Great Plains (4 page)

In a bed in the interpreter's room in the Dwelling Range, a young artist named Rudolph Friedrich Kurz once lay on buffalo robes, dreaming of milk. Like Karl Bodmer, Kurz was Swiss. The two had met in Paris in 1839, several years after Bodmer's return from Fort Union, and Bodmer had advised him to develop his technical skills further before heading for the wilderness. Kurz's study of painting and drawing had already consumed five years; he went back to Switzerland, studied and travelled for another seven years, and finally sailed for America in 1846. Kurz had elaborate theories about art, all of which seemed to revolve around the beauty of the nude figure. In St. Louis, he had to decide whether to go farther up the Mississippi or turn west up the Missouri. The Mississippi lost out, partly because (as he wrote in his journal) the Indians along that river “wore too many clothes.” He wanted “Nude Indians, with their beautifully proportioned figures, their slender yet well-formed limbs, their expressive eyes, their natural, easy bearing…”

Since he didn't have enough money for an extended stay upriver, he continued his journey as an employee in the fur trade. From the deck of the steamboat
St. Ange,
he watched through a telescope given him by his brothers Louis and Gustave as a group of Indian women and girls bathed in the Missouri: “As they thought themselves well concealed they were sportive and animated in a natural way. There were several dainty figures among them—so slender yet so round, so supple yet firm. How they splashed and romped behind the partially submerged tree that they thought screened them from observation. Others dreamily dried themselves in the sun, in postures and movements so natural and unrestrained, and yet such grace!”

He clerked for a while at Fort Berthold, near the mouth of the Little Missouri. Then he went on to Fort Union, where he cut tongues out of buffalo heads and packed the tongues in brine, issued meat and lard from the storehouse, painted a portrait of the bourgeois with his hand in his waistcoat, rowed customers back and forth across the river, refused to paint a nude female figure for the bourgeois, and recaptured a fox, an eagle, and a bear when they escaped from their cages. He wore spectacles, and the Assiniboin called him Ista Topa (Four-Eyes). The bourgeois's sidekick, a man named Jim Hawthorne whose duties included cutting his boss's tobacco, once got mad at Kurz and said he was ready to fight him with any weapon “from rifle down to needle.” (Kurz did not take up the challenge; his family motto was “
Fier mais sensible.
”) Often he had to share his bedroom with visitors to the fort, like the Assiniboin chief L'Ours Fou, who woke him up throughout the night to teach him Indian words and do imitations of animals. L'Ours Fou's imitation of a hog made Kurz laugh until tears ran down his cheeks.

In his spare time, he did pencil sketches of the fort, a beaver dam, a snowshoe, saddles, moose horns, himself, the fox, a meeting in the reception room, an ox yoke, a dogsled, tattoos, and Indians—all disappointingly clothed at this latitude, though he was always careful to indicate the forms underneath. Supplies ran low toward the end of winter, and the bourgeois sent him and a young Scotsman on a hunting trip so the fort wouldn't have to feed them for a while. Their camp was flooded twice by the swollen Missouri, their dogs ate up most of the meat, they found almost no game, storms blew their tent down, and Kurz spent days wrapped in a buffalo robe, keeping the fire alive. When he got back to the fort, he decided that since he was almost out of drawing paper, he might as well go home. He worked his way back down the river by rowing in a company keelboat. By the time he reached St. Louis, he was suffering from ague and dropsy. A man who owed him $140 had disappeared, so he sold some of the collection of Indian artifacts which he was intending to use to accompany exhibits of his planned masterworks of the Far West. On his way east he passed Niagara Falls, which he did not feel like looking at. In New York, he sold two watercolors and another part of his artifact collection. He bought a steerage ticket to Europe, was too sick to eat solid food the entire thirty-day voyage, and went straight home to Berne as soon as he landed. Reflecting later on his trip, he wished he “had taken more of an interest in things, such as studying the different species of ducks, etc.” His journal ends, “To earn my livelihood as artist in Berne. Alas! What a prospect.”

