PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The least the historian can do with any historical fact is to select and affirm it. To select and affirm even the simplest complex of facts is to give them a certain place in a certain pattern of ideas, and this alone is sufficient to give them a special meaning.

  —Carl Becker,

  “Everyman His Own Historian” (1932)

  The commonplace is the thing, but it’s hard to find.

  —Andrew Wyeth,

  The Helga Pictures (1987)

  The passion for inheritance is dead.

  [Today] knowledge—saturated in historical memory—is displaced by information, or memory without history: data.

  —Cynthia Ozick,

  “T. S. Eliot at 101” (1989)

  In the Quadrangle:

  Fox Creek

  If you’ve ever put an ax to a black-walnut log, you know how the wood splits suddenly, seems to leap apart as if looking for release, and you know how the cleaving follows a gentle and slight humping away from the perfectly straight so that there’s only a decurving regularity. Fox Creek divides this quadrangle into east and west rather evenly, with only the easy deviations that you find in split walnut, a tree common in these vales. State route 177, paralleling here the old Kaw Trail, follows the stream from the north county line, near where the Indian agency once stood, to where the highway crosses U.S. 50 at Strong City a mile and a half from the bottom of the quadrangle, which the Cottonwood River demarks. Other than 177, the roads lie along the river valley and leave the hills above Fox Creek a place of a few ranch trails and lone slopes of prairie chickens and coyotes: you can walk farther in a cardinal direction without encountering a road here than any other place in the county. And north of the Cottonwood, even on a stormy Tuesday night, you’d likely find more people along the quiet highway than in the few Fox Creek homes, all of them solitary ranches. On the fifty-some square miles above the river, only a couple of dozen people live, yet several of the most notable ranches lie along the creek and its tributaries, and chief among them is the Z Bar, now the center of another land-use fight. North a half mile, on a hill above the highway and in splendid isolation, as if it were some old aerial cargo that had slipped its restraints and fallen onto the blankness, is Fox Creek School, a one-room, cut-limestone building of 1882, the bell tower set so cleanly against the sky and the silhouette so archetypically native that it has become an emblem of prairie America. Its quintessential shape and location have even made travelers think it a reproduction: you’ve seen it in your imagination.

  The first white man to build a dwelling in the county—Seth Hays, trader to Indians and outfitter to the Santa Fe Trail—sent a Kaw down from Council Grove along Diamond Creek in 1854 to find some good winter pasture for his trail oxen; the Kaw found it just below the junction of the creek with the Cottonwood near a ford long used by Indians. This first improvement (so the citizens call farm structures) was the cabin of Hays’ overseer; today, what remains is but a nearly imperceptible hump in a bottom bean field just southeast of where the Superior branch of the Santa Fe line intersects highway 50, a junction called Neva Crossing. In 1937, George Washington Starkey, the farmer and antiquarian of whom I’ve spoken, numbered the worn logs, dismantled and hauled them to the park in the Falls, and reassembled the sixteen-by-sixteen-foot cabin. In time it fell into disrepair, and some citizens took it down and piled it by the rail line to await money for restoration; but a track fire got it first (I’ve heard that members of the city council, finding the thing more an eyesore than the oldest building in the county, set the blaze, but I don’t believe it).

  When Seth Hays, great-grandson of Daniel Boone, ran his cattle station here, Chase was part of a now nonexistent county named after Henry Alexander Wise, the dueling, cursing, slaveholding governor of Virginia who closed his term in 1859 by hanging John Brown at the very time Lincoln was campaigning in Kansas. As sectional unrest moved across the eastern part of the state, counties named by the pro-slavery “Bogus Legislature” (its statutes were later fired out of a cannon into the Missouri River) began shedding place names associated with the southern cause. Although Brown was at his fanatical bloodiest in Kansas, where he supervised the hacking to death of five pro-slavery settlers seventy-five miles east of here, he was, and to some extent still is, an honored figure in the state for his unyielding attempts to provoke emancipation. To local abolitionists like Samuel Newitt Wood, a settler and lawyer from Ohio who printed the first newspaper here in 1859 under a cottonwood tree near the falls, the Virginia governor’s action constituted defamation of a grand cause; that year, through the work of Wood, the southern half of Wise County joined with a northern piece of Butler County to become Chase County.

