The immigrants who had continued to leave the British Isles on the North Atlantic trade route were largely those who had not qualified by aptitude or opportunity for this bottom dog élite, and they took with them little knowledge of or loyalty toward the traditions of journeyman unionism. This continued up to the very end of the great migrational waves. Of the million immigrants who arrived in 1910, four out of five had earned their living in their homeland as labourers. They had much to gain. Shortage of labour kept wages high, and the early Eastern industrialists tried to stem the flow West. But as the reinforcements from Europe surged in, increasingly the new merchant capitalists of America found this an aid to pegging costs by recruiting the untrained peasants, and the women and children.
A free-for-all economic scramble was the prevailing and accepted state, and it was affected by the privateer attitudes broadcast into the city slums: by the frontiersmen with their loathing of regimentation, by the Yankee pedlars who beat around the outpost farms with their pushcarts of patent medicines, ‘notions’ and snappy Eastern kitchenware. In the atmosphere was independence and challenge, the promise of infinite boon awaiting those with the spirit to wrest free of the East. There were additional inducements to move. In the 1828 depression the New York Times reported: Thousands of industrious mechanics who have never before solicited alms were brought to the humiliating condition of applying for assistance.’
The assistance was limited and harsh. Early in the colonial period workhouses were instituted, according to the puritan view that labour was an obligation of all, as houses of correction for ‘Beggars, Servants running away or otherwise misbehaving themselves, Trespassers, Rogues, Vagabonds, and other people refusing to work’.
The early American statutes about vagabonds were derived from the English fourteenth-century remedies, after the Black Death, to restrain plague-carriers from meandering around with the virus. They were adopted by the puritan settlers similarly to check the infection of workshyness and worklessness, so that even today anyone on the road without a regular job or money in his pocket can be given the criminal rush and clapped in jail.
Indeed the American vagrancy laws in their vague omnicom-petence can be utilized to arrest such a motley bunch as gipsies, jugglers, recalcitrant minors, practitioners of hoomanamana (Hawaiian black magic), fiddlers without orchestras, sleight-of-hand artists, prostitutes, fortune tellers, ‘persons who paint their faces’, down-and-outs in general, gamblers, and, of course, eminent racketeers, who while reasonably able to murder safely are occasionally booked for vagrancy.
Neurosis about people not palpably on a pay-roll somewhere became of such national obsession that in 1892 the Assistant Secretary of State asked all foreign consular officers to obtain ‘the manner of dispensing of public charities and of controlling and abating that class of vagrant generally designated “tramps” in various countries’.
Back came the replies from all over the world, from Warsaw and from Austria-Hungary and from Cadiz, describing how down-at-heels were scourged abroad, the symposium of which - a blood-chilling encyclopedia of ingenious persecution and punishment - was published in 1893. Branding-irons, nose-slitting, flogging and the sexual separation of paupers were never officially adopted in America, yet the actual methodology of small town vigilantes and railroad beadles was not far short.
Come what may refusal to work could never have been the social problem which later arose through inability to work because of the absence of work. Non-workers were, per se, no-account. Can’t work means won’t work: the American faith admits only grudgingly, and then mostly academically (not in applied form), the notion that worklessness may be more complicated than individual sloth.
It was at the height of the immigrant flood, and the change from agrarian simplicity to industrialized complexity, that the double attitude became chronically schizophrenic. The voice of authority bayed sternly about the duty of diligence and the honourable splendour of sweat, while the hand of authority cast vast numbers of able eager men into permanent alienation.
It is interesting to see how this was vindicated, not only tolerated as a natural condition of an open economy but robed in myth to stimulate the advance into the interior. It was a sort of civilian Somme: men were shovelled through to the front, and the banners, trumpets and odes proclaimed the glory of the new land and its conquerors, while the casualty lists lengthened and the walking wounded silted up in the workhouses and dosshouses.
