THE SUN BEATS DOWN and the glistening grass all around is bluish-green like jade. I’m driving toward Mobridge under a deep blue sky. I’m thinking about Dallas and Daryl—and whether people have an obligation to understand as much of the world as they can, or whether it is enough for them to keep to their own, to be what Barry Lopez calls “geniuses of local landscape”—like Stuart Harris in the Swan River Valley. I don’t know whether Dallas’s and Daryl’s knowledge of their part of Nebraska would qualify them as geniuses, but I do know that Stuart knows about the rest of the world too, that he has broad concerns and sympathies. For Lopez local knowledge, much as he reveres it, is not enough. He cites a survey that “found Americans woefully ignorant of world geography. Three out of four couldn’t locate the Persian Gulf.”
NORTH MAIN STREET, Mobridge, is smart and tidy with some proud old buildings—one hundred years old or more, two-story, flat-fronted with tall, arched windows and intricate brickwork beneath their flat roofs. At the northern end of the street, a few steps beyond the delicate, white-painted Chamber of Commerce building, “established 1906,” I stand on the bank of the Missouri and gaze across blue water to the low green hills on the other side. Sitting Bull was born over there, in 1831 or 1834 according to different accounts, in a village called Many-Caches on the bank of the Grand River, a tributary that enters the Missouri just here, opposite Mobridge. He died on December 15, 1890, not far from where he was born, shot outside his log cabin by two of the forty-three Indian policemen sent to arrest him by Major James McLaughlin, the government’s agent at the Standing Rock Reservation.
One hundred and twenty years later on Main Street, Mobridge, tasteful burgundy-colored banners hang from antique lampposts and coax passersby with soothing white typography: Quality LIVING: MAKE IT MOBRIDGE; Start a BUSINESS: MAKE IT MOBRIDGE; Raise a FAMILY: MAKE IT MOBRIDGE. The message seems to be getting through. Plenty of smart-casual people are striding about, necks pushed forward, faces full of purpose, while their shiny cars point diagonally at the pavement and wait.
I drive to the western edge of town, toward the bridge that crosses the Missouri, and stop at the Klein Museum. Inside, a whole wall is devoted to photographs of Sitting Bull, and I spend some minutes studying his face, the face of a man who wouldn’t compromise—and who eventually came to be admired across America by white people as well as Natives for his bravery, determination, and integrity—and also, I sense as I look at him, for some hard-to-define charismatic, perhaps shamanistic, power; he was a medicine man, given to privation and trances, as well as the leader of his people in peace and war. His face is broad, with a strong jaw and a wide mouth with well-defined, slightly downturned lips. In some pictures he wears a hat or a many-feathered headdress. In others he wears two feathers, or just one, at the back of his head. His hair is parted in the middle and tied, sometimes with beads, in two plaits that fall forward over his chest almost to his waist. When he looks at the camera he seems stern, and when he looks away or down he seems sad, reflective.
The museum curator is called Diane. She’s bright-eyed, congenial, about my age, and we get to talking about politics. She is a liberal who votes Democrat and thinks Obama is a good thing. I must seem surprised, because she smiles and says, “Well. We’re in a minority around here—but, in the state as a whole, not such a minority as you might think.” South Dakota, she tells me, has two senators, one Democrat and one Republican. She has two sisters who are Republican, though her father is a Democrat. “I have friends who are Republican.” She frowns and shrugs. “But we get on.”
I describe Dallas and Daryl and their outlook and opinions, and she says that she knows the type. They might or might not be antiblack. There is racism; there are people who believe that blacks are somehow not as good as whites. “You’ll get a sports commentator who’ll praise a black man for his basketball skills, while thinking he’s less than a white in other ways. It’s one reason for the reaction against Obama.”
Almost everyone is sympathetic to the Indians, Diane says. However, the welfare payments that some of them get can, she thinks, be a hindrance to them as well as a source of bad feeling toward them. She tells me about some Indian schoolchildren who came to the museum and gathered around the old post office which has been reconstructed outside. She asked an eight- or nine-year-old boy if he knew what the post office was for. “Oh yes,” he said, “that’s where we go once a month to get our check from the government.”
I CROSS THE Missouri on a long, flat bridge. For the second time in three days I am heading for the place where Sitting Bull is buried.
In 1889, government agents called together a group of Hunkpapa and Blackfoot Sioux chiefs at Standing Rock and talked them into selling much of their remaining land. Sitting Bull, their most powerful and respected chief, was not told of the meeting because he was known to be opposed to the sale of any land at any price. He found out what was going on, but arrived too late to prevent the others signing the agreement. In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Dee Brown writes:
It was all over. The Great Sioux Reservation was broken into small islands around which would rise the flood of white immigration. Before Sitting Bull could get away from the grounds, a newspaperman asked him how the Indians felt about giving up their lands.
“Indians!” Sitting Bull shouted. “There are no Indians left but me!”
I follow a narrow road that winds between fields for three miles or so. At the end, on a low grassy mound overlooking the Missouri, I find two monuments to the great man. One, at the foot of the mound, is in the shape of a tombstone and shows Sitting Bull’s face in relief looking out from a halo draped in feathers. His plaits frame part of the inscription, his eyes swivel left toward the river, and he has a mischievous downturned smile. The story of the site is told in the inscription:
Sitting Bull was originally buried at Fort Yates, ND. On April 8, 1953, surviving relatives with the aid of the Dakota Memorial Association moved his remains to the present location and dedicated the Memorial Burial Site April 11, 1953.
This place, high above the river, close to where the chief was born and to where he died, must be more appropriate than Fort Yates, the headquarters of the Hunkpapa but some forty miles away. On top of the mound, a few feet from the gravestone, a bust of Sitting Bull rests on a granite plinth. Here he looks imperious. His eyes are narrowed and his mouth is again downturned, as if he dislikes what he sees—as well he might: the Missouri dammed to form a lake that drowned several Indian villages.
