In Bismarck, I was wondering if I were really in the West yet. I enjoyed a sense of wide plains there, but was this the true West of myth and fable?
The historian in Bismarck said the city is on the edge of the Midwest. It’s a gateway, he said. (Yet another gateway? Where’s the commemorative arch?) He said I would enter the real West when the bus crossed the Missouri River, which runs next to Bismarck. The river coincides almost exactly with the edge of the glacial plain that created the attractive rolling farmland in Wisconsin, Minnesota and most of eastern North Dakota.
Just as he predicted, as the bus went west out of Bismarck, the landscape gradually became broken, rugged, and fractured. I admit, the sun wasn’t up for two hours, and it was pretty black out there for the first hour, but I was paying attention, eager to see a demarcation of east and west. Of course, there wasn’t one. But the landscape did change; average precipitation drops west of the Missouri River, so vegetation changes, too.
A Montana sunrise
After two hours of driving west, and with the sun nearly up, a silver-green bush appeared scattered among the grasses on the verge of the road – sagebrush. Riders of the purple sage must have happened in a different county, because this stuff was silver green. In the distance, dark grey buttes stood guard over ranches with a few head of cattle and tightly rolled bails of hay scattered over rough fields.
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