Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  Sleeping with Snakes

  “Rattlesnakes have been observed. Please stay on sidewalks.” When you wake up and see a sign like that on the way to the bathroom, you know you’re out West.

  The Buffalo Country rest stop on I-94 had been as quiet as a Wal-Mart parking lot, except for the sound of trains rumbling by somewhere in the dark. The five RVs and cars I bunked with had already cleared out by dawn. Overnight parking wasn’t expressly forbidden, which to a libertarian meant it was therefore permitted. The official signs at the rest stop only cared about the important things – rattlesnakes and where you let your pet poop.

  I wasn’t far from the exit to the Custer Battlefield, which was about 50 miles south. Steinbeck went there – he said so in a letter to his wife – but he barely mentions it in "Travels With Charley." I was going there too, then on to Billings and Livingston by dinnertime. Steinbeck was a hard ghost to keep up with. He traveled from Beach to Livingston on old, skinny U.S. Highway 10, yet managed to pack a lot into Day 4 of his dash to Seattle. He told his wife he genuflected at the Custer memorial at the Little Big Horn and stopped at about six bars in towns along U.S. 10 – not to drink, necessarily, but to gather information.

  He arrived at a motel or a trailer court near Livingston in time to watch the third Nixon-Kennedy debate. Though Steinbeck almost certainly listened to Game 7 of the World Series on his truck’s radio, there was no reaction from him in the book or in his letters about the amazing finish, which ended – as every Pittsburgher knows – with Bill Mazeroski slaying the mighty Yankees with a homer in the bottom of the ninth.

  Brave Ghosts

  The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, as the site of Custer’s Last Stand is officially called, was a lovely place for a massacre. In every direction the rolling brown land was big and the blue sky even bigger. The only sound was the hard steady wind that rippled the dry grass and starched the American flag flying high above the Custer Memorial Cemetery.

  Everything – the parking lot, the visitors center and the cemetery and its ring of protective trees – looked up at Last Stand Hill, where a stone monument, a low black iron fence and 41 white gravestones stuck out of the thin grass. Talk about ghosts. If they exist anywhere, they exist on the silent windswept hilltop where Gen. Armstrong Custer and 40 of his men died on June 25, 1876.

  Getting myself to the site of Custer’s Last Stand had been a pleasant cruise through tall cornfields and short hayfields, but for the local wildlife one stretch of State Route 47 was a killing field. In a minute I saw a dead coyote, a dead skunk, two dead raccoons and a dead something else. Whatever hit them – including one of the trucks overloaded with lumpy sugar beets like the ones they left sprinkled on the road – was probably doing 75 like me. Not far from breakfast in Hardin I passed one of the favorite ambiguous road signs of my trip – “Slow Down When Dusty.”

  On a bright sunny Friday morning only 10 cars were in the Custer Battlefield parking lot. Steinbeck would have been annoyed to see the “No dogs off leash” sign. When he and Charley took their side trip to “pay our respects to General Custer and Sitting Bull," as he put it, they both were able to wander indiscriminately over the battlefield. Park ranger/historian Gerald Jasmer told me that except for some landscaping and the stone or gravel pathways laid out through the grassy slopes, no dramatic changes had been made to the site since Steinbeck’s time. The most significant difference since 1960 is how much more we know about what really went on during the battle itself.

  Fifty years ago most of what Steinbeck and everyone else in the country knew about Custer’s Last Stand came from Hollywood, where history and facts go to be tortured on the bloody altar of bad drama. But Jasmer said a lucky break occurred in 1983 when a wildfire burned off the battlefield’s grass and gave forensic archeologists access to thousands of artifacts – mainly spent cartridges and human remains – strewn over the slopes during the fighting.

  The legend of a heroic last stand by Custer and his soldiers, built up first by 19th century newspapers Back East and then Hollywood, was spoiled by facts and cold science. A more realistic, more likely scenario is that in the face of certain death the horse soldiers scattered and died in a state of panic and fear.

