American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  Maybe he sensed my discomfiture, because he stood up and walked the thirty yards or so separating us. He stroked the mule’s quivering flank and murmured to quiet it. I was grateful for the smell of his tobacco smoke and for the noise of the embers when he drew on the pipe. The mule calmed under his hand.

  “Told you it was a sight,” he said.

  The steppe was crowded with the remains of bison— grass growing up through bones that, except for scant rags of flesh, had been picked clean and bleached.

  “I never counted, but I’d guess maybe four, five hundred animals laying here. Or what used to be.”

  The troops sent to the Great Plains were killing buffalo in order to starve the Indians, forcing them onto reservations and away from the goldfields, settlements, and emigrant trails. It was “scorched-earth” William Tecumseh Sherman’s policy and Grant’s, too. The commander of Fort Dodge, where pretty-boy Custer was stationed, liked to tell the newspapers, “Every dead buffalo is one Indian gone.” The government was hell-bent on exterminating both.

  “I’d rather they was Indian bones any day than buffalo,” Osler said, his long yellow teeth clenched on his pipe stem.

  In those days, I would have agreed.

  I felt bewildered and sick. At that moment, I hated the Union and its army and wished Sherman, Grant, Custer, and the whole infernal gang dead. But in my own bones, I knew it wouldn’t change anything. If Davis and Lee had been victorious and the Indian Wars were being waged by men in gray, these same buffalo bones would be lying in the grass, the wind singing lamentations through the harps of their rib cages—their hides sent east on the new railroad and bought by the tanneries with Confederate money to make lap robes and mufflers. That’s what people are like.

  Osler spit what we called an “oyster” back in Brooklyn and asked, “Aren’t you going to take a picture?”

  I was transfixed by the maze of carcasses undressed of flesh by varmints, carrion birds, and industrious insects, their bones scrubbed clean by rain, the light of the harsh sun, and time. I could not take my eye off the wreckage, as though a thread of pity joined me to it.

  “Seems a shame after coming all this way.”

  Shame. That’s what this was, and shame was what I felt. Like a man who stumbles on a corpse, or like anyone who discovers a secret that makes him want to retch, to weep, to stab the sight from his eyes, to do like the ancients and tear out his hair and cover himself with dirt. For here on the desolate plain, the secret nature of our kind had been made visible in a latticework of bones. I think our shame will save us, if anything can.

  I set up the tent and camera, coated a plate, and stuck my head behind the drape. But the subject matter was too big— the enormity of it—even for an eight-by-ten-inch plate. I’d need a view camera like the one used by Robert Vance to photograph the mines and prospectors of the California goldfields. No, not even that big negative could begin to capture what I saw—what I felt when looking at so much death. That was it: No camera could contain my feelings for the subject. The pity of it. By now, you know I was not easily moved. I had seen death parceled out wholesale during the war and retailed on the cobbled streets of lower Manhattan, and I’d never flinched. I was accustomed to heaps and piles of dead men. I’d grown a callus over the tender conscience given us at birth. Maybe I was becoming womanish in my feelings. I’d need to be careful, or the bad men of the West would devour me, would pick my bones clean.

  “I shot a man once for beating his dog with a shovel,” said Osler unapologetically while I pretended to read the light that glared on the bones like caustic soda.

  So here, too, was someone who could be moved. A man with a modicum of respect for life—if not for a human’s, then a dumb beast’s. George Osler and I might have been low down on the ladder when it came to sentiment, leastways compared to Sunday school teachers, but we were a rung or two above the gunfighters, bushwhackers, claim jumpers, thieves, and cutthroats that crawled over the West like dung beetles on a steaming pile of shit.

  “I can’t stand to see an animal mistreated,” Osler said.

  In their youth, George and his brother, Frank, had a small dairy out in the country, north of Philadelphia. They’d kept a dozen milk cows and a horse to make deliveries. George talked about his family and his cows and how much he liked the life he’d had then. When I asked him why he’d left it to come west, he shrugged. I’d seen that shrug before, given in reply to the same question. Men would say, “To get a piece of land,” “To get rich,” “To get away from my wife and family,” “To get the bit out from between my teeth,” “To get closer to God,” “To get out of His sight.” Or they would say nothing, looking you fiercely in the eye or at thin air or the dirt at their feet. I suppose the best answer—meaning the most truthful—was the one I finally gave Jackson for wanting to take pictures: “I don’t exactly know.”

