Writing sample for the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program

University of Missouri-Kansas City

 

 

 

 

The following is an excerpt from Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains, a full-length travel narrative of a walking trip from Kansas City to Helena, MT, and return via the Missouri River in 1995

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick Dobson

1132 E. 65th St.

Kansas City, MO 64131

816-333-7303

patrickdobson@earthlink.net

 


 

Chapter Twenty One

An insignificant speck in the landscape.

Ft. Benton and The Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River

 

            The sun was already high over the river, which ran smooth but for swirls and eddies. Browned grass fringed with bright and dark greens along the bank covered low rounded hills downstream. Oak, sycamore, and cottonwoods canopied the quiet and charming park that was almost as big as the rest of town. In the center stood a replica of a blockhouse similar to that which the John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and subsequent U.S. Army regiments used to repel Indian attacks that occurred only infrequently, and usually in ways that rendered the blockhouse useless as a defensive mechanism. Historical markers and statues punctuated the park, mostly commemorating the arrival of white settlement. A small museum held artifacts with more coming soon from a neat square of bare dirt where a couple of squatting archeologists worked with hand shovels and brushes.

           Tedious attention paid to food stocks and last-minute details, I told myself I was going to the visitor's center one last time to gather up pamphlets and talk to the ranger, Bob Scholtes. Really, I felt as if I needed to tell someone I was leaving, going to disappear.

            "Say, you know that writer guy, William Least Heat Moon?" he said, as I walked into the room.

            "Sure. I've read his books."

            "That's right," he said. "He was through here a ten days ago or so with his boats. I'm sorry you missed him. He had a hell of a time."

            Heat Moon had come through on his cross-country, all-water trek from New York's East River to the mouth of the Columbia on the Pacific Ocean in a C-dory, the Nikawa (Osage for River Horse). Scholtes related a harrowing tale of underpowered boats, the failure of the BLM's own jet boat on a stormy night, and other frustrations. I was headed into territory that Heat Moon had already seen.

            “He had some folks with him,” Scholtes said.

            "Alone is good, too," I said. "It's really the best right now."

            "I'll vote with you on that, alone is good. But haven't you been alone a while?"

            "I've traveled alone, but I have not been alone—without people—at least not much."

            Scholtes gave me the BLM’s River Digest, a leather-bound binder with a compilation of river lore, stories of settlers, and historical fact, correlated with miles marked on the river maps I now had in my survival bag. I packed the gear, pulled the compass, and stepped into the canoe, which was set on a steep bank just downstream from town. The canoe jerked free and hung for a second in that ethereal space between heaven and earth. When I sat down, the world became real again, my view of it just about three feet above the water.

            Over time, the river had flowed everywhere between the banks of hills that rose up into plains beyond. Banks along curves washed away, carrying tons of soil downstream. Some of that soil accumulated on the lee side of the river, forcing greater pressure on the current bank. It was a process that led to curves and horseshoe bends that bent the river around nearly to touch again at the start and end of the curve. Floods and slow erosion then washed out these little land bridges, straightening the flow of the river and leaving islands and oxbow lakes—loops of water stranded without renewal along the plain. The incessant erosion and sometimes violent flooding changed the course of the river again and again in the same way person shaking a rope or string on a tabletop makes the rope snake around. Sagebrush flats opened at every bend, mostly on the lee banks. The current side of the river washed up against hills. Where the river flowed straight or along wide curves, hills rose up on both sides, and sagebrush blanketed the flood plain.

            Large, squarish cuts in the banks—the size of the river and filled with willows and cottonwoods—marked old channels. Dams upstream near and around Helena had evened water flow to slight fluctuations from season to season and slowed the channel-shifting process. Flooding was a common occurrence, but with the dams, washout floods had become less frequent, so that in flood years like 1977, 1993, and 1995, the river rose slowly to the banktops and fell again. The result was a river getting deeper and wandering less.

            The most dramatic changes in water levels now occurred in the reservoirs behind the dams. The Corps of Engineers emptied them in drought years to keep a constant flow of water for navigation in the lower Missouri from Yankton, South Dakota, to St. Louis. The effect on wildlife and plant life the length of the river had been devastating. Groves of cottonwoods dependent on flood for propagation, were getting old, and individual trees were tattered and broken. New trees found little purchase along the steep riverbanks. These old groves died over time and scrub oak and other low-growing trees replaced them. Several species of fish and birds teetered on the edge of extinction.

            Even so, the river had a quiet and sublime beauty here that it did not have above Great Falls. The flocks of pelicans were larger, as were the sandbars. In places the river spread and slowed so it became like canoeing on smooth, mirrored lake.