  Steinbeck would have heard the white-man’s politically incorrect version of what happened at the Little Big Horn. Visitors today get a more fair-and-balanced account of a military "engagement" – now there's a great euphemism – in which 260 men from the U.S. Army's 7th Calvary and 100 Lakota-Cheyenne warriors slaughtered each other in an unnecessary battle in an unimportant place. There’s also an Indian Memorial in memory of the tribes who died “defending their way of life at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.”

  In a letter to his wife Steinbeck called Custer a “dumb bastard,” which he was. But in “Travels With Charley” he writes that when he went to the battlefield site he "removed my hat in memory of brave men." If that’s what he did, it was a classy thing to do at a beautiful, almost spiritual monument to unimaginable human bravery, savagery and stupidity.

  To Livingston, I Presumed

  He had never visited Montana before, but Steinbeck chose the right place for the first of his two sleepovers in the state. After leaving the Custer battlefield site, he worked his way west to Livingston, which is stretched along Old Highway 10 on the bank of the Yellowstone River. He had covered about 400 miles on Day 4 of his Seattle Sprint. Crossing the sweeping plains of eastern Montana and slowly climbing into the shadow of the Rockies, he fell in love with Montana at first sight, as most normal people can’t help but do. Montana’s spectacular natural beauty put a spell on him. As he would famously write in “Charley,” “Of all the states it is my favorite and my love.”

  Steinbeck confessed his new love to his wife Elaine in a letter from Livingston that night. Though he told her he was at a trailer park “outside of Bozeman,” he was almost certainly in Livingston. It’s only 27 miles east of Bozeman and the towns are separated by the desolate and motel-less Bozeman Pass, which nears 6,000 feet as it cuts through the Gallatin and Bridger mountains.

  Adding the long day’s events to the letter he had written the night before but had not mailed yet, Steinbeck gushed over Montana’s “grandeur.” He described “the little square burnt-up men” he saw in the bars, mentioned his Little Big Horn side trip and told his wife about the old-fashioned stockman’s hat he bought in Billings to replace his naval cap, which he said was attracting too much attention so far from the sea. It was very cold and Steinbeck said there was snow in the Rockies and on the “great snowy mountain beside me.” He was heading toward Idaho in the morning, he said, but didn’t think he’d make it. Montana was not only huge. It was so beautiful he drove slower than usual so he could gawk at it.

  As Steinbeck did 50 years earlier, I got a stunning dose of what Montana was most famous for on my relaxed drive from Billings to Livingston on I-90: Gigantic sky, gigantic land, jagged mountain ranges running every which way, an endless sunset and not enough humans to form a Wednesday night basketball league.

  With a population of almost 1 million, Montana has 300,000 more people today than when Steinbeck blew through it. Huge and rural and wild, it’s still 99 percent empty. Like so many of the states on the Steinbeck Highway, it’s not even close to being a microcosm of America. In 2010 it was 90 percent Caucasian with twice as many Native Americans as Latinos and more Asians than blacks. It had so few blacks – 4,000 in the whole state – that Butte, a city of 34,000, had fewer African-Americans than registered sex offenders.

  Montana’s economy is powered by minerals, cattle, wheat and millions of visitors who are lured by a magnificent outdoor rec room that is inhumanely cold in winter and catches fire every summer. Despite its newfound oil and gas riches, the presence of mega-landlord Ted Turner and a trickle of celebrity immigrants from Hollywood, Montana is shockingly poor – the 6th poorest state in terms of median family income.

  In the fall of 2010 its unemployment rate was about 2 per
centage points lower than the national average of 9.5. Oil and gas development was nothing like North Dakota’s bonanza. And there were no six-figure corporate jobs open in Round Up or Big Timber. Still, Montana was a cheap place to live and housing could be laughably affordable if you didn’t want to own a mountain.

