The Lost Continent (38 page)

THE NEXT DAY
I was torn between driving back into Wyoming further east along Interstate 90 and going to the little town of Cody, or staying in Montana and visiting the Custer National Battlefield. Cody takes its name from Buffalo Bill Cody, who agreed to be buried there if they named the town after him. There were presumably two further stipulations: (1) that they waited until he was dead before they buried him, and (2) that they filled the town with as much tourist tat as they could possibly manage. Seeing the chance to collect a little lucre, the townspeople happily acceded and they have been cashing in on Cody’s fame ever since. Today the town offers half a dozen cowboy museums and other diversions and of course many opportunities to purchase small crappy trinkets to take back home with you.

The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I’m awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill’s birthplace and re-erected it in their town, but they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local. And the thing is, they have a talented native son of their own. Jackson Pollock, the artist, was born in Cody. But they don’t make anything of that because, I suppose,
Pollock was a complete wanker when it came to shooting buffalo.

So that was option one. Alternatively, as I say, I had the choice of driving on across Montana to Little Bighorn, where Custer came a cropper. To be perfectly frank, neither one of them seemed terribly exciting – I would have preferred something more in the way of a tall drink on a terrace over-looking the sea – but in Wyoming and Montana you don’t get a lot to choose from. In the end, I opted for Custer’s last stand. This rather surprised me because as a rule I don’t like battlefields. I fail to see the appeal in them once they have carted off the bodies and swept up. My father used to love battlefields. He would go striding off with a guide-book and map, enthusiastically retracing the ebb and flow of the Battle of Lickspittle Ridge, or whatever.

Once I had the choice of going with my mother to a museum and looking at dresses of the Presidents’ wives or staying with my dad, and I rashly chose the latter. I spent a long afternoon trailing behind him, certain that he had lost his mind. ‘Now this must be the spot where General Goober accidentally shot himself in the armpit and had to be relieved of command by Lt-Col. Bowling-alley,’ he would say as we hauled ourselves to the top of a steep summit. ‘So that means Pillock’s forces must have been regrouping over there at those trees’ – and he would point to a grove of trees three hills away and stride off with his documents fluttering in the wind and I would think, ‘Where’s he going
now
?’ Afterwards, to my great disgust, I discovered that the museum of First Ladies’ dresses had only taken twenty minutes to see and my mother, brother and sister had spent the rest of
the afternoon in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant eating hot fudge sundaes.

So the Custer Battlefield National Monument came as a pleasant surprise. There’s not much to it, but then there wasn’t much to the battle. The visitors’ centre contained a small but absorbing museum with relics from both the Indians and soldiers, and a topographical model of the battlefield, which employed tiny light bulbs to show you how the battle progressed. Mostly this consisted of a string of blue lights moving down the hill in a confident fashion and then scurrying back up the hill pursued by a much larger number of red lights. The blue lights formed into a cluster at the top of the hill where they blinked furiously for a while, but then one by one they winked out as the red lights swarmed over them. On the model the whole thing was over in a couple of minutes; in real life it didn’t take much longer. Custer was an idiot and a brute and he deserved his fate. His plan was to slaughter the men, women and children of the Cheyenne and Sioux nations as they camped out beside the Little Bighorn River and it was just his bad luck that they were much more numerous and better armed than he had reckoned. Custer and his men fled back up the hill on which the visitors’ centre now stands, but there was no place to hide and they were quickly overrun. I went outside and up a short slope to the spot where Custer made his last stand and had a look around.

It occupies a bleak and treeless hill, a place where the wind never stops blowing. From the hilltop I could see for perhaps fifty or sixty miles and there was not a tree in sight, just an unbroken sweep of yellowish grassland rolling away to a white horizon. It was a place so remote and
lonely that I could see the wind coming before I felt it. The grass further down the hill would begin to ripple and a moment later a gust would swirl around me and be gone.