*   *   *

The first time I visited Fort Union was on an afternoon in early fall when the only other vehicle in the parking lot was a dark-green Park Service pickup. I had been driving for several days, talking only to order in cafes, and sleeping in my van at night. I walked around the fort site for a while, and then I went in the visitor center. The ranger who was there heard the door open, came out of his office, introduced himself, took me on a tour, showed me the elk-skin winter moccasins he was sewing, led me inside a canvas tipi he had set up on the grounds, showed me some decorative porcupine quillwork he had done, took out a pipe of red pipestone, filled it with kinnikinnick (a mixture of tobacco and the dried inner bark of the red willow, which Indians used to smoke), lit it, and passed it to me. He was six feet five inches tall, barrel-chested, with one black braid falling across the National Park Ranger badge on his left breast pocket, and another falling across a name tag which read “Gerard Baker” on his right. I asked, and he said he was a Mandan-Hidatsa Indian.

Gerard Baker told me that the Mandan and Hidatsa have been neighbors and allied tribes for generatons; that the Hidatsa were also called the Minnetaree or the Gros Ventre; that today many Mandan and Hidatsa live on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota; that when the Hidatsa were first sent there, some of them didn't like it, and moved to the Yellowstone–Missouri confluence area; that his own grandfather told him he remembered camping near here, and also remembered the soldiers who eventually marched them back; that one band of Hidatsa came originally from the sky, another from underneath the earth, and another from the big water; that, before white men, the Hidatsa lived by the mouth of the Heart River in villages of round earth-lodges; that they made many objects of the sandbar willow, and were called the “people of the willows”; that their war parties went on raids hundreds of miles from home; that some people say it was the Hidatsa who gave history a nudge when they captured a Shoshone girl named Sacajawea and brought her back with them from the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri, where she later met Lewis and Clark; that he and other Hidatsa believe Sacajawea was in fact a Hidatsa who had been captured by the Shoshone and who escaped from the Rocky Mountains back to the Missouri with the aid of wolves; that the Hidatsa were skilled plant breeders who developed a strain of maize still in use today; and that there were about twelve hundred Hidatsa before the smallpox epidemic of 1837 killed more than half of them.

Later, I learned that the smallpox epidemic of 1837 came up the river on the American Fur Company steamboat the
St. Peter's.
One of the carriers was Jacob Halsey, who was going upriver to take over as bourgeois at Fort Union, and who came down with the disease on board. He had been vaccinated and soon recovered. The traders at the posts along the Missouri made efforts to keep the Indians away from the boat, efforts which unfortunately did not include turning the boat around and sending it back downriver. The disease spread quickly. In early July, it broke out among the Mandan. They rolled in fires, took sweat baths, gave all their possessions to medicine men, jumped in the river, threatened the traders' lives, killed their own families, killed their horses, killed themselves by pushing arrows down their throats. Their unburied corpses turned black and swelled to three times normal size. One observer said that 1,569 of 1,600 Mandan died.

No tribes were camped near Fort Union when the
St. Peter's
arrived there, and the traders attempted to contain the disease before the summer's trading began. They locked up the fort and inoculated all the Indian residents and a few white men with the smallpox itself, following a practice outlined in a popular home-doctoring manual. Most of the thirty Indian women in the fort died. With the gates locked, the traders could not remove the bodies, and you could smell the fort from three hundred yards away. The Assiniboin came in to trade and hung around outside the walls and soon caught the disease. The bourgeois later estimated that ten out of every twelve Assiniboin died.

After the steamboat's arrival, the traders had sent a keelboat loaded with supplies farther upriver to the post among the Blackfeet. On the way, the crew came down with smallpox. Perhaps fifty-five hundred Blackfeet were camped by the post. The epidemic of 1837 eventually killed a total of about six thousand Blackfeet, and marked a sudden decline in their power on the plains. Indians fleeing the disease carried it to tribes far from the Missouri, and the epidemic did not slow down to the north until it reached the neighborhood of the Hudson's Bay Company posts in the Canadian territories. By 1837, most doctors knew that the English doctor Edward Jenner had demonstrated forty-one years earlier that injections of the virus of the milder cowpox could immunize people against smallpox. With almost two hundred years' experience in Indian trade behind it, the Hudson's Bay Company had sent supplies of smallpox vaccine to its traders. Not many used it at first, but when they saw the epidemic approaching, they were able to vaccinate and save many Indians.

