What You See in Clear Water: Indians, Whites, and a Battle Over Water in the American West - Couverture souple

O'Gara, Geoffrey

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0679735828 ISBN 13 : 9780679735823

Editeur : Vintage, 2002

A propos du livre

Extrait :

from CHAPTER 1
Wind River Canyon

A century ago, when a journey from the Union Pacific depot in Rawlins, Wyoming, to the Shoshone Indian Reservation meant 150 miles in a hard saddle across windy tablelands set with waist-high sagebrush, Indian Inspector James McLaughlin trekked to Wind River Canyon. On the long trip north, he rarely looked up at the tall skidding clouds, or down at the sudden draws that dropped through the floor of the plains. It was spring, but barely spring, and scalloped ridges of snow still snugged against the lee sides of the hills. The creeks were mostly still dry, deep cracks blistering across the dun-colored plain. The ground was as cold as a corpse, but in places where the sun could soften it, gnarls of dust rose behind the horses. Then the clouds would collide in the huge sky, and the whitened bone of parched land would be suddenly drenched. Bentonite in the soil would turn it to a paste that coated the wheels until they looked like gray balloons, so heavy and slippery that the horses couldn't pull. McLaughlin would wait it out patiently. He was a twenty-five-year veteran of the Indian Service, and he'd made trips like this before into harsh corners of the plains that had been left to the Indians. The government recognized his knack for parleying with tribes, and it sent him all over the West. With experience and the trust he felt he'd earned among the Indians, he found these negotiations were not difficult; it was getting there that was hard.
The high desert McLaughlin crossed was the bottom of an evaporated ocean that once thinly covered the belly of the continent. Uplifted and emptied, the ocean bottom was turned back like a sheet and smoothed by wind. Along McLaughlin's route were hogbacks of red sandstone and scatterings of jade on the ground, but only an avid rockhound would want to linger. Now and then spikes of granite poked through, including a pinkish hump like Split Rock, a landmark westward immigrants still looked for in McLaughlin's time. West of the Rawlins uplift, the creeks drained into a desert bowl with no outlet--the Great Divide Basin, where the Continental Divide forks into west and east branches.

At night, if the wind wasn't whistling, the coyotes howled; now and then, as the party headed north, they found a fire ring and grass munched down by pack animals. But there were more signs of death than life: the curled ribs of an antelope carcass, a collapsed homestead cabin with a fallen wooden cross over a child's grave. An experienced traveler accepted the monotony, hardened himself to the artifacts of past suffering, and prepared for the unfriendliest weather. McLaughlin kept his gaze low and forward. This kind of open vista, this nakedness, had driven people mad.
Several days into the trip, the plateau suddenly dropped away. They couldn't see the escarpment as they approached it, because the world had been flat for miles, but by then they had spotted the white peaks of the mountains rising above the long curve of horizon and knew the ordeal would end soon. They dropped off Beaver Rim and the world began to change.

The desolate prelude made the natural beauty of the Wind River all the more stirring. The valley is a small concavity of warm, still air and braided river bottom that would seem to have no place in the midst of the high desert. The plains form a huge moat to the east and south--much more intimidating distances in McLaughlin's time than now--and on the other two sides rise knifelike peaks that only a fool, or an explorer like John Frémont, would scale. The basin was not without its own scabby draws and sagebrush snags, but the natural ramparts provided a sense of security missing on the trip north. The travelers were relieved, though no one said so. Thickly forested lake-dotted foothills sloped up to the west, and a weave of rippling water lined by cottonwoods etched the broad valley below.

McLaughlin had been the agent at Standing Rock in the Dakotas, a much bleaker post, where the Sioux leader Sitting Bull had been killed during McLaughlin's tenure. Wind River, with its generous portions of lakes and timber and arable land, was unusually rich in resources for a reservation. He looked into the steep cut where the Wind River plunged through the Owl Creek Mountains and was particularly impressed. "It is really such a grand work of nature that I believe, when the transportation problem has been solved in that country, it will rival the Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canon [sic] of the Colorado as an attraction for lovers of scenic grandeur."
McLaughlin's mission to Wind River in 1896 did not directly concern the canyon, but an area just downstream. He was meeting with leaders of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes to discuss an enormous hot spring that flowed from a red sandstone outcrop over a white travertine shelf into the Bighorn River just north of the canyon. McLaughlin, who had been called "White Hair" by the Sioux during his years in South Dakota, came to negotiate the sale of the hot spring. Among the largest in the world, it poured out nearly 19 million gallons of scalding water daily, and frontier entrepreneurs were diverting it in crude ditches to tent-walled spas with names like the Hotel de Sagebrush. They had visions of a Saratoga-like health resort. First, though, there was
the problem of land title: the spring and the surrounding lands belonged to the tribes.

McLaughlin considered himself sympathetic to Indians--his wife was part Santee Sioux--but he shared the prevalent view that white dominance of Indians was "natural law." His role in dismantling the Sioux reservation had made him no allies among Sitting Bull's followers, but he titled his memoirs My Friend, the Indian, and in them he sounded sympathetic indeed. "The Indian," he wrote, "has been made the object of speculative persecution by every white man who felt that he needed what the Indian possessed." Perhaps he touted the beauty and tourism potential of the canyon--which would remain in Indian hands--to distract attention from his role in relieving the tribes of the hot springs. The springs never became a western Saratoga, but today they are piped through commercial pools and resort motels in a state park.

Nowadays you will rarely see an Indian face at the hot springs, but once a year Native Americans turn out in force, and in costume, for a pageant called the Gift of the Waters. While local farm girls in moccasins and greasepaint sing praises to the hot spring, the legendary Shoshone chief Washakie raises his arms in welcome to the tourists and reads from a script: "I Washakie freely give to the Great White Father these waters beloved of my people that all may receive the great blessing of bodily health in the bathing. Red man or white, the difference lies only in outward appearance, our father knoweth his children by their hearts, and knowing them, loves them. . . . May we meet with no line a boundary, save that of mountains majestic and rivers of pure flowing water, receiving a kind benediction of love from the One Dama Upa."

The old chief is played by Starr Weed, a white-haired Shoshone dressed in a feathered headdress and buckskin decorated with colorful beading and quillwork; he smiles fixedly at the camera-wielding tourists, who are dressed in Ray-Bans and Bulls T-shirts and sun block. The script is, well, pageantlike, and Weed recites his lines stiffly but affably, stumbling now and then in the purple rhetoric, squinting at the paper before him. The crowd doesn't seem to mind, or pay much attention to what Weed says: they've come more for the dancing and costume. When it's over, they turn away and head for the pool or the camper, talking about which resort has the better water slides or where they'll rendezvous for dinner.
Weed had some pageant cash in his pocket and a smile on his face when we shook hands beside the hot spring. "The Shoshone came here on a hunt, from way over on the other side," he said with a gesture west, "and they saw something up there." He pointed to a ledge of tan sandstone that forms a bed-sized platform in the rock above the green-bottomed pool where the water emerges. Weed speaks slowly and gestures with his hands, smiling always. The hot springs in this basin were homes to monstrous serpents, and the Shoshone were warned by the Nimimbe--an elusive race of dwarfish mountain people--to respect them or suffer consequences. This is not mentioned in the pageant script, but an elder like Weed knows all about it. "That's where the lizard was, bigger than a man, and when the people came, he rolled off the ledge and plunged down into the spring. Scared them bad. The old people tell me that."

Weed is a descendant of Chief Washakie, the warrior who according to some stories cut the heart out of a Crow chief in a fight over which tribe would control the hunting grounds of the Wind River Valley. Weed was a latter-day warrior himself, spending months in a German prison camp during World War II; he has served on the Shoshone ruling council, and is a rancher who trains horses and riders for bareback races at Indian rodeos. He could have told the hot springs story more easily, and surely differently, in Shoshone or sign language.
Nearly a century after McLaughlin admired the canyon upstream from the hot springs, few tourists find their way to the steep gorge where the Wind River drops through the Owl Creeks. They pass through on a highway cut into the cliffs along the river, usually on their way to Yellowstone National Park. That trip is often broken up by a stop in Thermopolis, where the hot spring is now harnessed for water slides and spas, owned by non-Indians. At the top of the canyon is a dam built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, so the flows through the canyon fluctuate less than they did in McLaughlin's time. Fishermen may have heard that there are big trout in the canyon's pools--big, but hard to catch--and some stop to cast a line, though others find it too much trouble to buy a reservation fishing license on top of their Wyoming permits. Kayakers often ask if they can run the canyon's rapids, but are refused by the tribes (a few have run them anyway). At the bottom of the canyon, where the walls drop away and the river smooths out, is a site called Wedding of the Waters, where the Wind River becomes the Bighorn River, for reasons no one can remember.

Recently, though, Darren Calhoun has begun taking adventurous visitors on whitewater raft trips down the canyon. In an eddy near the top of the canyon, not far below Boysen Reservoir, he stands thigh-deep in the water and steadies a rubber raft loaded with me and a group from Iowa. Heavyset and long-haired, Calhoun is an Eastern Shoshone whose ancestors were present at the McLaughlin negotiations. He and his college roommate spent a few fun years in Jackson Hole after graduation, and at one point he took his father, Pete Calhoun, on a raft trip down the Snake River. Calhoun fils and père decided to approach the tribes about setting up an Indian-run business in the canyon. Calhoun spends most of the year in graduate school in Montana, while Pete ranches on the upper reaches of the Wind River--and some of the water passing through the canyon today might first have crossed his fields, a hundred miles away.
In June, the river is swollen with snowmelt from the mountains in the west, raising some of the rapids close to a difficult, Class V rating. Calhoun asks the passengers in the raft if any have whitewater experience. Where the river is not whipped into foam, it is pale brown, partly from eroding sandstone far upstream and partly from irrigation runoff that carries soil from the fields into the river. Patches of moss, torn from hot springs rising in the streambed, float in the water. The river has good-sized trout, but they're invisible this time of year.

