by Bryan Sykes
The day ended gloriously as the sun broke out from below the clouds and suddenly bathed the fields with a brilliant yellow light. The train was heading straight into the setting sun. Three egrets stood out brilliant white against a dark plowed field.
By the time we reached the outskirts of Omaha the sky was completely black, but there was enough artificial lighting from the city to be reflected from the surface of the other giant river of the Midwest, the Missouri, as we crossed the state line into Nebraska. We settled down to sleep, and as I did so I noticed how the wail of the siren was very slightly different from that of our earlier train from Boston to Chicago. Whereas there was no mistaking the mournful minor key of Lakeshore Limited, the Zephyr’s whistle was much more confident. Instead of “Excuse me, I have a long way to go,” it was far more, “Here I come and you’d better get out of my way,” as if the energy of the country were tilting to the west. Once in Nebraska, the line improved and the Zephyr speeded up, going almost fast. As on the train from Boston, the driver delighted in his generous use of the horn with three long blasts at every single crossing. I could imagine the occupants of the occasional trackside house being awakened at the same time every night, then turning over and going back to sleep after the Zephyr had passed, heading ever westward. At 3:00 a.m., as I looked out into the darkness, I saw an inland lighthouse that threw its beam for miles across the flat black countryside. What it was doing there, at least fifteen hundred miles from the sea in either direction, I never did discover. An hour later an orange glow reflected from the underbelly of distant clouds marked the position of a town, fifty, maybe a hundred miles away.
Dawn arrived, gray and raining, somewhere in eastern Colorado. We had spent almost the whole night, at a steady pace, getting from one side of Nebraska to the other. The country had changed, and the first sign of that was the silence. No aubade from the whistle warned people to get out of the way for there were no people, and no crossings. It was empty country, no fields, no farms, only gently undulating grassland that stretched, brown and waving in the half-light, to a thin horizon. Was that a herd of buffalo in the distance? Only when we got close did they morph back into dark brown cattle.
We went upstairs for an early breakfast and in doing so went through the sleeping car. At that time it had the atmosphere of a mixed geriatric ward. Seniors, who in any event made up the majority of passengers on the Zephyr, were slumped in their seats, sound asleep. Each of them had a name tag around his or her neck, large labels in plastic pockets fringed with green, each marked “America by Rail.” William Jackson, or rather William “Bill” Jackson, and Frank Przewalski dozed opposite their wives. It all looked very uncomfortable, leaving me wondering whether they had known what they were in for when they booked. But seniors in America, I discovered time and again, are a hardy bunch, determined to wring what adventures they can from the years that remain.
As the sky grew lighter and the train took a gentle curve, I could see straight ahead for the first time in hundreds of miles. On the western horizon stood the solid wall of the Rocky Mountains, snowcapped and seemingly impenetrable. Before us twinkled the lights of Denver, our destination. Gradually buildings began to appear out of the half-light. What looked for all the world like a large temple and a hotel materialized out of nowhere at a town called Lowes. More and more buildings came and went, and we passed row upon row of new agricultural machinery stockpiled in yards by the track. Then, much more suddenly than in Boston or Chicago, we were barely through the suburbs before we pulled into yet another Union Station.
It was cold, about fifty degrees, but the awakened seniors were disembarking in their shirtsleeves. From Denver the usual route took the Zephyr through the Rockies, on the sector that made the line one of the most popular scenic routes in the world, and no doubt the highlight anticipated by the “America by Rail” passengers when they booked. However, urgent repairs to the track near Grand Junction had closed the line and forced a detour far to the north. We had already decided to leave the Zephyr at Denver and head for the Indian reservation at Pine Ridge in South Dakota, then loop around and pick it up again in Salt Lake City. The only problem we faced was that I had utterly failed to get hold of Russell Means or anyone else from the reservation—but that didn’t stop us heading for the airport to pick up a car.
