when Thoreau, after his year in a hut just outside Concord, was rediscovering the ‘simplicity and nakedness’ of primitive man, ‘still but a sojourner in nature. When refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops’, and Thoreau found that ‘the occupation of a day labourer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The labourer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labour …’
Even after the turn of the century an American president, Theodore Roosevelt, was exalting the vision, being photographed in his North Dakota rancher role, wearing Davy Crockett cap and fringed buckskin frontiersman rig, bowie knife shoved through cartridge belt, and rifle across knee, and declaring: ‘I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.’
The vision sought increasingly frantic forms. In 1855 General Buncombe (whose name was added to the vernacular), a great huffer and puffer, was booming at the House of Representatives: ‘Sir, we want elbow room - the continent - the whole continent - and nothing but the continent! Then shall Uncle Sam, placing his hat on Canada, rest his right arm on the California coast, his left leg, like a freeman, upon Cape Horn.’
From the start Americans needed a frontier as a rampart to be topped and consequently the frontier concept has been applied to some pretty peculiar and dubious undertakings. The search, in its nineteenth-century form, became perversely unreal: a retreat into a limpid arbour of humbug. The actual life lived by the frontier farmer or the day labourer had not been looked at; only imagined, by the enthusiasts.
Ralph Chaplin’s mother, a farmer’s wife in Kansas, thought life on the frontier wasn’t glamorous at all. It was just ‘hard work and lonesomeness’. Cowboys were ‘nothing but farms hands in ten-gallon hats, Indians and Buffaloes were anything but romantic’.
Few people in the East heard this point of view. There was a much wider promotion of the idealized nature boy, rough-neck but radiantly virtuous, in the steam literature of the period. The popularizations in the Fenimore Cooper manner by Charles W. Webber, who produced fanciful novels about the gold mine and Redskin terrain, and the output of a host of fiction-churners such as David H. Coyner and Lewis H. Garrard, and the glamoriza-tion of Kit Carson by John Charles Fremont and Charles E. Averill, all put together did not achieve what Erastus Beadle did.
Beadle was the man who in 1858 launched the Dime Novel series, thousands of short takes aimed at mass sales to the emerging, peripherally literate, working-class readership. Therein the symbolic free-sailing figure was processed and vulgarized, but held to an amazing consistency of leathery saintliness. In the dime novel he was usually a hide hunter or fur trapper, not yet a cowboy. It was to be another decade before the plainsman and Indian-fighter of the Deadwood Dick and Buffalo Bill stripe was merged into the Tom Mix knight of the cattle ranges. But, the protagonists were invariably monadic, self-sufficient, steely loners with shoulders straight and heads high in a menacing universe, each one solitary and undeterred by an isolation awful yet sublime.
In the 1905 Prose and Poetry of the Livestock Industry of the United States it was recalled how, as late as the Civil War, the curious eidolon of a grim, hostile bleakness was the hob-goblin in the American fairy tale, both lure and mental barrier: ‘… attribute to this almost unknown region every conceivable horrid aspect… the desolate barren land of horrors that constituted the Great American Desert…
‘According to all these fantastic tales, the water-less, windswept land of sand and stone, this howling, hopeless, worthless cactus-bearing waste inhabited by savages of extreme fierceness and cruelty, and haunted by prowling beasts of unexampled ferocity, were joined to a mountain region in the far West where towering mountain peaks tore all the clouds to tatters, where snow that fell before Columbus landed still was under snow that had fallen since, where the naked granite sides of the mountains went straight aloft until lost to view, where shrieking gales forever blew over the frozen desolation that reigned supreme, and as they drove along, wailed out the warning to rash mankind: “Abandon hope, ye who enter here”.’
It may appear puzzling that Beadle’s dime novels did not exploit the roving cowboy who had entered this land of ‘every conceivable horrid aspect’ and had found no cause to abandon hope, and that he did not crystallize as a star until long after the brief twenty-five-year span of frontier range industry and the truly phenomenal drives of longhorns from the Texas spread up the Goodnight-Loving, Chisholm and Sedalia-Badter-Springs trails.
Assuredly in 1875 Laura Winthrop Johnson, in an article in Lippincott’s, did not recognize him as the lone hero. She responded with only nose-wrinkling distaste to the brutish crew of buckaroos she had seen at a Wyoming round-up: ‘Rough men with shaggy hair and wild, staring eyes.’
Why after being passed over for so long was he selected for the heroes’ gallery? As recently as 1952 Dobie remarked: ‘For every hired man on horseback there have been hundreds of ploughmen in America, and tens of millions of acres of rangelands ploughed under, but who can cite a single autobiography of a labourer in the fields of cotton, or corn, or wheat?’
6 The pot of gold
Part of the American heritage is the spirit that hates a cribbed confinement … the American will not tolerate the fate of being boxed in, like a trapped rat.
Max Lcrner
Jack Penrod comes limping out of the Triple T Arena at Custer, South Dakota. He has just been swiped in the thigh by the horn of Holly, the big black bull he has been riding bareback. ‘Now you won’t be able to come to the dance tonight and polish the tarnish off your belt buckle rubbing bellies with the ladies,’ shouts a cowboy in a polka dot shirt and fringed green chaps with the signature ‘Gene’ slanting across each leg, who is cantering his roan in for the team roping.
