FROM THE WINDOW OF my fifth-floor room at Bismarck’s Expressway Inn I can see Prius, some way off, neatly parked between white lines. This means that I’m in a hotel, rather than a motel. It’s a ballpoint hotel, a clicking-ballpoint-that-doesn’t-need-a-lid hotel—and there’s a coffee maker with which I can make not just coffee but tea; I boil water in the glass jug and pour it onto a tea bag that I brought from England, because tea, when you can get it in the USA, is usually Lipton’s, bland and fit only for drinking with lemon.
When I leave the room in the morning, a tall, lean man in a black cowboy hat is walking along the corridor toward me. Together we wait for the elevator and travel down to the ground floor. I linger behind him as we cross the lobby so that I can have a closer look at this dude whom my sideways glances have identified as a very clean cowboy. His Wrangler jeans are ironed, his shirt with mock-mother-of-pearl press-stud pocket flaps is pressed, and he even has a packet of Marlboro (original, not light) in his hip pocket. I wonder what happens when he sits down. In the car park he is joined by an ordinary-looking woman in a white T-shirt, whom I take to be his wife, and then by a large couple. All four climb into a small, beaten-up red car. The larger people sit in the back, and my man lights a Marlboro before getting into the driver’s seat while still wearing his hat. As they chug off, I see that the car is a Nissan Stanza.
I guess that this man is one of the cowboys whom Stuart and Garry described, the ones who “don’t have any cattle,” for whom cowboyhood is “a way of life,” who “wear the clothes” and are “not armed totally, but they’ll have a gun around.” Stuart and Garry said this with no disrespect. However, this cowboy is so clean, ironed, and immaculate that the snide aphorism “all hat and no cattle” comes into my mind. Of course, I could be wrong: he might be a real cowboy who is driving his Nissan to wherever he left his horse.
IN 1872 THE executives of the Northern Pacific Railway named the new town that would become Bismarck, Edwinton, after their chief engineer. A year later they took a more Reaganite–Thatcherite approach, eschewing sentiment and going for the money, and renamed it in honor of the German chancellor in an attempt to attract investment from Germany. Bismarck has an austere air with grand, gray public buildings, an unforgiving traffic system, and a tight beltway around its circumference.
I take a turn around the art deco skyscraper of the state capitol. High on a rough stone plinth stands a life-size bronze sculpture of a young woman in a flowing robe with a baby peeping over her shoulder—at least, he would be peeping if he weren’t asleep. The position of the baby and the woman’s resolute gaze make clear that this is not the Virgin Mary but Sacagawea and her son, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, who was nicknamed Pomp. The same image, plainly a North Dakotan icon, is printed in dark blue on the business cards handed to me by several people who work at the State Historical Society of North Dakota.
IN 1960, ACCOMPANIED by his dog, Charley, John Steinbeck drove around the United States in a customized van that he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse. In Travels with Charley, he wrote:
Someone must have told me about the Missouri River at Bismarck, North Dakota, or I must have read about it. In either case, I hadn’t paid attention. I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart.
Looking forward to seeing the pure west, I drive out of Bismarck and across the Missouri on a long, unexciting bridge, from which there is no view of the water, and arrive in Mandan, the town on the other side. It seems a dull place, enlivened only by a sign that announces Big Willies outside a closed-up, white-painted building.
Beyond Mandan, I see a lot of green grass—but I am driving south, whereas Steinbeck struck out west and was soon describing the North Dakota Badlands, one hundred miles away. My plan is to follow the west bank of the Missouri, as closely as possible, south for some hundred miles to a bluff overlooking the river where Sitting Bull is buried—and then to return to Bismarck.
Steinbeck doesn’t mention Highway 83; he probably didn’t notice that he crossed it as he drove into Bismarck from the east. Nor does he have anything to say about the 100th meridian west, a line of longitude 100 degrees west of Greenwich that runs down the middle of the United States and Canada, cutting the continent into two almost-equal halves.
