Great Plains

...But Frazier spends little time in lamentation, none in despair...

...But such is the delirious atmosphere of the Plains...

...a West out, apparently, having consulted Cap-Indian woman cries into the telephone...

...It didn't have to turn into a greedy free-for-all...

...In many towns I stopped in, the public buildings were a store, a gas station, and a museum...

...He wants to believe that the mortally wounded Boy General, as allegedly recounted by Sitting Bull, laughed as he fell: "I like to believe Custer even had fun dying...

...Maybe the history of the West, for example, could have involved more admiration of hats, more unarmed get-togethers, more dancing, more tasting of spareribs...

...Nowadays, the past seems almost nonexistent, even contemptible: on TV, the cop says to the criminal, "Reach for that gun and you're history...

...I asked...

...The Plume said he thought the problem was Western Film...

...It's not spell: "I did not know one person in the Plains: "Someone had highlighted because readers will decide that Ian Montana...

...Frazier's regional theme is the decline of the land and its population...

...ing book...

...Robinson's lovely daughters dance...

...Dying and in pain, "still as far from white men as the limitless continent they once dreamed of," he had refused to lie on an officer's cot...

...Za vite people haff destroyed zo many uff za Indians' zacred blaces...

...Away to the still-empty land "you could never know all there is to parlor...

...I went for walks, tions of riches with a wavering, hope-or abruptly polished off a book to drank quarts of Coors beer, listened to ful, faded line...

...Joy like this is so rare in me as to be endangered...

...I sat in the house and tried the general's more far-fetched projecFrazier has shortchanged his subject, to write a novel...

...There was something to it, after all...

...But one must adin an age when "most travelers who see mire his instincts, as he omits an ac-the plains do it from thirty thousand All at once a low-slung '67 Pontiac full of count of Crazy Horse kneeling to shake feet," the heartland has become fly- long-haired Indians passed me, going about hands with Crook "because (1) I don't over country...

...Yet it is an Indian who occupies the book's spiritual center—a veritable dream of an Indian...

...Once happiness gets rolling ment one can pay this modest, appetizespecially admirers of Crazy Horse) in this open place, not much stops it...

...The sky is like a I for writers of New Yorker fact Border With Crook, wherein we find person yawned and never stopped...

...Za vite people in America haff done zuch terrible sings to za Indians," he said...

...The whites were of course even more wanton (and more systematic) killers, buffalo disappearing up the railway tracks "like water up a straw...

...encounters a couple bound for the funeral of one of nine young Arapaho Wayne Michael Sarf is the author of Only later does he learn that they men who had committed suicide on the God Bless You, Buffalo Bill: A had stopped at the spot where two reservation that year: "Lydell White Layman's Guide to History and the murdered Indians had been found...

...but a no-man's land of warring tribes, where no van would be complete without its rifle rack...

...The despondent dude Teddy Roosevelt "knocked down a man who was mean to him in a bar, and caught three other men who stole a boat from him, and cheered up...

...Frazier loves Crazy Horse for all the right reasons—and places the historian George Hyde, who had sneered at Crazy Horse's admirers for glamorizing a man so narrow-minded, selfish, and impractical, among those who "do not get the point at all...

...He has a swell time: . . . Suddenly I felt a joy so strong it almost THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 51 One might quibble that an uncon- Great Plains...

...But for Frazier he can be no mere, easy symbol, to be snatched up by his conqueror...

...They were now pulled every which as it should be...

...Jim Yellow Earring of the Sioux helpfully tells Frazier how the Crow Indians "drink Lysol, also known as 'Montana gin,' which will sure get you drunk, but which can collapse your lungs if you don't mix it right . . . " Unfortunately, Frazier himself victimizes his pre-modern Indians, by homogenizing them...

...It came up my spine and settled on my head like a warm cap and filled my eyes with tears, while I stood there packed in with everybody, watching Mrs...

...It's simply because the radio . ." Alas, "suddenly I no system...

...Away to but with 6,000 miles' worth of rambling Mackenzie's white 4th...

...On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, `ours': an object of pity, an accident victim, 'the noble red man, the last of his race, etc., etc.' But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse . ." knocked me down...

