American Meteor (16 page)

The hardest thing in the world to understand is one’s own self. I’m not sure I ever sounded to the bottom of mine. Even
now, when I have time to consider what I’ve been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor as a man, for all the difference I’ve made on earth.

Jackson walked down to the river and spoke to a group of men working a rocker box, a kind of sieve to separate gold dust and the occasional nugget from the “placer,” a shoal of black gravel runoff near the riverbank. Upstream, other knots of dirty, ragged men paid rapt attention to rocker boxes of their own—“cradles,” as they were commonly called, though I never heard a lullaby sung in their vicinity. Whether by pan, sluice, or cradle, placer mining is brutal on the hands and back. For every miner who leaves the goldfield rich, a hundred others give up and go home, with less to show for their toil than an asparagus cutter’s wages. Prospectors are a half-crazed, harum-scarum, mostly unhappy lot, who no longer dream of the things they meant to buy with their dust, but only of its extraction. These men were nothing like Bret Harte’s Stumpy or Kentuck; the Bear River digs, a far cry from Roaring Camp, where a rosewood cradle was hauled eighty miles by mule to comfort the foundling Tommy Luck.

Jackson returned, and we set up the tent and readied plates to reproduce, with a ray of light on glass, the gruff and crusty miners. We exposed three negatives the first day and five the next: of men at the cradles, sifting black gravel; eating game and turnip stew washed down with black coffee and rum; sitting in their tents, their tired faces reddened by the setting sun. Only four of the plates were “good enough for Durant”—meaning that the miners had sat still long
enough to make their likenesses sharp, while their lifelike quality was drained by the rigor mortis of a lengthy exposure.

“These are for me,” said Jackson, pensively regarding four of the glass negatives, where the faces or some other aspect of the photograph lay in darkness or a hand was caught in motion—a blur of human anatomy caused by a restless subject. Jackson gazed at them as though they were gold and the others—for Durant’s lithographed prospectus—the worthless gravel dumped from a rocker box.

I confess I didn’t see the beauty of those spoiled views.

“Sometimes the truth is revealed when taken by surprise,” he said in that infuriating way of his.

“Your brother would have goddamned them as a waste of chemicals and glass.”

“Edward confuses art with perfection. Never despise the blemish, Moran,”

I was tired and had had enough lessons for one day. My outdoor technique was being refined under Jackson’s tutelage; I had skinned the time it took me to coat a glass with collodion and expose it before it began to dry. I’d begun to “read the light,” which is more changeable and elusive under the big sky than inside the studio. I was pleased with myself and in no mood to be nettled by Jackson’s metaphysics. I sometimes wonder if he missed his calling as a philosopher or a theologian—but damn if he didn’t make some of the most gorgeous images of any I would ever see! In my lifetime, I would learn to take respectable photographs. When I began sending them to Whitman, he wrote to say how fine they were and how what I’d learned to see of the West insinuated itself into his poems. That was praise enough.

Early next morning, I loaded a mule with my camera and
darkroom tent and walked upriver about a mile from camp. There, I found George Osler, one of the Bear River miners, originally from Pennsylvania. He was dangling a length of cord from a cut branch into the dark water; on the end of it was a drowned worm threaded on a hook.

“Morning,” he said as I tied the mule to a cottonwood.

“Morning,” I said. “Fishing?”

“There’s an almighty catfish down there, but I’m too lazy to catch him.”

He nodded toward the river, whose bed lay below what the slant of early-morning light through the cottonwoods could illuminate. It occurred to me that a fish unseen on the bottom, dragged up into sunlight, was like a truth surprised into revelation; but the warm June morning was too fine to bother with extravagant notions. I gave myself up to the pleasure of watching an angler enjoying his idleness, without any real ambition to complicate it by extricating the hook from the mouth or throat of a catfish, whose fins can cut a finger to ribbons and inject a dose of venom as painful as a water moccasin bite. He was one of those people who enjoy their pastimes in the abstract. Something stirred in the roots of a willow dug into the muddy bank. I turned in time to see a muskrat jump and disappear beneath the water. When I looked back at Osler, he was raising a monstrous fish, apparently unconcerned by either my opinion of his zeal or the danger of catfish even at their last gasp.

