Great Plains (11 page)

On the open prairie in west-central Montana, near no town, I came across perhaps my favorite ruin on the Great Plains. This ruin is an unfinished structure about twenty feet high which covers more than an acre. The outside of the structure angles inward, like the base of a pyramid; the walls are nine feet thick, mostly sheathed in bulldozer-yellow steel plate. On the concrete floor inside are tire tracks, and skid marks where kids have done wheelies or donuts. Swallows fly around inside and chirp. The ping of dripping water echoes. Pages of a water-stained Bible rustle in the wind. Through the main entry, you could drive a small house. On the exterior, someone has written in spray paint, “172 Million Dollar Monument to America's Stupidity.”

From a local person (it took about an hour of driving to find one), I learned that this structure was originally intended to be a command center for the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile system. Later, from a public-information officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Great Falls, Montana, I learned that the Army had been in charge of Safeguard and that construction of the center was suspended in 1974 when the United States got rid of parts of the ABM system in compliance with the SALT I Treaty. The command center was built to withstand nuclear attack; now, tearing it down would be too expensive to be worthwhile. Even damaging it at all seriously would require patience, cutting torches, and heavy equipment. Usually, ruins refer to the past, but what I like about this one is that it probably will still be here a thousand years from now. Inadvertently, it has become timeless, like the pyramids or the Great Wall. If the Army were using it for its original purpose, barbed wire and security forces would keep me far away; abandoned, viewed from up close, this monument of cold-war architecture has begun to look a little like a frame from an old James Bond movie. Paleontologists sometimes infer from a fragment of mandible whole skulls, species, cultures. Maybe in thousands of years this ruin will be evidence from which people infer nuclear weapons, the internal-combustion engine, automated banking, Phil Collins albums, and diet pancake syrup. As my van rocks gently on its springs in the wind, and as the wind whistles through the grama grass, I feel as if the car and the grass and I are all flesh to this ruin's bone.

*   *   *

In or near the towns of Colstrip, Montana; Rock Springs, Wyoming; Zap, North Dakota; Stanton, North Dakota; and Beulah, North Dakota, there is a different kind of ruin. At those places, and many others on the Great Plains, enormous power shovels strip away the land to dig out coal. From a distance, their posture on a ridge is that of a crow on carrion. Near Zap, you can see two or three of them on the horizon at one time, their booms swinging back and forth like feelers. At Colstrip, Rock Springs, Stanton, and other places, on-site power plants, also called mine-mouth plants, turn the coal into electricity. In Stanton, the strip mine and power plant are within sight of the location of a Mandan village which was emptied by the smallpox epidemic of 1837. That 95-acre expanse is now a National Historic Site, with posted signs saying “Digging Prohibited by Law.” Railroad tracks lead away from all the strip mines. From the mine-mouth plants, tall two- and four-armed pylons file across the prairie east and west, to places where more people live.

Obviously, I don't like strip mines. The only not horrible aspect of strip-mining I can think of is that the machines it requires are a real spectacle. Especially if you come upon one at night, all lit up, eating away under banks of lights miles from anywhere. Basically, a strip-mining machine is a steam shovel, exponentially enlarged. The cab section can be the size of a multi-story apartment block, with windows, ladders, catwalks, lunchrooms, and (for all I know) bowling alleys. The bucket has teeth the size of a man, and room to park three stretch limos. The biggest of these machines can strip an area of several city blocks without moving. In their wake, they leave not ruins but ruin. The coal companies sometimes attempt “reclamation” by planting grass or trees in the ruin and calling it a recreation area or a game preserve. Land that has been strip-mined, “reclaimed” or not, demonstrates that the rest of the Great Plains is a palimpsest: unstripped ground looks the way geology, wind, water, buffalo, cattle, the railroads have made it look. Like other arid but inhabited parts of the world, the plains sometimes hold pieces of the past intact and out of time, so that a romantic or curious person can walk into an abandoned house and get a whiff of June 1933, or can look at a sagebrush ridge and imagine dinosaurs wading through a marsh. In the presence of strip-mined land, these humble flights fall to the ground. Scrambled in the waste heaps, the dinosaur vertebrae drift in chaos with the sandstone metate, the .45-70 rifle cartridge, the Styrofoam cup. It is impossible to imagine a Cheyenne war party coming out of the canyon, because the canyon is gone.

