Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place

by Annie Proulx

  Jack Creek comes down from the Sierra Madre and flows into the North Platte at Bird Cloud. It is a curious source of pleasure to stand on the bridge and look up at the snowfield in the distant mountains and know that is where the stream begins. This creek was named for the Ute warrior Chief Jack, a.k.a. Ute Jack. His Indian name was Nicaagat (which means “green leaf” or “one with earring” according to various sources). Taylor Pennock said there were no ranches in the Saratoga Valley when he arrived in the 1870s. “The Utes used to come into the valley every spring and fall to hunt for meat but didn’t molest us. There were two camps of the Utes—one Ute camp was on Jack Creek and was under Chief Jack, after whom Jack Creek is named.”21

  As a child Ute Jack was sold by slave traders to a Salt Lake City Mormon family where he learned English before eventually escaping.22 He occasionally served as an interpreter for the U.S. military, had been to Washington and had a presidential medal. He played a major role in the so-called Meeker Massacre. The sanctimonious Fourierist Nathan Meeker, who wrote for Horace Greeley’s New York Herald Tribune, was deeply involved in settling Greeley, Colorado, which he was determined to make into a utopian colony. He borrowed money from Horace Greeley to buy up as much land as he could at the site of the future Eden. Unfortunately Greeley died soon after the project started and his heirs called in Meeker’s note. Forced to sell his lately acquired lands for almost nothing Meeker was left with a sizable debt and had to find a job. In 1878 he wangled the post of superintendent of the White River Indian Agency in a cold, remote valley, a region that interested white miners. Three bands of Utes were assigned to this agency. The aim of the government at this time was to convert all Indians into farmers. Even John Wesley Powell who eventually headed up the new Bureau of Ethnology thought hunters could be made into farmers. He wrote, “The sooner this country is entered by white people and the game destroyed so that the Indians will be compelled to gain subsistence by some other means than hunting, the better it will be for them.”23

  Meeker, still saturated with Fourierist ideals, took up the challenge of making the horse-loving warrior-hunter Utes into happy farmers. Meeker believed that if he got rid of their horses the Utes would be more tractable. In his zeal, he ordered their best horse pasture and racetrack plowed and planted to corn. This did not go down well. Ute Jack was the war chief for the bands and had many followers, though the whites regarded two other Indians as the primary chiefs. Trouble escalated and Meeker began to write untruthful letters to his superiors claiming that he had been assaulted by the Indians, that they were setting forest fires. Eventually the inexperienced Major Thomas Thornburgh, the commanding officer at Fort Fred Steele in Wyoming, got orders to proceed to the agency with his men. Through messages to and from Meeker it was agreed that Thornburgh, guided by the Rawlins livery stable owner Charles Rankin, would meet Meeker at Milk Creek with no more than five men to discuss the situation but would not cross the creek. Milk Creek marked the reservation boundary. The Utes, who had not fought the United States to that date, threatened war if troops came across the boundary creek.

  As Thornburgh and his men advanced, Ute Jack and the Indians were waiting on a vantage point to see if the major followed the rules. In violation of the agreement the troops crossed Milk Creek. A shot was fired by someone unknown and the battle was on. One of the first to die was Major Thornburgh. When Ute Jack saw Thornburgh fall he also knew what the inevitable future of the Utes would be; he left the battle. A messenger was killed; Meeker, back at the agency settlement, was killed. Soldiers and Indians crashed down from their saddles. Rankin made a daring ride for help which eventually came and saved Thornburgh’s troops from annihilation. The Utes were driven west to Utah and miners and settlers rushed onto their White River reservation land.

