by Tim Slessor
Title Page
MORE THAN COWBOYS
Travels through the History of the American West
Tim Slessor
Publisher Information
First published in 2012 by
Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road
Oxford
OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2013 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Tim Slessor 2012, 2013
The right of Tim Slessor to be identied as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. e whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.
Preface
“Well, good luck, and mind you tell them that it was a whole lot more than just cowboys.”
He was an oilman. We were both checking in at a motel in Casper, Wyoming. He asked me what I - obviously a Brit - was doing in those parts. Perhaps he thought that I was an oilman too. I explained. So, while the desk clerk ran our cards through her swipe and then gave us our keys, we stood and talked for a few minutes. Then we picked up our bags, said goodnight and went off to our rooms. It was one of those brief, chance encounters. But moments later, I was struck by his last, over-the-shoulder advice. It had a satisfying ring; it made good sense too. After all, the West is “a whole lot more than just cowboys”. Maybe I had a title for my book.
***
I have some explaining to do.
First, everything in this book is true. And even if it isn’t, it could be. You will soon see what I mean...
Second, the chapters that follow are uneven and often partial. Given the enormous spread of the West, in both its geography and history, they could hardly be anything else. So please, don’t expect a narrative that is neatly systematic. There are all kinds of omissions, bumps, diversions and potholes along the way. But more than that, and for most of the time, my path heads towards the places (and their histories) that I have come to know. My enthusiasms go back to the days when, once upon a time, I lived and worked for a very happy year on the High Plains; later I was lucky enough to have a job making documentaries for the BBC that took me zigzagging across those parts, particularly across Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. So, after a few broad-brush chapters, that is where we will be heading.
Third, you will ask how a mere Brit could have the nerve to write about something as quintessentially American as the West. That is a fair point and, 30 years ago, when I first started to write things down, I would have been too shy to attempt an answer. Indeed, I hid my early efforts in a bottom drawer for those three decades. But with increasing age, there comes a lowered embarrassment level - and I am now well into my dotage. Also, some of my American friends have suggested that I might have a different “take”, a foreigner’s angle, on certain well-worn subjects; it is encouraging of them to suggest that.
Fourth, who do I think I am writing for? Brits or Americans? The short answer is that I hope I am writing for both. But there is another possibility: maybe I am really writing for myself - putting together a sort of personal “thank you” to a people who, for nearly 50 years, have always made me welcome and whose history fascinates me. Therefore I have told my laptop that everything must be spelt/spelled in American. That task it has now learnt/learned, but of course it can’t cope with “usage”, which on one side of the Atlantic is sometimes different than/different from that on the other. So, Americans, please allow me occasional slips or perhaps some overly obvious perceptions. For instance, it is interesting for me to see that the Founding Fathers, when writing the Constitution, used the English spelling (originally from medieval Norman-French) for labour and defence. But if any of this is already familiar, please recognize/recognise that it may not be for many British readers.
Fifth, I make few claims for originality. Indeed, there is not much in this book that a diligent reader will not find in a good library. I don’t apologize/apologise for that; I am not trying to assert my credentials as a researcher. So, only rarely have I gone back to original sources, because by now all the usual archives have been so thoroughly plowed/ploughed over that they are unlikely to provide anything new, let alone revelatory. After all, most writers of history, if they are honest, have distilled the works of a whole slew of earlier literary explorers and pathfinders. How could it be otherwise unless they were actually “there” - at Fort Laramie, Sutter’s Mill, Wounded Knee, the Alamo or wherever? Even then, one will often read almost as many different eyewitness accounts of what took place (especially if the event was controversial) as there were people taking part. So it seems to me that, once past a few basic and unarguable historical facts (the Union won the Civil War, Colonel Custer most certainly did not win at Little Big Horn), one is quickly into the much more interesting background of a given event: what were its causes and, even more important (given that we may still be living with some of them), what were its consequences? At which point there is, as often as not, a divergence of opinion among the different commentators. In short, we have moved into interpretation. And that, surely, is what makes history so interesting. In other words, except in its most basic elements, history is seldom merely what happened; it is, more often than not, what different people think happened; or sometimes, even more pertinently, what they want to think happened. I am arrogant enough to hope it is my thinking, my occasional original opinions, that will interest the reader; but that of course is for the reader to decide.
Further, and in connection with that last paragraph, I am told that in the eyes of some professional historians a deficiency of detailed endnotes and source references labels one as someone of negligible legitimacy. So be it: I am resigned to being illegitimate. As already admitted, much of my information comes from a distillation of other people’s books and articles; I have listed around 200 of them in the Bibliography, and selected choice quotations for the chapter openings. Nevertheless, besides picking my way through other men’s literary flowers, I have driven many thousands of miles (and walked a few) across the West, and I have visited many (though certainly not all) of the places I write about. I have also talked and listened to people who know far more about these things than I do.
