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 overlooking 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 guidebook 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 Lieutenant Colonel Bowlingalley,' 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 taken only 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, even though it cost three dollars to get in. There's not much to it, but then there wasn't much to the battle. The visitors' center 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' center 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 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 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 centers 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 slightly more than 147,000 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 that 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 Heavens Gate, though in fact the term war is a gross overexaggera tion 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.
