Great Plains (25 page)

The fifty MX missiles recently installed in silos in Wyoming cost about $148 million apiece. Laramie County, Wyoming, where the first MX went in, produces about $40 million of agriculture a year. The total cost so far of the MX is about $15 billion. Before all the hundred projected MXs are in place, the cost may be $25 billion. Add what was spent for the now-abandoned Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile system to the amounts for the Minuteman and the MX, and the total approaches $200 billion. In a good year, the four-hundred-odd counties on the Great Plains produce agriculture—beef, cotton, hay, feed grain, much of the world's wheat—worth about $19 billion.

*   *   *

This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants' dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats. And in return we condense unimaginable amounts of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land which so much treasure came from—weapons for which our best hope might be that we will someday take them apart and throw them away, and for which our next-best hope certainly is that they remain humming away under the prairie, absorbing fear and maintenance, unused, forever.

11

W
HEN
I went for long drives on the plains, I might be on the road for weeks at a time. I could afford to stay in motels only every third or fourth night, so the others I spent in my van. I slept beneath the mercury lights of highway rest areas where my lone car was visible for six miles in any direction and the inside of the men's room looked as if it had been sandblasted with tiny insects, and on the streets of small towns where the lawn sprinklers ran all night, and next to dammed-up waters of the Missouri River where the white top branches of drowned trees rose above the waves. My van had so many pinholes from rust that it created a planetarium effect on the ground when I turned on the interior light. After a day of driving there was usually a lot of dust on the bed, and maybe a stunned grasshopper that had come through the open window.

One night I tried to sleep at a picnic area at the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River in Texas, on U.S. Highway 83. Highway 83 runs from Mexico to Canada and is like the Main Street of the Great Plains. Cars went by only occasionally, which somehow made them scarier. The moon was full, and the wind was blowing harder than during the day. I got up and walked around. By moonlight I read a historic marker in the picnic area which said that in 1877 hunters brought more than a million buffalo hides to a trading post near this spot. When I lay down again, the unquiet spirits of a million buffalo were abroad in the windy night. My head kept falling through the pillow. The moon shone, the stars blinked, the trees tossed back and forth, the shadows waited under the picnic kiosks. I got up again and drove until dawn.

In New Mexico I slept well in front of a shuttered vegetable stand on the outskirts of a town. I woke in the morning to blue sky and the sound of small animals playing under my car and scurrying across the roof. On the vegetable stand I saw a sign posted. I went over to see what it said. It said:

PLAGUE is passed to man by
WILD RODENTS
, Rabbits, and by their
FLEAS
 … Do
NOT
Pitch tents or lay Bedrolls on or near nests or burrows. Plague is CURABLE WHEN TREATED IN TIME.

The best places to sleep were truck stops. At two-thirty in the morning a truck-stop parking lot full of trucks is the capital of sleep. The trucks park in close rows, as if for warmth. The drivers sleep with purposeful intent. The big engines idle; together, the trucks snore. Hinged moisture caps on top of the diesel stacks bounce in the exhaust with a pinging noise. I tried to park as close as I could without being presumptuous. Unlike tourists in rest stops, truck drivers seem careful about slamming doors and gunning engines late at night. Sometimes the truck I had gone to sleep next to would quietly leave and another would quietly pull in. One morning when I woke up a semi-trailer full of pickup-truck camper tops had been replaced by a stock truck. On the truck's door, in big letters, a poem:

Buck Hummer

Hog Hauler

In Colorado, Highways 71 and 36 make a big cross on the map when they intersect at the town of Last Chance. Sixty miles to the west, the prairie ends and greater Denver begins, and the uplands are barnacled with houses for a hundred miles along the Rocky Mountain front. Fewer than seventy people live in Last Chance. The wheat fields are eroding, the oil wells are running dry, the only store in town burned down. “However, hope springs eternally in the breasts of our decreasing high school enrollment,” a citizen of Last Chance wrote recently. On a night of many thunderstorms, I pulled over to sleep at that intersection. The wind made the streetlight sway, and made its shadows sway inside my van. A full cattle truck came sighing down the road and then squeaked to a stop at the blinking red light. I could hear the animals shifting and bumping inside. They were very likely on their way to one of the largest feedlots in the world, sixty miles north of Denver, where they would stand around with a hundred thousand other cows and eat until they were fat enough to slaughter. The truck sat for a moment. Then the driver revved the engine and found first gear, and the full load of cattle braced themselves for the start. In step, they set their many feet all at once, like a dance revue.

*   *   *

Now, when I have trouble getting to sleep, I sometimes imagine that my bed is on the back of a flatbed pickup truck driving across the Great Plains. I ignore the shouts on the sidewalk and the bass vibrations from the reggae club across the street. The back of this truck has sides but no top. I can see the stars. The air is cool. The truck will go nonstop for nine hours through the night. At first the road is as straight as a laser—State Highway 8, in North Dakota, say—where nothing seems to move except the wheels under me and the smell of run-over skunks fading in and out in my nose. Then the road twists to follow a river valley, and cottonwood leaves pass above, and someone has been cutting hay, and the air is like the inside of a spice cabinet. Then suddenly the wheels rumble on the wooden planks of a one-lane bridge across the River That Scolds at All the Others. Ever since the Great Plains were first called a desert, people have gone a long way toward turning them into one. The Great Plains which I cross in my sleep are bigger than any name people give them. They are enormous, bountiful, unfenced, empty of buildings, full of names and stories. They extend beyond the frame of the photograph. Their hills are hipped, like a woman asleep under a sheet. Their rivers rhyme. Their rows of grain strum past. Their draws hold springwater and wood and game and grass like sugar in the hollow of a hand. They are the place where Crazy Horse will always remain uncaptured. They are the lodge of Crazy Horse.

