PIERRE SEEMED TO BE a pleasant place of parks and friendly people jogging by the river and walking their dogs. I had expected the Great Plains to show some signs of poverty, to see poor farmers barely subsisting, alongside the successful agribusinesses. So far I had seen none of that. Pierre’s unemployment rate was 3.2 percent, the same as in the surrounding rural areas, Hughes County and Stanley County.
In December 2013, Pierre’s unemployment was down to 2.8 percent. Bismarck, Minot, Valentine, the first town on my route in Nebraska, and North Platte, farther south in Nebraska, had similar levels. Garden City, a Kansas town with several meat-packing plants, had 3.6 percent unemployment; Abilene, Texas, 4.4; Laredo on the Mexican border, 5.6; Brownsville, where 93 percent of the inhabitants are Hispanic, 10.2. Unemployment in Chicago was 9.5; Los Angeles, 9.7; New York, 7.5; Detroit, 14.6.
So there are more opportunities for work on the prairies than there are in the big cities. Yet in Pierre, 10.8 percent are living below the poverty level (defined by the U.S. government in 2013 as an annual income of less than $23,550 for a family of four). In Bismarck, 9.7 percent are below that level; North Platte, 11 percent; Garden City, 14; Abilene, 18.8; Laredo, 29.8; Brownsville, 34.5. In Chicago 22.1 percent live below the poverty level; Los Angeles, 21.2; New York, 19.9; and Detroit, 38.1. There is poverty everywhere—just more of it in the cities.
A cause of this poverty—alongside the subprime-mortgage-and-collapsing-bank recession—is the dramatic increase in the inequality of incomes over the last thirty years—the Reagan–Thatcher years and onward—in the U.K. as well as the U.S. It’s not just me that says this kind of stuff. Barack Obama says it—and there are signs that even some Republicans in Congress are beginning to agree with him. George Packer says it movingly in his excellent book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. And Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Labor Secretary, says it and explains it with great clarity in the Observer of February 23, 2014: “Widening inequality is making it harder for the poor to escape poverty and thwarting equal opportunity... When almost all the gains from growth go to the top, as they have for the last thirty years, the vast middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power necessary to keep the economy growing and generate lots of jobs.”
And there are the facts: between 1979 and 2010, real annual wages of the highest earning 1 percent of Americans rose by 130.9 percent (according to the Economic Policy Institute), while the wages of the bottom 90 percent rose by 15.2 percent.
I DRIVE ACROSS the Missouri and out of the city. South of Pierre, the great river flows southeast—and, I like to think, slims itself down and smartens itself up ready for its date with the Mississippi in St. Louis and a life-enhancing sharing of fluids. I’ve been close to the Missouri ever since I visited Lewis and Clark’s Fort Mandan. Now 83 leaves the river and runs due south, a straight, undulating four-lane road made from concrete slabs, with grass in the middle and at both sides. It is good to be back on the road. There are no trees and little traffic, just a few farms away in the distance.
On a grassy rise to the west, four horses stand silhouetted against a flat blue sky; their necks curve in unison as they feed on lush gray-green grass. I stop the car to look, and something—perhaps the horses and the emptiness of the landscape—reminds me of a book that my mother gave me for my ninth birthday, Great Stories of the Wild West. I know it was then because I still have the book and she wrote the date inside. It’s a hardback, its cover decorated with cowboy hats, Colt 45 revolvers, sheriff’s stars, and horses, all wound around with lassos. I loved it and I read it many times. There is no named author, just an editor who wrote a short introduction, in which he says: “If the youngsters of today are anything like my generation, there is no story about the Wild West that they will not devour as hungrily as eggs and bacon.” In my experience that was true—and I loved eggs and bacon. As well as me and my friend Richard, most of the boys I was at school with were excited by the Wild West.
Of the five stories in the book, four are about individuals. Three of them were outlaws: Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid, and Jesse James. The exception is Buffalo Bill, about whom the editor writes: “Buffalo Bill was a champion of the law and the terror of the Redskins”—surely an exaggeration of the truth and only part of it. The fifth story, “California—Here I Come!,” is based on the true adventures and miseries of the Donner Party, a group of some eighty men, women, and children who tried to cross the Rocky Mountains in covered wagons in 1846; almost half the party died of cold and starvation while a handful of heroes of both genders emerged. As a boy I liked this story the most because it and the people in it seemed more real. Now, I can see that the writer had the advantage of telling the story of little-known real people, rather than famous men of action whom mythologies had made into caricatures.
Two years or so after she gave me that book, my mother left my father (for good reasons), and she and I went to live with her uncle, a genial old man, whom we both called Uncle Godfrey—and with whom I watched Westerns on television almost every night as he sat in a winged armchair sipping whiskey and soda. Rawhide was our favorite—we were much taken by the lean, mean Clint Eastwood in his role as “the ramrod”—but we were also hooked on Wagon Train, Laramie, and Bonanza. Again, Indians en masse were sometimes the enemy, the “baddies,” when, if instead we had been given the full story, they might have appeared sympathetic or even as heroes; while individual Indians were often “goodies,” friends to the white man and, in my eyes then, dignified men—and occasionally women—who had a special wisdom. Now, I see such Indians as simply—like most people faced with difficult, often impossible, circumstances—willing to compromise. This is not, of course, to belittle the good will and, sometimes life-saving, kindness freely given by many Indians to European settlers over the centuries.
In my early teens, I went to a new school and made friends with a boy called Quentin, who had also been indoctrinated by comics, television, and movies into the myth of the Wild West. He and I took to reading Western novels, Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey and a series of books by J.T. Edson featuring characters called Dusty Fog and the Ysabel Kid. When Quentin and I met in the corridors we would reenact scenes from these books, drawing imaginary guns, squinting into a make-believe sunset, and talking in American accents about how we were “kinda hard.” Later I learned that neither of those writers had firsthand knowledge of the Wild West. Zane Grey was a dentist who lived in New York. J.T. Edson was an Englishman who worked part time in a fish-and-chip shop in Leicester and had never visited the United States. Their books were constructed from, and promoted, the myth.