What I Learned from Virginia Bill
It
was a good place to end up. I’d wasted
a full week of glorious mid-summer cooped up in federal district court, Fargo,
a defendant (fortunately vindicated by a sensible North Dakota jury) in a suit
brought by a disgruntled would-be professor who argued that when we, his peers,
decided not to grant him tenure, it caused him to become sexually impotent, and
therefore he was entitled to cash damages.
Liberated, I lit out for the West in search of Virginia Bill Hamilton,
author of Dakota: An Autobiography of a Cowman, feeling just as good as
he did about returning, as he put it, to “the ways and habits of the
West.” Having concluded my library
research at the state historical society in Pierre; done my field work,
locating the Hamilton homestead and ranch sites and all the other local
landmarks he wrote about; and gotten some good advice about where best to wrap
myself around a good prime rib, I ended up at the Corner Bar, Camp Crook, South
Dakota.
The
name, I know, is unprepossessing–the Corner Bar. So is the building, a gable-roofed pile of stucco, indeed on the
corner in the middle of Camp Crook, a town that time may not have forgotten but
most everyone else has. It is, however,
a place with good prime rib, cold beer, and character. I was instructed to arrive and leave early
before the fights started, but nobody seemed at all belligerent, although there
were bullet holes in the massive, century-old bar, about the provenance of
which local opinion varied. The wood
floor hadn’t seen any varnish in a long time.
There were at least ten deer-heads on the walls, snake skins twined
among the antlers, and a few antelope.
Conversation was B+–most of the people there had started drinking an
hour or two before I arrived. When I
sat down for supper, I found myself beside a carload of folks, friends from
Bowman County, North Dakota, who had driven down for supper. Long light lingered on the sage as I drove
out of Camp Crook, satisfied.
What
I mean to convey with these opening scenes is that I enjoy being a historian,
enjoy historical research, and particularly delight in field work. What I mean to relate through the rest of my
talk is some of what I learned in one particular piece of research–on the trail
of Virginia Bill.
My
involvement in this project began with a call from Nancy Tystad Koupal inviting
me to do a little spade work on the author of Dakota, W.H. Hamilton, and
to write an introduction that would set the reprint of the work into
context. It is a rule of mine always to
do what Nancy asks. I suspect she
called me because one of the few things I know much about is the history of
farming and ranching on the Great Plains; because I had been doing research on
farms and ranches in nearby Bowman County (in which county, incidentally,
cousins of Virginia Bill were among the first pioneer ranchers), and therefore
I knew the area; and because she was pretty sure I would deliver a manuscript
in time to meet publication schedules.
So here we have the handsome
reprint. That’s a worthwhile product in
itself, but for me, there have been other benefits to the project. Here are four things I learned about, or was
brought to think about, because of it.
The western environment as experienced
by Virginia Bill was significantly different than it is today. Besides that, the western environment as
perceived by Virginia Bill, the way it registered and was ordered in his mind,
was substantially different than today.
Some things, of course,
remain pretty much the same. For
instance, the soils of the West River, and specifically those in the area
between Belle Fourche and Bowman, are largely gumbo of the Linler-Lismas and
Pierre-Kyle associations. Brigadier
General George Crook, while campaigning against the Indians, said that these
soils were horse-killers. Virginia Bill
and his neighbors learned that it was simply impossible to travel or work after
a rain. Pioneer historian Doane
Robinson said that wet gumbo “is very adhesive and roads and paths are
practically impassable.”
It also tends to resist
absorption of water. Water pools up on
the surface of the level ground between the buttes and offers opportune
breeding habitat for mosquitoes. Of these
insects Hamilton remarked, “Anyone who has never been in the north in mosquito
time knows nothing about them. You
simply could not breathe without something to protect your face. I have seen them so thick on horses I could
not tell their color.”
