Flying West to Abandon the West

We took off from an abandoned airstrip at night. If you don’t immediately see why that might be harrowing, I’ll spell it out: abandoned runways don’t have working lights. I had to point my truck’s headbeams down the tarmac to show our plane where to land in the first place, but that wouldn’t work for our takeoff. I would have had to leave the truck sitting in the open while I flew away, headlights shining.

There was a gibbous moon, so we were hardly blind. Still, we were in a four-seater prop plane, meaning that from the back seat I knew exactly what the pilot could and couldn’t see, and it was terrifying to speed down that gray runway with its edges blurring into the dirt. I kept imagining we were off line, that any second one wheel or the other would fall from the pavement, dig into the sand, and crash the plane’s nose straight into the ground.

Thirty seconds later, though, as we rose into the air, I looked down and saw that the runway was much wider than our dinky plane. There had been almost no risk we’d slip off.

Everything went smoothly for about the next ten minutes, until I noticed the smell. That reporter and I have been toting around a cat for days, for reasons I won’t go into now. Getting in the plane the engine noise had sent it into a thrashing, hissing freakout, and just to control it I’d had to roll it inside my coat with just its head poking out. The drop in pressure from our climb must have cut its last flimsy thread of cat-sanity, because it peed all over itself and my jacket.

We had to spend almost the full two-hour flight in that reek.

I’d been to Las Vegas once before, as a kid. My family and I had also landed at night, under a full moon—though the moon didn’t make much difference then. The whole valley was like a net of lights. Nowadays big patches of the net are missing. The Strip with all its lights off looked like a pile of gray plastic blocks.

We got decent rooms downtown at the Union Plaza, a ratty hotel at the head of Fremont Street. Hotels generally frown on cats, so we snuck ours and its litter box upstairs zipped in a gym bag. I felt a little bad for the animal after its plane trauma but not terrible—after all, it had peed on my clothes. I locked it in my bathroom with litter, water, and food, hung the Do Not Disturb sign outside the room, and took my jacket down to the street to find a dry cleaner.

Right away I started seeing incognito Possemen. If you’ve lived in the West awhile you learn to spot one who’s just shaved, washed, and changed his clothes for the first time in years, and come down from the hills to do a spot of business in the civilian world. He looks uncomfortable in his skin and walks carefully enough to make you wonder where the gun is hidden. Usually, though, you don’t see more than one or maybe two at a time.

But I have to admit that my first reaction wasn’t curiosity about why they were all there, let alone to try and find out. I’ll have to develop that instinct for my new job—soon I’ll be leaving this blog, and the West, for an introductory gig at an East Coast newspaper. No, my first reaction was shame. I was ashamed that I’m betraying the West by leaving, and I was sure they could tell. I felt like they even had the right to judge me.

Ridiculous, I know, since you—my readers—and I have done more good than Posses ever have by organizing, writing letters, attending public hearings, marching. The unglamorous everyday work of civil activism. My rational mind knows perfectly well that I’m every bit the Westerner they are and more, but reason doesn’t always rule.

I found a cleaner for my coat and headed back to the hotel. The casinos all had the air conditioners turned off and their doors open to the street. In one of these places I saw an old Posseman having a drink alone at a semicircular bar just inside. The irrational guilt I’ve just been describing pushed me toward him. I went in and sat down, offered him a cigarette, and we chatted. I think he was suspicious of me at first, but it was after midnight and he was pretty drunk; he couldn’t hold onto his suspicion for long because he couldn’t hold any thought for long. Finally I confessed to him that I planned to go East.

“I can’t blame you,” he said. “Any sane man would.”

Stupid as it sounds, that actually made me feel a little bit absolved.

***************

I feel like I should say something profound about all this. Some kind of formal goodbye nicely tied up with a Nevadan symbol, since that’s where I am now. That’d be the blog-post form. Unfortunately, Nevada’s a bad place to go looking for symbols. It’s a big empty space that the rest of the country appropriated in the 20^th century for its vices and nuclear waste.