            Around Evans Bend, the wind picked up, and the waves grew into whitecaps that blew upstream. I stayed close to the shore, looking for a place to exit if things got too rough. The McDermands’ advice to use the front of the boat as the stern was well taken. It was far easier to steer overall, and shifting my five-gallon water bag around in the boat made it an easier go in the wind. The bag, some forty pounds or more went farther to the front and less likely to be pushed around when the wind headwind was strong. I moved it back toward me when the wind came from behind, making my end of the boat sit lower in the water than the front. Moving the bag again to the front when the wind was calm kept the current from pushing the back of the boat around and forward.

            At the Upper Missouri mile 16, a fierce wind howled off the flat plain above and into the valley. I took a break on the bank. Between gusts, it sounded like whispers in the sagebrush and pinion, which sent chills up my spine. There was nothing and no one around, just bank, water, willows and sagebrush, and the grassy hills. I remembered something I read in Lewis and Clark's journals years before. When the Corps of Discovery met friendly Indians, there was often a parlay and some recreation—which included sexual congress with democratic Indians. While the first white men many of the Indians had ever seen was curiosity enough, William Clark's slave York was a real attraction. As Steven Ambrose wrote in Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, "York was a sensation. His size was impressive enough, but the Arikaras had never seen a black man and couldn't make out if he was man, beast, or spirit being. One warrior invited York to his lodge, offered him to his wife, and guarded the entrance during the act. York was said to be 'the big Medison.'"

            Many the Indians believed, in the end, that Big Medison was a spirit being. Through procreation, he would have given them power over their rivals that they never before enjoyed. Whether they received any powers was unclear. The sure thing was, as Ambrose points out, the Corps of Discovery gave Native Americans the gift of venereal disease.

            I wondered York, if he had children and how they might have been revered, what positions the may have held in Osage, Kanza, Omaha, Arikara, Minot, Mandan, Nez Perce, Chinook, Lakota and Tetonnais Sioux, Blackfoot, Flathead, and other tribes. Tracking the children would be impossible. I was only sure that when the Lewis and Clark's men returned, they received hefty bonuses for their two and some years in the new lands of Louisiana. When York appealed for his freedom as reward for his hard work, however, Clark beat him for it.

            At the junction of the Marias River and the Missouri, a large island swung away from the mouth of the Marias into the river, surrounded with wetlands and stands of willow. Although the Indians had told Lewis and Clark about the major confusions at turns in the river, none were specific about getting to the Great Falls. At the Marias River things became impenetrably confusing. The Marias was a big river, nearly as wide as the Missouri. The captains sent scouts up both rivers. When the men returned without discovering which one was definitely the Missouri, Lewis himself took a small party of men up the Marias. Still when they returned, it was anyone’s guess. The men believed the river that came from the north, the Marias, would lead them to the Great Falls. Lewis wanted to take the river he had not seen, convinced only by the slightest and shakiest details the Marias was not the river they wanted. He made an executive decision to follow the river flowing from the west. The river he had traveled he named after Maria Wood, his cousin—Maria’s River

            It was a fortunate decision. On the morning of June 13, 1805, Lewis climbed up on the plains out of the river valley. There, he still doubted himself. He feared “the river boar to the South an[d] that I might pass the falls if they existed between this and the snowey mountains...” He went on two miles “whin my ears were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water and advancing a little further I saw the spray arrise above the plain like a collumn of smoke...which soon began to make a roaring too tremendous to be mistaken for any cause short of the great falls of the Missouri.”

            The river lie in a magnificent gully in the plains above, like a rill on the moon. It was sometimes broad and slow, other times narrow and fast. The cut banks rose high and were topped with great rolls of grass; the lee banks were like swamps rising from the water slowly and in a profusion of willow saplings and water grasses. Cottonwoods filled in islands and some of the floodplain. Cormorants and ducks of many varieties played in eddies off the tails of islands. Carp scattered in splashes and large swells at the prow of the boat. Among the sagebrush, wildflowers of all colors bloomed.

            Near Churchill Bend, I hauled my gear to a large sagebrush and grass shelf about a hundred feet from the bank. The canoe lie up on the shore about twenty feet from the water below some cottonwoods, tied to the trunks to keep it from blowing away in the stiff wind. I trusted the fates to leave the boat where it was, and to keep the beavers (whose sign was everywhere) from gnawing the seats and thwarts out of it.

