Great Plains (3 page)

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the rivers of the Great Plains are the Cimarron, the Red, the Brazos, the Purgatoire, the Trinity, the Big Sandy, the Canadian, the Smoky Hill, the Solomon, the Republican, the Arikaree, the Frenchman, the Little Blue, the Big Blue, the South Platte, the North Platte, the Laramie, the Loup, the Niobrara, the White Earth, the Cheyenne, the Owl, the Grand, the Cannonball, the Heart, the Knife, the Little Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Powder, the Tongue, the Bighorn, the Musselshell, the Judith, the Marias, the Milk, the Missouri. Some of these rivers have several forks, like the Clear, Salt, and Double Mountain Forks of the Brazos, or the Clear and Crazy Woman Forks of the Powder. All of them have had at least one other name; the Spanish, who were the first Europeans to explore the southern plains, called the Purgatoire the River of the Souls in Purgatory. Before the Lewis and Clark expedition discovered and named the Marias, the Indians called it the River That Scolds at All the Others. The bigger rivers on the plains run roughly west to east. Carrying alluvial sands from the Rocky Mountains, they helped make the plains. Some, like the Brazos, flow to the Gulf of Mexico. Some run into the Red or the Arkansas, which both continue east to the Mississippi. The others end up in the Missouri, which follows a 2,500-mile course from the northwest until it finally joins the Mississippi at St. Louis.

The rivers of the southern plains are dry much of their length, much of the year. All-terrain-vehicle tracks cross the white sand in the bed of the North Fork of the Red. As you go north, the rivers are more likely to have water. Descending from the flat benchland into their valleys can be like walking off a hot sidewalk into a spa. Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun. The trees lean at odd angles, like flowers in a vase. In the summers, windrows of cottonwood-seed down cover the ground. Big cottonwoods have bark as ridged as a tractor tire, and the buffalo used to love to rub against it. In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair. At sunset, the shadows of the cottonwoods fall across the river and flutter on the riffles. Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain. Sandbar willows grow as straight as dowels in the gray-black mud along the banks. Game trails six inches wide wind through the willows. For a while, the air is smarting with mosquitoes, and weird little bugs that don't bite but just dive right for your eyes. Later there are stars, and silence. At dawn, birds pipe the light through the trees.

Nineteenth-century travellers who wanted to see the interior of the Great Plains when it was still a wilderness used to ascend the Missouri the way people do the Amazon or the Nile today. The Indians who lived along the river grew maize and beans, dried them, and traded them to tribes who followed the buffalo herds. The river Indians usually built their villages near where the Missouri and another river joined, and the white traders who came later followed this example. Between 1805 and 1860, traders built posts at every major confluence along the river. In 1828, the American Fur Company began to build the biggest trading post on the Great Plains, on the northern bank of the Missouri a few miles upstream from where it joins the Yellowstone. At first, they called the post Fort Floyd; later, in hope of the trade that would converge here, they called it Fort Union.

Until it was abandoned in 1867, Fort Union was like the Times Square of the plains. Indians from all over the upper Missouri watershed and beyond came to trade their furs—beaver skins and buffalo robes, mainly—for alcohol, and also muskets from London or Liège, scalping knives from Sheffield, blankets from the Cotswolds, steel traps from Manchester, powder and shot and dried corn from St. Louis, clothes from New York, clay pipes from Cologne, falcon bells and hand mirrors from Leipzig, glass beads from Milan, sugar and coffee from New Orleans, calicoes from Marseilles, and hardtack from Milton, Massachusetts. The buffalo robes were good for keeping warm in carriages in northern cities. Beaver fur was usually made into felt, which was made into top hats, which appeared on the heads of rich men almost everywhere. Prime beaver fur has two kinds of hair: the longer guard hairs, on the outside, and a matted coat of finer hairs, called “beaver wool,” underneath. Furriers combed this beaver wool from the pelt, and then the wool was mashed together, soaked, stiffened with adhesive and shellac, and pressed into felt. Because beaver hairs are barbed, they stick together well, and the felt they make is sturdy, easily molded, weather-resistant, and fine-grained. Its color is warm and lustrous. Men today seldom wear any garment as elegant as high-crowned hats of beaver felt used to be. Some countries had sumptuary laws which forbade the poor from wearing beaver; usually, a beaver hat signified a doctor or lawyer or above. The decline of Fort Union began at about that point in the nineteenth century when fashionable men discovered high top hats made of silk from the Orient.

