Through the side-view, I watched his slow procession. He veered into the right-hand lane, as if he knew the rules of the road. I grinned at Leslie, she grinned back, and we drove on.
I have a pedantic streak, a habit of lecturing, and I was going on and on, explaining the habits of elk, how they lay up in high timber during the day to conceal themselves in the shadows until twilight, when they move down to feed in the valleys. Leslie threw out her arms and bowed up and down. “O great Chingachgook, O learned one, tell me the ways of your elk brothers.” Her way of asking me to please shut up.
But I must have instructed her well, because she spotted them first, way off on a meadow under a fissured limestone cliff. A bull with a rack like a tree, a spikehorn, and four cows. On the other side of the road, in the very last light of day, two hundred bison were bedding down for the night, as many as Roosevelt might have seen in the 1880s.
Thoreau: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” That’s an often misquoted quote, salvation being substituted for preservation. But I preferred the error; I felt as saved as any Christian born again in a megachurch.
* * *
Montana’s official nickname is the “Treasure State,” but most people know it by its unofficial moniker, “Big Sky Country.” I don’t know about the sky, but the state sure is big. It’s as far from the North Dakota to the Idaho state line as Boston is from Detroit. The eastern third of the state, which we entered on a ninety-nine-degree scorcher, is often called “the Big Empty”—with justification.
The familiar signposts of the Lewis and Clark Trail reappeared. We hadn’t seen them since leaving Missouri. The interstate girded the Yellowstone River, so we were following the Corps of Discovery’s return route from the Pacific. It had split up in July 1806, with Lewis and several men making a reconnaissance of the Marias River, while Clark and several more proceeded down the Yellowstone in dugout canoes. On August 3, 1806, they reached the Yellowstone’s confluence with the Missouri, having covered more than six hundred miles from its source in about two weeks.
If the river had been anything like it was on June 29, 2011, Clark’s party would have done it in, oh, a day and a half. The mountain snows, deep enough in places to bury a semitrailer, continued to melt in the summer sun, and the Yellowstone looked like a torrent of froth-flecked chocolate milk. It had breached its banks and in a few spots threatened to drown the Northern Pacific tracks running alongside. I’d fished it the previous September and hoped to again on this trip. Rods, waders, flies were stowed in the rubberized carrier lashed to Fred’s leaky roofrack. They were going to stay there.
We left I-94, went south on I-90 into the Crow Indian Reservation, and rolled into the 7th Ranch, a few miles from the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. The owners, Chip and Sandy Watts, shaved the peaks and raised the valleys of the cattle market by operating a campground on their property. An American flag snapped on a clover-spangled hill above the parked trailers and RVs, one of which was the biggest we’d seen to date, a jet-black beast towed by a Mack or Kenworth diesel.
The Wattses had named their ranch in honor of the Seventh Cavalry. Virtually everything in the neighborhood had a Last Stand theme. A settlement nearby was called Garryowen, a short stretch from the town of Benteen (for Captain Frederick Benteen, one of the regiment’s battalion commanders). Custer, of course, got the lion’s share. Streets, roads, even convenience stores paid some sort of homage to the “boy general”1 from Monroe, Michigan. It’s long mystified me why so much adulation has been heaped on a rash officer who, intoxicated by his own mystique and ambitious for promotion, led more than a third of his regiment to their graves. Had he lived, he probably would have been court-martialed.
Our tour of the battlefield was delayed after Leslie, alarmed by my road diet (lots of summer sausage, Fritos, beef stew, and, yes, Spam), insisted that I consume more fruits and vegetables. My counterargument—that my father made it to ninety-four despite eating fried eggs and toast swabbed in bacon grease almost every morning—availed me nothing. So I dined that morning on a tub of mixed melon, grapes, and pineapple. Then, to avoid shaving and brushing my teeth in the same sink where we washed dishes, I trooped off to the campground bathroom. I was a few yards from the door when an invisible hand gripped my gut, and I hurled the melon, grapes, and pineapple. Sweat erupted on my forehead. I ran inside to a stall and vomited again; then diarrhea struck.
