Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

  —From An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco (1859) by Horace Greeley

  INDIANA NATIVE JOHN Babson Lane Soule, not Horace Greeley, was actually the first journalist to exhort his readers to “go west,” but few Americans promoted the new frontier as emphatically as Greeley, even if he found the raucous, brawling territories a tad coarse for his own tastes.

  Born to impoverished New Hampshire farmers in 1811, Greeley dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to apprentice with a printer, founded a weekly newspaper at the age of twenty-three, and was a dominant publishing force by his thirties, espousing everything from vegetarianism and temperance to the abolition of slavery. Greeley aspired to hold elected office, but a three-month stint in Congress filling a vacated seat and a disastrous presidential campaign represented the extent of his political career.

  After writing sympathetically about the “filth, squalor, rags, dissipation, want, and misery” of New York’s destitute in 1840, Greeley was contacted by Albert Brisbane, an American educated by philosopher François Marie Charles Fourier in France. Fourier was an early champion of women’s rights (according to some scholars he coined the word féminisme) and pushed for utopian communities, or “Phalanxes,” that fostered cooperation over individualism. Upon Fourier’s death in 1837, Brisbane took up the cause and found a kindred spirit in Greeley, who began publicizing utopian concepts in his influential New York Tribune and organizing Phalanxes wherever there was interest. He embraced Fourier’s idealistic belief that, as Greeley paraphrased him, “the true Eden lies before, not behind us.”

  One of these Fourier- and Greeley-inspired Edens, the Grand Prairie Harmonical Association, was established in Warren County, Indiana, named after the Revolutionary War hero Dr. Joseph Warren. And he deserves a mention. An outspoken voice for American independence, the thirty-four-year-old Warren fought as a private on Bunker Hill despite having been appointed a major general; his official promotion was several days away, and he preferred serving with the common soldiers. After he was killed by a shot to the head, British soldiers rolled his lifeless body into a ditch and stabbed it repeatedly with their bayonets. Warren’s brother John and their friend Paul Revere later identified Warren’s decomposed corpse by a false tooth.

  My guide for this particular sojourn into western Indiana is Terri Wargo, president of the Warren County Historical Society. Before I arrived, Terri sent me several articles about Grand Prairie and went out of her way to visit the site to make sure we could locate it. “There’s nothing really there,” she warned me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “That’s true for a lot of the places I’m visiting.”

  After staying overnight just across the border in Danville, Illinois, I meet with Terri at West Lebanon’s public library, where she’s worked for more than two decades.

  “How long have you been with the historical society?” I ask.

  “About ten years. I never thought I’d be running it, though. I guess I went to one too many meetings and was elected president,” she says, laughing.

  We drive north on State Road 63, which becomes U.S. 41, and then go west on Route 26 for a few miles. As we near a slight rise in the two-lane highway, Terri pulls onto the shoulder.

  “Here we are,” she says.

  Well, Terri was dead-on; there’s not much around except an everywhere-you-look vista of lush green bean fields and tiny white farmhouses dotting the landscape.

  Nineteenth-century maps and records confirm that this ridge is where the main building, the Community House, would have sat, overlooking the 350 acres purchased by the Association in 1851.

  “This shouldn’t take long,” I say as I photograph the surrounding terrain from the middle of the road. Terri watches the highway to make sure I’m not flattened by a truck zooming over the incline.

  Greeley never lived in or even visited Grand Prairie, but he outlined its intellectual foundation. Using language similar to that of other Fourier Phalanx charters, the Association’s manifesto declared that its intent was to educate members in “the three following departments, viz., educational, agricultural, and mechanical … for the culture of both mind and body.” There was a “college” to teach applied trades such as carpentry and blacksmithing along with more academic pursuits, and all money was held collectively by the board of trustees, of which Greeley was one. Few other specifics are known about the Association except its mission “to forward the elevation, peace and unity of the human family.”

  It lasted just over a year.

  The only first-person narrative I could find from a surviving member was dictated by a ninety-year-old man named Philander Child. He faulted a poor harvest, summer drought, and lack of employment for the Association’s demise and not any philosophical deficiencies in the overall plan. He conceded, however, that he remembered mostly the positive side of the experience because it was at Grand Prairie that he met his future wife, Eve.

