2--Bighorns

Chapter 2
The Big Horns: Sheep Camp
Crow Agency: 1942-44

The Big Horn Mountains swing in a wide circle through Northern Wyoming and Southern Montana at the very eastern fringe of the Rocky Mountains. To the north runs Rosebud Creek, where, In June of 1876, two weeks before the more famous Battle of the Little Big Horn, General Cook and a force of 1,000 soldiers and 200 Crow and Shoshone Indian Scouts engaged a force of 2500 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Before the battle, Sitting Bull, medicine man and chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux , participated in a Sun Dance during which induced a vision by cutting 50 pellets of flesh from his arms. In the vision he saw White soldiers falling upside down from the sky and heard a voice saying, “I give you these because they have no ears.”

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CROW AGENCY

I moved to Crow Agency, Montana, in 1942, after the war had begun, after my father had given up teaching in favor of running a sheep operation on the Crow Indian Reservation, in partnership with a man named Harvey Cort. I have not been able to find out much about the man. There was a Cort Hotel in Hardin Montana, named for him. I don’t remember ever seeing him in person. I suppose he put up the money and wisely kept out of the way.

In the winter months we lived in the town in Crow in a pleasant little stucco house across the tracks. It was nestled in among some trees and had a bay window with a built in bench where one could read, and a wonderful sun porch where I loved to watch the rain and feel the house shake with thunder. I slept on the porch when I hemorrhaged after had my tonsils out. My mother paid me a penny a bite to eat, though what I ate was mostly jello. The property had a little orchard where there were bees that stung my mother and her friend when they went to gather apples. In the those days, the treatment for bee-sting was “bluing,” a laundry additive and I remember them both walking around the house with blue legs, laughing. The house had a lawn too, that sloped down to a little irrigation ditch, usually dry, that could be crossed by a narrow footbridge. There were some sheds where my father kept a spare sheep-wagon and other things he needed for his business.

Across the tracks there was a section house, where the Nanto family lived, Japanese-Americans, though they called themselves Nipponese. Their father was the section foreman. They had many children, and one, Jimmy, was near my age. We played constantly along the tracks where we would gather long cool slivers of ice scattered when the passenger trains took on ice for the dining cars. It seems like a lost paradise to me as I remember sitting with Jimmy on the hot tracks, sucking those long slivers of ice and staring down the tracks that converged in the distance.

The railroad, more than the highway, stood as a symbol of the larger life. Playing by the railroad, we could feel like our small town was one bead on a long string. Down those tracks were exotic places, like Chicago. I do not remember making any resolutions that I would go to them, but I felt comforted to know they were there while I was safe in my known world. I had no notion that there was a war on, but I heard later my mother talking about the noose of Japanese relocation tightening around my Japanese friends. The government first took away their radio and then moved them away entirely, about the time that we left ourselves.

INDIAN COUNTRY

The school were I started first grade is just a few blocks from that house. I was a fall baby not yet six when the term began, but my parents decided I was ready and sent me there, into a first-grade class where I was the only White boy among twenty Indians and two White girls. All I knew about the Indians was that they put on the Sun Dance each summer, at a circular structure down by the river. The drums went all night long and were a comforting presence. Spectators were allowed, and my parents took me at least once. Up close it was a more unsettling. The Indians danced up to a pole at the center of the circular area and then back again to the beat of a drum, chanting a song I remember as Hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya. I think I knew that Indians were not allowed to drink and that fact was connected with the many empty bottles of vanilla and lemon extract littering the streets.

But I had nothing against Indians and was utterly shocked when I went to the lavatory on our first break and was violently and repeatedly thrown against the wall by the Indian boys. I did not go back there again but instead developed considerable bladder control. That was only a problem once, when forgot I was supposed to meet my mother downtown after school. I went home instead and found the door locked. The dam broke, I wet my pants and was damp at both ends when my mother figured out what had happened and came home to rescue me. At least once I came out the school house door at the end of the day and saw a sea of brown faces waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. I went back in, found a back way out and a secret way home.

That was practically my own encounter with the Indians during the year or two we lived there, and I did not think about them again until I began teaching English Composition to special classes of minority students at the University of Washington in 1969. The Chicanos in those classes were helpful and ambitious, the blacks sometimes combative and on the hustle, but the Indians were hardest to teach—remote, silent, frequently gone for long periods to attend the funerals on the reservations. They were, in the phrase of my mentor of the time, Roger Sale, habituated to despair.

