Wyoming: True West and Weird by John Borthwick

‘Truckers out there,’ drawls the husky voice coming over our car CB radio, ‘Anyone wanna kill an hour or two, see where the deer and the antelope play?’ We’re in the Badlands of Wyoming on a ribbon of mountain highway. Not a soul to be seen. Just forests of dark pine glistening with ice chandeliers.

‘What’s all that about?’ I ask Jennifer, my co-driver, who’s a font of local knowledge. ‘That’s a lot lizard,’ she answers. I imagine a curious being — partly woman and, um, mostly gecko? Not quite. Jennifer explains that on major US highways some sex workers target the big interstate truck stops, or lots. As their trade is of necessity rather furtive, they are known as ‘lot lizards’. The more enterprising lizards, such as this one, firstly solicit their trucker clients by CB. ‘Let’s answer her.’ says Jennifer, picking up the CB mike. ‘Where you all from?’ responds Lizard Girl, cheerily. ‘Sydney,’ we answer. ‘Hell — never heard of it. That someplace in Utah?’ At which point, sadly, our CB dies and along with it the chance to hear how the deer and the antelope really play.

Just east of the Rockies, west of Nebraska and south of Montana sprawls big, wild-hearted Wyoming — the Delaware Indian word means ‘on the great plain’. We’re gunning across exactly that in a rented Buick. Ahead of us the prairie grasses are rippling like a harp; behind us the Continental Divide is a seismograph of glory etched in three-thousand metre peaks.

In Wyoming the ghosts, of course, wear cowboy boots. At night you can hear them creaking down the wooden-halled floors of old places like the Irma Hotel in Cody. I leap from my room, hoping to catch a glimpse of some spectral gunslinger or perhaps the ghost of pistol-packin’ Belle Starr. No one there. ‘Nope, ain’t nobody been prowlin’ your hallway,’ the night manager assures me, ‘except maybe old Bill hisself — he turns up every now and then.’ Colonel William F. Cody, better known as ‘Buffalo Bill’, built the hotel and named it after his daughter, Irma; prior to this he had built the town and, modest to a fault, named it after himself.

In the morning there are cowboy boots galore downstairs in Irma’s dining room. Lined up at the 20-metre-long, carved cherrywood bar that Queen Victoria presented to Bill Cody in 1900 are a dozen good ol’ Wyoming boys, perched bow-legged on their barstools with Stetsons tilted back and de rigueur denims giving way to battered old boots. I’m wearing a beach shirt and runners. Any minute now a sheriff who makes Charles Bronson look like a ponce will book me for violating the town dress code.

The dudes at the bar are breakfasting on ‘biscuits’ — scones as large as barges — plus bacon, hash browns, undrinkable coffee, a pitcher of Coke and maybe a bourbon chaser. ‘I was on this horse for three days ...’ Snippets of conversation like this drift through the room. Outside, their Broncos are hitched — long wheelbase pickups with cabs so high that the mandatory Stetson never needs to come off, tyres like King Kong’s donuts and V8s that could power a Third World village.

Wyoming, a permanent state of Stetson head and Cuban heel, was and still is the heart of the Wild West. Because its exists they don’t need to invent it. Indeed, who could invent a place like Emblem, a not-quite town that we pass in two seconds: a red barn, two cottonwoods, three cows and a sign ‘Emblem. Population 10’? Or the bar-room poster we see advertising the mythical Road Kill Cafe (‘Centerline Bovine: you kill it, we grill it’)? Gorging itself on U-Pump-‘Em Gas our Buick leaps along perfect highways. Other than having to perform the occasional impromptu slalom-on-ice around a suicidal elk, for me it’s like driving a four-wheel jukebox. Songs well up from the subliminal nickelodeon in my head.

Above the great plains a storm cloud curls like a slow motion tsunami. The great American dream road, ‘that ribbon of highway’ as Woody Guthrie exalted it, unrolls below it like one of Woody’s own verses: above us that endless skyway, below us that golden valley. Sliding past pine forests and farmscapes of buckrail fences and hip-roofed barns you sense the spirit of huge optimism in America that once moved him to write ‘This Land is Your Land’. Half a disillusioning century later it might have been ‘Born in the USA’.

The downside of listening to my internal jukebox is that, ever since the Rockies, somewhere inside my skull Joe Walsh has been gargling ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ and, worse, John Denver keens ‘Rocky Mountain High’. There’s more to come. We’re heading eventually for Deadwood, South Dakota, and I dread the imminent arrival of Doris Day chirping about the Deadwood Stage a-rollin’ all over the plain. I turn on the actual radio. It’s pure Springsteen Land out there: the dial is jammed up with gospel stations (‘lost souls calling long-distance salvation’) and then darker stuff, with his tunes of highway psychosis strumming in my head (‘through the Badlands of Wyoming, I killed everything in my path’).

Next thing I’m laughing my way out of a Highway 26 town called Dubois, which is pronounced ‘Doo-boys’ (none of your nancy, Paris-Francey, ‘Dew-bwa’ stuff ), where too many of the roadhouse blokes over age 40 look like flops from a ZZ Top audition: all baseball caps and dunny-brush beards. Punching the buttons I find a country music station that’s awash with heartstrings and honky-tonk. The DJ announces a singer who, ‘prior to his recording career graduated from drag racing school.’ Seriously.

