Iron Memory
To see the buffalo slaughtered and left to waste upon the Plains must have been almost unbearable. This was not only a violation, not only a crime, but a torturous devastation of the soul, the spirit. Their reaction to it was what you might imagine, although it is unimaginable. It was a wound that would be very, very hard to heal, if it could be healed at all. Life was over, in a sense. To see such a thing is to see the death of the god.
N. Scott Momaday in an interview for Blood Memory
Much of what makes up America can be examined in Homestead: the rise of industrialization and the breaking apart of industrialization, the role that immigrants have played in American life, the migration of black people to the North, authoritarianism and the acceptance of it, contention between workers and employers, the role of unions in American life, the heroism of ordinary people in the face of the strongest adversaries, how America uses things—people, resources, cities—then discards them.
William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town
Around summer solstice, I had a chance to visit the Olympic Peninsula for the first time since moving away last year. Nothing was radically different. I took an alternative route to Port Townsend after crossing Hood Canal to avoid a road closure. There was a new roundabout in town where a traffic light used to be at the intersection of Kearney and Sims, and I must say traffic has never been moving better through that thoroughfare. The political yard sign du jour out there has to do with a tax that may be levied county-wide to replace the city’s aging pool, which is currently closed through July 26 for repairs following a water main break. Some businesses and nonprofits have found different office spaces to lease since I left, and the museum that I worked at finally had its restored historic front doors installed following what I assume was a frustrating back-and-forth with a contractor (we received grant funding for the project in August 2021, anticipated completing it in early 2022, and it was still tied up when I left in June 2023).
When I got a chance to hike in the south Hood Canal area that I’m especially fond of, there was even a familiar foggy abyss obstructing what on a clear day would be a panoramic view of Lake Cushman, the Skokomish River delta, and a handful of peaks and valleys. It wasn’t a rainy day and had I hit the trail later, the fog might’ve lifted to offer a slightly different view at the top, but I didn’t mind the low visibility so much. It made the profusion of post-solstice flower blooms the star of the day, and that felt appropriate. After all, I credit my years on the Olympic Peninsula for teaching me to look down and close by on the days when it was hard or impossible to see the dramatic landscape around me. That’s a teaching I’ve tried to carry with me back to Montana, particularly as I get reacquainted with the flower species of the Intermountain West that I started learning in my late teens and early twenties.
Taking an informal census of the comings and goings of flowers and migratory birds, I’ve found, is one of the ways to keep myself tethered to the progression of seasons that the demands of our modern lives can so aggressively alienate us from. And yes, gentle reader, the alienation happens even when we live in places known for their scenery and access to somewhat intact wild spaces.
In Helena, I was more grieved than I have been in recent memory over the transition from winter to spring. I was sad to lose winter, when the trail system I run on is delightfully quiet. While I was initially cranky in November about having to pack a headlamp for runs commencing well before sunset, then transitioning to microspikes in the snowy months where my route through the neighborhoods meets the trailhead, I came to love the extra effort and preparations needed to bear witness to psychedelic golden hours handing the baton off to moonrises that are sometimes just as hallucinatory in their beauty and color saturation.
What brought me around to accepting the lengthening days, incrementally busier trails, and steady return of users on bikes to what felt like my private cathedral in the coniferous foothills were the pasqueflowers. Then the shooting stars, mountain phlox, and Wyoming kittentails after that, followed by the overlapping arrowleaf balsamroot and penstemon explosions. The signs of greater-than-human life carrying on helped offset the uptick in human activity and made it less overwhelming. But the sign that really stopped me in my tracks back in May was budding prairie smoke—something I probably hadn’t seen since 2014, making me feel like I’d truly been back for a full annual cycle.
If you can’t tell by the low-grade Wordsworth energy I’m bringing to this subject, I can trip out on this shit all day. To me, learning the names of other carbon-based beings (albeit settler names for lifeforms that have been known by different names to Indigenous folks for millennia) is very much the foundation of feeling part of the living world—in essence, knowing your neighbors’ names, the crowds they roll with, when they come and go throughout the year, and why. I’m always delighted to learn the names of other beings that hunter-gatherers on this continent evolved alongside, and much of the satisfaction of my solstice hike through the familiar foggy abyss that hangs over the Olympics more days than not owed to that.
