River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Among us latter-day ascenders of the Missouri was a notion the next morning that our night at the Yankton casino was but a permutation of the history there for the past two centuries, even if the only warriors we saw were the man-mountain security guards, today mustachioed, badged (“metal breasts”), wearing photo-identity cards, and on their sleeves little American flags. Our relationship with the Yanktons was recapitulated, if reworked, history: the night before, when the Professor began his winning streak, several Indian employees gathered around the slot machine, the thing gleaming like a campfire, while he dropped in coins perhaps like Clark tossimg out twists of tobacco and ribbons. It seemed our crew and the Nakotas were very much the descendants of old rivermen and chieftains. When the luck ended, a young Yankton asked where we’d come from, Pilotis answered, and she said, “Are you redoing Lewis and Clark through here?” To this question we’d heard before, I said, Yes, but only because it’s the best water route west. She shook her head. “I mean, are you reliving a little of the history?” Until that evening, I would have said no.

  Down the hill from the casino, Fort Randall Dam lies along the edge of the second fort, of 1870, where only foundations and a ruined chapel remain. Randall was part of a catenation of outposts built in the middle of the nineteenth century to help open the upper Plains for the taking. In 1881, Sitting Bull was brought to the fort after his surrender and imprisoned for two years; the soldiers, tired of tourists come to see the great chief, were glad he later was sent on up the Missouri to Fort Yates.

  After we did work on our engines and propellers, we pulled Nikawa down to a narrow arm of Lake Francis Case (named after a South Dakota senator who supported anti-Indian bills President Truman vetoed) and launched under a blue sky holding big round clouds as the sea does islands. I took us in close to the dam, then we turned upstream and struck a course atop the old bed of the Missouri 120 feet below, heading west, passing over the site of the first Fort Randall of 1856 drowned by the impoundment like so many other historic places here. After all, Great Plains history often happens in watered valleys.

  I kept an eye on the chart to keep us above the former riverbed, not because of surrounding shallows but because I wanted the Missouri to know we respected its ancient path to the sea. Just after we crossed the ninety-ninth meridian, the Professor, a teacher of writing whose pate was coming into the years of high polish, said as if thinking aloud, “There are no angles in water. It’s an angleless stuff. Mountains have angles, and canyons, forests, the sky on a clear night.” Pilotis said, “That’s probably why fish have been so slow to take up geometry.” The Professor, still to himself: “A big spread of lake like this just seems to be, as if it does nothing more than exist. It doesn’t grow like a tree, or erode like a canyon or mountain. On a quiet day it’s just here, with no more apparent life than a big old lichen on a rock.” And Pilotis: “It’s ruminating.”

  From my first day on the great river, I had learned to be cautious of what I said in its presence, for it has great ears. The Professor was yet a gosling on the Missouri, so I warned him how Loose Lips Sink Ships, not just in war but also on certain rivers. I said, For example, speak of a day going easily, and some waters we won’t name will set your boat on her gunwales. He looked to see whether I was serious, and I said, If you must comment about smooth passage, then say it upside down. He thought, then whispered, “Well, the old Missouri, she’s putting it hard to us today.” Yes, I agreed, around the next bend we’re likely to catch it even worse. Pilotis told the Professor, “The coincidences on this voyage have coincidences.” I was just thinking that very thing in those very words, I said. And the Professor: “So was I.” A mile farther, we banged into a low rider, a waterlogged timber showing almost nothing above the surface, but we escaped with no worse than pounding hearts. Said Pilotis to the Professor: “He may have hit that deliberately to indoctrinate you. His former spouse claimed he wasn’t very smart, but he was lucky as all get-out.” I said, You don’t need to be smart if you’re lucky. Just then we struck another low rider, this one an unnerving thunk. Again we got away with it. Pilotis: “Will you the hell stop doing that? He believes you.” I said, It was pure coincidence.

  I have not mentioned that, a year earlier, I gave consideration to making the voyage alone in a motorboat, because, for a journeying writer, companions human or otherwise are distractions. I’ve often thought how much better Travels with Charley might have been had John Steinbeck left at home that eponymous poodle. Isolation is more than a boon to a writer’s effort—it’s a near necessity. However—however—the great enemy of long-distance solo travel is, as Steinbeck understood, desolation. I’ve covered thousands and thousands of miles alone, but for this venture I came to believe the isolation might turn into a desolation that would sooner or later doom the voyage. That spring afternoon as we rolled along between the great bluenesses of the Dakota sky and the Missouri lake, I relished my companions—their voices, their laughter, their very distraction—and I understood they were as necessary as my eyes, my hands, and they were indeed my good hands.