NOTES

INDEX

Notes

Chapter 1

 

Queen of the Cowtowns was only one of Dodge City's many monikers. Others were the Athens of the Cow Trade, the Cowboy Capital, the Wickedest City in America, and the Beautiful, Bibulous Babylon of the Frontier. The last two names were the invention of visiting journalists. See
Dodge City, Kansas,
by Charles C. Lowther (Philadelphia, 1940);
Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital,
by Robert M. Wright (Wichita, Kan., 1913), a good book by a man who lived in Dodge from its beginning;
The Cattle Towns,
by Robert R. Dykstra (New York, 1968); and
Queen of Cowtowns: Dodge City,
by Stanley Vestal (New York, 1952).

Air Midwest, at this writing part of Eastern, flies from New York City to Dodge City.

 

Various complicated routes West were available to travellers going overland in 1849. This itinerary is from
Overland to California in 1849,
by Joseph Sedgley (Oakland, 1877), pp. 5–7:

 

SATURDAY,
March 31.—To-day we left New York, and took passage in the steamboat
John Potter,
at seven o'clock,
A.M.,
and arrived at Amboy [New Jersey] at nine o'clock … At half-past nine o'clock we took the cars reserved for us, and traveled over the Camden and Amboy Railroad, and arrived at Camden at two o'clock,
P.M.,
covered with dust. Here we took the ferry-boat across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, where we arrived at five o'clock …

MONDAY,
April 2.—… At ten o'clock we took the cars of the Columbia Railroad, connecting with the Pennsylvania and Ohio Canal. Peach and other trees are in full bloom.

TUESDAY,
April 3.—… We crossed the Susquehanna River by the canal …

WEDNESDAY,
April 4.—… To-day we traveled up the Juniata River … We arrived at Lewiston at eight o'clock and took supper. Left Lewiston at ten,
P.M.,
and continued our journey up the Juniata to Holidaysburg, which point we reached at six o'clock, and took lodgings at the hotel …

FRIDAY,
April 6.—… We took the cars to go over the Alleghanay Mountains, thirty-six miles, to Johnstown … The ascent is made by means of ten inclined planes. After crossing the mountains, we took passage in a canal boat for Pittsburg …

SATURDAY,
April 7.—… We arrived at Freeport at twelve o'clock at night, and took lodgings at the Freeport Hotel …

SUNDAY,
April 8.—The boat not running on Sunday, part of our company, being anxious to reach Pittsburg, chartered a boat belonging to another line to take us there, which place we reached at five o'clock.

 

After nine days of travel between New York and Pittsburgh, Sedgley's party took steamboats from there to the edge of the frontier.

A good description of a route west from Baltimore is in
Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Golds-borough Bruff,
edited by Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines (New York, 1944). See also, among many other accounts,
Overland to California,
by William G. Johnston (Oakland, 1948);
Trail to California: The Overland Journal of Vincent Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly,
edited by David M. Potter (New Haven, 1945).

 

The story of Angus Mackay and the introduction of summer fallow to the plains is told in that classic work of Western history,
Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome,
by Joseph Kinsey Howard (Lincoln, Neb., 1983), pp. 276–77. Part of Howard's account is retold from
Hunger Fighters,
by Paul de Kruif (New York, 1928).

 

People have gone to extraordinary lengths to coax rain from the Great Plains sky. For example, an experimental cloud-seeding program sponsored by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Montana used high-speed jets to chase down and seed small clouds which often had a life span of less than thirty minutes. The program had planes equipped with laser probes, suction samplers, and armor plating against hail. In 1910, C. W. Post, the cereal magnate, began an ambitious rainmaking project on his 200,000 acres of the Texas plains. Post had noticed that in accounts of wars which he had read, heavy rains always seemed to follow artillery battles. He believed that with enough explosions he could produce rain. He blew off boxcars and boxcars of dynamite on the plains around his town of Post City, Texas. The dynamite was laid out on the ground and fired at intervals designed to simulate artillery barrages. Post and his staff kept at it for several years, and produced drizzles and one or two rainstorms, which encouraged him. (See
Heaven's Tableland: The Dust Bowl Story,
by Vance Johnson, [New York, 1947], Chap. VIII.)

 

A discussion of the boundaries, both physiographic and botanical, of the Great Plains is in
Prehistoric Man on the Great Plains,
by Waldo R. Wedel (Norman, Okla., 1961), pp. 20–24, 36.

 

The fact that banks and insurance companies would not lend money for agriculture west of the hundredth meridian I learned from a historical marker put up by the South Dakota Historical Society on Highway 16 just west of Blunt, South Dakota:

 

YOU ARE NOW ON THE
100°
MERIDIAN

Historically that meridian is significant. For two generations the Insurance Companies and other world wide lending agencies would not, as a matter of agreed policy, lend a shiny dime west of this line. Their reason was that some geographer had labeled it the
EAST EDGE
of the Great American Desert. Neither the geographer nor the Insurance Companies had been west of 100° … This unrealistic, geographically limited loan policy forced South Dakota into the farm loan business. Our Rural Credit business cost us plenty and was a splendid illustration of why a state should not be in the loaning business. But South Dakota has paid all its debts in full. The 100th Meridian is just another bad memory. Historically however the 100° Meridian was a most important one in Western economy.

 

Dayton Canaday, director of the South Dakota Historical Resource Center, sent me additional information about this subject.