Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  The Miami camp was ready. The bison had been herded into the corral, and a line of stakes closed off the entrance. The wagons had been drawn into a ring. The horses and ponies were huddled at its center. Beneath the wagons, the children cowered with the dogs. When the first curtains of rain swept across the grasses toward the camp, each man put his arms around his horse’s neck to keep it calm.

  Then there was a barrage of hail. The children cried out; the horses bucked and whinnied; the bison bumped against each other and grunted in pain. Rain came roaring down in vast gouts, as though being spilled from a tub directly overhead. The sky was black and the air was freezing cold. Moore kept staring out to the west, where the curtains of rain were thinning and falling aside. A zone of clear air opened up beneath the clouds and raced toward them. The rain stopped. In the lull the women at the wagons expertly tied off their bulging skeins of rainwater and stowed them in the wagons. But nobody in the company relaxed.

  That was when Moore saw it: there was something strange in the under-hang of the clouds, a kind of upside-down whirlpool. It was a sickly color; Moore described it as “greenish purple.” The swirl slowly extended into a bulging elongated shape that reminded Moore of a hot-air balloon. A billow of dust began circling and dancing directly beneath it. Then the balloon cloud reached through the dust to touch the ground. It churned forward and headed straight at the caravan.

  It was enormous. Moore guessed that the base of the cloud was a half mile wide. As it approached, the air began to crackle with electricity: Moore could see phantasmal lightning, like St. Elmo’s fire, darting and dancing all around the camp, ricocheting between the wagons and the corral. Then a new downpour fell on them, not rain, but wet sand and dirt and grass and dead weeds and small dead birds and stinging twigs. The air was filled with a continuous deafening roar. The women of the company wrapped their cloaks around the youngest children and bowed their heads; the men all threw themselves flat on the ground. Everything grew pitch-black. By one of the last starbursts of lightning, Moore saw that the entire company was praying.

  Then something changed. The cloud was about a hundred yards away when it seemed to thin out; its base was suddenly growing bright and confused. Moore thought he saw sunlight shining behind it. The massed blackness above rose up as though it were skipping across the earth, and it soared over their heads, a hundred feet up, in a shrieking, whistling rush. And then it was gone.

  They all turned to look behind them. A few hundred yards farther on, the base of the cloud re-formed, touched the ground again, and went roaring over the grasslands to the east. The western sky was already clearing. The late-afternoon sun lit up the receding cloud and shed a rainbow around it across the prairie.

  The company quickly roused itself to move on. Nobody had been seriously hurt. Some of the horses were bleeding; their flanks had been gored by the hailstorm. A hailstone had also struck out the eye of one of the bison. On either side of their camp was a half-mile-wide swath of flattened grass and torn sod, like a vast road cut through the prairie. It was broken only where the cloud had taken its fluke hop over the camp. Moore was left staring at this track and wondering what on earth they had just been through.

  All the nations of the plains told stories about tornadoes. Many nations said they were caused by the thunderbird, the storm god at the heart of the cloud who stirred up whirlwinds with the flapping of his great wings. The Comanche said the storm cloud itself was a sorcerer; the tornado funnel was his bag of winds and was so heavy that when he tired, he would sometimes drag it on the ground behind him. They all knew that tornadoes had strange habits and rituals: it was universally believed among the nations, for instance, that tornadoes would not go near rivers. They advised the whites—back when they were still willing to give advice to the whites—to build their settlements at river junctions. (It was only one more example of expert advice about tornadoes that turned out to be wrong.) But it was the Kiowa who spent the most time brooding about tornadoes, because they thought the tornadoes were their fault. There wouldn’t be any tornadoes on the plains, they said, if only two Kiowa boys hadn’t been so eager for horses.

  There had once been horses in North America, back in the dawn world before the human beings arrived. But they had all died off with the other strange creatures of that age—the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves. The horses the Spanish brought with them at the beginning of the sixteenth century were the first seen in North America for more than ten thousand years.

  The Native Americans were fascinated by them. They themselves mostly used dogs as pack animals, and some of the nations started calling the horses dogs—not that they thought they were the same species, but they were so impressed by the horse’s doglike friendliness and adaptability. They were eager to get them for themselves.

  There was one place they all looked. Each year the Pueblo Nation held large trading fairs. The other nations of the Southwest and the plains would come to barter over pottery and hunting gear and bison fat and livestock. Horses had started showing up for sale by the end of the sixteenth century. They were breeding pairs that had for the most part been stolen from the Spanish (by that point, the Spanish had several thousand horses in the New World). But they were tricky commodities: people had to learn how to keep them, how to provide grazing land for them, how to train them, and how to ride them. The negotiations for purchase often had to involve a deal for an instructor. (These instructors in the early years had acquired their knowledge mostly by trial and error, because the Spanish forbade Native Americans to have anything to do with their horses; later, as the horse population grew unmanageably large, the Spanish gave in and began hiring and training locals to work as horse herders.)

