PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  at the coming of the white man, the valley where Council Grove is today was primarily a clustering of big oaks and elms; of the individual trees now commemorated there—the Treaty Oak, the Post Office Oak, the Custer Elm—none is a cottonwood; within living memory all of the famous big trees have died and been lopped down to mere painted trunks: Council Grove today is a town of honored stumps

  do you know the ongin of the English maypole?

  six sentences from Black Elk: · The spirit said, “Behold the circle of the sacred hoop, for the people shall be like it, and if they are like this, they shall have life-force, because there is no end to this hoop” · The sacred hoop means the continents of the world and the people standing as one · They put the sacred stick into the center of the hoop, and you could hear birds singing all kinds of songs by this flowering stick, and the people and animals all rejoiced and hollered · Depending on the sacred stick we should walk, and it will be with us always; from this we will raise our children, and under the flowering stick we will communicate with our relatives—beast and bird—as one people: this is the center of life of our nation · The sacred stick is the cottonwood tree · This tree never had a chance to bloom because the white man came

  Across Osage Hill

  One Saturday afternoon I was in Buck’s Drive-Inn up on highway 50 at Strong City to revive myself with a milk shake after walking around Osage Hill, and I was staring out the window at highway travelers when a nearby, slow conversation chinked with snarls broke into a squabble about something, and I heard the woman say, What’ve you ever done with your life? She was speaking to a man nearly my age, whom I knew to be her brother. He said, There isn’t enough time to tell you all I done in my life, and the woman turned away and stared out the window at the highway, and he stared out too, and so did I: three people staring out at the passage, all of us fixed on what he’d just said.

  That night, on my long drive home, I thought of the tiff and the man’s defense, and I began wondering how long it would take to tell my half century of life. The next morning, Sunday, I went to the porch where I sometimes read the paper or write but more often just watch the woods. I set out a tape recorder and a digital timer with an alarm, and my mind wandered off, and I muttered sentences, and when I felt a kind of rhythm in it, I pressed on the recorder and timer; for sixty seconds I described my every motion and tried to do the same for my thoughts (I scratched my knee but I was watching an oriole pull the tough threads from a yucca leaf and carry them to the nest she was weaving in the big sycamore). The telling on tape of that minute took, of course, sixty seconds, but listening to it, I realized that for an audience other than myself all the important information was missing: why I was sitting there doing this, where I was and what it looked like, felt like, smelled like, how the yucca threads in a few weeks would hold four plump nestlings and the parent through a hard rain, why that minute was worth paying attention to.

  I took up a pencil and paper and began trying to give a description of those sixty seconds as a novelist might, and when I hit six pages I stopped—not because I was finished but because I was so far from finishing. I read the pages aloud, doing it as if I had a listener, and that took a little more than ten minutes. I totted up and figured: even an abbreviated retelling of one hour of my life would take ten hours to relate, and one working day—could I remember it all—would, with an hour of rest each day, require a week to retell, and that meant a single year needed seven years, and my half century of waking life would consume 350 years, about the time from the Mayflower till now.

  While I may pass my life in continuity and completeness, I comprehend it only in discontinuous fragments; of the lives of people around me my understanding is utterly fractured and piecemeal: scraps, shavings, smithereens. Family or friends tell me a story in a few details, and I say, I see. Even more than autobiography, biography and history and literature and all the arts are far-flung bits reassembled into an illusion of completeness so that we comprehend only by orts. Put a strong magnifier to, say, Dagwood Bum-stead’s face in the Sunday funnies, and, in a sense, you’ll see that he isn’t really there—mostly what’s there is white page rather than little dots of red ink. Our incapacity to see what is truly before us allows us to perceive the cartoon man in something like a hallucination.

  A cousin of mine, a metallurgical engineer, worked for a while on a doctorate in particle physics at Kansas University until he had a kind of breakdown; not long ago he told me, I kept going after matter—structures—and I kept going until I saw that when you go inward far enough there’s almost nothing there. Everything is space with tiny pieces strung out only in propinquity to each other. My crisis was about learning to live in the interstices by hugging up to little particles. He left physics, although he stayed in engineering, and became a Christian Science reader.

