A Geography of Blood (6 page)

Through erosion, the land forgets. And perhaps it was all this talk of remembering and forgetting that sent my thoughts tumbling back to Wallace Stegner again. I was staring out the window one day, idly wondering if that bump on the horizon had been laid down before or after the final retreat of the Bearpaw Sea, when it occurred to me that Stegner had been engaged in a kind of literary and historical stratigraphy. As he compared the heroic myth of the pioneer era with the equivocal data of his own childhood, he had detected evidence of unconformities, gaps between the received version of the settlement story and the reality he had lived. Part of his purpose in writing
Wolf Willow,
I suspected, was to take a stand against this erasure—to backfill the legend with truth.

What had he written in? First, failure: “the inevitable warp, as hope was the woof, of that belated frontier.”
2
Second, deprivation: “A dull, dull little town,” he says of the Eastend he encountered in the 1950s, “where nothing passes but the wind, a town so starved for excitement that a man's misfortune in losing his false teeth in the river can enliven a whole winter's poolroom and hardware-store conversation.”
3
Finally, his mother's painful disappointment: “For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it.”
4
It must have been hell on earth.

Who would have suspected that learning to read the geological strata along the Ravenscrag road, in a halting beginner's way, would have helped me to perceive new layers of meaning in Stegner's revisionist history? Yet even as my insight into
Wolf Willow
deepened and my respect for its author grew, there was still something about the book, something I couldn't quite put my finger on, that left me feeling bad tempered. I'd read the first few chapters with fascination, and then my mind would begin to skid and I'd find myself hot and bothered, fast-forwarding to the end. At first, I thought my grievance was with the concluding pages, in which Stegner denounces virtually the entire population of Eastend as a bunch of losers who stayed here because they weren't smart enough to leave and who are doomed to the eternal boredom of a “stagnant peasant society.”
5
As a product of a rural “peasant” society, and on behalf of my growing circle of Eastend friends, I felt like taking
Wolf Willow
and chucking it at him. Thank you so very much, Sir Tooty Snooty Stanford Professor.

But, no, that couldn't really be the problem, because I'd managed to read that part of the book. It's when I turn to the second section that,
wham
, I run into a wall. Here, under the banner of “Preparation for a Civilization,” Stegner focuses on the prelude to Western settlement, events in which he and I, though a generation apart, have a vital interest. The story he has to tell is not a pretty one. By his account, the settler society of the twentieth, and now twenty-first, century lies unconformably on a raw and savage past.

“However it may have seemed to the people who founded it,” he writes, “Whitemud [a.k.a. Eastend] was not a beginning, not a new thing, but a stage in a long historical process.

“Seldom, anywhere, have historical changes occurred so fast. From grizzlies, buffalo, and Indians still only half possessed of the horse and gun, the historical parabola to Dust Bowl and near-depopulation covered only about sixty years. Here was the Plains frontier in a capsule, condensed into the life of a reasonably long-lived man.”
6

In his determination to counter the effects of erosion, Stegner has penned a kind of thinking man's Western, starring the Cypress Hills as a land that had been lost for millennia in the great vastness between two river systems. Admitted to history by the belated arrival of explorers (Captain John Palliser in 1859) and traders (a Hudson's Bay Company man named Isaac Cowie in 1871), this innocent and previously unpeopled landscape unwittingly provides a stage for a final, violent reiteration of the frontier tragedy. The story is bloody, from the war-club-wielding warriors who, according to Stegner, had whooped through the hills for generations, to the officially sanctioned brutality of the American armed forces during the Indian Wars of the late 1800s. (“No one who has studied western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide,” Stegner notes grimly.)
7
It is a chronicle of ecological catastrophe, beginning with the ruin of the abundant animal life that once occupied the hills—“Beaver heaven, elk heaven, bear heaven, buffalo heaven,” shot to smithereens—and culminating in the calamity that inevitably befell the people whose lives had depended on wild things.
8

“Within little more than a decade, fur traders,
métis,
and Indians would find their whole world collapsing under them,” Stegner laments, “the buffalo would be all but gone”—pause for a moment of silence; cue the swelling music—“and law and order in a red coat would be patrolling the coulees where a few years before hardly any man, red or white or halfway between, would have dared to go.”
9

Lay on the truth telling, Mr. Stegner. I can handle that. But could you please keep a damper on that tone of triumph? And do I detect just the slightest tincture of racial prejudice in your remarks?