            After setting camp, I walked up into the hills above the river. It was at first like a long mirror, reflecting of the green-carpeted valley and brown hills, turning into black ribbon of unimaginable depth as dark clouds plumed the horizon. A raft with two people floated by slowly, easily. The plain ran above the hills and bluffs on the other side. There was not one man-made structure or road in sight.

            Later, my lamp burned brightly over Peter's diary and the Lewis and Clark journals. Wind fluttered the tent and rain fell steadily. Storms rolled off the plains and down the valley all night. Thunder boomed up the valley like drums in a large, empty room. Lightening struck close and sent shockwaves through the air and a tremble in the ground.

            A feeling of helplessness as I have never felt before washed over me, and being helpless, I was content. The ease with which the river flowed through the valley with me atop had convinced me that my part in the world was small, that in trying to control things, I made my misery. Giving up, accepting the notion that I was an insignificant speck in the landscape gave me a feeling of great power—not over the landscape itself, but over myself. The world wasn't for me or against me; it was indifferent to me. There was a strong feeling of a presence I did not try to understand as God or ghosts or spirits or anything else. It was good enough to feel it without thinking about it.

            The next morning, splinters from a cottonwood shattered by a lightning strike lie on the canoe. The still-overcast sky deepened the utter silence. The weather didn't break until mid-afternoon. The winds were calm; paddling was easy. The canoe moved from one side of the river to the other, depending on how the current bent around the smooth hills and down the flanks of long ridges. It kept the boat off sandbars and out of shallows.

            The landscape changed slowly from rolling hills—the last of the Rockies—into a valley bordered with long ridges. Shelves of land formed as lee banks grew on themselves into tight curves. The area, the Missouri Breaks, resulted from the river cutting through a great uplift of sandstone. These drainages, or coulees, entered the valley between cliffs of powdery sandstone. The rock went from brown to red to white, and at times, had a black stratum, which bled down the cliffs in odd curtains of bluish black.

            Early entrepreneurs in the Upper Missouri region had once mined this layer of coal, a necessity in a place where trees were rare if the breaks and bottoms were to be settled. Settlement, of course, would bring increase in the capital value of the area, which in turn would provide mineral and farm goods for a nascent riverboat industry and for settlers downstream. Early mining efforts in the 1860s yielded some coal. But miners soon found that the material was marginal, at best. There was also not much of it; the stratum was too thin to mine economically. The river was also cantankerous and unpredictable. Entire bluffs and hillsides slid into the current, changing the river’s course overnight and filling the channels with boulders. In a good wind or washout rain, tornado or flood, whole groves of cottonwoods fell and created vast fields of hull-piercing snags. Rocks, boulders, and sand shifted on the bottom like piles of leaves in a wind.

            After 1880, the Army Corps of Engineers kept a snag-puller in the area and tried to maintain a riverboat channel, but the era of the steamboat was over by then—even a couple of local freighters that operated up and down the river from Ft. Benton had ceased. The very last commercial boats went upriver from the Lower Missouri in 1896—the railroad and the freight wagon were better to transport the scant local goods to market and to get wares into the region. The Corps crews used dynamite and dredge to maintain a channel until 1920. After that, the Upper Missouri was dammed to form a string of lakes across the prairies. Only in the 1960s did local efforts begin the process of preserving significant pieces of the river in western Montana for recreation.

            Coal Banks Landing, a simple square of grass with a boat ramp, stood on a shelf of flood plain between the ridges where coal miners had attempted to find their fortunes. Black skids lined the bluffs, whose grassy tops slid into bare hillsides. At times, a short black line or spot separate from the other coal- and shale-bearing layers bled onto the bare bluffs and steep hills of varying, subtle hues of brown and yellow and red. The BLM maintained the landing. A couple was there fishing. John and Pat were from Great Falls.

            "Well, now, that's the way I've always wanted to travel," John said. Whitish stubble covered his rotund face. He was medium height, his fishing pole was taller than he was. The hook swung around the rod as it flipped around in his hand.

            "Sure, it's great," I said.

            John's face turned sage, know-it-all. His eyes narrowed and closed, his head cocked. He tucked his chin under and to one side. The tone of his voice was patronizing. I knew what was coming.

            "That Fort Peck Lake is a hundret and fifty miles long,” he said. “That's a lot of water. I know; I worked there for three years. I'd seen one or two people make it, but that was it. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone. You get out there and get stuck...why..."

            "Let's say I make it," I said. "How's getting around the dam?"

            "You'll have to portage a mile and a half or more."

            "Is there a way?" I said.

            "Well...You’ll hafta carry it around." He said it like it was the easiest thing in the world.

