On the COVID virus redux: North Dakota's Deadly Epidemic

 

Comprising the following subjects:

(1) Covid in PERU – (2) LESTER MADDOX is owed an apology – (3) Your vaccine protocol – (4) Like-A-Hook high mark – (5) Equinox – (6) BIDEN’S incompetency – (7) A “Righteous Strike” – (8) MVA at WATFORD CITY – (9) The flames of Hell – (10) An allegorical representation of the inner essence and outward nature of the TRUMP administration – (11) A plague press conference – (12) WOIWODE and JENKINSON – (13) The Vanity of Writers – (14) “The Subzero Winds” – (15) LOAF & JUG – (16) A lost OXYCODONE tablet – (17) A mysterious discovery – (18) BLACK GOLD – (19) Vaccine hesitant – (20) The Search for the Passage to the WESTERN SEA – (21) Monoclonal Therapy – (22) Fires on the Plain – (23) Rez Sushi – (24) White Indians with Blue Eyes – (25) Alien v. Predator: Dump Truck v. F150 – (26) CRAZY CRAVINGS – (27) A Wiped Butt – (28) Toxins – (29) Aiding and Abetting Suicide – (30) Insolent Bison – (31) MANDAREE – (32) MANIFEST DESTINY at KILLDEER – (33) MEDICINE HOLE – (34) The Lost Bridge of the Badlands – (35) Not in KANSAS anymore – (36) No Fooling at TAKOKUTY MOUNTAIN – (37) An Entrance to the Hollow Earth – (38) Booster – (39) Almost Killed – (40) Evening Drum Program – (41) Telluris Theori Sacra – (42) An Heir to LEWIS & CLARK – (43) DISAPPEARING VILLAGE – (44) HENRY LEWIS MORGAN: The Rise of the American Indian from Savagery to Barbarism – (45) BIDEN’S lies – (46) LIKE- A - FISHHOOK – (47) FORT CLARK – (48) Upriver to Mistah (Herr) KURZ (he dead) – (49) METIS – (50) Holocaust:ROTTEN FACE sickness – (51) BODMER – (52) Self-Torture and Mortuary Customs – (53) Mouth-breathing v. Nose-breathing (Alien v. Predator) – (54) ‘Hoppers – (55) An Heir to LEWIS & CLARK (ii.) – (56) DOUBLE-DITCH – (57) Aliens in BISMARCK – (58) MENOKEN – (59) CAIN and ABEL – (60) War & Contagion – (61) More lies from a Forked Tongue – (62) MILMAN PARRY – (63) BARTLEBY the SCRIVENER – (64) Defiance – (65) The Ark of the First Man – (66) A concluding Admonition to my Gentle Reader.

1.

On the morning after I returned from North Dakota, clips of a recent interview between Jake Tapper and the governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, were broadcast.  Tapper is a CNN reporter, more of an abrasive interviewer than a journalist.  Tate Reeves is an unsightly White man with a comb-over that looks, somehow, like a Beatles haircut on his oval head, granny glasses, and flushed red cheeks – with his smooth skin and soft jaw, Reeves looks like a middle-aged matron dressed like a man.  

Tapper points out that Mississippi has long required immunizations for polio and measles and other childhood diseases – so why not mandate Covid vaccines?  Reeves denounces President Biden and tries to change the subject.  Tapper, then, observes that on a per capita basis the only place in the world  where Covid has been so lethal is Peru.  Tapper wants to know if Governor Reeves is proud of being America’s Peru with the respect to the lethality of the virus.  Governor Reeves mutters something about the deaths in his state being a “lagging indicator” – that is, reports of death lag behind the State’s very real progress in — what?  One can’t sayhe is controlling the virus because no one in Mississippi is interested doing such a thing. The political agenda in Mississippi is to defy Biden; this means that true believers desire, it seems, to sacrifice themselves to show – what?  Not that Biden is wrong with respect to his mask mandates.  Reeves doesn’t seem to be claiming this.  In fact, it’s not clear what the Mississippians are sacrificing themselves for.  It seems just another version of the pestilential “lost cause” – death as a result of perfervid obstinacy.  

Tapper pressures Reeves, but the newscaster’s arguments are statistical and it’s pretty evident that most people don’t understand statistics in the slightest.  And statistics is math and math has something to do with science and science is the great destructive engine that has brought us Darwinism and internet pornography and abortion on demand and, therefore, not welcome in the Magnolia State.  Rather than arguing with Tapper, who is snide and saturnine, Reeves says that Mississippi has a “citizen legislature” – a good thing that other States would do well to emulate.  What this has to do with Covid and Covid vaccine mandates is obscure.  Perhaps, Reeves is trying to say that the dumber the legislator the better – although I doubt that this is his intent.  

The exchange between CNN’s liberal headhunter and the red-neck isn’t illuminating.  I thought of Randy Newman’s great song “Rednecks”:

Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show with some smart-ass New York Jew/ The Jew laughed at Lester Maddox and the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too / Well, he may be a fool but he’s our fool / And if they think they’re better than him they’re wrong / So I went in a park and that’s where I wrote this song...

Jake Tapper shows pretty decisively that Governor Tate Reeves is a fool.  But it’s not clear to me that proving someone who represents views held by 35% of the American public is a fool persuades anyone to get a vaccine.  In fact, this sort of interview, probably not even seen by the good folks of Mississippi,  simply confirms opponents of vaccine mandates in their suicidal determination to thwart the liberals and defy science and, thereby, perish.  This sort of ideology is not new to the extreme Right – do you recall the slogan: “Better dead than red”? – that is, better to die than to become Communist or be ruled by Communism.  The self-destructive intransigence of Governor Reeves is just a variation on this traditional theme. 

2.

(Younger readers may need a footnote on Lester Maddox.  Maddox was the governor of Georgia in 1967 to 1971.  He has been called “an arch-segregationist”.  Maddox, a self-made man, became famous when he denied seating to three Black seminary students who tried to patronize his family-run restaurant in Atlanta, the Pickrick.  When Martin Luther King was assassinated, Maddox refused to open the Capitol so that the slain civil rights leader could lie in state in the rotunda – he claimed that King’s violent supporters were likely to storm the capitol building and wreak havoc in its marmoreal halls.  Newman’s song refers to an infamous encounter with Dick Cavett on his talk show – of course, Cavett isn’t a New York Jew; he’s from Nebraska.  But, presumably, such distinctions made no difference to Maddox’ supporters.  Maddox is a feisty little bantum-rooster of a man with a high-pitched squeaker voice.  Cavett had Truman Capote and the Black football-player turned movie actor on the show with Maddox.  Things begin in an amiable enough manner.  But Jim Brown intervenes when the Governor touts his civil rights record of appointing Blacks to Georgia commissions and law enforcement.  Brown asks Maddox whether he had trouble with the “bigots” in the State when he appointed Blacks to constitutional offices.  Apparently, there is a commercial break.  Cavett rephrases Brown’s question: “Did you have trouble with your admirers when you made these appointments?”  Maddox immediately recognizes that Cavett is equating “bigots” with his “admirers” and becomes argumentative.  He demands that Cavett apologize for this statement.  Cavett acknowledges the word-substitution and seems to regret it.  But he won’t apologize for his formulation of Jim Brown’s question supplying a response of the order of “I apologize if I offended you and if you’re not a bigot, and support Governor Maddox, I’m sorry for the question.”  Maddox realizes that this is not an apology.  Brown smirks and Capote, a son of the South himself, simply seems embarrassed – he flaps his left hand in the air.  Maddox gives Cavett “one minute to apologize” or he will walk off the show.  Cavett can’t apologize because the audience is hooting and hollering and encouraging him to humiliate Maddox.  The fact is that Maddox won’t back down and is too smart for Cavett – there’s no question that Cavett’s reformulation of Brown’s question was tendentious and unfair.  With the mob in the studio braying, Maddox walks off stage, declaring that the only “bigots” he’s ever encountered came from New Jersey and New York.  I understand why Randy Newman was inspired by this encounter to write his famous song “Rednecks” – Maddox is very quick-witted, extremely aggressive, and, in fact, he has Cavett in a sort of vise.  Everyone in the audience makes fun of him, but it’s pretty evident that he has the better of this encounter with Cavett.  He may not be right and, indeed, he may be despicable on many levels, but he has caught the New York/Nebraska liberal in an illiberal question, makes a reasonable point as to the soft bigotry and hypocrisy of New Yorkers, and won’t sit still to be humiliated by the TV talk-show host.  Of course, Maddox became a clown – after leaving office, he toured the country doing stand-up comedy with a Black busboy who worked at his ill-famed restaurant: the Black man sang and danced while Maddox played harmonica and told jokes.)  

3.

When you are done reading this essay, you will run to your local pharmacy and get a jab of vaccine.  Then, you’ll thank me.

4.

I’ve stopped for gas in some lonely town just off-I94, sixty miles east of Bismarck.  The town’s main enterprise is a busy gas station.  There’s also a Cobblestone Inn, a forty room motel that is brand-new, a barn-like building with a vaguely Colonial-style facade.  The “oil patch” is close enough that, even, miserable wind-swept place like this requires an up-to-date modern motel with all amenities.

I turn on a frontage road, not expecting a place of this sort of have such a thing, and find myself going nowhere.  The freeway booms over my shoulder and I have to turn away to get back to the entrance ramp down to the interstate.  This part of North Dakota is surprisingly green.  I see that someone has “high-marked” the steep embankment angling up to the freeway overpass.  By this I mean that an ATV or four-wheeler has been driven up the sheer grassy slope of the road embankment to a point where the grade is simply too great for the vehicle to continue – the marks on the hillside show that the ATV has made a tight loop dropping back down into the roadside ditch.  The loop is the shape of a fish-hook, a groove cut in the green slope.  A sign stands on the roadside, casting an angular blade of shadow down onto the tight brown loop incised into the high bright grass on the side of the embankment.  The shadow seems green although I know this is just an optical illusion – darkness that makes the grass seem more vivid under its shadow.

The day is warm with hot, dry wind – 85 degrees on the prairie.

5.

As of the Fall equinox, September 21, 2021, Covid has killed 680,293 people in the United States.  This surpasses the US death toll in the Spanish flu epidemic by about 5000 lives.  There was no vaccine freely available and efficacious during the earlier pestilence.  The people dying now, and infecting their communities in the United States, are perishing to make a perverse political point.

6.

President Biden represents a return to normal, if often, grandiose incompetency in high office.  Trump was similarly incompetent but leavened his folly with sadism and corruption on an unprecedented scale.  And Trump, of course, was magnificently entertaining until he ceased to be so – reaching the point of media-saturation that rendered his antics became both tiresome and toxic.  Trump represents totalitarianism to the extent that he contaminated every aspect of life, private, personal, as well as political.  (After compromising NATO alliances, for instance, Trump would go on to condemn the Academy Award’s ceremony and congratulate Nazis for their patriotism – he wrecked everything without exception.  Biden just wrecks some things and, of course, you can get away from the old codger.  He doesn’t haunt your dreams or affect your choice of fast foods or insinuate himself into relations with your family – you can take him or leave him, an option that didn’t exist with Trump.)

Biden seems to have the right ideas but can’t implement them with anything like efficiency or, even, minimal competency.  The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan illustrates this pattern.  Everyone agreed that the war in Afghanistan had been lost (although no one was willing to admit this in any certain or unequivocal terms.)  Trump initiated a process of withdrawing troops from the country, accorded the barbaric Taliban status as a negotiating partner and, in effect, recognizing the Mujaheddin as legitimate.  Trump announced a withdrawal date, but, then, lacking the fundamental competence to execute the withdrawal, abandoned that time table.  Biden, inexplicably, decided to implement the troop withdrawal on the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 – exactly why anyone thought this was a good idea is completely obscure.  (Why would we appoint the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that instituted the entire chain of miscalculations and murderous fiascos that was the lost war in Afghanistan?  What was there to celebrate other than folly on a grandiose scale?)  Biden’s inept withdrawal, a horrific mise en scene that resembled the fall of Saigon fifty years earlier – still a vivid memory to those who witnessed this catastrophe on the Evening News – was justly condemned by just about anyone.  But one must hasten to add that history looks backward with 20/20 hindsight and human beings, and policy-makers, are forced to live forward, cast forever recklessly ahead of ourselves into an unknown future.  Seemingly, no one knew that the Taliban would capture the entire country in a matter of a ten days or so.  Should Biden have known this?  Probably not since no one else did.  And, most of the calamitous events in Kabul were the direct result of the total and ignominious collapse of the Afghan Security Forces, that is, the US-trained military, that were supposed to defend the country.  

As many commentators have pointed out – although usually implicitly – the debacle in Kabul arose from the bizarre concept that events in Afghanistan should be administered as symbols.  That is, the United States, with Joe Biden at its helm, forgot that Afghanistan involved mud and towering mountains, concrete, a network of streets and public places, people of various persuasions and abilities, an infrastructure of a certain kind, religious and political ideologies that were not entirely cohesive or even explicable – in short, the US forgot that Afghanistan was a real place with real people and elected to treat the withdrawal as an allegory.  The withdrawal was supposed to illustrate something about America and its manifest destiny and its political redemption after the nightmare of Trump.  But, in fact, flesh and blood doesn’t usually cooperate with allegory.  Hence, the catastrophe that ensued when America decided to inscribe a political allegory on real events in a real place.  Biden deserves his fair share of fault for this absurd mistake and, no doubt, his political adversaries will be assiduous in dramatizing his culpability.

Something similar is shown by the American breach of contract, if that’s what it is, involving our sudden withdrawal from a submarine-building venture with the French in favor of retaining Australian contractors to update our fleet.  Biden and his allies decried Trump’s wicked unilateralism in international politics, but, then, immediately adopted the same policy – much to the chagrin of the French who actually withdrew their ambassador from the United States in the wake of this sordid betrayal, an unprecedented event in the relationship between the two countries.  Again, in principle, the decision may have been valid, but the diplomatic execution of the policy was both inept and embarrassing.  These events suggest that there’s something wrong with decision-making in the Biden administration.  It will require another cycle of journalistic revelations, the publication of books by the inevitable snitches in the Biden White House to give us some idea of what has gone wrong.

On the morning talk shows, Ambassador Etienne appears to voice France’s rage at being “stabbed in the back” by the United States (this is the actual parlance used) with respect to the submarine contract.  Etienne is avuncular and polite but he has talking points and he’s damn well going to make them regardless of the questions posed by the American interviewers.  Etienne’s major complaint seems to be the unseemly stealth with which the United States executed this betrayal – essentially, Etienne says that we should have told the French that the U.S. was about to back out of the agreement; this would be a stab in the front not the back, and, yet, probably preferable to the connivance with the Australians now fully on display.

Etienne, recalled to Paris, poses for his interview in front of the Arc d’ Triomph, a monument to Napoleon’s sinister Realpolitik.  The monument is entirely swathed in pale linen, wrapped in a great white shroud.  This is Christo’s last work, conceived before he died, and now posthumously executed.  Toy-like cars whirl around the base of the grandiose monument.  It’s as if a fragment of glacier calved off the decomposing ice cap of Greenland has been hauled across the sea and moored in the center of Paris.  

7. 

If history shows us anything, it is that revenge is never a good idea and always goes awry.  A suicide bomber presses up close to the perimeter guarded by Marines at the Kabul Airport.  This is during the American withdrawal and evacuation of nationals and allied Afghans.  A noisome sewage ditch runs along the front of the wall around the airport on the east side of the boundary.  Supplicants are standing hip deep in the sewage trying to press forward to the airport wall when the bomb detonates.  Suddenly, the slurry in the ditch is full of bodies and fragments of bodies.  Thirteen Marines manning the wall are killed, all, more or less, instantly.  At least 160 Afghans are murdered in the explosion and no one knows how many are mutilated or maimed.  

The United States invaded Afghanistan ostensibly to deprive terrorist groups involved in the execution of the 9-11 attacks of safe havens from which to stage their depredations.  (I write “ostensibly” – there was no valid reason to attack Afghanistan; the 9-11 terrorists where all from Saudi Arabia, theoretically an ally of the United States, and many of the training camps were actually in Pakistan, another theoretical ally.  Someone had to pay for the 9-11 attacks and, in our typical blundering know-nothing response, people had to be slaughtered, although it didn’t really matter who was killed so long as they looked Middle-Eastern and dressed in a way unfamiliar to Americans.)  The suicide-bomb attack at the Kabul Airport demonstrated that, even before the U.S. had left the country, our policies had dramatically failed – the country was in shambles, women were being terrorized by the maniacal Taliban, and, now, ISIS, our arch-foe from Syria and Iraq, was resurgent and blowing Marines to smithereens.  The United States went to Afghanistan to deny the use of the place to terrorists for staging attacks.  But, now, even before the American troops had withdrawn (leaving sizeable and helpless contingents of Afghan allies to the tender mercies of the Taliban), the country was already festering with terrorists, implementing, it seems, attacks with impunity.  Of course, a reaction was required.  So American armed forces vowed revenge for the airport bombing.  A cold chill should go down your spine whenever the United States vows revenge – you can be sure that a wedding party or an infant formulae factory (one of Bill Clinton’s “wag the dog” air strikes) or an orphanage or hospital is going to fall prey to our righteous fury.  And, indeed, this is exactly what happened.  The US sent a drone to blast a car full of suspicious-looking Afghans.  These were apparently thought to be Liliputian terrorists, midget murderers, because, at least, seven of the bad guys looked oddly diminutive.  No mind – the drone fired its missiles, the vehicle was reduced to a burned chassis, the villains were eliminated, and the military announced complete success.  But, of course, the attack was on a bunch of schoolchildren who had nothing to do with the ISIS bombing – ten people were blown to bits, seven of them children.  Thus, as always, America’s righteous retribution.  Jesus counseled Christians to “turn the other cheek” – it turns out that his advice, if that’s how we want to regard it, isn’t merely spiritual, but, in fact, practical.  How often does revenge work out the way it’s supposed to.

