This is the well-paid elite of the transient construction industry that is getting fat on Federal projects that more and more Western states are coming to view as economic necessities.
Some people accuse Western governors, senators, and representatives of dipping into the "pork barrel," but others say these projects are no more than prudent allocations of the taxpayers' money for necessary construction that Western states either cannot or will not afford. At any rate it is a big industry in the West, a money tree for a lot of people including the foremen and the skilled heavy-equipment operators who make up the construction elite -- and a massive source of both hope and frustration to the boomers, drifters, and other free-lance laborers who go high on the hog when they get hired, and live like hobos when they don't.
"Bud," the broad-shouldered, pot-bellied cat driver, was not unhappy with life when I met him in a big dance hall in Jackson, Wyo. He was wearing an expensive gray Stetson and a pair of fancy cowboy boots that had not made much of a dent in his $200-a-week salary on the road-building job outside of town. In the course of an hour he asked about 30 girls to dance, got turned down by at least 25, and spent the rest of his time posing regally at the bar, dispensing wisdom and humor in every direction. At one point he let his gaze flash over the crowd and pronounced in the manner of a man long-skilled in the squandering of vast sums: "These damn silly tourists think they're big spenders! Ha! We'll see." At that, he swept his change off the bar and disappeared.
The tramp digger in Missoula had not been so lucky. He wore a cheap, frayed windbreaker that was all but useless in the bitter nights of a late Rocky Mountain spring. He was tall, with the thick neck and sloping shoulders of a man who works with his back, but his eyes were dull in a slack face, and he walked with a weary shuffle that made him seem like an old man at 26.
As we walked along the deserted sidewalks of Higgins Avenue I asked him what plans he had. "I don't know, pard," he said with a shrug and a half smile, "maybe California, maybe Utah, it's all the same. I'll just hit the road when it gets light. There's always work for a good hard-rock digger."
Bobby Cleary was a specialist of sorts; as a tramp digger he is a body for hire in any kind of dangerous, underground work. He had come over from Butte where he said he was black-listed in the mines because he had quit too often. There was no work in Missoula, he was stone broke, and his prospects for the immediate future were not real bright. Now he looked up at the sky that was already getting gray, took the butt of an old cigaret from behind his ear, lit it, and recited what seemed to be his motto:
"That's the way it goes -- first your money, then your clothes."
He had said it several times the night before, when we had struck up a conversation in the Thunderbird after he had frightened everybody else at the bar with a loud diatribe on "justice for the working man, by Jesus. My old man fought for the union and one of these days I'm gonna write it all down like Jack London. By Jesus he cared. He knew what it was like, and how about another whisky here, fella, for a no-count tramp digger!"
In the Oxford Cafe -- or "The Ox," as it is called by its generally unemployed and often homeless habitues -- I ordered coffee, and Cleary asked for "a bowl of beans." He looked at me and grinned: "I figure you're buyin', pard. Otherwise I'd have ordered a glass of water and crackers," he nodded. "Starch and water, it fills the belly."
I reached in the pocket of my leather sheepherder's jacket, pulled out a black, passport-sized wallet, and put two dollars on the counter. In the dreary dawn of a hobo's breakfast at the Oxford Cafe, that wallet seemed as out of place as a diplomatic pouch or a pair of cashmere Levi's.
It was a week or so later when the wallet embarrassed me again. I had picked up an elderly hitchhiker named Bob Barnes on Interstate 90 near the cattle town of Miles City, Mont. We stopped for gas at the North Dakota line, and I left the wallet on the dashboard while I wired up a defective muffler. When I got back in the car he said very quietly: "That's a real nice wallet; where did you get it?"
"Buenos Aires," I said, then immediately added, "Things are cheap down there." But I had not been quick enough and it showed in his face; here was a young punk with a fat black wallet, idly pulling rank on an old man who felt himself going down and out, for some reason that was either senseless or cruel, or both.
Bob Barnes was an ex-truck driver, who looked like an aging school-teacher. He was too old now for any chance of a job with the big hauling companies, but still able to work as a "wildcatter," which is like saying a pitcher cut loose by the Yankees might still catch on with the Mets. He had borrowed some money to come out from Minneapolis to Great Falls, Mont., where he had an old friend who owned a small trucking firm and would give him a job. But the friend had moved to California and nothing else was available -- at least not before his money ran out, and when that happened he began riding his thumb back to Minneapolis with not even a toothbrush or a pack of cigarets for luggage, and not a dime in his pocket.
When I picked him up around noon on Saturday, he had not eaten since Friday morning. "Every time I walked past one of those highway restaurants I thought about going in and asking if I could wash dishes for a meal," he said, "but I just couldn't do it. I'm not a bum and I don't know how to act like one."
We were together all afternoon, a long hot drive across the plains and the badlands to Bismark, but it was late in the day before he finally got around to admitting that his trip was not a lark of some kind.
