bury me not on the lone prairie
Submitted by Bumsita
Dedicated to my Momma
i. gold and oceans
The Great Plains are a rippling band of gold that welds the East to the West. The gold grows from the ground after a season of rain and is painted by gusts of wind in the next. If you believe nothing I say, believe me now, when I tell you that watching the wind blow over a field of wheat in August will change your life. You will learn that the wind has waves and crests. You will understand that you have spent your entire life breathing through an invisible ocean.
Consider also: the Great Plains were once at the bottom of a prehistoric sea, and the grasses that grow there remember this.
The little girl I used to be found sea fossils preserved in the limestone that scattered the cow pastures where we played after school. I collected the smaller ones in my pockets to share with my grandpa when he came home from work. He would go into his desk—mystifying and made of small drawers—and find a collapsing magnifying device, a union of metal frame and glass bubble. Together under the light above the kitchen table, we examined the evidence of ancient life, skeletons that showed how the 45 years that separated him and I meant nothing. He would use the same magnifying device to thoughtfully remove splinters from our small pink fingers.
In the 1880’s, a college professor in the Great Plains of central Kansas found chain mail and Spanish coins in the ground, forgotten between rich earth and limestone fossils. History indicates these are traces of the first documented expedition of the Great Plains by European forces. In the 1540’s, a Spaniard named Coronado was bumming around what is today Northwestern Mexico, when stories of the Aztec and Incan massacres made him itch with insecurity. He wanted the wealth, glory, and infamy of Corez and Pizzaro; another man made weak by a hunger for power.
An indigenous guide assured him that there was a city of gold—Quivira—out there waiting on the Great Plains. Coronado, with hundreds of men and horses, took off into what is now Arizona (passing, coincidentally, a few miles from where I sit writing this in Bisbee, AZ) before traversing New Mexico, Texas, and the finger of Oklahoma, to push on to the Kansan Great Plains. A thick atmosphere of misery pervaded the expedition. Native peoples, who knew that the wealth of the land there had little to do with mineral gold, were terrorized, raped, and killed, ushering in the age of disgrace we still uphold.
Then, somewhere in the middle of Kansas, Coronado gave up. He looked at the earth—at the flaxen tallgrasses that stretched to the horizon, abundance without end—but did not see it. Irony is a Spaniard so starved by the idea of a city of gold that he could not see the ocean of gold around him.
(Note: Coronado’s expedition is also widely believed to be the first time that horses were introduced to the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. Horses would become incorporated into those Indigenous cultures over the proceeding centuries, constituting a large part of the iconic imagery—Native, Gringo, and Mexican—that typifies these areas of North America.)
ii. a walk
The only boring thing about the prairie is what people think of it. It makes a body high lonesome; it does not beg for your attention. It is a fully mindful landscape that only reveals itself to those who pass by slowly.
My mother and I were raised on the same patch of the Kansan Great Plains. We visited the land together on a Sunday morning in early March, during my first homecoming since we lost Papa two springs prior. She thoughtfully packed us a picnic basket—low glycemic index muffins, drip coffee in a scratched thermos—with the same careful attention that her father used to pull splinters from my fingers. My stepdad drove, and I sat in the passive comfort of the backseat.
It is an hour and a half drive from where my mother lives to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, which is the only untouched grassland of its type left on earth. Children in the region frequently visit it on field trips. Out the window, I watched a herd of cows who had been set to graze in a field of harvested corn. The stalks they moved through had been leveled to neat rows of field-stubble the previous fall, by machinery so large and dangerous that it can claim a famer’s wealth just as easily as his body. Folks around here know that John Deere is the unofficial sponsor of the second mortgage.
It was the time of year—the death rattles of winter—when farmers take to burning their fields. All along the drive, plumes of white smoke frothed sporadically up from the rolling hills. The highway there hugs the natural land and all its sympathetic rises and falls, and trees become scarcer the further along you go. In the middle of all this lonesome is an 1800’s stone homestead—comprised of a schoolhouse, a barn, a main house, and an outhouse—that serves as the headquarters for the National Preserve. The structures have been faithfully preserved and are open to the public. Inside of the main house, I stood in the sunlight that poured in from an eastern-facing window. I thought about how the view has hardly changed in two-hundred years.
We ate a small snack and shared cups of coffee from the thermos before making our way to the National Preserve trailhead. None of us were in a rush—we three Kansans knew that the prairie reveals itself to those who take their time. My mother pointed out a spritely meadowlark, who sang sweet praises to the frogs chirping in a nearby pond. Native tallgrasses of pale yellow were given voices by the wind; the earth itself encouraged our slowness with a comforting chorus of “ssshhhhh” and “aaaaahhhh”. The sky on the prairie was impossibly blue, accented by ribbons of clouds that bloomed across its expanse.
