Great plains, p.8
Great Plains, page 8
On a dirt road on a cattle ranch, also in Wyoming, a rancher reached over and opened the glove compartment of his pickup and showed me dozens of worked pieces of stone which were rattling around with fence pliers, staples, binoculars, and candy wrappers. Some of the stones were oval, some were thumb-shaped, some appeared to be fragments of projectile points. The rancher said, “A guy came up here from Denver a while ago and said he wanted to look for artifacts on our land, and I asked what kind of artifacts, and he said, ‘Early-man tools.’ We all thought that was pretty funny—whenever we’d need a rock for something, we’d say, ‘Hey, hand me one o’ them early-man tools.’ Then one day the guy comes down off the ridge and he’s got this beautiful spearpoint about six inches long. Ever since, I’ve been keeping my eye on the ground, and picking up chippings and points and hide scrapers all over the place. Some of these rocks I don’t even know what they were, but I know they were something.”
The oldest human remains found so far on the Great Plains date from the end of the last Ice Age—about twelve thousand years ago. Archaeologists divide the early inhabitants into elephant hunters and bison hunters. Elephant hunters came first, and used a distinctive type of stone point, called the Clovis point, to kill Ice Age animals like mammoths, which were larger than modern elephants and had curved tusks fourteen feet long. After the mammoths disappeared, hunters used a smaller point, called the Folsom point, to kill prehistoric bison. Folsom points are believed to be between eight thousand and nine thousand years old. More recent points are, in general, harder to date and classify. The ones in the rancher’s glove compartment come from a three-thousand-year-long pre-Christian period called the Early Plains Archaic.
On a dirt road above the valley of Horse Creek, also in Wyoming, another rancher pointed to a federal construction site on the bluff opposite, where archaeologists working for the government had just discovered evidence of a prehistoric camp. “They found a couple of round grinding slabs and a metate—a grinding stone. They told me the camp was maybe three thousand years old,” he said. “What I can’t get over was that the grinding slabs and the metate were made of sandstone. I keep thinking about those grains of sand in the food.”
The big game animals disappeared from the plains about six thousand years ago, and archaeologists have as yet found little evidence of any game at all there for maybe two thousand years after that. Experts in the subject of paleoclimates believe that during these years—from about 4000 B.C. or 4500 B.C. to 2000 B.C.—the Great Plains went through a period of heat and drought which turned the land to near-desert. This period is sometimes called the Altithermal. As the climate gradually became cooler and more moist, humans again moved in, usually following river valleys. Stone grinding tools are often found at village sites dating from the last years of the Altithermal; in that environment, apparently, people were grinding up and eating just about anything organic they could find.
On the banks of the Sun River, in western Montana, I sat at the center of a wheel made of rocks, with spokes stretching across the prairie. I had read about the wheel in an astronomy column in a local newspaper; many people believe that these prehistoric stone alignments, called “medicine wheels,” found at a number of sites on the plains, were astronomical timepieces. The day of my visit was the summer solstice, June 21. I wanted to see if the sun would set exactly at the end of one of the spokes. The wheel once was whole, but the river eats away more of the bank every year, and now less than half remains. The hooves of cattle going down to the water have trampled out most of the wheel’s center. As I watched, the sun got lower, the blossoms on the little prickly-pear cactus caught the light, the shadows of the grass slid along the ground, the bluffs on the near riverbank turned dusky, the bluffs on the far bank turned pink. Then, beyond the low peaks of the Rocky Mountain front, the sun went down at a point indicated by none of the spokes of the wheel. I had with me a diagram of the wheel when it was less damaged, which showed a small double row of rocks on the approximate line of the sunset. The medicine wheel is on private land, and a trail used by ranch vehicles has scattered those rocks. Astronomers say that many of the medicine wheels on the Great Plains are aligned to the summer solstice. A well-preserved wheel in the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming indicates with spokes ending in rock cairns the points on the horizon where the sun rises and sets at the solstice; others of its cairns may be intended to show where the stars Aldebaran, Rigel, and Sirius appear at dawn in the summer sky. For most tribes of plains Indians, the summer solstice was the time of the Sun Dance, their most important religious ritual. In the years since white men came, none of the Indians has been much help in explaining who built the medicine wheels, or why.
In the valley of the Madison River, also in western Montana, I stopped at the Madison Buffalo Jump State Monument. A display in a kiosk near the parking lot indicated a nearby bluff off which Indians used to chase buffalo in the days before the horse. I climbed to the top of the bluff and walked away from it across the rolling prairie; when I looked back, I could find no hint that the land beneath my feet was about to end abruptly. It looked like just another rise. It would have fooled me, let alone a buffalo. The bluff is the end of a narrowing tongue of land which would have funnelled the herd to a point. The drop from the bluff—sixty or seventy feet—then turned the animals into a rain of meat. On the spot where so many buffalo would have landed and died, almost no grass grows, maybe out of tact. Indian hunters used this perfect natural trap over and over for thousands of years before the horse put it out of business. From the interstate highway which runs nearby, nothing about this bluff looks any different from thousands of others.
