Geography of Blood Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape {P R E L U D E}

CANDACE SAVAGE A GEOGRAPHY OF BLOOD Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape {p r e l u d e} We see them as a raven might see them, from a distance. The men walk single file, dark strokes etched against an infinite plain of snow. Behind them, a day’s straggling march to the south, lie a cold prison cell and the grim accusing faces of the Great Father’s blue-coated soldiers. Ahead of them, if the spirits prove willing, are friends and family, and the uncertain embrace of the Great Mother and her red-coated police. It is late November 1881, already the dead of winter. The men walk with the ghosts of the buffalo. They are almost ghosts themselves. The soldiers have taken their rifles and ammunition, their torn lodges, their moccasins. They are hungry. The snow stings their skin. The police: it is hard to tell what the red coats have taken, are taking. The truth. Otapanihowin, the means of survival. Black wings rasp against the frigid air. Two men stumble, get up, fall. The leader of the travelers, that Nekaneet looks up, then looks ahead to the blue smudge of hills on the horizon. That means, just like if we walk, if you are ahead, you are kani’kanit, the leader. Nekaneet is walking north, walking home, walking into another day. Somewhere up there in the distance, you and I are waiting, hungry for stories. {one} GETTING THERE . conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving . gertrude stein, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” 1935 et’s just say that it all began when Keith and I took a trip. Keith is Keith Bell, my companion of going on twenty L years, and it’s largely thanks to his love of travel that I’ve seen a bit of the world: the wild-and-woolly moors of Yorkshire, the plains of Tanzania, the barren reaches of Pen- insula Valdés in Argentina. Yet the journey I want to tell you about was not a grand excursion to some exotic, faraway destination but a trip that brought us closer home. A noth- ing little ramble to nowheresville. Remember what Thoreau once said about having “traveled a good deal in Concord,” that insignificant market town in which he was born and mostly lived? In an unintended riff on this Thoreauvian concept, Keith and I find that we 2 · A geogrAphy of blood have traveled a good deal in and around another insignificant dot on the map, a town called Eastend in our home province of Saskatchewan. Eastend, population six hundred, lies about a thumb’s breadth north of the Canada–U.S. border and more or less equidistant from any place you’re likely to have heard of before. It’s in the twilight zone where the plains of northern Montana meet and morph into the prairies of southern Saskatchewan, a territory that leaves you fumbling with highway maps. But if you piece the pages together, south to north, east to west, and scribble a rough circle around the centers of population—Great Falls, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Billings, and back to Great Falls again—you’ll find Eastend somewhere in the middle, a speck in the Big Empty of the North American outback. To explain how and why this out-of-the-way place has become so central to our lives, I need to take you back several years, to a day in late September of 2000. Keith was just embarking on a year-long sabbatical leave from his teaching duties as an art historian at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. As for me, I was supposed to be gathering forces to meet the most daunting challenge of my writing career. Earlier that summer, I had thrown common sense to the winds and agreed to prepare a natural history of the whole broad sweep of the western plains, from the Missis- sippi to the Rockies and from the llanos of Texas north to the wheat fields of Canada. By rights, I should have been at my desk day and night, or in the crypts of the science library, nose to the grindstone. What greater inducement could there be for hitting the open road? Happily for my guilty conscience, the route we had cho- sen for our travels that fall led directly into the heart of my research. If I were going to write with authority about Getting There · 3 grassland ecology (I told myself as I packed my holiday clothes), surely it was my duty to get up close and personal with my subject matter. I’m not entirely joking when I say that writing books is my way of getting an education. And so off we set, Keith and I plus our three trusty canine companions—an aging retriever, a wire-haired dachshund, and a perky young schipperke—from our home in Saskatoon south under the big skies of Saskatchewan and Montana to our turnaround point, the tourist town of Cody in north- western Wyoming. From Cody, our return journey would take us north to Eastend, where we planned a brief layover before returning to our obligations in the city. Cody, Wyoming, is an odd little town, and I am sur- prised to recollect that this trip marked the second time it had figured into our travel plans. On our earlier visit in the early 1990s, we had stayed in cheap digs along the highway, first at the Western 6 Gun Motel, where neon gunfire flared into the night from a sign at the entranceway, and then at the neighboring Three Bear Motel, where a trio of pathetic stuffed beasts, their mouths set in permanent snarls, stood guard over the check-in counter. This time around, several years older and more inclined to comfort, we’d gone upmar- ket to a respectable, if regrettably staid, establishment with a leafy courtyard. Funny the things you remember, the things you for- get. Even now, when so much else has faded from my mind, I could take you to the exact place we stayed in Cody, show you the room where we slept. See our boxy old blue van angled up to the building, its back doors swung open as we loaded it for the journey home. Hear our voices hanging in the thin morning air. “. binoculars?” “. water for the dogs? They say it’s going to hit ninety.” 4 · A geogrAphy of blood “Any idea what we’ve done with the maps?” (Turns out that where I was headed could not be found on a map, though I had no way of knowing that at the outset.) Although Cody’s primary attraction for travelers is its proximity to Yellowstone National Park, an hour’s drive to the west, the town prefers to see itself as a rootin’ tootin’ gateway to the past, to a West not merely of geography but of legend. From June to September, fake gunfighters confront each other in fake gunfights in the wide avenue outside the venerable Irma Hotel (Monday to Friday evenings at six and Saturday afternoons at two). Quite by accident, we’d caught them at it one evening, running around with their popguns and braying insults across the deserted street, under the guttering standard of the Stars and Stripes. In this, as in so much else, the town takes its inspiration from its namesake and founding father, the late William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. As anyone who stops in town quickly becomes aware, Mr. B. Bill was an arresting character. A real-life participant in the conquest of the western plains, he had earned his spurs and his sobriquet in the 1860s when, as a scout for the U.S. Army and supplier to the Kansas Pacific Railway, he is said to have killed 4,860 buffalo in just eighteen months. That works out to about a dozen carcasses every twenty-four hours, assum- ing that he rested his trigger finger on the Sabbath. Today, however, Buffalo Bill is remembered not so much for his actual exploits as for his pioneering success in trans- muting those deeds into entertainment. In the spring of 1872, for example, Cody led Company B of the 3rd Cavalry in an attack against a camp of Mnikhˇówožu, or Miniconjou, Lakota in Nebraska, an action for which he was immediately awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. By December of that year, Cody had temporarily abandoned the field of battle Getting There · 5 to impersonate himself on stage, in a production entitled The Scouts of the Prairies. From that day forward, Buffalo Bill Cody seems to have inhabited a borderland between history and myth, between the gore and the glory of Western conquest. Eventually, Cody’s mastery of the facto-fictional mash- up would lead to his creation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a circus extravaganza in which real cowboys and real Indians engaged in mock skirmishes and a middle-aged easterner called Annie Oakley showcased the skills of a typical West- ern girl. This pioneering “reality show” earned Cody a place in the pantheon of American show business. But I have always been more impressed, or perhaps merely bewildered, by accounts of one of his lesser-known projects, a touring theatrical that hit the boards in the fall of 1876. A few weeks earlier, General George Armstrong Custer had led the U.S. 7th Cavalry to a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Lakota, Northern Arapaho, and Northern Chey- enne near the Little Bighorn, or Greasy Grass, River (not far as the crow flies from Bill Cody’s Wyoming headquarters).

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