Читать книгу The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America - Simon Winchester, Simon Winchester - Страница 30

It is surely a universal truth that men and women who choose voluntarily to pack up everything, acquire a wagon, set off down a rutted track into the sunset, and then endure weeks and months of privation, misery, and real danger in order to create new homes for themselves countless miles elsewhere must have a powerful reason for doing so. Modern America’s very existence is based on the awe-inspiring reality that thousands upon thousands made this very choice. And at first blush it appears they had just as many thousands of reasons for setting forth toward the sunset.

Nearly all were going off to the West because they imagined a better and more congenial life there. Perhaps some were afflicted by a goading restlessness, but only a few went out on a whim. Some were drawn by reasons religious, others were compelled by a need to escape—to get away from political persecution, from the hand of the law, the clutch of a pestilence,³ the misery of a failed romance, or the stench of an unsavory past. A number in America’s Eastern and Southern states found the whole business of segregation and slavery unpalatable, and imagined that out west they might encounter a more tolerant and liberal atmosphere.

But for most, the West was simply the Promised Land. “Eastward I go only by force,” said Thoreau, “but westward I go free.” And the pioneers who were bold enough to head in that direction did so, generally speaking, imbued with a spirit of ambition and adventure and an unyieldingly optimistic sense of enterprise.

And yet—what was it, more specifically than all of their stated reasons, that truly provided the lure? What intelligence was it that had produced the necessary temptation—the impetus, the final trigger, that decided a hitherto settled Easterner to obtain a wagon, to pack up all his belongings, to say farewell to scores, and then to head off for thousands of miles into the Western unknown?

The answer almost always had something to do with the land. People went in multitudes because of what they knew, what they had heard told, or what they suspected about the very earth of which the West was made.

They learned that the far reaches of the country held places that sported a variety of temptations. There might be vast acreage of thick black soils. There might be cliffs rich with exotic ores. Some might have found rivers running over gold-specked gravel beds. Wanderers might have returned with news of coal seams, tar pits, strangely glinting mineral crystals, deposits of marble, beds of rich red sandstones, or prairie tablelands and valleys covered with a wealth of grasses and flowers that, once tamed and watered, could be farmed and persuaded to yield measureless wealth. These were lands well suited to those who had the necessary ambition, vision, and endurance, for those possessed of the true grit.

It was from the 1820s onward that those in the East were first being told about the remarkable qualities of the Western lands, and were being told of them in great and fascinating detail. The information was contained in the often breathlessly excited reports of the men who had made the journey already. Some of these were American Fur Company trappers; some others were missionaries—two missionary women, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, crossed the Continental Divide in 1836, and the husband of one came back east to tell of their adventures and to plead with others to come follow her example. Most reports, however, were sent back from soldiers or scientists accompanying those soldiers, who had been sent out officially by the United States government, charged with exploring the full extent of the trackless continent. Such men—and there were so many, a roll call risks becoming a blur—would turn out to be the vanguard of all the great migrations that followed soon after.

They were men like Edwin James, in 1820, who conducted a geological survey of the Appalachians, the Ozarks, and the foothills of the Rockies on an expedition run by a Major Long, United States Army. Or like Henry Schoolcraft, who went with one Major Cass to the headwaters of the Mississippi, also in 1820, and there found substantial deposits of copper, lead, and gypsum. In 1823 a geologist named William Keating found copper in West Virginia. In 1824 the heroic explorer, trapper, and mapmaker Jedediah Smith rediscovered the low and easy South Pass⁴ through the Rockies, and Benjamin Bonneville, who took a wagon train through it eight years later, wrote of his discovering the famous salt flats in Utah in 1832. Two years later still, the first-ever official United States geologist, George Featherstonhaugh, drew a remarkably accurate cross section of the country from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean, noting the presence of interesting-looking mineral deposits along the way.

In 1841 the eminent mineralogist James Dana—his Manual of Mineralogy was still a classic when I studied more than a century later, and its twenty-third edition was published in 2007—explored the Sierra Nevada and wrote extensively and temptingly of the mineral possibilities of the Far West. John Charles Frémont made a remarkable series of explorations of the West. One trip was made with the great frontiersman Kit Carson; on another he discovered Lake Tahoe and mapped Mount Saint Helens, then wrote what turned out to be the definitive map and guide for anyone thinking of traveling overland to Oregon or California; it remained in print for years. Howard Stansbury reconnoitered the near-empty territories between Salt Lake City and the Sierra Nevada in 1849; Marcy and McLellan wrote about finding coal and many other mineral treasures in the valley of the Red River in Louisiana and Arkansas in 1851; and Mr. W. P. Blake described “auriferous gravels” in California in 1853. The following year, seemingly to place a capstone on all these furious endeavors, Josiah Whitney—of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous forty-eight states, and of Mount Shasta’s Whitney Glacier—wrote The Metallic Wealth of the United States, which for many years served as vade mecum for the legions who dreamed of traveling westward, striking it lucky, and making a fortune.

Such temptations! All that scenery, all that gold, free farmland, open space, political freedom, copper, coal, abundance. And all, or almost all, of it was reported by those geologists who had gone out exploring, with hammer and magnifying glass and compass and acid bottle. Their reports, which would prove to be catnip to a restless generation, played also into a swelling current of official opinion, which John Quincy Adams had expressed so succinctly in his famous letter to his father, the former president, in 1811:

The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs. For the common happiness of them all, for their peace and prosperity, I believe it is indispensable that they should be associated in one federal Union.

Fourteen years after he wrote this most prescient and persuasive passage, Adams was himself elected president. And fifteen years after that, in 1840, an otherwise unknown Midwesterner named Joel P. Walker, together with his family and three missionary couples, decided that the drumbeat, the pressing need to move west was now, for him at least, too powerful to resist.

The allure of all that land, space, and possibility had been fully spelled out for Mr. and Mrs. Walker. The noble role his family might play in the creation of a national ideal had been made clear to him. The decision, bolstered by a logic that must have seemed all but inescapable, was now up to him.

So Mr. Walker bought tickets on a steamboat to one of the trailheads along the Missouri River. There he found himself a suitable wagon (for Jedediah Smith and others had reported that the South Pass was indeed suitable for the passage of wheeled vehicles); he yoked up a sturdy team of oxen; he piled up such possessions as he felt he needed for his new life; and in the late spring of 1840, he set out for the Green River staging post and rendezvous in what is now Wyoming and headed out to complete a two-thousand-mile journey into the West.

He traveled on the vague and rutted route that was already being called, by the fur trappers, traders, and missionaries who had already used it, the Oregon Trail. Joel Walker—whether he was real or a mere mythical symbol seems to matter little now—was the very first of a quarter of a million men, women, and children who would now follow him out west, as the great period of American migration and nation building got itself ponderously under way.

For the previous twenty years, geology had been paying out the lines, casting out the nets. Now at last it was reeling in the catch.