  In his 1868 autobiography, Recollections of a Busy Life, Horace Greeley skips over Grand Prairie and profiles three other ventures instead (all of which, like most Fourier Phalanxes, have historical markers). Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was launched in 1840 and counted the famed author Nathaniel Hawthorne as a founding member. Sylvania in Pike County, Pennsylvania, covered a whopping 2,300 acres and folded in 1845 after two years. And the longest-lasting was the North American Phalanx, a 673-acre property in Monmouth County, New Jersey, which started in 1843 and held up for seven years. (A real estate company selling posh mansions in Monmouth recently tried to capitalize on the area’s utopian history, luring prospective buyers with the promise that, although “a group of idealists” were unable to build “the particular future they dreamed of, … their spirit continues to influence the Monmouth County luxury homes and the region’s colorful lifestyle of today.” The fact that most of these nineteenth-century idealists disdained flamboyant displays of wealth is, I guess, beside the point.)

  Greeley had made Fourier’s Phalanxes a trendy utopian brand name, but they weren’t the only product on the ideological market. A capitalist version was set up fifteen miles outside of Chicago in the 1880s by railroad magnate George Pullman. His aim was to build an attractively designed community for his workers—with public parks, fountains, and manicured gardens—but where unions were banned and, in his words, “strikes and other troubles that periodically convulse the world of labor would need not be feared.” It endured for almost two decades; the recession of the 1890s sparked what Pullman most dreaded, a workers’ strike, and his dream died just before he did in 1897.

  Although utopian communities tended to follow a socialist economic model, many were founded on religious principles. (Some blended the two, using Acts 2:44–45 as their justification: “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; / And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”) Among the most enduring faith-based utopias were those built by the Shakers, who at their peak in the mid-1800s had approximately six thousand members in more than twenty communes nationwide. Maine’s Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village is still up and running after 220 years. With only about two or three members left, however, its future is grim. Shaker numbers have dwindled over the past two centuries mostly due to their strict no-sex policy. Ever. Even between married couples. The Shakers could expand only through the recruitment of new members, and celibacy was a hard sell.

  Such was not the case with the Oneida Community, founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes fifteen miles east of Syracuse, New York. Oneida was a carnal free-for-all compared with the Shakers’ communes or, for that matter, even your average swingers’ resort. Noyes, a former Yale Divinity School student, and his followers practiced “complex marriage,” which prohibited couples from being monogamous. Instead, everyone was essentially married to everyone and encouraged to have multiple sex partners. Oneida grew to several hundred people in just two years.

  Noyes’s “Heaven on Earth” began to unravel in
the mid-1870s due to various factors, including a backlash among younger members who actually grew tired of the forced promiscuity and wanted to settle down with a single person. Noyes fled America after learning he’d been accused of statutory rape, and in 1881 the Oneida Community disbanded. Its reputation wasn’t exactly enhanced when, later that year, a former member named Charles Guiteau assassinated President James Garfield. (As chance would have it, Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln was standing near the president when he was hit. Lincoln was also at the Pan-American Exposition when President William McKinley was shot, and while he declined an invitation to Ford’s Theatre the night of April 14, 1865, Robert was at his father’s bedside before he died. No other American has been in such relatively close proximity to three presidential assassinations.) Even before Charles Guiteau killed Garfield, his fellow Noyesians had written Guiteau off as a bit creepy, nicknaming him Charles Git-out.

  Calculating exactly how many utopias, or “intentional communities” as academics now refer to them, have been attempted is challenging because the definition is subjective. One person’s bright, happy collective is another’s oppressive, maniac-led cult. The stuffy but reliable Oxford English Dictionary adheres to the word utopia’s original meaning—conceived by Thomas More—as a perfect place that can never truly exist, while the OED’s more optimistic American cousin, Merriam-Webster, allows for it potentially to be real. But what can be said with certainty is that, from the Puritans’ shining city on a hill to “just leave me alone, man” hippie enclaves, no other nation on earth has attracted and hosted more of these colonies, ecovillages, and communes than the United States.

