So the portraits here are often figures in a landscape.
Most of these essays were written for magazines. That they might one day be companion pieces in a book was a thought that never occurred at the time. Each was an individual undertaking. Several of them, for reasons personal or professional, had to be done on short notice, “Now,” as Roosevelt said. They were produced over a period of nearly twenty years, at very different times in my life, and about subjects as dissimilar as Alexander von Humboldt and Conrad Richter. Two of the stories, one set in Panama, the other in the Badlands of North Dakota, resulted from research I was doing for books. Another represents a return to a subject I had already covered in a book, but about which I found I had some new things to say. It was written as a way of honoring the 100th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge.
In the final section, I’ve included two speeches written for such different occasions as a college commencement in Vermont and the ceremonies celebrating the bicentennial of the United States Congress.
Yet I find my subjects are more closely connected than I knew. Reading these essays again, selecting and arranging them as a book, I am struck by how much they have in common. In my way, I see now, I have been writing about the same kinds of people all along. And I see, too, the extent to which they have revealed the world and times past for me, and things about myself, that I would not have known otherwise.
Because of the ichthyologist, the incomparable Louis Agassiz, I was introduced not only to his world of fish, but to his way of seeing.
“Look at your fish!” Agassiz admonished his students in what for me remains one of the most valuable of all lessons. “Look at your fish!” are the words of the small, framed reminder I’ve since kept by my desk: discoveries are as likely to be found in material already in hand, before your eyes, as anywhere.
Agassiz was one of the greatest of the great teachers of the nineteenth century. His influence reverberates down to our own day. But then it’s fair to say my subjects are nearly all teachers. They are writers, civil engineers, men and women of science, aviators, wives and mothers, politicians. One of them, Frederic Remington, is a painter and sculptor; another, Harry Caudill, is a small-town lawyer; David Plowden is a photographer. Yet each in his or her own way is teaching us to see, and to experience the exhilaration, or magic, or outrage, or understanding they feel from what they see.
“What a grand and solemn spectacle! The very sight of it renewed our strength,” writes Humboldt of the moment in 1802 when, exhausted, gasping for air at an elevation of nearly fifteen thousand feet, he and his partner, Aime Bonpland, catch a sudden glimpse through the clouds of the summit of Mount Chimborazo.
“My microscope is my marijuana,” says Miriam Rothschild, who in many ways is Humboldt’s present-day counterpart.
“I don’t think that the men at the top of those enormous corporations are wicked men,” observes Harry Caudill as he and I survey the ravages of strip mining in his native Letcher County, Kentucky. “But you know there’s not a one of them that has been down here to see things with their own eyes, to see what is going on here. Not one. And yet the decisions they make have everything to do with how we live here.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe sees the evil of slavery and sees her duty plain. From the vantage point of the airplane, Charles and Anne Lindbergh and their fellow pioneer aviators, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Beryl Markham, begin to understand their place in the large order of things.
Finding my subjects over the years has been mostly a process of one thing leading to another. Reading about Henry Ward Beecher, as a way to understanding what life was like on Brooklyn Heights at the time the Brooklyn Bridge was being built, I came upon his sister Harriet, as described in Constance Mayfield Rourk’s vivid book, The Trumpets of Jubilee. Reading about early explorations of Central America for background on Panama, I encountered Humboldt for the first time, and research for an article on Humboldt led me to Agassiz, one of whose star students, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, was Theodore Roosevelt’s professor of geology at Harvard. It was to understand Roosevelt and his time in the Badlands that I looked into the life and influence of Remington. And so it has gone.
The research has rarely been dull, for the farther one goes in the pursuit, the more fascinating it becomes, like being on a detective case. Conrad Richter once told me he was seldom happier than when working at a big library table, with books, notes, and old letters all about him. It was later I found out what he meant.
How can I spend so much time on one subject, I am sometimes asked. The answer, of course, is that no subject is ever just one subject, but ten, twenty, more. You never know.
What is your theme, is another familiar question, and I rarely can say, not at least in the early stages of a project. “I can’t tell as yet,” I have to reply. To find the answer is one of the chief reasons for undertaking the story.
Reading about the lives of such great figures of the nineteenth century as Mrs. Stowe, Agassiz, the Roeblings, one is struck again and again by how much they accomplished in a lifetime. Where did they find the time or energy—if only to write all those letters? Or to keep such diaries? I wonder if perhaps it was because tuning out boredom had not yet been made so easy as in our day, before commercial entertainment took over in American life.
Those I have written about here nearly all led lives of active discovery and right to the last. They are immensely charged, renewed by what they do. Their work and interests are inspiriting forces. Harriet Beecher Stowe felt obliged to make herself useful. But then, I see now, they nearly all do in these stories. With the books they write, their bridges, pictures, their breakthroughs in science, the children they raise, their record journeys, the risks they take, they are the givers of civilization.
But I know the primary reason why I write about them: the great pull after all, is that they are good stories, even the few I don’t like, such as the Marquis de Mores. Many of their lives are deeply moving. To me they themselves are often very glamorous, in the old, true sense of the word.
