ancestors, 20:219.
18. New York Times, January 11, 1889.
1. Michael Ricciardi, “Massive Infestation of Beetles Threatens Mountain Pines in Western U.S.,” July 22, 2009, ecolocalizer.com/2009/07/22/massive-infestation-of-beetles-threatens-mountain-pines-in-western-us; Jim Robbins, “Spread of Bark Beetles Kills Millions of Acres of Trees in West,” New York Times, November 18, 2008, D3.
1. H. W. Tilman, China to Chitral (Cambridge University Press, 1951), 720.
2. Alden Nowlan, “It’s Good to Be Here,” in What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (Minneapolis: The Thousands Press, 1993, 2000), 128.
1. Charles M. Love, “Geological Influences on Prehistoric Populations of Western Wyoming,” Wyoming Geological Association Guidebook (1977), 26.
1. Rockwell Kent, N by E (New York: Brewer and Warren, 1930), 16.
1. Philip Jodidio, New Forms: Architecture in the 1990s (New York: Taschen, 2001), 28.
1. Douglas Crowe, The First Century: A Hundred Years of Wildlife Conservation in Wyoming (Cheyenne: Wyoming Game and Fish Department, 1990), 12.
2. Forts Kearney, Laramie, Halleck, Fred Steele, Bridger and several camps. Quite a few of these men were Irish, and some were “galvanized Yankees,” southern prisoners of war who changed sides and joined the U.S. Army.
3. Eugene Ware, The Indian Wars of 1864 (Topeka, Kan.: Crane & Company, 1911; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960), ch. 4. Ware profited from Gore’s visit, for he was later given a greyhound from a litter that Gore’s hunting dogs pro
duced at Fort Kearney.
4. Abstract, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 237, no. 1 (July 21, 2006); Fungi 3, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 5.
5. http://ahc.uwyo.edu/onlinecollections/exhibits/pronghorn/part4.htm.
6. Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800–1850,” Journal of American History 7 (1991): 465–485.
7. Crowe, First Century, 15. Unfortunately they neglected to include any enforcement measures which made the law as big a joke as the 1869 exercise in conservation. This was not Seton-Karr’s party as he came to Wyoming for the first time in 1877 and his first elk hunt was in August of that year. Henry Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays (London: Edward Arnold, 1904), 155.
8. Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, 3.
9. Ibid., 18.
10. Ibid. 145.
11. Rowland Ward, Records of Big Game, with Their Distribution, Characteristics, Dimensions, Weights, and Measurements of Horns, Antlers, Tusks and Skins, 3d ed. (London: Roland Ward, Ltd., 1899). Records of Big Game has gone through many editions and reprints. It is instructive to see how many of the largest “true wapiti” heads listed in this book were killed in Wyoming. The state must have been crawling with British shooters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
12. Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, 151.
13. Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, 284.
14. Ibid.
15. Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, 284–285, 322.
16. T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming, 2d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, 1978), 269.
17. Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, 287–294.
1. Donald M. Bahr, “Thin Leather’s Oration,” in Pima and Papago Ritual Oratory: A Study of Three Texts (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1975), 45.
2. Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains (London: Chatto and Windus, 1892), 12.
3. J. C. Malin, “Soil, Animal, and Plant Relations of the Grassland, Historically Reconsidered,” Scientific Monthly 75 (1953), 207–220, cited in Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History of Environmental Change in Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 98.
4. R. Gwinn Vivian and Bruce Hilpert, The Chaco Handbook (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002), 95.
5. We know little about those invisible movements of people over thousands of years. Craig Childs tells in his House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest, (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2007), how he has spent most of his life walking and puzzling out the trails of ancestral pueblo people through ruins, broken pottery, water sources and artifacts and conversations with archaeologists and historians. He has on-the-ground knowledge of the sometimes terrifyingly high and remote places these people lived that few of us will ever see.
66. Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977, 2004), 14–16; Grassland Plants of South Dakota and the Great Northern Plains, South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station bulletin B566 (Brookings, South Dakota, 1999).
7. Frances Carrington, My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearny Massacre (Denver: Pruett Press, 1990), 314, cited in John D. McDermott, A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 2.