John Wesley Powell, on the other hand, had plenty to say. Powell was a much-respected man of action, described by Simon Schama in The American Future: A History from the Founding Fathers to Barack Obama, as “an all-American hero, soldier, explorer, and scientist.” A team led by Powell, then the director of the United States Geological Survey, wrote Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, which was published by order of Congress in 1878 and made much of the 100th meridian as a line that marks the border between climate zones. The report warned that most of the land west of the meridian did not get enough rain to sustain agriculture—by which Powell meant arable farming; some parts of the dry west were good for ranching, he conceded, but almost none of it for farming. However, despite Powell’s authority and popularity, the railroad companies ignored him and persuaded gullible homesteaders, eager for their own free 160-acre farm, of the nonsensical doctrine that “water follows the plow,” a notion—promulgated by a misguided professor named Cyrus Thomas—that merely plowing up land causes rain.
Of course, Powell was right and much suffering would have been avoided had his advice been taken. In his book Bad Land: An American Romance, Jonathan Raban describes the desperate struggles of homesteaders west of the 100th meridian in Montana and North Dakota in the early years of the twentieth century.
The 100th meridian does indeed roughly divide the moist East from the arid West, and mark where the West begins. And the same can be said of 83. Until it reaches the citrus groves on the Texas border with Mexico—where it turns southeast to follow the Rio Grande—83 stays close to the 100th meridian and crosses almost the very center of North America. For most of its length, the road lies a few miles to the west of the meridian. South of Bismarck it crosses the meridian and keeps to its east for about a hundred miles before crossing back close to the South Dakota border; it crosses from west to east again north of Abilene, Texas, this time staying to the east until the end of the road in Brownsville.
It can fairly be said, then, that Highway 83 marks, roughly, where the West begins. West of 83 and of the meridian, the Great Plains become the drier High Plains and rise gradually toward the Rocky Mountains two hundred miles or so west.
THE DAY IS sunny, blue sky, big white clouds—and, as soon as we leave Mandan, Prius and I bowl along, windows down, on a two-lane road through open grassland. This is State Highway 1806—a piffling strip of tarmac compared to U.S. Highway 83. The Missouri is nearby to my left, though I can’t see it.
I turn left at a sign to Fort Rice Camping Ground and find a car park containing three or four recreational vehicles (RVs) and a shiny black pickup. I stroll up a slope and get a glimpse of Lake Oahe, the reservoir created by the damming of the river 230 miles to the south, close to Pierre, South Dakota. It is a quarter of a mile away: a gray puddle between flat meadows. Then, from beneath my eyebrows and at a distance, I watch as the man from the shiny pickup, big, bald, and wearing a tight blue T-shirt, rummages through a line of evenly spaced rubbish bins. He is picking out drink cans and putting them in the back of his truck. Can this be an altruistic exercise in recycling, or is he paid by the can like hobos in New York City?
He doesn’t look like a hobo. I stroll past nonchalantly, say something about the weather, and tell him that I appreciate his efforts at recycling.
For a moment he looks puzzled. “Recycling?” He scratches his head. “No, no. I remove these to prevent bobcats. I’m paid to do that.” He turns away and reaches into a bin.
“Oh!” I say—and walk on.
Bobcats are wild cats common in much of North America, but rarely seen because they are nocturnal. About twice the size of domestic cats, with pointed ears and short tails, they steal up on hares, rabbits, rodents, and even deer, and leap on them from several feet away. There are websites that encourage the preservation of bobcats and their habitat, while others show photographs of smiling men and boys holding dead bobcats by their necks or forelegs. For $350 a day, an Arizona-based company offers the shooting of bobcats and other “critters”; your guide will coax the “varmints” with a mouth call or electronic caller. “AR-15 and other semi-auto rifles” may be used, but by law the magazine may not hold more than five rounds. It is suggested that punters wear “camo.”
