And so off we set, Keith and I plus our three trusty canine companions—an aging retriever, a wire-haired dachshund, and a perky young schipperke—from our home in Saskatoon south under the big skies of Saskatchewan and Montana to our turnaround point, the tourist town of Cody in northwestern Wyoming. From Cody, our return journey would take us north to Eastend, where we planned a brief layover before returning to our obligations in the city.
Cody, Wyoming, is an odd little town, and I am surprised to recollect that this trip marked the second time it had figured into our travel plans. On our earlier visit in the early 1990s, we had stayed in cheap digs along the highway, first at the Western 6 Gun Motel, where neon gunfire flared into the night from a sign at the entranceway, and then at the neighboring Three Bear Motel, where a trio of pathetic stuffed beasts, their mouths set in permanent snarls, stood guard over the check-in counter. This time around, several years older and more inclined to comfort, we’d gone upmarket to a respectable, if regrettably staid, establishment with a leafy courtyard.
Funny the things you remember, the things you forget. Even now, when so much else has faded from my mind, I could take you to the exact place we stayed in Cody, show you the room where we slept. See our boxy old blue van angled up to the building, its back doors swung open as we loaded it for the journey home. Hear our voices hanging in the thin morning air.
“. . . binoculars?”
“. . . water for the dogs? They say it’s going to hit ninety.”
“Any idea what we’ve done with the maps?” (Turns out that where I was headed could not be found on a map, though I had no way of knowing that at the outset.)
Although Cody’s primary attraction for travelers is its proximity to Yellowstone National Park, an hour’s drive to the west, the town prefers to see itself as a rootin’ tootin’ gateway to the past, to a West not merely of geography but of legend. From June to September, fake gunfighters confront each other in fake gunfights in the wide avenue outside the venerable Irma Hotel (Monday to Friday evenings at six and Saturday afternoons at two). Quite by accident, we’d caught them at it one evening, running around with their popguns and braying insults across the deserted street, under the guttering standard of the Stars and Stripes.
In this, as in so much else, the town takes its inspiration from its namesake and founding father, the late William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. As anyone who stops in town quickly becomes aware, Mr. B. Bill was an arresting character. A real-life participant in the conquest of the western plains, he had earned his spurs and his sobriquet in the 1860s when, as a scout for the U.S. Army and supplier to the Kansas Pacific Railway, he is said to have killed 4,860 buffalo in just eighteen months. That works out to about a dozen carcasses every twenty-four hours, assuming that he rested his trigger finger on the Sabbath.
Today, however, Buffalo Bill is remembered not so much for his actual exploits as for his pioneering success in transmuting those deeds into entertainment. In the spring of 1872, for example, Cody led Company B of the 3rd Cavalry in an attack against a camp of Mnikhˇówožu, or Miniconjou, Lakota in Nebraska, an action for which he was immediately awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. By December of that year, Cody had temporarily abandoned the field of battle to impersonate himself on stage, in a production entitled The Scouts of the Prairies. From that day forward, Buffalo Bill Cody seems to have inhabited a borderland between history and myth, between the gore and the glory of Western conquest.
Eventually, Cody’s mastery of the facto-fictional mash-up would lead to his creation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a circus extravaganza in which real cowboys and real Indians engaged in mock skirmishes and a middle-aged easterner called Annie Oakley showcased the skills of a typical Western girl. This pioneering “reality show” earned Cody a place in the pantheon of American show business. But I have always been more impressed, or perhaps merely bewildered, by accounts of one of his lesser-known projects, a touring theatrical that hit the boards in the fall of 1876.
A few weeks earlier, General George Armstrong Custer had led the U.S. 7th Cavalry to a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Lakota, Northern Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne near the Little Bighorn, or Greasy Grass, River (not far as the crow flies from Bill Cody’s Wyoming headquarters). When word of this event reached him, he donned a black velvet costume adorned with silver buttons and lace that he wore in his stage shows and departed for the battlefield. There, he shot and scalped a Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hair, to avenge General Custer’s “murder.”
Back on the theatrical circuit, Cody was soon dramatizing this triumphant exploit in a production called The Red Right Hand, or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer. Although the evidence suggests that Yellow Hair was killed in a chance encounter, Cody presented the confrontation on stage as a face-to-face duel from which the better man had inevitably emerged as the victor.
On our first visit to town in the nineties, Keith and I had unexpectedly found ourselves staring at Yellow Hair’s dishonored flesh. There it lay, parched and sallow, in a shiny glass case in the gracious halls of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, still bearing the burden of Mr. Cody’s triumphant slogan. “The first scalp for Custer,” the museum tag read. This time, on our return visit, we had tiptoed through the galleries, almost afraid to look, but Yellow Hair’s scalp had thankfully been removed from public contemplation.
Looking back, it seems fitting for our first journey to Eastend to begin under the aegis of Buffalo Bill. At the time, however, with no idea of what lies ahead, Keith and I are just a couple of happy, middle-aged kids getting our own show on the road. Life rests gently on our shoulders that morning as we load humans and dogs into our old van and point it in a northerly, homeward direction. Away we go, across the Shoshone River, around the shoulders of the Beartooth range, and then, joy to me, out and into the high red-rock moonscapes of northern Wyoming and south-central Montana. At the sporty resort village of Red Lodge, we turn our backs to the mountains and swing downslope into a landscape that’s all space and sunlight and sky. My kind of country.
From Billings onward, we take the road less traveled, a narrow strip of asphalt that heads straight north through shimmering fields of stubble and herds of red-and-white cows. We stop for burgers at a town called Roundup, then sweep on through Grass Range without pause; side roads attempt to lure us off course to places named Fergus, Cat Creek, Heath.
The road and the country around it are so empty that every vehicle we meet demands comment. A red Silverado. Half an hour later, a black F-150. The drivers all boast big hats.
“I’m working on the wave,” Keith says. “Do you use one finger or take your whole hand off the wheel?” Since I grew up in small prairie towns, as he didn’t, he sometimes looks to me for advice about local etiquette. Even though he’s lived in Saskatchewan for more than half his life—he arrived in Saskatoon in the mid-1970s—he still occasionally feels like a newcomer. No wonder, since he was born in Nairobi and educated there, at a boarding school in Scotland, and at universities in England. We had met in the fall of 1991 (only a year or two before our first trip to Cody, come to think of it) when he had found himself newly single and, in those days before online dating, had dared to place an ad in the personal column of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix: “Friendly, attractive professional man, early 40s, seeks sincere, intelligent woman to enjoy adventures, travel, the arts . . .” I was then a youngish widow, with a freckle-faced daughter in tow: he had won me over at “friendly.” We met, great jubilation ensued, and here we were together, going down the road.
About an hour past Grass Range, U.S. Route 191 flows down into the broad, sculpted valley of the Missouri River—we walk the dogs to the silvery, high-pitched clatter of the cottonwood leaves—and then we are up and away again, flying past the Little Rocky Mountains, the cusps of their blue molars biting into the western sky, past, almost without noticing, the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, home to several hundred members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine nations. At the down-on-its-luck town of Malta, we turn west, through the not-much-luck-to-be-down-on hamlet of Chinook, and pass, again without noticing, a sign