  That day, I made two plates; the first a lengthy exposure. I wanted to capture the light on the bones, but not so that they were flooded by it. I was after that peculiar radiance Jackson called the “fat light.” The second plate, I exposed twice as long to give the weakened rays of the cloud-dampened sun time to burn themselves onto the negative.

  “We’ll sleep here tonight,” said Osler. “Too risky to travel the pass without a full moon.”

  I nodded and decided not to pack up the camera just yet. I thought I’d leave the lens uncovered to see how the remains would photograph under a sliver of moon and the gravel of stars. Of course, it didn’t turn out: The wet plate dried during the exposure. Later, when I showed it to Jackson, expecting to be lambasted for my stupidity, he said he was pleased. He reminded me that life and pictures can happen by accident. He looked at the empty plate and declared it “beautiful.” I don’t believe in accidents—not anymore.

  Osler took the mule and rode off toward the trees to gather wood. A June night can be cold a mile above sea level. We’d also need a fire to heat up our hash and coffee. Besides, I didn’t care for the idea of sleeping among so many dead creatures. I didn’t believe in what the eye couldn’t see and the hand couldn’t choke. Still, it’s easy to see ghosts when you sleep in a graveyard. I wanted a fire to ward them off.

  “I saw something even worse in the Platte River Valley,” said Osler, arranging sticks of wood with the fastidiousness of a haberdasher. “A two-hundred-mile stretch of bones— bare and bleached like these here.” He shook his shaggy head in wonder, as anyone might who happened on a thing so unspeakable that it defied understanding. “A man can kill eighty buffalo in a day, if he puts his mind to it.”

  In three years, white hunters and soldiers killed eight million American bison—not to eat, but for their hides, or for the pleasure they took in subjugating something remarkable, or for military strategy in the total war against native peoples, which were “fated to pass away” from the earth so that the Caucasian race could inherit it.

  That night, Osler continued in a talkative vein. Maybe he, too, was scared. Maybe he was awed by the presence of death or the absence of life (they’re not exactly the same thing). Maybe he knew that, after tomorrow, he’d never see me again. He could tell me his thoughts and admit feelings he never would to the other miners. Men seem cruelest when they are in one another’s company for any length of time. He said that he and Frank had come west the year before and gotten off the train at Omaha. They hadn’t been in town long when Frank got stabbed coming out of a saloon.

  “By an Indian wearing a Union blue coat.”

  “With sergeant’s stripes?” I asked. If I’d been a rabbit, my ears would have tensed in alarm.

  “Yes. Know him?”

  “I saw him around.”

  The most inconsequential thing can forge a chain of fatality: Whitman, Grant, Lincoln, Durant, Jackson, George Osler, Frank, a dispossessed, demoralized, and rum-soaked Indian—all connected by a sack coat. And that field of bones . . . is it connected to the firmament of stars? Whitman knew the truth: Everything is pitched to a mystic chord. Tho
ugh not always sweetly. Such are the thoughts that come to a man in the night.

  “What happened to the Indian who stabbed your brother?”

  “I put a bullet in him,” Osler replied.

  I lay in my bedroll and watched the moon climb up a corner of the sky and start down the other side. The stars composed their ancient stories, told each night to an earth that suffers under our dominion. The bones of nine hundred Indian ponies shone under this same sliver of a moon, near the Washita River in Indian Territory, after having suffered natural processes to turn them into a ruin interesting to photographers. In November, Custer had ordered the ponies shot after his 7th Cavalry killed the Cheyenne while they slept beneath white flags raised above their tents.

  Custer. He would fester in me, like a dirty splinter.

  The wind had lain down with Osler and me. Now and again it rose to hymn the night, which is, as anyone knows who’s slept outside in it, holier than the common day woven of distractions. If one turned out, I decided to send a print of the killing field to Grant to remind him of what death looked like, stripped of glamour and rhetoric. Sitting in his White House, he might have forgotten “the stark forms of existence.”