If there is a prevailing, unifying theme, I suppose it is the part courage plays. The exuberant daring of the Humboldt expedition is one kind. The moral resolve of Harry Caudill is another. Young Teddy Roosevelt’s determination to remain himself in the Wild West, in the face of ridicule, is another kind still.
Courage, moreover, is communicable. It was not Humboldt alone, but he and Bonpland together, who set off on the Orinoco; not one railroad builder who went into the Panama jungle in the 1850s, but a force of many. She flew as her husband’s copilot across thousands of uncharted miles, remembers Anne Lindbergh, knowing sheer terror much of the time. These are brave companions.
Every writing task involves new problems, some larger than others. Mainly writing means a great deal of hard thinking, the popular impression notwithstanding. (Paul Weis, who taught philosophy at Yale, one remarked, “I’m not as bright as my students. I find I have to think before I write.”) Yet sometimes the very struggle of getting the words down on paper does result in unexpected discoveries or clarifications.
In 1986 I was called by an editor of Life. The magazine, he said, would soon be fifty years old and he wanted me to do an essay for a special anniversary issue.
Would I sum up the importance of world history since 1936 in five thousand words?
I could hardly believe he was serious. The world since 1936 indeed! I stalled, said I would have to get back to him.
When I put the phone down and explained what he wanted to my wife, she said quietly, “You must do it.”
The article, “Extraordinary Times,” different in focus from others here, is included because I think it still stands on its own, for all the tumultuous change since 1986, in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East, but also because the experience impressed on me as nothing before had the extent to which the little-known events of a given time, and people who are not in the headlines, can be what matter most in the long run. And the long run is the measure of
history.
In writing history, to catch the feeling as well as the “truth” of other times, it is of utmost importance, I believe, to convey the sense that things need not have happened as they did. Life in other times past was never on a track, any more than it is now or ever will be. The past after all is only another name for someone else’s present. How would things turn out? They knew no better than we know how things will turn out for us.
The problem, as Thornton Wilder said, “lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom.”
It is a shame that history is ever made dry and tedious, or offered as a chronicle almost exclusively of politics, war, and social issues, when, of course, it is the full sweep of human experience: politics, war, and social issues to be sure, but also music, science, religion, medicine, the way things are made, new ideas, high attainments in every field, money, the weather, love, loss, endless ambiguities and paradoxes and small towns you never heard of. History is a spacious realm. There should be no walls.
What history is chiefly about is life, and while there are indeed great, often unfathomable forces in history before which even the most exceptional of individuals seem insignificant, the wonder is how often events turn on a single personality, or the quality called character.
I have been going through some of the research files for the stories that follow, remembering not only the work and where it was done, but much else about my own life at the time. I had ventured into the serious business of the historian as an amateur, and with a growing family to support, I was often near the end of my rope financially. But again and again, there were my subjects to lend encouragement, setting a standard by example. How could I not have taken heart from finding that it was as an amateur that Agassiz did his work on glaciers? Or from the picture of him descending by rope’s end into one of the “blue wells” on the Aar and surviving to tell the tale?
These, as I have said, are brave companions, the best of companions.
Humboldt never reached the summit of Chimborazo. Agassiz’s star faded. Washington Roebling endured the painful effects of his work on the Brooklyn Bridge for the rest of his days. Harry Caudill did not live to see an end to strip mining or poverty in Kentucky.
Yet, as I recognize now, these are all success stories. The key is attitude. I hope the reader will remember what Agassiz says to young William James as they lie sleepless in their hammocks on the deck of a steamer on the Amazon, on still another expedition, and how it was that Simon Willard made his clock and why it keeps ticking.
—David McCullough
West Tisbury, Massachusetts
April 8, 1991
I
PHENOMENA
CHAPTER ONE
Journey to the Top of the World
ON A MORNING in May 1804, there arrived at the White House by Baltimore coach, and in the company of the painter Charles Willson Peale, a visitor from abroad: an aristocratic young German, age thirty-four, a bachelor, occupation scientist and explorer. And like Halley’s comet or the white whale or other such natural phenomena dear to the nineteenth century, he would be remembered by all who saw him for the rest of their days.
He had come to pay his respects to the president of the new republic, Thomas Jefferson, a fellow “friend of science,” and to tell him something of his recent journeys through South and Central America. For the next several weeks he did little else but talk, while Jefferson, on their walks about the White House grounds; or James Madison, the secretary of state; or the clever Mrs. Madison; or Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury; or those who came to dine with the president or to do business with him, listened in awe.
The young man, they found, was a naturalist, an astronomer, a geographer, a geologist, a botanist, an authority on Indian antiquities, a linguist, an artist—an academy unto himself, as the poet Goethe would say. He was at home in any subject. He had read every book. He had seen things almost impossible to imagine. “We all consider him as a very extraordinary man,” Gallatin told his wife, speaking apparently for Jefferson’s entire official family, “and his travels, which he intends publishing on his return to Europe, will, I think, rank above any other productions of the kind.” He also talked at double the speed of anybody Gallatin had ever met before and would shift suddenly from English, which he spoke superbly, into French or Spanish or German, seemingly unaware of what he was doing, but never hesitating for a word, apparently to the very great confusion of his newfound American friends, Jefferson and the Swiss-born Gallatin not included.
