DESERT TIME -- A JOURNEY THROUGH THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST

PART FOUR:  SUMMER

Chapter 27:  Owyhee
Owyhee County, Idaho

I

There are not many people here. Almost no one goes outside the irrigated land. There are some cattle ranchers who live so far out in some spring hollow that they come to town once in six months and visit Boise once in ten years. Then there are the others: the prospectors and trappers whose business is with the raw country and always has been. The greatest thing one hears, wrapped around their stories, is the size and mystery of the country itself.

There are other people out there, too, people who do not want to be seen. There are old Shoshone horse traps in box canyons, and rumors that the traps are used, still, perhaps for the purposes for which they were made; perhaps not. There are stories of gold strikes made and the gold hidden and the hiders shot and the gold never found. Satanic symbols have been painted on rocks in hanging canyons. Remains of bonfires have been found, surrounded with strange implements. A black Cadillac with black windows has been seen parked on a track leading to a washed-in mine. Women have disappeared, and men, under strange circumstances, into this dry wild country for which there are no good maps.

The whole state of Idaho, even beyond this desert corner, even including the watered and forested north and the rich farm belts, is almost the same in population density (or un-density) as desert kingdoms like Oman. Owyhee County is the largest and least populated county in the state; it has one parking meter and no traffic lights and was named from the beginning for lost men. It lies south of the Snake River, its northernmost strip part of the Snake River Plain though plain is a misnomer; here it is riven by canyons and broken volcanic ranges. Beyond the irrigated land there are no traveled ways into the country except for a loose and unmapped (or wrongly mapped) net of gravel roads, anyone of which may be impassable for days after a rain. Ten inches or less, on the average, may fall here in any given year, and the rains are (true to desert form) unpredictable, local, and violent.

Together with the Harney Basin of southeastern Oregon and a chunk of northern Nevada between Salt Lake and the Sierras -- a chunk four hundred miles from east to west and nearly as far from north to south -- Owyhee is part of the most uninhabited country in the lower forty-eight. It is wilderness in the true sense, meaning that it is mostly untamed and pretty much unknown. For most human purposes most of Owyhee might as well not exist, and to most people it does not; it is a kind of North American Ar-Rub' al-Khali: an Empty Quarter.

***

"You never learn it all. Always something new. Something new to find. Devil of a country to some people but it's home to us," Ed says.

Ed Shultz has spent most of his life as a prospector and a miner. He is an amateur archaeologist, a self-taught geologist, and for almost all of his life he has worked in Owyhee County. He lives in Homedale at the north edge of the Snake River Plain, and a ditch full of dam-held, canal-brought, mountain-born water runs behind his house. He speaks in machine-gun bursts and hauls out by the bowlful, fistful, by the shelf after shelf and case after case the artifacts and anecdotes of a lifetime living here.

"We're desert people. We like it," he says, putting aside the bowl full of semiprecious stones: orange Bruneau jasper, roiled Biggs jasper, desert rose picture jasper with its pink sunrise skies, rainbow plume agate, Red Butte jasper full of flowery shapes, Idaho star garnets that are the color of grape juice with central stars of silver light, fire agates that look like live flames seen through black glass. He sets out display boxes full of Paiute and Shoshone arrowheads as if he were setting the table. They're made of flint, chalcedony, jasper, obsidian. There are big ceremonial points with multiple flanges, tiny ornamental gem points, buttons, hunting points, darts, simple heavy triangular war points.

"The warheads were lashed to the arrow haft, see, with rawhide thong. Once it penetrated the flesh the thong would absorb moisture and loosen up and if you pulled on that haft it would come, sure, but the point would stay in there. That was the point." He doesn't quite laugh, he busies himself stacking the boxes away.

He pulls out others. Strings of Texas Comanche clay beads, amulets of faces and birds, nasal plugs, knives and scrapers. These were once part of the collection of one Johnny Meyers -- "boozer buckaroo and range rider" -- who dug Comanche mounds on the sly and peddled the findings for nights on the town. After Johnny died, what was left of his collection, "which was the best of it, you bet; he may have been a drunk but he knew his stuff," was in shoeboxes under his bunk. Most of it went to a museum. Some of it came to Ed.

