Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir. These two did more to preserve the natural West than any others.

  Roosevelt didn’t exactly drop politics on the trip. Photographers trailed him, and a shot of Roosevelt and Muir standing at the brink of Glacier Point, thousands of feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley, served the purposes of both. Roosevelt burnished his naturalist credentials, while Muir made friends with the most powerful man in America. Ever after, Roosevelt addressed Muir as “Oom John”: his Dutch uncle.

  Hetch Hetchy Valley. Not long after this photograph was taken, the valley was inundated.

  Muir appreciated much of what Roosevelt accomplished in protecting the wild places of America. Working with Congress, the president set aside huge tracts of the West as national forests. He created five national parks, including Crater Lake, near the spot where Captain Jack was hanged. He made national monuments of the Grand Canyon, the Muir Woods of California, and more than a dozen other especially scenic locales in the West.

  Yet when the dam-builders eyed Yosemite, Muir rebelled. In 1906 a devastating earthquake and fire leveled large parts of San Francisco. As the city began to rebuild, it sought to secure a water supply for future growth. Civil engineers and hydrologists recommended a reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, in a corner of Yosemite National Park. Gifford Pinchot, the man Roosevelt had made the nation’s chief forester, endorsed the proposal and recommended it to Congress.

  Muir opposed the Hetch Hetchy project with all his might. It was an atrocious sellout of nature to the interests of commerce. “These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar,” he wrote. Muir shook his head in wonder and dismay. “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

  Muir lost this battle. Congress voted in 1913 to approve the project. Muir died the following year, before the rising waters reached the temple door.

  54

  THE LONG, LONG TRAIL

  BY THEN THE WEST OF MUIR’S YOUTH, AND OF ROOSEVELT’S, was a memory. The West still existed as a geographic zone, of course. The Great Plains still formed its eastern boundary, the Pacific its western. The Rockies and the Sierra Nevada were as tall as ever, the sky over the basin between the ranges as stingy as ever with moisture. The Missouri, Columbia and Colorado rivers still ran toward the sea.

  But things had changed. The Great Plains were dotted with farms, including the bonanza spreads of Dakota and the debt-ridden parcels of Kansas and Nebraska. Railroads crossed the mountains, making the journey from St. Louis to San Francisco pleasant and swift. Dams were beginning to modify the aridity of the Great Basin and would soon restrain the flow of even the most powerful rivers of the West.

  Something more essential had changed, too. The earlier West had been a zone of conflict; from the explosion of the Tonquin to the campaigns of U.S. soldiers against Crazy Horse, Quanah Parker, Captain Jack and Joseph, violence and armed conflict had characterized the American West. This hardly made the West unique in world history. Conflict has always marked the borderlands where peoples and cultures abut, and especially where one group has intruded on another. The Greeks fought their way across Asia Minor under Alexander; the sword of Caesar brought Gaul under the dominion of Rome; Spanish conquistadores, rather than Spanish friars, enforced Iberia’s will in the Americas; the Comanches dominated the southern plains, and the Sioux the northern, by killing or intimidating rival tribes.

  But in the United States, by the nineteenth century such regular conflict was unique to the West. America’s earlier frontier had once been as violent: the “dark and bloody ground” of Kentucky saw more mayhem per square mile than any part of the trans-Mississippi West. Yet nearly all the tribes of the East had been destroyed or removed within a generation after independence. The conflict in the later West lasted longer, primarily because the region was so much larger. And while the organized violence continued, it was a defining characteristic of the West. When the violence ended, most brutally and definitively in the massacre at Wounded Knee, the West, in its historical sense, was no more.

  THE WEST DISAPPEARED IN AN EMOTIONAL, OR PERHAPS sociological, sense as well. In American history the West had always represented opportunity; the West was the peculiar repository of American dreams. The dream of El Dorado had originated with the Spanish conquistadores, but it persisted deep into the American period of the West. The forty-niners were obvious descendants of Coronado; the cattle speculators of Dakota and the land-rushers of Oklahoma slightly less obvious. But material fortunes weren’t the only inspiration for Western dreams. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of an easy water route from the Missouri to the Pacific. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman dreamed of Christian salvation for their Cayuse hosts. Brigham Young dreamed of a Mormon refuge beyond the reach of a gentile government.

  The West had no monopoly on American dreaming. The entire American experiment in democracy was founded on a dream that ordinary people could govern themselves. And every immigrant to America came chasing a dream. But Western dreams were often larger, because the West was larger, and because for a long time it was largely unknown. In the American mind, the West was not so much a place as a condition; it was the blank spot on the map upon which grand dreams were projected.

  Inevitably, the blank spot was filled in, by the very efforts of those seeking to attain their dreams. Some did attain them, at least in part. Many argonauts struck it rich in California. Many emigrants to Oregon were delighted at how their long journey ended. Theodore Roosevelt didn’t become a cattle king, but he became president, which was no small consolation.