In fact, about half of the Assiniboin in the neighborhood of Fort Union who survived were ones the Hudson's Bay Company had persuaded to be vaccinated. Although anyone familiar with recent history along the Missouri River could have recalled several other times when smallpox brought by whites had killed Indians by the thousands, the American Fur Company never felt obliged to vaccinate its customers. Apparently, when the epidemic came in 1837 none of the American Fur Company posts even had any vaccine on hand. Here in the wilderness they had falcon bells from Leipzig, French fabrics, gin from Holland, capers, almonds, ketchup by the quart—but no smallpox vaccine. Jacob Halsey, one of those who brought the disease, later wrote to his superiors in St. Louis, “The loss to the company by the introduction of this malady will be immense in fact incalculable as our most profitable Indians have died.” At Fort Union, trade stayed about average; those Indians not yet dead wanted to trade more, and have a good time before the end.

Afterwards, the company increased its small trade in Indian skulls, always one of the favorite curios of the plains. Other tribes occupied the empty villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa, and then moved on. The earth lodges fell down and eventually disappeared, except for shallow round depressions in the ground, where the floors used to be. Today, empty fields where the villages once stood are still faintly marked with clusters of these depressions; from a distance, the fields look like a smallpox survivor's face. At Fort Union, the cemetery where some of the Assiniboin smallpox victims were buried was partially dug up in the early 1950s, before the state and then the Park Service took over the fort site. Highway contractors, needing fill, took away truckloads, and the bones of Assiniboin smallpox victims mixed with the gravel used to pave the county roads.

*   *   *

Gerard Baker had a double-bladed throwing ax, and he and I spent an hour or so fooling around with it. On the grounds near the fort site he had set up a forked cottonwood log as big as a man, and had worn a path to it from marks at ten, fifteen, and twenty-odd paces. At each mark, he knew just how to hold the ax when he threw so that its end-over-end flight would conclude with one of the blades deep in the wood and the handle quivering. The first time I saw him hit from the farthest mark, I cheered. When I threw, the ax glanced off with a clatter. Sometimes he would run up to retrieve the ax, sometimes I would. He kept showing me the right way to hold it. Sometimes I missed the tree entirely. Finally I got the ax to stick from ten paces. We threw again and again.

I was talking a blue streak. I don't remember what I said. Then Gerard Baker suggested we take a sweat bath. This ceremony was and is an important part of many Indian religions. It involves going naked into a small hut made of blankets or hides draped on a willow-branch frame, pouring cold water onto white-hot rocks inside, breathing steam as hot as you can stand, burning bunches of sweet grass, smoking and passing a sacred pipe, talking, praying, pursuing visions, and then coming out, rubbing yourself with sage, dousing yourself with cold water or a river plunge, and dressing again. I said I would like to, but I really should get going. Gerard Baker picked up his ranger hat from the ground where he had set it and walked me to my car. We stood for a moment looking across the plain to the north, and I told him I had imagined the tribe of Assiniboin Prince Maximilian described crossing it a century and a half ago. Gerard Baker sighted along his arm to a small break in the bluffs beyond. “I bet that's the place they came through,” he said. “I've found the trail of travois poles in the rock there. You can see the marks on each side where the poles dragged. There's all kinds of trails in those bluffs, and on top of a couple I've found eagle pits, where they used to wait with a rabbit or something for bait and grab eagles. I found buffalo jumps up there, too—places where they used to chase buffalo off cliffs to kill them. And my grandfather told me that when the Hidatsa were camping here after they left the reservation, they sometimes buried people way back in those bluffs, using the old way of burying, with the bodies wrapped in hides and tied to platforms.”

“Really? Could you maybe go up there and find those burials and find beads and pipes and stuff?” I asked.

Behind his brown eye, a shutter dropped. “… Well,” Gerard Baker said, “I suppose you
could
…”

3

H
ITCHHIKERS
:

Someplace in Wyoming, I picked up a guy who said his name was Darryl. He told me that he was an irrigator, and that he had just been fired from the ranch he worked for because he fell asleep and neglected to close a dam and flooded out half a mile of highway. He told me he was hungry, and that if I were to run over a jackrabbit we could build a fire and roast it. Whenever a jackrabbit would pop up along the road, he would yell, “
Hit
the son of a bitch!”