Great Plains (17 page)

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I wasn't sure whether I was on the Great Plains or not. Around the edges it was hard to tell. In the Southwest, I figured that when the plants started looking too pointy I was heading into the desert. On U.S. Highway 64 near Cimarron, New Mexico, I passed a sign which said: “You are now at the Great Plains-Rocky Mountain Boundary. The Cimarron Range, one of the easternmost ranges of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains,” but I kept going anyway. I wanted to see the little town of Lincoln, New Mexico, where the outlaw Billy the Kid shot some people about 110 years ago. The roads went along mountain canyons, through old Spanish and mining towns one after the next. Billy the Kid worked as a cowboy, but he was more a townie than a frontiersman. He was born Henry McCarty, possibly in New York City, possibly in 1859. His mother and stepfather ran a restaurant in Santa Fe. The shootings which made him famous by the age of twenty-one had mainly to do with a feud that developed between a lawyer and the owner of one of the general stores in Lincoln. In general, most famous Western gunmen were town people. They slept in boardinghouses, not under the stars. Wyatt Earp, who served as a lawman in Dodge City and other places, owned saloons, operated gambling halls, and died in Los Angeles. After a career on various sides of the law in places like Ogallala, Nebraska, and Las Animas, Colorado, and Mobeetie, Texas, the gambler and gunman Bat Masterson spent his last years in New York City as a sports columnist for the
Morning Telegraph,
where he died at his desk of a heart attack. Western gunfights were alcohol-related, or else involved battles over gambling, prostitution, or political preferment. They were closer in spirit to drug wars in the Bronx than to duels of honor.

The main street in Lincoln is narrow, and the little houses are close together. The town is in a valley and has no place else to go. It probably looks much the same as when Billy the Kid was here. The feud, sometimes called the Lincoln County War, was between a lawyer named McSween who lived on one side of the street and a former Army major named Murphy who ran a general store on the other side. Both were also incipient cattle barons competing for government beef contracts. Billy the Kid was among the McSween faction. From minor beginnings the feud quickly grew through several ambush killings, until finally the Murphy faction had their friends from the nearby Army fort surround McSween's house with cavalry backed up by a twelve-pound cannon. The house was then set ablaze. Billy the Kid was inside along with McSween, Mrs. McSween, and a number of McSween gunmen. He played the piano in the parlor as the flames burned closer. The attackers let Mrs. McSween escape to safety. Then the men came out shooting, except for McSween, who was unarmed. He caught nine slugs and died. Billy the Kid and a friend named Tom O'Folliard escaped unhit. A sign in front of the site of the McSween house tells some of this story; charred beams and adobe bricks still lie beneath the grass.

At large, Billy the Kid moved beyond the confines of the feud to more general shootings and stock thefts. Pat Garrett, the Lincoln County sheriff, eventually caught him, and he was convicted of murder and taken to Lincoln to be hanged. Since there was no jail to put him in, he was shackled and held in Garrett's office, on the second floor of the courthouse. One of the guards, deputy Robert Ollinger, showed Billy the Kid the double-barrelled shotgun he would shoot him with if he tried to escape. When Ollinger went across the street to the hotel for supper, Billy the Kid worked free of his cuffs, grabbed a gun from guard J. W. Bell, shot him, and walked to the window carrying Ollinger's shotgun. Ollinger came running at the sound of the shot, and Billy the Kid called, “Hello, Bob!” Then he shot him with both barrels. He said, “Take that, you son of a bitch! You will never follow me with that gun again!” Then he broke off his leg shackles with a miner's pick and (he must have had a musical streak) danced on the balcony. Then he jumped on a horse, rode down Main Street, yelled “Three cheers for Billy the Kid!” and galloped away.

Lincoln's main street would be a good place to yell that from. It is barely bigger than a road on a stage set, and it disappears picturesquely around a bend. The courthouse still stands. There is a marble marker on the ground at the spot where Robert Ollinger fell. The second floor still has a balcony—wooden, recently painted, with a railing. It is the only balcony in town, which it overlooks like a pulpit. I, too, went across the street to the hotel and had supper. The menu featured home-baked bread and sole; New Mexico is like the Vermont of the West. Later I had to drive miles out of town to find a gas station. All of the town of Lincoln is a historic district, which discourages new construction. Because Billy the Kid danced on it, the courthouse balcony endures.

