THE GRAND TOTEM. Were you to travel the Oregon or Santa Fe Trail in 1850, you would have learned to recognize, even from four miles away, nothing so quickly as a cottonwood tree. Great in size, comparatively numerous, marvelously useful and beautiful, the cottonwood is the totem of prairie and plains even more than the bison because, unlike the great beast, Populus deltoides is as abundant now as two centuries ago. Indians made canoes from it and used it to prop up teepees; Missouri River steamers fueled their way with cottonwood; homesteaders used it for rafters and posts in their soddies; game birds flew in to eat the catkins; bees made honey in trunk hollows; and travelers—red and white—climbed the trees to see what lay ahead or who might be coming up from behind. Without the cottonwood, life would still have proceeded across the plains just as life would have gone on in New England without the codfish, that eastern totem you can still see atop steeples and in the Massachusetts Statehouse; but I don’t know of any plains congregation (or legislature) that ever put up a weather vane in the shape of a cottonwood, yet well they all should have.
BRED OF THE BLIZZARD. An improbable beast indeed—the head too large, horns too small, shoulders too high and rump too low, tail too short; a composite beast indeed—hooves of a cow, hump of a camel, mane of a lion, beard of a goat, the temperament of a dragon. Possessed of surprising speed, tremendous strength, an allegedly slow brain and limited vision, and its common name a description of what it is not: buffalo. Yet to aboriginals and Americans alike the American bison—evolved to withstand deadly blizzards of the great expanses—was the essence of the prairie and plain. The Indians of the high midlands built a way of life around it, discovering in it heat and light, fuel for body and sustenance for soul, and finding a use for all of its parts from nostrils to tail, from its scat to its spirit. White people put bisons on coins, bills, postage stamps, medallions, state flags and seals, mostly after trying to exterminate them like cockroaches. Before 1800 there were perhaps a hundred-million bison roaming America in numbers possibly making them the most abundant large land-animals on earth. A century later, naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton thought only eight-hundred remained. White men hunted them for hides and flesh, but mostly they slaughtered bison as a kind of implicit genocide of Plains Indians, the last holdouts against American absorption. Today, there are about a hundred times more bison than Seton’s figure, and an alert traveler over the Great Plains may again see the beasts, if not in the millions that once stunned even the most wearied explorers, then at least as a symbolic presence. Never mind that now somebody owns every last one of them.
¿HABLA ESPAÑOL? At almost the exact center of Kansas is a small, brick museum and inside under glass lies a corroded piece of metal looking like a desiccated honeycomb, its medievalness startling in the vast wheat fields around Lyons. One of Coronado’s men, so it seems, left that bit of chain mail behind in 1541 near the farthest penetration the conquistadors made into the American heartland. The horsemen, sweltering under their iron shirts and heavy morions, were hoping to duplicate the rapine and plunder of Pizarro in Peru. Led by two Indians who were kept chained and urged to yield up information by snapping dogs of war, the Spaniards searched the Southwest and central plains for rumored cities of gold. Had the conquerors been capable of perceiving Quivira as a metaphor of the economic promise of the territory, American history would be something much different, so changed that you would probably be reading this sentence in Spanish.
THE WARRIOR DIPAUCH. To fall in love with the land is, sooner or later, to ask what it was like before the twentieth century hit. Did the hills show as they do now, and did the river then turn just so under the bluff; and the first people, how did they spend their days here? On occasion there is an answer, as in the work of Prince Maximilian zu Wied, a German ethnographer, and his illustrator, Karl Bodmer, a Swiss painter. They ascended the Missouri in 1833 and created the fullest and finest artistic record of preconquest America ever. They saw and represented the place in its primeval aspect when Plains Indians had not yet much come to depend on foreign goods. Bodmer was a watercolorist who drew with the precision of a draftsman and painted with the genius of a master. You can check the accuracy of many of his landscapes today by comparing his paintings with the actual topography. Even more magical is a work like his Interior of a Mandan Earth Lodge. When paired with Maximilian’s written account of evenings spent in the lodges where the travelers listened to tales told by the old warrior Dipauch, a viewer is almost present among the five Mandans sitting around the fire-pit, dusky winter-light slipping down through the smoke hole, long lances stacked just so, shields and parfleches and medicine bundles hung neatly, a bull-boat paddle leaning against a cottonwood post. Maximilian supplies the voices, the music, and dances, as he describes where the men sat, the gifts young warriors gave older ones, the tall and powerful dancer with an effeminate voice, and the women ceremoniously arising to the drumbeat and picking up lances and throwing aside their robes, and their discomfort as they hurried past the agog foreigners.
