In Riverton, Wyoming, about 1962, I think, I must have been in the sixth or seventh grade. My father was a mining engineer at Lucky Mac in the Gas Hills. Riverton was sort of a low-budget ranch town in a sagging wash on the verge of the Wind River Indian reservation. Cold-War uranium mining put some post-agricultural life in the local economy, and eventually the money inspired erratic aspirations to culture and civilization, such as art guilds and French lessons, that eventually seem to overtake established communities in the West, Telluride, Denver, and Laramie, as examples, but Riverton was maybe a hundred years behind.
The kids of the ranchers were those hardy, independent cowboy types with good-hearted but incorrigible contempt for anything exotic and anybody they suspected of intellectual attitudes. I read an article in The Ranger that referred to homosexuals in the state prison. I didn't know what a homosexual was, so I asked my friend if he thought that was a problem. He never spoke to me again. That was Riverton in 1962.
The reservation was a separate economic class for reasons I later learned had to do with the peculiar legal status of the native peoples, oddly echoing the language of segregation, a separate but protected nation. Since they couldn't legally mortgage property, the Shoshone and Arapahoe had no way to borrow for improvements or to finance any kind of enterprise. If you want to understand the social effects of corruption in federal government combined with restricted credit, consider the history of the reservations. At the time, the Shoshone and Arapahoe lived pretty much on a subsistence level with an old car or pickup truck parked outside a tar-paper shack. That was my take on the economic image of the reservation. The Shoshone kids who lived off the reservation were respectful, quiet, and kept to themselves. They didn't mess with the cowboy kids much, or the miners.
I was in Piggly Wiggly one day with my mother, picking up the week's provisions I guess. That was the only way I would have been in the store for any length of time. Occasionally a few of us would walk over there to buy Sugar Babies, but we weren't allowed to hang around on our own. I would have been waiting up front to ring through a pretty good load of groceries. That was probably how I happened to notice an old Shoshone woman walking slowly past the dog food in the space across from the cash registers.
You could always tell the Shoshone because they dressed almost hyper-Western style with pearl button shirts, turquoise bolos, and black Stetsons with silver conchas on the bands. I never understood if that was an expression of a kind of desperate desire to belong, or a kind of irreverent parody of cowboy culture.
Maybe both, maybe neither, but I noticed the old woman because she wasn't wearing cowboy jeans and a corduroy shirt like the younger women with her. She had on a traditional head-dress and Navaho blankets with a big Mexican skirt that spread out four or five feet and hung to the ground, like you saw more in the Southwest, but hardly ever around Riverton. Her face was like the dark shiny old knots on the Pinion Pines, and completely fixed, without an expression, like she really was wood.
She moved slowly, as if she was very tired, a step at a time, but with a kind of dignity that even a junior high school kid could notice, until she got to an empty corner on the other side of the dog food where she could stop and turn around and lean back to brace herself against the wall. Then she pulled her blankets around her and closed her eyes. She moved around a little, a sleeper maybe dreaming under her blankets about life on a lost frontier, but otherwise she squatted there in the corner, completely motionless, while her companions shopped and rung out a few things.
There was some kind of problem with them ringing out, and it took the whole time that me and Mom rung through our own big buggies and got them loaded up again. That was before barcodes and scanners. A price-check or an ID could be terminal.
About the time Mom finished writing her check, the old woman finally opened her eyes, hitched up her colorful Mexican skirt, and waddled in her slow but dignified way out the door after the rest of her family. When we got to the door, my buggy hung up on the edge of the dog food rack, so I walked around the side of the buggy to push it loose, and I was facing the same corner where the old Shoshone woman had waited patiently, maybe dreaming about a proud and mythical past. Spread out there on the gray linoleum floor, in the space that the wide skirt had covered, was a huge shining puddle of bright yellow liquid.
Sometimes I wonder if it was a cultural thing.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
The kids of the ranchers were those hardy, independent cowboy types with good-hearted but incorrigible contempt for anything exotic and anybody they suspected of intellectual attitudes. I read an article in The Ranger that referred to homosexuals in the state prison. I didn't know what a homosexual was, so I asked my friend if he thought that was a problem. He never spoke to me again. That was Riverton in 1962.
The reservation was a separate economic class for reasons I later learned had to do with the peculiar legal status of the native peoples, oddly echoing the language of segregation, a separate but protected nation. Since they couldn't legally mortgage property, the Shoshone and Arapahoe had no way to borrow for improvements or to finance any kind of enterprise. If you want to understand the social effects of corruption in federal government combined with restricted credit, consider the history of the reservations. At the time, the Shoshone and Arapahoe lived pretty much on a subsistence level with an old car or pickup truck parked outside a tar-paper shack. That was my take on the economic image of the reservation. The Shoshone kids who lived off the reservation were respectful, quiet, and kept to themselves. They didn't mess with the cowboy kids much, or the miners.
I was in Piggly Wiggly one day with my mother, picking up the week's provisions I guess. That was the only way I would have been in the store for any length of time. Occasionally a few of us would walk over there to buy Sugar Babies, but we weren't allowed to hang around on our own. I would have been waiting up front to ring through a pretty good load of groceries. That was probably how I happened to notice an old Shoshone woman walking slowly past the dog food in the space across from the cash registers.
You could always tell the Shoshone because they dressed almost hyper-Western style with pearl button shirts, turquoise bolos, and black Stetsons with silver conchas on the bands. I never understood if that was an expression of a kind of desperate desire to belong, or a kind of irreverent parody of cowboy culture.
Maybe both, maybe neither, but I noticed the old woman because she wasn't wearing cowboy jeans and a corduroy shirt like the younger women with her. She had on a traditional head-dress and Navaho blankets with a big Mexican skirt that spread out four or five feet and hung to the ground, like you saw more in the Southwest, but hardly ever around Riverton. Her face was like the dark shiny old knots on the Pinion Pines, and completely fixed, without an expression, like she really was wood.
She moved slowly, as if she was very tired, a step at a time, but with a kind of dignity that even a junior high school kid could notice, until she got to an empty corner on the other side of the dog food where she could stop and turn around and lean back to brace herself against the wall. Then she pulled her blankets around her and closed her eyes. She moved around a little, a sleeper maybe dreaming under her blankets about life on a lost frontier, but otherwise she squatted there in the corner, completely motionless, while her companions shopped and rung out a few things.
There was some kind of problem with them ringing out, and it took the whole time that me and Mom rung through our own big buggies and got them loaded up again. That was before barcodes and scanners. A price-check or an ID could be terminal.
About the time Mom finished writing her check, the old woman finally opened her eyes, hitched up her colorful Mexican skirt, and waddled in her slow but dignified way out the door after the rest of her family. When we got to the door, my buggy hung up on the edge of the dog food rack, so I walked around the side of the buggy to push it loose, and I was facing the same corner where the old Shoshone woman had waited patiently, maybe dreaming about a proud and mythical past. Spread out there on the gray linoleum floor, in the space that the wide skirt had covered, was a huge shining puddle of bright yellow liquid.
Sometimes I wonder if it was a cultural thing.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