Wyoming can be a Tarantino-with-spurs warping of the real and the reel. At Old Trail Town (near Cody) I see the grave of frontiersman Jeremiah ‘Liver Eating’ Johnson (1824-1900), who supposedly consumed the liver of the Crow Indian who had slain his wife. Robert Redford played Johnson in the 1972 movie of the same name. Just a few metres away from Johnson’s headstone, you can duck inside the actual (though relocated) wooden building that, in the 1890s, sheltered another of Redford’s characters, the Sundance Kid, along with Butch Cassidy and their Hole in the Wall Gang. All the non-spaghetti Westerns of my childhood come to life with Saturday arvo Hopalong serials and the Duke’s bravura drifting into living history.

The landscape is pure Marlboro Country minus the class litigation. Cruising between snow-slathered mountains and eroded desert buttes we look out to where, from the 1840s to the 1890s, massive migrations by wagon trains — ‘prarie schooners’ — carried over one million people westwards and where the Indian Wars soon followed. The scenery’s subliminal soundtrack is rolling again. This time it’s the scalding irony of Woody’s one-time protégée, Bob Dylan singing of how the cavalry charged and the Indians died — when Wyoming was young, with God on its side.

The Overland Trail. Buffalo Soldiers. Medicine Bow. Frontier history ambushes us everywhere. Little Big Horn, site of Custer’s last hubris and of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull’s revenge, is just across the border in Montana. We push further east to Deadwood in the Black Hills of South Dakota. (I’m trying desperately not to hear Paul McCartney tweetling ‘Rocky Racoon’.) The main drag is a gulch — the town’s original name was Deadwood Gulch — that was much widened during an 1870s gold rush into a classic gunfighter main street lined with gambling saloons. When the town’s moribund economy was revived in the 1990s with the reintroduction of legal gambling, Deadwood’s historic two- and three-storey hotels and blackjack joints were duded up with scores of slot machines.

The Midnight Star Saloon, owned by Kevin Costner, is a combo gaming palace and chapel of honour to St Kev of the Wolves — its walls are lined with showcases of his movie costumes. Just up the hill — Boot Hill, no less — the old West still lives, albeit six feet under. In adjacent graves lie James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok (1837—1876) and Martha ‘Calamity Jane’ Burke (1852—1903). After his death, Calamity Jane falsely claimed to have been Wild Bill’s mistress; on her death bed she insisted, ‘Bury me beside Bill Hickok.’ Old Bill could hardly argue the toss.

Hickok is to Deadwood what Buffalo Bill is to Cody: without his myth the local tourist economy would hardly exist. These days, however, Deadwood is more KevWorld than Wild Bill’s stomping ground. In a town whose appeal is based on the sniff of gunfights and whisky I see the homily, ‘Dare to resist violence and drugs’ displayed primly on the Deadwood Sheriff’s patrol car. Amen.

Now is that Pat Garrett on the corner welcoming a bowling club tour to the Mild West?

Every now and then you still get a glimpse of the old frontier sassiness. Out front of a saloon called B.B. Cody's, on a snow-blasted winter’s night, a big spruiker with a larynx like a foghorn is booming, ‘B.B Cody’s got blackjack! Slots! Ribs!’ From across the street, a woman who in earlier times might have been called ‘a soiled dove of the prairie’ teases him: ‘You got prime rib, honey.’ ‘Ain’t that you?’ the spruiker honks back. ‘Hell no!’ the lady protests, perhaps too much, ‘I’m a looker not a hooker.’ With a mischievous cackle and a swirl of her skirts, she saunters back towards the Number Ten Saloon like the ghost of Belle Starr.

Not far from Deadwood lurk various spectres in stone. At Mount Rushmore presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt give the world their famous blank stares. More spectacular and bizarre is the Crazy Horse Monument in the Black Hills, where the Oglala Sioux chief, Crazy Horse (whose fighters massacred General Custer in 1876), is commemorated in the world’s largest sculpture project: 8.5 million tonnes of mountainside have been moved so far. It has taken several generations of the Ziolkowski family of mega-sculptors some 53 years to shape Crazy Horse’s 30-metre-high head and 88-metre-long right arm. They’re nowhere near finished. The project honours Native American culture by demolishing a mountain that is sacred to said natives. Who says Americans aren’t big on irony?

Tableaux of Americana flicker by. A home is marzipanned with snow, its front porch twinkling with fairy lights. Out front waits a pickup with gun racks. Next door is a church. A freight train 100 cars long drives through the rain. Honking geese fly through the hickory-smoked air and snow-muted dusk. Small town main streets, now boarded up and Fonzie-free, look like a set from Unhappy Days. A sign says ‘2 burgers 2 cokes 2 bucks.’ This is a Norman Rockwell world gone to trailer parks and K-Marts.

Wyoming has fewer than half a million citizens. Friendly as they are, that’s the way they like it. At one of those Bud-and-Bronco roadhouses in the village of Shell (population 150) — Jennifer knows all these places — a jovial barman named Vernon points out to us a new bumper sticker he’s selling, with a message to America: ‘Keep Wyoming beautiful. Don’t move here. Visit.’