by Bill Bryson
They were by no means the first whites to venture into the vast North American interior. As early as 1680, some eight hundred French fur trappers were at work in the West,2 and by 1804 both French and English traders and trappers were a common sight all along the sprawling watershed of the Missouri River. In 1792-3 a Briton named Alexander Mackenzie had travelled over the Canadian Rockies to British Columbia, and in doing so had become the first person of European descent to reach the Pacific overland. Many more had reached the west coast by sea, as Lewis and Clark discovered when Pacific North-west Indians greeted their arrival with a hearty ‘son-of-a-pitch’ in the evident belief that this was an English call of friendship.3 They also encountered an Indian woman with the name ‘Jonathan Bowman’ crudely tattooed on her leg.4 In 1801 the explorer Mackenzie published an influential book, Voyages from Montreal... through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, in which he suggested that the British pre-empt the United States in the western territories while the chance was there. It was this alarming prospect that had led Jefferson to initiate the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Though Lewis and Clark were not the first to venture into the western territories they were the first to approach the matter scientifically. With unflagging diligence they labelled, mapped and inspected everything that passed before them, recording their findings in their famous journals, which still make marvellous reading today. It is impossible to read Clark’s notes in particular without developing a swift affection for his rough spelling and erratic grammar, which at times, in the words of George R. Stewart, ‘approached the inspired’. From his first entry upon setting off – ‘We proceeded on under a jentle brease up the Missourie,5 – his directness of description and eccentricity of composition make the whole hazardous undertaking come alive:
Sunday 25th a fair morning river rose 14 Inch last night, the men find numbers of Bee Trees, & take great quantities of honey, at 11 oClock 24 Sauckees Came pass from St Louis, and asked for Provisions... . Guterge [his spelling of Goodrich] returned with Eggs & [illegible], Willard brought in 10 pr. Hinges George Shannon Caught 3 large Cat fish – The musquetors are verry bad this evening.6
Under his uncertain hand, circumference became secumpherance, rheumatism became rhumertism, and Missouri became almost anything – Missouris, Missouries, Missourie – often taking on two spellings in the same line. Sacagawea, the heroic Indian girl who guided the party across the wilderness, he wisely steered clear of, referring to her as ‘the squar’. Lewis, though himself an erratic speller, brought a more assured style to the journals. Between them they coined almost a thousand terms for animals, plants and features previously unrecorded on the landscape. They discovered 178 plants and 122 animals, among them the grizzly bear and great-tailed fox, and several species of pike, catfish and squirrels. No other explorers or naturalists in American history have named more objects.
Among the words not previously recorded in English are great plains, prairie dog (though Clark preferred ground rat) and cache for a secret hole in the ground (taken evidently from French trappers and spelled, almost inevitably, ‘carsh’ by Clark). Some of their words didn’t catch on. Their term small wolves was eventually displaced by the Mexican-Spanish coyote (from the Nahuatl coyotl). They also named every feature of the landscape that didn’t have a known name already, though quite a number did. Yellowstone, for instance, is no more than Lewis’s literal translation of the French trappers’ Roche Jaune. Yet relatively few of their geographic names survived. They gave the noble name Philanthropy River to a tributary of the Missouri, but it didn’t stick. Later passers-by renamed it Stinking Water. The Lewis River later became the Shoshone. Philosophy River became Willow Creek.
Despite having three interpreters to call on, Lewis and Clark often encountered extraordinary language difficulties with the native Americans. At one meeting, in a kind of pass-the-parcel round of translating, Lewis’s English was translated into French by one listener, from French into Minitari by another, from Minitari into Shoshone by the next person in line and finally from Shoshone into Nez Percé. The Indians themselves obviated such difficulties with a universal sign language of about a hundred gestures, which could communicate, if baldly, most needs. The party also experienced remarkable good fortune, most notably during a potentially tense encounter with Indians when Sacagawea realized that one of the opposing braves was her brother.
