ll her life, Tabitha Fortune has been intrigued by Lakota stories about giant creatures who haunt the nearby Badlands. Sally Dancing Moon calls them ghost horses; Tabitha believes they might be dinosaurs. But to test her theory during the summer of 1899, Tabitha must become someone else.
“This multilayered first novel is fast paced and intriguing.” — Booklist
“…a triumph. The characters are strong and well developed.” — Signal
host Horses began in the spring of 1981, when Bill and Jess Marty found a really, really, really big bone while they were mending fence on their northwestern South Dakota ranch. The bone was partially buried in a gumbo bank on Haystack Butte. Bill and Jess thought it was a buffalo skull – until they tried to dig it out: the more they dug, the more bone they found.
In fact, it took a crane, a flat-bed trailer, and a special insurance policy to get Bill and Jess’s discovery safely off the butte – because that really, really, really big bone turned out to be the remains of a 65-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. It was the world’s sixth T. rex skeleton, the first one found in South Dakota. It wasn’t long before the “terrible lizard of Haystack Butte” was making national and international headlines.
From Haystack Butte to the Bone Wars
Shortly after the Haystack Butte story went public, the American West magazine asked me to write a detailed article about the discovery. It was published two years later in 1983.
During my research for the story, I stumbled onto the fascinating lives of two American pioneers in paleontology: Edward Drinker Cope and O.C. Marsh. Although neither figured in my article, their story fascinated me.
The two men hated each other. They disagreed violently over scientific interpretations; they raced to beat the other’s bone count and publish their findings first; their crews feuded over prime digging sites and probably shot at each other. Eventually, the two men sparked a giant publicity war. Their intense rivalry became known as “the Bone Wars.”
This laid the foundation for Ghost Horses. So too did a variety of other South Dakota writing experiences. As a public information specialist for the South Dakota Division of Tourism and the Department of Social Services, I researched and wrote articles on Calamity Jane, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Wild Bill Hickok, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Badlands National Park, the Corn Palace, homesteading, railroads, and frontier life. I interviewed Lakota families on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Indian Reservations; staged photography shoots in historical locations; and even costumed a theatrical pageant about South Dakota women in history. I used pieces of all this in Ghost Horses.
Tell the Truth But Tell It Slant
Since Ghost Horses is fiction, not everything in it is factual. To paraphrase a line from poet Emily Dickinson, I told the truth but told it slant. Tabitha Fortune and her family, Abby Hart, Sally Dancing Moon, Dr. Phineas X. Parker, and A.V. Harding exist only in my imagination and on the pages of Ghost Horses. You won’t find the town of Rim on any map of South Dakota. I made it up, based on observations of real western South Dakota towns: Wall, Kadoka, and Murdo.
Even the phrase “ghost horses” itself sprang from my imagination – with some help from my daughter and additional research. In 1993, after a history class on the Plains Indians, my daughter wrote this on a notecard and gave it to me: “The Pawnee believed that at one time the world was ruled by giants, but the giants were destroyed because they grew too proud. They [the Pawnee] believed the giants’ bones were left in the Kansas hills. Recent excavation discovered these bones to be dinosaur bones.”
Her note corresponded to a similar passage in an early fur trader’s journal, identifying big, fossilized bones as “chompers” of what the Sioux called “the thunder horse.” From there I made a leap – to Sally Dancing, who introduces Tabitha to the phrase, “ghost horses.”
The Corn Palace in Mitchell is real, but I fudged a few facts. John Philip Sousa actually played the Corn Palace, but not until 1904. Ernie Jones’s Golden Girls didn’t perform there until 1923 (I just couldn’t resist their name and all it implied). And in “real time,” Tabitha and her family wouldn’t have taken the train from Pierre west to Rim. Why? Because the Missouri River railroad bridge in Pierre wasn’t completed until 1907.
Of course, I didn’t have to set the book in 1899 and 1900, but I did this for a reason. In Tabitha’s world people are apprehensive about a new century – what changes would it bring in science, technology, religion, education, even family life? This heightens the conflict in the book – and it paralleled what was happening while I wrote it in the mid-1990s, as the world worried not only about a new century, but a new millennium.
