Great Plains (10 page)

Bonnie Parker was tiny—4′ 10″, 85 pounds. Clyde Barrow was 5′7″, 127 pounds. The night they were here, she was twenty-two, he was twenty-four. (Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother, was twenty-eight.) Clyde always drove fast, which was probably why they missed a detour sign and crashed into the river. They also liked to drive far. Frank Hamer, the Special Investigator for the Texas prison system and former Texas Ranger who followed Bonnie and Clyde for 102 days before setting up the ambush in which they were killed, said that Clyde “thought nothing of driving a thousand miles at a stretch.” He said he once traced them as far east as North Carolina, where all they did was visit a cigarette factory and turn around. The officers they kidnapped at this house were Sheriff Dick Corry and Marshal Paul Hardy, who were taken into Oklahoma, handcuffed together, and tied to trees with barbed wire cut from a fence. In a crime spree of over two years, Bonnie and Clyde kidnapped many other people, robbed many small-town businesses, and killed nine law officers, two grocers, and one lumber salesman.

Clyde had on his right arm the tattoo of a girl and the name “Grace.” Bonnie had on the inside of her right thigh a tattoo of two hearts joined by an arrow, with “Bonnie” in one heart and “Roy” in the other. They kept a white rabbit, and took it with them on their travels. Clyde also brought along his saxophone and sheet music. Bonnie read true-romance magazines, painted her toenails pink, and dyed her hair red to match her hats, dresses, and shoes. When Frank Hamer and other Texas and Louisiana lawmen shot them to pieces on a road near Plain Dealing, Louisiana, Bonnie was wearing two diamond rings, one gold wedding ring, a small wristwatch, a three-acorn brooch, and a chain with a cross around her neck. Congress passed a resolution thanking Frank Hamer for his part in ending Bonnie and Clyde's career. He was also awarded their guns. Collectors offered a lot of money for the guns. Both Bonnie's mother and Clyde's mother wrote indignant letters to Frank Hamer, demanding that he turn over their children's guns to them.

In front of the house was an old slippery-elm tree—once a friendly tree in a yard, now just a tree—with big roots knuckling up through the ground. The roots were skinned and smooth from people sitting on them, and on the bare dirt in between I spotted a silver-and-purple tube of Wet 'n Wild lipstick. The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges, of a shade of reddish-pink which its manufacturer calls Fuchsia Pearl. I thought about the kids who dropped it. They probably come here sometimes to park and make out. Bonnie Parker would have been happy to find this lipstick. She would have opened it and sniffed it and tried the color on the back of her hand. As I examined it, my own hand seemed for a moment as ghostly as hers. I made a mark on a page of my notebook with the lipstick, recapped the tube, and put it back on the ground.

*   *   *

You can find all kinds of ruins on the Great Plains; in dry regions, things last a long time. When an enterprise fails on the plains, people usually just walk away and leave it. With empty land all around, there is not much reason to tear down and rebuild on the same site. In the rest of America, you are usually within range of the sound of hammers. A building comes down, another goes up, and soon it is hard to remember what used to be there. Nowadays, the past seems almost nonexistent, even contemptible: on TV, the cop says to the criminal, “Reach for that gun and you're history.” But, for many places on the Great Plains, the past is much more colorful and exciting and populous than the present. Historical markers are everywhere. In many towns I stopped in, the public buildings were a store, a gas station, and a museum.

