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Turner Bison System

MONTANA

‘There is a lot of space here. A lot of space.’

Not the most effulgent list of prominent citizenry, but while only Alaska, Texas and California may be larger in size than Montana, it is also true that only Alaska, Delaware and the Dakotas have lower populations. There is a lot of space here. A lot of space. And there is a line…a very famous line:

I see a long, straight line athwart a continent. No chain of forts, or deep flowing river, or mountain range, but a line drawn by men upon a map, nearly a century ago, accepted with a handshake, and kept ever since. A boundary which divides two nations, yet marks their friendly meeting ground. The 49th parallel: the only undefended frontier in the world.

From the prologue to the film 49th Parallel

The phrase ‘49th Parallel’ is often used to describe the entire border between the US and Canada. Perhaps the title of that Powell and Pressburger film, starring Eric Portman and Laurence Olivier (wearing a moustache and one of his most absurd accents, that of a French Canadian trapper), contributed to this fallacy, for it is chiefly in the west that the frontier actually follows that line of latitude. Further east, cities like Toronto and Montreal are actually quite a long way south, on the 44th and 46th parallels. But here in Montana, all 550 miles of northern border are shared with Canada and follow–so much as the mapping technology of the nineteenth century allowed–the 49th line of latitude.

As for the film’s claim that it is ‘the only undefended frontier in the world’…well, poor dear Canada may not have a reputation as a hotbed of insurgency and terrorism or arms, people and drug smuggling, but all American frontiers in the post-9/11 era are now guarded with a new and implacable urgency, so undefended it is not. Since 2002 the US Customs and Border Protection Service has been part of an overarching government body, the fearsome Department of Homeland Security. This status is reflected in new uniforms, a bigger budget and an even higher sense of patriotism and moral purpose.

The Border

I visit the border with patrolmen John and Alex, driving up from Shelby through the delightfully named one-truck towns of Sunburst and Sweetgrass.

And there she lies: the 49th Parallel. A fence. Not a formidable barrier, but a fence all the same. I watch with envy birds flying over without documentation or security checks of any kind. It is cold, very cold facing Canada in the northernmost part of Montana. It therefore comes as a shock when John tells me, with the smug air of one who knows that he is delivering a knockout blow, that here on the 49th we are on the same line of latitude as France. The line goes through Paris, for heaven’s sake.

‘So how come P-p-paris doesn’t get this c-c-c-cold?’ I ask, through chattering teeth. John has no answer for that. I have no doubt it has something to do with the Arctic (which is no nearer to us than it is to Paris, but no matter) and with mountains and winds and gulf streams. All the same.



There is no action on the border. No would-be immigrants pressing their faces up against the wire.

The following morning, when I fly over in a European AS350 A-Star helicopter (we are shown a grounded Black Hawk, but the rest were all in service, I am told) the same atmosphere of muffled winter hush pervades. This would be no time to attempt an illegal border crossing. Any human would be visible for miles. And there would be footprints that even I could track.

MONTANA

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:MT

Nickname:Treasure State, Big Sky Country, Land of Shining Mountains, The Last Best Place, The Bonanza State, the Stub Toe State

Capital:Helena

Flower:Bitterroot

Tree:Ponderosa Pine

Bird:Western Meadowlark

Grass:Bluebunch wheatgrass

Motto:Oro y plata (‘Gold and silver’)

 

Well-known residents and natives: Theodore ‘Unabomber’ Kaczynski, Norman Maclean, Richard Brautigan, Evil Knievel, Gary Cooper, Myrna Loy, George Montgomery, Sam Peckinpah, Peter Fonda, Carol O'Connor, David Lynch, Patrick Duffy, Dirk ‘A-Team’ Benedict, Dana Carvey, Charlie Pride.

Not for the first time I am forced to contemplate the melancholy truth that, in one significant way at least, Al Qaeda has won. Its victory in the interior of the United States may not be complete, but it is enough. Through one outrageous and atrocious act and the credible threat of more, they have ensured that America’s freedoms and conveniences have been unprecedentedly curtailed. Queuing up for security checks in every international and domestic airport, having one’s sun-cream, nail scissors and mineral water binned and one’s patience worn down, these are minor but palpable victories. No one dares say it in the queues as they build and build, it would be considered unpatriotic. That fact, that the truth itself is now unpatriotic, that too is a victory. Al Qaeda have cost the US and its citizens untold billions in time and manpower, in inconvenience and stress. And along the thousands and thousands of miles of international borders, they are costing American tax-payers billions more. New helicopters, thousands of new recruits. The bill is incalculable.

