The third Alliance City Jail victim was an eighteen-year-old named Chillo Whirlwind. In the wee hours of an early June morning, on the thirty-fourth day of his imprisonment, he allegedly stood on a wastebasket with a towel around his neck. After tying the towel to a cell bar, he kicked the wastebasket across the floor, which had to have made a loud, banging sound. Police Chief Hutton complained that Whirlwind’s dozing cellmates failed to wake up. Two years earlier, Chillo had been sent to the Nebraska State Reform School for Juvenile Offenders in Kearney, Nebraska, where he got into frequent fights with other kids and was often placed in solitary confinement. Back in Alliance only a couple of months, Chillo was arrested for breaking into a gas station. It is said that when he was two years old, his mother gave him up for adoption to the Swalley family, whose immigrant forefather came to Nebraska from Lancashire, England, and married a Lakota woman who may have been Chillo’s great-aunt. When a city councilman suggested the police install a closed-circuit TV system in the city jail to better monitor the prisoners, Police Chief Hutton huffed, “Some of our jail guards are women, and I can’t have women watching the sex acts that go on in the drunk tank.”
And finally there was Irene Blackfeather, forty-three, whose death later that same month may have been the most disturbing of all. Sick and lying in a pool of blood and vomit, she moaned and cried in agony while her sister Betty, in the next jail cell, yelled out for the cops to call a doctor. Police Chief Hutton, on duty at the time, ignored Irene’s cries and Betty’s pleas until they became unbearable. When he finally came up the stairs to the cellblock to tell “those noisy squaw bitches to shut up,” Irene had passed out and was barely breathing. Hutton called for an ambulance, but it was too late; Irene was DOA at the emergency room.
Bad press and the fact that Irene was the fourth to die in a short period prompted the governor of Nebraska, J. James Exon, to call for a grand jury investigation. As part of the investigation, an autopsy on Irene’s body was ordered, and when confronted with the news that she had died from pneumonia complicated by cirrhosis, Hutton complained, “God, we’re not doctors!”
Sadly but predictably, the investigation turned out to be a whitewash—Chief Hutton and his merry band of bigots were exonerated. Reports that the Alliance cops arbitrarily arrested Indians to work on the street-cleaning crew, beat them in jail and allowed them to fight among themselves until bloody handprints could be seen on the cell walls, sexually abused women prisoners, and staged suicides were found by the grand jury to be based on rumor and hearsay. The suicides in Alliance, the jurors concluded, were not attributable to criminal negligence by the police but were the “tragic consequence of the socio-economic conditions under which the Indians live.”
Outraged, I wrote the protest poem that serves as the overture of this libretto, and submitted it to the Alliance Times-Herald for the annual “Poetry Day” edition. Of course, my father, who was the editor, published it, but I rather wish he hadn’t positioned it as the lead poem in the two-page section. My words ignited a firestorm—subscriptions were canceled and advertising pulled, and letters to the editor flooded the newsroom; at home my dad received anonymous threatening phone calls and my mom was embarrassed. I became a persona non grata.
Thinking about good old Alliance, how wonderful and yet how monstrous it was, makes me super hungry. Holiday Inn Express prides itself on the “free” breakfast brunch it serves every morning, and I know people who say it is delicious, but what do they know? OK, I admit that living on the West Coast has spoiled me food-wise forever. I refuse to eat microwaved biscuits, yogurt infused with high-fructose corn syrup, powdered eggs, chewy toast with fake butter, sugar-laden cereals—at least the Holiday Inn has real bananas picked from real banana trees (I presume), and the coffee, while it looks and tastes like it was brewed during the Eisenhower administration, does the trick as long as I drink a lot of it and drink it black, without the complementary powdered cream. Banana, black coffee, plus a tangerine and a few almonds from my travel bag, and I am good to go.
* * *
Alliance is a small town in an area of Nebraska called the “Panhandle,” because if you look at a Nebraska map, the state is shaped like a pan and Alliance is in the middle of the handle. Founded by land speculators in 1888 at the north-south, east-west junction of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, the town grew quickly, populated by Civil War veterans and European immigrants drawn by the promise of “free” land courtesy of the Homestead Act, the claim size having recently been increased from 160 acres to 640 acres (equivalent to one square mile). Never mind that in 1868 this land had been ceded by treaty to the Lakota Sioux Nation.