After two unhurried days on the train, it was a shock to be brought right up to date by the unwelcome urban bustle of the car-rental counter. But what car to choose? Our imagination fired by footage of the grizzlies we would no doubt encounter on the road ahead, we decided we needed something large and solid. We were directed to that section of the lot, and there we definitely found large cars even by American standards. There was a silver monster called the Suburban—a joke, surely, since it would have flattened any child it came across playing ball on the streets of leafy outskirts that movies informed me to expect in all American suburbs. (You could have fitted the suburbs of a small American city into a Suburban and still have had room for the dog.) In the end we chose the most American-sounding of models, the Chevrolet 4×4. Richard at once wired the car radio to receive signals from his iPod—don’t ask me how—and we were ready. We tried once more to reach someone from Pine Ridge without success, then headed north anyway. After all, this was supposed to be a road movie, wasn’t it?
Our plan, such as it was, was to get to Rapid City, South Dakota, which is about an hour from the Pine Ridge Reservation, but as we headed into the empty prairies it seemed a very long way off, across most of Colorado. More or less our last glimpse of urban civilization was the enormous Budweiser plant at Fort Collins, a few miles north of Denver. Beyond that the grasslands stretched to the north and east, while the Rockies still crouched on the western horizon. This was our first encounter with big-sky country, and it lay under high gray clouds gently twisting and writhing like cigar smoke. Nodding steel donkeys, dotted around, pumped water from deep aquifers to the surface. A small clump of distant windmills on the top of a low hill caught the weak sunlight, turning into a bleached Golgotha. Low limestone bluffs interrupted the grassland from time to time, the lives of their entombed residents remembered in a Dinosaur Museum announced by the huge figure of a Triceratops, incongruous on the skyline. Snow fences to the west reminded us that this country was not just big but high as well, and that as a consequence the winters were severe.
We pulled into the small town of Wheatland for refueling and lunch, and to make a decision. The diner was warm and welcoming, and we slumped at a small table with a red gingham cloth. The heads of bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, and white-tailed deer looked down from the walls. This was hunting country, and judging by the cards on the bulletin board, bristling with taxidermists. We ordered, then contemplated our position. We were on our way to an Indian reservation with no guarantees that we would meet with anyone who could help us. And we also didn’t really know what we wanted to do when we got there, anyway.
Although it broke our self-imposed road-movie rules, we did have a plan B. I had found a guide service operating out of Sheridan, Wyoming, that had advertised day trips to the sacred sites of the Cheyenne. I had called them before and been told that they definitely did not go to Pine Ridge, advising us to avoid that reservation altogether (they did not say why). But we decided to give Pine Ridge one last try. I called the number I had been given, and again there was no reply. So plan B was activated. I called Sheridan and heard that, thanks to a cancellation, the agency’s top man was available for two days starting tomorrow. We paid up and hit the road. Richard scrolled through his playlist and, as we rejoined the freeway heading north for Sheridan, the Steppenwolf riff that opens “Born to Be Wild” blasted out of the speakers. This was more like it.
To the right lay the dry, broken grasslands that stretched all the way to the Mississippi. Large numbers of pronghorn antelope, camouflaged brown and white against the drying grass, raised their heads as we passed by. Occasional farms, one or two with stockades of domesticated buffalo, came and went a
s we ate up the miles. To the right the Rockies rose like a low curtain, snowcapped even in October, and still looking very hard to penetrate. At one point we crossed the line of the old Oregon Trail, over which convoys of settlers moved slowly west to their ultimate destination, still more than a thousand miles away. Though I knew very well that these settlers and thousands like them had obliterated the old Indian way of life, I could also admire their fortitude and determination. I wondered what it must have been like, toiling for weeks over mile upon mile of unbroken prairie, up and down the rough undulations in a covered wagon, camping by dried-up creeks. What a relief it must have been to see the mountains for the first time, not the end of the trek by any means but the end of the monotony.
14
The Great Spirit
The Medicine Wheel, Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming.
The Havasupai case, and to a lesser extent the legal arguments surrounding the remains of Kennewick Man, have brought into the open the clash between science and tribal beliefs. It was the attempt to understand a little more about this clash that had brought Richard and me to the northern plains, one of the most thinly populated and remote parts of America.
