White Bird: The Quiet Ground

It was November when I drove into White Bird Canyon. The land rolled out pale and cold under a washed sky. Grass moved like worn cloth. The wind made no sound I could name. There are places in the West where the air itself feels marked — as if something once burned there and never quite went out. White Bird is one of them.

In 1877, this valley saw the first gunfire of the Nez Perce War. It began in confusion — soldiers crossed a ridge, a shot misfired, and the Nez Perce returned fire. When it ended, thirty-four cavalrymen lay dead. The Nez Perce rode north. The war followed them across miles of wilderness and grief. What began as one misunderstanding became a chase that still echoes through our telling of the American story.

I came to White Bird not as a historian, but as someone listening for what the ground still holds. My work has become a kind of pilgrimage — an ongoing project across the American West, tracing places where hate or war burned for a while and then went quiet. Some are battlefield sites. Others are towns that disappeared after the violence passed. I bring my daughter, Murphy Kendall. She walks beside me and reads the plaques. Children accept what is written as truth. Adults know how much of truth gets lost.

That November day, the sky hung close. No one else was on the road. I parked and walked the trails where the fight began. The ground was stiff with frost, the color of old bone. I photographed the ridges and the draw, without hurry, just to remember the shape of what happened here. The light was thin, the kind that makes every shadow honest.

Back in the studio, I began to draw. Graphite first, the dark and the gray, the texture of distance. I drew the canyon, the sloping ridge, the faint trail where horses once broke through the grass. Over the drawing, I laid down words — bits of cavalry documents, Nez Perce accounts, my own notes written on the road. The words came from both sides of the story. None of them told the whole truth. Together, they came closer.

I build each line of text by hand using transfer lettering. One letter at a time. I press it onto the paper, test the weight, the balance, the tone. I wipe many away. I press them again. There’s a rhythm to it, the same rhythm memory keeps — write, erase, remember, forget. The words carry their scars. So does the drawing. My hand travels the same paths over and over until the surface gives in a little. I like that. The work should look lived-in, like the land itself.

When the image feels whole, I coat it with wax. It’s not a finish; it’s a thin shield, temporary and tender. The wax catches light the way snow does — a quiet shimmer that hides as much as it shows. A drawing like this doesn’t aim for permanence. Pencil is bluntly mortal. It smudges. The wax will yellow. But nothing that tries to remember should last longer than the memory itself.

Most art reaches for forever. These drawings do not. They are closer to weather — shifting, breathing, fading. If you look close, you can see places where the lettering sinks into the grain, where graphite has softened from too much touch. I think of them less as pictures and more as objects, as shards. A piece of paper that once carried a hand’s warmth.

Sometimes the drawing surprises me: a smudge falls in the right place, or a word lands slightly crooked, the line breaks the silence of the page just enough. That’s when I stop. Art doesn’t answer. It listens.

Drawing a battlefield teaches its own tempo. There is no hurry out there — only wind and land, always there before us, and the faint sense that someone once fought for something they believed was true. Standing in a place like White Bird, you feel both shame and awe. It is not the kind of awe that exalts; it is the kind that asks you to look harder. To see how small we are against what has already happened.

I travel to these places because I believe seeing matters — because we have made a habit, as a country, of looking away. Each drawing is a way to stay, to linger. The graphite marks are not attempts to fix history but to face its outline, even as it fades.

My daughter, when she was small, used to ask what happened in these places. I told her the truth in pieces. Men fought. Others fled. People died. She would look out at the sky and ask, Here? Right here? I would nod. Then she would point to the horizon, already looking at something new. Children always move forward. Adults stand still, counting shadows.

Later, when I returned to White Bird, the wind had changed. The grasses were taller, the same color as the horse trails in my drawing. The earth forgets, but never all the way. There’s a gravity in the soil that keeps the memory close. If you listen long enough, you can almost hear what the Nez Perce must have heard: the horses breathing, the calls from the ridge, the silence that followed.

Drawing on paper is an act of trust. You trust that the pencil will say enough and not too much. You trust the page to hold what you can’t. It’s simple work, humble and slow, like mending a net that will never catch what it once held. But there’s grace in the attempt — in the soft erasures, the borderlines, the shadows caught before they fade again.

Each drawing from White Bird carries two lives: the landscape itself, and my trying to understand it. They are maps of time, of grief, of the stubborn human need to touch history even as it slips away. I take them as proof of something small and good — that art can reach into silence, that meaning can live in what’s fragile, and that sometimes, a quiet mark on paper is enough to keep a story breathing.