  Ute Jack had a dreadful end. A newspaper story of the period began with the gross sentence “Only once in history of the Wyoming country is it recorded that a single Indian was dignified by being made the sole target for a cannon.” Ute Jack, who had taken refuge in a tipi on the Shoshone reservation at Fort Washakie and was betrayed by an army spy, was that target. The Laramie Sentinel turned this outrage into high humor with a mock obituary celebrating the scattering of his brains “over four acres of sagebrush” and adding, “His body will lie in state in a cigar box, until the time . . . he will be interred with . . . a corn planter.”24

  The thriving, rich civilizations and cultures of North and South America collapsed under the ravages of imported diseases against which indigenous people had no built-up immunities. Until the 1960s white historians seemed unaware that swaths of disease had killed vast Indian numbers. In the late nineteenth century, white travelers in the American west described Indians as dirty, primitive, dull-eyed and listless. They were seeing (but not comprehending) the sick, demoralized, rootless remnants of once-healthy, intelligent, vigorous people whose languages and cultures had been gutted by the wildfires of smallpox and other European diseases. Many early Wyoming settlers were pleased when large numbers of Indians died. A particularly repugnant passage from an article, “The Greatest Trout-Fishing Town in the World,” by C. E. Van Loan in the July 1910 issue of The Outing Magazine departs from its rapturous ravings about the fine fishing in Saratoga’s North Platte River. (The same article shows a fisherman casting into Bird Cloud’s deepest pool.) The author reported on a conversation between a visiting fisherman and two local men, one the owner of the hot springs.

  The forty-niners came through this part of the country and they brought a little smallpox along with ’em. That was new stuff for the Injuns and the first thing they knew, they had a fine hospital list, and they didn’t know what was the matter.

  The medicine men went out and got orders to hike for Medicine Bow and the healing springs. They came in here by the hundreds with their sick and the medicine men built the tepees over the springs and herded the sick bucks into ’em and parboiled ’em for two or three days. Then one of the Comanche medicine men got a new message from the great spirit. The sick bucks weren’t doing very well under the old treatment and this medicine man thought it would be a grand idea to take the patients out and heave ’em in the river and try cold water for a change. Nothing but running ice after around here in the spring, you know.

  There were more good Indians around here that spring than ever before or since. Die? Say, they went bulging into the great hereafter ten abreast! First they were going to kill the medicine men, but then one of them got another wireless from the great spirit and sent out a signed statement that a curse had been put on the springs. Just the same as giving out word that the operation and treatment were highly successful, but the patient died. Since then the Injuns haven’t come within forty miles of this place.25

  The presence of the Indian past is strong at Bird Cloud because of the ancient campsites, arrowheads, stone knives, manos, rubbing stones and other tools that turn up, many made from material taken from the four chert quarries on the property. The evidence of people in the region long before the white explorers, army men, pioneers and ranchers came, especially along the river, is everywhere. My onetime neighbor, Ken Olson, found a bison skull, spear blades, arrowheads and much more from this and adjoining land over forty years. I too see Indian marks on the land and their lingering presence is never far away.

  We were aware of archaeological possibilities from the first. While leveling the house site the James Gang discovered a deep fire pit full of charcoal under the area that became the dining room. We got back the report of an age of 2710 +/- 40 B.P. for the carbon 14 analysis, the Late Archaic period.

  As we scraped and dug around the house area, fire pits emerged from under the tough grass, yielding chert flakes, an occasional hammerstone or a scraper, and one melted green glass bead no larger than a pinhead. The charcoal under the glass bead dated to 2410 +/- B.P., millennia before any trade beads came to North America and more than a thousand years before the sinewy Ancestral Puebloans (a.k.a. Anasazi) left their stronghold cliff dwellings
. The archaeologist Dudley Gardner said insects or rodents might have carried the minuscule bead underground, or it may have been dropped by later people using an old fire ring. The fire ring area was barely an inch below the surface. This reassured me that there had been no great flood at the house site for more than two thousand years.

  Most of the sites we found at Bird Cloud dated to the Late Archaic, 4600 to 2000 years B.P., and the stone grinding tools, the side-notched and corner-notched projectile points we turned up were characteristic of the period. The common foods of these people were large and small game animals either killed outright or scavenged, foraged plants, fruits, berries and winnowed seeds. The Archaic people also built semisubterranean pit houses with deep storage pits, hearth stones and reflector stones. During this period the climate was becoming drier, encouraging cacti and shrubs.

