The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  But William Maclure did not immediately leave New Harmony. He remained behind to use the community as a base to preach the benefits of science and science education—and most especially the value of geology, the science that had first anchored him to America.

  And in that sole regard, New Harmony was to become in this fresh incarnation something of a success. Maclure saw to it that the leaders of the more quarrelsome factions were persuaded to leave, that houses were now bought and sold and rents were expected and paid, that new shops were opened, and that the vigor of commercial life replaced the rigor of communal life. A printing shop was set up, and produce from the gardens was sent down to be sold in New Orleans.

  Most of all, Maclure began to plan and finance his revolutionary education system, preaching and then practicing in town his long-held beliefs in the gift of free education for the American working youth. He gave his superb personal library to the town and opened it for the benefit of all. The young scientists—botanists, physicians, geologists—who had come down with him on the Boatload of Knowledge were to be the first teachers in the schools that were opened, and soon students came from towns and villages both nearby and far away. The town began to flourish again, and soon began to win a reputation—which spread nationwide—as a center of educational excellence.

  Members of the community began to write books: there would soon be definitive multivolume works on fish, insects, the shells of mollusks, and the trees of North America. There was a resident engraver and color printer in New Harmony, too—and finely wrought monographs soon began to appear for sale at nearby fairs and bookstalls.

  But William Maclure was beginning to feel his age. The Indiana winters were settling their cold deep into his bones. He started to take off on southerly explorations, finding himself eventually in Mexico, declaring a liking for it and settling on a new ambition to create progressive schools there. By 1830, when he was sixty-seven, he decided finally to cut loose from the winter cold of Indiana and stay put in the soothing balms of Mexico. He would for a while continue to finance New Harmony, but now only from afar.

  THE TAPESTRY OF UNDERNEATH

  The presiding intellectual genius who then ran New Harmony in his place was Robert Owen’s youngest son, David Dale Owen. who would become one of America’s leading geologists and a key player in the surveying of the nation as it expanded all the way westward across to the Pacific. William Maclure certainly started it all and is revered as the father of American geology in consequence. David Dale Owen, apprenticed in New Harmony, set in train the practical tasks that proved necessary for finding out what America was made of. Maclure had the vision and led the way; Robert Owen’s son went the distance and did the work.

  When David Dale Owen was born, in 1807, there had been almost no geological maps made of anywhere. That soon began to change very rapidly, in response partly to Maclure’s American map of 1809 but more to William Smith’s map of England and Wales published in London in 1815, which demonstrated decisively how a proper stratigraphic map should be made. Not for nothing is Smith’s cartographic achievement still regarded as “the map that changed the world.” His revolutionary idea of illustrating the rocks according to their relative ages allowed for extrapolation and prediction: armed with a Smith map one could forecast with some certainty where a plunging coal seam might lead or where iron or copper—or one day, oil—could be found deep below the surface. By the time David Dale Owen assumed control of New Harmony, such mapping was standard practice in Europe, and both the federal government and state governments soon saw a pressing need to bring America similarly into order.

  The first regions to be properly and systematically examined were in the Eastern states. The capital of New York State, Albany, was mapped in 1820 by Amos Eaton, a blacksmith’s son who two years earlier had published a cross section of America from the Catskill Mountains through Massachusetts to Boston and the Atlantic Ocean—a thing of sinuous curves and colors, showing the rock layers rising and falling in great subterranean swoops of blue and yellow that perhaps owe more to art than to science.

  The practical demands of commerce soon introduced more scientific rigor to the mapmakers’ efforts: in 1832, Massachusetts became the first state to be systematically surveyed for its invisible underneath. The driving force behind the design was nakedly mercantile, the state’s governor demanding that the survey show “valuable ores . . . quarries . . . coal and lime formations . . . for the advancement of domestic prosperity.” Such imperatives would soon produce a torrent of new surveys and maps, invaluable guides to an America that was by now quickly evolving into an overwhelmingly industrialized nation.

  The country’s mills, smelters, and forges were demanding iron and coal and copper—while wealthy city dwellers were demanding other precious metals and stones to be brought out from underground, too. Agriculture was expanding westward with the settlers: fertilizers were needed, and beds of phosphate and marl needed to be identified by a cadre of elite scientists who were now all of a sudden being seen as ever more vital to the national interest. The maps they made—not entirely comprehensible to most, true—were becoming popular items, in vogue at least among those eager to be able to forecast where needed treasures might be found.

  David Dale Owen was a key player during this ebullient period in America’s expansionist history. His first duties involved helping with the geological survey of the state of Tennessee, which was begun in 1833. He was appointed assistant to a Dutchman, Gerard Troost, whom Tennessee had appointed to be its first-ever state geologist and who, as a passenger on the Boatload of Knowledge, had been a keen member of the utopian community. The men knew each other: both were legatees of Maclure’s ever-spreading influence, both were graduates of the New Harmony schools.