            But John was a nice man—"of retirement years," he said. He was a young-looking 60. His wife, Pat, was 44, tall and attractive with red, curly hair and glasses. They were a good-looking couple. They invited me to a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

            We sat inside their camper; a trailer with everything a home needs, but practical and compact. They had been independent insurance adjusters.

            “Since Montana doesn’t have the population for insurance companies to justify full-time adjusters, they contracted with people like us,” Pat said. “Or they used to, since we are out of the business. We did all kinds of insurance claims work—home, life, auto, workplace liability, and more. We saved enough money over the years to quit working.”

            “We spend our time watching sagebrush grow," John said.

            When I left, they were sitting under the lone cottonwood next to their camper in lawn chairs. John tipped his coffee cup.

            The sun broke through the clouds. Tall bluffs, gray and yellow-brown, lined the river. The land seemed untouched, but the place had been used and abandoned. Trappers, farmers, miners, and speculators, had taken the last dimes of the resource they exploited and left the land to the next. Their presence was noticeable in the way a hill was eroded more deeply in one area or another, or in small, weathered cabins that stood on the flats. It had been unimaginably difficult to make a living from these small pieces of ground. The region was dry; the soil poor, even the grass and sagebrush had a tough time.

            At Little Sandy Creek, I stopped to look into some tipi rings marked in the BLM history digest. The creek was dry and easy to walk. The rings were on the flat grassland above the bluffs, simple circles of rounded stones that once held down the leather sides of tipis. These rings dotted the landscape. If the Indians didn't choose this spot for any other reason than the view—grassland to the horizon behind and the jagged river valley below—it was good enough. Here, I burned some sage as Gordon had told me, taking the smoking butt and running it up and down so the smoke would touch all parts of my body. In truth, I don’t know that I felt much more than a connection with Gordon, which is probably what it was all about. But as I stood there, it was easy to imagine the tipis, a few running dogs and playing children, women around the campfire, and men dragging bison skins filled with meat to be hung and dried.

            A few miles downstream the White Cliffs region began. Sheer bluffs of snowy white sandstone jutted from the flood plain like fortresses, statues, and obelisks. First reported by Meriwether Lewis as "a thousand grotesque forms," the shapes of the formations were so odd and wonderful to him, that he devoted several pages of the journals to descriptions of landmarks along white cliffs.

            The cliffs were also a dominant element of the paintings of Karl Bodmer, the artist who accompanied Prince Philip Alexander Maximillian Wied-Neuwied on his expedition up the Missouri in the 1830s. The paintings had so intrigued and enchanted travelers that more than one traipsed off to see the formations after viewing Bodmer’s work. The landmarks were easily identified from Bodmer’s paintings. Pilot Rock jutted out of the Jasper Ranch like an ice cream cone dropped by a child. Just up from there, the white sandstone rose in columns and chimneys, walls and roofs. One set of bluffs stuck out into the river like a battleship. Soon, the formations so difficult for Lewis to describe and easy for Bodmer to paint lined both sides of the river—on one side bluffs came right into the river, on the other, bluffs rose from the flood plain some three hundred yards distant. The "white" of the cliffs actually ranged from pure white to beige and yellow and back again.

            The cliffs were most stunning across from the BLM campground at Eagle Creek, where the Eye of the Needle, an arch of rock through which water from the top of the bluff drained, leaving a long dark streak under the arch—the needle and the eye. LaBarge Rock, a spike of granite named for a steamboat captain, poked up from the river, a stark contrast to white cliff.

            This was in this lonely landscape, and surrounded by reminders of loneliness. Where the river was not settled—most of it in the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River—the principle business was cattle grazing, with most of the banks given over to cows. Many people had tried to homestead here and either did not make it, or lasted only a short while. Only a few families eked out a subsistence living for a generation before lights and work in the cities lured the children away. Broken cabins and outbuildings, abandoned cattle troughs and feeders, and once in a while a well-preserved old Ford stood on the brushy shelves of the floodplain next to the river. They were testament to heartache. And to flood, drought, infertile soil, lack of transportation, and costs exceeding prices. Stringy clouds spidered across the blue above; shadows shifted colors from red and yellow to hues of brown, and back again. The earth had slowly turned pine and white, and the White Cliffs fixed historical textbook learning into real, tangible things.

            At the campground at Eagle Creek, if I held my breath, I couldn't hear anything but my heartbeat, and a few crickets and some frogs in the cottonwoods above. The evening was still, the clouds slowly thickening, telling of rain. I sat by my fire with a cottonwood stump as a writing table, where I set a notebook, a candle, and the medicine bag. Once in a while, a fish jumped in the water next to the bank, sending whorls over the surface of the still water.

