Wolf Willow, Page 6

  We hunted old bottles in the dump, bottles caked with filth, half buried, full of cobwebs, and we washed them out at the horse trough by the elevators, putting in a handful of shot along with the water to knock the dirt loose; and when we had shaken them until our arms were tired, we hauled them down in somebody’s coaster wagon and turned them in at Bill Christenson’s pool hall, where the smell of lemon pop was so sweet on the dark pool-hall air that it sometimes awakens me in the night even yet.

  Smashed wheels of wagons and buggies, tangles of rusty barbed wire, the collapsed perambulator that the French wife of one of the town’s doctors had once pushed proudly up the plank sidewalks and along the ditchbank paths. A welter of foul-smelling feathers and coyote-scattered carrion, that was all that remained of somebody’s dream of a chicken ranch. The chickens had all got some mysterious pip at the same time, and died as one, and the dream lay out there with the rest of the town’s short history to rustle to the empty sky on the border of the Hills.

  There was melted glass in curious forms, and the half-melted office safe left from the burning of Joe Knight’s hotel. On very lucky days we might find a piece of the lead casing that had enclosed the wires of the town’s first telephone system. The casing was just the right size for rings, and so soft that it could be whittled with a jackknife. If we had been Indians of fifty years earlier, that bright soft metal could have enlisted our maximum patience and craft, and come out as ring and medal and amulet inscribed with the symbols of our observed world. Perhaps there were too many ready-made alternatives in the local drug, hardware, and general stores; in any case our artistic response was feeble, and resulted in nothing better than crude seal rings with initials or pierced hearts carved in them. They served a purpose in juvenile courtship, but they stopped a good way short of art.

  The dump held very little wood, for in that country anything burnable got burned. But it had plenty of old metal, furniture, papers, mattresses that were the delight of field mice, and jugs and demijohns that were sometimes their bane, for they crawled into the necks and drowned in the rainwater or redeye that was inside.

  If the history of Whitemud was not exactly written, it was at least hinted, in the dump. I think I had a pretty sound notion even at eight or nine of how significant was that first institution of our forming Canadian civilization. For rummaging through its foul purlieus I had several times been surprised and shocked to find relics of my own life tossed out there to blow away or rot.

  Some of the books were volumes of the set of Shakespeare that my father had bought, or been sold, before I was born. They had been carried from Dakota to Seattle, and Seattle to Bellingham, and Bellingham to Redmond, and Redmond back to Iowa, and Iowa to Saskatchewan. One of the Cratchet girls had borrowed them, a hatchet-faced, thin, eager, transplanted Cockney girl with a frenzy for reading. Stained in a fire, they had somehow found the dump rather than come back to us. The lesson they preached was how much is lost, how much thrown aside, how much carelessly or of necessity given up, in the making of a new country. We had so few books that I knew them all; finding those thrown away was like finding my own name on a gravestone.

  And yet not the blow that something else was, something that impressed me even more with how closely the dump reflected the town’s intimate life. The colt whose picked skeleton lay out there was mine. He had been incurably crippled when dogs chased our mare Daisy the morning after she foaled. I had worked for months to make him well, had fed him by hand, curried him, talked my father into having iron braces made for his front legs. And I had not known that he would have to be destroyed. One weekend I turned him over to the foreman of one of the ranches, presumably so that he could be better cared for. A few days later I found his skinned body, with the braces still on his crippled front legs, lying on the dump. I think I might eventually have accepted the colt’s death, and forgiven his killer, if it had not been for that dirty little two-dollar meanness that skinned him.

  Not even finding his body cured me of going to the dump, though our parents all forbade us on pain of cholera or worse to do so. The place fascinated us, as it should have. For this was the kitchen midden of all the civilization we knew. It gave us the most tantalizing glimpses into our neighbors’ lives and our own; it provided an aesthetic distance from which to know ourselves.