At Fort Griffin State Historical Park, in north-central Texas, I walked the edges of a plowed field where much of the town of Fort Griffin Flat once stood. In the 1870s, the equation that turned buffalo hides into buffing rags brought a lot of money here. Today, only the ruin of a Masonic Lodge remains. Among the many people who came here to profit from the buffalo hunters’ earnings was the famous gambler Dr. John Henry Holliday, known as Doc. Doc Holliday had been to dental school in Baltimore, and he had good hands. He also had tuberculosis. He was one of a long list of people who came to the dry plains for their health. After a career which involved him in countless knife- and gun-fights, including the shootout at the O.K. Corral, the most famous Western gunfight of all, he finally died of his disease in bed in a hotel in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. His last words were, “This is funny.”
Here at Fort Griffin Flat, according to the later recollections of his friend Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday reprimanded a man during a card game for looking through the discard pile. The man, named Ed Bailey, pulled a gun, and Doc Holliday killed him with a knife he carried in his breast pocket. Doc Holliday was jailed, and when some of Bailey’s friends decided to lynch him, a woman named Big Nose Kate set the livery stable on fire, sprung Doc Holliday in the confusion, and rode with him six hundred miles north to Dodge City. No grave in the old cemetery near the town site has a headstone with the name of Ed Bailey. In fact, none of the graves has any marker at all, and the graveyard itself is unmarked and untended. In this part of Texas, the ground is mostly limestone rock, so a lot of graves in this cemetery were the classic heap-of-stones type familiar from Western movies. With the years, the centers of such graves sag back to the ground.
Just outside the town of Holcomb, in western Kansas, I pulled into the driveway of the house where the Herb Clutter family was murdered one night in 1959, and where, later, the writer Truman Capote came to research his book In Cold Blood. Wind-bent trees line both sides of the driveway, and cross their branches above. I drove past a “Keep Out” sign; since the murders, the house has been mostly untenanted. The murderers parked in the shadows of a tree. The ambulances drove up to the front door. The history of this house makes everything here look different; it makes warm afternoon sunshine into the flash of a police photographer’s camera. The shots that stopped four lives in this house also seem to have stopped time. From my car, I could see that the lawn was recently mowed, that the beige frame-and-brick exterior did not need new paint, that a bruise-colored curtain was drawn in a downstairs window. A detail that transported the whole scene back to 1959 was the elaborate television antenna on the roof; anybody as interested in television today would have a satellite dish.
On the open prairie in west-central Montana, near no town, I came across perhaps my favorite ruin on the Great Plains. This ruin is an unfinished structure about twenty feet high which covers more than an acre. The outside of the structure angles inward, like the base of a pyramid; the walls are nine feet thick, mostly sheathed in bulldozer-yellow steel plate. On the concrete floor inside are tire tracks, and skid marks where kids have done wheelies or donuts. Swallows fly around inside and chirp. The ping of dripping water echoes. Pages of a water-stained Bible rustle in the wind. Through the main entry, you could drive a small house. On the exterior, someone has written in spray paint, “172 Million Dollar Monument to America’s Stupidity.”
From a local person (it took about an hour of driving to find one), I learned that this structure was originally intended to be a command center for the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile system. Later, from a public-information officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Great Falls, Montana, I learned that the Army had been in charge of Safeguard and that construction of the center was suspended in 1974 when the United States got rid of parts of the ABM system in compliance with the SALT I Treaty. The command center was built to withstand nuclear attack; now, tearing it down would be too expensive to be worthwhile. Even damaging it at all seriously would require patience, cutting torches, and heavy equipment. Usually, ruins refer to the past, but what I like about this one is that it probably will still be here a thousand years from now. Inadvertently, it has become timeless, like the pyramids or the Great Wall. If the Army were using it for its original purpose, barbed wire and security forces would keep me far away; abandoned, viewed from up close, this monument of cold-war architecture has begun to look a little like a frame from an old James Bond movie. Paleontologists sometimes infer from a fragment of mandible whole skulls, species, cultures. Maybe in thousands of years this ruin will be evidence from which people infer nuclear weapons, the internal-combustion engine, automated banking, Phil Collins albums, and diet pancake syrup. As my van rocks gently on its springs in the wind, and as the wind whistles through the grama grass, I feel as if the car and the grass and I are all flesh to this ruin’s bone.
* * *
In or near the towns of Colstrip, Montana; Rock Springs, Wyoming; Zap, North Dakota; Stanton, North Dakota; and Beulah, North Dakota, there is a different kind of ruin. At those places, and many others on the Great Plains, enormous power shovels strip away the land to dig out coal. From a distance, their posture on a ridge is that of a crow on carrion. Near Zap, you can see two or three of them on the horizon at one time, their booms swinging back and forth like feelers. At Colstrip, Rock Springs, Stanton, and other places, on-site power plants, also called mine-mouth plants, turn the coal into electricity. In Stanton, the strip mine and power plant are within sight of the location of a Mandan village which was emptied by the smallpox epidemic of 1837. That 95-acre expanse is now a National Historic Site, with posted signs saying “Digging Prohibited by Law.” Railroad tracks lead away from all the strip mines. From the mine-mouth plants, tall two- and four-armed pylons file across the prairie east and west, to places where more people live.
