Great Plains (8 page)

In general, the rich people had a lot of fun on the plains. They drove around in fancy traps and four-in-hands, raised polo ponies, experimented with new breeds of cattle, rode to the hounds after coyotes, fly-fished for trout, and imported oysters, fresh flowers, and opera companies. The opening of the Cheyenne, Wyoming, Opera House featured an opera titled
Olivette,
with programs printed in blue on perfumed white satin. Teddy Roosevelt knocked down a man who was mean to him in a bar, and caught three other men who stole a boat from him, and cheered up. Refrigerated steamships opened Europe to American beef, and people in England especially began to eat more of it, and some investors made a lot of money. A book called
The Beef Bonanza; or, How to Get Rich on the Plains,
by General James S. Brisbin, explained, with many pages of figures, how an investment in the cattle business would double in five years and pay an annual dividend of ten percent all the while. More money went into cattle, more cattle came to the plains. A De Kalb, Illinois, farmer named Joseph Glidden invented a kind of barbed wire which was easy to manufacture, and suddenly farmers had a way to build cheap fences on treeless land. The line of towns and smaller farms moved farther west.

Other ranchers on the plains were not rich. These men—former soldiers, miners, storekeepers, freighters, cowboys—were concerned about the big increase in rustling which came with the cattle boom. In Montana, they got together and formed a Vigilance Committee. Its members gave themselves new names, like X or No. 84. The railroads had killed off the steamboat trade, and all along the Missouri River the woodlots that had supplied the boats were now deserted. Men with a lot of time on their hands took to living in the woodlots and thinking up ways to steal horses and cattle. Often these men were buffalo hunters, newly unemployed after killing off their profession. Members of the Vigilance Committee rode all over the state and into North Dakota looking for men they thought were rustlers. When they found them, they hanged them from barn beams, hay frames, pine trees, auction-corral gateposts, unfinished buildings, butcher's hoists, and balm of Gilead trees.

By 1886, cattle were overcrowding the range. That summer was dry; the winter that followed was so bad that accounts of it tend to be hour-by-hour: at about ten o'clock in the evening of January 9 the temperature began to drop, it dropped forty degrees in two hours, the wind picked up from the north, snow started to fall, it fell all night, when dawn came you couldn't see any but the faintest light, etc. One snowstorm followed another. In bad weather, buffalo usually faced into the wind until they found a hollow or a valley for shelter; cattle, with thinner coats, tend to travel with the wind. In the winter of '86–87, storms took cattle hundreds of miles. Some ranchers never found their herds at all. Most found them far to the south, piled up five and six deep in ravines, buried in drifts, drowned in rivers. Sixty percent of the cattle in Montana died. Throughout the rest of the plains, the winter killed hundreds of thousands more. Ranchers sent their cowboys out to skin and bring back the hides.

Investors who had been making millions before now lost millions. Ranches folded right and left. The rich people on the plains usually went elsewhere for the winters; after '86, few returned. Winston Churchill's uncle went back to England. Teddy Roosevelt counted the dead cattle on his land in the spring, and never had much to do with ranching after that. The Marquis de Morès, who had wanted to build a transcontinental meat-packing empire, eventually lost about a million and a half dollars and went back to France. Later he became involved in the French anti-Semitic movement, wounded a Jewish newspaper editor in a duel, killed a Jewish Army officer in another duel, and was himself robbed and killed by Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa while on a personal mission to forge a Franco–Islamic alliance against England and the Jews.

When the buffalo were slaughtered, they lay so thick on the ground that you could walk for miles on the bodies. After time passed, only the bones were left, and the railroads took those, too. Hundreds of trainloads were shipped from places like Dodge City, Kansas, and Miles City, Montana, to factories in the East, where the bones were used to make fertilizer and china. Ranchers who had not been upset to see dead buffalo everywhere were sickened by what the winter of '86 did to their cattle. Some gave up ranching entirely; some could never own a cow again. Those who stayed in business reduced their herd to numbers which they could more easily feed and take care of year round. The winter of '86 was the end of all but a few of the giant investor-owned ranches. It was also the end of people coming to the Great Plains in any numbers from far away just for the sake of adventure or fun.

