by Hugh Brogan
BOOK THREE
The Age of Equality
I know of no country where the conditions for effecting great changes in the settled order of things, for the development of right ideas of liberty and humanity, are more favourable than here in these United States.
Frederick Douglass, 1857
12 The Planting of the West
Oh don’t you remember sweet Betsy from Pike
Who crossed the big mountains with her lover Ike,
With two yoke of cattle, a large yellow dog,
A tall Shanghai rooster, and one spotted hog;
Saying, goodbye, Pike County, farewell for a while,
We’ll come back again when we’ve panned out our pile.
Folk song
By the Peace of Paris in 1783 the United States gained a vast domain in the West, which in the course of the next seventy years was to be extended as a great empire to the Pacific, dislodging the French and Spanish from North America and forestalling British designs on Oregon. The Land Ordinance and the North-West Ordinance had given it flexible and efficient machinery for governing and developing this empire, and in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution it had two excellent manuals for governing itself. Unfortunately, as everybody knows, technical manuals will only take you so far. The Americans believed that their ideology and their institutions were better than adequate for any problems that might arise, but even if they were right they still had to learn how to apply them. In a sense, the rest of this history shows them learning; this chapter and the two which immediately follow it describe the process in its earliest days, when perhaps it was most important. The Americans were an imperial, westering people; democrats; liberals, many of whom were slave-holders; a nation of immigrants; part of a burgeoning industrial civilization. Any one of these traits would have exposed them and their beliefs to a severe testing. Together, they produced a ferment so remarkable, and so nearly ruinous, as to make the nineteenth century even more dramatic and revolutionary than the eighteenth. The story is best told one theme at a time, beginning with the earliest, the movement west; for in ways which will be shown it largely conditioned everything that followed.
A great change overtook the Americans in the years after 1789; a change as profound in its consequences as the Revolution itself. Previously their society had looked seawards. Every settlement in the New World had depended for success on finding functions in the great Atlantic economy of seaborne trade. Maritime links were to remain strong during the nineteenth century, but their controlling importance soon ended. Until 1815 the leaders of the republic were still defensively preoccupied with Europe; but more and more their fellow-citizens looked westwards. They felt the pull of the land.
Of course it had always been there, that vast, tempting, unexplored wilderness; but until the late eighteenth century the advance upon it had necessarily been slow. Demography, politics, diplomacy, economics, technology and the Indians had seen to that. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century the balance had tipped dramatically to the other side, and the race for the Rockies and the Pacific was fairly begun. With it also began the great age of the Wild West.
Here a difficulty arises. The legend of the West, the Matter of America, is that country’s greatest gift to the imagination of the world, and a historian neglects imagination only at excessive cost. So it must be acknowledged that somewhere in everyone’s dreams Sulky Sam Snake, the fastest gun in Rattlesnake County, wearing a black hat, is cheating at poker in the Crooked Dollar Saloon. Diamond Lil looks over his shoulder. Meanwhile James Stewart, in a white hat, rides into town, a tin star twinkling on his chest. Elsewhere smoke rises off the mesa: the Apache have bad hearts, and are preparing to attack Fort Laramie, residence of a golden-haired heroine in a grey print dress. A thin blue line of US cavalry rides to the rescue. Elsewhere again, the wagon train crosses the Divide by South Pass: looking back east you can just see Natty Bumppo disappearing into the forest. Cowboys, the great drive over, whoop it up, more than ready for Lil and the Crooked Dollar. Someone, somewhere, is picking out ‘I ride an old paint’ on a mouth-organ. Frankie and Johnny are lovers.
Yet unchecked legend is the greatest enemy of historical truth. The precious insights it conveys are all too easily lost in fantasy, irrelevance and downright falsification. Epic takes space that ought to be devoted to statistics. Its glamour very frequently obscures the less showy but even more moving record of what really happened. American historians of the West have perhaps enjoyed their subject too much. They have not always been careful to make the necessary distinction between the West as a point of the compass, as a certain region of the United States, and the moving West of the past – the West of exploration and settlement, that began at Jamestown and crept across the continent in the following centuries: the so-called frontier. Their works have been rich in suggestions and richer still in information; but they have not always avoided the trap of implying that the frontier was always much the same, from century to century; or the opposite error, that it was entirely different from generation to generation, region to region. There was uniformity; there was diversity; continuity and new departures. Both must be brought home to the understanding, for otherwise legend prevails.