When he finally began talking about himself, I wished he hadn't. His wife had been killed two years earlier in an automobile accident. Since then he had been a drifter, but it was a hard dollar for a man in his 50s, and this wild stab at a job in Montana was his last real idea what to do with himself. When he got back to Minneapolis he thought he could "arrange a loan until things get better."
Unlike the other boomers I met, Bob Barnes has gone the whole route and found it pretty barren in the homestretch. He has pushed big timber trucks through blizzards in northern Minnesota and driven straight through from Florida to Chicago with a load of tomatoes that would spoil if he stopped to sleep. He has driven every kind of rig on every major highway in the nation. He knows the names of waitresses in truck stops in Virginia and Texas and Oregon. And he can tell you how to get from New York to Los Angeles with a heavyweight load by taking back roads and avoiding the truck scales; there is only one route left, and only a few veteran wildcatters know it.
I dropped him at the Salvation Army in Bismarck, where he could get a bowl of soup and a cot for the night before striking out again in the morning for Minneapolis. We shook hands and wished each other good luck. I felt like a pious hypocrite and drove off rapidly, without looking back.
Several days later, on the flat black ribbon that runs from Bismarck down the prairie to Pierre, I picked up a young, happy-go-lucky type from Pennsylvania. He had just quit a hay-hauling job in North Dakota and was on his way to Los Angeles, where he felt sure of getting a job.
Maybe so, I thought, but I hope I don't have to pick you up in 10 years when they've really tightened the screws, because the day of the boomer is rapidly coming to an end. In the age of automation and job security, a touch of the wanderlust is the kiss of death. In any count of the chronically unemployed the boomers will be very prominent; they have never sought security, but only work; they have never saved, but only earned and spent -- participating, as it were, in an increasingly technological economy that has less and less room for their sort with every passing year.
When we got to Pierre I dropped the young optimist and his blue plastic suitcase on the south side of town. He got out in the middle of a small dust storm and pointed his thumb toward Los Angeles.
I returned to the Holiday Inn -- where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms -- to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yeste
rday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.
National Observer, July 13, 1964
Marlon Brando and the Indian Fish-In
Olympia, Wash.
"As an actor, he's not much of a field general." That was the consensus here last week after Marlon Brando's well-publicized but futile and disorganized attempt to help local Indians "regain" fishing rights granted them more than 100 years ago under treaties with the U.S. Government.
The old Governor Hotel, just down the street from the State Capitol, was almost taken over by Indians who came from every corner of the nation to protest "encroachment" on their historic treaty rights. The show was billed as the turning point for the American Indian in this century. Said one of the leaders: "Up to now we've always been on the defensive, but now we've reached a point where it's life or death for the Indian culture, and we've decided to take the offensive."
Early rumors had it that not only Mr. Brando, but Paul Newman, James Baldwin, and Eugene Burdick would be on hand to offer moral support and draw publicity. But of the four only Mr. Brando showed up, along with writers Kay Boyle and Paul Jacobs from San Francisco, and the Rev. John J. Yaryan, canon precenter of San Francisco Grace Cathedral. The canon arrived with a white bucket marked "bait," and the blessing of his bishop, James A. Pike. The idea was to stage a "fish-in" for the Indian cause.
More than 50 tribes were represented by some 500 Indians at the gathering, and one of the leaders said happily that it was the first time Indians had demonstrated any unity since the battle of Little Big Horn.
This time, though, things didn't go so well for the red man. Mr. Brando led the Indians in three separate assaults against "the forces of injustice," and they lost all three. By week's end, the show had fizzled out and Mr. Brando was off in the wilderness of the northwest Olympic Peninsula, trying to get himself arrested again and prove some point that had long since been lost in the chaos that characterized the affair from beginning to end.
Even so, the thing was a qualified success almost in spite of itself. Among the important results were:
-- A new feeling of unity among Indians, where previously there had been none.
-- Plenty of publicity for the Indian cause, thanks largely to Mr. Brando's presence.
-- The emergence of a new, dynamic leadership in the form of the National Indian Youth Council.
-- Emergence of the fact that the Indian wants no part of the Negro civil-rights cause and will make every effort to detach himself from it.
-- The inescapable conclusion that the Indians still have a long way to go before they can speak with one voice, or even make themselves heard effectively without the help of people like Mr. Brando.
The aim of the whole affair was to protest the state of Washington's forbidding the Indians to fish with nets on certain areas outside their tiny reservations.
The Indians point out that the Treaty of Medicine Creek, signed in 1854 by representatives of Washington state Indians and the U.S. Government, deprived them of their reservations but permitted them to fish in "usual and accustomed places." So, they claim, did other treaties of similar vintage.
The most "usual" place for these Indians -- mostly members of the Nisqually and Puyalhip tribes -- has been the Nisqually River, fed by a Mt. Rainier glacier and cutting 60 miles to enter Puget Sound a few miles south of Tacoma.
In recent years they have used nylon gill nets and other increasingly effective gear of the white man -- to the discomfiture of sportsmen restricted to rod and reel, commercial fishermen banned from the river entirely, and fisheries officials who fear complete loss of salmon and steelhead trout runs.
