The Dying Grass, page 177
Janis Heple lent me a memoir about Elk City, where her ancestors once lived. Virginia Conte gave me much information about horses.
Joe Williams, owner of The Gun Works in Eugene, Oregon, let me shoot a vintage trapdoor Springfield. His friend David Hascall, an expert hunter and shooter who made this experience possible, fired this rifle with me (and, unlike me, mostly hit the target). David’s pretty wife Barbara uprooted stalks of camas from the yard for my edification; one resulting silhouette is reproduced in this book. Thank you all.
My daughter Lisa gave me Davis and Wiley’s Civil War: A Complete Photographic History, whose photographs I drew on several times, as shown in the Source-Notes.
My friend Tom Robinson, who appears in this book as a character, sent me articles, scanned some old photos and taught me much about the images at the Oregon Historical Society—which is a wonderful institution where I have spent many happy hours over the last decade. Jennifer Kaiser, Scott Daniels, Susan Seyl and several other helpful people went beyond the call of duty for me.
Likewise, I am very grateful to the Holland Library at Washington State University in Pullman. I send my special thanks to Pat Mueller, who gave me the thrill of seeing Peopeo Tholekt’s original drawings.
The best single source of General Howard’s papers is his old alma mater, Bowdoin College. In the couple of days I was able to spend there, my understanding of the man and his family, friends, enemies and hangers-on was vastly enlarged. It was a moving experience to take into my own hands a consolatory letter to him from none other than Sojourner Truth.
I am also much indebted to the kind people at the Idaho Historical Society (aka the Idaho State Archives and Research Center) in Boise, where I got to read George Shearer’s letters and other fascinating documents; to the Public Archives at Butte, Montana, where I was able to handle the original numbers of The Butte Miner and The New North-West; the Montana State Historical Society Archives in Helena—a fabulous source of photographs, not to mention James Bradley’s letters; the Oregon Secretary of State Archives Division in Salem, the Bozeman Public Library (Montana Room) and (the place I went most often) the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, where wonderful, intelligent people gave me access to Howard’s field reports, Adventures in Geyserland, and any number of other sources.
I am grateful to my agent, Susan Golomb, and to her two patient assistants, Krista Ingebretson and Soumeya Bendimerad. My appreciations, ladies.
Let me now thank my publisher, Viking, for having borne with me on all the Seven Dreams thus far. My friend and editor, Paul Slovak, has not always had an easy time with this stubborn, uncommercially-minded author. I am sure my next book will be shorter—much shorter, perhaps, if I get fired for having written this one. My copy editor, Maureen Sugden, has once again saved me from myself, overcoming semi-invisible yet nightmarish inconsistencies with brave thrusts of her red pen. Without her, terrible idiocies would have been perpetrated. Maureen, please consider me your grateful friend. Nancy Resnick, my new designer, has done much beautiful, patient work. I am thrilled with the look of the type and its many sweet indentations—whose convolutions required a toilsome coding system, invented by Matt Giarratano and completed by Jane Cavolina. Three proofreaders, Bitite Vinklers, Adam Goldberger, and Roland Ottewell, took the trouble to read this long book against copy, not only for consistency but also for sense, thereby repairing several more inconsistencies. Bruce Giffords, the senior production editor, is a scuba diver who recently swam around in a tank of giant and probably hungry fish. I imagine his descent into this book’s dark cold typographical nightmare as having required a great deal of oxygen and maybe some spear-fishing apparatus. Thank you, Bruce.
My father on the Nez Perce trail
*In 1866 our Army mustered fifty-four thousand men. Now it’s twenty-five thousand; long have they pass’d. Companies, regiments, brigades deflate like last year’s wild grapes wrinkling on the vine. Maybe by 1886 we won’t need an Army at all! The faster it shrinks, the better reconciled grow all those stoically retired slaveholders to our Government—not that I care about politics.
*General Howard.
*Nez Perce name for the Bannocks.
*The approximate precursor of Oklahoma.
*The meaning of “Lapwai.”
*Darling.
*Reservation.
*White Bird Cañon.
*Lakota.
*Cheyennes.
*James Reuben.
*The Bible.
*In this case, the Lewis and Clark expedition.
*Agent Monteith.
*A Flathead band from the Bitter Root Valley.
*Whiskey.
*Her name means “Broken.”
*President.
*Flathead.
*Lewiston.
*Blackfeet.
*His true (WYAKIN) name was White Thunder, but this was intimate; everyone addressed him as Yellow Wolf.
*On the Clearwater, near the town of Stites.
*Perry.
*Robinson Minthon.