  I know what you’re thinking, Jay. Your disapproval is written all over your face. Bear with me awhile longer, and then you can have your say.

  Omaha, Nebraska, June–September 1870

  Now that the Union Pacific was finished, Durant had no more need of the old Lincoln parlor car or its steward. I burned my white uniform and became William Jackson’s full-time assistant. I let my hair grow long and wore a beard like his, and I didn’t give a damn whether my fingernails were clean or not. We lived on board the “photographic car,” fitted out with berths, a trestle table, and upholstered chairs abandoned when a tent town erected along the right-of-way went bust. There was also a darkroom. I became skilled at printing negatives, retouching albumen prints, and hand-coloring stereopticon cards of the Wild West. Ordered by a Boston firm, the cards gave voyeurs back east something to gape at. It was hack work and oftentimes despicable, but Jackson depended on its income to finance his excursions.

  While he was off taking pictures of Indians, I worked on the Boston job and on an album of prints for Durant, commemorating the Omaha depot. When I finished it, he handed me the camera’s bill of sale. I was nearly twenty-two and considered myself disenthralled at last, as Lincoln would have said. I’ve often wondered whether he would have advocated extermination, like Custer and Phil Sheridan; salvation, like the missionaries; or starvation, like Sherman, as the final solution to the Indian problem. (It was by Lincoln’s order that the Northern Ute were driven out of the Provo Valley onto a reservation.) Frankly, I didn’t see how to pacify them. We couldn’t pack them off to Africa the way we wanted to do the blacks. The Indians might have had good reason to kill us, but we couldn’t just doff our hats and offer them our scalps.

  In June 1870, Durant sent Jackson to Colorado Territory to photograph the linking of the Denver Pacific to the new transcontinental railroad. Afterward, Jackson traveled by stage-coach the hundred miles to Denver City, where he’d been commissioned to make portraits of the mining millionaires Tabor, Croke, Patterson, and Campbell. They paid him, as they paid for everything, ostentatiously.

  “Each handed me a hundred-dollar gold piece,” Jackson told me later. “Then each one lit a cigar with a hundred-dollar bill. I don’t think they meant to humiliate me, only to prove to one another that they were too rich to consider such sums anything more than a trifle.”

  The money, along with what the recent stereopticon order brought in, would be enough to restock our plates and chemicals and to allow us to live like lords through the coming winter. Or so I thought. Jackson went out and got himself bathed, shaved, and massaged, replenished his supply of dried apricots, and bought a brand-new wool union suit for each of us at Omaha Dry Goods. The town had grown prosperous, and Geissinger, the store’s squint-eyed owner, had hired a painter to add emporium in gold letters to his sign. I wondered what had possessed Jackson to buy me new underwear, but I said nothing, knowing how much he liked to appear mysterious. Jackson would have made an excellent shaman or a Moslem fakir, depending on the hemisphere.

  “We’re going to take a trip up into northern Utah,” he said finally, chewing on an apricot.

  I waited for him to elaborate, but he got into his berth without another word and shortly began to snore—the ends of his ample mustache riffling with each exhalation. I pushed a chair into the late-afternoon light and read awhile in Leaves of Grass—the passage beginning “O something pernicious and dread!/ Something far away from a puny and pious life!” I never failed to find a sentiment in Whitman’s book that accorded with my own life and aspirations. I knew people—men and women both—who would open the Holy Bible and stab blindly at the page with a finger to find an answer in times of trouble and crisis. I would use his Leaves, which is, I believe, also a holy book. Doesn’t he say in it about the grass “I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord”?

  Jackson woke from his nap, and we sat down to eat at the trestle table where we worked on our negatives and prints. I heated coffee and some corned beef and potatoes on the spirit lamp, filled our mugs, and flung wet gobs of hash into tin bowls. We ate in silence. Finished, Jackson pushed his bowl aside, sipped his coffee, and told me at last what he had in mind.

  “I want to photograph a sorry ragtag band of Northern Ute,” he said. “To get the bad taste of Denver millionaires out of my mouth.”

  I thought of the heavy woolen underwear and began to worry.

