Copyright © 1996, 2014 by Louise Jones
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62636-574-2
eISBN: 978-1-62873-940-4
Printed in the United States of America
FOR ANNIE PROULX
In our intercourse with the Indians it must always be borne in mind that we are the most powerful party . . . We are assuming, and I think with propriety, that our civilization ought to take the place of their barbarous habits. We therefore claim the right to control the soil they occupy, and we assume it is our duty to coerce them, if necessary, into the adoption and practice of our habits and customs . . . I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect upon the Indians, regarding it rather as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil
—Columbus Delano
U.S. Secretary of the Interior (1873)
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Ucross Foundation in northern Wyoming and its executive director, Elizabeth Guheen, for providing me with a residency during the month of April 1993, while I traveled and researched a small part of the Great Plains. Thanks also to Claire Kuehn, archivist-librarian of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, for granting me access to invaluable material on commercial buffalo hunting in western Texas during the 1870s. The custom gunmaker Steven Dodd Hughes of Livingston, Montana, an expert on nineteenth-century firearms who is familiar with most of the weapons mentioned in this book, read my manuscript for accuracy; I’m grateful for his time and effort. My editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Margaret Ferguson and John Glusman, demonstrated great patience and a willingness—above and beyond the call of duty—to deal with obscure and violent subjects. To both of them my utmost gratitude and respect.
Introit
The virgin prairie: no wheel ruts, no chimneys, no spiders yet—the bison in his plenitude. No history here, no numbers, not even the resonance of place-names. No villains, no heroes. And if once the land had them, who knows what they signified?
Just the land, flat, empty, endless and timeless, cut to the bone by the rare run of water, pounded by the sun.
The wind blows steadily, night and day, driving men and animals wild.
Then it stops.
The heat builds.
Buffalo gnats swarm everywhere, fleas and lice, the stench of rotting meat. The seasons swing through impossible arcs, heat and cold, sunglare, starglare, frostbite, flood and snow, mirage. Black, dry tongues in skulls that still breathe; a herd of elk frozen in place, standing; mummified antelope withering within their sun-parched hides; frost-puckered men losing toes and limbs to the cold. A couple of newcomers frozen by the norther; other wayfarers come upon them, look down from their gaunt horses; the weather’s victims snowblind and helpless, begging for mercy, just a bullet or two, for pity’s sake; they ride on, but one goes back and shoots them—is it mercy? No, he merely wished to see if his rifle would still fire in such a frost as this. Scarce time for pity here.
When horses are starving, men will feed them meat and the horses will eat it as readily as hay. You’ll see them now and then, hobbled beyond the firelight, gnawing the bones of long-gone wayfarers, whether frozen to death or baked alive matters not to your pony.
The Indians believe there was a time when all animals, even buffalo, preyed upon men and devoured their flesh. But that was long ago.
The buffalo herd moving through time: big ugly shaggy smelly louse-ridden powerful animals, black-humped, black-horned, huge heads and tiny feet, bellowing, roaring, grunting, pursued by wolves, ridden down by Indians, gunned in their milling millions by hide men, shot and puking blood, hundreds of them pouring into rivers and over cliffs, breaking their bones and dying, or drowning and dying, or doomed to starve with broken backs and legs, and the rest running right over them, through them, with no compassion, no concern, driven mindlessly, as are we, by their nature, our nature.
These lives, our lives, are merciless—they will make you cry out for emptiness—cry out for a single redeeming message.
You’ll not get it here, unless . . .
The Human race is vile, unthinking Nature best, and Prayers won’t help us anyway.
The plains go on forever.
PART
I
1
THE PANIC OF 1873, precipitated by the failure of Jay Cooke’s banking house in New York, spread rapidly from east to west. Armies of tramps and incendiaries moved through the land that fall, jobless, roofless, hopeless men, hamstringing blood horses in their anger, burning barns, grabbing broody hens and cooking them—barely plucked, still quivering—over smoky fires made of planks they tore from the floors of chicken coops, wolfing down the red-veined meat half raw. Smoke rose thin in bitter blue-gray columns through the autumn woods and the stench of house fires lay heavy on the land.