Does no one consider that retaliation by committing murder is always a bad idea?  United States military practice has been contaminated by the vicious Israeli practice of targeted killings.  Targeted killings, in any reasonable assessment, are war crimes.  Enemies can be killed on the battlefield, but sending assassins to murder people in their homes is more than a bit unseemly.  Even the violently retributive Israelis seem embarrassed by this sort of killing and tend to conceal their so-called successes with this species of warfare.  And the Israelis have a long and sordid history of this kind of assassination and seem to be fairly competent in carrying out these missions.  Not so, the United States – everytime we launch a targeted killing, somehow the targeting goes awry, and we just end up murdering noncombatants.  It’s reliably estimated that 90 percent of the victims of American drone strikes were not involved in any belligerent activities against our forces.  So the rate of collateral damage in targeted drone strikes in 90 out of a hundred killed.  Can this rationally be accounted a successful policy, particularly since every drone strike simply breeds another hundred (or 500) terrorists, themselves inspired by motives of righteous indignation that precisely mirror the retributive intent of American military decision-makers.

When the United States declares an intent to wreak vengeance, everyone in the theater of war had better hide their wives, daughters and children, recess school for the day or the week, avoid churches and hospitals, and keep a keen eye out for death from above – or better yet, hide in bunker until America’s short attention span is diverted to some other topic.  American rage, ginned-up by the media, fades – everyone is now enthralled with Brittany Spears and the conservatorship that seems to have denied the pop star some of her civil liberties.  

8.

So what am I doing in North Dakota?

A client is badly injured when he is involved in an accident at a place called Watford City, the center of the so-called “oil patch” from which petroleum is extracted from the Bakken shale formation.  The client is a full-blooded Mandan Indian who lives on the Three Affiliated Tribes Reservation, a huge tract of land also called the Fort Berthold Reserve.  After the crash, my client was airlifted to Minot where he was treated in intensive care for several days and remains hospitalized.  My objective was to interview my client and learn how the accident occurred, examine the scene of the crash in Watford City (123 miles from Minot), and photograph the vehicles involved.  I also hoped to obtain an accident report embodying the Highway Patrol reconstruction of this incident.

Minot is 580 miles from Austin.  I drove to Fargo, spent the night there, and, then, continued to Minot.  I interviewed my client in the Trinity Hospital in that place, then, drove to Watford City where I carefully examined what I thought to be the scene of the crash.  (I went to the wrong place and had to re-do my inspection at the right location the next morning.)  I spent the night in Williston, fifty miles to the Northwest of Watford City, then, drove back to that town the next morning where I located the crash scene and photographed it.  Then, I found the smashed garbage truck my client was driving when the accident took place – I made more photographs.  At the Watford City law enforcement offices, I was told that the accident report was not yet complete and, therefore, unavailable to me.  I then drove through the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and took the scenic route up to Mandaree, a town on the Fort Berthold reservation.  From that place, I drove south to Killdeer to look at some nearby sites of historical interest.  I spent the night in Dickinson, a town about fifty miles from the Montana border.  The next day, I toured some archaeological sites near the Missouri River and north of Bismarck and, then, returned to Fargo.  I reached my home in Austin mid-afternoon on Sunday, the next day. 

9.

On the weekend that I traveled to North Dakota, the rate of Covid infection per capita was 16.4%, second only to Tennessee which was .2 per cent higher.  No one masks.  The State is full of anti-vaxxers.  No one maintains social distance – all restaurants and bars are open to full capacity.  Who expects to get sick?  Life short and dangerous, particularly in the oil patch. Big trucks careen along narrow gravel lanes, rushing between fenced yards where oil pumps planted in bright red scoria are pumping.  On hillsides, torches are burning, blasting orange flame twenty feet into the air as the natural gas seeping out of the Bakken burns off above the crushed and rutted prairie grass.   

10.

A few miles west of Fargo, someone has decorated a chicken coop and a shed with blue and white Trump signs.  The structures are collapsing and seem to have been melted by the sun – there isn’t a right-angle in sight: everything droops and slumps.  I don’t suppose that the proud Trump supporter considered the peculiar message that the ensemble of sign and structure presents.  The cause is imploding, falling into itself as walls herniate outward and the shingled roofs drain down into the dark funnels of cellar.  

11.

While I can still access public radio broadcast from Minnesota, I hear Jan Malcolm, the Commissioner of Public Health.  Each week, she takes questions for journalists and the media by conference call.  Reporters call a number and, then, their lines are “opened” so that they can address questions to the Commissioner.  It’s raw sounding broadcast, fizzy with emergency.

Malcom says that the “great Minnesota get-together”, the State Fair produced a cluster of 140 Delta Variant (Covid) cases, all highly contagious and, presently, developing additional infections.  Several deaths are associated with cluster of cases.  The Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota transmitted 33 cases back to Minnesota, people who were exposed and, then, showed symptoms after returning from the event.  Hospitals, it is said, are on the brink of being overwhelmed.  This is because a slackening in the rate of infection mid-summer caused medical facilities to open for elective procedure and routine treatment.  As patients returned to the hospitals on this basis, the Delta variant suddenly surged and flooded health care facilities with new, extremely sick patients.  The unremitting work required from health care professionals to treat Covid patients has led to many practitioners falling prey to exhaustion and “burn-out” and simply leaving the industry: there must be better ways to make a living than laboring in a vineyard full of dying people.  And, so, the health care industry is once again on the brink of collapse, melting away in the fierce radiance of the virus, although, I suppose, one could say that this crisis is based on “lagging indicators.”

12. 

When I attended the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate, the student prince in the English department was a handsome young man named Clay Jenkinson.  Jenkinson was blonde and lean, a bit like a young cowboy.  The homosexual English professors worshiped him.  Once I attended an English Department function in which Mr. Jenkinson was awarded a prize as the most promising student in the department.  At that time, I think he was lionized for his close reading of John Donne and Spenser.  He knew the seven kinds of ambiguity and spoke in precise, lucid sentences with a tiny inflection of western drawl.  At the awards ceremony, the professor bestowing the prize remarked that Dickinson was from the windy plains of North Dakota, that he was a son of the soil, and that the luminous sunshine and stark extremes of weather in his home state were reflected in his staunch and brilliant literary criticism.  The praise seemed a bit exorbitant for a young man just commencing his studies in English and, of course, it made me envious.  The comment about the fierce winds of North Dakota has remained with me for fifty years.

At a Barnes & Noble in Fargo, I saw a display of Jenkinson’s books, mostly essays it seemed, some of them collected from the Bismarck Tribune – there were several volumes on Teddy Roosevelt, an important figure in North Dakota, and Thomas Jefferson.  Above the shelf of books, labeled Local Interest, the bookseller had posted a picture of the author.  The image showed a handsome burly man with a flushed face wearing a big white cowboy hat and posed against the backdrop of the banded bluish-white badlands.  Later, I read about Mr. Jenkinson on the Internet.  After graduating from the University with honors in English literature, Jenkinson studied at Oxford and took an advanced degree. He is well-known for a program in which he imitates Thomas Jefferson, dressing in period clothing, and speaking from the perspective of the famous man.  

The clerks at Barnes and Noble, however, made a mistake.  The picture of the rugged fellow standing in front of the Badlands of the Little Missouri is actually an image of Larry Woiwode.  Woiwode is also a prominent North Dakota author.  He wrote several novels in the late seventies that were shortlisted for the National Book Award, most notably Beyond the Bedroom Wall, a book that was something of a bestseller in the upper Midwest.  (I read this novel when I was in law school – it came highly recommended by Garrison Keillor.  I don’t remember much about the book except that it was a spooky high modernist work, influenced by Faulkner and Garcia Marquez; the subject matter involved incest on the high plains, presented from various stream-of-consciousness perspectives.)  Woiwode is not Clay Jenkinson.  But it’s his picture used to advertise the books written by this local luminary. 

13.

The road to Minot is flat, cutting a diagonal from Valley City across the mid-section of the State.  Midway between the freeway and Minot, I stop in the village of Carrington.  This is most definitely not oil-patch North Dakota – the roads are empty, the vast plains devoid of any human habitation.  Shelter belts fray at their edges and spread out in kite-shaped fans of old, storm-gnarled trees.  The villages are desolate, a couple of intersections, a brick nursing home, a grain elevator standing in the weeds, maybe a shed selling hunter equipment.  The flat land is windy and the dust seems to be swirling through the streets of these hamlets.  A local café opens into an empty room with white-washed walls.  The early settlers built their churches in the country, among the farms that have failed or been consolidated into vast acreages plowed and harvested by big operators.  So there aren’t even any churches at the villages at the crossroad between long, straight and flat two-lane highways.  

Carrington is where Larry Woiwode lives.  His family has inhabited that place for five generations.  But no one is stirring in the town this morning.  At the edge of town, there is a tiny courthouse with a metallic sheen to its little dome and stone walls.  But it’s parking lot is empty – justice is slumbering in this county this morning.  I’d like to see Mr. Woiwode, limping along the sidewalk, perhaps, seeking a cup of coffee in the false-front building with the whitewashed walls inside – maybe, there will be a commercial special at noon, the so-called Blue Plate special.  The swarthy girl in the gas station has tattooed wrists.  I am about to ask her if she knows Woiwode, but decide that this would be pointless.  Even if she knew the man, she wouldn’t likely tell me anything about him – locals are protective of one another and suspicious of strangers.  And if I saw Woiwode at an intersection, perhaps waiting for the traffic light (the only one in the country) to turn to WALK, I’d be confused – I would think that, somehow, Clay Jenkinson, was in town (since the picture in the bookstore was labeled improperly) and so, our conversation would undoubtedly commence of false premises.  Writers are vain; they don’t like to be confused for one another.  

14.

In this part of North Dakota, there’s no public radio news and commentary station.  The radio that I can access from my car is all classical music.  These people are conservative.  I expect that they have no interest in hearing what East (or West) coast pundits have to say on issues of racial reckoning or politics.  (Public radio is all “racial reckoning” all the time.)  Driving between farms, on the empty roads running from horizon to horizon, people prefer to listen to soothing classical music – a piano concerto by Brahms, banal, tinkling music by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach.

The classical station advertises a concert by the Minot Symphony.  The program will feature a woodwind septet from Minot called the “Subzero Winds.”

15.

The skies have darkened and it’s a lightless day.  I enter Minot on the old highway, skirting rows of old two-story houses in very bad repair, a poor part of town with neighborhoods squeezed between big concrete grain elevators, railroad tracks curving through weedy backyards full of scrap-cars and crumbling sheds.  

Minot is located in the Souris River valley, under several steep bluffs.  The downtown is cavernous, arched over by precipitous hillsides covered with old houses.  The streets are precipitous, stark asphalt chutes.  Everything seems tilted.

I pull into a Loaf and Jug, a C-store on the old highway in town.  Across the street, a building rises in yellowish steps up the sheer hillside, fluted with Art Deco pilasters.  I ask the girl at the counter were Trinity Hospital is located.  “It’s right there,” she says, gesturing to the yellow stone building that I had taken to be a post office.  

16.

A full-scale statue of St. Francis holding the Christ child against his left shoulder stands at the hospital entrance.  The statue is ceramic and painted in tones of celestial blue and white; the Christ child’s swaddling clothes are saffron-colored.  Security is tight in the lobby.  Only one visitor is allowed to enter per patient per day.  I’m on the list to see my client this mid-day.  A sensor wielded by the guard reads the temperature on my forehead and I have to deny any symptoms of Covid.  I look into a computer screen to have my picture taken, printed on an adhesive badge that I then affix to my left breast.  The security guy wraps a turquoise band around my right wrist, indicating that I am cleared to visit my client.  

Upstairs, my client, badly battered by the car crash, rests in bed.  The TV is turned on, babbling to itself  near the ceiling in the room.  My client has a head cold.  I ask him about these symptoms.  He tells me that he had Covid last Fall and that he has been fully vaccinated.  He’s a full-blooded Mandan Indian and knows that vaccines are vital for the health of his Nation.  His window looks out on the steep tilt of the street running up to the top of the river bluffs.

When his nurse appears, my client rates his pain at 7.  She is holding an oxycodone pill with a muscle relaxer in the palm of her hand.  When she tries to hand my client the pill, she drops it and, for a time, she scrambles about on the floor searching for the tiny capsule.  Then, she roots around in my client’s bedding but in vain – the tablet has vanished.  My client has both legs badly fractured and, so, there’s nothing he can do to help her.  The crash flattened one of my client’s lung and he has a monitor on his chest, a little oval patch that blinks with a tiny green light.  Sometimes, when he coughs or sneezes, the miniature green light flashes as if with alarm.  

17.

In 1913, some children playing on a hillside above the Missouri River saw something black protruding from the prairie.  It was the afternoon before Valentine’s day.  It’s not recorded what the children were doing on the bluff overlooking the river valley and we don’t know their names.  Perhaps, it was a warm day with the sun melting the snow on the bare exposed hillside.  Maybe, the children had climbed the ridge with their sleds to slide down the long, steep incline toward the distant river. In any event, they rooted out the object, a lead plate crusted in dirt.  When the rectangular piece of lead was washed, letters appeared.  The words were written in a foreign language.

The children knew that lead could be worked into moveable type used by print shops.  So they carried the lead plate to the newspaper and offered it for sale.  Someone recognized a name on the plate, La Verendrye and deciphered the text as written in Latin.  These events happened near Pierre, South Dakota and the metal plate was taken to the State Historical Society.  Doane Robinson, the director of the Society recognized that the lead object was a monument buried in the hillside to establish France’s authority of this part of the upper Missouri River.  The plate bore the name of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de la Verendrye, a famous soldier and explore who had traveled up the Missouri in search of a northwest passage to the Western Sea in March of 1743.  La Verendrye was also searching for a tribe of White Indians who looked like Frenchmen, spoke a language similar to French, and lived in well-made houses along the upper Missouri.

  

South Dakota immediately acknowledged France’s legitimacy as ruler of the State.  French was declared the official language and a branch of the Sorbonne was established in Rapid City.  This history explains why there is a mountain located in the Collines Noir (Paha Sapa in Lakota) carved with the likenesses of Voltaire, Napoleon, Charlemagne, and Victor Hugo.  This also explains why the bread in South Dakota is so excellent, the prevalence of fine malodorous cheese, and the superb escargot exported from that State.    

18.

After forty miles, the landscape west of Minot becomes stark, a treeless prairie with stony buttes and deep hollows folded into the terrain.  The day has become dim, as if someone turned down the brightness on the screen that I am surveying through my insect-scabbed windshield.  The rumpled prairie looks grey and desolate. 

I see the first oil pumps as bright orange pennants of flame flaring against the horizon.  Stacks near the pumps are billowing with fire, burning off natural gas secreted by the oil-bearing Bakken shale.  At first, there are only one or two pumps every couple miles, but the density of these sites increases the farther west that I drive. 

At a place called Stanley, I turn south on the State Highway to New Town on the Fort Berthold Reservation.  There’s a gas station at the intersection and the first of a hundred nondescript motels encircling all of the hamlets in the oil patch.  The hotels have three or four stories, pale aluminum siding, and no amenities – they are essentially sheds for housing workers in the oil fields, barracks as it were.  The motel in Stanley is called the Black Gold Motel.  I buy some fuel at a Sinclair station.  Pick-up trucks full of oil rigging gear are lined up at the pumps.  When I go inside the gas station to use the toilet, I find that the place isn’t really a store, but rather some kind of dispatching station with an office lined with big maps and telephone consoles.  The room is empty although lit against the gloomy, overcast day.  Perhaps, the dispatchers are on their mid-afternoon break.  At the pumps, a local rancher drives up with a big F-150 pickup.  He has two black Labrador Retrievers in the back bed of his truck.  A middle-aged blonde woman knows the dogs and calls them “her boys”, and as she talks to the big rancher, a huge man in his sixties wearing an orange hunting vest, she hugs the dogs and strokes their dark, velvety heads.    

19.

A friend, a man whom I had always regarded as a reasonable person, told me that he was getting vaccinated against Covid-19 “because (he) wasn’t sure what the vaccine would do to his body in twenty years.”  Of course, one must survive for another twenty years to face this question.  If you become ill with the Delta-variant of this virus, there is a possibility that you won’t live until the end of this year, let along for two more decades.  So being vaccinated keeps you alive long enough to face the consequences (if any) of the vaccine in the year 2041.  Furthermore, people who do succumb to Covid may suffer from what is called “long haul symptoms.”  This is a mysterious malady, somewhat similar, I think, to fibromyalgia, and, perhaps, imaginary.  Nonetheless enough doctors suggest that “long haul” Covid symptoms do exist and may be disabling.  Therefore, refraining from vaccination in the here and now means that one risks an infection with the additional possibility of concomitant “long haul” symptoms.

Most likely, a vaccine now means hair loss, occasional impotence, digestive problems, weight gain, deterioration of cardiovascular function, generalized aches and pains, and joint disease.  Twenty years from now, you will likely experience some of these symptoms.  Most everyone does

20.

Pierre La Verendrye was a son of New France, born and raised in Quebec.  Time that he spent in Europe was campaigning in the War of the Spanish Succession – he fought for the French crown in Flanders in 1722 and was seriously wounded.  After recovering, La Verendrye returned to Quebec, married, and operated a fur trading business along the St. Lawrence River.  

At that time, the New World was a theater of proxy warfare arising from conflict in Europe between the British and the French.  England controlled the territory around Hudson Bay and, therefore, possessed the Northwest Passage, although no one had yet discovered a viable Arctic route to the Western Sea.  La Verendrye, who possessed several fur trading outposts on the north shore of Lake Superior, determined that he would mount an expedition through the big lake and river canoe-country to the western prairie.  The objective was to find a river rumored to flow across the plains to the Western Sea.  Initially, it was thought that this river originated in what is now known as Lake Winnipeg and so La Verendrye, with his three sons and a group of fifty contract-soldiers, marched as far west as the Rainy River and Lake of the Woods, establishing small fortified fur trading posts as they went.  These explorations took place between 1731 and 1734.  La Verendrye ran short of supplies and money at the end of this term and returned to Montreal to secure additional funding for the expedition.  In 1736, the more western outposts founded by La Verendrye and his sons were too remote to be properly provisioned.  Jean Baptiste La Verendrye, one of Pierre’s son, withdraw to the Lake of the Woods country between what is now Minnesota and western Ontario, a vast wilderness of lakes, rivers difficult with rapids and waterfalls, and impassable swamps.  The Sioux controlled the terrain transitional between the great plains and the northern forests and there was conflict with them.  In a fight on an island on Lake of the Woods, Jean Baptiste La Verendrye was killed with 18 of his Cree guides.  It appeared that a vendetta was imminent but Pierre La Verendrye was more concerned with profit from beaver pelts than vengeance and he averted a war between the Cree and Sioux.