  A distant relation by marriage of Wood, Salmon Portland Chase, Lincoln’s frequent rival as well as his secretary of the treasury (and, later, chief justice), began his career in Cincinnati. He was an ardent supporter of Kansas Free Soilers, a lawyer who defended so many fugitive slaves that opponents called him the attorney-general for runaway negroes. He was counsel to John Van Zandt, the original of Kentuckian John Van Trompe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the whilom slaveholder who frees his blacks, buys land for them in Ohio and then turns his farm into a stop on the underground railroad, sits back on his porch, and enjoys his conscience. In a confrontation made coincidentally peculiar by the county names, it was Governor Salmon Chase who responded to Henry Wise when the Virginian threatened to invade Ohio to thwart purported attempts to break John Brown out of jail after his raid on Harpers Ferry. And it was Chase, despite his belief that the Emancipation Proclamation was too weak, who wrote the last paragraph of it, the one calling for men to judge the action. He was such a vigorous and eminent opponent of slavery (later a proponent of Negro suffrage) that anti-Lincoln groups put him forward for president. As chief justice presiding over the court of impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Chase probably saved the president by insisting on proper judicial procedure. He helped preserve the Union through his intelligent work as secretary of the treasury, and he originated the national banking system, organized what is now the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to help finance the Civil War, and it was he who modified a phrase from the fourth stanza of Francis Scott Key’s poem “The Star-Spangled Banner” and put it on American coins: “In God We Trust.” A friend named the Chase National Bank, now the Chase Manhattan and the second largest in the country, after him. Yet the legacy of Salmon Chase has no more popular currency here today—not even in the historical society—than the ten thousand dollar bill bearing his portrait. In a county he never saw, that ignorance is sad, since it’s the only one in the nation named for him.

  It was along Fox Creek, a decade after the Civil War, that Sam Wood’s daughter-in-law, Zilphia (a descendant of Roger Williams), one morning heard a scratching on her cabin door. She looked through a chink in the logs to see a Kaw warrior called White Eyes, a man she knew the army was offering a reward for. Food, especially meat, was so scarce she had nothing to share. Although she was alone, she was afraid not to open the door. White Eyes asked to “borrow” a knife, and she handed over her biggest one and stepped back. He looked at it, rubbed a finger against the dull edge, looked at her, said nothing, and left. Some weeks later, hearing a thump outside, she frantically figured what to do, but there was no place to hide. She unlatched the door but something heavy lay against it. The small woman leaned into it, the door slowly opening, until she saw blood on the threshold. Cautiously, she peeked out, and there lay a freshly killed deer, and thrust in it was her sharpened butcher knife.

  A few mornings ago, not far from where Zilphia Wood lived, I found along the road a slender cottonwood sapling that a highway crew had slashed back and forced into an elbow, and I cut and trimmed it into a walking stick. For months I’d been hunting the right shape and dimension of cottonwood, that tree of life the Plains Indians made into sacred staffs. I stepped off a few paces to test the stick in the hills, and it felt so right in the hand, swung forward so truly, and so pleasingly balanced me l
ike an outrigger that I kept walking until I ended up down along Fox Creek, where much prairie life exists narrowly in the bottoms. Things lay still and silent: had the rocky plates of the earth’s surface shifted a millimeter, I’d have heard the grinding. Then a fulvous shadow moved toward the stream, and I froze and waited expectantly to see my first fox in the county, and I thought how fine it was that even yet the truth of a name could linger on. Then a bronze shape emerged, a coyote slipping from the brush to drink. There was no fox. (A few days afterward, I learned the creek carries not the name of an animal but of an early settler, Edward Fox, who stayed here only two years.) I sat down, disappointed, and whittled on the walking stick, and my thought wandered off and ended up on Flora Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1949:

  My father kept his books in two cases flanking the fireplace. Among the volumes on torts and liens, covenants and contracts, was a Harvard Classics edition of Aesop’s Fables, and another book, thick and forest green, full of pictures: American Wild Life Illustrated, a WPA compilation sponsored by Fiorello La Guardia and filled with arcana about, says the introduction, “those forms of life which at some stage in their development possess a notochord,” a thing human beings lose before leaving the womb. My father explained notochords to me in a way that let me see the brotherness in the Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox stories. Once past the preface of American Wild Life, a nine-year-old can follow along, as I often did cross-legged on the floor in front of the shelves, sometimes the fireplace warming me. This book, which I still have, led me toward certain attitudes and away from others. It was almost an Aesop itself—minus the morals but not without an ethic. I read how a fox will shake pursuing hounds by running along a stone wall, or by crossing a freshly fertilized field, or by jumping onto the back of a sheep for a ride that will break the trail of its glandular-scented feet, and how a fox will test thin ice before moving out to the center to lie circled in its insulating tail while the heavy hounds break through into the cold water. And there was this paragraph:

  The fox shows its true genius in ridding itself of fleas. Taking a stick in its mouth, the fox submerges slowly in a pool of water. As it sinks, the fleas move upward to drier regions. When only the wood remains above the surface, the fleas desert the sinking fox to take refuge on the raft. Thereupon the fox releases the stick, leaving the fleas to their fate.

  For people who like to dichotomize the world, here’s mine about woods folk: houndsmen or foxmen. The image of Reynard riding smartly away on a ram’s back left me long ago on the side of wildness over domestication in whatever forms.

  But the reality of foxness remained for me a thing of words until one morning in 1949 when a friend of my mother came to visit wearing a fox stole, its eyes stuck shut as if in an afternoon doze, and I found myself in one of those childish muddles of repulsion and fascination as if the woman were Medusa herself. While the adults talked, I crept into the bedroom and pulled the skinned fox from the piled coats, and I was surprised by its sad weightlessness and its opened and varnished mouth. In caution, I stroked its glossy back, then curled the stole under the bed and stuffed a dust bunny between its rows of small, fierce teeth. It was this last act that got me into trouble: my mother tolerated the covert protest, but she didn’t let pass an embarrassment to her housekeeping.

  After the Sixteen-Sixty-Six Beast

  This happened first (in Darla’s Fun Center, the lone bar left in Cottonwood): a worn man in coveralls, the tatters revealing that he was neither cowboy nor farmer, seasoned his sandwich of raw hamburger on white bread with Tabasco, and he said, All I need now is a few shakes of gunpowder. I asked what he meant, and he said, Black powder’s what I’m talking about. The old boys used to feed it to their coyote dogs to make them fierce—put the fight into them. I asked what a coyote dog was (the word coyote here rhymes with “my coat”), and he told me and said there weren’t many left around here now, but Paul Evans over east of Strong, on past Dead-man’s Comer where they found that corpse years ago, he had the best ones, and he was a true oldfangled coyote man, quiet, but a good fellow. They are hunting dogs that run down the quarry, a sport descending from the old-time “wolf” drives (a prairie wolf is a coyote). The whole thing sounded so medieval, so Chaucerian:

  A huntsman there was, a most worthy wight,

  And nothing more loved he than hounds in flight.

  This happened second: I am going to see Evans, it’s early December, and a big red Christmas star lights the front of the small farmhouse and directs me over the black road. Paul and Leola, his wife, are not far from sitting to an early supper, and, after we talk about their six coyote dogs, they say to join them. The Evanses are in their early seventies but appear a decade younger, their faces shaped by the prairie wind into strong and pleasing lines. They have no chil dren. Paul speaks softly and to the point, and Leola is animated, the kind of woman who can take a small, smoldering story and breathe it into bright flame. Paul listens to her in barely noticeable amusement and, from time to time, tosses her tinder. The meal is a Charolais roast beef from their herd, mashed potatoes, pickled beets and candied cucumbers, and Paul’s specialty, cottage cheese dressed with corn syrup, and I have two helpings of each but for the last. I’ve been in the field all day, and it was cold, and, in all my time in the county, I’ve been asked to join a meal only a few times. We sit happily and there is time for stories.

