In Our Time - The American West

Episode Date: June 13, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the myths and harsh reality of the 19th century American pioneers. In 1845 the editor of The New York Morning News wrote that it was the "manifest destiny" of the United States "to overspread and to posses the whole of the continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us." With such phrases ringing in their ears the pioneering wagon trains rolled west into the uncharted wilderness of the American continent. Thus began the wagon trails that cut a path beyond the frontier to California and Oregon, a path soon to be followed by gold prospectors, entrepreneurs, cowboys and finally the US army itself. But what propelled them all to go? Was it an "experiment of liberty", or the promise of a better life? Does the story of the frontier help us to understand the American psyche and do our ideas about the American West owe more to the mythology of John Wayne movies than to the history of the real trailblazers? With Frank McLynn, Visiting Professor in the Department of Literature, University of Strathclyde; Jenni Calder, Author of There Must Be a Lone Ranger: The myth and reality of the American Wild West; Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1845, the editor of the New York Morning News wrote that it was the, quote, manifest destiny of the United States to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent

which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us. With such phrases ringing in areas, the pioneering wagon trains rolled west into the uncharted wilderness of the American continent. Thus began the wagon trails that cut a path beyond the frontier to California and Oregon, a path soon to be followed by gold prospectors,

entrepreneurs, cowboys, the US Army, and Hollywood. But what propelled those early pioneers to go? Was it an experiment of liberty or the promise of a better life? Does the story of the frontier help us to understand the American psyche and do our ideas about the American West owe more to the mythology of John Wayne movies than to the history of the real trailblazers. With me to discuss the American West of Frank McClain,

visiting professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Strathclyde, and author of a new book, Wagons West, the epic story of America's Overland Trails. Jenny Calder, writer and author of There Must Be a Lone Ranger, the myth and reality of the American Wild West, and Christopher Fraley, Rector of the Royal College of Art in London, and author of Spaghetti Westerns, Cowboys and Europeans, from Carl Mai to Sergio Leone. Christopher Freling, can you tell us how the North American continent was divided up at the beginning of the 19th century? Who owned what land, who controlled what bits?

Well, the first big thing that happened was in 1803 when Napoleon sold all the French holdings in America to President Jefferson and actually sold him 800,000 square miles of territory. It's hell of a thing, indeed. It actually doubled the size. the United States. The buying of America. Yeah, that was the first stage. But when the wagon trains set out, you mentioned in the introduction in the early 1840s, they were originally called the emigrant trails, because in effect they were going into foreign countries. They set out from Missouri. They go across what was called the Great American Desert. It

hadn't even been coloured in on the maps yet. And then when they reach the west, they either go to Oregon, which is a British province run by the Hudson's Bay Company, based in Fort Vancouver, or they go to California. which is run by the New Mexican state had traditionally been run by the Spanish. So whichever way the wagon trains go, they're going into territories that don't belong to the United States yet. So it's not just going west, it's going abroad in a sense.

So the whole of the south, all the southern states, Texas, Arizona, southern Utah, New Mexico belong to the Spanish and then to the Mexicans. The west belongs to the Spanish and the British, and the middle bit, it hasn't been coloured in yet and basically belongs to the Plains Indians. So it isn't a continent yet. It's a half-country.

And it was really in the 1840s that the United States changed from being a patchwork to half a continent. It's astonishingly recent, isn't it? I mean, you can't get over how recent it was. Anyway, why did the early pioneers decide to travel West Christopher? Did they go for individual reasons? Is it the usual mess and intricacy? Or was the one major propelling force?

Well, traditionally what's said, is that there's a kind of restlessness, an itch in the American character. I remember once meeting an elderly cowboy in a place called Elko, Nevada, and he claimed to have had tea with Wyatt Earp, which was pretty far-fetched on both counts. But he said to me, the difference between your country and mine, referring to Britain, is that in Britain, you stand for Parliament, and in America you run for Congress,

and that motion, moving on, restlessness, scratching the itch, is actually very deep within the American psyche. the traditional interpretation of why the wagons pointed west. But, of course, there were low motives, the high motives. Low motives, politicians were boosting the West because they wanted as many settlers as possible to settle in California and Oregon to out-settle the Brits and the Spanish. They'd done it in Texas, where the Anglos moved in and pushed the Mexicans out,

and they wanted to do the same thing in the West. So there was a kind of boosterism to repopulate the West. There were all sorts of individual motives. Some people hadn't paid their mortgages, some were on the run from the law, some just wanted to have a second start, a lot of honeymoon couples who wanted to start married life in a new place. Frank argues in his book that there's a different attitude to the land in America, whereas in Europe we have a rather rooted attitude towards the land.

