Cottonwood Gulch: Kurt Vonnegut

Cottonwood Gulch: The Vonnegut Contribution

One early trekker with The Prairie Trek Expeditions was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., the humorist and writer of novels, short stories and magazine articles. Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis and went camping with the groups led by Hillis Howie. Kurt’s father, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., paid for his son’s enrollment fees by drawing architectural sketches for the Base Camp cabins. Following Vonnegut blueprints and the Henio enhancements, many of those original Gulch cabins were built by the Silversmith and Henio families. Under supervision by Hillis Howie and Grandfather Tom Henio they built cabins, latrines, workshops and caretakers’ quarters. They even dug garbage pits for all of the food waste.

Vonnegut wrote, “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater; I’m in choir; I play the violin and piano; I used to take art classes.”

“And he went, ‘WOW. That’s amazing’. And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.’”

“And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind, because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.'”

“And that remark honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the Myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘Win’ at them.”

Vonnegut continued: “We had a truck and three station wagons, and we traveled all over [the Southwest]. We had specific missions from the Field Museum in Chicago. I was a ‘Mammalogist,’ for instance, and I put trap-lines out every night. In fact, in 1938, I caught a sub-species of the tawny white-foot mouse, which had not been seen before. When I was in the Army telling someone about this, he immediately named it Mee-sis Vonn-egee-sis.”

Stephen Howie, grandson of Hillis and Elizabeth, recalled his grandfather’s memory of Kurt Vonnegut: “If you have ever read a Vonnegut short story or novel you know that Kurt was fond of tall tales and cussing. I was with Hillis in his later years when he was asked if he had ever read Vonnegut’s novels. Without batting an eye, my grandfather said that he would not read Kurt Vonnegut’s books “because of the gratuitous profanity.” Hillis Howie was a Boy Scout through and through. Due to the timing, Hillis never knew that Vonnegut dedicated his novel Galapagos (1984) to him, two years after Howie’s death.

During a 1985 book-tour interview about the novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut was asked if his school teacher-heroine named Mary Hepburn, was modeled after Hillis Howie. Vonnegut said:

“I would think so. It took me a long time to realize what a great man Hillis Howie was. That’s part of the American experience … to suddenly come across a truly great person who never becomes rich or famous, but who is enormously beneficial just to those near him. Hillis Howie was such a person, a great naturalist, very kind and strong with boys….He ran these expeditions to the West and they still go on. But it was his invention.”