A Geography of Blood
Contents
Prelude
We see them as a raven might see
them, from a distance.
The men walk single file, dark strokes etched
against an infinite plain of snow.
Behind them, a day's straggling march to the south,
lie a cold prison cell and the grim
accusing faces of the Great Father's blue-coated soldiers.
Ahead of them, if the spirits prove willing,
are friends and family, and the uncertain
embrace of the Great Mother and her red-coated police.
It is late November 1881, already
the dead of winter.
The men walk with the ghosts of the buffalo.
They are almost ghosts themselves.
The soldiers have taken their rifles and ammunition,
their torn lodges, their moccasins.
They are hungry. The snow stings their skin.
The police: it is hard to tell what the red coats
have taken, are taking. The truth.
Otapanihowin
, the means of survival.
Black wings rasp against the frigid air.
Two men stumble, get up, fall.
The leader of the travelers, that Nekaneet
looks up, then looks ahead to the blue smudge
of hills on the horizon.
That means, just like
if we walk, if you are ahead, you are
kani'kanit, the leader.
Nekaneet is walking
north, walking home, walking into another day.
Somewhere up there in the distance,
you and I are waiting, hungry for stories.
{one} Getting There
. . . conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving . . .
GERTRUDE STEIN, “The Gradual Making of
The Making of Americans,
” 1935
Let's just say
that it all began when Keith and I took a trip. Keith is Keith Bell, my companion of going on twenty years, and it's largely thanks to his love of travel that I've seen a bit of the world: the wild-and-woolly moors of Yorkshire, the plains of Tanzania, the barren reaches of Peninsula Valdés in Argentina. Yet the journey I want to tell you about was not a grand excursion to some exotic, faraway destination but a trip that brought us closer home. A nothing little ramble to nowheresville.
Remember what Thoreau once said about having “traveled a good deal in Concord,” that insignificant market town in which he was born and mostly lived? In an unintended riff on this Thoreauvian concept, Keith and I find that we have traveled a good deal in and around another insignificant dot on the map, a town called Eastend in our home province of Saskatchewan.
Eastend, population six hundred, lies about a thumb's breadth north of the CanadaâU.S. border and more or less equidistant from any place you're likely to have heard of before. It's in the twilight zone where the plains of northern Montana meet and morph into the prairies of southern Saskatchewan, a territory that leaves you fumbling with highway maps. But if you piece the pages together, south to north, east to west, and scribble a rough circle around the centers of populationâGreat Falls, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Billings, and back to Great Falls againâyou'll find Eastend somewhere in the middle, a speck in the Big Empty of the North American outback.
To explain how and why this out-of-the-way place has become so central to our lives, I need to take you back several years, to a day in late September of 2000. Keith was just embarking on a year-long sabbatical leave from his teaching duties as an art historian at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. As for me, I was supposed to be gathering forces to meet the most daunting challenge of my writing career. Earlier that summer, I had thrown common sense to the winds and agreed to prepare a natural history of the whole broad sweep of the western plains, from the Mississippi to the Rockies and from the llanos of Texas north to the wheat fields of Canada. By rights, I should have been at my desk day and night, or in the crypts of the science library, nose to the grindstone. What greater inducement could there be for hitting the open road?
Happily for my guilty conscience, the route we had chosen for our travels that fall led directly into the heart of my research. If I were going to write with authority about grassland ecology (I told myself as I packed my holiday clothes), surely it was my duty to get up close and personal with my subject matter. I'm not entirely joking when I say that writing books is my way of getting an education.
And so off we set, Keith and I plus our three trusty canine companionsâan aging retriever, a wire-haired dachshund, and a perky young schipperkeâfrom our home in Saskatoon south under the big skies of Saskatchewan and Montana to our turnaround point, the tourist town of Cody in northwestern Wyoming. From Cody, our return journey would take us north to Eastend, where we planned a brief layover before returning to our obligations in the city.
