What Time is it?

No one really knew exactly what time it was at any given moment, at any particular location, until November 18, 1883. Before that date, when it was “High Noon” in Lincoln it just might be a quarter to two, or a bit before or a smidgen after, someplace else.

For most folks out on the Great American Plains it really didn’t make a whole lot of difference what time it was. The sun was all the clock they needed. If you weren’t out in the field with the mule hitched to the plow by the time the sun peeked over the tops of the trees, if you had a tree, you were late for work. Or it might just mean that some ornery sneaking coyote had done in the rooster. If that was the case, you knew exactly what time it was. It was time to get a new rooster--and time to do some coyote hunting.

And of course you could always rely on the grumbles from your stomach to let you know it was time to head in from where ever you were, wash up at the pump or the crick, and line up at the chuck wagon or set down at the kitchen table. Long before that ole hollow spot in your middle started hollering you knew it was getting close to time to eat because the heavenly smell of fresh baked bread and pie, and maybe fried chicken, was wafting on the prairie breeze.

Folks on the plains had other ways of knowing what time it was. If you were out in the barn milking the cows and your misses, who had steadily been growing what looked like a watermelon under her apron for the past nine months plus a few extra days, hollered from the back door sort of frantic-like—you knew it was “her time.” Depending on the intensity of her holler, you either finished milking the cows or you threw a saddle on Ole Dan and hightailed it to the neighbors to get their misses for help. All the way there you prayed you’d get back in time. After you delivered the neighbor woman to your house, it was time for you to round up your young ones, if you all ready had some, and get the heck out of the way.

When, in 1873, surveyors laid out a route for the Northern Pacific Railroad along the northern margins of the unceded Indian Territory the Plains Indians sure didn’t need any fancy timepiece to know the score. They just bided their time till a whole bunch of them, in 1876, were camped on the banks of the river they called the Greasy Grass that hot day of June 25th. I don’t think Crazy Horse, Rain-in-the-Face, and Chief Gull all stood around their Sunday campfire and coordinated their watches as they viewed Custer and his boys trotting towards the banks of the Little Bighorn.

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