  Horace Greeley himself conceded defeat on their long-term prospects in this country or anywhere else. They might be “excellently calculated for use on some other planet,” he concluded in his Recollections, “but not on this one.”

  In 1869 the New York Tribune’s agricultural editor, Nathan Meeker, helped establish a “temperance colony” about fifty miles north of Denver that eventually became Greeley, Colorado, named in honor of his abstemious boss. Greeley, the place, was intended to be not a Fourier Phalanx but a clean, family-friendly town where faith, education, culture, and hard work were celebrated and alcohol was illegal. (The ban lasted a whole century.)

  In an odd historical postscript, Greeley has sporadically been in the media spotlight for the past decade because of an Egyptian student named Sayyid Qtub, who lived there more than sixty years ago and attended classes at what is now the University of Northern Colorado. Qtub came to the United States in 1948 and passed through New York City first before his six-month stay in Greeley.

  New York’s frenzied, menacing streets, with their noisy gin joints, brothels, and seedy drug dens, had traumatized the shy and soft-spoken Qtub, and Greeley should have seemed, in comparison, like heaven on earth. Classical concerts, free public lectures, sock hops, and potluck suppers were the town’s main entertainment, and religious services were always fully attended. But again, one man’s Shangri-la is another’s Hades, and Qtub saw only decadence in Greeley. “Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists,” he later wrote of one church-sponsored event. When he went on to fume that “the atmosphere was full of love,” he did not mean the chaste and innocent kind. Qtub was especially revolted by the latest musical craze. “Jazz is the American music,” he seethed, “created by Negroes to satisfy their primitive instincts, their love of noise and their appetite for sexual arousal.”

  After returning to Egypt, he traveled throughout the Middle East lecturing and writing extensively about the West’s spiritual wickedness, as evidenced in little Greeley, Colorado. Qtub isn’t exactly a household name in the United States, but the movement of like-minded souls he inspired, “the Base,” is universally recognized. The original Arabic translation is probably more familiar to most of us: al-Qaeda.

  PIKES PEAK’S SUMMIT

  We were now nearly fourteen thousand feet above the sea level. But we could not spend long in contemplating the grandeur of the scene for it was exceedingly cold, and leaving our names on a large rock, we commenced letters to some of our friends, using a broad flat rock for a writing desk. When we were ready to return I read aloud the lines from Emerson.

  “A ruddy drop of manly blood,

  The surging sea outweighs;

  The world uncertain comes and goes,

  The looser rooted stays.”

  … We pursued our journey in all possible haste, anxious to find a good camp for the night before dark. At last when I thought I could not go a rod further, we found a capital place, a real bear’s den it seemed, though large enough for half a dozen. And here we are, enclosed on every side, by huge boulders, with two or three large spruce trees stretching their protective arms over our heads.

  Yours truly,

  J. A. Archibald

  J. A. ARCHIBALD wrote these words in early August 1858 after climbing the Colorado mountain named after Zebulon Montgomery Pike Jr., the twenty-eight-year-old Army officer who began mapping out the southern regions of the Louisiana Purchase in 1805 while Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, somewhat more famously, charted the north. Pike attempted to scale the 14,115-foot mountain in late November 1806, but after several days without food and blanketed up to his waist in snow, the starving and frostbitten explorer gave up. “No human being,” Pike concluded, “could have ascended its pinical [sic].” Pike is believed to have been the first non–Native American to make the attempt, and he never tried again. J. A. Archibald would go on to accomplish what Pike himself could not, earning a spot among our nation’s most notable mountaineers.

  Archibald’s parents, John and Jane, undoubtedly contributed to their child’s bold, adventurous spirit. In 1854 the family was living in Massachusetts when the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, granting settlers in these relatively wild, unruly territories the right to decide whether or not slavery should be allowed there. Mr. and Mrs. Archibald saw an opportunity to promote their abolitionist beliefs, so they packed up their eight children and headed for Kansas. Soon after arriving, they offered their new home as both a meeting place for fellow Free Staters and a safe house, or “station,” on the Underground Railroad. There is no record of violence against the Archibalds, but their actions could have easily gotten them killed; pro-slavery thugs from Missouri poured into what became known as “Bleeding Kansas” to murder and terrorize anyone aligned with the Free State cause. From these brutal clashes emerged the abolitionists’ fiercest advocate—some would say madman—a New York–born cattle raiser and tanner named John Brown.