  All this meant that the spread of horses through the plains happened slowly, over several generations. By the middle of the seventeenth century, horses had spread through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and were beginning to be traded by the Apache to the plains nations. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Kiowa of the southern plains had horses. But the northern Kiowa nation in the Black Hills still didn’t. The way those Kiowa told it, two boys from the Black Hills saw horses for the first time while visiting their southern relations. They were too impatient to wait for their elders to barter for a breeding pair; they wanted a horse immediately. So when they came home, they went to their greatest sorcerer, the legendary Sindi, and they asked him to make a horse. They wanted the most powerful horse in the world, a horse that would leave all the other nations of the plains in awe. So Sindi set to work. He gave them exactly what they wanted. They watched in amazement as the horse took shape on the prairie in front of them. It was a great gray horse with flashing red eyes. But it quickly became apparent that they were never going to be able to ride it. The horse was filled with such powerful magic that it was in a perpetual fury. It at once reared up and let out a deafening whinny, and then it began kicking up and stamping the ground, over and over, spinning as its hooves thundered down, spinning till it was a whirling gray blur with its eyes glowing red within. This was why it was named Red Wind. It never stopped its furious spinning; it soared up into the clouds and became the heart of the storm; but afterward sometimes its rage was so great that its spin would carry it down again and its legs would reach from the cloud to stamp the earth beneath its hooves.

  This was not a story the Kiowa always liked to tell. But they would sometimes use it to explain why only their charms and spells worked against the tornado. One Kiowa elder put it this way: When he was a young man, he was with a company that was caught out in the prairie by a roaring storm “that sounded like buffalo in the rutting season.” The cloud dipped down a funnel with a red glow at its heart. Bolts of lightning came darting down through the funnel and set the dry prairie grass on fire. When the cloud came along the banks of the Washita River, it tore trees out by the roots and tossed them into the air. “We were terribly afraid,” the elder remembered. “As it got near, it made our hair stand straight up.” The
group wanted to run. But the elders told them to take courage: “We understand about this,” they said. “It is the horse that Sindi and the Boys made that is causing the big whirlwind.” They had an urgent piece of advice: “Get out all the pipes and light them!” The chiefs produced their pipes. As soon as they had them lit, they turned their stems out and pointed them up at the funnel, crying out, “Smoke it! Smoke it!” They beseeched Red Wind to pass the group without harming anyone. “Don’t come here!” they cried. “Pass on around us!” Red Wind heard them and swerved off to the side without touching them. “We were saved,” the elder remembered. “But it was very close.” Red Wind had understood them. Since they were the ones who had made him, he naturally spoke Kiowa.

  On nineteenth-century maps of North America, the region of grasslands at the center of the continent was marked as “the Great American Desert.” This might seem like an odd choice of words for such a lush landscape, but the mapmakers didn’t necessarily mean “desert” to be taken in the modern sense—that is, an arid place with sand dunes and cacti. “Desert” still had some hint left of its original meaning, which now survives in the word “deserted.” A desert was unpeopled terrain, waste ground. It’s what Shakespeare meant when he called the Forest of Arden a “desert inaccessible.” Any wilderness, no matter how tropically fertile, could plausibly be called a desert so long as nobody was living in it.

  The grasslands of America were in this sense the biggest desert any of its white explorers had ever seen. Some of the explorers were so unnerved by the absence of trees that they thought the soil must be poisonous. They were all certain that it couldn’t be farmed. Even if there was nothing unwholesome about the soil, the practical difficulties were insurmountable: the roots of the prairie grasses had been weaving and knotting and tangling together for thousands of years to form an unbroken mat that was in many places more than ten feet deep. The strongest wooden plow couldn’t dent it (metal plows didn’t come in till the middle of the nineteenth century), and the heaviest wagon wheel wouldn’t leave a rut. This is one reason that many whites thought of the Indian Removal Act as fundamentally humane: since the Indians had demonstrated they could live in the Great American Desert, it was only fair to turn it over to them permanently, because it was land the whites would never want.

  The early records of the whites on the prairie show that they had only one concern: getting across to the far side as quickly as possible. But that was an enormously difficult undertaking. From the western fringes of the forest, where the dense tree canopies opened up into parkland and meadow, all the way out to the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, where the true sagebrush desert began, the prairie unfolded in a serene and almost uniform sea of grasses. There were no peaks or promontories, no great valleys or canyons, barely any natural landmarks of any kind: just the grasses and wildflowers filling up the landscape out to every horizon.

  In the eastern ranges, from Illinois to a few hundred miles west of the Mississippi, the dominant species of grass was big bluestem. This was a hardy and towering plant; it was why this zone came to be called the tallgrass prairie. At the peak of summer on the prairies big bluestem grew to six to eight feet high, and along the riverbanks, where the ground was wetter, it could get above ten feet. It was bright green on its upper leaf blade and dull milky green on the underside; when travelers were looking out onto a vast open expanse of big bluestem, they could see each gust of passing wind as a kind of racing footprint of paler color as the millions of grass blades bowed and yawed together. Big bluestem was also known on the prairie as ripgut grass, because the edges of its blades were razor sharp, sharp enough to draw blood. Anyone unwise enough to run unprotected through a stand of ripgut grass would emerge looking as though he’d been mauled by a panther.