The Great Plains have plenty of room for the past. Often, as I drove around, I felt as if I were in an enormous time park. Near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, I visited a rock shop made entirely of fossilized dinosaur bones. Just north of the shop is Como Bluff, a low ridge about six miles long which was the site of one of the world's classic discoveries of dinosaur and early-mammal fossils. During the Jurassic period, from 190 to 136 million years ago, when seas advanced and retreated over much of the Great Plains, the rocks of Como Bluff were sediments at the edge of a coastal plain. Animals that died in rivers upstream tended to wash down there. By the end of the Jurassic, many bones had become fossils in deposits of clay and sandstone. Fossils are harder to remove intact from sandstone than from clay. As it happened, a number of geologic circumstances combined at Como Bluff to preserve thousands of fossils in clay deposits at or near the surface. Fossil bones were just lying around in the open. In 1877, some years after the railroad came through, a station agent for the Union Pacific and his section foreman wrote to Professor O. C. Marsh, of Yale University, about the bones they had found. Professor Marsh sent one of his collectors out, and later identified the odd, multipronged object which someone at the station had tied to a rope to keep a horse from wandering as the fossilized tail weapon of a stegosaurus. Professor Marsh eventually took almost five hundred ton-sized wooden boxes of bones from the Como Bluff quarries. The brontosaurus in New Haven's Peabody Museum is from there. Discoveries on the Great Plains were the basis for much of our modern knowledge of dinosaurs. More than half the specimens in the dinosaur rooms at the American Museum of Natural History come from the American or Canadian plains.

On a dirt road on a cattle ranch, also in Wyoming, a rancher reached over and opened the glove compartment of his pickup and showed me dozens of worked pieces of stone which were rattling around with fence pliers, staples, binoculars, and candy wrappers. Some of the stones were oval, some were thumb-shaped, some appeared to be fragments of projectile points. The rancher said, “A guy came up here from Denver a while ago and said he wanted to look for artifacts on our land, and I asked what kind of artifacts, and he said, ‘Early-man tools.' We all thought that was pretty funny—whenever we'd need a rock for something, we'd say, ‘Hey, hand me one o' them early-man tools.' Then one day the guy comes down off the ridge and he's got this beautiful spearpoint about six inches long. Ever since, I've been keeping my eye on the ground, and picking up chippings and points and hide scrapers all over the place. Some of these rocks I don't even know what they were, but I know they were something.”

The oldest human remains found so far on the Great Plains date from the end of the last Ice Age—about twelve thousand years ago. Archaeologists divide the early inhabitants into elephant hunters and bison hunters. Elephant hunters came first, and used a distinctive type of stone point, called the Clovis point, to kill Ice Age animals like mammoths, which were larger than modern elephants and had curved tusks fourteen feet long. After the mammoths disappeared, hunters used a smaller point, called the Folsom point, to kill prehistoric bison. Folsom points are believed to be between eight thousand and nine thousand years old. More recent points are, in general, harder to date and classify. The ones in the rancher's glove compartment come from a three-thousand-year-long pre-Christian period called the Early Plains Archaic.

On a dirt road above the valley of Horse Creek, also in Wyoming, another rancher pointed to a federal construction site on the bluff opposite, where archaeologists working for the government had just discovered evidence of a prehistoric camp. “They found a couple of round grinding slabs and a metate—a grinding stone. They told me the camp was maybe three thousand years old,” he said. “What I can't get over was that the grinding slabs and the metate were made of sandstone. I keep thinking about those grains of sand in the food.”

The big game animals disappeared from the plains about six thousand years ago, and archaeologists have as yet found little evidence of any game at all there for maybe two thousand years after that. Experts in the subject of paleoclimates believe that during these years—from about 4000
B.C.
or 4500
B.C
. to 2000
B.C.
—the Great Plains went through a period of heat and drought which turned the land to near-desert. This period is sometimes called the Altithermal. As the climate gradually became cooler and more moist, humans again moved in, usually following river valleys. Stone grinding tools are often found at village sites dating from the last years of the Altithermal; in that environment, apparently, people were grinding up and eating just about anything organic they could find.