We try and make something of it, and we pass it on from generation to generation. In the 1840s, the American settlers tend to have a get-rich-quick attitude to the land. Let's do something quickly with the land, and if it doesn't yield, let's move on and try somewhere else. And there's a lot of that going on. And then at the most high flow, and there's all this manifest destiny, stuff being talked about, a kind of Hegelian view of history where Providence has given the continent to the Americans. So they'd better settle it and try this experiment of democracy and liberty across the entire continent.

So all sorts of high-flown and low motives coexisting, like everything else, it's a mixture, I think. Frank McElgin, you go along with that. You talk in your book about push and pull factors. Yes, people in the Midwest, which were the states from which the immigrants came, Illinois, Missouye, Missouri, Iowa, Mississippi, lived in a disease-ridden country, which was also in the grip of economic recession at beginning of the 1840s. That constitutes what I call the push factor. And the pull factor is simply the tall stories, if you like,

put about by the Oregon and California boosters, about a land flowing with milk and honey, a promised land by the Pacific. there was even this story of roast pork running around with knives already in it and tales like that. And it was said that California was a Shangri-La in a real sense in that you could live to be 200 years old and there was a story of someone who died

and was brought into California and then rose from the day. So there were many... bizarre stories like that. But taking on from what Christopher said about going to a foreign country, and I think a lot of people will be quite surprised now how recently it was that they were foreign countries. The Brits were there, the Spanish were there masses of it. And it was the buying and occupation of the continent

that we're talking about at that stage. How has this trail created, Frank McLean? What was the geography of the, what were the obstacles? Basically, the emigrants went west from Missouri along river lines. There were three forts along the route, which were the staging posts, Fort Hall, Fort Laramie, Fort Boise,

and later was Fort Bridger. And to jump from one fort to another, basically the emigrants followed rivers, first of all the plat, then the sweet water, then the bear, finally the snake. It was just in the later stages of the journey, whether you went to California or Oregon, that you had problems

because then you had to leave the rivers and ascend the mountain ranges, the Sierra Nevada, in the case of California, and the Blue Mountains in the case of Oregon. So the emigrants were moving across lines of latitude, almost, you could say, pretty well due west. And there was a good reason for that, and that was that these emigrants were farmers,

who were taking animals and seeds with them, and they had to take the animals and seeds to similar latitudes. It was just common sense. Was it a very dangerous trial? Yes, I think mortality. Overall mortality was about 10%, which is considerable when you think about it. The obstacles were not so much the Indians and the wild animals

as the geographical obstacles, such as the mountains and the rivers, drownings actually constituted the greatest single cause of death on the trail. And accidental discharge of firearms because the immigrants were so careless was another. But you don't mention Indians at all. As I understand it in the 1840s, when the pioneers are moving over, largely or perhaps totally unprotected, the Indians were on the whole no problem at all. No, this is absolutely true.

the country through which the emigrants moved was inhabited by Indians, all of whom were astonishingly peaceful at the time. The Indians were often very helpful. They would ferry wagons across difficult rivers. They'd point out sources of food and water. Most of the time they were helpful. Mythology has conflated the wagon train period of history with, much later period of history, because when you watch the movies, you see Comanche and Apache

and Cheyenne attacks on wagon trains. Well, these never actually happened. Insofar as there were attacks on wagon trains, they tended to be small scale and carried out by Indian tribes whose names are hardly known at all except to anthropologists. So straight away, there's a conflict between history and the history we get from the movies. Jenny Calder, what kind of people were the early travellers? And what kind of lifestyle were they leaving behind and did they take with them? We had this idea of the rugged person on the covered wagon with a woman hitching up her skirts on the front. And what was going on?

