Sitting at camp next to a creek, Colonel Chouteau told the story of a young Indian man returning from St. Louis to his tribe, who had been camping at that very creek. When he arrived, the camp had been abandoned, except for one young girl, his beloved Flower of the Prairie, to whom he was betrothed. What was she doing there? “Waiting for you.” So they set off together, she carrying his bundle of belongings in the Indian way, until she sat down below a tree and declared she would not enter the village with him, because it was not proper. He went on ahead and, when he arrived among his friends and family, asked his sister to go and fetch Flower of the Prairie. His family surrounded him, weeping, and told him that she had died several days earlier. He could not believe it, but when they all returned to the tree where he had left her, they found his bundle lying on the ground. The young man died of grief.
When they arrived at Fort Gibson, near the confluence of the Neosho, the Arkansas, and the Verdigris Rivers—known as the Three Forks—Irving met Sam Houston, who was living in a wigwam with a Cherokee wife on the west bank of the Neosho, and rode with him about thirty-five miles up the river to Chouteau’s nearby home at La Grande Saline, a strong salt spring and geyser where Chouteau had one of his trading posts. After crossing the beautifully clear river, where a “group of Indian nymphs” lounged half-naked on the banks, Irving was greeted by an old slave, grinning “from ear to ear.” Indians and half-breeds stood around a tree in the courtyard, Negro girls ran about giggling, dogs and cats and chickens wandered in and out, as did turkeys and geese. A large buffalo robe hung over a railing. They dined on venison steaks, roast beef, bread, coffee, and cakes, waited on by the sister of Chouteau’s Indian concubine, as Irving called her. “In these establishments,” Irving wrote in his journal, “the world is turned upside down—the slave the master, the master the slave.” He was struck that the master was forced “to plan, scheme, guard, and economize” whereas the slave “thinks only of living, enjoying—cares nothing how it comes or how it goes.”
Colonel Chouteau was a remarkable figure in the history of Indian relations, and as Irving obliquely suggests, his business and financial affairs were not always in good order. Chouteau was continuously in debt, in no small part because of his commitment to the Indians with whom he spent most of his life.
In 1804, after traveling with his father and fourteen Osage to meet President Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis secured a spot for him at West Point. Chouteau graduated and served as aide-de-camp for General James Wilkinson at Natchitoches but resigned after six months to become a fur trader. Although his rank was merely that of an ensign when he left the service, Chouteau was thereafter always known as “Colonel.”
Like all Indian traders, Chouteau was a speculator, and his schemes often went awry, as when he was attacked by Pawnees while illegally trapping along the upper Arkansas and trading with the Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. He was later arrested by Spanish authorities and imprisoned in Santa Fe for forty-eight days. He continued to trade with the Osage all his life and kept a large extended family among them. When the Creek, Cherokee, and Choctaw began moving in along the Verdigris, forced out of their lands east of the Mississippi, Chouteau acted as go-between and peacemaker. Treaties had promised the Creek $200,000 in annuities, as well as food and clothing, guns, ammunition, and traps. They were cheated and received nothing at all, but Chouteau extended credit, fed them and gave them clothing, and spent the rest of his life trying to collect those debts from the U.S. government. He never did.
Sam Houston seems not to have made a large impression on Washington Irving, for he left him out of the travel book, A Tour on the Prairies, that he subsequently published. From Fort Gibson, Irving and his companions—among them a comic French Creole he calls Tonish, a half Indian named Beatte, and the twenty-one-year-old Swiss count on his grand tour—caught up with a troop of rangers who were off to patrol the Pawnee hunting grounds. Over the next month, Irving wandered across what is now central Oklahoma, sleeping under the stars and shooting anything that moved. The rangers were a motley troop of young greenhorns, with a few old-timers mixed in, eager for adventure and Indian fighting, despite Commissioner Ellsworth’s stated mandate to bring messages of peace and goodwill from the Great White Father in Washington. Beatte, who was serving Irving’s company as a scout, looked upon the rangers with a mingling of contempt and indifference.
