CHAPTER 5

For this country, my ranch is small. It consists of 1,080 acres that I own and another 760 acres that I have leased (all or part of) for fifteen years. At the very southern tip of the ranch, two and a quarter miles from my place, lies another house tucked away in the overgrown lilacs and barren fruit trees. The house was built sometime in the fifties but has not been lived in for at least twenty-five years; the outbuildings are neglected, slumping at their shoulders from too much winter, too little paint. The site is typical of the northern plains, deserted by a couple who took their kids to town because the wife, in a fit of sanity, proclaimed that she had had enough. Chet and Mae Garrett have become great friends of mine. They are old now, with creaky knees and artificial heart valves. Their kids are scattered from the Gulf Coast to Seattle.

In some ways it has fallen to me to look after the old building site. I make sure the raccoons haven’t found their way into the attic of the house, that the roof hasn’t blown off the barn, and that the yard is mowed a couple times a summer. And when I’m down there, I make a point of walking behind the house that Chet and Mae built, to the ruins of the first house built on the original homestead. There are a few old lilac bushes in the tangle of prairie grass reclaiming the site, but they will not last much longer. Soon nature will reclaim her own and expunge all trace of the failed attempt to tame this place. I can’t help thinking that this little spot of earth has lain prisoner for nearly a century and only now is feeling the twinge of freedom that was its former self. I wonder if I will live to see buffalo once again tread upon that soil.

Given the deep poverty of most homesteaders who flowed into our country at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of twentieth, a reasonable assumption would be that the original house on that site was a dugout or a sod hut. But the house whose ruins I kick around and ruminate over was not dug out of the ground to shelter an impoverished immigrant family. It was built by a resourceful man of moderate means named Freeman Smalley. He arrived at the beginning of the century, just as the era of the open cattle range was giving way to homesteading, the crackpot scheme to turn the northern plains into a grand matrix of small prosperous farms.

Freeman was from Michigan, where the climate can better support the free and independent yeoman farmers described by Thomas Jefferson as the bedrock of democracy. For a reason lost to history and legend, he and his mother sold their Midwestern farm in the early years of the twentieth century and moved to the northern edge of the Black Hills. By all accounts, Freeman was a capable and industrious man. Like almost all the people of the homestead era he was a farmer, but he had other talents. He was a good farm manager, a carpenter, and somewhere in the limestone country of Michigan had picked up the skills of masonry and stone-cutting.

Freeman and his mother were not actually homesteaders, because they never lived on the place and improved it to earn the patent to the land. They had money enough to buy the original place from the family who had actually done the homesteading. The story of where he and his mother lived when they first moved to the West is fuzzy. Perhaps they inhabited a soddy somewhere in my south pastures or perhaps they lived in town for a while. But in a short time they became established in the community. The mother is obscure to history but Freeman gained a reputation as a good grain farmer, a decent stockman, a hard worker, and, perhaps above all, a tireless fiddler. Maurice Dachtler, a wiry, hickory nut of a neighbor six miles south, is seventy-five and old enough to have worked for Freeman. He shakes his head and smiles. “The man loved to dance. Oh, God, yes. Loved the ladies, too. Oh, God, yes.”

Freeman became famous for his ability to put in a day’s work and then to fiddle and dance all Saturday night. As for the ladies, the legend settles mostly on a woman named Margaret Martin, who lived down on Whitewood Creek with her family. The neighbors who can remember say she, too, liked to dance and that Freeman visited her every time he could sneak away from his mother. They say her beauty was the kind for which ears are sacrificed, for which monuments are constructed. Freeman Smalley must have figured he needed his ears to tune his fiddle, because he opted for building Margaret a monument in the form of a huge sandstone house. He hoped to lure her away from her parents and into matrimony. Wandering about the grassy ruins of his dreams, I like to imagine that, like me, Freeman sat up nights contemplating the meaning of life. I wonder if, like me, he grappled with understanding what it takes to pluck a life from the jaws of mediocrity and what is required to make it noble. In the 1920s the definition of a noble life was perhaps more clear. The First World War, Freeman’s war, was simpler than mine. Physical work was revered and always good. You didn’t worry about long-term impact on the land, and the need for a wife and family were not questioned.

