THE VERY WORD WAS enticing. No good, thieves, murderers, danger, darkness, mystery. It would have been foolish not to go. And, if I saw the Badlands, I should get a better idea of what the word really meant: dry, bad for farming—and yet the Indians, Arikara and Oglala Sioux, had lived there in numbers.
On a hot morning, I drove west along I-90. The sky was deep blue, paler toward the edges. There was little traffic. The land was flat and grassy—so flat and so grassy as to be dreary, even boredom-inducing. I was hungry. I looked for an exit that might lead to a café or a filling station, some place where I could get something to eat.
After half an hour, I saw a sign, high on a concrete stalk off to the left: JR’s Bar and Grill. I drove off and under the interstate, past a sign announcing the town of Belvidere (pop 49), and into a dirt car park where a solitary pickup stood in front of a low brown building.
Inside: dim daylight; pine floors and pine tables; a dance floor, speakers, microphones on chrome stands; a long wooden bar against the front wall. There seemed to be no one in the room.
Then a voice said, “Howdy. What can I get yer?”
My eyes adjusted to the gloom.
He was a tanned, middle-aged man with a kind face and a short-cut beard. I asked if he had tea—and he did and, yes, I could have it with milk or any other thing I wanted.
Was he doing food?
“What do you want?” he said. “I got eggs, bacon, burgers, steaks.”
He handed me a menu. “Stuffed tators.” It was ten o’clock in the morning. I wasn’t going to eat a potato or a steak—and I wasn’t in the mood for eggs. I asked for a burger with salad and no fries.
The man called out to someone. Far away, at the other end of the bar, stood a small boy. He came nearer and the man told him to cook me a hamburger, and to wash his hands first. I watched as the boy did what he was told, while the man made a fine salad with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrots, and onion. As he moved around, I saw that he had a limp—the kind where one leg stays straight because the knee won’t bend.
The man was John Rogers: JR from the sign outside. The boy was his son. “Second marriage,” he said, with a shrug.
John liked Highway 83. He often drove down it to Oklahoma to visit his daughter. He’d had English people in his bar before, a couple who had stopped on their way to the Grand Canyon. He’d liked them so much that he’d invited them to stay on their way back—and they had, “in my camper out the back.”
The burger was good. The boy had fried it on a gas-fired hob behind the bar. Now he needed a new lighter for the gas and persuaded his father to give him the money to buy one. John threw him a bunch of car keys, and I watched through the window as the boy—all four feet of him—climbed into the pickup and started the engine.
I asked how old he was.
“Nine,” John said. And explained that he wasn’t going to drive on a public road. The store was next door and the boy would drive from one parking lot into another. He’d taught all his children to drive when they were young. One daughter had been driving in the fields at the age of five. One day, in snow, when the wheels wouldn’t grip, she’d accelerated so fast that John was thrown off the back of the pickup where he’d been throwing out bales of hay for the cattle. The little girl had cried when she’d seen him lying on the ground. “‘Oh no! I’ve killed my daddy!’” John laughed.
He had built the bar and dance hall himself, all of it out of wood, with a springy floor and no concrete, because a doctor had told him to walk on a soft surface—otherwise he’d be in a wheelchair inside five years. This was after he’d been dragged by a horse, damaged his leg, and been forced to give up farming.
He called it farming, but he had kept some cattle. It’s hard raising cattle in this region, he said. Low rainfall and lack of water mean that it takes twenty acres to feed one cow, whereas one hundred miles east, where his brother farms, three acres will keep a cow.
“We’re on the edge of the Badlands here,” he said. “And Badlands means dry land.” So they grow wheat and other crops, but only biennially; in alternate years the land lies fallow, often with straw and a thin layer of dirt on top to conserve moisture. The average farm here is twelve thousand acres, John said. And everyone wants to make their farm bigger. One of John’s neighbors is ninety-three years old and still buying land.
I remembered Jonathan Raban’s descriptions, in his book Bad Land, of the lives of homesteaders in eastern Montana—not far from here; how, in the early 1900s, they struggled and failed to make a living growing wheat on their allotted, and arid, 160 acres.
A few years ago the water supply to Belvidere was so unreliable that people traveled to a spring four miles away to fetch drinking-water. By writing endless letters, John had persuaded the authorities to provide an efficient supply. He told me this with modesty—but it was clear he was a man who liked to make things happen. He was proud of his dance hall and the numbers it attracts; people come from a hundred miles around. He hires bands who play “CCR, country and western, and rock ’n’ roll in that order.” (I didn’t like to ask what CCR stood for, but I checked later. Of course! Creedence Clearwater Revival. Duh!) “The farm workers are working hard now,” he said. “They’re busy haying—fourteen- to sixteen-hour days for four weeks, so no dances.”
I had to get moving to see the Badlands. After that, John said that I should visit Wall Drug. “That’s something else.”