Turner Bison System

The ugliness of man seems a long way from the glaciers and mountains below, which create a landscape as monumentally beautiful as any I have ever seen. I drive the taxi from Helena, the state’s capital through the Gallatin Forest, skirting entrances to Yellowstone Park which is, frustratingly, closed to visitors between November and mid-April. But the Gallatin National Forest is beautiful enough, and takes me closer to my destination, Bozeman and the Flying D Ranch.

Who is the biggest landowner in Britain? Most Britons would suggest the Crown. Followed by the Church. Followed by Trinity College, Cambridge and the Duke of Westminster. Or something similar. And they would have been able to proffer the same names for hundreds of years. But who is the biggest landowner in America, not counting the Federal Government? It is an individual who began buying tracts in a serious way only twenty years or so ago. He is now far and away the possessor of the most private land in all of the United States of America, owning ranches in South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico and–which is why I’m here–Montana. In all he owns around 3,000 square miles of land. The land is used to graze bison. He has the largest herd in the world.

Bison (often called buffalo) once roamed the Great Plains of North America (the vast swathe of steppe east of the Rocky Mountains) in unimaginable numbers, sustaining tens of thousands of Plains Indians who were nourished by their flesh and warmed by their hides. Then the Europeans arrived with their horses, their rifles and their scientific ways of killing. There were ‘bags’ of between 2,000 and 100,000 bison a day during the height of the slaughter. Within twenty years the numbers had been so drastically reduced that the entire species was under threat. Even William Cody, Buffalo Bill himself, pleaded for legislation to protect the herds. President Ulysses S. Grant and others deliberately squashed any bills for the bison’s protection, however, for they knew that if the bison went extinct then the lives of those pesky Plains Indians would be made immeasurably more difficult. Not America’s finest hour. So-called civilised men colluding to perpetrate both genocide and the extermination of an entire animal species in one fell swoop. Fortunately for the bison, one or two enlightened ranchers maintained small private herds and kept them alive. Since then they have bounced back impressively. It is estimated that there are now 500,000 bison in total, of which approximately 300,000 are in the United States and 50,000 belong to the Mouth of the South himself, Mr Ted Turner.

Turner is best known in Britain for marrying Jane Fonda and founding CNN, but in America the Turner Broadcasting System also provides the popular channels TBS, TNT and TCM. An extraordinarily generous and, some would say, eccentric philanthropist, he has famously donated one billion dollars to the United Nations. As much, one cannot help feeling, to annoy the American Right who abominate that institution as for any other reason. I have no doubt that is unfair, but he does seem to enjoy his maverick status as one of the richest liberals in the world, taking time to insult equally the Iraq war, religion and the gun lobby. He also promotes environmentally sensitive land ownership and the protection of native flora and fauna.

The ranch he spends the most time in is the Flying D, outside Bozeman, Montana. I drive through the gates and urge the reluctant taxi along mile after mile after mile after mile after mile of road until we arrive at the ranch house. He has consented to have breakfast with me and show me around the ‘spread’.

A trim, silver-haired, sexily moustached sixty-nine-year-old, he stands and greets me in the log-beamed dining room in jeans and cowboy boots, every inch the rancher, affectionate dogs frisking at his heels and every inch the billionaire, attentive people lurking within earshot in case he should need anything.

While he is pleased to own these bison, he tells me, sitting down in front of a bowl of granola and bidding me do the same, the purpose is to demonstrate to the world that you do not need to keep them for charitable and environmental reasons alone. Unstoppable entrepreneur that he is, he has made a true-blue, hard-headed business out of the animals: Ted’s Montana Grill, of which there are now sixty branches nationwide, and which all bear the slogan ‘Eat Great. Do Good’. The bison steaks and burgers they serve are, claims Ted, higher in protein and lower in fat and cholesterol than any comparable meat. Nothing is frozen or microwaved and everything is as eco-friendly as he can make it. The take-away cups in the restaurants are made of corn-starch, the menus are printed on recycled paper, the soaps in the restrooms are biodegradable and the drinking straws are made of paper, not plastic. He is clearly most proud of this and is happy to dedicate the latter part of his life to promoting healthy and environmentally aware eating the American way: no arty-farty salady nonsenses, nothing but good red meat western style.

Ted Turner has that characteristic I have always found in hugely successful entrepreneurs: a disposition to talk uninterruptedly without listening to anyone else who might be in the room. Years of power, of being proved strategically and tactically right in almost everything he has done and of being surrounded by sycophantic adherents have led to this trait no doubt, though to be fair it is also true that his hearing is not what it was and it is also true that he has no reason to suppose that I, or anyone else, can tell him anything he doesn’t know or anything even remotely interesting. I have no problem with his loquacity: I am here, after all, to record an interview with him and the more he talks the better, especially as his people have told me that I have only an hour and half before he needs to fly off to Atlanta.