The sun beats down, coarse grass grows through cracks in the tarmac, and, overhead, squadrons of clouds lumber past on their way north. It’s one thirty. There is no one else here. I sit on the grass eating almonds, apricots, and granola bars.
For much of his life Sitting Bull was either fighting or evading U.S. soldiers. After the battle of Little Bighorn and Custer’s demise, he evaded the U.S. Army and escaped to Canada, the country that the Indians called the land of the Grandmother (Queen Victoria), where he lived for four years with around three thousand followers. But life was hard. The British tolerated rather than welcomed the Sioux. In 1881 the U.S. promised him a pardon and said that he could live on the Hunkpapa Sioux reservation at Standing Rock. He returned. The promise was broken, and he was imprisoned for two years. However, by then, he was famous. Until his return he had been one of only two living chiefs—the Apache Geronimo was still free in Mexico—who had not capitulated, not signed a treaty, not agreed to live on a reservation. After his release in 1883, he went to the reservation, lived beside the Grand River, and again led his people, determined to resist the white man’s attempts to extract more land from the Hunkpapa with devious treaties.
From then on his fame grew. He made a fifteen-city lecture tour with an interpreter, toured the United States and Canada with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, and met two U.S. presidents, Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland. Like the Black Panthers who, in the 1960s, were invited to parties by wealthy socialites like Felicia and Leonard Bernstein, and Gail and Sidney Lumet—a trend exquisitely lampooned by Tom Wolfe in his essay “Radical Chic”—Sitting Bull attracted the attentions of wealthy, white liberal sympathizers. One in particular, a rich widow from Brooklyn, went further than Bernstein and friends by traveling west, living in Sitting Bull’s camp, and becoming his secretary; she left only when Sitting Bull proposed marriage.
The focus on him was like that directed at A-list celebrities in the twenty-first century. In Great Plains Ian Frazier describes matters neatly:
He received fan letters in English, French, and German, hate mail and letters from lunatics. He not only had an Indian agent, he had a booking agent. He sold his autograph for a dollar each. Fame made him a lot of money, but his colleague Annie Oakley remembered that he gave all the money away to ragged little boys.
Through it all, he held firm to his belief in the rights of his people and of all Indians, and his anger at how they had been treated. He appeared fearless while displaying, what must have been to the authorities, an infuriating sense of fun and of the ridiculous. Perhaps more deliberately than his enemy Custer, Sitting Bull used fun as a weapon and as a conduit for his emotions.
In 1883 he accepted an invitation to speak at a ceremony in Bismarck arranged to celebrate the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad, an event that was to be attended by President Grant. A young Sioux-speaking army officer was provided to help him write the speech. The plan was that Sitting Bull would speak in Sioux and the officer would translate. In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Dee Brown describes what happened:
When Sitting Bull was introduced, he arose and began delivering his speech in Sioux. The young officer listened in dismay. Sitting Bull had changed the flowery text of welcome. “I hate all the white people,” he was saying. “You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts.” Knowing that only the army officer could understand what he was saying, Sitting Bull paused occasionally for applause; he bowed, smiled, and then uttered a few more insults.
The horrified interpreter improvised a friendly speech so convincingly that the audience stood up and cheered—and the railroad company invited Sitting Bull to another ceremony in St. Paul.
I drive away, back across the Missouri and through Mobridge. How far was all this from the plastic Indians of my childhood, from the brown cotton tepee standing in our small garden, from dear old Tonto forever smiling and rescuing the Lone Ranger!
I STOP AT Mr. Bob’s Drive-Inn, an irresistible red-and-white-painted eating place at the side of 83 in Selby. Opposite Mr. Bob’s, three or four trucks are parked outside Shorty’s Truck Stop. Shorty’s looks all right, but it reminds me of a passage in Blue Highways where William Least Heat-Moon, who showed plenty of nerve as he drove around the USA, explained why he tried to avoid truck stops and truck drivers, or “teamsters”: “When I hear teamster cant about being the self-professed ‘sons-of-a-bitches of the highway’... and witness their ludicrous attempts to be folk heroes, I get very nervous the next time I see one pushing forty tons seventy miles an hour at me.”
At Mr. Bob’s I order a root beer float with vanilla ice cream from a girl dressed in red-and-white stripes who stands inside a window. Being English, I’ve not had a float before and I’m not sure about root beer either. But it is refreshing and exactly what it sounds like: vanilla ice cream floating about, and slowly melting in, a lake of root beer—which tastes like cough medicine.
The girl in stripes asks about my accent, and soon I am asking her whether she knows that 83, which is about ten feet away, goes all the way to Texas and the Mexican border.
She doesn’t, but seems pleased to find out. She lives here. “Small town,” she says, and giggles.
I drive on, heading for Pierre (pronounced peer), capital of South Dakota—and again feel the thrill of being on the American road: the one seen in movies, imagined in songs, read about in books: John Steinbeck’s road—not the one in Travels with Charley—the one in The Grapes of Wrath, along which Okies with jalopies and handcarts scrabbled to escape the dustbowl. Jack Kerouac’s road, Woody Guthrie’s, Bob Dylan’s. It goes on and on and on, between fields, past small herds of black or brown cattle, under a blue sky filled with fluffy, pillow-shaped clouds, across a relentless flatness—or perhaps curvedness because, again, I seem able to see beyond the horizon, way out into hazy space. And, as I drive this straight road slowly, at a constant speed, mesmerized by a rhythmic rush of telegraph poles, I feel exhilarated. It is as if I have traveled it before, as if I have seen it and dreamed about it.