After the expedition Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of the Louisiana Territory. In October 1809, three years after the expedition’s completion and while aged just thirty-four, the great explorer died in exceedingly odd circumstances in a back-country inn called Grinder’s Tavern along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Clearly suffering a severe outbreak of his ‘hypochondriac affections’, he began behaving in an odd and paranoid manner – to the extent that the proprietor of the lodgings moved out of the house and into an outbuilding. For hours Lewis could be heard talking and shouting to himself. Then at some time late in the night gunshots were heard and all went quiet. In the morning Lewis was found with terrible wounds – half his skull was blown away and he had other self-inflicted injuries all over – but still conscious. He begged the proprietor to put him out of his misery, but the proprietor refused. Lewis died later that day. His friend and colleague William Clark fared rather better. He became governor of the Missouri Territory and commanded it with distinction, though he never did learn to spell.
For the better part of a century Lewis and Clark’s scientific and linguistic achievements went almost wholly unremarked. Not until 1893, when a researcher and naturalist named Elliott Coues rediscovered their all but forgotten manuscripts mouldering in a cupboard at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and produced an annotated edition of their journals, were they at last accorded recognition as naturalists, cartographers and ethnologists.7
Jefferson thought it would take a thousand years for Americans to populate the vast emptiness of the West,8 but he hadn’t reckoned on the great waves of immigration of the nineteenth century and the odd ‘restlessness of character’ that so fascinated Tocqueville.9 From the start, Americans seldom stayed anywhere long. Jamestown was a ghost town less than a century after it was founded. Few states haven’t seen their state capitals move at least once and often more. Just between the Revolution and War of 1812, a period of roughly thirty-five years, eight of the original thirteen colonies moved their seats of government. Further west, capitals changed even more often. Indiana moved its from Vincennes to Corydon and finally to Indianapolis. Illinois went from Kaskaskia to Vandalia and on to Springfield.10 Frontier, which meant (and still means) a national border in British English, took on in America the new sense of the ever-moving dividing line between wilderness and civilization.
Towns were established with high hopes and, if things didn’t work out, abandoned without hesitation. In 1831 Abraham Lincoln moved to New Salem, Illinois. Six years later, trade on the nearby Sangamon River proving disappointing, he and everyone else abandoned the community and scattered to more promising parts. All over the West towns came and went. For every Chicago and Milwaukee that thrived thousands of others passed quietly away. Iowa alone had 2,205 communities fade into ghost towns in its first century.11
Before the 1800s city was a term usually reserved for substantial communities, but in nineteenth-century America it began to be applied to almost any cluster of houses, however modest. To this day America is dotted with ‘cities’ for which the term is patently overambitious – places like Republican City, Nebraska (pop. 231), Barnes City, Iowa (pop. 266), Rock City, Illinois (pop. 286). But what we tend to forget is that in America dusty hamlets could become cities, and almost overnight.
The boom town par excellence was a little community on the shores of Lake Michigan called Fort Dearborn. In 1832 it had fewer than a hundred inhabitants. Sixty years later, renamed Chicago, it boasted a million inhabitants and was the largest grain market in the world.12 No community in history has risen to greatne
ss so swiftly. As Daniel Boorstin has noted: ‘Mankind had required at least a million years to produce its first urban community of a million people. Chicagoans accomplished this feat in less than a century.‘13 What made it possible to house such a mass of people in so short a period was a Chicago invention that went by the odd name of balloon frame construction. This revolutionary method of building, in which light but sturdy timber frames are hammered together, then hoisted into place, was invented by Augustine Taylor in Chicago in 1833, and was so ingeniously unimprovable that it is still almost universally used in the building of American homes. Balloon frame was not Taylor’s term. It was coined by sceptical carpenters to denigrate the method because of its extraordinary lightness and presumed frailty.14 When Taylor used the method to construct Chicago’s first Catholic church, nearly everyone thought that the building would be carried off like a tent by the first strong winds. Needless to say it was not, and soon the method was being copied everywhere.