Once I was back in Helena, I worked on identifying the flower photos I had taken (all on June 24), and learned that I’d made no less than six new friends: little prince’s pine, Pacific trillium, Davidson’s penstemon, pink mountain-heather, Columbia tiger lily, and what I’m pretty sure is Pacific lupine (though I’d love to be corrected if you think it’s something else!). I also encountered one mystery buddy that I haven’t been able to identify (if you can from the photos, I’d be much obliged if you’d jump in the comments or get in touch).
All these flowers have made me think about how I credit my years west of the Cascades for the practice of always surveying the ground and taking note of the other beings around me. I very much see it as a practice because it still doesn’t come naturally to me. You have to remember that I grew up in a place that one of my high school classmates aptly described as “alarmingly picturesque” after we’d both left for college elsewhere. Adding to the features that can overshadow the micro-world, the most prevalent non-human animals of Greater Yellowstone aren’t small—by adulthood, most are bigger than us humans. I think that all contributes to the deliberate effort it takes me to really lock in on the beings with less biomass, even as I’ve learned time and time again of the rewards to be found in it.
To be clear, the landscape that defines much of the Olympic Peninsula is as staggering as any on bluebird days, when you can see it all in perspective: the Olympics that rise inexplicably above treeline from basically sea level, miles of the Washington Cascades to the north and east, the bays and inlets of the Pacific, and the estuaries of all the rivers that pour into it from their montane headwaters. But those features—the water and the mountains—have survived ice ages and mass extinction events.
Along with our fellow animals, humans on this continent have managed prairies and forests and bodies of water since probably the last ice age, but only cataclysmic disturbances on the magnitude of earthquakes, floods, volcanism, explosive industrial activity, or fiery and/or rocky encroachments from outside our atmosphere have the potential to alter the landscape irreversibly and beyond recognition. Us carbon-based beings aren’t so hardy. We’re prone to disease, changes in our climate, and both interpersonal and mass violence wrought by each other—often for asinine reasons.
I don’t think I was conscious while I was receiving this lesson, but my time west of the Cascades gave me a habit of essentially not taking my fellow beings for granted while they’re here with us. Though we’ve been together for millennia, that may not always be the case. I was recently reminded listening to an interview with the great Robin Wall Kimmerer that biologists estimate 99-99.9% of all species that have ever called the Earth home, are now extinct. Why cockroaches can’t be among those to have already perished is a question that haunts many of my waking hours. Until I mature beyond my many prejudices, just know that none of what I proceed to say about respect for our fellow beings applies to cockroaches.
A Promise and a Warning
There are lifeforms in our midst that we will lose in my lifetime, which is why I think paying attention to them now is immensely valuable. It’s important to take cues from the ones that have survived all these years, because there’s wisdom in their persistence for all of us navigating a changing world. But I also want to remember the ones we lose, too. They had a role and a purpose in the living order while they were here with us. Things being what they are these days, it’s likely that their death wasn’t inevitable, human activity had a great deal to do with it, and their ecological role is still vitally important to our collective thriving. The power of humans in particular to harvest, poison, shoot, or displace our fellow beings into extinction is well known at this point. And I wouldn’t be the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem kid that I am if the historical memory of the near-eradication of the keystone species of this continent’s Serengeti wasn’t constantly on my mind.
It’s impossible to not feel nihilistic and defeated every time folks with wealth and power can make decisions and engage in behaviors without the posterity of generations after them in mind—generations whose survival as complete somatic and spiritual beings with compassion and a sense of belonging depends on an intact living order, just as it had for our ancestors across the planet going back tens of thousands of years.
My latest contemplation of our willingness to discard something of inestimable significance like the bison was brought on by surprising events. The biggest and best of them—something initially reported online back on June 4, though only recently confirmed officially—was the birth of a wild white bison calf in Yellowstone. While such an event is not unheard of, it basically is in modern wild bison populations that have no evidence of breeding with cattle (so, if you come across some wise guy running his mouth about all the white bison they have at a state park near Evanston, Wyoming, you can tell that genius that those bison have Charolais cattle DNA and aren’t descendants of the last free-roaming herd–he probably won’t listen because he’s an idiot, but you can bask in the knowledge and self-assurance that you understand the difference).