The cowpokes have ridden in from surrounding ranches or driven in auto parties up to 600 miles to compete in the afternoon’s saddle bronc riding, bulldogging and buffalo riding. Some came by charter plane and used friends’ horses on the spot for the events.
Jack Penrod piloted himself up in his 150 Cessna from Cheyenne, Wyoming, where there was a rodeo the day before. He runs three ranches near Ashland, Montana, and owns a herd of 1,200 head of cattle but he is also a professional rodeo bullrider. He is a spectacularly good-looking man with the traditional hard-frozen Western taciturnity which offsets the feminine flamboyance of his dress: an iridescent purple silk shirt, high-heeled white boots with black curlicues, and around his Levis an embossed belt with a grapefruit-sized championship buckle in no need of polishing on a lady’s belly. He is thirty-two and was born at Pinetop, Arizona.
‘I compete in maybe fifty rodeos in the season, May through September, two or three a week, which means flying about 15,000 miles during the summer. I keep the plane at the ranch, just land it on a sod field. Wintertime I put it away in a hangar but in summer I just tie it up.
This way I can cover pretty near all the rodeos in these five states, North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska. In the three years I’ve been bull-riding I’ve won about $5,000. That pays for the plane but I shall keep it for getting around the ranches even when I’ve finished with rodeos.
‘I started bull-riding late. The world champion lives fifteen miles from me and he got me going in 1963. He put me on about twenty practice bulls. I sort of took to it and I won the championship the first year. I reckon I’ve got another year.
‘I don’t reckon I’ve hit my best yet but a guy starts tapering off about thirty-five. He slows down. He isn’t so fast and his coordination isn’t so good. I’ve been on about 200 bulls and only once been hurt bad, last year at Riverton, Wyoming, when I broke six ribs. I love riding the bulls. You get to know which are the true ones and which are unpredictable. You ca
n look yours over before the show, talk it over with him. My wife’s glad I shall be quitting soon. She’s always scared I’ll get hurt, but I’m going to miss like hell doing the rodeos because I got friends all over these five states and it’s kinda nice running across each other all the time.’
Below the snow-capped peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico and the volcanic lava drippings, now thinly grown with juniper and squawbush, is the lushly grassed range-land which was the hunting ground of the Kiowa and Comanche Indians. The ruts of the Cimarron Cutoff, the pioneer road through to the west, are still visible, old scar tissue in the turf. Capulín on Highway 87 is a sprinkle of buildings: the Auto Tramp Trailer Court, the Wigwam Camp Modern Motel and the Country Store. Opposite the Texaco gas station lives Orb Gossett in his first permanent home.
He is seventy-nine, a trifle bent but still tall and sinewy, and quite toothless. His jeans are held up by braces over a check shirt with pearl buttons, and he keeps on his pale fawn ten-gallon hat in his sitting room with its Victorian profusion of photographs, china bric-a-brac and embroidered table runners. He also wears brown riding boots although it is two years since he sold his horse, Tony, and was last in the saddle.
‘I’ve been a roving cowboy all my life,’ he says. ‘My father was a rancher at Throckmorton, Texas, and I began riding when I was eight. I worked for dozens of ranches, through Texas, Wyoming, South Dakota and New Mexico, always moving on.
‘I always wanted to see what was on the other side of the hill. Sometimes on long distances me and a companion would move with a covered wagon and a chuckbox but oftentimes I’d just go alone with my horse. Longest trip I ever did do by horse was 1,000 miles and when I was sixteen I rode 600 miles from Throckmorton to Dumas, with a bedroll and cooking for myself on cowchip fires.
‘The ranges were bigger then. They didn’t have no corral. You just rounded up the longhorns and roped ’em down by the fire for the summer branding. We’d brand 30,000 calves a year.
‘I thought I was tough and I didn’t wear a slicker, one of them overcoats that throws off the rain. I just toughed it out, sleeping in wet bedding or riding all night. You don’t get no strays now because everywheres is fenced in but then we’d have to ride fifty miles bringing in the strays. The steers was wilder then - they weren’t fed and they lived wild. A rabbit or lightning would make them stampede and it took days to round them up again, and you could get skinned real bad if you got in the way of a stampede.
‘In those times you never did quit riding. I was a bronco rider, too: I broke them Spanish horses to ride to cattle. I’ve broke fifteen or twenty a day, just knocking the rough edge off them, enough to saddle and hobble.
‘My daddy, he could crease those wild horses with a .44 Winchester when they was running, just put a bullet across the top of their necks and they’d turn somersault but soon be all right. I carried a six-shooter, everyone did. I was no expert but I carried it, trying to be tough, I guess, though if a fellow had got awkward I’d probably have thrown it down and run.
‘Back in ’52 in South Dakota I near froze to death. I was with my son, who was killed four months ago when a horse rolled on him, and we were driving in a jeep through the Black Hills to feed 1,250 head on a ranch ten miles away. The road got drownded out in a snow drift and we sat in the jeep for thirty hours. My teeth froze to my gums.