“It’s a humdinger!” he said, admiring the fish juddering in the grass. “It’s almost worth the effort to have caught him.”

He put his boot on the creature’s flank and worked out the hook. Seeing the worm none the worse for its ordeal, I felt the poor fish had been cheated. By rights, it ought to
have enjoyed the temptation that proved to be its undoing. I supposed there was a moral lesson to be learned from this small tragedy, a fable of some kind, but the sun made me too lazy to decipher it. Osler’s purpose was far from didactic, however. He brained the fish, slit it from gills to anus, pulled out its entrails, and rinsed it in the river.

“Had your breakfast yet?” he asked.

I had, but I was curious about the taste of a catfish flavored by Bear River.

“No, and I can feel my belly rubbing up against my backbone.”

He made up a fire and spitted the heavy fish on a barked stick. In short order, the skin was bubbling with its own hot juices. We sat down on the grass and ate—the white flesh tasting of river. I enjoyed that breakfast out on the Wyoming scrubland more than any fancy meal I’d eaten on the train. When it was finished, I cursed myself aloud for having forgotten to take a picture of the occasion. It would have been worth showing Jackson: the morning light picking out every reddish whisker of the miner’s stubble, the coals of the fire, the fish, its mouth gaping open on the spit, the river behind, and, behind it, a stand of ponderosa pines stuck up, stiff and sharp, against the wide-open sky.

“I’ll show you a sight for picture taking,” said Osler, wiping grease from his lips onto the back of his hand. His hand was interesting: scarred and bulging with blue veins, the nails black and broken.

We walked about three hours, across prairies and over low hills. I lead the mule packed with my equipment. I think we crossed into Utah, but I can’t swear to it. I was dazed by the big sky, which had lost its awful clarity now that the wind
was herding clouds from west to east, casting woolly shadows on the leaning grass. Like most of his kind, Osler was not given to idle conversation. I don’t know what silences such men. They’re not contemplative: They don’t look into themselves. Maybe they’re struck dumb by the spectacle of untrammeled nature. Maybe they exist on a level of consciousness where speech is neither habitual nor desirable. He said little until we came through a defile and out onto a wide prairie.

“There,” he said tersely, nodding toward a complicated lathwork of bones that sprawled into the bluish distance like a street of houses going up.

“What the hell?” I nearly shouted with the shock of what I’d come upon in the grass.

“Go and see.”

“You coming?”

“I already saw. I’ll wait here.” He sat on the grass and busied himself with his pipe and tobacco.

I got up onto the mule and nudged its flanks. It didn’t budge. I kicked at the recalcitrant animal, and it started forward, its back hooves clattering nervously against fieldstone. The wind pushed a lumbering cloud across the face of the sun, and the bones, which an instant before had been slashes of fierce light, darkened. The mule shied, whinnied, and heehawed. I whipped it, with an anger I didn’t understand. I suppose what provoked me and agitated the poor beast was fear. The soughing of the tall grass couldn’t be heard for the flies, as loud and insolent as they’d been four years earlier in the Armory Square Hospital’s bedpans. I held down my rising gorge, unwilling to let the older man see me unnerved.

Maybe he sensed my discomfiture, because he stood up
and walked the thirty yards or so separating us. He stroked the mule’s quivering flank and murmured to quiet it. I was grateful for the smell of his tobacco smoke and for the noise of the embers when he drew on the pipe. The mule calmed under his hand.

“Told you it was a sight,” he said.

The steppe was crowded with the remains of bison— grass growing up through bones that, except for scant rags of flesh, had been picked clean and bleached.

“I never counted, but I’d guess maybe four, five hundred animals laying here. Or what used to be.”

