Great Plains (18 page)

“Tipis take on color from the wood you burn in your fire. Cottonwoods make poor firewood—they turn tipis a kind of smutty brown. Willow gives 'em a nice soft yellow color. Pine burns pitchy and turns 'em black. Quaking aspen hardly smokes at all. The Crows liked willow because they took great pride in how light-colored their tipis were. You don't ever go off and leave a fire burning in one of these. And you don't want wood that sparks. At a rendezvous several years ago, a tipi caught fire and burned to the ground in a minute and a half, and one rendezvous person was killed.”

We finished the Cokes, and Moses McTavish put the cans away out of sight. “My real name is Lee Walsh,” he said. “I used to be a food chemist for Trenton Foods. Then I made printed circuits for Gulton Industries. I've worked as an anthropologist, classifying bones. Once I worked on a skeleton with a stone arrowhead in his lumbar vertebrae. Now I do this. I go to eleven rendezvous a year. I spend three months of every year in a lean-to. My wife's got a good job.”

On my way out, I stopped at the Bent's Fort information kiosk, where a uniformed park employee with a name tag that read “McGee” sat alone. I asked if he was going down to the rendezvous. He said, “No, I'm not. I know what it is to chop wood and haul water and shit outside and I don't want to have a thing to do with it.”

The Arkansas River used to be one of the most treacherous on the Great Plains, a multi-channelled torrent of liquid sand that often drowned people and animals when it was in flood. Driving east along the Arkansas valley from Colorado into Kansas, I saw only trickles of water for two hundred miles. At Dodge City, where I stopped, cowboys sometimes spent days trying to coax their herds into the river. A Dodge City hotelkeeper named “Deacon” Cox owned a swimming cow which he would lend to trail bosses with stalled herds. The cow avoided the slaughterhouse for years because of her willingness to jump in and lead the others across. Today a swimming cow would be hamburger with a hidden talent. A person strolling through the dusty bed of the Arkansas near Dodge City might never guess at the river that was there.

Dodge City has had at least three booms in its history. The first began in 1872, when it was the western terminus for the Santa Fe Railroad and the center of trade for buffalo hunters on the middle plains. In 1872 and 1873, millions of hides and seven million pounds of buffalo tongues were shipped east from Dodge City. The second boom was a few years later, when Dodge became the destination of cattle herds heading for the railroad from Texas. Every business from barbershops to dance halls grew on Front Street along the railroad tracks. Doc Holliday briefly practiced dentistry there after his escape from the Fort Griffin lynch mob. In the Long Branch Saloon, Cock-Eyed Frank Loving shot and killed Levi Richardson; in Webster's Saloon, the cowboy Bing Choate was killed by the gambler Dave St. Clair; at the door of the Opera House at the corner of Front Street and First Avenue, Mysterious Dave Mather shot and killed Assistant City Marshal Tom Nixon. Women named Mollie Hart and Lizzie Palmer and Sadie Hudson and Bertha Lockwood became involved in hair-pulling battles and stabbings. Bat Masterson, who was sheriff in 1877, appears in the town census of 1880 living with a nineteen-year-old named Annie Ladue, identified by the census taker as a “concubine.” In all the years of the cattle boom, fewer people were shot or stabbed in Dodge City than die violently in New York City in three days; what gave Dodge its fame, partly, was the fact that the town had several weekly newspapers chronicling each gunfight and its aftermath in detail.

Dodge City's third boom began more recently, when the town was the fictional setting for several TV series, including
Gunsmoke,
one of the most popular series ever. Fans of those shows wanted to see what the original Dodge City looked like. By then, not much of old Dodge was left—a fire destroyed the buildings on Front Street in 1885—so the town built a new museum and reconstructed some of the old saloons and businesses on a nearby site. Much of the land where the dangerous part of Dodge City once stood is now under a long parking lot for visitors and tour buses. As I pulled in, a thunderstorm hit so hard that raindrops were bouncing back up off the pavement. In the museum's gift shop, a woman just off a tour bus undid her clear plastic scarf and said to a man, “Look, honey—figurines.”