  The town dump was our poetry and our history. We took it home with us by the wagonload, bringing back into town the things the town had used and thrown away. Some little part of what we gathered, mainly bottles, we managed to bring back to usefulness, but most of our gleanings we left lying around barn or attic or cellar until in some renewed fury of spring cleanup our families carted them off to the dump again, to be rescued and briefly treasured by some other boy. Occasionally something we really valued with a passion was snatched from us in horror and returned at once. That happened to the mounted head of a white mountain goat, somebody’s trophy from old times and the far Rocky Mountains, that I brought home one day. My mother took one look and discovered that his beard was full of moths.

  I remember that goat; I regret him yet. Poetry is seldom useful, but always memorable. If I were a sociologist anxious to study in detail the life of any community I would go very early to its refuse piles. For a community may be as well judged by what it throws away—what it has to throw away and what it chooses to—as by any other evidence. For whole civilizations we sometimes have no more of the poetry and little more of the history than this.

  It is all we had for the civilization we grew up in. Nevertheless there was more, much more. If anyone had known that past, and told us about it, he might have told us something like this:

  II

  PREPARATION FOR A CIVILIZATION

  The old, old maps which the navigators of the sixteenth century framed from the discoveries of Cabot and Cartier, of Varrazanno and Hudson, played strange pranks with the geography of the New World. The coast-line, with the estuaries of large rivers, was tolerably accurate; but the centre of America was represented as a vast inland sea whose shores stretched far into the Polar North; a sea through which lay the much-coveted passage to the long sought treasures of the old realms of Cathay. Well, the geographers of that period erred only in the description of ocean which they placed in the central continent, for an ocean there is, and an ocean through which men seek the treasures of Cathay, even in our own times. But the ocean is one of grass, and the shores are the crests of the moun tain ranges, and the dark pine forests of sub-Arctic regions. The great ocean itself does not present more infinite variety than does this prairie-ocean of which we speak. In winter, a dazzling surface of purest snow; in early summer, a vast expanse of grass and pale pink roses; in autumn too often a wild sea of raging fire. No ocean of water in the world can vie with its gorgeous sunsets; no solitude can equal the loneliness of a night-shadowed prairie: one feels the still ness, and hears the silence, the wail of the prowling wolf makes the voice of solitude audible, the stars look down through infinite silence upon a silence almost as intense. This ocean has no past—time has been nought to it; and men have come and gone, leaving behind them no track, no vestige, of their presence. Some French writer, speaking of these prairies, has said that the sense of this utter negation of life, this complete absence of history, has struck him with a loneliness oppressive and sometimes terrible in its in tensity. Perhaps so; but, for my part, the prairies had noth ing terrible in their aspect, nothing oppressive in their lone liness. One saw here the world as it had taken shape and form from the hands of the Creator. Nor did the scene look less beautiful because nature alone tilled the earth, and the unaided sun brought forth the flowers.

  CAPT. W. F. BUTLER, The Great Lone Land

  1

  First Look

  In May, 1805, the six canoes and two pirogues of the Lewis and Clark expedition were working up the Missouri between the mouth of the Yellowstone and the Musselshell. The wooded bottoms and the wide greening plains outside so swarmed with game that “it is now only amusement for Capt
. C and myself to kill as much meat as the party can consum.” Hardly a day passed that they did not have an encounter with a grizzly —“a verry large and a turrible looking animal, which we found verry hard to kill”—and from morning to night they passed through “great numbers of buffalow, Elk, Deer, antilope, beaver, porcupins, & water fowls ... such as, Geese, ducks of dift. kinds, and a flew Swan.”

  They came watchfully, for they were the first. They came stiffened with resolution and alert with wonder. Beyond the bottoms with their cutbanks and their half-flooded willow-grown bars was the wide disk of the Plains, the same Plains they had known, wintering among the Mandans, but extended and extended beyond expectation and beyond credulity, unknown to every horizon and past it. Every river and creek that came in from south or west brought word of the Stony Mountains and the passes that might lead to the Great South Sea; every stream from north or northwest was a possible trail to the Saskatchewan in Prince Rupert’s Land. More and more, as they moved westward, the country that lay between them and these desired goals was not merely unknown, it was unrumored. Lewis and Clark first crossed it and tested its extent. Things they did not know, and could not discover from their informants the Min netarees, they guessed at. And they noted everything, for everything was new.