I think they were pretty rugged, or at least if they weren't rugged to start with, they had to become rugged along the way. They were mainly families, sometimes quite large family groups, sort of extended family groups. They were generally people who had made a life for themselves of some kind in what were then the frontier states. A lot of children, amazing numbers of children, who were often vulnerable to accident and disease. There were people of some substance because it actually required a fair amount of investment. You had to buy your wagon, equip yourself, your beasts. your oxen, your mules, your horses, your food, absolutely essential,

and something with which to make a start when you arrived. So they weren't destitute, although there were quite often a number of hangers-on who didn't have much to contribute except their work. They could help a family along the way. You talk in your book about, I'm quoting, restlessness as an heroic quality. What do you mean by that? And how do you think it characterised the people we're talking about?

I think there was a sense from a very early stage, perhaps from the very beginning of America's history, by which I mean the beginning of European settlement of America, that there was a huge territory beyond the eastern fringe, and gradually the frontier moved west. Thorough talks about he said something like I have to walk towards Oregon

not towards Europe there was a sense that Europe was old and outdated it was what they had left behind all these people whether their generation their fathers their grandfathers their great-grandparents

they had all come west already they had made that transatlantic journey so it was it was kind of In the blood, for any European who settled in America, they made a journey West and the West still beckoned. Thorese certainly believed that the movement West was the movement to civilization. That was the way the civilized world was going from the East to the West.

You have two ideals here, don't you? The ideal of individualism and the necessity for community spirit to just get along with each other on the wagon. train and going across. And then you arrive in places in which there are a lot of it. We can't say there's nobody at all because there were Indians there, but they weren't in that particular spot. And maybe a few miles around, you set up a community. Can you tell us how that worked out?

One of the classic elements of the myth, of course, is how a community is born, how it transformed from being a collection of people who just happened to be occupying the same place to a genuine. community. The community of travellers was often a very fraught one with a lot of rivalries and quarrels and problems of all kinds. And those didn't necessarily just disappear when it came to trying to establish a settled community. And there were huge difficulties, of course. And it was very hard work there wasn't the infrastructure of the law, so these settlers' communities did tend to be kind of honeypots for those who were on the run or on the make in some fashion or other.

The great counter-example to the myth of the wagon train, I think, is the most famous anyway, is an incident concerning the Donner Party, which was a wagon train led by George and Jacob Donner in 1846, which went to California. and the great myths of sort of togetherness on the trail, being well prepared, knowing where you're going, having a map, taking the right route. All of them go wrong for the Donner Party. They go the wrong way. They take a shortcut that doesn't work.

They start rowing. They reach the Sierra Nevada's much too late in the season, and the snows come early. They find themselves snowed in over the winter of 1846, 1847, marooned. And ultimately, the most dreadful thing, actually you get cannibalism, where, you know, they've run out of game, they've run out of food, they're snowed in, the search party goes off to Fort Sutter to try and get help. That goes wrong, and they start eating each other.

The Indians, interestingly, the two Indian guides guiding the search party, refused to eat human flesh, so they just shot them and ate the Indians instead. Then, meanwhile, back at what's now Donner Lake, which was then called Truckee Lake, the actual people who are maroons start eating each other as well. And it's an absolute object lesson in everything the myth doesn't tell you about the wagon trains. It was just chaos. It wasn't a society on the move at all. It was completely ramshackle.

They hated each other. They rowed. They wanted to do each other down and eat each other's supplies. It was a really ramshackle society. So the Donner Party is, you have to remember that. When you read all this manifest destiny stuff and the foundation of the American community, remember the Donner Party of 1846 because it wasn't always like that. Frank McLean, you do with the 1840s.

Towards the end of then, you have the gold rush. Does that change things radically? Can you just tell us how it does? Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, quantitatively, I mean, between 1841 and 48, only about 15,000 immigrants made the journey. Immediately in 1849 to 50, you get figures like 75,000 people going to California.

And from 1849 to 61, a quarter of a million people make the journey. So just in sheer quantity, you know, you get a... a complete change of gear. Perhaps more seriously, the quality of the people changes as well, because whereas the early emigrants had been family groups almost entirely. Yes. Middling farmers and their families, law-abiding, god-fearing folk, you know, very low incidence of crime, very low incidence of violence. Once you get the gold rush, you get an entirely different sort of person,

appearing on the frontier, you get overwhelmingly single males, many of them violent, many of them sociopaths or psychopaths, you know, and get rich quick and kill anyone who stands in the way. You've got an entirely different can of beans, if you like, once the gold rush starts in that sense. You know, and the problems of crime and punishment become acute immediately. Jenny, talking about young men, male psychopaths, sociopaths, whoever, going for a girl, what about the women? There are two extremes of women who are represented. One is a sort of pioneering woman who has to try to get a school sorted out, often bring up children and so on, not much seen in the movies, but she was that.