Assiniboine Indians living near Lake Winnipeg said that there was a great northern river flowing to through what is now modern Saskatchewan that was a candidate for the Northwest Passage.  The Indians also said that there was a large river to the south, flowing generally southeast, that, perhaps, had its origins in the Western Sea.  (This is the Missouri River.)  La Verendrye thought the southern route to the Sea was more likely than the northern river running into the Arctic.  Therefore, he set forth once more to explore the territory around what we now name the Missouri river.  The Assiniboine told him that there were White Indians with blue eyes who lived in permanent houses in villages like Frenchmen on the river’s upper reaches.  These people were reputed to trade with tribes to the West who knew the way to the Western Sea.  And, so, La Verendrye set out to find these people. 

21. 

Anti-vaccination ideology is bizarre and has some grotesque implications.  Apparently, fools who refused vaccination and became seriously ill are demanding monoclonal antibody therapy.  Monoclonal antibody infusion is a brand-new therapy and offered under the emergency dispensation of the FDA. Unlike the RNA vaccines developed to combat the virus, these infusions are frankly experimental and no one has studied the impact of this treatment over the long term.  Furthermore, the treatment works by infusing the sick person with virus antibodies.  In other words, it’s a sort of post-illness vaccine.  The precise same people who refused the vaccine on the basis that it was “experimental” or “unproven” are more than willing to literally open their veins to a therapy developed on an exigent basis that has not been well-studied.  This makes no sense and unmasks the anti-vaccination movement for what it really is: some sort of perverse accretion around Trump worship.  The anti-vax movement is essentially religious and, therefore, impervious to logic – otherwise people who rejected the virus on the grounds that it was experimental or unproven or not properly vetted would not demand therapy that, in fact, is experimental with unknown consequences.  But Trump had the monoclonal therapy and, so, presumably his acolytes are willing to follow in the footsteps of their beloved leader.  

The vaccine which is 94% efficacious can be administered in about 90 seconds, involves a poke in the arm with a needle, and is both free and readily available – it’s estimated that each vaccine has a cost of about $20 to the government underwriting this prophylactic measure.  Monoclonal therapy requires the supervision of, at least, one doctor and is an infusion therapy – this means it is administered intravenously, a process requiring skilled nursing.  It’s estimated that monoclonal infusion costs the government about $2000.  And the therapy ties up a hospital room for thirty minutes with an additional hour of observation required.  Therefore, people who could have avoided severe illness on the basis of a $20 90 second procedure performed in a closet in a grocery store or pharmacy, now are clamoring for a treatment that ties up a nurse and doctor in a hospital room for about ninety minutes, requires the initiation of an intravenous line, and costs $2000.

One might observe that the selfishness of those refusing vaccination imposes a high cost on all the rest of us who have submitted to the jab.  What is most annoying is the insistence by the anti-vaxers that they are somehow entitled to this treatment.  Whatever happened to the notion of personal responsibility, the bedrock on which conservative ideology rests?  If I make a bad judgement, am I not responsible for the consequences of that mistake.

22.

Driving south toward New Town, the headquarters for the Three Affiliated Tribes, I crest a ridge and the great lake comes into sight, a sheet of lead-grey water stretching east and west between barren hills heaped up around sandy-looking eroded shores.  This is Lake Sakakawea, named after the Indian girl who guided Lewis and Clark up the Missouri to the shining mountains.  The body of water is created by the Garrison Dam, an enormous earth embankment built between 1947 and 1953 that impounds the waters of the Missouri to create the lake.  (The lake is 178 miles long, 14 miles across at its widest point, and fills the river valley with 180 feet of water behind the dam.)  Today, the lake looks dull, the color of a dead fish’s belly.  But the hills tumbling up to the edge of the water, shaped like giant bald cocoons, are lit by the torches of natural gas burning off at the oil rigs scattered along the ridges.  The flare of fire is reflected in the flat expanse of water, here about two miles wide.  It’s a dramatic sight, even breathtaking, although on reflection disturbing: the oil pumped out of this shale will destroy our world and the fires have an apocalyptic quality under the stony, grey skies.

23.

When I was last in New Town, the place was a shambles of small government houses, little unkempt bungalows on bone-dry earth with wrecked cars and garbage strewn all around.  The village was desperately poor, a ruinous ghetto in the desert.  The place catered to sportsman come to fish the well-stocked waters in the lake.  The motels on the edge of town had plates screwed to the walls warning guests to not “gut fish in the rooms or butcher deer.”  After dark, alcohol set the town afire and the streets were full of drunks wandering around like zombies.   In those days, there were bonfires in the hills, not oil flares, where people were drinking beer in around half-wild campfires surrounded by grisly-looking pickup trucks. There were no restaurants really, just a café on Main Street and a Tastee-Freeze ice-cream place with some picnic tables under yellow lights swarmed with flying bugs.  At the bottom of ravines around the town, groups of trailer homes were haphazardly arranged, located in flash-flood channels.  A big bridge crossed the reservoir on the west side of the village, the road to Montana, then, rising over the crumpled treeless hills – I recall a desolate cemetery full of wooden crosses and plate-sized home-made cement (Sakrete) grave markers on the right (south) side of the highway on the flats just beyond the Four Bears Bridge.  The cemetery was full of broken glass from libations poured into the thirsty red scoria and the gravel heaped over the graves.  People had put up tobacco offerings, rags tied to the barbed wire fence surrounding the place, and there were empty whiskey bottles half-dug into the scarlet gravel on some of the graves.  

Oil money has inflated New Town now and it has a half-dozen ultra-modern-looking motels to house the geologists and riggers and roustabouts.  There’s a sushi place on Main Street and a Japanese steakhouse.  Little shops line the road, nail and pedicure places, small kiosks selling tacos, expensive sporting gear, and stylish clothing.  A bicycle trail winds along the hillside parallel to the highway, the sort of thing one might see in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, and several Indian women with long braided hair are walking their small white dogs.  Just beyond the Four Bears Bridge, a big casino shaped like an Lake Superior ore boat is drydocked on the river banks where I remembered the cemetery to be located.  The casino sits becalmed among acres of parking lots, flanked by a couple of luxury resort hotels with pale fishing docks pushed out into the waters of the lake.  A road curves along the cove where the casino is located leading to the tribal museum and several earth-lodges on the hillside demonstrating how the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikawa) once lived.  A small strip mall fronts the highway.  About two miles down the road, I find the little cemetery, on the right or south side of the highway, smaller than I recalled but still fenced in barbed wire. I’m not sure if memory has foreshortened  the actual distance between the Four Bears Bridge, decorated with warlike shields on its walkway railings, and the graveyard or, if the tribes relocated their ancestral bones to make way for the casino.  

Moving things from place to place is a cultural tradition among the Three Affiliated Tribes (abbreviated TAT).  When the Garrison Dam was built, the objections of the Indians were ignored and their towns flooded.  About nine small villages occupied the river valley and were inundated by Lake Sakakawea – the largest of these places was Van Hook (380 people) followed by Sanish and Elbowoods, named for trees growing along a bend in the river at the town site.  Ultimately, about 1500 people, mostly members of the Three Tribes, were forced from their homes and encouraged to move into New Town, a village platted and built by the government in 1953.  

From the Four Bears bridge, a vista opens over the water to some monumental-looking square-topped buttes rising over this arm of the lake.  Intricately eroded badlands lie at the base of the buttes and dip their toes in the icy-looking lake. Jogging trails around the casino are illumined by light poles so that the facility can be used around the clock.  A green ribbon of golf course hangs off a hillside.  Some scoria roads, the color of raw hamburger, loop into the hills to the pumping rigs.  UFC fighting is featured at the casino; an event called the Ultimate Beatdown is promoted on billboards.  

24. 

In the Fall of 1737, La Verendrye found the White Indians who lived in big houses near where New Town is located.  The contact site is drowned beneath the waters of the lake.  The town was very large, bigger than many European villages, and, wandering between the massive dirt blisters of the earth-lodges, some of his men actually became lost.  There were many hundred lodges packed tightly together on the clay banks of the river.  

La Verendrye’s Cree guides didn’t know Mandan and couldn’t communicate very effectively with the Indians in the town.  Efforts to question the Indians about the route to the Western Sea were unsuccessful.  For their part, the Mandans didn’t see any benefit to hosting the expedition members in their town, particularly with Winter imminent.  The tribal leaders seem to have made up a story that marauding Sioux were on warpath, about to attack the village.  La Verendrye left two Frenchmen in the village to learn the local language, but, then, decamped, anxious to avoid fighting with the Sioux, Indians who had, after all, killed one of his sons.  

The explorer returned to Montreal to promote another expedition.  The southern route along the Missouri to the Western Sea now seemed unpromising.  Therefore, La Verendrye raised funds to explore Saskatchewan River, that is, the northern way west.  But he died in 1749 before embarking on that expedition.  

25. 

My own expedition leads to Watford City where my client’s dump truck was hit by a pickup and, in fact, rolled over three times in the ditch.  

I don’t have good instructions as to how to find the accident scene.  It’s said to be just beyond a set of traffic lights where another semaphore controls the next intersection up the road.  Cold rain is spitting out of the sky.  Watford City, once a tiny place, is now a big town with a dozen motels, strip malls, and gas stations that sell gourmet pasta.  The local school rides the crest of a hill across the valley, a majestic structure with stream-lined wings, a stadium, and an elaborately landscaped campus.  Everything is brand new. 

The intersection that I investigate turns out not to be the actual location.  I take forty photographs and make some measurements at a location that has nothing to do with the crash.  (As it turns out the accident scene is on the new bypass around the town.  All of these cities have bypasses to prevent oil traffic, ruinously heavy trucks, from rumbling down their main streets.)  Then, I drive 47 miles to Williston where I have reserved a motel room.  Using old maps, I came to the mistaken conclusion that there would be no place to stay in a hamlet so small as Watford City.  But, in fact, the place has, at least, ten-thousand or more inhabitants now, is a major commercial hub in the oil patch, and its prairie breaks and hillsides are covered with condominiums, mint-new apartment buildings, and motels closely packed together with narrow access roads between them.  

26.

Williston reminds me of Ankara, Turkey.  The town sits in a basin cut by several small streams surrounded by naked, wind-swept hills.  The place has suburbs full of new apartments and motels extending for miles in all directions around the historic city-center.  Brand-new freeways radiate out from the downtown, slicing through the bands of sand hills and gravel buttes overlooking the valley.  At the motel where I am staying, a buffet dinner of meatballs and spaghetti is on offer, free to guests although only a trio of people are eating from the hot trays and crockpots.  

I eat at a place called Crazy Cravings, a Mexican restaurant about a mile away along the freeway.  The restaurant occupies a metal shed in an industrial park otherwise devoted to oil rigging equipment, welding shops, and big lots full of parked semi-trucks.  Inscrutable heaps of metal surrounded by cyclone fencing are scattered around the landscape.  The sun is setting over the western hills, ridges split here and there with stretches of eroded badlands.  

Crazy Cravings has a nondescript exterior but is very colorful inside.  The walls are painted bright red.  Some picnic tables are set on the cold concrete floor and there are alcoves parrot-colored with flamboyant displays of Mexican candy on utilitarian metal shelves.  You can get a tripe or sow-belly street taco here or tacos made with beef tongue.  The kitchen is open and merry with a couple of cooks who are joking around in Spanish.  The condiments are in the center of the shed in buckets on a steel table.  I’ve been warned to avoid any Mexican condiment that isn’t reddish in color – the green dressings are hot and the purplish or blue-colored stuff lethal.  (A friend gave me this advice in Mexico City; the red dressings are tomato based and colored with anchote, a spice that is mostly without taste and used to impart a rich hue to the sauce, and these condiments are more sweet than peppery.)  My lengua (tongue) tacos, served on a double corn-shell, are very good.  A little skylight has been cut into the roof of the shed and I can see a pale patch of blue sky above me with sunset painting some feather clouds as brightly pink as some of the spun-sugar candies for sale here.

Tomorrow, it is supposed to be 30 degrees with frost, sixty by noon, and over 90 in the late afternoon. 

27.

Joe Biden seems to be incompetent and disengaged, but, at least, he’s not obviously corrupt and sadistic.  No doubt, he is corrupt in the traditional manner, that is, circumspectly and covertly corrupt and half-ashamed of his corruption.  This differs markedly from his predecessor who seemed to take pride in openly profiting from the emoluments of his office.  Objectively, he is better in all respects than Trump, but this is a very, very low bar indeed.

There’s a half-crazed, senile and maniacal side to President Biden that is rarely on display, but, sometimes, glimpsed.  For instance, he doesn’t tolerate hostile questioning any better than his predecessor and tends to make curmudgeonly and scarcely coherent insults when a member of the press has the temerity to hassle him.  And, then, there’s the inscrutable video of Joe Biden strutting along toward a waiting helicopter one bright and summery afternoon.  The press is gathered around, but unseen, and Biden wears sunglasses and sports a summer jacket and slacks and makes a point of walking briskly to the ‘copter as if to show that his elderly legs are still fitted with their original joints and that they can be made to move with impressive alacrity.  (During the campaign, Biden had a habit of jogging up to the dais when on stage, an alarming spectacle that always caused me to hold my breath – would the old codger seize up and keel over?)  Biden looks demented as he hustles to the whirly bird.  Some ‘copter personnel in military garb seem to be awaiting him and, as he comes within ear shot of these aides, Biden cries out: “My butts been wiped!”  There’s no doubt that he says this, or something cognate, although god only knows what he means.  (Some pundits think he is saying: “That must be right!” and suggest that once you hear the sounds formulated in that fashion, you can’t translate the utterance into the scatological phrase – but this is manifestly an apologetic and not true: there’s no doubt that the clipped, imperative statement, more like a command than anything else, sounds exactly like the words “My butts been wiped!”) And Biden seems to think he has just delivered an impressive bon mot, because he laughs at his own wit and the people waiting to receive him laugh as well and, even, the unseen press corps shouting questions to the Commander-in-Chief are also tittering and, so, the only hypothesis that makes any sense is that, for some reason, en route to his helicopter, Biden barks out “My butts been wiped!” and everyone around him hears this peculiar declaration and all of them, including the President, laugh in a jolly way at this strange statement.  This suggests that the carefully groomed and neatly edited presence that we see on TV, speaking coherently, if with a bit of broken English, as he reads the teleprompter is, perhaps, quite different from those who experience the man in the flesh.  

  

28.

Let me repeat myself: every thimble-full of oil pumped out of these abraded hills is poison to the planet.  And you should hasten to get your vaccine so that you don’t suffer the fate of the Mandan, the Arikawa, the Hidatsa.  

29.

Oil fields require pipelines.  And pipelines must cross land owned by farmers and ranchers, Indian tribes, and State and Federal governments.  Some of the land through which pipelines must pass is protected, wildlife reserves or national forests or other conservation resources.  Therefore, pipelines are controversial and their construction has engendered massive protests.  

In Aitkin County Minnesota, a proposed pipeline was met with resistance, some of it fanatical.  A couple of demonstrators crawled into a section of pipeline awaiting installation and refused to be removed from their cramped quarters.  It was a hot day and the temperature soared and the sun beating down on the pipeline section harboring the two demonstrators turned the place into a kiln.  The sheriff’s department policing the scene was afraid that the protestors who had trapped themselves in the pipe-section would die from heat exhaustion.  At last, the two were plucked from the pipe, both of them well-lubricated with sweat from head to toe and dizzy, staggering, and incoherent.  The protestors had to be transported by ambulance to a local hospital, much to the annoyance of the cops who were harried by other demonstrators and trying to keep the peace at the construction site.

The couple retrieved from the pipe were charged with criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, and more picturesquely aiding and abetting a suicide attempt.  Of course, the protesters have entered a non-guilty plea and demanded a public defender.  The strategy is to bankrupt the county’s public defense and court finances.  No one is willing to plead guilty and no one will negotiate for a plea bargain.  The court system is taxed to the point of collapse and a small rural county, of course, doesn’t have the budget to front defense (and prosecution) costs for dozens of cases relating to pipeline protests.  In this way, counties hosting pipeline construction, which is, I suppose, otherwise a boon to the local economy will find themselves severely affected by the presence of pipes crossing their terrain.

30. 

After locating the accident scene, a cold and windy stretch of the 23 Bypass south of Watford City, and, after photographing the crumpled garbage truck, still smelling strongly of rot and decay, and, after a visit to the Watford City law enforcement center (a gleaming new building with marble walls and corridors), I’ve finished my work in western North Dakota.  I drive down to the North Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drive the badlands of the Little Missouri from the bottom of the eroded wall of cliffs up to the rim, fourteen miles in both direction.  It’s a beautiful day and the sun glints on the terraces and exposed ribs of the mauvais pais, the heights striped with glistening ebony veins of bentonite so dark as to be bluish between layers of crumbling white clay that look like something that could be used to powder a lady’s face or coat a 18th century lord’s wig.  

A big bison with hook-shaped nut-brown horns comes clip-clopping down the road, walking in the middle of the two lanes so that I have to pull aside.  I have my window open and the bison, who is as tall as my Honda, somnolently rambles past me, so close that I could reach out and touch the beast’s matted fur, buzzing with flies, if I were so foolishly inclined.  The bison has a strong ruttish odor, a musk that he drags along with him as he descends the coulee that I am trying to drive up.  Later, when I come down from the overlook, the bison has walked about a half-mile and is now imprinting his hooves in a smear of brand-new asphalt that has just been spread in a small parking lot next to a trailhead (the Capstone Coulee trail) and rest room facility.  

31.

My map shows a State highway parallel to the road running south of Theodore Roosevelt National Park marked with dots to signify that it is particularly scenic.  So I drive east to this road, Highway 22, and head north as far as Mandaree on the Fort Berthold Reservation.

Mandaree lies to the west of state highway, on the other side of the crest of a treeless ridge.  The town isn’t friendly to oil traffic – on the access road, there are three large speed bumps, each accompanied with a big stop sign and a sign warning oil trucks to stay out.  Political correctness hasn’t invaded this small village – the high school’s athletic teams are called “The Warriors” and “The Lady Warriors.”  The word “WARRIORS” is painted for all to see on the village’s tear-drop shaped light blue water tower.  The village is small and looks poor, deserted at this hour except for some curious dogs.  The houses are little government bungalows on scraps of land erratically scattered across a hillside that looks like it would be blazing hot in the Summer and deadly cold in Winter.  

