by Simon Schama
Lately, though, George Bush has begun to sound like Jimmy Carter, with a smidgin of Al Gore’s concern for climate change. In December 2007, the Act for Energy Independence and Security was signed, mandating fuel efficiency standards for automobiles of at least thirty-five miles to the gallon by 2010 and increasing the supply of biofuels to 36 billion gallons. The modest commitment to higher fuel efficiency was immediately denounced by Grover Norquist, the director of Americans for Tax Reform, as a measure that would kill Americans by forcing them to drive smaller, more vulnerable cars.
Norquist’s quaint anxiety that America’s national character, not to mention its life and limb, were being imperiled by environmental fanatics has been overtaken by the four-dollar gallon, a popular rush back to public transport, and the abandonment of the SUVs and minivans that have been the mainstay of the automobile industry’s profits. Caught wrong-footed by a sudden and massive shift in demand, the Big Three manufacturers are buried in redundant back inventory. But the bigger issue for the present campaign and for the future is whether an America of limits can actually be sold to the electorate. John McCain, who for years subscribed to environmental pessimism on global warming and ecological damage, understands the bewilderment of Americans who have had to abandon plans for a driving vacation and have a van in their garage they can’t use, and has had a change of heart. Now his position is closer to the unreconstructed George Bush than the reformed version. He too wants to abandon the elder Bush’s ban on drilling in environmentally sensitive regions. Open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, bring in the rigs, and the price of gasoline will magically return to the proper American level of around two bucks a gallon. It was McCain’s bad luck that on the day he was due to offer this remedy, a hurricane prevented him from landing on an offshore platform and an oil tanker collided with a barge in the Mississippi Delta, spilling crude and producing a twelve-mile oil slick.
McCain is betting that environmental optimism is hard-wired into the American character. He may yet be right. Even in their tight spot, not many want to hear that the country has finally come to the end of its providential allotment of inexhaustible plenty. Public support for an end to drilling restrictions has risen sharply even while consumers try to trade down to more fuel-efficient smaller cars of the kind that Grover Norquist condemned as unpatriotically hazardous. But there is equally a sense that if nature comes up short, that other infinite resource, American know-how, can make up the difference. It was native ingenuity, planted in the most unforgiving soil, that could deliver a yield. Taming the untamable Colorado River with the stupendous Hoover Dam produced a water supply in the arid western desert copious enough to supply populous cities and intensive farming. In Imperial Valley, California, one side of the All-American Canal is a dunescape so barren that it could (and often does) serve as Hollywood’s version of the Sahara; on the other are fields so abundant they produce green beans, asparagus, and strawberries for the supermarkets, and alfalfa for the cattle feedlots, all year round. Never mind that the reservoir of Lake Mead that delivers water to those cities, and farther downstream, the farms, is at 50 percent of capacity; all will somehow be well. The taps of Los Angeles running dry? The solution, a farmer, waxing indignant at the thought of selling some of his surplus water to the cities of Nevada and California, told me, is right on “their” doorstep: desalinate the Pacific!
It’s not over, then, the American sense of a national entitlement to plenty, in which no one gets shortchanged and the next generation is always better off than the last. But then the dream of cost-free abundance, a mirage of America as a perennially fruitful garden, goes back a very long way into the national past.
34. Strawberry fields, 1775
It was when the hooves and fetlocks of his horse were dyed scarlet from the crush of strawberries that Billy Bartram reckoned he must have arrived in the Elysian Fields. He had just not expected them to be located in the northwest hill country of Georgia, nor their inhabitants to be Cherokee. Bartram was botanizing in the South for Dr. John Fothergill, the London Quaker whose collection of American flora was second only to Kew. The vocation came naturally, as his Philadelphian father, John, had been recognized as botanist to the king. No one had been more assiduously encyclopedic in his mission to spread abroad the reputation of flora americana than John Bartram, yet he had not been especially content that his son should follow in his footsteps. He would rather he had pursued some more lucrative profession, and was dismayed by Billy’s (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to turn indigo planter. But reluctantly or not John Bartram recognized in his son someone who could not help warming to the discovery of a new variety of Robinia or Philadelphus, and so he reconciled himself to his son’s path.
