Sitting Bull and the Broom of Heaven
WHEN I LEANED OVER the side of Nikawa that Saturday morning to check the hull, a mural of a cumulus sky lay across the slick river, and from the clouds suddenly appeared a countenance smiling down on me, a bearded one. If I’d believed the Engine of Creation had a human face, I might have taken the visage for It, but It was only I, who soon dipped my hands into the river and shattered the firmament and myself, then held perfectly still to watch the fractured sky and a man’s mug slowly return as if the river knew precisely where each piece belonged, and all was seemingly just as it had been, but it was an illusion of the reflection, another trick of the river, for in the minute the water took to return to a mirror I was that much older, the clouds had puffed noticeably into new shapes, world population increased by 162, the planet sailed another eleven hundred miles through the ether, the solar system traveled seventy-eight hundred miles closer to the Northern Cross, and the tectonic plate the Missouri flows across had crept microscopically closer to Siberia. A stilled river is an illusion of the human situation where stasis is only a concept, but a flowing river is a traditional metaphor for the way of all things. Mountains suggest fixity, but rivers give continuance.
Yet it was quiet water that showed humankind its face. Watching myself reassembling, I wondered about the first person to discover that the image on the water was his—or hers—and not the visage of a river demon, about the first someone capable of imagining the blind river might have made him—who was largely water—so that it could not just see itself—a toad could serve that end—but also perceive itself and imagine rivers as the legs and arms of the seminal seas sent onto land to learn to breathe, walk, smile, love, dream, and esteem its sources.
Pilotis caught me in my idling and asked, “What are you doing now?” I said, Just reflecting.
Beyond the sheltered nook where Nikawa lay, the river ran harsher, and we rattled along for some miles, our bellies solid for the moment with a breakfast of the Sitting Bull Special: eggs with chopped green peppers, salsa, hash browns. Just beyond the mouth of the great Hunkpapa chief’s natal river, the Grand, the Professor put his hands to his stomach as we bounced hard and said, “I hope the old warrior doesn’t decide to stand up.” One more Red Man’s Revenge, I said. The river grew smoother for a space, and I could throttle forward to bucket us along a fair course slowed only by my weavings past floaters, many of them dark and nasty low riders which Pilotis began calling dreadnoughts, a term more decorous than the maledictions we’d been heaping on them. As we rounded a bend, a crosswind picked up a piece of cold river and pitched it through the window into my face and helped settle my Special, but the roughness made the depth finder useless for guiding us above the channel, and the complexity of the braided Missouri under the reservoir rendered the chart nearly as bootless in revealing shallows of submerged trees.
Wind makes a river immensely complicated if not impossible to read, so as we went on, we tried to prepare for that sound from Hell, the props striking anything less yielding than water. We had a hit here and there, nothing terminal, but with each one the tense Professor expelled a loud sailor’s blessing. After several of these I had to tell him that while I liked his sharing my concern for the boat, the sudden shouts were more unsettling than the strikes. Could he swear more serenely? I noticed he looked a bit peaked and asked how he was. He said, “Sitting Bull’s crouching.”
We crossed into North Dakota, happy about another mark behind us, and the water smoothed in the bends protected from the Plains wind. Where the broad river ran straight, it looked like a wide avenue reaching beyond the horizon into some huge openness that could be only a sea or, as it was, the fossil of an ancient one now raised high and dry. The Professor said, “The first time a river engineer visits an ocean, he’s thinking, There’s got to be one hell of a dam out there somewhere.”
A dreadnought struck hard against the hull, a location I seldom worried about in spite of the loud vibration, but the others took it more seriously, their faces registering deep misgiving. I loved how my mates shared the burden of foreboding, and I was beginning to realize their anxiety served to raise my pluck, and I hoped it was neither inappropriate nor unmanly to feed off their edginess in that way. Their disquiet invariably made me want even more to see them safely through.
To distract us from the banging hull, I did what I sometimes tried during long miles—I asked a hypothetical question: Were Sitting Bull to rise again and see his homelands along the Missouri, what would he recognize? My companions considered. Certainly not the impounded river nor the overgrazed slopes nor vast acres of plowed flatlands nor hills barren of massed bison and antelope nor the miles of gravel roads. Pilotis said, “The question is, What have we successors changed the least? What has eluded our technical grasp?” And the Professor, “What’s impervious to so-called civilization?” They were quiet too long, and I translated the inscription honoring architect Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, “If thou seekest his monument, look around.” Pilotis squinted down a long reach: “Water? No, no.” Consider the face of the river, I said. The Professor: “Waves and more waves.” Pilotis: “Wind! Sitting Bull would recognize the Plains wind.” I said, The broom of heaven.
Near Fort Yates, an outpost named for a captain killed with Custer, the place Sitting Bull was a prisoner for some months and later buried for many years until his people came in the night and took him away, I spied a small wooden dock running into Oahe from a heavy willow thicket, a chance to tie up and get relief from the banging, although I wasn’t sure precisely where we were and thought we might be about to trespass on the Standing Rock Reservation. The wind mastered me the first two tries to get us against the dock, then I slipped under a gust to get close enough for Pilotis to loop our bow line over a cleat and secure Nikawa, and we hopped onto the pier, the Professor saying, “How excellently firma is this terra.” We broke out sandwiches, ate in silence, walked the shore, then packed up.