So last month the State Supreme Court ruled that the state can restrict off-reservation Indian net-fishing in areas it deems the more necessary to protect salmon and steelhead runs. The state did so, and the Indians promptly claimed this action violated the Treaty of Medicine Creek.
Says Janet McCloud, Tulalip Indian whose husband fishes the Nisqually: "They [the original treaty-makers] promised us we could fish for eternity -- as long as the mountain stands, the grass grows green, and the sun shines. . ." The State Game Department, she said, thinks the steelhead belongs to the white man. "They must think the steelhead swam over behind the Mayflower."
Since the state restricted their fishing, the Indians have been organizing in protest. The state, by way of defense of its action, points to the majority decision of the Supreme Court, which said, "None of the signatories to the original treaty contemplated fishing with a 600-foot nylon gill net, which could prevent the escapement of any fish up the river for spawning purposes."
The Indians deny this. They say such factors as pollution and dam-building are contributing heavily to depletion of Washington's fish, and add that only 30 per cent of fish caught in Washington are caught by Indians -- the rest going to sportsmen and white commercial fishermen.
That was the background to last week's developments. For the Indians, the week began well and became progressively worse. On Monday Mr. Brando and Canon Yaryan got themselves arrested for using a drift net to catch two steelheads in the Puyallup River near Tacoma, where a recently issued injunction forbids net-fishing by Indians or anyone else. They also got a lot of half-serious publicity, but to Mr. Brando's chagrin the charges were quickly dropped. Said Pierce County Prosecutor John McCutcheon: "Brando is no fisherman. He was here to make a point. There's no use prolonging this thing."
And so, reluctantly, the rest of the day was taken up with a series of strategy meetings dominated by Mr. Brando and a bevy of lawyers, one of whom gave a nearly superhuman performance by managing to appear in almost as many news photographs as did Mr. Brando.
So the "fish-in" proved nothing except that a Hollywood actor and an Episcopal minister can fish illegally in Washington and get away with it. The Indians were no better off, and the only one who took the risk of fishing with Mr. Brando and the canon now faces a contempt-of-court charge for defying an injunction.
Nor did a mass demonstration at the State Capitol on Tuesday help the cause. Gov. Albert D. Rosellini, along with about 1,500 others, listened to several fiery speeches and a "proclamation of protest" concerning "harassment" of Indians, then gave a flat "no" to proposals that Indians be given greater freedom to fish in "the usual and accustomed places." To do so, said the governor, would be to condone a "hazard" to state fish resources.
Mr. Brando called the governor's stand "unsatisfactory" and said he would step up his efforts on behalf of the Indians. "We're prepared to go all the way to the wall with this thing," he told reporters. "I'll keep on fishing, and if it means going to jail, I'll go to jail."
All of which made good copy for the local press, but nobody seemed to know what good would come of it. At one point, a lynx-eyed young lady in a very tight dress asked the actor if it was true that some of the Indians resented his new role as "the Indian spokesman."
Her question was merely the public echo of a feeling that quite a few people had expressed in private. There was no doubt that Mr. Brando's presence at the affair drew a lot of public attention, but much of it was irrelevant and led to speculation -- some in print -- that he was "doing the whole thing for personal publicity."
He wasn't, but he so completely dominated the scene that many of the Indians felt lucky when anyone noticed them at all. The issue came to a head when a television network scheduled an interview with several leaders of the youth council. It was a chance for the Indians to present their point of view to a nationwide audience that is largely ignorant of their problems. But Mr. Brando vetoed the interview because he had plans for another "fish-in" on the same day, and wanted all the Indians with him.
Unfortunately, he couldn't convince the press to drive four hours through a rainstorm to cover an event that seemed to have no news value. Contrary to his expectations, the publicity effort was a flop.
In a
ll, the whole affair suffered badly from lack of organization. Mr. Brando was undoubtedly sincere in his effort; he talked persuasively and at great length about Indian problems, but he seemed to have no strategy except to get himself arrested.
Only three or four people among the several hundred involved seemed to have any idea what was happening from one hour to the next. An air of mystery and intrigue pervaded the whole affair. Mr. Brando explained it as being necessary to keep the authorities in the dark, but the authorities were several jumps ahead of him at every turn, and the only people really in the dark were the reporters, who were generally sympathetic at first; the Indians, many of whom had taken time off from their jobs to come to Olympia and accomplish something; and the lawyers, whose laboriously contrived strategy proved ineffective at every showdown.
Aside from lack of organization, another root problem was the Indians' fear of getting their "cause" identified in the public mind with the Negro civil-rights movement. "We're happy to have Marlon on our side," said one Indian leader. "But he's one of our big problems, too, because he keeps making statements comparing Indians and Negroes; the two movements are entirely different. The Negroes don't have the law on their side yet and they have a lot of popular prejudice against them, while the Indians' problem is the Federal bureaucracy; we already have the law on our side in the form of treaties, and all we ask the white man to do is live up to those treaties."