And the other is the May West Calamity Jane, hard-wearing, or prostitute. But those seem to be what we're offered. Was that what was going on? Well, certainly the women on the make, as it were, they came hard on the heels of the gold rush, of the railroads. That was the next sort of major phase of opening up the West. Wherever there were numbers of single men, sooner or later you're going to get numbers of single women.

And they were certainly there. After the Civil War, largely, gone to Frank's book. Largely, we're talking about placid enough Indians. They're there in the plains. There's 400,000 of them. They're looking after that buffalo. They're a bit annoyed when people kill buffaloes and take only the tongue, but basically they're... Oh, sorry. After the Civil War, the attitude towards Indians changes radically. Can you explain why and what happens? Well, the Great American Desert, that uncolored in bit of the map that the travellers had covered, began to become of commercial interest.

The transcontinental railroad is built, finished in 1869. And that's really the point where things snap with the Native Americans or the Indian. And you've got the locomotive steaming through the hunting grounds. You've got the massacre of the buffalo. You've got the United States cavalry setting up all sorts of forts all over that part of America in the wake of the American Civil War. And the land becomes commercially valuable. So all sorts of treaties with Washington are made with the Native Americans

in the central part of America, and almost, you know, they wake up one morning and their blankets are all black and they discover there's oil underneath. So the following morning, the treaty gets rescinded. And there's a lot of that in the 1860s and the 70s. Until by the 1880s, the Native Americans are basically a very sad, spent force. So there's something about the Ulysses Grant and Custer and people after the American Civil War were much more, they went looking for more enemies.

They were looking for more people to kill in a way. Yeah, lots of action. And in fact, one of the great stories, in the Western is those who were used to action in the American Civil War, used to military life, transposing all that energy, that negative energy, into peacetime, but taking on the so-called Indian wars in the 1860s. Let's try to draw something about the myths that have come out of the West that inform, as you might think, what America is.

The historian Frederick Jackson-Turner published his essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. That was in 1890. What was the idea of that, Frank McLean? Why was it important? Well, this is all, it's very controversial stuff. You know, there's an entire academic industry about this. The closing of the frontier in 1890, it was supposed to denote the fact that American life really worked properly if there was an area to expand into, both in economic terms and in terms of republican virtue.

And that some sort of crisis was then posed because the frontier had. had been closed. Did that mean then that the frontier had to be extended elsewhere across the Pacific, for instance, and what implications did that have geopolitically? But, I mean, the thesis is that, and it was 1893 for the Chicago Exposition, this Wisconsin historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, gives it to the American Historical Association. Some reckon it was, you know, one of the most significant academic papers ever given in terms of its impact on culture. he says that basically the defining feature of American political culture and indeed of the American character, whatever that is, is the frontier experience, is the contact, is pushing across the continent. And that in that sort of balance between what he calls savagery and civilization,

wilderness and garden, lawlessness and law, there's that very finely poised balance as those things changed. So that's the crucible out of which the American character is formed. And also behind it, the idea of utopia. and beyond the frontier is utopia. No, promise. The golden promise. Exactly.

And there's an inventiveness of practicality, a certain coarseness, what he calls a restless nervous energy, rugged individualism. All these things emerge out at the crucible of the frontier. Now, historians have constantly criticised Turner because the frontier didn't work like that. I mean, the urban frontier, if anything, the development of the cities was much, much more important

than the rural frontier, which is what he's writing about. And all sorts of other reasons, you can trip up Turner. But in terms of political rhetoric and the impact on public discourse about the West, Turner's frontier thesis was hugely important, and it still hasn't been shed. I mean, you need to read Turner's essay to understand exactly what George W. Bush is talking about when he talks about wanted dead or alive or tracking people down or smoking them out, because the frontier thesis is central to American political discourse in some senses.