Every culture has origin myths that do not always survive unscathed when scrutinized by rational examination. In two regions that I know well, the effect of science on belief has been rather mild in comparison with the chasm that has opened up in the United States. The indigenous people of Polynesia, with whom I worked for many years, believe in the original homeland of Havai’iki, although they are uncertain exactly where that is. Genetics has pointed to the islands of Indonesia as the likely location of Havai’iki and not, as many believed following Thor Heyerdahl’s thrilling adventures aboard the raft Kon-Tiki, in the Americas. In Britain in the Middle Ages the predominant origin myth was that our ancestors had survived the Trojan War and our first king, Brutus, had vanquished a race of giants. He began a line of kings that included King Arthur with his Knights of the Round Table. This changed in later centuries to what is the predominant myth today—that the English are descended from Germanic Saxons and that today’s Irish, Scots and Welsh are the descendants of indigenous Celts. Genetics shows that this is not the case, and that the genetic bedrock of the whole of Britain and Ireland is fundamentally Celtic overlaid with a thin topsoil of Saxons and Vikings, nowhere more than 20 percent. And no sign of Greek heroes or Trojans. But so far these discoveries have had very little material effect on belief—and have not resulted in any court cases.
Among American Indians, origin myths are very much alive, and though the details differ among tribes they share one fundamental similarity: that their ancestors lived where they now live. They have always been there and came from nowhere else, which is why they find clandestine research into their origins by outsiders so offensive. Spiritual affinity to the land is of utmost importance, and is easy to appreciate when you visit the lands they occupy. I do not pretend to be in touch with the Great Spirit, in whose name the Indians are not owners but guardians of the land and all life that depends on it. But I do have enough atavistic sense, handed down unseen from my own tribal ancestors, to feel the thrill of connection to the land in wild country. This is not the place to attempt in any way to summarize the rich tapestry of Native American origin myths—there are many better sources for that. But one myth, told to us by our Cheyenne guide, Serle Chapman, deserves a place here.
Richard and I drove out to Serle’s place the following day. Tall and fair with carefully braided waist-length hair, he was evidently very accustomed to guiding European visitors like us around Indian country, which is what he does for a living. We set out at a brisk pace to Sacred Waters, or Lake De Smet, a shimmering blue lake about three miles long and a mile wide, not far from Interstate 90. Serle gestured with his hand to the island where a Cheyenne ancestor called Roman Nose had come on a vision quest at the age of fourteen and stayed for four days and four nights without food and water. Here also Ta-Sunco-Witko, or Crazy Horse, the Oglala Sioux war leader, came for guidance in 1875 when They Are Afraid of Her, his three-year-old daughter with Black Shawl, died of cholera. As Serle spoke, at a rapid rate, the elements of the landscape, the low hill to the east, the island, the water—all filled with characters from the Cheyenne past. I had to interrupt because I could see that otherwise we would be treated to a familiar recitation, very fascinating but not what I was really after. I explained briefly who I was and why we were there, and that I wanted to hear about the Ancient Time, the story of his ancestors. The Cheyenne, he told me, had not always lived there. They once lived in the east, near the Great Lakes, but had moved west to avoid defeat and enslavement by the Pawnee. They were again on the move after the Indian Wars and his great-great-grandfather Yellow Wolf had led part of the tribe south to Arkansas to become the Southern Cheyenne. Typically, there was nothing so prosaic as dates attached to Serle’s recounted histories of his tribe.