Still later, after I had left the mountains and come to the Great Plains, my wife and I began to teach Vacation Bible School at White Shield, on the Ft. Berthold Reservation, on Lake Sakakawea. The three affiliated tribes there are the Mandan, the Hidatsas Arikaras. Those three tribes joined together in the 18th century, after smallpox had reduced the the Arikara by 90 percent, from 30,000 to 2,000, forcing them to join with the Hidatsa and Mandan. The Arikara were originally part of the Crows, and there is a graveyard near where we taught, honoring the Indian scouts killed in the Indian wars, fighting against their traditional enemy, the Sioux, and on the side of the white beast who was eating their land. Without the help of the scouts, Custer would not have even known where to look for the thousands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors and their families who were camped in the little coulée just down the road from where my father had our summer sheep camp.I had come out of the Big Horns and onto the Plains, but I had come full circle.

The first year we taught there, some friends loaned us their swank lake cabin, but after that, we camped in tents on the church grounds or nearby. Some of the teaching was very hard and some of it glorious. I generally taught third and fourth graders, most of whom were still shy and wistful. One morning, a dark-eyed girl, already overweight, brought me a lead pencil, well used. Haltingly, she got me to understand that this was a present: not a contribution to the lesson, but something to show her respect. I had been teaching for several years at that point but had never had a student make such a disarming gesture. I have never forgotten it.

Another time, we were leaving the only restaurant in the community, when a young Indian boy pulled up on a bicycle. He was carrying in one hand a chokecherry branch laden with blossoms, fragrant even from several feet away. “What a beautiful thing,” someone in our party said, meaning only to praise its abstract beauty. Without hesitating, he handed it to her and would not take it back. I have always found such generosity endemic and instinctive among Indians, however ultimately destructive. The restaurant where we received the gift of chokecherry blossoms went out of business shortly after that, because the Indian running it would not refuse credit to his friends and family.

After supper, the males in our party would play basketball on the hard-packed ground behind the church. When it got dark, we Whites would retire to our tents and lie there, there listening to the womp, womp-womp of the basketball on the hard-packed dirt, far into the night. We returned each summer for five years, long enough to see the sweet, shy third graders turn sullen and remote toward white people. and to see them already being drawn deep into a culture awash in poverty, overweight, alcoholism, promiscuity--all existing side by side with an almost spiritual presence palpable to anyone who spends even a little time on a Reservation.

I have found that a certain kind of brokenness essential to my humanity, even to my survival. I share that with humankind. The trick is to be broken in the right way, in a way that allows one to embrace that brokenness. One path involves a Jewish carpenter being crucified on a hill outside Palestine about 30 A.D. It seems an odd path, even though two billion people claim some affinity with it. When the brokenness comes in the wrong way, as it clearly has with native people, pain and suffering proliferate. But even the wrong kind produces some kind of spiritual substance.

Just a mile from the church where we taught, there is a graveyard and monument for scouts who helped the cavalry, including Custer. As early as the 1840’s, some indians, including the he Arikara and Crow, had thrown in their lot with the white beast that was eating their land. This was probably not because they saw the handwriting on the wall, but rather two other factors. Second, they had problems with the Sioux. Though they were trading peacefully with the Teton Sioux when Lewis and Clark came met them in 1804, the Lakota Sioux were their moral enemies, and they saw the White soldiers as their only hope for survival.

SHEEPCAMP

Sheepcamp. I love to say that word, with its neat, tight assonance. It summons up a whole world of memories, most of them pleasant. We lived there through the summer months and on into fall because I remember standing on the rough board floor of the cabin while my mother fiddled with the cardboard silver buckles on the shoes of my costume for the school skit, where I had to proclaimed, loudly but without inflection, “You are right. I am George Washington.” I suppose the sheep camp was six or seven miles from town. The living quarters were one long room. At one end my parents had a big double bed. I suppose I must have slept in a bed nearby. In the middle was a huge cook stove with room behind it for the lambs whose mothers had rejected them. Surely, there were chairs and a table.

The forces of darkness were all around us but I was protected against them. Often I was startled awake by the sound of my father’s .30-.30 fired into the air to frighten or at least silence the coyotes who had been howling while I slept. Once while my mother and I were in town shopping, a rattlesnake made its way into the cabin and curled on the floor at the foot of the bed. Luckily my father came home first, cut off its head with a shovel it and tossed the severed pieces out into the sagebrush behind the cabin. He did not tell her until years later when they could both tell the story and laugh.

I was not told about the rattlesnakes but I was allowed to play down along the banks of the creek near-by probably a tributary of the Little Big Horn. Under the massive cottonwoods, the creek made a wide circle, leaving a bank of sand on the inner curve. The sand was hot to the touch but cool and wet just under the surface and it seems now I must have played for hours there, alone and happy.

