More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  And, lastly, I know how to order a Western breakfast in a roadside diner without even glancing at the menu. “I’ll take a small orange juice, two eggs over-easy, four bacon strips, hash browns and a toasted English muffin.” And “Yes, I’ll take my coffee now.” (For British readers: the correct usage is “I’ll take”, never the supplicatory “Can I have?”) To spread on the muffin (second cousin to a crumpet), you will be provided with some purple goop called Smuckers Grape Jelly. The best that one can say of the stuff is that, presumably, both the grapes and the good folk at Smuckers have done their best. Believe me, for a foreigner, ordering breakfast in a diner is a most practical skill - certainly worth a Diploma in Basic American Studies. Incidentally, the coffee served in most of these places is so weak that it should be deeply ashamed of itself. Further, unless you specifically ask for “real cow milk”, the coffee will come with a plastic thimble of white stuff; the label tells you that this is “non-fattening dairy-style cream substitute”.

  Anyway, let’s get back to Chadron. Like all small western towns, it really is - as the old song had it - a place of “kind hearts and gentle people”. But, in the wider scheme of things, one has to say that most Americans have never heard of it. It thinks it gets its name from a Breton fur-trader, Louis Chatron, who presumably made friends with the Sioux hereabouts back in the very early days. A brochure put out by the town’s Chamber of Commerce - and wherever two or three small-town businessmen find themselves gathered together they quickly form themselves into a Chamber of Commerce - told us that this was The Forward City. No one I asked knew quite what that meant. But it did not matter; Chadron was a good place to live. It is unmistakably western and of the High Plains. If you look down any street, you can see grassy prairie in one direction and pine-dotted hills in the other. Within 25 miles there are places called Buffalo Gap, Mirage Flats, Hay Springs and Dead Horse Butte. Within a further 25, one will find Custer, Red Shirt, Wounded Knee and Cheyenne Crossing. You really cannot get more western than that.

  When we lived there, the town and the surrounding 1,600 square miles of Dawes County had three policemen, one traffic light and a population of about 4,000. That was 45 years ago. When I was back there in the spring of 2011 the place had grown, but not much. Main Street is as it has always been: four lanes wide, broad enough to turn a wagon and its team - useful in the early days. Downtown, behind the cars tethered nose-in to the sidewalks, are the shops and the stores. A few still have their original false fronts and peeling paint, some have neon signs hanging on modern facings of glass bricks and aluminum. Each building, one beside the other, is a different height and color; together they look like a row of very uneven teeth. Above, a complicated tangle of wires sags from pole to pole: power lines, telephone cables, street lighting. Chadron is not picturesque; few western towns are. But it has a functional charm.

  At the northern end of Main Street, the tracks of the Chicago and North-Western Railroad cut across the roadway at a wide and ungated crossing. For over 60 years, people set their clocks by the rumble of the big black steamers that came hissing and sighing through the town once a day in each direction. But no more: because of competition from trucks, the last freight trains came through in the early 1970s; because of cars, the last passengers stepped down 20 years before that. Today, a line of wagons loaded with local wheat is hauled away two or three times a summer. And that, “railroadwise”, is about it.

  These days, the town’s main artery parallels the railroad three blocks to the south: Highway 20 begins in Chicago and ends somewhere beyond the Rockies. In the two-and-a-bit minutes that it takes you to drive through the town - and the speed limit of 25 mph is rigidly enforced - one has the choice of four gas stations, three used-car lots, seven motels, five “eateries” (including a MacDonald’s, a Pizza Hut and a place that offers Kidz Kuizine). And there are two supermarkets, a couple of laundromats, a car laundry (sic), and, for those who need these things, there is the Birthright Pregnancy Store and the Jeepers Peepers Eye-Care Center. There is also a church with a sign that advises “If God is only your co-pilot, switch seats”. This, for a small western town, is pretty much the standard compliment of such facilities (and advice). And, for shopping, if you can’t find “it” in Chadron - whatever “it” may be - you had better try your luck in Rapid City 100 miles to the north or in Scottsbluff about the same distance to the south.

  Chadron is a ranching center. Along the sidewalks strolls the occasional cowboy in town for the afternoon. Some of them really do have bow-legs and walk with at least one thumb hooked into a low-slung belt; those with Stetsons wear them with the brims as tightly rolled as tricorn hats, but these days many are (disappointingly) wearing baseball caps. I don’t know about today, but back when we lived there, young “Native Americans” (one is not meant to refer to “Indians” these days, though they themselves don’t seem to mind the word) would stand against the walls between the bars down on Second Street; some of them might have walked 30 miles from the reservation. They seemed sadly aware that many people hereabouts tended to see them as a “problem”. And sometimes they were - though given their story since we whites first began to dispossess them of their land, their occasional sulky bad temper is neither surprising or unjustified. At times there is even an altercation with some local drunks. But, apart from this, when we lived in Chadron, one of the more serious crimes was breaking that speed limit.

