by Tom Cunliffe
‘Where you bound?’ I asked.
‘You guys took your time starting,’ he observed laconically as he mopped his sweating forehead. ‘But you’re the best of transport. This humidity’s killin’ me. I’m headin’ up for the old Jones place. Track must be around thirty miles north.’
‘You familiar with the turn-off?’
Every few miles, dirt lanes wandered away into the hills. Some were marked by a lone mailbox. The rest could have led to the rainbow’s end.
‘Nope. But I reckon I’ll spot it. You runnin’ about sixty?’
I nodded.
‘I’ll time us. I’ll know the place.’
We gave him a drink of water, then reorganised the luggage to make room on Black Madonna. He hopped aboard, jammed down his hat and away we went across the fractured plain, the bike note deepening as we powered up hills, and settling back to a sweet purr dropping down into the valleys. My washed-out green cotton shirt flapped in the heat and my forearms burned an even deeper brown above my hands, wet with sweat inside skin-tight black leather riding gloves. The road was so empty that Roz came up alongside, using the whole highway to maintain a safe distance in case either of us weaved. Betty was a grand sight, pounding the prairie as she was born to do, her buckskin tassels flying in the slipstream. I thought about the die-hards back East who’d said the bike didn’t have the guts for the long haul. From the general bike scene around the larger towns, I now understood why they thought so. Most 883s are used only for short-range pottering, but then, so are a lot of full-sized Hogs. It was all a question of perceived image and nothing to do with the facts. The sunshine Harley was performing far better than any traditional bike I’d ever owned. There was no question of Madonna leaving her behind. There was still a long way to go, but so far Betty Boop was gobbling the job.
Exactly half an hour after we’d picked him up, the hitch-hiker dug me in the ribs. I leaned the bike into a run-down track to the left and we climbed off as Roz propped Betty on a carefully selected piece of ground that was hard enough to hold the stand. The silence after the engines would have been oppressive but for the chirping of the grasshoppers.
‘You got relatives up there?’ I asked. The lane was grown over and could not have taken a vehicle for months.
‘Nope. Never knew the people. Reckon they’ve been gone twenty years or so.’
I looked across the prairie. We were on a high section. If there were any valleys in the vicinity, they were well-hidden by the tall grass. There was no indication that anything had changed since the Indians and the buffalo left, save for the roughly metalled road and the telegraph lines withering out into the distant haze. It was none of my business, but curiosity bettered social caution and I asked him point-blank what he was up to.
Robert was a treasure hunter, a modern-day prospector. He was broke, unemployed and homeless, but he had hit a winning streak on the Keno lottery. He had also met a woman up in North Dakota who drank his whiskey then told him about a stash of buried silver coins on the abandoned Jones farm.
‘People there died,’ he said. ‘He had a cancer. His wife hung on five years on her own. The woman I met was with a group of hippies – come up here years ago lookin’ for the simple life. They didn’t find it, but they discovered the old lady and they didn’t like that at all. She’d been dead three weeks, the sheriff said. Coyotes had been in. Seems they didn’t have no children. Preacher came up next with some folks from the town. They took away what was left an’ they buried her.’
‘So how do you know about the coins?’
‘There was a letter the old girl had been writing. It wasn’t finished. “Dear Eliza,” it said, but there wasn’t no address, so the woman kept it. She showed it to me.’
As the story grew ever more improbable, it transpired that the unsent note had mentioned the silver and that it was buried ‘good and safe’, but that there was no indication of its whereabouts. The hippies hadn’t even looked, but on the strength of the tale Robert had spent his winnings on a metal detector, bought a week’s rations and headed for the booty. He didn’t mind telling us, he said, because our bikes indicated that we were well enough heeled not to consider shooting him for his metal detector.
‘Besides,’ he added, patting his satchel meaningfully, ‘I’m ready for trouble.’
Fascinated, we walked with Robert up the track to the clump of cottonwoods a mile from the road which hid the remains of the Jones place. The inevitable windmill still hung on to two of its original twenty blades by the side of the weather-board house. A porch wider than the living room of our English cottage must once have been a source of pride to Mr Jones, but now the screens had blown away on the endless winds while the wooden steps had rotted and broken under the weight of winter snow. Somebody, perhaps the burial party, had cleared the homestead out comprehensively. Maybe the job was completed by other fortune-hunters who dropped by some time over the last quarter-century, but not a stick of furniture remained in the parlour; even the beds had been taken. Weeds were growing up through the floorboards and the roof had fallen in at the rear, showing an impassive sky with the first clouds of the day beginning to boil up.
I stood in the back kitchen and thought about Mrs Jones. No farmer’s wife in her day made a positive decision to remain childless, so one way or another she and her husband had carried the burden of barrenness through their life together in this remote homestead. The rose wallpaper was peeling away under the onslaught of the weather but the cooking range where a lifetime of meals for two had taken shape was still defying nature. Above it was the sole surviving sign of warm human life. A calendar given out by a North Platte agricultural supplier. No monthly picture, just a tear-off four-week planner. March 1968. She’d clung to life through one last winter, but had finally given up the ghost, perhaps in the last blizzard of that year. Nothing was written on the day squares. It was her time to go.