Dodge City has lots of tourist attractions, including my favorite museum combination of all time: on Fifth Avenue, just across the street from the town's old Boot Hill Cemetery, a single building houses the Kansas Teachers' Hall of Fame and the Famous Gunfighter's Wax Museum. (“Each, a separate attraction,” says the brochure which they also share.) The Kansas Teachers' Hall of Fame is free, and contains portrait photos and short testimonials to honorees like Marie Harden Reynolds, a vocal and instrumental music teacher from Pittsburg, Kansas, who inspired many of her former students to become music teachers, and Ward L. Kiester, former principal of Basehor Rural High School, and Clare Kaufman, from Gridley, whose students remember her star-gazing field trips, and Alice V. Tuttle, an elementary-school teacher from Garden City (“If we could bottle her patience and sell it, we would be very wealthy,” said a former student), and J. Harvey Douglass, a former industrial-arts instructor from Winfield, author of
Units in Woodworking
and
Projects in Wood Furniture.
In the other half of the building, the Famous Gunfighter's Wax Museum (admission $1.85) has life-size replicas of Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, Clay Allison (“Alcoholic New Mexico cattleman who killed 32 men and died in a fall from a wagon while drunk”), Grat Dalton (“Member of the awful Dalton gang of killers and robbers”), and, on a purple velvet pillow, the severed head of Joaquin Murrieta, a California outlaw who “tied Chinamen together by their queues, made them dance to the tune of a pistol, and shot their eyes out.”

A three hours' drive north of Dodge City is the town of Oberlin, Kansas. Years ago, I stopped in Oberlin to visit the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum, and met the curator, Kathleen Claar, a white-haired woman with a habit of shyly touching her listener's elbow to point out exhibits she liked best. In 1978 I went back to write a
New Yorker
article about the town's celebration of the centennial of the raid. Indian descendants of the Cheyenne who killed about forty settlers on the prairie around Oberlin were supposed to attend the celebration, but at the last minute they couldn't make it. The article I wrote appeared. Something I wanted to include in the article but didn't get a chance to was a trip Kathleen Claar and I took to the site of Hawkeye, a now-vanished town near where she used to live. We met at a cafe in Oberlin called Lindy's, got in my rent-a-car, drove west on the highway, and turned off onto a gravel road. It was early fall. We passed a field of tall sunflowers with their heads all turned the same direction, like a crowd at a ball game. The sky was an enamel blue. “If I had a dollar for every time I've been down this road,” Kathleen Claar said. “It was my husband's mail route and I used to drive it all the time. Right over there was where his family's land started. Old Henry Claar—my grandfather-in-law—was a ladies' man. What's the word I'm looking for—he was
overbearing.
All the Claars were like that. My daddy Pickens farmed not too far from here. He didn't homestead. He farmed the homestead that my grandfather left him, but he had itchy feet and couldn't stay in one place too long and out here he didn't stick. One time I saw my daddy kneeling down in the field with his head in his hands and tears was streaming down his face and I said, ‘What's wrong, Daddy?' and he said, ‘We should've never come out here. Nothing goes right for me in this state. I hate Kansas.' So, later, when I was living in Idaho and I met Lawrence Claar and he wanted me to come back here, I said no. See, I didn't want to come back to the state that had made my daddy cry.

“I lived in a sod house from when I was two and a half until I was four. It was just a one-room house made of blocks of sod cut from the prairie. I remember it—bugs and snakes and mice were always dropping down from the ceiling. The ceiling was made of brush, branches from the creek, fodder—you know what fodder is?—like cornstalks, weeds, anything. Mama used to hang sheets over the tables and beds so that things wouldn't fall on them. Then we got the idea of putting a big piece of muslin across the whole ceiling. We'd keep it up there for a year or so until it got too filthy and rain-stained and then take it down, tear it into strips, wash it, dry it, sew it back together, and put it back up. To decorate the windows, we used to cut up red and green wrapping paper that Mama would save through the year—heavier-quality wrapping paper than they have now. We kids used to try to come up with the prettiest design. I was the youngest of eight in the family, and even today I'm still the baby when my older sister is around.

“In the middle of that field of milo is where Claar's Road-house used to stand. It was like an inn and had stables and barns. It was a great big old three-story building. The people who bought the land some years ago tore down everything. Then they came to ask me where the well that old Henry had dug was at and I wouldn't tell them. I said, ‘This place should have been a historic monument and you tore out all those trees that took years to grow.' The soil around here doesn't look very much like it used to. See those draws and washes? That didn't use to be here. Didn't use to be any gullies, or not as many as there are now. What caused it? Men's greed. They wanted to plow up everything, put in wheat and other crops, and they ruined a lot of land that used to be good grazing land. During World War I the price of wheat went way up and everybody thought they were going to be rich. Now a lot of the land is just wore out.”

