<< Back 7/10/02 Only a light holiday slaughter By Dawn Gilchrist-Young Buffalo meat is delicious. The grain is less dense than that of beef, and the meat, even in our century’s domesticated herds, retains a wild taste reminiscent of venison. I’ve eaten buffalo a few times, at Spirits on the River in Asheville, once in Colorado, and most recently for dinner at Ft. Robinson State Park in Nebraska, in an old army mess hall converted to a restaurant dining room. I am with my family and numerous other sunburned and happy tourists just a few hundred yards from where Crazy Horse, the Oglala Lakota chief, was bayoneted and died. The irony of what I’m eating and where I’m eating it is plenty obvious. To make it still more so, there is a simple marker built of stone that memorializes his death. It reads that he died trying to escape. Later I read in Lakota Noon that he was brought to Ft. Robinson by other Indians he believed to be his friends. By that point buffalo had become scarce, and the United State government was more interested in feeding Indians and assimilating them into American Society than in continuing to fight with them. Almost everyone who could vote believed in Manifest Destiny. (It’s a familiar story. Conquerors always believe God is on their side. All historians know this. The Third Reich’s “Gott ist mit uns” was not an anomaly.) Crazy Horse’s memorial marker stands in front of a reconstructed log adjutant’s office/ jail cell. Tourists walk by in sunglasses and sandals, peer into the dark interior, shake our heads and shrug, then move on to the swimming pool, the air-conditioned RV’s, tents, or the guided trail rides. Crazy Horse’s death on Sept.. 7, 1877 was long ago. We are on vacation, and we mean to enjoy it. In the spirit of enjoyment, my family and I go for a late evening walk after dinner up to the limestone bluffs above the fort. We find a high vantage point and view the expanse of land below. Having read the chronology of Ft. Robinson’s history, we are aware that this is also where a band of Cheyenne rose up and were killed or recaptured trying to return from the reservation in Oklahoma to their traditional homes and lives. We wonder which route they may have taken from the fort in their failed attempt. They weren’t far from home, though some part of them must have recognized that home, as they had once known it, would never exist again. We try to imagine what the plain below us may have been like with a moving mass of buffalo, as far as vision allows, grazing in the dusk, as the longhorns below us graze now. Imagination fails, in the same way that it fails when I try to imagine a sky darkened with passenger pigeons. Thomas Wolfe said it. Everyone knows it. You can’t go home again. The Dalai Lama speaks even more simply, nearly crossing the line into the trite: things change. We are in West Virginia, my husband’s childhood home, a few days later, and. we visit his grandmother, Thelma, in the hospital. She has an infection, and she suffers from the latter stages of Alzheimer’s disease. When she leaves the hospital she will return to the 24-hour care center where she has been for a few weeks after losing the ability to care for herself and then becoming combative in her daughter’s home. She seems glad to see my husband, is lucid enough to acknowledge our postcard from Wyoming and to remark that she couldn’t travel now. The next day when I visit she asks for her mother, who has been dead for 50 or more years. I tell her I saw a photograph of her mother that afternoon. This is not the right answer, and her eyes grow teary. None of us in the room has any words of comfort. I wish I’d brought the photographs of her mother and her siblings with me. As in most photos from the twenties and thirties, the people depicted look serious. This was before it became de rigueur for everyone to at least appear happy, and my husband and I had spent a couple of hours that afternoon sitting on the floor of her empty house, soon to be placed on the real estate market, going through old photographs of very serious looking people. I hadn’t wanted to help with this task. My husband and his father had just emptied and removed the grandmother’s beautiful old secretary, paid for with cash, like everything in the house of a woman for whom credit buying was anathema — she had lived through the Great Depression in West Virginia’s coalfields. My husband suggested we go back and sort though the papers and photos the secretary had contained, even though I hated the idea of going into her now vacant house and thought his mother could do it later, when she had time. But he was insistent, feeling that it was a desecration for all of her photographs and documents to be left lying on the floor until his mother went through them. For him, it was the history of his grandmother’s life lying there. As we went through them, we saw that some pictures had words printed on back, helping us to add missing pieces to what we already knew. An unnamed young man in a WW I uniform is followed by a picture of Thelma’s ailing father on the front porch of their house on Cabin Creek. Then there is a picture of a handsome brother as a G.I. in WWII, and then the same brother with two fellow soldiers, all in uniform. The brother and one young soldier smile broadly, enjoying the moment. The third young man wears pants hitched up too high, his belt askew, face long and mouth down-turned. I wonder if he made it through boot camp, much less the war. I try to picture him, having made it all the way through, giddily kissing some young woman, a beautiful stranger, on V-J Day. It’s too much of a stretch. He looks like the kinds of guys you see in movies, just one removed from the extras, who always get bumped early. Towards the bottom of one stack are photographs of my husband’s grandfather. In some he holds a rifle, now stored in our house, and rabbits or squirrels killed for food. In one, grinning, he points the rifle directly at the person taking the picture. In still others he squats in campsites, or on rocks beside creeks now buried by mountaintop removal operations. There is usually a cigar in his mouth. In the last few