Where there are sheep there must be sheepdogs and sheepherders. The herders were dark, mysterious, inscrutable, silent. I sometimes rode with them and my father in the pick-up as he took them out to their remote stations. All of them seemed to chew plug-tobacco, probably Redman, which was vile, tarry stuff—tobacco leaf compressed in a brick. The herders would cut off pieces with a pocket knife and then lift pocketknife and all to their mouths to insert the wad. They were carefully insulated from my mother, but she would shop for them, being sure to have enough Redman. My father, or perhaps Coyote Brown, who worked as a kind of foreman, would take the boxes of supplies out to them every week or ten days.

The job was so lonely that I am sure only misfits could do it, and even that kind of misfit is so rare now that most of the herders still working are Basques, who have no trouble getting immigration papers, because they have so little competition. At times in my life, I have longed for exactly this kind of job, sheepherding or perhaps tending a lighthouse, where I would have fixed responsibilities easily discharged, where diligence and care would be enough to insure success. For me, these times have come when I had administrative responsibilities—in the Navy and again when I was chair of an academic department. Leaders are responsible not only for their own diligence and competence, but for that of others. Leaders are responsible for allocating finite resources among infinite demand. Leaders are responsible for developing consensus among people who sometimes seem determined not to agree even on the simplest tasks.

I have done this work and been successful at it to the extent that success could be achieved by conscientiousness, personal discipline, and a capacity for tedious and mind-numbing detail. But when more than that is required, I am not the man. When a bold move has to be made that transcends consensus, one that will bring howls of discontent from subordinates who are also colleagues, I can seldom see what such a move might be. Even when I can see it, I lack the courage to make it. When I have called to implement unpopular but necessary policies, when the halls of academe become the Land of No Eye-contact, then I long to be out on some wind-swept sage prairie without even a radio, with only 2,000 sheep and a two dogs and a week’s supply of pancake mix and bacon, and silence, silence, silence.

Sheepherders lived in miraculous devices called sheep-wagons. They were an early version of the RV, intricately designed so that the seats, the tables, and the beds all had storage underneath them. The first ones were built in the 1880’s. The standard size was 6 1/2 feet by 11. A bed sat width-wise across the back, covered with a heavy canvas. There was a small iron stove with a chimney venting somehow through the canvas covering, which was stretched over ribs that I suppose were made of iron. Standing at the stove, you could see out the top half of the Dutch door. Most had one or more boxes fastened to the exterior, but all had one at the back, called the boot. Earlier they had been pulled by teams, so they had a long tongue handy for sitting on. I have a picture of myself sitting on one, age 5, beside Coyote Brown, who wears a high peaked hat like Tom Mix. Sometimes there would be a spare sheep wagon parked by the house in town, and I would be allowed to sleep overnight in it. At least one organization, White Buffalo Lodges , based in Livingston, MT, offers to restore old sheep wagons for $3,000 and up or sell you new ones, beginning at $12,500. In fact, Joanne and I own one, only we call it a camper. Every spring we get it out of storage, put it on our pick-up and go off on high adventures.

The lambs were born in the spring, early enough to provide the maximum weight gain before fall but late enough to avoid, if possible, the unpredictable spring snowstorms. The pregnant ewes would be brought in close to the camp so my father could attend them, day and night. Sometimes I would go out with him at night and help him set up lambing tents. These were springy steel frames that unfolded to make a space about four feet square, with a sewn canvas cover stretched tightly over that. A lantern could be hung from where the steel formed a loop at the top. There could be several of these, scattered around the camp. At night they seemed like watchfires, glowing beacons of coziness and new life. Sometimes he would set one up for me so I could crawl inside and sit wondering at the creamy, black-flecked that filtered in.

My father knew a thousand tricks for bringing new life into the world. Often a lamb would die, leaving its mother bewildered and full of milk. At the same time another ewe might reject one of her triplets or even one of her twins, shoving it rudely away when it tried to nurse. My father would skin the dead lamb and drape its pelt over the reject and present it to the grieving ewe. Generally she would sniff it carefully and allow it to nurse. If no bereaved ewe were available, he would bring the orphan into the cabin and put it in a box behind the stove and feed it from a Coke bottle fitted with a large black rubber nipple. If these survived they were called “bum” lambs. Often they did not survive. I suppose most of them were thrown out into the sagebrush, but my father let me bury one of them with full honors, including a little cross made out of pieces of lath nailed together.

