River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  We repaired to our quarters, tossed a football for an hour, took a doze, called friends (the Professor learned his young daughter was playing the role of Cricket in her grammar school Wetlands Pageant), and went across to the saloon for supper. I talked to a retired teacher who came in to drink tea and absorb conversations. As we watched the wind blow through the dusk, I told her my concern that we might be trapped here even longer, and she said, “If there’s enough blue in the sky to make a Scotchman’s kilt, the day will be fine.”

  The next morning I awoke and listened. The only wind I could hear was exhalations from the sleeping crew. I looked outside. The saplings stood straight, leaves still, and above them was enough blue to weave kilts for all of Scotland. Later I saw the woman again and told her we were heading out onto Lake Sakakawea which was rising two inches a day and would likely surpass its record volume, and she said, “People around here watch that rise and think we have more water than we used to, but planet Earth has all the water it’s ever going to get. If our lake’s deeper, someplace else is shallower.” I said, I hope it’s not Montana. When we headed for Nikawa, I thought I heard her call what sounded like, “Beware the pillows!” Or maybe it was billows or willows.

  Were Lake Sakakawea a sea, it would not be notably big, but as a river—or what used to be one—it’s almost unnervingly big, by surface area the largest manmade lake in the United States, large enough to have navigational lights on a dozen headlands although it has no commercial traffic. Some years ago, North Dakota proclaimed the official state spelling and pronunciation of Lewis and Clark’s Shoshone guide to be Sakakawea in spite of the popular Sacajawea or the version most historians prefer now, Sacagawea. The impoundment covers almost two hundred river miles running nearly to the Montana line, and happily for us it lies predominantly east and west. Less merrily, the eastern end has arms and bays so big we would have to work to differentiate them from the main river, and even less merrily, it’s big enough to let the wind have a good long rip to maul little boats, so we set out onto Sakakawea with high respect for its several capacities to snuff our expedition.

  Near the dam, Nikawa disturbed some western grebes huddled under a leeward shore, then we entered a few miles of rough water, then easy water, and rough again whenever we ran a reach open to the dying norther, but the buffetings were not enough to stop us. I feared the relative calm would pass at any moment, so, encountering only small floaters we called driftoids, I moved us as fast as the water permitted, fifteen to twenty miles an hour. The Corps of Engineers chartbook for that inland sea was again inexcusably deficient, nothing more than badly printed aerial photographs pasted into a composite that looked more like a high school craft project than a piloting aid. With not a single community along the shore between the dam and New Town, our destination ninety miles north, we all watched the lonely embayments and eroded headlands to try to match them to the chart, an easier procedure than picking out the small navigational day marks against the immense background of sky and bare hills. Despite our efforts, we thought ourselves lost until the Photographer noticed the distance scale on part of the chart was off by miles.

  The Missouri, Garrison Dam to Fort Peck Dam, 347 river miles

  The inundated mouth of the Little Missouri is almost as broad as the main lake, and the huge bay called Van Hook Arm is more than twice as wide, and both of them, from water level, looked as if they might be the route we wanted. By neglecting that morning to set down compass headings, I increased the likelihood of following a faulty course, and, bucking the wind as we were, I could only approximately translate rpm’s into miles per hour, so we once again guessed our way upriver until Nikawa entered the long, narrow reach above Van Hook that confirmed our position; from there the bays were smaller and easier to identify as cul-de-sacs. I gave the wheel to my mates to help them break the miles, and I photographed and sketched the striated contours of the shoreline or just watched. Our relief at having escaped the wind long enough to ascend almost half of Sakakawea was full upon us, and we moved along so felicitously the Professor exclaimed before we could stop him, “Couldn’t ask for nicer water.” Trying to neutralize his words, I said how we all enjoyed his sarcasm, but I knew I was too late, the Great Ears too large, and when we went around the next wide bend Nikawa caught some miles of slammers. I took the wheel again, and the Professor said, “Reason can’t hold with that listening-river stuff, but experience proves it does. A priorily, the Missouri does in fact have ears.”