The troops sent to the Great Plains were killing buffalo in order to starve the Indians, forcing them onto reservations and away from the goldfields, settlements, and emigrant trails. It was “scorched-earth” William Tecumseh Sherman’s policy and Grant’s, too. The commander of Fort Dodge, where pretty-boy Custer was stationed, liked to tell the newspapers, “Every dead buffalo is one Indian gone.” The government was hell-bent on exterminating both.

“I’d rather they was Indian bones any day than buffalo,” Osler said, his long yellow teeth clenched on his pipe stem.

In those days, I would have agreed.

I felt bewildered and sick. At that moment, I hated the Union and its army and wished Sherman, Grant, Custer, and the whole infernal gang dead. But in my own bones, I knew it wouldn’t change anything. If Davis and Lee had been victorious and the Indian Wars were being waged by men in gray, these same buffalo bones would be lying in the grass, the wind singing lamentations through the harps of their rib cages—their hides sent east on the new railroad
and bought by the tanneries with Confederate money to make lap robes and mufflers. That’s what people are like.

Osler spit what we called an “oyster” back in Brooklyn and asked, “Aren’t you going to take a picture?”

I was transfixed by the maze of carcasses undressed of flesh by varmints, carrion birds, and industrious insects, their bones scrubbed clean by rain, the light of the harsh sun, and time. I could not take my eye off the wreckage, as though a thread of pity joined me to it.

“Seems a shame after coming all this way.”

Shame. That’s what this was, and shame was what I felt. Like a man who stumbles on a corpse, or like anyone who discovers a secret that makes him want to retch, to weep, to stab the sight from his eyes, to do like the ancients and tear out his hair and cover himself with dirt. For here on the desolate plain, the secret nature of our kind had been made visible in a latticework of bones. I think our shame will save us, if anything can.

I set up the tent and camera, coated a plate, and stuck my head behind the drape. But the subject matter was too big— the enormity of it—even for an eight-by-ten-inch plate. I’d need a view camera like the one used by Robert Vance to photograph the mines and prospectors of the California goldfields. No, not even that big negative could begin to capture what I saw—what I
felt
when looking at so much death. That was it: No camera could contain my feelings for the subject. The pity of it. By now, you know I was not easily moved. I had seen death parceled out wholesale during the war and retailed on the cobbled streets of lower Manhattan, and I’d never flinched. I was accustomed to heaps and piles of dead men. I’d grown a callus over the tender conscience
given us at birth. Maybe I was becoming womanish in my feelings. I’d need to be careful, or the bad men of the West would devour me, would pick my bones clean.

“I shot a man once for beating his dog with a shovel,” said Osler unapologetically while I pretended to read the light that glared on the bones like caustic soda.

So here, too, was someone who could be moved. A man with a modicum of respect for life—if not for a human’s, then a dumb beast’s. George Osler and I might have been low down on the ladder when it came to sentiment, leastways compared to Sunday school teachers, but we were a rung or two above the gunfighters, bushwhackers, claim jumpers, thieves, and cutthroats that crawled over the West like dung beetles on a steaming pile of shit.

“I can’t stand to see an animal mistreated,” Osler said.

In their youth, George and his brother, Frank, had a small dairy out in the country, north of Philadelphia. They’d kept a dozen milk cows and a horse to make deliveries. George talked about his family and his cows and how much he liked the life he’d had then. When I asked him why he’d left it to come west, he shrugged. I’d seen that shrug before, given in reply to the same question. Men would say, “To get a piece of land,” “To get rich,” “To get away from my wife and family,” “To get the bit out from between my teeth,” “To get closer to God,” “To get out of His sight.” Or they would say nothing, looking you fiercely in the eye or at thin air or the dirt at their feet. I suppose the best answer—meaning the most truthful—was the one I finally gave Jackson for wanting to take pictures: “I don’t exactly know.”

That day, I made two plates; the first a lengthy exposure. I wanted to capture the light on the bones, but not so that
they were flooded by it. I was after that peculiar radiance Jackson called the “fat light.” The second plate, I exposed twice as long to give the weakened rays of the cloud-dampened sun time to burn themselves onto the negative.

“We’ll sleep here tonight,” said Osler. “Too risky to travel the pass without a full moon.”