Two large, round men stepped from the willows. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels and travelers’ accounts contain many a passage about Indians seeming to materialize from a forest, a prairie, the night, as if they were resident souls of trees, stones, the dark wind. Those two men were not there, then they just simply were there. I thought an arrest was imminent until I saw they held beer cans. They approached, greeted us, gave us left-side handshakes in the gentle grip common among tribal peoples, and they asked about Nikawa, where we were going. Then a woman, also quite round, appeared, and behind her came two children, slender and pretty, and one of the men said they were his family. She carried a bottle of light beer, and her grin was an interspersal of incisors and cuspids between dark gaps that gave her the appearance of an awesome figure out of a shaman’s vision.
One at a time, each person asked to go aboard Nikawa, to which I said yes, although I was uneasy because the beer had taken some measure of the adults. The children romped into the pilothouse and began tugging at the controls, the Professor’s caution going unheeded. The father asked for a ride, but I declined for several reasons, the alcohol not the least; instead, I offered a couple of T-shirts imprinted with NIKAWA that I had made up for the crew and also strangers helping us. He was pleased, and said he would leave a Hunkpapa jacket at the Fort Rice trading post upriver. I said, You’re Sitting Bull’s people? And Chief Rain-in-the-Face? “Yes!” the children cried out, proud of the association. But the beer made good conversation difficult, and the parents knew little of the river ahead other than it was natural—that is, shallow and twisted.
They climbed back onto the dock, waved goodbyes, and the father pitched his beer can into the willows and the mother her bottle of light into the river, dispelling my illusion that our encounter—with its formal greetings, gifts, and queries about what was upstream—carried echoes of earlier travelers. I pulled into the current, the wind taking us again, and Pilotis said, “There’s proof that respect for the land doesn’t come with the blood.”
The Professor: “Education, education, education.” I added, And a fair chance to escape poverty, to live hopefully.
I asked had they ever seen one of the old Savage Arms Company advertising posters with a portrait of Sitting Bull and the slogan “Savage Rifles Make Bad Indians Good.” The famous Hunkpapa chief needed to be made “good” because he fought against the breaking of an 1868 treaty that guaranteed the Lakotas possession of much of their territory, and he had the temerity to resist gold miners swarming in to pillage the sacred Black Hills, the grubstakers soon supported by the U.S. Cavalry. Of all the enemy leaders the United States Army has taken on over the past couple of centuries, none has stood for a more honorable cause than Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, a cause that any American—with our fierce allegiance to real property—should be able to comprehend. One may see the respect, commingled with bigotry, that soldiers and civilians once accorded Sitting Bull in their myth that he was a white man in disguise.
The Missouri gave us broad bends, each with an attendant warning on the chart of “Hazard Area,” but we proceeded without hits or groundings past the shallows, some invisible but others perfectly outlined by willow copses standing in the high water. We ascended beyond the Cannonball River, known for round stony concretions washed out of its sandstone shores, and above it, Oahe began to diminish and become again the Missouri River. Near the site of old Fort Rice, we pulled up to a boat ramp where I’d arranged to meet the trailerman, and despite the wind and current made a nice landing and hauled Nikawa up to a farm. Pilotis received permission to leave her overnight while we reconnoitered the next miles of real river, ones we’d heard would be especially wicked.
How to Be a Hell of a Riverman
WITH EACH MILE we set behind us, I felt some small achievement as if we’d really done something, and our creeping across America gave me a joy tempered only by the relentless lurking of the Grand Terminator, that unseen but probably not unforeseen error or malfunction or injury which could end the voyage for the year and perhaps forever. In so many ways we were defenseless because most of the threats were no more visible than a bunkered enemy, and our only shield was limited knowledge, our only sword insistence, and our lone ally luck, an ingredient no long venture can succeed without.
Even though I did not dwell on the dark possibilities, I never forgot that the last mile done might be the last mile we could do. One evening the Professor said to me, “Wouldn’t it be easier on you to treat this voyage as a lark or a mere outing?” Yes, I said, if I can first teach myself to treat my life as a lark. Still, except in moments of real duress, I was not apprehensive, and I slept solidly even if I often did dream of the river, dreams that were never sweet. Above all else, what kept me from dwelling on the very real possibility of failure was my belief—with no rational basis—that Nikawa was destined to reach the Pacific if—if—I did not fail in resolve, for I could probably overcome my ignorance, but never could I surmount irresoluteness. So it was that bit of near irrationality that kept me atop a potentially crippling anxiety and let me love our river days even as they tried me and tired me, because, once we were on the water, past and future diminished into a long flowing and consuming present that reduced life to terms almost the simplest a human can know. Upon returning to Nikawa after the brief hiatus on the lower Missouri, Pilotis had reported an incapacity at home for dealing with the mundane requirements of contemporary life, an unwillingness to tolerate “pissants and nitwits,” an enervating awareness that, without the invigoration of ever-present threats, life turns vapid and is beneath respect. For all the river took away from us, it returned the greatest of gifts—a clean and unassailable purpose to existence. We lived to go another mile, to try to encounter it fully so memory would register it deeply, and to stay around long enough for the next mile and a reward of repose at the end of the day.