5

I dropped Jim Yellow Earring off in the town of Bullhead, South Dakota. He asked me if I had a couple bucks I could lend him. I gave him a five. He started to ask for more, and I told him to look at the bill. He said, “
Oh!
You done better than I thought!” A station wagon loaded down to the road with Indians came by. The driver, a woman with a face so broad it seemed to fill the whole side window, gave me a dark look. Jim Yellow Earring asked me where I was going next. I told him Strasburg, North Dakota, the birthplace of bandleader Lawrence Welk. He said, “Goddam! All right!” I asked him if he knew that Lawrence Welk was from Strasburg. He said everybody knew that. He said Lawrence Welk was one of the greatest people ever to come from around there.

I drove on for a while and then pulled off the road and slept in my van. The next morning was Sunday. In the cafe where I had breakfast, everybody was still dressed up for church. I heard a young waitress say to an older one, “I think I'm really gonna like these new hours I've got.” I drove on through fields with nobody working in them. Gusts of wind crossed the wheat like messages across a Fan-O-Gram. The leaves of the cottonwoods along the road were dark green, or khaki with dust. I turned off at the town of Hague, North Dakota. It had a Catholic church breathing cool church smell through its open doors, a red firehouse, a grocery store, a grain elevator, a big Behlen Quonset hut near the railroad tracks, a Knights of Columbus hall, a bar called Lit'l Gillys, a Coke machine on the sidewalk, one-story houses with octagon clotheslines and eight or ten rows of corn in the back yards, a lawn sprinkler shaped like a little tractor in one front yard, a few cars angle-parked on the main street, and three blond kids bouncing on a mattress in the back of a pickup truck outside the cafe.

Hard to believe that one night more than sixty years ago, during a dance that had turned rowdy, someone hit Lawrence Welk over the head with a brick in Hague, North Dakota.

Strasburg, North Dakota, is fourteen miles away. Although both are small towns, everything about Strasburg seems to be one size bigger. Strasburg could be Hague's older brother. Like a number of benign towns on the northern plains, Strasburg has a public campground with a restroom and a free shower. I used it and shaved and changed my shirt. Then I found a shady place to park on Main Street and watched people walking by. Strasburg, a town of 623, also has a municipal swimming pool. Kids in bathing suits were walking along the sidewalk in that shivery way you walk after getting out of a swimming pool. Kids on their way to the pool clutched coins in one hand. Kids coming back left wet footprints on the sidewalk. A girl going said to a boy coming back, “Mom wants you home right now.” In the distance were kids' swimming-pool shrieks, and the clink of somebody throwing horseshoes, and the Rolling Stones singing “Faraway Eyes” from speakers set out on a lawn.

Lawrence Welk's family did not live in town, but on a farm three miles away. He was born there on March 11, 1903, the seventh of eight children, to Ludwig and Christina Welk. As a child, Lawrence was fascinated by his father's accordion, an heirloom which had come with the family from Europe. In the summer after fourth grade, Lawrence suffered a ruptured appendix, was driven to the hospital seventy miles away in Bismarck, and nearly died. He spent seven weeks there and another three months at home in bed with a drain in his side. As in the lives of many artists, illness revealed his vocation. During the year of his convalescence, his parents let him play his father's accordion as much as he wanted. He taught himself many tunes, and also went around discovering the sounds he could get from pitchforks, rain barrels, and anvils. After missing a year of school, he did not want to go back and be older than everybody in his class, so his parents let him stay home and work on the farm.

One winter, between chores, Lawrence ran a trapline, and with the earnings from his furs bought a $15 mail-order accordion. Unequal to his enthusiasm, it soon broke. Lawrence was a big fifteen-year-old, and sometimes made money playing for dances in the Strasburg pool hall. He told his father that in return for the $400 he needed to buy a good accordion he would work on the farm until he was twenty-one and give his father all the money he earned playing. His father agreed. The new accordion made him feel like a professional musician for the first time. He played many weddings, birthdays, and dances in and around Strasburg. He drove to jobs in a buggy, often returning home just in time to begin the morning's chores. When he was hit with the brick, he never told his parents.