Mandaree was founded in 1953 and named by a Catholic priest for Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikawa, sometimes called the Ree people.  The inhabitants came to this hillside from villages flooded by the Garrison dam.  Several important tribal chiefs have lived here including Edward Lone Fight, one of the first Native Americans on the Reservation to be college educated, a man famous for reviving the Hidatsa language and from a family that claims Buffalo Bird Woman and Four Bears himself as ancestors.  Tex Hall, a recent tribal chairman, lives here as well.  He was the architect of contracts for oil exploitation on tribal lands that have made the Three Affiliated Tribes wealthy.  Therefore, the town’s aggressive stance against oil trucks seems a bit ironic.  

32.

To the south of Mandaree, 22 skirts some pothole lakes, shaped like fat fingers under the looming ridge of grasslands.  Some intriguing gravel roads run between the lakes ringed with marsh, rising over the bluffs into the prairie where there are stark buttes with ribbons of green evergreen at their bases.  But I’m unwilling to venture too deeply into the scoria and gravel roads twisting between the oil rigs and so I continue south toward Killdeer.

The highway dips sharply into a large, deep valley entirely walled with pinnacles of bad land.  At the bottom of the long hill, where the valley is deepest, a bridge crosses the Little Missouri.  A few hundred yards upstream from the river-crossing is the site of the so-called Lost Bridge.  

A sign tells me that in 1931, money was available to construct an iron span over the Little Missouri.  The bridge was completed before there were any reasonable access roads corkscrewing down from the high eroded bluffs to the river.  Nonetheless, a small lane was plowed for the opening of the bridge, timed to occur at the end of the Killdeer Mountain Round-Up Rodeo.  (Killdeer, then, was a tiny hamlet about fifteen miles to the south in the middle of ranching country.)  Hundreds of people attended the opening of the bridge and an orchestra was commissioned to play tunes for celebrants dancing on the bridge span.  Unfortunately, a torrential rainstorm occurred during the gala and flashfloods obliterated the access road and the river spilled over its banks creating a sea of mud in which vehicles and wagons were trapped.  Politicians slated to deliver speeches at the bridge opening had to be hustled away before the valley became impassable.  The tall pointed buttes above the river, all ribbed with erosion channels, spewed water in torrents down into the valley and it was a terrible mess.

Then, the Great Depression intervened and the State went broke and there was no money to build a decent road to the bridge.  And, so, metal span stood rusting over the gravel-filled ditch braided by the river, but no one could get to it.  The first gravel road to the bridge was built 22 years after its dedication – that is, in 1953.  A paved highway finally curved down through the gorges in 1968.  In the early 1990's, the old span was obsolete and removed from its pylons.  A new bridge was built a quarter mile downstream.  Next to the explanatory sign, there’s a raw, corroded framework of iron, metal that looks a bit like a mattress spring, all that remains of the famous Lost Bridge of the Badlands.

33.

Thirty years ago, I had a North Dakota highway map, old even in those days.  Two points of interest were marked near the town of Killdeer, south of the Fort Berthold Reservation.  One was the site of the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, a skirmish during the 1863 campaign against the Lakota Sioux following the so-called Minnesota Massacre of the preceding year.  Once, during a road trip, I found the monument commemorating the fight on a lonely dirt road under the escarpment of the mountain. 

The other site marked in tiny red letters on highway map was the “Medicine Hole”.  There was no description of that place and I wondered what it was.  

After looking at the stone marker at the battlefield, I drove into Killdeer.  It was a tiny hamlet, just two or three crossroads with exhausted-looking trees shading some debauched, broken down houses.  On the main street, there was a cowboy bar.  It would be seductive to say that the town had seen better days, but I didn’t think this was true – the place was defunct and still-born the day that its first foundation was laid.  Killdeer was the kind of place that always looks scorched and dusty even in the Winter when it is 20 below, a sad, remote town naked to the sun and the wind. 

There was a gas station at the intersection in Killdeer and I asked the girl behind the cash register if she knew about the “Medicine Hole”.  She seemed to resent the question – it was as if I had asked her about the village’s last lynching. The girl told me that, although she had lived here all her life, she had never heard of the place.  An older woman came out of the toilet and stood among the racks of candy and potato chips.  She said that the Medicine Hole didn’t exist any more.  Some Boy Scouts, she told me, had rappelled down into the pit twenty years earlier.  Then, heavy machinery rumbled over the terrain and knocked stone into the shaft, blocking it.  From her description, I concluded that the place was some kind of sinkhole.  

I followed a couple of meandering gravel roads around the base of the escarpment.  The big mesa green with evergreens in its ravines and blue in the distance, a flat ridge with some sentinel rock formations like chess-pieces above pale, chalk-colored cliffs.  The mountains were an island in the rolling prairie, rising about three or four-hundred feet above verdant marshes at its base, the long mesa running from the northeast to the southwest, notched in the middle, and, then, turning its high flank to make a towering wall above Killdeer and its ranch lands.  The upper hillsides were forested, dense woods on a shelf just below the cliff top, and the top of mesa seemed completely inaccessible – the gravel lanes to the ranches encircled the fortress-like ridges but didn’t lead up into the heights.  

34.

Killdeer is now at the edge of the oil patch.  The village still looks sad and disheveled, but there are two big motels, obviously brand-new, and the lonely gas station and general store with its old wooden floors and small noisome toilets is now a big convenience store, almost a supermarket, with a pizza kitchen and expensive snacks – the toilets are tiled with high ceilings and the men’s room had a half-dozen urinals and five stalls. Oil trucks were parked along the diesel pumps.  A large dance hall, apparently a local VFW was enigmatically marked with the words MANIFEST DESTINY, probably, I concluded, the name of a local band.  A group of white apartment buildings is arranged in a horse-shoe next to a pasture where four white and grey ponies are grazing.  The town extends beyond the two or three intersections that once comprised the place, neighborhoods of trailer houses standing in the distance under the pitiless blaze of the sky.  Out on State Highway 23, there’s a big historical marker, also very new, describing the Medicine Hole as the entrance to a cave cutting down through the Killdeer Mountains.  The battle with the Lakota is described and there’s even a map, although the location of the sinkhole remains uncertain even as shown on the brand-new marker.  

35.

The road to the battlefield leads by dog-legs over the open prairie toward the base of the escarpment.  On the last jog, someone has hung dead animals from the road signs, all of them, pock-marked with bullet holes.  Most puzzling, is a life-size bunny costume, bright pink, and dangling as if from a scaffold on the speed limit sign a quarter mile from the old historical marker.  Some hand-made signs are slung from the official markers – they warn oil rigs to stay away, prohibit truck traffic, and have the general flavor of the scary signs in The Wizard of Oz: “if I were you, I would turn back now!”  As always in the oil patch, you are never really alone – pick ups armed with strange-looking machines in the backs are careening around on mysteriously urgent missions; in the distance, a big oil tanker carrying water for fracking is raising a huge dome-shaped cloud of dust from a gravel road.  And there’s some guy towing a horse trailer, insistently urging me forward, driving faster than I would dare on this washboard-gravel road.  

The battle monument stands on a small knoll, a grassy patch surrounded by barb wire fence.  The stone marker looks like an old field-stone hearth, the chimney to a house that has vanished.  On one side of the heap of stones and mortar, a marker describes the battle.  The mountain puts down paws extending out from the ridge here and, cupped between those wooded foothills, a little blue and green marsh is seething with frog song, a couple of long-legged white birds delicately striding through the mire.  

36.

In 1862, the Lakota Sioux in Minnesota, goaded into warfare by government default on annuity payments owed to them, launched an uprising in which about 500 settlers were murdered.  The army chased the belligerent Sioux out of the State and, indeed, drove them through Dakota territory beyond the Missouri – these actions occurred in 1863.  The next year, a Sioux war party killed four settlers and, so, another campaign was launched from forts in Minnesota, two army brigades dispatched to hunt down the renegades and kill them.  General Alfred Sully commanded about 2200 soldiers, half of them cavalry, and spent the summer of 1864 chasing the Indians.  Sully wasn’t nimble – he had agreed, albeit reluctantly, to provide escort to a wagon train of about 200 miners heading for the gold fields in the West.  After much maneuvering, and being re-supplied by a steam boat coursing up the Missouri, Sully’s column encountered the Sioux at a place that was called Takahokuty Mountain (“Where deer are killed”).  The Indians, a large group of Sioux from the Western plains (including Sitting Bull) were camped in the wooded foothills of the ridge, near some pinnacles of white stone that look like skeletal fingers extending from the sloping earth.  Probably about 1600 warriors were in the encampment along with women and children.  

Sully cautiously advanced toward the camp, led by friendly Santee Sioux from Minnesota.  The terrain was broken, with steep ravines cut into the face of the hillside and patches of stony badland.  Sully determined that it wasn’t good cavalry country and so he had his troops dismount and form a hollow square to the rear of a picket line that moved forward, sniping at the Indians. A group of Sioux led by Lone Dog rode toward the soldiers, taunting them and drawing fire.  (Sully claimed his sharpshooters killed Lone Dog; the Lakota say that he wasn’t hit and lived to fight again.)  The rest of the Sioux fighters, now armed and ready for battle, swarmed from their teepee village, fanning out over the broken terrain and flanking the attacking troops.  There was some fighting around the square of dismounted cavalry, a number of long distance sniper duels, and, finally, an assault on Sully’s rear that resulted in some hand-to-hand fighting with casualties.  Sully had howitzers and he fired in the direction of the Sioux camp.  The shot burst near a group of warriors who had gathered to stage another attack and the Indians retreated.  The camp and its provisions were abandoned and the Indians fled into the hills, following the crest of mesa to the northeast and, ultimately, vanishing into the impassable terrain of the Little Missouri badlands twenty miles away, upstream from the Lost Bridge.  That night, the Indians mounted a sortie on Sully’s pickets and killed two of them.  In the confusion, another picket was killed by friendly fire.  

Sully exaggerated the body-count, claiming that his troops had killed as many as 160 warriors.  (Probably, the casualties were less than fifty.)  A civil war hero named George Northrup was killed in the hand-to-hand fighting between the dismounted cavalry and the Sioux.  He is buried at the battlefield along with another soldier, Horace Austin.  Two small military grave markers, half buried in the tall prairie grass are within a cast-iron enclosure near the battlefield monument.  Sully admitted to five killed and about 13 wounded.  

About two weeks later, Sully’s columns, still encumbered with the wagon train of gold miners and their families, fought an extended skirmish in the badlands that are now within the Theodore Roosevelt National Park’s South Unit.  Again, Sully said that he killed more than 30 warriors.  The Indians remembered a single casualty, someone hit by a stray bullet, killed more or less by accident.

A dozen yards from the monument, a gate opens into a local rancher’s property.  The gravel lane turns at a group of modest steel grain tanks shaded by some big trees.  I presume the ranch house is farther along the drive.  It looks like a pleasant place tucked into the woods on the mountain hillside. The rancher has posted “no trespassing” signs all along the road and has marked the land beyond his gate as a “fee access area,” flying a little white flag next to that placard for emphasis.  Next to the monument, a sign says that the land owner will not tolerate hunting or trapping on his land, and, in fact, says “No Nothing!  No Fooling!” to emphasize his point.  The writing gives the impression that the man has been harried to the point of near-hysteria by interlopers tramping all over his property.  Another sign rather plaintively asks: “How would you feel if I came to your front lawn without an invitation and had a barbecue there and left all sorts of garbage and, then, trespassed in your back yard with rifles and metal detectors...?” and, so on, for about another four-hundred words.  Animal skulls are tacked up along the road and hang from the posts supporting the rancher’s iron gate.

As I am standing near my car, the urgent fellow with the pick-up and stock trailer skids up to the gate and unlocks it.  This must be the much-harassed rancher.  He is a small wiry man with dark hair.  Despite his foreboding signs, the man seems pretty friendly.  He salutes me with a wave and a “howdy” and, then, after unlocking his gate and yanking it open, he proceeds down the shaded lane to turn along the steel palisade of grain bins.  He has left the gate open, as if inviting me into his property, but I don’t think I should accept that invitation.    

37.

The legend of the Medicine Hole is that the Sioux ascended the rugged slopes of the mountain to a narrow fissure dropping down into caves honeycombing the ridge.  The Indians slid down into the sinkhole and made their way through a massive system of tunnels and caverns to an opening in the middle of the Little Missouri badlands twenty miles away.  In this way, the Lakota escaped the pursuing soldiers.

In fact, there is a deep crevasse between heaps of limestone boulders on the crest of the escarpment overlooking the battlefield.  The pit is nondescript, the sort of crack you see in rocky hilltops in the West.  (There are similar cistern-like cavities in cracks in the stone comprising the Big Horn Mountains.  Many of these are formidable pits 80 or 90 feet deep, dropping down into complicated cave systems tunneling vertically through the mass of the mountains.  These holes don’t seem too prepossessing on the windy barren tops of the Big Horn ridges, but, if you drop a pebble down into the crack, you won’t hear it hit bottom.)  The story, of course, can’t be true – real caves are pitch-black, wild, and full of dangerous drop-offs and claustrophobic squeezes and siphons.  The Indians didn’t depart their camp all that precipitously – Sully’s troops couldn’t pursue them due to the broken terrain and fear of ambush and, it seems, that Indians were able to pack-up most of their buffalo-hide teepees and provisions.  Further, Sully wasn’t exactly in hot pursuit – he was still entrusted with guarding the slow-moving wagon train and didn’t catch up with Sioux for another ten days or so.  

Local boy scouts did explore the pit sixty or seventy years ago.  The spelunkers reached a depth estimated to be 175 feet from the vertical shaft at which point the passage divided into three tunnels too narrow to be penetrated.  One of the tunnels was blowing a gale from within the mountain, a phenomenon that signifies a very large cave system breathing within the mesa.  Somehow, the cave was filled with debris a few decades later and the shaft is passable for only about twenty or thirty feet in its current form.

On the sign by the roadside, a peculiar photograph shows two men sitting on flat, sun-baked rocks next to what looks like a crude root cellar cut into a stony crack.  Both men are formally dressed and one of them wears a natty Stetson hat.  The man on the left side of the root cellar in its cobblestone pit is stroking a black box apparently connected to a strange-looking gramophone – the dark trumpet-shaped mouth of the gramophone faces the camera, counterpoint to the shadowy hole a few feet below it.  This man wears headphones and is intently studying the box in front of him.  He is sitting with crossed legs on a shelf of stone.  The legend to the picture says that it was taken at the Medicine Hole in 1930 and that it is “not known whether he was trying to get reception from a local radio station or listening to signals within the cave.”  It’s an eerie image, made more so, by the nonchalance of the other man in the Stetson hat watching him.  This fellow seems to be wearing black gloves.  A couple of spidery black shrubs, entirely leafless, are poised over the dark hole.  

38.

At noon on the 27th of September, TV news shows me Joe Biden getting a booster shot. He speaks during the injection, then, puts his sports jacket back on this slim shoulders when the process is completed.  “I’m a born optimist,” President Biden says about the shot, the weather, his legislative agenda, the world. 

I’m ahead of him with regard to my own booster shot  My wife arranged for my third injection of the Pfizer vaccine at 1:30 pm on Saturday the 25th of September at the Hy-Vee pharmacy.  There was an old man with a cane awaiting his injection but no one else.  The pharmacist, a big blonde woman, was jolly and efficient.  Recently, I was stung on the wrist by a wasp.  The injection was completely painless, nothing like the wasp sting, and, this time, there was no requirement that I wait fifteen minutes to ascertain whether I would have some sort of adverse reaction to the vaccine.  The whole thing took about 90 seconds, even less, and, when I picked up my vaccine card, the guy behind the pharmacy counter gave me a ten dollar Hy-Vee gift certificate.  I bought groceries for the week after the injection.  For some reason, a lot of people that I know were shopping the aisles at Hy-Vee and several of them greeted me.  I didn’t mention that I had just been vaccinated with the third dose booster.  

In the middle of the night, I woke up feverish, brooding about the lost villages of the Mandan, the Hidatsa, and the Ree (Arikawa).  I felt cold and my hands trembled.

39.  

In the late afternoon, under the waning sun, I drove along the dusty gravel roads in the shadow of the Killdeer Mountains, long, flat knife-shaped darkness cast by the mesa down on the green rolling prairie.  (North Dakota seems preternaturally green for this time of year, well-watered, a sort of paradise.)  Several tiny signs pointed the way to the Medicine Hole, but the directions seemed contradictory, aiming me away from the mountain.  I drove a few miles north on State 23.  The slopes rising up to the mesa were dotted with oil wells, even derricks in some places driving their long needles into the rocky soil, a phalanx of semi-trucks waiting obediently beneath those steel towers.  At a couple intersections, I saw home-made signs pointing the way to oil installations and, one of the cardboard signs said “Medicine Hole H & P 156", a curious marker that pointed, I suppose, the way to another pumping facility.  

The mountain is notched, with a saddle between the two high flat ridges and I found an asphalt road curving up to the pass between the north and south sides of the mesa.  After about three miles, I approached the height of land.  A dense deciduous forest, leaves partly turned gold, spilled down from the top of the ridge to fill the saddle.  At the crest of the highway, I could see down onto the prairie beyond the mountain to the west, goblin badlands here and there breaking the land, and more oil wells scattered over the terrain where cattle were placidly grazing in the raking rays of the sun low against the horizon.  Suddenly, the road changed to rough gravel and, ahead of me, I saw a semi-truck fishtailing around a curve, running hell-to-leather down the middle of the road.  I pulled far to the side and slowed and oil truck sheared by, very close to the side of my car and flinging rocks in a shower against my vehicle.  I saw the stones raining down in the ditch and, then, there was a crack like a rifle shot and my windshield was starred, an octopus-shaped tangle of tentacle-cracks extending from the left side of glass about eight inches into the window.  If I had been standing by the road, I suppose, the rain of big knuckle-sized rocks might have killed me.  

This was too much and I had seen enough of the road to the pass between the long flat ridges of the mountain and so I turned around.  On the asphalt returning to the main highway, I came up behind a kind of open jeep, big wheels and a roll-bar, with some oil company men struggling to unfurl a map about the size of a sheet on a double bed.  The wind caught the map and kicked it sideways and the man driving the jeep swerved all over the road and I looked at the clock under my now smashed windshield, uncertain whether it displayed mountain time or CST, and thought to myself that sufficient to the day is the evil thereof and that it was time to drive to my motel in Dickinson.