Lastly, although at the end of this book I acknowledge in some detail the help I have had at so many points in putting the whole thing together, I want to say another “thank you” at this early stage as well. So, I thank everyone who responded to my questions and who offered advice, encouragement or simple kindness: like that oilman in Casper, or the warden-historians at the Little Big Horn Battlefield, or the highway patrolman who pulled me over for speeding (and then let me off), or the Kansas farmer who stopped his pick-up on a back-country road to ask if I had a problem. When I explained that I had just pulled over to look at my map, I think he was mildly disappointed. I mention him (without even getting close enough to ask his name) because his concern was, and is, entirely typical of the hospitality one gets all over the West, from complete strangers.
Tim Slessor
Wimbledon, 2011
First Things First
We think so much of our state that if the Good Lord chooses it for His second coming, we’ll be pleased, but not much surprised.
A notice over the mirror in a Scottsbluff (Nebraska) barber’s shop
***
More than 45 years ago, being disappointed with my boss, I left my BBC job, or, to use the vernacular in which I soon found myself, I “up’n’quit” - to go and work for 12 months on the Great Plains of the American West. I had been there before; I have been back many times since. I was, and still am, fascinated by the place.
It is a well-worn cliché, but the West is much more than just an enormous spread of geography. As has often been observed, it is also a way of life, a state of mind, an attitude, a style, a way of saying and doing things. Westerners - the real ones, not the dudes - even walk, talk and smile a little differently than the rest of us. And, more often than not, they think a little differently too - sometimes a lot differently. So, above all, the West is its people, past and present. They have always been rather special, and, based on my hither-and-thither travels around the rest of the world, I can tell you that they are also among the most open and hospitable. And one other thing: even though many of them hardly recognize it, they are conditioned by an epic sweep of history; I am thinking of the facts, not the fiction - though, at times, the two are (satisfyingly) not too far apart. Yet, intriguingly, if any of today’s Westerners think about these things at all, their time-perspective is such that they are likely to regard “the taking of the West” (and much that followed) as having happened only a little this side of Magna Carta. Yes, I exaggerate. But not much.
After all, when the BBC first sent me filming “out west” in 1961, I found myself listening to an 82-year-old Sioux who told me how, as a boy, just after Christmas in 1890, he had watched the 7th Cavalry (yes, the same 7th that, under Colonel Custer, had been chopped up only 14 years before) riding out to bring in a minor chief called Big Foot and his small band of followers - an episode that ended in the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee. “So-called” because it was not much of a battle, more a massacre. I do not know if the old man was telling me the truth, but, given his age, there is no reason to suppose that he was not. Later and elsewhere, I met a gnarled old rancher who proudly told me that his father, as a lad, had ridden with Butch Cassidy; indeed, he had held the horses while Butch went into various small-town banks to make “some cash withdrawals”. Further, he was adamant that, in his father’s company, he had briefly met Butch in the early 1920s. So, Butch was not killed in Bolivia, but secretly came home to live out his days under a false name - until he died of cancer in 1937. (We will come to that intriguing story.) And then there was Mr. Roberts, born before the Civil War. At 101 he still lived on the same Colorado acres that his parents had staked out as their homestead in the mid 1870s. Some 92 years later he was still grumbling about what he judged to be an ill-considered treaty under which some local “Injuns” had been given back their guns. Today of course, 50 years later, he and those other old-timers are long gone. But, once upon a time, I met and listened to them; I still feel something between awe and great privilege that I did so.
Anyway, back in 1965, and some weeks before my wife and I and our two small children left London, a friend from New York was downright disbelieving. “But why do you want to go and live in Nebraska?” To him, as to many East Coast sophisticates, the place was not an appropriate destination for anyone except perhaps, well, Nebraskans. At the same time, an English friend said that, yes, he knew about New York, New Orleans, New Jersey, New Hampshire and even New Mexico. “But come again, where’s this place, New Brasker?” Perhaps he was joking; I hope so.
I at least knew where the place was. But I had no tightly drawn idea of why I wanted to go and live there for a year. I just did. Anyway, given that the land now 8,000 feet below was Nebraska, it was rather late for introspection.
Places visited in the text
Earlier that day we had lifted away from a London morning, and then, pressurized and slightly queasy, we had arrowed through the stratosphere at something over 500 mph, non-stop for Chicago. There, dropping down into the sticky heat of a mid-western August, we presented ourselves at US Customs. “Any fresh meats or agricultural products?” “Yes,” my wife answered brightly, “we have a couple of apples for the children.” The Customs man’s eyebrows went up and, throwing back his head, he hollered “A-a-agareeculchah!” (A statement of fact or of amazement?) Presently another man with a pair of long tongs appeared; with a “thank-you-ma’am”, he carefully lowered the offending apples into a plastic sack. Clearly, we had arrived in the U.S. of A. With only 30 minutes remaining to make a connection, we ran to catch the next plane. “Just think positive, ma’am, and you’ll make it”, advised the Customs man. So we flew another 300 miles to Omaha where, still thinking positive, we changed planes again, to Frontier Airlines.