Here we have a brilliant man, a scholar with the soul of a poet, a master storyteller, and a person who has dedicated himself to speaking the painful truth, yet even he had been hornswoggled by the march-of-progress myth. What if the hills weren't really an uncharted wilderness before the Europeans showed up? What if there was more to the indigenous prairie cultures than whooping and war clubs? What if it wasn't the Métis (as Stegner claims) who stripped these hills of wildlife, bringing their own way of life to an end? What if the red-coated heroes of the North-West Mounted Police hadn't always managed to live up to their Dudley Do-Right reputations?

For the agricultural settlement of the western plains to rank as “progress,” the new order had to be an improvement on what had been here before. Try telling that to the grizzly bears, Mr. Stegner, to the elk and the buffalo. Try telling that to Chief Nekaneet, walking through the snow.

Interview with Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, spare bedroom/office, Taylor House, Eastend,
SK
, July 30, 2010, 11:33
AM

C.S.: Good morning, Mr. Stegner, er, Wallace. May I call you Wallace?

W.S.: If this is about Eastend, you'd better make it Mr. Page.

C.S.: Right. Mr. Page, let me get straight to the point. I was shocked by some of the things you say in
Wolf Willow.
Like here, on page 65. [She picks up the book and reads.] “The more Indian the
métis,
the more insatiable their desire for drink.”
10
Or over here, [she flips back a few pages] you write about “an Indianism as savage as that of the most unregenerate Blackfoot,”
11
and later on you refer to the people who took refuge in the Cypress Hills in the 1870s and 1880s as an “ethnic junk heap.”
12

You're an open-hearted and humane man, or so you lead us to believe. But do you remember what Thoreau said about “a charity that hides a multitude of sins”?
13
How could you say such disturbing and, I have to say it, racist things?

MR. P.: [He takes his glasses off, places them on the table, and rubs his eyes wearily.] Yes, in retrospect, I can see that I could and should have aspired to a larger humanity. In my own defense, I can only say that I am a product of the culture that formed me, a dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere.
14
And kindly remember that I have been dead now for almost twenty years. If anyone has a right to be an anachronism, surely I do.

C.S.: When I was a kid, I used to imagine my grandma and an Indian woman (we didn't have other words then, just Indian) standing across from one another, on opposite sides of a field, just frozen there, unable even to shout out a greeting.

MR. P.: [He puts his glasses back on, raises his head, and nods.] About once a year in my boyhood, a family or two in a rickety democrat wagon would come down to Eastend from somewhere and camp for a few days in the river brush. I remember packs of us hanging wary as coyotes, just out of what we imagined was gunshot range, around their camps, spying on the dark children, the shapeless women, the heavy-featured men with braids and (we felt) a shiftless mixture of white and Indian clothes. We watched the whole outfit as we would have watched ugly and perhaps dangerous animals from a blind. The moment an adult emerged from one of the brush shanties we edged back, prepared to scatter.

[He pauses.] Sometimes we yelled catcalls in their direction, half in derision and half speculatively, to see what would happen. Nothing ever did. With what I now recognize was either helplessness or dignity they ignored us, and any temptation we might have had to go on into the camps and hobnob with their kids was discouraged by the dogs and by our mothers' warnings.
15
That was the end of it.

C.S.: You're gone now, so you're the perfect person to answer this next question. Is it fair to judge the dead for thinking what they thought and for doing what they did? Can the dead avoid censure by claiming to have been captives of the culture that they inhabited?

MR. P.: I can only speak for myself, Miss Whoever-You-Are, and I can honestly say that I struggled against intolerance for as long as I lived. Now, you'll have to excuse me. It is too late for any of this.

Wolf Willow
is a very personal book, and its gifts of candor, intelligence, and lyrical beauty are testaments to the generosity and talents of one gifted man. The book's blind spots, by contrast, are societal. In publishing
Wolf Willow,
Stegner was speaking to and for his demographic, trying to make sense of what it meant to have participated, as barefooted kids at the turn of another century, in the grand scheme of Western development. If he failed to detect the racist underpinnings of the Great Plains adventure—the confident assertion of white European superiority and the unquestioned value of European “civilization”—he certainly wasn't alone. As for his easy capitulation to the “growth-and-progress gospels” that, in his heart of hearts, he recognized as frauds, he clearly deserved to be outed as a backslider. But perhaps he also rates a vote of thanks for beginning to chip away at the dogmas of historical certainty.

