American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and Bullriders - Softcover

Grant, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802141803 ISBN 13: 9780802141804

Publisher: Grove Press, 2005

Synopsis

Fascinated by the land of endless horizons, sunshine, and the open road, Richard Grant spent fifteen years wandering throughout the United States, never spending more than three weeks in one place and getting to know America?s nomads ? truckers, tramps, rodeo cowboys, tie-dyed concert followers, flea market traders, retirees who live year round in their RV?s, and the murderous Freight Train Riders of America (FTRA). In a richly comic travelogue, Grant uses these lives and his own to examine the myths and realities of the wandering life, and its contradiction with the sedentary American dream.
Along with a personal account, American Nomads traces the history of wandering in the New World, through vividly told stories of frontiersmen, fur trappers and cowboys, Comanche and Apache warriors, all the way back to the first Spanish explorers who crossed the continent. What unites these disparate characters, as they range back and forth across the centuries, is a stubborn conviction that the only true freedom is to roam across the land.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

American Nomads

Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and BullridersBy Richard Grant

Grove Press

Copyright © 2005 Richard Grant
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780802141804

Chapter One

Notes from an all-night truck stop on the outskirts of Albuquerque.Drinking coffee in a red vinyl booth, gazing out of the window at the gaspumps, I watch the nomads come and go in the night, making their desertcrossings: a gang of bikers en route to the rendezvous in Sturgis, SouthDakota; six migrant workers in a rattletrap jalopy, following the ripeningharvest from Texas to Montana; a vanload of tie-dyed teenagers, headed forthe next Phish concert or Rainbow Gathering; truck drivers, travelingsalesmen, rambling flea-market vendors; an itinerant preacher in a camperrig nailed together from planks of wood and scrap metal: "Rev. DaleBillings-Traveling Revival-Sinners Welcome."

From the shadowed canyons between the parked Kenworths and Peterbilts(where they drink malt liquor and denounce their enemies), bearded,furrow-faced road tramps and drifters emerge into the sodium glare,shambling across the forecourt to bum cigarettes and spare change.

Across the interstate, parked in neat, orderly rows at an electrifiedcampground, are forty or fifty RVs, Recreational Vehicles, the huge,luxurious motor homes favored by the peripatetic retirees of theSouthwest. RV brand names: Wanderer, Sundowner, Sunchaser, Airstream,Nomad.

Through a Western truck-stop window in the early hours of the morning, itseems like half of America is perpetually on the move: picking up andmaking a fresh start somewhere else, traveling for a pay cheque, or justtraveling to be traveling, moving for the sake of motion. Wanderlust,restlessness, itchy feet, antsy pants, white-line fever. There is more ofit here than in Europe, or anywhere else in the industrialized world: thenagging conviction that a better life lies somewhere down the road, or onthe road itself. Does it begin on the inside, or filter in from theoutside? Is it nature, nurture or disease?

Here's what the sedentary doctors have to say. Dromomania: an abnormal,obsessive desire to roam. Drapetomania: an uncontrollable desire to wanderaway from home. A nomad, of course, would produce vigorous arguments tothe contrary: that being sedentary is a forced, unnatural and oppressivecondition for human beings. That the desire to travel is an innate humanurge-a genetic legacy perhaps, from the million years we spent aswandering hunter-gatherers. This was Bruce Chatwin's big idea, that humanshave similar migratory instincts to certain birds and animals. Why is ahuman baby calmed by the motion of rocking and swaying? he asked. Because,for 99.9 percent of our evolutionary span, this is what human babiesexperienced as the natural rhythm of life, strapped to their mothers'bodies in slings or cradleboards, "rocked into contentment by the gentleswaying walk".

The sedentary doctor smiles a patronizing smile: a dromomaniac can alwaysproduce a good reason to roam, just as an alcoholic can always find a goodreason to take another drink. And, like alcoholism, it is a disease thatafflicts a disproportionate number of men. But what does a sedentarydoctor know? Has he ever experienced the pure rush of freedom that comesfrom leaving it all behind-the debts, the ties, the possessions andresponsibilities-and launching out into the wild blue yonder? Has he everbeen secretly tempted?

"Truck driving is the ultimate fulfillment of the American dream." This isthe bold claim of Mike Hatfield, twenty-four, from Reno, Nevada, hauling aload of mattresses across the country, taking time out for a cup of coffeeand a bowl of chilli. Slim, bespectacled, well read, cheerful-you wouldnever pick him for a trucker.

"Forget the little house on the prairie," he says. "Forget the whitepicket fence, the house in the suburbs, the monthly mortgage payment, thetwo-car garage and the rest of that crap. Americans dream about the road.We dream about burning down the house and saddling up the horse, and it'sbeen that way ever since the plains were knee-deep in buffalo shit."