  I’m not really concerned here about human understanding as hallucination; what I have to say is about Osage Hill, but I must do that through a kind of equivalence to the pointillist spots of ink that compose Dagwood’s face, my words serving as daubs that may allow you to enter a kind of dreamtime where you can pass across the Hill. The subject of this chapter, I suppose, is really its method. To American Indians who believe that the past is to a people as dreams are to a person, stories are the communal snaggings of generations, the nets that keep people from free-falling toward pointlessness, as did my cousin, and they are also the knots of matter that help people into dreamtime, where the listener, the traveler, can imagine he sees links between smithereens; from that hallucination, everything that we value arises. I’m speaking about shards and grids and crossings, about that great reticulum, our past.

  That Saturday before I went to Buck’s for a chocolate milk shake, I’d been walking around on Osage Hill, writing down notes, talking to myself (about a half bubble off plumb), quick-sketching a few details, and taking two photographs. It was April, and from the west, low and heaped clouds fat as galleons slipped in only to break open on the flinty ridges and spill their cargo, an airy blueness that rolled on east: it was a day of two skies and one weather. I carried my cottonwood stick and my usual haversack, but my real equipage was a mind full of stories I’d heard about Osage Hill, pieces of the real hill, a Platonist might say: with the greater framework now lost, they were more chips of narratives than whole tales, icons without an iconography, isolated pictographs that can remind a person and involve him in more than they actually were themselves; they were small configurations that had to be continually reinfused and reinvoked to keep them from becoming indecipherable. I believe Indians fear loss of meaning—that is, memory—beyond all other losses, because without it one can love nothing. After all, love proceeds from memory, and survival depends absolutely upon memory.

  Osage Hill, lying between Cottonwood Falls and Elmdale, is actually a long and massive ridge extending several miles from the southern end of the county northward to stop abruptly only where the Cottonwood River comes in askew of due west and, in its last grand shift of course, takes a true easterly run to the Neosho River. The western slope of Osage Hill, coincidentally lying atop the granite Kansas Mountains, the Nemaha Ridge three thousand feet below, is much steeper than the gentle rise on the east, and the five miles of gravel road between the two towns is mostly straight although not level, and it crosses the ridge at its highest point to give one of the fine valley views in the county; it is this vista, above all else, that has made the hill special to the people: as early as 1885 couples came here to be married in the high pasture.

  In the initial days of federal highways, this road was a stretch of U.S. 50 before it got moved a couple of miles to the north, down into the valley floor to ride around the base of the hill, as do the tracks of the Santa Fe and fishermen floating the Cottonwood. The first death from an auto accident in the county happened on the east end of the Osage Hill road in 1908 when William Romigh—Lizzie Brandley’s brother, a man who once beat out Sam Wood for county attorney by four votes—one autumn Sunday drove h
is brand-new Oldsmobile runabout (which he was just learning to handle) off into Spring Creek, and the seventy-six-year-old got pinned under the upside-down car in a few inches of water and drowned. Several years later, at precisely the same place, another man ran off the straight road into the little creek and died. But passage here is much older: a rock-ledge ford, one of the two or three important Indian crossings over the river, lies at the bottom of the western slope, and near it the tribes, especially the Osage, camped on their treks into the nineteenth-century bison ranges that once began fifty miles west. To stand on the end of the hill overlooking the big angle of the river and to see both ways along its dogleg valley, to look down this fluvial breaching of the Flint Hills (the only other gap is the much larger Kaw Valley) and also to look up the vales of Middle and Diamond and Fox creeks and see the commingling of waters, is to realize the special strategic and spiritual significance Osage Hill held for tribal peoples in passage; it is fitting that, of the very few Indian place-names in the county, this preeminent location bears one.

  I’ve already spoken of Seth Hays, the Santa Fe Trail provisioner who built the first cabin in Chase for the overseer of his wintering oxen, but I haven’t said that the building was at the base of Osage Hill; so, depending on your views of white westering and genocide, the ridge is either a kind of a triumphal monument or a cenotaph. (George Starkey, the man who, years later, dismantled and reassembled that cabin in the city park at the Falls, crashed his steam-drawn thresher on a wild descent of the hill in 1905 and was severely burned when he was pinned against the boiler.) Behind Seth Hays came a generation of wagons that often stopped at a burr-oak grove below the ridge, a place that later became a picnic ground for the citizens of Elmdale, where, on the Fourth of July, farm boys having no firecrackers would push boulders down the slope, and those rocks, so goes the story, became tables for later picnickers.

