In My Time - Dick Cheney [11]
When we first arrived in Casper in 1954, I read a lot about World War II. I checked Guadalcanal Diary and Those Devils in Baggy Pants out of the Carnegie Library, a redbrick building with a white dome on Second Street. I didn’t know anybody yet, so I was a regular patron.
Our house was the last one on the east side of town, and Bob and I loved to go out on the prairie. To a casual observer the landscape might have seemed barren and boring, but my brother and I, out there for hours, knew its different grasses, the sagebrush, the scrub pine, and all the animals that lived there—antelope, deer, jackrabbits, cottontails, and an occasional rattlesnake. We took our .22s along and usually returned with at least a couple of rabbits, which Mom would fry up for our lunchboxes the next day.
In Casper we were living in the heart of the old West, in a town on the Oregon Trail that traced its beginnings to a ferry that the Mormons established to take pioneers across the Platte River. As the number of wagon trains rolling down the trail increased, so did conflicts with the Plains Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry came riding into the West—often at their peril. In 1865, not far from the site of the old ferry on the Platte, there was a battle that took the life of young Lieutenant Caspar Collins, after whom the town would be named, with the spelling only slightly altered. The following year, a few hours north at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors wiped out an army column of some eighty men, including their commander, Captain W. J. Fetterman. And ten years later, just over the border in Montana, Sitting Bull’s warriors killed General George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred men of the 7th Cavalry in a battle near the Little Bighorn River.
I became fascinated with the stories of the men who came before the pioneers, such as John Colter, who broke off from the Lewis and Clark expedition and in the winter of 1807–1808 made his way to what we now call Yellowstone National Park. People accused him of lying when he reported on the geysers and boiling pools he had seen, and although he wasn’t telling tall tales, exaggeration was part of the mountain man tradition—as were independence and self-reliance. Whiskey and profanity were part of it too—except maybe in the case of Jedediah Smith, a man of religion, who traversed vast sections of the West with his Bible and an unbelievable threshold for pain. When an encounter with a grizzly left him with his scalp and ear hanging off, he had one of his fellow mountain men sew them back on, and within a few weeks, he was back blazing trails. Hugh Glass was another great story. In an encounter with a grizzly, he was so badly wounded that his traveling companions left him for dead. His leg broken, his body gashed and torn, he crawled a hundred miles to a river, where he constructed a raft and floated to Fort Kiowa. When he had recovered, he set out to kill the men who had left him.
A. B. Guthrie’s novel The Big Sky re-created not only the era of the mountain men, but the remarkable land of high plains and higher mountains that was now my backyard, a place where “there was more sky than a man could think, curving deep and far and empty, except maybe for a hawk or an eagle sailing.” Guthrie’s book was a favorite of my teenage years, surpassed only by Bernard De Voto’s telling of the mountain men’s story in Across the Wide Missouri. De Voto knew well the land that the pioneers traveled as they approached the Platte River ferry, and vast stretches of it still existed, “gullies, knife-edges, sage, greasewood, and alkali,... covered with flowers in June, relieved by small sweet creeks flowing among cottonwoods.” I’ve reread Across the Wide Missouri many times since my youth. It’s one of those books I’ve never really put away.
DURING OUR FIRST SUMMER in Casper, I signed up for Pony League baseball, and at the end of the season I was picked for an all-star team that got to travel on a chartered bus to Richland,