Here, in Nebraska, we name a thing after the tool used to destroy it. Here, on this spot, where the American Legion Memorial Highway intersects with Outlaw Trail Scenic Byway, in October 1804, Lewis and Clark spent several days with the Arikara tribe—days that Boyd County historians insist on calling “tranquil.” That the Arikara had been nearly decimated due to a smallpox epidemic may be responsible for this description. Many of those whom the plague did not claim were later beaten and hung from the boughs of the region’s black walnuts and black cherries, honeylocusts, hackberries, cottonwoods, and pecans. The township decided, in 1948, to change the name of its new surveying pillar from Old Baldy to Lynch. Downstream from the Knife River, still a ways from Massacre Canyon, Lewis and Clark discovered the prairie dog, a species then unknown to the Western world. Scientists later discovered that prairie dogs are chiefly herbivorous, with an affinity for buffalo grass, tumblegrass, fescue, and blue grama. Pregnant and lactating females, in the wintertime, gorge themselves on snow for the extra water. In the name of development, manifest destiny, and what the Nebraska Department of Agriculture once called “prairie dog management,” we began poisoning their food supply with aluminum phosphide. We began referring to them as a plague. The grounds that were to become Lynch, were soon littered with the suffocated corpses of the prairie dogs, their lungs filled with a fluid of the loveliest amber. The thing most responsible for the decimation of the prairie dog colonies was now the prairie itself.
Menu