Gallatin, a man not easily impressed, found the extent of the visitor’s reading and scientific knowledge astonishing. “I was delighted,” he said, “and swallowed more information of various kinds in less than two hours than I had for two years past in all I had read and heard.”
In a letter to Jefferson written from Philadelphia a few days earlier, the young man had said, “[I would] love to talk to you about a subject that you have treated so ingeniously in your work on Virginia, the teeth of mammoth, which we too discovered in the Andes.” Jefferson had responded immediately and most cordially. “A lively desire will be felt generally to receive the information you will be able to give.” In the new capital city, Jefferson wrote, there was “nothing curious to attract the observations of a traveler,” which was largely so, save, of course, for Jefferson himself. Upon arrival the young man had found the presidential mansion anything but imposing—crude wooden steps led to the front door, rooms were still unplastered—and at one point he had inadvertently encountered the chief executive sprawled on the floor, wrestling with his grandchildren.
But there they were in Washington for several days, two of the most remarkable men of their time, fellow spirits if ever there were, talking, talking endlessly, intensely, their conversation having quickly ranged far from fossil teeth.
The young man’s name was Humboldt, Alexander von Humboldt—Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt—or Baron von Humboldt, as he was commonly addressed. He had been born in Berlin on September 14, 1769, the second son of a middle-aged army officer, a minor figure in the court of Frederick the Great, and of a rather solemn, domineering young woman of Huguenot descent who had inherited a sizable fortune. He was a baron in about the way some Southerners are colonels.
William Burwell, Jefferson’s private secretary, described him as looking considerably younger than his age, “of small figure, well made, agreeable looks, simple unaffected manners, remarkably sprightly.” And Humboldt’s passport, issued in Paris in 1798, has him five feet, eight inches tall, with “light-brown hair, gray eyes, large nose, rather large mouth, well-formed chin, open forehead marked by smallpox.” However, in a portrait by Peale, done shortly after the trip to see Jefferson, the eyes are as blue as Dutch tiles.
Years later, when the phenomenon of Humboldt had become known the world over, the learned and curious would journey thousands of miles for the chance to see him, and his published works would be taken as the gospel of a new age. He would be regarded as the incomparable high priest of nineteenth-century science—a towering godlike inspiration to such a disparate assortment of individuals as John Charles Frémont, John James Audubon, John Lloyd Stephens, Sir Charles Lyell, Simon Bolivar, W. H. Hudson, William Hickling Prescott, Edward Whymper, Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz. Darwin, during the voyage of the Beagle, would carry with him three inspirational books—the Bible, Milton, and Humboldt.
But at this point the name Humboldt meant very little. The honorary citizenships, the countless decorations, were all still to come. No Pacific Ocean current, no bay or glacier or river had been named for him as yet, no mountains in China. Humboldt, Kansas, and Humboldt, Iowa, were still prairie grass, part of that incomprehensibly vast piece of the continent purchased by Jefferson from Napoleon only the year before and that Jefferson had just sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to investigate. So it was the young man himself, not a reputation
, and the story he had to tell that captivated everyone. After nearly five years he had returned from one of the great scientific odysseys of all time. It was a journey that would capture the imagination of the age, but that has been strangely forgotten in our own time. It is doubtful that one educated American in ten today could say who exactly Humboldt was or what he did, not even, possibly, in Humboldt, Iowa, or Humboldt, Kansas. Perhaps this is because his travels were through Spanish America. Perhaps his extraordinary accomplishments were simply overshadowed by the popular impact of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In any event, his was a journey of enormous scientific consequence (far more so than the Lewis and Clark expedition) and a fascinating adventure by any standards.
In the company of a young French medical doctor turned botanist, Aime Bonpland, Humboldt had departed from La Coruña, Spain, in June 1799, on a Spanish frigate, slipping past a British blockade in the dark of night, in the midst of a storm, and carrying with him a unique document from the Spanish government. He and Bonpland had been granted complete freedom to explore—for scientific purposes—any or all of Spain’s largely unexplored American colonies; to make astronomical observations, maps; to collect; to go wherever they wished, speak to whomever they wished. The whole arrangement was quite unprecedented (prior to this Spain had rigorously denied any such travels by foreigners), and it had come about quite by chance.
Humboldt, after completing his education and serving as a government inspector of mines in Prussia, had decided to lead his own far-flung scientific expedition. Just where was an open question, but both of his parents had died, with the result that he had become a man of ample private means and was free to do whatever he wished. His impulse had been to go to Egypt, to catch up with Napoleon’s troops there. But he and Bonpland (whom he had met by chance in Paris) had proceeded no farther than Spain when Humboldt, during an audience with Charles IV, expressed an interest in His Catholic Majesty’s overseas empire. An expedition, to be paid for by Humboldt, was immediately and most unexpectedly sanctioned, and the two young men were on their way.
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