A lamb might get turned the wrong way in a birth canal so the ewe could only lie on the ground and pant. In hopeless cases, he would have to ease a pocketknife inside, shielding the blade, and cut the lamb into pieces so they could be delivered. More often he would insert his arm into the womb and gently rotate the lamb. I once did this myself, when I was older, and my father was at work. I was amazed that I could do it and nearly refused. But with my mother encouraging me, I suddenly thrust my arm up into the ewe and felt around. I had no idea what I was doing, but suddenly the slick mass began to move and followed my arm out into the daylight.

FARMING AND FATHERS

That was one of my few agricultural successes. Generally I was inept and careless, but I was also poorly trained. Once I was supposed to check the pregnant cows when I got home from the school dance at midnight. I did so, but missed seeing a heifer who was having trouble. When my father went out for the check at 2 a.m., he found her down and struggling with the calf sticking half out. He woke me up to help him and to see the results of my work. I helped him as best I could as he ran through the repertoire of delivery techniques. The last step was to the attach one end of a fence stretchers to the calf and the other to an upright in the barn and, in a long agony, haul the calf into the night air. The calf dropped lifelessly on the straw and I assumed it was dead. But, after getting the cow on her feet, my father cleaned the mucus from the calf’s nose and gently blew into its nostrils. It stirred and then struggled upright and made it was to its mother. Cow and calf lived but the cow was never the same. She walked with a permanent hump and was never able to bear a calf again. I assume she was eventually slaughtered for meat. My father wisely let the long night’s work serve as my chastisement.

I felt guilty and was, but this was part of a powerfully destructive process that I barely survived. I had been told to check the cows, but I did not know what that meant. Perhaps the cow was already down and I simply missed seeing her. But it seems more likely that she was still up, with a half delivered calf hanging out of her. It seems obvious now that I should have shown the flashlight on the hind end of every cow. No doubt it was obvious to my father, either because he grew up in the country or because he had an instinct, for this work. Again and again, I failed my father because I did not do something that I had not been told or taught to do. Usually his disappointment was expressed with bellowing, sometimes with cursing--devastating to my spirit. Perhaps no amount of teaching could have instructed so dismal a student as I was, but it seems equally likely that my father was not a good teacher. Certainly he had his troubles as a Smith-Hughes teacher, and they continued with his sons.

He was not inarticulate. Later in his life, he went to toastmasters and was seemed to be good at it. He served on county planning boards. He was active in Stockgrowers and Woolgrowers. Most of the people who worked for him in the Soil Conservation Service were loyal and devoted to him. One, whose last name was Love, began as his apprentice in Ennis and later became District Supervisor in Dillon. My father was so active in the community that he was selected Father of the Year sometime in the mid-60’s. For my brother and I, and especially for my brother, this award is festooned in savage irony.

Later I became a teacher myself. I worked hard to be as good as I could be, and was adequate—patient, diligent, kind, keeping careful records, returning work on time, always prepared for class. But except for the first few years in the Junior college, my student evaluation scores were seldom better than average. This was a great disappointment to me, but nothing I could do seemed to change it. When I retired I was given an Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award, but everyone, including me, understood it was not to recognize my classroom teaching, but to rather my civic activity, my energetic presence on committees, my ability use small ideas to brighten the corners of the campus to which I had been assigned.

I have thought much about this failure to communicate and concluded that I simply do not explain things very clearly. I have gotten a little better, but I still hem, I haw, hesitate, start over. Distracted by the stress of being in front a group, I cannot conceive things even as clearly as I had when I was preparing, let alone get on a roll and rise above my preparations. Speaking on my feet, I often can’t get words don’t come out right. I need the printed word. As anyone can testify, my conversation is full of silences, in which people are likely to start taking and then feel embarrassed when they seem to interrupt me when I finally open my mouth to complete my thought. One-on-one with people who are willing to make allowance for my ways, I can converse well enough, but in a group, I often sit silently because I cannot form a thought quickly enough to slide it in the conversation before someone else has picked up the ball. I need to start and restart sentences, stare at the screen, move things around, fiddle and fiddle. I need to write.

Perhaps, incredibly, my father was the same thing. Incredibly, perhaps my father was a writer. Who would have thought it? My mother was the verbal one, the Greek and Latin major, the English teacher, the record keeper, the indefatigable keeper of diaries. But my father, in his early 60’s, wrote down some of his memories in installments, with titles: Horses in My Life, Dogs in my Life. The manuscript isn’t long, perhaps 15,000 words in all, but most people knew him as a man whose characteristic expressions were monosyllabic, and were astonished that he wrote it at all

We would have been less surprised if we had seen the two compositions that survive from his Composition classes in college. One from 1929 was graded C+ with the note: Your spelling and handwriting are terrible—some good descriptions.” It is called “Billy Lee,” and it tells the story, in third person, of a bachelor who lives in a shabby cabin in a mostly deserted mining town. The prose runs a little purple:

The wind rising again as the sun went down, moaned lonesomely at the northwest corner of the cabin, as if it felt the desolateness of the black icy hills and the hollows between, and of red sky with its purple shadows hovering over the quiet land, as if it would make fickle friendship with some human thing.

