The Man Who Walked Backward

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The Man Who Walked Backward Page 5

by Ben Montgomery


  Plennie Wingo stood still in the hot lights, a curtain painted with a rural scene of tall trees and a winding river behind him, as the photographer made adjustments to his camera. Plennie assumed the posture of a man walking in reverse, though in the image that would be frozen in time, he could just as well have been walking forward, or sideways for that matter. His feet were inside shiny black shoes and he wore a light patterned necktie and a dapper homespun suit one size too large for his small frame. His brown hair was neatly trimmed around his ears and he wore on his face driving goggles with small, rectangular mirrors fixed to the rims. In his left hand he held an impressive carved coffeewood cane with a polished buffalo-horn handle. Missing from that hand was his wedding ring.

  Plennie Wingo, April 1931, Dallas, Texas. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  He stood just five feet, five inches tall but wore the shifty smile of a man twice his size, revealing a gap near his upper left bicuspid, the tooth behind the canine. He had been professionally photographed once before, sometime around 1911, his sixteenth year, with eight siblings and his mother and stepfather, but he was grown and independent now, twenty years later. A man, alone in the big city of Dallas, making a go of it. If his mother could see him, see how he eased with confidence backward across the busy big-city boulevards, how he’d already made more than a regular week’s pay in just two days…

  He had expected trouble in Dallas and was apprehensive upon arrival. While advertising for the stock show, he had been hassled by the Dallas police, who informed him that the city had implemented an ordinance prohibiting the carrying of signs of any type. So he stopped at a filling station on the edge of town to phone the mayor. Plennie explained that a policeman had nearly arrested him the last time he passed through, just a few weeks ago.

  “Yes, but what’s your problem now?” the mayor asked.

  Plennie explained what he was doing and that he planned to walk through Dallas in reverse. “May I ask your permission to pass through your city like that?” he asked.

  “Well,” the mayor said, “we don’t have laws against the way you walk.” But he hesitated when Plennie told him he might soon be carrying a sign that said something like AROUND THE WORLD BACKWARDS.

  After some hemming and hawing, the mayor said: “Oh, well, you come on through. If any of the boys stop you, just refer them to me.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Plennie said, “and look out Dallas.”

  A police officer seemed to be waiting for him when he reached the Trinity River, the Dallas skyline jutting into the air behind him. He thought the mayor had double-crossed him, but the cop was just as curious as everyone else. Plennie explained himself.

  “Buddy,” the officer said, waving him through, “the town is yours.”

  Before long a crowd formed and began following Plennie through the streets, between the impressive high-rise buildings, toward the Western Union. Dallas had grown leaps, and construction remained strong even then. The year before, a wildcatter had struck oil about a hundred miles east, and the city fast became the hub for black-gold affairs across Texas and Oklahoma. While other industry failed, oil development remained strong. In the first few months of 1931, nearly thirty petroleum-related business ventures had sprung up or moved to Dallas, and banks were providing loans to develop fields as far away as the Texas Panhandle and the Permian Basin out west.

  When Plennie emerged facing forward from the Western Union with his book stamped, the crowd began to boo. It took him a second to realize why. He explained that his stunt was to walk every step backward between cities, but once he got the stamp he could walk forward about town until he was ready to leave, whereupon he’d return to the Western Union and start again backward. Folks seemed to understand, and Plennie thanked them and checked into a nearby hotel, where he cleaned up a bit and set out to take care of a few chores. He met a man who agreed to paint a sign on a piece of sheet metal—AROUND THE WORLD BACKWARDS—for no cost. He gave an interview to a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, and a short item ran in the April 19 paper under the headline WALK AROUND WORLD BACKWARDS IS GOAL OF VISITOR FROM ABILENE:

  There may be nothing new under the sun, but Plennie L. Wingo, 36, of Abilene is trying for something he has never heard of being accomplished. He left Fort Worth Wednesday on a backward walking journey around the world and arrived here Friday. He will leave Monday, planning to visit McKinney, Sherman and Denison, Texas; Joplin and St. Louis, Mo., and Chicago, Ill., en route to New York, where he hopes to arrive by Christmas, 1931. He will take a boat for England and there will resume his walking campaign. He wears sun glasses equipped with mirror attachments, making it possible to see behind him. He hopes to walk around the world in three years. He was born and reared at Abilene, where he has been in the café business. He is married and has a 16-year-old daughter.