Cody, Wyoming, is an odd little town, and I am surprised to recollect that this trip marked the second time it had figured into our travel plans. On our earlier visit in the early 1990s, we had stayed in cheap digs along the highway, first at the Western 6 Gun Motel, where neon gunfire flared into the night from a sign at the entranceway, and then at the neighboring Three Bear Motel, where a trio of pathetic stuffed beasts, their mouths set in permanent snarls, stood guard over the check-in counter. This time around, several years older and more inclined to comfort, we'd gone upmarket to a respectable, if regrettably staid, establishment with a leafy courtyard.
Funny the things you remember, the things you forget. Even now, when so much else has faded from my mind, I could take you to the exact place we stayed in Cody, show you the room where we slept. See our boxy old blue van angled up to the building, its back doors swung open as we loaded it for the journey home. Hear our voices hanging in the thin morning air.
“. . . binoculars?”
“. . . water for the dogs? They say it's going to hit ninety.”
“Any idea what we've done with the maps?” (Turns out that where I was headed could not be found on a map, though I had no way of knowing that at the outset.)
Although Cody's primary attraction for travelers is its proximity to Yellowstone National Park, an hour's drive to the west, the town prefers to see itself as a rootin' tootin' gateway to the past, to a West not merely of geography but of legend. From June to September, fake gunfighters confront each other in fake gunfights in the wide avenue outside the venerable Irma Hotel (Monday to Friday evenings at six and Saturday afternoons at two). Quite by accident, we'd caught them at it one evening, running around with their popguns and braying insults across the deserted street, under the guttering standard of the Stars and Stripes.
In this, as in so much else, the town takes its inspiration from its namesake and founding father, the late William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. As anyone who stops in town quickly becomes aware, Mr. B. Bill was an arresting character. A real-life participant in the conquest of the western plains, he had earned his spurs and his sobriquet in the 1860s when, as a scout for the U.S. Army and supplier to the Kansas Pacific Railway, he is said to have killed 4,860 buffalo in just eighteen months. That works out to about a dozen carcasses every twenty-four hours, assuming that he rested his trigger finger on the Sabbath.
Today, however, Buffalo Bill is remembered not so much for his actual exploits as for his pioneering success in transmuting those deeds into entertainment. In the spring of 1872, for example, Cody led Company B of the 3rd Cavalry in an attack against a camp of MnikhËówožu, or Miniconjou, Lakota in Nebraska, an action for which he was immediately awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. By December of that year, Cody had temporarily abandoned the field of battle to impersonate himself on stage, in a production entitled
The Scouts of the Prairies.
From that day forward, Buffalo Bill Cody seems to have inhabited a borderland between history and myth, between the gore and the glory of Western conquest.
Eventually, Cody's mastery of the facto-fictional mash-up would lead to his creation of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a circus extravaganza in which real cowboys and real Indians engaged in mock skirmishes and a middle-aged easterner called Annie Oakley showcased the skills of a typical Western girl. This pioneering “reality show” earned Cody a place in the pantheon of American show business. But I have always been more impressed, or perhaps merely bewildered, by accounts of one of his lesser-known projects, a touring theatrical that hit the boards in the fall of 1876.
A few weeks earlier, General George Armstrong Custer had led the U.S. 7th Cavalry to a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Lakota, Northern Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne near the Little Bighorn, or Greasy Grass, River (not far as the crow flies from Bill Cody's Wyoming headquarters). When word of this event reached him, he donned a black velvet costume adorned with silver buttons and lace that he wore in his stage shows and departed for the battlefield. There, he shot and scalped a Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hair, to avenge General Custer's “murder.”
Back on the theatrical circuit, Cody was soon dramatizing this triumphant exploit in a production called
The Red Right Hand, or Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer.
Although the evidence suggests that Yellow Hair was killed in a chance encounter, Cody presented the confrontation on stage as a face-to-face duel from which the better man had inevitably emerged as the victor.
On our first visit to town in the nineties, Keith and I had unexpectedly found ourselves staring at Yellow Hair's dishonored flesh. There it lay, parched and sallow, in a shiny glass case in the gracious halls of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, still bearing the burden of Mr. Cody's triumphant slogan. “The first scalp for Custer,” the museum tag read. This time, on our return visit, we had tiptoed through the galleries, almost afraid to look, but Yellow Hair's scalp had thankfully been removed from public contemplation.
