Great Plains (22 page)

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O
NCE
, the whole country faced west. For Thomas Jefferson, exploring the western part of the continent had the same fascination that exploring space had for later Presidents. When Jefferson designed his house, Monticello, he gave it a long porch and terrace from which he could view the western horizon. In 1803, he sent an expedition headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the enormous tract of trans-Mississippi wilderness recently acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. The expedition was to follow the Missouri to its source, look for easy water routes across the continent, continue to the Pacific, and return. Particularly on the high plains, Lewis and Clark camped at places where nothing as important has happened since. On some of the bleaker reaches of the upper Missouri, they were the harbingers not of civilization but of future visits by Lewis and Clark buffs. Today the names they gave to geographic features commemorate themselves, their sweethearts, enlisted men with the expedition, Clark's slave, the President, Sacajawea's baby son, and several otherwise-forgotten members of the Jefferson Administration.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition was actually Jefferson's third try at sending explorers to the American West. His second try was a decade earlier, when, as Secretary of State, he wanted to send a party headed by the French botanist André Michaux. Michaux got as far as Kentucky before President Washington had him recalled for his part in a French scheme to get America to declare war on Spain. Jefferson's first try was in 1785, when he was living in Paris as United States Ambassador. There he met a man named John Ledyard, who was, as Jefferson said, “of a roaming disposition.” Ledyard was born in Groton, Connecticut, in 1751. He had failed to finish at Dartmouth because he was always off in the woods exploring, and he had sailed with Captain James Cook on his famous voyage of discovery to the South Pacific in 1776. Ledyard was obsessed with the idea of crossing the North American continent. In Paris, he and Jefferson came up with a plan for Ledyard to explore the West by heading east: that is, Ledyard would go from Paris across Europe, across Russia, across the Pacific in a Russian ship, down the west coast of North America to the latitude of the Missouri, and down that river to the Mississippi and the United States.

Jefferson loved this idea, but first he had to get Ledyard a passport from the Empress Catherine to travel in Russia. Jefferson sent his request by way of diplomats he knew who knew her, and she took months to respond. When she did, she said, “Everything that has been written about this expedition is completely false and a chimerical dream.” Jefferson decided to wait and ask again. Meanwhile, Ledyard became so impatient that he went to London and got passage on a ship sailing to the American Northwest. Before setting out, he bought “two great Dogs, an Indian pipe and a hatchet” for the journey. Soon after the ship left the harbor, it was overtaken by a customs boat and forced to return because of unpaid debts.

To Jefferson's later request, Catherine replied through his go-between, the Baron von Grimm of Saxe-Gotha, “I have told you all I had to say about Mr. Ledyard.” In London, Ledyard finally decided he was going anyway, although by then winter was coming on. He raised money with the help of an English nobleman and an American diplomat, sailed to Ostend, travelled to Hamburg, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. On the way, he lost one of his dogs. From Stockholm, he had intended to go by sled across the frozen Baltic Sea to Finland. Unfortunately, that winter was warm, and the Baltic froze only enough to prevent ships from sailing. So, rather than wait a few months for the Baltic to become navigable, Ledyard walked around it. In the middle of winter, he went up one side of the Gulf of Bothnia, down the other, across Finland, and over to St. Petersburg. The northernmost part of the trip took him almost to the Arctic Circle. In all, it was a walk of about twelve hundred miles. He arrived in St. Petersburg in March of 1787.

Still in need of a passport to cross Russia, he somehow managed to get one after a few months with the help of a Russian Army officer who was a favorite of the Grand Duke Paul, who did not like Catherine. From St. Petersburg, Ledyard went on to Moscow, followed the Volga River to Kazan, crossed the Ural Mountains, and continued, in various conveyances, to Tobolsk, Omsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk. By then he was about 3,100 miles from St. Petersburg. From Irkutsk he went two hundred miles to Kachuga on the Lena River, and floated fifteen hundred miles down it to Yakutsk. There, a local Army commandant ordered him to wait until spring to continue on to the Pacific, still five hundred miles or so away.

