The Hearts of Horses (34 page)

Of the four million horses sent over to that war, a million died outright, and of the three million still alive when the end was reached, only a handful made it home alive, horses written up in the newspapers—this or that one brought home by a captain or a colonel whose life had been saved by his horse. After the armistice, with so many farms and fields racked by years of bombs and mustard gas, the three million horses who had survived were butchered for meat to feed all the hungry refugees, something the newspapers failed to mention. Martha wouldn't learn of it until she was a woman of fifty sitting in her living room reading
Life
magazine, dropping the magazine into her lap with a helpless cry.

After the war the spirit of ruthless intolerance and repression that had caused so much trouble in those years carried right over into the peace. In the first months after the war ended, the Ku Klux Klan placed an advertisement in the
Elwha Valley Times-Gazette
calling for new members—"Patriots Who Hold This Country Dear"—to conceal their identities in robes and hoods and march from the Shelby meeting hall to the fairgrounds for a public initiation. Not a single Negro person was living in Elwha County in those days, and the Chinese were all in Grant County or Baker County working the mines, and the Indians were penned up in other parts of the state; but there was a Jewish family running a dry-goods store in Shelby and some Basques and Mexicans down in Owl Creek Canyon and plenty of Catholics of all stripes; and that was where the local Klan planned to focus its attention. That, and patriotic vigilance to keep the Negroes and Chinese and Indians and various undesirable immigrants from moving in and overrunning the valley.

This was around the time the League of Nations was de-286
feated in the Senate, and Jack Bliss, sitting in his wheelchair at the kitchen table with the newspaper spread open on his lap, told George and Louise heatedly that America's reputation around the world as a peaceful and democratic nation, a country with a mission for good, was dead now, had died with that vote. Louise said in dismay, "Oh Jack, I hate to think so." When George looked over at Louise, he wasn't surprised to see her mouth looking drawn-down and thin. He and Louise both worried a good deal over Jack, who was in pain much of the time and suffered from night terrors, dreams his parents couldn't imagine and therefore never spoke of. George didn't feel he had room in his life just now for worrying about what the rest of the world thought of the United States of America.

Not much more than a year after the war ended, Jack Bliss married one of the Glasser sisters and opened a business selling carpet sweepers and other household appliances; in the 1920s, George and Louise moved to town and gave over the running of the ranch to their son-in-law, Howard Hubertine. In those years just before the start of the Great Depression, a couple of money men from Pendleton bought Stanley's Camp and macadamized the road going up to the lake; on the ashes of the livery barn they built a two-lane bowling alley and a dance hall and a hotel, which for a few prosperous years brought crowds of townspeople from as far as Prineville and La Grande and Baker City for summer holidays. When things went downhill in the thirties, the government claimed the property and redrew the boundaries of the forest reserve to take in Stanley's Camp. And sometime in the late thirties a WPA crew built a dam at the outlet of the lake for power and to hold the spring runoff on the Little Bird Woman River, which served to irrigate a few farms in the upper valley and also quickly put an end to the fish runs. Stanley's cabins had been log-built with the bark left on, which made a sentimental picture, but they were
run up from the bare ground without any sort of foundation, and the gaps between the logs stuffed with newspaper and pebble dash. After the hotel was built Stanley's little cabins were left vacant and went quickly to ruin, and by the time the dam went up, not much was left of those old cabins but crumbled heaps of litter in the bare outline of logs.

In 1938, after George died, Miriam Hubertine persuaded her mother to write a history of Elwha County, from Indian days to the end of the Great War. Louise's thin little book was called
The Wonderful Country
and dedicated "To My Dear Family and Friends," and it was published by the
Times-Gazette
in celebration of the county's fiftieth anniversary of incorporation. By then, Emil Thiede had twice been elected to the Board of County Commissioners, and Louise's chapter about the war years—the way the Thiedes among others had been made to feel isolated and despised—struck most people as a quaint and improbable fiction. Within a couple of years there would be an internment camp in the county, and a few hundred Japanese Americans living in made-over livestock barns, but not many people saw this as having anything to do with Louise's story about that earlier war.

In later years when Martha was an old woman—as old as the Woodruff sisters had been when Martha first came into Elwha County—one of her granddaughters pointed out to her that her life had overlapped with the lives of the famous Apache Indian Geronimo and the famous Western gunslinger John Wesley Hardin; that she had seen Buffalo Bill, in his fringed and beaded leathers and shock of white hair, when he came through Pendleton and set up his Wild West Show on the fairgrounds; and that when she was sixty years old and she and Henry were living on a ranch in northern Nevada she had stood out on her porch and watched that other show, the
mushroom cloud from an A-bomb they were testing over there in the desert. And wasn't that just amazing to think about?

Martha was taken aback. All her childhood dreams went flying through her mind in a moment. She remembered how, in her dreams, she had galloped bareback across fenceless prairies through grass as high as the horse's belly. She had dreamed of living like the Indians, intimate with animals, intimate with the earth. Sometimes in those dreams, just as in the Western romances, she had no name, no family. For a while she had taken as her heroes the cowboys of those novels—lone horsemen, symbols of independence and freedom—who were not a bit like the cowboys she knew in her life, men whose only freedom was the right to quit at the drop of a hat and look for work on down the road.

It occurred to her now that the West of her dreams was not—never could be—the testing ground for atomic bombs; and she wondered how it had happened. She said to her granddaughter, without planning to say it, "You know, honey, I guess we brought about the end of our cowboy dreams ourselves." It was a startling thing to hear herself say, but then she thought: Here I am in my old age and just at the beginning of figuring out what that means, or what to do about it.

This book grew slowly from a seed planted years ago by Teresa Jordan in her oral history
Cowgirls: Women of the American West.
It's been a long germination, but I would now like to thank Teresa, and to thank "the rancher's daughter" Marie Bell, whose words recorded by Teresa quietly took root in my mind. This is not Marie's story, of course, but I have borrowed Marie's seed words almost verbatim for the opening lines of the novel.

I'm grateful to Soapstone and Fishtrap for residencies in support of this writing, and to the Harris family of Soda Springs, Idaho, for time spent on horseback and for stories around the supper table, especially McGee Harris's story about stranded cows and the horse that righted himself after drowning.

And thanks to Russ Johnson of Georgetown, Idaho; Corine Elser of Crane, Oregon; Gigi Meyer of Alfalfa, Oregon; Linda and Martin Birnbaum of Summerville, Oregon; Stella and John Lillicrop of Mitchell, Oregon; Samantha Waltz of Portland, Oregon; Becky Sheridan of Lakeview, Oregon; and especially Lesley Neuman of Rescue, California: for schooling me in the art and the hearts of horses.