We stopped at the Fort Rice gas station and trading post to ask what lay ahead, and we heard that the river was once again a natural waterway with the usual bugaboos, and a man told us, “Maybe you can make it up to Garrison Dam, I don’t know, but you sure as hell picked the best year to have a run at it. In seventy-five years I never saw the water so high.” Said murmuring Pilotis, “See, Captain’s got this rainstick.” The crew was delighted with the clerk’s history even after I reminded them the dams existed for only about half those years, and further, a high river is not necessarily easier than a low one—it just changes the location of obstructions. What’s more, the fellow probably knew nothing of the river five miles farther up, where, we’d heard earlier, the water was low because the dam was letting almost nothing through. The Photographer asked the man about the promised Hunkpapa jacket, but it wasn’t there.
We retrieved Nikawa from the farm and put her in the Missouri exactly where she’d come out and set off for Washburn, North Dakota, under one more day of blue sky, a good weather about to become critical to our continuing. A mile above Fort Rice, the river turns northwest and enters a twisted section choked everywhere with bars and islands, false chutes, and stumps. I wound us through a broken forest of deadheads bleached like skeletons that eventually led to more open water but so generously braided we had to hunt the channel at every moment, and our progress was slow, then slower, then it stopped altogether when Nikawa grounded out.
We went fore and aft and poled off, not cussing, just working, because at last we understood that getting hung up was not like a flat tire—an unexpected and usually preventable annoyance—but rather part of the nature of ascent up the Missouri, just as lifting one’s foot is part of walking. The Photographer, our fretter-in-residence, nonetheless said, “Are we pushing Nikawa too far here? Isn’t it time for the canoe?” I said we couldn’t know what was too far until we went too far, and we still had to play distance against time, against the June rise, and it was now June, and we were still about five hundred miles from the region of most questionable water.
On a narrow sandbar near the eastern bank, we saw for the first time white pelicans, veritable symbols of the high Missouri. I was telling about Lewis and Clark shooting a pelican to see how much water its big throaty beak would hold, but I didn’t get to say five gallons before Nikawa crashed hard into something and rolled to starboard, halfway to her gunwales, charts flying across the pilothouse; it was as if she’d fallen into a hole. Then she righted herself.
I cut power, apprehensively raised the motors, and Pilotis went aft to face what sounded like the arrival of the Grand Terminator. As the props emerged from the dark water into the light, Mate called out, “No damage!” We checked the hull for leaks, but all was sound. Pilotis: “Chapter Forty-four of One Goddamn Scare a Day,” and we took up another installment of the Canoe Debate, moot for the time being since the Grumman was on a highway somewhere ahead of us. We went on, relieved to have escaped once again, although I knew that those ringing hits accumulated on the crew, each blow less easy to shrug off, each one increasing our belief that the law of averages was gaining on us.
At a speed hardly better than what the canoe could do, we passed the location of an ancient riverside village now called the Huff Site that tractors, a highway, and the erosive river have not ground into oblivion. Raymond Wood, the archaeologist who excavated Huff, once told me that over the almost six hundred miles from the mouth of the Niobrara River to Garrison Dam, there was a prehistoric site along the Missouri about every mile, but the Missouri Valley farther west even to its headwaters is nearly free of them, and nobody knows why. We ascended beyond the mouth of the Heart River, once an important Mandan settlement. George Catlin spent time with those people when he came upriver in 1832 and wrote extensive and colorful accounts of them before disease all but eliminated the tribe. In one of his “letters” the painter wrote:
The Mandans are certainly a very interesting and pleasing people in their personal appearance and manners, differing in many respects, both in looks and customs from all other tribes which I have seen. . . . A stranger in the Mandan village is first struck with the different
shades of complexion and various colours of hair which he sees in a crowd about him and is at once almost disposed to claim that “these are not Indians.”
There are a great many of these people whose complexions appear as light as half breeds, and amongst the women particularly, there are many whose skins are almost white, with the most pleasing symmetry and proportion of features, with hazel, with grey, and with blue eyes, with mildness and sweetness of expression and excessive modesty of demeanour, which render them exceedingly pleasing and beautiful.
Why this diversity of complexion I cannot tell, nor can they themselves account for it. Their traditions, so far as I have yet learned them, afford us no information of their having had any knowledge of white men before the visit of Lewis and Clarke made to their village thirty-three years ago. Since that time there have been but very few visits from white men to this place, and surely not enough to have changed the complexions and the customs of a nation. And I recollect perfectly well that Governor Clarke told me before I started for this place that I would find the Mandans a strange people and half white.
The diversity in the colour of hair is also equally as great as that in the complexion, for in a numerous group of these people (and more particularly amongst the females who never take pains to change its natural colour as the men often do), there may be seen every shade and colour of hair that can be seen in our own country, with the exception of red or auburn which is not to be found.