Mike turns out to be a Western history enthusiast, an amateur scholar ofsorts. The cab of his Peterbilt and the sleeper compartment behind arefull of books, ranging from pulp gunfighter fiction to the learned,historical tomes of Bernard De Voto and Walter Prescott Webb. The booksare well thumbed, dog-eared and coffee-stained, with scrawled commentsspidering up the margins and key passages underlined in pencil. The markedpassages all address the same theme. "After the Indians came the cowboysand prospectors and railroad men, and they were just about as loose-footedand freedom-loving and prone to rambling. I'm a quarter Cheyenne Indian,and three-quarters Scotch-Irish cowboy. The way I look at it, I was bornto roam."

He gives me a ride east into Texas, eating little white pills,chain-smoking Marlboros and talking a blue streak through the night. Weare out on the vast tableland emptiness of the Staked Plains, the LlanoEstacado, the windswept heartland of the old Comanche country, when thefirst gray light appears in the east. Mike pulls over to the side of theroad and brews up some coffee on a camp stove. He is an aficionado of thedawn and will often stop to watch it rise.

The first rim of sun crests the horizon and a pale apricot light spreadsacross the blue-gray plain, with the moon still visible in the west, andthe coyotes yammering and howling, celebrating the night's huntingperhaps, or the simple fact of being a coyote. Our shadows take formbehind us, elongated like figures in a funhouse mirror.

There is a line of telephone poles along the side of the road. The wireshang in loose stitches across the sky. There is a barbed-wire fenceclogged with tumbleweeds, and beyond the fence the eye leaps out to thehorizon across forty or fifty miles of smooth, pure space.

"Look at this country," Mike says. "It wasn't made for settling down in.It's too big and dry and wide open. The Lord intended man and beast tomove about in a country like this. The Comanches knew it, the cowboys knewit, the buffalo knew it. Man, can you imagine? All this covered withbuffalo, just black with buffalo all the way to the horizon. That's howbig the herds got, as far as you could see."

No one knows how many bison used to roam the Great Plains. The estimatesvary between 50 million and 125 million. Whatever the number, it is safeto say that no large wild animal ever grew so numerous, anywhere on Earth,and the key to their success in this environment was mobility. The herdsgrazed into the wind, which blows almost constantly on the plains. Thespecies evolved with the wind, developing huge shaggy heads and shoulders,for facing down the howling winter blizzards, and small, lean,short-furred, curiously pert hindquarters. In the course of a normal year,the winds on the Great Plains shifted counterclockwise through all fourquarters of the compass, so the herd migrations formed a rough circle orellipse, three or four hundred miles across, passing through coolerlocations in summer and warmer ones in winter, always moving toward freshgrazing and water.

Occasionally, the wind blew too long from the southwest and buffalo intheir thousands trailed off into the deserts and died of starvation andthirst. The Montana herds sometimes ended up in the far, frozen north ofCanada, lured to their deaths by a soft, persistent, northerly breeze inthe early part of winter. But these were rare and inconsequential events.Maybe you can grasp the figure of 60 million or 125 million. Mike and Ihave tried and failed.

It took less than thirty years to bring the herds to the brink ofextinction, and most of the killing was done in a single decade, the1870s. By 1883, only two or three hundred buffalo were left, kept fornostalgia's sake on private ranches. White hide-hunters did most of thekilling, working with the approval of the white authorities, and most ofthe white population, who saw the slaughter of the buffalo as the finalsolution to the Indian problem. The problem, as always, was how todispossess the Indians of their land. There was an element of imperialistconspiracy at work, but it was capitalist economics, the emergence of abooming market for buffalo leather in the East and Europe, which accountedfor the speed and rapacity of the slaughter, and sent five thousandfreelance hide-hunters out onto the plains. Killing and skinning buffalowas exhausting, filthy, dangerous work-up to your shoulders in gore mostof the time, and constantly watching for Indians-but for a while themarket paid enough to make it worth the risk. Enough, that is, for whiskeyand a whore and a gambling spree, when you got back to town and sold yourhides.

The meat was left to rot on the prairie, fouling the air for hundreds ofmiles around. It was a fine, fat, lazy time to be a wolf, or a vulture, orany scavenger of carrion, and a terrible, hungry, world-wrenching time tobe an Indian. Not that Indians hadn't contributed to the slaughter. Assubsistence hunters, they had barely dented the herds, but by the 1870sthey too were entangled in the market economy. They needed more hides thanthey used to, to trade for guns, ammunition, iron cooking pots, steelknives, needles, awls, cloth, mirrors, coffee, sugar, whiskey and otherproducts of white civilization on which they had become dependent. Andcontrary to popular belief, Indians did not always use every part of thebuffalo. If, for example, an Indian was being pursued, or traveling alone,or needing trade goods in a hurry, or craving whiskey, he might take thehide and the tongue, leave the carcass to rot, and think little of it.