The complexity of the real frontier experience can perhaps be most easily conveyed through sketches of the true life stories of half a dozen legendary Western leaders. Their biographies do not by any means include all aspects of the development of the American Empire; but in limited space it is impossible to deal completely with so huge a topic. We must be content with such drama and such truths as these lives can convey. Let us begin with Daniel Boone, the Long Hunter; for as he himself remarked, ‘the history of the western country has been my history’.
He was born of Quaker parents in 1734, and although, once he had reached manhood, he stopped going to meetings, or indeed to any church, that particular religious background perhaps in part explains the notable patience and serenity of his character. More certainly, his life’s course was shaped by a certain restlessness that seems to have been native to all the enormous tribe of Boones, and by an upbringing on the Pennsylvania frontier. He learned farming as a boy, but his natural instrument was the American long rifle, developed for the needs of frontiersmen by German gunsmiths in south-eastern Pennsylvania. Boone was from the first a marvellous shot. He was fascinated by the local Indians – they were Shawnees, a tribe he was to spend many years fighting – and learned his phenomenal woodcraft from them; they called him Wide Mouth. He became a hunter. When he was in his teens his father, having quarrelled with the Quakers, sold his farm and set off down the Great Valley of the Appalachians, a course taken by tens of thousands in the mid-eighteenth century. The land dictated which way he should go, as it had dictated to the beasts and the Indians before. The mountains lie on a slanting axis: the Boones soon discovered that the easiest road and the best land lay always to the southwest. Presently they reached the Yadkin river in North Carolina and settled. There, at the age of twenty-two, Daniel married.
But first he had an adventure. In 1755, the year before his wedding, he went, as did the young George Washington, with General Braddock’s army to attack the French Fort Duquesne at the forks of the river Ohio. The expedition was a frightful failure: Braddock, ignoring all warnings, walked into an ambush and, with most of his men, was killed. Boone, serving as a waggoner (‘teamster’, in American English) had a narrow escape. But the direction of his life was settled: he had gone into the country beyond the mountains for the first time. In 1758 he went there again with the expedition that avenged Braddock and founded Fort Pitt (soon to be Pittsburgh) on the site of Duquesne. He did not forget.
He tried hard to settle down as a farmer on the Yadkin. Life was anything but dull. Indian raids had to be fought off during the Cherokee War, and afterwards he and his fellow-citizens had a sore struggle to restore order to a countryside stiff with horse-thieves and other robbers, oppressed also by corrupt government and c
rooked lawyers. This was the seedbed of the Regulator movement, 1 but Boone began to hold himself aloof. For him, the lure of the dark woods was paramount: he was forever prowling off along the trails after bear and buckskin, to the neglect of his family and his business. Small debts accumulated. He involved himself with an ambitious land speculator, one Richard Henderson, who had dreams of founding a proprietorial colony in ‘Transylvania’ across the Appalachians. He made an excursion down to Florida, newly annexed to the British Empire, but decided that he preferred the West. By 1767 his restlessness was too much for him: he set out to cross the mountains into the longed-for Kentucky. 2
4. The expansion westward
He was unlucky in the course he took. The uplands of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee are poor farming country: their only wealth is coal, which Boone did not know about and could not have used if he had. He saw, killed and ate his first buffalo (the liver, raw, and the hump, roasted, were reckoned to be particular delicacies on the frontier) but the hills were covered with a tangled forest of laurel. In the spring of 1768 he gave up the struggle and went home.