pictures, the words on back read, “Vacation in Texas,” and “Taken the day Roy died.” A drunk driver killed “Roy,” my husband’s grandfather, on that particular day in 1955 while Roy and his family were vacationing. Newspaper clippings tell the story, name the surviving wife and 16-year-old daughter. Photographs show crushed metal that was once a car. But, still, there are survivors, and so life and clippings continue — the daughter performs in the school band. The daughter gets married. In the 1960s, she represents Union Carbide as a “Carbide Wife,” a striking beauty even after four children, the eldest of whom became my husband, and with whom I sat on the floor of a vacated house going through old pictures and papers that indicate someone was once here. Someone was lucky enough to have had a long turn on the planet, to have lived 88 years, was unlucky enough to have suffered, to have a gene, maybe, that predestined its carrier for Alzheimer’s. But she was here in this house, and the bits of paper and images we collect are the factual history. A week or so before, we had stood with others at the Little Bighorn National Battlefield, listening to a ranger tell us about other bits of paper. These contained the names of dead soldiers, the ones who could be identified. The papers were rolled up and tucked into shell casings, which were then tamped into the tops of lodgepole pine posts, one end sharpened and hammered into Montana’s hard earth. Each pole marked the location of one of Custer’s fallen men. The lengths of pine were taken from the tipis abandoned during the fighting by the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes encamped nearby. Perhaps all of them would have been killed in their village had Lt. Col. Custer been successful in his assigned mission to search out and destroy those supporting Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse (who violently resisted the advancing settlers because they went against the signed treaty and pushed further into land already designated “reservation”). Although the lodgepole pine posts are gone, small white stone markers have replaced them. The markers dot the wild grass and yucca covered hillside, and their placement lends itself to theory after theory concerning what actually happened here in June of 1876. And as the markers encircle “Last Stand Hill” and the Seventh Cavalry Memorial, so vehicles with names like “Cherokee Chief,” “Toyota Sequoia,” “Dodge Dakota,” and “Winnebago” also wind their way around the hill, around “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” to appropriate Walt Whitman’s famous phrase. The trucks, SUVs, and RVs are a bizarre echo of the real event, a perverse reminder that this was the last great battle to be won by the tribes whose buffalo were already too scarce to provide hunting and sustenance by the time Crazy Horse died, and whose buffalo had long been consigned to ranches (for tourist consumption) and national parks (for tourist viewing) by the time I tried their meat. The remnants of the tribes that defended themselves against the United States Army now live largely on reservations. The closest reservation to this battlefield is that of the Crow, former enemies of the Oglala and the Cheyenne, and whose members sell us fry bread and Dr. Peppers at a sidewalk fund raiser for the Tribal Rotary Club when we go looking for supper in the nearby town of Hardin, Montana. The fry bread tastes wonderful, and my husband, the vegetarian, manages to pick around the meat and still satisfy his appetite. An old woman walks by and pats me on the back, inquiring about the quality of the food. I tell her it is good. A young girl asks my daughter where she got her cool running shoes. My daughter suddenly becomes shy, answers, “Cheyenne.” We are good eaters, good customers, nice people, and everyone likes us. It begins to rain on the sidewalk where we finish our meals, and we go inside a Latte and Cappuccino bar. Men wearing cowboy hats sit in the back. A group of Indians sits in the front. Tourists sit at the bar. We’re all assimilated, and we smile at each other, pretty paper cups snug in our hands. Generally speaking, Americans are very good customers, and very good eaters, and we want everyone to like us, even those we’ve tried to destroy. We want to be counted on. We want to make up for things. We want to make things right. Because of this, our actions can be predicted, and maybe that’s OK. Maybe it isn’t. When we destroy, we tend to rebuild the way we want things. “Manifest Destiny” is still alive in this country, and it has a circular logic — that is, since God intends us to conquer and prosper, and we are created in God’s image, then we should recreate what we’ve destroyed in that same image; that is, to look like us. Certainly, this belief has made a lot of things possible, like the Marshall Plan, for one, and the sadly prevalent view that America and MacDonald’s are synonymous, for another. We drive on through the plains, past the fences of ranches, the lights of Indian casinos, bobbing oilrigs, smells of stockyards and excrement, everything that marks, albeit temporarily, that we are here, that this part of this continent is currently occupied. The two lane roads we’ve opted for were once foot and horse trails, then wagon wheel ruts, and now they belong to the American tax-paying public. Things change. We head towards family, an impending loss, an empty house to which Thelma won’t return, and that other families will occupy even before she dies. Her pictures will belong, first, to her daughter, and later, perhaps, to my husband. The grass that fed the buffalo, that covers Crazy Horse, the grass that Whitman loved, will eventually cover us all, and I hold that thought, finding it cheerful. The morning after our stay at Ft. Robinson, Neb., heading home after our vacation, we hear a radio announcer say, “Due to heavy travel during the Fourth of July week, packing houses are anticipating only a light holiday slaughter.” The buffalo lies a little heavy on my stomach — I think I may not eat for days. I can certainly see why the buffalo was the basis for an entire culture. I’m sorry it’s all gone.