River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (38 page)

We hauled up to Niobrara, Nebraska, the one that recently moved out of the floodplain to higher ground but still saw almost half of its residents give up on the place altogether. The new Niobrara had a chance to lay out an innovative village plat, but the citizens only put down another grid and built a string of mock Old West false-fronts. I groused about it, and Pilotis said, “Is a mock false-front like a double negative where you end up with a positive?” Since the real West was full of false-fronts, perhaps Niobrara had to fake it to be real.

The reeds may have turned our wits to swamp muck, because such embrangled conversation continued in the Two Rivers, a new Old West saloon, and Peterson also fell into the bibble-babble of tired travelers. He said, “See if you can make sense of this sentence,” and he wrote: Is that that that that that that that that person meant? We sat numbly until the Professor said, “It makes sense if you can hear it with the right inflections.” I remembered a sentence grammar teachers used to inflict on students to punctuate: Hadley where Haddam had had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the instructor than had had had. Pilotis said, “I’ve done had had it. That that-that-that sentence is just like that reed bed—a damn tangle of sameness.”

We went out and pulled
Nikawa
up along flooding Ponca Creek, left Nebraska, reached the Missouri again at Pickstown, South Dakota, and took a big room in the hotel of the Fort Randall Casino owned by the Yankton tribe. About those people, William Clark wrote (the passage corrected by his first editor):

These are the best disposed Sioux who rove on the banks of the Missouri, and these even will not suffer any trader to ascend the river if they can possibly avoid it; they have, heretofore, invariably arrested the progress of all those they have met with, and generally compelled them to trade at the prices, nearly, which they themselves think proper to fix on their merchandise; they seldom commit any further violence on the whites.

We were about to see how the old commentary was holding up.

S
EVERAL YEARS AGO
in Seattle, I was walking along the water, front to see up close the business of Puget Sound when a man approached me for a handout. He was tired, possibly ill, and probably younger than he looked. His T-shirt said
HOKA-HEY
, an Indian greeting, and I asked what his tribe was. He said, “Sioux.” Does that mean, I said, that you’re a Lakota? He looked stunned, awakened, and his eyes filled with tears, and he said more confidently, “Yes. Lakota. Oglala Lakota,” and he smiled.

On the thirty-first of May,
Nikawa
entered what was once known as Sioux Country, a vast region covering nearly all the northern half of the Great Plains, the home of peoples who gave to most of the world the current perception of what an American Indian is. Even in the United States today, tribes with no connection to the Siouan nations have taken up certain elements of their nineteenth-century culture and apparel. Until we reached the mountains some weeks hence, the Indians we met would be Sioux, a name their ancient enemies the Chippewa put on them: “adders.”

I reminded the crew that for the next fifteen hundred miles we’d be passing through Indian lands, reservations where we’d be foreigners, and I suggested they avoid the word “Sioux.” I asked them to remember the four branches of those inhabitants of the northern Plains: Teton, Santee, Yanktonai, and Yankton, with each except the last having several bands, such as the Oglala, Hunkpapa, Assiniboin. Even better, I said, call the Tetons Lakotas, the Santees Dakotas, and the others Nakotas—if you wanted to make friends with someone from London, would you call him a limey, a European, or an Englishman?

We talked of that matter in the breakfast grill of the Fort Randall Casino and Hotel while a young Yankton waitress needled us about our losses (but for the Professor who had won twenty dollars) at the slot machines the night before. Pilotis said, “Consider the money reparation.” And she: “You’ve got a long way to go then.”

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Yanktons, under the usual pressures of white encroachment, were forced to sell most of their land for about thirteen cents an acre, although they had long demonstrated an amicable disposition to whites with their world-changing enterprises. In 1862 the Yanktons even sent warning to settlers about an impending raid by other tribes. From the earliest traders on, for the next half century, Yankton land marked a traveler’s entry into Sioux Country, and those people were often a white’s initial encounter with Indians still living their traditional ways directed by the ancient visions. In short, Yanktons were frequently the first full-fledged aboriginals Missouri River travelers met, and such meetings typically began with trepidation. Had an intractable and bellicose tribe, say, the Tetons, lived along here, the Anglo opening of the West would have gone more slowly, more bloodily. Despite the significant negotiations Lewis and Clark conducted with the Otos and Missouris downstream, it was the captains’ parley with the Yanktons at Gavins Point that first began to reveal to them how insufficiently they understood the red world about to encompass them.