Out in the yard, the mood was less gloomy. We ate oranges from our saddlebags while Robert told us his plans. The money he was about to dig up was already earmarked to finance his next venture which, he hoped, would take care of his needs forever.
‘What happened is no secret,’ he said, ‘but I’ve worked out where the gold will be.’
‘What gold?’
‘The gold that was sittin’ in a Pony Express depot out in Wyoming. It was on the way through when the place was attacked by Indians. The office was hooked by wire to the transcontinental railroad track. The telegraphist was the last man alive. He banged out a message that he’d buried the gold in a Dutch oven. Then they scalped him. The cavalry found the bodies, but they never found no gold.’
Robert had discovered a plan of the station and decided that anyone in his right mind would have buried the gold across a shallow river whose waters ran just below the buildings. He was also confident that nobody had yet searched the area with a metal detector. The problem was, he had to have a four-track to reach the remote site. It was hard to imagine Mr and Mrs Jones’ life savings amounting to even a clapped-out Chevrolet pick-up thirty years on. I suggested a trail bike, then we left him alone with his schemes. We also left him our water, because he had none, and without it he looked set to join Mrs Jones in the local cemetery before he made good. An hour later we were drinking our fill in North Platte.
We quit town at breakfast time after meeting up with three middle-aged adventurers on the spree from their suburban wives. Like every other motorcyclist for a thousand miles, they were bound for Sturgis, but their message was in total contrast to the last intelligence we’d received. When they heard Roz was bound for this centre of biker violence, our backstreet heroes warned us to watch out for gangs, not to venture anywhere near Buffalo Chip Campground and not to ride out after three in the afternoon, because of the militant high-velocity drunks. They asked what type of firearm I carried, sucked their teeth at my unarmed irresponsibility, then blasted off up the valley in a cloud of blue smoke and insecurity.
I glanced towards Roz.
Thirty miles up the potholed road we ran into solid evidence that the theory of travel and tourism Roz expounded in Dodge City was bang on the money. The same holds good at sea. If you are the first foreign yacht ever to visit some far-off outpost, be it in Norway, Russia or the South Sea Islands, the locals will come looking for you full of curiosity. It only remains for you to be pleasant and they will open up. Arrive after the same place has been overrun with visitors for a decade or two and, with a few notable exceptions such as the Azores, the main interest the natives have is how many bucks they can screw from your pocket before you give up and leave. The central United States has seen little in the way of casual callers off the beaten track, and less of motorcycle travellers. The great plains are of almost oceanic proportions. A couple biking in from a different world on the other side take on the status of deep-sea wanderers and are greeted with generosity.
The country people of Nebraska love to put one over on the city dweller. When he learned that we knew New York, the proprietor of the solitary service station in the tiny settlement of Tryon, just had to tell us about how he had faced down a hard-nosed New Jerseyman. An ex-trucker, he’d once carried a load scheduled for delivery before the next evening just west of the George Washington Bridge. Even using the interstate system, the timing had proved too tall an order, and after driving non-stop for thirty-six hours, our man found himself approaching the bridge at the close of the working day. Perhaps understandably, he missed his exit in the fourteen lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike, was unable to turn around and ended up having to pay $12 to cross the Hudson River into Manhattan. The toll really got to him, but he worked through the streets, re-crossed the bridge and arrived at the drop just as the storemen were leaving. The slick manager told the Nebraskan that he’d have to come back in the morning as they didn’t work out of hours for a delivery driver who hadn’t called in that he would be late. Disgusted, the driver grabbed his repeating rifle from the back of his cab and secured their attention by loosing off three rounds into the door of the showroom. When they returned from their hiding places, he announced that he would rather tip the load into the Hudson than wait until morning for their convenience. Seeing that he meant it, they opened up, took in the cargo and bought him a beer. The following month, they sent in a far larger order which, he said, went to show that New Yorkers weren’t as bad as people said, so long as you gave good return for their rudeness.
‘Love the bikes,’ admired a young rancher filling up from the other side of the pump.
‘Do you ride?’ I asked.
‘Only an off-roader for cow work,’ he responded unexpectedly, ‘but I’d sure like a road machine one of these days.’
‘You mean you round up cattle on a motorbike?’ asked Roz.
‘Sure thing,’ he replied. ‘We still keep a horse. Use both together sometimes, but the bike’s cheaper. More fun too,’ he added with a self-conscious grin.
He joined our conversation with the garage man and Roz expressed her concerns about the Sturgis event. Neither man even knew where Sturgis was, or had any interest in its dubious claim to fame.
‘You guys in a hurry?’ the farmer suddenly asked. ‘Come on down to the ranch in the morning. Me and my pa have a load of heifers to get to market. You might enjoy the action.’
Prices in town were now almost embarrassingly low and we were charged just $20 for a homely room. Leila, the owner, gave us coffee and lemon cake. She wouldn’t take a cent for her hospitality. Instead, she sent me to Sowders’ Store (‘Western Art, Rocky Mountain Jeans, Hats, Short Orders, Sandwiches to Go’) across the street to have my boots resoled, then told us that the rancher must have been Kirk Neal, who runs 6 sections with his father 15 miles north of town.
