HOW THE WEST WAS LOST

Travels in Native America
The Sunday Times, August 1998

I SEE the snake just before I hear it, and it’s hard not to giggle at a rattlesnake actually rattling - it’s one of those things you think you’re only ever going to hear in a cinema. Jack Bailey, whose family own this bit of Montana, and who is shuffling towards the annoyed reptile, doesn’t see it, because he’s pointing up at some rock carvings with his walking staff and, as he’s explained earlier, he doesn’t hear so good these days.
“There’s a snake under that rock, Jack,” I announce.
Jack stops, and leans forward on his stick.
“Naw,” he decides. “There’s a whole bunch of snakes under that rock.”
This can be looked at a couple of ways, other than warily, while we all take a step backwards. On one hand, there’s no earthly reason why the snakes shouldn’t be here. On the other, we’d been told as we drove to Jack’s ranch, just outside the Northern Cheyenne reservation, that rattlesnakes are traditional guardians of Deer Medicine Rocks, and that if they’re waiting for us, at least one of our group should have stayed at home.
Anywhere else, the rationalist answer would seem unarguable, but Deer Medicine Rocks, which erupt two storeys into the sky from a hillock on the Bailey ranch, can make the most hardened sceptic wonder. The rocks are the last stop on a 12 day, 4500 mile tour of the disregarded back roads and byways of the Native American history of South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Down one side of the rocks, a crooked cobalt streak has been scorched by an ancient lightning strike. Around the foot are carvings left by centuries of worshippers, soldiers and travellers. It was here, in 1876, that the Lakota chief Sitting Bull had a vision of soldiers tumbling into his camp, and carved this script into the stone a little to the left of the rattlesnakes’ repose - the figures, though faint, are visible. Not long afterwards, not far from here, at a place history remembers as Little Bighorn, the men of General George Custer’s 7th Cavalry played their parts as predicted.
“The snakes are here,” I am told by our guide, the author and photographer Serle Chapman, “because one of the women here has her period. It’s a different kind of powerful medicine. It’s like putting the same poles of two magnets together.”
We have a score draw on the omens front - as we’d approached the Rocks, an eagle had soared lazily above them. This, Jack had said, was a good sign.
If the eagle had appeared for any of us, it had probably been Jack, whose family have ranched this property for more than a century, and utterly failed to turn it into a tourist trap - given that already on this trip we have seen any number of Wild West theme parks decorated with tipis and statues of feathered warriors, the financial rewards that might be plundered from Sitting Bull’s immortal autograph can only be wondered at.
Jack Bailey could have queues of tourists with sun visors and camcorders stretching from his gate to the sunset, a car park full of those cavernous campervans that accomodate that strange need Americans have to take absolutely everything they own on holiday with them, and a monstrously profitable souvenir stall shipping Sitting-Bull-in-a-snowstorm paperweights at ten dollars a time. But there are no signs on nearby roads directing traffic to this glorious, lonely place, no souvenirs available bar a brochure which doesn’t even contain the address, and no charge for admission beyond the addition of your name to the tattered guest book on Jack’s kitchen table. Jack is also scrupulous about letting local Cheyenne pray at the rocks as and when they feel like it.
In refusing to wring the land of Montana for every last cent, and in affording basic respect to the descendents of the people who were here first, generations of Baileys have bucked the prevailing trend of the region’s history. As we drive back to the farmhouse, Jack mutters something about coming back up with his gun and sorting out the snakes.
“They’re only doing their job, Jack,” says Serle, who knows Jack well.
“I guess you’re right,” says Jack.

SERLE Chapman’s role as guide has been thrust upon him since people who’d read his first book about travelling in Native America, “Trail Of Many Spirits”, contacted his British-based publisher, Bear Print, wanting to know how they could visit the same places. Serle now divides his time, accent and consuming passions (Native America and Leeds United) between South Dakota and his native Yorkshire, and conducts the tours with insight, wit, and an admirable lack of new age twaddle.