  May 8 brought them to the mouth of a large river emptying into the Missouri from the northwest. It looked to be navigable for boats and pirogues, and for canoes perhaps a long way, for it carried a strong flow of milky-white water and seemed to drain a great reach of country to the north. They looked up it with the eye of imagination: like the White Earth and other northern tributaries they had passed, this one intrigued them as a possible way to the Saskatchewan and the fur country of Prince Rupert’s Land, bitterly contested by the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwesters. They mistook the stream for the one the Min netarees called The-River-That-Scolds-All-the-Others, and so thought themselves farther west than they were, but the name they gave it is the one it is still called by: Milk River. Walking up it several miles, they stood on its bluffy banks and strained their eyes into the characterless country from which it came. One feels that they abandoned it with regret, leaving it unexplored only because of the greater Unexplored that led them westward.

  “Capt Clark who walked this morning on the Lard. shore ascended a very high point opposite to the mouth of this river; he informed me that he had a perfect view of this river and the country through which it passed for a great distance probably 50 or 60 Miles, that the river from it’s mouth bore N.W. for 12 or 15 Miles when it forked, the one taking a direction nearly North, and the other to the West of N. West”

  Standing where he stood, a few miles below the site of modern Fort Peck Dam, Clark was not able to look very far, actually, into that province of the unknown. His fifty or sixty miles of view would have shown him only uninterrupted prairie. The fork that came into the Milk from directly north was a minor creek now called the Porcupine. The Milk itself, if they had chosen to follow it, would have led them not into the north but on to the west, not to the Saskatchewan but to what would some day be Glacier National Park.

  Still, they were barely out of sight of the northern divide that they guessed at. To the northwest, up the Milk River valley, lost in the shimmer at the extreme edge of Clark’s vision, another tributary did come in from the north, draining the plains that stretched on up across the 49th parallel. Followed, it would have led them through some very rough badlands, across plains that flattened to heat-wrinkled horizons. Along the course of the creek, especially on the north bank where the grass was thin, they would have found the country cut by big rough coulees; out on the level plains they would have found stretches of gravelly unprofitable soil thinly grassed and spotted with round cushions of cactus and with prickly pear and sage. In this gray-brown desolation the ground would have been bitten with burnouts and buffalo wallows, dusty clay depressions where gathering alkali salts had all but prohibited any growth, where wind had blown the powdery dust away and burrowing owls had shrugged their way under the lips overhung with curly grass, and whirlwinds had vacuum-cleaned them into shallow craters. This clay soil they would have found unbelievably sticky in the rain. The grass would have been the short curly variety, extraordinarily nourishing because it cured on the stem, that sometime in the next century would acquire the name of prairie wool.

  Out here, far more than in the brushy Missouri bottoms, the explorers would have found a land with no transition between earth and sky: in the heat the horizons melted and ran; on the flats the sky and clouds moved in the reflecting sloughs. This earth was densely peopled with small creatures as with large—prairie dogs, picket-pin gophers, field mice, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, jackrabbits, burrowing owls. The plains were humped and pimpled with the tailings of their burrows, and across the interminable grasslands, even more homeless and fluid than the clouds that moved from west to east across the immense sky, or the winds that searched the grass and were almost never still, swept the blackness of the buffalo, the red-tawny shadows of antelope bands. In every slough went the mating mallards.

  The birds of these prairies—ducks, robins, meadowlarks, sparrows, hawks, shrikes, blackbirds—were birds whose bond with the earth was strong. Their nests lay not in trees, for there were none, but in among the tules of sloughs, or in hidden cups under the curl of the prairie grass, or among the blades of prickly pear. Some of them, like the burrowing owls, went underground and lived like rodents.

