What’s the picture
on this blog?
That’s Scotts
Bluff National Monument in western Nebraska.
It’s one of those place where, if you look hard enough, you can still
see the ruts from the conestogas that rolled along the Oregon Trail more than
150 years ago.
I used to be able
to see that bluff on my way to school in the morning.
I didn’t know it
at the time, but I was growing up in the very heart of the Old West—literally a
mile from the Oregon and Mormon Trails, almost within walking distance of a
famous old fur trading post, and a few hours’ car ride from the spot where
Crazy Horse was killed and the Plains Indian wars ended in the tragedy of
Wounded Knee.
But I was a
kid. To me, the town of Scottsbluff,
Nebraska, was just like any other small town in what I thought of as the
Midwest except that we had that funny looking butte just across the river. We went to school and church, palled around,
watched TV (the few hours a day it was on when it first arrived in town) and
did the stuff kids normally did in the ‘Fifties. On Saturdays, we could walk to the Midwest
Theater on Broadway and, for a quarter, see a cartoon and a double feature,
which as often as not was a western.
To us, those John
Wayne or Randolph Scott movies were about somewhere else, some mythic Wild
West, not our little town. “Davy
Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” was about Tennessee and Texas—the “real”
wild frontier. Never mind that when we
picnicked in the Wildcat Hills, we had to sit on top of the picnic tables
because the place was crawling with rattlesnakes. Somewhere else was the “West.”
Fast forward a
lifetime, though, and it’s clear to me that that place got under my skin and
into my brain and marrow and sinew in ways I would never have believed at the
time. (And don’t you know that only
western writers use terms like “bone and marrow and sinew”!)
Perhaps it was
because of the spinster woman who lived two doors away, the great aunt of my
best friend. We’d play canasta in her
living room and listen with one ear to stories about growing up in the pioneer
days before cars and highways and radio.
Or perhaps it was long drives to Cheyenne, across the starkly beautiful
emptiness of the Nebraska panhandle and southwestern Wyoming. Or visiting Rapid City, where the Reptile
Gardens was at least as interesting as Mount Rushmore to a 9 year old, and
having lunch in the home of Korczak Ziolkowski, the artist who was just
beginning a lifetime of pounding away at the Black Hills granite to create the
3-D monument to Crazy Horse.
Maybe it was some
early exposure to the works of Mari Sandoz, the gifted Nebraska writer whose
works covered the intersection of white settlement and the military defeat of
the native Americans.
It was Sandoz who
wrote my favorite western book ever—Old
Jules, the story of her tough-as-nails father who planted an orchard in the
Nebraska Sand Hills. She also wrote the
classic Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas that was
made into a movie starring (of all people) Victor Mature, a man of Swiss and
Italian heritage. The movie played at
the Midwest, of course. But I digress.
No matter what
made me fall in love with the West—John Wayne or Aunt Cass or the pine-studded,
rattlesnake infested Wildcat Hills—I did.
I moved away after
a few years to New Mexico (another fertile landscape for a Western
novelist-to-be), then to Iowa. Years
later, I circled back to Nebraska, and after a few more fits and starts, here I
am today, although on the eastern end of the state where we can claim to be
more properly Midwestern but no less authentically part of the American
westering experience.
After all, Lewis
and Clark passed by going to and coming from their grand adventure. They buried the only member of their party to
die on the journey just a hundred miles upriver near where Sioux City, Iowa,
stands today. The Mormons camped here
before they started their oxcart trek to the Promised Land, and the Union Pacific,
the mother of railroads, was—and is—headquartered here. A short day trip away is the Homestead
National Monument, which includes some of the first acres successfully claimed
under the Homestead Act. Less than ten
miles from my home is the Platte River, the north branch of which flowed less
than three miles from my home in Scottsbluff nearly sixty years ago.
This land and the
people it nourishes are in me, and I in them.
Is that why I write about the West?
“Yes” is as good
an answer as I can ever hope to come up with.
How about you?
By the way, here are the links to the Nook versions of The Intruders and The Old Boys. Check 'em out!