THE BEND IN THE TRACK. It’s dusk, and the stone mass of Scott’s Bluff in western Nebraska has gone indigo against the sky and seems to cast a shadow all the way to the distant train tracks which here make a small, almost imperceptible deviation from a course otherwise as unyielding from straightness as a civil engineer can execute. In 1905 a railroad altered its track bed by a few feet to avoid a single, forgotten and isolated grave of a woman pioneer who died in 1852. Somewhere between her New York home and the Missouri River eighteen-hundred miles westward, she contracted cholera. Week after week, she lay upon a few thin quilts in the jolting wagon heading for the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. This halfway point accomplished, she died, and her family buried her in the sagebrush flats and marked the grave by setting into the ground a spare rim for a wagon wheel. On the iron felly a friend had scratched:
REBECCA WINTERS AGED 50 YEARS.
The rim, slicked by visitors’ touches, stands today just ten feet from the Burlington tracks which shake only a little more than the grave when the freights pass every hour or so as they have for nearly a century. Of the many burials still marked along the great western trails, this one somehow moves me the most because of the grudging shift it forced in steel tracks that never want to get out of the way of anything, even mountains: the persistence of that small and pitiful ferrous arch and the bones below in the dry soil being jarred ever so steadily into the granular soil they are coming to resemble.
PRAIRIE TROGLODYTES. Henry David Thoreau, in his customary way of negative boasting, said his cabin at Walden Pond cost $28.12½ in 1845. Oscar Babcock of North Loup, Nebraska, in 1872 built his home of comparable size for one-tenth Thoreau’s small sum. The Walden cabin had two windows and Babcock’s only one, but both had a single door without a lock. Babcock cut his home into a hillside and closed the front with a sod wall, spending nothing until he put in the eight-by-ten-inch window, the wooden door, and the stovepipe. Living in a dugout like his, typically, prairie settlers as soon as circumstances allowed would build a sod house and, if the crops came in and a tornado didn’t suck up somebody, eventually build a frame home, all three within a few feet of one another. Wooden structures didn’t always make sense on a terrain exposed to strong winds, wildfires, severe cold and heat, and Indians bent on mischief. After all, dugouts and soddies, which can last a century, never blew away or caught fire, they naturally ameliorated outside temperatures by twenty to fifty degrees, and they were reasonably defensible. But even with a whitewashed front door they were inelegant, and bison or wagons in the night sometimes ran over the top of a dugout, and rain seeped through and was likely to drip for a couple of days. One homesteader said she had to stand at her stove with an umbrella raised to keep clods from dropping into the stew, and another family got lax with maintenance and found themselves one night buried in the mud of a collapsed ceiling. A plains mother jumped off the roof of her dugout but failed in her try at suicide. Men found it almost impossible to convince a missus who had know
n a real house in the East that she wasn’t now living like the gophers just beyond the well.
