State by State

by Matt Weiland

  “My newspaper exists because I’m selling ads, but do you think it is Bosnian community that supports me the most? No. It’s the Americans. They’re the ones who advertise; the Bosnian community thinks all they need is word of mouth. There are maybe 200 or 300 small business owners in Bosnia’s St. Louis community. They read the paper and pass it on. But the Americans. They advertise. Maybe if the Bosnian community understood what I’m trying to do, they would be more appreciative. I have not raised my price from the beginning because I’m trying to hold them together. Right now,” he says, “only six out of the paper’s fifty-two pages are in English, but some day will be 100 percent English.

  “And maybe someday in Bevo Mill it is Sabah Restaurant, Sabah Taxi, Sabah Hotel.”

  And then he floored it all the way back to St. Louis.

  MONTANA

  CAPITAL Helena

  ENTERED UNION 1889 (41st)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From the Spanish for “mountain”

  NICKNAME TreasureState

  MOTTO Oroyplata (“Gold and silver”)

  RESIDENTS Montanan

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 1

  STATE BIRD Western meadowlark

  STATE FLOWER bitterroot

  STATE TREE ponderosa pine

  STATE SONG “Montana”

  LAND AREA 145,552sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Fergus Co., 11 mi. W of Lewistown

  POPULATION 935,670

  WHITE 90.6%

  BLACK 0.3%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 6.2%

  ASIAN 0.5%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 2.0%

  UNDER 18 25.5%

  65 AND OVER 13.4%

  MEDIAN AGE 37.5

  MONTANA

  Sarah Vowell

  The tallest mountain in Montana is former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s tiny tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery. Could Granite Peak in the Beartooth Mountains usher through the Civil Rights Act and get eighteen-year-olds the right to vote?

  The license plates say Big Sky Country for a reason but if you really want to learn something about the pink-blue light in winter, go inside, pull off your melting boots, and look at January Afternoon in the Gallatin Valley, a Russell Chatham lithograph from 2004. The thin, flat strip of snowy ground is upstaged entirely by an ample stretch of glowing air.

  Lewis and Clark Caverns’ ceiling drips with the strange beauty of stalactites but it can’t be as strange or as beautiful as the films of Missoula’s David Lynch, not that the candlelight tours of the caverns at Christmastime aren’t recommended. The formations in the caverns were made by something called “hydrostatic pressure” but the best word people can come up with to describe Lynch’s work is “Lynchian.”

  The bald eagles are worth a look-see but so is the YouTube footage of airborne, Butte-born Evel Knievel in flight. Has a bald eagle ever jumped the fountains at Caesar’s Palace, cleared the Snake River Canyon, and/or bounded over fourteen Greyhounds—on a motorcycle?

  It’s thrilling to find out what Montana is like; but it is not entirely dull to find out what Montanans have done. There have never been that many people in the state so the men and women who are here have always tended to stick out. To wit:

  Every September mountain man John Colter is honored in the seven-mile “John Colter Run,” a cross-country race at Missouri Headwaters State Park. Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was the first white man to see what would become Yellowstone National Park in 1807. Colter was a trapper, and he and his partner were collecting beaver pelts in 1809 on the hunting grounds of the Blackfoot tribe. Captured by the Blackfoot, Colter’s buddy was executed. Rather than do the same to Colter, his captors, just for fun, stripped him naked and told him to run for his life so they could hunt him down. He was barefoot, running fast and far, killing the only Blackfoot who caught up to him with said Blackfoot’s own spear. The last 200 yards of the course in the John Colter Run require participants to wade across the Gallatin River in honor of the way Colter escaped the Blackfoot—by diving into the Jefferson River and hiding under a log. (Unlike John Colter, participants in the John Colter run are allowed to wear shoes.)

  Three of your more famous names in American history—George Armstrong Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull—came to what is now Little Bighorn National Monument near the town of Crow Agency on June 25, 1876. But they’re not necessarily the participants in that lopsided skirmish the visitor to the battlefield remembers most vividly. Here, the Seventh Cavalry’s tombstones are laid out willy-nilly, the men buried where they fell. None of that Gettysburg grid here—no neat parallel rows. This is more pathetic, more existential, a bloody game of Pick Up Sticks. At the end of the trail, the grave markers end. Or so you think, until you look up, across a ravine and see the lone tombstone of some poor soul who almost got away. He didn’t though. He’s the one a visitor can’t forget.