Obviously, I don’t like strip mines. The only not horrible aspect of strip-mining I can think of is that the machines it requires are a real spectacle. Especially if you come upon one at night, all lit up, eating away under banks of lights miles from anywhere. Basically, a strip-mining machine is a steam shovel, exponentially enlarged. The cab section can be the size of a multi-story apartment block, with windows, ladders, catwalks, lunchrooms, and (for all I know) bowling alleys. The bucket has teeth the size of a man, and room to park three stretch limos. The biggest of these machines can strip an area of several city blocks without moving. In their wake, they leave not ruins but ruin. The coal companies sometimes attempt “reclamation” by planting grass or trees in the ruin and calling it a recreation area or a game preserve. Land that has been strip-mined, “reclaimed” or not, demonstrates that the rest of the Great Plains is a palimpsest: unstripped ground looks the way geology, wind, water, buffalo, cattle, the railroads have made it look. Like other arid but inhabited parts of the world, the plains sometimes hold pieces of the past intact and out of time, so that a romantic or curious person can walk into an abandoned house and get a whiff of June 1933, or can look at a sagebrush ridge and imagine dinosaurs wading through a marsh. In the presence of strip-mined land, these humble flights fall to the ground. Scrambled in the waste heaps, the dinosaur vertebrae drift in chaos with the sandstone metate, the .45-70 rifle cartridge, the Styrofoam cup. It is impossible to imagine a Cheyenne war party coming out of the canyon, because the canyon is gone.
Among the many booms that have occurred on the Great Plains have been several booms in archaeology. One began in the late forties, when the Army Corps of Engineers was getting ready to dam the Missouri River and submerge forever hundreds of miles of riverbed and thousands of square miles of bank and valley. Teams of archaeologists working for the government went along the river examining sites and recording data. Another boom followed the Arab oil embargo of 1974, when energy companies were considering mining more coal and building bigger mine-mouth plants to burn it. By law, anyone who plans to dig up public land must first hire an archaeologist to report on the land’s historical significance. Archaeologists who do that kind of work are called contract archaeologists. In a booklet called Early Peoples of North Dakota, written for schoolchildren, C. L. Dill, an archaeologist with the State Historical Society of North Dakota, explains: “If a site is dug up before it is investigated, the information in the site will be lost forever, just like tearing a page from a book. Archaeologists excavate sites carefully and record everything they see and find. That’s like reading the page before it is thrown away.”
Strip-mined land is land thrown away. Usually, trash exists in a larger landscape; after strip-mining, the larger landscape is trash. Instead of adding a new layer to the palimpsest of the Great Plains, strip-mining destroys the palimpsest itself. Of a place where the imagination could move at will backward and even forward through time, strip-mining creates a kind of time prison. Even after “reclamation,” land that has been stripped gives you no year to think about but the year when the stripping happened.
I fear for the Great Plains because many people think they are boring. Money and power in this country concentrate elsewhere. The view of the Great Plains from an airplane window is hardly more detailed than the view from a car on the interstate highways, which seem designed to get across in the least time possible, as if this were an awkward point in a conversation. In the minds of many, natural beauty means something that looks like Switzerland. The ecology movement often works best in behalf of winsome landscapes and wildlife. The Great Plains do not ingratiate. They seldom photograph well—or rather, they are seldom photographed. Images of the plains are not a popular feature of postcards or scenic calendars. And, in truth, parts of the plains are a little on the monotonous side. Convincing someone not to destroy a place that, to him, seems as unvaried as a TV test pattern is a challenge. The beauty of the plains is not just in themselves but in the sky, in what you think when you look at them, and in what they are not. A strip-mining machine could eat the Madison Buffalo Jump—a one-in-a-million piece of ground which fooled buffalo for thousands of years—for breakfast. By leaving nothing behind but a landscape of trash, strip-mining insults the future. By destroying the physical record, and by making the history of white people on the Great Plains look like nothing more than the progress of appetite, strip-mining also insults the past. Land that has been strip-mined reduces the whole story of the Great Plains to: chewed up, spit out.
6
ONE day, on the street in front of my apartment in New York (this was before I moved to Montana), I met a Sioux Indian named Le War Lance. I had just been reading a study of recent economic conditions on Sioux reservations. The authors seemed puzzled that so few Sioux were interested in raising sugar beets or working in a house-trailer factory. As I waited for the light to change, I noticed that the man standing next to me resembled many pictures of Sioux that I had seen. I said, “Are you a Sioux?” He smiled and said, “I’m an Oglala Sioux Indian from Oglala, South Dakota.” He said his name and asked for mine. He had to lean over to hear me. He was more than six feet tall. He was wearing the kind of down coat that is stuffed with something other than down—knee-length, belted around the waist, in a light rescue orange polished with dirt on the creases—blue jeans lengthened with patches of denim of a different shade from knee to cuff, cowboy boots, a beaded leather ponytail holder. His hair was straight and black with streaks of gray, and it hung to his waist in back. After I saw him, I never cut my hair again. In one hand he was holding a sixteen-ounce can of beer.