  But there were to be many more. The United States Congress was at the time making certain that all American public land that held proven or suspected reserves of minerals—lead, iron, and coal in particular—be sold in an organized manner, without either favoritism or fraud. Owen, his skills honed in Tennessee, was next appointed an official in the General Land Office, the body that made both the rules and the sale, and in 1840 the agency demanded that he survey eleven thousand square miles of the ore-rich corners of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

  He achieved this survey with remarkable dispatch. Within two years, he had finished and had turned in to his superiors a report that encompassed “161 printed octavo pages, 25 plates and maps, including a colored geological map and several colored sections.” He had had help—no fewer than 139 assistants, every last one of them drawn from the schools in New Harmony, all of the young men trained by him and Maclure. According to an official history, Owen’s organization of the survey “was a feat of generalship which has never been equaled in American geological history . . . one more illustration of the energy, persistence, and virility of the Scotch emigrants and their descendants in America.” It was a testament also to the enduring role of New Harmony in the making of early America.

  By the time Owen died, in 1860, at least twenty-eight states had organized well-established geological surveys. Scores of maps were being published from all sides. Moreover, geologists who had arrived by sea on the West Coast had looked carefully at California and Oregon and had declared that it was likely that great mineral wealth existed there, and that discoveries of great value, such as the one made at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, were likely to be repeated.

  All of the land between the coasts was also soon about to yield to squadrons of men who were equipped just as Owen and the Eastern, Midwestern, Californian, and Oregonian explorers had been. American scientists would in short order offer up thousands of detailed and very beautiful cartographic images of how the entire country had been constructed. So the knowing of the country was now well under way, and with this knowledge came the pressing urge to settle those places now being revealed map by map, survey by survey. To settle places deemed suitable for living, for farming, for mining, or for the birth and nurturing
of an unbridled frontier optimism—a territory that was fast being fashioned and united into something that for millions of settlers could soon be called a homeland.

  SETTING THE LURES

  It is surely a universal truth that men and women who choose voluntarily to pack up everything, acquire a wagon, set off down a rutted track into the sunset, and then endure weeks and months of privation, misery, and real danger in order to create new homes for themselves countless miles elsewhere must have a powerful reason for doing so. Modern America’s very existence is based on the awe-inspiring reality that thousands upon thousands made this very choice. And at first blush it appears they had just as many thousands of reasons for setting forth toward the sunset.

  Nearly all were going off to the West because they imagined a better and more congenial life there. Perhaps some were afflicted by a goading restlessness, but only a few went out on a whim. Some were drawn by reasons religious, others were compelled by a need to escape—to get away from political persecution, from the hand of the law, the clutch of a pestilence,* the misery of a failed romance, or the stench of an unsavory past. A number in America’s Eastern and Southern states found the whole business of segregation and slavery unpalatable, and imagined that out west they might encounter a more tolerant and liberal atmosphere.

  But for most, the West was simply the Promised Land. “Eastward I go only by force,” said Thoreau, “but westward I go free.” And the pioneers who were bold enough to head in that direction did so, generally speaking, imbued with a spirit of ambition and adventure and an unyieldingly optimistic sense of enterprise.

  And yet—what was it, more specifically than all of their stated reasons, that truly provided the lure? What intelligence was it that had produced the necessary temptation—the impetus, the final trigger, that decided a hitherto settled Easterner to obtain a wagon, to pack up all his belongings, to say farewell to scores, and then to head off for thousands of miles into the Western unknown?

  The answer almost always had something to do with the land. People went in multitudes because of what they knew, what they had heard told, or what they suspected about the very earth of which the West was made.

  They learned that the far reaches of the country held places that sported a variety of temptations. There might be vast acreage of thick black soils. There might be cliffs rich with exotic ores. Some might have found rivers running over gold-specked gravel beds. Wanderers might have returned with news of coal seams, tar pits, strangely glinting mineral crystals, deposits of marble, beds of rich red sandstones, or prairie tablelands and valleys covered with a wealth of grasses and flowers that, once tamed and watered, could be farmed and persuaded to yield measureless wealth. These were lands well suited to those who had the necessary ambition, vision, and endurance, for those possessed of the true grit.

  It was from the 1820s onward that those in the East were first being told about the remarkable qualities of the Western lands, and were being told of them in great and fascinating detail. The information was contained in the often breathlessly excited reports of the men who had made the journey already. Some of these were American Fur Company trappers; some others were missionaries—two missionary women, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, crossed the Continental Divide in 1836, and the husband of one came back east to tell of their adventures and to plead with others to come follow her example. Most reports, however, were sent back from soldiers or scientists accompanying those soldiers, who had been sent out officially by the United States government, charged with exploring the full extent of the trackless continent. Such men—and there were so many, a roll call risks becoming a blur—would turn out to be the vanguard of all the great migrations that followed soon after.