Nevertheless, Indians were horrified by the way the hide-men laid waste tothe herds, killing relentlessly and methodically until no animals wereleft, and then moving on to the next herd, wasting unimaginable quantitiesof meat. Surely this was a sign of sickness or insanity. Indian huntingpractices were not always as tidy and thorough as they are remembered, butthe plains tribes did feel a deep, religious reverence for the buffalo,which gave up its life in a sacred transaction so that Indians could live.The great herds had seemed as timeless and elemental as the grass or thewind, and when they disappeared Indians refused to believe it at first,saying the buffalo had gone up to Canada or taken refuge underground. Eventhe white hide-hunters were astonished that they had killed themselves outof a living in so short a time.

Later, a new market arose, and a rabble army of bone-pickers went out ontothe plains. The bones were stacked in immense ricks by the railroad, sixtyor seventy feet high, waiting to be shipped east and ground intofertilizer, turned into buttons, combs and glue. Men posed in front of thebone-ricks for photographers, with shabby hats and bristling mustaches,looking like mean, proud, haunted, belligerent dwarfs. If all the boneshad been loaded at once, calculated the Topeka Mail and Breeze, they wouldhave filled a freight train 7575 miles long, more than twice the distancefrom San Francisco to New York.

By the end of the great slaughter, in 1883, all the nomadic plains tribeshad been corralled into reservations, to be forcibly instructed in thearts of Christian piety, private property ownership and sedentary farming.By 1886 the footloose trail cowboy was gone from the plains too, workingon ranches now and sleeping in bunkhouses, fenced off the open range bythe settlers he despised. His heyday had lasted only twenty years, andrepresented the last gasp of mounted nomadism in North America. There werestill a few wandering outlaws, recalcitrant Indians and horse thieves leftout in the back country and the canyons, but in short order they werehunted down and brought in, and the West was pronounced conquered, tamedand settled.

Traveling around the region today, it doesn't always feel that way.Settlement, and the feeling of settlement, does not occupy the land in thesame way that it does back East, or in Europe. It is not just the vast,empty spaces, or all the drifters on the highway, or the ghost towns,being seeded back into prairie by the wind, or the dying family farms,defeated by the harshness of the climate and the machinations of corporateagriculture. The restless, rootless, migratory history of the West is alsoevident in its cities.

In Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas, urban populations aregrowing faster than anywhere else in the country, yet these booming,sprawling, modern cities have a flimsy, impermanent presence, at least toan eye trained in Europe. You drive through miles of trailer parks andmobile-home encampments, through brave new suburbs and utopian retirementcommunities-frame and Sheetrock dream homes, built on a vanishing watersupply, designed to make a fast buck for the development company and fallapart in twenty or thirty years: "disposable homes," to borrow a phrasefrom a friend of mine who builds them for a living. In Phoenix, the mosttransitory of Western cities, 40 percent of the population have livedthere for less than five years, and 50 percent say they plan to leave assoon as they get the chance.

Maybe it's just a matter of time. Maybe in another hundred years the wideopen spaces will be gone, or reduced to islands in a sea of concrete, andthe inhabitants will come to feel rooted in place. Given time, perhaps,the settlement of the West will be completed, but there remains aformidable obstacle that never existed in the East or in Europe.

Except for a small, soggy corner in the Pacific Northwest, aridity is thedominant characteristic of the American West, the organizing principle ofits geography and biology, and the ultimate limit on its ambition ofnever-ending growth. The underground aquifers, which took millions ofyears to form, by slow accretion of scant rainfall, are plummetingdramatically. The major river of the Southwest, the Colorado, is alreadyso tapped for irrigation that it no longer reaches the sea. Aridityexplains why the grass on this prairie grows in separate bunches, ratherthan close-packed turf, why there are no trees rooted in the soil, why therivers and the towns are so far apart. A buffalo seeking water and a truckdriver seeking breakfast must travel the same approximate distance to findwhat they need to move on.

Aridity literally creates space. Where there is no moisture to mist up theair, and no trees to block the view, the human field of vision expandsdramatically. From the ramparts of Bryce Canyon in Utah you can see for180 miles on a clear day-London to Manchester-and still wonder what liesover the horizon. Unless some kind of technological rain dance is devised,it seems likely that the West will remain dominated by big empty spaces,and a certain type of human being will feel compelled to wander acrossthem. First rule of nomadism: open space invites mobility.



Continues...

Excerpted from American Nomadsby Richard Grant Copyright © 2005 by Richard Grant. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802141803
• ISBN 13: 9780802141804
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320