THE FIRST SETTLER IN the area that was to become Liberal was a man called S.S. Rogers. He had water on his land and regularly gave it away to thirsty travelers. The travelers—or at least one of them—thanked him by saying, “That’s very liberal of you.” And the word became the name of the fledgling town.
The receptionist at the Liberal Inn Hotel, a chatty brown-haired woman, told me this. It happened in 1872, and S.S. Rogers wasn’t trying to sell ice cream or drugs. I want it to be true because it displays the word’s true meaning: generous. And it seems likely to be true. In 1885 S.S. Rogers built a general store including a U.S. Post Office which was called Liberal. In 1888 the railroad arrived and the town was officially incorporated. Within a year the population was eight hundred. Nowadays, Liberal is one of the three big beef-processing cities of southwest Kansas, along with Garden and Dodge. Guyman, nearby in the Oklahoma Panhandle, is a center for processing hogs.
Today is July 4, Independence Day. The receptionist says that nothing much will happen in Liberal. If people want to celebrate they go to big cities where there are fireworks, or they stay at home, have a few friends over, and let off their own fireworks.
ACROSS THE ROAD from the Liberal Inn Hotel, life-size cutouts of the characters from The Wizard of Oz stand in a raised flowerbed in front of some small trees. Behind them is a museum that contains Dorothy’s (Judy Garland’s) house and the Yellowbrick Road. Dorothy is a fictional character who comes from Kansas. Where in Kansas is not specified by her creator, L. Frank Baum. So some smarty-pants has to be congratulated for building her house in Liberal.
I ignore Dorothy and drive south out of town. After three miles I come to a sign, pitted by a few bullets, that says Welcome to Oklahoma: Native America, reflecting Oklahoma’s history as Indian Territory and the many tribes that still hold land in the state. I’m entering the Oklahoma Panhandle, which measures 166 miles east to west and just thirty-five miles, via 83, north to south. The Panhandle was once part of the short-lived independent Republic of Texas but was surrendered when Texas entered the Union as a slave state in 1845, because slavery was prohibited to the north of the line that became its southern boundary. For years after that it was known as No Man’s Land—and, in a way, that’s how it still seems.
FROM 1834 UNTIL 1889 the land that is now Oklahoma—the rest of which is east and southeast of here—was known as Indian Territory. It was the place to which the U.S. government dispatched scores of Indian tribes when they got in the way of white expansion—or in the way of what journalist John L. O’Sullivan in 1845 described as “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” The idea of manifest destiny, held long before O’Sullivan gave it a name, was that white Americans had a right to create across America an agrarian utopia that would serve as an example to the rest of the world. And, of course, the demands of God, or Providence, and the need to spread Christianity were part of the general idea.
Yet God didn’t spare the Indians. And surely no god worth worshipping would have blessed the enforced removal of Indian peoples from their ancestral lands to any place, let alone to this so-called Indian Territory, much of which was dry, flat, treeless, and covered in grass that appealed only to buffalo. Every removal of Native Americans to Indian Territory brought about tragedy and, frequently, death. The story of the flight of the Northern Cheyenne, who found that life on that land was literally killing them, is one example.
Another story, even more shocking, is that of the Cherokee, one of a group of tribes known then by Anglo-Americans as “the five civilized tribes”—the others were the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole. The five tribes lived in the southeastern United States—the Cherokee in the mountains that now span the border between Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee. All five tribes had a tradition of living in towns and practicing agriculture as well as hunting. Faced with white men from Europe, the Cherokee tried to accommodate them and learn from them. Churches and roads were built; missionaries were invited to open schools; and European methods of farming were adopted. They grew cotton, they spun and wove, they kept slaves. A Cherokee named Sequoyah worked hard to devise a Cherokee alphabet, based on the eighty-six syllables that they used, so their language could be written down. Missionaries who were teaching the children in English were skeptical, but when, after twelve years, Sequoyah succeeded, all his tribesmen wanted to learn and thousands did. The Cherokee then produced a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix; the Creek put out a Bible; and laws were written down. By the 1820s and ’30s, they had set up law courts, magistrates, police, a militia, and the first public school system in the South—and they had put in place a system of government based on that of the United States.
Christopher Davis, author of North American Indian, writes, “In fact they were too successful.” Six thousand people, a quarter of the tribe, broke away and migrated beyond the Mississippi because they wanted to retain their Indian identity.
Meanwhile, in 1828, the Americans had elected Andrew Jackson as their seventh president, a man who believed in manifest destiny—though the expression was yet to be coined—and who wanted to move all Indians west of the Mississippi. Jackson was a soldier, a popular general both in the 1812 war against Britain, when his men nicknamed him “Old Hickory,” and in wars against the Creek and Seminole who called him “Sharp Knife.” In 1830 Jackson introduced the Indian Removal Act in Congress which, in effect, stated that the five civilized tribes must move from their homelands to lands beyond the Mississippi. The act was passed in the House of Representatives by just five votes. But many spoke against it, including Davy Crockett, the representative for Tennessee. Some cited the guarantees, given by Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, the first three presidents, of federal protection for all Indians.