  Then he ducked into the first photo studio he saw, Hugh D. Tucker’s studio at 2012½ Elm Street, which offered copying, enlarging, portraits, Kodak finishing, and postcards. Tucker told Plennie his rate was twenty dollars for a thousand cards, which sounded like a deal, but after the hotel rent Plennie didn’t have enough for a thousand. They hashed it out, decided that he’d pay for half now to take with him, then Tucker would ship the other half somewhere along his route and Plennie would pay cash on delivery. Deal.

  When the flashbulb popped there in H. D. Tucker’s studio, freezing in sepia for all time a man on the front end of a very important thing, Plennie was smiling like he could hear a cash register ringing. He determined then that he would sell each postcard for twenty-five cents, versus the way he had been doing it—“Just whatever you wish to pay”—which seemed less like he was asking for charity.

  Before printing, he adorned the cards with a simple explanation along the sides and bottom portion of his portrait, an open-ended launch that answered four of the five Ws: who, what, when, where. The why would take some explaining.

  WALKING

  BACKWARD’S

  AROUND

  THE

  WORLD.

  STARTED

  4/15–31

  IN

  FT. WORTH

  EAST

  TO

  N.Y. CITY

  PLENNIE. L. WINGO

  OF ABILENE TEXAS

  He spent the rest of the evening and into the late night addressing postcards to the folks who had paid and, for good luck, to the ones who had not, to Gene Humphreys of McCamey and the folks at the Dallas Oak lunchroom, to Jack Nelson on South Erving and G. W. Seago on First Avenue. He also took a few minutes to update his journal in passable cursive (with slightly less passable spelling): “I spent the knight with Mr. + Mrs. Hoffman in their Tourist Camp at Arlington, Tex. The Courtesy shown me by them will be remembered through out my trip. As well as lots of other good people that I met in Arlington.”

  He was, even then, beginning to think about turning his adventure into a clothbound book. If all went well, the postcards would support his day-to-day needs, but liquidating his epic journey by way of book sales could potentially make him a wealthy man for life. If he could accomplish the enormous task of walking backward around the world—no small feat!—he could certainly capture the experience with words. What was so hard about it? If Pearl S. Buck and Edna Ferber could do it, so could Plennie Wingo. And who wouldn’t want to read that? The audience had taken shape already, in the crowds of looky-loos following him through the streets. All he had to do was put the words on the page and convince them to part with their money. And he’d only just begun.

  5.

  Where the Grass Grew the Thickest

  When he woke early the next morning, on Monday, April 20, 1931, it was to a vision. The only father he’d ever known, storming into the room he shared with six brothers, all sound asleep. “Get up, boys,” Plennie heard the old man holler. “It is Monday morning and we have work to do.”

  Family was on Plennie’s mind as he shot out of bed, stuffed clothes in his trunk, and tugged on his suit. Things had be
en growing steadily worse back home, and the downturn was hurting a quarter of all Americans, since nearly one in four at the last decade’s end lived on a farm. Same for his people. While the stock market crash of 1929 made only ripples in much of rural America, the following year brought a terrible reality to the Great Plains, that massive swath of fertile land that jutted down into Texas like a thumb: they’d farmed too much.

  Plennie could see it on the roadsides as he backed out of Dallas and pushed north up State Highway 6 toward Denison, Texas, and Oklahoma beyond that. His bag was aboard a bus headed the same direction and the driver slowed outside of town long enough to holler—“Come on, buddy!”—and then he was gone, leaving Plennie alone with his thoughts.

  He was a pilgrim on a peculiar journey through a gallery of the consequences of conquest. The land on both sides of the highway had been overworked, yes, but it was more than that. He was bearing witness to the side effects of generations of shortsighted subjugation.