With these issues out on the table, I'm finally able to put my misgivings behind me and open my mind to the book. In particular, I become interested in the stratigraphy, or periodization, of Stegner's narrative, which I recognize (partly from incessant repetitions in elementary school) as the classic structure of Western historical writing. The story begins, as it always does, with the primordial silence of prehistory and then advances through the successive, sometimes overlapping, stages of exploration, fur trade, open-range ranching, frontier disorder, and the eventual dawning of law and “enlightenment.” The boldest, blackest line of demarcation is inscribed in the final stages of this process, between the outlaw West of the 1870s and 1880s and the bucolic landscape of farm and village that emerged in its wake.

In
Wolf Willow,
Stegner absolutely insists on this division, chronicling not only the decimation of the buffalo but also what he describes as the complete obliteration of the indigenous peoples. “The white man literally created the culture of the Plains Indians by bringing them the horse and the gun,” he writes, “and just as surely, by conquest, disease, trade rum, and the destruction of the buffalo, he doomed what he had created.”
16
As for the Métis, he says that their only legacy was “death and emptiness.”
17
The buffalo prairie and its people had apparently gone extinct, as dead as the dinosaurs. And just as, in ancient times, the mammals had moved in to fill the vacancy left by their reptilian antecedents, so the incoming settlers were pictured flowing into a vacant land, obeying the dictates of the survival of the fittest.

Fine and dandy except, of course, that's not really what happened. The indigenous civilizations of the Great Plains did not die out in the nineteenth century, whether the “frontier” had ended or not. They were present when the settlers arrived, and they are fiercely alive right now. So why have the keepers of Western history, including friend Wallace, been so obsessed with defining the end of the old, indigenous West?

Since I have the advantage of a historian-in-residence, I decide to put the question to him. Keith and I are sitting in the backyard on a blustery day in mid-summer, lunching on hummus and beer. “I get the impression that they are trying to draw a line between the past and the present,” I say, between mouthfuls. “It's like they want to distance it, to disconnect us from something.”

Keith picks up his glass and looks at me thoughtfully. “There are a lot of things that nobody talks about,” he responds, after a pause, “in the imposition of colonial power.”

What lay inside that obscure stratum marked “end of the frontier”? Was it true that something terrible really had happened here?

{five} Stone Circles

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.

LAKOTA ELDER BLACK ELK,
Black Elk Speaks,
1932

By the time
I'd settled my score with
Wolf Willow,
a couple of years had passed, and life and work had been moving along, ordered and full of purpose. Then, as another winter closed down around us and just as I was preparing to write the last chapter in my prairie book, something terrible happened to us. Keith was diagnosed with cancer. Unable to foresee the three years of treatment that would follow or his eventual recovery, we were jittery, brittle with anxiety.

For Keith and me in this time of crisis, Eastend and its circle of hills offered a respite not just from the city but also from the wonderful, terrible technologies—the wheezing scanners, the cold sizzle of radiation, the monstrous hypodermics—that were busily saving Keith's life. Naturally, all of our worries came with us when we hit the highway, and sometimes the deserted streets and empty rooms that greeted us on our arrival threatened to make things worse. Our thoughts echoed in our minds and in the small-town silence:
Don't die, don't die, don't die.
But then something would happen to break the spell and draw us back out into the light.

For instance, we might be sitting at the kitchen table and look up just in time to see, right there in front of us, a tiny round bird with big round eyes and a spangle of red atop its head, feeding in the pine tree at the front of our house. It couldn't be, but there it was, a ruby-crowned kinglet, a spectacular little number that is typically found far to the north and west but that has a pinpoint distribution right here in the Cypress Hills. And now, we were among the lucky few who had seen it.

Or we'd take the dogs for a walk in some scuffed-up, dung-strewn patch of pasture on the outskirts of town, heads down, wrangling dachshunds or preoccupied by our own thoughts, until one of us caught a flicker of movement under the thin thatch of grass. “You've got to see this,” a voice rings out, and then we're both down on our hands and knees, watching a bizarre creepy-crawly with the body of an ant, the hairy integument of a woolly bear caterpillar, and the red-and-black warning coloration of something poisonous, hurrying from wherever it was to wherever it wants to be. Back at the house, we Google “red black hairy ant” and discover that what we've seen is a kind of wasp with a sting so powerful that people only half-jokingly have dubbed it the “cow killer.”