  A paragraph back I wrote that the town is a ranching center. It is also the home of Chadron State College, a degree-granting “school” for about 2,600 students, mostly drawn from this western end of Nebraska. The College (though much smaller back in 1965) was why we had come; it had offered me a job.

  When my wife and I had decided to take a year or so out of our patterned lives in London, I had written to several friends out West. Two weeks later one of them had phoned to ask if I would be interested in teaching something called “Communications” at the College. Surprisingly, the job seemed to be mine for the taking. As my friend Phil (he ran a local newspaper) was paying for the trans-Atlantic call, and as “Communications” seemed to be broadly my “trade” (journalism, radio, TV), we did not go into much detail. Besides, the job paid better than the likely alternative: stacking shelves in a supermarket. So I wrote a formal letter to the College. Back came a reply giving me the job at $660 a month, telling me to be there at the end of August, and enclosing my “assignment schedule”. Reading it, I quickly realized that “Communications” had nothing to do with journalism, radio or television; it was just a rather American way of saying “English”. This was a disaster because, in the teaching of English, I had no qualifications or experience whatsoever. Indeed, the truth was that I had no experience of teaching anything - period.

  I phoned the College from London to explain that, in honesty, I could not take the job. But the Dean seemed much less interested in my (his?) problem than in the fact that the call was coming all the way from London. He countered my “resignation” by saying, “I understand that you went to Cambridge and that you wrote a book some years back. And besides, it will be real good for our students to be taught by someone from the jolly old BBC.” Lastly he added that the course only involved “teaching English at freshman level”, as if that did not make things even more difficult. He would not take No for an answer. Given that I had already “resigned” from the BBC, I did not have much choice. So it was fixed. I hurried to a Wimbledon bookshop to buy a book or two on English grammar. Four weeks later we were on our way.

  Dangling Participles and Misplaced Modifiers gave me some problems at first, but my students were very patient. Once I had the basic grammar sorted out, it turned out to be a very special year. For an absurd $60 a month, the College let us have a small three-room house on campus. People we had not met three days earlier lent us pots and pans. During an early snowstorm, we borrowed some warm clothes - until our trunk arrived by sea and rail. We bought a “previously owned” Ford, only slightl
y smaller than an ocean liner, for $500. We opened a bank account where, after just three weeks, it was “Hi, Mr. Slessor. What can we do for you today?” (Back home in London, they were still checking my signature after more than two years.) We watched our son Jeremy making friends with other children, and beginning to talk about candy in what we liked to think was a western drawl. And when his younger sister Katy called for what sounded like a “party”, we learned that if we didn’t hurry she would soon be needing a clean nappy. (Sorry, diaper.)

  We settled in. At weekends and holidays/vacations we explored the country around. We picnicked under Register Cliff where the Forty-Niners, with more than another 1,000 miles still to go, paused to carve their names. We found our way to Hole-in-the-Wall, a remote hide-out sometimes used by Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch. We climbed the low hill at Wounded Knee where the last shots of the Indian Wars were fired. We went to rodeos, calf round-ups and town parades. We watched mirages, bears, rattlesnakes and western sunsets. We made friends with cowboys, ranchers and the local sheriff. We listened to the radio in February telling us that it was minus 330F and, 5 months later in July, that it was “103 and goin’ up”. We learned the rules (well, we tried) of American football.

  In the longer vacations (semester breaks) we took off for the Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming ski slopes, Black Hills ghost towns, and Denver shopping malls. We got to know something of the West; or rather, a small part of it. And between times I got on with the job of trying to explain the difference between a Gerund and a Participle, between an Allusion and an Illusion. In a year we drove nearly 20,000 miles. The West is a big place.

  We submerged ourselves in the social landscape (not a happy phrase, but I can think of no other). Looking back, our Going West was one of the best ideas that we ever had. Friends sometimes ask why, as we enjoyed it so much, we did not stay. The answer lies in the fact that my trade and training was in documentary television and, let’s face it, there is not much of that in small-town America, A year’s self-imposed sabbatical is one thing; a lifetime’s is something else. But I would go back any time. Fortunately, I sometimes do.

  So, I am fascinated by the West, by its people, by its history, by its skies and by its scale, by everything about it. Well over a century ago, a traveling Englishman, Lord Bryce, wrote that the West “may be called the most distinctively American part of America because the points in which it differs from the East are the points in which America as a whole differs from Europe”. That thought is no less true today; which, I suppose, is one reason for this book. Another, as I have partly implied, is that when one is thoroughly won over by a place, its people and their story, one surely wants to tell everyone else about it.

  La Vente De La Louisiane

  The day that France takes possession of New Orleans... from that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.

  President Jefferson’s comment on learning of Napoleon’s plans to re-establish a French empire in North America

  ***

  When I try to tell my American friends about the debt the United States owes to the British for an early, critical and sudden expansion of their young Republic, they usually look doubtful. I have to admit that the story, in at least one respect, seems so improbable that I do not blame them. Anyway...

  ***

  Back in January 2009, I made a phone call to the London bankers, ING-Barings; I asked to be put through to their archivist - if they had one. Presently, Moira Lovegrove came on the phone. I explained. “Yes indeed,” she said. “We have many of the financial papers. Do you want to come and look at them?” Yes, please!