Again with the confidence and arbitrary certainty of the super-rich, he suddenly rises as if bored with my conversation (which he might well be since I haven’t had the chance to say anything more than ‘yes’ for the last ten minutes) and says, ‘Let’s go find some bison.’

He has tens of thousands of them on this ranch, but that doesn’t make them easy to track down, for the Flying D is an enormous piece of land in which ten of thousands of brontosaurus could happily lose themselves without fear of discovery.

After a consultation with a ranch hand, we drive off and–near a house belonging to one of Ted’s sons–we spot them. Shaggy-coated, goatee bearded and hump-backed, there is something primally satisfying about the shape of these vast creatures. Ted tells me that they are in fact, technically at least, dwarf bison, the really huge species having died out as recently as 10,000 years ago, along with American mammoths and elephants.

Nonetheless, dwarf or not, these are far from friendly beasts and we dismount from the truck and approach with caution. Ted tells me that he is keen for his land to sustain, not just bison, but all kinds of native species. Prairie dogs, for example, which are gopher-like burrowing creatures regarded as a ‘keystone’ species whose presence will encourage all kinds of eagles, hawks, foxes, ferrets and badgers to flourish.

We film away as close to the herd as possible and then Ted looks at his watch.

‘Okay,’ he says, ‘I have to go now. Stay as long as you like.’

And he is gone. A likeable, stylish individual who seems to have got more pleasure from his money and done more with it than most.

We finish up our filming without him and, after skirting the herd like hunters, we get our footage and leave the ranch. Ten bouncy miles later we are back on the public highway and heading for Idaho. But first we stop off for ten minutes to admire some wolves and bears in a small sanctuary on the way. Bison, wolves, billionaires and grizzlies all on the same day–I couldn’t be happier.

IDAHO

‘I pour water on the Idaho side and it will make its way to the Pacific…I pour it a tad on the Montana side, and it will flow to the Mississippi.’

Oh dear. I feel immeasurably guilty about my time in Idaho. It was just one of those things, one of those unfortunate logistical necessities.

A glance at the map will show you how our journey down the Great Plains, from Montana to Texas, including Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado and Oklahoma, is higgledy-piggledy enough without including Idaho on the itinerary. But include it I had to, for it would not fit into the next journey up from New Mexico to Washington State either.

En route from Montana to Wyoming, therefore, I stop off at the state line that Montana shares with Idaho. I choose that particular section of the state line that is also the Continental Divide, for I have a piece to camera to do explaining this geographical phenomenon.

No matter how hard I try and grasp the nature of landscape and terrain, it still astonishes me how much it is all a question of gravity. That there are floodplains, valleys, estuaries and deltas is all down to one ineluctable fact. Water will flow downwards. And if there is no downwards–i.e. if it is in a piece of flat land–it will not flow at all.

The entire continental United States is divided in two, for fluvial or river-ish purposes. Water will either flow into the Atlantic or into the Pacific. If it flows south into the Gulf of Mexico, that counts as the Atlantic of course.

Right. I get that. I may have given up geography at school very early and still be unsure of what a rift valley or a terminal moraine is, but I can get the fact that any water that falls from the sky or tumbles from the melting snow of the mountains must end up somewhere. Given that America is not, despite appearances, a flat bowl in the middle, the water follows gravity and makes it to the sea. The sea is at a lower level than the land and therefore all water must inevitably end up there.

The Great Divide, the name given to the continental divide in the United States, is surprisingly far west. Part of it runs down between Idaho and Montana before it makes its way a little further eastwards and down through Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico.

 

I stand on the divide itself and demonstrate to camera, with the aid of a bottle of mineral water, the significance of this line. I pour water on the Idaho side and it will make its way to the Pacific…I pour it a tad to the east, on the Montana side, and it will flow to the Mississippi and out into the Gulf.

Do I find time to tell the BBC audience that Idaho is best known for being the potato capital of America–hence its secondary nickname, The Spud State? One in every three potatoes bought in America is grown here. Do I explain that it was to this state that Ernest Hemingway came to live for a few years, before ending his life with a shotgun blast to the head in 1961? Do I mention that the very name of the state, Idaho, was apparently made up by an eccentric called Willings in the 1860s, claiming without foundation that it was based on a Shoshone Indian phrase meaning ‘gem of the mountains’–the so called Idahoax?

I am ashamed to say I do none of these things. Of all the states I have visited, Idaho gets the shortest shrift. A glass of water and no more. I feel terrible about this and have promised that I will make up for it with a private visit just as soon as I am able.

Heigh ho. Farewell, Idaho.

IDAHO

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:ID

Nickname:The Gem State, The Spud State

Capital:Boise

Flower:Syringa

Tree:Western White Pine

Bird:Mountain bluebird

Slogan:‘Great potatoes. Tasty destinations.’