After gamboling across the prairies, punctuated by dreary interludes of bushwhacking through the post-oak and blackjack thickets of the Cross Timbers, with their innumerable ravines and rocky defiles, the company at last managed to capture some wild horses and slaughter a few dozen buffalo. They forded crumbling streams, got lost, suffered false alarms and panics over imagined Pawnee ambuscades, huddled together during prairie thunderstorms, and finally limped home in rags, their horses mostly lame and too exhausted even to graze.
—
By 1854, when Perry and Welmett set off, the Osage Trace had long been trampled and beaten down into an emigrant and military road. Jackson’s Indian removal was complete, and the Trail of Tears was history. Sixty thousand Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole Indians were uprooted from the southeastern United States, by means of force and fraud, and settled largely in eastern Oklahoma. It was the year of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which reopened the question of slavery in the western territories. Immigration to Texas had increased steadily throughout the period of the republic, and much of that traffic passed down through the Indian Territory to the Red River along the Texas Road. A decade of Texas independence gave way to annexation by the United States and the Mexican War.
I said farewell to Patricia and Grant and set out from Prairie Village on a bright, sunny spring day, more or less the time of year when wagoneers would have hitched up their teams to cross the prairie. Timing was important, for fresh green forage would be wanted for the livestock; leave too early and there would be nothing to eat. Those who were California-bound would be anxious to cross the Rockies before snows set in. Perry and Welmett would have come out of Weston and crossed the Missouri on a ferry just west of Kansas City. Driving south, searching for signs of the Texas Road, I saw a life-sized replica of an “overland stage,” labeled just so, sitting in front of a UMB Bank. A road sign welcomed me to the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails.
Overland travel had its share of hardships, I know, but at least they didn’t have stoplights in 1854; as I descended a mellow rise, I saw before me a hideous procession of red lights diminishing into the hazy distance. Blocky stucco condominiums lined the thoroughfare, alternating with certified pre-owned-automobile dealers. The clouds above were silvery and delicate, reflecting on the windshields of Dodges and Jeeps lined up in ranks like white-topped wagons ready to conquer the Great Plains, sunshine glancing off polished chromium bumpers to burn ephemeral sunspots on my corneas. A phalanx of warring big box stores arose before me, a Super Target vying for customers with the Costco across the way, and then I spotted an actual human female on foot: a jogger taking her chances out among the automobiles and Marriotts, trying to forestall the slow onset of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Finally, I managed to push out beyond the stop-and-go exurban landscape into a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone, and casual groves of hardwoods and planted evergreens began to dot the gaps between parking lots.
THE TEXAS ROAD
Not far beyond the Overland Park Convention Center, I struck U.S. Highway 69, the approximate route Perry and Welmett would have traveled on the Texas Road. Trappers and traders had very sensibly taken the paths broken by uncountable generations of Indians. So too did settlers, and when, as a matter of course, highways were laid down, they traced more or less the same courses. From Weston and Kansas City and Independence, and other trailheads, the various trails eventually converged and became one. As a guide, I had with me Down the Texas Road: Historic Places Along Highway 69 Through Oklahoma, a booklet published in 1936 by Grant Foreman, the dean of Oklahoma historians.
Farmland opened up before m
e, complete with silos and barns and the occasional huge round bale of hay. I was abroad in Kansas, flying down the macadam surrounded by a landscape that Washington Irving would not have recognized as a prairie. After an hour a sign advertising the Trail of Tears flashed by, and I passed a country road called 247th Street, which seemed a surprisingly optimistic assessment of Kansas City’s future growth potential.