That had led William south into the Carolinas and Florida, making copious notes and sketches for Dr. Fothergill, and recording his impressions of scenery and people as he went. The difference between father and son was one of cultural generations as well as personal temper. Bartram Sr. was an Enlightenment rationalist, for whom scientific information, scrupulously recorded, was wonder enough. William, on the other hand, while priding himself on exact detail, was a botanical romantic, for whom around every turn of a hilly trail, a living miracle lay waiting. Thus a singularly beautiful species of Aesculus pavia, growing six feet tall on the crests of a Georgian hill, had limbs that terminated “with a heavy cluster or thrysis of rose or pink-colored flowers, speckled or variegated with crimson.” But what Bartram wanted to be seen in his hot prose was “these heavy spikes of flowers, charged with the morning dews, [that] bend the flexile stems to the ground.”
Compared to this kind of excitement, of what import was the news, picked up at Charleston, of the fight between the British and Patriot minutemen at Lexington, some weeks earlier? As Bartram progressed up the Savannah River, away from the flooded rice fields of the Low Country, and reached undulating hills, his excitement climbed along with the topography. Between Augusta and Fort James he rode past “heaps of white, gnawed bones, of ancient buffalo, elk and deer, indiscriminately mixed with those of men, half grown over with moss.” Billy was entering his own Gothic romance. “How harmonious and sweetly murmur the purling rills and fleeting brooks, roving along the shadowy vales, passing through dark, subterranean caverns, or dashing over steep rocky precipices, their cold humid banks condensing the volatile vapors which falling, coalesce in crystalline drops on the leaves and elastic twigs of the aromatic shrubs and incarnate flowers!” Steady on, the reader protests, but it’s too late; Bartram is already lost in the Vale of Tempe, deep inside the “New Purchase,” which meant the land torn from the Cherokee after a defeat. No romance would be complete without mysterious ruins, which Bartram duly beholds in the form of ancient Indian tumuli, flattened at the top like the Wiltshire mounds but here overspread at their summit with red cedar, the sides indented with “lookouts” or sentry places, and terraces below planted with corn. “It is reasonable to suppose,” Bartram speculates, that “they were to serve some important purpose in those days as they were public works and would have required the united labor and attention of a whole nation.”
The stock romantic image of the American Indian is of a solitary, nobly brooding savage, imagined in forest glades, or bow-hunting deer and elk; far less familiar is an idea of tribes like the Cherokee dwelling in towns and large villages, building public works, constituting a complex society. But that is exactly what Bartram would encounter, the deeper he penetrates the interior of the Cherokee world. At Fort Prince George, he waits for three days for the Indian who was deputed to be his guide, before deciding to set off on his own under thundery skies. Climbing to the crest of the Oconee range, he looks down on the mountain wilderness “undulated as the great ocean after a tempest, the undulations gradually depressing, yet perfectly regular as the squama of fish or imbrications of tile on a roof.” (It is beneath the poetic-scientific dignity of Billy to call them scales.) He descends by the banks of glittering rivers, names a mountain (Magnolia) and throb
s to the spectacle of “roving beauties” (Calycanthus floridus, Philadelphus inodorus, Convallaria majalis, Leontice thalictroides, Anemone hepatica…) that “stroll over the mossy shelving, humid rocks.” He finds a deserted Indian hunting lodge in which to shelter for the night from an immense electrical storm, dines on dried beef and biscuit, and listens to the whip-poor-wills. In the morning before him are spread, in their gaudy splendor, “the painted beds” of wild strawberries. Before long, he is entertained by the chief of Watauga and his two sons at their house (a log structure, plastered with clay inside and out), served “sodden venison” and hot corn cakes with milk and hominy pudding, afterward taking a pull from a mighty four-foot pipe, wrapped in “speckled snakeskin.” “During my continuance here, about half an hour, I experienced the most perfect and agreeable hospitality conferred on me by these happy people…I mean happy in their dispositions, in their apprehensions of rectitude with regard to our social or moral conduct.”
