Most know that Crazy Horse spotted a dustman when he was wandering around shortly after Black Buffalo Woman ran off and got married to No Water. He fingered the good-luck stone behind his ear and worked his sickly horse to a gallop, but he couldn’t catch the dustman. It moved ahead of him like the moon. It was a dustman of prophecy, dreamlike, with pantaloons that swirled around his legs, granules of dust that took on the dark bluish grays of a tornado cloud (Crazy Horse had seen his share of twisters); for a moment the dustman paused, turned, and they had a silent conversation regarding the nature of the horizon, lament for the coming warfare, and the demands inherent in the wind itself.

Along the beach near Truro, Massachusetts, on August 1, 1889, a couple spotted a dustman rising from windblown sand and lime, remnants of clamshell and marl light enough to become airborne. He took the shape of the well-known pirate Sam Bellamy, whose treasure would eventually be found close to shore, in absurdly shallow waters. With hat astride his boney skull, whipping along the edge of the water, this dustman seemed determined to reach the couple, who were running away, craning their necks in what was called (in the Provincetown Gazette) “an effort to make haste away from the creature, said dustman gaining on their running, said dust devil making his perambulatory, ethery way toward them until he came forward and broke away in a twirl of sand.” He didn’t speak, this dustman, but gestured as if he wanted to speak. Many creatures arising out of the swirling of dried bone and ash and vapory elements try to speak, one account concluded. They made hand gestures similar to those Native Americans used to communicate during times of warfare or hunting.

During the huge mill fire near Nekoosa, Wisconsin, two heat devils tore loose from the fire—the combustion of five tons of notebook paper, a hundred tons of finished Christmas wrapping, along with twenty tons of tissue paper and fifteen tons of onionskin. (The carbon paper mill—two miles downstream—would suffer a similar fate a few years later. Both fires lit up the night sky for a hundred miles.) Two heat devils broke away from the inferno and, according to the fireman who witnessed the event, took dustman forms. One resembled Ben Franklin. The other was Thomas Paine, but the fireman couldn’t put a name to the face. (By the way, Ben Franklin was a big believer in dustmen.) At that point the wind shifted and the fireman had to run from the heat. When he turned for one last look, the Ben Franklin dustman was making gestures, upward movements of his hands, as if conducting some ill-tuned, furious symphony. Similar figures were seen rising out of a tire fire in Northridge, Alabama, where a half million tires burned for weeks, producing a spume of dark oily smoke visible from the orbiting space shuttle. One astronaut claimed the cloud of smoke looked like Mickey Rooney; another noted a strong resemblance to Mickey Mantle. The owner of the tire pile—a guy named Albert Wayward—saw a face form in the commotion of heat and smoke. It was his father’s face. It made a few halfhearted lip movements, attempted to speak, and then broke apart in the hot winds. Yeah, yes sir, yes indeed, it was Dad as sure as sure, he said. Pop was a miner. When I saw him it looked as if he were right out of the mine, covered with the dust. Even his teeth, for Christ’s sake. Even his teeth were covered with coal dust.