  “When?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “If we leave soon, we can get there before the snow piles up in the passes.”

  We could have traveled in relative comfort on the Utah Central from Ogden to Salt Lake City, but Jackson wouldn’t hear of it. He was sick of railroads, which, in his opinion, had tamed things, and wanted to surround himself with “the haggard beauty” of the Wasatch Range when the snow began to fall.

  “Can’t we go in the spring?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I want to see the Indians at their most miserable,” he said.

  The Utah Valley, October 1870–April 1871

  The Ute gave their name to Utah, and whatever else they had of value (they owned nothing, ownership being an alien concept)—land, timber, artifacts, buffalo, elk, antelope, and deer—Utahans took. So it went anywhere Indians had, by right of prior possession, what emigrants coveted. The taking proved easy; they swarmed over Indian lands, regardless of treaties made with the “white fathers,” and stole or killed what they liked. When the Indians objected, the squatters complained to the newspapers and Congress, and the army herded the Indians onto wastelands to the sentimental drinking tune of “Garry Owen.” If they became indignant and scalped a few settlers or prospectors out of pique, the army retaliated by killing their men, women, and children and the millions of bison the Indians relied on for food, clothing, shelter, and spiritual well-being. Some say there were as many as 75 million buffalo on the Great Plains before we hunted them nearly to extinction to feed railroad workers toiling west, to profit from their bones and hides, to satisfy the itch to kill, and—most important—to annihilate the Lakota and the Cheyenne. Unable to defeat them, the army eventually starved them into submission.

  Jackson and I entered the Utah Valley through the Wasatch. Wasatch is Ute for “low pass over high range.” He hadn’t anticipated the quantity of snow fallen already in the mountain passes, and the going was arduous, exhausting us as well as the mules, which found their footing with difficulty on the snow-covered rocks. We spent six days on the crossing, made increasingly nervous by each day’s new snowfall. It was bitter, and the raw wind cut. I recalled the fate of the Donner Party in the Sierra Nevada two decades earlier and wondered how Jackson would taste, stuffed with his dried apricots.

  I never doubted I could endure the extremities of weather and
terrain. I spent four years living like an animal in mud, rain, snow, and heat. And a tenement in winter or in the dog days is far worse. I’d survived an impoverished childhood and a terrifying war, but trudging through the Wasatch passes took the sand out of me. I felt my backbone melt in the heat of Sisyphean exertion, and—no sooner had it turned to slurry—I’d wince as it froze up once more in the cold. Forlorn, I would spend bitter hours of repentance for having agreed to make a trip for no other reason than to take pictures of the “fish eaters,” the Toompahnahwach Ute wintering in misery on the shore of Utah Lake. Jackson was imperturbable. Not even frostbitten toes could discourage him. He would spend the better part of his life in strange countries, including the one found inside each of us, and never doubt himself or yield to self-pity, the latter a quality predominant in my character.

  On the seventh day, we came out of the snow-bandaged mountains and into the valley, near the Mormon settlement at Spanish Fork, about ten miles south of Provo. After resting the mules and giving them a ration of provender, we rode west toward the big lake where the fish eaters had their winter camp.

  There were fifty-three Toompahnahwaches—call them Ute, for convenience—living under shabby lice-infested buffalo hides stretched on alder saplings. How lice managed to survive their wretchedness became a theme I returned to often that winter. In my boredom, I’d speculate on the damnedest things: how geese knew when to step up onto the ice before lake water knit up around them; why piss didn’t freeze in our bladders, when we couldn’t lick a metal spoon without our tongues sticking to it; why our stubble didn’t stay, by some kind of natural law, inside our faces, where it would be warmed, at least a little, by our blood—questions of no great import, inspired by the cold. I would have felt sorry for the Indians if I hadn’t been busy feeling sorry for myself. The snow crackled, hissed, and seethed; it twisted, wraithlike, over the white crust when the wind grumbled. What birds we hadn’t eaten shivered on the ridgepole. By the time April came and, with it, the thaw, nine Indians had perished from a variety of ills: children, old people, and a girl. One child was born and survived—a fact I consider miraculous under circumstances that were worse than dire.