Due to the lack of law enforcement, Alliance also attracted a subculture of thieves, prostitutes, and escaped convicts. Within a few years, the population grew to five thousand as churches, hotels, schools, and farm and ranch supply businesses sprang up alongside the saloons and whorehouses. Ranchers and homesteaders traveled to Alliance by horseback and wagon from as far away as Torrence, Wyoming, to trade and buy goods, gamble, get drunk, and get laid.
The terrain north and west of Alliance has always been much the same—boring patches of flat farmland where farmers mostly grow wheat, potatoes, barley, and sugar beets. South and east of Alliance is dramatically different, breathtakingly beautiful—the Nebraska Sandhills, twenty thousand square miles of semi-arid sand dunes pockmarked by hundreds of spring-fed ponds and lakes, with a thin coating of prairie grass, a frozen ocean of green-gold-brown colors stretching out to faraway horizons, and a vast metallic-blue sky arching overhead.
In more recent times, the consolidation of farms and ranches and the flight of young people to bigger cities have depopulated most of the surrounding Nebraska towns, but Alliance keeps on growing thanks to the little railway company Nebraska mogul Warren Buffett purchased in 2007 for the bargain price of $44 billion. Every day, hundreds of 120-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe trains slowly rumble through Alliance. They haul coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming or crude oil from the fracking operations in North Dakota—and Alliance is not just a point on the map that these sooty trains pass through, it is also the location of a huge locomotive repair shop, by far the city’s largest employer.
* * *
But now it is time to let my adventure begin. Back in my room I grab my camera and head outside to my yellow Mexican VW rental car, which I have decided to christen Villa VW in honor of the great revolutionary hero Pancho Villa, because building Volkswagens in Mexico is definitely revolutionary, isn’t it? There’s a cold, bright sun peeking over the horizon, but my iPhone tells me it’s going to be an unusually warm Good Friday, with temperatures in the mid to high seventies. Already, cars are parked at the Arby’s drive-through across the highway from the Holiday Inn Express, and there are more at McDonald’s. I notice that the Kmart opposite McDonald’s is also open and can’t help recall a recent book I read called The Magician’s Assistant, by Ann Patchett, which takes place in Alliance some year during the freezing days of February, a time when according to Ms. Patchett, many locals, including teachers and students, meet up with each other and find refuge from the cold in Kmart. I’m wondering if they are doing that now. Driving out from my designated Holiday Inn courtesy parking onto East Third, a brick-paved road, Villa VW and I cruise past the Wonderful Kitchen Chinese takeout and head directly under the railroad underpass where as a high school sophomore my brother, Roger, tried to outrun the local cops. His souped-up Chevy Impala was definitely up to the task, but unluckily, Roger spun out across the highway into a pillar and ended up spending his next six weekends in the county jail. There are so many things to remember driving down the streets of Alliance. There’s Ken and Dales Restaurant, where I should have had breakfast, but there is no time for that now. Vernell is waiting and I can’t wait to see him.
A few minutes later I’m outside the Alliance city limits, driving past my old classmate Jim Furman’s sprawling ranch house, his veterinary center and horse corrals and
the prefab metal barn where in the summer of 1995 we had our thirtieth high school reunion dance in ridiculous ninety-degree heat, an overflowing beer keg on the straw floor and a tape player barking out country tunes. I could see right away which of my classmates had moved to Colorado or California and which ones had stayed in Nebraska—the exiles looked trim and healthy in their Polo outfits; the left-behinds were much heavier, and decidedly less stylish. I smile thinking of the impression my wife and I must have made with our in-your-face interracial family: my dark, large-framed stepdaughter, Jazz, her massive dreadlocks piled on her head like a coiled boa constrictor; my toddler granddaughter, Jamaica, so precious with designer wire-rim glasses magnifying her sparkling brown eyes; and especially Darrell, Jazz’s latest boyfriend, fresh out of San Quentin, licorice-black, pick comb sticking straight up from his head, a true pioneer of the sagging-pants look. At all times, Darrell was on DEFCON 1 alert for racial slights—poised to confront local cowboys who happened to look at him in the wrong way.