  What had once been the magical and diverse bequest of the New World was now in many places pathetic, dry, tortured earth. The Great Plains had once been bountiful grasslands covering a full contiguous fifth of the United States and Canada, the largest single ecosystem in North America outside the boreal forest, stretching some three thousand miles from the Mackenzie River at the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Rio Grande down south, and hundreds of miles from the interior lowland and Canadian Shield in the east to the great Rocky Mountains out west. The Plains covered more than a million square miles and ten American states and, before European settlement, was home to vast herds of grazing buffalo and pronghorns, as well as other smaller, familial animals like coyotes, prairie dogs, prairie chickens, and rattlesnakes. The first Europeans to gaze upon the big flat country were Spanish colonists from Mexico in the sixteenth century, and they brought with them cattle and horses. The introduction of the horse gave rise to a thriving nomadic Plains Indian culture, and tribes like the Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Apache, Sioux, Tonkawa, Iowa, Kanza, Mandan, Omaha, Osage, Pawnee, Ponca, Quapaw, Santee, and Wichita flourished. Before the Spaniards brought the horse, hunting buffalo was difficult. Hunters would surround the beasts and force them off cliffs or into corrals made from downed trees for easier slaughter. But horses gave hunters the ability to cover great distances and strike with speed and precision. The Comanche were among the first of the tribes to adopt a mounted nomadic lifestyle, in the early eighteenth century, and they were extraordinary horsemen. They became known as the Lords of the Plains and numbered about twenty thousand by the mid-1700s. They lived off the buffalo, using every part of the beast. The meat was stew or jerky. The hide was clothing or shelter or shields. The bones were ladles or tools. The sinew made bowstrings or moccasins. Dried dung was fuel.

  The Comanche were persistently hostile to the Spanish invaders, then the Mexican invaders after them, then the Texan invaders after them. They fiercely protected their territory, known as the Comanchería, from lighter-skinned men trying to claim land in North Texas. The land—like a river, or a bird—belonged to no one and everyone; ownership and property rights were concepts of imperialists or “settlers,” as the white men thought of themselves. So when Texas became a republic and organized a militia called the Texas Rangers to combat the natives in the 1840s, the Comanche struck back hot and hard, displaying time and again their skill and courage in raid after raid.

  Near the small town of Plano, about twenty miles northeast of Dallas, Plennie walked past the site of a slaughter that would live on in Texas lore, despite the lack of white witnesses. There on the bank of Rowlett Creek were buried the bodies of two of Plano’s first settlers, Jeremiah Muncey and McBain Jamison, who had tried to lay claim in the 1840s to more than six hundred acres given them by the Republic of Texas. Ninety years before Plennie passed by, Muncey and Jamison had built a lean-to and were working on a log house when a hunting party stumbled across the two men dead on the floor. They found the mutilated bodies of a woman and child nearby. Two other boys had gone missing, and their remains were found in the nearby woods a year later. They blamed the Indians.

  So went the surge and heave of bloody settlement, the constant taking and resisting, the steady stream of immigrants staking out turf in a world that was not theirs. By 1867, the federal government had decided to try to negotiate with the tribes who had successfully resisted white encroachment into the Great Plains. The government dispatched a Congressional Peace Commission to broker the deal. The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 granted the Sioux a reservation in the Northern Plains, and the Fort Laramie Treaty the next year gave a reservation in Indian Territory to the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Kiowa-Apache, and Comanche.

  The decision whether to cooperate and relocate fell to Ten Bears, the elderly leader of the Comanche. The terrible dichotomy of his predicament—to resist or retreat—gurgled through his address to the commission.

  “It was you who sent out the first soldier, and it was we who sent out the second,” he told the men. “Two years ago, I came upon this road, following the buffalo, that my wives and children might have their cheeks plump, and their bodies warm. But the soldiers fired on us, and since that time there has been a noise, like that of a thunderstorm, and we have not known which way to go. The Comanches are not weak and blind, like the pups of a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and farsighted, like grown horses. We took their road and we went on it. The white women cried, and our women laughed.…You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and to make us Medicine lodges. I do not want them.”