I stumbled back to the trailer and flopped on the bunk, with stomach cramps and dry heaves. Leslie took my temperature—a hundred and one.
“So much for fruits and vegetables,” I croaked, and spent the day in bed, where Leslie fed me boiled white rice and ginger ale. I vowed to increase my intake of meat and fat as soon as possible.
* * *
Sometimes I enjoy having my mind changed. On the patio at the Custer battlefield visitor’s center, we sat in on a “battle talk” delivered by a National Park Service ranger, a man with a wiry build, hair like strands of iron, and a martial bearing. He did not demolish my opinions of Custer, but by the time he was through, I saw the flamboyant Yellow Hair in a somewhat more favorable light. Because our mental states are often determined by the condition of our bowels, it may have been that I felt better about him because I felt better all around; no foreign objects had gone down my throat that morning, only the familiar slide of fried eggs, fried potatoes, and corned beef hash.
The gist of the lecture was that Custer wasn’t the author of the catastrophe. He was both its flawed protagonist and a mere supporting actor in a much larger national drama. It went like this.
The country was in bad shape. The financial panic of 1873 had brought on an economic crisis: banks and businesses went broke, unemployment soared (that sounded familiar). Some way had to be found to improve the chances of the disgruntled masses and of Civil War veterans, who were clamoring for the land promised them for their service. Out in the West lay millions of unclaimed acres occupied by “savages.” The solution?
“By clearing the West of Indians,” the ranger said, “the nation would be developed and good times restored.”
Resolved to do just that, Washington gave the Lakota and Cheyenne an ultimatum: move onto reservations or you’ll be considered hostile. The Indians refused. Custer’s regiment was part of three army columns ordered to find them and force them to obey the summons. That brought our lecturer to Custer’s tactical mistakes: failing to heed his scouts’ reports that one hell of a lot of Indians were camped on the Little Bighorn; dividing his command in the face of a superior enemy force. Eight thousand Indians in a single encampment was unheard of, and as we could see—the ranger motioned with an arm—the thick tree cover along the river and the labyrinth of hills and coulees made it almost impossible to determine the actual size of the hostiles’ village.
The decisive moment came when it appeared that Lakota scouts had discovered the presence of the Seventh Cavalry.
“Custer’s fear was that he’d lost the element of surprise. He was afraid that the Indians would break up into small bands and scatter over the plains, and the army would waste months tracking them down.”
And so he attacked, galloping off to an early death and the reward of having stuff named after him.
The Seventh Cavalry monument, three granite blocks inscribed with the names of the 263 soldiers who died in the battle, rises atop Last Stand Hill.2 Names and names, each one representing a life, somebody’s father, husband, brother, son. And there, on one of the panels, we saw ARCH’D MCILHARGEY. All around, enclosed by an iron-picket fence, marble headstones marked the places where the men had fallen. RHIP (Rank Hath Its Privileges) applied even in death: the officers’ markers bore their names, but the enlisted men’s all had the same inscription: U.S. SOLDIER, 7TH CAV. KILLED JUNE 25, 1876.
Was one of them McIlhargey? Although there was no record of what he did after conveying Reno’s messag
e, I doubted he’d remained with Custer, waiting for a reply. Custer had committed his battalion to an attack; he or an aide probably ordered McIlhargey to rejoin his unit.
On nearby hillsides, down in ravines, more headstones poked up through the grass in clumps. Now and then we came across a red granite marker for an Indian warrior. LAME WHITE MAN, A CHEYENNE WARRIOR. DIED HERE JUNE 25, 1876 WHILE DEFENDING HIS HOMELAND AND THE CHEYENNE WAY OF LIFE. Or: UNKNOWN SIOUX WARRIOR, DIED HERE JUNE 25, 1876 WHILE DEFENDING THE SIOUX WAY OF LIFE.
A hot wind blew as we headed to where I Company, cut off from Custer, had made its own last stand. Broken clouds lunged from the horizon to reach across the immense sky. Hills bright with clover tumbled down to the Little Bighorn Valley, the silver river snaking through stands of high timber. Except for the segments of the interstate occasionally visible, the scene looked much as it had 135 years and one week ago. Even the heat was the same.
