The bane of Native American reservations is alcoholism. With few jobs and fewer prospects, many men and women fall into the trap of dulling their senses with alcohol or other drugs. Distrustful of outsiders, especially whites, Native Americans too rarely realize their potential unless and until they are awakened and led by one of their own.
It had been a hard winter on the plains of central Wyoming. As the sun rose in mid-January 1943, Catherine Ratliff realized her baby was coming. The Ratliffs, members of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, lived on a ranch twelve miles from their nearest neighbor, and still farther from the hospital at Fort Washakie, on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation.
Scott Ratliff wrapped his wife in a thick blanket and set out for Fort Washakie in his battered pickup truck. Hours later, when he arrived at the hospital, a nurse told him it might be a day or two or even longer before the baby came. He said goodbye to his wife and returned to the ranch, where there were animals to feed and chores to do.
It would be two weeks before he returned to the hospital to learn his wife had given birth to a healthy boy, whom they named Scott but called Scotty.
Catherine was furious she’d been left at the hospital for two weeks. “I guess she forgave him eventually,” opined her son, now in his seventies. Catherine, now ninety-seven and a widow, lives alone on her ranch.
“I was raised on that ranch,” Scott Ratliff explained. “My extended family lived there, and besides my sister and younger brothers, I had nine cousins. Being the oldest, the responsibility of getting things done always fell on my shoulders, as it still does. If there’s a family problem, it seems like they always come to me with it.”
As a senior at Pavilion High School, Ratliff began to drink. Upon graduation, he enrolled at the University of Wyoming. “I dropped out several times,” he explained. “I got married and I had a lot of family problems, mostly because of my drinking. That kind of thing wasn’t as common on the reservation as it is today, but it certainly wasn’t foreign. Alcohol has been a big part of my life, both sober or drunk. I spent many years drunk.” He continued, “They were painful times because they severed marriages. I was twenty-four after my first divorce. And then, in 1966, I was drafted.”
At twenty-four, he was the oldest in his training cohort and spared many of basic training’s worst indignities and appointed to positions of responsibility. After advanced infantry training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, he shipped out to Vietnam and to the Twenty-Fifth “Tropic Lightning” Infantry Division’s Second Battalion, Thirty-Fifth Infantry, then operating in the Central Highland jungles near Dak To. “I enjoyed seeing that part of the country. There were so many native people living there, and I liked that,” he recalled.
Ratliff was an assistant machine gunner. Four months later, when his gunner was killed in a firefight, he did what he had always done: he took over. He grabbed the gun and began firing at the enemy. A little later a bullet tore into his right shoulder.
“It was kind of interesting,” he explained. “When I got shot, it also took the top part of my lung out. It blew me over and I saw what looked like my arm flying off. It was just a flash. The bullet severed the main nerve instantly. I never felt a drop of pain from that arm.”
Ratliff was quickly flown to a field hospital. “I was bleeding badly. They gave me blood and plasma, then put me on a plane and flew me to a big hospital in Qui Nhon,” he recalled.
Doctors repaired a torn artery in his arm, but not before gangrene had begun to appear in some of his fingers. “In all the Western movies of my childhood, when someone got gangrene, they had to cut off a leg or an arm or something to save his life,” Ratliff explained. “I did not understand gangrene. When I came out of surgery, I still had my arm, but I couldn’t feel it. It was like I was holding some other man’s arm. Then I saw that two of my fingers were turning black. I called a nurse over and she said I had gangrene. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, get a doctor over here and cut them fingers off,’” he recalled.
The nurse explained his gangrene was only from a loss of blood. When they fixed his artery, the fingers would again receive blood flow. As it happened, Ratliff did lose the pads of his little and ring fingers.
From Vietnam, Ratliff was flown to Japan for more surgery, and then to Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver, where surgeons attempted for the next eleven months to find a way to repair or regenerate the nerves in his arm. “There was a gap of about six inches in the nerve, where the bullet destroyed it. And they were never able to hook up the two parts,” Ratliff explained. “The doctors asked if I wanted them to amputate my arm. I wrestled with that idea and finally decided against it.
“I’m a rough man and was kind of a worthless piece of crap before I went into the service, mostly because of my drinking. I continued with the drinking for years, but I realized I had to do something with my life. I had three daughters by then, and I had to support them. I knew I had to get an education, because I couldn’t make it doing physical stuff.