Among the many booms that have occurred on the Great Plains have been several booms in archaeology. One began in the late forties, when the Army Corps of Engineers was getting ready to dam the Missouri River and submerge forever hundreds of miles of riverbed and thousands of square miles of bank and valley. Teams of archaeologists working for the government went along the river examining sites and recording data. Another boom followed the Arab oil embargo of 1974, when energy companies were considering mining more coal and building bigger mine-mouth plants to burn it. By law, anyone who plans to dig up public land must first hire an archaeologist to report on the land's historical significance. Archaeologists who do that kind of work are called contract archaeologists. In a booklet called
Early Peoples of North Dakota,
written for schoolchildren, C. L. Dill, an archaeologist with the State Historical Society of North Dakota, explains: “If a site is dug up before it is investigated, the information in the site will be lost forever, just like tearing a page from a book. Archaeologists excavate sites carefully and record everything they see and find. That's like reading the page before it is thrown away.”

Strip-mined land is land thrown away. Usually, trash exists in a larger landscape; after strip-mining, the larger landscape
is
trash. Instead of adding a new layer to the palimpsest of the Great Plains, strip-mining destroys the palimpsest itself. Of a place where the imagination could move at will backward and even forward through time, strip-mining creates a kind of time prison. Even after “reclamation,” land that has been stripped gives you no year to think about but the year when the stripping happened.

I fear for the Great Plains because many people think they are boring. Money and power in this country concentrate elsewhere. The view of the Great Plains from an airplane window is hardly more detailed than the view from a car on the interstate highways, which seem designed to get across in the least time possible, as if this were an awkward point in a conversation. In the minds of many, natural beauty means something that looks like Switzerland. The ecology movement often works best in behalf of winsome landscapes and wildlife. The Great Plains do not ingratiate. They seldom photograph well—or rather, they are seldom photographed. Images of the plains are not a popular feature of postcards or scenic calendars. And, in truth, parts of the plains are a little on the monotonous side. Convincing someone not to destroy a place that, to him, seems as unvaried as a TV test pattern is a challenge. The beauty of the plains is not just in themselves but in the sky, in what you think when you look at them, and in what they are not. A strip-mining machine could eat the Madison Buffalo Jump—a one-in-a-million piece of ground which fooled buffalo for thousands of years—for breakfast. By leaving nothing behind but a landscape of trash, strip-mining insults the future. By destroying the physical record, and by making the history of white people on the Great Plains look like nothing more than the progress of appetite, strip-mining also insults the past. Land that has been strip-mined reduces the whole story of the Great Plains to: chewed up, spit out.

6

O
NE
day, on the street in front of my apartment in New York (this was before I moved to Montana), I met a Sioux Indian named Le War Lance. I had just been reading a study of recent economic conditions on Sioux reservations. The authors seemed puzzled that so few Sioux were interested in raising sugar beets or working in a house-trailer factory. As I waited for the light to change, I noticed that the man standing next to me resembled many pictures of Sioux that I had seen. I said, “Are you a Sioux?” He smiled and said, “I'm an Oglala Sioux Indian from Oglala, South Dakota.” He said his name and asked for mine. He had to lean over to hear me. He was more than six feet tall. He was wearing the kind of down coat that is stuffed with something other than down—knee-length, belted around the waist, in a light rescue orange polished with dirt on the creases—blue jeans lengthened with patches of denim of a different shade from knee to cuff, cowboy boots, a beaded leather ponytail holder. His hair was straight and black with streaks of gray, and it hung to his waist in back. After I saw him, I never cut my hair again. In one hand he was holding a sixteen-ounce can of beer.

“Your name is Lou?” I asked. “
Lou
War Lance?”

“
Le!
” he said. He pronounced it kind of like “Leh” and kind of like “Lay.” He said it meant “this” in Sioux. I had never before met anyone whose first name was a pronoun. Next to him was a compact woman with straight auburn hair. I had not thought they were together. “Do you know each other?” Le asked. She recoiled just perceptibly. “Oh,” he said. “Noelle, this is—” I said my name.