Edward Everett, a Massachusetts congressman who later became president of Harvard, said:
The evil was enormous, the inevitable suffering incalculable... Nations of dependent Indians, under color of law, are driven from their homes into the wilderness. You cannot explain it, you cannot reason it away... Our friends will view this measure with sorrow and our enemies alone with joy. And we ourselves, Sir, when the interests and passions of the day are past, shall look back upon it, I fear, with self-reproach and a regret as bitter as it is unavailing.
Simon Schama describes the passing of the Removal Act as “one of the most morally repugnant moments in American history,” and Jackson as “the ethnic cleanser of the first democratic age.”
The Cherokee, under their chief John Ross, who was one-eighth Cherokee and seven-eighths Scot, appealed to the Supreme Court where the Chief Justice, John Marshall, upheld their case, ruling that they were a nation, that treaties had been made with them, and that therefore the state of Georgia might not hold a lottery to sell off their land.
But Jackson ignored the Supreme Court and calmly rescinded the relevant treaties. The lottery went ahead. And when John Ross returned from arguing the case in Washington, he found his house occupied by a lottery winner and had to move his family into a log cabin.
Jackson wanted the Cherokee to leave their land voluntarily, but Ross refused to go and persuaded his fellows to resist. In 1838, by which time Martin Van Buren was president, the deadline for voluntary removal expired. The Cherokee, including women, children, and the elderly, were rounded up by seven thousand troops, led by a general, and herded into corrals. There many died. The rest were loaded onto leaky, overcrowded boats. The survivors of the boat trip were pushed onto railroad boxcars, from which the dead and dying were thrown as the train progressed. Then came an eight-hundred-mile walk, in a long line. A passerby described a line of two thousand Cherokee three miles long: “A great many ride on horseback and multitudes go on foot—even aged females apparently nearly ready to drop into the grave were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back—on the sometimes frozen ground and sometimes muddy streets with no covering for the feet except what nature had given them.”
Eventually Ross was allowed to take command of the transportation. Even so, a quarter of the sixteen thousand who left Georgia died. The journey they were forced to make became known as “The Trail of Tears.”
The other four civilized nations had already been removed to Indian Territory. A few Cherokee escaped to the mountains of western North Carolina where their descendants still live, and three hundred to five hundred Seminole—their tribal lands were in Florida—fought U.S. soldiers in the Everglades, killed fifteen hundred of them, and never surrendered; their descendants call themselves the “Unconquered People.”
It might be thought that now, getting on for two hundred years later, there is no opportunity for redress of the misery suffered by the five nations. But there is something, suggested by Simon Schama: Andrew Jackson’s face, complete with what Schama calls “his imperious quiff,” could be removed from the twenty-dollar bill where it has been since 1928. And it might be replaced (my idea, not Schama’s) by the face of a woman—Sacagawea perhaps, or Rosa Parks. There are no women on U.S. banknotes.
THE HARVEST IS over and the land looks worn out, flat and dismal with few trees and fewer houses—just sweeps of dusty stubble, plowed earth, and scrubby grassland. The air is warm, almost hot, and the sky is blue above rolling clouds. 83 is two-lane, gray, rough, cracked here and there. There are no telegraph poles, save for an occasional line looping east or west and away out of sight.
Once in a while a pickup overtakes, or zips by going north. The map shows two or three small towns or villages, but they amount to almost nothing. And soon I reach the Texas State Line, white letters on green; and Drive Friendly the Texas Way, the same colors around a painted Texas flag, white-and-red horizontal bands against a vertical blue one with a single white star.
I’m in the Texas Panhandle, in the Lone Star State—and immediately everything changes. There is plenty to look at: hills, valleys, gulches, a small canyon, rocky outcrops, long graceful curving bends in the road—the first real change in the landscape since I left Swan River. 83 is different too. Although this is famously a rich state, the road is a little narrower, with gentle bumps and sways; at the same time it is homier, cozier, worn reddish-brown over black.
As I drive into Perryton, the first town in Texas, I pass a small sign in washed-out black capitals, CLUB 83, and in smaller letters underneath, DANCING. Club 83 is housed in a brand-new, shiny silver, corrugated-iron, windowless Nissen, or Quonset, hut. Electric cables leading to the unobtrusive sign suggest that at night CLUB 83 DANCING will be lit up, pulsating to the beat, and visible for miles in every direction. Sadly, it’s too early for me to stop.
