Читать книгу The Quiet Crisis - Stewart L. Udall - Страница 12
ОглавлениеDaniel Boone, Jed Smith, and the Mountain Men
Go play with the towns you have built of blocks,
The towns where you would have bound mel
I sleep in my earth like a tired fox,
And my buffalo have found me.
—STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT “The Ballad of William Sycamore” (1790-1871)
“It was on the first of May, in the year 1769, that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time, and left my family and peaceable habitation on the Yadkin River, in North Carolina, to wander through the wilderness of America, in quest of the country of Kentucke. . . .” So ran the words of Daniel Boone’s autobiography—and so another chapter in American frontiering began. A tall man with whipcord muscles beneath the buckskin, Boone moved silently through the forest with the soft stride of an Indian. He carried a slim, long-barreled American rifle and it was plain by the way he handled it that it was an extension of his eyes and hands. His animal instincts were honed fine, and in the woods he was sure-footed, with the tireless gait of a man who could lope most of the day if there was good reason—as there sometimes was.
His tradition was older than that of Jefferson’s farmers, for he was the essential outrider of settlement. Frontiersmen before him, in quest of their own “Kentuckes,” had already traversed more than a third of the continent. Their first great captain, Samuel de Champlain, founded Quebec before Plymouth Rock, and by 1750 his intrepid successors—Joliet, La Salle, Verendrye, and the voyageurs—had paddled and portaged across a great Y extending from Quebec to Lake Winnipeg down to the mouth of the Mississippi. These French and English trapper-explorers were not searching for gold, or for land to farm. Some sought the Northwest Passage; others were after the only treasure their canoes could carry—the finest furs in the world.
Daniel Boone was not a discoverer, in the strict sense. Trappers and Indian traders had penetrated the dark hills before his time, and nearly eighty years earlier La Salle’s courtier de bois, the peerless Couture, traveled from the Mississippi up the Tennessee River and over the crests to Charles Town on the Atlantic Coast. The trail-opening work of Boone and other hunters in the 1770’s struck an auspicious note in our history because it coincided with the events of the Revolution.
The sixth son of a Quaker blacksmith, he was bom in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1734, nine years before Jefferson. His father later took up a farm in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, and here, on the far edge of settlement, Daniel learned the survival code of the frontier and acquired from friendly Cherokees a forest prowess that made him at home in wild country the rest of his fife.
While still a young man Daniel went off to war as a wagoner in Braddock’s campaign against the French and Indians, and on returning, he married and carved out a farm of his own, but the urge to have a long look at the undiscovered country got the best of him.
The truth was that Daniel preferred the rifle to the plow, and although word was about that a British Proclamation forbade expansion, the King’s rules didn’t run in the upcountry, and young men with Indian instincts were bound to crave a westward look.
There was the lure of adventure and the chance to test one’s backwoods skills, but there was more than that. At this point in our history, the meaning of the wilderness began to change: the best of the backwoodsmen had mastered Indian woodcraft, and as venturesome hopes dissolved some of the old fears, a new mystique gripped men who lived at the fringe of the frontier. Jefferson sensed it later, and wagered the price of Louisiana on the destiny it held for the American people. It was a mystique known only to men confronted with a virgin continent or an uncharted sea: the undaunted curiosity and quiet fury that led earlier men—Marco Polo, Columbus, Balboa—to take the final chance in their search for the edges of the unknown.
Despite all hazards, men would cross the next river and push through the next gap because certain desires could not be quenched. And so, while young Jefferson formed new ideas about government and the rights of farmers, Daniel Boone left his plow in a half-finished furrow and went into the woods to rediscover an old way of life. Its pleasures were not so cozy as the ones back home, but there were deer and buffalo to kill, and bear to try himself against. There was the dark forest to explore, a game of hide-and-seek with the Shawnees to give a tang to it all, and always the compelling questions: Where does that ridge lead? What lies over the blue hills beyond?
There have been Americans who have had a sixth sense for geography, a map in their heads, and a compass and sextant in their innards. Daniel Boone was one of them, and in 1769 his compass pointed toward Kentucke. He must have fallen in love with the country there, for he wintered over twice and did not return to his family for two years. By the time he came out, he knew more about the bluegrass country than any other white man.
