The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (21 page)

3

W
HEN THE FIRST WARM WEATHER ROLLED AROUND—UNUSUALLY EARLY FOR
K
ANSAS, IN
M
ARCH—
W
ARD AND
I
SET OUT TO FIND THE
J
OSEPH
C
OLLIER HOMESTEAD ON THE
M
IDDLE
B
EAVER.
Collier had been Sherman County’s first permanent resident. I wanted to find the exact spot, to see if there was any water left where he’d lived.

With one finger on his pickup’s steering wheel and one arm on the sill of his open window, Ward drove us into the valley on a winding road, a welcome diversion from the straight section-line roads on the flat divide we’d crossed after leaving his place. He was wearing his King Ropes cap and his chocolate-brown Carhartt jacket, which set off his blond mustache and hair. On the tape deck, Lucinda Williams was singing about her own knee-buckling addiction to a man. We were both enjoying the liberating breezes of spring after a winter of long drives on snowy highways, then excruciating weeks between our visits, when the season’s cold exacerbated our longing.

I inhaled the sweet smells as we passed groves of budding cottonwoods and sprinkler-irrigated hay meadows. That’s one thing that would make living here nicer than living in Laramie, I thought. I wanted to wake up each spring morning to the promise in the soil. Laramie winters were too friggin’ long.

As we rounded the turns, white-tail deer sprang across the meadows and disappeared into stands of mature cottonwoods. Wild turkeys trotted through tall grass. Pheasants scurried into ditches. In Collier’s time, the valley must have been even richer in animal life, although there would have been one notable absence.

Collier had started coming into the area as a bone picker, one of the men who roved the prairies collecting buffalo bones. In the 1870s, the plains had been littered with those bones because the hide men, or hunters, who’d wiped out the buffalo herds had a ready market only for the hides. Vultures, wolves, coyotes, cougars, and in some cases,
even grizzly bears had cleaned the bones of flesh, leaving them easy pickings for the final scavengers.

Collier alone claimed to have gathered a thousand tons of bones. I envisioned him crisscrossing the unfenced prairie from pile to pile on still mornings, his horses’ harnesses creaking, the bones in his wagon clacking. Using the same trail that had served as the Indians’ Ladder of Rivers, he hauled the bones to a railhead near Fort Wallace, on the Smoky. From there they were shipped east and made into all sorts of things—knife handles and combs but mainly bone black, a form of charcoal used in refining sugar. Some bones were ground up, shipped back west, and dusted onto the monarchs’ own Elysian fields, as fertilizer.

My map led us onto the headquarters of a showy ranch with a big barn and several Quonsets. I didn’t recognize the locally famous ranch until Ward stopped in front of a two-story limestone house with a red tile roof. I’d heard about the beautiful house from my mother, who had once attended a ladies’ club meeting there.

We found the owner in the side yard, spray-painting an iron bed frame gold. “You got a little on your boot,” said Ward.

The man looked up. “Well, look what the cat drug in.” Ward knew all the ranchers, the dwindling number who had not succumbed to farming. This one was compensating for low beef prices by stocking his pastures with game and selling hunting rights. He’d turned the house into a bed and breakfast for the hunters. The bed frame, he explained, was destined for one of the guest rooms.

Ward stood with his arms folded and his mustachioed lip curling in a wry smile.

“Sometimes hunters bring their wives,” the man explained. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that his great-grandfather, who’d bought the place from Collier in the early 1900s, had torn down the homesteader’s soddie when he built the barn.

When I asked, he recalled that the ponds along his family’s stretch of the Beaver had been large enough to swim and fish in when he was a kid. They used to irrigate alfalfa out of the creek too but hadn’t been able to do that for a long time.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Groundwater pumping and what all. The big spring under the bridge still runs.” He pointed down the road.

As we approached the body of dark water, a pair of mallards churned over the surface and waddled into the shoreline brush, where hundreds of red-winged blackbirds trilled from their perches on the powdery heads of last year’s cattails. I leaned on the bridge’s railing and stared down at the shiny water, stained dark by cottonwood and hackberry leaves. I’d read a beautiful definition of a spring: “a place where, without the agency of man, water flows from a rock or soil.” Such appearances were a kind of grace, like the buffalo that the Indians once believed flowed perpetually from a cave hidden on the prairie. It was only human, I supposed, to think that these fonts could never dry up.

Funny, though, how all could seem right with the world as long as I stood in a beautiful place. It helped to be under love’s spell. “Hello,
Homaiyohe
,” I said.

“The Mighty Beaver,” Ward said.

It had thrilled me to run across Cheyenne words for the creeks and rivers. The Smoky Hill River that still trickled in the valley below Ward’s house was
Manoiyohe
, Bunch of Trees River. My childhood creek was
Homaiyohekis
, Cheyenne for Little Beaver. The beavers would have dammed the water that trickled from the springs, creating marshes for wildlife and allowing the water enough time to trickle down through the sands, recharging the aquifer. But the animals had disappeared long ago, trapped by fur traders in the first half of the 1800s.

Many beavers had returned, Ward now explained, but ranchers used to dynamite the dens, freeing the water for their hay meadows.

“Did you ever do that?” I asked, hoping the answer was no.

“Never did on my place. But I helped my uncle do it when I was a kid.”

“Did that bother you?”