In 1763 after the defeat of the French, and when no doubt lingered that British sovereignty would stretch out beyond the Mississippi Valley, the Secretary of State, Lord Egremont, urged that fidgety Americans should be forbidden to clear off into the interior. Instead they should be steered to Georgia or Nova Scotia, still near the sea, ‘where they would be useful to their Mother Country instead of planting themselves in the Heart of America out of reach of Government where from the great difficulty of procuring European commodities, they would be compelled to commerce and manufactures to the infinite prejudice of Britain…’
Then this seemed a perfectly logical proposal to those who conceived America as (except for the coastal colonies orientated toward the Atlantic and Europe) a lunar land beyond the scope of sea trade.
However the opposing view was held by Benjamin Franklin, who had the foresight to understand that no one, lawyer or soldier, was going to dam the inevitable overspill. In 1782 in his Information To Those Who Would Remove To America, Franklin expounded: ‘Strangers are welcome because there is room enough for them all, and therefore the old Inhabitants are not jealous of them … Tolerably good Workmen in any of these mechanic Arts are sure to find Employ.’ It was endorsed by the backwoodsman’s motto, that of the picaresque Simon Suggs: ‘It is good for a man to be shifty in a new country.’
Immediately here was a conflict of interest and vision: one, of an America as part of an empire held on the old British reins of sea power, and two, the agricultural transformation of those ‘savage groves as yet uninvestigated by the traveller, unsung by the poet, or unmeasured by the chain of the geometrician’, as The Freeman’s Journal put it in 1782. It was the tug away from the old bonds which created the first densification of vagrants on the bum, the result of Jefferson’s Embargo Act, designed to avoid embroilment in the Napoleonic Wars, which halted sea traffic with Europe. Thousands of sailors were thrown ashore. Many continued their voyaging on ‘the wavy waste’ of the uncharted land West of the Appalachians.
It was after the Civil War, when a railroad reached its terminal point, when a canal was cut, when a new mine was sunk, when any large scale construction finished, that there began the recurrent, quickening situation of a mob of abruptly unwanted labourers being stranded 1,000 miles and more from cities. They were never savers. What money had piled up fizzed away in the local gambling-drinking-whoring caravans which followed them. To get back East or on to the next work site they panhandled: they begged grub, stake and fare. Panhandling worked for quite a time, because it implied (true or false) that they had been having a tough time out in the Texas Panhandle, which signified pioneer railroad building in the whole of the South-West.
But in fact it was not until the startlingly recent date of the 1840s that the idea of those ‘savage groves’ becoming a manageable commercial estate was taken seriously, the time when a Connecticut senator spoke of ‘the creative power of a railroad’, and Asa Whitney, seeking a sixty-mile wide land grant to run a rail track from Lake Michigan to the Pacific, contended that until that was done the settler in that remote fastness would remain a ‘demi-savage’.
5 The phantom deer arise
The American intelligentsia has a deep sentimental attachment to barbarism and savagery, preferably of a nomadic sort.
Floyd Dell
The filling station sign says: ‘How’s your gas? Next town 113 miles.’ Ahead are the 1,676,676 acres of Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest and the adjoining 1,239,840 acres of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, a terrain of granite and forest uncros
sed by roads and penetrable only along canyon paths and elk trails.
A chunk of this - an area about twice the size of Yorkshire -is supervised by a forester of thirty-three named Frank Fowler who lives in a log cabin at the Powell Ranger Station, loomed over by fir-bushy crags which only the black bear can negotiate.
Rolling a cigarette from a leather pouch and sitting on the steps of a building marked LUMBERJACKS’ HAVEN: GRUB WANAGAN, Frank Fowler says: ‘I was pretty directionless when I got out of high school in Washington DC. I’d run wild in the streets as a kid, getting into plenty of trouble with fights and heaving rocks. I’d worked around as an usher in a stock car race track, dug ditches, carried shingles for roofers, toted a hod and mixed mortar.
