Winter Count (8 page)

The father hugged his son, abruptly but firmly, when he left.

He expected to be gone a while, to find a job, to spend a few weeks in the mountains to the north. He was fortunate in that he took none of these plans seriously; he simply expected to do whatever was necessary to obliterate a sense of himself. The repressed bigotry in Yuma gave him an edge to work against. His uncle went out each evening dressed with a Mexican sense of fastidiousness, and was largely absent. The closeness of the border bred malevolence and suspicion. Tourists wandered the streets as if in a state of forgetfulness. None of this touched him. Only the sense that he was removed from the gardens of Beverly Hills and that he was Mexican and that he enjoyed reading; and certain knowledge that there would be other bends in the river as dangerous for him farther on.

The room in which he stayed took a breeze in the morning. The afternoon light was indirect and seemed to hover in the room. Suddenly one day he was taken with appreciation at the sight of his hard, blunt thumbs against the white pages of a book. The afternoon heat hung in suspension in the air and he felt a delicateness in his belly. He thought of the inscrutable life buried in a wheelbarrow full of bulbs, of the sound of his spade going into the earth, and of his cleverness with water.

He turned pages, and read on.

A
CCORDING TO A JOURNAL
kept by Benjamin Foster, a historian returning along the Platte River from the deserts of the Great Basin at the time, the spring of 1844 came early to western Nebraska. He recorded the first notes of a horned lark on the sixteenth of February. This unseasonable good weather induced him to stay a few weeks with a band of Pawnee camped just south of the Niobrara River. One morning he volunteered to go out with two men to look for stray horses. They found the horses grazing near an island of oak and ash trees on the prairie, along the edge of the river. When he saw the current and quicksand Foster was glad the horses had not crossed over.

On the way back, writes Foster—little of his last journal survives, but some fragments relevant to this incident are preserved—the Pawnee told him that the previous summer the upper Niobrara had disappeared.

At first Foster took this for a figurative statement about a severe drought, but the other Pawnee told him, no, the Niobrara had not run dry—in fact, the spring of 1843 had been very wet. It disappeared. That Foster took this information seriously, that he did not treat it with skepticism or derision, was characteristic of him.

The Pawnee, he goes on to say, did not associate the disappearance of the river with any one particular phenomenon (Foster, I should say, was a confidant; he spoke fluent Pawnee and I’m sure they felt he was both knowledgeable and trustworthy); they attributed its disappearance to a sort of willful irritation, which they found amusing. They told Foster that the earth, the rivers, did not belong to men but were only to be used by them, and that the earth, though it was pleased with the Pawnee, was very disappointed in the white man. It suited the earth’s purpose, they said, to suddenly abandon a river for a while, to confound men who were too dependent on such things always being there.

Foster thought this explanation narrow and self-serving and told the Pawnee so. But they were adamant. Foster writes that he himself was increasingly at a loss to understand what had happened, but he had been among Indians long enough to appreciate their sense of humor and to know their strength for allegory. He pointed out to them that if the river had shifted course or disappeared, the Pawnee would be as affected by it as the white men; but the Pawnee said, no, this was not so, because they saw things like this all the time and were not bothered by them.

It is difficult to fathom what happened to the river or to Foster either, once he concluded, as he apparently did, that the Pawnee were literally correct, that sometime during the summer of 1843 the upper reaches of the Niobrara River, above the present town of Marshland and westward into Wyoming, did vanish for four or five months.

An initial thought, he wrote, was that the people he was camped with were not Pawnee. He thought they might be a little too far north—in Sioux or possibly Arapaho country. Even though they spoke, ate, dressed, and even played at sleight-of-hand like Pawnee, they could be somebody else, with a cavalier regard for local truth. In others of his papers Foster writes about a rite of imitation in which a band of people from one tribe, Arikara, for example, would imitate a band from some other tribe for long periods of time, fifteen years or more. They began doing this on the northern plains in the 1820s, imitating each other in exacting detail, as a form of amusement. There was no way Foster could be certain he was not among Oglala Sioux pretending to be Pawnee and playing the Long Joke, fooling a white man and making at the same time a joke about their star-gazing neighbors the Pawnee who might not know what was going on at their very feet. But he had been intimate with the Pawnee; after extensive inquiry he believed he was among them, not someone else.

It appears Foster tried systematically to establish a basis for belief in the river’s disappearance, and pursued this course with increasing determination, as though he intuited the truth of the thing but didn’t know how to demonstrate it. I don’t know why, but I feel that, by that point, the man had begun to wonder at all he had seen in his life, and what of any of it would be believed.

The possibility that the river had simply changed its channel seemed plausible to him, but after reconnoitering extensively through the hills he discounted it. And the river had not switched channels or run dry, it was repeatedly emphasized to him, it had vanished. There were no willows on the islands. There were no islands. There were no mud flats, no smooth places even in the sand, no abandoned channels, nothing. With the aid of survey maps made in 1840, and a theodolite, compass, artificial mercury horizon, and other instruments he borrowed from Fort Laramie some hundred miles to the southwest, Foster tried to compare the present location of the river with its location in November 1840, when the maps were made. The disagreements were too insignificant to have meaning, however, what one would have to expect given the crudeness of tools and methods in those days. Foster subsequently was unable to find any permanent resident to question, or to learn anything from men garrisoned at Fort Laramie or Fort Platte to the south. He rode as far north as the Sioux Agency in South Dakota looking for people to talk to. Exhausting all these traditional methods, he turned finally to something less conventional. It had long been his personal belief (and he was bolstered in this by some of those with whom he lived) that the history of the earth was revealed anew each spring in the shapes of the towering cumulus clouds that moved over the country from the north and west. If a man were blessed, were
wakan,
and had the patience and watched from the time of the first thunderstorm until the first prairie grass fire, he would see it. There was no sequence; the events unfurled in an order of their own, so Foster prepared himself for a long vigil. One April afternoon, seventeen days after he had begun, he saw on the horizon with the aid of an interpreter, as clear as the blades of blue grama grass and his moccasined feet before him, the fading and disappearance of the upper Niobrara River in the clouds. He judged the time of year to be late June.