  The population of Montana is small enough to send one measly legislator to the House of Representatives. For nine terms, that congressman was Evel Knievel’s first cousin, Pat Williams. After Knievel’s death, Williams wrote in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle that one time, in the 1960s, he ran into his cousin at Nick’s Bar in Butte. Williams recalled:

  I pushed through to the bar and, putting my arm around Knievel’s shoulder, I retrieved a newspaper clipping from my wallet, kidding him about the headline: “Knievel to Jump Grand Canyon.” He smiled, reached for his own wallet and took out his newspaper clipping with a headline that read “Pat Williams to Run for Legislature.”

  One of Williams’s predecessors, Jeanette Rankin of Missoula, was the first woman elected to the United States House of Representatives and the only member of Congress to vote against the United States entering both World War I and World War II. “I want to stand behind my country,” she said in 1916, “but I cannot vote for war.” After Pearl Harbor, the House of Representatives voted 388–1 to declare war in 1941; Rankin was the lone dissenter. “War is evil,” she said during the Vietnam War, leading the Jeanette Rankin Brigade in a 1968 protest to Capitol Hill at the age of eighty-seven.

  Maybe Montana’s most lasting legislative gift to the American republic is the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, mandating the popular election of senators. That’s because in 1899 millionaire William Andrews Clark bought himself a seat in the United States Senate by bribing the Montana State Legislature. (One recipient scored $30,000 for his trouble, which isn’t that much less than the present-day Montana median household income.) Clark’s example, and that of a couple of similarly public-minded senators, stirred the groundswell for a popular vote. Clark was one of the most talented money-makers of the Gilded Age, which is saying something. At the time of his death, in 1925, he was worth more than $200 million. He deserted the Confederate Army in 1863 and came to Montana Territory for a gold rush in Bannack but soon made more money selling supplies such as eggs to other miners than his claim paid out. From there, he went into banking, railroads, newspapers, and, most notably, mining, becoming one of the three “Copper Kings” of Montana. A tiny supply stop for his railroad between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles turned into Las Vegas, which is why they named that county Clark after him.

  If there is one thing all Montanans have in common, other than a disdain for speed limits and a thing for huckleberries, it is a love of William Shakespeare. Thanks to Shakespeare in the Parks, a traveling summer program headquartered at Montana State University since 1973, you don’t have to be some city slicker from Billings or Great Falls to enjoy fine Elizabethan entertainment. Nope, you can pile the family and its lawn chairs into the pickup and enjoy Merry Wives of Windsor at the Dahl Memorial Lawn in Ekalaka, or take in Comedy of Errors at the Fire Hall Park in Wolf Point. Sometimes, according to Shakespeare in the Parks alumnus Bill Pullman, “the outdoors becomes a framing audiovisual that can add a lot of suspense to a plot. When a big thundercloud stacks up high and dark behind the mountains in Chico Hot Springs, you can add a glance in its direction when you are talkin
g about your character being in danger.” A Montanan could have seen—for free—almost all of Shakespeare’s comedies, a tragedy or three, and the odd Molière, without ever leaving Whitefish. An ex-Montanan could be at the movies in Chicago and, spotting a bit player in a hospital bed in the Sandra Bullock vehicle While You Were Sleeping, spill her popcorn while elbowing her friend and exclaiming, “Oh my God! That’s Thomas Q. Morris, my family’s favorite Shakespearean!” Pullman recalls that audiences in “isolated towns … really felt compelled to think about the stories and the characters from Shakespeare. They weren’t going to the performance to just say they went or for the sheer entertainment. They wanted to think about how a character in the play might be like some parts dealer they had known or how chance can bring calamity in short order.”

  Amble alongside the junior scientists and their parents enjoying the Hall of Horns and Teeth at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies and you can’t help but wonder which kid will end up a sunburned scientist someday in the Badlands of Eastern Montana unearthing prehistoric fossils. The museum’s curator of paleontology, Jack Horner, was six years old when he dug up a dinosaur bone in his backyard in Shelby. A dyslexic who flunked out of college only to become one of the least pasty recipients of a MacArthur genius grant and the model for the paleontologist in Jurassic Park, he discovered the first dinosaur eggs in the western hemisphere, the first dinosaur embryos, and evidence that dinosaurs cared for their young. Asked once if it was lonely to grow up in an isolated place like Montana, he answered, “I actually like sparseness, the emptiness, and I don’t find it a bit lonely. How can you be lonely in any ecosystem?”

