Great Plains (26 page)

 

The size of the aquifer beneath the Great Plains is mentioned in an article in
The New York Times,
“Depletion of Underground Water Formation Imperils Vast Farming Region”: “… the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge deposit of water-laden sand, silt, and gravel that stretches through Nebraska clear down into New Mexico and Texas. Its volume is estimated to be roughly equivalent to that of Lake Huron” (August 11, 1981, II, 4:1).

 

The fact that the Great Plains export two-thirds of the world's wheat is mentioned in
The Last West,
by Russell McKee (New York, 1974), p. 270: “Fully two-thirds of all the world's wheat exports are shipped from the Great Plains of Canada and the United States, an amount not expected to decline.”

 

The expedition led by Zebulon Pike went west along the valley of the Arkansas River, and saw the landscape created when Great Plains winds blew sand from the bed of the Arkansas into dunes and hills. The Stephen Long expedition followed the Platte, and saw there a similar landscape, which they called the “deserts of the Platte.” See
Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains in the Years 1819, 1820,
by Edwin James (London, 1823), Vol. II, p. 176.

The theory that it was the particular landscape which Pike encountered along his route which led eventually to the idea of the Great American Desert is discussed in “The Cognition and Communication of Former Ideas about the Great Plains,” by G. Malcom Lewis, in
The Great Plains: Environment and Culture,
edited by Brian W. Blouet and Frederick C. Luebke (Lincoln, Neb., 1979), pp. 35 et seq. Professor Lewis also traces the first appearance of “Great Desert” and “Great American Desert” on maps and atlases of the time.

 

An examination of the advertising and public-relations blitz which attempted to remake the Great American Desert into a garden spot is in
Garden in the Grasslands,
by David M. Emmons (Lincoln, Neb., 1971). Joseph Kinsey Howard also talks about this subject in
Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome,
Chap. XVI et seq. A “wet period” which attracted would-be settlers to the northern plains at the turn of the century is mentioned in
The Rape of the Great Plains,
by K. Ross Toole (Boston, 1976), p. 131. Another, in the 1880s, is mentioned in
The Great Plains,
by Walter Prescott Webb (New York, 1931), p. 341.

 

Whitman actually used “A newer garden of creation” as an epithet for the prairie states, in a poem of that title. Whitman's poetry often looked “inland to the great pastoral Plains.” See
Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose
(New York, 1982), pp. 524, 282.

 

The fact that two-thirds of the counties on the Great Plains have lost population since 1930 comes from U.S. Census Bureau figures from 1920 through 1980.

The estimate of the coal reserves under the plains comes from newspaper articles on the subject. An article in
The New York Times
of July 3, 1974 (p. 39:3), says that forty-five percent of the nation's coal reserves is in the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming. Those deposits lie in a formation called the Fort Union formation. More deposits are found in Colorado and New Mexico.

 

The spot where a driver gets a dramatic first view of the Great Plains is on U.S. Highway 89, about five miles east of St. Mary's, Montana.

 

It was the Stephen Long expedition whose scent moved through a herd of buffalo and frightened animals far in the distance. See James, Vol. II, p. 167.

 

All of the information about the murder of Thomas Running Rabbit and Harvey Mad Man and its aftermath comes from the Kalispell, Montana,
Daily Interlake
and the Missoula, Montana,
Missoulian.

Chapter 2

 

The River of the Souls in Purgatory is mentioned in James, Vol. II, p. 264. The River That Scolds at All the Others is mentioned in
The Journals of Lewis and Clark,
edited by Bernard De Voto (Boston, 1953), p. 88.

For more on the Missouri River system, see
The Missouri,
by Stanley Vestal (New York, 1945).

 

Among the river Indians, the Mandan in particular were skillful traders. In the days before white men, Indian trade routes brought dentalium shells from the Pacific Coast, obsidian from the upper Yellowstone, horses from the Southwest, pipestone from Minnesota, conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, native copper from the Great Lakes, etc., to the Mandan villages at the mouth of the Heart River and (later) the Knife River. I learned about this from Eric Holland, a park technician and interpreter with the National Park Service at the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, near Stanton, North Dakota. (See also
Indian Life on the Upper Missouri,
by John C. Ewers [Norman, Okla., 1968].)

