TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080789/08078900.027

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.6 KB | 159 lines

                                                                                TRAVEL, Page 64

Exploring The Real Old West


By Gavin Scott


    Signs of America's Old West start as far east as Adair,
Iowa, where an old railroad wheel marks the spot on which Jesse
James held up his first moving train in 1873. Sweeping along
the interstate at a sedate 65 m.p.h., a westward-bound traveler
may then dally at Omaha's splendidly revitalized Old Market,
which evokes gold seekers and prairie pioneers heading out
aboard the Union Pacific railway circa 1865. But by the time you
reach Al's Oasis at Oacoma, S. Dak., on a bluff over the
glistening Missouri River, all doubt vanishes as quickly as
adherence to the speed limit on I-90. The proud sign at Al's,
a pit stop featuring buffalo burgers and passable 5 cents
coffee, unabashedly announces WHERE THE WEST BEGINS.

    The legendary names and places pepper the maps of South
Dakota, North Dakota and Montana, three Old West states
currently celebrating 100 years of statehood. Trails are named
the Lewis and Clark, the Bozeman, the Cheyenne-Deadwood; names
like Custer, Big Horn and Virginia City beckon the eye.
Undaunted by the midsummer heat, the states have mounted an
extravagant array of rodeos, cattle drives, river regattas and
folk fests that will culminate in November. Enthusiastic tourism
officials predict that the number of out-of-state license plates
on the roads will top last year's by as much as 10%. Roadside
wax museums, water slides and reptile farms abound. Yet with
some advance mapwork, visitors can reach well beyond familiar
kitsch to centennial exhibits that speak directly to the
westward movement and the nation's astonishingly recent past.

    Two wagon trains are constantly on the move in South
Dakota, tracing a cross-country odyssey that will take them
about 2,500 miles before they hook up at the state fair at Huron
in late August. Manned by eager volunteers who drop in and out
as their stamina and patience dictate (no charge, all welcome),
the trains cover up to 24 miles between overnight camps, where
they circle in classic fashion. Some vehicles are older than the
state itself. Some come from as far afield as Texas and
Pennsylvania. When the trains pull out each morning, cries of
"Wagons ho!" fill the air. "There's no better way to see the
scenery than looking between a horse's ears," says Bud
Livermore, 67, a retired South Dakota rancher who scouted the
route for the western wagon train.

    One of the most noticeable of the leathery wagoners is Dave
Bald Eagle, 70, a Northern Cheyenne and rancher who has clopped
along with the 32-vehicle western train for 40 days. Bald
Eagle, who intends to see the train out to the finish, dons his
ceremonial regalia when the wagons enter some small towns. He
dismisses the irony of a Native American traveling in a
nostalgic procession of white folk, who were once fearful of
Indian attack. "It's my way of letting the Indian people know
it's best to cope with the modern world, to get busy, to do
something," he says.

    Such serendipity is not hard to come by once you venture
beyond the expressways. Two miles south of the Badlands is a
bleak crossroads called Interior (pop. 70), the site of LaVonne
Green's seven-table WoodenKnife Drive-Inn. A South Dakota
guidebook last year said Europeans recommend the place to their
friends, especially for the Indian tacos, but Green, whose
daughter is married to a Sioux, professes puzzlement at the
transatlantic accolade. She is also mysterious about her secret
fry-bread recipe, which includes the root vegetable tinpsila.
But on only two days in the past ten years has no one come to
call at the WoodenKnife. "Some local people have a prejudice
against Indian food," she notes dryly, standing against the
spectacular Badlands moonscape that she describes as "my
million-dollar view." She adds, "Not everybody, of course. But
they think Indian food has puppies in it or something."

    Some 800 miles to the west, at Montana's Fort Missoula, is
a premier exhibit of photographs and artifacts from life in the
thriving frontier city exactly a century ago. Established in
1877, the outpost became known as "Fort Fizzle" because Indians
fleeing from Idaho to Canada merely detoured around the
fortification. The exhibit includes furniture, clothing, tools,
weaponry and a reproduction of a 41-star American flag that was
never mass-produced. Reason: more states were already slated
for admission the next year. A banquet menu indicates that the
framers of the state constitution dined on the likes of
green-turtle soup and broiled quail.

    All politics was local politics. A Missoula newspaper gave
second billing to statehood, emphasizing instead the selection
of the first U.S. Senators. "It was a surprise to us to learn
how modern Missoula was," says museum director Wes Hardin. "The
image of a wild and woolly Montana was not true. There were
flush toilets, electricity and a horse-drawn streetcar system."
One of the city's living relics is the Oxford, a rough-hewn
downtown saloon known simply as "the Ox," whose claimed lineage
variously dates back as far as 1883. Draft beer comes for 50
cents a pop; a woman barks off keno numbers over a loudspeaker.
Gnarled poker devotees alternate five-card stud with games like
Hold 'Em and Crazy Pineapple. Warns a stern sign: EACH PLAYER
IS RESPONSIBLE FOR PROTECTING HIS OWN HAND.

    Another revealing glimpse into Montana's vivid past is on
display at the glorious Deer Lodge Valley in the northern
Rockies, ten miles west of the continental divide. The
Grant-Kohrs Ranch, started by Canadian fur trader Johnny Grant
in 1862, became the center of open-range cattle operations owned
by German immigrant Conrad Kohrs. The ranch ran herds on more
than 10 million acres in four states and Alberta, an area nearly
the size of Switzerland. "Grant was the last mountain man, and
Kohrs the first cattle baron," says Lyndel Meikle, a park ranger
who has spent twelve years studying the National Historic Site.
When the Park Service took over in 1972, the 23-room ranch house
was festooned with Victorian trappings and family photographs,
just as it had been almost a century before. It still is. So
far, curators have cataloged 11,000 items, including a wagon
Kohrs used to take his family on a 7 1/2-week sojourn to
Yellowstone.

    Another centennial find is the reconstructed Fort Union
Trading Post, built in 1829, near the confluence of the
strategic Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in the northwest
corner of North Dakota. Fort Union served as a linchpin in John
Jacob Astor's lucrative beaver-fur and buffalo trade with the
Assiniboin, Crow and Blackfeet Indians. In its halcyon days,
which lasted a quarter-century, the post dominated the upper
Missouri from behind an elegant, whitewashed palisade. Annual
steamboats brought artists and ethnologists. The bourgeois, or
superintendent, maintained a splendid table, and French wine
flowed in an imposing residence topped with a bell tower. With
its bastions of stone and 63-ft. flagpole aflutter with Old
Glory, Fort Union conveyed a flashy, mercantile style and
substance until smallpox twice struck the Indians and
homesteaders encroached on their lands, eclipsing the trade. By
1866 the once proud post had lapsed into disrepair, and the U.S.
Army dismantled it. Five years ago, a local citizens' group
spearheaded reconstruction of the flagpole. Then for three
summers, a squad of 45 archaeologists working for the Park
Service set about excavating artifacts. Under a $4 million
federal appropriation, the bourgeois house and palisade were
meticulously rebuilt. "It's a shining example of a government
agency and the private sector working together," says Edward
Hagan, a retired physician from nearby Williston who heads the
private group that has raised $500,000 of its own for the
project. "Now we have an authentic treasure to show off."

    Spontaneity is not confined to such ambitious projects.
Scattered across the plains every summer weekend are powwow
reunions dedicated to preserving Indian language and folkways.
A score of modest vans and trailers descend on the meeting
points. Tepees dot the periphery. Over bowls of venison soup and
yellow hominy, knots of Indians chew over native rights and
tribal ritual. At Flandreau, S. Dak., Isanti Sioux Bill Gilbert,
32, a cook at an Indian school, prepares to dance in ceremonial
gear of eagle feathers and porcupine quills. "It brings people
together and gives a chance to get away from rush, rush, rush,"
he sighs. "All you do is get off on the side roads. And then
people will ask, `What took you so long to get here?'"