News that my crew and I were going up to the reservation over the coming Fourth of July weekend for a powwow at Vernell White Thunder’s ranch along with my friends Dennis and Connie McCullah; Don Nace and his wife, Linda; and their unsuspecting children only added to the shock value. One of my ex-girlfriends warned Linda to stay in the car. “White women who venture onto the reservation,” she said, “get killed or worse,” which would have made me laugh if it hadn’t been so stupid.
* * *
So little traffic. Windows down, I can take in the clean country air, hear my tires humming on recently repaved blacktop. I’m only seven miles down the road, but already I need to make a pit stop because I drank so much weak coffee. So I stop at Carhenge—an odd replica of Stonehenge formed by thirty-eight classic cars from the 1950s and ’60s, uniformly coated with gray spray paint. Without seeking the advice or consent of the locals, farmer Jim Reinders buried some of these cars upright in five-foot pits and welded others on top to form Stonehenge-like arches—on his own land, mind you, but within clear sight of the highway. The citizens were scandalized; they insisted Reinders dismantle his atrocity, which surely would turn Alliance into the laughingstock of the nation.
And then, as Reinders was wrangling with the city council over a business permit, an online travel Web site, TripAdvisor, named Carhenge one of “America’s Top Roadside Attractions,” and the tourists started coming. Carhenge was featured in a network TV commercial. More tourists came. Some stayed overnight, gassed up and ate in Alliance, even wrote appreciative letters to the Alliance Times-Herald. Reinders suddenly became a local hero. These days people from Alliance love Carhenge; if you happen to run into one of them, say in Pocatello, Idaho, they will invariably ask, “Have you been to Carhenge?”
HAY SPRINGS
WHY CROW DOG WAS SET FREE
How many years has it been since I’ve had to slow to a crawl for some crazy-ass farmer driving a tractor right down the middle of the goddamn highway? I wonder as I patiently wait for my opportunity to zoom by. The odds that I can safely go around him are ten thousand to one in my favor, no need to worry, these roads are deserted, but then I think of my boyhood friend, twelve-year-old Buddy Oswald, riding his bicycle not far from here, probably daydreaming when he crossed the road right in front of a semitruck. They say he was decapitated. Buddy’s death was my earliest experience with traumatic death. So many people came to Buddy’s funeral that they couldn’t cram them all into the church, so they piped the sound outside. I was one of those outside. His mom was crying and carrying on so much it was hard to hear the pastor, but I do distinctly remember him saying it was part of God’s plan for Buddy to die, to be snatched away from his family, and as hard as it was to understand, we must accept this. “Buddy is in Heaven now,” the pastor said. “He’s playing with other prematurely dead children, waiting for the rest of us.”
Now that I have at last passed the tractor, I can see for miles and miles ahead as I enter what locals call the “Box Butte Tableland”—flat and nearly featureless endless brown-yellow stubble on my left side, field of pale green on my right, most likely cover crop, ryegrass or buckwheat. Cloudless, the sky looks two-dimensional, a muddy canvas of splotchy blues.
This small tip of the North American prairie was once part of the Great Sioux Reservation, an immense twenty-five-million-acre expanse stretching from the Yellowstone River in Montana across eastern Wyoming, including a slice of North Dakota, the western half of South Dakota, most of western Nebraska, and parts of northeastern Colorado, blanketed with mixed short and long grasses—buffalo, porcupine grass, switch grass, and Indian grass—interspersed with a kaleidoscope of colors impossible to duplicate in man-made gardens: violet and indigo flowers, white and purple prairie clover, black-eyed Susans, wild licorice and strawberries, goldenrods, prickly pear, sage, purple coneflowers, wild onions, prairie turnips, gooseberry and chokecherry bushes. An inland sea of nutrition teeming with fat prairie chickens, grouse, and quail, great herds of elk, mule deer, pronghorn antelopes, and tens of millions of buffalo. There were also wolves and grizzlies, but no fences, no farms, no roads, no telegraph poles or railroad tracks.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, ratified by the U.S. Senate, granted the Great Sioux Reservation to the Lakota people in perpetuity. The “country north of the North Platte river and east of the summits of the Bighorn mountains” was to remain unceded, meaning no white person or persons would “be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory.” Included was an isolated mountain range in present-day northwest South Dakota, the Black Hills (Paha Sapa), sacred to the Lakota and the Cheyenne—thusly named because the pine-covered slopes appear to be black when viewed from a distance.
