Great Plains (7 page)

Sioux medicine men collected tiny, glistening pebbles from anthills and used them in medicine rattles. The Hidatsa rushed eagerly into hailstorms and gathered hailstones to cool their tepid Missouri River drinking water. The Mandan and others loved European toys. The Cheyenne at one time painted their arrows blue, in reference to the waters of a sacred lake in the Black Hills. Cheyenne warriors put on their best clothes and painted themselves and rebraided their hair before going into battle; if they didn't have time to, they ran away. Whenever the Assiniboin sent each other presents of food, they also sent along a little boy to bring back the dish. The Assiniboin cleaned their pipes with pointed sticks decorated with porcupine quills, which they carried stuck in their hair. The Sioux might eat a dead horse, but would never kill one for food. The Kiowa, when moving from a campground they especially liked, would leave strings of beads or little pouches behind, as a “gift to the place.” The Osages were said to be the best-looking of the plains tribes; Maria Tallchief, the ballerina who became the third wife of Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine, is half Osage. Balanchine once said that by marrying her he had at last become truly American.

The Arikara, also called the Rees, lived on the Missouri River in earth lodges, like the Mandan and the Hidatsa. According to reports of traders, the Arikara stuck their hair together with gum, clay, grease, and paint, had many large lice which they picked off each other and crushed between their teeth, practiced incest, communicated venereal diseases to their children, filled the spaces between their lodges with garbage, killed lone white men indiscriminately, were poor warriors and horse thieves, shot you with one hand while shaking hands with the other, gambled and smoked all winter, spent the summers sleeping, catching catfish, and chasing each other's wives, and caused neighboring tribes on the Missouri to move away from them. Among the traders, the Arikara were known as the “Horrid Tribe.” What the Arikara called the traders is not recorded. Many nineteenth-century white observers liked to list Indian vices, sometimes switching to Latin when the subject was sex. That the Indians who were easiest to observe tended to be the ones most affected by white trade apparently never occurred to them.

The Comanche, who probably killed more settlers than did any other American Indians, made a distinction among whites between Texans and all others. Then, as now, it was possible to tell the difference. Texans rode big Kentucky horses, did not parley or give presents, wore homespun clothes dyed butternut, and were trigger-happy. The Comanche hated Texans the most of all. The Comanche were a whirlwind on horseback, but awkward on foot. They were small and bandy-legged, the jockeys of the plains. Comanche raids against Spanish towns in Mexico kept the plains supplied with horses, and discouraged Spain from expanding her empire north. The Comanche had a lot to do, indirectly, with the development of the handgun. The first time the Texas Rangers used Samuel Colt's new revolving pistol in a fight with Comanche was the first time they whipped them. The revolver was the perfect horseback weapon against an enemy who could shoot twenty arrows and ride three hundred yards in a minute. It amazed the Comanche, who remembered that encounter for generations. The rangers made suggestions to help Colt improve his gun, and gave him his first fame. The Comanche prided themselves on their stealth. They had a story about a tribesman who stole a sleeping woman from her husband's side so quietly that neither woke. They often took captives during their raids, and sometimes raised them in the tribe. Women captives had an especially miserable time; even if they were rescued, they usually did not live long. The Comanche enjoyed torturing prisoners. After a day of torture, when they wanted to get some sleep, they would cut the prisoners' tongues out. The Comanche thought the roadrunner was a good-luck charm, and hung its skin in their tipis. They also made fans of the tail feathers of the scissor-tail flycatcher, which they wore at the shoulder like epaulets. After the Army sent troops after them in the winter of 1874, and the Comanche lost many women and children, they surrendered their horses and guns and moved to reservations.

Indians ate young, fat dogs (killed, singed, scraped of hair, gutted, beheaded, boiled, served unaccompanied—a delicacy), ants (scooped from anthills in the cool of the morning, washed, crushed to paste, made into soup), grasshoppers (taken in drives, then dried, boiled, or roasted), beaver tails (cut into small slices, boiled with prairie turnips until very tender—another delicacy), wild peas (robbed from the caches of field mice, boiled with fat meat), choke-cherries (stones and all, with a noise “fully as loud as horses eating corn,” according to one observer), rose pods (pounded, mixed with bone grease), buffalo berries, wild plums, turtle eggs, serviceberries, wild artichokes, morning-glory roots, cottonwood bark, wild onions, june-berries. They would eat a wild turkey only when they were near starvation. They did not eat many trout, although the soldiers who fought them caught and ate thousands. Indians thought eating pork was disgusting; some believed that the federal inspection stamp was in fact a tattoo, and the meat was white man.