But what's interesting is when he gave the talk in 1893 at the Chicago Exposition, half a mile away Buffalo Bill was performing his wild way. West show. So you've got the popular culture invention of the Wild West going on at precisely the same time as the academics are trying to write papers about it. So Turner's talking about the synonymous of the front here. Buffalo Bill is reenacting the raid on the Deadwood stage, the Native American Wars, in his kind of military tattoo plus circus, his so-called Wild West Show. So 1893 is the moment where the Western gets invented. Jenny Calder, in 1902, just at a time Christopher's talking about, Owen Worcester, the novelist, mourned the passing of the golden age. He wrote, What's Become of Our Horseman, the Cow Puncher, the Last Romantic Figure, upon our soil? And he addressed this book in his book, The Virginia. And did that, again, did that reinforce the idea that America could look for its soul, as it were, in its experiences along the trail, and to the worst? What Whistair does is he takes the myth and he makes it palatable to the east.

He turns it into something that is kind of both romantic and respectable. And he glosses over a lot of the less pleasing features, which those who had experienced some of these things were only too aware of. So I think Wister is an essential stepping stone. to allowing the East to kind of adopt the myth of the West. And to, it's a bit like, it's a bit analogous to, in Scotland, taking on the identity of the Highlander as representing a Scottish identity. So in America, in the East, they take on the identity of the,

of the frontiersmen and the pioneer to represent American identity. Right, McClain, what do you think about this? Do you think in that time, in the time, in the mid-century, mid-ninth century, was defined America's idea of itself, which had gone to Christopher Failing, is still a strong runner. Yes, I think it's certainly a strong run. I mean, there's the famous occasion in 1964

when Senator Goldwater, who was then running for the presidency, invoked the spirit of Daniel Boone, when he said that Daniel Boone didn't need welfare to go into the wilderness. And that may strike you as an absurd argument, but that resonates in the United states the idea that self-help and all of these virtues are the essence of the pioneer spirit

and that modern Americans have betrayed them by their dependence on welfare. So there's no question in my mind, but that the frontier myth is the central one in American culture. Although the relationship, I think, it's fascinating to do the trajectory. I mean, if you take President Lincoln in the early 1860s, and he could credibly say he was brought up in a log cabin and went from... log cabin to Whitehouse and was a rail splitter in his youth and actually did these things. Then at the turn of the century,

another Harvard alumnus, to Theodore Roosevelt, who was actually a great friend of Owen Worcester, and the Virginian was dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt uses the myth of the West to support his claims for the presidency. Actually, very consciously, he writes a four-volume book called

The Winning of the West, which is about the least politically correct history of this period you could possibly read, but boost that up, becomes the President. Then you get to Reagan, who's an actor in Western movies who becomes president. So he's one step removed again. And finally, you've got George W. Bush standing in front of television cameras saying, wanted dead or alive,

and remembering television programs he watched in his youth in Texas. So we go from log cabin to conscious use of the myth by a Harvard man, to someone who acted in B movies, to someone who watched it on television. Now, the myth remains the same, but they all have a different relationship with it. And now, when you've got someone actually spouting words taken from TV programs, a serious political discourse. It does show the resilience of the Western. It does.

Do you think there's a sense, in which the Western was also consciously and unconsciously, a propaganda tool to say to immigrants from Europe and immigrants from the East of the West and internal immigrants, look, there is gold in them, thy hills, this is a golden country, you go for it and you'll get it. So a lot of things that are a great number of people we admire about America.

Absolutely. That myth is still powerful, the land of opportunity. It's been oversold because, because Americans are now worrying about the invasion of Chicano's from Mexico into the Golden State as a result of this overselling. What do you think finally the three of you? Why do you think that the Western sprung up so immediately alongside the events? It must be maybe the first time in the whole of history,

where you have the history going on, and the myth is communicated. Of course, the cinema made it, a mass communicated, at the same time. Well, I think it's an analogy with the arts and crafts movement in England. This sounds mad, but you've got Ruskin and Morris writing about the Middle Ages in order to try and accommodate themselves to industrial and technological change and trying to find a way historically of adjusting to that. Simultaneously in America, you've got the cowboy myth and the crafts of cowboying.

They haven't got any history, they haven't got a 14th century to go back to, so they go back to the mid-19th century and turn this itinerant agricultural labourer, the cowboy, into their folk hero, not a prince, not a king, not an Arthur. Not an oedipus, but a cowboy. And it all happens in the 1890s. I'm afraid we run out of time, Frank. awfully, sorry. Thank you very much. Frank McLaughlin-Jenny Calder, Christopher Freilly. And thank you all very much for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com.