In any switchyard along the North West Railroad’s right-of-way through Wisconsin, wherever the cars were going slow enough, you could see the tramps drop from the freight cars like ticks from a dead dog’s belly, swollen in the wrappings of their filthy rags, shuffling off through the dead-fallen leaves with an ominous whisper, some with shiny new boots, cocksure for the minute.
A farmer residing near Clyman went out to his pigsty one morning and found two dozen saddleback porkers lying dead with their throats slit. He could see from the tracks in the jelled purple blood that the other eleven had been carried away.
In the silent woods near Rhinelander, the bodies of unidentified men are found dangling from tree limbs. A tramp falls from a freight car on the outskirts of Butler, the wheels nip the top from his skull. Tramps turned away from a farmhouse door not far from North Prairie go into the barn, cut the throats of three cows, leaving a card spiked on a bloody horn: “Remember this when next you refuse us.”
Suicide takes many forms. Paris green. Carbolic acid. The noose. The revolver. One man beats himself to death with a hammer. Another, demented, eats a dozen cigar butts and chokes to death when he vomits them back up. Yet another lashes sticks of dynamite around his torso, caps them, lights the fuse . . .
A troop of fifty hoboes invades the town of Bad Axe. They terrorize the citizenry and burn the county courthouse. Others occupy Peltier’s Store, break into the wine cellar, and devour the sausage and crackers and all but three of the dill pickles. An affray ensues, in the course of which one tramp shoots another over the division of spoils. More gunshots follow. When the smoke clears, the sheriff counts nine dead bodies. Another four hoboes seriously wounded, three not expected to live.
A plague killed many children that year—”the black diphtheria”—infants mainly, though older children, too: a lovely girl of seventeen in Kewaunee, whose picture ran in the paper; and every day the bells tolled another dozen f
unerals. In some families, two or three children died in a single day. A sore throat at first, a slight fever, then the bacillus raging out of control—throat tissue eaten away, replaced by a tough gray membrane, the telltale sign of imminent death. Suffocation swiftly ensues. (Or worse, prolonging suspense because it is slower, the infection leaches downward through the esophagus, finally inflaming the walls of the heart.)
The babies looked lovely in their embroidered burial gowns: their sightless glances half lidded, blue eyes and silky blond hair, a bit of rouge on their plump smooth cheeks, their bottoms scrubbed clean, held upright, in tiny pine coffins lovingly sawn and tacked together, on hooks implanted in their backs by the town photographer. Family mementos. Many mothers went crazy with grief. Women walked the streets of Wisconsin—the entire Northwest—with their eyes deranged and dead babies in their arms. They walked into stores the way they had when their babies were alive, then sat in chairs before the cast-iron stoves and rocked until the babies began to stink. No man dared approach them. Some women felt so guilty about the deaths of their infants that they cut their own throats with case knives or sheep shears, some threw themselves into cisterns, others laid their heads upon the railroad tracks and allowed the thundering wheels to shatter their skulls. One woman near Eau Claire was chopped into three pieces by the wheels.
Yet the Badger Banner reported: “More poetry is written in Wisconsin than in any other state in the Union.”
A HARD FROST that morning, the morning that changed her life, and Jenny Dousmann snug in her bed. It was cold in the loft, warm under the goosedown comforter. She said a little prayer.
Lieber Gott, mach’ mich fromm, dass ich in dein Himmel komm’. Amen.
Dear God, make me pious, so that I go to Heaven . . .