  When I pulled into Livingston’s Yellowstone Inn it was almost dark. I knew my way around the artsy tourist town, which is on the (relative) doorstep of Yellowstone Park and is a popular base camp for fishing and hunting expeditions. I’d been to Livingston half a dozen times before. I’m not a hunter, hiker, kayaker or fly-fisherman. But I’ve seen a fair amount of the state’s “grandeur” and its neighborly people on vacations at my wife’s family’s log cabin in the Lewis & Clark National Forest north of Bozeman.

  I had also seen most of Montana’s collection of livable small cities. Missoula was a hip college town. Great Falls, where my wife grew up, and Billings, the biggest city in the state with 104,000 people, were dustier and working class. Bozeman was part Missoula/part outdoor-recreation Mecca. Butte was an ex-copper boomtown that belonged Back East in the Rust Belt. Lewistown was a small jewel set among several mountain ranges in the dead center of the state.

  Helena, the capital, I had only seen once, but I imagined it had too many politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers per square mile than was healthy. But as far as I knew, all of Montana’s mini-cities had old residential neighborhoods and solid, healthy, original downtowns with cool old buildings that had made it through the 20th century without being bulldozed, wrecking-balled, gentrified, redeveloped or otherwise “improved” by their local politicians.

  Drinking with Batman

  On the drive from Billings I had set up a quick meeting with actor Michael Keaton, who was from Pittsburgh but lived on a ranch east of Livingston. I knew Keaton a little bit through my sportscaster brother John and from my time in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Thanks to the magic of cell phones and Keaton’s personal assistant in L.A., we met for a beer at the 2nd Street Bistro in Livingston’s historic downtown.

  The bistro is on the ground floor of the Murray Hotel, a creaky, uniquely time-warped treasure right on old U.S. 10. The hotel is the most famous of Livingston's old buildings, thanks to its flamboyant neon sign, crazy Western decor and rowdy 106-year-old history. Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill stayed there – not as a couple, mind you. And there are not-so-tall tales of a grizzly bear in the bar, cowboys riding horses up the stairs and movie director Sam Peckinpah, a permanent resident from 1979-1984, shooting holes in the ceiling of his room.

  The bistro, more civilized, was prized for its fine grub and good wine. It had become a safe hangout for Livingston's colony of artists, writers and actors, who included landscape painter Russell Chatham, author Tom McGuane, Margot Kidder and Keaton, who’s well-liked in Pittsburgh as a regular guy who got to play Batman in a movie and make out with Michelle Pfeiffer but never went Hollywood.

  Keaton lived up to his good-guy rep. Though we hadn’t seen each other in 15 years, we were like old friends who'd gone elk hunting together the previous weekend. We sat at a mini-bar in the bistro with just the bartender and an actor from New York who, unbelievably, used to live in the same 1927-vintage apartment building I once lived in on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.

  Keaton had been out bird shooting and had an SUV full of dogs at the curb. But before he left we went around to the proletarian Murray Bar to check the score of the Yankees-Rangers playoff game. Dozens of lonely young Montana homeboys were sipping beer, playing pool and praying a bored starlet would walk through the door and ask for a lift back to Hollywood. The Fossils, who did not choose that name by accident, were tuning their guitars.

  No one bothered or seemed to recognize Keaton, whose only disguise was a baseball cap. The Murray Bar was the kind of under-illuminated neighborhood man-cave Steinbeck might have slipped into for a dozen beers when he was 25 or 30. The 2nd Street Bistro was more like the upscale places he frequented on his "Travels With Charley" trip. But like the celebrity colonists from Tinseltown, the bistro wasn’t there in 1960.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Friday, Oct. 14, 1960 – Somewhere west of Missoula

  Before heading west from Livingston, Steinbeck says in the book he abruptly decides to drive about 55 miles south on U.S. 89 to Yellowstone Park. When Charley goes nuts every time he sees a grizzly bear, Steinbeck quickly leaves and retraces his path to Livingston. He turns west on U.S. 10, buys a rifle in Butte and drives past Missoula before stopping. In an undated letter to his wife Friday night he mentions his Yellowstone detour that morning and says he was camped on the property of an old woman west of Missoula about 60 miles from the Idaho line. That would have been near Tarkio, but local old-timers there could not provide any further clues.