Motto:Esto perpetua (‘Let it be forever’)

Well-known residents and natives: Chief Joseph, Ezra Pound, Edgar Rice ‘Tarzan’ Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway, Lana Turner.

WYOMING

‘It was the French who discovered the Grand Tetons…they gave them the name that the French just would: The Three Tits. Les Trois Tétons.’

Why oh why, oh ming? Land of Laramie and Cheyenne, true cowboy country at last. I remember as a boy watching westerns and being confused by the fact that, while they were usually shot in deserts dotted with scrub and cactuses and bleached cattle skulls, the cowboys were often shown riding through ice and snow too. It seemed contradictory to me that a country could be both burning hot and freezing cold. Like picturing snow in the Sahara or palm trees in Antarctica. But that is the true west for you. A land of extremes.

Wyoming has it all: the Rocky Mountains, the Range and those High Plains where Clint Eastwood so famously drifted. It is the least populous state in America, containing less than half a million citizens, each having, on average, more than five square miles to play in all by themselves. Wyoming shares with its neighbour Colorado the distinction of being one of only two states which are entirely rectangular. Looking at them in an atlas you can picture bearded nineteenth-century politicians and surveyors in Washington leaning over a map of the United States with a ruler and a set square in their hands.

But for all its wilderness and maverick spirit, Wyoming is becoming an increasingly popular destination for the well-heeled. Jackson Hole in the Grand Teton National Park is one of the swankiest skiing resorts in the world, up there with Gstaad and Aspen.

 

I am embarrassed to say that I had never heard of the Grand Tetons before. Part of the Rockies, they abut Yellowstone and are as majestic and beautiful a mountain range as any I have seen. Were they in Europe they would vie with some of the Alps for supremacy. But like so much that is tucked away in the vastness of America, they are there to be discovered. It was the French in fact who discovered them for Europe and it was the French who gave them the name that…well they gave them the name that the French just would: The Three Tits. Les Trois Tétons. This is not to be confused with the ‘Teton’ that is another word for the Sioux nation of American Indians. That Teton derives from the Lakotan language and means…well, nobody knows quite what it means, but you can be fairly certain that it doesn’t mean tit.

Elks

I head round the Grand Tetons, my destination an elk park. The elk, a massive ungulate not dissimilar to our own European red deer, is in trouble here. Misnamed by European settlers who thought it looked like a moose, it is listed as having a conservation status ‘of least concern’. That may be true worldwide, but in North America there has been a growing problem with their population for some time. For that reason the National Elk Refuge in Wyoming was founded in 1912 to protect the habitat and encourage healthy stocks. I drive out across miles of spongy terrain with the wardens. We are following a feeding vehicle that spits out from its rear a long trail of green alfalfa pellets. The elk come shyly down to nibble them. Their habitat is shrinking and recently one of their natural predators was reintroduced into the Wyoming wilderness. I now wind my way back around the Tetons towards the town of Dubois to find out more about this controversial reintroduction.

WYOMING

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:WY

Nickname:Equality State, Cowboy State

Capital:Cheyenne

Flower:Wyoming Indian Paintbrush

Tree:Plains Cottonwood

Bird:Western Meadowlark

Fish:Cutthroat trout

Motto:Equal rights

Well-known residents and natives: Dick Cheney, William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, Jackson Pollock, E. Annie Proulx, Harrison Ford.

The Predator

John and Debbie Robinet are ranchers. Not on the scale of Ted Turner perhaps, but the 70,000 acres that they manage and graze cattle over is impressive enough. It takes an age to drive from the roadside to the ranch house itself, a delicate and perilous business in the snow. I am keen for the taxi not to break down or get stuck in a drift. There is no mobile-phone signal here, it would take hours to walk to the ranch house and maybe…just maybe those predators are about.

I arrive at the ranch house without being rent from limb to limb. John and Debbie welcome us into the suffocating warmth of the interior and tell us their story. Six of their pet dogs have been lost to the Predator. A foal too, and plenty of cattle. The issue divides them, for John approves of the Predator’s reintroduction, despite the harm it does to his own animals. Debbie is all for getting out her gun and ‘letting the darned critters have it’.

The Predator in question is, in case you hadn’t guessed, canis lupus, the Gray or Timber Wolf. The question this part of America faces is yet to be settled: can man and wolf coexist? John believes that despite everything they can and must. But with food prices rising and the tolerance of most ranchers worn thin, Debbie believes that the wolf’s days are numbered. They were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and have thrived ever since, ranging all round the Rockies in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and doing what wolves do best–killing livestock. Debbie thinks it is time to take them off the endangered species list, which would allow ranchers to shoot them. John shakes his head sadly.