The Comanche display is put aside and Ed spills a handful of beans onto the table. Some of them are white, others red, others mottled like pinto beans. I've never seen beans so large: nearly the size of pullet eggs. He handles them like jewels. They were found in an Anasazi pot that was, he says, six to eight hundred years old, according to its patterns and glazes. The pot was sealed with a bung of juniper bark hardened with resin. Ed planted half the beans last year, and ten percent of them grew. The second generation of Anasazi beans is sprouting in his garden now.

We go to see. His vegetables are weedless, the rows straight, the beans are just now germinating under a clean long mound of earth. Nearby is a flower garden filled with found objects displayed as if in a museum: an ore bucket, a bighorn horn, a cow skull with two bullet holes.

"Where do you think them holes came from?" He chuckles. "They used to hang men for rustlin', hereabouts. Some still do."

The lawn is flat and green as carpet. Everything around him reflects the same meticulous museum-ization of trinkets from a rough life and a rough country. There's a hunk of blue jasper the size of a pail, racehorse shoes, hay knives, wolf traps, a clawfoot bathtub overflowing with petunias, oil lanterns, iron-rimmed wagon wheels. There are petrified Miocene tree stumps between the cornflowers.

"When you're out there alone, you have to protect your camp, see," he says, this fact too a part of the collection of wild found objects neatly displayed, now, among domesticated things. "You lay out dead limbs all around. The crackle will tell."

Ed says that he rode a mustang named Ghost for years. He broke Ghost himself. You put double cinches on and hang panniers on the cinches and put blocks of salt in the panniers "just about heavy enough to crack their ribs" and put snaffle bits in their mouths and put them on plowed ground so they can't buck. When Ed was a kid, his dad broke horses for ten dollars a head. Breaking horses was nothing new.

The first "real rock" that Ed ever found in the woods was a black-and-white Nez Perce arrowhead. The second was a piece of red agate the size of a golf ball. These things went into a boy's pocket as such things go into all kids' pockets, but he hasn't forgotten them. At the end of World War II he was with the Army in Guadalcanal -- he did demolition in the Army -- and one day when they were swimming there he sat beside an outcrop and there was a ruby sticking out of it the size of a pea. A pigeon-blood red ruby. He picked the ruby out and put it in his pocket. Before he got back to his compound the ruby wore a hole in his pants and he lost it and pocketknife and all.

"I got fascinated after that," he says, "that was it, that changed my life."

Back in Idaho he placer mined for gold, working the riverbed gravels. He shot deer and elk for food. There was nothing much else to eat. He learned that grouse live and die within ten acres, that they live by creeks, that they generally have a birdish hankering for shiny things; if there is gold around the grouse can be trusted to have nuggets in their craw. Grouse were a diagnostic tool as well as dinner.

He learned that badgers quarry down six feet and bring deep gravels out for you to see. Squirrels burrow, too. When he lived in a cave on Three Fingers Creek he learned that a patch of unusual wildflowers means different mineralization in the soil. He learned that the first ground to thaw in spring is mineralized ground; metals heat faster than stone.

One day he worked up a ridge. He'd married by then, he lived in a house, he'd started a family, his wife and two boys were along. They'd brought a picnic. They spooked two bands of wild horses on their way into the hills; that was something, they all remembered that. Late in the morning Ed climbed the ridge to a pocket two or three hundred yards across.

"There was chunks of picture jasper lying around in there the size of bread loaves."

He brought in a Cat and bulldozed a road. He owned his own Cats and lowboys, and an Ingersoll rotary diesel drill. He drilled first with two-foot bits, then four, six, eight. He made four rows of six holes, each of them eight feet deep. The holes were packed with two sticks of 80 percent dynamite and a one-pound coffee can full of nitrate fertilizer. Primacord, caps, fuses.

