Great Plains (32 page)

 

Sitting Bull's account of Custer's death is quoted in Tillett,
The Wind on the Buffalo Grass,
p. 71.

 

Merington (p. 8) describes Custer at West Point:

 

Of deviltry, the young Custer had full measure. He and a comrade one day swam the Hudson, clothes tied to head. A banquet was being held in the James home on the opposite shore. The swimmers did not sit with the guests, but they did full justice to the delectable courses, served to them in the stable by a conniving butler.

In French class Custer was bidden to translate at sight
Léopold, duc d'Autriche, se mettit sur les plaines.
His too-free rendering began, “Leopard, duck and ostrich…” [This is misquoted in Ambrose, p. 108.]

 

One of the pantomimes with which Custer entertained his classmates in chapel involved pretending that the red hair of a boy seated in front of him was fire. Custer mimed heating his fingers in the hair and then pounding them on an anvil (Monaghan, p. 19).

 

“Do you think I am a confirmed monk?” is quoted in
“Boots and Saddles,”
p. 118.

For Custer to own a dog named Lucy Stone is rather like Oliver North owning a dog named Betty Friedan or Germaine Greer. In fairness to Mrs. Custer, she was embarrassed by the name; she says in
“Boots and Saddles”
(p. 41) that the dog had been named by a previous owner and would not respond to any other name.

Custer's accidental shooting of his horse is recounted in
My Life on the Plains,
Chap. 3.

 

“How painfully, almost despairingly exciting…” is in
My Life on the Plains,
p. 196.

 

The Honorable John A. Bingham, congressman from Michigan, who appointed Custer to West Point, said that he was “beautiful as Absalom with his yellow curls” when he called on Bingham shortly after the First Battle of Bull Run (Merington, p. 13).

 

Accounts of Indians who were at Little Bighorn are possibly even more numerous than books about Custer. Again, I have drawn on just a few sources.

That the Indians knew the soldiers were coming after them is mentioned in many accounts; e.g.,
Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux, Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull,
by Stanley Vestal, p. 185; and
Cheyenne Memories,
by John Stands In Timber and Margot Liberty, p. 191.

Sitting Bull's prophetic vision was recounted by Henry Oscar One Bull, Sitting Bull's nephew, in
Echoes of the Little Big Horn
(reprinted in Tillett,
The Wind on the Buffalo Grass,
p. 60).

The Cheyenne Chief Two Moon described Custer's advance: “While I was sitting on my horse I saw flags come up over the hill to the east like that [he raised his fingertips].” From Hamlin Garland, “General Custer's Last Fight as Seen by Two Moon,”
McClure's Magazine,
Vol. XI (September 1898), p. 446.

Short Buffalo's account of Crazy Horse at the Little Bighorn is in Hinman, p. 35:

 

In this Custer fight I was helping fight Reno and never noticed Custer coming. We had Reno's men on the run across the creek when Crazy Horse rode up with his men.

“Too late! You've missed the fight!” we called out to him.

“Sorry to miss this fight!” he laughed. “But there's a good fight coming over the hill.”

I looked where he pointed and saw Custer and his blue coats pouring over the hill. I thought there were a million of them.

“That's where the big fight is going to be,” said Crazy Horse. “We'll not miss that one.”

He was not a bit excited; he made a joke of it. He wheeled and rode down the river, and a little while later I saw him on his pinto pony leading his men across the ford. He was the first man to cross the river. I saw he had the business well in hand. They rode up the draw and then there was too much dust—I could not see any more.

 

The orderly retreat of the soldiers up the rise is mentioned by Sitting Bull in Tillett, p. 70. The formidable Chief Gall of the Hunkpapa Sioux described the attempts to kill the horse-holders in ibid., p. 75. (Gall's interviewer, from the St. Paul
Pioneer Press,
noted, “The chief's mind seemed to dwell particularly upon the number of horses they captured rather than the terrible slaughter which took place.”)

The warriors flying through the dust like shadows, the eagle-bone whistles screaming, the Indians shooting each other by accident are all mentioned in
Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux,
as told through
*
John G. Neihardt (New York, 1972). Standing Bear describes, on pp. 97–98, how a Cheyenne was mistakenly scalped.