At a corner where two dirt roads met, we stopped at a little cemetery behind a fence. A flock of sparrows burst from a row of pruned juniper trees as we went through a gate under a black wrought-iron arch that said “Hawkeye Cemetery.” The grass was mown and wet; someone had just watered. Beyond the fence, wheat and milo fields stretched away on every side. Kathleen Claar showed me the graves of her husband, his parents, her daughter, her granddaughter, and her grandson. She said she had raised her grandson after his parents divorced, and he was killed in a car accident in Trinidad, Colorado, while waiting to ship out for Vietnam in 1972. She said his death was the one she hadn't gotten used to yet. She showed me a stone marked “Unknown Dead” on the grave of an apprentice boy who stole a horse up in Nebraska and was killed by pursuers who found him hiding in a nearby barn. She showed me the grave of an in-law who loved California and whose last wish was that his ashes be buried in a California prune box. Then she led me to a marker all by itself on the other side of the cemetery ground. She said, “Did you ever hear about the last man lynched in Kansas? Well, this was him. His name was Rick Read. He was lynched in 1932 after he raped and murdered an eight-year-old girl. The Reads lived right next door to us and I used to see him all the time when I was driving my mail route. He had these big long arms hanging down and sometimes he used to just come out of the bushes when I was driving on the road and come toward the car, and the lust on that man's face! I used to drive away as fast as I could and not stop until I was a long way away and then get out of the car, I was shaking so bad. He was jailed in Colorado for a similar offense a long time before, when I was a schoolteacher there, and later when they paroled him I said, ‘We will all live to regret this day.' After they lynched him I didn't want to visit his family but we had to. They were friends—his sister still is a close friend of mine—and his poor old mother, her cheeks were so red from crying you could see the blood right through them. His dad was a member of the Odd Fellows Lodge and so was he—he went through right before my husband—and his poor old dad said he wanted his son to have an Odd Fellows funeral. My husband turned pale and then another Read boy said, ‘Dad, you forget how he died.' They wanted us to go in and look at him and oh, Lord, I didn't want to, but my husband said, ‘You've got to—they were good friends of your mother and father.' So my husband took me by the hand and led me in and my goodness I'll remember that sight as long as I live. They must've used a rope this big on him, there was a big purple groove around his neck. When they went to bury him the people were so mad they would have dismembered the body and no preacher would preach the sermon, but at the last minute a preacher showed up who believed that every man was entitled to a Christian burial—he was a relative of mine but I'd never liked him very much—and he preached the most beautiful sermon I ever heard. He said, ‘If you had a man in your community as crippled in body as this man was in spirit you would all have so much pity on him you'd take him into your homes and care for him.' All the women started to weep and I cried myself and some men cried, too, and you could feel all the hatred and violence just dissolve up into the air.”

*   *   *

This time, the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum was closed for the day when I got to Oberlin. I called Kathleen Claar from a phone in the Pizza Hut, but she wasn't home. Being in a place I'd already written about felt strange to me, so I got back in my van and continued north into Nebraska. Later I sent Kathleen Claar a postcard. She sent me a Christmas card. We talked on the phone. She said that we should go back to Hawkeye, and that she had a lot more to tell. Just before Christmas 1987, at the age of eighty-seven, Kathleen Claar died, and joined her husband and family and the last man lynched in Kansas in the old Hawkeye cemetery in the wheat fields.

*   *   *

I slept in my van outside the town of McCook, Nebraska. The next morning I went on, over Interstate Highway 80, across the forks of the Platte River (the first river with any water I'd seen for days), and into the west-central part of the state. I was now in one of the blankest spots on the American map, a big section showing almost no rivers or roads or towns. This is the Nebraska sandhill country, the original model for the mapmakers' Great American Desert—a land of grassy rises receding into the distance like a sea in a heavy chop. There was so little to look at that when a crow flew past in front of me and dropped something from its beak I turned around and went back to see what it was: a fetal duckling, featherless, blue, with bulging sealed eyes and tiny webbed feet.