“Spirituality and sovereignty are the same thing,” Serle says, more than once. The most potent symbols of this connection between spirituality and sovereignty are South Dakota’s Black Hills, or Paha Sapa, our first stop. The Black Hills - which, from a distance, do look like silhouettes smudged against the horizon - have long been of spiritual significance to the Cheyenne and Lakota (the term “Sioux” is a white imposition, sometimes regarded as out-dated and offensive, and sometimes used by the Lakota themselves out of convenience), and the Hills’ importance today is as much derived from their position at the centre of the defining legal conflict between the United States and its original inhabitants. In 1868, under the Fort Laramie treaty, the Hills - and a whole swathe more besides of what is now North and South Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming - were ceded to the Lakota Nation by the United States government.
This treaty, signed by President Ulysses Grant in 1869, remains, in theory, law. In reality, it was barely respected in its early days, and wholly ignored after an expedition into the Hills in 1874, led by George Custer, stopped at a place called Frenchs Creek, and found gold. Frenchs Creek and more of the Black Hills are now part of Custer State Park. The name is a triumph of tact likely to remain unequalled until some bold entrepreneur opens a Cromwell Wildlife Reserve in County Armagh, but the park does offer a glimpse of what the Lakota fought to protect throughout the 19th century, and want returned, as is their legally enshrined right - in the park’s undulating ranges, a small herd of buffalo has been cultivated, and we spend a morning in the Hills driving slowly among them.
The buffalo of North America could once numbered in the tens of millions, but were reduced to near-extinction by systematic slaughter during the 19th century. The herds weren’t hunted for sport - General Phil Sheridan observed, during the crucial 1870s, that “The buffalo hunters have done more in two years to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire army has done in the last 30 years - they are destroying the Indians’ commissary, and an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage”. To the Indians, the buffalo was more than just a spiritual totem and staple food source (the meat is delicious, and lower in fat than beef). It was a kind of perambulating Wal-Mart. Water bottles were made from its bladders, tools and toys from its bones, and clothes and shelter from its hide and fur.
We run across - and, in a couple of cases, almost run over - other fauna as we spend long days on the interminable roads beneath the edgeless skies: a moose, its absurd television-aerial horns bobbing in long grass by the side of the road up to the sacred Medicine Wheel site in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains; a black bear, galumphing in the undergrowth of Glacier Park; groundhogs, which are basically squirrels without tails; a marmot, basking on the vertiginous lip of Madison Park’s Buffalo Jump, over which Indians once herded stampedes of bison; and several eagles, one of which flies in front of the truck as we head towards the battlefield at Big Hole where, in 1877, the Nez Perce tribe under Chief Joseph fought the troops of Colonel John Gibbon.
The memorial at the site is across the river from where skeletons of tipis mark the location of the Nez Perce camp on the day of the battle, and where wooden feathers and wooden blue hats denote the resting places of the fallen. The monument recalls that Gibbons’ men “Surprised” and “Fought superior numbers of” Nez Perce. The Nez Perce view of events would probably substitute, respectively, the terms “Ambushed” and “Were given a bit of a hiding by”, but the Nez Perce weren’t asked to write the inscriptions.
Back in 1805, the Nez Perce had inadvertently helped open up the American west. The explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark stumbled into Nez Perce country, in what is now Idaho, in the September of that year. The Nez Perce welcomed them, made sure their visitors didn’t freeze, starve to death or get lost, and told them about the river route to the Pacific Ocean. Given what happened next, it would be forgivable if no Nez Perce has helped anyone across a busy street since. The trappers and traders followed Lewis & Clark, the settlers and missionaries followed them, and the gold prospectors and the army followed them.
By 1877, those of the Nez Perce who had refused to sign treaties alloting them a reservation a fraction of the size of their ancestral lands, were fugitives. From June to October, under the leadership of a remarkable man called Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce slogged through the rivers and mountains of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, pursued and harassed by both the U.S. Army and Crow Indians, heading for the sanctuary of the Canadian border.