Furs, and beaver furs in particular, were a main temptation of empire in North America. Animals in cold lands grow the best fur, so the countries which first explored the northern part of the continent—England, France, and the Netherlands—were the leading rivals for the trade. The Dutch trade came down the Hudson River to the posts of the Dutch West India Company at Manhattan and Fort Orange (Albany). The French trade came through French Canada, to independent traders at Quebec and Montreal. After a century and a half of wars and treaties, the English finally had Canada and New England to themselves, and their Hudson's Bay Company, with exclusive rights to trade in millions of square miles of northern Canada, became the biggest fur-trading company in the world. The next rival to the English appeared after the American Revolution, when a German immigrant to New York named John Jacob Astor started the American Fur Company. For many years, the Hudson's Bay Company and the American Fur Company were the Exxon and Mobil of the fur trade. As John Jacob Astor expanded his company west through the American territories, he destroyed and bought out and merged with many smaller companies. Fort Union was built by men from the former Columbia Fur Company, which once had posts from the Great Lakes to the Missouri.

At its height, Fort Union ate six hundred to eight hundred buffalo a year, and the boss of the fort (called the bourgeois) had his private stock of brandy, gin, smoked hams, plums, herrings, almonds, ketchup, and half-pint bottles of capers by the dozen. At his table, one had to wear a jacket to dinner. Frenchmen, Spaniards, Russians, lapsed English noblemen, Swiss, Italians, Indians, half-breeds, escaped slaves, and Yankees worked at the fort. Naturalists, Indian agents, missionaries, sportsmen on hunting trips, Army officers, river pilots, surveyors, territorial governors, writers, and rival traders visited. George Catlin arrived on the steamboat
Yellowstone
in 1832, and painted portraits of Indians while sitting on a twelve-pound cannon in one of the bastions. The Swiss painter Karl Bodmer came with Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian, of the German principality of Wied-Neuwied, in 1833, and held the attention of an Indian named Nothing But Gunpowder with the help of a musical snuffbox. Some of the Indians thought the box must have a little white man hidden inside.

By the time they meet, the Yellowstone and the Missouri are both big rivers. When they're low, they expose acres of mud dried to jigsaw cracks. Full, they're both hundreds of yards across, and flow smoothly at the lip of their banks, suddenly boiling up with a sucking sound, then flowing smoothly again. The Great Plains usually give few hints about the uses people should make of them, but the expanse of flat tableland surrounding the confluence of these rivers strongly suggests a city site. It's like the junction of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, minus Philadelphia, or the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela into the Ohio, minus Pittsburgh. The reason no city grew at the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone is that in 1866 the Army built a post called Fort Buford a few miles east of Fort Union, and in 1868 created a thirty-mile-square military reservation with the post at the center. Since the reservation was closed to all settlement, the city which people eventually built was farther down the Missouri, at the junction of the Little Muddy River. Today this city is called Williston, North Dakota, and it gets much of its income from oil, and its long commercial highway strips wax and wane. Fort Buford was abandoned in 1895, and farms and ranches have since taken up the military reservation lands. All of which means that the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri, the surrounding landscape for as far as you can see, looks about the same in life as it does in the painting Karl Bodmer made from sketches drawn on a bluff north of Fort Union 156 years ago.

The land Fort Union stood on was declared a National Historic Site in 1967. I have been there three times since. I liked to stand by the visitor center, which was a converted double-wide house trailer, and look up the driveway, past the barbed-wire fence, past the county road, past the railroad tracks, and across the mile of open plain to the bluff where Bodmer sketched. Owen McKenzie, half-Indian son of Kenneth McKenzie, the fort's most famous bourgeois, used to run wolves on his fast buffalo horse on this plain. An Assiniboin Indian wife of another bourgeois used to put on her best clothes and race her pony here, her “magnificent black hair floating like a banner behind her,” according to one account. Here, also, Prince Maximilian watched a tribe of Assiniboin approach the fort; they wore eagle feathers, prairie-chicken feathers, wolf skins, antelope horns with yellow horsehair at the points, green leaves. Their faces were painted with white clay and vermillion and black paint. Crooked dogs with backbones showing pulled packs lashed to dragging travois poles. The warriors advanced in a group of two or three hundred, and sang a song which reminded the prince of one he heard the Russian soldiers sing during the Napoleonic Wars. On this plain, or near it, John James Audubon, who spent about nine weeks at the fort in 1843, once timed a lark to see how long it stayed aloft at a stretch (thirty-six minutes). Nobody rides or sings or walks or even drives very much on this plain today.