New Mexico has towns over three hundred years old. None of them is on the Great Plains. The little towns back in the canyons were hiding from what used to be out here: Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche, mainly. As I came out of the pinon foothills, the flat openness still seemed to suggest swarms of screaming mounted warriors. For centuries after General Francisco Vásquez de Coronado first explored the southern plains in 1541, the Spanish kept sending parties of soldiers and missionaries this way. Often, they did not return; pieces of captured Spanish armor survived as heirlooms in Indian households long after the Spanish were gone.

Sucking on milkshake cups full of crushed ice, I drove north in the heat, to Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River. The Arkansas runs for 1,459 miles from the Colorado Rockies across the plains to the Mississippi. Traders from the Mississippi valley travelled up it on their way to the Spanish settlements of the Southwest. Bent's Fort, built in 1833 with adobe walls fifteen feet high and seven feet thick, was to the southern plains what Fort Union was to the northern. Its builders, Charles and William Bent, of the mercantile firm of Bent, St. Vrain and Company, chose to trade here to avoid the power of the American Fur Company to the north. Rather than sell the fort to the Army, William Bent blew it up in 1849; the National Park Service has since reconstructed it, including the cactus which once grew on top of the walls. The fort is not far from the present town of La Junta, Colorado. When I got there on an afternoon in August, it was filled with men and women wearing buckskin and broadcloth and calico in styles which were common in 1850. They had come to Bent's Fort for a black-powder rendezvous.

Black powder is the gunpowder old muzzle-loading firearms used. Black-powder people, as they are sometimes called, are hobbyists with an interest in black-powder guns—specifically, guns of the period 1800–60. For most black-powder people (they prefer the name “buckskinners,” or “skinners”), enthusiasm for that era extends to everything else about it: clothes, tools, skills, trade goods, history, figures of speech. Some call each other “Hoss” and refer to buffalo as “buffler” because supposedly trappers in 1840 did. Buckskinners number in the tens of thousands, and they hold rendezvous all over the country (although mainly in the West). The original rendezvous, back in the 1820s, were gatherings held in some Rocky Mountain valley where fur trappers met traders recently arrived from the settlements with pack trains of goods, and everybody traded and drank and gambled and brawled. A modern rendezvous is a family event. People sleep in tipis and purge the campsite of all signs of the twentieth century; at Bent's Fort, the cars and trailers hide in a weed-screened lot a quarter mile or so away. Debates on what one may or may not bring to a rendezvous often include reference to historical texts. Powdered lemonade mix is okay; it existed in 1840, when it was known as “crystallized essence” of lemon. Mosquito netting accompanied the fancier travellers of the 1840s, so it, too, is defensible. A person who prefers to sleep on an air mattress might cite this passage from
Up the Missouri with Audubon,
by Edward Harris:

We struck our camp on the River shore under 6 Cotton Wood Trees growing in a clump, and after making a good fire, Michaux and one of the Hunters started after Deer, having still an hour or more of daylight. We had hardly any time to refresh ourselves with a little bread and cheese, before they brought in a fine yearling Buck … It was not long before some of the choice morceaux were roasting before the fire … We all agreed it was the best Venison we ever tasted, and none failed to do ample justice to the repast. Our beds were soon blown up and wrapped in our blankets with our guns by our sides, we were soon asleep.

Audubon and company called their air mattresses “India rubber beds.” The year was 1843.

In the shade of the fort's walls, I talked to Bill Gwaltney, a seasonal Park Service ranger from Texas, in charge of activities at the rendezvous. Bill Gwaltney was wearing a Missouri River boatman's shirt with bloused sleeves, white cotton broadfall trousers from an Amish clothing-supply house in Indiana, and a strand of red-and-blue glass beads of a design about three hundred years old. “What's so funny about being a buckskinner is the contrast between then and now,” he said. “If you go into a Wendy's hamburgers dressed in your rendezvous gear, people look at you like you're crazy, when in fact you're not. A black-powder rendezvous is a positive, out-of-doors experience, a family experience. It generates respect for Native Americans. The fur-trade period was fascinating for lots of reasons. The trappers who came West brought technology to the Indians, but the Indians gave the trappers spiritual and survival knowledge in return. The fur-trade period was an opportunity for us to learn from Native Americans, and in the end we turned that opportunity down. I prefer a rendezvous without any reminders of the modern era at all, but there can be some leeway. Take yourself, for example: your canvas shirt, denim trousers, leather belt, notebook, pencil; about the only thing you wouldn't've had back in 1840 would be the hard rubber soles on your hiking boots. I am opposed to air mattresses at a rendezvous, personally. If you have to have them, cover them with a hide or a blanket. Same goes for coolers. And then there's other things which are just ridiculous—rawhide beer-can holders, for example. People say the trappers would've used them if they'd had them. That's a cute saying, but I don't buy it.”