  Where John Got His Jacket

  In “Travels With Charley” Steinbeck doesn’t mention his night in Livingston. He merely jumps from the Little Big Horn to his snap decision to veer south to see Yellowstone National Park. He had no interest in seeing the park. As he writes in the book, he thought national parks enclosed and celebrated the freaks of nature. Yellowstone, he said, was “no more representative of America than is Disneyland.”

  It’s a cynical, environmentally incorrect, interesting and semi-defendable point of view. But Steinbeck knew his friends and neighbors would never let him forget it if he was so close to the park and didn’t go, so he drove about 90 minutes south on U.S. 89 to its north entrance. His day-trip was a disaster. Charley apparently went nuts every time he saw a bear – which was every 30 seconds in the era when grizzlies loafed by the side of the roads waiting for handouts. Today if a bear is sighted in the woods half a mile away, it instantly creates near hysteria and a 100-car traffic jam.

  I skipped Yellowstone, not needing to see it for the sixth time. I had been there before and after the 1988 fire burned nearly a third of it. It was tremendous, spectacular. But it also was an overcrowded, over-regulated theme park best visited in winter on a snowmobile. I opted to poke around Livingston. Its official tourist attractions include a fly-fishing museum, a cool train station and some old whorehouses from the early 1900s. But its best feature is the town itself.

  Its priceless turn-of-the-19th-century downtown buildings testify to Livingston's early wealth as a 1880s railroad hub and original gateway to Yellowstone. Behind the handsome storefronts were art galleries, boutiques, coffee shops, hotels, sports bars and real estate offices. Sax & Fryer, which sold office supplies, stationery, books and newspapers, has been in business 127 years and looked it. It still uses mechanical adding machines and cash registers. The woman running the store was the daughter of a silver miner and, amazingly, she was born in infinitesimal Neihart, Montana, where my wife’s family has had their log cabin since the late 1950s.

  She asked me not to tell anyone that Tom Brokaw and Carl Hiaasen, the star Florida writer who had a place nearby, were among Sax & Fryer’s regular happy customers. She wasn’t a summer resident and held no grudge against them. She and 7,000 others lived year round in Livingston, which she warned was not as idyllic as it seemed in summer or on a 50-degree fall day. “It’s a neat place to live until January, when the winds are blowing at 60 miles an hour and there’s horizontal snow.”

  Since Steinbeck said in his book that he bought a jacket in Livingston, I walked into another old building to see if it might have been at Bob's Outdoor. Bob’s has been selling Western clothes since 1946. I asked owner Shelly Chapel if she had an old family story to tell me about the day the great John Steinbeck bought a hunting jacket at Bob’s. She didn’t. I had just as little luck trying to figure out which "pretty auto court" or trailer court Steinbeck might have stayed at exactly 50 years before. Inquiring at four or five older motels and two RV parks, I came up empty and took the highway to Butte, where Steinbeck bought his gun.

  What’s Left of Butte

  After another 120 miles of I-90’s all-natural beauty pageant, I wasn’t ready for the sight of post-
industrial Butte. I’d been through Butte once years before. It was a mile-high city built on a mountain of copper – literally and figuratively. Old Highway 10 zigzagged me through parts of town that looked semi-abandoned, then led me to the city’s amazing historic downtown, which, because it is halfway up a mountain, is called Uptown.

  I’d seen my share of de-industrialized cities. I grew up, lived and worked in one. But Butte’s ghost downtown was an unbelievable amalgamation of hundreds of 19th century brick buildings, benign urban blight and glaring signs of lost wealth and missing people.

  Uptown was built to serve Butte’s peak population of 100,000 in 1910, when it was one of the country’s wealthiest cities and the Copper Capital of the World. But a hundred years later the city-county population was stuck at 34,000. Painted on the walls of larger buildings were the “ghost signs,” some 70 years old, of once successful hotels and businesses that had died and disappeared.