The commander’s marker was in the middle of a cluster of headstones: M.W. KEOGH, CAPTAIN, CO. I, 7TH CAVALRY. FELL HERE JUNE 25, 1876. His troopers’ embraced his, as if protecting it. U.S. SOLDIER, 7TH CAVALRY …
I recalled John Ellison’s comment: “You can still hear ’em fightin’.” And I almost could—rifle fire and arrow hiss, the deafening pound of horse hooves, thousands of them, shouts, screams, the terrible bray of wounded animals, warriors’ cries, “Hi-Yi-Yi, Hoke-Hey!” (Come on!), and the shrill of their eagle-bone whistles. A prickling went up the back of my neck. Somehow, I knew that one of those stones, eloquent in its anonymity, marked the ground where Private McIlhargey had stood before a bullet or arrow found him.
We’d gone out of our way to see this battlefield, and I was glad of it. I stood there for a moment, as much to pay homage to the dead, trooper and warrior alike, as to thank the great-granddaughter who had given my father so much of herself.
26.
Fort Smith, on the Bighorn River, is so small you could walk across the whole town during a Super Bowl commercial and be back in time to watch the next play. After filling a shopping bag or two with oatmeal and canned goods at the local market, we ran into a friend of Chip and Sandy Watts, Don Kray, a cowboy who’d grown up on the Crow reservation. Old enough, at seventy-five, to remember when some of his Indian classmates in grammar school still lived in tepees, Kray had a face like a fissured hillside, a ready laugh, and a hand missing two fingers. He’d lost them years ago in a well-drilling accident. We drank strong coffee in his barn-red house, its front adorned with cow and buffalo skulls, its tidy interior with black-and-white photographs of brandings and cattle drives that looked as if they’d been taken in 1870.
Despite his age and mangled hand, he still worked cattle, when there was work to do. Not much was left.
“It’s changed. Usta be just two, three big ranches around here, and all the farmers had cattle. There was one year I got five, six thousand calves branded. Almost all gone now.”
The big outfits got sold off into ten- and twenty-acre parcels—ranchettes occupied by spacious log homes—and the fly-fishing guide replaced the cowhand as folk hero. Kray became an anachronism, and he didn’t know the names of half the people in town, small as it was.
“Ever feel like a bastard at a family reunion?” he asked, chuckling.
He guided us through his photo gallery: cowboys lined up on horseback, their hats raised after the last branding on a ranch in 1996; his father, his two wives, both dead now. Lucille, his second, a heavy smoker, succumbed to cancer, and after her death his first wife returned.
“She was gonna stay a few days. Stayed eight years. She had a pot-bellied pig, ole Nellie. The pig got mad at me, and she left. I should say the pig left and took her with.”
“Do you have any kids?” Leslie asked.
“None that I know of. Haven’t seen any with three fingers on their right hand. Two, three stepkids…”
Which brought him to a picture of a mare that a stepson had given him. She threw him about ten years ago. “Bucked me right off, ironed me out good, goddamned right she did, and it feels different at sixty-five than it does at sixteen.”
Among the images of family members and horses and cowhands pushing cattle, one stood out for its incongruity: a helicopter.
“The vice president stopped by here. That was one of the helicopters he was in.” Kray paused, frowning as he searched for a name. “Cheney. He came here for fishing. There was four helicopters and more goldanged people around here.”
Leslie asked, “Do you get along with the fishermen, or do you fight with them?”
“Oh, I don’t fight. I just like to antagonize ’em. I start a little story and wait four, five days and then really build somethin’ in their minds. Most of ’em that know me don’t listen to me anymore. They’ve heard it all.”
He thanked us for stopping by. Not many people in town talked to him, possibly because of those false fish stories he cooked up.
Crossing the road to Polly’s Café for lunch, I was tempted to think of Don Kray as one of a vanishing breed; but then, cowboys have been vanishing for at least a century and somehow never quite disappear.