In the center plaza of the fort, vendors had set out displays of black-powder items for sale on blankets: knives made of half a sheep-shear, jugs, rose-pink hand-blown glass bottles from Mexico, riding quirts, strike-a-light bags of flint and steel and tinder, little knives like the ones Indian women used to wear around their necks to kill their attacker or themselves if they were about to be raped, hand-carved tipi pins, animal legbones for making knife handles, turtle shells, door knockers made of deer hooves, bunches of sweet grass for burning, tiny powder horns with silver stoppers for fine-grained priming powder, polished stones, porcupine-quillwork barrettes, and throwing tomahawks like the one Gerard Baker and I fooled around with when I visited Fort Union.

It turned out the guy with the tomahawks even knew Gerard Baker. He said, “Shoot, ol' Gerard's District Ranger at the northern unit of Teddy Roosevelt National Park now.” On the plains, that happened to me often; I ran into people who knew Gerard Baker all over. They'd say, “Gerard's an old buddy of mine. He's the fella that taught me how to jerk buffalo meat,” or “Gerard's the guy that got me into flint-knapping,” or “Gerard and me are gonna trap an eagle this fall.” If anyone nowadays could be called a genuine plainsman, it is Gerard Baker.

Men in coyote-skin hats and buckskin were walking around the plaza and hailing each other by their black-powder names: “Hey, Long Shadow, what you know good?” “White Eyes, how you been?” “Hey, Bijou, ol' hoss, how you makin' it?” To talk, they often got down on their haunches and hunkered. A man with long gray-and-black hair hanging straight down, wire-rim glasses, a calico shirt, and stiff buckskin trousers was telling several listeners about a woman gunsmith of the 1830s named Anne Patrick. Then the discussion turned to buffalo hunter Billy Dixon's famous mile-long shot at the Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874, and whether the Indian he was shooting at was killed or just had the wind knocked out of him. After a while I butted in to add that Billy Dixon's hair was supposed to be almost nine feet long. Then the man with the wire-rim glasses, who gave his name as Moses McTavish, told me all kinds of things about buffalo hunters. He said they were always dying of skunk bites. With his knuckles he drew a map in the dust of the Staked Plains of Texas, a mostly flat place with no landmarks where the hunters often got lost. He said that a lot of buffalo hunters were as dumb as a rock.

Moses McTavish asked me if I wanted to see his tipi. We went out the side gate of the fort, down a long, gentle slope, and across a grassy depression where the Arkansas River used to run before it moved. On the other side, a grove of big cottonwood trees grew far apart, in what botanists call a gallery forest. The people at the rendezvous had picked this spot for their campground; canvas tipis as white as water-cooler cups stood among the trees. A few tipis had blue smoke coming from their tops. In front of one, a round mirror hung from an iron holder shaped like an upside-down L. Others had cooking pots hanging over fires from tripods. Beneath a canvas awning strung between two trees, several guys leaning back on their elbows were passing a small jug. Here and there, picketed horses grazed. Little kids as barefoot as any in 1840 played in the trodden-down grass.

Moses McTavish and I ducked through his tipi door and sat cross-legged on buffalo robes around the fire pit in the center. Moses McTavish reached under a deer hide, lifted the lid of a cooler, and brought us out a couple of cans of Coke—Classics, of course. Then he filled his clay pipe with Prince Albert tobacco mixed with mullein weed for his bronchitis and lit it. He said, “This is a Crow lodge. Some people prefer Sioux lodges, some Cheyenne, some Comanche. I like Crow because of its shape—the tipi poles of a Crow lodge extend so far above the covering that the whole thing looks almost like an hourglass. You could tell the tribe from the shape of the tipis from miles away. Cheyenne tipis kind of angled forward to the door. Sioux were like Cheyenne, but without the two flaps above the door. Comanche tipis were more squat and conical. Indian women could take a tipi down in a few minutes and put it up in an hour. If my wife and I hustle, it takes us fifteen minutes just to unload it all from the trailer. It takes us two and a half hours to get everything up and where it belongs. This tipi has I forget how many square yards of canvas, sixteen poles, fifteen pegs, twenty stakes, five different ropes, a canvas liner—that's just some of it. You see those cords running along the inside of the tipi poles? Well, when it rains real hard, water will run down the poles, and when it gets to a bump or a knot on the wood it will stop there and drip on you. Those cords are so the water has something smooth to run along all the way to the ground.