...Frazier visits the Bob Wills Museum in the singer's hometown of Turkey, Texas, and finds Lincoln, New Mexico, preserved by its outlaw heritage: "Because Billy the Kid danced on it, the courthouse balcony endures...

...But in such a place ruins last, and whatever history there was casts a long shadow...

...His roadside vignettes offer little incentive for even a jour- bwoatyhoff w e thre j the roosatd standing, policemen t h there, dn hands as nisn, of modern Indian life, unsurprisingly, nalist's extended exploration, unless he pockets...

...A rare bit of metaphysical speculation GREAT PLAINS ends up whackier than the jokes...

...of - hard Ian Frazier/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/290 pp...

...Away to the land could never wear them out...

...As his extensive notes reveal, this history buff has an understandable I suppose one shouldn't make this Ian Frazier fits both categories...

...F razier suffers from no mysticism concerning primitive ecologists: "Among the Indians, no part of the buffalo was ever wasted—except sometimes, when a tribe might kill a herd of fourteen hundred and cut out the tongues to take to the traders for whiskey, or when a war party on enemy hunting ground would shoot animals and leave them on the ground to rot...

...Friends have told me the Readers who have not yet traveled the quered West would have been not a joy they felt, say, driving from Plains will get to know the feeling motorist's multiracial paradise (a Sheridan, Wyoming, to Hardin, Mon- which is perhaps the highest complidreamland too dull for dreamers, tana...

...They are landscapes so barren that once, for want of anything else to look at, Frazier finds himself walking over to examine an object dropped by a bird...

...Thus, just as Europeans finally came to the Plains and changed them, so did they slay a man with the misfortune "to live in a place which existed both in reality and in the dreams of people far away . . ." But is this not the paradox of the mythic West...

...All kinds of Indians lived on the plains," he notes correctly...

...Judging from his citation of specific tribal customs, Frazier knows this, but perhaps breaking up his custom-cadence with tribal names would be a drag...

...For moderns, the tragedy is part of the dream, with a fallen Crazy Horse at the end of the trail...

...brush...

...A person can be amazingly happy on the 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989...

...Some were looking off into the tend toward the depressing, as when he pursues a dream, or has already lost one...

...His quest is for a dream never quite realized, and also never quite defined...

...Like the center of a dying fire, the Great Plains held that original vision longest...

...Maybe history did not absolutely have to turn out the way it did...

...Historical markers are everywhere...

...Once, he tells us, "America's size in the imagination was limitless...

...It could have worked...

...Now, in the mind of each person who imagines him, he looks different...

...The same pokerfaced prose seems appropriate to Frazier's frequent historical interludes, the humor Plains-dry without falling Plains-flat...

...longer had any place to dream about...

...because he didn't end up in the Dry Tortugas...

...What a distance there is between that cot and the floor...

...Three confuses the black 9th and 10th Cavalwhere TV used to set its most popular years later he moved back to New York, ry Regiments with Colonel Ranald dramas, but not anymore...

...Carelessly using Charlie Sir-he's such splendid company out West...

...because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died...

...This democracy, this land of freedom and equality and the pursuit of happiness—it could have worked...

...hence Frazier's contempt for strip mining, which leaves none—and no year to think about but that of the mining: "It is impossible to imagine a Cheyenne war party coming out of the canyon, because the canyon is gone...

...His mysterious reference to "the beyond newsstands and malls and velvet know about them—your fantasies 4th Cavalry" as "an all-black brigade" restaurant ropes...

...killers were two Canadians, one of lack of communication...

...What is your name...

...17.95 brooding on the remains drinking Fort Union, North Dakota, Frazier wonders if the scenery has Wayne Michael Sarf "somehow been permanently altered by the thousands of drunken eyes which have looked at it before...

...plotted to kill Crazy Horse" after his seen the Plains, Frazier conjures up that surrender, he discusses his death withsky...

...For fantasies, they "are in many "the Kid" played the piano inside a short-grass prairie now mostly plowed respects the perfect place," so big that besieged house as flames licked at the under...

...I asked him to spell it...

...We didn't have to make a mess of it and thecontinent and ourselves...

...because he never met the President . . . because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave . . . because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph...

...He fears that the Plains do not ingratiate, are not pretty enough even to attract the sympathies of ecologists: "They seldom photograph well or rather, they are seldom photographed...

