sense of fastidiousness, and was largely absent. The closeness of the border bred malevolence and suspicion. Tourists wandered the streets as if in a state of forgetfulness. None of this touched him. Only the sense that he was removed from the gardens of Beverly Hills and that he was Mexican and that he enjoyed reading; and certain knowledge that there would be other bends in the river as dangerous for him farther on.
The room in which he stayed took a breeze in the morning. The afternoon light was indirect and seemed to hover in the room. Suddenly one day he was taken with appreciation at the sight of his hard, blunt thumbs against the white pages of a book. The afternoon heat hung in suspension in the air and he felt a delicateness in his belly. He thought of the inscrutable life buried in a wheelbarrow full of bulbs, of the sound of his spade going into the earth, and of his cleverness with water.
He turned pages, and read on.
The Location of the River
A CCORDING TO A JOURNAL kept by Benjamin Foster, a historian returning along the Platte River from the deserts of the Great Basin at the time, the spring of 1844 came early to western Nebraska. He recorded the first notes of a horned lark on the sixteenth of February. This unseasonable good weather induced him to stay a few weeks with a band of Pawnee camped just south of the Niobrara River. One morning he volunteered to go out with two men to look for stray horses. They found the horses grazing near an island of oak and ash trees on the prairie, along the edge of the river. When he saw the current and quicksand Foster was glad the horses had not crossed over.
On the way back, writes Foster—little of his last journal survives, but some fragments relevant to this incident are preserved—the Pawnee told him that the previous summer the upper Niobrara had disappeared.
At first Foster took this for a figurative statement about a severe drought, but the other Pawnee told him, no, the Niobrara had not run dry—in fact, the spring of 1843 had been very wet. It disappeared. That Foster took this information seriously, that he did not treat it with skepticism or derision, was characteristic of him.
The Pawnee, he goes on to say, did not associate the disappearance of the river with any one particular phenomenon (Foster, I should say, was a confidant; he spoke fluent Pawnee and I’m sure they felt he was both knowledgeable and trustworthy); they attributed its disappearance to a sort of willful irritation, which they found amusing. They told Foster that the earth, the rivers, did not belong to men but were only to be used by them, and that the earth, though it was pleased with the Pawnee, was very disappointed in the white man. It suited the earth’s purpose, they said, to suddenly abandon a river for a while, to confound men who were too dependent on such things always being there.
Foster thought this explanation narrow and self-serving and told the Pawnee so. But they were adamant. Foster writes that he himself was increasingly at a loss to understand what had happened, but he had been among Indians long enough to appreciate their sense of humor and to know their strength for allegory. He pointed out to them that if the river had shifted course or disappeared, the Pawnee would be as affected by it as the white men; but the Pawnee said, no, this was not so, because they saw things like this all the time and were not bothered by them.
It is difficult to fathom what happened to the river or to Foster either, once he concluded, as he apparently did, that the Pawnee were literally correct, that sometime during the summer of 1843 the upper reaches of the Niobrara River, above the present town of Marshland and westward into Wyoming, did vanish for four or five months.
An initial thought, he wrote, was that the people he was camped with were not Pawnee. He thought they might be a little too far north—in Sioux or possibly Arapaho country. Even though they spoke, ate,
The room in which he stayed took a breeze in the morning. The afternoon light was indirect and seemed to hover in the room. Suddenly one day he was taken with appreciation at the sight of his hard, blunt thumbs against the white pages of a book. The afternoon heat hung in suspension in the air and he felt a delicateness in his belly. He thought of the inscrutable life buried in a wheelbarrow full of bulbs, of the sound of his spade going into the earth, and of his cleverness with water.
He turned pages, and read on.
The Location of the River
A CCORDING TO A JOURNAL kept by Benjamin Foster, a historian returning along the Platte River from the deserts of the Great Basin at the time, the spring of 1844 came early to western Nebraska. He recorded the first notes of a horned lark on the sixteenth of February. This unseasonable good weather induced him to stay a few weeks with a band of Pawnee camped just south of the Niobrara River. One morning he volunteered to go out with two men to look for stray horses. They found the horses grazing near an island of oak and ash trees on the prairie, along the edge of the river. When he saw the current and quicksand Foster was glad the horses had not crossed over.
On the way back, writes Foster—little of his last journal survives, but some fragments relevant to this incident are preserved—the Pawnee told him that the previous summer the upper Niobrara had disappeared.
At first Foster took this for a figurative statement about a severe drought, but the other Pawnee told him, no, the Niobrara had not run dry—in fact, the spring of 1843 had been very wet. It disappeared. That Foster took this information seriously, that he did not treat it with skepticism or derision, was characteristic of him.
The Pawnee, he goes on to say, did not associate the disappearance of the river with any one particular phenomenon (Foster, I should say, was a confidant; he spoke fluent Pawnee and I’m sure they felt he was both knowledgeable and trustworthy); they attributed its disappearance to a sort of willful irritation, which they found amusing. They told Foster that the earth, the rivers, did not belong to men but were only to be used by them, and that the earth, though it was pleased with the Pawnee, was very disappointed in the white man. It suited the earth’s purpose, they said, to suddenly abandon a river for a while, to confound men who were too dependent on such things always being there.
Foster thought this explanation narrow and self-serving and told the Pawnee so. But they were adamant. Foster writes that he himself was increasingly at a loss to understand what had happened, but he had been among Indians long enough to appreciate their sense of humor and to know their strength for allegory. He pointed out to them that if the river had shifted course or disappeared, the Pawnee would be as affected by it as the white men; but the Pawnee said, no, this was not so, because they saw things like this all the time and were not bothered by them.
It is difficult to fathom what happened to the river or to Foster either, once he concluded, as he apparently did, that the Pawnee were literally correct, that sometime during the summer of 1843 the upper reaches of the Niobrara River, above the present town of Marshland and westward into Wyoming, did vanish for four or five months.
An initial thought, he wrote, was that the people he was camped with were not Pawnee. He thought they might be a little too far north—in Sioux or possibly Arapaho country. Even though they spoke, ate,
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