South of Perryton, on a bend at the bottom of a hill, I come to a stopping place and a notice: Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway. In the shade of a lush patch of cottonwoods, I lean on Prius and read: “In gratitude to the thousands of men and women who served our country during the Vietnam War, the people of Texas dedicate this highway which runs across our state from the southernmost tip to the northernmost point. It is our hope that all those who travel U.S. 83 will pause to remember those who gave up their lives or their youth or their hopes in that long and bitter conflict. We vow not to forget those who did not return to us and we pledge to remember the sacrifices of those who did come home.”
In fact, the whole length of 83 in the U.S. is designated Veterans of Foreign Wars Memorial Highway. All of the six states supported this individually and it is marked on some road signs in North Dakota and Nebraska, but this is the first time I’ve seen a dedication or anything to read.
A few miles on I cross the wide and almost dry Canadian River. Fifty yards to my right is the outline of an old bridge, the predecessor of the concrete one that is carrying me and 83. I drive over to its southern end where a plaque describes it as a wagon bridge, built in 1916 and restored in 2000. More specifically it is a Parker truss bridge, made up of twenty-one steel hoops, or trusses, resting on concrete piles, held together with steel struts, and painted rust brown. It is 3,255 feet long, and in 1916 was the largest steel structure west of the Mississippi.
It is late afternoon and warm. I walk halfway across on a surface of sun-bleached boards. The air is scented with herbs. Birds dart and sing in the long grass of the dry riverbed and in the trees. Suddenly, loud squawking—and a flock of pigeons flaps unaccountably skyward from beneath the new concrete bridge.
It’s hot in the town of Canadian. I walk up the brick-paved slope of Main Street and I buy a cold lemonade in the foyer of the Palace, a beautiful old movie theatre. I am served by a man called Shane Spencer who owns the place and restored it. He says that Canadian celebrated July 4 on July 3: yesterday—because it was Saturday. There was a parade, fireworks, dancing, free movies, and numerous attractions. But there’s a rodeo tonight starting at seven. It’s now a quarter-past six. Shane recommends a motel that is between Main Street and the Rodeo Arena. I drive there, check in, splash my face with cold water, flip the television on and off, and walk back, north along 83, half a mile to the arena.
The grandstand is smaller than at North Platte and the entrance fee is five dollars instead of ten, but the evening is more fun because it is less slick. At least some of the cowboys come from local ranches, and not all of them are lean young men—in fact, some are middle-aged and quite fat. The twanging guitar of the great Duane Eddy is piped at us, and two clowns sweep the arena with besoms. The announcer is full of wit, but there are no in-jokes and no sycophancy directed at his good pals, the local panjandrums. In the rows in front of me are numerous cowboy hats, mostly stiff, pleated-at-the-crown, cream or white Stetsons; serious ranchers often have these custom-made at a cost of around five hundred dollars.
As in North Platte, I am sympathetic to the poor steers that feature in many of the events; there is a group of them and they are constantly being chased, lassoed, thrown on the ground, and tied up. The completion of Stray Gathering, for example, occurs when one, often fat, man sits on a steer with his knees on his neck while another ties the animal’s feet. In other events they have their ears and tails pulled (that didn’t happen in the swanky Buffalo Bill Rodeo in North Platte). And these steers are very small. Two of them are brown while the rest are black. One of the brown ones has white splodges on his face. I feel especially sorry when he gets a rope around his heel and is jerked to the ground. And I am overjoyed when the cowboys throw their lassos and miss, and the steer skitters away. I can see them curse as they have to loop up the lasso and try again.
Near the end, there’s an event that I don’t at first understand. Several Texas longhorns—adults, rather than steers, with beautiful long, pointed horns—are released into the arena. Teams of three chase after them. The longhorns don’t like this. Men and beasts struggle. Eventually, one man grabs an animal around the neck, another hugs its midriff, while the third seems to fiddle about underneath. Soon the third man runs across the arena holding a small bottle and empties it in front of the judges.
There is a large, Hispanic-looking man sitting next to me. I ask him what is happening.
“They’re milking them.”
“Oh!” I say. “So they’re female?”
He gives me a look. “Yep.” And turns away toward his wife and son.
When the rodeo ends I walk through the small car park. A horse, saddled and bridled, stands patiently in a parking space, alone among cars and pickups.
AT HALF-PAST TEN, outside Pizza Hut, it is still warm and everyone except me is wearing flip-flops. Many of those waiting are Hispanic, young couples and young families, and I remember that I am now in Texas; after the Indians, the Spanish were here first—and Mexico isn’t so far away. Doors and windows are open to the street, and some of the men seem to have forgotten to put on their trousers. One handsome young dude, with a tall and striking young woman, has chosen an expensive-looking orange-colored shirt to hang over his stripy boxers and chunky brown legs.