I DRIVE ON. Despite the blue sky and green grass and rolling countryside, the region seems desolate, perhaps because that is all there is: blue sky and green grass. There isn’t even much traffic.
I come to a sign: You are entering Standing Rock Indian Reservation. It has several bullet holes in it; otherwise it is a conventional U.S. road sign, with rounded white letters on a green background. A few yards on, another sign: Welcome to the Standing Rock Nation, tasteful white letters on dark blue with a message underneath, dark blue on cream: Take good care of the land, your family, and your life.
I am in one of the largest Indian reservations in the U.S., in the land of the Hunkpapa, or Standing Rock, Sioux—the grouping of which Sitting Bull was chief. Long blue-green grass rises to the tops of hills to my right, and, as I drive south, the hills grow gradually more angular and majestic.
I turn left into the small town of Fort Yates, headquarters of the Standing Rock Sioux. Here there is a new-looking school, a well-maintained administrative building, a smart health center, a low red-brick courthouse. In a car park on the edge of the lake is the standing rock itself: small, curiously shaped, and sacred to the Sioux. It is said to be the petrified body of a young woman sitting on the ground with a baby on her back. After her tribe moved on she stayed behind, upset that her husband had taken a second wife (not uncommon among the traditional Sioux). When her husband’s brothers came back to look for her, she and her baby had turned to stone. Thereafter the band of Sioux took the stone with them wherever they traveled and revered it as holy. Now mother and child sit on a plinth of beige bricks, and a brass plaque tells their story.
On a road away from the lake are small wooden homes: some are well maintained, others look abandoned, a few are boarded up. I stop at a small supermarket. Inside, an Indian woman is shopping with her teenage son and daughter. The boy wears a red hoodie; he swings his arms—clearly bored with shopping—rubs his eyes, spins slowly on one foot, and lopes off behind mother and sister. An Indian woman in a green overall is mopping the floor; the place is very clean. I find dried apricots and a box of Nature Valley Oats ’n Honey granola bars. A small woman, also wearing a green overall, smiles as she takes my money and offers me a plastic bag.
I RETURN TO 1806 and head on south. For miles there are no houses, no sign of man, save for wire fences and the road, which sweeps on, dipping and swerving. Flat-topped hills, mesas, with no rocks, just grass, appear faraway—and then closer. Are these Steinbeck’s “water scorings and small outcrops”? A group of horses—eight or ten of them, tiny to my distant eye, chestnut brown and somehow perfect—stand against the sky, high above me, gazing west; they look wild and ready to be ridden by Indians, bareback and fast.
There is a fork in the road, and a sign: 1806 is closed ten miles on. Arrows point to the right, to a diversion away from the Missouri. I stay on the country road; I want to reach the cliff above the river where Sitting Bull is buried; perhaps I can get through.
Still there are no houses, no cars, just hills in random folds like a rumpled blanket, empty fields—and then a crowd of black cows, way off in the lee of a line of trees. From the crest of a hill I look down at the Missouri, wide and blue.
The road is blocked; it is being resurfaced. I must drive back the way I have come. But I will get to Sitting Bull—tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, from the south.
Later, in mid-afternoon, there are pickups on the road and SUVs up close in the rearview mirror, black and intimidating. In an essay called “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” about the impact of 9/11 on the inhabitants of Bloomington, Illinois, David Foster Wallace mentioned “the town’s two basic classes and cultures, so well and truly symbolized by the SUV and the pickup truck.” Those classes and their vehicles seem to be all over North America. And SUV drivers, despite being posh or at least aspirational, are probably friendly and harmless. Many are women, not that that means they are friendly or harmless.
The sun is high to my left, the air is warm, mirages—pools of water that aren’t there—somehow reflect the lights of oncoming cars. Many of these all-terrain vehicles keep their headlights on in daylight, perhaps to make sure that the cows can see them—a twenty-first-century adaptation of shooting in the air and yelling, “Yeeee-eeee-eeee-haaaaah!”