It is hard for us to recreate accurately the life and times of Daniel Boone or to know the Kentucke of his first years. Writing was a skill he lacked, and the autobiography John Filson ghosted for him is two parts Paul Bunyan and one part truth. There were other woodsmen whose achievements at least matched Daniel’s—trail blazers like Ben Logan, Colonel James Knox, Simon Kenton, and Michael Stoner—but, thanks mainly to Filson, it was Boone who became the symbol of them all. The book provides more insight into the folk beliefs of the time than into the state of mind of the real Daniel Boone. Filson’s Kentucke was a halfway house between the Garden of Eden and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. The soil was richer, the climate was “more temperate and healthy than other settled parts of America”; there were no marshes or swamps; wild game abounded; livestock could roam untended—and manna from heaven could be had for the asking. Filson’s tales of Boone, like the legend of Paul Bunyan, helped fill his fellow Americans with optimism that made a paradise of any land to the West.
After we won our independence, the making of land-myths became a national pastime. The myth-makers infected our politics and produced the Go West and Manifest Destiny movements. As long as men were convinced that our continent was a succession of pastures of plenty, they would attempt great and foolhardy deeds, and their forward thrust would ultimately move beyond Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.
Filson’s Kentucke was, in reality, a moving magnet—a neck of the woods that moved a little farther west each year, always one step ahead of settlement. We will never know precisely what Boone saw when he peered down into the valleys of Kentucke from his lookout on top of Big Hill, but we know full well that the Filson-Boone autobiography is one of the early manifestations of the Myth of Superabundance that later caused us to squander our natural resources.
About the time Daniel had his first big look, decisions about the future of Kentucke were being made, and the fever of land speculation involved him in the Transylvania Land Company’s scheme to circumvent the King’s Proclamation, preempt an enormous area beyond the mountains, and plant a new colony in the wilderness.
It was early in the spring when Boone set out with a party of twenty-nine along the wilderness road through the Cumberland Gap. Four weeks later, on the twentieth of April, 1775, the first pack train arrived at the site of Boonesborough. This, unknown to the Kentucke colonists, was a moment of national climax, for just twenty-four hours earlier there had been a beginning of another sort on the village green in Lexington, Massachusetts, where a small band of “embattled farmers” put their future in the hands of the minutemen.
Boone, hunter, explorer, and White Indian, was now an agent of progress and a promoter of towns, but this was an episode he would regret. As a result of his service to the Transylvania Company, he eventually acquired claims on 100,000 acres of choice land. Although he lost much of this land when the Transylvania Company collapsed during the Revolution, he temporarily prospered. But Boone was never at home in a world of fences and farms and legal documents, and as a landlord and land speculator he had a bungling way of letting property slip through his hands.
In 1799, Old Daniel called it quits and headed downriver to accept a Missouri land grant tendered the famous Colonel Boone by the Spanish governor. But fate and his own incompetence in the land business stripped the old man even of this grant. Years later the discouraging story was repeated for the last time when Congress awarded him 850 acres for his “arduous and useful services” to his country. Boone sold this land to pay his Kentucke creditors, and he died in 1820, at eighty-five, a landless freeman still in love with the open country.
Filson made him a rustic George Washington, and put a politician’s words in his mouth: Boone considered himself “an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness” and “all his toils and dangers” were made worth while by the prospect of Kentucke becoming “one of the most opulent and powerful states on the continent of North America.”
It is far more likely, however, that another utterance of the old man (recalled years later by a grandson) reveals for us the real Daniel Boone: “I had much rather possess a good fowling piece, with two faithful dogs, and traverse the wilderness with one or two friendly Indian companions, in quest of a hoard of buffaloes or deer, than to possess the best township or to fill the first executive office of the state.”
Boone the town man was a failure. Boone the folk hero existed only in fiction. It was Boone the outdoorsman who left us a lasting legacy. Land-planning eluded him, but Daniel Boone seemed to hold the notion that every man should have a chance to own a piece of property—to farm, to develop, to use. Implicit in his way of life also was the idea that part of the land should be unowned, or rather publicly owned, as a permanent “hunting ground” for all who like the out-of-doors. His idea of happiness included unspoiled country where the land could sing its authentic songs, and where men could hear the call of wild things and know the precious freedom of the wilderness. By the time Boone died, however, his countrymen were already preparing to dismember the wilderness, and to the east both state and federal governments were disposing of their public lands so rapidly that too little land would be preserved where the young men of the future could relive the adventures of Daniel Boone or know the challenge of wide-open spaces.
Others along the wide Missouri and down the Mississippi knew what Boone meant. One, Mark Twain, would later write a nostalgic story of our early Eden. Huck Finn is a portrait of the American close to the frontier and the wilderness—careless, free of restraints, with none of the unimportant virtues and all of the essential ones. He does not plow or plant or build; he accepts his world with an Indian’s casualness and with now and then an Indian’s respect. When, at the end, he has a choice of alternatives—to be “civilized” and learn to live up to his newly discovered moral sense, or to stay with nature and to head for the Territories—he picks the latter as the better choice.