The day after his twenty-first birthday, Lawrence left home to be a musician. His father said he would fail. He went to Aberdeen, South Dakota, because he had heard there was work for musicians there. He could not read music, and had trouble getting jobs. The worst moment of his life occurred after a dance in Oldham, South Dakota, when he overheard one of the other band members say, “Did you get a load of that accordionist? If I had to play every night with him, I'd go back to jerking sodas.” After that, Lawrence practiced playing more softly, and tried to blend in better with the other instruments. After touring with several bands, he finally got a job playing every weekday morning on WNAX radio in Yankton, South Dakota. It was the only radio station for miles, and Lawrence's band soon drew a following. One of the fans who often came by the studio to listen was a young woman named Fern Renner, a nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital. Lawrence asked her to go out with him many times, but she always refused. Finally he decided to enter the hospital for minor surgery, in the hope of seeing more of her there. The tactic worked, and they were married in April 1930.

In the thirties, Lawrence travelled all over with his band—to Tom Archer's Rigadoon Ballrooms in Sioux City, Iowa, to O. K. Farr's Rainbow Ballroom, in Denver, to the Mirador Ballroom in Phoenix, Arizona. When hiring band members, Lawrence always preferred less talented musicians of good character over brilliant musicians of unstable character. Once, he discouraged a band member from fooling around with a local girl by arranging for a policeman to pretend to arrest him on a paternity charge. The Depression had hurt the ballroom business, and Lawrence briefly owned a hotel in Dallas, an appliance store in Yankton, and a restaurant in Mason City, Iowa. The restaurant sold hot dogs and hamburgers in accordion-pleated boxes with pictures of band members on the side.

In 1936, the Welks moved to Omaha, where their second daughter was born. In 1938, the band got a job at the ballroom of the William Penn Hotel, in Pittsburgh. Many of the big hotels broadcast their Saturday-night shows over the radio, and someone at the local station suggested the band bill itself as “Lawrence Welk and His Champagne Music.” From then on, the band (now grown to an orchestra) played many big hotel ballrooms—the Edgewater Beach and the Agora, in Chicago; the Roosevelt, in New York; the St. Francis, in San Francisco. For ten years, their semi-permanent home was the Hotel Trianon ballroom, in Chicago. When they played the Aragon Ballroom, in Ocean Park, California, in 1951, the first TV station in Los Angeles, KTLA, began to broadcast their show, and it was such a hit that ABC decided to broadcast it nationally. The Welks, who had moved to River Forest, Illinois, moved to Brentwood, California. “The Lawrence Welk Show,” sponsored by Dodge, premiered on ABC on July 16, 1955. Soon forty million people were watching it every Saturday night. Six thousand people a week sent letters and postcards. In 1957, the Lawrence Welk Orchestra played at Eisenhower's Inaugural Ball.
Life
magazine called Lawrence Welk “the most popular musician in U.S. history.” Lawrence invested in real estate and golfed with Bob Hope. Comedians did impressions of him. On the subject of his music's appeal, he said, “We play not to please ourselves, but the listeners. I simply have no use for those smart alecks who perform only for one another and ignore the public.”

*   *   *

The doors of the Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Strasburg were open; the parking lot was empty. The town had worshipped, now it swam. Inside, the silence teemed. There was a smell of polished wood, hymnals, and rubber floor mats. The empty air was still vibrating slightly with the suppressed fidgets of children. Except for the pews and the floors, almost every interior surface was covered with statues or paintings. Two girl-sized statues of angels holding fonts of holy water stood by the main door. The tall, narrow windows each had a saint in stained glass. Angels and biblical scenes covered the ceiling. The altar had a crucified Christ in the center, statues of the Virgin Mary, St. Anne, St. Peter, St. Paul, the Last Supper, candles, scrolls, filigrees, more angels—a scene as colorful and crowded as the finale of the Radio City Easter Show. All the vents at the bottoms of the windows were open. At the front of the church, Emerson Seabreeze electric fans on wheeled stands faced the congregation.

Lawrence Welk's family sometimes battled snowdrifts to get to this church. In fact, if his parents had been less serious about their religion, Lawrence Welk probably would not have been an American. Both of his parents were born on farms near the city of Strasbourg in what was then called the Alsace–Lorraine region of France. After the Franco–Prussian War in 1870, Prussia annexed Alsace–Lorraine and outlawed Catholicism. With other Catholics, the Welks moved to southern Russia, where they helped found a town called Strasburg. Their Catholicism was so different from the local Russian kind that the congregation was accused of heresy and had to move again. This time they came to America, to Strasburg, Pennsylvania, where people they knew from home had settled. But land was scarce in Pennsylvania, so they went on to the Dakotas and founded this Strasburg—the fourth one they had lived in.