40.

The road south of Killdeer ran straight as an arrow between low buttes, forty miles to Dickinson on the freeway crossing North Dakota.  But, after the first ridge and, then, trough in the prairie, I saw red lights flashing ahead, a mile away at the crest of the next hill.  Cars and trucks in a line of indeterminate length were stopped ahead, motionless on the highway.  I had tuned my radio to the Reservation station, an oddly curated mixture of rap music, blues, show tunes and movie scores (“Hey there, Georgie Girl”), and old rock and roll favorites by the Rolling Stones and Allman Brothers.  Now and then, an announcer said that I was listening to “the number one station” on the Fort Berthold Reservation broadcasting to the Three Affiliated Tribes, begging the question, I suppose, whether there was a number two or three stations, and, if so, what those wavelengths might offer.  (I thought of the man sitting tailor-style on the stone ledge above the dark hollow of the Medicine Hole listening to signals on his black box with the black-throated gramophone funnel next to him.)  Nothing moved on the highway.  Now and then, a pick-up or a truck carrying oil rig gear scooted by in the oncoming lane, a good sign I thought that traffic was flowing at least in the northbound direction until it occurred to me that these vehicles had likely been in the queue ahead and simply turned around to head back toward Killdeer.  And, indeed, some of the drivers made gestures with their hands, waving their finger in a circle as if to suggest that we should turn around too since the road was, apparently, irremediably blocked.  At six-o’clock, the announcer on the Indian radio station said that it was time for the “Evening Drum Program”, songs featuring traditional Pow-wow music with a thudding drum circle beat and choruses of men wailing in high falsetto voices, a sound that would be terrifying if you didn’t know, more or less, what it meant.  Between drum songs, the announcer said that he was the voice of KMJA Fort Berthold, that is the sound of the MAH Nations.  Some of music had lyrics in English: one song featured this refrain: I see the stars in your eyes/ I feel the warmth of the sun when I hold you tight./ Baby, do me a favor and stay right here.  A chorus of girls keening followed, responding, it seemed, to the refrain.  A Dunn County Sheriff’s department pilot car passed leading an endless column of oil rigging trucks and vehicles full of geo-technical gear.  I put my car in park and studied my map.  It seemed that there was a 41 mile highway running crookedly north - south about ten miles to the west of Killdeer.  This looked like a route to detour around the bottleneck on the hillside where I was stalled.  After forty minutes, I edged out into the oncoming lane and turned around, coasting down the big slopes to Killdeer and, then, running West to the road ostensibly leading to the freeway six-miles on the Montana side of Dickinson.  I had gassed-up at the deluxe station and C-store in Killdeer.  No towns were marked as existing on the road south to the freeway.  In fact, it didn’t appear to me that the road even had a name or number.

(Returning to Austin, a few days later, I learned that a semi-truck had hit a pickup at the crest of the hill on 23 four miles south of Killdeer – the result was one fatality and several people badly injured.)

41.

The sun is setting behind filaments of grey haze.  The prairie is only half-lit, a page of text that the eye struggles to decipher in the dusk.  I am anxious to get off this lonely, remote road before it becomes really dark.  The map is accurate – there are no towns on this two-lane black-top, not even any intersections except for raw-looking red lanes leading to oil wells.  A few cars approach and I can see headlights, perhaps, three miles behind me, when the road skates down from the barren ridges capped with fractured rock.  

Exactly opposite to the sun entrapped in evening mist, I see the faded hulk of the moon, derelict and hovering over the vast, empty country.  The road drops to a little ravine where a faint glint of water shimmers between clay banks.  The darkness is growing.  

A man named Thomas Burnet published a book called Telluris Theoria Sacra.  This volume was translated into English in 1680 as The Sacred Theory of Geology.  Burnet hypothesized that the world was as flat and even as the surface of an egg before Man’s first disobedience and his fall from grace.  The earth was hollow and contained an immense volume of flood waters.  When God destroyed the sinners infesting the earth with a mighty flood, the gush of waters heaped up hideous debris in the form of mountain ranges and scoured out great awful declivities in the hitherto smooth-polished surface of the planet.  The moon hovering over the eastern horizon is a chalky blue and obviously marred by dark shadows, pock-marked like the face of a man with small pox.  This is the disfigured visage of the planet exploited for oil and other mineral resources, the terrain all racked with the abscesses of open pit mines and the sinister ranks of ceaselessly laboring oil wells.  To the west, the setting sun glints like lead or metallic zinc, a wan indefinite light in a fog of clouds.  The sun, perhaps, represents the world when it was smooth, with neither mountains nor valleys.  The poor battered moon, bruised with exploitation, is another earth, another habitation for mankind, but now ruined by the oil wells and row-crop agriculture, rivers all dammed and diverted and the darkling plain speckled with burning flares of natural gas.  

It’s a long road with many twists and turns and, in a kind of panic, I’m driving as far as I can, hurrying to get off this empty highway.  At last, I come down a hill and can see the throb of traffic on the great interstate and, I think, I am delivered from this lonesome road.  The overpass hangs above the lanes with traffic hustling to the east and west.  It’s one of those exits that you see in passing marked with a big sign that says: NO SERVICES.

42.

After the oil patch, central North Dakota feels calm, vast, and empty.  The roads are straight and flat, iron-colored lances aimed at the horizon in the early morning.  The little towns feel bereft, orphaned, small houses in which elderly people dwell, the businesses on main street all boarded-up, and the nursing home on a treeless pillow of hillside the only enterprise that seems to be thriving.  In Stanton, some corrals and a rickety bleachers stands in a fairground, a couple of metal sheds at the end of a looping gravel lane.  The Courthouse is a one-story brick building behind a four-foot wall of field stone that encloses a small parking lot, a flag pole, and a grass lawn.  A couple miles north of the town, near the line of trees concealing the west bank of the Missouri, the National Park Service maintains a tract of land once occupied by the Knife River Indian villages.  A small visitor center displays some artifacts, but the place primarily houses an office, some toilets, and a small room where a movie provides perspective on the archaeology of the site.  

Masks are mandatory in the visitor center, a mandate from the President and his government.  The park ranger in charge of the center is a garrulous blonde woman wearing a stylish bandana over her mouth and horn-rimmed glasses.  She accosts me and delivers a brief lecture about the matrilineal characteristics of the Hidatsa Indians who lived here.  The women, she tells me, built the earth lodges and owned them as well as all of the property inside the structures –these buildings were passed from grandmother to mother to daughter.  What did the men do?  The park ranger says that they hunted for bison and waged war.  I don’t know why she has chosen me for this lecture, a form of “mansplaining” as it is called, except here conducted by a woman.  She nods at me as if to ask what I think about the social arrangements of the Hidatsa and their allies, the Mandan.  “Seems logical to me,” I observe.

Another old man approaches the talkative park ranger and says that he has visited every State in the Union except North Dakota, now crossed-off his list, and Maine.  “Maine is pretty remote,” the park ranger says.  The man’s wife eases away from him to look at the pottery and carved wood and bone implements in the glass cases nearby.  The old man says that he is on the trail of Lewis and Clark.  This is because his grandfather was involved with the expedition of the Corps of Discovery.  This seems remarkable to me.  If the old man’s grandfather was a part of the 1804-1806 expedition, then, his father must have been born around 1820.  This means that the old man is, indeed, very, very old – probably about 170 years old.  The park ranger doesn’t seem to regard her interlocutor’s advanced age as remarkable.  Despite her youthful looks, she may be a hundred herself.  She nods appreciatively when the man begins telling her some family lore about the expedition and remarks that he has diaries at home written by his grandfather that describe his adventures on the Upper Missouri.  “Those diaries must be very fascinating,” the park ranger says.  The 170 year old man says that they are hard to decipher, but very interesting.  The geezer with his wife struts out to his RV, pleased to have established his personal relationship to this site.  I ask the woman in the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikawa spoke different languages.  She tells me that this is true and that Lewis and Clark observed a Hidatsa man and an Arikawa working together, not exchanging a word, but conversing quite volubly in sign language.  In fact, Mandan and Hidatsa are similar dialects, Siouan in their grammar and vocabulary.  The Arikawa spoke a Caddoan dialect, something like Pawnee.  

The ranger invites me to stroll along the trails that lead to the village sites.  She directs me to a reconstructed earth lodge at the rear of the building.  I got outside in the bright sunlight.  It’s still early and dew glistens in the grass.  The lodge is cool and a little musty, like a basement.  A square skylight lets in some rays of sun and I can see household artifacts stacked against the walls – there’s a hoe made from a bison scapula, some wooden rakes, and a few beige clay pots.  Next to the hearth under the skylight, a bell-shaped cache has been dug deep into the floor – it seems to be about five feet deep and the cavity yawns in a menacing way, a little like the shaft in the Medicine Hole.  Several bull-boats, round baskets of bison hide stretched on a concave framework of bent wood, loiter against the wall.  The boats were used to navigate the Missouri and could be paddled across the stream to the opposing shore.  When it rained, someone would climb up onto the turf dome of the lodge and set an upturned bull-boat over the smoke hole opening into the lodge.  For some reason, this delights me, an elegant solution to the problem of rain and snow sifting down through the overhead opening.  

The Knife River villages were built around the confluence of the tributary Knife with the Missouri.  Until about 1837, some five or six towns of earth lodges were located in this area, all within sight of each other.  Each village had about one-hundred of the big yurt shaped lodges, some of them large enough to house as many as thirty people.  The place was prosperous, buzzing with life, until the great smallpox plagues in 1836 ravaged the communities.  By that time, the Sioux were menacing the villages and, so, the Mandan and Hidatsa who had survived the plague moved upriver to place called Like-a-Hook (or Like-a-Fishhook), a name that describes a sharp bend in the Missouri River.  This location, now inundated under the river impounded by the Garrison Dam, was the old site of Fort Berthold, then, a trading agency with the three allied tribes.  (The Arikawa’s role in this history is a little obscure – unlike the Mandan and Hidatsa, the Arikawa were unreliable allies; sometimes they fought against the Mandan and Hidatsa, and, later, made an alliance with the Lakota Sioux to oppose the White men encroaching on their territory.)  

Sakakawea, the woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the Western Sea, was living in the Hidatsa villages on the knife river with her French-Canadian husband Toussaint Charbonneau.  Charbonneau was a reprobate, lazy, cowardly, and abusive.  Nine years before Lewis and Clark met him, Charbonneau was injured while raping a Native American girl – apparently, an old woman in the tribe observed the assault and stuck a canoe awl in the French-Canadian’s back, wounding him so severely that he was useless when the canoes had to be portaged.  Charbonneau’s unsavory reputation pursued him and, with two Shoshone wives, one of them the 16-year old Sacagawea (or Sakakawea, depending on spelling), he fled down the river to the Knife River villages.  Lewis and Clark didn’t like Charbonneau, but they knew that the Missouri originated in mountains where the Shoshone lived and needed someone who could translate that language for them.  Sacagawea was obviously highly intelligent and fit the bill. (Charbonneau, by contrast, was not accomplished with language – although he had lived among the Hidatsa for several years, he didn’t know how to speak that language.)  Reluctantly, Lewis and Clark signed-up Charbonneau as part of the Corps, primarily to have access to the young woman.  

After the expedition, Charbonneau worked for Manual Lisa in St. Louis in the fur trade.  He managed to acquire several additional wives, marrying an Assiniboine girl who was 14 when he was seventy.  

43.

A paved trail leads across the prairie to some large mown fields, each several acres in extent.  The grass is rippled with low embankments and round shallow craters.  The indentations in the field are what remains of earth lodges, the round rims of their foundations still faintly persisting in the grass.  The embankments are middens.  Irregularly shaped ditches, none deeper than eight or nine inches, mark the spoil pits from which the Indians excavated earth to cover the wooden frameworks of their lodges.  The dwellings are close-spaced, some of them almost touching one another.  

A couple of local women wearing sunglasses are walking small white dogs on the asphalt trail.  The noses of dogs are so sensitive that the animals can be used to sniff out mammoth bones that are twenty-thousand years old.  So, I suppose, that the little pooches straining on their leashes scent the buffalo and catfish bones buried in the trash middens.  

It’s a long walk in the sun that seem increasing in heat, a warm, dry wind sweeping over the fields.  At the end of the trail, some signs tells me that I have reached the village called Awatixa (or “Disappearing”).  A steep embankment at the edge of the site drops to some swampy-looking terrain, brown matted marsh-grass extending for several hundred yards to a line of yellowish cottonwood trees.  The Missouri is fickle and changes its course and, now, flows behind the range of trees, remote from this ledge above where the river once bent and looped.  “Disappearing” refers to the fact that the Mandan and Hidatsa built their earth lodges on the very edges of the river bank and, during the Spring floods, the current undercut the village site and, sometimes, caused earth lodges to collapse into the muddy torrent.  

Old men interviewed about the village in the early twentieth century recalled that the floods in March and April would deposit the carcasses of drowned bison at the very foot of the village, beneath the tenuous clay banks on which the town was erected.  The bison were spoiled but made good-eating and the old men recalled with pleasure, butchering the carcasses and feasting on them.  Some caches of flank meat were kept near the lodges.  When they were swarming with maggots, the meat would be carefully anchored in the wading lagoons near the river bank.  Catfish would come to eat the maggots and the people would catch the fish, dragging them ashore to be kept in bathtub-shaped pools scooped out of the river bank.  

Lewis and Clark met Sacawagea in Awatixa.  After the expedition, she lived with the Hidatsa for three years and, then, moved to St. Louis at the invitation of William Clark.  Clark arranged for her son, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, born during the expedition, to be educated at a prestigious boy’s school in St. Louis.  Bird Woman (Sacagawea) is supposed to have died in 1812 when she was 25 – records show that William Clark adopted her two children in that year (this is based on records of the “Orphan’s Court” in St. Louis.  But the Comanches claim that she appeared among them, married into the tribe and may have lived among that people until 1884.  Dr. Charles Eastman, a Minnesota Dakota Indian, believed that Sacagawea was known as Porivo (“Chief Woman”), a Comanche-speaking elder who died on the Wind River Reservaton.  There is a monument on the Fort Washakie Reservation claiming that the famous participant in the Lewis and Clark Expedition is buried nearby.  In Indian Country, there is no clear distinction between legend and history.

Awatixa was attacked by the Sioux in 1834.  The lodges were burned and, under the grass, there is ash and cinders where the dwellings once stood.  

  

44.

During the first third of the 19th century, the Mandan and Hidatsa (along with the Arikawa) lived in villages.  Some of these villages show signs of urban planning – the earth lodges are laid out in regular intervals with plazas for ceremonial purposes.  These Indians living along the upper Missouri River, spent half the year in earth lodges, structures that had to be wholly rebuilt every ten years.  (The houses were not erected on top of one another, but rather dismantled, wood, a precious commodity on the Dakota plains, salvaged and, then, reconstructed in a different location within the town.)  The lodges were cool in the Summer and were inhabited during the warm part of the year; North Dakota is scalding in July and August.  In the Winter, the Indians moved down into the river bottoms where there was abundant game and wood for making fires.  The Winter camps were temporary, comprised of buffalo-skin tents.  

In classical archaeology, the transition between hunter-gatherer forager clans, the social organization of the Mesolithic period, to sedentary Neolithic villages occurs about ten-thousand years ago.  Villages supported by agriculture, possessing domestic livestock, first appeared in the Middle East at places like Jericho and Catalhoyuk around that time.  The first villages of this sort appeared in Europe about six-thousand BC – Neolithic architecture at Newgrange on the River Boyne in Ireland and Lepenski Vir in Serbia as well as around 4500 years ago at Lake Constance, the so-called Bodensee Pfahlbauten (Lake Constance stilt-dwellings).  Recent studies suggest that the transition between Mesolithic and Neolithic societies may have been triggered by religious rituals and, not necessarily, economic factors – people began to gather at sacred sites to celebrate festivals, calibrated, often, according to astronomical and seasonal factors.  

The villages along the Missouri river in North Dakota display this transition as well.  Clearly, the Three Affiliated Tribes were evolving into a village society in which the nomadic bison economy was supplemented by farming – the tribes grew squash, beans, corn, and sunflowers in gardens next to their town sites.  Given sufficient time, it seems probable that the Indians would have begun domesticating bison and, ultimately, abandoned their nomadic way of life.  The Mandan, Arikawa, and Hidatsa living at the Knife River villages represent a transitional form – the Indians were still partly nomadic in that the men followed the bison across the plains.  But, after the hunt, they returned to villages sustained in one location, according to the archaeological record, for periods of as long as forty to fifty years.  

Henry Lewis Morgan was a railroad lawyer and politician.  But, as a young man, he had developed an interest in Native American history.  (He founded a club in his late teens in which the members called themselves the “New Iroquois,” meeting weekly in the upper rooms of a Freemasonry lodge in upstate New York where he lived.)  Although never affiliated with any university, Morgan turned from playacting red men to actual anthropology and undertook a study of the kinship systems observed by Native American tribes, publishing copiously on this subject.  In either 1861 or early 1862, Morgan surveyed the ruins of the Knife River Villages, now abandoned and derelict. The gardens were overgrown and the earth lodges had mostly collapsed or been burned by the marauding Sioux.  Morgan pronounced the ruins “highly impressive.”  A little later, returning from Dakota Territory, he learned that his two of this three daughters, girls two and 12 years old, had died of Scarlet Fever.  Morgan was in Sioux City, Iowa when he received this information.  He wrote that he was unable to weep and that his sorrow was too profound for tears: “I go home to my stricken and mourning wife, a miserable and destroyed man.”  Disease has a way of intervening in human affairs.

Morgan’s ethology posited that human history passed through three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.  Savages had fire, bows and arrows, and pottery.  Barbarians lived in villages, farmed, could smelt and work metal and raised domesticated animals.  Morgan thought he was civilized – he used the alphabet to write books, the hallmark of civilization.  (Walter Benjamin said that every advance in civilization is equally an advance in barbarism.)  No one uses loaded terms like savagery and barbarism today.  But the idea of the transition from late Mesolithic to early Neolithic is pretty much the same idea.  Marx and Engels both admired Morgan.  They imagined that his writings about North American Indians revealed an era of primitive Communism, a social system in which land was held in common and men were equal.    