Of course, Indians mainly ate buffalo. There were maybe seventy million buffalo on the plains before white men came. Before the horse, Indians hunted buffalo by chasing them over blind cliffs (called buffalo jumps), up box canyons, or into steep-sided sand dunes where the animals' cloven hoofs would flounder. Horses made hunting buffalo much easier. An Indian who chased a buffalo and killed it with a lance or an arrow might, if he was hungry, cut it open on the spot and eat the warm liver seasoned with bile from the gallbladder. The women followed to do the butchering, and could slice the meat as thin as paper. When it was hung on racks, the plains wind and sun dried it, and then it would last for months. The Comanche liked to kill young buffalo calves and eat the curdled, partially digested milk from the stomach. The Assiniboin made a dish of buffalo blood boiled with brains, rosebuds, and hide scrapings. The Arikara retrieved from the Missouri drowned buffalo so putrefied they could be eaten with a spoon. With stone mallets, Indians cracked buffalo bones to get at the marrow. There were cuts of buffalo just as there are of beef; the Hidatsa had names for twenty-seven different cuts. The Sioux boiled buffalo meat with heated rocks in a buffalo paunch, then ate the paunch, too. Roasted fat hump ribs, boiled tongue, and coffee was a meal Indians dreamed about. Buffalo meat did not make you feel full. Some Indians could eat fifteen pounds of buffalo meat at a sitting.

Among the Indians, no part of the buffalo was ever wasted—except sometimes, when a tribe might kill a herd of fourteen hundred and cut out the tongues to take to the traders for whiskey, or when a war party on enemy hunting grounds would shoot animals and leave them on the ground to rot. White people were likely to kill buffalo for pleasure. Noblemen from the British Isles took long safari-like hunting expeditions on the plains and killed thousands. Early travellers on the Oregon Trail hunted when they got a chance, and the buffalo split into two herds, the northern and the southern, to avoid them. Nobody in history, however, consumed buffalo the way the railroads did. Between 1867 and 1880, the Union Pacific, the Kansas Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Santa Fe all reached the Great Plains. The remaining buffalo—maybe thirty or forty million—disappeared up the tracks like water up a straw.

Not that any industry was crying out for buffalo products at the time. Fresh buffalo meat was hard to ship, because it would not travel except in the cold months. Buffalo hams and tongues were complicated to smoke or salt. The easiest part of the buffalo to move was the hide. All you had to do was shoot the buffalo, skin it, scrape the flesh from the hide, and peg the hide out on the ground to dry. You were left with a hard, flat thing with hair on one side, a thing which could be stacked and bailed and loaded in freight cars. When these hides (called flint hides) arrived in the East, they proved more difficult than cowhide to tan commercially. But since the hides were cheap, tanners soon solved the problem. Tanned buffalo leather is too soft and pliant to use for shoes or belts or harnesses, but it makes excellent buffing rags. Tanneries eventually bought hides by the millions. In New York, the price of a buffalo hide went from $1.25 to $3.50 in just a few years. From the railheads, professional buffalo hunters fanned out across the plains.

These hunters preferred to be called “buffalo runners,” but they did not chase buffalo and shoot them from horseback. Once they found a herd, they sneaked up to within rifle range on foot. Some wore kneepads to help them crawl. Then they set their sixteen-pound guns on a rest of crossed hardwood sticks and shot buffalo one after another with bullets an inch long and half an inch across. Many buffalo hunters used the fifty-caliber Sharps buffalo rifle, which could kill a buffalo bull at six hundred yards and a man at up to a mile. The hunters tried to kill as many animals as possible in one spot, for the convenience of their partners who did the skinning. Buffalo hunters usually worked in parties of four, with one shooter, two skinners, and one hide stretcher and cook. Everybody wanted to be the shooter. On a busy day, the guns heated up quickly. If the hunter had no water to pour on the barrel, he might urinate on it. Many skinners used mules to pull the hides off. At night, the men sometimes got out a fiddle and pegged down a dry buffalo hide and danced on it. They wore heavy clothes which they seldom changed. Dried blood caked in their beards. When a group of them walked up to a bar, they would reach into their clothes, and the last one to catch a louse had to buy. The prostitutes who catered to them were a special type.