The adventure and romance of the great Expedition have blinded many Americans to its central aims which were more political and economic than scientific. A key duty of Captain Lewis was to inform people who had dwelt in the land for twelve thousand years and probably more that they were now “children” under the hand of the great and distant White Father. That is an act of conquest, not science. (The American West is today, of course, a bastion of resistance to anything emanating from Washington—except subsidy checks—and those who yelp the loudest about federal “intrusion” are the grandchildren of those who overran aboriginal lands. Right-wing militias are an ironic amusement to Indians.)

The world of the Plains peoples was considerably more complex and independent than any other native realms the Expedition had yet encountered, but relations began happily when the Yanktons welcomed two scouts Lewis sent ahead by carrying them into the Nakota camp on a bison robe, a sign of honor, although later one of the chiefs, Weuche, made it clear his people wanted more than words, peace medals, and American flags. When he learned the Expedition was not there to trade, he asked permission for his warriors to stop the next merchant boat and help themselves. Another chief, one of fine name, Half Man, prophetically warned that Indians farther upriver had ears harder to open. Indeed, in the next encounter, the Brulé Tetons so troubled the Corps of Discovery that Clark wrote words (again corrected by his editor) of uncharacteristic vehemence: “These [Tetons] are the vilest miscreants of the savage race [and] must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri until such measures are pursued by our government as will make them feel a dependence on its will for their supply of merchandise.” Some history buffs prefer to ignore that sentence, just as they ignore the overt imperialism of the Expedition, as well as the words of its father, Thomas Jefferson, in of all places the Declaration of Independence where he speaks of “merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”

Among us latter-day ascenders of the Missouri was a notion the next morning that our night at the Yankton casino was but a permutation of the history there for the past two centuries, even if the only warriors we saw were the man-mountain security guards, today mustachioed, badged (“metal breasts”), wearing photo-identity cards, and on their sleeves little American flags. Our relationship with the Yanktons was recapitulated, if reworked, history: the night before, when the Professor began his winning streak, several Indian employees gathered around the slot machine, the thing gleaming like a campfire, while he dropped in coins perhaps like Clark tossimg out twists of tobacco and ribbons. It seemed our crew and the Nakotas were very much the descendants of old rivermen and chieftains. When the luck ended, a young Yankton asked where we’d come from, Pilotis answered, and she said, “Are you redoing Lewis and Clark through here?” To this question we’d heard before, I said, Yes, but only because it’s the best water route west. She shook her head. “I mean, are you reliving a little of the history?” Until that evening, I would have said no.

Down the hill from the casino, Fort Randall Dam lies along the edge of the second fort, of 1870, where only foundations and a ruined chapel remain. Randall was part of a catenation of outposts built in the middle of the nineteenth century to help open the upper Plains for the taking. In 1881, Sitting Bull was brought to the fort after his surrender and imprisoned for two years; the soldiers, tired of tourists come to see the great chief, were glad he later was sent on up the Missouri to Fort Yates.

After we did work on our engines and propellers, we pulled
Nikawa
down to a narrow arm of Lake Francis Case (named after a South Dakota senator who supported anti-Indian bills President Truman vetoed) and launched under a blue sky holding big round clouds as the sea does islands. I took us in close to the dam, then we turned upstream and struck a course atop the old bed of the Missouri 120 feet below, heading west, passing over the site of the first Fort Randall of 1856 drowned by the impoundment like so many other historic places here. After all, Great Plains history often happens in watered valleys.