45.

As one might expect, the liberal bias in the media is evident in coverage of Biden’s most recent deceit.  In an interview at the time of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the President said that none of his military advisors had urged to maintain a peace-keeping force in the country.  Biden is slippery – he generally qualifies his declarations with words to the exact opposite effect; whether this is due to dotage or political expediency is uncertain.  In his interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden first announces that his advisors told him to withdraw without leaving any forces in the country, but, then, notes that the counsel was “split”.  Two generals and another military advisor testified before a congressional committee investigating the withdrawal debacle on September 28, 2021.  All of them said that they told the President to retain forces in Afghanistan, at least 2500 troops and, possibly, more.  This testimony, taken under oath, reveals that someone is lying.  Of course, if this situation applied to Donald Trump, the media would simply have reported that once again the spectacularly mendacious president had promulgated self-serving lies.  But, one proceeds more gingerly with respect to Joe Biden – the reports are that his generals “seem to contradict” what he told Stephanopoulos.  “Seems to contradict” is a different headline from “The President lies about Afghanistan.”  

Lies are not without consequence.  The deceit practiced on Trump’s supporters is literally killing them.  Democrats are 92% vaccinated; Republicans are 48% vaccinated.  These figures correlate directly with hospitalizations and deaths.  A friend who supports Trump wrote to me that: “Vaccine hesitancy, as it is termed, is, for me at least, absolutely tied up with this concern (that the election was rigged and stolen).”  The equation, accordingly, seems to be that if you are vaccinated, you condone the theft of an American election as a consequence of a vast and sinister conspiracy.  Since American democracy is at stake, becoming vaccinated is tantamount to treason. 

46.

The Hidatsa survivors of the holocaust at Fort Clark made their way north to a big loop in the Missouri called “Like a Fishhook” (or sometimes “Like a Hook”).  The women built their lodges at the bend in the river around 1845.  The remnants of the Mandan trekked north as well and constructed dwellings along side the Hidatsa lodges.  This time the fur traders came to the Indians (and not vice-versa as had occurred at Fort Clark); the American Fur Company had an outpost at Like-a-Hook prior to the Civil War.  When the army chased the Sioux across the Dakota territory, the American Fur Company’s trading post was used for staging purposes and the site was called Fort Berthold.  The original outpost was too small for military use and it was razed.  The remaining Arikawa migrated north as well and they built their village on the site of the old fort, the trading post now absorbed into the larger military base.

The Garrison dam drowned the site.  Salvage archaeology conducted in 1954 uncovered a number of earth lodges, post-holes and settlement debris exposed in wide, shallow trenches.  A number of artifacts were found, including pipes, bells, and hand-tools.  Several interesting earth embankment corrals were exposed and mapped.  This shows that the Mandan, despite their depleted numbers, remained engaged in trade.  Throughout their history the Mandan were intermediaries in the horse and gun trade.  Indians brought horses to them and received, in exchange, long guns.  The horses were kept in large oval corrals enclosed by six-foot high earth walls.  The horses were for sale – you could acquire them in exchange for coin or guns or other trade goods.  Other tribes specialized in raiding and murder.  The Mandan were horse-traders and gun salesmen.  

A virtual reality tour of the 1954 excavations at Like-a-Hook is being designed.  With your computer, you will be able to glide over the sere prairie grass on the terraces above the river, peer down into open trenches where lodge caches with their customary bell-shape are visible as well as the imprint of post holes in the soil.  I have a 2001 prospectus for a computer programming “virtual archaeology” presentation of the salvage work at Like-a-Hook.  The programmers propose to “seed” the virtual site with artifacts that students accessing the presentation can “discover”.  It seems like an intriguing project but doesn’t seem to have been funded.  

 

47.

Descriptions of Fort Clark suggest that visitors should tread lightly on the turf where that fur trading post once stood.  The place, after all, is a massive cemetery with acres of unmarked graves. In the history of the Three Affiliated Tribes, all historical arcs lead to Fort Clark and, then, away from it.  It was at this place that the classic Mandan culture was documented by the artists George Catlin and Karl Bodmer.  This is where the iconic pictures of earth lodges and bull boats bobbing like little dark buoys in mighty Missouri were sketched and, then, painted.  Here is where Bodmer’s famous and majestic portrait of Four Bears, the Mandan war chief was made.  Fort Clark represents the Mandan and Hidatsa and Arikawa (to a lesser extent) at their cultural apogee and, then, stages their doom.  

The historical site of Fort Clark is about fifteen miles from the Knife River Villages, a zigzag route on empty roads through empty country.  (The Indians and fur traders would have traveled between the places by canoe and flat-bottomed cargo boats.)  A little field stone shelter stands near a gate opening onto a huge field where markers are interspersed at hundred yard intervals, some clusters of them at the far horizon, where the land drops at a sheer precipice down to water-meadows, bottom land full of dark, contorted trees, most of them spoiled by flooding, and some patches of grassland.  The Missouri has wandered away from the site of the Fort and, now runs in a broad channel perhaps a mile away.  The precipice is the eroding bank where the river once flowed, the steep drop-off gradually subsiding, slumping down to the river bottoms where there are ponds, water fowl, copses of trees.  I suppose that when the rain falls here and cuts ravines in the old river banks, skulls and vertebrae are exposed. 

A path loops between the historical markers.  There’s no shade of any kind and the turf chitters with grasshoppers, legions of them that buzz momentarily when they take flight.  The sound of the grasshoppers spurting up and, then, falling to the sod is something like the noise that hail makes when it pelts the ground.  No one is touring the site – it’s just me.  A dry, warm wind blows against me.  

48.

The Mandan came to trade at Fort Clark around 1830.  A large Mandan village was built there, complete with ceremonial plaza and a large earth lodge dedicated to religious ritual. The location ws readily defensible, protected on two sides by a tight bend in the Missouri River – this is the sharp precipice that bounds the historical site on its north and east.  On its other perimeter, the village and trading post was protected by a piquet, that is, a palisade made from wooden posts, trees logged in the river bottoms and dragged up onto the bank to be set as a fortress in the prairie soil.  The piquet was slotted so that warriors could see through the gaps in the posts and fire at approaching enemies.  The Indians dug a ditch inside the parapet and parallel to it.  The ditch was a place for the warriors to shelter as they reloaded their firearms.  The idea was that the defenders of the village would shoot through walls to repel invaders, reload in the ditch, and, then, return to firing positions at the wooden palisade.  A government fort was near the village, but has been lost when the river changed course.  

The American Fur Company, founded by John Jacob Astor in 1808, operated the trading post at Fort Clark.  The American Fur Company (AFC) was what we would call today an multi-national corporation.  The business was divided into two divisions, the Pacific Fur Country in the Oregon territory and the Midwest Fur Company operating out of St. Louis.  The firm traded with China and sent pelts, mostly beaver, to London and continental Europe.  When Fort Clark was established around 1830, the business was beginning its decline and Astor was no longer its Chief Executive Officer.  

At Fort Clark, the business operated on the French-Canadian model – it’s administrators were called Bourgeoises.  The chief Bourgeois at Dakota territory outpost was a German named Kurz.  (Comparisons to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are inevitable.)  Bourgeois Kurz spoke Mandan and had a native wife.  He was an efficient employee with several subordinates.  The compound was equipped with large earth-walled corrals for the Mandan trade in horses.  These are called “Bulberry corrals” because, in ruin, bulberry plants colonize the eroded dirt embankments.  Of course, nothing much is visible today at the site: the grassy prairie bears the faint imprint of circular earth lodges, round thumb-prints in the sod and there are some middens heaps at the edge of the perimeter, a scarcely perceptible ditch marking the location of the palisade and, apparently, visible to magnetic imaging, rows of post-holes for the parapet wall.  It takes vigorous exercise of the imagination to see anything in the scatter of ripples and shallow craters indenting the grass.  

49.

In 1834, Fort Clark was one of the largest settlements on the northern plains, a hub radiating outward to a dozen or more Indian tribes.  Visitors remarked that separate encampments of Shoshone, Assinboine, Cree, and Gros Ventre Indians were scattered along the river bluffs beyond the fort’s palisade wall.  Large groups of Metis, or mixed blood French-Canadian and Indian people patronized the place and their camps in which people spoke Indian dialects with French words or French with Indian syntax, encampments where musicians played the fiddle and men and women danced minuets inherited from the Court at Versailles, were ranged across the rolling hills.  Travelers said that the fort was a babel of languages, an enormous market place where fortunes were made and lost.  But God, as we know, didn’t much admire the Tower of Babel and retribution was waiting in the wings.  

50.

Almost fifty years earlier, around 1785, a great small pox plague swept through the Mandan and killed half of them. (There was another less deadly plague in 1801).  Wombs are fruitful and industrious and a half-century after catastrophe, the tribe was again populous and powerful.  Then, the small pox came again.  The old people recognized the horrible symptoms and recalled that, notwithstanding the virulence of the infection, many had survived.  But this time, things were immeasurably worse.

In 1832, the Federal Government had instituted a vaccine policy with respect to Indian tribes in close contact with settlers and pioneers.  The principal objective of the mandate was to prevent pestilence from spreading into White populations, but, of course, there were important incidental benefits to the tribal people inoculated.  The Indians, knowing the danger of pestilence, seem to have submitted willingly to vaccination.  

(Perhaps, I should address here the canard that White traders knowingly introduced small pox into Indian tribes, using contaminated blankets to destroy them.  This is an absurd contention for which there is no evidence.  Why would traders dependent for their income on their Indian trade partners want to kill them?  To the contrary, in 1832, the Federal Government was aggressively inoculating Indians against small pox.)

Unfortunately, the Mandan and other Plains Indians lived in places remote from European settlers and weren’t perceived as posing a threat to the White population.  Furthermore, they were not scheduled for mass deportation to Indian reservations and led a free existence on the Upper Missouri, even today a very remote area.  For this reason, the Mandan and their affiliates, the Ree (Arikawa) and Hidatsa were excluded from the vaccination program imposed on other tribes in closer contact with White settlers.  Accordingly, they did not receive the vaccine. 

On June 18, 1837, news reached Fort Clark that a steam boat towing several barges was about thirty miles downstream from the densely populated river banks near the trading post.  Francis Chardon, knew that one of his sons was on the boat, coming to visit his father who was a fur trading superintendent at the fort.  Chardon rode paddled downstream, met the steam paddle-wheeler and retrieved his son from the vessel.  Chardon, apparently, learned that someone on the paddle-wheeler named the St. Peters was sick with small pox.  (Indeed, there may have been several persons ill on the vessel.)

The next day, the St. Peters reached Fort Clark.  Goods were unloaded and it was a festive occasion.  In his journal, Chardon records a “frolic” involving much dancing on the evening that St. Peters moored at Fort Clark.  (The vessel continued upstream to Fort Union spreading contagion as it went.)

About two weeks later, the first Mandan died with his face rotten with small pox.  (The Indians called the disease the “rotten face sickness”.)  The contagion spread, at first, killing about two or three Indians a day.  On July 26, 1837, the famous chief Four Bears was sick.  He wandered out onto the prairie and vanished.  Four Bears was an influential man and he was enraged by the contagion.  It was one thing to die in personal combat with the enemy, even a good thing to be tortured to death by the Sioux or Cheyenne since that gave a man an opportunity to display heroism, but an abject death by humiliating sickness was too much to be borne.  Four Bears, who had been a staunch ally of the White men, said that it was time for the allied tribes to rise up and kill all the traders:

Four Bears, a renowned orator, gave a noteworthy speech before he died.  Chardon recorded his words as reported him by other Mandan and Arikawa:

...I have loved the Whites, I have lived with them ever since I was a boy, and, to the best of my knowledge, I have never wronged a White Man...Four Bears never saw a White Man hungry, but what he gave him to eat, drink and a buffalo skin to sleep on in time of need.  I was always ready to die for them, but... how they repaid my (generosity)?..I do pronounce them to be a set of black-hearted dogs, they have deceived me, them that I always considered brothers have turned out to be my worst enemies.  ...I do not fear death my friends, you know it, but to die with my face rotten, that even the wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me and say to themselves, “that is Four Bears, the friend of the Whites.  (Consider) that all you hold dear, are all dead or dying with their faces all rotten, caused by those dogs, the whites, think of all that my friends and rise all together and not leave one of them alive. 

On July 28, a young Mandan warrior carrying a gun cocked under his robe hunted among the cabins at Fort Clark, seeking assassinate Chardon.  He was apprehended and returned to his people.  That afternoon, a party of Arikawa returned from a successful horse-stealing raid on the Sioux.  The Arikawa gave two “splendid dances” in celebration of their profitable foray and told Chardon “that they dance on account of their not having a long time to live as they expect to all die of the small pox – and as long as they are alive, they will take it out in dancing...”

Chardon reports two-thirds of the Mandan sick with pox on August 8.  He issued to them six large bags of Epsom salts, apparently, as a remedy.  On August 11, Chardon says that he was no longer keeping track of deaths in the Indian villages – there were too many dead to count.  Five days later, Chardon records that a nearby stream is clogged with corpses and the villages are full of the dead lying in their lodges or on the paths to the gardens.  This created “a very bad smell all around.”  On the 17th of August, an Arikawa warrior sick with the pox shot a Dutchman in the spine and killed him.  The Indian, then, said “Here is where I want to die” and ripped open his own abdomen with a knife.  The suicides began in earnest two days later on the 19th.

Chardon was drinking heavily, grog that fortified him against increasing despair.  The other Whites threatened to leave the stricken trading post.  At every hour, he expected an Indian ambush would result in his death.  The brother of the man who killed himself after shooting the Dutchman was lurking around the outskirts of the Fort, intending to murder Chardon.  In the next week, the Mandan men were dying at a rate of 7 or 8 a day and Chardon wrote “the women and children I keep no account of.”  On the 22nd of August, two young warriors shot themselves and it was rumored that the few surviving men were planning to set fire to trading post.  Chardon stationed men in the bastions at the palisade wall and expected an assault.  The clan of the man who shot the Dutchman came to the Fort to “smoke with us and make peace” – Chardon thought this was a pretense and anticipated an attack but, apparently, the Indians had come in good faith: “how long it will last I cannot tell, however we must put up with it, good or bad.”  Chardon’s interpreter was sick and he wrote: “If I lose him, I shall be badly off –“

All the Indians were sick and could not pursue the bison.  Food was running out.  Probably, the surviving able-bodied Mandan and their allies didn’t attack the fort because they had to range through the countryside foraging for food.  Chardon now was sick, not with small pox, but the fever.  He writes: “An Indian vaccinated his child by cutting two small pieces of his (the boy’s) arms and two on the belly – and, then, taking scab from one (another Indian) that was getting well of the disease and rubbing it on the wounded part three days after, it took effect, and the child is perfectly well.”   Another Indian, driven half mad by the pain of blisters covering his body and face, rubbed the scabs until blood was running all over his body and, then, “rolled himself in the ashes which almost burnt his soul out of his body.”  But this extreme measure seemed efficacious, Chardon said that “two days after, he was perfectly well (but) it is a a severe operation, so that few are disposed to try it.”  On the 30th of August, Chardon reports that he is perfectly well – his fever had passed.  But things were worsening among the Mandan.  After her husband died, a Mandan woman killed her eight children and, then, hanged herself.  At the end of the month of August, Chardon counted 23 surviving Mandan men, many of them old men who had survived the plagues in 1785 and 1801 and, presumably, still had antibodies resisting the “rotten face” disease.  

On September 1.1837, Chardon saw wooden rafts that “passed by the fort” bearing dead bodies, wrapped in White (that is buffalo hide with the inside membrane turned to the outside).  The Mandan had elaborate mortuary customs: the dead were wrapped in hides and suspended on tall fragile scaffolds.  When the scaffolds collapsed, weakened by wind and rain, the corpses were deemed sufficiently decomposed to be stripped of any remaining flesh, the bones buried except for the skulls which were placed on the grass between two ceremonial poles. (This practice is called “excarnation.”) The women in the village did their weaving and leatherwork in this garden of skulls, chatting with the bones and, even, sometimes feeding them with bits of jerky and ladles of water.  Of course, this traditions couldn’t be observed, bodies were left in abandoned, reeking lodges or thrown like trash onto midden heaps or left to bloat on the edges of the river.  The social fabric collapsed.  Chardon recorded that a young man was dragged out onto the prairie by his father and left alone to die.  Somehow the young man survived, fending off wolves and eating roots and insects.  But he recovered and had now come to the fort to hunt down his father to kill him “for leaving him alone.”  Indian traders came to the fort by canoe and said that small pox was now killing the Asinniboines and Black Feet, but that so far the Sioux had been spared.  A man staggered into the trading post reporting that one of the little villages nearby had been exterminated by the disease – less than 14 people remained living in that place.  Chardon estimated that 7/8ths of the Mandan were dead.  The weather became cold and because of the disease there was no firewood collected in the Fort.  Several people frozen to death and a half-dozen children in the family of French trapper died from small pox.  Chardon’s own son, who had been sent to Fort Pierre, a hundred miles downstream on the Missouri died on Friday September 22nd.  

By October 1837, the worst was over.  The disease was no longer killing people among the remnant at Fort Clark who had survived.  But on Monday, October 15, 1837 several Ree (Arikawa) who had fled to live with the Sioux arrived at the Fort to say that the small pox had broken out among that tribe.  People hunting in the river bottoms near the fort saw gaunt spectral Indians on horseback – they told Chardon that these figures were ghosts.  

51.   

With this history in mind, Karl Bodmer’s images of Mandan dancers, heavily adorned with horned buffalo heads, are particularly poignant.  Bodmer, a Swiss-French painter and engraver, was recruited by the German Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, the ruler of Koblenz, a German principality, for an expedition that he was led to the American West.  The young man was only 19 when he joined Maximilian zu Wied’s party, traveling first to Boston, then, St. Louis and ultimately making their way up the Missouri as far as Fort Benton in present-day Montana.  The trip was made by steamer, at first, and, then, keel-boat on the upper reaches of the Missouri.  Along the way, Bodmer sketched what he saw and later published many engravings documenting the trip.  The entire enterprise seems to have been planned along the model of Alexander von Humboldt’s explorations in South America and Mexico, twenty years earlier.  