He and I talked through several changes of the “Walk” signal. I gave them directions to Astor Place. Back in my apartment, I took out my Lakota–English dictionary and paced up and down. It had never occurred to me that there might be a Sioux within twenty yards of my front door. I called several friends and told them about the encounter. I paced around some more. Then I went up to the store and bought lamb chops for dinner. On the way back, at the triangle made by the intersection of Greenwich Avenue, Christopher Street, and Sixth Avenue, I saw Le again. He was just standing there, like a man waiting in line at a bank. He was still holding a sixteen-ounce can of beer. I went up and said Hi. “The girl went home,” he said. “She had to go back to New Jersey.”

For a moment, we considered this. Then I said, “Le, would you mind telling me if I'm pronouncing this right:
Hehaka Sapa.
”

Le's eyes saw me for the first time. “What?” he said. “You mean
Hehaka Sapa—
Black Elk? Black Elk was a great holy man. He was Oglala, like me.
Sapa
means black.
Hehaka—
elk.” He said the second
h
back in his throat. The word even sounded like an elk.

“How about
Tasunke Witco?
”

“
Hoka hey!
” he said. “
Tasunke Witco—
Crazy Horse!” He took my right hand in the “power” handshake. Nobody had stood this close to me in weeks. “I can see that we were meant to run into each other again today,” he said. “Crazy Horse was my gran'
father
!”

“Really?”

He smiled and nodded in my face. Then I started asking him questions about Crazy Horse: Before battle, did Crazy Horse streak his pony with dirt thrown up by a burrowing mole, and touch a little of the dirt to his hair, so that the mole's blindness would make him and his horse harder to see? Did he wear a medicine bag around his neck containing the dried heart and brain of an eagle mixed with dried wild-aster seeds? Did he wear a round, flat rock on a buckskin thong, always keeping the rock between his heart and the enemy? Did he always dismount to shoot, so as to improve his aim? Did he always give his captured ponies to the needy boys of the camp? Was he always by himself? Did he have a wild coyote that followed him around like a dog? Did bullets and arrows vanish before they reached him? Did he never wear white man's clothing? Did he say that after his death his bones would turn to rock and his joints to flint? Was his bay war pony the fastest on the plains? Le War Lance smiled and nodded. Occasionally he exclaimed “
Hoka hey!
” or “
Crazy Horse was my gran'father!
” When I asked where Crazy Horse's name came from, he said, “'Twas a vision!” A drizzle started to fall. I cradled the bottom of the paper bag containing my lamb chops. Taxicabs were screaming at each other. People streamed past us on all sides. I asked if it was true that Crazy Horse never painted his face for battle. “Crazy Horse painted his face blue with white hailstones,” Le War Lance said.

*   *   *

Unlike most Indians who had won names for themselves during wars with white men on the Great Plains, Crazy Horse never visited New York. In fact, of all the famous plainsmen in history, Crazy Horse was the only one who neither came to the plains from somewhere else nor ever left. As a teenager, he once went along on a raid against a village of Omaha Indians in what is now eastern Nebraska; other than that, as far as anybody knows, he lived his entire life between the hundredth meridian and the Rocky Mountains. Crazy Horse was probably born in 1840 at the foot of Bear Butte, near where Sturgis, South Dakota, is now. He had sandy-brown hair, and his parents called him Curly. During his boyhood, bands of his tribe often camped near Fort Laramie, which was on the Oregon Trail in present southeast Wyoming. In August of 1854, he saw thirty soldiers kill a chief named Conquering Bear and several other peaceful Sioux with a cannon in a dispute which had begun over a lost or stolen cow belonging to a Mormon emigrant. He also saw the Indians respond by killing all the soldiers but one. When he went on the raid against the Omahas, he killed an Omaha woman, and authorities at her agency wanted him arrested. From his late teens on, he fought many battles against the Crows, the Shoshones, and the Army. After a fight with the Arapahos where he charged the enemy alone, took two scalps, and came back wounded, his father gave him his own name, Crazy Horse. In 1866, he was one of the hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne who besieged Fort Phil Kearny, in present north-central Wyoming, and so enraged the defenders that an officer named William Fetterman, who had bragged that with eighty men he could whip every Indian on the plains, rashly chased a few decoy warriors into an ambush where his entire party—about eighty men, as it happened—was killed. Crazy Horse was one of the decoys.