People don't drink as much here as they used to, either. In some ways, the history of the confluence area since white men first came is the history of a binge. Lewis and Clark, when they camped across the river in 1805, were so pleased at their arrival that they issued whiskey to all the party, and somebody got out a fiddle, and “they spent the evening with much hilarity,” Lewis says. The main trade item at Fort Union was always alcohol. Many Indians would give or do anything for it. Traders made “Indian Whiskey” from straight alcohol boiled with ingredients like river water, ginger, molasses, red peppers, gunpowder, chewing tobacco, and (occasionally) strychnine. Whiskey with strychnine was said to produce an exceptionally crazy drunk. A man who was chief clerk at the fort for many years said that he sometimes stayed up all night dragging drunken Indians out by the arms and legs. He said that Indians sometimes snatched burning logs from the fire and rubbed them on their heads. Of course, Indians who were drunk also killed themselves and each other and froze to death and drowned and burned up and fell from their horses and died of withdrawal. John Jacob Astor, who owned the American Fur Company until 1834, once met in New York with George Simpson, of the Hudson's Bay Company, and suggested that both companies stop trading in alcohol. But finally Simpson and Astor agreed that if they did, the smaller whiskey traders would ruin them. Astor said that Simpson's company would hold the head of the cow, and his own would hold the tail, and all the others would get the milk. Astor never went West himself. He lived most of his life on Manhattan Island, and built his first fortune on the fur trade. His son, William B. Astor, reported in 1831 that the American Fur Company brought them returns of half a million dollars a year.

For miles around the confluence in every direction, whiskey bottles littered the prairie. When the Army moved in, the first commander of Fort Buford, Captain William G. Rankin, spent much of his time under arrest for drunkenness. Drink often confined his successor, Colonel Andrew Bowman, to bed. The post surgeon recorded interments in the cemetery of soldiers like Bartholomew Noon, a private who apparently drank himself to death on a night when there was “much drunkenness in the garrison.” Whiskey killed laundresses, scouts, teamsters, and more Indians. In 1889, the first North Dakota legislature voted to make their state dry, and in 1903 several men, including a German immigrant who was also an agent for Blatz Beer, founded a town three miles west of the confluence. The town was called Mondak, because it straddled the Montana–North Dakota state line, and the half of the town in Montana (which was wet) had nine saloons. Train crews from the Great Northern Railroad often stopped in Mondak to drink, and sometimes men would pass out on the tracks. It is said that the Great Northern ran over more people in Mondak than at any other place along the line. Except for some foundations, a small structure covered in red pressed tin, and a couple of rows of concrete cells which used to be part of its jail, Mondak has disappeared. As I watch the purple clouds building to the north, the cottonwood leaves showing their pale undersides in the wind, the whitecaps rising on the river, the veils of dust blowing from a butte, I wonder if maybe this scenery has somehow been permanently altered by the thousands of drunken eyes which have looked at it before.

Employees of the Park Service have done enough minor excavation of the grassy eminence where the fort used to stand that they can indicate the different parts with markers. For years, their caretaking left undisturbed a ghost population as dense as any on all the ghosty plains. (More recently, the Park Service has decided to rebuild much of the fort; now archaeologists are digging up and photographing the site, to record what construction will destroy.) The walls of the fort were squared-off cottonwood logs about seventeen feet high set in a rectangle 220 by 240 feet. Against the inside of one of the walls for much of its length was a one-story building called the Dwelling Range, where some of the fort's employees lived with Indian wives and children. These employees had names like Michel Bellehumeur and Michel Carrière and Joseph Joyaille and Bonaventure LeBrun. Overlooking the walls were two whitewashed stone bastions. At the center of the fort was a 63-foot-tall flagstaff, surrounded by a fenced plot of lettuce, radishes, and cress. Near it, a man who had just shot a clerk named Isidoro Sandoval through the head with a pistol in the retail store announced to the fort: “I, Alexander Harvey, have killed the Spaniard. If there are any of his friends who want to take it up, let them come on.” None did. At one end of the fort was the bourgeois's house, which had glass windows, green shutters, and a red-shingled roof. Kenneth McKenzie once caught his squaw in the bedroom there with a young blond-haired trapper named Bourbonnais, and chased him from the fort with a club. Bourbonnais started walking around outside the fort yelling death threats, McKenzie got all the clerks to sign a paper agreeing Bourbonnais could be killed if necessary, somebody warned Bourbonnais, he didn't stop, and McKenzie paid a mulatto named John Brazo to shoot him from the bastions. Badly wounded, Bourbonnais left for downriver some months later.