Darren normally has a dry sense of humor--as he backs his trailer full of rafts toward the river, he cackles a little at his own erratic steering and mutters "back-paddle!"--but not once he's in the water. He was affected deeply when a rafter died after a boat overturned earlier in the summer, though the cause of death was a heart attack, not a boatman's mistake. He went to a traditional Shoshone sweat afterward, and as the cedar fumes and steam filled the lodge he felt a panicky impulse to flee, imagining in the darkness that everyone was looking at him, the way tearful people looked up at him on the riverbank after the man didn't respond to CPR.

Growing up on his father's ranch along the Upper Wind, Darren rode horses from boyhood. These were not trail-plodding plugs but working horses, smart and agile. A boy sitting atop a powerful animal would not be there long if he was inattentive or cruel. Now, pushing off from the riverbank, he encouraged his guests in the canyon to approach the river the way he had a horse--with respect. "You can't just yahoo down this river," he said, "when the water is this high"--more than 4,000 cubic feet per second, pushing up standing waves taller than a man. With an edge in his voice to keep their attention, he explained how to pull a passenger back on board if someone took an unscheduled "swim." He was much more earnest than any stewardess as he gave the rafting equivalent of make-sure-your-seat-belts-are-securely-fastened. But as he listened to the unconcerned giggles from the front of the boat, he wondered if his clients these days came from a world so conditioned by the artificial thrills of amusement parks that a truly wild river was inconceivable.

To date, no amusement park has been able to create this sort of geological sculpture: a steep-walled incision into dark metamorphic rock laced by veins of pink and white quartz, with towering sandstone walls looming hundreds of feet above. Below, tapering down to the river, gentler talus slopes are anchored by grasses and juniper. A sparse fringe of conifers spikes the canyon rim, atop a vertical wall where only bighorn sheep can find footing. The stratigraphy of rock visible in the walls of the canyon is not horizontal but tilts downward south to north more steeply than the grade of the canyon itself, creating a dizzying sensation of going up when you travel down the canyon, and vice versa. In the wall are dips and shadows like the features of a face, where boulders have broken loose and tumbled down to the river. Some of those rocks, as big as small houses, now clog the riverbed and force the water to take odd twists and turns.

The jumble of colors and formations is typical of Rocky Mountain geology, where thrusting and faulting tilt the strata laid down in ancient seas and ridges. It's not unusual for pre-Cambrian rock to be found folded over Flathead sandstone two billion years younger, or to find ocean-bed fossils on a peak of igneous basalt.

The mountains the canyon cuts through are actually an older range than the towering peaks along the Continental Divide to the west. The Owl Creeks were buried beneath a huge load of sediments that eroded rapidly from the younger and taller Rocky Mountain ranges that thrust up 100 million years ago. For millions of years they lay in a tomb of silt. Then the region as a whole lifted again, and the streams pouring off the Rockies got faster, cut deeper. Eventually, the Wind River resurrected the Owl Creeks, and cut its own difficult route north through this canyon.
The group now pushing off from the banks near the top of the canyon knows little of this, and they get only snippets of more recent history from their hosts. Indian bands--Crow, Sioux, Arapaho, Shoshone--used to cross the Owl Creeks in both directions on hunting expeditions, and many of the toughest rapids in the canyon have been named after leaders of the tribes that eventually settled here. " 'Black Coa...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

For nearly a century, the Indians on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming have been battling their white farmer neighbors over the rights to the Wind River. What You See in Clear Water tells the story of this epic struggle, shedding light on the ongoing conflict over water rights in the American West, one of the most divisive and essential issues in America today.

While lawyers argued this landmark case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Geoffrey O’Gara walked the banks of the river with the farmers, ranchers, biologists, and tribal elders who knew it intimately. Reading his account, we come to know the impoverished Shoshone and Arapaho tribes living on the Wind River Reservation, who believe that by treaty they control the water within the reservation. We also meet the farmers who have struggled for decades to scratch a living from the arid soil, and who want to divert the river water to irrigate their lands. O’Gara’s empathetic portrayal of life in the West today, the historical texture he brings to the land and its inhabitants, and the common humanity he finds between hostile neighbors on opposite sides of the river make What You See in Clear Water an unusually rich and rewarding book.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Vintage
• Date d'édition: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0679735828
• ISBN 13: 9780679735823
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 304