  This tributary of the Milk whose willowed course groped across the northern plains was later to be called by some the Frenchman, by some the Whitemud. If Lewis and Clark had found and followed it, it would have led them across the 49th parallel and thence northwesterly to a low dome of hills as unknown as the river, and in the hills, 165 beeline miles from the junction with the Milk, to an unknown lake. The hills would later be called Montagne aux Cypres, the Cypress Hills; the lake was Cypress Lake. And from the bench above the unmarked source of the unrecorded stream, on a plateau-like height where oddly arctic vegetation replaced the characteristic vegetation of the Plains, they could have looked on, and still on, north and east and west, and seen only more plains, more antelope, more fleets of clouds running eastward before the constant wind.

  But they would have been looking down the imperceptible hill that led to Hudson Bay.

  They did not go north, and did not see it. In 1805 nobody had been as close as they, and their brief speculative stare at the southern edge of the region was the last look any white man would give it for more than a half century.

  Exploration and the fur trade had consistently fallen short of the Hills or gone far around them. Henry Kelsey, on his doggerel-recorded excursion for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1690 and 1691, had come as far into the prairies as some point between the Saskatchewan and the Assiniboine, and in 1739 the Verendrye called the Chevalier had penetrated to about the site of Prince Albert, below the junction of the North and South Saskatchewan. Neither Kelsey nor Verendrye had come within several hundred miles of the Cypress Hills; and the fur trade whose entry into the far Northwest they heralded had followed the route of wood and water along the North Saskatchewan, anchoring itself on a chain of prairie posts: Fort Ellice, Fort Qu‘Appelle, Fort Carlton, Fort Edmonton, Rocky Mountain House. Not until the late 1850’s would the first white explorer, Palliser, make his way to the high country just north of the 49th parallel; not until the 1860’s would métis winterers begin to build their shanty villages there; not until the 1870’s would it be even partly surveyed; and not until the railroad established it in 1886 would there be a road of passage near it.

  As late as 1860, one hundred and fifty years after Kelsey, more than a hundred after Verendrye, more than fifty after Lewis and Clark, the Cypress Hills and the little river they mothered were lost in an unmapped West as wide as ocean, being saved, perhaps, after all the rehearsals on other frontiers, for the staging of one last drama of white settlement.

  But lost as it was, and outsid
e the reach of Lewis’s and Clark’s vision, the river demonstrated the acuteness of their geographical intuition. Just at the eastern base of the Hills there was then (it has since been drained by the CPR) a shallow pond that in spring released a tiny stream south to join the Frenchman, the Milk, and the Missouri, and another stream north to become the South Fork of the Swift Current, headed for Hudson Bay by way of the South Saskatchewan and Lake Winnipeg. The explorers were close to one of the geographical secrets they were looking for, one of those heights of land which direct the rivers how to flow and so change both politics and history. That little pond in what seemed to be a valley near the modern village of South Fork was balanced like a saucer on the continental divide; the Hills themselves divided the Gulf of Mexico from Hudson Bay.

  And they were a divide in more ways than those that concerned the parting of the waters. If William Clark had been a prophet as well as an explorer, and a student of human water-sheds as well as a geographer, he might have made some interesting speculations as he stood on the Milk River bluffs looking northward toward the region which would retain longer than any part of the United States, and any but the sub-arctic parts of Canada, the characteristics of the West that he knew in 1805.

  2

  The Divide

  Slight causes often have profound effects. There is a theory held by some archaeologists and historians, for instance, that the absence of cobalt in the soil of northern Jutland resulted in a failure of the cattle to produce Vitamin B-12, which caused abortion sickness, which forced the inhabitants in the 2nd century B.C. southward upon more nutritive grass, which jarred their southern neighbors the Cimbri loose upon still more southerly tribes, which set off the great invasions of the Cimbri and Teutons which shook Rome. It may not be good history but it is an attractive parable, and comforts a student who would like to find specific causes, preferably simple and concrete, for human movements.