The years when railroads first crossed the plains are when most Western novels and movies and TV shows take place. Those years are what people mean when they talk about the Wild West. The Army was fighting the Indians winter and summer, trying to force them onto reservations, and eventually it more or less succeeded. The buffalo were disappearing, and buffalo hunters had millions of dollars to spend. General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Army's Department of the Southwest, applauded the hunters for “destroying the Indians' commissary.” He said, “Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.” Newspaper editors in the new towns along the cattle trails got a kick out of the phrase “the festive cowboy,” and used it often in their accounts of shootings and brawls. Even before the buffalo were gone, cowboys were driving thousands of cattle north from Texas to railroad shipping points, or to summer ranges, or to Indian agencies. By 1880, the thousands had become hundreds of thousands. Most of the cattle were Texas longhorns, a breed descended from cattle brought to the New World by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The longhorns' ancestors were runaways who grew up wild in the brushy bottoms of south Texas. In just a few centuries they evolved horns up to four feet long and an uncowlike fierceness. Texans and Indians hunted them like game, sometimes getting killed in the process, because longhorns were skilled at ambushing people in the brush. When the railroads provided a market for beef, suddenly the six million longhorns running loose in Texas were worth something. Cowboys drove them from the brush and herded them north. Steers which were wild and unwilling sometimes had their eyes sewn shut with linen thread. By the time the thread rotted, the animal was usually tame. Although longhorns were dangerous to cowboys and horses and each other, and so skittish that a man striking a match at night could put them into a stampede, they were also strong travellers, with long legs and an ability to cover miles without water. Each steer had a travelling partner which it walked with every day. Longhorns were skinny and dusty, of many dun colors—mulberry blue, cream, red, yellow, ring-streaked—and their meat was stringy. Sometimes, after months on the trail, they would keep on walking around and around in the freight-yard pens for a week or so after they arrived.

Meanwhile, in the nearby saloons, the cowboys who had brought them drank and acted crazy. Cowboys were often kids who had grown up hungry in Texas during the Civil War. They had names like Bump Miskimmins and Real Hamlet (first name Real, last name Hamlet). At night, on the trail, they used the rotation of the Big Dipper around the North Star to tell when their watch was over, and rubbed tobacco juice in their eyes to keep awake. They sang a song about the trail, and every river they crossed—the Nueces, the Colorado, the Red, the Washita, and on up—had its own verse. They liked canned food, a new convenience at the time. Fads swept them; one day a cowboy named Charlie Colcord appeared on the streets of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, carrying a toothbrush, and soon every cowboy had one sticking from his vest pocket. Just as the cowboys were often from the South, so the saloonkeepers and marshals and livery-store owners and railroad brakemen and small farmers they met along the way were often former Yankees. Fights tended to be at distances where the flame from one man's pistol would set the wadding of the other man's coat on fire.

People with money back East and in Europe quickly realized that the Great Plains cleared of Indians and buffalo meant endless acres of free grass. English lords, Irish dukes, Scottish linen manufacturers, Boston bank presidents, Edinburgh lawyers, St. Louis shoe manufacturers, the Cunard family, actors from New York and Chicago invested in cattle ranches bigger than Eastern states. The Earl of Aberdeen and Baron Tweedmouth founded a ranch called the Rocking Chair Ranche, which took up much of the Texas panhandle. Its offices were at 25 Piccadilly, London. The English-owned XIT Ranch had an English foreman whose name was Walter de S. Maud. By 1884, foreign interests controlled more than twenty million acres of Great Plains ranchlands. Many rich people came West to oversee their ranches themselves: East Coast Biddies and Aldriches and Sturgises, Winston Churchill's Aunt Clara (wife of English-born cattleman Moreton Frewen), Baron Walter von Richthofen (grandfather of the World War I ace), Teddy Roosevelt (recovering from the death of his wife; he told friends he would never be happy again), and a Frenchman named Antoine Amédée Marie Vincent Amat Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès. “I am weary of civilization; I long for wilderness; I want an absolute contrast to the old life,” the marquis said. He bought ranchland in the valley of the Little Missouri River in North Dakota and built a big house on a bluff. His wife, Medora von Hoffman, of New York, brought along silver hairbrushes in sets of two, for either a right-handed or a left-handed lady's maid.