A ‘section’ of land is equivalent to a square mile, a system of measurement adopted for the original survey of the West begun by Thomas Jefferson and completed in the late nineteenth century. At that time, plains townships of 36 sections were designated on a geometrical pattern before they were settled or, in some cases, even thought of. The arrangement, together with a number of early military highways of Roman straightness, goes some way to explain the grid-iron framework of the prairies.
After supper we ambled down a side street, past the three or four homes that bordered it and out into the wild land beyond. The smell of the earth was strong in the moonless darkness, and the stars burned sharply. Half a mile from the buildings the faint sounds of the settlement faded out. There was no traffic noise and zero light pollution. The whisper of a breeze had sprung up with sunset, the grass rustled quietly and somewhere far to windward a cow lowed. Gigantic nature seemed to be pressing in on the 100-year-old township, calling in ghosts from the former cattle trails. According to our map, the population of the 800 square miles of McPherson County was 534 souls. Maybe 100 of them lived around Tryon. The rest were spread very thinly indeed. Cherry County to the north of McPherson, named after Lieutenant Samuel A. Cherry, murdered in 1881 by one of his own men, is two-thirds the size of Wales. Its only town of more than 200 inhabitants is Valentine at 2,826. Western Nebraska is not troubled by overpopulation.
13
RANCHERS AND
FARMERS
The 15 miles north to the Neal ranch after breakfast the following morning gave scant time for reflection on the change of country from the fractured plain and open prairie we had been crossing for two weeks. Twenty thousand square miles of western Nebraska is made up of arid sandhills more or less held together by sparse clumps of coarse grass. Before the white man began to settle the area it was the home of the Pawnees, until an epidemic of imported European smallpox in 1831 wiped out over half their population with more deadly efficiency than the carbine ever did. The powerful Sioux moved into the vacuum, and it was them that the first settlers and cowmen had to contend with. The area was known to exist because it bordered the well-beaten Oregon Trail in the Platte Valley, but it was not until the late 1870s that reports from wandering cowboys of lush valleys among the sand led to the arrival of the cattle barons. By the mid-1880s, herds of up to 50,000 head roamed the sandhills, but the land failed to regenerate from this range-plundering. Having denuded much of the grazing, the legendary barons moved on, leaving the sandhills to less ambitious ranchers who began nurturing the difficult land.
We swung off the pitted surface of Highway 97 at the Neal mailbox and my morale sagged as I saw the track winding into the hills ahead. I knew what Roz would be thinking.
‘Oh, hell! Another dirt road and I can’t dodge this one.’
Up until now, Roz had managed to avoid following me far on to an un-metalled road, but this time there was no choice. Having to hold the Harley on its feet along the western highways was bad enough, but the rutted, semi-graded surface of dirt paths half-destroyed by winter weather was off limits. I felt some frustration as a result, but hung in without too much complaint, grateful that my partner had the guts to come this far and hoping that her resolve would not crack. If she came off, even unhurt, it would set her back a month. It might also bend the bike.
But she didn’t tumble, and soon the ranch house appeared about a half-mile from the road, nestling deep into a small valley. The modern-style bungalow was surrounded by outhouses, screened by a group of densely foliated cottonwoods and sided by a large corral full of bellowing beasts. As we came into view, we saw Kirk talking with a slim, broad-shouldered man on a trail bike. He waved us over and introduced Laverne, his ‘old man’, who had inherited this ranch from his own father and grandfather.
As he clambered off the Yamaha, Laverne moved with surprising fluidity in his high-heeled boots and blue jeans, his legs slightly bowed
from long years in the saddle. A few years earlier, he had left the ranch free for his son and moved into a ‘buy-it-from-our-showroom-and-take-it-away’ house a mile or two down the track. At around sixty-five, he could have been the perfect client for an off-the-peg retirement home. Instead, he worked the cattle as number two. This morning, he was here to help load the heifers on to the truck, when it arrived. The breeze plucked at his green check shirt, but didn’t trouble the tall hat clamped above his weather-burned face as if it had grown there.
Laverne was straight from a John Wayne movie, except for the motorbike where once a horse would have stood. Kirk represented the new fashion in cowboy gear, herding in a sweatshirt, comfortable pants and baseball hat.
Kirk packed Roz and me into a museum piece Chevrolet pick-up for a tour of the spread. We lurched away slowly across the uneven grass of the sandhills, climbing unsteadily to the top of a high mound from where Kirk assured us we could see 35 miles.
‘We can fatten six to eight cows per hundred acres here,’ he announced to our astonishment. We knew of dairy farmers in England who made a living 180 acres ‘all up’. The widely spread cows were a gauge of the poverty of the land.
‘Those heifers down in the corral,’ he continued, ‘they’re crossed Hereford and Angus with a few Charolais. There’s sixty-five of them and they’re around a third of our gross annual output.’
‘What’ll happen to them?’
‘Truck’ll come around lunchtime. They go to auction in North Platte and on to a fattening yard, then it’s the dinner table.’