  So ponder the ponderosa pine, but don’t forget to read A River Runs Through It by Norman “these stories have trees in them” Maclean. Remember that the wind blows through downtown Livingston long and lonesome but so does everything Gary Cooper never said. Know that there’s nothing more optimistic than springtime in Paradise Valley, but if you need year-round renewal memorize this line from a Richard Hugo poem set in Philipsburg so you have it handy for life’s little cold snaps: “The car that brought you here still runs.”

  NEBRASKA

  CAPITAL Lincoln

  ENTERED UNION 1867 (37th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From an Oto Indian word meaning “flat water”

  NICKNAMES Cornhusker State or Beef State

  MOTTO “Equality before the law”

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 3

  STATE BIRD Western meadowlark

  STATE FLOWER goldenrod

  STATE TREE cottonwood

  STATE SONG “Beautiful Nebraska”

  LAND AREA 76,872sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Custer Co., 10 mi. NW of Broken Bow

  RESIDENTS Nebraskan

  POPULATION 1,758,787

  WHITE 89.6%

  BLACK 4.0%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.9%

  ASIAN 1.3%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 5.5%

  UNDER 18 26.3%

  65 AND OVER 13.6%

  MEDIAN AGE 35.3

  NEBRASKA

  Alexander Payne

  The WPA’s Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State begins this way and is a good place to start: “The traveler crossing Nebraska gets an impression of broad fields, deep skies, wind, and sunlight; clouds racing over prairie swells; herds of cattle grazing on the sandhills; red barns and white farmhouses surrounded by fields of tasseling corn and ripening wheat; windmills and wire fences; and men and women who take their living from the soil.”

  That the first words invoke the traveler rather than the Nebraskan himself captures how Americans have been thinking about the place for over 200 years—as somewhere to travel through, not to. A response we Nebraskans often hear when we say where we’re from is, “Oh, I drove through Nebraska once. Boy, that state goes on and on.” A kid from San José down the hall from me at Stanford could remember Nebraska only as the place his family bought a new car after they totaled theirs hitting a deer. (That happens a lot, by the way.) For Jack Kerouac “it was perfectly legitimate to go 110 and talk and have all the Nebraska towns—Ogallala, Gothenburg, Kearney, Grand Island, Columbus—unreel with dreamlike rapidity as we roared ahead. …” People generally have just a few other associations with the state, if any—Mutual of Omaha, corn, beef, and football.

  Americans have been saying about Nebraska, “Boy, that state goes on and on,” since well before the automobile was invented. Settlement of the West long preceded that of the Middle West, and what is now Nebraska lay smack in the middle of the trip. It was, apparently still is, a hard slog across that seemingly endless prairie described by early travelers as a sort of desert. (How often do I still hear “cultural desert?”) After the initial explorers—Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, and Stephen Long—came the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the 49ers, the Pony Express, the Transcontinental railroad, the Lincoln Highway, and finally Interstate 80. Now with aviation it’s called a “fly-over state.” Even birds see Nebraska like this, as each spring hundreds of thousands of migrating sandhill cranes, ducks, and geese famously converge on the Platte River before continuing on. Writer Mari Sandoz called our home “that long flat state that sets between me and any place I want to go.” In fact, you’re probably just skimming through this chapter on your way to Nevada.

  One could not imagine the WPA Guides to Maine or Montana or Missouri or even next-door-neighbor Iowa beginning with the words “the traveler crossing …” although people certainly cross those states too. There is something about Nebraska’s nature as a place to be traversed rather than as a destination to be reached that has both kept our state sparsely populated and deprived us of a readily grasped identity—even, to a degree, among ourselves. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that “plain” and “plain” are the same word.