She waited until she heard her father rattling in the kitchen, firewood snapping in the stove, then threw back the cover, jumped out of bed, hiked her nightgown, squatted over the chamber pot, and dashed for her clothing. She was a strongly built girl with fair hair and fair skin, large green eyes, and freckles—faint ones—on her cheekbones. The coffee was done by the time she came down the ladder. Vati was out in the barn milking the cows. She punched the air from some bread dough left to rise the previous evening, shaped it into the pans, and set the dough to rise a second time. She covered the pans with damp towels. When she had finished, she went out to the henhouse to gather eggs. She heard her mother stirring in the big bedroom as she closed the kitchen door. Mutti would put the bread in the oven when it was ready. That was their daily routine.
A bright blue morning, frost glitter in the trees, roosters singing all through the valley. Woodsmoke rose in a ruler-straight line from Wielands’ chimney half a mile down the road. She noticed that their own rooster was silent, the hens as well. None of the usual Jammer that greeted her arrival with a sack of cracked corn and barley.
There were few eggs in the henhouse, just over a dozen. She went across to the barn to tell her father. Perhaps there’d been another fox around during the night. She found Vati hanging from a noose tied to a rafter. His handsome face was dark with constricted blood. A dreadful stink. She saw that he had beschmutzt himself. It was dripping from the cuffs of his overalls onto the toes of his boots. His tongue stuck out, dark blue. His eyes bulged. Jenny yelled toward the house for her mother. Mutti came on the run, barefoot over the frosty ground, her yellow-white hair flapping. She stood breathless at the barn door. Jenny pointed. Her mother stared but did not scream.
Jenny dragged a ladder from the side of the barn, propped it against the rafter, and climbed up to her father. She used the blade of a scythe to saw through the rope. He thumped in the mud. She pulled down his overalls to clean his bottom and his legs, using fresh hay from a new bale.
In the bib pocket of his overalls she found a notice from the Heldendorf Mercantile Bank advising Herr Emil Dousmann that full payment of the outstanding amount of his mortgage, $938.55 in toto, was due on the twelfth of October 1873, and that if said payment was not forthcoming by said date, the bank would have no choice but to take over the farm. Below this cold, formal statement, the bank’s president, Herr Jochen Sauerweiz, had written in pencil: “Sorry, Emil, but business is business, and it’s bad everywhere right now.” The Sauerweizes and Jenny’s parents had come to America on the same ship from the Old Country.
Today is the twelfth, she thought. Sakrament! He hadn’t been happy for a long time now. No music in weeks from his fiddle. Too sad; I should have known.
Jenny felt like weeping, but thought of her mother. I’d only get her crying along with me. Mutti is too zartfilhlend, too sensitive, too soft for this land. She cries at nothing—wind ruffling the water on the stock pond, cold light on the hills at sunset, a kitten suckling on its purring mother. I suppose it reminds her of her innocent childhood in Germany. She never left Deutschland behind. Oh ja, she cries plenty when Vati plays his fiddle . . .
Mutti had gone back into the house. Jenny went to comfort her. She found her mother on the floor of the kitchen, her mouth leaking blood. The bottle of carbolic acid stood on the kitchen counter, still uncapped. Jenny screwed the cap back on, its threads crusty on the brown glass. Skull-and-crossbones on the red-lettered label. Jenny knelt beside her mother and tried to wipe away the slippery foam, but it just kept bubbling from her nose and mouth. She was not breathing. She was dead. Selbst-mord. An ugly word: suicide . . .
Panic thumped Jenny’s heart clear up to her eardrums. Her mind leaped away from the horror. My apron’s all bloody and stinking, she thought, suddenly short of breath. And my dress, too—filthy! And what’s that?—the bread’s risen too far! Mutti forgot to put the pans in the oven. Jenny sprang upon the offending loaves and punched them flat.
Outside, the frost was melting under a cheerful sun, dripping from the roof and the trees, black splats in the barnyard dirt, and now finally the rooster was singing as if there were no tomorrow.
I must get word to Otto . . .
After she had cleaned up, Jenny walked over to the Wielands’ place. She found Herr Wieland mucking out the cow stalls. Andres Wieland was a tall, big-bellied peasant from Hesse with an uhlan’s mustache brindled by tobacco juice, merry blue eyes, and a wart on his right nostril that looked like dried snot. She told him what had happened.