It was the Cheyenne chief Wooden Leg who said that the battle looked like “thousands of dogs…”
Wooden Leg, a Warrior Who Fought Custer,
by Thomas B. Marquis, p. 237.

Standing Bear said that the Indians could have killed the soldiers with their horses' hoofs (
Black Elk Speaks,
p. 97).

Gall said, “I killed a great many. I killed them all with the hatchet. I did not use a gun” (Tillett, p. 75).

Two Moon said that the soldiers were covered with white dust;
McClure's Magazine,
Vol. XI (September 1898), p. 448.

That the fight lasted “about as long as it takes for a hungry man to eat his dinner” was mentioned during a tour of the Custer Battlefield National Monument by the guide, Ranger Clifford Nelson, who said he heard it from somebody who had heard it from somebody who had heard it from Two Moon. Accounts of the length of the battle vary. Many Little Bighorn buffs think it probably lasted about an hour.

 

The reluctance of veterans of the Custer fight to admit Indians returning from World War I to their warrior societies is in
Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux,
by Stanley Vestal, pp. 59–60.

In
Black Elk Speaks,
p. 101, Iron Hawk recalled how nervous he was before going to fight. Black Elk's description of his feelings after the battle is on p. 106. White Bull's “It was a glorious battle, I enjoyed it,” is in
Warpath,
by Stanley Vestal, p. 199.

 

Black Elk talks about touring with the Wild West Show in
Black Elk Speaks,
pp. 182 et seq.

For more on Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, see
The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill,
by Don Russell (Norman, Okla., 1960). A reenactment of Custer's Last Stand was usually the show's finale.

 

The fact that there were thirty Western series on prime-time TV in the late 1950s comes from the “Inner Tube” TV column in the New York
Daily News,
March 19, 1986, p. 64.

The four “development guidelines” for screenplays at Walt Disney Studios are listed in “Touchstone's Magic Touch,” by Joy Horowitz, in
Premiere
magazine, October 1987, p. 34.

Chapter 10

 

In a sense, Lewis and Clark wrote the West as they went along. They named the Clark's Fork of the Columbia River, and Lewis's River, after themselves; the Judith River after Julia Hancock, of Fincastle, Virginia, who later became Clark's wife; the Marias for Lewis's cousin Maria Wood (“It is true that the hue of the waters of this turbulent and troubled stream but illy comport with the pure celestial virtues and amiable qualifications of that lovely fair one,” Lewis wrote); the Shields River, Pryor Creek, Ordway's Creek, and other pieces of geography after enlisted men with the expedition; York's Dry River after Clark's slave, York; the Jefferson River after the President; Pompey's Pillar, a rock formation in the Yellowstone Valley, after Sacajawea's infant son Baptiste “Pomp” Charbonneau; the Dearborn River after Secretary of War Henry Dearborn; the Gallatin River after Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin; and the Smith River after Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith.

 

Jefferson's unsuccessful attempt to send André Michaux to explore the West is discussed in the introduction to the
Original Journals of Lewis and Clark
(edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites), Vol. I, pp. xxi, xxii.

Jefferson described John Ledyard, his journey, and his eventual fate in a preface to the 1814 edition of the
History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark,
p. ix.

 

Other information about John Ledyard comes from Stephen D. Watrous, editor,
John Ledyard's Journey through Russia and Siberia 1787–1788: The Journal and Selected Letters
(Madison, Wis., 1966); Jared Sparks,
Life of John Ledyard
(Cambridge, Eng., 1828); and Kenneth Munford,
John Ledyard: American Marco Polo
(Portland, Oreg., 1939).

 

Mark Alfred Carleton lists the many similarities between the North American plains and the Russian steppes in “Hard Wheats Winning Their Way,” in the
U.S. Agriculture Department Yearbook, 1914,
pp. 398 et seq., and in “Russian Cereals Adapted for Cultivation in the United States,” in the
U.S. Botany Division Bulletin, 1891–1901,
pp. 8–9.