I’ll probably get angry comments now from Nevadans. Bring ‘em on. Look at the facts: barely anything happened here worth mentioning until at least the 1940s. There was a silver boom in the 1860s and another in the 1910s, but even those “booms” were relative, leaving behind ghost towns and little else. At the height of the Teens rush, fewer people lived in Nevada than any other Western state including lonely Wyoming, and most of those states were founded considerably later.

One of the few historical claims Nevada does make is that the last shot of the Indian “Wars” was fired here in 1911. Except it’s not true. The actual last firefight was in 1918, just inside the Mexico-Arizona border, between the 10^th U.S. Cavalry and a group of Yaqui Indians who mistook the Americans for the Mexicans they meant to shoot at. Only one Yaqui and no U.S. soldiers died.

The Indians involved in the Nevada story were about fifteen members of a Shoshone family who had had lost their reservation homestead in southeastern Idaho to settlers: a patriarch named Mike Daggett, his two adult sons, their wives, and various grandchildren ranging down from teens to babies. They’d wandered across northern Nevada for twenty years trying to live off the desert and sometimes doing labor on ranches.

During the very cold winter of 1911 the Daggetts roped and slaughtered some cows that didn’t belong to them. A short while later, four Basque shepherds stumbled onto their campsite in Little High Rock Canyon (about 120 miles north of Reno and not far from where the Burning Man Festival used to be held). The family thought the men were after them because of the cattle theft, so Mike and his two sons killed the Basques and the whole family ran away.

Two weeks later a posse caught up to them and shot all but four: one of the women and three young children. The bodies went into a common grave. (Though they don’t still lie there. Somehow the bones entered the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and in 1994 they were shipped to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Fort Hall, Idaho for proper burial. The spot where the Daggetts died is now part of a major gold mine’s mineral dump.)

I suppose this story is emblematic of the West in at least one way. Looked at sympathetically, the Daggetts were victims along with the rest of their tribe, forced onto a reservation and then defrauded of even that corner of land. They robbed because they were starving, killed because they were desperate, and when the posse caught them tried to defend themselves with a black-powder rifle, a couple of forty-year-old pistols, and spears. On the other hand Mike Daggett and his two sons were unquestionably murderers, no matter how poorly armed they were. Members of the posse even later claimed to have killed most of the family in self-defense. They said the women and children picked up the men’s weapons when they fell and tried to keep fighting. I’ll leave it to you to decipher how credible that is, but bias it by recalling two things. First, the fact that women seem quite often to fight alongside their menfolk in the accounts of Army officers who participated in indiscriminate butchery. For example this description of an 1865 massacre of Arapahos:

I was in the village in the midst of a hand-to-hand fight with warriors and their squaws, for many of the female portion of this band did as brave fighting as their savage lords. Unfortunately for the women and children, our men had no time to direct their aim … squaws and children, as well as warriors, fell among the dead and wounded.

Second, the words of Colonel John Chivington in 1864, right before the massacre at Sand Creek I described recently: “Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”

Our position as Westerners now is a little like the Daggetts’, if less desperate. Collectively we’re in the right. We’re being oppressed on our home soil. But individually there’s no way to justify Posse murders or rapes. (Apart from physical cowardice, that’s the main reason I never joined a Posse.) We wanted the Indians’ land and some of them recognized that fact well enough to fight back, often in ways the Feds would probably call terrorist now and that we Western immigrants called the equivalent then. Today the Feds want our water, and some of us see what that means well enough to fight, using methods fairly called savage.

Is it morally pure for Westerners to hoard what we stole from Indians not so long ago? Of course not. Even our water we often took at their expense.

But Montana is my home and Montanans are my people—and by extension the West is my home and Westerners are my people. What other side could I choose? The Feds? They’re no better than us. In fact they’re just as guilty of all the old evils.