A mere six years after the treaty was signed, Civil War hero “Boy General” George Armstrong Custer embarked on a “scientific mapping expedition” through the Black Hills. You might think such a mission would require a dozen men on horseback and perhaps another dozen pack horses, but sensing an opportunity to advance his growing public profile and his ambitions for the White House, Custer turned his little treaty-violating adventure into a virtual invasion of Indian lands by hauling along more than a hundred wagons and nearly a thousand men—soldiers, bandits, prospectors, thugs, Indian scouts, newspaper writers, and, for cover, one paleontologist, one geologist, one topologist, and one botanist. He did not bother to notify or seek permission from the Indians. Thus, August 2, 1874, became a very sad day in the history of the Lakota people when the prospectors accompanying Custer’s outing found traces of gold in the gravel bed of an intermittent stream called French Creek, near where it empties into the Cheyenne River. One of the scouts who witnessed this historic moment of discovery, a Yankton Lakota known as Goose, reportedly said, “The whites threw their hats in the air, jumped up and down, and ran in circles like headless prairie chickens. Laughing, screaming—I could not understand. A few specks of yellow dust made them crazy.”
Embedded correspondent William Curtis understood well enough. The Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper published his sensationalized version of the discovery on August 17 under a one-word banner headline:
GOLD!
From the grassroots down, it was pay dirt; all the camp was aglow with gold fever. Shovels and spades, picks, axes, tent-pins, pot hooks, bowie knives, mess pans, kettles, plates, platters, tin cups, and everything within reach that could either lift dirt or hold it was put into service by the worshipers of that god, gold.… The expedition has solved the mystery of the Black Hills, and will carry back the news that there is gold here, in quantities as rich as were ever dreamed of.
Curtis’s article—reprinted in papers around the world—inspired thousands of prospectors, speculators, dreamers, and the merely out of work to pour like the spring floods into the Black Hills.
At first the U.S. Army vigorously turned back these greedy-eyed whites from entering the Black Hills, expelling those who slipped through, destroying their wagons, burning equipment and supplies
. As more and more kept coming, however, it became politically unpopular to hold them back. Millions of discharged Civil War veterans were out of work, and the Union army was standing in the way of economic expansion; standing in the way, in fact, of Manifest Destiny! Within two years of Custer’s discovery, the generals caved and began protecting the prospectors. And in another violation of the Fort Laramie treaty, a new railroad called the Cowboy Line was hastily built across northern Nebraska. It brought in thousands more, including recent Irish and German immigrants. Many of those who didn’t travel on by wagon or horseback to the Black Hills settled in the small towns that sprang up alongside its tracks.
One of these small towns, Hay Springs, is ahead of me. Mari Sandoz, chronicler of pioneer life, biographer of Crazy Horse, was born on a homestead near here in 1896. Her father, the “Jules” of her book Old Jules, unlike most of his European neighbors, liked the Indians living nearby, enjoyed visiting with them, befriended many. Elder warriors from the Lakota, Brulé, and Cheyenne tribes spent hours around his kitchen table, drinking coffee, telling colorful tales from the old life about hunting buffalo, raiding Pawnee, dancing the Sun Dance, and battling Custer. Sometimes they even camped across the road from the house. As a little girl, Mari often sat on the floor, sometimes under the table, and around the campfire listening to their stories. She learned many Lakota phrases, became familiar with their ways. Later she would beautifully transcribe firsthand accounts from Indians who survived the Sand Creek and Powder River massacres, who participated in the Battle of Platte Bridge, Roman Nose’s Fight, Red Cloud’s War, the Fetterman Fight, the Battle of the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn), and many others. When writing what many consider her masterpiece, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (published in 1942), she made a three-thousand-mile trip through Indian country, spending weeks interviewing Crazy Horse’s friends and relatives, including Red Feather, Little Killer, Short Bull, and his closest friend, He Dog, then a blind old man who ultimately lived to be ninety-nine.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 2