  The Professor brought along a small library of Missouri River books, and from these he read to us in quiet moments or sometimes just paraphrased a page or two, words always linked to our location or experience. As I sat back listening, steering Nikawa with my stockinged feet, taking in the greatness of the undulation of plains, he was saying, “South of here Lewis and Clark poured five barrels of water into a prairie-dog burrow to flush out a specimen to send to President Jefferson. They dug six feet down into another den only to discover they weren’t halfway to the lodge, but they killed a rattler in a tunnel and found inside the snake a freshly swallowed prairie dog.” Then he read a passage, changing a few crucial words to turn it into pornography, which may explain why the note I was making at the time about a west butte later appeared on my pad as “wet butt.” My good hands, my sweet distractions.

  Somewhere along there in 1843, on about the same date in May, Indians waved their request for the little steamboat Omega to make a landing and engage in trade, but the vessel chugged on upriver as the Indians stood disappointed before picking up their firearms. Passengers along the rail heard bullets striking the chimneys and piercing the cabin bulkheads, and a sleeping Scotsman had a bullet cut through his pantaloons before bouncing off a trunk to fall to the deck, and another traveler, John James Audubon, picked up two lead balls and put them with his collection of bird specimens.

  We passed the mouth of Whetstone Creek, and three miles farther made a perfect ninety-degree turn back westward, and then, after sixteen miles, went under the Winner Bridge. From that point on, we’d be traveling farther north than we’d yet been. For years I’ve loved bridges—their designs, histories, function—but being on rivers made me see them as something even greater: they confirmed our position; they gave us hope that, were one of us to fall to injury or illness, we could find help; they reminded us we were not so alone as the vast openness often made us feel.

  Near Snake Creek the sounder showed a depth of 240 feet, and Pilotis said, “The river Audubon or Maximilian or Captain Lewis knew is twenty-four stories below us,” a comment that likely would have sent me into one of my bottom-walker reveries had not the inconstant Missouri suddenly shoaled out and put us into an increasingly twisted section of submerged trees on islands and sandbars then just inches beneath the surface, and I asked my mates to take up a deadhead watch. We’d gotten away with two hits that afternoon; even a dull-wit pilot knows when not to push luck too far. The compass headings rolled from west to west by north, to west-northwest, back again, west by south, west-southwest, and started all over once more, then we ascended past the inundated mouth of the White River pouring a long streak of muddy water into the blue lake.

  Soon we came up to the old Milwaukee Road railway bridge, and then to a big, broad span. I asked, Do you know what that is? The Professor: “I’ve customarily called it, or ones resembling it, a bridge. What is it in your tongue, Tonto?” Interstate
Ninety. In sarcasm, Pilotis took up the copilot’s log and pretended, with manifest flourish, to make a note of it as if we’d spotted something rare, like a lost leg of the Oregon Trail. When sailors must suffer under a monomaniacal cap tain, they are prone to such mocking sport to relieve their repressed vexation. Just so, my hearties, said their Ahab, but where did our ship first cross Ninety?

  Their jeu d’esprit turned to curiosity, then to sorry lubberly guesses, then to a mad riffling through the road atlas. Said the surprised first mate: “It was the Hudson, a hundred forty miles above New York City,” and then more turning of pages and, “This is the fifth time we’ve gone under it.” I asked, And where will be the last?—Don’t look it up! —Just guess and wait. And they, macaronically, smartly, “Aye aye, mon capitaine.” I said, Ninety is the longest interstate and one of only two to run sea to sea.

  The Nikawa, eighty-seven miles above the dam, came abreast of Chamberlain, South Dakota, a good little main-drag town, and we made our way up American Creek to an anchored dock cut off from shore by the record high water of the impoundment. We tied in, hoisted pant legs, and, shoeless, waded ashore past a sandbagged café to where the Photographer waited for us.