  But startling, strange, and beautiful things happen on those plains, as suggested by the WPA Guide’s immediate mention of “skies, wind, and sunlight.” We Nebraskans marvel at the big sky, the stunning sunsets, the dazzling electrical storms, the vivid fall hues. But we also contend with hideous freezes, stifling humidity, and catastrophes of nature that make one wonder constantly what sort of people the Indians and pioneers were to have managed out there in the open, utterly exposed—and not so very long ago. Along with the blizzards, prairie fires, floods, tornados, and droughts, there was the practically biblical plague of grasshoppers in the 1870s that obscured sunlight, destroyed all crops, and even stopped trains by making wheels spin uselessly on their crushed bodies. A survivor of the great 1888 blizzard that killed over 100 people wrote, “for a number of years I used to meet people in Omaha who had parts of ears, fingers or toes missing.” One day during the 1934 drought, rain struck a dust storm, and a rancher saw geese covered in mud fall to the ground. I grew up a modern city boy, yet my own destiny was altered when in 1975 a tornado that ripped through the center of Omaha blew the roof off my junior high and sent me to a Jesuit school I’d never planned on attending.

  Again from the seventy-year-old WPA Guide: “It is this determination to remain on the land, this never-ending struggle of human strength and will against natural forces that characterizes the Nebraskan temperament. Nebraskans are practical in temper—a trait growing out of their continual struggle for life.”

  “Practical?” What a bland word to refer to the character of our citizenry. But it is true, and it leads me to think about another term often used to describe Nebraskans—conservative. If Nebraskans default, as the overwhelming majority do, to conservatism—political and otherwise—it is not of the type endemic to financial fat-cats, jingoists, haters of the other and of the poor, NRA yahoos, or kooky Evangelicals. It is rather the conservatism born of self-starting, self-reliant individuals—Indians, waves of Germans, Czechs, Swedes—who literally carved their houses out of the ground, broke their backs against the plow, fought the elements, and had little time or patience for those who fell by the wayside. Nebraska was described by explorer Stephen Long in the 1820s as “wholly un
fit for cultivation, and … uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence,” but it was beaten into submission, particularly after the Homestead Act of 1862, by austere, frank, no-nonsense, stern, practical people. An English settler wrote home in 1870, “If any man has plenty of money, nerves of steel, a constitution warranted to withstand all climates, and … an ‘India rubber conscience,’ he may do well out here. Anyone not possessing these qualities had better stay away.” The failure rate among pioneers was extremely high.

  It’s the conservatism of strong-willed people of modest means who frown upon luxury and ostentation, and this is behind the ethos one finds there today. Omaha, for example, is a prosperous city with many millionaires, but you’d never know it. Unlike Americans on the coasts who flaunt even what they do not have, Nebraskans would never wish to appear—bend over backwards not to appear—better than anyone else or to possess more than what they seemingly need. The state motto is “Equality before the law,” but one could add “Equality before others.” People are surprised to learn that Warren Buffett still lives in the same middle-class house he bought in 1958 for $31,500, but to us it’s perfectly normal—textbook Nebraska. (My parents bought our house, two blocks away, in 1956. They still live there too.) It’s common in Omaha for millionaires to hang out with pals of modest means, and the disparity in status is never an issue; it’s almost as though we insist it not be an issue. And when people in Nebraska meet for the first time, the question “What do you do?” appears not early but late in a conversation, if at all. It would be in poor taste to appear as if you’re judging a person by class, occupation, or bank account; besides, it’s personal. Nebraska is also a place where a wealthy citizen might readily stop to help an illegal immigrant push a stalled car out of the street.

  Politically, Nebraskans are Republicans to such an extreme that President Clinton did not even set foot in the state until a month before leaving office, and since the WPA Guide was published in 1939, the only Democrat to carry a presidential election there was Lyndon Johnson. Yet Nebraskans are Republicans of a generally fair-minded, plain-speaking, egalitarian sort. During the ugly, fractious partisanship that has so characterized American politics in the last decade, and despite some of my own opinions, I found myself sharing in little of the knee-jerk Republican-bashing I often heard around me; I had, after all, grown up in Nebraska, where people are reasonable and respectful of the opinions of others even in disagreement, and where open confrontation is discouraged—I have my views, but I’d never want them to appear better than your views. We’ve had more than our share of dull, rigid politicians, but as the WPA Guide points out, “That Nebraskans are practical in temper … has been shown frequently by their choice of leaders regardless of caste or political label. The man and the actions are what count. Influenced by the industrial development of the East and by the independence and individualism of the West, Nebraska seems to follow a middle course of liberalism rooted in the soil.”