  As we neared our destination across the water from New Town, we passed another boat, the first we’d seen in days. When Nikawa was secure for the night in Four Bears Bay, we went up the open hills to the hotel and casino run by the Three Affiliated Tribes—Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan. About the latter William Clark wrote, “These are the most friendly, well disposed Indians inhabiting the Missouri. They are brave, humane, and hospitable.” We took a big room overlooking Sakakawea, then went for River Relief in the casino lounge where we met a young man, Two Crows. The Professor asked him the significance of his name, and the fellow replied, “Haven’t the slightest idea. What’s the significance of your name?” Said the Professor, “Right.”

  Another young man, an Anglo, came in and called to a comely Hidatsa talking to Pilotis, “Maxine! Hey, what’s happening? Where’s Tom?” She said, “On the road.” And he: “Okay! Now there’s room for me!” In full nonchalance, she said, “Nothing comes between me and my man. Nobody, nothing, not a blanket, not a sheet, and definitely not you.”

  That evening I walked around the landscaped grounds above the river refulgent in moonlight, the air vibrating with the clinking of dishes, the electronic warbles of slot machines, voices whispering Siouan, Caddoan, and English, sometimes in the same sentence, and I thought how, for the last couple of centuries when these tribes lived in villages not far downstream, they greeted almost every traveler who ascended the river that far: trappers, traders, explorers, artists, soldiers, steamboatmen, engineers, ethnologists. The location of their villages, their friendliness, and a settled way of life made them the great hosts of the Missouri, and many of their guests recorded their customs. Lewis and Clark wrote rich accounts during the winter they spent with the people, and so did Prince Maximilian and George Catlin, the last also painting them and their earth lodges and ceremonies, as did Karl Bodmer. Today the three tribes have an illustrated history of their ancestors unsurpassed by any other Plains Indians, perhaps by no others in America.

  When I walked among them that evening, I looked at them closely, thinking how some of their great-grandparents had shared meat and corn with Meriwether and William, consorted with the crew, danced for the prince, posed for Karl and George, and I thought how the blood of some of those I saw surely carried the genes of two centuries of white and black travelers, all of us now linked by the old river under the hill, yet still separated by remnants of our history, like this one by Samuel Bowles in Our New West, his narrative of an 1868 journey from the Mississippi to the Pacific:

  We should stop making treaties with tribes, cease putting them on a par with ourselves. We know they are not our equals; we know that our right to the soil, as a race capable of its superior improvement, is above theirs; and let us act openly and directly our faith. “The earth is the Lord’s; it is given by Him to the Saints for its improvement and development; and we are the Saints.” This old Puritan premise and conclusion are the faith and practice of our people; let us hesitate no longer to avow it and act it to the Indian. Let us say to him, you are our ward, our child, the victim of our destiny, ours to displace, ours also to protect. We want your hunting-grounds to dig gold from, to raise grain on, and you must “move on.” Here is a home for you, more limited than you have had; hither you must go, here you must stay; in place of your game we will give you horses, cattle, sheep, and grain; do what you can to multiply them and support yourselves; for the rest, it is our business to keep you from starving. You must not leave this home we have assigned you; the white man must not come hi
ther; we will keep you in and him out; when the march of our empire demands this reservation of yours, we will assign you another; but so long as we choose, this is your home, your prison, your playground.

  Why Odysseus Didn’t Discover America

  EARLY, WE WENT DOWN to the river and boarded Nikawa and took her out of the bay and upstream beyond the Four Bears Bridge, the span with nineteen names honoring as many Indian leaders, two of whom were Four Bears, the more famous called Mato Tope in Mandan, a chief Karl Bodmer painted luminously in 1833 and George Catlin rather less so soon after. Mato Tope repeatedly assisted whites coming up the river until 1837 when they again brought smallpox into the villages, a scourge that eventually left no more than 150 Mandans alive out of about sixteen hundred. As he was dying from the disease, the Chief reportedly said, in his own tongue, “Four Bears never let a white man go hungry. But now, how they have repaid us! I do not fear death—yet to die with my face rotten so that even wolves will shrink at seeing me and say to themselves, ‘That is Four Bears, friend of the whites.’”