 

The origin of the name Fort Union is found in
The American Fur Trade in the Far West,
by Hiram M. Chittenden (New York, 1935), pp. 329–330, one of the few comprehensive books on the subject of the American fur trade.

 

Some of the goods offered for trade at Fort Union I learned about in conversation with historian Charles Hanson, of the Museum of the Fur Trade, in Chadron, Nebraska. Others are mentioned by Rudolph F. Kurz, onetime clerk at the fort, in his
Journal.

The hardtack from Milton, Massachusetts, was made by the G. H. Bent Company, which has been making hardtack, hard crackers, and pilot bread in that town for almost two centuries, and is still in business. Hardtack was used as military and ship's rations. To discourage spoilage, it was baked so dry that it absorbed all the moisture in your mouth like a blotter when you bit it. Hardtack and hard crackers were not usually items of trade, but rather snacks given out with coffee and molasses to get trading started. The crackers tended to break into crumbs when bitten. Cracker fragments crunching underfoot was a common sound in the retail stores at Indian trading posts.

 

All the information about beaver fur and beaver-felt hats comes from
Hudson's Bay Company 1670–1870,
by E. E. Rich (New York, 1961)—in particular, from Vol. I, Chaps. I–VI. My description of beaver felt comes from a beaver hat I saw on display at Fort Union. As for the importance of the hat, E. E. Rich says, “In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the beaver hat was a social necessity” (Vol. I, p. 49).

E. E. Rich also discusses the rivalry among the English, French, and Dutch for the North American fur trade. For more on the merger of the American Fur Company and the Columbia Fur Company (into what was called the Upper Missouri Outfit of the American Fur Company), see
Across the Wide Missouri,
by Bernard De Voto (Boston, 1947). De Voto goes into the various trading companies and their rivalries in detail.

 

The number of buffalo Fort Union ate in a year is in
Travels in the Interior North America in the Years 1832 to 1834,
by Alexander Philipp Maximilian, Prince von Wied-Neuwied (London, 1843), p. 191.

The contents of the bourgeois's private larder come from a list titled “Order for Sundry Articles to be shipped by H. K. Ortley Spring 1836 pr Steam boat Addressed to K. McKenzie Fort Union,” included in the Appendix to
Chardon's Journal at Fort Clark 1834–1839,
edited by Annie Heloise Abel (Pierre, S.D., 1932).

That one had to wear a jacket to dinner at the bourgeois's table is mentioned in
Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri,
by Charles Larpenteur (Chicago, 1933), p. 56.

A partial list of the different nationalities at Fort Union is in Wied-Neuwied, p. 186.

George Catlin's visit to Fort Union is in
The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone,
by Mark H. Brown (Lincoln, Neb., 1969), p. 90.

Bodmer and Prince Maximilian arrived at Fort Union on June 24, 1833. The Indian Nothing But Gunpowder is mentioned in Wied-Neuwied, p. 306. The musical snuffbox is in ibid., pp. 202, 443.

 

The reason why no city grew at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri is discussed in
The Wonder of Williams: A History of Williams County, North Dakota,
published by the Williams County Historical Society (Vol. I, p. 24). My thanks to Thor Garaas of Bigfork, Montana, for lending me his copy.

Williston, North Dakota, sits on top of a deposit of oil called the Williston Basin, which extends north into Alberta, west into Montana, and south into South Dakota.

The fact that Bodmer painted the confluence after he returned to Europe, using sketches for reference, is in
Carl Bodmer's America,
published by the Joslyn Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri.

 

Owen McKenzie's pursuit of wolves is in
Audubon and His Journals,
edited by Maria R. Audubon and Eliot Coues (New York, 1899), Vol. II, p. 84.

The “magnificent black hair” is in ibid., p. 88.

Prince Maximilian's description of the Assiniboin is in Wied-Neuwied, pp. 200 et seq.

Audubon and his party arrived at the fort on June 12, 1843, and left on August 16. The incident with the lark (actually a Sprague's pipit,
Anthus spragueii
) occurred on June 24; see Audubon and Coues, Vol. II, p. 55.