  More commonly, though, the reality fell short—often far short—of the dreams. The explosion of the Tonquin blasted John Jacob Astor’s dream of an American fur empire. The Whitmans died seeking their harvest of souls. The argonauts who ended up laboring long hours in the underground mines asked why they had ever come west. The cowboys who found themselves working the year around, at the beck of a cost-counting boss, wondered what had become of their freedom.

  As the West passed from dream to reality, it became more like the East, until nothing significant distinguished the one from the other. A twentieth-century Horace Greeley might have sent his young protégé to Wall Street or Washington as readily as to the West.

  Yet a residue remained. The gambling spirit of the gold rush found its echo in the venture capitalism of Silicon Valley. Hollywood was built by maverick filmmakers fleeing the constraints of Eastern cartels, much as American Texas was built by malcontents fleeing the constraints of debt and marriage. Dude ranches in Wyoming and Montana attracted cowboy wannabes in the twenty-first century in the same way working ranches in Dakota attracted dudes like Teddy Roosevelt in the nineteenth.

  ROOSEVELT DIED IN 1919. THE MOST FAMOUS IMAGE THAT marked his passing was a sketch called “The Long, Long Trail,” which showed him in cowboy gear riding a spectral horse into a Western sky. Other figures from the earlier West had gone before. Joe Meek died in 1875, amused that having begun life in Washington County, Virginia, he was ending it in Washington County, Oregon. John Wesley Powell died in 1902, months after passage of the Newlands Act. Nez Perce Joseph died in 1904 on the Colville reservation of Washington state, still exiled from his beloved Wallowa Valley. Quanah Parker had crossed the cultural gap between his father’s people and his mother’s, and become a wealthy rancher; he died in 1911 in Oklahoma.

  Black Elk outlasted them all. The Lakota visionary, witness to so much of his people’s history, and to the history of the West, never forgot what he saw at Wounded Knee, and what it meant. “A people’s dream died there,” he said many years later. “It was a beautiful dream.” Black Elk lived to the age of eighty-six, and died in 1950.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK DAN GERSTLE AND Lara Heimert of Basi
c Books for suggesting this project. And Kris Puopolo and Bill Thomas of Doubleday for letting me pursue it. As always, my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin have been most helpful in sharing their knowledge. My students have been patient as I have tested my ideas on them. The Monday mafia—Greg Curtis, Stephen Harrigan, and Lawrence Wright—have set a high bar for literary excellence and a low bar for humor. Both are appreciated.

  A book like this would be impossible without a great deal of previous work by hundreds of historians, archivists and librarians. To all of them I am deeply indebted.

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  Photo credit: University of Texas

  H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to His Class. He lives in Austin, Texas.

  ALSO BY H. W. BRANDS

  Heirs of the Founders

  The General vs. the President

  Reagan

  The Man Who Saved the Union

  American Colossus

  Traitor to His Class

  Andrew Jackson

  Lone Star Nation

  The Age of Gold

  The First American

  TR

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1 “It was bitterly cold… nearly undrinkable”: Roosevelt to Alice Lee Roosevelt, Sept. 8, 1883, Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org. This account of Roosevelt’s Dakota experience draws on H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (1997).

  2 “I am now feeling very well”: Roosevelt to Alice Lee Roosevelt, Sept. 17, 1883, Theodore Roosevelt Center.

  3 “I have been three weeks”: Brands, TR, 189.

  4 “In the latter part of March”: Brands, TR, 208.

  CHAPTER 1: THE RIVER AT THE HEART OF AMERICA

  1 America’s West entered human history: An accessible introduction to life in the Americas before European contact in the late fifteenth century is Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005).

  2 “I would rather”: Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (2002), 288.

  CHAPTER 2: THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY

  1 “The object of your mission… on your decease”: Jefferson to Lewis, June 20, 1803, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, American Memory, http://memory.loc.gov. In this and other documents from the period, idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation have been normalized and abbreviations spelled out.

  2 “Captain Lewis and myself”: Entries for Aug. 2 and 3, 1804, in The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary E. Moulton, https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu. This is the most authoritative version of the journals of the Corps of Discovery. Stephen E. Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996) is an enthusiastically told account of the Lewis and Clark journey informed by the author’s reprise of the trek.