The site of Custer’s last stand is enclosed by a black cast-iron fence. Inside this little compound, about fifty yards across, are scattered white stones to mark the spots where each soldier fell. Behind me, fifty yards or so down the far side of the hill, two white stones stood together where a pair of soldiers had obviously made a run for it and had been cut down. No-one knows where or how many Indians fell because they took their dead and injured away with them. In fact, nobody really knows what happened there that day in June 1876 because the Indians gave such conflicting accounts and none of the white participants lived to tell the tale. All that is known for sure is that Custer screwed up in a mighty big way and got himself and 260 other men killed.

Scattered as they are around such a desolate and windy bluff, the marker stones are surprisingly, almost disturbingly, poignant. It’s impossible to look at them and not imagine what a strange and scary death it must have been for the soldiers who dropped there, and it left me yet again in a reflective frame of mind as I walked back down the hill to the car and returned to the endless American highway.

I drove to Buffalo, Wyoming, through a landscape of mossy brown hills. Montana is enormously vast and empty. It is even bigger and emptier than Nevada, largely because there are no population centres to speak of. Helena, the state capital, has a population of just 24,000. In the whole state there are fewer than 800,000 people – this in an area of 145,000 square miles. Yet it has
a kind of haunting beauty with its endless empty plains and towering skies. Montana is called the Big Sky country and it really is true. I had always thought of the sky as something fixed and invariable, but here it seemed to have grown by a factor of at least ten. The Chevette was a tiny particle beneath a colossal white dome. Everything was dwarfed by the stupendous sky.

The highway led through a big Crow Indian reservation, but I saw no sign of Indians either on the road or off it. Beyond Lodge Grass and Wyola I passed back into Wyoming. The landscape stayed the same, though here there were more signs of ranching and the map once again filled up with diverting names: Spotted Horse, Recluse, Crazy Woman Creek, Thunder Basin.

I drove into Buffalo. In 1892 it was the scene of the famous Johnson County War, the incident that inspired the movie
Heaven’s Gate
, though in fact the term ‘war’ is a gross over-exaggeration of events. All that happened was that the local ranchers, in the guise of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, hired a bunch of thugs to come to Johnson County and rough up some of the homesteaders who had recently, and quite legally, begun moving in. When the thugs killed a man, the homesteaders rose up and chased them to a ranch outside town, where they laid siege until the cavalry rode in and gave the humbled bullies safe passage out of town. And that was it: just one man killed and hardly any shots fired. That was the way the West really was, by and large. It was just farmers. That’s all.

I reached Buffalo a little after four in the afternoon. The town has a museum dedicated to the Johnson County War, which I was hoping to see, but I discovered when I
got there that it is only open from June to September. I drove around the business district, toying with the idea of stopping for the night, but it was such a dumpy little town that I decided to press on to Gillette, seventy miles down the road. Gillette was even worse. I drove around it for a few minutes, but I couldn’t face the prospect of spending a Saturday night there, so I decided to press on once again.

Thus it was that I ended up in Sundance, thirty miles further down the road. Sundance is the town from which the Sundance Kid took his name, and from all appearances that was the only thing in town worth taking. He wasn’t born in Sundance; he just spent some time in jail there. It was a small, charmless place, with just one road in and one road out. I got a room in the Bear Lodge Motel on Main Street and it was pleasant in a basic sort of way. The bed was soft, the television was hooked up to HBO, the cable movie network, and the toilet had a ‘Sanitized For Your Protection’ banner across the seat. On the far side of the street was a restaurant that looked acceptable. Clearly I was not about to have the Saturday night of a lifetime here, but things could have been worse. And indeed very soon they were.

I had a shower and afterwards as I dressed I switched on the television and watched the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, a TV evangelist who had recently been caught dallying with a prostitute, the old rascal. Naturally this had put a certain strain on his credibility and he had taken to the airwaves, more or less continuously as far as I could tell, to beg for mercy. Here he was once again appealing for money and forgiveness, in that order. Tears rolled from his eyes and glistened on his cheeks. He told me he was a miserable sinner. ‘No argument there, Jimbo,’ I said, and switched off.