  At the ford, called Osage Crossing, Joshua Shipman in 1870 built a dam and gristmill, and to it Russian Mennonites from Marion County hauled their wheat and corn, and children ran and hid and stared at the men of strange words and hanging black beards that caught the wind. The water behind the milldam became a good fishing and swimming hole (kids jumped their ponies in) and ice-skating pond and also a place to drown. Shipman in 1882 built a new and bigger mill that burned in 1906, and later his dam washed out, so that today you find only a few cut stones to mark the site. Whitt Laughridge told me that near the crossing was a rock, now buried, with three footprints left by a dinosaur wading a muddy shoal: ponderous, claw-footed reptiles sloshing where aboriginals hunting bison would one day cross, where goggled drivers would test a new roadster to see whether it could climb the hill in high gear, where farmers would haul produce in Model T trucks, some of them with gravity-fed carburetors that made them take the steep western face of Osage Hill in reverse. Paul Evans, the coyote hunter, told me when he was a boy living near Elmdale he and a couple of friends every August used to lie in wait among the oaks for the farmers’ old trucks loaded with watermelons to start up the hill (this before the road was straightened and the grade lessened in 1972): because of the clutching mechanism of those trucks, the driver had to keep moving and hold his foot to the low-gear pedal to make the laborious, grinding ascent, and he could only watch as Paul boarded the back end and pirated off a couple of choice melons; it was a kind of toll for using the road.

  On the morning I was on Osage Hill with my lading of stories and hoofing around not far from where the telephone relay tower stands (now one of the good navigational points in the county), it seemed that most of what I knew of the hill had to do with passage and semiotics: precisely midway east and west across the county, it has been a high hub around which waters and men and their events turn, a still point drawing transit and tales to it as the quiet eye of a tornado draws atmosphere. It is a centripetal force of a hill, yet it has neither the classic symmetry nor arresting isolation of Jacobs’ Mound; in fact, from the valley, it doesn’t particularly stand out. It’s the kind of rising that moves you only after you’ve surmounted it and then discovered it’s there, and, in this sense, it’s a hill only when you’re on its western side: I’ve wondered how many travelers come to the vista above Elmdale and say, How the hell did we get up here? Aboriginal peoples give attention to natural places with steep edges, and, I think, that attraction is not yet entirely erased even in city dwellers who may work on some twentieth floor.

  My hiking that morning on the hill as I walked in its stories was a try at entering it and partaking of its identity and life, at being infused with its old, cryptogrammic presence.

  A few weeks later, Whitt Laughridge and I were talking about Osage Hill and the road over it, and he said that he thought he’d identified an old Hockaday sign on a fencepost there, and I was surprised because I’d just read something about Hockaday and his signs, so we drove out, and I picked up a rusted and riddled metal plate now devoid of any markings, and we took it back to the county museum. I was as pleased as if we’d unearthed a piece of a temple at Chichen Itza, not so much with the object as with the unexpected link it had revealed between Osage Hill and a man whose bubble often floated far off plumb.

  F. W. Hockaday, called Woody, was an auto-supply dealer in Wichita in the early days of motoring, a time before highways carried numbers, when “maps” were instructions: left at the big oak; go one mile; right a quarter mile past red barn on south. Woody was a small and bespectacled fellow who could take up a cause with a fervor beyond most people. When it came to roads, Woody thought like a Roman, and he decided to measure and mark the major highways in Kansas; since he was paying for it, he would make his auto-parts store mile zero—this, of course, occurring before the U.S. Zero Milestone was set up in front of the White House on the eastern end of highway 50. He toured around nailing up rectangular metal signs two feet long showing a large red H on a white background, a directional arrow, the name he’d given to the highway, and the next town. We all know that a driver, no matter how veteran, never happily accepts losing the road: if he’s delighted with the wit of some signs—