  Experienced leaders of wagon trains tried to stay out of the depths of the tallgrass zone. Big bluestem grew so high that people moving through its depths were hard-pressed to tell what direction they were heading in or whether they were going in circles. They were surrounded by the walls of yielding grass, endlessly shifting and rushing, closing up over their heads, briefly opening in the winds to show random scraps of the sky. Here and there, the grasses parted around their feet in what looked like trails, but they weren’t human trails; they had been left by grazing bison and antelope (and by the wolf packs that hunted them), and they crisscrossed randomly in every direction. Any traveler foolish enough to follow one would simply end up deeper in a centerless maze. Most wagon trains had to move through the tallgrass country at a creep, inch by inch, with teams of men proceeding ahead of the line swiping at the grass with scythes, while the convoy’s commander perched on the lead wagon peering down continually at a compass.

  It was more prudent to try to outflank the tallgrass and travel inland as far as they could by river. The Missouri and its tributaries were the major routes over the north country; steamboats carried cargo to where the waterways dwindled down into muddy trickles. But eventually the travelers had to take their chances overland by wagon.

  In the middle ranges the land was more arid than it was to the east, and big bluestem didn’t flourish there. Instead, the tallgrass gave way to a proliferation of mixed grasses—short bluestem, wheatgrass, oat grass, switchgrass, needlegrass. These grasses tended to grow only three or four feet tall even in high summer, which meant that travelers at least got a look at the landscape they were moving through. Not that there was much to see: the land was a slow, regular, endless succession of immense swelling hills, like ripples in a gigantic pond. From the crest of each one, the view ahead was essentially the same: just the grasses and wildflowers evenly filling up the landscape out to the ring of the horizon. Sometimes the travelers would see meandering lines of darker green bulging up in the distance; those were scrub trees along the line of a riverbed. More rarely, there were faint white shapes on the horizon, remote broken hills and bluffs like motionless clouds, relics from some former age not quite worn away yet by the winds.

  Guides warned travelers never to let their guard down while crossing the mixed-grass prairie. For all the openness of the terrain, it was still an extremely easy place to get lost in. Anyone who strayed from the wagons for more than a few minutes could become hopelessly confused among the maze of shallow valleys. Sounds barely carried in that region of the prairie; the grasses muffled them, and there were no solid prominences to send back echoes. The ground was so hard, and was so densely interwoven by the grass roots, that the heaviest wheels barely left an imprint. If the wagon train had begun moving in the meantime, there would be nothing to see from any ridgeline but the trackless uniformity of the unfurling land. Strayed travelers might spend days wandering hopelessly from one ridgeline to the next, looking for their missing companions. Their only chance was the hope that in the twilight they might spot the smoke trail of a distant campfire.

  The landscape seemed to many travelers to be uncanny, as though they were moving through a waking dream. Strange signs and tokens were everywhere. Millions of years earlier the prairie had been submerged under a vast shallow salt sea, and its relics were still to be found underfoot. Along the hilltops and the slopes, wherever the grass roots were thinner, the earth was starred with countless fossil seashells—souvenirs of the Flood, obviously, and proof that this country was somehow more primordial than the rest of the earth. The land shifted in so many mysterious ways it sometimes seemed as though the floodwaters had never receded and the caravans were making their way across the bottom of the ocean. Not only were there no fixed landmarks, but the appearance of the grasses all around them changed day by day and sometimes hour by hour. The gorgeous tapestries of wildflowers were constantly shifting their colors, folding and unfolding with the sunlight. Each day at dusk the evening primroses would open, and hillsides that had looked brilliant green a few minutes before were suddenly as white as if they’d been buried by a blizzard.

  The land was also a continuous seethe of winds. The winds were always blowing. There was an incessant successi
on of rushes and sighs and roars and rustles. The winds burned the skin as the sun did. They sent gusts of stinging sand hour after hour like plagues of flies. They kept people tossing and turning in their camps all night with tearing and flapping at the canvas of the wagons and sudden gusting stampedes through the campfires that sent up billows of choking, burning cinders everywhere. People believed that the winds were intolerable to live with for any longer time than it took to make the crossing; they said that people who tried to homestead in the isolation of the grasslands were invariably driven insane by the winds. They called it prairie madness.

  But the greater danger were the storms. The storms were like nothing any of the travelers had ever seen before. They built up in gigantic, horizon-to-horizon tidal waves that swept over the prairie in crests of cataclysmic grandeur. Here is how the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow described his first experience of a prairie thunderstorm:

  The lightning got broader, and its flashes quicker in succession; the thunder surpassed everything I have heard, or read, or dreamed of. Between explosions we were so stunned that we could scarcely speak to or hear each other, and the shocks themselves made us fear for the permanent loss of our hearing. One moment we were in utter darkness, our horses kept in the road only by the sense of feeling; the next, and the vast expanse of rain-trampled grass lay in one embrace of topaz fire, with the colossal piles of clefted cloud out of which the deluge was coming,—earth and heaven illumined with a brightness surpassing the most cloudless noon.