            Evening turned dark and green. A thunderstorm boomed father down the valley. The small campground of fire rings stood under cottonwoods that swayed in the wind. I considered the cottonwood above. Thunderstorms were destructive forces that broke trees and let in the bacteria, viruses, and molds that killed the weak and old cottonwoods and made room for the new. Tornadoes had the same effect, as did hail and snow and sleet and flood and drought. The wind could turn the brittle wood of that cottonwood around, and splinter it in a flash. Such storms drove wheat into the mud, scattered ripe rye from the stalk, bruised corn, and pocked apples. But the destruction of the cottonwood above would have made room for seeds that would float in on the spring rise.

            The next morning, I took the canoe across to the cliff and paddled its length, taking in the cracks and crags, the color and the feel of the rock. The sand that made the rock was fine, it's color more clear than white. LaBarge Rock—the single brown and black formation among the white sandstone bluffs—was granite, forced up through the ancient seabed floor as the Pacific Plate ran up against the Continental Plate and made the Rocky mountains. The rock was named for Joseph LaBarge, an expert river pilot who had learned his trade on the lower Missouri in the 1830s and had become renowned among river men. His fur trading company LaBarge, Harkness & Company, tried to compete with the monopolistic American Fur Company in the fur trade and freighting business. Establishing their own fort near Fort Benton in 1862, LaBarge, Harkness embarked on a significant investment that would lose LaBarge himself $100,000 in two years—mostly due to excessively low river levels that stopped steamboats at Cow Island some 130 miles downstream. By the time LaBarge started his trade, the bluffs around LaBarge Rock and the Eye of the Needle had become famous in themselves. Bodmer’s sketches and paintings of the area, with the Prince Maximillian’s written observations were, with the Lewis and Clark Journals, probably the most historically significant documentation of the area previous to white settlement.

            Returning to the campground, I hiked up to the grassy plain above Grand Coulee. The morning light fired the grassland into hues of yellow and blue. The breeze was gentle, the sky reefed with puffy clouds. Tipi rings and large and small rock cairns dotted the edges of the bluffs amid smaller fire rings. The grassland and sage flattened out to the horizon and fell into the dozens of ravines and drainages along the river. At the entrance to Grand Coulee, white spikes and domes formed rock gardens, mushroom pits (depressions where rounded brown sandstone boulders topped thin columns of white sandstone), and winding white hallways that descended in the narrow defiles below. A startled deer stood a moment amid a mushroom village before springing off across the treeless plain. I ran after it until it disappeared over the edge of one of the ravines.

            Grand Coulee was a deep gash, or break, in the plain. Eagle Creek dribbled in the dark some 60 feet below at the bottom of a snake-like canyon under white columns and walls and capstone mushrooms. The deep and narrow defile wound back on itself like a snake, taking tens of hairpin turns before draining out on the bank of the river. The rains made the black and brown clay along the rim oil slick and a slide into the deep sandstone crevice inevitable. I had to satisfy myself with short forays below the rim for a closer look into the intestine-like innards of the drainage where I could safely get back up.

            The ten miles between Eagle Creek and Hole in the Wall was gone in no time. Book-spine walls of upended brown igneous rock fell down to the river on one side and back up the other. The softer sandstone between these volcanic dikes had worn down to form undulating hills along the riverbank. The Hole in the Wall was one such wall the rose perpendicular to the river with a large hole a hundred feet above. The trail to the formation snaked through a sheep yard with a small hay hut and feeders. A small road disappeared up the riverbank. I climbed up through fragrant sage and scrub to a long, vertical sandstone formation of white, like the cliffs through the whole valley. One of the large igneous dikes abutted it. The trail ascended to a chimney carved by wind and rain into the sandstone face of the bluff. I bullied my way up the chimney, back against one side and feet against the other. Wide vistas opened over my shoulder. I broke out on top, smacking dust and grumbling.

            Below, the river rolled out smooth and blue between wide arcs of floodplain, bumpy and green with sagebrush. Brown hills fluttered either side of the plain up to brown plains, wrinkled and scarred with drainages and more hills. The hazy sky drew down from cerulean blue above to yellow white where it melted into the hills. The book-spine wall jutted out above the river, hard and brown. But further back, white sandstone, like glaciers, grew knobby, rounded outcrops and mushroom gardens. The wall was a nearly flat surface, akin to broken road, from the apex to the bluff, where it disappeared into the sagebrush plain. I walked out to the apex, stood on the precipice. The wind blew harder and I dropped to my knees and stared off into the river.