"Hey! You could hear 'em blow clear to Boise!" he said.

They named it the Wild Horse Mine. His son still works it now. Wild Horse picture jasper is known around the world; the king of picture jaspers, a hard, fine-grained stone that cuts clean and takes a high polish, semiprecious stuff made of silts that once perked up volcanic vents: nickel formations making blue sky, iron oxides making browns and reds of landscape, manganese dendrites making scribings of dryland trees and brush. It's the picture of the country where it is: canyons and basins, desert distances, tumbled boulders, eroded multicolored volcanic scarps.

Cattle Skull with Bullet Holes

II

Cobby smells of woodsmoke when I come to his house, next door to Ed.

''I'm making char-cloth. Come on through," he says.

Soon I smell of woodsmoke too. There is the fire and a lidded can in it, a hole punched in the lid and smoke spurting from the hole. Beyond is the shed, a heap of untanned hides, racks of bark-dyed traps, a garden with corn and potatoes, the irrigation ditch and a field and the pale Owyhee hills beyond, like an animal asleep.

Cobby squats by the fire with forearms across his knees. He owns this house and his wife and family live in it with him -- when he's home -- but he can live on wild ground and on his own with little more than a knife and flint and steel. There isn't much about wildlife he doesn't know, or wonder, and he's at home in the wilds so much himself that the most complex arcana of campcraft are natural to him; his membership in the American Mountain Men isn't as much a hobby as an acknowledgment. He's a master tracker, of people as well as animals, and folks come to know this after a while, and the police have made use of his skills from time to time and place to place. Most of the year he traps for a living, doing custom predator control in summer and fur in winter. Trapping is more or less a solitary pursuit, and accords with his nature. During fur season most of what he traps are bobcats. A bobcat isn't shy.

"Shy is a very poor term. If you understand his nature ..." Cobby pauses, pokes the burning wood. "He's a stalker, he depends on not being seen. He doesn't have a long running ability. He's not a coward. He depends on sneaking up, on not being seen." Cobby pokes the can, it sends up a final spurt of smoke. "And he's solitary. Kind of like me. It's just his style of hunting."

Cobby grins, a good grin, and takes the can from the fire. No more smoke can be encouraged from the hole. He puts it in the dirt and leaves it to cool.

"Let's go," he says. "I want to show you Map Rock."

We go in the pickup. There are coils of snares looped over the side mirrors. He takes a set of buckskin saddlebags with him everywhere -- that and his leather hat -- as some people take a credit card and keys. He wears his hat every time he leaves the house, even to dig potatoes; he's as naked without it as other people are without pants. He never goes into the hills without his saddlebags and his knife.

In the saddlebags are a piece of white flint and a steel. If you can't find flint then agate will do, even jasper, but flint makes the hottest and the whitest spark. The steel is a new-moon arc that fits in a fist and curves handily over the knuckles. Along with the flint and steel is a buckskin packet held with a bone button. In the packet is a metal case full of pieces of char-cloth: squares of pure cotton that have been blackened to charcoal in an airless can. When a flint-and-steel-struck spark lands on a square of char-cloth, the cloth will burn hotter than any match. In a pinch, char-cloth can be made from a shirttail or a strip from the bottom of your jeans.

Soon we're on a dirt track angling toward the river. The hills have come close.

"It's two hundred and sixty miles across to the nearest paved road," he says.

The truck bangs through ruts. There is a cliff of rusty rhyolite capped with twenty feet of black basalt, like chocolate icing on a cake.

Here water has a way of traveling, pooling, perking from underground, so the Owyhees are not entirely dry.

"There are some big springs in there." Cobby nods toward the hills. "Meadows. Ranches forty fifty miles apart."

More ruts; I brace myself.

"And rivers," he says. "Not like Nevada. We've got rivers. With beaver on them."

There's a pause. The beaver will lead to something.