‘My son finally got help with an airplane and got me out but they thought I’d lose my hands and feet. I worked on after that but I wasn’t the same. I could have went and worked that herd in a pick-up truck but that wouldn’t have been right for me. I’d a heap rather be out there on the range than sitting in this room. I cried when I sold my saddle. I’d had that saddle for twenty-five years and when I sold it I figured “I’m through now.” So I don’t ride no more.’
*
In 1917 Hamlin Garland published his Son of the Middle Border, one of the few books to deal with pioneering and the Westward epopee other than in poet-pilgrim terms.
Its start is in the 1860s in a little Wisconsin coulee at the fork of a trail. ‘Beyond this point all is darkness and terror.’ Garland’s father is consumed by the hunger for the West - where there is ‘a fairer field for conquest. He no more thought of going East than a liberated eagle dreams of returning to its narrow cage … Beneath the sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity’.
To his father ‘change is alluring. Iowa was now the place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold.’ The family is kept on the hop, to Minnesota, on to Iowa, then across the line of the middle border, and even farther West, and Garland begins to perceive that they are actually part of a destructive agency of the very quality that ‘the pioneer impulse throbbing deep in my father’s blood’ is in quest of. He sees the swift changes, the fencing and the houses neatly fretting the wild country. ‘And yet with all these growing signs of prosperity I realized that something sweet and splendid was dying out of the prairie. The whistling pigeons, the wailing plover, the migrating ducks and geese, the soaring cranes, the shadowy wolves, the wary foxes, all the untamed things were passing, vanishing with the blue-joint grass, the dainty wild rose and the tiger-lily’s flaming horn. Settlement was complete.’
Again his father turns his face to the free lands farther West ‘He became again the pioneer. Dakota was the magic word … Once more the spirit of the explorer flamed up … Once more the sunset allured.’
When Garland himself reaches manhood he takes a train to Farmington, where the Dakota branch of the Milwaukee railroad crosses his line of march, in the hope of obtaining a teaching post. Here in Farmington he feels ‘to its full the compelling power of the swift stream of immigration surging to the West. The little village had doubled in size almost in a day. It was a junction point, a place of transfer, and its thin-walled unpainted pine hotels were packed with men, women and children laden with bags and bundles (all bound for the West) and the joyous excitement of these adventurers compelled me to change my plan. I decided to try some of the newer counties in Western Minnesota. Romance was still in the West for me.’ All America was ‘in the process of change, all hurrying to overtake the vanishing line of the middle border’.
Now the train had replaced the prairie schooner and the canvas-covered wagon. ‘Free land was receding at railroad speed, the borderline could be overtaken only by steam and every man was in haste to arrive.’
Here encapsuled is the American tragedy of disenchantment, the inability to enter the mirage. Years later Garland returns from the East to the Iowa where he grew up. He finds the young men ‘worn and weather beaten and some appeared both silent and sad … The days of the border were over.’ Yet the people there are still ‘living in pioneer discomfort, toiling like a slave’.
Says one woman: ‘We make the best of it, but none of us are living up to our dreams.’ Garland looks at ‘the hard and bitter realities … the gracelessness of these homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical daily routine of these lives … The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me … This wasteful method of pioneering, this desolate business of lonely settlement … These ploughmen, these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly shacks by the force of landlordism behind.’
In 1891 Garland published Main Travelled Roads. He explains: ‘The main travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in summer and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snows across it … Mainly it is long and wearyful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil at the other. Like the main travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate.’
All about him as he travelled he ‘perceived the mournful side of American “enterprise”. Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers, daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were everywhere breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in restless mo
tion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships. At times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants - which was an injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently futile and aimless striving…’
Garland was not the first to be disillusioned with the sanctified West. In 1871 there had appeared the irreverent The Hoosier School-Master by Edward Eggleston, which had a considerable impact on the young Garland, and in the next decade had appeared an out-of-step growling novel entitled The Story of a Country Town by Edgar W. Howe, in which a character utters the blasphemy: ‘Men who are prosperous … do not come West, but it is the unfortunate, the poor, the indigent, the sick - the lower classes, in short - who came here to grow up with the country, having failed to grow up with the country where they came from.’
Even earlier, it might be noted, examination of the state of the nation, in The Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York, 1836–37, revealed a morose disharmony with the orthodox mood of ebullience and mettle: ‘The population of the United States is beyond that of other countries an anxious one. All classes are either striving after wealth, or endeavouring to keep up its appearance … We are an anxious, care-worn people.’
Garland quite deliberately set out to earn his tag ‘The Ibsen of the West’ by iconoclastically exposing the ‘mystic quality connected with free land’ which had ‘always allured men into the West. I wanted to show that it is a myth.’
This downbeat melancholy did not suit the determined Argonaut policy of the time. Editors, Garland found, ‘did not like this stark reality treatment of farming and the West’. He had difficulty getting his stories accepted, and when his collection was published he was ‘execrated by nearly every critic as “a bird willing to foul its own nest”,’ and editorials and letters denounced his ‘message of acrid accusation’ as giving a viciously false picture of the middle border and the pioneer life.
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