What happened next, apparently, was that Catherine found out Ledyard had gone ahead with his trip despite her refusals, and she hit the ceiling. Soldiers came after him, found him in Irkutsk, where he had returned for some reason, arrested him, put him in a carriage “with his linen quite wet from the wash-tub” (in the words of an Englishman who was there), and drove him all the way back to Moscow. According to Jefferson, Ledyard “was put into a close carriage, and conveyed day and night, without ever stopping, till they reached Poland,” but it is hard to believe this is literally true. In any event, Ledyard's captors must have made good time over the four-thousand-odd miles; Ledyard later wrote his cousin, “This journey was performed in 6 weeks: cruelties and hardships are tales I leave untold.” In Moscow, authorities held an inquisition to find out if he was a spy. Then he was taken to the Polish border, told never to come back to Russia, and released.

The experience almost ruined his health, which he partially regained in Poland in the care of some Jewish women who may have found him crying by the side of the road. Then, before the year was out, Ledyard went to Egypt to get a caravan together to explore the interior of Africa. On the day he had planned to leave Cairo on the journey, some people who were to take him up the Nile decided to wait because the winds were wrong. The delay made Ledyard so upset that he became sick to his stomach. For relief, he took an emetic, which caused him to vomit so violently that he burst a blood vessel and died. He was buried in the sand. As Jefferson later wrote, “Thus failed the first attempt to explore the western part of our Northern continent.”

That Catherine the Great should obstruct John Ledyard on his way to explore the region of the Great Plains is appropriate, because the Great Plains are linked more closely to Russia than to any other country. Among the Soviet Union's 8,650,000 square miles are many which resemble the Great Plains in latitude, treelessness, and rainfall. The steppes of southern Russia—a six- or seven-hundred-mile-wide belt of prairie stretching eastward from Hungary for thirty-five hundred miles or more—are colder than the southern plains and drier than the northern. They are at least as windy and empty. On a map of the Soviet Union, town names thin out to the east of the lower Volga River, just as they do in America west of the Missouri. Both the plains and the steppes are ruled by continental weather systems, with similar extremes of temperature, and similar thunderstorms interrupting months of blue skies. The fine windblown loess soil of the Great Plains is like the
chernozem,
or black earth, of the steppes. Many of the same plants flourish there as here. In fact, some of the most successful weeds on the Great Plains came from Eurasian Russia with settlement in the nineteenth century. Before white men, the Great Plains had no Russian knapweed, no goat grass, no cow cockle, no summer cypress. Corn cockle, which grows with winter wheat and makes bread taste bad when it gets ground up in flour, came from Russia. So did cheat-grass, that stick-like plant that takes over pastures and is not eaten by cows. Russian pigweed, which has spread from the Canadian plains to North Dakota and Montana, came originally from Siberia in 1886.

On the steppes, as on the plains, plants live in the wind. One Russian import which has done particularly well here is the Russian thistle, also called Russian cactus, saltwort, prickly glasswort, or wind witch. On the plains, its most common name is the tumbleweed. Its seedlings appear in dry, sandy soil in the spring, and for a couple of months they are edible to livestock. When the weather gets warm, they become hard, woody, prickly bushes which crowd out other vegetation. In early fall, the stalk breaks loose from the ground, and the plant rolls away on the wind. A single plant may have from 10,000 to 100,000 seeds, which fall off as they ripen all through the winter. The winds can take the plant for miles in many directions, and the seeds it drops stay vital for several years. As the ground freezes over the winter, many species of plants on the Great Plains come loose and become tumbleweeds. The Russian thistle is the best traveller, and the toughest tumbleweed for farmers to control.

Because tumbleweeds spend a lot more time in the wind than in the ground, they are not much use for cover, shade, or holding the soil in place. On the plains, from the point of view of humans, the tumbleweed's main function is poetic. They roll and bounce on the wind, they fly through the air like half-filled weather balloons, they pile up in throngs against fences and buildings. The poet Anselm Hollo has written that a tumbleweed “looks like the skeleton of a brain.” Everywhere on the plains you see Tumbleweed Motels, Tumbleweed Cafes, Tumbleweed Liquors. In the Tumbleweed Bar, the jukebox is likely to have the song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” by the Sons of the Pioneers, one of the most popular Western tunes ever.
Tumbleweeds
is a favorite syndicated cartoon strip, and in at least one prairie town Tumbleweed is the nickname of the travelling marijuana dealer. Tumbleweeds blow before the Kansas tornado at the beginning of
The Wizard of Oz.
They are a signature of hundreds of old Westerns: the saloon doors swing back and forth, a tumbleweed rolls across a deserted street, the marshal and the bad guy walk slowly toward each other. In southern Russia, too, Russian thistles blow all over—in Turkestan, in the Crimea, on the Khirgis Steppe in Kazakhstan. Russians don't call them Russian thistles, but
perekati-pole,
which means “roll-across-the-field.”