  Leola says: It was 1949, May. Paul was home from the Pacific. We’d made it through the war, then this. We were living just across the county line, near Americus, on a little farm by the Neosho River. One Friday night I came upstairs to bed and Paul gawked at me. He said, “What the dickens are you doing?” I was wearing my good rabbit fur coat and wedding rings, and I had a handful of wooden matches. It wasn’t cold at all. I said I didn’t know but that something wasn’t right, and he said, “What’s not right!” and I didn’t know. We went to bed and just after dark it began to rain, and then the wind came on and blew harder, and we went downstairs and tried to open the door but the air pressure was so strong Paul couldn’t even turn the knob. That wind had us locked in. We hunkered in the corner of the living room in just our pajamas—mine were new seersucker—and me in my fur coat. The wind got louder, then the windows blew out, and we realized we were in trouble when the heat stove went around the corner and out a wall that had just come down. We clamped on to each other like ticks, and then we were six feet in the air, and Paul was hanging on to my fur coat—for ballast he says now—and we went up and out where the wall had been, and then we came down, and then we went up again, longer this time, and then came down in a heap of animals—a cow and one of our dogs with a two-by-four through it. The cow lived, but we lost the dog. We were out in the wheat field, sixty yards from the house, and Paul had a knot above his eye that made him look like the Two-headed Wonder Boy. Splintered wood and glass and metal all over, and the electric lines down and sparking, and here we were barefoot. Paul said to walk only when the lightning flashed to see what we were stepping on. We were more afraid of getting electrocuted than cut. We could see in the flashes that the second story of the house was gone except for one room, and we saw the car was an accordion and our big truck was upside down. The old hog was so terrified she got between us and wouldn’t leave all the way up to the neighbors’. Their place wasn’t touched. They came to the door and saw a scared hog and two things in rags covered with black mud sucked up out of the river and coated with plaster dust and blood, and one of them was growing a second head. The neighbors didn’t know who we were until they heard our voices.

  Paul says, That tornado was on a path to miss our house until it hit the Neosho and veered back on us. The Indians believed a twister will change course when it crosses a river.

  Leola: The next morning we walked back home. The electric clock was stopped at nine-forty, and I went upstairs to the one room that was left, and, there on the chest, my glasses were just like I left them, but our bedroom was gone, and our mattress, all torn up, was in a tree where w
e’d have been.

  Paul: We spit plaster for three weeks. It was just plain embedded in us.

  I’m thinking, what truer children of Kansas than those taken aloft by the South Wind?

  Leola serves her coconut cream pie, a delectable thing calling for a second round, and she says, I came out of the tornado with my rings, and then, six months later I was in the kitchen when Paul called he needed help with a calf. I took off the rings and put them in a teacup—three of them—a wedding band, an engagement ring, and another diamond ring. That evening I was making a pie and dropped a piece of leftover dough in the cup. I’d forgotten about the rings. I didn’t use the dough, and the next day I dumped it into the dogs’ trough. That evening I went to put the rings on, and I remembered, and I was out in that dog pen right now. The wedding band was in the trough, but the diamond rings were gone. I don’t need to tell you what I did for the next week.

  No, you don’t need to tell what you did, Paul says, and I say, what did you do? and Leola thinks a moment.

  I went from pile to pile and I panned for gold, and no prospector ever had worse luck.

  Says Paul, I’d let a couple of the dogs out for an hour. Those rings are out in that prairie somewhere. And I say, a wise old Indian told me, what the winds taketh not, then willeth the dogs.

  This happened third: a mid-December morning, early and cold, the prairie lies coated in hoarfrost, the whitened hills like worn crystals, the grasses spiky with rime, and Paul says iced pastures will show up a coyote well. We’re in his dog wagon, a cracked-windshield pickup, the bed holding the old plywood dog box with a flop-down door that Paul can release from the cab by pulling a slender cable called a jerk rope. If we encounter a coyote, Paul will yank the line, and the five hounds, whose slender skulls are now thrust through a narrow window in the door as they watch the frozen slopes, will bolt to hit the ground running, and the chase to death, canines after canine, will begin.