"The mountain men came through here," he says. "The Snake was one of their main routes. Lots came in the seventeen hundreds but the main heyday was from 1805 to 1840 -- Jedediah Smith, Hugh Glass, Bill Williams, Jim Bridger, those were the big names, but there's a lot of them no one remembers. They sent teams of trappers here to trap the beaver. All up the rivers. Once they sent out thirty men and two survived. That wasn't unusual. That was typical."

There's a bottle made of cow horn hanging from a knob on the dash. The wide end is sealed with a circle of polished wood held with brass nails. A notch around the narrow end is wrapped with a hide thong, the thong ends decorated with red and metal beads. In the small end there is a buttonlike bung of wood. The bottle is full of beaver castor: the contents of beavers' scent glands, a brown paste. It smells warm, tannic, resinous, musky, like summer woods. The mountain men used castor for stomach medicine, as balm for wounds, for baiting traps.

In 1818, Donald Mackenzie brought the first brigade of trappers here to the Snake River valley. The whole brigade was native Hawaiians who had sailed to the Northwest on a fur-trading ship: cheap labor. Mackenzie led them in here and left them with their gear, and months later he came to pick them up. He waited at the bend in the river and no one came. No one ever came. The whole brigade was gone. Hawaii was spelled Owyhee in those days -- the pronunciation is the same -- and now it's the name of the desert county where Hawaiians disappeared.

***

We come to Map Rock: a monster basalt boulder rolled from the rim and come to rest near the level by the river. Even from a distance it's easy to see the wriggles and circles scribed in the stone. Near the bottom, one winding line is deeper and wider than others, a snake in motion.

"That's the river, that part's clear enough!" Cobby laughs, tracing the Snake with a finger. "The rest, well ... it's clear to anyone this is a map. They say it's an Indian map, see, but I have my own ideas. They could be wrong. Likely they are."

We climb on the boulder and crawl across the canted scrawls, tracing lines, patches of concentric circles.

"To my mind the circles are the locations of major Indian camps," Cobby says, "Nez Perce camps to the north and west of the mountains, Blackfoot on the east. At the bottom there is the Snake to where it dumps into the Columbia, with Paiute camps along there."

He points them out, larger and smaller bull's-eyes spaced in the Owyhee valleys.

"The Paiutes went into the timber in summer and came back down in winter. Where the Boise and the Snake come close were communal fishing grounds. Common grounds, for the tribes. Same thing with good arrowhead country. Common grounds, where they kept peace."

We crawl east:

"The edge of the rock is the edge of the Plains."

We crawl north:

"This one line, here, is the north trail to the upper end of the hills, up the great divide. Up here, see this here?"

Bumpy lines:

"On mountain man maps that means rough country. That would be north Idaho. Heavy timber country. That was avoided by the mountain men. It was dense and difficult. The Snake was a major trail for them to go north of here. There's no better place for a map than right here."

There's a pause. He stares at the patterns, thinking.

"Maps are a white man's concept. Foreign to this country," he says.

Cobby himself is part Iroquois and part Cherokee. He was raised to hide this; he doesn't hide it now. Ed told me -- when I asked where he was from himself -- that everyone from the West is part Indian somewhere no matter what they tell you, and he winked when he said it, and said that it was nature's way of making peace.

"I think this is a mountain man map," Cobby says. "That's what I think. That's who I think made it. They'd pass here and add a little line or two, some trail they'd found in here."

The Owyhee Mountains are, between Paiute camps, a maze of winding intersecting and conflicting lines.

"It hasn't changed much in there! No one knows all the roads in there." Cobby laughs, jumps down from the rock. "Look here. This is clear enough!"

On the side of the rock are animals. There's a mule deer, a bighorn ram, a bighorn ewe, a pronghorn antelope, an elk, a beaver. Below them is a wriggling line: a river full of fish?

"Yes, ma'am, that's their groceries," Cabby says. "Let's go."

***

"Every animal has his own nature. Once you get a handle on that nature, catching him is not a problem," he says, on the way home. In the evening light the wheat fields and mountains are equally gold.

