Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  The Predator in question is, in case you hadn’t guessed, canis lupus, the Gray or Timber Wolf. The question this part of America faces is yet to be settled: can man and wolf coexist? John believes that despite everything they can and must. But with food prices rising and the tolerance of most ranchers worn thin, Debbie believes that the wolf’s days are numbered. They were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and have thrived ever since, ranging all round the Rockies in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and doing what wolves do best–killing livestock. Debbie thinks it is time to take them off the endangered species list, which would allow ranchers to shoot them. John shakes his head sadly.

  Wyoming

  ‘Dear John,’ says Debbie. ‘Like all men he’s a sentimental romantic. It takes us hard-headed businesswomen to see the truth.’

  I am all for wolves too. In theory. Would I be quite so generous if I had children, pets and a herd of cattle to protect? I am not so sure.

  As it happens, Debbie got her way. Exactly two weeks after I left their ranch (the taxi getting stuck in the snow and ice on the way out, necessitating a dig out and rescue) the United States Fish & Wildlife Service removed the western gray wolf from the federal endangered species list. At least ten wolves were immediately shot and killed in Wyoming, including one large male who had become something of a star with the public in Yellowstone. Whether Debbie was responsible I don’t know, but I can picture her mouth setting in a grim line as she sights along the rifle and squeezes the trigger with a breathed ‘Goodbye critter…’

  Another ambition realised: hauled by Stacey’s huskies.

  ‘A coalition of environmental groups’ is apparently now planning to sue the federal government in order to force them to categorise the gray wolf as endangered once more and therefore bring an end to the legalised killings. John and Debbie’s household, it turned out, was representative of America: a house divided on the issue of these beautiful but dangerous beasts.

  Mush, Mush!

  There is one descendant of the wolf that does have a secure place here: the husky. It has long been an ambition of mine to be pulled in a dog sled and today I am about to have that ambition realised. The crew (and I too, in my heart of hearts) are a little worried that the bone in my arm hasn’t knitted well enough to take the bumps and bounces that accompany a sledge ride, but I am determined.

  Ten miles or so from Jackson Hole, along the switchback roads, lives Stacey and her pack of dogs. She has picked out a fabulously, absurdly old-fashioned sled for me to be conveyed in. All I have to do is help her attach the dogs (a complicated business involving leashes and reins looped in improbable ways) and then lie down and enjoy the ride. Which I do. The snow is falling thickly in the woods, the huskies are as yelpingly, sparklingly happy as any animals I have ever seen, and the rapid sliding motion is surprisingly bumpless.

  Not for the first time on this epic journey do I realise how insanely lucky I am.

  NORTH DAKOTA

  ‘The waitresses are all over sixty and frighteningly Germanic.’

  The highest and lowest temperatures ever recorded in North Dakota are 121º and -60º F (49º and -51º C) respectively. I don’t know if anywhere else in America can match that for extremes–in fact I can’t think of many places on earth that can. And yet the primary occupation of your North Dakotan is farming. Good luck, dear.

  They call it ‘Norse’ Dakota (ho, ho) on account of the large number of Scandiwegians in the state, but in fact it is those of German ancestry who make up most of the population. Two and half per cent of all North Dakotans speak German at home. I am to discover more about this when I visit the capital, Bismarck, where more than half the citizens are of German stock, but first I need to understand the bigger picture. Since I crossed over from Minnesota to Montana I have been wondering at the large number of roads, schools and commercial establishments named after two men called Lewis and Clark. I think I need to give myself a small history lesson, for what they did means a great deal hereabouts.

  I was always a little hazy about the Louisiana Purchase, mistakenly believing that it involved America buying the state of Louisiana. In fact it was the sale, in 1803, by France of its entire Louisiane territory, a massive swathe of mid-western America, including Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas, not to mention a healthy chunk of New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana. It cost the United States about twenty-three million dollars which added up in the end to about three cents an acre. Something of a bargain for doubling the size of the country. This was land occupied by American Indians. Naturally they were not informed about the sale.

  The President at the time, the nation’s third, was Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and perhaps the most revered of all the founding fathers. He determined that more ought to be discovered concerning this enormous tract of land, since neither the French who sold it nor the Americans who bought it really knew much about it. Jefferson was a great believer in what was already known as the ‘manifest destiny’–America’s right to expand westwards to the Pacific, and to hell with the Indians or anyone else.

  A very short time after the purchase had been concluded, therefore, President Jefferson appointed a man called Captain Meriwether Lewis to undertake an expedition which would obtain more knowledge about the new territory, principally its rivers, for this was an age in which the only way commerce and traffic could be managed in such terrain was by water. The idea was to track the Missouri River to its source. The aim was specifically, and in Jefferson’s own words, to explore ‘for the purposes of commerce’.

  Lewis and his fellow expedition leader Clark with their ‘Corps of Discovery’ travelled thousands of miles to the Pacific Ocean and back, reporting to Jefferson some three years after setting out. Now written indelibly into American history and legend, the expedition mapped most of the new territory with surprising accuracy and contributed to the making of the modern United States. Only when you have travelled in some of the lands they covered can you appreciate what a gigantic achievement it was. I have a London taxi, modern highways, air conditioning, heating and all the conveniences of the twenty-first century and I still feel like a hero when I’ve completed a four-hundred-mile leg of my journey. Lewis and Clark had canoes and horses and no idea into what hostile Indian lands or impenetrable ravines their journey would take them.

