I grew up in Western Canada, so a road trip in that part of the world propels me as much into my own past as into the landscape that’s served as the backdrop for so many movies and TV series set in the “old West.” Especially when crossing the border into the U.S, I feel myself back in the land of my early childhood —including memories of the entire family exiting the car, so that border officials could spray the interior and our luggage against hoof-and-mouth disease.
But once past that ordeal, we were in the realm of cheap gas and an above-par Canadian dollar that allowed us to shop for our school clothes at the J.C. Penney store in Minot. They had escalators there, still unknown in our department store back home. And television! Years before we western Canadians had any programs beamed into our homes, Americans had TV sets everywhere —in Penney’s window, and also perched high on the wall in roadside bars, where real cowboys straddling real barstools could gaze up at movie scenes set in phony Western saloons, while downing real shots of whisky and rolling real cigarettes.
Even now, in those Western States, there’s that mixture of new and old, ersatz and authentic, making it hard to tell where lore lets off and reality begins. Out the window of our second-floor room at the Best Western in Billings, for instance, the sign on the shop across the street reads:
“Fresh Meats, Custom Cutting.” And that more or less covers it, in a land where the custom has always called for cutting, whether into a haunch of buffalo, or cutting cows from the herd or cutting off a calf’s masculinity.
We’d come to Billings directly from Alberta, where we visited the Bar U Ranch, near Longview—Canada’s only National Historic Site located on a ranch. There, in addition to stories about the Sundance Kid’s time on the ranch as a horse-breaker, strolling among the remains of outbuildings and patting the noses of the living descendants of the original herd of Percheron horses, we learned that the Bar U has always existed as a kind of tribute to the meat-packing industry, including onetime ownership of the ranch by the founder of the Burns Foods empire and arrangements for direct shipping of stock from the Bar U via the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Now, we’re overnighting in Billings en route to the nearby battlefield at Little Bighorn. The next day, at the battle site, we will learn how the troops of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry were assisted in their war against Sitting Bull’s forces by the Crow and Arapahoe and other indigenous tribes. Why? Because even before their ouster from the land by white ranching interests, the Crow had already been at war with Sitting Bull’s Lakota Sioux over claim to the diminishing herds of bison.
Less than two decades after Little Bighorn, another battle involving the U.S. Cavalry took place in Johnson County, Wyoming, in and around the county seat of Buffalo. This time, however, it was a cattle war, sparked by big ranchers, who’d already driven off the Indians and killed off the buffalo, and wanted to maintain open grazing of their enormous cattle herds over vast tracts of prairie. In reality, the land was “open” only to the business of cattle men and big game hunters. They opposed small settlers and ultimately enlisted hired guns from Texas and support from the Sixth Cavalry to drive off and/or kill those folks designated as “rustlers”—whose ranks included anyone who got in the cattle barons’ way.
Today, the small city of Buffalo, Wyoming is still surrounded by unimaginably huge tracts of land, with swaths of sagebrush, like nubbly carpeting covering the rippling brown hills that loom over broad yellow fields of harvested grain. Black Angus and Shorthorn cattle still graze there, along with horses, no doubt more beautiful and glossy than the broke mustangs cowboys in the past used to round up and drive cattle to slaughter.
Now it’s livestock trucks that fulfill the function of transport, hauling long metal trailers with portholes so small and the interior so dark you can’t tell if there are occupants inside.
However, the small city of Buffalo, Wyoming still has one foot planted squarely in the Old West. And that’s the aspect that tourists come to see. In my case, to confirm what I’ve already written about Buffalo, sight unseen: A scene set in the saloon of the main hotel, circa 1893, a re-encounter between a man who may or may not be Owen Wister and the young woman he’s previously parted from, who may or may not be on her way to becoming the outlaw Etta Place.
I’ve envisioned the bar along one side of the room, the tables and chairs, and most importantly, an upright piano at the back of the room. There, the young woman is seated, playing, as the man comes in. And sure enough, when I walk into the Occidental Saloon in the hotel of the same name in present-day Buffalo, Wyoming, there it is, just as I imagined it, right down to the piano.
Of course, the present-day piano belongs to a jazz group that plays nightly in the saloon, but that hardly matters. And of course the so-called Historic Saloon has been restored to look as it did in 1908, not 1893. But that hardly matters either. The point is: here I am, walking into someone else’s past as I invented it, and it looks exactly like what I envisioned. That’s the moment of affirmation all writers dream of: that moment when what you made up turns out to be true. (Or at least, true-ish.) There ought to be a term to denote the fictional past meeting the actual present and shaking hands. What would you call it? Not dèja-vu, exactly. More like dèja-imaginé, now confirmed.
And that is an American Western odyssey to me, whether it’s a refurbished saloon-bar, or a museum dedicated to the Wild West Show, in which real-life characters like Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill and maybe even the Sundance Kid used to come out onstage to play themselves in scenes from the past. While the Plains Bison, long since extirpated, were played by cattle draped in buffalo hides, being pursued across a fake prairie by real-life American Indians now paid only to make believe.