  They were men like Edwin James, in 1820, who conducted a geological survey of the Appalachians, the Ozarks, and the foothills of the Rockies on an expedition run by a Major Long, United States Army. Or like Henry Schoolcraft, who went with one Major Cass to the headwaters of the Mississippi, also in 1820, and there found substantial deposits of copper, lead, and gypsum. In 1823 a geologist named William Keating found copper in West Virginia. In 1824 the heroic explorer, trapper, and mapmaker Jedediah Smith rediscovered the low and easy South Pass* through the Rockies, and Benjamin Bonneville, who took a wagon train through it eight years later, wrote of his discovering the famous salt flats in Utah in 1832. Two years later still, the first-ever official United States geologist, George Featherstonhaugh, drew a remarkably accurate cross section of the country from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean, noting the presence of interesting-looking mineral deposits along the way.

  In 1841 the eminent mineralogist James Dana—his Manual of Mineralogy was still a classic when I studied more than a century later, and its twenty-third edition was published in 2007—explored the Sierra Nevada and wrote extensively and temptingly of the mineral possibilities of the Far West. John Charles Frémont made a remarkable series of explorations of the West. One trip was made with the great frontiersman Kit Carson; on another he discovered Lake Tahoe and mapped Mount Saint Helens, then wrote what turned out to be the definitive map and guide for anyone thinking of traveling overland to Oregon or California; it remained in print for years. Howard Stansbury reconnoitered the near-empty territories between Salt Lake City and the Sierra Nevada in 1849; Marcy and McLellan wrote about finding coal and many other mineral treasures in the valley of the Red River in Louisiana and Arkansas in 1851; and Mr. W. P. Blake described “auriferous gravels” in California in 1853. The following year, seemingly to place a capstone on all these furious endeavors, Josiah Whitney—of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous forty-eight states, and of Mount Shasta’s Whitney Glacier—wrote The Metallic Wealth of the United States, which for many years served as vade mecum for the legions who dreamed of traveling westward, striking it lucky, and making a fortune.

  Such temptations! All that scenery, all that gold, free farmland, open space, political freedom, copper, coal, abundance. And all, or almost all, of it was reported by those geologists who had gone out exploring, with hammer and magnifying glass and compass and acid bottle. Their reports, which would prove to be catnip to a restless generation, played also into a swelling current of official opinion, which John Quincy Adams had expressed so succinctly in his famous letter to his father, the former president, in 1811:

  The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs. For the common happiness of them all, for their peace and prosperity, I believe it is indispensable that they should be associated in one federal Union.

  Fourteen years after he wrote this most prescient and persuasive passage, Adams was himself elected president. And fifteen years after that, in 1840, an otherwise unknown Midwesterner named Joel P. Walker, together with his family and three missionary couples, decided that the drumbeat, the pressing need to move west was now, for him at least, too powerful to resist.

  The allure of all that land, space, and possibility had been fully spelled out for Mr. and Mrs. Walker. The noble role his family might play in the creation of a national ideal had been made clear to him. The decision, bolstered by a logic that must have seemed all but inescapable, was now up to him.

  So Mr. Walker bought tickets on a steamboat to one of the trailheads along the Missouri River. There he found himself a suitable wagon (for Jedediah Smith and others had reported that the South Pass was indeed suitable for the passage of wheeled vehicles); he yoked up a sturdy team of oxen; he piled up such possessions as he felt he needed for his new life; and in the late spring of 1840, he set out for the Green River staging post and rendezvous in what is now Wyoming and headed out to complete a two-thousand-mile journey into the West.

  He traveled on the vague and rutted route that was already being called, by the fur trappers, traders, and missionaries who had alread
y used it, the Oregon Trail. Joel Walker—whether he was real or a mere mythical symbol seems to matter little now—was the very first of a quarter of a million men, women, and children who would now follow him out west, as the great period of American migration and nation building got itself ponderously under way.

  For the previous twenty years, geology had been paying out the lines, casting out the nets. Now at last it was reeling in the catch.

  OFF TO SEE THE ELEPHANT

  Starting in the 1840s, there were three principal westbound trails: one for those bound for California, a second that turned southward toward Santa Fe, and then the Oregon Trail, which was initially the busiest and, thanks to Francis Parkman’s celebrated book of the same name, the best-known. The Mormon Trail, which was established for altogether different reasons, geology barely among them, took off six years later.

  Those setting out on each of these trails chose as their first jumping-off point the town of Independence, Missouri. The Mormons, however, decided on Omaha, farther north upstream along the Missouri River—and though the set of westbound trails went initially parallel for some hundreds of miles through the prairies, the folk who were looking for somewhere to plant their beleaguered religion (doing so eventually in Salt Lake City) traveled on the northern side of the Platte River valley, while the more mercantile were on the southern side. They would not meet until Wyoming.