Winter made the river impassable and so Maximilian and his company spent the cold season with the Mandan at Fort Clark.  It was here that Bodmer made his iconic portrait of Four Bears (Mato-Tope), leaning back as if burdened by the weight of his magnificent headdress, a lance decorated with eagle feathers in his right hand.  In another stunning painting, the Hidatsa warrior Pehriska-Ruhpa of the Dog Society is shown dancing, crouched in mid-stride, a rattle with eagle feather in one hand and a bow and arrow tucked under his other arm.  He wears a splendid roach of porcupine guard hair, an immense headdress that flares opens like a great monochromatic blossom above his skull and shoulders.  Perhaps, Bodmer’s most famous picture depicts the inside of an earth lodge, a homely space in which men are seated around a hearth in the floor, above them the sky peeping in through the smoke hole, dense chiaroscuro with the Rueckenfigur of a scrawny, shadowy dog contemplating an old man, identified as a chief, involved in beadwork.  In the foreground, we see some drums, a buffalo skull, ritual paraphernalia stacked against a post, a bull boat and ornamented paddle, and, of to the side, two horses stabled under the domed roof of the dwelling.  It’s a haunting picture, an image of a lost world.

52.

Bodmer painted a Mandan “offering”, three bleached bison skull set next to lances shaggy with fraying pennants, more than a dozen human skulls set in a line, empty eye sockets gazing at the viewer.  The level blue-green plain stretches unbroken to the horizon. (Catlin made a similar painting, characteristically less atmospheric, but more ethnologically analytical – in his picture, the artist shows the scaffolds on which dead are decomposing.) In light of the epidemic, the deserted picture seems strangely prescient.  

George Catlin painted the Mandan when he visited their villages at Fort Clark in 1832.  Catlin had met William Clark in St. Louis two years earlier.  Clark told him about the earth lodge villages on the Upper Missouri and so the young man (he was 24) traveled up the river to see these places.  Unlike Bodmer, Catlin’s style is less finished and more primitive – his figures have a doll-like quality and his herds of bison look like swarms of fat mice dashing about on a vivid green carpet.  But some of his pictures are extremely beautiful.  In one round canvas, he shows Mandan warriors suffering the Okipa ceremony – the men are hung by skewers through the tendons in their chest muscles and they droop from the vault of big domed earth lodge as if boneless, hanging like animal skins suspended to dry.  In another picture, we see the clay overhang of river banks heavily laden with close-packed earth lodges decorated with lances and scalp poles driven into their turf domes.  Brown naked children splash in the waters of the great river and a couple of bull boats bob merrily on the current.  Catlin’s most atmospheric painting is called “Distant View of a Mandan Village.”  The picture shows an elbow-shaped bend in the Missouri.  Bright green grass carpets fields that gracefully slump toward the water.  The meadows are edged with dark brown cliffs, undercut by the current.  The opposite shore is flat, with wet lands, a few distant trees, a pale sand bar surfacing in the limpid water, and distant green ridges surmounted by conical buttes.  The picture is a landscape and it is exquisite in all respects, a glorious work of art.  The river is painted with great subtlety so that we can sense that it is shallow and that the sandy bottom is slightly tinting the still, azure water at the big bend.  The mud cliffs are veined with little grooves cut by the rain and make a balletic counterpart to the great curve in the river.  High cirrus clouds touched by the setting sun glow overhead.  A few tiny figures, Indians fishing with curved sapling rods, occupy the headland closest to the foreground – there are children, possibly a small fire, and a big dog resting on its belly watching the fishermen.  In the middle distance, a horseman rides perilously close to the clay cliff.  Then, in the background, on a high promontory above the curve in the river, we can see the pale brown domes of earth lodges, each of them flying decorative pennants, lances and poles displaying scalps.  It’s a wonderful picture and, unsettling in its objectivity – bright green and pale blue under a turquoise sky, the painting depicts an idyll, a lost paradise.  

53.

All of the great events in Karl Bodmer’s life occurred before he was 28.  He returned to France, opened a studio from the proceeds from engravings that he sold depicting the American Indians, and became well-known as an astute, accomplished landscape painting.  He is regarded as one of the founders of the sedate Barbizon School – painters that specialized in comely rural scenes, green pastures, and beautifully portrayed cows.  He continued to make engravings.  A startling image of this kind shows a cat fighting a viper in the dooryard to a farm.    

George Catlin’s later life was stranger, tinted with paranoia.  Trained as a lawyer, Catlin never practiced law.  He returned to the East with 500 paintings that he displayed Salon-style, that is, ranged from floor to ceiling in his so-called Indian gallery.  When interest in the exhibit waned, Catlin urged the federal government to buy his pictures as an ethnographic record of Indian life on the Plains.  When the bureaucrats demurred, Catlin took his show on the road, and, even, toured Europe – Baudelaire was impressed with his paintings.  Catlin was not a reliable historian and tended toward bombastic lying – for instance, he claimed he was the first White man to see the Pipestone quarries on the Buffalo Ridge in present-day Minnesota.  This is manifestly untrue: Philander Prescott described the quarries in a book published in 1831 before Catlin reached that site.  Entangled in debt, Catlin’s debtors forced the auction of his Indian collection, including paintings and artifacts.  Middle-aged, Catlin then set out to re-paint the pictures that he had lost, ultimately making 400 new canvases – during this work, he seems to have been employed by the Smithsonian Insitute and, in fact, worked in the “Castle” building on the National Mall.  His travels among the American Indians caused him to endorse breathing only through the nose.  (He had observed that the Indians never breathed through their mouths and, therefore, enjoyed “excellent health” and had good teeth – it isn’t clear to me, how nose-breathing influences dentition.)  Catlin published a book on this subject picturesquely entitled Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life.  

Catlin’s so-called “Cartoon Collection”, his late paintings based on earlier sketches of the canvases lost to his debtors, was donated to the Smithsonian Institution when the artist died in 1872.  Probably it was fortunate that he didn’t live to see the final destruction of the Plains Indians after the Battle at the Little Big Horn in 1876 and the ensuing slaughter at Wounded Knee fifteen years later.  Catlin died in Jersey City, New Jersey.    

54.

It would be callous to say that the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikawa killed by small pox have come back as grasshoppers to haunt the empty fields where old Fort Clark once stood.  Better, I think, to imagine the pelting insects, hard brown and green shells rising and, then, falling to drum against the short grass sod, as a sort of place-keeper for the vanished Indians.  The creatures rattle in the grass, a sound similar, I imagine, to the noise made by the feather-tipped rattle that Pehriska Ruhpa of the Dog Society carries in his delicate left hand in Bodmer’s great portrait.

55.

Back at the shelter where my car is parked, I’m thirsty.  The sun is unrelenting in the cloudless sky.  Although the day started with dew and temps of 40, it’s now 82 degrees with hot scirocco blowing.  Under the shingled roof of the shelter, I find a pulpit that can be opened to reveal the Visitor Registry.  People seem to happen upon the site about every three or four days, but I am surprised to see that someone has preceded me this morning.  In clear cursive script, the visitor has written: This has personal significance to me.  My relative Benito Vasquez traveled here.  This has been a very emotional day for me.  Benito Vasquez was a Spanish citizen engaged in the fur trade, first in New Madrid, Missouri and, then, at St. Louis.  (He was a partner with another Spaniard, Manuel Lisa, who established a trading post on the Upper Missouri in 1808, the precursor to Fort Clark).  One of Vasquez’ other partners was George Drouillard, called “Dwyer” in William Clark’s journals of the expedition by the Corps of Discovery – that is, the Lewis and Clark expedition.  Drouillard was a great huntsman (Clark says he killed six elk in one day’s foraging) and a talented linguist.  Drouillard learned Mandan and was able to communicate with the Indians in their language.  The writer must bethe old man that I saw at the Knife River Indian Villages visitor center, apparently just come up the river from Fort Clark.  I thought he said that his grandfather had been on the Lewis and Clark expedition and that he had a manuscript diary that the man had kept – possibly, he was referring to George Drouillard, although at Fort Clark, the traveler describes himself as related to Benito Vasquez.  I’m confused and the heat and grasshoppers don’t help to clear my mind.  Ancestry is all fictional anyway once you consider people more remote to you than your great-grandfather – perhaps, this explains the traveler’s odd statements.  And there is something about the vast skies and the endless plains that makes people boastful.

I have an empty pop bottle in my car and I go into the toilet and fill it up with lukewarm water at the sink.  I hope this water, which seems cloudy, is potable.  But I don’t have much choice.  I’m very thirsty.  The water tastes faintly of Diet Mountain Dew and chlorine.  

56.

The Mandans, in keeping with most world religions, believed that God, the First Creator as they named him, sent a terrible flood to chasten mankind.  The Mandan say that the east bank of the Missouri, terraced with mild rolling bluffs, was made as a dwelling for mankind.  The west bank of the river, with towering buttes incised with deep gravelly ravines and raw badlands was left in a rugged State, pleasing to the First Creator and a warning to the races of men not to transgress God’s laws again.  As with the aborigines in Australia, landscape merges with theology and legend.  The forms of bluff and mesa, the stands of trees around springs, the collapsing river banks – all of these features of the landscape have stories associated with them.  Indeed, the upper Missouri is a song-line, that is a chronicle of human and divine history running from the bluffs below present-day Bismarck up to Fort Clark and the Knife River Country and, then, as far north as Like-a-Hook village and, later, New Town.  One can sing this stretch of river and, thereby, hold it in existence.

On the drive from Fort Clark, the highway crosses the Missouri at Washburn.  A power plant leaks smoke.  A long bridge hangs over the river, bright with pale sand bars stretched like taffy between meandering channels.  The landscape seems consistent with Indian legend.  The east bank of the river slopes gently away from the water, rising in a mild incline to long, pillowy-looking parallel ridges.  By contrast, big heaps of cobble-stone and alluvial sand are thrown up like ramparts along the Missouri’s west bank.  Several towering buttes with flat crests hang over the river and there are twisted, crooked gorges between conical peaks of stone.  

About nine miles north of Bismarck, downtown buildings spiking the horizon and a hydroelectric plant standing guard over the river, a driveway curves down to a boat launch.  In the bright day, some fisherman are cruising upstream, leaving a feathery wake behind them.  An asphalt trail runs along a terrace about a half-mile to a path that ascends to a higher terrace about fifty feet above the shelf on the river bank.  Here the Missouri is very close, a palpable presence.  It seems as if you can see for miles in all directions, particularly on the second, higher terrace where Double-Ditch Village once stood.  

The prehistoric town is like the other sites that I have visited – a grassy meadow scarred with circular indentations, rippling mounds of trash under the sod, and some enigmatic, broad divots cut into the terrain, the remains of pits excavated to make the earth lodges and defensive ditches.  Some historical markers point out features scarcely perceptible in the big field.  North Dakota 1804, a local highway, runs along the edge of the village site and cars headed toward Bismarck scoot by.  Most of the traffic seems drawn into the orbit of the modern city, although a few vehicles, people who have completed their weekend shopping in Bismarck head, north into the empty open country.  Unlike the other places that I have been on this day, several families are hiking the perimeter of the village, little kids protesting against the wind and heat, accompanied by big dogs panting in the warmth.  

Double-Ditch Village is named for two concentric ditches cutting through the remains of the earth lodges and the trash middens.  In fact, magnetic resonance imaging shows that there are four ditches here, all of them apparently defensive.  As the town expanded, it grew out of its original fortification so that new ditches were added around the successive and expanding rings of earth lodges.  This was a large town, comprising at least 1500 people at its apogee.  A historical marker reminds us that a population of 1500 people is a census count exceeding the number of residents in 95% of North Dakota towns today.  In fact, at least nine other villages, smaller but still impressively built, were located along this part of the Missouri.  In 1450, when Double-Ditch Village had reached its maximum size, many thousands of people lived in the neighborhood; closely massed earth lodges would have been visible at intervals all up and down the great river.  

Signs how people hunted catfish in the Missouri shallows.  Some historic pictures show men standing chest-deep in the murky river water.  The men are manipulating round weirs made of tightly woven willow and reeds.  The catfish were herded, as it were, into the weir and, then, seized and lifted into elegantly designed funnel-shaped osiers.  Channel catfish were called patonde in Mandan and could be a yard long and ninety pounds.  Other photographs show old women with leathery wrinkled faced building bull boats by making a willow branch framework and, then, stretching “green” bison hides (hair on the outside) over those hooped frames.  Diagrams show how the earth lodges were built.  Here, the earliest lodges were rectangular built over  support timbers dug into the sod.  Most of the lodges had entrance porticos, that is, lean-to sheds to the fore of the openings into them.  The first, square lodges were made in about 1360 with building styles evolving toward the circular, domed dwellings familiar to us from the historic period.  

So-called “float bison,” winter-killed dead buffalo from upriver, were snagged in the shallows, hauled out of the water and processed for food.  Although the meat is described as half-putrefied, apparently, “float bison” was regarded as a delicacy.

In 1804, Lewis and Clark saw Teton Lakota encamped among the fist-shaped collapsing earth lodges. The Mandan were gone.  The Lakota said that the people who had built the great ruin had abandoned it, perhaps, 25 years earlier.   In the last decade of the 19th century, old men at Fort Berthold gathered to hunt for the remains of the Mandan villages along this once heavily populated stretched of river.  A man named Wounded Face, disfigured with a smashed cheek and crooked jaw, drew several maps and, in fact, the remains of earth lodge towns were found where he marked them at river side.

57

It’s ten miles to the fast food places and new malls in Bismarck.  The sun glints on miles of cars in traffic impounded behind stop-and-go lights.  For, at least, eight-hundred years many people have lived along this stretch of the Upper Missouri.  Bismarck is 169 miles from Fargo where I plan to spend the night.  Along the boulevard, I see a theme-restaurant called Aliens.  Several pale greenish humanoids are standing near the entrance, beckoning travelers to enter.  

58.

The modest remains of the Menoken Indian Village can be found just a few-hundred yards off I-94, seven or eight miles from the easternmost exit to Bismarck-Mandan.  There’s not much to see, although this is true of all of the archaeological sites along the Upper Missouri.  A fence designed to ward off wandering cows encircles two sides of the prehistoric village.  The west and north edges of the site are bounded by a mud cliff about thirty feet high that drops down as a sheer wall into crooked arroyo, a dry gulch periodically scoured by flash floods, sandy with eroded dirt edges where some dead trees have been pushed by torrents into spiky dead-fall barricades.

The Indian village was discovered in 1936.  The most prominent feature visible at the Menoken Indian Village is a grassy circular crater, the results of an archaeological excavation in the late thirties that was not backfilled after completion of the study.  Aerial photographs reveal that the arc of land subtended by the arroyo, technically a “perennial stream” called Apple Creek, was fortified where the site was accessible to adjacent open prairie.  The palisade built here was impressive, about 800 feet long with four bastions located along the defensive wooden wall.  Some suggest that the wall was covered in buffalo hides stretched along its extent.  

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, the first generation of archaeologists familiar with this site associated it with a place where La Verendrye first made contact with the Mandans in 1638.  This theory was enthusiastically advanced and much of the scientific work at this place was dedicated to proving this hypothesis.  As late as 1985, literature on the Menoken site suggested, albeit with qualifications, that this was location of La Verendrye’s first encounter with the White blue-eyed Indians, that he thought to be either French or Welsh.  More precise dating, now, shows that the Menoken village was occupied between 1000 and 1300 AD, that is, predating by more than 300 years La Verendrye’s explorations on the Upper Missouri.   

The place was lonely when I arrived.  In the raking late afternoon sun, trees around the edges of the lost village cast long, somewhat plaintive-looking shadows.  It was warm and grasshoppers hurled themselves into the air as I paced the site, looking at some markers posted here and there in the one-and-a-half acre meadow.  At one time, as many as 30 lodges were crammed together into the small location defended by the 30 foot earth cliff on two sides and the big fence of palisade posts along the south and west sides of the village.  The people who lived here were ancestors of the Mandan or Hidatsa, apparently, but had different customs and their own distinct way of building.  These Indians were more nomadic, probably returning to this village as a encampment for only a few months a year.  Although they gathered wild squash and beans, they don’t seem to have grown anything as farmers.  They dug pits in the prairie about three feet high, drove some stakes into the ground to support a ridge line and, then, stacked sod to make walls a round the dwelling.  The tops of their buildings were flat, made from woven branches and grass and, then, slathered with mud from the creek.  Archaeological evidence shows that Indians put bison skulls on top of their houses above their entrances.  The vertical posts supporting the ridge-line were stabilized in their holes with bison bones, typically from the animal’s hip or pelvis.  As I have noted, the fortification wall was probably covered with stretched bison hides tacked to the wood.  It is reasonable to consider these Indians as living within the bowels of imaginary buffalo, bison skulls overhead, bison skins protecting their fortifications, and bison bones tamped into the post holes where columns supported the roof.  The great beast, it seems, sheltered these people.  

A variety of lithic tools and pottery shards (more than 10,000) were found at the site (and it has only been partially excavated – only two or three of pit-houses have been exposed for study; a number of above-ground dwellings on the site are also only vaguely understood.)  Some copper from the Arrowhead in Minnesota, the extreme north eastern part of the State, was found among the houses as well as obsidian from the Upper Yellowstone in Wyoming.  This part of North Dakota has deep soil and few rocks.  The flints on the site were dug out of a quarry sixty miles to the West.  

Although it’s now obvious that La Verendrye didn’t meet anyone here, the site is extremely important as one of the few known places where the transition from Late Woodland (foraging) culture to the Prairie Village complex (the Mandan, Arikawa, and Hidatsa village of the post-contact period).  In other words, this village represents the horizon between what I have earlier called late Mesolithic and early Neolithic ways of life.  

The most prominent feature at historic site is a cemented cairn bearing a bronze plaque carefully phrased to imply that La Verendrye first met the Mandan here, although this is not explicitly stated.  The cairn is shapely, solidly built next to a shelter that bears the hallmarks of late Depression CCC construction.  Modern signs provide an aerial view of the village site to show the location of the borrow pits, about 10 or 11 depressions where dwellings once stood, and the palisade all.  A ditch about eight feet deep was dug like a moat outside of the palisade and it appears that turf was stacked along the trench to make a smaller earthen rampart.  Except for the pit left after the archaeological work in 1938, there is really nothing to see here.  Trucks passing on the freeway a quarter-mile to the south moan and whine, shifting gears that they come out of the Missouri River Valley.  The wind sighs in the trees above the barren, dry creek bed.  