With his romantic projection in overdrive, Billy Bartram is now enclosed within the American terrestrial paradise. He rides through a forest glade and emerges to look down on “a vast expanse of green meadow…a meandering river, saluting in its various turnings the swelling green turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and [of course] strawberry fields; flocks of turkeys strolling about them, herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills,” and, most enticingly of all, “companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins” filling baskets with berries with which they will stain their lips and cheeks. Stirred by the strawberry girls, Bartram and his trader friend spy on them, “although we meant no other than an innocent frolic with this gay assembly of hamadryades, we shall leave it to the person of feeling and sensibility to form an idea to what lengths our passions might have hurried us, thus warmed and excited, had it not been for the vigilance and care of some envious matrons who lay in ambush and espying us, gave the alarm, time enough for the nymphs to rally and assemble together.”
After eros, power. Riding on alone into the Overhill towns, Bartram encounters the “caravan” of Little Carpenter, Ata-cul-culla, whom he calls “emperor or grand chief” of the Cherokee. He has enough self-possession that, when the chief asks him if he knows his name, Bartram replies that he certainly does and introduces himself as from the tribe of “white men, of Pennsylvania, who esteem themselves brothers and friends to the red men, but particularly so to the Cherokees and that notwithstanding we dwell at so great a distance we are united in love and friendship and that the name of Ata-cul-culla is dear to his white brothers of Pennsylvania.”
The chief bids Bartram welcome but goes on his way down country to the meeting near Charleston, the outcome of which would bring disaster to the Cherokee for it would ally them with the king rather than the revolution. (With the exception of 1812 they had a record of choosing the wrong side in American wars.) But although Bartram published his Travels in 1791, he refuses to cloud the moment of instinctive human fraternity with anything ominous. In fact the friendship between Quaker botanist and Cherokee deepens when, on his way back to the coast, he visits the town of Cowee, where about a hundred houses were built around a grandly pillared circular “Council House” or “rotunda” where townsmen could meet to discuss tribal business or the state of the harvest. The Cherokee honor Bartram with an elaborate feast where he listens to “orations” from elders and then sees the ballplay dances (like lacrosse, only played with two racquets), whooping young male dancers “ornamented with silver bracelets, gorgets and wampum” dancing in a semicircle before a line of singing be-ribboned girls. Bartram is, as usual, spellbound.
Though he understands the enmity between Cherokee and Creek, and both of those tribes and the Choctaw, Bartram is innocent enough to idealize what he sees in the wooded mountains, the brilliant meadows and the strawberry fields as the perfectly self-sustaining American society. “Physically tall and graceful, the Cherokee are fond of their children. The men behave well to their women and they cherish their aged. The tribe hunts but it also cultivates, so that corn, melon, beans, pumpkin and squash are raised in a common garden.” Plainly they are in no need of a white “civilization” whose incursions have brought them only trouble and rum. And they don’t need Improvement. It is something of a wonder, Bartram muses, that they have been able to resist the corruption of the white world for so long, and he fears the magic of their world may not much longer survive the hordes of land-hungry settlers pressing on their territory. But, Bartram hopes, in a country so abundantly blessed, is there not plenty for all to go around?