We began to notice clusters of deep brown that were punctuating the tallgrasses on the horizon. I was overwhelmed to recognize this as a herd of buffalo, an animal that I have never seen outside of captivity, and one that is only just returning to this native region. We slowed and observed from a distance. Two-dozen or so buffalo were clustered in small pockets across the open range, with a bull standing watch at the edge. We were just close enough to notice the way the wind moved the earth-colored fluff between his horns—an exaltation of how wind moves through the tallgrasses.
Three hikers and a cheerful yellow lab bustled up the trail behind and passed us, heading directly towards the herd. We watched from a distance as they, blinded by the buffalo’s commanding presence on the land, grew close—too close—to where the herd had congregated. Barks from the lab drifted back to us on the wind, and we watched anxiously as the two-thousand pound bull ambled purposefully towards the people and their dog. We made lighthearted predictions to take our mind off the potential emergency at hand. Fortunately, the other humans took the hint, and retreated down a side trail to harass other forms of wildlife. In celebration, the bull rolled himself in the prairie dirt.
I sent a small prayer of gratitude to the noble bull, who handled us humans so patiently (I know that we do not deserve it). The three of us moved as a unit down a gentle muddy trail, walking parallel to a low fence that separated us from the buffalo. At the base of a hill, we met a mellow brook, which fed a grove of cottonwood trees. A peaceful look came across my mother’s face, and she told us about how as a little girl she would play in limestone outcroppings that looked much like the ones here. She called them “dragon rocks”. Across the stony micro-landscape of the dragon rocks, my mother and her action figures spent afternoons in rich fantasy, the kind of afternoons that are unique to childhood.
I flew back to California the next day. I watched the land change again, this time from a cold plastic window. There are so many places that I could have been brought up. I feel thankful that the place where I was is a ceremony of subtlety. I know that in my soul is a prairie, as the land where we are raised never leaves us.
My mother still carries dragon rocks in her pockets.
iii. wrapped up in white linen, as cold as the clay
The shadow of The American Cowboy howls the constant reminder of a grand undoing. Though cowboy bodies are scarce, cowboy songs have stuck around to invoke the saudade of a culture that believes itself capable of wrangling wilderness into submission. The American Cowboy is pure, ephemeral nature; lonesome phantoms shepherding individualism into a world yet unsullied by such notions.
The American CowboyTM is a multi-use tool—some use it to engender romance and historical interest, while for others it functions as an unassuming hook on which to hang ideas of ethnic superiority (Note: actual American Cowboys shared far more with Mexican Vaquero culture than with mainstream American “society”, another reminder that America’s number one superpower is gaslighting history). Irrespective of motivations, modern folks are drawn to The American Cowboy for three central reasons: first, for his sense of raw style, with clothing that evokes a type of hard-working sexuality which is largely missing from modern American culture. Second, for the way the Cowboy distracts from the utter-fucking-horror of Western American history, and third, for his tunes.
Cowboys songs are a curious thing. There is a mismatch between their sound and their branding. The uninitiated would imagine that they sound hard-driving and violent, or at the very least rebellious. I blame the Outlaw Country movement for this misconception. In reality, classic Cowboy songs sound as though they are being sung for cattle as much as they are for people, with melodies that swing around softly and fold in on themselves easily. This is especially true of the songs from the Great Plains region, where all songs are stories, scattered like apple seeds across the spur-scarred landscape.
From this motif comes the ballad O Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie. It is a song about disregarding the wish of a dying man—and in this sense, is squarely American. His wish is to be carried back to civilization and laid to rest among family and friends. From where the young man lies in a bloom of bloodied earth, a phrase manages to trickle from his pale lips,
“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie,
Where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free
Where there’s not a soul that will care for me
Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.”
But he is buried there, on the lone prairie, by men with better things to do, and his dying words are howled around campfires in perpetuity.
As I was writing this piece—after translating my conceptualization of the Great Plains as an ocean—I discovered that this song was born not on the lone prairie. It was born on the high seas. Originally titled The Ocean Burial, this version of the song began with the dying wish of,
“O bury me not in the deep, deep sea.”
Documents indicate that The Ocean Burial was popular amongst eastern sailors in 1830’s. It was first officially documented on the Great Plains in the 1920’s, though it was likely sung low by cowboys for many decades prior. I imagine the child of a sailor bringing this song westward. They must have stood on some slope and watched the dance of wind and tallgrasses, and known, just as I have, that the ocean and the prairie are separate only in theory. Both are mighty lonesome places.
I am a person who was raised on the Kansan Great Plains. I can sing you our songs, those of cowboys and sailors, of buffalo and barking dogs. Of fossils in rocks and blue eyes that love you.