  That night at dinner, safely beyond the Great River Ears, Pilotis said, “Was it an easy day because we were lucky, or are we learning how to do it?” The apprentice Professor argued for education, but the cynical skipper, long in the wiles of the Big Mischievous, held for chance. Said his friend a bit mockingly, “I guess we don’t have to get smart as long as we stay lucky.”

  Later, the Photographer and I walked down to the Black Hills Bar, a delightful place of embossed tin ceiling and a worn screen door, the kind kids used to bang shut as they ran out into their summer days, and there we took up a conversation with two surveyors working for the Bureau of Land Management. They told how some white farmers on the unfenced plains encroach on Indian land by taking in an extra row with their big plows each spring. Said one fellow, “Given the width of those rigs and the size of the fields here, we’re talking several acres every year.” The Photographer: “Will there ever come a time when whites stop finding ways to steal Indian land?” The surveyors, blonds from North Dakota, looked at him as if the question had been, “Will the Second Coming begin the day after next?”

  A Conscientious Woman

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER was an inventive fellow who could juryrig a number of malfunctioning things with a length of coathanger, a chip of wood, or some oddment he’d found on the street, and, once, an old tennis shoe. To accomplish his simple wizardry, he functioned as an ambulant vacuum cleaner capable of picking up and packing away any loose thing weighing up to about sixty pounds. As a former Navy man, I insisted on maintaining Nikawa in near Bristol fashion, and as navigator I always watched our draft and concomitant fuel economy, permitting only necessities to be packed away in either the boat or her tow wagon, the latter already much burdened when Nikawa was on the trailer, with the mountains still before us. Almost daily I emptied our transport of residua, continually reminding my mates the boat required no ballast and the wagon no more stowage, and I threatened to court-martial any hand committing such slovenliness or acquisitiveness. Little changed. I would turn up materiel the Photographer had found and tried to squirrel away: a peculiar shard of broken glass, a large carriage bolt, a length of oily string, a rock shaped like a potato (any object resembling an object of another kind he was sure to pick up). Those were the small et ceteras. The big ones—driftwood for an end table, a boulder for a rock garden, a packing crate to hold the recrements—those I forbade whenever I saw him lugging them. For the last several years, after his wife turned up one of his caches hidden in their attic, he has tried to give me a large, broken metal-and-neon café sign that says EAT.

  To my knowledge, the Photographer is the formulator of the Strap Rule: If a strap can catch on something, it will. That’s a maxim I can not gainsay, as I thrice proved that morning right after I discovered a piece of boiler and a lawnmower wheel hidden in the tow wagon: my belt, camera lanyard, and shoulder case attached themselves to a nail, doorknob, and boat cleat as if they were loath to leave port.

  The Photographer came aboard, the Professor happy to have the shore time he was coming to prefer. We waded out to Nikawa and set off down the creek and onto Impoundment Francis Case, the morning again in flawless weather. Nobody said it, of course, but everything was right. That reservoir, like Lake Sharpe twenty miles upstream, is narrow, with submerged and exposed dead trees infesting its banks, places so stump-ridden a fisherman can hardly pull a lure through, so, although the way looked quite open, we proceeded up the lake by again trying to keep the old river beneath our hull. On the low hills we saw more decaying timber in the water than trees of any sort on shore, and on both sides of us, beyond the narrow U.S. government boundary surrounding the Missouri, Indian land stretched northward for some sixty miles.

  A man who had watched us get ready to slog out to Nikawa that morning told us of a fellow passing through Chamberlain a year earlier. “He was running coast to coast like you, but he was taking seven years to do it. He did a stretch every summer, but he had a speedboat, so he was going to have to portage pretty much all through Montana and Idaho.” With that qualifier I lost interest, but the Professor, wanting to spend more time where people were, said, “Seven years to cross sounds like a sane traveler.” I agreed but told him that wasn’t the plan for me who knew the towns and counties along our course; I wanted what I didn’t know, the riverine route across America. One can drive over the Plains, to mention one instance, on highways nearest the Missouri and see its water only a half-dozen times, usually in places where everyone else is looking. No matter how marvelously open the land appears there, the Missouri and its bottom country are quite hidden away, and a traveler passing through the Dakotas could come to believe they are utterly dry. From a highway, perhaps one can get an idea of things like the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, but for a notion of what Lewis and Clark or Audubon or Father De Smet encountered on the river, that an automobile can’t provide.