  Bird Cloud and environs attracted Archaic period Indians because of the south-facing sites sheltered from the constant winds, the river and the creek that guaranteed game, the large numbers of nutritious wild plants, the good sight lines and defenses offered by the cliff, and the chert vein for toolmaking.

  In this semiarid land water was the great wealth, then as now. The Indians used the North Platte River and Jack Creek not only to procure game, but for drinking, cooking, bathing, for thirsty horses (after the tribes of this region acquired them in the 1700s). Bison, deer, elk and pronghorn grazed the surrounding prairie. Mountain sheep lived in and along the cliff line. There were abundant jackrabbits and prairie dogs. Eagles and falcons nested in the crannied cliff, symbols of strength and sources of ceremonial feathers, and in the river lived waterfowl, beaver, muskrat and mink. Presumably there were fish—according to Seton-Karr only suckers until the state of Wyoming introduced rainbow trout in the late nineteenth century.26 Today only the fish, raptors, deer, elk and pronghorn remain. Edible Chenopodium, Indian ricegrass, sego lily roots, yucca, biscuit-root, bloodroot and many other nutritious and medicinal plants still grow here.27 The soil, though alkaline as short-grass soils are, has been enriched by centuries of river and creek silt deposition. Along the creek and the river shoreline grew willows and reeds likely used to make baskets and mats though we have found no evidence of these. In the cliff face, along a ridge half a mile back from it, and on a knoll near the east end are ancient chert quarries, the flake evidence of heavy use lying everywhere. Countless rounded river stones provided good hammers, and we sometimes found these tools, round and smooth on the handhold end, abraded on the striking end. A few miles away the hot springs cured aches and illnesses. From the top of the cliff there were long views in every direction.

  The cliff itself not only was a superb lookout point but may have been used as a bison or mountain sheep jump where hunters set up a drive line on the top and gradually forced the animals over the edge to their deaths below. Dave Quitter, the geologist and techie member of the James Gang, used Google Earth imaging to see if anything was visible from aloft. Satellite views showed a possible drive line of widely spaced stone clusters with a classic hook on one side near the brink. So much soil had covered these stones over the centuries and so many badgers, marmots, foxes, coyotes and prairie dogs had built and dug around them that they were almost impossible to see except in the satellite photo.

  Dudley Gardner came to help us explore the base and face of the cliff where we surmised a bison drive might have ended and where we had seen a shallow cave that seemed blocked by carefully placed stones. We scratched around but did not find any bison remains in the colluvium pile below, and the seemingly carefully placed stones at the front of the shallow cave were only natural rockfall from the ceiling. But Deryl had spied a dark round spot high and to the left of the shallow cave the week before. We brought an old ladder along on this trip to get up to the spot and see what it was. I think we were all expecting something from the Indian past, but it turned out to be a 1917 penny. Someone had scraped out a penny-size circle in the rock and forced the coin in. It was badly corroded but had stayed in place for ninety years.

  Higher up we could make out large letters scratched in the soft rock—J O H N S O N. Probably not Indian. I had seen a photograph taken in the 1880s showing Henry Seton-Karr’s ranchhands.28 One of them, a boy in his teens sitting on the ground, was identified as Johnson. I surmised he might still have been working in the area in 1917, a tall, tough and lithe fellow in his forties by then and quite capable of climbing around on the cliff face and carving his name there. There was another inscription higher up and in an unknown language, very difficult to see. I wondered if it were Finnish, as there had been Finn settlers thirty miles northeast in the mining towns of Carbon and Hanna, and Dudley wondered if it were Mormon-related. And so high up that we could not reach it we could see another cave of fair size with something that looked like a large bone sticking out. Gerald vowed he would go down from the top on ropes and extract the bone. Perhaps it was a human bone, the site of an Indian burial. But that exploration would have to happen later.

  Dudley returned weeks later and Gerald announced that the moment to pull the mystery bone out of the high cave was at hand. We all went across the river to the cliff, Dudley and I climbing down to the base, the James Gang on top with ropes and harness. Gerald came over the edge, lower and lower until he was at the mouth of the cave. I stood below, mouth agape, expecting we would see human remains. He grasped the bone and tugged. It was cemented into a pack rat midden with years of detritus and excrement. Gerald tried not to breathe in the effluvium and finally, with a mighty yank, he pulled the bone out. It was a short piece of what looked like a cow’s leg. There was nothing else but the pack rat’s personal effects.