A marshy seep beside a broken-down bridge yields a ground-hugging patch of gentians the color of winter twilight. Small sinks in the course of a summer-dry gully are studded with shooting stars and blue-eyed grass, flowers so precisely formed and so perfect that they could have been crafted out of porcelain. Ruby-red strawberries glisten in the grass, condensing the sweetness of summer into a morsel the size of one's littlest fingernail. Through all the long, trying months of Keith's treatment and subsequent recovery, the hills repeatedly offered us these small moments of beauty and surprise, quietly distracting us from our troubles and suffusing every cell in our bodies with a species of joy. One or both of us might be dying, but for the moment, we were alive.

Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras, und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen.
1
All flesh is like grass, and all loveliness is like a flower in the field.

Was there ever such a country for empathy with our frailty?

It is a characteristic of the prairies that things hide in plain view. Think of pronghorns, for example. For all their gracile runner's build, they are substantial animals, comparable in height and weight to Great Danes or female mountain goats. Yet seen at any distance, a herd of pronghorns looks strangely insubstantial, as if they were caramel-colored exhalations of the caramel-colored grass. (It's amazing what several million years of evolutionary coexistence can accomplish!) I've been known to laugh out loud when a blotchy, whitish boulder resting in a field suddenly raises its head and fixes me with its dark eyes.
That ain't no rock, ma'am. That there's an antelope.
It's enough to make you wonder what you've been smoking. The prairie's hallucinatory powers seem to be strongest when clouds settle low over the curve of the land, and the light is caught, shimmering, between earth and heaven. In the gloaming, a jackrabbit standing against the sky looms as big as a deer, and the ground-nesting birds that leap up at your feet almost immediately vanish into the dazzle. It was on one of those strange twilit days that Keith and I stumbled across something half hidden in the grass that was to give my travels in the hills a sharp new focus.

We were walking our dogs on the north bench of the Frenchman Valley, upslope from the T.rex Centre, twenty minutes or so from our house, following a route that we had taken dozens of times before. If we'd been in the mood, we could have dropped in to visit the fossil clamshell in a coulee a short hike below, but the weather was brisk—a perfect day for striking out across the high tablelands that line the valley. So away we went, shouldering into the wind, our words blown from our mouths in tatters, our heads and eyes turned down. The earth beneath our feet was covered with a Persian carpet of ground-hugging vegetation, no more than ankle high: a finely knotted fabric of selaginella, or club moss, fringed with
Artemisia frigida
(silver sage), and tufted with the curly leaf blades and dainty eyelash-shaped seed heads of
Bouteloua gracilis,
blue grama grass.

The whole place was strewn with rocks, rocks, and more rocks, all river rounded and smooth, as if they had been flung from fast-moving water onto this arid shore. In a sense, of course, that is exactly what happened, since these cobbles are a manifestation of the Cypress Hills Formation (last seen atop the cliffs along the Ravenscrag road) and were carried here by mighty rivers thirty or forty million years ago. No wonder the rocks are blotched and crusted with lichens; even at a rate of millimeters per year, they've had time to grow. No wonder the stones are strewn about at random, dropped wherever Miocene rivers and, much later, Ice Age glaciers happened to leave them. There is no rhyme or reason to these deposits, but that doesn't stop your eye from trying to find a pattern by literally connecting the dots, searching for meaning where none is possible.

And, then—wouldn't you know it?—a hint of order appears. At first, you're sure that you are seeing things, but no, the array of stones that you've stumbled across really does form an arc. See, you can follow it, step by step, all the way back to where you started, a complete circumference. And now that you know what you're looking for, you quickly locate half a dozen more rings clustered round about, each set apart from its neighbors at a companionable distance. Some of the circles are drawn with single rows of rocks, while others are framed by two or more stones laid side by side, so they seem to form a narrow path. Walking on these eloquent relics is like walking the spiral pathways of a labyrinth.

Apparently, the play of light and shadow on that particular day had allowed us to detect a phenomenon that had previously been hidden from view. Although Keith and I had seen tipi rings before, we had never found any for ourselves. Now here we were, the proud “discoverers” of the tracings of a small encampment. Since then, we have had the good fortune to trip across dozens of similar rings along the Frenchman and in other places round about, including a large and well-documented site in Chambery Coulee, overlooking the T. rex quarry. (As one of our new Eastend area acquaintances once commented, evincing more pleasure at the thought than her choice of words denotes, “This whole part of the country is infested” with stone circles.) But no matter how many times the experience is repeated, there's nothing like a first kiss, and the impact of that very first time has never faded.