 

Lewis and Clark's sojourn at the confluence appears in their
Journals
for Friday, April 26, 1805: “After I had completed my observations in the evening [Lewis writes] I walked down and joined the party at their encampment on the point of land formed by the junction of the rivers; found them all in good health, and much pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot, and in order to add in some measure to the general pleasure which seemed to pervade our little community, we ordered a dram to be issued to each person; this soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing, and seemed as perfectly to forget their past toils, as they seemed regardless of those to come.”
The Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
by Meriwether Lewis (Reuben Gold Thwaites, editor; New York, 1959), Vol. I, p. 338.

That the main article of trade at Fort Union was alcohol is mentioned in many sources, including Brown, p. 76.

Strychnine was used on the frontier as wolf poison. Its use and effect in whiskey was told to me by Orville Loomer, a park ranger at Fort Union.

The trader who dragged drunken Indians from the fort was Charles Larpenteur. See Larpenteur, p. 60.

The meeting between Astor and Simpson is in Rich, Vol. III, p. 478. It is hard to believe Astor had any serious intention of discontinuing the liquor trade. Whenever antiliquor trade bills came up before Congress, he lobbied against them. When they passed, he disregarded them. He was like a tick, and liquor was his anticoagulant. His annual income from the American Fur Company is in
John Jacob Astor,
by Arthur D. H. Smith (Philadelphia, 1929), p. 224. Astor's half a million a year was tax-free in those days before income tax. He left a fortune of $20 million, of which $460,000 went toward the eventual creation of the New York Public Library, where I read of his greed.

 

Information on drinking at the confluence area comes from
The Wonder of Williams: A History of Williams County, North Dakota.
The death of Bartholomew Noon is in
A Chronological Record of Events at the Missouri–Yellowstone Confluence Area from 1805 to 1896
(a pamphlet), edited by Ben Innis. The story of the town of Mondak is in
Since 1887: A Word and Picture History of Williston and Area
(no publisher, no date. I found it in the Williston Public Library).

 

A good description of the fort is in Audubon and Coues, Vol. II, pp. 181 et seq. The names of the fort's engagees appear either in that book or in Chardon. Alexander Harvey's shooting of Isidoro Sandoval is in Larpenteur (p. 146). The McKenzie–Bourbonnais contretemps is in ibid., pp. 98–102.

 

The version of the
Journal of Rudolph Friedrich Kurz
which I read was in the
Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 115
(1937). Ye Galleon Press, of Fairfield, Washington, has also published an edition of this journal. Some of Kurz's drawings and paintings were reprinted in
American Scene
magazine (Vol. 8, no. 3). They give some idea why Bodmer advised Kurz to study more before going to America; Kurz drew competently enough, but his skills as a watercolorist were shaky. At Fort Union, Kurz suffered with the philistine tastes of the bourgeois, Edwin T. Denig. “Mr. Denig thinks a portrait worthless unless the eyes follow a person who gazes upon it, no matter on which side the beholder stands,” Kurz wrote.

 

Some of the facts which Gerard Baker told me about the Hidatsa I found later in other sources, including
Travels in North America, 1822–1824,
by Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Württemberg (Norman, Okla., 1973); “The Horse and Dog in Hidatsa Culture,” by Gilbert L. Wilson, in
The American Museum of Natural History Anthropological Papers
(Vol. XV, pt. II, 1924); and
The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West,
edited by Howard R. Lamar (New York, 1977).

 

Much of the information about the smallpox epidemic of 1837 comes from
The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian,
by E. Wagner Stearn, Ph.D., and Allen E. Stearn, Ph.D. (Boston, 1945). Eyewitness accounts of the outbreak at the posts along the Missouri also appear in Chardon, pp. 121 et seq., and in Larpenteur, pp. 109–12.

The statement that Halsey was a carrier appears in
Leonard's Narrative,
by Zenas Leonard (Cleveland, 1904), p. 44, and other sources.

 

The preventive policy of the Hudson's Bay Company
re
smallpox is discussed in
Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri,
by Edwin T. Denig (edited by John C. Ewers; Norman, Okla., 1961), pp. 115, 124, an informative book written by the same man whose tastes in art annoyed Kurz. A more detailed look at the role of the Hudson's Bay Company can be found in “Smallpox: The Epidemic of 1837–38,” by Arthur J. Ray, in
The Beaver
[the magazine of the Hudson's Bay Company], Autumn 1975, p. 8. The fact that many of the Assiniboin who survived were ones vaccinated by the Hudson's Bay Company is in Denig, p. 72.