Nine miles south of Freeman’s land, on the edge of the Black Hills, where the dark pine trees begin, stands a Veterans Administration hospital. It is built on the site of an early army fort named for the famous Civil War general George Gordon Meade. The fort was used as a base for pacifying (or, where deemed appropriate, subduing) the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne in the late 1870s and ’80s and has the dubious distinction of being the site of the trial of Major Marcus A. Reno, a popular scapegoat for General George Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn Creek, which lies two hundred miles to the northwest. The irony in Reno’s court-martial is that he was not tried for the cowardice that he was unjustly accused of, but rather for gazing at the daughter of the post commander through her bedroom window. By most calculations he was an odd and brooding man. By my calculation he might well have been only lonely.

The VA hospital is still called Fort Meade and many of the old buildings still remain. They are built of huge sandstone blocks quarried from the hills to the west. The blocks are a light terracotta red and weigh several hundred pounds each. To the designers of Fort Meade they must have seemed the perfect material from which to construct solid, imposing buildings that would communicate the power of the United States on the Great Plains, a place that by its nature shrugs off puny human notions of power. To Freeman Smalley the giant sandstone blocks seemed exactly right for building a monument to Margaret Martin in the form of a house like no one had seen this side of St. Louis.

He began working the quarry in the fall of the year. After the farmwork was done and through that first winter and the succeeding four winters, he cut the stones using a continuous abrasive cable method he’d learned in the quarries of Michigan. After the stones were cut, he loaded them onto a wagon with a gin pole and made the ten-mile trek to the site at the lower extremity of my ranch. Maurice Dachtler was not old enough to remember the construction, but he remembers that the older men talked about helping Freeman with some of the heavy work. “But Freeman did most of the work himself. Handy son of a gun, you bet.”

A handy son of a gun with a flair for the grand gesture. The house was three stories high in a land and time where most homes were still subterranean. No one can tell me how long he worked on his matrimonial castle but it was certainly years and years. All the time he continued to see Margaret at Saturday-night dances and to visit her down on Whitewood Creek when he could elude his mother.

No one has ever said that Mrs. Smalley was overly protective, or even that she was opposed to her son’s plans, but they do imply that Freeman felt he had to see Margaret on the sly. I suppose Smalley felt his mother was his charge and that he was trying to be a good son, trying to figure out how to lead that noble and meaningful life, and coming to the conclusion that some deception was necessary.

While it might have been possible to be discreet in his visits with Margaret, it was impossible to keep the construction of his growing manor house on the QT. Big, old, water-seeking cottonwoods ring the ruins now, but during construction Freeman’s chosen site must have blended with the surrounding prairie, treeless and stark. By the standards of modern America the house was not exceedingly large, but by the standards of homesteading America, it was gargantuan: nearly five thousand square feet, counting all three floors. The stone walls were two feet thick, and bay windows, with sills beveled with a stone chisel to carry the rain away, graced each corner. The porches must have been stone, too, because I can find swirls of sandstone laid in burgeoning patterns under the creep of weeds and the litter of seventy years of cottonwood leaves. I never saw the top story. It was made of wood, and Chet and Mae, after a couple years of trying to heat the drafty old house, tore that story off to recycle the lumber into the house they built in the fifties. They say the top level had a balcony overlooking the ballroom that took up the major portion of the ground floor.

“The man loved to dance. Oh, God, yes.”

Maurice tells me that Freeman’s plan was to be able to sit fiddling on the balcony above his ballroom and watch the ladies dance below. But it never worked out that way. In fact, the house was never completely finished. “Wind used to blow through the cracks,” Maurice says. “Cold son of a bitch, you bet.”

Perhaps she was tired of waiting for the house to be finished or perhaps she never even loved Freeman. But Margaret abruptly disappeared from local lore, gone to some distant population center, most likely, and Freeman Smalley went back to work on his farm. He could still be found fiddling at Saturday-night dances but seldom danced again. “He loved the ladies,” Maurice says. “He’d just watch ’em. Watch ’em for hours.”

No one who knew Freeman has ever told me that he loved this land. Like most of us, he raised beef cattle and liked to farm, but I wonder where he found his beauty after he was jilted. I wonder if Freeman ever emerged from his stone house in the morning and looked at the sunrise and thought, Jesus, that strip of pink makes life worthwhile. Homesteaders had pretty much denuded the land of wildlife by then, but if he ever saw a deer or antelope, I wonder if he took the time to watch the way it moved. How it lowered its head warily to eat, how it might have jumped straight up and bucked for the sheer joy of it. If Freeman ever noticed these things he was a unique man for his age. My bet is that after he was rejected he put all his energy into his ranch, with an eye toward making money, not for finding the nuances that make it beautiful.