  Just north of the bridge, on an immense but gentle treeless slope rising high above the river, is the largest geoglyph on the Missouri, and although not ancient, it’s visible for a couple of miles: a medicine wheel with the Four Sacred Directions, precisely the shape of the one left in front of Nikawa at Omaha and now fixed to our forward bulkhead. To pass below the emblem is to share its native blessing and be reminded of the respect due creation, no matter how contrary it sets itself against small human purposes. Beyond it, Indian lands today cease, and the designs in the earth come from plowed furrows or circles of central-pivot irrigators that mine ground water as augers do coal.

  We were headed for Williston. Because we’d heard the upper end of Lake Sakakawea was a complication of shallows, I changed our propellers that morning to older ones. The water was two miles wide with steep banks of eroding tan clay, sediments from the prehistoric ocean that the new reservoir has eaten into, removing as much as twenty-five feet of shoreline in just forty years, giving the banks again the look of a coast, something you might see in Cornwall. The lake lay quiet that morning, showing only a few driftoids, and we moved along at a pretty pace. Across the great openness our radio succeeded in picking up the Professor before we disappeared again into ever more isolated country. The impoundment progressively narrowed, not horizontally but vertically, its depth decreasing from sixty feet to a third of that, then a tenth, and the almost transparent bottle-green water became olive drab, then milky tan as the channel again began winding between big flats of snags, visible and otherwise, and at the river edge, the raw, striated banks became more weathered, turning into deeply rippled reclinations blown bare, and despite places of verdure, they said, Arid, arid, arid.

  We talked of whatever came to mind. The Photographer asked about Nikawa, how I’d found her, and I said she was the last part of the voyage to fall into place. After more than a year of assembling what I thought we would need—charts, gear, knowledge—four months before we were to leave, I had everything except a boat. I had searched and searched and found nothing that could handle the tremendous variations of waters and conditions we’d face. One December evening I realized the whole undertaking was about to collapse. I went out into a light snow to the best newsstand in the county to look again at boating magazines. I’d been checking the racks for months, had been making calls, talking with rivermen, and still I was boatless and now nearly desperate. That night, time running out, I came across a skimpy, cheap rag, an unpromising one I’d never seen before. I turned through, slowly. Nothing, nothing. Three pages from the back I saw an advertisement with a small photograph of a boat having lines befitting a vessel for our purpose, a craft with the five requisite characteristics: flat hull, shallow draft, stern able to hold two moderate-sized motors, great range, small enough to be hauled around dams and over mountains. To use another parlance, I liked the cut of her jib.

  A family company built only a few of them each year. At the last possible moment, in the middle of a winter night, holding a magazine I’d never seen before or since, I thought I might have found the boat. The next morning I called the outfit and described our venture, and a few days later I flew to the West Coast. Within hours I was steering a demonstrator across Puget Sound as the builder told me of cruising alongside friends in speedboats that usually left him behind until they hit bad water—then his “little tortoise” would catch them. He said, “She’s built to fish the Alaskan coast.” The following morning I ordered a C-Dory, and only three weeks before our departure, a friend hauled Nikawa to my home, just in time for us to launch her into the rising Missouri and learn the ropes prior to pulling her on to New York Bay.

  Said sardonic Pilotis to the Photographer: “You see, Skipper’s the most luck-dependent man who ever came upriver, and this voyage may be the most coincidence-riddled trip ever undertaken. If Odysseus had experienced our good fortune, he’d have discovered America two thousand years before Columbus.” I said, Will you please watch your expression around this river? Out the window I yelled, Belay that last—it’s all jokes! But I knew I was too late.

  The upper third of Sakakawea lies almost as due east-west as the lower section, and its bends are equally broad, but the shore is mostly free of bays that can confuse a pilot unfamiliar with the impoundment, so Nikawa skimmed along, and I began to hope Pilotis’s loose talk had gone unheard.

