Gone west
MARCUS CUNLIFFE
The first white men to traverse the West were Spaniards. led north by Coronado in 1539. They had hoped to find civilisations as opulent as the Aztec. Instead they were amazed by distances and negations. On the buffalo plains there was, one of them testified, 'nothing but cows and sky.' Ownerless, random herds; scattered tribes of Indians, unable to travel ambitiously be- cause there were no horses on this continent; otherwise an almost total absence—of towns, farms, roads, bridges, monuments, graveyards. The landscape gave no purchase; it was in every sense uncultivated. In short, there was nothing lootable. Henry VIII was doing better by staying at home to rob the monasteries.
The story of the American West is of this giant emptiness searched, exploited and squatted on by forerunners from remote societies: explorers, trappers, miners, buffalo-hunters, soldiers, cattlemen, railroad builders, home- steaders, boosters, speculators, tourists. Some, like the Mormons, were in quest of the good place and meant to stay. These, in common with the Spanish mission-founders, had a re- ligious purpose. The motives of the majority were more mixed. Coronado set the style. Hardy to the point of magnificence, they were also the agents—sometimes unwittingly—of rapacity. What makes the venture heroic and touching, at least until the twentieth century, is the sheer difficulty of the task, the room for manoeuvre, and the ennobling sense of wilder- ness. Human endeavour, as the historian Park- man saw, was both dwarfed and magnified by the surrounding silences. The most ferocious of men could be awed into magnanimity by those `sweet-aired, endless plateaus.'
Nevertheless, it was a history of exploita- tion. The Indians were the first and the corn- pletest victims, along with the buffalo herds. The 'conquest' of the West entailed defeats, treacheries, annihilations. The Indians were not quite wiped out; by a happy fluke some have done well out of oil and uranium. But most of them disappeared. Their last • protest, the Ghost Dance craze of 1890, was a gesture of despair. They could do no more than haunt their conquerors with a terrible dream. In the words of Kicking Horse the Sioux, the Great Spirit had told him that 'the Indians had suffered long enough, and that the time had come for their deliverance. They were to occupy the earth once more. . The Great Spirit told him that the earth was getting full of holes, and many places were rotten. He would gradually send a wave, of earth
twenty feet or more over the country. . Tat Indian must keep dancing so as to be on top, and when the wave passed. all the palefaces would be buried underneath and the Indians would be on top. All the dead Indians would be restored to life again, and the buffaloes, horses, game, and their old hunting grounds would be as they were hundreds of years ago. . .
Haunting indeed—though the Sioux had for- gotten that they owed the horse to the pale- face invasion.
The story of the West is, as this point illus- trates, also full of ambiguity and incongruity, Civilisation and the primitive mingled in quite surrealist ways. Professor Hawgood, whose ex- pert narrative teems with instances, has found an extraordinary photograph of the Apache warrior Geronimo, seated in old age at the wheel of a Buick and wearing a top hat. Oscar Wilde lectured in auditoriums built overnight to washbowl miners. Young Endicott Peabody, soon to be headmaster of Groton, demonstrated the manly art of fisticuffs to similar audiences: an art he had acquired at Cheltenham College Around 1880, a stage-coach robber known as Black Bart was traced and captured through the laundry mark on a dropped handkerchief He proved to be a mild, elderly character fond of leaving his poetry at the scene of :he crime: I've labored long and hard for bread— For honor and for riches—
But on my corns too long you've trod You fine haired sons of bitches.
There is a saving comedy in this, well brought out in the declaration of a latter-day 'buff': 'I resolved to re-explore every nook and cranny of the West that could be reached by air-con- ditioned Cadillac.'
Mercifully there is still some room for manoeuvre. There are still areas as big as England, such as Wyoming, which have fewer than a million people living in them. There are beautiful evocations of this sweet-aired West in the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth, William Stafford and others: And the river there meant something always coming from snow and flashing around boulders after shadow-fish lurking below the mesa.
Enough has happened to supply an archaeologY. a coating of history. John Hawgood puts the now-venerable record straight for us, with 3 clear and cheerful pen, first-hand knowledge of the places he writes about, and a generous allowance of good maps and illustrations. It is not his fault that there is something sad and anticlimactic in the chronicle. With every new trail and settlement there came a diminution, a loss of wonder. Hence, as he suggests, the imaginative power of the cowboy legend and of Turner's frontier thesis: each represented an effort to arrest the process, to stop the clock
xt the magical moment when only one figure occupies the scene, tiny, dauntless, and happy. Yesterday it was empty, tomorrow it will be overpopulated and less happy. These instan- taneous moments form the purest history of that Never-Never Land, the American West.
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