On the banks of the Sun River, in western Montana, I sat at the center of a wheel made of rocks, with spokes stretching across the prairie. I had read about the wheel in an astronomy column in a local newspaper; many people believe that these prehistoric stone alignments, called “medicine wheels,” found at a number of sites on the plains, were astronomical timepieces. The day of my visit was the summer solstice, June 21. I wanted to see if the sun would set exactly at the end of one of the spokes. The wheel once was whole, but the river eats away more of the bank every year, and now less than half remains. The hooves of cattle going down to the water have trampled out most of the wheel's center. As I watched, the sun got lower, the blossoms on the little prickly-pear cactus caught the light, the shadows of the grass slid along the ground, the bluffs on the near riverbank turned dusky, the bluffs on the far bank turned pink. Then, beyond the low peaks of the Rocky Mountain front, the sun went down at a point indicated by none of the spokes of the wheel. I had with me a diagram of the wheel when it was less damaged, which showed a small double row of rocks on the approximate line of the sunset. The medicine wheel is on private land, and a trail used by ranch vehicles has scattered those rocks. Astronomers say that many of the medicine wheels on the Great Plains are aligned to the summer solstice. A well-preserved wheel in the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming indicates with spokes ending in rock cairns the points on the horizon where the sun rises and sets at the solstice; others of its cairns may be intended to show where the stars Aldebaran, Rigel, and Sirius appear at dawn in the summer sky. For most tribes of plains Indians, the summer solstice was the time of the Sun Dance, their most important religious ritual. In the years since white men came, none of the Indians has been much help in explaining who built the medicine wheels, or why.

In the valley of the Madison River, also in western Montana, I stopped at the Madison Buffalo Jump State Monument. A display in a kiosk near the parking lot indicated a nearby bluff off which Indians used to chase buffalo in the days before the horse. I climbed to the top of the bluff and walked away from it across the rolling prairie; when I looked back, I could find no hint that the land beneath my feet was about to end abruptly. It looked like just another rise. It would have fooled me, let alone a buffalo. The bluff is the end of a narrowing tongue of land which would have funnelled the herd to a point. The drop from the bluff—sixty or seventy feet—then turned the animals into a rain of meat. On the spot where so many buffalo would have landed and died, almost no grass grows, maybe out of tact. Indian hunters used this perfect natural trap over and over for thousands of years before the horse put it out of business. From the interstate highway which runs nearby, nothing about this bluff looks any different from thousands of others.

At Fort Griffin State Historical Park, in north-central Texas, I walked the edges of a plowed field where much of the town of Fort Griffin Flat once stood. In the 1870s, the equation that turned buffalo hides into buffing rags brought a lot of money here. Today, only the ruin of a Masonic Lodge remains. Among the many people who came here to profit from the buffalo hunters' earnings was the famous gambler Dr. John Henry Holliday, known as Doc. Doc Holliday had been to dental school in Baltimore, and he had good hands. He also had tuberculosis. He was one of a long list of people who came to the dry plains for their health. After a career which involved him in countless knife- and gun-fights, including the shootout at the O.K. Corral, the most famous Western gunfight of all, he finally died of his disease in bed in a hotel in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. His last words were, “This is funny.”

Here at Fort Griffin Flat, according to the later recollections of his friend Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday reprimanded a man during a card game for looking through the discard pile. The man, named Ed Bailey, pulled a gun, and Doc Holliday killed him with a knife he carried in his breast pocket. Doc Holliday was jailed, and when some of Bailey's friends decided to lynch him, a woman named Big Nose Kate set the livery stable on fire, sprung Doc Holliday in the confusion, and rode with him six hundred miles north to Dodge City. No grave in the old cemetery near the town site has a headstone with the name of Ed Bailey. In fact, none of the graves has any marker at all, and the graveyard itself is unmarked and untended. In this part of Texas, the ground is mostly limestone rock, so a lot of graves in this cemetery were the classic heap-of-stones type familiar from Western movies. With the years, the centers of such graves sag back to the ground.

Just outside the town of Holcomb, in western Kansas, I pulled into the driveway of the house where the Herb Clutter family was murdered one night in 1959, and where, later, the writer Truman Capote came to research his book
In Cold Blood.
Wind-bent trees line both sides of the driveway, and cross their branches above. I drove past a “Keep Out” sign; since the murders, the house has been mostly untenanted. The murderers parked in the shadows of a tree. The ambulances drove up to the front door. The history of this house makes everything here look different; it makes warm afternoon sunshine into the flash of a police photographer's camera. The shots that stopped four lives in this house also seem to have stopped time. From my car, I could see that the lawn was recently mowed, that the beige frame-and-brick exterior did not need new paint, that a bruise-colored curtain was drawn in a downstairs window. A detail that transported the whole scene back to 1959 was the elaborate television antenna on the roof; anybody as interested in television today would have a satellite dish.