As I’m writing this, the white calf born to Yellowstone’s northern breeding herd in Lamar Valley has not been spotted since its birth in June, and it may very well not live to adulthood (one in every five wild calves die shortly after birth due to natural hazards). Even so, the birth alone is so improbable as to be momentous. Different cultures of the North Plains interpret the significance of the event differently, but there seems to be a prevailing message wherein the birth is a sign of better things to come mixed with a warning to give us all a chance to walk back from some fateful precipice. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to read that interpretation as plausible, given the moment and conditions we find ourselves in.
Whatever part of the message speaks most to you—whether the promise or the warning—I believe that implied in both is a responsibility to take care of the beings we have, both human and non-human, because we’re all participants in rupture, repair, and regeneration.
I’m not in any position to do anything consequential and far-reaching with this information, but I tend to embrace this unlikely birth as more of a warning with the possibility of better times to come if we can rise to the occasion. I think that just comes from the recognition that it was not inevitable or guaranteed that somebody like me would ever get to grow up in a temperate zone ecosystem with bison at the dawn of the 21st century, just like it was not inevitable that they were nearly erased from the landscape in a matter of four human generations in the 19th century. That they exist on our continent by the tens of thousands when they were reduced to a few hundred in 1900 is a testament to both the bison’s evolutionary power to survive and human cooperation to change course despite varying motivations. That they existed on our continent by the hundreds after roaming it by the tens of fucking millions before 1800 is only a testament to the destruction, wastefulness, and hubris of settler colonialism—particularly when it comes to that which has economic value, or stands in the way of something else that does.
I’m sure I’ve written or at least spoken of something to this effect before, but anymore, I can hardly look at historic photos of the destruction done to the Plains by the hide trade of the 19th century or the bone trade after that. Those images are profane enough to approximate the images of carnage from the Holocaust of European Jews in my mind. Such industrialized slaughter—the magnitude, the suddenness, and completeness, to borrow terms George Bird Grinnell used in describing this same period in our history—is fucking depraved in a way that should compel us all to interrogate ourselves constantly about our potential to aid and abet genocide, of any beings, on any continent.
That memory should drive us all to question our motives and our complicity, and always be willing to correct our actions when we know they’re causing harm. That’s kind of what I mean when I talk about embracing the birth of a wild white calf—something that’s never been reported in Yellowstone since it’s been a national park and something believed to occur in “one in 1 million births or even less frequently” in wild herds—to a kind of clarion call.
Because this calf is considered a “landmark event in the ecocultural recovery of bison,” it recalls the events this continent’s bison had to recover from—carnage on a scale hard to conceptualize. Trying to relate the amount of biomass lost feels useless since the numbers would be so astronomical that they’d be hard to compare to anything—these are creatures that can weigh a full fucking ton as adults. However, in terms of headcount, it would be like 10-20% of the U.S. human population today being killed off, plus the ecological flowdown effects of all the living things that currently depend on our tending and upkeep (or at least our maintenance to head off imminent ecological disaster in the case of nuclear waste sites and whatnot). A white calf in a wild herd is only possible at this point because there’s enough genetic diversity now for that to happen. And we know how quickly the pendulum can swing the other way. This is all so fra-gee-lay, if you know what I’m saying.
Tethered and Severed
Now, I said that this latest contemplation was born out of “surprising events”-plural, which brings me to something else I was dealing with amidst this calf’s exciting earthside appearance. Back in mid-May, I sustained some gnarly lacerations just below my left knee after wiping out onto some sharp rock and other organic matter on a Thursday night trail run. At least, I assume sharp surfaces were involved—I didn’t exactly stop and inspect the scene once I could see far enough inside my meat suit to know my evening plans suddenly included an urgent care visit for stitches and a TDAP booster.
Like any wound-based injury, the recovery process was tedious and for most of it, I dressed like a divorced dad: Generally the same running shorts, socks with sandals, and a crewneck sweater for days on end, though one of my coworkers suggested I could’ve truly completed the look with a Hawaiian button-down shirt in lieu of the sweater. This attire not only accommodated my non-stick dressings that I changed twice a day, but made it easier to keep my left leg extended like a Barbie for 11 days to avoid tearing my stitches. Walking during that time—though not painful—was a comically slow process, and I could only take downward stairs one at a time leading with the extended left leg. Whenever possible, I took upward stairs two at a time, leading with my right leg—the one way I could be slightly more efficient without interfering with the stitches.