  Ten Bears had been born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, where there was nothing to break the light of the sun. There were no enclosures. Everything drew a free breath. And he wanted to die there, not within walls.

  “I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas,” he said. “I have hunted and lived over the country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them, I lived happily. When I was at Washington, the Great Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours, and that no one should hinder us living upon it. So why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind, and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep.”

  He expressed hate for the Texans, who’d reneged time and again on their treaties, and felt that the land was not the federal government’s to offer up.

  “The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was best,” Ten Bears said. “Had we kept that, we might have done the thing you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.”

  So the invading US Army began to destroy the homes and livestock of the Indians, raiding villages with wagon guns and modern rifles and using women and children as human shields. They began to cut off the food supply of the natives. In the Plains, this meant killing the buffalo that had roamed the grasslands since the last ice age, ten thousand years before. Within a few years of the Medicine Lodge Treaty, whites were killing buffalo by the millions. Railroads advertised excursions wherein passengers fired .50-caliber rifles into the herds from the windows of trains for sport. One man named Orlando Brown claimed to have killed six thousand bison himself and lost his hearing from the constant shooting. When it looked like the population was decimated, the Texas Legislature considered passing a bill to protect the surviving herds, but US Army general Philip Sheridan opposed it.

  “These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary,” he said. “And it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and th
e festive cowboy…forerunner of an advanced civilization.”

  In a two-year period in the 1870s, one government agent estimated the bison slaughter at 25 million. The beasts were stripped of hide and horn for trading back east, and their rotting carcasses were left strewn across the great grassland. The Indians looked on in horror. The white-hot sun bleached the buffalo bones as men laid railroad ties through open lands, and the man who financed it all said, “Immigration will soon pour into these valleys,” and, “Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years,” and, “This is the grandest enterprise under God!” The last spike was driven in the Pacific Railroad in 1869, and a mere three hundred buffalo remained. Sixty million buffalo to three hundred buffalo in a hundred years. That’s what civilization looked like.

  The Indians submitted and the buffalo rotted and the Plains sat empty. No one was sure what to do with them next. They turned to the plow. The land once described as unalluring and uninhabitable and worthless was pitched as bountiful and prosperous in brochures that made it all the way to Europe. The farm was the way forward. Turn the land, the boosters said. Rain would follow the plow. And it did, for a time.

  The railroad came to Plano, Texas, in 1872. The town incorporated in 1873. Barbed wire was invented in 1874. By 1888, when the St. Louis, Arkansas, and Texas Railway Company ran lines intersecting the Houston and Texas Central, Plano was a bursting outlet for productive blackland-prairie farmers. The Indians and bison were gone and the land was fertile. The telephone line came, then the public school and the fire department and the Palace Theater and City Hall.

  To make money in an unsustainable market, speculative farmers turned millions upon millions of acres of flourishing prairie in the High Plains states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico into wheat fields. In the early twentieth century, when one million immigrants a year flowed into the United States, some stayed put and made homes in the great cities of the East. But thousands of others set out for the Plains, lured by the temptation to work their own tracts of prairie and get rich off dry-land farming. In good times they busted the sod, turned it with machines, and made profits ten times over the cost of production. Word spread that a woman had made a profit of $75,000 on two thousand acres of Kansas, more than the president of the United States earned. Two hundred million acres of land on the Great Plains was homesteaded between 1880 and 1925. In the next five years, five million acres of native sod was plowed in the Southern Plains. So much food was produced that by 1929 there was a surplus in the United States. Farmers stacked unsold wheat in giant towers or left it to rot in the fields rather than pay to harvest what would not be returned in profit. Early the next year, 1930, while Plennie was hatching his backward idea, wheat was selling for an eighth of what it had sold for ten years before. Suitcase farmers who had flocked west to cash in ghosted their homesteads. The grass was gone. The land was now exposed soil. Those who remained plowed more with the idea that to break even, they had to expand even farther. The harvest in 1930 would break every known national record for wheat grown.

 

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