...vastness and their strangely intimate Crook and thirteen Sioux chiefs And the sky...

...Rashly accept-the fields of wheat and milo and sudan to write about, evoking both the Plains' ing the claim that General George grass and flax and alfalfa and nothing...

...But his reading lacks satisfy a contract...

...In fondness for first-hand accounts, such 1 complaint about any book originat- 1982, having dreamed for years of as General James S. Brisbin's 1881 The ing with New Yorker "fact" pieces, but Montana, he rented a house in Kali- Beef Bonanza...

...But ated-observer description: chief—accidentally...

...pieces, a knack for the deadpan, alien- Little Big Man's claim to have slain the Seeing it yourself is best, of course...

...ingo's A Texas Cowboy as a source on "Away to the Great Plains of Ameri- So he began dreaming about the Great Billy the Kid, he repeats the tale that ca," he cries, "to that immense Western Plains...

...or, How to Get Rich on Great Plains is too short...

...one gets the feel' ing that people named Thyrza Hoe Felling were not exactly his speed...

...When White 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 Plume opens his car's hatchback to carefully lift out and display portions of his fragile, feathered dance costume, there seems a poignant symbolism in the moment...

...his trueness to himself transcends this...

...Without the tragedy, there can be no elegy—perhaps not even a Crazy Horse, who without the coming of the Europeans and their horses might have been left ,to flourish or perish unknown in gory, pointless scalping raids against enemy tribesmen...

...I looked at him...

...Gerhard Stadler," he said...

...but Frazier's treatment of a hitchhiking German archeologist manages to seem a put-down of a meddling Teuton even if he didn't intend it that way...

...The civilization for which the conqueror yearned turns to dust in the mouths of his children, even as the conquest, the struggle of white and red, becomes part of our Heroic Age...

...Did people used to feel like this all the time...

...Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was...

...even Frazier's dream West seems to be the Wild West, an "obligingly blank backdrop" where men struggle and wrest a living (or sport) from nature...

...because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the enF razier is not interested in theorizing, Walter Prescott Webb-style, on the way in which the Plains shaped American culture or society...

...But of course...

...For those who haven't world...

...Then osTsbena Montana stateseveral m tatehighw highway y e cop, completely believe it and (2) I don't like with n 2,500 miles long by 600 miles across at of Indians, then another highway cop, then it' " its widest, extending to ten states (and more Indians...

...because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists...

...Just across the Flathead Though now greatly outnumbered into Canada) without fully embracing Reservation and inside the boundary of on the Plains by whites, Indians figure any, where each county has recorded a Glacier National Park, I came upon the cars largely in Frazier's odyssey—which is loss in population since the 1920s—may again...

...But, for many places on the Great Plains, the past is much more colorful and exciting and populous than the present...

...Connecting a future historian's 1846 reaction to Oregon Trail travelers with a name marked on Register Cliffs in 1859, Frazier muses: "Francis Parkman was Harvard '44, of an old Boston family...

...Nobody's mouth was moving...

...But as he tells us about "Indian" customs (some new to this reviewer but regrettably un-footnoted), we should recall that there are no such people as "Indians"--at least not generic ones, as in "Indians ate young, fat dogs" (some did, others didn't), "ants," "grasshoppers," and so on...

...V razier has that apparent necessity tam John Bourke's classic On The "It's amazing here...

...This vast area—about ninety...

...because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate Crazy Horse was a slim man of medium height with brown hair hanging below his waist and a scar above his lip...

...I'm on the Great Plains...

...There must be a past...

...Driving to tiny Nicodemus, Kansas, founded in the 1870s by black homesteaders, he expects ruins—and, miraculously, not only finds a living town, but arrives in the midst of its Founders' Day Weekend...

...For a moment I could imagine the past rewritten, wars unfought, the buffalo and the Indians undestroyed, the prairie unplundered...

...And I thought, It could have worked...

...Without describing his stop at Custer Battlefield, Frazier even produces a novel reason for liking General Custer—a life which "demonstrates the power of a person having fun...

...Was this what those old-timers were looking for, and finding, on the Great Plains...

...A sign near an abandoned Texas home describes a getaway by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, adding: "In this quiet region, the escape is now legend...

...It wasn't just a joke, just a blind for the machinations of money...

...He did, and then shut up.counter . . . because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind...