Free Great Plains by Ian Frazier Page B

slaughtered, they lay so thick on the ground that you could walk for miles on the bodies. After time passed, only the bones were left, and the railroads took those, too. Hundreds of trainloads were shipped from places like Dodge City, Kansas, and Miles City, Montana, to factories in the East, where the bones were used to make fertilizer and china. Ranchers who had not been upset to see dead buffalo everywhere were sickened by what the winter of ’86 did to their cattle. Some gave up ranching entirely; some could never own a cow again. Those who stayed in business reduced their herd to numbers which they could more easily feed and take care of year round. The winter of ’86 was the end of all but a few of the giant investor-owned ranches. It was also the end of people coming to the Great Plains in any numbers from far away just for the sake of adventure or fun.

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    I dropped Jim Yellow Earring off in the town of Bullhead, South Dakota. He asked me if I had a couple bucks I could lend him. I gave him a five. He started to ask for more, and I told him to look at the bill. He said, “ Oh! You done better than I thought!” A station wagon loaded down to the road with Indians came by. The driver, a woman with a face so broad it seemed to fill the whole side window, gave me a dark look. Jim Yellow Earring asked me where I was going next. I told him Strasburg, North Dakota, the birthplace of bandleader Lawrence Welk. He said, “Goddam! All right!” I asked him if he knew that Lawrence Welk was from Strasburg. He said everybody knew that. He said Lawrence Welk was one of the greatest people ever to come from around there.
    I drove on for a while and then pulled off the road and slept in my van. The next morning was Sunday. In the cafe where I had breakfast, everybody was still dressed up for church. I heard a young waitress say to an older one, “I think I’m really gonna like these new hours I’ve got.” I drove on through fields with nobody working in them. Gusts of wind crossed the wheat like messages across a Fan-O-Gram. The leaves of the cottonwoods along the road were dark green, or khaki with dust. I turned off at the town of Hague, North Dakota. It had a Catholic church breathing cool church smell through its open doors, a red firehouse, a grocery store, a grain elevator, a big Behlen Quonset hut near the railroad tracks, a Knights of Columbus hall, a bar called Lit’l Gillys, a Coke machine on the sidewalk, one-story houses with octagon clotheslines and eight or ten rows of corn in the back yards, a lawn sprinkler shaped like a little tractor in one front yard, a few cars angle-parked on the main street, and three blond kids bouncing on a mattress in the back of a pickup truck outside the cafe.
    Hard to believe that one night more than sixty years ago, during a dance that had turned rowdy, someone hit Lawrence Welk over the head with a brick in Hague, North Dakota.
    Strasburg, North Dakota, is fourteen miles away. Although both are small towns, everything about Strasburg seems to be one size bigger. Strasburg could be Hague’s older brother. Like a number of benign towns on the northern plains, Strasburg has a public campground with a restroom and a free shower. I used it and shaved and changed my shirt. Then I found a shady place to park on Main Street and watched people walking by. Strasburg, a town of 623, also has a municipal swimming pool. Kids in bathing suits were walking along the sidewalk in that shivery way you walk after getting out of a swimming pool. Kids on their way to the pool clutched coins in one hand. Kids coming back left wet footprints on the sidewalk. A girl going said to a boy coming back, “Mom wants you home right now.” In the distance were kids’ swimming-pool shrieks, and the clink of somebody throwing horseshoes, and the Rolling Stones singing “Faraway Eyes” from speakers set out on a lawn.
    Lawrence Welk’s family did not