To Americans ‘the West’ was an ever-changing, concept. At the time of the first federal census in 1790, 95 per cent of America’s four million people lived hard by the eastern seaboard and ‘the West’ was virtually everything else. By the 1820s, it extended not much beyond the Appalachians. Kentucky’s leading paper of the day was called the Argus of Western America. Even as late as mid-century a chronicler like Charles Dickens could venture only as far as St Louis, still the better part of a thousand miles short of the Rockies, and plausibly claim to have seen the West.
The move to the West as we now know it began in earnest in the mid-1840s when the expression Oregon fever erupted. Encouraged by the government to settle the north-western territory claimed also by Britain, homesteaders set off in their thousands for a new life at the end of the Oregon Trail, following a route blazed by trappers twenty years before. The phrase that summed up America’s new assertive attitude to western development was coined by the editor of the Democratic Review, John O’Sullivan, in 1845 when he wrote that it was ‘our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’.15 The peopling of the West became not just an opportunity to be seized, but a kind of mission.
Oregon Trail is a somewhat misleading term. For one thing, it wasn’t a trail in the sense of a well-defined track. It was almost entirely a notional corridor, highly variable in width, across the grassy plains. Moreover, after the first few years relatively few of those who travelled the trail were heading for Oregon. Once past the Rockies, they instead broke off and made for the gold fields of California.
One of the great myths of the westward migration, compounded by a thousand movies, was that the immigrants lumbered over the prairies in Conestoga wagons. These sturdy vehicles were, in the words of the historian George R. Stewart, ‘uselessly heavy for the long pull to Oregon or California’.16 They did haul some freight west, but almost never did they transport families. Instead westward immigrants used lighter, smaller and much nimbler wagons universally known as prairie schooners. These were hauled not by horses, but by mules or oxen, which could withstand the hardships of prairie crossings far better than any horse could. A final myth engendered by Hollywood was that wagons gathered in a circle whenever under attack by Indians. They didn’t, and for the simple reason that the process would have been so laborious to organize that the party would very probably have been slaughtered before the job was even a quarter accomplished.
Wagons were covered with canvas, as in the movies, though that word was seldom used; the material was more generally known in the nineteenth century as twill. Though wagon train was also used (it is first recorded in 1849), the term wasn’t particularly apt. For much of the journey the wagons fanned out into an advancing line up to ten miles wide to avoid each other’s dust and the ruts of earlier travellers – and providing yet another obstacle to their forming into circles.
Many of the early homesteaders had only the faintest idea of what they were letting themselves in for, and often through no fault of their own. Until well into the third decade of the nineteenth century ignorance of the West remained so profound that maps were frequently sprinkled with fanciful rivers – the Multnomah, the Los Mongos, the Buenaventura – and with a great inland sea called the Timpanogos. Those who went west, incidentally, didn’t think of themselves as still being in America. Until about the time of the Civil War, America was generally taken to signify the eastern states, so that accounts of the time commonly contain statements like ‘Some people here [in Oregon] are talking about going back to America’ or ‘We’ll go back to America. Dressed up slick and fine’ (from, respectively, the New York Tribune in 1857 and the Rocky Mountain News in 1860).
The landscape they found was so strikingly different that it required new words. Although great plains had been used as early as 1806, the grassy flatlands west of the Missouri were usually called the barrens, or sometimes the great dismal, until the French prairie began to supersede it. Prairie, from an old French word for meadow, had been in use in America since colonial times, originally signifying a piece of wild open ground enclosed by forest. Desert, too, was modified to suit the peculiar landscape of the West. Originally it had signified any uninhabited place (a sense preserved in deserted). Thus Great American Desert, first noted in 1834, described not just the scrubby arid lands of the south-west, but also the rich grasslands to the north. Much of the landscape that we now think of as desolate and forbidding was nothing like as barren then as it is today. When the western migrants arrived, much of the south-west was covered in waving grass. They simply grazed it away.17 Even so, there was no shortage of places that proved treacherous beyond endurance. One party that tried taking a short cut to California in 1849 discovered to its cost a killing expanse that they named Death Valley.