A week after we visit Big Hole, we see where their flight ended, 1500 miles away at Bear Paw battlefield in Montana, only 40 miles from Canada and what might have been safety. Bear Paw is another windy, bereft, rattlesnake-infested place, although at least the memorials here acknowledge that two sides fought. A bronze plaque praises “the valour and devotion of those both red and white” and depicts Chief Joseph’s famous surrender to General Oliver Howard (“From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever”).
This memorial isn’t much, but by the standards of what we’ve seen, it is generosity itself. At most of the other sites of spiritual or historical significance to Native America that we visit, there is little or nothing to suggest that they were of any import whatsoever until the first white man found them. At Devil’s Tower, the giant rock creme-caramel in the top right corner of Wyoming, the visitors’ centre has little to say about traditional explanations for it, but plenty on its appearance in “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” (“Though,” sighs Serle, who has tried to persuade the centre to make an effort, “for most Americans, that’s about as sacred as it gets”). At Wind Cave, near Custer Park, a sign explains how this place, where atmospheric pressure causes wind to blow upwards from a fissure in the rock, was “discovered in 1881” by one Tom Bingham. That the Lakota had been venerating it for centuries before as the place from which the first man emerged is not mentioned.
Even at the most basic, self-interested level, this disregard of the Native American perspective is bewildering. Whether or not you buy the Indian myths, they’re good stories, without which Devil’s Tower is just a large if undeniably impressive rock, and Wind Cave is an altogether tedious hole in the ground.

THE story of Native Americans has been the story of indigenous people wherever the imperial powers of Europe sought to spread Christianity, democracy and cricket - a litany of dispossession and persecution mutating into modern malaises of alcoholism, crime and unemployment. We drive across several Indian reservations, mostly expanses of nothing much, dotted with isolated towns. Some are quite pleasant, all things considered. Some are horrible. All are poor. Native Americans have the lowest life expectancy of any American ethnic group, unemployment hovers between 50 and 80%, suicide is twice the national average, alcoholism - despite the fact that reservations, by law, are dry - six times the national average. The reservation casinos that have inspired a popular myth that Native Americans are becoming a clique of tax-subsidised millionaires are rarely anything more extravagant than the fruit-machine arcades found on British high streets.
In Rapid City the night before we leave, we meet an Oglala Lakota called Bob Hall. He’s a teacher at Rocky Ford Elementary School on Pine Ridge, the reservation which holds the wooden spoon in about every socio-economic category you can think of. He talks, slowly and softly, about his life, which has had the episodes of drinking problems and police harassment standard to many reservation dwellers. I ask him about what his students want, whether they dream of making their reservation a better place, or if they just want out.
“They want to leave,” says Bob. “And they do. But they always come back. It’s their home.”
“Home” has always been the problem - the European view of the land and nature is that it’s something to be tamed, adapted, and owned. The Indians are caught between this concept and their traditional view of the land as something that they are part of, and vice versa. A few days earlier, in a town called Browning, on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, we’d been greeted by the actor Steve Reevis, who has starred in “Dances With Wolves”, “Geronimo” and “Last Of The Dogmen”, among others. He is presumably not short of a quid, and has a home in Hollywood. But he’s moving back, to this modest burg in the middle of nowhere, with a vision of one day running buffalo on the plains, because “It’s my home”.
It’s tempting to look at this as self-pitying defeatism, but it is becoming apparent that a growing number of Native Americans are finding genuine strength in the ways of their ancestors. Nobody has exact figures, but everyone talks of a revival of interest in sweat lodges and sundances, of hunting down elders who can pass on the discarded languages. As Leslie Caye, who shows us around the Salish & Kootenai People’s Centre in Pablo, Montana, explains, “Our stories have always been passed by word of mouth, and if we don’t have our own language, we’re going to be losing something in the translation”.