  I made sandwiches as we moved toward the end of the lake where it begins to dwindle into natural river again. “Amuse us,” Pilotis said. I told of my aunt who wanted to become a professional dancer. In the late 1920s she saw an ad in a magazine for an instruction kit guaranteed to teach a young, flexible woman the bump-and-grind in five minutes. For two dollars she received in the mail a flimsy wide-brimmed hat, three lengths of red ribbon, two large buttons, a long feather, and directions to attach the buttons and feather to one end of each ribbon and the other ends to the brim of the hat, then put the hat on so the feather hung in front and a button to each side, the ribbons reaching to her hips. All she had to do was crank the Victrola, put her hands on the back of her neck, elbows outward, and rhythmically repeat this phrase while doing it: Hit the button, hit the button, hit the feather twice!

  As Pilotis tried the method, something rose on the horizon, some thing we’d never seen before. I said, What the hell is that? We all leaned forward as if to get closer to identify it. Across the river, shore to shore, lay a faded brown line like a low fog. Pilotis: “What is that thing?” I said, It’s either some trick of light off the water or it’s trouble—if it doesn’t shift, I think we’re in for something. We each took a turn with the binoculars but could distinguish nothing more than a dun gossamer that appeared to be creeping toward us. “What is that damn thing?” The Photographer recited elements from two movies featuring deadly miasma. Whatever it was, it got bigger until it became a rampart, a streak of evil that was not fading away. I said, Bad news—that sonofabitch is no mirage. And Pilotis, “My heart’s pounding again. How far’s Williston?”

  I slowed to a stop, picked up the field glasses, and looked a long time. Then I understood. Oh jeezis, I said, oh goddamn! “What is it? What the hell is it?” I shook my head and told them, Trees, a solid wall of trees. We moved forward slowly in water now only six feet deep. Across the entire widely braided river grew slender and almost leafless willows protruding five to seven feet above the surface. We’d found what the woman in Pick City told us to beware. As we approached, we could discern numerous small, twisted channels leading into the flooded underwood, each path looking like a dead end, each seeming more impassable than the others. “We may have to turn back,” the Photographer said. I roved along the stockade, looking, looking, then gave up, took a chance, and just chose a channel. In a moment we could see neither upriver nor down, and in places even the low hills on the distant banks disappeared from us. The depth held at about six feet, so I went slowly on until Nikawa was engulfed. After a time, I stopped, climbed atop the
pilothouse, but the elevation wasn’t sufficient to let me see far enough over the thickets. The aerial photographs in our chartbook were only seven years old, yet they showed open water, not a willow anywhere, and miles of mostly barren surrounding land.

  Pilotis said, “There’s something eerie about this place. I mean, what kind of a place is a place that’s not on the map?” I said, It’s called Willowston. The Photographer again proposed turning back. Sure, I said, just point the way. The river suffered us to slog forward until the willows rasped the bow, sides, and stern all at the same time. I had only an approximate idea where we were, and I feared if we were as many as thirty miles from Williston, we’d play hell pushing through the tangles that far. Hoping the way would open, I proceeded according to the old Missouri River pilot’s Precept of Last Resort: There’s no other choice.

  From time to time we found a channel with a good current and followed it, only to see it disappear, then we’d scrouge through the trees and eventually find another current that led us on before vanishing. At last I decided we weren’t going to get out like that. I said, If we draw mud in here, we’ve had it—it’s too woody to swim, too deep to walk, and too hidden for anybody to see us. What quicksand is to land, that boscage was to a river.

  For the moment, we had three things in our favor: the water seemed to be holding a steady depth, the sky was clear, and the willows had not leafed fully enough to blind us further. When it seemed we were only becoming hopelessly enmeshed in that place which neither water nor earth had yet entirely claimed, I said, In a way, nobody can be truly lost on a stream because it always has two sides, and what we need now is a side. Pilotis: “Even if we get the boat to a bank, how do we get it off the river?” The Photographer: “Would you call this a river?” No, I said, I’d call it the Missouri.