This must have been slightly disquieting for Foster, living in two worlds as he did, lying there on his back under the inexorable movement of clouds, feeling the earth turn under him, thinking what he did and did not know, could and could not prove. On the basis of what is a man to be believed?

There is something else here, too. In a letter to Foster dated July 7, 1831, the American explorer and painter George Catlin remarks on his terror of open space in Nebraska. While on foot in the tallgrass prairie, he and his party used a sextant and chronometer, as though at sea. I don’t know whether having underlined this passage in Catlin’s letter (it survives) means Foster’s own perception of the prairie was oceanic—people later spoke of the “coasts of Nebraska”—or whether on his own he had always felt unsettled by the unbounded space, as he might particularly have been that spring.

The disappearance of the upper Niobrara might never have come to light at all had it not been for Foster’s breakdown at that point and, much later, the interest of a graduate student at Idaho State University called Anton Breverton. Breverton tried to document Foster’s career in the west in his history thesis and he tried especially to clarify this one episode on the Niobrara. I lost touch with Breverton some years ago. He is either living today in obscurity, possibly in Europe, or he has passed on. His thesis, I am sorry to say, is also unavailable. The archival librarian at Pocatello believes his was among some twenty theses lost when the library transferred its collections to a new building in 1948. I read Breverton’s thesis at his request when it came out, made a few notes, and returned it. Reconstructing Foster’s life had been a preoccupation of mine, too, since coming into possession of the notes and journals he failed to destroy that spring.

Breverton read extensively in the literature of western Nebraska, in science and history, from both native and white sources, trying to find some hint of explanation for the disappearance of the river or what was meant by the Pawnee who told Foster this. He combed emigrants’ journals, reports from the Smithsonian, the Carnegie Institution—all fruitless. He even read regional novels, including those of Mari Sandoz, going so far as to go to New York and interview Miss Sandoz. An unusually sensitive woman who grew up in that country at the turn of the century, Sandoz had been particularly attentive to the stories of the region. But Breverton was unable to corroborate any part of it. He finally left it out of his thesis.

I understand a colleague of Breverton, irritated by the entire issue, nearly enraged in fact, secured some military funding to conduct a soil analysis throughout Dawes, Sioux, and Box Butte counties in Nebraska where the river flows, but I do not know what became of this information. I myself have communicated with the Pawnee Tribal Council, with friends among the Arapaho, and with faculty at the University of Nebraska who could be expected to add something, but to no avail.

For my part, I do not think the river ever disappeared. I imagine Foster, a brilliant man much troubled by the destruction of native cultures, simply fell prey to a final madness.

A catalytic event occurred in Foster’s life in 1808 when he was living in a large Chippewa village near the present town of Bayfield, Wisconsin. Representatives of the Shawnee Prophet had come among them and instructed the people to extinguish all their fires, to rekindle fire in the old way with sticks, and to never let it go out. They said the old lifeways would return, that the prophet himself would bring back the dead. The psychologically depressed Chippewa enthusiastically adopted the beliefs of these impassioned young men. A demonstration of allegiance they required was that of throwing away one’s personal possessions. As an eleven-year-old boy, Foster saw the shore of Lake Superior lined with the medicine bundles of a thousand men, all washed up by the waves. These small bundles, decorated with trade beads, strips of bright cloth, feathers, and quill work, must have been gathered up by someone (perhaps even Foster) and taken somewhere, for one morning the beaches were empty.

From this time forward, I am sure Foster was possessed of the idea of recording the beliefs of native tribes before they fell victim to whites or to the panic of their own spiritual leaders. This much is clearly implied by a boyhood friend of Foster who wrote about the incident on the lake in
A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner.
(It is further substantiated in the private papers of W. W. Warren in the manuscript collection of the Minnesota Historical Society. You can appreciate perhaps the difficulty of piecing together Foster’s career, in the wake of the destruction of all his notes.)

Foster spent the next thirty years with six or seven different tribes. He is occasionally mentioned in the correspondence of Ogden, Sublette, and others as a translator and Indian expert of exceptional skill. He would apparently live for years with a tribe before moving on. Though loath to do it, he deposited this steady accumulation of field notes periodically at various American and British trading posts for safekeeping, intending one day to collect them all. This is what he was doing in 1844 when he was waylaid by the Pawnee and good weather. He had eleven pack mules with him at the time, all of them burdened with manuscripts. His writings were more detailed, complete, inclusive of fantastic incident, rigorous, and perceptive (to judge from the scraps) than anything Fontenelle, Maximilian, Ruxton, Stewart, or any of the rest ever wrote down. He was en route to Kansas City, where the great trading family of Chouteau had offered him money for publication. The collection would have equalled in scope and importance the collected volumes on the west edited by Reuben Thwaites some sixty years later. It is one of the great tragedies of American history that he did not arrive and that his manuscripts were ruined.