A massive coal plant appeared on the horizon as I entered Linn County, Kansas, silver clouds of greenhouse gases steaming from its candy-striped stacks. When I came abreast of the plant, I stopped at a convenience store and learned from the counter clerk that a new stack was under construction, which accounted for all the traffic. There were two or three pickups outside. I spotted another truck driving up toward the plant. A farmer woman chatted with the clerk and wondered whether it might rain, discussing the lotion she liked best and whether or not she could afford to buy what she needs, the kind she likes. Pushing on, pushing south, I passed bait shops, cabin rentals, and signs for catfish, all you can eat, and suddenly I crossed the Marais des Cygnes River. That sounded familiar. When I saw a sign for the Marais des Cygnes massacre site, I swerved wildly for the exit and went in search of atrocities. Instead, I found a national wildlife refuge and much helpful information about the local flora.
What once had been tall-grass prairie, with two or three hundred different species of plants growing together in glorious equilibrium—home to scissor-tailed flycatchers, short-eared owls, and loggerhead shrikes—was plowed under, cultivated, and then abandoned to the invading Ozark forests of oak and hickory, spreading down from the uplands. Nonnative grasses such as fescue invaded or were deliberately seeded by well-meaning agricultural technicians as a range-improvement measure. But deer don’t like to eat it, and even cattle turn up their noses. In fact, nothing eats it, and small birds that nest on the ground, such as bobwhite quail, die out or go elsewhere. Some varieties of fescue are even toxic to small mammals.
If the former grasslands are now monocultural deserts, at least the woodlands harbor some diversity. I learned that the forests are full of white oak, chinquapin, post oak, and shagbark hickory and that wild turkey, coyotes, and bobcats lurk in their shadows among the wild lilies, trillium, and Dutchman’s-breeches.
I never did find the monument of the Marais des Cygnes massacre, one of the most notorious of the Bleeding Kansas incidents. Some well-meaning civic leaders apparently moved it. But what happened was this: In 1858 a band of bloodthirsty pro-slavery Missouri border ruffians, out to harass Free-Soilers, rode into the nearby town of Trading Post, so named for another of Colonel Chouteau’s commercial establishments. They captured eleven men, marched them out of town, turned them in to a gully, and started shooting. Five men died, five were injured, one got clean away, and the best-selling Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier was moved to publish his immortal elegy “Le Marais du Cygne” in The Atlantic Monthly. Here are the first three stanzas and the last:
A blush as of roses
Where rose never grew!
Great drops on the bunch-grass,
But not of the dew!
A taint in the sweet air
For wild bees to shun!
A stain that shall never
Bleach out in the sun!
Back, steed of the prairies!
Sweet song-bird, fly back!
Wheel hither, bald vulture!
Gray wolf, call thy pack!
The foul human vultures
Have feasted and fled;
The wolves of the Border
Have crept from the dead.
From the hearths of their cabins,
The fields of their corn,
Unwarned and unweaponed,
The victims were torn,
The whirlwind of murder
Swooped up and swept on
To the low, reedy fen-lands,
The Marsh of the Swan.
On the lintels of Kansas
That blood shall not dry
Henceforth the Bad Angel
Shall harmless go by;
Henceforth to the sunset,
Unchecked on her way,
Shall Liberty follow
The march of the day.
This wasn’t Whittier’s only Kansas poem. He also eulogized John Brown, who in his zeal to avenge the wrongs of slavery murdered his share of innocent men.
Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good!
Long live the generous purpose unstained with human blood!
Not the raid of midnight terror, but the thought which underlies;
Not the borderer’s pride of daring, but the Christian’s sacrifice.
I pulled in to the combined Trading Post museum and rest stop. There was a primrose path with interpretive panels, with ponds and pretty pink wildflowers. In the distance, near the highway, was a wooden cutout of a horse and rider, silhouettes in the misty light of that cool spring morning. I stood and gazed out at the bright green no-longer-prairie, intersected by the highway, invasive woodlands thriving on gently rolling hills in the far distance, an endless procession of Walmart tractor-trailer rigs speeding past.