I’d read about Wall Drug, and wasn’t so sure.
I STOP AT a gas station. A gale is blowing from the west. Two horses stand nearby on the prairie, heads up and sideways to it. The sky is hazy, smudged with dust. The car rocks as I sit in it, and grit pops against the paintwork. In the service-station shop yet another pair of immensely unslim people are blocking the aisle.
I wrench the car door open against the wind, and pull my foot in before the door slams. I gaze at the brown prairie through the dust on the windshield, and I’m reminded of the Buffalo Commons, the idea that an enormous area—ten or twenty million acres—of the drier part of the Great Plains be restored to native shortgrass prairie, which the buffalo thrived on.
The Buffalo Commons is the brainchild of an academic couple called Frank and Deborah Popper who point to the depopulation of the Great Plains: in places there are fewer than six people per square mile, and in Kansas there are said to be six thousand ghost towns. The Poppers believe that the current use of the land is not sustainable. They suggest that farms and ranches might be turned over to their former wild state—gradually and with the agreement and participation of farmers and ranchers who would be remunerated over a long period and continue to live on their land—and that wild buffalo be brought in.
Others have pointed out that the buffalo and their habit of scratching up the soil would encourage other plant and animal species, including wolves, which are declining in numbers and for which buffalo are a source of food. In turn, boosting the wolf population of North America, in particular in its national parks, would keep down the elk which are currently running rampant, eating and damaging too many trees and shrubs that produce berries, and thereby reducing the bear, beaver, and bird populations. When there are no wolves in wolf country, as there weren’t in Yellowstone Park between their extermination in 1926 and their reintroduction in 1995, the natural order collapses—including the shapes of rivers since the roots of the trees, on which elk thrive, hold their banks in place. A study by William Ripple and Robert Beschta of Oregon State University has shown that, since the return of the wolves, the ecosystems of Yellowstone and other national parks have quickly swung back to normal.
It is thought that twenty to thirty million buffalo once lived on the plains from the Gulf Coast to Alaska. In 1889 there were just 1,091 survivors. Now there are thirty thousand wild buffalo in protected herds, of which five thousand roam free, unfenced and, it is said, disease-free. (There are almost five hundred thousand farmed, semidomesticated buffalo, most of which have been crossbred with cattle.) In part this growth is the work of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which was formed in 1991 when members of nineteen Indian tribes met in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The council now has fifty-six member tribes across nineteen states, and it trains Indians to manage buffalo and to nurture appropriate grassland. In 2009, the tribes were responsible for fifteen thousand buffalo.
A HALF HOUR on, I drive off at a sign to Scenic Overlook. There’s space to park, and a path that curls for thirty yards up a shallow slope to a high point. From there I can see for miles to the north, west, and east, but there is little to look at: just long grass blowing in the wind. To the south is the interstate and beyond it some small rocky cliffs.
Two girls, one of them pretty fat, struggle up the path in the wind to look at the view. As they walk back down, a car pulls up and a woman calls out, “Is it worth it?”
“No,” they both shout. And the car pulls away and back on to the highway.
I SAT IN a queue of vehicles waiting to get into Badlands National Park. The wind had dropped and once again the sun bore down from a deep blue sky. Prius’s four windows were down. Rough conical rocks rose from the prairie to my left. In front of me, a starburst of reflected sun came from the rounded rear of a vehicle that seemed to be made of stainless steel: a mobile home, the size of a small bus—a Winnebago. (Game for children on long car journeys: How many names of Native American tribes can you find written on the backs of cars?) We were being admitted to the Badlands in batches. A line of cars drove out and then a line drove in. It was like waiting outside a car park for someone to leave, and finding that ten leave all at once.
Soon I paid fifteen dollars and was given a map and a Badlands visitor guide, both nicely printed in color. Then off I went behind the Winnebago, and gradually the line of vehicles spread out.
The Badlands Loop Road wound between strange, horizontally striped rock formations: mountains and canyons, peaks and gullies, buttes and mesas. Some of the mountains and buttes and mesas rose all alone out of the green prairie; others were clumped together in ranges that stretched for miles.
I stopped in a car park packed with vehicles from all over the United States and beyond. From there I wandered and looked, sometimes up, sometimes down, at the stripes and triangles and curious bulges that made up peaks and ravines and plump grassy rolls of rock. Eons of time were stacked up in unimaginable numbers, like the wages of footballers and film stars. At the base of some of the mountains and mesas was black rock that was seventy-five million years old; above it were layers of many colors—red, gray, brown, yellow—formed by seas and rivers and forests and volcanoes that had come and gone over time. The youngest layer, a rock that was a sort of beige color, was twenty-eight million years old. But the erosion of what had been a flat plain into the shapes that are there now, began more recently, just half a million years ago—and continues every time it rains.
