Great Plains by Ian Frazier

his days in the Army in Fort Benning, Georgia; about his mother, who was dead; about a man named Straight Pine, a short, stocky fella who used to run the best damn Hereford cattle in the area; about how the Crow Indians in Montana drink Lysol, also known as “Montana gin,” which will sure get you drunk, but which can collapse your lungs if you don’t mix it right; about how much he loved to dance; about how his mother used to take him and his brothers down to the Grand River to play; about how he owned all the land I was looking at, and so what if they wouldn’t let him run cattle in here he’d take and run cattle in here anyway; about what a tough guy Bullhead (he pronounced it “Bull’id”) was; about how Sitting Bull pulled a good shot on Custer; about all the white people who dig ruts in this road on their way to see Sitting Bull’s camp. He kept telling me, “My side! Your side! My side!” He did imitations of different accents—Navaho, black, New York. He sang a song about being a thousand miles away from home, waitin’ for a train. He asked me, “Do you ever get lonesome? My mom died nine years ago, and we used to live—well, did you see that old washing machine we passed back there? Well, that’s where our house was.”
    â€œThat was your washing machine?”
    â€œIt was my mother’s washing machine.”

4
    I N former times, Indians thought the white men’s custom of shaking hands was comical. Sometimes two Indians would approach each other, shake hands, and then fall on the ground laughing. Indians swam differently than white people, built smaller campfires, sharpened knives only on one side, and did not use the stars to guide themselves. White butchers saw through bones and cut meat across the grain, but Indians usually cut with the grain and rarely sawed bones. Some Indians would not eat meat cut across the grain. Indians usually did not (and do not) grow a lot of hair on their faces or arms or legs, and some found the hairy bodies of white men disgusting. Indians were shocked by the way white parents grabbed their children by the ears to discipline them; because of this custom, some Indians called white people “Flop Ears.” Almost all Indians, at one time or another, composed verses about events in their lives or visions they had seen, but they did not use rhyme. For many Indians, swearwords or “Whiskey!” were the first English they learned. In front of white people, Indians did not like to refer to each other by name.
    Indian children played with toy bows and arrows, and often put each other’s eyes out. There were many one-eyed Indians. Indian children did not have to be in bed by a certain hour, and often stayed up through the night. The historian Francis Parkman, when he lived in a Sioux camp in 1846, kept a short stick for punching the heads of kids who climbed on him in his sleep. An Indian camp in no danger of attack was likely to be noisy all night long. People chanted, dogs howled, women mourned, gamblers shouted. Many Indians loved to gamble, and played guessing games with objects hidden in one hand or the other. Many also knew card games like monte, poker, and seven-up. In winter camps, gambling was sometimes about all the men did.
    Most Indians did not know how old they were. They measured time in days, moons, and winters, but they had no weeks, hours, or minutes. On the eve of an important event, when they were afraid they might oversleep in the morning—for example, when a war party discovered an enemy camp and wanted to make sure to wake up and attack it at first light—Indians would drink a lot of water before going to bed.
    Indians loved crowbars. They used them for digging prairie turnips, bitterroot, tobacco root, and holes for tipi poles. When freshly pitched, tipis were nice inside, with the grass still green and fresh. It took twelve to fourteen tanned buffalo hides to make an