*Joe Albert.
*Jupiter.
*The Joseph Plains between the Snake and Salmon rivers.
*Field-glasses.
*Clearwater River.
*Gros Ventres.
*Nimiputumít for “Split Rock.”
*The Grande Ronde River. The meaning of this word is unknown to me.
*Captain John and Old George.
*John Levi.
*Abraham Brooks.
*No relation to Lieutenant Wood.
*Middle fork of the Clearwater.
*Conjectural meaning of láqsa, the Lochsa River.
*Apparently some of the Nez Perces mistakenly believed that the U.S.A. began in Montana, which in fact would not join the Union until 1889.
*Clitoris.
*The Umatilla version of a WYAKIN.
*The Columbia.
*Howard’s old comrade Colonel Nelson Miles.
*Cheyennes.
*Probably a Frenchman.
*Vulva.
*Probably three stars in the handle of the Big Dipper.
*This appellation was more generously used in the nineteenth century than now. Gibbon was in charge, so his men called him the general of the expedition (and the whole military district). Moreover, he had been a major general in 1864. Like his colleagues Miles and Sturgis, he was forced to live with the reduction in rank necessitated by the shrunken postwar army. See here.
*The name by which White Thunder was called by others.
*This contained codeine.
*Yellow Stone River.
*Coincidentally, they were bound for Major Shearer’s volunteers in Idaho.
*Redington.
*“A big river which flows through Yellow Stone.”
*Custer.
*In mourning.
*What the Nez Perce called Bear’s Paw.
*A minor river in Yellow Stone Park. Exactly which one is unclear.
*Cheyenne.
*Jim.
*Shooting Thunder is entertaining himself by using the Umatilla word for “sweetheart.”
*Columbia River.
*A Crow verb.
*The color of their caps.
*The Musselshell River.
*Used to kill small game.
*The Missouri River.
*Cow Island.
*That is, sisters-in-law.
*General Sherman.
*The Milky Way.
*Chinook jargon for “woman.”
*Old Joseph.
*Crows.
*His relative by marriage.
*Jones.
*Hell.
*Mr. Atkins.
*The Earl of Dunraven explained to us: Blackfoot may fairly be regarded as a representative man. Superior to the mass of Red Indians, he is a good specimen of the ruling class among them.
*About the Nez Perces he writes in his Autobiography: I frequently and persistently for seven long years urged that they be sent home to their own country, but not until 1884, when I was in command of the Department of the Columbia, did I succeed . . . In that work he hardly mentions General Howard. If you read it you will learn that Miles was wounded at the Battle of Fair Oaks; his old commanding officer, whose arm he held as it was being amputated, has been expunged.
*Redington, who never liked him, put it about that among his effects was found a tintype of Grace from the 1880s, looking very lovely in oval spectacles, short hair and a hat of black feathers. Perhaps Guy gave it to him.
*Monteith.
*Here stood the cross where General Canby was murdered. (Just down the way, the most complete array of Modoc petroglyphs had just been vandalized.) Late afternoon light struck a bluff of yellow-greenish grass. Evening came on at Captain Jack’s Stronghold and birds were rising off what remained of Tule Lake, the wind now rushing like a river from that cañon over the low lava-studded rise of dying grass. Golden grass danced on the forehead of Captain Jack’s cave, within which rock-shadows grew and grew. (Hunting in there for souvenirs, Mason, so I have read, considered the silence, then said to Perry, who merely grimaced: This is what it must be like to be dead.) Behind me, something pretended to be gurgling water; it was wind coming through the grass. On the high ground behind lay the ring of lava stones where the warriors and shamans danced a magic dance, promising their People that the Bluecoats could never break through; and far away on that horizon studded with blue buttes rose the white jewel of Mount Shasta, wide and snowy, her crown hidden in the clouds. Turning back toward the lake and its decrepit towns, I smelled wild rose and sage in the freshening evening breeze.
*In 1930 we find him putting the Secretary of the Interior straight: But your ideas of assimilating the Indians do not seem to take. Most white people do not care to mix with them, as the Pocahontases and Longfellow Hiawathas are rather rare, and the assimilation would include too many coyote-dogs and odors from the wigwam. The nobility of the nobile [sic]. red man is The Bunk to most western people, especially those who have seen the mutilated remains of the victims of Indian atrocities.
*The Civil War.
*And did I tell you that the language has the same word for an empty rifle-shell, a coffin and a turtle shell?
*See, for instance, the “Experience of Two Moons” source-note, here, to the chapter on the Big Hole massacre.
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William T Vollmann, The Dying Grass