8. The excellent word “filibuster” sprouted from the Dutch word for pirate—vrijbuiter—a freebooter seeking prizes. Other languages borrowed the word. The Spanish converted it to filibustero. From the Spanish it entered American English in the nineteenth century as adventurers tried to seize personal kingdoms in Latin America. These rogue efforts were discussed at length in the U.S. Senate, and comparisons were not lost there. (The tactic had been used by the Roman senator Cato the Young.) Uncontrolled talkers began to be described as “filibustering.” Gradually the word took on the meaning of causing a delaying action by taking advantage of the senatorial right to speak interminably on any subject without restriction.
9. A valuable study of Indian oratory, with many examples, is William M. Clements, Oratory in Native North America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002).
10. Clements, Oratory, citing Wroth in his essay in Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: New American Library, 1975).
11. See McDermott, Guide.
12. “Map of the Indian Tribes of North America,” drawn in 1836 by Albert Gallatin, New York Public Library, reproduced in Paul Cohen, Mapping the West: America’s Westward Movement 1524–1890 (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), 114–115.
13. Carl Wheat, Mapping the Trans-Mississippi West 1540–1861, vol. 3, The Mexican War to the Boundary Survey 1846–1854 (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1959), 129 ff. “. . . a really great map drawn by Father de Smet in 1851 for the Indian Bureau. It is a large and detailed map showing all the Indian Tribes from the Missouri River to the junction of the Snake and Columbia rivers, and from the Canadian border to the southern border of New Mexico.”
14. Gay Day Alcorn, Tough Country: The History of the Saratoga and Encampment Valley 1825–1895 (Saratoga, Wyo.: Legacy Press, 1984), 14, 28, 29–38, 49, 62.
15. Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, ed. Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 1:457.
16. Ibid., 1:462.
17. Alcorn, Tough Country, 62.
18. Ibid.
19. “Recollections of Taylor Pennock as Dictated to Mr. I. R. Conniss, Saratoga, Wyoming, April, 1927,” Annals of Wyoming 6, nos. 1–2 (July–October 1929): 199–212. Not all of the old settlers were as dependable in their accounts of the past as Pennock. James M. Sherrod’s account of his life was disputed by other old-timers. See Annals of Wyoming 4, no. 3 (January 1927): 325 ff. for Sherrod’s tales.
20. McDermott, Guide.
21. Annals of Wyoming 6, nos. 1–2 (July–October 1929): 199ff. This may be the area a mile west of Bird Cloud where scores of tipi rings are still visible, one notably smaller than the others.
22. Peter R. Decker, The Utes Must Go: American Expansion and the Removal of a People (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Publishing, 2004), 101.
23. Decker, The Utes Must Go, 99.
24. Quoted in ibid., 192.
25. C. E. Van Loan, “The Greatest Trout-Fishing Town in the World,” Outing Magazine 56, no. 4 (July 1910), 336–337.
26. Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, 268.
27. Chenopodium is a member of the goosefoot family. Huantzole, a vigorous spinachlike Chenopodium, is still grown in Mexico and in my garden. One May we were astounded to find a large draw on the top of the property crammed with thousands of sego lilies whose starchy tubers were prized by the Indians.
28. See chapter 8 for Seton-Karr.
29. Flakes are the tiny chips of stone that are broken off the piece of chert someone is trying to make into a projectile point. This is not a lost art. There are many flint knappers today who can make beautiful points and tools.
30. Dudley Gardner, Report 3 (December 30, 2009), 2.
31. Ibid. It should be noted that Archaic pit houses in Wyoming were older than and vastly different from the deep and elaborate pit houses with storage pits, vent holes and partitions in the southwest, as at Mesa Verde.
32. Unpublished letter to Annie Proulx.
1. Stokes Field Guide to Birds: Western Region 3 (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), 83–84.
2. Geoffrey Trease, The Grand Tour: A History of the Golden Age of Travel (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 2.
3. Michael Frome cited in Dennis Drabelle, “Unfair Game,” Audubon, January–February 2008, 5; “Environment: Sluicing the Eagles,” Time, August 16, 1971.
4. Ibid.
5. Drabelle, “Unfair Game.”
6. Chris C. Fisher, Birds of the Rocky Mountains (Edmonton, A. B., and Renton, Wash.: Lone Pine Publishing, 1997), 298.
7. Paul R. Ehrlich, David
S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye, The Birder’s Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 420.
8. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 91.
9. Charles H. Trost in David Allen Sibley, The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior (New York: Knopf, 2001), 418.
10. James Hancock, Herons of North America: Their World in Focus (San Diego, London: Academic Press, 2000), 43–45.
11. Mary Meagher and Douglas B. Houston, Yellowstone and the Biology of Time: Photographs Across a Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud
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