The rest of the story had to wait until we reached our next destination, one never to be forgotten and the point when I first realized the dual nature of truth. We drove for two hours across the plains, past the town of Gillette, Wyoming, where off to the left the land was scarred by an immense opencast coal mine. They are dreadful sights anywhere, but the way the gigantic machines inched their way across the floor of the quarry, tearing the earth and scooping it into unsightly heaps for onward processing felt particularly loathsome that day. Soon we turned off the main road, then past a series of sculpted rock canyons that follow the course of the Belle Fourche River until, rounding a corner, we caught our first glimpse of Mato Tipila, Lakota Sioux for “Bear Lodge,” but known to many as Devils Tower and to nearly everyone as the setting for the space-abduction scene from Steven Spielberg’s epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
We skirted the main parking lot and walked up to a grassy mound at the edge of the ponderosa pine forest to the east. There we sat on a stone bench with the simple inscription, “In honor of all dads who introduced their children to the outdoors.” Away to the east the sacred Black Hills of Dakota ruffled the far horizon. The sky was an unusually deep blue, and the faint waning half-moon was poised just above the summit of Mato Tipila. The giant rock rose up in front of us, and I asked my first stupid question: “How high is it?” “How high does it look?” replied Serle. This was beginning to sound like a psychotherapy session. Wisely I did not give an answer, but I did look it up afterward. The answer is 1,267 feet. Serle obviously did not think it needed a height, and I agree with him. But we can at least have a description. It is a high flat-topped mountain, almost circular in cross-section, with near-vertical sides. They are not smooth, but striated with long vertical cracks going from top to bottom. Serle began his explanation.
A long time ago, a great bear stole a man’s wife and took her back to his lodge to live with him. The man tracked the bear down and crawled into the lodge, in the roots of a tree, and finding the bear asleep, woke his wife and led her away. They hurried back toward their own lodge, but the bear woke up, realized what had happened and, with a great roar, burst out in hot pursuit. Faced with certain death should they be caught, the pair called on the Great Spirit for help. He answered their prayers by lifting the ground beneath their feet and, with them safely on top, raised it beyond the reach of the bear. That did not stop him trying to reach them and he started to climb the sheer sides. Every time he climbed a little higher he slipped backward, and his claws dug into the rock and gouged out the furrows that are now such a feature of Bear Lodge.
The great bear eventually gave up, but that left the pair with the problem of getting down. In the end this was not necessary as the Great Spirit lifted them to the heavens, where they became the bright star cluster, the Pleiades, in the constellation of Taurus. As we looked at Bear Lodge, we all knew that this story was true. It was such an improbable rock, and the claw marks were in plain view. Around the summit, just visible without binoculars, turkey vultures circled in sinister silhouette. Before the rock was climbed, Se
rle told us, the only birds on Bear Lodge were eagles.
We walked back down the mound to the car and stopped long enough at the official parking lot to see a sign informing visitors that “The Tower is held sacred by many American Indians and highly regarded by other peoples,” and asking that they respect the place. The audience here are the four hundred thousand visitors who come every year to see Devils Tower, first made a U.S. National Monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. What most of them see is the alternative truth, an igneous intrusion of gray porphyry, a rock rather like basalt, whose vertical furrows were caused by the hexagonal crystal structure of the rock as it very slowly cooled. Erosion removed the surrounding softer sandstones to reveal the stark igneous monolith. An obvious challenge to eager rock climbers, it was first scaled in 1893 with the help of a thousand wooden pegs hammered into cracks in the rock. Today hundreds of climbers make the attempt each summer, though they voluntarily avoid the month of June, when Indian ceremonies are held around the base. As we drove back toward Sheridan, I continued to absorb the revelation of dual truths. To Europeans, Devils Tower is one thing, to the Cheyenne it is another. It was pointless to say one was wrong and one was right. In their own way both were true.
The following day we headed in the other direction, west into the Bighorn Mountains. From Sheridan they didn’t look all that high. Cloud Peak, the highest summit, had a little snow on it but looked nowhere near its real elevation of just over thirteen thousand feet, even considering that Sheridan is already four thousand feet above sea level. Serle took us to a steep-sided canyon leading into the heart of the mountains. The Tongue River Canyon had been used by Crazy Horse as a safe haven for his warriors and their horses as they were being pursued by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry under Gen. George Armstrong Custer in the weeks leading up to the Battle of Little Bighorn. The cream-colored rock of the canyon wall was sculpted by erosion into fantastic pinnacles three hundred feet above the track.