Wyoming

‘Dear John,’ says Debbie. ‘Like all men he’s a sentimental romantic. It takes us hard-headed businesswomen to see the truth.’

I am all for wolves too. In theory. Would I be quite so generous if I had children, pets and a herd of cattle to protect? I am not so sure.

As it happens, Debbie got her way. Exactly two weeks after I left their ranch (the taxi getting stuck in the snow and ice on the way out, necessitating a dig out and rescue) the United States Fish & Wildlife Service removed the western gray wolf from the federal endangered species list. At least ten wolves were immediately shot and killed in Wyoming, including one large male who had become something of a star with the public in Yellowstone. Whether Debbie was responsible I don’t know, but I can picture her mouth setting in a grim line as she sights along the rifle and squeezes the trigger with a breathed ‘Goodbye critter…’

‘A coalition of environmental groups’ is apparently now planning to sue the federal government in order to force them to categorise the gray wolf as endangered once more and therefore bring an end to the legalised killings. John and Debbie’s household, it turned out, was representative of America: a house divided on the issue of these beautiful but dangerous beasts.

Mush, Mush!

There is one descendant of the wolf that does have a secure place here: the husky. It has long been an ambition of mine to be pulled in a dog sled and today I am about to have that ambition realised. The crew (and I too, in my heart of hearts) are a little worried that the bone in my arm hasn’t knitted well enough to take the bumps and bounces that accompany a sledge ride, but I am determined.

Ten miles or so from Jackson Hole, along the switchback roads, lives Stacey and her pack of dogs. She has picked out a fabulously, absurdly old-fashioned sled for me to be conveyed in. All I have to do is help her attach the dogs (a complicated business involving leashes and reins looped in improbable ways) and then lie down and enjoy the ride. Which I do. The snow is falling thickly in the woods, the huskies are as yelpingly, sparklingly happy as any animals I have ever seen, and the rapid sliding motion is surprisingly bumpless.

Not for the first time on this epic journey do I realise how insanely lucky I am.

NORTH DAKOTA

‘The waitresses are all over sixty and frighteningly Germanic.’

The highest and lowest temperatures ever recorded in North Dakota are 121º and -60º F (49º and -51º C) respectively. I don’t know if anywhere else in America can match that for extremes–in fact I can’t think of many places on earth that can. And yet the primary occupation of your North Dakotan is farming. Good luck, dear.

They call it ‘Norse’ Dakota (ho, ho) on account of the large number of Scandiwegians in the state, but in fact it is those of German ancestry who make up most of the population. Two and half per cent of all North Dakotans speak German at home. I am to discover more about this when I visit the capital, Bismarck, where more than half the citizens are of German stock, but first I need to understand the bigger picture. Since I crossed over from Minnesota to Montana I have been wondering at the large number of roads, schools and commercial establishments named after two men called Lewis and Clark. I think I need to give myself a small history lesson, for what they did means a great deal hereabouts.

I was always a little hazy about the Louisiana Purchase, mistakenly believing that it involved America buying the state of Louisiana. In fact it was the sale, in 1803, by France of its entire Louisiane territory, a massive swathe of mid-western America, including Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas, not to mention a healthy chunk of New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana. It cost the United States about twenty-three million dollars which added up in the end to about three cents an acre. Something of a bargain for doubling the size of the country. This was land occupied by American Indians. Naturally they were not informed about the sale.

The President at the time, the nation’s third, was Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and perhaps the most revered of all the founding fathers. He determined that more ought to be discovered concerning this enormous tract of land, since neither the French who sold it nor the Americans who bought it really knew much about it. Jefferson was a great believer in what was already known as the ‘manifest destiny’–America’s right to expand westwards to the Pacific, and to hell with the Indians or anyone else.

A very short time after the purchase had been concluded, therefore, President Jefferson appointed a man called Captain Meriwether Lewis to undertake an expedition which would obtain more knowledge about the new territory, principally its rivers, for this was an age in which the only way commerce and traffic could be managed in such terrain was by water. The idea was to track the Missouri River to its source. The aim was specifically, and in Jefferson’s own words, to explore ‘for the purposes of commerce’.

Lewis and his fellow expedition leader Clark with their ‘Corps of Discovery’ travelled thousands of miles to the Pacific Ocean and back, reporting to Jefferson some three years after setting out. Now written indelibly into American history and legend, the expedition mapped most of the new territory with surprising accuracy and contributed to the making of the modern United States. Only when you have travelled in some of the lands they covered can you appreciate what a gigantic achievement it was. I have a London taxi, modern highways, air conditioning, heating and all the conveniences of the twenty-first century and I still feel like a hero when I’ve completed a four-hundred-mile leg of my journey. Lewis and Clark had canoes and horses and no idea into what hostile Indian lands or impenetrable ravines their journey would take them.

In Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and here in the Dakotas many diners, streets, hotels, dry goods stores and lakes are named after Lewis and Clark. Their camp sites are national shrines and their navigational routes, or parts thereof, annually reproduced by hardy canoeists and kayakers in all the states of the Midwest.

NORTH DAKOTA

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:ND

Nickname:Peace Garden State, Roughrider State, Flickertail State, Norse Dakota

Capital:Bismarck

Flower:Wild prairie rose

Tree:American elm

Bird:Western meadowlark

Fruit:Chokecherry

Motto:Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable, or Strength from the soil

Well-known residents and natives: Warren Christopher, Angie Dickinson, Ann Sothern, Lawrence Welk, Peggy Lee, Bobby Vee, Roger Maris.

The Missouri River, which was their principal point of interest, snakes right through the centre of North Dakota before turning west and disappearing into Montana. The Red River (sadly not the one immortalised by Howard Hawks in his western masterpiece, Red River) forms the state line with Minnesota to the east, and it is here that the major towns of Grand Forks and Fargo lie.

‘Sit down unt eat.’

But my destination is the capital, named Bismarck in 1873 after the great European statesman who had just succeeded in forging a dozen disparate states and kingdoms into the new nation of Germany. Incidentally, the town of Bismarck didn’t give itself that name because it was full of patriotic Germans who loved their Chancellor, but rather because it wanted to attract Germans over to the Dakotas. The total population of the entire state back then was around 3,000. The renaming ploy worked: Bismarck was soon flooded with hard-working, God-fearing Teutonic farmers who put up with temperatures that they could never have experienced back home. I cannot but wonder how the Dakota Territory as it was known back then (it wasn’t divided into North and South until 1889) was sold to those Germans? Was there a brochure promising lush, fertile countryside and balmy weather? And were the Germans who arrived bitterly disappointed? For North Dakota, although by no means unpleasant, is neither notably lush nor even slightly balmy. Scraggy scrub and featureless plateaus characterise much of the state.

Whatever their feelings, they came and they stayed, those Germans. And they brought with them their food. I have always believed that the best way to understand any culture is through its cuisine and so as soon as I arrive in Bismarck I head straight for Kroll’s Diner on Main, a legendary German restaurant.

The moment I enter what appears to be a traditional fifties-style diner, I know I have come to the right place. The waitresses are all over sixty and frighteningly Germanic.

‘Sit down unt eat!’ I am commanded. I discover that this is their motto. Were the ‘girls’ who work here not famous enough with the regular lunchers, they have become state-wide celebrities through their TV commercials, which I would urge you to watch. They are collected together on the Kroll’s website, www.sitdownandeat.com. They demonstrate better than I can the bizarre postmenopausal atmosphere that pervades here.

Many Bismarckians are descended from people who lived in ethnic German enclaves in Russia. The food therefore is as much Russian as German. The signature dishes of the house are Knoephla (a chicken, potato and dumpling soup), Fleischkuechle (a hamburger wrapped in pastry and deep fried) and the classically elegant and sophisticated ‘Fried Dough’.

Needless to say, I tried them all. I am a hearty eater, rarely defeated by anything, but it was all I could do to rise from the table and totter to the car park without falling over on my back and waving my legs in the air like a capsized beetle.

A massive ingestion of calorific fat, starch and protein will at least, I rationalise to myself as I ease my stomach under the steering wheel and point the taxi south, prepare me for the rigours of life on the next leg of my journey–three days and nights on an Indian reservation.

SOUTH DAKOTA

‘Mind you, Mount Rushmore itself isn’t exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either.’

Merely to list the legendary landmarks of South Dakota gives me a kind of thrill. A thrill in which hero-worship and dread are painfully mixed. The wide skies of Texas and New Mexico, the cactus deserts of Arizona and the High Plains to the north–these have light and space and optimism built in. But the very names of South Dakota’s Badlands and Black Hills and Deadwood and Wounded Knee carry within them heavy hints of the tragic, the cruel, the bloody and the lost.

At Wounded Knee, the US 7th Cavalry disgraced itself and its name eternally with the cruel and savage massacre of three hundred men, women and children of the Sioux Nation. In Deadwood Wild Bill Hickok was slain at the poker table by that no-good cowardly skunk Jack McCall. To this day the two pairs Wild Bill had been dealt seconds before his death, aces and eights, are called the Dead Man’s Hand. Men and women like Wild Bill and Calamity Jane had come to the Black Hills in the 1870s, (sacred to the Sioux and granted to them in perpetuity only a few years earlier by treaty) in search of gold. The boom soon fizzled out, forcing those who remained to scratch out their existences in unforgiving dirt farms. The Lakota Sioux tribes were enclosed within reservations where, denied their traditional hunting grounds and historically nomadic way of life, their morale and social structure disintegrated: disease, poverty, unemployment and alcoholism stalk these reservations to this very day.