In 1769, with Henderson’s financial backing, he tried again, and this time, guided by an old frontier pedlar, his party found the Cumberland Gap, the all-important, relatively easy route through the last eastward barrier of the Appalachians. A broad south-north valley (Boone approached it from what is now Tennessee) sloping gently up and down, ten miles long (1,665 feet or so above sea-level), it cut through the Cumberland mountains to the crossing of the Cumberland river. Others had seen it before Boone (the Indians called it Ouasioto) but none had made much use of their discovery. Now came the pathfinder: not the first, but the best explorer. Boone, though he did not know it, was pioneering a trail (not for the last time) along which, eventually, enormous numbers of settlers would pour. They would call it Boone’s Trace, or the Wilderness Road. For twenty years it would remain the same boggy, rocky, narrow, tortuous path that he hacked out of the forest in 1775: passable only by pack-horses and travellers on foot.
In 1769, once past the Gap, Boone followed an Indian trail which skirted the laurel jungle and led to the great Kentucky bottomlands of which he had heard. Lying on either side of the river Kentucky, which flows north into the Ohio, these lands had already been colonized by another arrival from Europe – the famous bluegrass, phleum pratense, a native British plant. If the Narrative of Boone’s adventures is to be trusted – and though not written by him, as it pretends, it is based on information that he supplied – it was then that he fell in love with the country. He passed through the forest noting only the beauty of its fruits, leaves and flowers, and the abundance of its game, especially the wild turkeys; coming to the bluegrass, he was amazed by the vast droves of buffalo feeding in the meadows; his trained frontiersman’s eye told him how good the soil was. He ignored the innumerable biting insects. He was intensely happy. He spent the next few years exploring the entire region, until he knew it intimately. He had many escapes and adventures, of which the best to tell is perhaps that in which some Indians stalk and trap him on the edge of a high cliff. He jumps out of their clutches into the air, landing sixty feet lower down in the topmost branches of a maple tree. 3 His knowledge of the back-country became famous, and many settlers were willing to follow him; but the Indian menace was daunting. In 1773, when he tried to lead a party into Kentucky, it was ambushed, his eldest son James was cruelly killed, and the party hurried back in dismay to the Yadkin. Only in 1775, after Henderson had bought off the Cherokees with trade goods and whisky, was the way open; but chief Oconostota took Boone by the hand and warned him: ‘Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it.’ Boone said later that these words often came back to him in the next twenty years, for the war for the conquest of Kentucky and Ohio was the longest and bloodiest of all the struggles between the Americans and the Indians. But in 1775 Boone, his family and other pioneers pressed up the Wilderness Road until in April they reached the banks of the Kentucky, where they founded the fort and village of Boonesborough.
Even in this Boone was not quite the first: a little place called Harrodstown (today, Harrodsburg) had already been founded not far away by settlers coming down the Ohio. It was in the years to come that he earned his unique fame. They were years of battle, when the Shawnee Indians fought to retain their hunting-grounds and got plentiful assistance from the British, fighting to retain their Empire. At times the pitiful line of wilderness settlements was all that stood between the enemy and the fat back-country of Virginia and the Carolinas, and but for Boone’s cool courage, dauntless leadership and unmatched woodcraft the settlements would have been wiped out. They came near to it when Boone was captured by the Shawnees; but instead of killing him the old Shawnee chief, Black Fish, adopted him, under the name of Big Turtle, as his son. Boone had to go naked (save for a loin-cloth), shave his head (save for a scalp-lock), paint his face and wait for months; but in the end he was able to escape from his captors and carry warning to Boonesborough that an attack was imminent. He compelled the demoralized and disorganized settlers to prepare their defences, so that when the siege came the Indians were finally beaten back, though it was a close thing.