The record affirms that he made some good crops in the years following his heartbreak, and that he made some good deals with his money. Freeman’s holdings began to expand. He made money and he invested it in the land of his neighbors. If someone needed a loan for seed or for machinery, Freeman would advance the money and take a mortgage on the property. When the notes came due, Freeman would demand his money, and if it was not forthcoming he would foreclose. He picked up my hay fields that way. He got the quarter section where my house stands today.

“He was tough,” Maurice says. “Really intent on making it big. Had the first car on the bench. Got him a big old Maxwell. Shit, nothing but mud roads out here then. That’s how I met him. After that deal with Margaret Martin. He was stuck up the road past our house and me and my brother hitched up a horse and went and pulled him out. He give us five dollars. Why, shit, we’d never seen five dollars before. I went to work for old Freeman that spring.”

Freeman Smalley realized early on that the homestead idea, which assumed that a family could survive, or even thrive, on 160 acres of northern plains land, was idiotic. The land was not fertile enough, the rainfall was far short of what was required to raise good crops. By foreclosures and outright purchases he parlayed his original farm into a few thousand acres. He came to this country at the close of the open-cattle-range era, when tens of thousands of cattle were pastured, free of charge, on the public domain. No one looked at that system as the first agricultural subsidy to buoy up the Great Plains, but that’s what it was. It was a giveaway for the rich of the East Coast and Europe and, though it was short-lived, it made many investors even richer at the expense of the land, and began the myth of the independent, self-determined cattleman of the Great Plains.

Freeman was a smart man, and I suppose he saw who was getting rich and how. He was here to see the second big government giveaway, too, in the form of the homestead acts that again lined the pockets of industrialists by giving them artificial markets for their goods and supplying them with a source of raw material. Freeman saw how things worked on the Great Plains: milk the government, never mind what damage you might be doing to the land, be ruthless with the inhabitants. He witnessed the deterioration of the homestead dream, perhaps felt some of the disillusionment himself in the form of a personal rejection that knocked the joy, optimism, and charity right out of him.

Some would say that Freeman’s being jilted by Margaret had nothing to do with the northern plains experience, that love goes unrequited every day in every locality and that his story is a common one. But I wonder. I spent an afternoon not long ago with an articulate man in his late thirties or early forties who lived alone on a cattle ranch of nearly nine thousand acres in one of the remotest parts of South Dakota. The man took some not unearned pride in the way he and his neighbors lived. “It wants to be a horse culture,” he told me. “These men are tough. If the economy is off, they’ll eat venison to survive. If the well goes dry, they’ll pack water from some spring somewhere.” It was a rainy day and we were sitting in his kitchen, drinking coffee. Outside the window a fog had settled nearly to the level of the single telephone line that led away from his house. He stared at that disappearing line after he spoke and let one eye squint. He was obviously thinking thoughts that were none of my business, so I looked around his tiny, neat kitchen. On the refrigerator were two childish pieces of art. Stick men riding stick horses. Written across the top of the picture in orange crayon was: “For daddy, come visit us in Denver!”

Suddenly the man came back from wherever that single telephone line had taken him. “But it can never be a real culture.” He sipped at his coffee and gave no indication that it was stone cold. “The women won’t stay,” he said. “Can’t have a culture without women.”

This man had perhaps never considered that it was not necessarily the women’s fault. What woman in her right mind would stay in a house that was cold in the winter and hot in the summer with a man so bullheaded that he would eat dead deer meat three meals a day and haul water in milk jugs tied to his saddle horn?

But still, I know from experience that that lonely man had a point. There is no doubt that any life, especially a hard life, needs the sustaining hand of a woman, and there is no doubt that the northern plains has always been short of that particular commodity.

Freeman ended up taking care of his mother in his huge, never-quite-finished stone house. Maurice Dachtler was working for Freeman the day his mother died. “She must have been over eighty years old,” Maurice said. “Colder’n Billy hell that day. Oh, shit, it was cold. Old Smalley come out to where I was feeding the steers and says, ‘Mother’s dead.’ Just like that. ‘Mother’s dead.’ ” Maurice went in to help Freeman and found the old lady in the kitchen, wrapped in her long purple overcoat, sitting in a chair with her feet in the stove. “They’d shut down the rest of the house. Lived just in the kitchen. I guess she was cold. Died in her sleep.” Ten years later, Freeman would also be found dead in the same kitchen on a similarly cold winter morning, the stove still pushing out its pitiful heat.