"My wife claims I'm a psychiatrist of wildlife. It's hard to say. It's personality that interests me."

There's a pause. The packet of char-cloth, the unnecessary beauty of the horn bottle, the way that Cobby uses words, are the marks of a careful man.

"A possum has rocks in his head. He never learns.

"An otter is suspicious and particular. The kind of guy that when he comes home he looks in all the closets to make sure somebody isn't hiding there before he sleeps.

"A skunk has a big gun. And everybody knows it.

"A red fox is half cat, half coyote, but dumb as a muskrat. And he has a strange habit about him. A fox is a kind of scurfy character with a fairly predictable pattern.

"A coyote will do a little bit of his own thinking. He's unpredictable. A coyote is a terrorist; a cat is a hit man.

"Cats -- bobcats and lions, too -- are the same, more or less. Some days you're in a good mood, some days you're in a bad mood. There's a different style of tracks from these different moods. Some days you're playful. Some days you're plain grumpy. And damned independent!"

We laugh.

"And most folks don't know the first thing about it. The hard part is that animal. You've got to become a part of him, and see the world through his eyes."

Petroglyph Groceries on Map Rock

III

Basalt clothes the country: its icing is everywhere here on slices of high ground as if, since icing time, the cake had been much chunked up.

A single event started this icing process some seventeen million years ago, in southeast Oregon, just across the state line from here. A meteorite of considerable size came and punched a hole in the body of terra firma, something like a Shoshone warhead on a cosmic scale. And the wound has not healed. The meteorite (or its explosion) punched clear through the planet's crust -- which is as thin relative to the whole as an apple peel is to its apple -- and the magma below squeezed up and out. The meteorite crater became, quickly, a lava lake. Lava slopped out clear to northern Washington. Floods of basalt swallowed the valleys of western Idaho.

That lava lake was only part of it. The meteorite's impact made a split in the earth's crust clear from Oregon to Mexico like a crack propagating from a BB ding in a windowpane. A healthy bite of North America has since threatened to slip off westward, opening a rift and then an ocean through the heart of Nevada; and would, too, if the whole of the Americas weren't drifting westward fast enough to override the break, to keep the rifting closed, closed enough, but not wholly shut; the earth's crust here is pulling apart.

The continent moves. It floats west, over the meteorite wound. As the West Coast grinds out over the Pacific plate, driving it down, the Sierras crumple upward and wring all moisture from the Pacific wind. Here, the wound is still open. Once in a while this "hot spot" in the mantle rock bursts through the sediments and the ancient seabeds and river gravels and whatever has accumulated on the crust, and tips a load of hot new rock into the world. The wake of all this is the Snake River Plain. The wound itself is now under Yellowstone: the hot spot over which North America helplessly rides. Whenever it punches through, the crust continues to shatter, more cracks propagating southward from this string of BB dings in the continental pane. All the country south of the hot spot track, the Snake River Plain -- all this country from the California Sierras to Utah's Wasatch Front and clear to Mexico -- is breaking up. It is rifted, faulted country, extended and extending terrain striped with fault block mountains: basin and range.

***

Next midday we stop near a cave high in the country between Succor Creek and Leslie Gulch. We see the cave from the track we're on. It's hot up here and the cave may be cool; it's time for lunch. We stop the pickup and hike in.

Neither Cobby nor his wife, Carol, has been here before. Carol wears a black felt hat with the side brim held to the crown, Aussie style, with a raccoon bone. We carry lunch in plastic bags.

The cave is rhyolite: rock with the chemistry of granite but with a different history. Granite starts as a dome of magma, a molten push that never surfaces from whatever overlayment it comes up under; it cools, slowly, in place, crystallizing there with no one the wiser until the overlayment sloughs away, via weather. Rhyolite, on the other hand, arrives. It comes from molten domes that break, violently, through. On arrival, rhyolite magma is as thick as putty and soaks up water like a sponge, translating water to steam and expanding with it like a nightmare cartoon Alice in Wonderland who ate the cake or drank from the bottle: cubic miles of red-hot steam and magma shrapnel devour landscape like shock waves from a bomb. Shuddering to a stop at last, the magma shrapnel welds into rhyolite.