 

I read about weeds that came from Russia in
Weeds,
by Walter C. Muenscher (New York, 1935);
A Manual of Weeds,
by Ada E. Georgia (New York, 1914);
Migration of Weeds
(a pamphlet) by Lyster H. Dewey;
The Prairie World,
by David Costello (Minneapolis, 1969); and
The Conservationist
magazine, August 1969.

Anselm Hollo's description of a tumbleweed is in his volume of poetry,
Tumbleweed
(Toronto, 1968).

Information on Russian thistles in Russia comes from Russian émigré Alex Melamid.

 

Almost all the information about the Mennonites is from
The Coming of the Russian Mennonites,
by Charles H. Smith (Berne, Ind., 1927).

 

Mark Alfred Carleton explains the Mennonites' farming techniques in “Hard Wheats Winning Their Way,” p. 400.

 

The saga of Mark Alfred Carleton, who almost by himself made the Great Plains the leading wheat-growing region of the world, then fell into debt to pay for the medical bills of a sick daughter, was suspended by the Department of Agriculture for financial misdealing, and eventually died broke in South America, is told in
Hunger Fighters,
by Paul de Kruif, Chap. 1.

Carleton describes finding the Russian wheats in his writings listed above.

 

The problems of the Mennonites during World War I are detailed in Smith,
The Coming of the Russian Mennonites,
pp. 271 et seq. Because the Mennonite and Hutterite war resisters refused to put on uniforms, many served time in military prison in their underwear. A Hutterite named Joseph Hofer caught pneumonia while chained to a wall in Alcatraz prison and later died in Fort Leavenworth prison. His jailers dressed him in a military uniform and buried him. His brother, Michael Hofer, died a few days later.

 

Wheat-export figures at the beginning of the war are listed in
The War and the World's Wheat,
by Alfred Akers, a pamphlet published in 1914.

The effect of the German blockade upon international wheat markets, along with many other facts about the Dust Bowl and the events surrounding it, are in
Heaven's Tableland,
by Vance Johnson.

Howard, in
Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome,
says the price of wheat doubled between 1914 and 1918 (p. 183); Johnson says wheat was 99¢ a bushel in 1914 and $2.10 in 1917 (p. 210).

 

Speculative part-time farming of the plains is described in “Losing Ground,” by Erik Eckholm, in
Environment
magazine, April 1976, p. 6; also in
Heaven's Tableland,
p. 143.

 

Accounts of the big dust storms of '34 are found in the sources named above; in
Land of the Underground Rain,
by Donald E. Green (Austin, Tex., 1973); and in newspaper reports of the time.

The storm of May 10, 1934, which blew all the way to the Eastern Seaboard, was important because it drew national attention to the problem. Shortly after that storm, Roosevelt proposed a drought-relief program to Congress. In August, he took a tour of dust-stricken counties. His idea to plant a twenty-million-acre windbreak was announced in July.

After the storms in April of '35, people started leaving the plains in large numbers. It was an appropriate time for Woody Guthrie to write “So Long, It's Been Good to Know You.” Woody Guthrie told Alan Lomax that he wrote the song on April 14, 1935 (see
Land of the Underground Rain,
p. 124).

 

“Snirt” storms were mentioned during congressional hearings on the Great Plains Conservation Program before the House Committee on Agriculture, April 17 and 18, 1969.

One side benefit of the dust storms of the thirties was that they unburied signs of prehistoric human habitation, particularly in Washington and Yuma Counties in eastern Colorado (
Prehistoric Man on the Great Plains,
p. 70).

 

The Great Plains have never returned to the population levels of the late 1920s. U.S. Census Bureau figures show losses of over fifty percent in some counties.

“The people who moved away then…” comes from the Williston, North Dakota,
Herald,
May 15, 1983.

 

That Baca County was advertised as part of the “Rain Belt” is mentioned in Emmons,
Garden in the Grasslands,
p. 159.

According to the 1940 U.S. Census, Baca County had 10,570 people in 1930 and 6,207 in 1940. The 1980 census showed a population of 5,419.

 

A good discussion of the Ogallala Aquifer and its depletion can be found in
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,
by Marc Reisner, Chap. 12.