When I arrived in Fort Scott, Kansas, I saw a sign that read EXPLORE FT. SCOTT: SIMPLE PLEASURES, HIDDEN TREASURES. In the distance little black dots of Angus cattle lolled about a stock pond in the middle of a bright green field. Trees grew along fences as windbreaks, like hedgerows. Old fields were infested with young weedy trees, some with signs of halfhearted attempts at brush removal, but evidently the reluctant farmer lost interest or died and simply left a few piles of brush in the field, adding to the clutter as the woods continued their patient invasion of the prairies. I decided I had to obey the sign and explore Fort Scott, boyhood home of Gordon Parks. I skipped the trolley tour and went straight for the old fort. A small troupe of young boys walked by with fishing poles over their shoulders.
The buildings in Fort Scott were beautifully reconstructed. Most impressive were the old barracks, stately white clapboard buildings with wide front porches buttressed with pillars of native stone. In 1855, I learned, just about the time Perry and Welmett would have been passing through, the U.S. government abandoned Fort Scott, and both the barracks and the officers’ quarters were converted into hotels. On one side of the parade ground was the pro-slavery Western Hotel, and on the other side was the Free State Hotel. Fort Scott grew rapidly after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act as pro-slave settlers poured into Kansas from Missouri, South Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere. After the Marais des Cygnes massacre, a Campbellite minister named James Montgomery, a notorious horse thief and marauding jayhawker, raided Fort Scott in response to a rumor that the massacre had been planned at the Western Hotel. He failed to burn it down, though he tried mightily. In another raid Montgomery’s gang did manage to kill a former lawman named John Little, who had fired into the crowd of Free-Soilers. Little took a bullet as he leaned out a window. Later, his fiancée sent Montgomery a letter. “Oh, the anguish you have caused,” she wrote. “Now the cry of ‘the Osages are coming!’ can awaken him no more. He sleeps quietly in our little graveyard. But remember this. I am a girl, but I can fire a pistol. And if ever the time comes, I will send some of you to the place where there is ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ You, a minister of God? You mean a minister of the devil, and a very superior one too.”
Trading Post, Kansas
After half an hour of walking through the fort, I browsed the gift shop’s fine collection of books on Bleeding Kansas, avoided talking to the five bored park rangers working the desk, and pressed on toward Pittsburg, home of the fighting Gorillas football team, and Oklahoma. Fort Scott was slightly sad and dilapidated, a town seemingly bereft of any reason for being, much like my hometown of Del Rio. More small dried-up towns awaited my gaze, with empty storefronts and lines of people waiting to sell their scrap metal. Dead armadillos, pioneers of climate change, littered the roads. Camptown Greyhound Park sat empty, shuttered. Even the dog track
had gone out of business. A helpful local church had put up a sign: SMILE, YOUR MOM CHOSE LIFE. And another: ABORTION: GROWING, GROWING, GONE!
I just kept going. Kansas continues to bleed.
—
I was listening to the Flatlanders, with Jimmie Dale Gilmore crooning “Dallas.” Have you ever seen Oklahoma from Highway 69 at night? I sang, twisting the lyrics. This stretch of country, like Dallas–Fort Worth, purports to be the place where East meets West, where the West begins, and I suppose that’s always true, wherever you happen to be, but there’s something about Oklahoma, especially along the eastern border, with its heritage of the Five Civilized Tribes and their southeastern legacy, that gives the claim a certain legitimacy. I was still following the Frontier Scenic Byway, trying to stick to Route 69, but I kept seeing signs for Route 66. Quapaw and Vinita and Miami rolled on by, amid the rolling prairie with trees clustered along the drainages. I had to stop at Quapaw, had to get out of my rented Ford, just to marvel at the emptiness. Not just shuttered downtown storefronts, lovely in their ruination, a common enough sight in so many little towns across rural America and beyond, but bare foundations, slab after concrete slab. The very buildings had been carried off. There’s no mistaking tornado country.
I ignored the turnoff for the Will Rogers Turnpike, though the fact of it made me curious, and I saw another dead armadillo. Then another. Pretty soon I was counting them. Picturesque round hay bales punctuated green fields while backpackers pushing baby carriages strode down the shoulder of the highway. They were going somewhere.
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