Well, that is to put the most negative construction possible on South Dakota. The state itself would tell you that its National Parks and tourist attractions make it one of the most amiable and desirable destinations in all of America.

Certainly Mount Rushmore attracts an average of nearly six thousand people a day and I have every intention of being one of those six thousand but first, in deference to the Lakota people, I am on my way to another monument: the largest sculpture in the world, a South Dakotan attraction quite as preposterous as Mount Rushmore but a little less well known.

Crazy Horse

Lakota is the word I will use from now on to describe the major Plains Indian tribe of South Dakota, often also referred to as the Sioux. They are divided into seven ‘council fires’, such as Oglala, Hunkpapa and Miniconjou, but unless it is necessary I will say Lakota. Lakota also refers to their language, which is not to be confused with Dakota or Nakota…but that is another story.

In 1868 the Lakota were granted by the Treaty of Laramie all rights of possession over the Black Hills, which they held sacred. In fact some scholars, including some Indian historians, are a little cynical about this as there is evidence that the Lakota had driven out by force other Indian tribes from the hills less than a hundred years earlier. In any event, it was the Lakota’s arch nemesis, General Custer, who returned from the Black Hills in 1874 bearing talk of gold which resulted in an instant betrayal of the treaty. The Lakota got their final revenge on ‘Yellowhair’ at the Battle of Little Big Horn two years later, a victory that soon turned into defeat as the US Army exacted its own revenge the following year, capturing and killing Chief Crazy Horse.

It is to the Crazy Horse Monument that I have come. The vision of a sculptor called Korczak Ziolkowski who had himself worked on Mount Rushmore, this giant and unfinished enterprise carved out of the rock of Thunderhead Mountain features Crazy Horse astride his stallion, pointing out over the land below.

Ziolkowski embarked on the project in 1948 after receiving a letter from Chief Henry Standing Bear in 1939 which said, in reference to work Ziolkowski was doing on Rushmore, ‘My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.’

SOUTH DAKOTA

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:SD

Nickname:The Mount Rushmore State

Capital:Pierre

Flower:American Pasque flower

Tree:Black Hills spruce

Bird:Ring-neck pheasant

Soil:Houdek loam

Motto:Under God the people rule

Well-known residents and natives: Sitting Bull, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, L Frank ‘Wizard of Oz’ Baum, Seth Bullock, Wild Bill Hickok, Crazy Horse, Mamie van Doren, Russell Means, Calamity Jane, Pat O’Brien, Tom Brokaw, David Soul, Cheryl Ladd.

I am driven up the hill to the site in an ancient, stickshift vehicle by Ziolkowski’s son, Kaz. The old man himself died in 1982, leaving his widow and children to complete the work. We inspect the 87-foot-high head of Crazy Horse (the heads on Mount Rushmore are ‘only’ 60 foot high), which was completed and dedicated in 1998, fifty years after the project began. The face looks good in profile, to my eye, but a little less dramatic full on. The scale of the enterprise is astounding, daunting, mind-boggling. It seems to me that Kaz’s grandson is unlikely to be alive by the time it is finished, if it ever is.

The monument is also controversial. Some would dismiss it on the grounds of taste alone, for it must be admitted it does resemble–the horse especially–those tacky designs in rock crystal advertised every week in the Sunday supplements and celebrity gossip magazines; a more serious criticism is levelled by some Lakota Indians who believe that the very idea of carving a human sculpture into a mountain is degrading and insulting. They call attention to the fact that in his lifetime, Crazy Horse refused to be photographed. It is all very difficult. For my part, I applaud the idea behind memorialising a romantic warrior chief like Crazy Horse, whose tragic and noble life should be remembered by all, on the other I do wish something less distressingly kitsch could have been managed…

Rushmore

Mind you, Mount Rushmore itself isn’t exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either. After the naïve daftness of the Crazy Horse monument, I find the pompous idiocy of those four presidents somehow more risible still. Wishing to show respect or feel a vicarious thrill of admiration and pride, I can only giggle. For which I am very sorry. Any loyal American reading this who feels outraged and insulted is free to explode with derisive snorts of laughter at any British equivalent.

Reservation

On my way to Pine Ridge, the second-largest Indian reservation in America, I drive through the South Dakota Badlands. The landscape here is like no other. Beautiful but strange, contorted and dreamlike.

The highway winds on for miles and miles, past weird rock formations, parched gullies and grey, windswept plains until I turn off the blacktop road and head for my destination. The settlement of Porcupine is reached by a brown dusty track called Indian Service Road 27; in a desperate attempt to make it sound more touristically attractive someone has given it the pointless soubriquet ‘The Bigfoot Trail’.