  In the early summer of 1857, twenty-year-old J. A. Archibald set out with a younger brother, Albert, to join gold hunters from Lawrence, Kansas. “I was much pleased to learn on my arrival, that the company contained a lady [Mrs. Robert Middleton],” Archibald noted in a long letter detailing the journey. Middleton was one of the few fellow travelers Archibald wrote about, but a lasting friendship wasn’t in the cards; Middleton was put off by Archibald’s progressive views, even if they benefited Middleton herself. “I soon found that there could be no congeniality between us,” Archibald wrote. “She proved to be a woman unable to appreciate freedom or reform … and confined herself the long days to feminine impotence in the hot covered wagon.”

  Alternately riding in these ox-drawn wagons and walking in thin leather moccasins across the kiln-hot plains, Archibald and the Lawrence party trekked more than five hundred miles from Kansas to Colorado. Whether or not they found gold (and they didn’t) mattered little to Archibald, whose aim was to rove “across the prairie sea.”

  Traveling for the sake of traveling I understand, having already covered thousands of miles by car, boat, helicopter, kayak, train, plane, bus, and hiking boots. The beauty of this country is simply breathtaking. Even the gas stations and chain restaurants I’m passing on I-25, as I drive south from Denver to Manitou Springs, can’t diminish the magnificent sight before me of a dark-blue mountain range backlit by the rays of a vanish
ing sun. But what these early pioneers endured seems beyond comprehension. Aside from the physical exhaustion, thirst, and hunger they experienced, they had to maintain constant, hyperalert preparedness for everything from rattlesnakes underfoot to thieving bandits around every trail bend, while also staving off long periods of mind-numbing boredom.

  Although there is one passage dedicated to the “disgusting inactivity, and monotony” of their expedition, Archibald’s letters and journal are free of grievances or grumblings. Mostly they contain descriptions of the land’s infinite splendor and surreal, dreamlike images—“The Indians have the custom of suspending their dead in trees, where the dry air of this elevated plain speedily shrivels them up”—as well as the small unfolding dramas of the natural world: “The buffalo cow as well as the bull is naturally a very timid animal, save when wounded or driven to bay. I learned that the mother of the captured calf made a heroic stand, and presented a beautiful illustration of maternal feeling over fear.… She died in his defence.”

  In Archibald’s time, the only way to ascend Pikes Peak was by foot. Now going up “America’s most visited mountain” can also be accomplished by bike, car, or cog railway. I’m choosing the latter because I, blessedly, share none of Archibald’s craving for self-punishing exploration. Adventure, yes; misery, no. I justify my laziness by reasoning that I’m on a tight schedule and don’t have several days to spare trudging up and down a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain. I’m also curious to see what our tour guide will say about Archibald’s momentous climb to the top.

  “She’s not a tour guide,” a staff member at the Manitou & Pikes Peak Railway corrects me. “She’s a conductor, and her name is Erin.” Attractive and (I’m guessing) in her mid- to late twenties, Erin teaches high school history most of the year and works here in the summer. She is personable, funny, and very smart, and she keeps all 180 of us engaged and entertained for the entire ninety-minute trip. We first learn some basics about the Cog Railway itself. After enduring a painfully bumpy two-day burro ride up Pikes Peak, inventor and businessman Zalmon Simmons (of Simmons BeautyRest mattress fame) resolved to finance a more comfortable mode of transportation. On June 30, 1891, the inaugural steam-powered train safely transported its first paying customers, a Denver church choir, up the 26-degree incline to the summit. Tickets back then were $5 apiece, or approximately $135 in today’s dollars. (I paid $33.50.) Erin assures us that, since the maiden voyage well over a century ago, there hasn’t been a single passenger fatality or serious injury. Our ninety-ton train, we also learn, is powered by a diesel/electric engine and chugs the 8.9 miles up the mountain no faster than 10.5 miles per hour.