Lighting Out

By John Skow

GREAT PLAINS by Ian Frazier

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

290 pages; $17.95

No sooner had the first motley pioneers lit out for the American West than they were followed by a band of nosy fellows with notebooks. Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America) was among the earliest, in the 1830s. Francis Parkman (The Oregon Trail) packed his saddlebags a few years later. By the mid-20th century, when Bernard De Voto wrote Across the Wide Missouri, traffic on Western highways was clogging up with authors in vans, their kids and stalled novels left back home with parents.

New Yorker humorist Ian Frazier is the latest to light out, looking for locals with twangy accents, and it's still a fine, fresh idea. There is plenty of West to go around, it turns out. Frazier pokes about in the Plains states, to the east of the Rockies, letting his own mild adventures and rummagings in small-town museums drift into recollections of the old days. "Indians thought the white men's custom of shaking hands was comical," he reports, enchanted by this odd information. "Sometimes two Indians would approach each other, shake hands, and then fall on the ground laughing."

Frazier tells us that tumbleweed came from Russia, that Nicodemus, Kans. (pop. 50), was founded by black settlers in 1877, that during the dust-bowl years of the mid-'30s storms called "dusters" were identified by color -- brown from Kansas, red from Oklahoma, dirty yellow from Texas and New Mexico. He relates that in 1910 C.W. Post, the cereal magnate, tried to produce rain at Post City, Texas, by blowing up boxcarloads of dynamite. He had enough success, or at least enough coincidental rain, to be encouraged. Frazier is fascinated by the nobility of Crazy Horse, the great Oglala Sioux chief, and talks himself into a long, marveling chapter on the splendid old warrior's death. It might be expected that a writer accustomed to being funny in magazines would perform too gaudily in a book of this kind, luxuriate too much in the acuteness of his ironies. Frazier's enthusiasms are personal, but he stays out of the snapshots most of the time, and he leaves the reader with a powerful impulse to change the van's oil and head West too.