Whereas on the northern
plains we still enjoy the descendants of the insects that plagued Virginia
Bill, we seldom anymore encounter a bighorn sheep. Hamilton had several encounters with them, and a neighbor even
tried to domesticate one. Before his
time there were bighorns on every butte in the country, but these were highly
vulnerable to early hunters. Bighorns
were eradicated from the region. They
have been re-established in the badlands, but these are a different sub-species
than the original. Other large wild
herbivores persisted better, but by 1910 or so pronghorn antelope, mule deer,
and whitetail deer all were practically eliminated from the plains. Virginia Bill had hunted pronghorn for the
market; had shot and eaten many a blacktail; but regarded the whitetail as a
rarity. Fortunately, under state
protection, antelope and more especially deer have rebounded to plentitude on
the plains since the 1950s.
It is unlikely, however, we
will ever see native grouse–sharptail and sage grouse–in such plenty as did
Virginia Bill when he shot them for market.
The native grouse and partridges of North America commonly thrived on
the frontier–actually increased in numbers with earliest settlement, which
introduced grains into the food supply–but declined with subsequent wholesale
changes in land use.
We must not leave off the
topic of animals without mention of wolves, the bane of the small rancher
seeking to establish a cow-calf operation.
The plains wolf that the Hamiltons cursed and hunted was the subspecies Canis
lupus nubilus, which was to persist in the region until the 1920s, but is
now extinct. Reading about the
Hamilton’s pursuit of wolves in the 1890s, I realized that while their campaign
had an economic basis, it was also recreation.
They loved hunting wolves. They
crossbred their trailing hounds with greyhounds to produce a hunting dog that
could track, overtake, and kill a wolf.
I suspect that had Virginia Bill still been in Dakota when the wolves
were extirpated, he would have missed them.
Interaction with animals was
the stuff of everyday life, but in a larger sense, the early ranchers
interacted with the landscape differently than a modern, automotive
people. The key landmarks were the bare
buttes and the oversized, flat-topped, timbered buttes given the name
“hills.” Modest buttes–Mud Buttes,
Two-Top, Macy Butte, and others–demarcated the route of the Old Dickinson Road
out of Belle Fourche past the Cave Hills.
The Cave Hills, the Short Pine Hills, and Slim Buttes were still more
important to the ranchers. They
harbored ranch headquarters. Their tops
and slopes bore timber for construction and fuel; their rugged escarpments
offered shelter for beasts and for homesteads; springs flowed from their
declivities. The Hamiltons enclosed
their range by using the south face of the South Cave Hills as a southern
barrier without fence, fencing butte-to-butte on the south side, and joining
with eastern and western neighbors to erect the partition fences.
In general, to these early
ranchers, the landscape was ordered as three domains: the buttes and hills; the
rivers and creeks that ran between them; and the level prairie, where the
mosquitoes swarmed in summer, where the blizzards held sway in winter, and
where the dogs might run down a wolf foolish enough to foot-race them.
Whereas Virginia Bill learned
the landscape from a saddle, I arrived in his country with the advantages of
modern navigational aids. For those of
you who love to explore historic landscapes, let me review a few of these.
1. County-level maps from the state highway department
2. Quad maps from the U.S. Geological Survey
3. The DeLorme series of state atlases
4. GPS
I identified the location of
Virginia Bill’s homestead on the Belle Fourche River by the Register of Deeds,
got good directions from present residents to find the ranch headquarters in
the Cave Hills, and located other sites by reckoning from references in
Virginia Bill’s memoir. At all these
sites I took GPS readings. Later, when
I constructed a web site to recount my research and to publicize the book, I
included the GPS readings in the pages.
This has set me thinking
about the potential of GPS and the World Wide Web to stimulate a new and higher
order of historical tourism on the Great Plains–a subject I’d be happy to take
up in discussion, if anyone is interested.
In the chronicles of the
Great Plains we like to have neat points of demarcation in matters large and
small. We date the implementation of soil
conservation from the Dust Bowl, we date the advent of Colorado potato beetle
in the Missouri River valley from the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush. These turning points make good stories, but
they don’t always make for credible history.
One of the most-cited turning
points in the history of the plains is the blue winter, the hard winter of
1886-87. The story goes like this:
Through the initiative of the great Texas outfits, and with the great influx of
eastern and foreign capital during the 1870s and 1880s, the range cattle
industry expanded to every corner of the Great Plains grasslands during the
late 1870s and early 1880s. It not only
expanded, it also overstocked the range, so that cattle went into the winter in
poor condition. Then came the
blizzards, and the chinooks that only covered the grass with an impenetrable
glaze, and after that more blizzards, and after that the buzzards, and finally
Charlie Russell painting the Last of Ten Thousand. The big Texas outfits were broken by the hard winter and abandoned
the range to smaller, independent ranchers determined to operate in more sober
and responsible style–making hay, fencing the range, and bringing in Hereford
bulls. Progress, darn it, flowed from
disaster.