  In Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and here in the Dakotas many diners, streets, hotels, dry goods stores and lakes are named after Lewis and Clark. Their camp sites are national shrines and their navigational routes, or parts thereof, annually reproduced by hardy canoeists and kayakers in all the states of the Midwest.

  * * *

  NORTH DAKOTA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  ND

  Nickname:

  Peace Garden State, Roughrider State, Flickertail State, Norse Dakota

  Capital:

  Bismarck

  Flower:

  Wild prairie rose

  Tree:

  American elm

  Bird:

  Western meadowlark

  Fruit:

  Chokecherry

  Motto:

  Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable, or Strength from the soil

  Well-known residents and natives: Warren Christopher, Angie Dickinson, Ann Sothern, Lawrence Welk, Peggy Lee, Bobby Vee, Roger Maris.

  * * *

  The Missouri River, which was their principal point of interest, snakes right through the centre of North Dakota before turning west and disappearing into Montana. The Red River (sadly not the one immortalised by Howard Hawks in his western masterpiece, Red River) forms the state line with Minnesota to the east, and it is here that the major towns of Grand Forks and Fargo lie.

  A Kroll customer.

  ‘Sit down unt eat.’

  But my destination is the capital, named Bismarck in 1873 after the great European statesman who had jus
t succeeded in forging a dozen disparate states and kingdoms into the new nation of Germany. Incidentally, the town of Bismarck didn’t give itself that name because it was full of patriotic Germans who loved their Chancellor, but rather because it wanted to attract Germans over to the Dakotas. The total population of the entire state back then was around 3,000. The renaming ploy worked: Bismarck was soon flooded with hard-working, God-fearing Teutonic farmers who put up with temperatures that they could never have experienced back home. I cannot but wonder how the Dakota Territory as it was known back then (it wasn’t divided into North and South until 1889) was sold to those Germans? Was there a brochure promising lush, fertile countryside and balmy weather? And were the Germans who arrived bitterly disappointed? For North Dakota, although by no means unpleasant, is neither notably lush nor even slightly balmy. Scraggy scrub and featureless plateaus characterise much of the state.

  Whatever their feelings, they came and they stayed, those Germans. And they brought with them their food. I have always believed that the best way to understand any culture is through its cuisine and so as soon as I arrive in Bismarck I head straight for Kroll’s Diner on Main, a legendary German restaurant.

  The moment I enter what appears to be a traditional fifties-style diner, I know I have come to the right place. The waitresses are all over sixty and frighteningly Germanic.

  ‘Sit down unt eat!’ I am commanded. I discover that this is their motto. Were the ‘girls’ who work here not famous enough with the regular lunchers, they have become state-wide celebrities through their TV commercials, which I would urge you to watch. They are collected together on the Kroll’s website, www.sitdownandeat.com. They demonstrate better than I can the bizarre postmenopausal atmosphere that pervades here.

  Many Bismarckians are descended from people who lived in ethnic German enclaves in Russia. The food therefore is as much Russian as German. The signature dishes of the house are Knoephla (a chicken, potato and dumpling soup), Fleischkuechle (a hamburger wrapped in pastry and deep fried) and the classically elegant and sophisticated ‘Fried Dough’.

  Needless to say, I tried them all. I am a hearty eater, rarely defeated by anything, but it was all I could do to rise from the table and totter to the car park without falling over on my back and waving my legs in the air like a capsized beetle.

  A massive ingestion of calorific fat, starch and protein will at least, I rationalise to myself as I ease my stomach under the steering wheel and point the taxi south, prepare me for the rigours of life on the next leg of my journey–three days and nights on an Indian reservation.

  A Germanic slice of Americana.

  SOUTH DAKOTA

  ‘Mind you, Mount Rushmore itself isn’t exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either.’

  Merely to list the legendary landmarks of South Dakota gives me a kind of thrill. A thrill in which hero-worship and dread are painfully mixed. The wide skies of Texas and New Mexico, the cactus deserts of Arizona and the High Plains to the north–these have light and space and optimism built in. But the very names of South Dakota’s Badlands and Black Hills and Deadwood and Wounded Knee carry within them heavy hints of the tragic, the cruel, the bloody and the lost.

  At Wounded Knee, the US 7th Cavalry disgraced itself and its name eternally with the cruel and savage massacre of three hundred men, women and children of the Sioux Nation. In Deadwood Wild Bill Hickok was slain at the poker table by that no-good cowardly skunk Jack McCall. To this day the two pairs Wild Bill had been dealt seconds before his death, aces and eights, are called the Dead Man’s Hand. Men and women like Wild Bill and Calamity Jane had come to the Black Hills in the 1870s, (sacred to the Sioux and granted to them in perpetuity only a few years earlier by treaty) in search of gold. The boom soon fizzled out, forcing those who remained to scratch out their existences in unforgiving dirt farms. The Lakota Sioux tribes were enclosed within reservations where, denied their traditional hunting grounds and historically nomadic way of life, their morale and social structure disintegrated: disease, poverty, unemployment and alcoholism stalk these reservations to this very day.