  3 “Sergeant Floyd”: Entries for Aug. 19 and 20, 1804, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  4 “The man who went back”: Entries for Aug. 5, 7 and 18, 1804, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  5 “On that nation”: Jefferson to Lewis, Jan. 22, 1804, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

  6 “We prepared some clothes”: Clark entries for Sept. 24 and 25, 1804; Gass entry for Sept. 25, 1804, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  7 “These are the vilest miscreants”: Clark, “Estimate of the Eastern Indians,” undated, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  8 “We shewed but little sign”: Clark entry for Sept. 27, 1804, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  CHAPTER 3: WEST BY NORTHWEST

  1 “Two shots were fired”: Gass and Ordway entries, Jan. 1, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  2 “I ordered my black servant”: Clark entry for Jan. 1, 1865, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  3 “All the party in high spirits”: Clark entry for Mar. 30, 1805 (mislabeled as Mar. 31), Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  4 “It may be observed generally”: Gass entry for Apr. 5, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  5 “I observed the extraordinary dexterity”: Clark entry for Mar. 29, 1805 (mislabeled as Mar. 30), Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  CHAPTER 4: TO THE PACIFIC

  1 “Our vessels consisted”: Lewis entry for Apr. 7, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  2 “We are informed”: Lewis report to Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rivers and Creeks Which Discharge Themselves into the Missouri,” undated (winter 1804–1805), Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  3 “This morning I walked”: Lewis entry for Apr. 27, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  4 “On arriving to the summit”: Lewis entry for May 26, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  5 “I had proceeded”: Lewis entry for June 13, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  6 “The Indian woman recognized”: Lewis entry for Aug. 8, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  7 “Both parties now advanced”: Lewis entry for Aug. 13, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  8 “I have been wet”: Clark entry for Sept. 16, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  9 “I ascended a high cliff”: Clark entry for Oct. 19, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  10 “The country on both sides of the river”: Gass entry for Oct. 23, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  11 “The natives are very troublesome”: Ordway entry for Oct. 22, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  12 “Great joy in camp”: Clark entry for Nov. 7, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark. This passage in the journal was edited, for publication, to read, “Ocean in view! O! the joy!” The edited version is the more widely quoted one. See Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites (1905), 3:207.

  13 “By land from the U. States”: Clark entry for Dec. 3, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  CHAPTER 5: ASTORIA

  1 “I received, my dear sir”: Jefferson to Lewis, Oct. 20, 1806, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

  2 He was sketching a plan: The present account of the Astor project follows Washington Irving, Astoria (1836), an authorized history of the enterprise. A recent account of the American fur trade is Eric Jay Dolan, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (2011).

  3 “I am sent off”: Irving, Astoria, 1:82–83.

  4 “Indian ragamuffins”: Irving, Astoria, 2:98.

  CHAPTER 6: COMCOMLY’S DISMAY

  1 At one point one of the partners: Irving, Astoria, 2:124–125.

  CHAPTER 7: THE WHITE-HEADED EAGLE

  1 The latter had deep roots: The classic history of the Hudson’s Bay Company is Donald McKay, The Honourable Company: A History of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1936).

  2 “From what I had seen”: John McLoughlin statement, undated, in Transactions of the Eighth Annual Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association for 1880 (1881), 46.

  3 William and Ann: Frances Fuller Victor, The River of the West: Life and Adventure in the Rocky Mountains and Oregon, Embracing Events in the Life-time of a Mountain-man and Pioneer, with the Early History of the North-western Slope (1871), 29–30. This indispensable and delightful book is both a history of Oregon and the fur trade and an as-told-to memoir of Joseph Meek. It is the source for the Meek tales below, which are probably no more embellished than the stories in most memoirs. Mrs. Victor was sympathetic but not gullible.

  4 “It is of no use”: Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of the Northwest Coast (1884), 2:451–452.

  5 “I divulged my plan to none”: McLoughlin statement, Transactions 1880, 48.

  CHAPTER 8: MOUNTAIN MAN

  1 “They did not grieve”: Victor, River of the West, 41.

  CHAPTER 9: COLTER’
S RUN

  1 “Sublette came round”: Victor, River of the West, 70–71.

  2 “I have been told”: Victor, River of the West, 76–77.

  3 “Go! Go away!”: Thomas James, Three Years Among the Indians and Mexicans, edited by Walter B. Douglas (1916), 58–64.

  CHAPTER 10: URSUS HORRIBILIS

  1 “It is old Joe”: Victor, River of the West, 77, 86–87.

  2 80 “I have held my hands”: Victor, River of the West, 120, 122, 146.

  CHAPTER 11: MOSES AUSTIN’S DYING WISH

  1 “We saw many signs of gold”: The Journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, edited by Ad. F. Bandelier (1905), 166.

  2 “Tell dear Stephen”: The Austin Papers, edited by Eugene C. Barker, 3 vols. (1924–1927), 1:409–410. The best biography of Stephen F. Austin, which includes a full account of Moses Austin’s Texas project, is Gregg Cantrell, Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas (2016 ed.). Background material for this section comes from H. W. Brands, Lone Star Nation (2004).

  3 “The first 4 miles”: “Journal of Stephen F. Austin on His First Trip to Texas, 1821,” Texas Historical Association Quarterly 7 (1904): 288–296.