I was fortunate in a lot of ways where my injury could’ve been far worse. I could still drive myself while I had stitches since I could bend my right knee. My lacerations—though unsettling in their depth by the looks of them—weren’t so deep that they impacted tendon, muscle, or bone tissue. I have decent health insurance, so I didn’t have to think twice about hauling ass to urgent care once I booked it home. I also have a comfortable chaise sofa that made it easy to keep my leg extended and somewhat elevated through the inflammatory and proliferative stages of the wound healing process (basically days 4-24 after injury). And, though it brings me no pleasure to admit it, I did have a little past experience with the slow burn of recovering from lower leg wounds. Around this very time five years ago, I could be found mostly on the couch of the Bloomingdale row house I occupied along with two other tenants for three of my DC years, nursing some infected ice burns (basically, glorified road rash) sustained while ass-glissading down a steep couloir without gaiters over my pants after summiting Mt. Whitney in June 2019.
How this whole recovery process ties into the bigger meditation on our responsibility to our carbon-based relatives and ourselves is two-fold. My involuntary state of limited mobility basically afforded me lots of time to reflect on what keeps me tethered to this world and where my own forbears’ history intersects with a legacy of ecological destruction that looms so large in my mind.
Most folks who’ve interacted with me at length will be familiar with my abject hatred of billionaires and the extractive growth capitalism that enables theft of resources and labor en masse so an exploitative minority can accumulate unspeakable wealth. Of those familiar with my adversarial feelings toward the idle rich, many have probably heard some version of my family ties to the late 19th and early 20th century labor wars. The version I’m fond of reciting goes something like: My paternal Brennan and McCallister kinfolk fled the land that inspired their ancestors’ language, songs, and heavily pagan version of Catholicism to get on coffin ships after the English empire tried to starve them to death because although Irish farmers were producing enough food to feed the country, it was all getting exported to England. When they got off the boats, the men went straight into the Union Army in their new country, then after the Civil War, straight to work in an industrial fiefdom that made Andrew Carnegie the richest American alive by 1901.
The public records you can find on my ancestors seem to track with the struggle, squalor, and generally shitty standard of living chronicled in histories written about the lives of Monongahela Valley steelworkers. For example, my third great-grandfather Peter McCallister’s death notice reports that he died in 1911 of injuries sustained on the job at the Homestead Steelworks. Two of his sons, my second great-grandfather James and one of his younger brothers Daniel, both reported intriguing details involving left limbs on their draft registration cards from World Wars I and II.
The third question under the “Registrar’s Report” section of a WWI draft card asks: “Has person lost arm, leg, hand, foot, or both eyes, or is he otherwise disabled (please specify)?” James’s response from June 1917 reads, “Left hand off at wrist.” He claimed exemption from the draft for this on the front side of his card, which also states that at the time he was a railroad signalman for “Carnegie Steel Co.” His younger brother Daniel’s 1942 WWII draft card indicates an artificial left leg as his sole “obvious” physical characteristic—not an exemption, merely a trait that could aid with identification. Whether or not their jobs had anything to do with these injured extremities, I may never know for certain. But odds are good that was the case based solely on the number of waking hours they spent at work. Following the 1892 Homestead Strike, Carnegie’s mills shifted from an eight-hour to a 12-hour workday, six days a week, with a 24-hour shift every two weeks. In Homestead specifically—where this family worked—the 24-hour shift (aka “the long-turn”) happened more likely every three weeks, but most steelworkers worked a seven-day week.
Daniel, 46 at the time of the WWII draft, worked for Carnegie-Illinois Co., a subsidiary of what had become U.S. Steel back in 1901 when Carnegie sold his steel empire to J.P. Morgan. Though he was over eight years younger than his brother James, Daniel would die 17 years earlier in April 1943–almost exactly a year after his draft registration. Needless to say, whether they lived to age 47 like Daniel, 73 like James, or 53 like their father, these steelworkers all had an occupation or employer to list on their death certificates because they all worked until they died. Although their official causes of death vary, it’s not hyperbolic to say their work killed them early. A 24-hour shift every two or three weeks of your adult life would destroy anyone, even if your ancestors had already survived generations of starvation and cultural genocide across the pond.
