Great Plains Read Free Page A

the distance. I said that when early travellers on the plains came through a big herd of buffalo, they could watch the human scent move through it on the wind, frightening animals eight and ten miles away. Suddenly we crossed the path of one of the rainclouds, and the hard dirt road turned to glue. Mud began to thump in the wheel wells, and the car skidded sideways, went off the road, and stuck. We got out in cement-colored mud over our ankles. Two pieces of harvesting machinery sat in a field nearby; other than that, there was no sign of people anywhere. I tried to drive while my friend pushed, then she drove while I pushed, then I left it in gear and we both pushed. We whipped the mud to peaks. It clotted on the wheels until they became useless mudballs. Finally I took a flat rock and got down on all fours and scraped the mud off each wheel. Then my friend drove carefully in reverse for one wheel turn until the wheels were covered again. Then I scraped the mud off again, and we drove another revolution. We kept doing this over and over until we made it back to dry ground. It took about two hours. Another event early travellers mentioned in their diaries was miring their wagons in the gumbo mud of the Great Plains. Now I knew what they meant. When I got back in the car, I was all-over mud and my fingernails were broken. From her purse, my friend produced a freshly laundered white cotton handkerchief.
    For hours we drove on roads which Rand McNally & Company considers unworthy of notice. A moth glanced off the edge of the windshield, and in the sunset the dust its wings left sparkled like mascara. That night, my friend said on a gas-station pay phone, “I’m on the Great Plains! It’s amazing here! The sky is like a person yawned and never stopped!”
    Eventually, over several summers, I drove maybe 25,000 miles on the plains—from Montana to Texas and back twice, as well as many shorter distances. I went to every Great Plains state, dozens of museums, scores of historic sites, numerous cafes. When I couldn’t travel, I borrowed books about the plains from the Kalispell Public Library— Curse Not His Curls, by Robert J. Ege (a ringing defense of General Custer), and Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson. I also watched the local newspapers for items about the plains, and finally I learned why the Indians and policemen I had seen by the road the day I first arrived were standing that way. They were at the place where the bodies of two missing Blackfeet Indians, Thomas Running Rabbit and Harvey Mad Man, had been found earlier in the afternoon.
    Police in Eureka, California, had arrested two Canadians for robbing a convenience store, and had discovered that the Canadians’ car was the same one the young Blackfeet men were driving when they disappeared. In custody, one of the Canadians, a nineteen-year-old named André Fontaine, said that they and another man had hitchhiked down from Red Deer, Alberta, to West Glacier, Montana; that there the three met two Indians in a bar; that they drove west with them in the Indians’ car; that the Indians stopped the car; that his companions took the Indians into the woods; that he heard two shots; that his companions came running from the woods; that the three then drove away. Aided by this information, police soon caught the third man, a Canadian named Ronald Smith, in Wyoming. All three were returned to Montana and held in the Flathead County Jail. At first, they pleaded not guilty, but then Ronald Smith confessed to shooting both the young men. Smith was twenty-four, and he said he had always wanted to see what it felt like to kill somebody. He said that it felt like nothing. While awaiting trial as an accomplice, André Fontaine was asked to appear as a guest on F. Lee Bailey’s television show, Lie Detector. The Flathead County Attorney, a county sheriff’s detective, a local police detective, and a court-appointed defense attorney