The trail of the White Indians did not end with Daniel Boone’s burial beside the Missouri. Just a few miles upriver a ten-year-old named Christopher Carson was doing his farm chores and longing to strike out across the plains. In a blacksmith shop in St. Louis an illiterate adolescent named Jim Bridger was sweating over the red-hot iron and wondering about the high country. In some unknown stretch of forest an educated young man with a Bible in his pack was already moving inevitably toward that day, a year and a half later, which would determine the course of his short life and influence his country’s future. The day was March 20, 1822, when Jedediah Strong Smith, aged twenty-two, read this notice in a St. Louis newspaper:
To enterprising young men. The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.
The man who placed this famous want ad was William H. Ashley, the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri. Within a week he had his takers, and preparations that would revolutionize the fur trade moved forward. The toughest of his recruits would tackle the Indians and the elements, become the most competent outdoorsmen in our history, and write the boldest chapter in the winning of the West.
The magnet that drew the expedition west was beaver, and Ashley’s motley band shared a spirit of adventure as expectant and strong-nerved as that which had carried sea-going men around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic centuries earlier. They had Boone’s bent, but the risks they ran were greater and only the lucky ones would live long enough to be town men. Equipped only with horses and rifles and traps, they headed toward the high mountain streams of the Rockies a thousand miles away.
There was a St. Louis saying that God always stayed on his own side of the Missouri, but raw nerve was the long suit of these “enterprising young men,” and Bernard De Voto has given us a superb description of the Spartan demands of this frontier:
The frontiersman’s craft reached its maximum and a new loneliness was added to the American soul. The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains. This was the arid country, the land of little rain; the Americans had not known drouth. It was the dead country; they had known only fecundity. It was the open country; they had moved through the forests, past the oak openings to the high prairie grass. It was the country of intense sun; they had always had shade to hide in. The wilderness they had crossed had been a passive wilderness, its ferocity without passion and only loosed when one blundered; but this was an aggressive wilderness, its ferocity came out to meet you and the conditions of survival required a whole new technique. . . . In that earlier wilderness, a week’s travel, or two weeks’ travel, would always bring you to where this year’s huts were going up, but in the new country a white man’s face was three months travel, or six months’, or a year away. Finally this was the country of the Plains Indians, horse Indians, nomads, buffalo hunters, the most skillful, the most relentless, and the most savage on the continent. . . . Mountain craft was a technological adaptation to these hazards.
The decade of the 1820’s was the golden era of the fur trade and gave birth to the free-trapper tradition. Out of that era have come as many legends as facts, and the legend-makers have bequeathed us, larger than life, a Kit Carson and a Jim Bridger. But most of the mountain men never reached the glory road of Western fiction: they did not find their Filson, or they ventured too much, or their luck ran out. This is not their story, but we owe it to them in passing to recite names like Tom Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, Antoine Leroux, “Black” Harris, the Bent brothers, Manuel Lisa, and Etienne Provost.
They were mostly unmarried, and no umbilical cord tied them to a farm or family. Land ownership never entered their minds, for these men were the complete sons of the wilderness, the true White Indians. They shared Boone’s illiteracy and stoicism; and their dreams of wealth, if they ever had any, were as foredoomed as Daniel’s. Their business was the killing of beaver and De Voto rightly called it “as ruthless a commerce as any in human history.” Francis Parkman, the historian, was not far wrong when he referred to them as “half-savage men.” They had to be to survive, and they could move safely through the high country precisely because their language and dress and sometime bedmates were Indian. Among them were the managers who led the parties, and arranged for the marketing of pelts in St. Louis or Santa Fe. The most remarkable of these men was surely Jedediah Smith.
At the age of twenty-three Jed Smith went upriver with Ashley, and ten years later he was lanced to death by the Comanches on the Cimarron. In the interim he scouted nearly every major stream west of the Mississippi, survived the three worst massacres of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, and compiled a list of firsts that stands by itself. In his quest for untrapped beaver he traveled farther and saw more of the West than any of his contemporaries—including Lewis and Clark. Had he taken the time to put his dead-reckoning knowledge of topography on paper, American mapmaking would have jumped twenty years ahead.
Physical comage was the sine qua non of mountain men, and Smith proved his at the Ankara massacre, which made Ashley’s first expedition a failure. A grizzly marked Smith’s face for life a few months later, and his endurance and personal force carried him within three years from head of a hunting party to senior partner of the dominant fur-harvesting partnership in the Rockies—Smith, Jackson, and Sublette.
Smith roamed the tributaries of the Upper Missouri, went as far as the Bitterroot, and later traversed the South Pass gateway into the Great Basin.
