Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam

By ART CULLEN

I’m plopped into my chair eating apple pie on Sunday after four days of driving, and I think: What a huge country, how lucky we are, and what a flatlander I am.

The milo was ripe and the sunflowers brilliant as traffic zoomed on I-90 past Mitchell, S.D. I was on my way to Cowboy Central, Sheridan, Wyoming, to a film festival for a screening of the documentary “Storm Lake.” Up into the Badlands and Black Hills where the leaves are turning golden and toward the Big Horn Mountains. Merle and Willie serenade.

You pull off the road and stop at the facade of commercial vitality, the truck stops and cafes and motels, and get beyond earshot of the freeway. The views are gorgeous and the poverty stunning, especially around the reservations. The towns call you in from their billboards for gas, coffee and casinos, scraping what revenue they can as the grain elevator is falling in with the broken-down homes and cars.

They say there isn’t enough room in America for these immigrants. It makes you wonder as you drive by the reservation that lies north of Sheridan, just beyond the huge ranch homes with million-dollar vistas. What do the Cheyenne think about immigrants? At the reservation’s south edge there’s a roadside cafe called Custer’s Last Stand.

Sheridan is named after a distant relative, Gen. “Fightin’ Phil” Sheridan, who laid waste to the Native people after Custer’s defeat, and who before that laid waste to many Confederates for the Union cause. He saw military victory as his mission, and killed anyone in his way. That’s how the immigrants won the West, indeed the entire continent.

The railroad made the town. Ranchers settled in. The trains hauled the cattle and coal that stoked the nation. Down at the fairgrounds the college rodeo competition evoked that history with women jumping off painted ponies to rope a goat and men hurling off a horse to wrestle a calf to its back. It’s the classic expression of dominion. The soundtrack over the loudspeaker was Merle and Willie. I sang along: Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Most of the contestants and the crowd were female.

There is a deep cultural thing going on, and although I know the lyrics I am not really part of it. I wear a Twins baseball cap and tennis shoes. There’s a different sort of redneck with a certain rectitude and sense of place and conformity than, say, your average redneck from Fort Dodge. So I asked the young woman working at the Sheridan Press, whose family ranches outside of town, about it. She said that what goes on in the ring is not what goes on at the ranch. She sounded emphatic.

Downtown, a couple White guys in dark helmets watched a half-dozen dark-skinned guys in white helmets on their knees grooming the new concrete Main Street and sidewalks. I was thinking about them when a man who watched the movie told me that millions of immigrants are illegally streaming in and threatening our security.

We strolled down Main Street and met a hair stylist who hails from Galva, now living in Rapid City. A man called out: “Art Cullen! How ya doin?” He was a clothier from Des Moines, Kevin Hansen, who is pals with Storm Laker John McKenna. He was with his fishing buddy from Australia, who liked our Capital City so well he just became a citizen. How boutcha, mate!

Like the trucker who needs to see his baby tonight on the radio, those meetings made me itch to get back over the Missouri River. Exiting that damned freeway let me see where I was. Near Winner, S.D., the milo and sunflowers (browned and wilted in the heat just since Wednesday) gave way to soybeans and corn. The land flattened out.

The farther east you go, the towns become more frequent and prosperous. You hop the Big Sioux into Plymouth County and the farm homes look like the Hearst Castle at San Simeon by comparison to those in the high plains and hills.

I got woozy doing hairpin turns with New York filmmaker Beth Levison in the Big Horn mountains. I’m sure the view was something, but I kept my eyes on the yellow lines in order to keep her rental car clean. There’s no place like Buena Vista County Road C63, and you see Kevin Cone pulling a combine into his drive.

So I sat down with that pie made by the hand of Dolores and thought that this is where a fellow belongs. Here, we raise hogs and kill sunflowers. We have our own sort of deep cultural thing going on that so often is righteously blind and insular. Storm Lake really is a beautiful place, especially because of immigrants. I wish that film critic from Wyoming could see it, or at least see who is fixing Main Street.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2023

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