I stepped out on to Main Street. It was ten of seven, as they say in this part of the world. The evening was warm and in the still air the aroma of charbroiled steaks floated over from the restaurant across the street and berthed in my nostrils. I hadn’t eaten all day and the whiff of sirloin made me realize just how hungry I was. I smoothed down my wet hair, needlessly looked both ways before stepping off the sidewalk – there was nothing moving on the road for at least 100 miles in either direction – and went over. I opened the door and was taken aback to discover that the place was packed with Shriners.

The Shriners, if you are not familiar with them, are a social organization composed of middle-aged men of a certain disposition and mentality – the sort of men who like to engage in practical jokes and pinch the bottoms of passing waitresses. They get drunk a lot and drop water balloons out of hotel windows. Their idea of advanced wit is to stick a cupped hand under their armpit and make farting noises. You can always tell a Shriner because he’s wearing a red fez and his socks don’t match. Ostensibly, Shriners get together to raise money for charities. This is what they tell their wives. However, here’s an interesting fact that may help you to put this claim into perspective. In 1984, according to
Harper’s Magazine
, the amount of money raised by the Shriners was $17.5 million; of this sum, the amount they donated to charities was $182,000. In short, what Shriners do is get together and be assholes. So you can perhaps conceive of my disquiet at the prospect of eating dinner amid a group of fifty bald-headed men who are throwing pats of butter around the room and setting fire to one another’s menus.

The hostess came over. She was chewing gum and didn’t look overfriendly. ‘Help you?’ she said.

‘I’d like a table for one, please.’

She clicked her chewing gum in an unattractive fashion. ‘We’re closed.’

I was taken aback once more. ‘You look pretty open to me.’

‘It’s a private party. They’ve reserved the restaurant for the evening.’

I sighed. ‘I’m a stranger in town. Can you tell me where else I can get something to eat?’

She grinned, clearly pleased to be able to give me some bad news. ‘We’re the only restaurant in Sundance,’ she said. Some beaming Shriners at a nearby table watched my unfolding discomfort with simple-minded merriment. ‘You might try the gas station down the street,’ the lady added.

‘The gas station serves food?’ I responded in a tone of quiet amazement.

‘No, but they’ve got potato chips and candy bars.’

‘I don’t believe this is happening,’ I muttered.

‘Or else you can go about a mile out of town on Highway 24 and you’ll come to a Tastee-Freez drive-in.’

This was great. This was just too outstanding for words. The woman was telling me that on a Saturday night in Sundance, Wyoming, all I could have for dinner was potato chips and ice-cream.

‘What about another town?’ I asked.

‘You can try Spearfish. That’s thirty-one miles down Route 14 over the state line in South Dakota. But you won’t find much there either.’ She grinned again, and clicked her gum, as if proud to be living in such a turdy place.

‘Well, thank you
so
much for your help,’ I said with elaborate insincerity and departed.

And there you have the difference between the Midwest and the West, ladies and gentlemen. People in the Midwest are nice. In the Midwest the hostess would have felt bad about my going hungry. She would have found me a table at the back of the room or at least fixed me up with a couple of roast beef sandwiches and a slab of apple pie to take back to the motel. And the Shriners, sub-imbecile assholes that they may be, would have been happy to make room for me at one of their tables, and probably would even have given me some pats of butter to throw. People in the Midwest are good and they are kind to strangers. But here in Sundance the milk of human kindness was exceeded in tininess only by the size of the Shriners’ brains.

I trudged up the road in the direction of the Tastee-Freez. I walked for some way, out past the last of the houses and on to an empty highway that appeared to stretch off into the distance for miles, but there was no sign of a Tastee-Freez, so I turned around and trudged back into town. I intended to get the car, but then I couldn’t be bothered. There was something about the way they can’t even spell ‘freeze’ right that’s always put me off these places. How much faith can you place in a company that can’t even spell a monosyllable? So instead I went to the gas station and bought about six dollar’s worth of potato chips and candy bars, which I took back to my room and dumped on the bed. I lay there and pushed candy bars into my face, like logs into a sawmill, and watched some plotless piece of violent Hollywood excrescence on HBO, and then slept another fitful night, lying in the
dark, full and yet unsatisfied, staring at the ceiling and listening to the Shriners across the street and to the ceaseless bleating of my stomach.