But his most astonishing overland odyssey began in the late summer of 1826 when, in search of new beaver country, he headed southwest from the summer rendezvous at Bear Lake. In a year’s time he pushed to the lower Colorado River, through the parched Mojave Desert to the California missions (where he got a reception befitting the first American overland party), trapped his way up the San Joaquin Valley, made the initial crossing of the Sierra Nevada, and returned across the Great Basin to his headquarters. As if this weren’t enough for any man, he set out a month later to retrace his steps, lost half of his men to a savage Mojave attack, and blazed the first trail from southern California north to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. Of twenty men who had survived the Mojave attack only four lived through an ambush by the Umpqua Indians in southern Oregon, but Smith pushed on up the Columbia to Fort Colville and two years after his departure rejoined his partners at Pierre’s Hole in southern Idaho. Unlike the military expedition of Lewis and Clark, Smith’s men were ill equipped, and he imposed discipline only by the force of his own fortitude. Before he was through, his travels covered nearly three times the distance spanned by Lewis and Clark in their earlier voyage of discovery.
The objective of these expeditions was beaver, but Smith once wrote in his journal that he was also led on by “the love of novelty common to all.” Weather-beaten and rawhide-tough, he had appeared in California and Oregon, without credentials or a flag, but the very presence of this scout in buckskin was a rude announcement of Manifest Destiny to the colonial outposts of Britain and Spain.
None of the mountain men got rich trapping, and most died poor. Beaver plews sold for six dollars apiece in peak years, and a good trapper could make one thousand dollars a season. But at the summer rendezvous the fur companies charged outrageous prices for supplies hauled in from St. Louis, and most of the time the trappers decided to stay on another year in the high country and hope for a bumper harvest. A few cleaned up, and John Jacob Astor, running part of the show from back East, became the richest man in America because he knew how to organize the extermination of the beaver. But while in pursuit of beaver, Smith and the mountain men planted outposts, learned a way of life, and enjoyed a once-upon-a-continent freedom to explore some of the finest mountain country in the world.
Some of them later used their hard-won knowledge of the wilderness to guide the wagon trains that began to spill out across the plains in the ’40’s and ’50’s. The last of the White Indians gave what discipline they could to an undisciplined migration, found the waterholes, and kept the emigrant-trains moving.
What is the land legacy of the mountain men? Legends aside, surely we owe them a larger debt than we have yet acknowledged.
Thomas Jefferson knew their fathers, and wagered all on the ability of such men to respond to the wilderness challenge. For nearly a generation these men were the American presence in an area where sovereignties overlapped and national boundaries were still undefined. As Jefferson foresaw, in the last analysis it would be unafraid men, outward bound to conquer and explore, who would fill the vacuums and fix the boundaries of the nation. The mountain men, if they failed in all else, made him a prophet.
Like Kit Carson, the best of them were “cougar all the way,” and they established an ideal of prowess which entered the marrow of our national character, which saw us up San Juan Hill and through two world wars. Our sentimental fondness and genuine respect for this ideal is, I suspect, the secret of the durability and fascination of the American “Western.”
But all qualities, including a mustang human spirit, have their defects, and these, too, must be entered in the record. The trappers’ raid on the beaver was a harbinger of things to come. Their undisciplined creed of reckless individualism became the code of those who later used a higher technology to raid our resources systematically. The spiritual sons of the mountain men were the men of the next wave—the skin-and-scoot market hunters, the cut-and-get-out lumbermen, the cattle barons whose herds grazed the plains bare.
It is neither fair nor quite true to say that the tradition of thoughtless land exploitation started with the mountain men, but certainly a part of it can be traced to them. Leatherstocking, James Fenimore Cooper’s idealized frontiersman, found God in the trees and water and the breath of summer air; but the true-life mountain man made his demands on America’s abundance without thought, without thanks, and without veneration for living things. These men embodied, as few others have, one facet of the self-reliance of which Emerson later wrote, but they wholly lacked the self-discipline which alone could give it grace and meaning.
In all this, the circular process of history was at work. The land was determining the character of men, who, in ton, were determining the future of the land itself. The result of this interaction was the clearest possible example of the American ambivalence toward the land that continues to dominate our relationship to the continent and its resources. It is a combination of a love for the land and the practical urge to exploit it shortsightedly for profit.
It is in their love of the land that the frontiersmen and the mountain men have given us a lasting gift. Each new generation of Americans is inspired by their ideal of individual prowess. In our few remaining wild lands we can still catch a glimpse of the world of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger and Jed Smith—the world that shaped our character and influenced our history. The spirit of Boone and the mountain men still walks the woods and Western ranges. A stanza Vachel Lindsay once wrote is their ultimate epitaph:
When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,
The phantom deer arise
And all lost, wild America
Is burning in their eyes.