After his mother’s death he continued to slip from the joyous Saturday-night fiddler to the miserly old man in seldom-washed coveralls. In later years Freeman would sometimes take his workers into town for lunch at a particular café. He would always buy a lemon pie for himself and made the waitress hold his hand before he would pay his bill. I wonder what his grip felt like to that young girl. The hands were certainly rough, perhaps not clean. Was there any tenderness left in them? Or was there just the desperate strength of the forlorn?

The snow, wind, rain, and subzero winters have worn the house down to little more than rubble. Sometimes a guy forgets that the ruins are in the trees behind Chet and Mae’s barn. When you stumble across the big stones, tumbled and half-buried by the recovering prairie sod, it is as if you have discovered a North American Stonehenge. You know that something important happened here, but what it was or what it means eludes you.

In October of last year I spotted a group of sharptailed grouse in the wheatgrass pasture a mile north of the ruins and put a young peregrine falcon up over them. The falcon had little experience and I didn’t think she had a chance of actually catching a grouse. But, of course, that is not the main goal of hunting with a falcon, anyway. I was there to watch her fly, to see her do things humans can never do. I stood by the pickup with Moose-Ann at my side. We both watched the falcon play on the breeze that blew from the northwest. As we watched, a wild prairie falcon came in and took a playful shot at my peregrine.

Prairie and peregrine falcons share a niche on the Great Plains and their rivalry, though eternal, is mostly symbolic. But that day something snapped in my bird and she took off after the prairie falcon with a vengeance. Moose-Ann’s short tail rattled in the dry grass when she saw our falcon’s serious wing beat. The prairie falcon took to the upper reaches of the blue sky to escape this foul-tempered youngster, and the peregrine went right up after him. The prairie was out of my sight and the peregrine just a speck when I saw her set her wings. She must have been a thousand feet high when she banked and started back. “Ohh, Moosie,” I whispered, “this could be good.”

As the peregrine winged her way back to a position above us, Moose-Ann and I moved to a place from which we could flush the grouse. I had my ball cap on backward so I could watch the anchor shape wheel on the wind far above. When it looked just right I gave Moose-Ann a line to the grouse with my hand. She sprang ahead with so much force that her front feet did not hit the ground for ten feet.

As the grouse came up Moose-Ann hit the deck and stayed there. By the time I looked up, the falcon was already halfway down, going perhaps two hundred miles per hour. But this was a young bird and so she held back and did not hit the grouse with all the force she had built up in the stoop. She strummed its back, and feathers trailed off as she rode the power curve back into the sky. The peregrine peaked at a point high enough to get another stoop and hit on the grouse. But by then she had lost her energy and disappeared in a flat pursuit toward the south. She was winging for all she was worth, but sharptailed grouse are tough and fast and I didn’t think the peregrine had a chance of catching it.

Moose and I waited for ten minutes for the bird to return and when she didn’t appear we made our way back to the pickup to see if we could get a signal from the tiny radio the falcon wore on her leg. When a peregrine does not return from a flight like that it is hard not to imagine that she has been successful, but experience has taught me that grouse are seldom caught in that way. Still, there is always a chance that she did indeed catch her quarry, and as I fiddled with the receiver, I recalled that she had been fired up by that prairie falcon in her territory. I got a signal to the south and it did not appear to be moving.

We tracked her to the neglected tree grove that hid the ruins of Freeman’s house, where a five-minute search revealed her standing triumphantly on a sharptailed grouse in the center of what had once been the old ballroom. By that time she had deplumed a great part of the grouse in preparation for her meal. She stood in an explosion of gorgeous black and white feathers with her head high and proud. Her eyes were deep black, the irises expanded by the adrenaline of the chase and kill, and I thought that this was likely not the first grouse to be caught by a falcon on this spot. Who knows how many times the scene before me had been played out, starting long before white men came, perhaps even before the Indians. How many times had it gone unobserved during the open range days? Had anyone seen what I was seeing when this land was populated by land-hungry immigrants? Had anyone ever noticed it before that day?

The peregrine lowered her head and plucked another delicate feather from the grouse’s breast. She shook her beak and the feather floated to join the others in the rosette of elegant plumage around her. The wind shifted the feathers slightly and added the sound of rustling leaves to this, the most elegant event ever to occur in the grand ballroom of Freeman Smalley’s stone house.