‘It was a scout-master who’d been a forester who put me on the right track. He said he’d get me a summer job in the woods. This was what I needed, to get out of the city rat-race.
‘I hitch-hiked up to Montana to enrol in the forestry school at Missoula. I was so bushed when I got there that I flunked the entrance examination but I did get in with another try. To support myself in college I enrolled as a smoke-jumper.
‘They drop you on lightning fires from Ford tri-motors and C47s. They train you to land in trees. You have a canvas suit with a knee-pack holding a hundred-foot rope for lowering yourself and two days’ rations. They drop a parachute cargo of radio, shovel, saw and a pulaski, a kind of hatchet tool. You go down on a steerable ‘chute. Your job is to go in as soon as there’s a trickle of smoke in the summer storms, before a blaze develops if you can get there in time.
‘I did nine operational drops and one rescue. When I’d finished college I went on smoke-jumping to clear off some debts I’d accumulated. Then I went off down to North Carolina on a timber reserve survey, random sampling timber in the coastal swamps, until I was drafted and sent to Germany in the Army. When I was back I got fixed up at Metaline Falls in the state of Washington on timber sales and then I moved to Kettle Falls in the same forest and eventually took charge here.
This life means everything to me. You have to feel like that about it because it isn’t easy. By Christmas the snow’s banked up fifteen feet and stays there till April. You’ve got to be self-sufficient and value what you’ve got.
‘Historically, ideally, independence is supposed to be very important to Americans but in truth I don’t think we’re sustaining it. We’re too ready to trade it in for goods. The pressures reach even here. I find I spend more arid more time on office routine, timber sales and administration, with just an occasional helicopter patrol across the primitive area.
‘But when the pressures get too much I can always saddle my horse and go up the trails. There aren’t many places left in the world where a man can go and find his peace with nature.’
*
The practical mechanics of wiring-up the unknown with the modern world acquired unexpected allies, poets and writers who charged the Westward compulsion with destiny and drama.
It was Walt Whitman who in Leaves of Grass illumined rhapsodically the virgin quality of life, man’s second chance, vouchsafed out there in the sunlight beyond Old Europe’s stultifying grey shadow. ‘A free original life there … simple diet and clean and sweet blood … litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes and perfect physique there… immense spiritual results…’
The dichotomy here has been analysed by Henry Nash Smith. There was Whitman’s ecstatic philosophy: that from the languid, effete people of the bone pile of Europe ‘the youthful and sinewy pioneers take up the cosmic burden’, inaugurating a new era for mankind. ‘We debouch upon a newer, mightier world …’ There was Davy Crockett who, says Parrington, ‘had the good fortune to preempt the romance of the backwoods, to file on an unsur-veyed tract of Western life’ … Popular imagination seized upon him and endowed the mighty hunter of the canebrakes with the fugitive romance that had been gathering for years.’
But Crockett was also used as a political instrument - as a weapon against President Andrew Jackson and his policies, for the 1830s were ‘robustious times when broadcloth in politics had suddenly gone out of style and homespun had come in. The new coonskin democracy had descended upon Washington … Wastefulness was in the frontier blood, and Davy was a true frontier wastrel.’
Awkwardly there were these two contradictory and discordant Wests. There was the Wild West roamed by pathfinders like Kit Carson, ‘cougar all the way’, the trappers, buffalo hunters and backwoods lone wolves, ‘an exhilarating region of adventure and comradeship in the open air’, whose white Indian heroes were not members of the society which entrapped the majority, but ‘noble anarchs owning no master, free denizens of a limitless wilderness’.
Remarked The Crockett Almanac in 1838: ‘The backwoodsman is a singular being, always wanting to move Westwards like a buffalo before the tide of civilization.’ He moved because, just as the American rape was to continue to the modern day, he pillaged as he went. He was unmarried; no tendon held him to family, parents, farm or responsibilities; land ownership neither attracted him nor occurred to him. Jefferson’s prescript, ‘The land belongs to the living generation. They may manage it, then, and proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct,’ had no meaning for them. Usufruct? Hell, what’s that? They had the whole wilderness to use. They ‘enjoyed a once-upon-a-continent freedom’.