Looking back, it seems fitting for our first journey to Eastend to begin under the aegis of Buffalo Bill. At the time, however, with no idea of what lies ahead, Keith and I are just a couple of happy, middle-aged kids getting our own show on the road. Life rests gently on our shoulders that morning as we load humans and dogs into our old van and point it in a northerly, homeward direction. Away we go, across the Shoshone River, around the shoulders of the Beartooth range, and then, joy to me, out and into the high red-rock moonscapes of northern Wyoming and south-central Montana. At the sporty resort village of Red Lodge, we turn our backs to the mountains and swing downslope into a landscape that's all space and sunlight and sky. My kind of country.
From Billings onward, we take the road less traveled, a narrow strip of asphalt that heads straight north through shimmering fields of stubble and herds of red-and-white cows. We stop for burgers at a town called Roundup, then sweep on through Grass Range without pause; side roads attempt to lure us off course to places named Fergus, Cat Creek, Heath.
The road and the country around it are so empty that every vehicle we meet demands comment. A red Silverado. Half an hour later, a black F-150. The drivers all boast big hats.
“I'm working on the wave,” Keith says. “Do you use one finger or take your whole hand off the wheel?” Since I grew up in small prairie towns, as he didn't, he sometimes looks to me for advice about local etiquette. Even though he's lived in Saskatchewan for more than half his lifeâhe arrived in Saskatoon in the mid-1970sâhe still occasionally feels like a newcomer. No wonder, since he was born in Nairobi and educated there, at a boarding school in Scotland, and at universities in England. We had met in the fall of 1991 (only a year or two before our first trip to Cody, come to think of it) when he had found himself newly single and, in those days before online dating, had dared to place an ad in the personal column of the
Saskatoon
Star-Phoenix:
“Friendly, attractive professional man, early 40s, seeks sincere, intelligent woman to enjoy adventures, travel, the arts . . .” I was then a youngish widow, with a freckle-faced daughter in tow: he had won me over at “friendly.” We met, great jubilation ensued, and here we were together, going down the road.
About an hour past Grass Range, U.S. Route 191 flows down into the broad, sculpted valley of the Missouri Riverâwe walk the dogs to the silvery, high-pitched clatter of the cottonwood leavesâand then we are up and away again, flying past the Little Rocky Mountains, the cusps of their blue molars biting into the western sky, past, almost without noticing, the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, home to several hundred members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine nations. At the down-on-its-luck town of Malta, we turn west, through the not-much-luck-to-be-down-on hamlet of Chinook, and pass, again without noticing, a sign directing us to the Bear Paw battlefield, sixteen miles to the south. It was here, in the fall of 1877, that a massed force of U.S. infantry and cavalry, armed with a twelve-pound gun, surrounded, pounded, and eventually defeated a camp of Nez Perce refugees who, during the preceding months, had fought their way cross-country all the way from Oregon, in the desperate hope of finding safe haven on the other side of the international border.
At Havre, we jog north again, running for the border ourselves, and fail to notice, on the western outskirts of town, the remains of Fort Assinniboine, established in 1879 and once the grandest military establishment in Montana, with a garrison, at its peak, of more than five hundred blue-coated men. Their mission was to clear the country of “British” Indians, Cree and Métis hunters from across the line, by whatever means necessary. Voices hang in the air here, speaking of hunger, displacement, and cold, but we do not hear a word. Do you suppose it's really true that what you don't know can't hurt you?
From Havre onward, the land is reduced to a kind of primal simplicity, a tawny expanse that tugs our eyes to the farthermost edges of the world. Somewhere over there, in the white haze of distance, earth and heaven collide. Although I have always thought of myself as a prairie person, I am out of place here, dazzled by these spinning horizons and this unbounded sky that bleeds off into infinity. The prairie landscapes of my childhood had been softer, more contained. If instead of stopping at Eastend, Keith and I were to continue driving northwest clear across Alberta to the edge of the plains and into the scrubby fringes of the northern forest, and if we then pushed on through swamp spruce and muskeg for half a day more, we'd eventually break into the tree-fringed grasslands of the Grande Prairie in the Peace River Country. That's where I was born.