The traditional western stagecoach, notwithstanding its perennial role in movies and TV programmes, saw active service for only a little over a decade. The first service was inaugurated in 1858 when the Overland Mail Company began twice-weekly trips from St Louis to San Francisco. Its Concord coaches (named for Concord, New Hampshire, where they were developed) were intended principally to carry mail and freight but also carried up to nine passengers at $200 each for the westward trip and $150 for the eastward. (Eastward was cheaper because the traffic was largely one way.) All being well, the trip took a little over three weeks. In 1866 the Overland Mail Company was sold to Wells, Fargo and Co., but it was put out of business by the opening of the first transcontinental railway three years later.
Even more short-lived was the Pony Express. Inaugurated on 3 April 1860, it was designed to carry mail as quickly as possible from St Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Riders rode in relays, each averaging fifty to eighty miles a day (though some occasionally went as far as three hundred miles without a rest), carrying a mail pouch or mochila, as it was more normally called. On an average run, seventy-five riders would cover the two thousand miles between Missouri and California in ten and a half days. It was a fabulous achievement, but economic folly. Setting up and maintaining riders, horses and way stations was an exceedingly costly business. The express’s investors sank $700,000 into the service and, despite charging a whopping $5 an ounce for letters, never made back more than a fraction of their costs. By late 1861, barely nineteen months after starting, the Pony Express was out of business, a victim of the newly installed telegraph and its own inescapable costs.
For those who wished not to face the perils and discomforts of travelling overland, the alternative was to go by sea. One option was to take a ship to Panama through the Gulf of Mexico, cross the fifty-mile-wide Isthmus of Panama (or Isthmus of Darien as it was then commonly called) on horseback and catch another ship up the Pacific coast. But connections were uncertain and it was not uncommon to be stranded there for weeks at the mercy of steamy heat and yellow fever. The other option was to go by ship around Cape Horn, a 15,000-mile journey that seldom took less than six months and sometimes twice that in condi
tions that rarely rose above the squalid. Altogether, getting to California was a dangerous and uncomfortable affair.
But that didn’t stop anyone – not at least after gold was found there in 1849. In the first four years of the gold rush, the population of California went from 20,000 to just under 225,000. In those same four years, $220 million in gold was pulled from the ground or sluiced from its glittering creeks. The gold rush not only enriched a fortunate few, but enlivened the language. Many of the terms that arose from it soon made their way into more general usage, among them pay dirt, pan out, to stake a claim and to strike it rich,18 all of which were soon being used in senses far removed from the idea of scrabbling in the earth for nuggets of gold.
One of the many side-effects of the gold rush was the invention of hard-wearing canvas trousers and bib overalls in San Francisco in the 1850s. The inventor was of course Levi Strauss, who had travelled west with a load of canvas (or twill) intending to make tents, but found a much greater demand for trousers that would stand up to the wear and tear of life in the mining camps. He didn’t call them jeans. In the 1850s the word signified not an item of apparel but a type of cloth. It is a corruption of Genoa, the Italian city where it was first woven. Not until this century did denim (itself a corruption of serge de Nîmes, from the French city) trousers become generally known as jeans and not until the 1940s were people calling them Levis.
The traffic to California wasn’t all from east to west. Many thousands came from China. At the beginning of the gold rush, just 325 Chinese lived in California; two years later the number had jumped to 25,000. In the next three decades it increased twelvefold, to over 300,000, or nearly one-tenth of the population. Because of political turmoil in China, almost all of them came from just six small districts in Guangdong province.
