Great Plains Read Free Page B

accompanied André Fontaine back to California for the taping. The show put them up in North Hollywood at the Beverly Garland Hotel, except for the prisoner, who stayed in the Los Angeles County Jail. When Ronald Smith confessed, he had requested the death penalty. He had said that he felt he was beyond rehabilitation, and that the Indians in the Montana prisons would probably kill him anyway. Shortly before his execution date, he changed his mind. Lawyers took his appeal through the county and state courts, which denied it, and to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. Then they filed another appeal in the federal courts challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty. Three years after the crime, while the appeal was still at the state level, I moved from Montana back to New York.

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    A MONG the rivers of the Great Plains are the Cimarron, the Red, the Brazos, the Purgatoire, the Trinity, the Big Sandy, the Canadian, the Smoky Hill, the Solomon, the Republican, the Arikaree, the Frenchman, the Little Blue, the Big Blue, the South Platte, the North Platte, the Laramie, the Loup, the Niobrara, the White Earth, the Cheyenne, the Owl, the Grand, the Cannonball, the Heart, the Knife, the Little Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Powder, the Tongue, the Bighorn, the Musselshell, the Judith, the Marias, the Milk, the Missouri. Some of these rivers have several forks, like the Clear, Salt, and Double Mountain Forks of the Brazos, or the Clear and Crazy Woman Forks of the Powder. All of them have had at least one other name; the Spanish, who were the first Europeans to explore the southern plains, called the Purgatoire the River of the Souls in Purgatory. Before the Lewis and Clark expedition discovered and named the Marias, the Indians called it the River That Scolds at All the Others. The bigger rivers on the plains run roughly west to east. Carrying alluvial sands from the Rocky Mountains, they helped make the plains. Some, like the Brazos, flow to the Gulf of Mexico. Some run into the Red or the Arkansas, which both continue east to the Mississippi. The others end up in the Missouri, which follows a 2,500-mile course from the northwest until it finally joins the Mississippi at St. Louis.
    The rivers of the southern plains are dry much of their length, much of the year. All-terrain-vehicle tracks cross the white sand in the bed of the North Fork of the Red. As you go north, the rivers are more likely to have water. Descending from the flat benchland into their valleys can be like walking off a hot sidewalk into a spa. Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun. The trees lean at odd angles, like flowers in a vase. In the summers, windrows of cottonwood-seed down cover the ground. Big cottonwoods have bark as ridged as a tractor tire, and the buffalo used to love to rub against it. In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair. At sunset, the shadows of the cottonwoods fall across the river and flutter on the riffles. Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain. Sandbar willows grow as straight as dowels in the gray-black mud along the banks. Game trails six inches wide wind through the willows. For a while, the air is smarting with mosquitoes, and weird little bugs that don’t bite but just dive right for your eyes. Later there are stars, and silence. At dawn, birds pipe the light through the trees.
    Nineteenth-century travellers who wanted to see the interior of the Great Plains when it was still a wilderness used to ascend the Missouri the way people do the Amazon or the Nile today. The Indians who lived along the river grew maize and beans, dried them, and traded them to tribes who followed the buffalo herds. The river Indians usually built their villages near where the Missouri and another river joined, and the white traders who came