I kept an eye on the chart to keep us above the former riverbed, not because of surrounding shallows but because I wanted the Missouri to know we respected its ancient path to the sea. Just after we crossed the ninety-ninth meridian, the Professor, a teacher of writing whose pate was coming into the years of high polish, said as if thinking aloud, “There are no angles in water. It’s an angleless stuff. Mountains have angles, and canyons, forests, the sky on a clear night.” Pilotis said, “That’s probably why fish have been so slow to take up geometry.” The Professor, still to himself: “A big spread of lake like this just seems to
be
, as if it does nothing more than exist. It doesn’t grow like a tree, or erode like a canyon or mountain. On a quiet day it’s just here, with no more apparent life than a big old lichen on a rock.” And Pilotis: “It’s ruminating.”

From my first day on the great river, I had learned to be cautious of what I said in its presence, for it has great ears. The Professor was yet a gosling on the Missouri, so I warned him how Loose Lips Sink Ships, not just in war but also on certain rivers. I said, For example, speak of a day going easily, and some waters we won’t name will set your boat on her gunwales. He looked to see whether I was serious, and I said, If you must comment about smooth passage, then say it upside down. He thought, then whispered, “Well, the old Missouri, she’s putting it hard to us today.” Yes, I agreed, around the next bend we’re likely to catch it even worse. Pilotis told the Professor, “The coincidences on this voyage have coincidences.” I was just thinking that very thing in those very words, I said. And the Professor: “So was I.” A mile farther, we banged into a low rider, a waterlogged timber showing almost nothing above the surface, but we escaped with no worse than pounding hearts. Said Pilotis to the Professor: “He may have hit that deliberately to indoctrinate you. His former spouse claimed he wasn’t very smart, but he was lucky as all get-out.” I said, You don’t need to be smart if you’re lucky. Just then we struck another low rider, this one an unnerving thunk. Again we got away with it. Pilotis: “Will you the hell stop doing that? He believes you.” I said, It was pure coincidence.

I have not mentioned that, a year earlier, I gave consideration to making the voyage alone in a motorboat, because, for a journeying writer, companions human or otherwise are distractions. I’ve often thought how much better
Travels with Charley
might have been had John Steinbeck left at home that eponymous poodle. Isolation is more than a boon to a writer’s effort—it’s a near necessity. However—
however
—the great enemy of long-distance solo travel is, as Steinbeck understood, desolation. I’ve covered thousands and thousands of miles alone, but for this venture I came to believe the isolation might turn into a desolation that would sooner or later doom the voyage. That spring afternoon as we rolled along between the great bluenesses of the Dakota sky and the Missouri lake, I relished my companions—their voices, their laughter, their very distraction—and I understood they were as necessary as my eyes, my hands, and they were indeed my good hands.

The Professor brought along a small library of Missouri River books, and from these he read to us in quiet moments or sometimes just paraphrased a page or two, words always linked to our location or experience. As I sat back listening, steering
Nikawa
with my stockinged feet, taking in the greatness of the undulation of plains, he was saying, “South of here Lewis and Clark poured five barrels of water into a prairie-dog burrow to flush out a specimen to send to President Jefferson. They dug six feet down into another den only to discover they weren’t halfway to the lodge, but they killed a rattler in a tunnel and found inside the snake a freshly swallowed prairie dog.” Then he read a passage, changing a few crucial words to turn it into pornography, which may explain why the note I was making at the time about a west butte later appeared on my pad as “wet butt.” My good hands, my sweet distractions.

Somewhere along there in 1843, on about the same date in May, Indians waved their request for the little steamboat
Omega
to make a landing and engage in trade, but the vessel chugged on upriver as the Indians stood disappointed before picking up their firearms. Passengers along the rail heard bullets striking the chimneys and piercing the cabin bulkheads, and a sleeping Scotsman had a bullet cut through his pantaloons before bouncing off a trunk to fall to the deck, and another traveler, John James Audubon, picked up two lead balls and put them with his collection of bird specimens.

We passed the mouth of Whetstone Creek, and three miles farther made a perfect ninety-degree turn back westward, and then, after sixteen miles, went under the Winner Bridge. From that point on, we’d be traveling farther north than we’d yet been. For years I’ve loved bridges—their designs, histories, function—but being on rivers made me see them as something even greater: they confirmed our position; they gave us hope that, were one of us to fall to injury or illness, we could find help; they reminded us we were not so alone as the vast openness often made us feel.