The lonely bachelor looks around the room at a broken tea pot on a battered stove and imagines it all quite different. In the northwest corner of the room is “a black and shiny stove with a fire crackling inside and teakettle with unmarred spout and dependable handle.” The floor is white and has a strip of red carpet running from the table to the stove. A woman appears in the imaginary scene but is quickly shut out, for “He felt dimly that they were like the heaven his mother had taught him, altogether perfect and altogether unattainable and not to be thought of with any degree of familiarity.”

Perhaps he stole that from some pulp magazine and just never got caught, but if he wrote it himself, it is not bad for a crippled country boy who seldom appeared to have anything on his mind but where his next horse was coming from.

The drawing is another thing. I never saw my father sketch, but there are a dozen sketches in the family files that are signed by him or similar in style to the ones he did sign. All of them are of rural life. Most appear to be done from photographs. The most carefully done is one of himself stretched out on the bunk of a sheep-wagon, fully clothed in chaps and boots, reading a copy of a Woolgrowers magazine. They area painfully tight and unsuccessful as drawing, the work of an amateur who is drawing what he thinks not what he sees. But they show a yearning for artistic expression that even minimum instruction could have developed.

And then, of course the leatherwork. I don’t know where he started doing leatherwork, but he did it all the years I knew him. Until the last decade of their marriage, my mother always carried a purse he has done, and he carried a billfold. He had a saddle he had built himself, and when he rode in the rodeo parades, his horse had a matching bridle and martingale that was punctuated with round disks of silver that had been themselves decorated and then hammered over a mold to raise their centers. That equipment, along with the saddle, was stolen in the early 80’s, along with his guns and much of my mother’s jewelry, after he was living alone and came out to Minot for a visit. It was never recovered.

Under my father’s instruction, I tried a bit of leatherwork myself, in my teens. I was embarrassed by the crude result but delighted in the process, which offered a rich mixture of smells and sounds. Any Boy Scout who has been to camp knows the rudiments: You soak thick pieces of leather in water overnight and then trace standardized patterns onto it with carbon paper. The patterns are always swirling floral designs, stylized and romantic. At least in his time, originality was frowned upon. Once the design was on the wet leather, you used a swiveled knife to outline the curved leaves and petals. Then you raise those into a kind of relief by lowering the background with stamping tools, sturdy rods of knurled metal that were about a big around as a pencil but half as long, with a geometric patterns cast into the end of them. The background can be dyed black with a pungent dye and a tiny brush. He had dozens and dozens of these stamping tools in a metal box that was dense with the weight, along with many other specialized tools, all kept in a large wooden chest. I still have the merest sampling, not enough to even fill a small tackle box, tucked away in a corner of the basement.

He was not a bad reader either. He would sit in a big overstuffed chair we had, with his feet extended on a big ottoman. The chair had arms that curved outward like a flower so that his body, which seemed to dominate the chair when I was young, seemed years later to swallow his much diminished body. The chair was originally bristly chintz, like a fresh crew-cut , and its much recovered carcass was still there when we closed up the ranch in the late 80’s.

He used the chair mostly to read Westerns—Some Zane Grey and Louis L’aMour, I think, but more of Max Brand and Luke Short, and his horse magazines, The Quarter horse and Western Horseman. When he lived with Joanne and me, after we moved him out of the nursing home in Dillon in the fall of 1989, I would get him large-print books from the library. Again, these would be mostly Westerns, but occasionally I would smuggle in a Saroyan or a Steinbeck and he would read those too. One day he complained about Steinbeck: “He’s a good writer,” my father said, “but everything he writes is so sad.” It was a perceptive statement and one that let me know that he had read more serious books that I thought and read them better than I would have thought.

And so this gruff, monosyllabic, brooding, man with his explosive temper, who did so much good and yet brought so much agony in the lives of those he loved, had things going on inside his head. Perhaps the gap between what was going on there and what he could get expressed gave him the temper and the lack of patience that turned the last years of my mother’s life into a kind of living hell and nearly destroyed my brother.

The more I think of him the more like him I seem. I was able to create an inner world of out the written word—words I read and words I did write and more important, words I dreamed I would one day write. I drew enough strength from this world to function socially and hold a job. But I have done damage in my time too, and perhaps for the same reasons my father did—because the disparity between what was inside and what could get out grew too large.