THE CYCLONIC TRACK. If it’s murder you seek in American history, look no further than the prairies and plains, the traditional home of solid and upright citizens, people who abide laws, are first to fight in a war and the last to join a social revolution. But Americans know that the greatest warriors—because of the odds against them—on the continent were the Plains Indians whose resistance became the soul of the Mythic West. (Once on the Great Wall of China, in a strange conversation, a Chinese man asked me about the ferocity of Comanches and whether they still conducted raids.) We know that tribal peoples of the plains were the last to cease the fight against the theft of native lands and the white corruption of their ways; we may remember that the final pitched battle between Indians and a federal force occurred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota—not in 1876 but 1975. For the settlers, in spite of not having a cause so just as the Indians’, the history is even more crimson: Jesse and Frank James, the Younger Brothers, the Dalton Gang, John Brown, William Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, the Bloody Benders, Wild Bill Hickok, Richard Hickcock and Perry Smith (In Cold Blood), Boothill, Bleeding Kansas. In the 1930s, a physician named William Peterson postulated in his book The Patient and the Weather that people living in areas of severe and frequent meteorological disturbances—Tornado Alley is here—are prone to aberrations like mental alertness, genius, comeliness, and to counterparts like insanity, feeblemindedness, and physical malformation. Should the theory have merit, who could have been surprised by the cruelty of a Nebraska serial killer named Charlie Starkweather?
AN EIGHT-FOOT PHARMACOPOEIA. In Missouri, south of Sedalia, the trees begin to thin out, the land to open, and something fine and rare appears: prairie never penetrated by a plow. On these virgin acres that haven’t even been grazed in years, a hiker with a guidebook to plants and a sharp eye can find relicts high and low. Example: a slender stalk of bristly leaves and yellow flowers that look like small sun disks. Identification: compass plant, also called pilot weed, gum weed, and Silphium laciniatum. The Ponca Indians called it makatanga (big medicine) and the Pawnee kahtstawas (rough medicine). Because it aligns its narrow leaves with the poles, it gave direction to hunting Indians and westering whites, and to both it provided soft exudations that made a serviceable chewing gum. The Omahas believed that where this plant appeared in abundance lightning would also, so they camped at a distance and burned the dried taproot during electrical storms to allow rising smoke to deflect thunderbolts. The Pawnee pounded the long, carrotlike tuber into a decoction for general disability, and settlers (learning from the Indians) used it and a related species to treat rheumatism and scrofula in themselves and glandular enlargements in their animals. The leaves they brewed into antispasmodics, diuretics, emetics, and cough suppressants. For this eight feet of pharmaceutical utility, they needed no guidebook.
A PRAIRIE RIDDLE. The creature is so associated with the American prairie and plains as to be its totemic mini-beast, but its heritage is classical and biblical. Eos, Greek goddess of dawn, transformed her mortal husband into one so that he might have endless life—and the change worked, if you consider immortality to be an eternal withering of the human into nothing more than a cracking, disembodied voice. To Aesop the creature was a symbol of improvidence; Moses named it as one of the three things his people could eat in the wilderness; and John the Baptist in his desert journey survived on it (with a touch of honey). On this continent, Potawatomi Indian women ground and blended it with acorn meal into patties and roasted them on hot stones or sun-dried them to eat during winter; whites, though, could see them only as an airborne pestilence that came on like evil thunderclouds to strip off fields like bedsheets for the wash. Sometimes the things would even gnaw away on sweat-stained hickory handles of scythes and pitchforks. Yet, one alone, winging, leaping, stridulating, is a creature of distinctive voice and delightful name: grasshopper.
WHIZZ! It’s one more thing the bulldozer, with help from rural electrification, has put the quietus on. You can now cross the seven-hundred miles of Iowa and Nebraska or roll through Kansas or Oklahoma and see not a single working windmill. Yes, you might spot a few derelict steel towers yet holding on to the helic blades, perhaps one continuing to rotate slowly on unoiled bearings dryly screeching as it grinds toward a final silence. Even more than barbed wire, the American wind-engine allowed settlement and ranching in a land where water moved not so reliably in creeks as in aquifers below. Then, at mid-century, came submersible electric-pumps and bulldozer-gouged ponds, both impervious to windstorms and neither needing much maintenance. But lo! The white man’s West was not the same without the interruption wind-machines gave to the horizon and neither is a rancher’s utility bill which once reflected the frugal pumping of shallow waters. And more, gone from the western country of swiveling metal vanes with painted trademarks that could cast words—a virtual story of passion—into the prairie wind: Adam’s Novelty, American Advance, Back-Geared Baker, Geared Gearless, Boss Vaneless, Defiance Oilomatic, Running in Oil Giant, Midget Wonder, Eureka Junior, Farmer’s Friend, Terrible Swede, Lady Elgin, Gamble Long Stroke, Dempster Double Stroke, Irvin Screw, Whizz, Improved Climax, Happy Home.