  By noon we reached Big Bend Dam, a sinuous earthen and concrete wall athwart the Missouri, the spillway on the east and powerhouse on the west. The Professor waved the orange signal flag to direct us toward his voice over the radio and the waiting trailer, and we soon had Nikawa loaded and hauled up the slope and across the dam and back into the water. The weather remained neighborly, and the impoundment gave us nothing more than a washboard of wavelets. The Photographer said, “Why do I feel the Missouri is setting us up?” Pilotis: “That’s its nature.”

  When we were again under way on Lake Sharpe, Mate stared back at the dam for some time, then nodded: “If we stopped up all the rivers, we’d be living underwater. They keep us dry. Without them, we’d have no bean patches or baseball diamonds. We’d be some kind of underwater species.” The Photographer, who can tell you the plot of such movies as They Saved Hitler’s Brain, said, “Maybe like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Pilotis: “When we speak of land, we talk about our lives, but when we speak of rivers, we talk about life.” I said, There’s something in flowing water that can turn a bloke downright contemplative. Pilotis: “I think I know why I’m finding these impounded miles so slow—the river has no song in the reservoirs. It’s quelled. I can’t see the flowing, so sometimes it’s like neither we nor the water is moving.”

  Seven miles above the dam, the Missouri strikes against a hard peninsula that forces it nearly ten miles north before it again reaches a more tractable terrain and turns to resume its southeasterly run to the sea. The Big Bend is, to my mind, more accurately a loop in the shape of a turkey’s head, the long neck to the south, the beak to the west. From Lewis and Clark on into steamboat days, passengers sometimes went ashore at the narrow base to take a constitutional over the open but uneven ground to the other side, less than a mile distant today, but three times that before the dam. William Clark reported doing it and so did Prince Maximilian, both of them watching
their boats labor around the bulgy spit, land now intensively plowed, a piece one would walk these days only to recapitulate a historical circumstance. While the river is wider today, its old braiding is yet apparent in the tricky shallows there, and I tried to match the chart with readings from the sounder as we hooked around the grand loop that slowly widens to nearly three miles on the upper end. At the base of the turkey neck, we passed our thousandth mile on the Missouri, almost three thousand water miles away from the Atlantic, but the erratics of the river gave us no moment to celebrate beyond high-fives.

  The entire peninsula belongs to the Brulé Tetons, the tribe that came close to wiping out Lewis and Clark’s Corps not far from Big Bend. The dramatic and angry face-off, a story often retold, is memorable because both sides checked their anger just enough to avoid blood, a détente that kept not only Jefferson’s Expedition but much other Missouri River history from derailing early.

  Each shore lay in reciprocations of treeless and anciently eroded slopes between leveled cropland, some of it with center-pivot irrigation insanely spraying water onto the entombed river. We turned north, went back west, and four miles farther reached another benchmark, the great hundredth meridian, the most popular definer of where the American West begins. Our day nearly done, we rolled along feeling in charge of our fate, but, a few miles below Pierre, South Dakota, the Photographer lapsed and said, “What an easy day,” caught himself, and added, “Of course, it’ll get worse.” Damnit, I said, you know you can’t trick a trickster.

  Although thirteen thousand people live in the capital, we saw little indication from the water that there were even thirteen thereabouts; wooded islands and bankside trees once again screened us into the illusion we were isolated voyagers. In search of a dock, two miles below the mouth of the Bad River—called the Teton by Lewis and Clark, and the Little Missouri by the French-Canadian explorers, the Véren-dryes—I took us up a shallow, dead-end chute along the east bank, a hazard area according to our chart. In the still water I tried to navigate with the depth finder, but the shoals sent the thing haywire, making it fluctuate wildly. When I noticed it register 196 feet, I cut power quickly but not before putting us onto an invisible mudbar. Surprised to be so solidly fixed, I looked back and saw a brown wake a quarter of a mile long. Wearily helping to pole Nikawa free, I said to my fine hearts, Part of standing watch is to look backward as well as forward, especially when I have to keep an eye on the goddamn sounder. One of them answered, “Billy Joe said we’ve got to learn to look ahead.” Sure, I grumbled, and what direction was he facing when he said it?