“Du lieber” he said, the smile of greeting frozen at her words. “How? Why? You poor child . . .”
Then she saw the initial shock in his eyes replaced by a look of calculation. All that land now, right next door. Those fine cows . . .
He said he would send his wife to help.
He himself would go into town to report the tragedy. He would wire a telegram to Jenny’s older brother to return quickly home.
Otto Dousmann was in Kansas, near Fort Dodge, hunting buffalo. A wire might reach him care of the Fort. Or perhaps through the railroad, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe—they now had a station at Dodge City.
The Wieland boys, Friedl and Willi, were still out in the pasture with the cows. Frau Wieland drove Jenny back home in her buggy; she wept silently all the way. Vroni Wieland had been Minnie Dousmann’s closest friend in America. They often helped one another with their housework, singing songs from the Old Country as they cooked or cleaned or ironed or beat carpets or washed windows or waxed one another’s floors, even out in the garden chopping weeds. “Du Bist Wie Eine Blume,” “Der Schwartze Zigeuner,” “Am Brunnen Vor dem Tore”—they had sweet voices, Frau Wieland a husky alto, Frau Dousmann a soprano. Jenny had loved to hear them harmonize, their chubby wet red faces streaming with tears and sweat, their eyes laughing as they cried and rolled out strudel dough, the tears turning the flour on their cheeks into white runnels that ended in little lumps of salty pastry dough that almost cooked from the heat of their homesickness.
Those were warm lovely evenings in the kitchen, with the cold black American night wrapping itself around the house, the mothers with their sweet voices, cheeks wet with tearshine. The men came back from barn
or field, clumping mud off their boots on the back stoop, and sometimes there was the bang of a shotgun off in the distance as Willi or Friedl or Otto, when he still lived at home, shot plump prairie chickens, and later the birds coming brown and hot and gleaming with fat from the oven, with bread and apple and onion stuffing, and potatoes and red cabbage, strudel with Schlagsahne—what the Americans called whipped cream—from our own sleek cows after, and then Vati playing his violin . . .
LATER THAT NIGHT, after Frau Wieland had returned home, Jenny prayed for Otto’s swift return. He’s a soldier, she thought, familiar with death and decisions. He’ll know what to do. But she had to make some decisions of her own, she knew. Frau Wieland had been kind, offering to take Jenny into her household “like a daughter of my own.” The Wielands had had a daughter once, named Hannelore, but she had died at the age of eight. They had buried her at the foot of a big red oak at the top of the hill behind their house. The sun set in winter directly behind that oak, and every evening Frau Wieland watched it go down and wept a little. Jenny had seen her tears often.
Herr Wieland had always wanted this farm. A frugal, penny-pinching man, he had plenty of money now and he might very well buy it from the bank for the price of the outstanding mortgage.
But I don’t want to live with the Wielands, she thought. Even if Otto had enough money to pay off the bank, she knew she couldn’t keep up the farm all by herself. Yet her father had worked so hard to build it. He was an educated man, not an echt Bauer—a true farmer, like Andres Wieland. Emil Dousmann had grown up in Kassel and attended the Technische Hochschule there. His own father was a draper, a member of the Bürger-stand—the bourgeoisie—but Emil Dousmann had joined the Socialist Party. After the ‘48 revolution failed, he and his wife came to America. At first he had worked as a printer in New York, played violin with the Liederkranz, and written for socialist newspapers in Milwaukee. His dream, Vati had always said, was to build on his own acreage and farm “scientifically,” following the precepts of his heroes, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander von Humboldt. With the money saved from his newspaper work, he’d bought this land near Heldendorf, west of Milwaukee, and made it into a small but productive farm. He had borrowed money from the bank only to improve his herd and his orchards, and to send his daughter to the Heldendorf Academy.
Tie My Bones to Her Back Page 1