THESE TWENTY EMBLEMS. Bits of essence, pieces of prairie and plains, commonplaces, definers, synecdoches, things abundant—or at least once so. But even where abundance has vanished, as I write now, they are for a while longer still on the land, and you have only to look in a certain cast of light to see them or perhaps only their pentimenti.
TO GO SOLO
For a writer in search of stories, traveling with a friend or partner—no matter how affable—can be a distraction difficult to overcome. Despite the assists from an additional pair of eyes and ears, other details potentially useful get inevitably masked or obliterated by a second human presence and vanish unnoted. I estimate it takes about two days of travel with a companion to equal reportage gathered during a single day of solo exploration. Call this near-necessity the loneliness of the long-distance writer.
A Fallen Yew, an Oaken Pillar, a Forgotten Birch
Of the several ways to enter a foreign land, mine has always been to plunge into its depths, immerse myself in differences that immediately tell me home is a long way off. When I arrived near London one warm early October morning, a fellow traveler and I moved quickly to hire a little four-on-the-floor, right-side-drive auto and, unwisely, took no practice tour around the parking lot. I steered us off onto the left side of a small highway and immediately got pulled into the vortex of a roundabout—a rotary—those paved circles that whirlpool racing traffic, sort it out, and send it along its various routes. A foreign driver watching for road markers may have to circle enough times to begin to feel like one of Dante’s wayward souls being spun in Purgatory.
My navigator—a woman of pronounced Germanic heritage, whom I shall call Lucy—read the route signs fast and said, “Go right!” but since all exits were right turns, I had to circle again. I suggested she see the roundabout as the face of a clock and tell me our direction as if it were an hour. On the next rotation, she, a precise person and lover of digital time, called out “Nine-forty-five!” I interpreted that to be ten o’clock, which was wrong, and she said, “Try nine-thirty. Maybe nine-twenty-five toward nine-twenty-six.”
Soon after, we entered a second rotary and explored its possibilities. She called out, “Three-twenty-two!” The road I did not want was, by nasty chance, the B3022, and so that’s the one I took. Once again on the correct route, I said, possibly louder than necessary, “Just the hour! Use just the hour hand!”
At least until Americans widely adopt the traffic rotary, the English roundabout gives sudden, full-measure introduction to national differences, but not of the sort I was hoping for. I wanted a prelude more felicitous; say, a pub snack to accompany a half-pint of ale should suffice. We found a traditional plowman’s lunch—two types of hard cheese; pickled cocktail onions; small green salad; a
whang of house-baked bread; and the capstone: a scoop of Branston pickle (a relative of chutney). English motoring challenges be damned, assisted by a dollop of Branston pickle and a half-pint, I sat back in full pleasure of differences and felt happily arrived. Ah, to be in England now that October’s here.
To shake jet lag, about fifteen miles east of Winchester we turned off toward Selborne, a Hampshire village capable of inflicting serious quaintness-shock on an unsuspecting Yank, but I’d been there before and reckoned myself sufficiently inoculated to keep my wits and tame my ardor for rural England. We checked into an old inn, drew the draperies against the afternoon light and, meaning only to shake some jet lag, inescapably slept deeply until Lucy awoke me with a rattling announcement of “Hell’s bells! It’s six-thirty-eight! P.M.!”