Born in 1925 in Ireland, my fourth great-grandfather James McCallister (Peter’s father, his sons’ grandfather) first shows up in public records in August 1861 when he enlisted in the Union Army in Indiana. By the time of the 1870 census, he was working as a coal miner in Baldwin, Pennsylvania. Notably, iron ore, coal, and scrap steel are the three main raw materials needed for steel production. Like his children, and his children’s children, and most of the families they’d marry into, his labor fed the burgeoning steel industry concentrated most densely in towns along the Monongahela River. The words George Bird Grinnell would opine in an 1899 issue of The Atlantic to describe the changes ushered in by white settlement on the North American Plains could also be used to describe Andrew Carnegie’s iron grip on American steel manufacturing at the same time: “The magnitude of it is equaled only by the suddenness with which is has been wrought, and by its completeness.”
Every Second Counts
The two histories–the ecological destruction unlike any documented in world history in the eight decades after the Lewis and Clark Expedition AND the century-spanning rise and fall of the largest industrial conglomerate in world history precipitating in the unceremonious closing of mills through the 1980s, gutting an industry that had once employed 700,000—are quite intertwined.
In his excellent 1992 book, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town, the late labor journalist William Serrin points out that the Homestead Works, the most famous steel mill in the world and the one that employed at least six generations of my ancestors, was originally built as a Bessemer rail mill. Carnegie would transform it into a heavy products mill after acquiring it in 1883, but only after it had turned out tens of thousands of miles of steel rails to accelerate the settler colonial project of westward expansion. Over its 102 years, it would supply American imperialism in other ways–most notably producing the armor plate that transformed the American Navy from a wooden fleet to a steel-hulled armada.
It’s not simply that my ancestors were an accessory to the mass murder of Late Pleistocene beings that have become a national symbol. They were that by virtue of the steel product coming out of Homestead—the rails that would crisscross the continent, the beams that would be used to erect bridges and skyscrapers, the armaments that would be used in two deadly international wars. They were also victims of this ecocide wrought by American industry and human hubris. They missed by about a century the presence of bison in western Pennsylvania when they were dense enough, by one account, to scratch their backs on a homesteader’s cabin until it collapsed. They were robbed of a chance to see these magnificent creatures when they roamed east of the Mississippi, and they worked themselves to death in the sprawling riverfront mills likely occupying land eastern bison had once grazed. I hope I don’t sound like I’m making an indulgent bison pun by saying it behooves us to not forget these things.
Now, is my standard of living as bad as some of my McCallister ancestors I introduced you to here? By no means. But I likely have the epigenetic markers of the trauma, violence, and starvation they endured. And I sure as hell have a one-ton, bison-sized chip on my shoulder, dating back to at least the American Industrial Revolution, that I think I’ve come by honestly. I just get very ornery when I think we’re abdicating our responsibility to the abundance we still have, or tolerating harmful systems that benefit so few at such a massive cost to ourselves and every other being. I know we all have to make difficult decisions to survive in this late-stage of capitalism (which is what I chant to myself repeatedly whenever I learn of another acquaintance who has entered the preeminent extractive industry in the modern American West: real estate). It just sucks that people have to make themselves accessories to the next market-driven disturbance that whatever’s left of carbon-based life will fall victim to someday down the road. And that road seems to be shortening by the year—which is why every second counts, chefs!
My fear is that, worse than oblivious, we’re willfully ignorant, resigned, and can’t be bothered to honor what we have. My fear is that in my lifetime, we’ll essentially look back at the near-eradication of the North American bison and say “hold my beer” instead of “never again.” My fear rests in the awareness that we already tolerate so much harm and we don’t see that it’s all self-harm.
But I also know this from history that’s far from ancient: the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the wanton extraction of the hide and bone trades, a killing campaign led by the U.S. Army, and foreign disease introduced to this landscape by domesticated cattle could’ve all been the death knell for one species that so much life on this continent has revolved around, and evolved alongside, for tens of thousands of years. But they weren’t. Not yet, anyway. And there was a wild white calf that joined us earthside last month. Who knows if it’s still grazing the grassy sides of the Lamar and Yellowstone rivers. Maybe it’s a promise, maybe it’s a warning. I take it as both–a sign to not take any of this for granted, to lead lives worthy of the riches we still have, and, more than not forgetting, to actively remember how much our histories are connected. With some inspiration from my ancestors and their mangled left limbs, I’ve recently added a reminder to the left side of my body to help me remember.
Featured Image: Prairie smoke going to seed on Mt. Ascension on June 14, one month after I sustained some sweet lacerations and one week after I was able to resume trail runs.