A good story, but
investigating the situation between Belle Fourche and Dickinson for this
project, I decided it just didn’t apply.
In the first place, the big outfits were not wiped out by the hard
winter. They took heavy losses, but
nowhere near the 50 percent reported by contemporary newspapers and some later
historians. More to the point, as the
Hamiltons enter the story of ranching in the region in 1890, the big
outfits–the E6, the Turkey Track, and others–are still on the scene. They haven’t been wiped out. They are, however, suffering severely from
the long-term effects of a depressed cattle market. The new, small ranchers just slip in alongside them. And they do make hay, fence, and
up-breed–which explains why Virginia Bill had to shoot that obstreperous scrub
bull, Old Diamond.
This is a transitional
generation of ranchers deserving of more study. Ranching communities grouped ordered by physical features, such
as Virginia Bill describes in the Cave Hills, would be good units for such
study. There’s a thesis out there.
[Here inserted a selection of
slides]
In 1893 Virginia Bill
Hamilton brought his West Virginia bride, Nancy Ellen Showalter Hamilton, to
the ranch in the Cave Hills. This
involved a journey by wagon up the Old Dickinson Freight road, past all the
familiar landmarks. Coming north, he
says, they stopped on the divide between the North Fork of the Moreau River and
Clark’s Fork of the Grand. This was a
planned stop. From this point, Virginia
Bill knew, the South Cave Hills, site of the ranch homestead, would be first
visible; moreover, the vista would be compelling, and thus impressive to his
bride. Following his account, studying
the topographical maps, and going over the ground myself, I think I located the
place where they paused that day. Here
is what I wrote about the spot.
A
century later this is still a sublime vista.
Over my left shoulder, to the southwest, rise the East Short Pine Hills,
pale sandstone‑faced, dark pine‑topped. Before me is a broad
prairie, with the Cave Hills visible some 25 miles north. The only signs of
human life on the prairie are one ranch headquarters, a few Black Angus cattle,
and here and there a windmill. To the east and west, along the face of the
divide, protrude many small, bare, steep clay buttes the color of ruddy chalk.
Over my right shoulder comes a south wind perfumed with sage and sweet clover.
Out of the clover some thirty yards away spring two pronghorn, running off
across the prairie in the direction of the Cave Hills. No wonder Virginia Bill loved the West.
Now I’ll read you an excerpt
from a letter by Virginia Bill to his son Harold in 1933, after moving back
east to Missouri and raising his family there:
“Had it not been to give you children a first class education, I would
never have left Dakota.”
It is not explicitly stated
but is nevertheless clear how the decision was made that the Hamiltons should
leave South Dakota, buy a farm in Missouri, and raise their children
there. Now I know that I am treading
close to gender stereotypes here, but darn it, gender matters, and I think the
best scholarship in women’s history on the plains will bear me out on this.
Men who came to the farming
and ranching frontier did so because it was different from back east. Virginia Bill Hamilton exulted in “the ways
and habits of the West.” He shot the
blacktail, ran the wolf, fenced the range, and drove his herds into Dickinson
or Belle Fourche the master of all before him.
On the other hand women such
as Nancy Ellen Hamilton, who had four children, performed mainly the same
domestic duties as they did back east, only under far less advantageous
conditions–conveniences sparse, neighbors distant, doctors unavailable, schools
rudimentary. The same adventuresome
conditions that stirred men’s blood posed untold dangers to children, adding
anxiety to hardship in women’s lives.
I am not saying that women do
not feel the romance of the landscape–I know they do, today, because they tell
me so. I am saying that a century ago,
it would have been a rare woman indeed who could subsume the hardship and
anxiety and fully share in the sort of exultation that Virginia Bill records in
his autobiography.
[Concluded with song, “Ways
and Habits of the West”]