Then, incredibly, Boone was court-martialled on charges of treachery. He was said to have secretly aided the Indians, and to be a British agent. It was the first of a long series of insults that he was to receive at the hands of the Kentuckians who owed him so much. He was acquitted, but the incident dramatizes the fact that Boone was a divided soul, like so many of those who first opened up the wilderness. He wanted to be rich in land, chiefly for his wife and children’s sake; he sought out good acreage on the frontier as eagerly as anyone, and knew that it could only be secured from the Indians by a mass movement of population; so he led his countrymen through the Cumberland Gap. But at the same time he was in love with the untouched wild; happiest when, clad in deerskin shirt and moccasins, he was stalking deer, bear or buffalo, his rifle ready to his hand, his senses alert for any sign of Indian danger. He was, by instinct, more than half an Indian himself: the settlers sensed this and disliked him for it. The filling up of the new country, which he did so much to further (not least by killing off the game) was always a sad process for Boone, and he never made any money by it, being an extremely poor businessman. Kentucky appointed him a colonel in her militia, named a county after him, made him a territorial legislator, granted him wide lands – and then stripped him of them. Neither decency nor gratitude deterred the land sharks who poured into the region before and after it became a state of the Union in 1792; by systematically exploiting their influence, the uncertainties of land-surveying, and the inexactitude of legal records, they were able to rob Boone of every acre and then claim, that he was still their debtor.
By 1799 the old hero had had enough: he left Kentucky in a dugout canoe, vowing never to return, and settled across the Mississippi under Spanish suzerainty, bringing with him a large party, which gained him an award of 9,000 acres from the Spanish government, in a form of head-right. He was thus one of the founders of Missouri, as formerly of Kentucky; and as in Kentucky he soon lost everything after the area became part of the United States in 1804. But he proved amazingly resilient. His children were able to support him, and old though he was, he could still, for some years, explore. He travelled and trapped far up the river Missouri, and died happy, at the age of eighty-five, in 1820.
Boone had long since become a legend, one which reached Europe, where Byron put him into some stirring stanzas of Don Juan. Fenimore Cooper, the first great American novelist, assimilated his fictional hero, Natty Bumppo, to what he knew of Boone. As self-sufficient master of the forest trails, he still haunts the American imagination, and his pithy sayings still have power: ‘I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who isn’t sometimes afraid. Fear’s the spice that makes it interesting to go ahead.’ And, when teaching his son deer-stalking: ‘Wisdom comes by facing the wind. Fools let it carry them
.’
Andrew Jackson 4 differed from Boone in everything save courage. After a wild year or two in North and South Carolina, passed in scraping a legal education and losing his small but useful inheritance at the race-track, he got himself appointed, in 1788, at the age of twenty-one, public prosecutor in the trans-Appalachian province of North Carolina. This was an immensely significant step. It illustrates the rapid emergence of a new ruling group in the West. Jackson was the son of one of the many Ulstermen 5 who, driven out of Ireland by oppressive English policies, landed at Philadelphia and found their way down the Great Valley of the Appalachians as the Boones had done. But the Irish had none of the craving for the woods that marked Daniel Boone (Andrew Jackson’s only recorded aesthetic emotion was his admiration of British army drill as displayed before the Battle of New Orleans): they settled together in the back-country, and as one rose to fame and fortune he pulled up all his cousins with him. That was how Jackson got his job: thanks to his more prosperous relations he moved in influential circles, where he made a friend of the judge who was to be his superior officer in the West, a young fellow not much older than himself. Together they rode through the Cumberland Gap. Already Kentucky, to the north, was too full and competitive a place for a beginner; besides, it belonged to Virginia: Carolina connections would have been no good there. So Jackson was happy to head west along the newly opened Cumberland Road to Nashville, Tennessee. Apart from a hot temper, a steely will and a sort of shrewdness that was half intuition, half common sense, his only assets were a girl slave he had bought for $200, a saddle-bag full of elementary law books, and his friends. The combination did not fail him, the less so as he promptly married into the dominant clan at Nashville. It was a marriage of love, not uncomplicated by drama, for Jackson’s Rachel had to be rescued by divorce from an unhappy marriage before she could become Mrs Jackson, and in the process she unintentionally committed bigamy, a misfortune that was to be the cause of much suffering to both man and wife in the years to come. The fact remains that by his marriage Jackson painlessly made the transition from one burgeoning aristocracy to another. He lived hard for most of his life, but he never lived small.