1900: A Thoroughly Modern World
The social issues raised in Ghost Horses are grounded in history. That part of the book I didn’t fictionalize. The clashes between science, religion, and feminism were very real in 1900 – and continue today with different variations.
What surprises many people, however, is that in 1900, science was often at odds not only with religion but with the idea of equality for women. The most outrageous passage in Ghost Horses is a quote from late nineteenth century social scientist Gustave Le Bon, who actually wrote this:
Without a doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely.
He went on to say that “women represent the most inferior form of human behavior and are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man.” As unbelievable as his opinions sound today, they reflect mainstream ideas of the period. Many scientists at the turn of the last century believed that the size of a person’s head and the height of one’s forehead indicated more brainpower and intelligence. Since men’s heads are usually bigger than women’s.... Well, you get the picture.
Remember that rivalry between Dr. Cope and Dr. Marsh? At his death, Dr. Cope left instructions to have his skull carefully preserved and measured; he dared Dr. Marsh to do the same and have the results published posthumously for all the world to see; surely the man with the biggest brain cavity, Dr. Cope believed, would, in life, have been the smarter and better paleontologist. (Dr. Marsh, by the way, left no such instructions for his family at his death).
Medical experts in the United States and beyond also believed women’s minds were fragile, limited, and clearly inferior. College was too stressful for women; it made them mentally unstable, unsuitable for marriage or motherhood. A professor at Harvard Medical School in the late 19th century wrote that difficult academic study drew blood away from a woman’s ovaries and into her brain; college educated women, therefore, would be unable to have children.
These assumptions about biology affected women well into the 20th century in very real ways. In Ghost Horses, for example, Tabitha earns $34.80 a month, the actual salary women school teachers in Pennington County, South Dakota, earned during 1900. But if she’d been a man, Tabitha would have made $48.75 a month, doing exactly the same work. In many states, women were forced to resign their teaching posts when they got married. Surely no woman could raise a family and teach school.
In 1899 and 1900, women were allowed to vote in just four western states – Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. That’s why Tabitha thinks it’s so extraordinary that Abby Hart had “voted for Grover Cleveland” when she was homesteading in Wyoming, the first state to give American women voting rights. It wasn’t until 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, that women were allowed to vote nationwide. The New Woman
Despite these incredible limitations, a growing number of women in Tabitha’s era had found new ways to liberate themselves. Like Abby Hart, they were homesteaders, postmistresses, or teamsters (known as bull whackers in the west). They established their own businesses; practiced medicine or law; or pursued careers in the sciences like Tabitha – and A.V. Harding.
Such women also demanded the right to vote; better educational and career opportunities; more progressive attitudes toward birth control and medical care; and more equitable laws governing marriage, divorce, and property rights. As a group, these early American feminists represented what became known as the “New Woman,” and the changes they advocated alarmed many people.
One result was the rise of Christian Fundamentalism. Ministers like Charles Fortune in Ghost Horses opposed virtually every aspect of the women’s movement – from voting rights to career opportunities. As one early Fundamentalist periodical from 1893 proclaimed, “Woman has no call to the ballot-box.... She is the divinely appointed guardian of the home.” The Fundamentalists’ stance against the “New Woman” became one of the their most popular appeals. So was their opposition to evolution.
The Devil’s Plot
In 1859, English naturalist Charles Darwin published a controversial book entitled On The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The book’s central premise – that life on earth evolved gradually over millions of years – created a crisis of faith for many. How could they reconcile the Biblical account in Genesis with Darwin’s theory of natural selection?
In Ghost Horses, when Charles Fortune preaches that “The Devil himself has left these so-called dinosaur bones, buried in the earth after the Great Flood,” he’s voicing a popular argument of the day, particularly among Fundamentalists. Dinosaurs never actually roamed the earth; they were part of the Devil’s plot to “mislead the minds of men.”
Getting the Science Right
Yet as early as the 1820s, amateur and professional scientists alike were puzzled by the mysterious fossils and giant dragon-like skeletons they uncovered, sometimes in their own backyards. The word “dinosaur” (terrible lizard) became part of the English language in 1841, and was coined by English naturalist, Richard Owen. So in 1899, the science of paleontology, the study of prehistoric life based on fossil evidence, was still very new. Students of this new science, like Tabitha, were often self-taught, a practice that continued into the 1930s and beyond. In fact, Sue Hendrickson, who found the world’s biggest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in 1990 (more about this later), doesn’t have an academic background. Like Tabitha, she’s taught herself everything she knows about dinosaurs.