35. White Path, 1801–23
There were days when the agent thought his commission impossible to fulfill and wondered why, in his sixties, he had accepted so thankless an office. But then Return Jonathan Meigs had never been one to shrink from a challenge. Portrait engravings of the colonel show a tough old turkeycock of a man, beady-eyed and bony. So when his old comrade from the Quebec campaign of heroic and disastrous memory, Henry Dearborn, now President Jefferson’s secretary of war, had inquired if Meigs might go to Tennessee to be United States agent among the Cherokee, he had not hesitated. Everyone seemed to go to Tennessee sooner or later. Besides, his son, Return Jonathan Jr., could now be left safely in a place of authority and eminence in Ohio, with the brightest prospects in the world, needing no paternal eye for his further advancement. Meigs had heard fine things of the Smoky Mountains, of the high country of north Georgia, and the old adventuring passion that had sent him in 1788 into the wildest regions of western Ohio had not yet died in his old body. It had been on the Ohio frontier that he had seen the Indians in full fury, but when the time came to speak with them about the return of captives, he found they were men like himself; men whose cast of mind he believed he understood. Could the Cherokee be much different?
But those Indians in the Ohio country had been braves and warriors. Now, as he understood his appointment, he was being asked to do something quite different, something about which Return Jonathan, from the beginning, had decidedly mixed feelings. The policy of the government toward the Cherokee, as it was to the other tribes of the Southeast, was to uphold them as proprietors of their land, and protect those rights against white frontiersmen who sought to dispossess them by simply squatting and daring the law to come and evict them. Neither Washington nor his secretary of war, General Henry Knox, imagined the Indians could be protected forever. But neither did they wish to have endless wars on the frontier. So the policy was to be one of social rather than military pacification. The Cherokee (and for that matter the Creek, Chickasaw, and the Choctaw) were to be turned into true Americans, which meant farmers. In any case, their old hunting grounds had been invaded by whites and depleted of game; and (so it was said) their communal gardens never yielded enough crops to see them through from year to year. Bartram’s Cherokee Eden had been a fantasy. But if the Indians could somehow be persuaded to adopt a civilized life, the tomahawk replaced by the plow, each family with its own, the women supplementing food crops with cotton (for the Cherokee were slave owners), they could card and spin, and no longer be a threat. To the tidy, economical American mind, hunting grounds were a shocking waste of good land that could be made productive. Since there were at most 16,000 Cherokee claiming to occupy millions of acres, the abandonment of the old life would liberate a great portion of the land for sale and tillage. Perhaps the Cherokee could be induced to part with it in exchange for the settlement of the exorbitant debts they seemed to run up to white traders.
In one of the many meetings he had with Indian chiefs in Washington, Thomas Jefferson put the policy most clearly and generously, so Meigs thought: “Let me entreat you, on the lands now given to you, to begin to give every man a farm; let him enclose it, cultivate it, build a warm house on it, and when he dies let it belong to his wife and children after him. Nothing is so easy as to learn to cultivate the earth; all your women understand it and to make it easier we are always ready to teach you how to make plows, hoes, and necessary
utensils. If the men will take the labor of the earth from the women, they will learn to spin and weave and clothe their families…When once you have property you will want laws and magistrates to protect your property and person…you will find our laws are good for this purpose…you will unite yourselves with us, join with us in our great councils and form one people with us, and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great continent.”
The idea may have been noble, and it would inspire an entire generation of Cherokees to take the Jeffersonian dream seriously. But the president was playing a double game. In 1802 he let it be known to the state of Georgia that one day Cherokee rights would be retro-ceded to it. But his own officers, especially Colonel Meigs, believed his grander intentions. The first federal agent to the tribe, Leonard Shaw, had been sympathetic to the fusion of Indian and American and had married a full-blood Cherokee, instantly earning the suspicious hatred of the frontiersmen. Return Jonathan came to know the Cherokee well enough to understand that there could never be any question of their easy mass conversion to horse-and-plow farming; that hunting was ingrained in their culture; that it gave them food and clothing, and that attached to the division of labor between the sexes was an entire cultural calendar. Their religion, their dances, their food and tobacco were all unthinkable without this union of opposites: forest and garden.