The most spectacular expression of this dim but discernible optimism is Crow Fair, the annual gathering on the Crow reservation, within sight of Custer’s last stand.
At the bottom of the long slope up to Custer Hill, a rodeo is in progress. This includes the usual men in big hats annoying cows and falling off bulls, but ends in a relay race - three local kids doing three laps of the dirt racetrack on three horses, one lap on each, bareback. Two of the riders make this look as hard as it doubtless is. The third, in a billowing red shirt, executes each changeover as if vaulting off one speeding horse and onto another is roughly as difficult as walking down stairs. His final switch, made when he’s already a lap in front, is one of those moments of transcendent grace that makes you remember why you spend so much time watching sport. I’ve seen Viv Richards hoist one into the top deck of the SCG Members’ Stand, and I’ve seen Gianfranco Zola curl a free kick in off the post from 25 yards at Stamford Bridge, and the horsemanship of the kid in the red shirt is fit to be filed alongside them.
At the main site of Crow Fair, dozens of white canvas tipis fill the paddocks around the arena, in which hundreds of dancers demonstrate that their cultures continue to evolve - the stomping feet are shod as often by Nike as by moccassins, and the Crow dancers have noticed that those kaleidoscopic reflector sunglasses favoured by snowboarders could have been made to complement eagle-feather war-bonnets. I suspect some of the participants might not appreciate the comparison, but I’m reminded of the inclusive, celebratory atmosphere of Sydney’s Gay Mardi Gras (a few of the outfits are similar, as well). There are no booths distributing angry political tracts, no sign of hostility towards the nation that took theirs, and the stars and stripes flies high at the front of the parade, as the Indian warriors of Korea, Vietnam and Kuwait are honoured in the shadows of the mightiest Indian warrior of all.

CRAZY Horse himself probably wouldn’t have cared - he never even allowed anyone to take his picture or paint his portrait - but Little Bighorn must be the only battlefield on earth at which the sole memorial has been erected to the losing side. The cenotaph stands at the top of Custer Hill, upon which George Custer and the final surviving remnants of his command were killed. White stone markers poke through the grass where each soldier fell. Down the valley, towards the trees which secluded the Indian camp that June afternoon in 1876, more of the melancholy little tablets mark the path of Custer’s retreat. It was a bad day for the Custers - also among the dead that afternoon were two of his brothers, and his sister’s husband.
George Armstrong Custer was a hero of the U.S. Civil War, wearing a Major-General’s stars before his 26th birthday, though there are numerous examples to support the contention that congenital idiocy was no barrier to promotion in the Union Army. His career subsequent to that conflict was controversial, to say the least - Custer was accused of deserting his command, mistreating his men and, most infamously, of perpetrating the massacre of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne camp on the Washita river.
Though almost certainly correctly judged by posterity as a vainglorious buffoon whose luck made up for his judgement for an awfully long time, Custer didn’t lose the battle of Little Bighorn by himself. He did make a rare mess of his assault on the Indian camp, but he was also out-thought and out-fought by two instinctive strategists - the Lakota chiefs Gall and Crazy Horse. Looking down to the west from the top of Custer Hill today, it is easy to imagine the sight that confronted Custer’s bewildered, terrified men as they struggled to the high ground: Crazy Horse and far too many of his mates, wheeling around the left of the battlefield in an inspired charge to cut them off.
Crazy Horse and George Custer remain two of America’s most famous military commanders. Both of them made their lasting claims to immortality on this windswept ridge. That the memorials are all for the less deserving of the pair isn’t surprising, given the American fondness for flawed icons - the fundamental dynamics of Custer’s story have been echoed down the decades by Monroe, Presley, Tyson, Simpson, Cobain and Clinton. But it would surely do little harm to build a statue on the other side of the river, as well, to remember that battles were fought over this land because two lots of Americans wanted it - and that for some of those Americans, the wanting continues.