Getting the science right was one of my biggest challenges with Ghost Horses. Although Dr. Cope had indeed excavated in South Dakota in the 1870s, and again in 1892, he hadn’t found anything really significant (more too about this). In fact, until 1981, when Bill and Jess Marty found the Haystack Butte dinosaur, most of the discoveries in South Dakota hadn’t been especially spectacular. Was it believable for Tabitha to find something big in the Badlands? Even if she found something big, what could it be? After all, the first T. rex had been found in Montana in 1906. These were facts I couldn’t fudge, so I decided not to identify the big carnivore Tabitha finds in Ghost Horse Canyon.
There was, of course, one other scientific challenge. Today you and I probably know more about dinosaurs than Dr. Cope and Dr. Marsh did in the late 1800s. At one point, for example, Dr. Cope proudly displayed a dinosaur skeleton in his museum that he’d unknowingly put together backwards. This may sound like a stupid mistake, but at the time, Dr. Cope and Dr. Marsh were laying the foundation for an entirely new form of scientific study; they simply didn’t have the bulk of knowledge about dinosaurs that we do today. So once I started writing Ghost Horses, I cut myself off any new research on dinosaurs. I didn’t want to know much more about them in 1993 than Tabitha did in 1899.
Truth is Stranger Than Fiction
After the book was finished, however, I heard some amazing news: Sue Hendrickson had found the world’s biggest T. rex skeleton – and she’d found it in South Dakota! Maybe that Haystack Butte dinosaur wasn’t so unusual after all. Maybe Ghost Horses hadn’t slanted the truth as much as I’d feared.
Then the truth got even stranger! In December 1999, more South Dakota ranchers found yet other big bone sticking out of a bluff along the Moreau River. Clearly, it was another T. rex. But as they and a group of paleontologists excavated the site, they found scraps of metal from what might have been a wagon wheel. Some of the bones themselves had been neatly stacked and buried, perhaps at an earlier dig.
That’s when one of the paleontologists remembered that Dr. Cope had excavated near the Moreau River in 1892, and had reported finding the remains of a big dinosaur he named Manospondylus gigas. It was actually a T. rex, possibly the first discovery of its kind, predating that Montana T. rex discovered in 1906. But Cope’s name for the creature didn’t stick – because he hadn’t brought enough of its bones back to civilization with him for confirmation. They were too big. But now that scientists may have found the rest of Dr. Cope’s M. gigas, the name T. rex may become obsolete.
So who knows what’s lurking beneath the sandstone in Tabitha’s Ghost Horse Canyon? It could very well be another T. rex – or should I say, M. gigas? Only time will tell.
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_______. Where the Trail Divides. New York: A.L. Burt Company, 1907.
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For Further Reference
Baker, Jean H, ed. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
DuBois, Ellen Carol. Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.
Harlan, Bill. “Lost and Found? T. rex reamins may be first discovered.” Rapid City Journal 11 June, 2000, D.
Johnson, Diane. “What Do Women Want?” New York Review of Books. November 28, 1996.
Perutz, M.F. “A Passion for Science.” New York Review of Books. February 20, 1997.
Pulley, Kathy J. “Gender Roles and Conservative Churches: 1870 - 1930.” Essays On Women In Earliest Christianity. Vol. 2. Ed. Carroll D. Osburn. Joplin, MO: College Press Publishing Company, 1995.
Verrengia, Joseph.“Maverick explorer rues fame of a dinosaur named Sue.” The Oregonian 14 May, 2000, A14.
Ghost Horses,
Holiday House
(Hardcover), 1996
Ghost Horses grew out of a story Pamela Smith Hill wrote for this magazine - about the world's sixth Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.
Ranchers found that T. rex here - on Haystack Butte in northwestern South Dakota.
The South Dakota Badlands, where Tabitha looks for dinosaur bones, is now a national park.
These two Lakota women inspired the character of Sally Dancing Moon in Ghost Horses.
Calamity Jane, like Abby Hart in Ghost Horses, was a bullwhackeress, who seemed equally at home in buckskins and ostrich plumes.