Some of this blasts to the stratosphere and falls elsewhere as ash. To give you some idea of scale here, the size of the Mount St. Helens explosion in 1980 put one-third of a cubic mile of rhyolite on the ground. Some of these Snake River Plain events have spread two hundred cubic miles of the stuff -- in a single explosion, mind you. Afterward, at center stage, where the magma dome had been swelling over aeons, tumorlike, a surge of high and mounded ground, there is empty nothing: caldera, sinkhole, great collapse. Later on, calderas tend to fill with ash and trickles of basalt. The Yellowstone caldera is not hard to see. Right now, domes are rising there: the Mallard Lake dome, the Sour Creek dome. The Yellowstone caldera is more than fifty miles across. It has vomited a rhyolite disaster three times, at roughly six-hundred-thousand-year intervals, the last one being six hundred thousand years ago. There are plenty of signs over there of things heating up.

Here in this rhyolite cave, with its ceiling pockmarked like Swiss cheese and a level gravel floor, it is cool and dim and smells sweet, aromatic, like sagebrush and honey.

"Mmmmm! What's that! What is that wonderful smell?" says Carol.

Cobby moves in a slow rocking padding walk around the perimeter of the cave, staring down toward the toes of his cowboy boots, analyzing every scratch and dent and fleck of dung. He looks up once without expression and nods his head.

"Oooh, look at this!" Carol says. "And another one!" She bends, twice, and stands and holds out a palm: a flake of green jasper, a flake of pinkish agate. Both are slim bright chips sharp as scalpels, with the concentric rings showing where they were pressed off some Paiute's projectile point with an antler awl.

"Look, look! Obsidian!" Carol says, smiling, holding out a new-moon shard of volcanic glass, smoky and transparent.

"Obsidian is nowhere near here," Cobby says, "they brought that in, oh, tens of miles."

"It's packrat. And mouse," I say. "The ceiling is full of mice!"

"What is?"

"The smell ... it's their middens dried up into this tar," I say, "that's what the smell is. Plant resins they just pee out. Hey!"

A white-footed mouse, big black eyes and little white feet and white belly and copper coat, peers from a ceiling hole and goes padding away through a rhyolite corridor. The ceiling and back wall of the cave are coated with gobs of molassesy tarry resin, hard as wood, fragrant as honey. I remember a story (maybe apocryphal, it's in one of those old explorers' diaries, though) of starving desert wanderers eating this stuff and finding it chewy and "sweetish, not bad," but they didn't know what it was, exactly. Which is just as well.

"Give him some cheese!" Carol says, and we do, placing a bit of Kraft American in the hole where we saw the mouse.

We sit against the back wall eating our sandwiches, watching the bit of cheese. History's more ghastly events have a way of becoming prosy and domestic, life breaks through, somehow, in wonderful ignorance, thank God. I think of film I saw of children in France after the last war playing a kind of handball against a wall that was  pocked with bullet holes. Big bullet holes. An archway shattered. Two boys leaping, a little girl scratching a bugbite on her knee. A colony of mice in rhyolite. An old colony, comfortable, secure, here for countless generations. They couldn't know or care less about the Armageddon that blew in here thirteen million years ago, burying a humid jungly forest in red-hot shrapnel. A mouse comes and whiffles at the cheese, then drags it back a little way, and eats, mouthfuls chewed then more mouthfuls, watching us as we're watching it.

"Oh, yes, the bobcats use this place, sure," Cobby says, when I ask. "One tom was in here yesterday."

There's a pause. He chuckles, looking up at the mouse warren, the packrat holes and middens:

"He can't keep himself away." And then he laughs, a brawny deep-chested laugh. "This place is pure frustration for a cat!"

Cobby

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