  Well, that is to put the most negative construction possible on South Dakota. The state itself would tell you that its National Parks and tourist attractions make it one of the most amiable and desirable destinations in all of America.

  Certainly Mount Rushmore attracts an average of nearly six thousand people a day and I have every intention of being one of those six thousand but first, in deference to the Lakota people, I am on my way to another monument: the largest sculpture in the world, a South Dakotan attraction quite as preposterous as Mount Rushmore but a little less well known.

  Crazy Horse

  Lakota is the word I will use from now on to describe the major Plains Indian tribe of South Dakota, often also referred to as the Sioux. They are divided into seven ‘council fires’, such as Oglala, Hunkpapa and Miniconjou, but unless it is necessary I will say Lakota. Lakota also refers to their language, which is not to be confused with Dakota or Nakota…but that is another story.

  In 1868 the Lakota were granted by the Treaty of Laramie all rights of possession over the Black Hills, which they held sacred. In fact some scholars, including some Indian historians, are a little cynical about this as there is evidence that the Lakota had driven out by force other Indian tribes from the hills less than a hundred years earlier. In any event, it was the Lakota’s arch nemesis, General Custer, who returned from the Black Hills in 1874 bearing talk of gold which resulted in an instant betrayal of the treaty. The Lakota got their final revenge on ‘Yellowhair’ at the Battle of Little Big Horn two years later, a victory that soon turned into defeat as the US Army exacted its own revenge the following year, capturing and killing Chief Crazy Horse.

  It is to the Crazy Horse Monument that I have come. The vision of a sculptor called Korczak Ziolkowski who had himself worked on Mount Rushmore, this giant and unfinished enterprise carved out of the rock of Thunderhead Mountain features Crazy Horse astride his stallion, pointing out over the land below.

  Ziolkowski embarked on the project in 1948 after receiving a letter from Chief Henry Standing Bear in 1939 which said, in reference to work Ziolkowski was doing on Rushmore, ‘My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.’

  * * *

  SOUTH DAKOTA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  SD

  Nickname:

  The Mount Rushmore State

  Capital:

  Pierre

  Flower:

  American Pasque flower

  Tree:

  Black Hills spruce

  Bird:

  Ring-neck pheasant

  Soil:

  Houdek loam

  Motto:

  Under God the people rule

  Well-known residents and natives: Sitting Bull, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, L Frank ‘Wizard of Oz’ Baum, Seth Bullock, Wild Bill Hickok, Crazy Horse, Mamie van Doren, Russell Means, Calamity Jane, Pat O’Brien, Tom Brokaw, David Soul, Cheryl Ladd.

  * * *

  I am driven up the hill to the site in an ancient, stickshift vehicle by Ziolkowski’s son, Kaz. The old man himself died in 1982, leaving his widow and children to complete the work. We inspect the 87-foot-high head of Crazy Horse (the heads on Mount Rushmore are ‘only’ 60 foot high), which was completed and dedicated in 1998, fifty years after the project began. The face looks good in profile, to my eye, but a little less dramatic full on. The scale of the enterprise is astounding, daunting, mind-boggling. It seems to me that Kaz’s grandson is unlikely to be alive by the time it is finished, if it ever is.

  The monument is also controversial. Some would dismiss it on the grounds of taste alone, for it must be admitted it does resemble–the horse especially–those tacky designs in rock crystal advertised every week in the Sunday supplements and celebrity gossip magazines; a more serious criticism is levelled by some Lakota Indians who belie
ve that the very idea of carving a human sculpture into a mountain is degrading and insulting. They call attention to the fact that in his lifetime, Crazy Horse refused to be photographed. It is all very difficult. For my part, I applaud the idea behind memorialising a romantic warrior chief like Crazy Horse, whose tragic and noble life should be remembered by all, on the other I do wish something less distressingly kitsch could have been managed…

  Rushmore

  Mind you, Mount Rushmore itself isn’t exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either. After the naïve daftness of the Crazy Horse monument, I find the pompous idiocy of those four presidents somehow more risible still. Wishing to show respect or feel a vicarious thrill of admiration and pride, I can only giggle. For which I am very sorry. Any loyal American reading this who feels outraged and insulted is free to explode with derisive snorts of laughter at any British equivalent.

  With Kaz, the largest sculpture in the world looking on.

  Heading across the South Dakota Badlands.

  Reservation

  On my way to Pine Ridge, the second-largest Indian reservation in America, I drive through the South Dakota Badlands. The landscape here is like no other. Beautiful but strange, contorted and dreamlike.

  The highway winds on for miles and miles, past weird rock formations, parched gullies and grey, windswept plains until I turn off the blacktop road and head for my destination. The settlement of Porcupine is reached by a brown dusty track called Indian Service Road 27; in a desperate attempt to make it sound more touristically attractive someone has given it the pointless soubriquet ‘The Bigfoot Trail’.