I have come to talk to Russell Means, a celebrated and controversial American Indian writer, activist and, latterly, film actor. I have been reading his autobiography, Where White Men Fear To Tread and am anxious to meet him.

Means comes across gloriously like the noble and romantic Indian chief of one’s imagination: a mahogany face, hawk nose, hair braided into long plaits and a voice that summons drums in the mind. He is angry, however, and as he tells his life story, his rage at what the white man has done to the Indian surfaces. He tells of his early days, drifting around America at the whim of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, his political enlightenment and recruitment into AIM, the American Indian Movement which paralleled for the Indians what the Black Panthers were doing for the African-Americans. All this led to the sit-in of Mount Rushmore (on which he famously relieved himself) and the occupation of Wounded Knee, a 71-day siege that captured the attention of the whole world in 1973.

Means’s rhetorical gifts, his genuine fury and his unquenchable energy make him a splendid subject for interview. He has some views which are unsustainable in fact and unorthodox to the point of lunacy: there are no Lakotan words for ‘war’ or ‘weapon’, he tells me firmly at one stage, adding that the whole idea of warlike Indians was invented by the Europeans. He overplays the spiritual ‘earth father’ card in that tiresome way that suggests all Europeans are emotionally constipated, materialist, bellicose, territorial and entirely without spirituality in their history or culture. Such exaggerations, distortions and wishful thinking do little to add credibility to his cause, which has now become the secession from America of the entire Lakotan people, whom he has declared a sovereign nation with rights over the Dakotas and large parts of the neighbouring Great Plains states, withdrawing his new nation from all existing treaties with the Unites States. He claims that some UN countries are interested in recognising this new state and he is dismissive of the majority of the Lakota people who have not followed him and whom he does not, in any political sense, represent, comparing them to the French under Vichy rule. For all his faults, vanities and bombastic overstatements, I admire Russell Means enormously. He has behaved with extraordinary courage throughout his life and been a passionate, eloquent and determined advocate for his people.

Wounded Knee

The next morning I stop off at Wounded Knee. I try to imagine being born an American Indian in today’s United States. Who am I? What are my prospects? A life of alcohol and sugar-rich junk food which my system has not evolved to process without the risk of alcoholism, obesity and diabetes and the grim spectre of almost permanent unemployment. I would have nothing to look back on but an outrageous history of cruelty, betrayal and neglect by the White Man, the heritage of such monstrous crimes as the Wounded Knee massacre and a sentimentalised view of the previous unsullied holy perfection of my own people. How terrible for my pride to know that much of my income comes from my mother and sisters making dream-catchers and beaded knick-knacks for white tourists on the very site of that massacre and that my best hope of prosperity is to leave the lands my ancestors fought so hard to retain and to try and make it as an integrated, miscegenated American in the big city. Why would I not feel victimised and oppressed, why would I not become bitter and angry?

Mel, a Lakota deputy sheriff I meet, tells me that such negative thinking must stop. ‘It is time,’ he says, ‘for young Indians to shake off their sense of being victims and to take responsibility for who they are now. We can go on howling about the past or we can embrace the future.’ Mel is married to a white woman, Lisa, who happens to be the local tribal court judge. She lets me sit on a sad case of ‘elder abuse’.

That evening I watch the children at Pine Ridge High playing ‘the hand game’, a traditional Lakotan betting game, I listen to the boys drumming and chanting and I sit in on a class in which traditional decorative beading is being taught. In another one-to-one class, a young boy called Jesse is being taught the Lakota language by his grandfather.

Somewhere between Deputy Sheriff Mel’s insistence that his people must forget the past and the sight of young Lakotans enthusiastically connecting with their ancestral traditions must lie a future in which these proud and abused people can lead fulfilled modern lives without turning their back on their history or losing their unique identity.

To be honest I had been dreading three nights on a reservation. In the end I enjoyed myself here as much as I have anywhere.

NEBRASKA

‘I finally succumb and buy a hat, the kind of western cowboy hat that no Briton can wear without looking like ten types of dick.’

Mile after mile after mile of grassy plain lies between Nebraska’s border with South Dakota and my destination, the town of Grand Island. They call this country the sandhills, where the plains undulate gently and the grey-green grass heaves and swells like the sea.

Nebraska is a farming state: it was born of the great land grabs of the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government offered free land to whomever could scramble to it and claim it for their own. These homesteaders grew corn and raised cattle and lived a Great Plains life. Then came the Union Pacific railroad, which passed right through Grand Island, giving it quite a reputation as a place of high living and loose morals. The great days of the railroad are over of course, but Grand Island has since benefited, if that is the word, from having one of the great Interstate Highways run plumb spang through it.


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 545


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