The
Old West & Wal-Mart: My trip through Wyoming
21 September 2010By Jane Stillwater
Early this morning, I started my tour of Wyoming in
South Dakota, with a trip to Deadwood’s famous Boot
Hill in South Dakota. “Over there is Wild Bill
Hickok’s grave," I was told, "and that’s Calamity
Jane’s grave right next to it." According to her
original tombstone, Calamity Jane died from ‘bad
alcohol’ – but that was just a polite way of saying
that she was a drunk.
Next stop? Devils Tower, a sacred Lakota Sioux
monument up near Sundance. I walked around the base of
the tower, feeling all holy – but that feeling didn’t
last very long. It never does.
Next came the Big Horn mountains. I was actually there
in the Big Horns. With Custer and them. How historic
is that!
According to Gary Cooper, in a really good documentary
called “The Real West” (you can get it at REI), the
entire saga of the Old West only lasted around 40
years. This famous era started right after the civil
war between the Union and the Confederacy ended, when
apparently the U.S. Army was looking around for
something else to do and so moved west to fight
another, even larger civil war – between
Native-Americans and European-Americans.
I’m still trying to wrap my brain around what happened
out here during this second civil war -- and this is
hard to do because the conflict between those who
originally lived in this area and those who came
pouring in from outside was so vast. The settlers just
kept on coming. And the Indians tried to stop them but
there were just too many to stop and the newbees
didn’t want to share.
Perhaps it would help me to understand this conflict
from a modern perspective if I risked getting yelled
at by making a comparison between native Palestinians
and the unstoppable flood of Zionist settlers from all
over Europe that has recently poured into the land of
Saladin.
You try to defend your homeland but you can’t.
But Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse really gave it a
shot!
So. Who was I cheering for during the glory days of
the Old West? The Native-American underdogs or the
European-derived settlers? I always root for the
underdogs.
And just think of what America would be like today if
cowboys and settlers had never arrived in the Old
West. Probably not so bad. Native-Americans used to
have a pretty good way of life going on here in the
Big Horns. They honored the earth. We could use a
little bit more of that now.
But instead of that alternative reality, we now have a
gigantic new Wal-Mart in Sheridan, Wyoming – with four
or five huge aisles alone devoted purely to candy and
chips. To the winner goes the spoils.
PS: All this Indian Country talk has got me all
identifying with my Native-American great-grandmother,
Mary Ballard. Perhaps it’s because of her that I
identify more with Crazy Horse than I do with all
those 250-pound shoppers at Wal-Mart.
PPS: I wasn’t going to mention the Buffalo Bill Museum
in Cody that I also visited today, but it turned out
to be so completely interesting that I really should
say a few words. They had lots of Remingtons there –
both the painted kind and the weapons. The museum's
weapons section was fascinating.
Then I tried really hard to organize a ride out to
Heart Mountain, the World War II Japanese internment
camp, yet another moment in American history that I am
not proud of. Heart Mountain is only 15 miles outside
of Cody -- but everything I tried seemed to fall
through. “Most of the cabins there are gone now,” said
one old-timer here, “but you can still see the
smokestacks and there's been some recent attempts at
restoration. However, you can see several of the old
cabins that have been moved into town, that people are
now using for tool sheds.” Tool sheds? They had
American citizens living in jails the size of tool
sheds -- for four years?
Never again.
©
EsinIslam.Com
Add Comments