  A MAN

  A MISS

  A CAR—A CURVE

  HE KISSED THE MISS

  AND MISSED THE CURVE

  BURMA-SHAVE

  —he becomes devoted to anyone sending him, as the needle edges toward empty, off down the right route. Even though Woody’s markers created thankful customers, he became obsessed with his signs and put more and more auto-store income into them, until by 1917 he’d spent at least sixteen thousand dollars on his project; two years later he contracted to mark thirty-five hundred miles of road from Washington to Los Angeles. He began numbering highways (Kansas 96 was his auto-supply phone number) and issuing maps with “his” routes marked in red, and he spoke of the Hockaday National Roads, and he even began asking farmers to paint the name of the nearest town on their barn roofs to help aviators. Eventually his expenditures and time away from Wichita did his business in.

  Thereafter, he had to take respites in sanitariums. In 1938 in Oklahoma City he tried to jump into President Roosevelt’s car, he said, to shine FDR’s shoes. Woody was declared insane and sent off for another rest. In the forties, he became an antiwar zealot and went around visiting American Legion posts where he would tear open a pillow and sprinkle the behatted old warriors with down and call out his message: Feathers are better than bullets any day! The slight, myopic fellow was regularly thumped by police, and he finally died, sixty-three years old, in a sanitarium only an hour from where I live in Missouri. To Plains Indians the red road is the good road (the opposite of the blue road of the self-concerned). I wish I could have talked to Woody Hockaday about his red highways, and I’m sorry that the proposal in 1954 to name the Kansas Turnpike after him went nowhere.

  As Whitt and I were wiping off the old Hockaday marker and hoping to find some ghost of a word, which we didn’t, he said, This reminds me: in the late thirties or a little later, every summer up on Osage Hill there used to mysterio
usly appear a sign that would say something like great is the white thunder god and another year maybe the thunder god is coming. Dick Iliff, the old newspaperman, knows the story.

  The next day we talked to Iliff, and he lent me a book privately printed in 1947, titled White Thunder God, by Pat Reid, a name Iliff assumed to be a nom de plume In the novel is a photograph of a pleasant-looking man and this caption:

  Rev. Floyd M. Gurley

  “Thunder God” to the Pedro Martir Indians.

  Gurley, said Iliff, had gotten into trouble in the county in the early thirties, and, some years later, this book had mysteriously appeared in the Leader office.

  I went to the courthouse and, in the first big index I opened, my gaze fell right to Gurley’s name, both the clerk and I taken aback by the immediacy of what could have been a long hunt. She brought out the file, and I read through the papers of his arrest and conviction for arson and his commitment to prison for three years at hard labor; and there was, signed by Governor Alf Landon, Gurley’s Citizenship Pardon, a document he apparently never wanted. There was also something the clerk had never before seen in a file: attached to the original complaint a photograph of Gurley that confirmed his connection to White Thunder God.

  Unless a transcript of proceedings exists, criminal court files often don’t reveal the story, so I went to the historical society and read old issues of the Leader; at first the case seemed to be a simple crime of revenge and confession: twenty-four-year-old Gurley, a motorman for the San Francisco streetcar company, returned in the summer of 1932 to Butler County to visit relatives and court a fourteen-year-old girl, the younger sister of a pretty woman he’d lost to another fellow a couple of years earlier. In August, allegedly for lover’s vengeance, he went to the isolated farmhouse on Coon Creek, about twelve miles south of Osage Hill, where his first love lived with her husband, and burned it to the ground while they were away. When the sheriff arrived, Gurley ran into a cornfield, leaving his luggage and Model T coupe behind, and hurried back to his job in San Francisco. A month later he waived extradition and was returned to Cottonwood, arriving at three in the morning after two days on the train; without sleep, he underwent an interrogation that lasted eighteen hours. The exhausted man finally confessed. The day before he was sent off to state prison, he married his fourteen-year-old sweetheart in the courthouse; with that, reports in the Leader about Gurley cease, and the easy simplicities of a crime and punishment vanish: why would a girl marry a man who had just burned down her sister’s house? Why would parents of a minor consent to such a marriage? The criminal file indicates that they all testified at the hearing, but would they give witness against a man about to become husband and son-in-law? Was a confession forced from him?