            The next miles sped by into Judith Landing, a campground and public access near the Judith River. There, the Missouri narrowed into innumerable rows of standing waves between two steep banks, above which the valley and floodplain were widening. The white cliff formations and volcanic dikes gave way to bluffs in hues of red and brown that lined both sides of river on alternate bends. What white sandstone remained now was laced with swatches of gray, brown, and black that matched the layers in the bluffs beyond.

            Once ashore, I stretched my legs and brewed a cup of coffee. I boiled the water on my pack stove, turned down the flame, and poured the grounds in the water. A burst of foam sprung up for a few moments and then collapsed on itself. I turned the flame up to roll the boil. When all the foam disappeared, I turned off the flame. A splash of cool water over the top dropped the grounds to the bottom. I sat on the picnic table under a massive cottonwood, one of many lining the bank. The Judith River, small enough to be a creek, joined the Missouri just in front of me.

            "Cowboy coffee," said a man behind me. Larry Haight, a BLM volunteer who ran the campground at the landing, introduced himself. "It's the best coffee, really. I have a coffeemaker over there in the trailer." With a thumb over his shoulder, he indicated a big travel trailer at the back of the campground. "I never use it though; I'd rather have it that way."

            "Join me?"

            "For a cup of strong coffee, I'd do just about anything—within reason."

            Larry was a retired letter carrier who volunteered for the BLM every summer. I got the feeling he did it for his health. He had broad shoulders, hair going white, and deep-set blue eyes. He looked to be in his late-40s. His legs were strong, and he wore sensible boots. His ruddy complexion had the well-tanned look of someone who spent time on the water. He offered me his best fishing hole right off.

            "Say, see that RV over there, the fifth-wheel?" he said. "Why don't you come have dinner with us over there. I'll call you when we're ready."

            I rigged some line with a small hook and weight, and canoed up the Judith River to the fishing hole Larry had described. A piece of old sausage pulled in a couple of nice flathead catfish, robust and strong. I laid back and watched the end of my string. The fish quit stirring.

            I was lying on the picnic table, my head propped on my still-rolled tent when Larry and another man came marching over, looking serious and angry. They stopped short of the table. "Are you this man?" he said. He was tall, thin, and sinewy. He seemed to be in his mid-50s. His brown eyes were clear and wild; his dark brown, pomaded hair about to come unsprung. He had a Great Falls newspaper with my picture in it. He pointed at the picture.

            "Sure, that's me," I said.

            "Mr. Dobson, I have a warrant for your arrest."

            I sat up and took the paper. He looked serious. Larry stood by him, looking helpless. My mouth went dry. My heart pounded. But I couldn't think of one thing I had done wrong but for trespassing, which I had done in abundance.

            "Can I see the warrant?" I said.

            "Hell no," he said. He was quite stern, then he started to laugh. What had looked like anger turned into a sparkle. "You can't see the warrant 'cause I'm just pullin' yer leg." Larry's face eased as well. Practice, I thought. Just a few minutes, but enough practice put together this evil, but hysterically funny, charade. Larry seemed to love his work just because of moments like this.

            Don Cassidy shook my hand.

            We all sat down in lawn chairs in Don's "yard," a prefect square of fixtures, barbecue grills, and lights laid out before his homemade fifth-wheel trailer. Don's wife Judy scampered up and down the RV steps, lighting grills and candles, bringing out iced tea and chips. Soon, Cameron and Ruby Worstell joined us. They were calm, quite people who were proud of their new motorboat, which sat on a trailer behind their RV.

            Judy brought out little ceramic pitchers filled with onion soup-topped with cheese baked over. Then came salad and baked fish, a sauger Larry caught the day before, and grilled steak. It was a fine meal, followed with home made, sweet oat muffins in little cupcake papers.

            Conversation was congenial. Don and Judy did fair and carnival midway acts. Don played four characters, each with their own costumes and always on stilts he attached to his calves and feet, making him over nine feet tall—Tall Tex, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, the Knight, and a star-spangled, red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam. They went to conventions and shows where exhibition and fair people gathered to sell their wares. They had a home somewhere in Texas, but spent most of the year traveling the United States and Canada, wherever the next show began.

            "Yep, we got it down to a science," Don said. He had a constant, mischievous look about him. "We know what costumes work best for what people, and it changes during the day, depending on whether the bulk of the crowd just showed up or have been there a while. You can always tell by the kids. If they're clean, well, they just got there. If they're smudged with candy and pop, and mom and dad look a little tired, they've started a while back.