Exactly how and when these plant species came to the Great Plains is not certain. Probably, they accompanied the tens of thousands of German Catholics, Mennonites, Hutterites, Amish, and others who left southern Russia for the Great Plains in the 1870s. Almost all of these immigrants were people who had been adrift in Europe since the Protestant Reformation 350 years before. Basically, the German Catholics were persecuted for saying that the Reformation went too far, and the Mennonites, Hutterites, and Amish for saying that it didn't go far enough. The last three groups were a type of radical Protestant sometimes called Anabaptist, because they did not believe in infant baptism. They believed that only adults who knew what they were getting into should be baptized. They also did not believe in swearing oaths, dancing, drinking, or gambling. At various times, certain sects among them were also opposed to marriage of cousins, tobacco, filing lawsuits, Fourth of July celebrations, buttons on clothing, circuses, and singing hymns in harmony. Most important, the Anabaptists believed in nonresistance, which meant they refused to serve in any war.

All these groups were in Russia in the first place because Catherine the Great had invited them. In addition to making John Ledyard miserable, Catherine also waged a series of wars with Turkey, which won for Russia new lands along her southern border. Catherine was German herself, and she wanted these sober, German-speaking farmers to secure her conquests by settlement. To convince the Mennonites to leave their homes in Polish Prussia, she promised them religious toleration, military exemption, 175 acres of land per family, tax exemptions, transportation payments, a loan of five hundred rubles per family, and government support until the first harvest. At least six thousand Mennonites took her up on it. They settled the steppes so successfully that their numbers grew to forty-five thousand in less than a century. Then, in 1870, Czar Alexander II withdrew the special privileges which Catherine had offered them. They and half a million other German-speaking colonists were now supposed to become full Russians at last. They would have to serve in the Army, and their children would have to speak Russian in Russian schools. The emissaries the Mennonites sent to St. Petersburg to protest this order could protest only in German, which one minister said proved the Czar's point. The Mennonites were upset about losing their military exemption, and the German Catholics, who were not war resisters, did not want to lose their German schools. All the German colonists started thinking about other countries where they might move.

Right away, representatives of the American railroads showed up. If Germans made the best farmers, these Russian Germans were thought to be the best of all. The Santa Fe Railroad, which ran through Kansas, got into a bidding war for the Mennonites with Nebraska's Burlington and Missouri. Both railroads offered almost everything that a farmer could want—free hay, roads, buildings, railroad passes, shipping. The B & M eventually even offered free land, but most of the Mennonites chose in favor of the Santa Fe, mainly because they liked the Santa Fe's immigration agent, a tireless man named C. B. Schmidt, who spoke German and finally got kicked out of Russia for his skill at convincing people to leave.

Hoping for the same military exemption their group once had in Russia, several Mennonite elders went to Washington to discuss the matter with President Grant. They were surprised to find him surrounded by none of the pomp that surrounded the Czar. Grant met them in a worn black frock coat and listened politely. As it happened, General Custer was there to see Grant at the same time. Custer, who was of German ancestry, spoke to the Mennonites in German, and later took them to a play, and they liked him—a man whose views on war could not have been more different from their own. General Grant made the Mennonites no promises. Canada, which was also eager for Mennonite settlers, enacted a law specifically exempting them from military service, but the U.S. Congress never did. However, such laws passed the legislatures of Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota—which meant little, since it was not usually the business of the states to raise armies. Of the ten thousand or so Russian Mennonites who came to America, the majority settled in south-central Kansas and built villages often with the same names and street plans as the villages they had left in Russia.