  There were scattered fire pits on the lower section of Bird Cloud, and on top. We found the chert vein by accident. I noticed chunks and flakes of chert near the cushion plant area at the west end of the cliff. The James Gang and I began exploring the west talus slope where a barely discernible trail angled down the steep, crumbly slope. Here the cliff was a series of shelves separated by steep colluvium deposits. It was possible to walk along the shelves. After an hour or so of exclaiming over the thousands of flakes of chert that littered the ground, we discovered a shoulder-height vein of glistening dark chert and followed it along for a quarter of a mile until the ledge we were walking on pinched out. Underfoot everywhere were thousands of flakes and larger fractured chunks, discarded small cutting tools and hammerstones.29 Dudley called this a “lithic procurement site.”

  We traced the vein. The cliff bent to the northeast and on top the vein appeared again, running diagonally across the chalky two-track before disappearing into the sedge and sagebrush. It reappeared along a ridge half a mile distant, on a hogback near the north boundary. That vein was not as pronounced, nor the workings as obvious. It was also the lair of an exceptionally large rattlesnake which pleased Dudley, a thwarted herpetologist, and showed once again on the flanks of an eroding knoll. Dudley remarked later in a report that the chert materials “represent the entire lithic reduction sequence core, primary, secondary, tertiary, and micro flakes.”30 He also, after our many walks over the property, noted five types of sites in addition to the quarries. They were open campsites, lithic scatters, rock art, historic sites and isolated artifacts.

  The James Gang and I became intensely interested in the traces of the bygone time when the Indians were on the land. Dudley generously agreed to excavate in the rare times when he was in the area and had a few hours or days free. He showed us how to look and what to look for. We became alert to fire-cracked rocks on the surface, arrowheads, stones that showed signs of use.

  He said we could do a practice dig at the east end of the property in a sandy area at a site with fire-cracked rocks—a site already disturbed by a badger. We painstakingly measured out the plot, divided it into squares with stakes and string and began to scrape and dig. The soil went into buckets and the buckets were emptied onto a meshed sorting screen which caught many, many chert flakes. The wind rose and threw dirt and
sand at us, despite Gerald’s quick plywood windbreak. In addition to the flakes we uncovered two dozen fire-scorched rocks, a biface (knife), a broken piece of fossiliferous chert that had been heated. Dudley said a cow had stepped on it.

  In the years after I bought the Bird Cloud property Dudley narrowed the sites worth exploration down to three: the Under Penny site, the Falling Cow site and a series of sand dunes at the back of the top plateau. The sand dunes showed little after a shovel test, but the Under Penny, which was an assemblage of fire-cracked rock and some charcoal, yielded an age of 1030 +/- B.P. and indications of Chenopodium and mountain sheep remains.

  Eventually Dudley looked at and mapped the Falling Cow site, and agreed that it was worth a bit of digging. The site was a gradually sloping ridge with a south face nearer the river and a north face a few hundred feet distant. We saw a pink quartz arrowhead and a scraper on one strew of fire-cracked rock. The lithic debris was primarily moss agate, a cream-colored chert and the root-beer-colored chert from the four quarries on the property. We could see several more fire pits in an area of a few acres. A deep gulley ran down to the river.

  Dudley’s visits were very widely spaced and the digging sporadic, but in 2009 he came with Martin Lammers, a historian turned archaeologist, and several students. They started excavating three fire pits on the south side of the ridge where the soil was a thin, eolian deposit overlying regolith, or crumbled rough rock. The flora was sagebrush and sedges and some grass. Martin said the wiry black roots of the sedge were almost impossible to cut through. It became quite clear that more than five hundred acres of sedge at the top of the cliff were holding the soil in place in defiance of the hurricane-force winds that tore over them. These profuse, tangled roots as fine as thread and as strong as steel form an almost impenetrable mat just below the soil surface.