            "We also do for-hire work, you know, parties and birthdays. The Scarecrow, for instance, always, always works best for kids from 4 to 11. Any younger and you scare them to death. Any older and they think you're a crank. But it works for oldsters well, too. Especially really old people."

            Cameron taught vocational skills and industrial arts at the Montana State University in Havre, town near the Canadian border. Ruby and Judy didn't say much, leaving the heavy breathing to the men. But when Don died down, they asked a million questions about my trip.

            The sun was setting, the deepening yellow light coming in through the cottonwoods. It was Don's birthday, and Judy pulled out a camera to catch the last light. Don aped for photos, and even posed for a few with a regular smile, his arm thrown around Larry and me. (Don demonstrated what became of the nerdy, weird kids I grew up with.) Then the lying started, with everyone but Ruby telling stories from the road, ironic and embellished stories that took us into the night.

            Larry invited me to stay the night on the couch in his trailer.

            "I can't let you sleep under the stars," he said. "Those mosquitoes will find you, and I'd feel awful bad seeing your swollen face in the morning."

            The night was quiet after the rambling evening. I felt I had been refilled, like a water or gas tank, with what I needed most, human contact—stories and jokes and slaps on the back.

            Larry was up with the dawn. We talked for a long time over coffee on the wood platform that made a small porch for his trailer. He pulled out maps, an atlas and several others, with reverence.

            “I'm from Nebraska,” he said. “A town just south of Lincoln." He traced his index finger over the map. "It sounds to me you went along this road." He talked of towns along the path: Beatrice, Friend, North Platte, Kimball. I told of the people I had met there. After Nebraska, Larry pulled out a gazetteer of Wyoming, and then topographical maps of Yellowstone.

            "I can look at maps for hours," he said. "The town names, the roads, the colors. All of them mean something, something important. And maps are good long after the roads have changed. They tell us where we've been, how far we can go, and what still needs to be seen."

            Three hours later, Larry took me up to the closest phone at the neighboring ranch, a 12-mile drive. The rancher was kind enough to let me use the phone in his machine shed. The shed was a jumble of farm implements, lathes, grinders, every sort of small engine (and a few large ones). But nowhere was there the dust of disuse. The rancher, a hard-bitten man in greasy, dusty jeans, had a crew, and used nearly everything in the shed at different times of the year to tend the huge spread.

            The phone was an old wall, dial model, yellow somewhere under the years of grease. The place was so remote an operator had to place the call. Days away from home and the length of the trip still to go felt heavy. My girlfriend answered, and homesickness came to a head. Huge sobs welled up from deep inside. I cried big, fat tears that fell in spatters on the concrete floor.

            Then I thought of myself, in rough-and-tough man country, in the middle of the Montana plains, above a remote stretch of river, crying—in a ranch repair barn, surrounded by worn tools and parts, augers and fence post drivers, spilled grease and rusty machinery. I laughed until I cried again. I cleared up after a while.

            “You probably think I’m a manic,” I said.

            “No. You’ll be home in a while, then something new and different begins. It’s just hard to see right now,” she said.

            Larry waited patiently outside in the truck, watching the wind whip the sagebrush. He was quiet as we bumped back toward the campground over the dirt track.

            “Tough, isn’t it?” he said after a time.

            “Yeah, I kind of lost it back there.”

            “First time in a long while, wasn’t it?”

            “The first time since Topeka, Kansas. I talked to my kid there on a pay phone. My feet hurt. She was eating ice cream.”

            “This time felt better, didn’t it?” he said.

            A tension somewhere inside had been released. He drove with one hand draped over the steering wheel. He knew what it was to be alone.

            Larry hauled the canoe and gear over to a boat ramp. Don and Judy came over to say goodbye, and after a round of shenanigans, the canoe broke free from land and it felt like flying. The river moved quickly through an ever-widening valley. Coulees and breaks became more jagged and frequent. The river began to wind more tightly, turning back on itself, advancing just a quarter or half mile in a three- or four-mile turn. The floodplain extended between bluffs on either side of the river in dark green sagebrush. There was not a tree in sight.

            Some thirty-eight miles later, I landed the boat across from Cow Creek and Cow Creek Coulee on a lonely shelf that jutted into the river with a clump of cottonwoods in the middle. Behind the cottonwood were grass and sagebrush that lead up to big, but rounded sandstone hills. The layered sandstone and clay hills lined the panorama across the river. Under a clear sky, the windless air left the river glass smooth with only small swells and splashes from fish to decorate its surface. The sand near the cottonwoods was dry and soft. Everything was completely calm.