Now, nearly 15 hours from London, we were still flying west - though more slowly, and under mere propeller power. It was the same sun, swinging down into the sinking evening, that had risen that morning over our departure from Wimbledon. My still uncorrected watch showed an English midnight.
Every 20 minutes or so the plane, a workhorse DC3-Dakota, banked to glide into some town with a western-sounding name: Grand Island, North Platte, Scottsbluff. Coming in over the rooftops, one sees that there is not much that is European about these places; they have not grown higgledy-piggledy, slowly and organically down the centuries. A railroad track runs like tailored stitching down the middle. Beside the track, tower enormous white grain elevators, like ultra-modern cathedrals. The low sunlight flashes off the cars parked slant-wise, like horses at a hitching rail, along Main Street. Less than one hundred years earlier most of these places had not even existed.
They grew up as depot towns in the late 1860s along the railroad which, searching out a route to the Rockies and to the Pacific far beyond, was hammering down its rails along the same rough trail taken in the years before, first by the westering fur-trappers, later by the wagons overlanding to Oregon, then by the Mormons, the gold-seeking Forty-Niners on their way to California, the Pony Express and, lastly, the continental telegraph. They all made their way up the wide valley of the River Platte, the greatest of all the highways leading west from the center of the continent. From the air, considering its place in history, it is a disappointing river. In the evening, it flashes silver as it trickles over the sandbars; then, as the flaps are lowered and the aircraft turns against the sun on its final approach, the water loses the slanting light and turns to mud. The Platte: “Too thick to drink, too thin to plow, and so muddy that the fish have to come up to sneeze.” The early settlers often said things like that; sometimes their grandchildren still do.
The plane only stops for a few minutes. Maybe a cowboy gets off (well, he is wearing a cowboy hat, pointy boots and a big-buckled belt, but he could be a local lawyer who likes dressing up); a bundle of the afternoon papers out of Omaha is dumped on the warm tarmac; a couple of businessmen get aboard, one of them unclips his tie and immediately goes to sleep. Then we fly on.
We are over the deep heart of the continent; the Atlantic is nearly 1,500 miles behind; the Pacific is almost as far away to the front. We have crossed the 98th meridian; in geography and history this is the line where the mid-West becomes the West, where the grass becomes shorter and drier and, away from the few rivers, the trees become almost non-existent.
In the dusk, the wing-tip lights flashed red and green; we banked and then steadying gently we slid onto the runway. The flight hostess took down our coats and toys from the rack, opened the door, lowered the steps and, as we stepped down and thanked her, she gave us the gentle goodbye we were to hear so many, many times over the next twelve months. “You’re welcome, and mind you take care now.” We walked across the tarmac still radiating from the afternoon sun. Behind us, the DC3 turned and taxied back to the runway. Then, with an accelerating growl, it lifted off on the last leg of its schedule, north 100 miles to Rapid City.
So, in one very long day, we had come from Wimbledon to western N
ebraska - to the small town of Chadron.
***
I had first been west a few years before, filming for the BBC. When that particular assignment was almost finished I had phoned my wife to suggest she fly over and join me. Having no children at that stage, there was just enough money to spare. Over a three-week vacation we rented a VW Beetle out of Denver and saw enough of Nebraska and Wyoming to make us want to come back - one day. Two years later, I was lucky enough to persuade the BBC to send me back again to make a five-part series to be shown on the shortly-to-be-opened channel BBC2. By the time I got back from that assignment, I was completely hooked.
So now, with two small children, we had come back. We were going to live and work here in Chadron. Through a Nebraskan friend I had met three years earlier, I had been offered a job teaching English. I was nervously unqualified. But if I could hold my nerve, the job would, at the least, keep us in rent-money and food for 12 months. Our son Jeremy was just 4; our daughter Katy was nearly 2. So they were old enough to travel, but not old enough to be at school. It seemed the right time to take off. Indeed, we reckoned that if we did not go then, we probably never would.
It was a very good year. And ever since (well, until I retired over 35 years later) I was lucky enough to have a job that allowed me to go back - again and again. So, over almost half a century, I have grown to know as much about the West (“my” part of it, anyway) as many Americans, and more than most foreigners. Much of what I have picked up is not remotely significant, but I take an unreasonable pride in it. I know where one can still see the ruts of the overland wagons (just south of Guernsey, Wyoming); where there is a good cheapish motel in Cheyenne (The Scout); how to make the quickest time between Laramie and Casper (along the back roads of the Shirley Basin); what to do if stopped on a highway by a police car (keep still and don’t get out until the officer tells you); where to look for arrow-heads (in the miniature badlands 5 miles west of Chadron); how to play a passable game of horseshoes; when (and when not) to filter right on a red light; what to do when one of those yellow school buses slows to a halt on the highway (stop immediately, in both directions); how to keep the score when ten-pin bowling; what, in the matter of western headgear, is the difference between a Stetson, a Low Crown Topper and a Montana Peak.