Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2013

Copyright © Simon Winchester 2013

Simon Winchester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Original jacket design by Richard Ljoenes. Map courtesy of the Library of Congress. Front cover: (top) The Arrival of Captain Lewis at the Great Falls of Missouri, courtesy of the artist, Charles Fritz; (bottom) Trestle at Promontory, by Andrew J. Russell, from photographs taken during construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Source HB ISBN: 9780007532377

Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007532384

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Praise
From the reviews of The Men Who United the States:

‘Simon Winchester is one of the quintessentially English writers who will go anywhere, literally and figuratively … because of his amateur status, boldness and decidedly nonacademic approach to history, [he] achieves something remarkable here’

Literary Review

‘Winchester understands that specificity is what counts, as it always does in writing … He has read prodigiously, and has pounded the trail with equal diligence’

Sunday Telegraph

‘This book’s cleverness lies in an organization neither chronological nor biographical, but elemental: there are five sections on wood, earth, fire, water and metal … This is an imaginative piece of historical writing, interwoven with memoir. But it is, in the end, more than either of those things: it is a love poem to the American landscape and to the spirit of people, now dead, who traversed it’

BBC History

‘Entertaining … A pleasure’

New York Times Book Review

‘Mesmerizing and fascinating … Winchester is a master storyteller, and all the individuals, places, and events that he passionately writes about come to life in exquisite detail … a magnificent achievement in writing, storytelling, and education’

New York Journal of Books

‘The fun here is in Winchester’s exuberant enthusiasm for his new country and for the characters he has found who helped shape it’

Washington Post

‘Vivid, valuable … Winchester’s book is especially fine on retrieving the forgotten map makers, geologists, topographers and engineers who showed them the way … what an extraordinary, propulsive tale he tells’

Wall Street Journal

‘Simon Winchester never disappoints, and The Men Who United the States is a lively and surprising account of how this sprawling piece of geography became a nation. This is America from the ground up. Inspiring and engaging’

Tom Brokaw

‘A very charming and meticulously researched celebration of America’s enduring unity and the various people and historical forces that have made it possible’

The National

‘An elegantly written account … filled with fascinating information’

Boston Globe

‘Another winning book from a historian whose passion for his subjects saturates his works’

Kirkus Reviews

‘Winchester masterfully evokes the excitement of the nation’s early days – when opportunity and possibility were manifest in uncharted mountains and new technologies – while bringing each of his subjects to life … the key to the book’s greatest achievement [is in] conveying the large-scale narrative of unification via the small-scale experience of the individual – the creation of a people by the agglomeration of persons’

Publisher’s Weekly

‘[His] writing style is a fortuitous juxtaposition of the rigors of scientific inquiry with the reporter’s keen eye for a good story. The happy result is this elegantly written and captivating meditation on the unique physiology of that cultural-political phenomenon known as the United States of America’

Washington Times

Dedication

February 23, 2012, was the eightieth birthday of my mother-in-law,

MRS. AKIKO SATO.

Shortly before the family celebration, I told her of my plan to structure my book around the five so-called classical elements. She briefly left the room, returning with this card on which she had handwritten this aide-mémoire for me, the five elements rendered in English, Chinese characters, and Japanese.

Three hours later, toward the end of her party, happy and surrounded by friends and family, Mrs. Sato collapsed and later died.

This card was thus the very last thing she ever wrote in her life—one ample reason among many for me to offer this book as dedication both to her daughter

SETSUKO

and, with gratitude and respect, to the memory of

MRS. AKIKO SATO.

Born, Tokyo, 1932. Died, New York, 2012.

May this small offering be her memorial.

Epigraph

Think of the United States today—the facts of these thirty-eight or forty empires solder’d in one—sixty or seventy millions of equals, with their lives, their passions, their future—these incalculable, modern, American, seething multitudes around us, of which we are inseparable parts!

—WALT WHITMAN, A Backward Glance o’er Travell’d Roads (PREFACE TO THE 1888 EDITION OF Leaves of Grass)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Maps and Illustrations