No one was fishing the raging Bighorn, and business was slow at Polly’s. We were it. The waiter, who doubled as cook, was thrilled to have something to do. While he flipped burgers on the stove and we examined the hefty trout and walleye on the walls, three women in identical Red Cross vests came in. One, a brunette with a southern accent, asked in a tone of suppressed desperation, “Where can we get some gas?”
“We’re not in a crisis situation yet,” said the blonde, “but we’ve come a long way, we’ve got a long way to go, and there’s a lot of distance here between gas stations.”
Relieved to hear from the waiter/cook that gas could be had nearby, the trio sat down to lunch. They were volunteers, summoned from their homes—the brunette was from Kentucky, the blonde from California, and the third, a lean woman with cropped gray hair, hailed from Colorado—by the ongoing floods. Their field of expertise was mold control, but they were now bringing food, clothing, and bedding to flood victims in Montana. The California woman told us about one man on the Crow reservation. Floodwaters had washed out the road to his house, gouging a sinkhole thirty feet deep and a hundred feet across. There was no way he could get to his place to salvage his belongings, and the reservation didn’t have the money to rebuild the road.
“The poor guy tried driving his truck overland, but he bogged down in a ravine and then had to call for a wrecker to pull him out,” the blonde said, distressed. “The place is a total loss, and he’s got six kids.”
I felt sorry for that man and at the same time heartened by those women who’d left their distant homes to come to the aid of strangers. They reminded me of the volunteers who’d flocked to Tuscaloosa. I’d read or heard somewhere that the individualism in which Americans pride themselves had curdled into a pathological selfishness. Yet there were still some who believed that we’re all in this together.
* * *
The morning was one of those that make you wish you’ll never die. We set off at exactly 9:10 a.m., a record time for us, and rolled toward Livingston and a visit with our old friends Jim and Linda Harrison. Way off west of Billings, a ruffled white line shone on the horizon, like a shoal of low clouds, and the clouds rose with each mile till they revealed themselves to be the snowy rims of the Absarokas and the Beartooths. The Rocky Mountains, the backbone of the continent. The Great Plains were behind us.
We pulled into a campsite on the Yellowstone, in the Paradise Valley. For me, it was a kind of homecoming. There, thirty-six years earlier, I’d rented a cabin on a tributary called Pine Creek and finished my first book, A Rumor of War. The valley had been all rangeland then; now some of the ranches had been chopped up into vacation properties but the Paradise was still heartbreakingly beautiful, the shoulders of the Absarokas on the east side and the Gallatins on the west mantled in firs, the peaks in ermine white, and the swollen Yellowstone below, surging through the fla
tlands as through a mountain gorge.
After settling in, we detached Fred and headed for the Harrisons’ restored ranch house and a dinner of pork ribs, white beans, salad, fruit pie, and three—or was it four?—bottles of Bordeaux and Côtes du Rhône. Linda said that we were guinea pigs for a new recipe. After weeks of eating out of tin cans, we would have been happy if they served breaded boot leather. As it was, Jim being the great gourmand of American letters, a former food columnist for Esquire magazine, the meal would have been praised by his friends Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.
Afterward, while Sage and Sky frolicked in the yard with their old friends Zilpha and Mary, we talked. I should say, Jim did. Like Whitey Wenzel, the South Dakota biker, he’s a champion conversationalist. No one has ever accused me of being taciturn—long ago, Leslie nicknamed me “Talkie-the-Dwarf” because I’m a five-foot-six-inch blabbermouth—but in Jim’s presence, I grew as word-bound as Gary Cooper (though not as tall). Linda and Leslie, both as economical in speech as Jim is extravagant, were reduced to near-total silence. I don’t recall what we talked about, mostly because Jim speaks in a low rumble and switches subjects so quickly that following his trains of thought is like trying to follow electrons bouncing off one another in the Large Hadron Collider. But I’m sure we were entertained—he has one of the most original minds I’ve ever encountered.
Before we left, he gave us a signed copy of his twenty-ninth book. Better than twice my production, and I wondered aloud not only how but why he kept at it.
Jim, an Olympic-class smoker, sucked on an American Spirit and growled, “I don’t have enough hobbies.”
* * *
The Longest Road Page 21