59.

We tend to imagine that marauders and the village people that they preyed upon are like Cain and Abel, two brothers born from the same womb.  But there is another way to view the relationship between raiding societies and sedentary village cultures.  Simply put, the Mandan were prosperous and, therefore, wealthy targets for the depredations of the marauders.  Agriculture produced surpluses and the villagers had lots and lots of stuff.  Bodmer’s famous painting of the interior of a Mandan earth lodge is notable for the plethora of things he shows: the place is crammed with ceremonial regalia, weapons, boats and paddles, and beautiful garments and bead work.  Raising corn and beans and squash created a rich material culture.  The Sioux and other High Plains raiders were, in effect, produced by the prosperity of the villagers living in their snug earth lodges, as wealthy as Frenchy peasants in Normandy or the Breton.  The wealth of the villages created their nemesis.

60.

War and contagion are two constants in human life.  Around the year 2000, the wealthy Western democracies thought that they had banished these afflictions to the planet’s impoverished and violent corners and that, soon enough, everyone would be free of them.  We thought we had overcome disease – smallpox and measles were eradicated, children didn’t die during their first years of life, and illnesses like leprosy were confined to increasingly small enclaves in the tropics.  War was no longer the experience of most people in the West.  Our conflicts were fought faraway by reckless young men and women who had volunteered for combat in protest at the meaninglessness of our bland and craven consumer economy or out of economic desperation or just for the hell of it.  

But there is no lasting idyll.  Contagion has returned to our alabaster cities once thought to be undimmed by human tears.  And soon enough we will have war on a colossal scale.  The planet has been ruined by the very extraction processes visible in North Dakota and combat over resources will soon be prevalent everywhere.  

The Indians who lived in the place we call the Menoken Village knew all about war.  Otherwise why would they have erected a 800 foot palisade enclosed within a deep defensive moat.  The palisade consisted of about 800 trees cut down, dragged into place, and dropped into post-holes.  Imagine the labor required to cut down 800 trees with stone implements.  Imagine the ferocity of the threat that would have triggered such exertions. 

And the wall was unavailing.  All of the excavated earth lodges show signs of having been burned.  The bison scapula tamped into the ridgeline post holes were charred.  The talismanic bison skulls over the entries to the pit houses are all sooty.  Everywhere there is a level strata of ash and cinder.    

60.

It’s not a lie if everyone knows it’s a lie.  The media has developed this formulation, it seems, to defend the dissembling of politicians of whom they approve.  A case in point is the Leftist “spin” put on the arrant failure of Biden’s legislative agenda on the 30th of September, 2021.  

Here is the background: Biden won election, like all politicians, after making a number of promises to voters, some of them feasibly possible to implement, others not so much.  One promise was that Biden would supervise the passage of a massive infrastructure bill, an enactment dedicated to the improvement of bridges, airports, and highways.  The Progressives (Radicals?) in the Democratic party wanted to freight this legislation with so-called “human infrastructure” investment – that is, essentially massive social welfare plans that are hard to imagine as bridges or tunnels.  (For instance, how can subsidized day care for working families be described as infrastructure?  If mothers can work, they can support our economy and a flourishing economy is one that will be able to finance good bridges – I think that’s how the argument is constructed.  On that theory, one might propose free Hormel chili for all people: Hormel chili is nutritious and those who eat it will be able work harder and harder work benefits the economy and a flourishing economy will be able to finance good bridges.)  After much wrangling between the centrists and radical progressives, a compromise bill on brick and mortar infrastructure was framed and passed in the Senate with bipartisan support.  A vote on the bill in the House of Representatives, necessary, of course, to enact the measure into law, was delayed by the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, long the bete noir of Conservatives.  Pelosi’s actions, a sop to the radical wing of her party, were designed to link passage of the 1.2 trillion dollar hard infrastructure law (planes and cars) to a much larger 3.5 trillion dollar investment in “human capital”, a give-away bill named “The Build Back Better Law.”  For some reason, Pelosi assigned September 30, 2021 as the date that she would call a vote on the first infrastructure bill, hoping that the radical wing of her party would support that measure on the basis of promises made by moderates in her party to later enact the 3.5 trillion dollar law.  But this proved impossible: moderates (conservatives?) in the Democratic party refused to promise support to the “human infrastructure” bill.  This led the radicals in the Democratic party, in effect, to hold hostage the infrastructure bill – they indicated that they would vote down the bridges and tunnels law unless they had guarantees that the 3.5 trillion dollar welfare bill would be passed.  After weeks of tense negotiations, it was obvious that Pelosi didn’t have the votes required to pass the 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure Bill in the House.  And, so, after negotiations between the two wings of the Democratic party continuing fruitlessly into the midnight hour, Pelosi withdrew the planes, trains, and automobiles Bill – or, at least, didn’t call it for a vote even though the enactment had passed muster in the Senate six weeks earlier.

This debacle casts serious doubt on President Biden’s ability to control the Left of his party, a longstanding and much promoted criticism advanced by Republicans.  In the Republican narrative, Biden is too weak to unify his party, literally too old and feeble to consolidate the factions among the Democrats and, therefore, will be held hostage, despite his centrist inclinations, by the radical elements on the Left.  (This was precisely the criticism advanced by the conservative Wall Street Journal in its opinion columns published just before the 2020 election – and, now, this criticism seems prescient.)  Pelosi’s September 30 deadline for the legislative vote, designed, it seems, to focus attention on this legislation, now seems to have been a miscalculation and drama playing out in Washington verifies the worst fears of moderates – Biden will be powerless to resist the Left in his own party.  

So what happens on the morning news shows on the day after September 30?  Faces that we rarely see on TV, soft-spoken moderate Democrats appear on screen and tout the legislative failure as a good thing.  These talking heads assure us that all is well and that the failure to pass the bipartisan-endorsed infrastructure bill for planes and trains is productive and beneficial.  “Debate is healthy,” these legislators assure us.  “In legislation, you must talk to the other side, make compromises, and give and take,” someone says.  This is all well and good, but it isn’t credible.  Even more alarming are a number of Democrat moderates who now say this: “The top line (total cost) of the Bill doesn’t matter.  What matters is understanding the policies and programs that will be funded and whether those will be good for the American people.”  Remarks like this are made with a straight face.  But the shocking implication is that most everyone in Washington was prepared, just yesterday, to case decisive votes on a law that no one understood, that had not been studied with respect to policies and programs that it was too fund, and that might not even have been good for the American people.  This is all forked-tongue double-talk and rationalization – yet on CNN not a single interviewer called out those making these ridiculous statements for hypocrisy or, just, plain folly.

Something similar is evident in the ongoing, and nauseatingly sanctimonious coverage of the Gabby Petito murder.  Perky Gabby was an attractive petite blonde.  She was an adherent to the Van Life movement – a social media phenomenon involving young people who travel nomadically across the country in SUVs, sleeping in their vehicles and enthusiastically reporting on their adventures on computer platforms of which I know little or nothing, Instagram or Tik-Tok for instance.  Gabby’s companion was a brutish-seeming fellow, at least as portrayed in the media, a bald thug who seems to have tired of his girlfriend’s self-centered and relentless self-promotion and, so, after engaging in several public squabbles with her, apparently murdered the poor woman in the shadow of the majestic Grand Tetons.  The boyfriend drove Gabby’s van back to Florida where he lives (Florida the great fons et origo of much that is bad about America).  He, then, promptly vanished, never, I think, to be seen again.  For some reason, this squalid little story has achieved enormous traction.  I’m not interested in the case but, it seems, that everyone else is.  (The media, generally, shares my view and, in particular, cable news broadcasters seem to be embarrassed by their obligation to spend ten minutes with this story every hour.  For a time, they tried to pivot away from the Gabby Petito story by enlisting indignant Black women to argue that if the murder victim had been a “person of color” no one would have cared about the story, in effect, indicting as racist the very media outlets by which they are gainfully employed.  But this ploy was utterly annoying and disingenuous and so the media, perceiving that, in fact, no one really cared about missing Native American women or Asians or African-Americans dropped that aspect of the coverage like the proverbial hot potato.)   

Every story requires a villain.  Here Gabby’s boyfriend is obviously the bad guy.  But he’s disappointingly MIA – probably in the belly of an alligator in one of Florida’s swamps.  So, now, the press has designated a couple of hapless sheriff’s deputies in Moab, Utah as aiding and abetting the murderer.  It seems that Gabby Petito placed a 911 call, or that a passer-by reported, domestic violence.  The cops stopped Gabby and her boyfriend on a picturesque desert road and interviewed them.  Gabby didn’t want her cross-country adventure interrupted in this disreputable manner and, so, she seems to have minimized the incident with her boyfriend.  She said that she hit him first, that he didn’t strike or slap her, but that he took hold her chin and held it in his grip.  The cops confronted with this account, decided, reasonably, I think, that they couldn’t intervene on this evidence and let the couple depart.  Now, the media interviews experts in domestic violence, attractive women who opine that the victims of domestic violence often engage in “self-blaming” behavior and minimize assaults inflicted on them.  Therefore, the media is now stigmatizing these poor cops, more or less, as accomplices to the murder because they didn’t recognize that “self-blaming” and “denial” are crucial aspects of domestic abuse.  I don’t need to say that this is blatant, even offensive, nonsense.  If a woman reports abuse, she must be believed and the perpetrator taken into custody.  If a woman denies abuse, or admits that she was the abuser, this is “self-blaming” and, therefore, the other partner must be taken into custody.  Either way, every intervention has to end with someone spending the night in jail.  This bizarre mode of thinking, analysis that would intrigue Franz Kafka, was pioneered by the alcohol treatment industry – if you admit drinking too much, you need treatment; conversely, if you deny drinking too much, you are “in denial” and, therefore, need treatment.  It’s not wise to compare great tragedies to small injustices, but there is something distinctly totalitarian, even, Stalinist about this kind of thinking.

To corral this digression and bring it within my account of the Great Epidemic in North Dakota, I observe that it has been claimed that Native American orators often accused liars of “speaking with a forked tongue.”  The history of the usage in English literature dates back to 1626, when the preacher Lancelot Andrews used the phrase in a sermon.  Andrews referred to the Latin description of a serpent’s tongue as lingnam bisulcam (a “cloven” or “divided” tongue) – that is, saying something that “is not” or lying. (There are even earlier examples in the poet John Skelton’s work, around 1516, and a 1601 use by Ben Jonson.)  Milton employs the phrase, albeit descriptively, for devils converted into serpents in his Paradise Lost (1667).    With reference to Native Americans, a source in 1859 says that the term entered the parlance of the Indians as a result of the French Canadian War – in that conflict, the French made peace overtures to the Iroquois, invited them to a banquet and, then, slaughtered all of the attendees.  The false invitation was speaking “with a forked tongue.”

Oddly enough, all references to American Indians actually using the phrase turn out to be fictional.  Apparently, real Indians didn’t actually speak in this way.  But, President Andrew Jackson must have thought that they understood the phrase, while employing himself a decidedly forked tongue, he assures the Indians whom he is addressing at a treaty conference in 1826 that they must not think that he “speaks with a forked tongue.”  Andrew Jackson, needless to say, was Donald Trump’s favorite president.

62.

I’m back in Fargo by 6:30.  I haven’t eaten lunch and so I’m hungry.  There’s a Thai place in a little strip mall about 30 blocks from my motel.  I know the way.  The Thai restaurant is across from the Himalayan Yak where I have eaten before.  

I order sweet curry.  A couple of female school teachers are talking about mask mandates and vaccinations in the booth behind me.  I am reading a book about Milman Parry, the scholar who first grasped that Homer’s epics were composed by oral poets using mnemonic and metric techniques very different from those characteristic of written texts.  Parry proved his point by collecting long poems recited by illiterate Serbian peasants, heroic stories of bandits, thwarted love, and combat between the Ottoman Turks and the Christians. Parry recorded hundreds of hours of these epics, including one 11,000 lines long, improvised across three or four nights in Yugoslavian coffee house.  Before he could complete his magnum opus, Parry was shot dead in a hotel room in Los Angeles.  (It seems likely that his wife killed him.) 

When I am done eating, I pay the bill and pick up a take-out menu for use later, perhaps, when I am in town visiting my grandchildren.  And I leave my book on the table.  Arriving back at the motel, thirty blocks distant, I grope at the seat next to me for the book, but find only the take-out menu.  Undoubtedly, I have left the damn thing at the restaurant.  So I turn around drive back to Thai place that is, still open, although now without any customers other than the Door Dash patrons whose drivers, all of them immigrants, now and then enter the restaurant to pick up their orders.  “Your book?” the hostess says, handing it me.  “My book,” I reply.    

63.

Bartleby, the Scrivener, the principal character in Herman Melville’s 1853 story of that name is a key figure in the American “imaginary”.  A scrivener employed by a Wall Street firm, Bartleby works hard at his dull task, copying documents.  He is the mid-19th century version of xerox copy machine.  One day, he initiates a mild rebellion: when presented with a copying assignment, he mildly asserts “I would prefer not to” do this work.  As time progresses, Bartleby rejects more and more assignments, always saying “I would prefer not to.”  In the end, staring out the window at a wall facing his office, Bartleby “prefers not to” eat and drink.  And, inevitably, this leads to his death.

As Covid-19 Delta variant rages, the strange case of Bartleby, the Scrivener, seems relevant.  Against all practical reason, Bartleby rejects life and would “prefer not to” live. 

64.

Handsome and worried, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a TV medical commentator, is interviewing a nurse employed at Gundersen Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse, Wisconsin.  The nurse is buxom and has dark hair and she appears by a fuzzy computer link, Skype, perhaps, or ZOOM.  The nurse is protesting the mandate by her employer that she be vaccinated.  She notes that many other hospital staff members, mostly housekeeping and kitchen workers, although other nurses as well, have refused the vaccination.  Gupta has a long bronze face and a peculiar tic – when he is not speaking, he moves his mouth as if using his tongue to search for a damaged and painful molar.  The nurse has no rational basis for her refusal to accept vaccination.  She is reasonably bright and articulate, but what she says makes no sense at all.  Gupta reminds her that six billion injections have been administered without any statistically significant adverse reactions.  This seems meaningless to her.  Like almost all of these people, she proclaims that she is not an anti-vaxxer and that, of course, she vaccinated yearly against the flu and other contagious diseases.  Gupta says that, if he were her family physician, he would advise her to be vaccinated immediately.  She replies that she believes that it is her right to decide what is “put into” her body and that her intransigence is an aspect of “informed consent.”  She reminds Gupta that “informed consent” is vital to medicine and says that she has often supported decisions of her patients to refuse medical treatment on that basis.  Gupta responds by observing that her decision doesn’t just affect her well-being.  The vaccine controls an infectious disease.  By refusing vaccination, she is exposing her family, her neighbors, her co-workers, and, most importantly, her vulnerable patients to a potentially lethal infection.  This argument has no effect on her.  (Of course, she has heard, and rejected, it a thousand times.)  The gist of her refusal, mildly stated but adamant, is that she would “prefer not to” get the vaccine injection.  The reason that she is opposing vaccine is that someone has told her that she must be vaccinated.  

Sanjay Gupta asks her this question: “What could I tell you that would change your mind?”  “Nothing,” she replies.  He is saying to her that he has a remedy that is free, painless, without side-effects, approved by the FDA, successfully administered six billion times, that could save her life, the life of her children, and the lives of others in her tribe.  This is his offer.  And she rejects it without a moment’s hesitation.  

65.     

In the plaza before the Mandan ceremonial lodge at Fort Clark, an old post of cedar stood upright, planted in a hole drilled into the soil packed hard by the feet of the dancers.  Shielding this ancient column of cedar was a barrel made from curved timbers.  The cedar was pale and splintery and had something of the aspect of an old man, although the people didn’t dare touch the wood , let alone carve it.  

The cedar post and barrel represented the Ark of the First Man or “Big Canoe”.  Big Canoe was the first Mandan, a hero who had paddled up the Missouri River looking for places to found cities.  During his travels, the Creator-God ravaged the world with a great flood.  The land was swallowed by the waters and, on all sides, of Big Canoe, the flood was a vast, featureless and level waste.  Then, a dove came to Big Canoe bearing a sprig of sage in its beak so that the first Mandan knew that the world had been spared and that, when the waters receded, grass would grow and the buffalo would return.  And, indeed, the waters of calamity subsided and the west bank of the Missouri bore the marks of the fatal flood and was desolate while the east side of the river was habitable with gently sloping terraces and rolling sunlit hills.  

Small Pox had murdered the Mandan.  Almost none of them were left.  Inside the big ceremonial lodge, there were many strange and powerful things: mummified bison fetuses, ancient shields and lances, fossils and fulgurites and strangely shaped stones, roots that wailed when you roasted them, the horns of monstrous animals, miniature war-clubs of the malign little people, instruments for self-torture.   But the warrior brotherhoods had been decimated and the ritual specialists were all dead and no one remembered the sacred ceremonies any more.  The remnants of the people went north to Like-A-Hook and the lodge was abandoned.

The Arikawa, who were more numerous, didn’t want to waste the noble structure now lying vacant.  So they threw out the old Mandan stuff and brought their own effigies and fetishes and medicine bundles into the cool, high-vaulted earth lodge.  In front of the lodge, they set a boulder called Grandfather Stone and planted another cedar post, this named Grandmother Tree.  Grandfather Stone is the Earth.  Grandmother Tree is corn.  But the virus had much diminished the Arikawa as well.  After a few years, they also deserted the ceremonial lodge at Fort Clark, now a place of ruins, and migrated up the river to Like-A-Hook.  The rain dissolved the lodge and melted into the grass of the prairie.

It is tempting to end this essay on a elegiac note.  The dwellings are now just depressions in a grassy fields and, try as you might, you can’t hear the sounds of Indian children playing in the shallows of the great river, and the people are gone.  But this would be false.  The Mandan, Arikawa, and Hidatsa are very much alive and, indeed, populous once more.  They live in white government houses, stick-built, by the sides of the great reservoir.  Although somewhat reserved in the presence of strangers, you can talk with them.  They host pow-wows that you can attend.  They will even let you participate in their dances, although less powerful songs are reserved for tourists, the sort of dances performed by the children grass-dancers to prepare the field.  

    

66.

If you are not vaccinated, please get the shot.  

October 3, 2021