Then there was the other West, the domesticated arable in-between, lacking both the city’s culture and sophistication and the bold, dangerous dazzle of the outpost country. This attitude is typified in The Journals of Francis Parkman, the account of an 1842 tour by a Harvard student who set forth to seek ‘a superior barbarism, a superior solitude, and the potent charm of the unknown’.
Parkman - in his own words, ‘haunted by wilderness images day and night’ - encounters a woodsman in the bosky wilds: ‘… resolute and independent as the wind’, compared with whom the New England farmers are ‘a race of boors about as uncouth, mean and stupid as the hogs they seem chiefly to delight in’.
The dichotomy was apparent again in the attitude to the coon-skinned Daniel Boone character, seen by one body as the trail-blazer with bowie knife and hatchet, and by the poetical who recognized with ‘a delicious melancholy’ that, while the cult of progress could not be gainsaid, the borderman was the one American not to be brought to heel.
There was general acquiescence with the sentiments of George C. Bingham’s 1851 painting, ‘The Emigration of Daniel Boone’, depicting him shepherding a party of settlers, with wives, children and livestock, out ‘into a dreamily beautiful wilderness’. This was the prescribed mode of thought at that time, as expressed in Timothy Flint’s unctuous biography of Boone: ‘The rich and boundless valleys of the great west - the garden of the earth -and the paradise of hunters, had been won from the dominion of the savage tribes, and opened as an asylum for the oppressed, the enterprising, and the free of every land.’
Udall has pointed out that Boone’s so-called autobiography (ghosted for him by John Filson) provides more insight into folk beliefs than into the mind of the real Boone. The ‘Kentucke’ Filson depicted was ‘a halfway house between the Garden of Eden and the Big Rock Candy Mountain’. It was ‘a moving magnet - a neck of the woods that moved a little farther West each year, always one step ahead of settlement … The Filson-Boone autobiography is one of the early manifestations of the Myth of Superabundance that later caused us to squander our natural resources … Implicit in his (Boone’s) way of life also was the idea … of 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’. Udall adds sadly: ‘By the time Boone died, however, his countrymen were already preparing to dismember the wilderness.’
About a century later, when the shimmer had dulled, Vachel Lindsay wrote:
When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,
The phantom deer arise
And all lost, wild America
Is burning in the
ir eyes.
While the dismemberers got to work, the pious veneration of the brawny and essentially wholesome russet open-lifer remained prevalent in the mid-i8oos.
Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, carried a frontispiece of the new bard, bearded, shirt-sleeved and revealing a bark-like under-vest. The preface winged straight into the inflating myth: ‘… here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.’
Whitman’s announced motive was to ‘write the evangel poems of comrades and love’, to make ‘a song of These States’, ‘a world primal again’, Adam’s innocence retrieved and iridescent in a pure, eternal spring.
This was felt by a few to be a ‘barbaric yawp’, yet it was a yawp which was ringing throughout all the industrialized, or industrializing, nations of the West. It was a reaction attuned to the German summerlander bliss of Erdlebenbild, the image of the earth’s organic life, Lenau’s Drei Zigeuner, and the untrammelled gipsy heroes of Romantic poetry. It was an idealistic banner against the black beastliness of factory smoke and for the stunted drudges who dwelled amid it.
This was the period when Ruskin was sanctifying ‘rude untutored freedom’, when there was ardent melting at such tremulous sentiments as Francis Lucas’s 1897:
Heigh ho! for the hedger and ditcher
There’s many wiser and many richer
But leather, all leather from top to toe
The worst weather that ever can blow
Is good enough for the hedger and ditcher,
Hard Travellin Page 5