“I got out of the service in Denver and stayed there while I went to Arapahoe Community College for two years. Then I went to Black Hills State University in South Dakota for two years,” he continued. In 1973, Ratliff earned a master’s in counseling at the University of Wyoming. Meanwhile, he struggled daily to learn to use his left arm as well as he had once used his right.
After college, Ratliff returned home to the Wind River Reservation and found a job as an Indian counselor at one of the high schools. Later, he ran the Department of Indian Education there for a year. “Indian education didn’t differ a great deal from what the white children got. I worked at different schools, and I tried to train my students to treat Indian students as they themselves would want to be treated,” he explained.
Ratliff obtained some government funds and used them to hire home-school coordinators to work with at-risk children at all the schools on the Wind River Reservation. These students were struggling academically. The coordinators tried to keep them in school instead of becoming so frustrated that they dropped out.
For the next twenty-five years, Ratliff counseled Indian students at Central Wyoming College. “Their biggest problem was attendance,” he explained. “Students fell behind and wanted to quit. Some of them were involved in petty crime and they’d get arrested or go into hiding. Or they’d just take a week off. It’s hard to make that up. I had to talk to their teachers and see if I could get them back in class. Sometimes they’d have to change classes.”
All the while he was teaching and counseling, Ratliff engaged with the reservation community. He sponsored the Veterans Club, the Rodeo Club, the Blue Sky Indian Club, and other student organizations.
In 1979, drawing on grim determination and what the Cody, Wyoming, Star Tribune described as “his strong spiritual belief in his Creator,” Ratliff quit drinking.1 “That’s a long story,” he said, “but never mind. Once I was sober. I discovered I had thoughts. A brain that could function. I’d been drinking for so long I’d forgotten about that.”
Soon after achieving sobriety, Ratliff attended a community meeting with several members of the Wyoming House of Representatives. He didn’t like what he saw. “I thought I could do a better job than they were, so I decided to run for office,” he explained. “I didn’t know anything about politics. Nothing. I couldn’t even tell you who I’d voted for the year before. But I ran and I won.”
Ratliff went on to serve six two-year terms in the legislature between 1980 and 1992. “I served on the appropriations committee for six years, and we made many important decisions about the future of our state,” he explained. Of the many laws he worked to pass, he is proudest of one that required insurance companies to recognize alcoholism as a disease. “That was huge,” Ratliff said.
After twelve years in office, he decided he needed to change his life. He and his wife divorced. “I was pretty well-respected and so was my wife. Many in the community were angry at me over the divorce. I decided I didn’t want to go through another election.”
The Wind River Reservation traces its history to 1868, and it’s unique because it’s the only reservation where two former enemy tribes live. The Eastern Shoshone Tribe, the original residents, share the land with members of the Arapaho. Each tribe manages its own affairs and has its own schools.
Ratliff has left a lasting imprint on his community. He founded and served as the first president of the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame, whose purpose is “to preserve, promote, perpetuate, publish and document Wyoming’s rich working cowboy and ranching history.” A lifelong horse rancher, Ratliff has spent a lifetime in the saddle. He still has five hundred acres and raises what he describes as “petting horses.” And he competes in rodeo and other equestrian events.
Since 2002, Ratliff has served as an advisor to Wyoming senator Mike Enzi, a lifelong friend. “I keep him up to date with all tribal issues, and I try to keep the tribe informed of federal issues,” Ratliff explained.
Ratliff has served as a member of the Wyoming state board of education since 2011 as well as on the National Advisory Board on Indian Education. With several like-minded colleagues, he started Native Ed for All, which works to expose all students in Wyoming to Native American culture.
Ratliff is also involved in trying to reintroduce the Shoshone language to the younger generation as a means of preserving a vanishing culture. “There are about 5,000 Shoshones but only about 123 native speakers,” he explained. “That’s terrible. Part of the problem is there are very few educated people who speak the language. In years past, most people grew up hearing it spoken by their grandparents or parents. That’s not happening now. The schools tried bringing these grandparents in to teach. They’re fine people and know the language, but they are not teachers. They want to teach the children one word at a time. In successful language programs, students are taught a subject using the language. And they’ve had tremendous success with full immersion.
“I believe that the term warrior isn’t just about the minutes when you’re battling,” Ratliff opined. “You are either a warrior or you are not. And if you are, it’s a lifetime battle. I’m seventy-five years old now. I’ve made it this far. I call it good, living the life of this man. I’ve had some blessings,” he said.
A proud Shoshone warrior, Scott Ratcliff continues to battle for his people.