Fossils of animals that lived millions of years ago have been found, and paintings of those creatures were on the page in front of me, as were photographs of animals that live in the Badlands now. Many of them aren’t that different. Leptomeryx looks like a deer, and, as far as I can see, Paleolagus is a rabbit.
Easier to imagine were the humans who once lived around here. The first were mammoth hunters who arrived only eleven thousand years ago. Later came nomadic tribespeople who hunted buffalo, and then the Arikara Indians, who didn’t just hunt but lived here, close to the White River in the south of the Badlands.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the Sioux took over and stayed until they finally lost out to the white man on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee, a creek some sixty miles south of the Badlands Loop. There 120 Sioux warriors, led by Big Foot, on their way to what they thought would be the safety of the Pine Ridge Reservation, set up camp with 230 women and children. Big Foot and his men were then ordered by a colonel of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry to lay down their weapons. They did so, but there was confusion, possibly caused by a deaf man who held his rifle above his head. A single shot was fired and set off the Massacre of Wounded Knee; the unarmed Sioux were strafed by Hotchkiss guns, early machine guns that fired almost a round a second. Close to three hundred died.
Two weeks earlier Chief Sitting Bull had been shot dead. After Wounded Knee the surviving Sioux and other Plains Indians effectively capitulated, did what they were told, and tried to adapt to life on reservations.
After two and a half hours and forty miles, I left the park and soon entered the town of Wall, named after the Badlands Wall, a sixty-mile line of rock formations, some of which I had just driven through.
WALL IS FAMOUS for a curious reason that has nothing to do with rocks. In 1931 a couple named Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought the only drugstore in the town, which had then a population of 326, all of whom were poor and had become poorer as they struggled to survive the Depression. The Husteads made this move for three reasons: Ted was qualified as a pharmacist and was tired of working for someone else; Ted’s father had died and left him three thousand dollars, enough to buy the drugstore; encouraged by two of Dorothy’s aunts who were Dominican nuns, Ted and Dorothy and their families prayed together and collectively decided that their taking on the pharmacy in Wall was God’s will.
The Husteads soon became popular in Wall, and Ted was pleased with his role as supplier of medicine to the community. But for five years the drugstore made very little profit. Too few people were buying the ice cream and soft drinks that American drugstores sold in those days, and Ted felt that he spent too much time staring out of the window looking for customers, and swatting flies. That year, 1936, the Husteads’ second child was born, and Ted worried about the privations he would put his young family through if he carried on with the drugstore.
On a Sunday afternoon that hot summer, Dorothy left Ted in the shop and went off for a nap. An hour later she came back. She hadn’t slept. She’d lain awake listening to the traffic on what was then Route 16A (now Interstate 90), and it had occurred to her that the people in those cars must be hot, and that they must want water. “Ice cold water,” she said. The Husteads had plenty of water and ice. Dorothy suggested that they put signs on the highway inviting passing motorists to come and get it for free.
The rest of the story is an archetypal example of the fulfillment of the American dream, and should long ago have been made into a film starring Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart. The Husteads acted on Dorothy’s idea the following weekend. Ted was skeptical, but before he and a helpful high-school boy had finished putting up signs on the highway, Dorothy was struggling to cope with the rush back at the shop. And, of course and crucially, many of the customers who came in for free water saw that the drugstore sold ice cream.
In 1982 Ted Hustead wrote about that day in 1936:
When the day was done, Dorothy and I were pooped. We sat in front of the store, watching the sun set, feeling a cool breeze come in off the prairie...
“Well, Ted,” Dorothy said to me, “I guess the ice water signs worked.”
The next summer, the staff at the store expanded to include eight girls who wore matching gingham-check dresses.
And now Wall Drug, still owned by Husteads, has much in common with a theme park. It has twenty thousand customers on a good day in summer, one million annually. It takes up a complete block on Main Street, sells almost everything, and, as well as a pharmacy, contains a 520-seat café, a museum, a chapel, Ted Hustead’s cowboy orchestra, an eighty-foot-long dinosaur, a creature called a jackalope made of fiberglass, the Chuck Wagon Quartet, and a replica of Mount Rushmore.
I parked in the immense and crowded car park and went in. Inside I wandered around, lost among thousands of others, all of us gazing glassily at stuff: lumps of rock, gold bracelets, cowboy hats. I bought some postcards, a chicken burger, and a Hershey bar—and before I left, I pressed a lever on the wall of the café and filled a plastic glass with free ice water.
I DROVE FAST along I-90, slowing a little to pay homage to John Rogers with a wave at the JR’s Bar and Grill sign, which rose out of the plain like a giraffe on the savanna. With Continental Stomp, a recording of a live concert by The Hot Club of Cowtown, in the CD player and the volume turned up, I covered the sixty miles to the junction with 83 in less than an hour.