  So the next day I made my way to an address in the heart of London’s financial district. Mrs. Lovegrove met me in the lobby and took me up to a boardroom where, on the mahogany table, she carefully opened the file. There they were - nearly all the documents pertaining to what, today, we might call the nitty-gritty of the financing of what, back then, was referred to as La Vente de la Louisiane (which I will continue to refer to as La Louisiane, to save any confusion with the far smaller boundaries of modern-day Louisiana). On that table, there must have been nearly 100 items: letters, lists and memoranda in French, in English and (if I am allowed the distinction) in American. All were in beautiful copperplate writing.

  Here was what I had heard about, and, as I carefully turned those pages, I could not help thinking that those American friends would be amazed to hear of this little-known but essential stage of the proceedings. How could they imagine the crucial role that two very British institutions played in helping their not-long-independent nation to grow and, thereafter, to prosper? I am referring to the successful conclusion of what was, and still is, the biggest real-estate deal in history: the Louisiana Purchase. After all, without that colossal bargain whereby the then US more than doubled its size, how else might history have turned out? Who knows, but for the fact that a British bank advanced what was essentially the mortgage capital, there might never have been a wholly American West...

  ***

  So where and how did the British play such a key role in the growth of the young Republic - apart from the small matter of having provided most of the forebears of its liberty-loving citizens in the first place? But wait: perhaps, on reflection, that was not such a small matter. Look at the names on the Declaration of Independence and, a little later, those of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention: Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hancock, Hamilton, Madison, Henry, Randolph, Adams, Jay, Scott, Bloodworth, Livingston, Gadsden and more than 80 others. With just one possible exception (William Paca?) those would seem to be British names - English with a useful stiffening of Scots and Scots-Irish. The more intelligent among those British, whether at home or abroad, have never taken comfortably to restrictive edicts, peremptory taxes, arbitrary embargoes or heavy-handed, let alone undemocratic, rulers. That aversion is, after all, what prompted many of them to cross the Atlantic in the first place.

  No taxation without representation. Absolutely. It was a typically English response - which is why the attitude of the “rebel” colonists was well understood and supported by large sections of the thinking population back in “the mother country”. Among those thinkers, one can point to John Wilkes, Edmund Burke, William Pitt, Charles James Fox and, of course, Thomas Paine, who must have been mentally drafting his seminal Common Sense before he had even stepped ashore in the New World. And in one further demonstration of where many of the rebels, to use a modern phrase, were “coming from”, one can quote the Virginian George Mason: “We claim nothing but the liberty and privileges of Englishmen, in the same degree if we had still continued among our brethren in Great Britain.”

  Now let us get back to the purchase of La Louisiane with a question: how, specifically, did the British, 20 years after American Independence, contribute to forging the key that was to open the West? Well, among a tangle of worries in Napoleon’s mind, there was the clear, though latent, threat of the British navy, invoked and then, at a key moment, leaked by President Jefferson - as the quotation at the head of this chapter demonstrates. The last thing that Napoleon wished to see was any kind of alliance or cooperation between the Americans and the British. More specifically, the threat of a blockade by Britain’s warships either in the English Channel or in the distant Caribbean now became such a concern in Napoleon’s calculations that, in the end, he was forced to realize that he would have to abandon his grand design to re-build a North American empire from the distant bridgehead of New Orleans. Instead, and no doubt in sulky frustration, he decided that all those North American lands to which his country laid rather dubious claim were likely to become a draining liability rather than an imperial asset. They would have to be dumped - sold to the Americans. Of course there were negotiations and haggling, but on 30 April 1803 in one short Paris afternoon, to the squeak of several quill pens, the United States more than doubled its size, for $15 million. The fact is that Napoleon
, knowing that the cannons of the British navy were primed to blast apart the supply lines that he would have needed to sustain any Louisiana “empire”, had little choice but to abandon his plans. And the other contribution of the British? Well, believe it or not, given that Napoleon was unwilling to allow the Americans to pay off that $15 million in the form of a bunch of promissory notes to be redeemed, bit by bit, over the next 15 years, it was a London bank that came up with the bulk of the “here and now, money down, $15 million” that he was demanding.

  But first we need to go back 40 or so years before that afternoon of the quill pens. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Britain and France were at war: situation normal. In Europe, it was the War of the Spanish Succession or the Seven Years War; in Boston and Philadelphia it was called Queen Anne’s War; in the forests of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks it was the French-and-Indian War or “la petite guerre”. But it made no difference what it was called when, on a forest path, an arrow came singing in from 20 paces to take the next man in the throat. It was a vicious and bloody business. Both sides bribed the tribes to do most of the dirty work - paid off according to the number of scalps brought back. Generally, the British colonists suffered worst. In a series of hit-and-run raids, the French, reaching down from the St. Lawrence in the north, carried this ragged guerrilla war to within 20 miles of Boston; their Indian mercenaries burned, tortured and terrorized all along the farming frontier.