Exploring The Real Old West

By Gavin Scott

Signs of America's Old West start as far east as Adair, Iowa, where an old railroad wheel marks the spot on which Jesse James held up his first moving train in 1873. Sweeping along the interstate at a sedate 65 m.p.h., a westward-bound traveler may then dally at Omaha's splendidly revitalized Old Market, which evokes gold seekers and prairie pioneers heading out aboard the Union Pacific railway circa 1865. But by the time you reach Al's Oasis at Oacoma, S. Dak., on a bluff over the glistening Missouri River, all doubt vanishes as quickly as adherence to the speed limit on I-90. The proud sign at Al's, a pit stop featuring buffalo burgers and passable 5 cents coffee, unabashedly announces WHERE THE WEST BEGINS.

The legendary names and places pepper the maps of South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana, three Old West states currently celebrating 100 years of statehood. Trails are named the Lewis and Clark, the Bozeman, the Cheyenne- Deadwood; names like Custer, Big Horn and Virginia City beckon the eye. Undaunted by the midsummer heat, the states have mounted an extravagant array of rodeos, cattle drives, river regattas and folk fests that will culminate in November. Enthusiastic tourism officials predict that the number of out-of- state license plates on the roads will top last year's by as much as 10%. Roadside wax museums, water slides and reptile farms abound. Yet with some advance mapwork, visitors can reach well beyond familiar kitsch to centennial exhibits that speak directly to the westward movement and the nation's astonishingly recent past.

Two wagon trains are constantly on the move in South Dakota, tracing a cross-country odyssey that will take them about 2,500 miles before they hook up at the state fair at Huron in late August. Manned by eager volunteers who drop in and out as their stamina and patience dictate (no charge, all welcome), the trains cover up to 24 miles between overnight camps, where they circle in classic fashion. Some vehicles are older than the state itself. Some come from as far afield as Texas and Pennsylvania. When the trains pull out each morning, cries of "Wagons ho!" fill the air. "There's no better way to see the scenery than looking between a horse's ears," says Bud Livermore, 67, a retired South Dakota rancher who scouted the route for the western wagon train.

One of the most noticeable of the leathery wagoners is Dave Bald Eagle, 70, a Northern Cheyenne and rancher who has clopped along with the 32-vehicle western train for 40 days. Bald Eagle, who intends to see the train out to the finish, dons his ceremonial regalia when the wagons enter some small towns. He dismisses the irony of a Native American traveling in a nostalgic procession of white folk, who were once fearful of Indian attack. "It's my way of letting the Indian people know it's best to cope with the modern world, to get busy, to do something," he says.

Such serendipity is not hard to come by once you venture beyond the expressways. Two miles south of the Badlands is a bleak crossroads called Interior (pop. 70), the site of LaVonne Green's seven-table WoodenKnife Drive- Inn. A South Dakota guidebook last year said Europeans recommend the place ) to their friends, especially for the Indian tacos, but Green, whose daughter is married to a Sioux, professes puzzlement at the transatlantic accolade. She is also mysterious about her secret fry-bread recipe, which includes the root vegetable tinpsila. But on only two days in the past ten years has no one come to call at the WoodenKnife. "Some local people have a prejudice against Indian food," she notes dryly, standing against the spectacular Badlands moonscape that she describes as "my million-dollar view." She adds, "Not everybody, of course. But they think Indian food has puppies in it or something."

Some 800 miles to the west, at Montana's Fort Missoula, is a premier exhibit of photographs and artifacts from life in the thriving frontier city exactly a century ago. Established in 1877, the outpost became known as "Fort Fizzle" because Indians fleeing from Idaho to Canada merely detoured around the fortification. The exhibit includes furniture, clothing, tools, weaponry and a reproduction of a 41-star American flag that was never mass-produced. Reason: more states were already slated for admission the next year. A banquet menu indicates that the framers of the state constitution dined on the likes of green-turtle soup and broiled quail.

All politics was local politics. A Missoula newspaper gave second billing to statehood, emphasizing instead the selection of the first U.S. Senators. "It was a surprise to us to learn how modern Missoula was," says museum director Wes Hardin. "The image of a wild and woolly Montana was not true. There were flush toilets, electricity and a horse-drawn streetcar system." One of the city's living relics is the Oxford, a rough-hewn downtown saloon known simply as "the Ox," whose claimed lineage variously dates back as far as 1883. Draft beer comes for 50 cents a pop; a woman barks off keno numbers over a loudspeaker. Gnarled poker devotees alternate five-card stud with games like Hold 'Em and Crazy Pineapple. Warns a stern sign: EACH PLAYER IS RESPONSIBLE FOR PROTECTING HIS OWN HAND.

Another revealing glimpse into Montana's vivid past is on display at the glorious Deer Lodge Valley in the northern Rockies, ten miles west of the continental divide. The Grant-Kohrs Ranch, started by Canadian fur trader Johnny Grant in 1862, became the center of open-range cattle operations owned by German immigrant Conrad Kohrs. The ranch ran herds on more than 10 million acres in four states and Alberta, an area nearly the size of Switzerland. "Grant was the last mountain man, and Kohrs the first cattle baron," says Lyndel Meikle, a park ranger who has spent twelve years studying the National Historic Site. When the Park Service took over in 1972, the 23-room ranch house was festooned with Victorian trappings and family photographs, just as it had been almost a century before. It still is. So far, curators have cataloged 11,000 items, including a wagon Kohrs used to take his family on a 7 1/2-week sojourn to Yellowstone.

Another centennial find is the reconstructed Fort Union Trading Post, built in 1829, near the confluence of the strategic Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in the northwest corner of North Dakota. Fort Union served as a linchpin in John Jacob Astor's lucrative beaver-fur and buffalo trade with the Assiniboin, Crow and Blackfeet Indians. In its halcyon days, which lasted a quarter- century, the post dominated the upper Missouri from behind an elegant, whitewashed palisade. Annual steamboats brought artists and ethnologists. The bourgeois, or superintendent, maintained a splendid table, and French wine flowed in an imposing residence topped with a bell tower. With its bastions of stone and 63-ft. flagpole aflutter with Old Glory, Fort Union conveyed a flashy, mercantile style and substance until smallpox twice struck the Indians and homesteaders encroached on their lands, eclipsing the trade. By 1866 the once proud post had lapsed into disrepair, and the U.S. Army dismantled it. Five years ago, a local citizens' group spearheaded reconstruction of the flagpole. Then for three summers, a squad of 45 archaeologists working for the Park Service set about excavating artifacts. Under a $4 million federal appropriation, the bourgeois house and palisade were meticulously rebuilt. "It's a shining example of a government agency and the private sector working together," says Edward Hagan, a retired physician from nearby Williston who heads the private group that has raised $500,000 of its own for the project. "Now we have an authentic treasure to show off."

Spontaneity is not confined to such ambitious projects. Scattered across the plains every summer weekend are powwow reunions dedicated to preserving Indian language and folkways. A score of modest vans and trailers descend on the meeting points. Tepees dot the periphery. Over bowls of venison soup and yellow hominy, knots of Indians chew over native rights and tribal ritual. At Flandreau, S. Dak., Isanti Sioux Bill Gilbert, 32, a cook at an Indian school, prepares to dance in ceremonial gear of eagle feathers and porcupine quills. "It brings people together and gives a chance to get away from rush, rush, rush," he sighs. "All you do is get off on the side roads. And then people will ask, 'What took you so long to get here?' "