            Cow Creek Landing and Cow Creek Island had been an important off-loading point for freight going to Ft. Benton, and for supplies going back into homesteaders scattered about the region north and south of the Missouri. Here Chief Joseph last crossed the Missouri on his flight to Canada in 1877. The Nez Perce, a fiercely independent people, had refused to be settled on a reservation to the south, and had fought back federal efforts to subdue and resettle them. The troops had nearly caught up with the band of Indians several times through Utah, Wyoming, and Montana, but the wily and sage Nez Perce escaped through their own savvy and guerrilla attacks on the front lines of soldiers. At Cow Island, the Indians had tried to trade with merchants for supplies. But the traders refused. The Indians upped what they would pay, and still the traders would not hear of it. Finally, the Indians took what they needed, sending the merchants into the hills with rifle shots and knives.

            A group of twenty-nine army volunteers went to Cow Island (now attached to the bank, the head of which began just below the spit of land where I camped) on hearing that the Nez Perce were headed there. They arrived shortly after the Indians raided the place. A battle broke out between the volunteers and Indians, who then started burning freight and supplies at the landing. When reinforcements arrived on Sept. 24, 1877, Joel Overholser, a captain with the arriving troops, found that “Sgt. Moelchert, 11 soldiers, and five civilians had manned the rifle pits for two days...The whites were unable to prevent the burning of about 50 tons of freight.”

            The Indians advanced on the U.S. troops several times, taking light casualties and destroying more of the landing. The larger body of troops arrived and made ready for an all-out assault on Indian positions. On the morning of Sept. 27, the troops popped their rifles over the tops of their pits and raised their eyes to take aim. But there was no one to shoot at. Chief Joseph and his people, a band of some seven hundred men, women, and children vanished up Cow Creek Coulee, their trail lost among the sandstone and sagebrush. Civilian homesteaders joined the search but came up with nothing. It was only ten days later, when the supplies taken from Cow Creek Landing had run out and weather turned colder that Chief Joseph surrendered to federal troops just short of the Canadian border. The Canadian Rockies, in what for the Nez Perce had become the Promised Land, sat in the distance. It was the sad, but responsible thing to do. The people tired, hungry, and dying. At the surrender, Chief Joseph uttered his most famous words, “I will fight no more, forever.”

            Cow Creek Landing had been a raucous place where rough men played cards, told stories and lies, drank deeply, and fought with fists and guns. Here, hundreds of tons of freight, raw materials from the opening West, and cattle and sheep passed each other being loaded and unloaded from riverboats that had successfully made the journey to wrest huge profits from merchants and homesteaders. Indians traded here, and Indian fighters told stories of their conquests, matches, scalps, and draws.

            Now only crickets broke the quiet. Geese and pelicans flew just inches above water turned lavender and pink with sunset. Little was known about this area previous to the advent of the fur trade, and nearly nothing about Indians who had kept distant from whites. Across the river, archeologists had just begun to uncover the bones and stone tools of people who had inhabited this land 6,000 years before white settlement. It came down to this spike of land, a sort of arrow pointing to a yet unilluminated past. But there were constants, things that were here long before men came and would be here long after they would forget and be gone. After dark, a beaver slid into the water with barely a splash, then began to smack the water with its tail, sending up gunshot-loud cracks into the veils of stars.

            At sunrise, I went for a long hike on the plain above the sandstone hills. Cow Creek, across the river, wound down the coulee in tight, thread-like, curls. The plain behind me spread treeless, or nearly so, to the horizon. Tipi rings dotted the top of the hills as the ground sloped toward the river. Chief Joseph had pulled quite a disappearing act. From the hilltops, nearly all the floor of the coulee was visible. But Chief had determination and will to survive on his side and had winter not ground him down, that would have kept him and his people safe from the federal troops. On the hillside, sand and rock crumbled under foot and rolled away down the slope. Uncertainty I felt the day before had disappeared overnight, blown up Cow Creek Coulee with the Nez Perce.

            The canoe steered itself. Rugged ravines and jagged hills lined the river from the last bit of the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River into Fort Peck Lake. I kept thinking of the gentleness of the landscape, the way the river caressed the point of land with the cottonwoods, and the stillness of the plain and river at Cow Creek. There, perhaps, went the souls of men when they died. If not there, then a place as serene.

 


home/subversion/résumé/Porno/poems

Seldom Seen/archive/contact/poetrysheet

 

 all material copyright rev. patrick dobson and personally recommended press,

1132 e. 65th st., kansas city, mo 64131, 816-333-7303.