As the train gathered speed I thought of a trip I had made ten years before, in a covered wagon, from our old home in Kansas to my father’s claim in Oklahoma Territory. He had stopped his team in that bright new land of opportunity at an Indian burial ground, and the entire family had scrambled to gaze in awe at lines stretched from the tops of poles to stakes in the ground. On the lines, like a family wash put out to dry, hung human scalps. The long, silky hair of white women and the short, crisp hair of white men lifted and rippled in the breeze that blew across the prairie.
