the car I felt an uneasy sense of guilt for leaving the place undefended.
I drove into the gathering evening gloom. The clouds were low and swift. The landscape was a sea of white grass, fine as a child's hair. It was strangely beautiful. By the time I reached Russell, it was dark and rain was falling. The headlights swept over a sign that said, WELCOME TO BOB DOLE
COUNTRY. Russell is the hometown of Bob Dole, who was at this time running for the Republican nomination for president. I stopped and got a room for the night, figuring that if Dole were elected president, I could tell my children that I had once spent the night in his hometown and perhaps thereby deepen their respect for me. Also, every time Russell was shown on TV over the next four years I could say, 'Hey, I was there!' and make everybody in the room stop talking while I pointed out things I had seen. In the event, Dole dropped out of the race two days later, primarily because nobody could stand him, apart from his family and some other people around Russell, and the town, alas, lost its chance at fame.
I awoke to a more promising day. The sun was bright and the air was clear. Bugs exploded colorfully against the windshield, a sure sign of spring in the Midwest. In the sunshine Kansas seemed an altogether more agreeable place, which surprised me a little. I had always thought one of the worst things anyone could say to you was, 'We're transferring you to Kansas, son.' Kansas calls itself 'the Wheat State.' That kind of says it all, don't you think? It really makes you want to cancel that Barbados trip, doesn't it? But in fact Kansas was okay. The towns I went through all looked trim and prosperous and quintessentially American. But then Kansas is the most quintessential of American states. It is, after all, where Superman and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz grew up, and all the towns I went through had a cozy, leafy, timeless air to them. They looked like the sort of places where you could still have your groceries delivered by a boy on a bike and people would still say things like 'by golly' and 'gee whillikers.' At Great Bend, I stopped on the square beside the Barton County Courthouse and had a look around. It was like passing through a time warp. The place appeared not to have changed a fraction since 1965. The Crest Movie Theater was still in business. Nearby stood the Great Bend Daily Tribune and the Brass Buckle Clothing Store, with a big sign on it that said, FOR GUYS AND GALS. Gee whillikers. A man and his wife passed me on the sidewalk and said good morning like old friends. The man even tipped his hat. From a passing car came the sound of the Everly Brothers. This was almost too eerie. I half expected Rod Serling to step out from behind a tree and say, 'Bill Bryson doesn't know it, but he's just driven into a community that doesn't exist in time or space. He's just embarked on a one-way trip into . . . The Twilight Zone.'
I had a look in the window of the Family Pharmacy and Gift Shop, which had an interesting and unusual display that included a wheelchair, a packet of disposable absorbent underpants (it isn't often you find a store catering to the incontinent impulse shopper), teddy bears, coffee mugs bearing wholesome sentiments like 'World's Best Grandma,' Mother's Day cards and a variety of porcelain animals. In one corner of the window was a poster for a concert by-you are never going to believe this-Paul Revere and the Raiders. Can you beat that? There they were, still dressed up like Continental soldiers, prancing about and grinning, just like when I was in junior high school.
Goodness me, what assholes. They would be performing at the Civic Auditorium in Dodge City in two weeks. Tickets started at $10.75, This was all becoming too much for me. I was glad to get in the car and drive on to Dodge City, which at least is intentionally unreal.
Somewhere during the seventy miles between Great Bend and Dodge City you leave the Midwest and enter the West. The people in the towns along the way stop wearing baseball caps and shuffling along with that amiable dopeyness characteristic of the Midwest and instead start wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots, walking with a lope and looking vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they think they might have to shoot you in a minute. People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo.* (*Many people will tell you that you mustn't call them buffalo, that they are really bison. Buffalo, thesepeople will tell you, actually live in China or some other distant country and are a different breed of animal altogether. These are the some people who tell you that you must call geraniums pelargoniums. Ignore them.). Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000.
Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000
Indians, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West.
When they weren't shooting things, the people of the West went into towns like Dodge City for a little social and sexual intercourse. At its peak, Dodge City was the biggest cow town and semen sink in the West, full of drifters, drovers, buffalo hunters and the sort of women that only a cowboy could find attractive. But it was never as tough and dangerous as you were led to believe on
'Gunsmoke' and all those movies about Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. For ten years it was the biggest cattle market in the world; that's all.
In all those years, there were only thirty-four people buried in Boot Hill Cemetery and most of those were just drifters found dead in snowdrifts or of natural causes. I know this for a fact because I paid $2.75 to go and see Boot Hill and the neighboring 'Historic Front Street,' which has been rebuilt to look like it did when Dodge City was a frontier town and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were the sheriffs. Matt Dillon never existed, I was distressed to learn, though Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were both real enough. Bat Masterson ended his life as sports editor of the New York Morning Telegraph. Isn't that interesting? And here's another interesting fact, which I didn't tell you about earlier because I've been saving it: Wyatt Earp was from Pella, the little Iowa town with the windmills. Isn't that great?
Fifty miles beyond Dodge City is Holcomb, Kansas, which gained a small notoriety as the scene of the murders described with lavish detail in the Truman Capote book In Cold Blood. In 1959, two small-time crooks broke into the house of a wealthy Holcomb rancher named Herb Clutter because they had heard he had a safe full of money. In fact he didn't. So, chagrined, they tied Clutter's wife and two teenaged children to their beds and took Clutter down to the basement and killed them all.
They slit Clutters throat (Capote describes his gurglings with a disturbing relish) and shot the others in the head at point-blank range. Because Clutter had been prominent in state politics, the New York Times ran a small story about the murders. Capote saw the story, became intrigued and spent five years interviewing all the main participants-friends, neighbors, relatives, police investigators and the murderers themselves. The book, when it came out in 1965, was considered an instant classic, largely because Capote told everyone it was. In any case, It was sutticiently seminal, as we used to say in college, to have made a lasting impact and it occurred to me that I could profitably reread it and then go to Holcomb and make a lot of trenchant observations about crime and violence in America.
I was wrong. I quickly realized there was nothing typical about the Clutter murders: they would be as shocking today as they were then. And there was nothing particularly seminal about Capote's book. It was essentially just a grisly and sensational murder story that pandered, in a deviously respectable way, to the readers baser instincts. All