“I tried not to let it. If you want to make a living, you have to pull in your feelers sometimes, sweetheart.” He squeezed my hand.

I squeezed back. I was in no position to criticize.

Blue dragonflies flitted about, their wings blurring the air. One of them landed on my forearm.

“A good omen,” I said.

“Do you think?” Ward smiled indulgently, letting show his western condescension toward anything that smacked of the New Age.

But this was Old Age stuff. The Cheyenne believed that dragonflies were messengers from deep water. They called them little whirlwinds because their swarms took that shape, warning Indians of enemies and indicating which direction to travel. This insect was a lustrous mechanism, with bulbous aquamarine eyes and what looked like precious blue-green stones on its back where the wings attached. The wings were delicately veined and so clear I could see the hairs on my arm through them. One wing had a notch torn from the lower edge.

Ward raised his camera and shot the picture that he would later hang on the wall over his kitchen phone—my hair white fluff in the sunlight, and the dragonfly a strike of blueness on my glare-whitened arm.

In 1857, a military expedition had discovered the remains of a recent sun dance on the Middle Beaver, probably at this very spot. Historians believed that almost every member of the tribe had been present. “More than four thousand people,” I said now. “Can you imagine?”

“There must have been a lot more water than this,” Ward said. “Must have run all the way up and down the valley. Hold that pose.” Grasping his camera, he left the bridge and threaded his way into the cattails.

I waited, transfixed by the warmth of the day and the clarity of the dark water in Collier’s spring.

Not long after Joseph Collier built his house, wrote his granddaughter in a Sherman County family history volume, another man and his family settled in the valley. One day soldiers appeared on the road, escorting some Indians. When the Indians turned their ponies out in Collier’s hayfield, the two neighbor men rode out and told them to graze their horses elsewhere. This so angered the band’s chief that he grabbed the reins of Joseph’s horse and jerked them. Joseph was almost thrown.
The two made a hasty retreat to the Collier home
, wrote the
granddaughter.
They decided the ponies would not damage the hay land so much as they had first decided.

The anecdote had struck me as a remarkable admission of less-than-heroic behavior in a pioneer ancestor. I sensed that the granddaughter was on the chief’s side. Was there some awareness seeping out between the lines that the meadow belonged more rightfully to him?

That chief might have been one of the many who’d defended the land from invaders, returned to it now as a prisoner. He might have been among those who’d sun danced here in 1857. If so, he’d won his rights to this rich valley with his own suffering. Braves doing the sun dance bled into the dirt, went thirsty for days, ate nothing. The medicine man would have pierced the chief’s chest, strung a rawhide rope through the wounds, and tied it to a cottonwood tree that the tribe had chopped down and erected at the center of the circle with exacting ceremony. The custom was to pull back on the rope until it tore through the flesh.

Although the Cheyenne had come onto the plains from the forests around the Great Lakes, they had known what to worship here. As the writer N. Scott Momaday put it, on the plains “the sun has the certain character of a god.” His Kiowa people had also adapted quickly. “After untold centuries bent and blind in the wilderness of the northern Rockies, they soon reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.” We had no idea what it was like to meld with indwelling spirits, I thought. Because we were unwilling to bleed for the land, as it did for us, we were still foreigners here.

“Don’t look at the camera,” Ward called from his stand in the rushes.

“It doesn’t help, telling me not to,” I called back.

I’d wanted to visit this place to see what had made life possible here for my own people. Were it not for this and other rare surface water, there would have been no homesteaders. Settlers who didn’t live near water were said to have filled barrels at places like this one and rolled them home. But as usual, it was the Indian history that excited my imagination. When I’d read that the sacred sun dance had been performed on the Middle Beaver, I’d looked up from the book and
stared. Triangles in my office’s southwestern-print wallpaper had floated in my vision as the marvel set in. The knowledge that the plain old dry creek my family crossed every time we went to town had hosted such a spectacle no more than twenty miles east of that crossing gave me a glimpse of the land as once wild. I would never attain the Indians’ ferocious connection to the place. You did have to bleed for that, but thanks to the image the words conjured, when I thought of the past on our land, I now saw colors. Instead of gray images of windblown homesteaders, I saw dancing, heard drums and songs that praised and gave thanks for the grass and sky. I saw wild animals. I saw live water.

•   •   •

T
HROUGHOUT THE SPRING, WHENEVER
I
WAS ABLE
to visit, Ward and I continued making rounds to all the old watering places. On an unseasonably hot Saturday in early April, we went searching for the headwaters of the Smoky Hill River and the campground of the Dog Soldiers. We stopped at Sherman State Fishing Lake, where my brother Bruce used to play hooky from farm work. I remembered his triumphant returns home, the silver tabs on his stringer flashing as he pulled sun perch, catfish, and blue gill from his bucket. Now only heat waves swam in the dry lake bed.

As we continued south through the Smoky Valley, a glimpse of blue in the distance led us to traipse across a pasture in the record heat, visions of a cool swim egging me on and giving Ward a window on my fanaticism. As we arrived at the pond, which turned out to be unappealingly muddy, the banks erupted in dark, bubblelike objects. These scuttled, like a battalion of remote-controlled robots, into the water. Turtles! We perched on a chunk of limestone and watched for them to reappear. Only once did we spot what looked like a wood chip floating on the water—the knot of a turtle’s snout, taking in air.