Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
look at them and not imagine what a strange and scary death it must have been for the sol-
diers who dropped there, and it left me yet again in a reflective frame of mind as I walked
back down the hill to the car and returned to the endless American highway.
I drove to Buffalo, Wyoming, through a landscape of mossy brown hills. Montana is
enormously vast and empty. It is even bigger and emptier than Nevada, largely because
therearenopopulationcenterstospeakof.Helena,thestatecapital,hasapopulationofjust
24,000. In the whole state there are fewer than 800,000 people-this in an area of slightly
morethan147,000squaremiles.Yetithasakindofhauntingbeautywithitsendlessempty
plainsandtoweringskies.Montanaiscalled theBigSkycountry,anditreallyistrue.Ihad
always thought of the sky as something fixed and invariable, but here it seemed to have
grown by a factor of at least ten. The Chevette was a tiny particle beneath a colossal white
dome. Everything was dwarfed by that stupendous sky.
The highway led through a big Crow Indian reservation, but Isaw nosign ofIndians either
on the road or off it. Beyond Lodge Grass and Wyola I passed back into Wyoming. The
landscape stayed the same, though here there were more signs of ranching, and the map
once again filled up with diverting names: Spotted Horse, Recluse, Crazy Woman Creek,
Thunder Basin.
I drove into Buffalo. In 1892 it was the scene of the famous Johnson County War, the in-
cident that inspired the movie Heavens Gate, though in fact the term war is a gross over-
exaggera tion of events. All that happened was that the local ranchers, in the guise of the
Wyoming Stock Growers' Association, hired a bunch of thugs to come to Johnson County
and rough up some of the homesteaders who had recently, and quite legally, begun moving
in. When the thugs killed a man, the homesteaders rose up and chased them to a ranch out-
sidetown,wheretheylaidsiegeuntilthecavalryrodeinandgavethehumbledbulliessafe
passage out of town. And that was it: just one man killed and hardly any shots fired. That
was the way the West really was, by and large. It was just farmers. That's all.
I reached Buffalo a little after four in the afternoon. The town has a museum dedicated to
the Johnson County War, which I was hoping to see, but I discovered when I got there that
itisonlyopenfromJunetoSeptember.Idrovearoundthebusinessdistrict,toyingwiththe
idea of stopping for the night, but it was such a dumpy little town that I decided to press
on to Gillette, seventy miles down the road. Gillette was even worse. I drove around it for
a few minutes, but I couldn't face the prospect of spending a Saturday night there, so I de-
cided to press on once again.