I've lost count of the number of times we've been back to visit that spectral village since we first encountered it. Part of the wonder of the place is the precarious chance of its survival, on a fringe of natural prairie bordered on the south by the drop of the valley and on the north by a straggly stand of cultivated grass. If the farmer had made even two or three more rounds with his plow, the whole site would have been lost and the stones would have ended up, sans stories, in anonymous rock piles. It is thanks to the thin soil and uneven ground along the valley rim that these stone circles were spared from destruction.

The special charm of the site lies in its location on a bench overlooking the modern town, as if daring you not to make the connection between
then
and
now.
Standing in the center of the largest circle, where the fire would have been, I try to imagine the people who lived here for an unknown span of days at some unknown time in the past. Were they here two centuries ago or two millennia? I find myself straining to hear fragments of their conversation, their laughter, the barking of their dogs, but all I hear is the wind and the great silence.

And then I'm eight years old again and standing on the road that cuts across the Indian Quarter on my father's father's farm. In my mind's eye, I see my grandmother and the buckskin-clad princess just as I had left them all those years ago, still facing each other, mute and immobile, across an empty field. I'm reminded of picnicking by the Beaverlodge River, thinking of the disappeared encampments and of the people who had lived in them. Now we were here, having a good time, and they were . . . well, the best I could say was that they were somewhere else.

By settling in Eastend, Keith and I had unwittingly gained intimate access to the past, not only to the stupendous grotesqueries of evolution and earth history but also, as the tipi rings made clear, to the more recent, domestic experiences of people. So here I was, a mortal being; a wide-eyed traveler in a country that knew more tales than a mere human could ever tell, a dislocated child who longed for an attic full of old stories, a disgruntled adult who smelled a rat in the accepted version of the homestead saga, and a writer at the end of her big
Prairie
project, with the prospect of time on her hands.

An intention began to form in my mind, hazy at first, like a cryptic boulder-that-could-be-an-animal seen from afar but becoming clear as time advanced. I would find out who these stone people were, learn what had become of them, and see how their story intersected with the myth of agricultural settlement. I'd pry open the locked wooden chest labeled “1870–1885, End of the Frontier” and reveal whatever moldy, disagreeable truths were stored within.

If I had wanted a reason for being in Eastend, I now had one.
My mission, should I choose to accept it.
Had I suspected how much I had to learn or how painful the truth can be, I might have set the project aside and gone on to other things. Even without that foreknowledge, I harbored certain doubts. What if I wasn't the right person to do this work? After all, I was just a visitor here, a glorified tourist really. Who was I to muck around with local history? More troubling still, I am the descendant of incoming settlers, with no filial link to the people who had made the tipi rings. Was it disrespectful, or just plain wrong, for me to attempt to address their history?

But even as I wrestled with these misgivings, that first vague impulse to proceed was coalescing into a plan. And I was encouraged by what, logically, must have been mere happenstance. It was another monochrome, overcast day, and this time we had driven up onto the north bench and parked our truck on the edge of a dirt track that parallels the valley rim. Our plan was to hike the few hundred yards cross-country to the edge of the bank, pause and take in the view, and then proceed toward the headland where the tipi rings were. At first, everything was perfectly ordinary, and we scuffed along,
oohing
and
aahing
over plants, rocks, lichens, the spiral ascent of a hawk. Then, just as we rounded the last curve, almost in sight of our goal, we were stopped in our tracks by a voice that seemed to come out of nowhere. And again—a throaty, mournful song, punctuated by high-pitched yips.

“What was that?”

“A coyote?”

“Look. I think it's straight ahead.”

Against the silvered sky, a silvery shape raised its muzzle and uttered a tremulous howl.

“Isn't that where the tipi rings are? It has to be sitting right in the middle of them.”

Calling our dogs close beside us, for the coyote's safety and their own, we continued slowly forward, not at all sure what would happen. The coyote watched us advance for a minute and then retreated to the top of the next rise, far enough away for comfort but still in plain sight. When we moved, the coyote moved; when we stopped, it stopped up ahead and sang, for all the world as if it were trying to tell us something. This continued for the better part of an hour, until we'd finished our walk. When we finally turned our backs on the valley and headed for our vehicle, the coyote sat down on its haunches and watched us retreat, its quavering notes continuing to bridge the gap in between.