Author’s Note

Preface: The Pure Physics of Union

PART I: WHEN AMERICA’S STORY WAS DOMINATED BY WOOD, 1785–1805

A View across the Ridge

Drawing a Line in the Sand

Peering through the Trees

The Frontier and the Thesis

The Wood Was Become Grass

Encounters with the Sioux

First Lady of the Plains

High Plains Rafters

Passing the Gateway

Shoreline Passage

PART II: WHEN AMERICA’S STORY WENT BENEATH THE EARTH, 1809–1901

The Lasting Benefit of Harmony

The Science That Changed America

Drawing the Colors of Rocks

The Wellspring of Knowledge

The Tapestry of Underneath

Setting the Lures

Off to See the Elephant

The West, Revealed

The Singular First Adventure of Kapurats

The Men Who Gave Us Yellowstone

Diamonds, Sex, and Race

PART III: WHEN THE AMERICAN STORY TRAVELED BY WATER, 1803–1900

Journeys to the Fall Line

The Streams beyond the Hills

The Pivot and the Feather

The First Big Dig

The Wedded Waters of New York

The Linkman Cometh

That Ol’ Man River

PART IV: WHEN THE AMERICAN STORY WAS FANNED BY FIRE, 1811–1956

May the Roads Rise Up

Rain, Steam, and Speed

The Annihilation of the In-Between

The Immortal Legacy of Crazy Judah

Colonel Eisenhower’s Epiphanic Expedition

The Colossus of Roads

And Then We Looked Up

The Twelve-Week Crossing

PART V: WHEN THE AMERICAN STORY WAS TOLD THROUGH METAL, 1835–TOMORROW

To Go, but Not to Move

The Man Who Tamed the Lightning

The Signal Power of Human Speech

With Power for One and All

Lighting the Corn, Powering the Prairie

The Talk of the Nation

Making Money from Air

Television: The Irresistible Force

The All of Some Knowledge

EPILOGUE

Footnotes

Bibliography

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Simon Winchester

About the Publisher

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Illustrations noted as “(pd.)” are in the public domain.

1. The five classical elements. (Lettering by Mrs. Akiko Sato; courtesy of the author)

2. The Point of Beginning, East Liverpool, Ohio. (Courtesy of the author)

3. The B-2 bomber squadron at Whiteman Air Force Base. (Courtesy of the US Department of Defense, photograph by SrA Jessica Kachman, June 1998)

4. William Maclure in New Harmony. (Painting by Thomas Sully, courtesy of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Ewell Sale Stewart Library, Drexel University)

5. Maclure’s geological map of the United States. (Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com)

6. Gouverneur Warren’s 1858 map. (Courtesy of Derek Hayes)

7. John Wesley Powell. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

8. Steamboat Rock. (Courtesy of the author)

9. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (Painting by Thomas Moran, 1893; courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY)

10. Clarence King in the field. (Courtesy of the US Geological Survey Photographic Library)

11. Ada Copeland (also known as Mrs. King or Mrs. Todd) with her son Wallace. (Courtesy of the New York Daily News)

12. The Youghiogheny River. (Courtesy of the author)

13. A column by “Hercules” in the Genesee Messenger. (Courtesy of The New-York Historical Society)

14. “Wedding of the Waters” ceremony, New York. (Copyright 1905, C. Y. Turner)

15. Asian carp. (Courtesy of Nerissa Michaels)

16. The Chancellor Livingston. (Courtesy of The New-York Historical Society)

17. Donner Pass. (pd.)

18. On the 1919 motor convoy. (Courtesy of the National Archives)

19. The “Good Roads Train.” (Courtesy of Project Gutenberg)

20. Thomas MacDonald. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

21. “Good Roads Everywhere” map. (Courtesy of Derek Hayes)

22. Map of the Interstate Highway System. (Courtesy of Derek Hayes)

23. Opening of the I-94, in Wisconsin. (Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society)

24. Cal Rodgers. (Courtesy of Stephen White)

25. Cal Rodgers’s plane. (Courtesy of Stephen White)

26. Farny’s The Song of the Talking Wire. (Courtesy of the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati)

27. Samuel Morse’s patent, No. 1,647. (Courtesy of the US Patent Office)

28. Samuel Morse sending the first telegraph message. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

29. Telephone wires in New York City. (Courtesy of Stephen White)

30. Electricity demonstration. (Courtesy of Stephen White)

31. Nikola Tesla. (pd.)

32. “PWA Rebuilds the Nation” poster. (Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com)

33. Reginald Fessenden and his transmitter lab. (pd.)

34. Family grouped around a radio receiver. (Courtesy of Stephen White)

35. Johnny Carson. (pd.)

36. Joseph Licklider. (pd.)

37. Vint Cerf. (Courtesy of Joi Ito, 2007)

38. Robert Kahn. (pd.)

39. Google server farm. (Photograph by Connie Zhou; courtesy of Google)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

On Independence Day, July 4, 2011, I swore a solemn oath before a federal judge on the afterdeck of the warship USS Constitution in Boston Harbor, and by doing so I became, after half a century of dreaming, a naturalized American citizen. The following day I acquired my voter’s registration card; a week later I was issued my first American passport, a document on which I have traveled ever since. When I returned to Kennedy Airport after my first trip overseas as an American, I was little prepared for my reaction when the immigration officer remarked with casual warmth, “Welcome home.” I felt almost overwhelmed by at last now being a part of all of this.

The most recent design of an American passport incorporates a series of declarative epigraphs at the top of each visa page. Samuel Adams: “What a glorious morning for our country.” The inscription on the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit in Utah: “May God continue the unity of our country as the railroad unites the two great oceans of the world.” And Jessamyn West’s description of the railway as “A big iron needle stitching the country together.”

But of all the quotations, the one I like most is a paragraph taken from Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural address of January 20, 1965. The nation was at the time still shocked by the tragic shooting of President Kennedy—the event that elevated LBJ to the presidency. The country, still mired in Vietnam, was in a liverish mood, and many more tragedies were yet to come. But Johnson, seeking by his speech to help salve the country’s wounds and to better the temper of the times, spoke in an optimistic vein:

For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say “Farewell.” Is a new world coming? We welcome it—and we will bend it to the hopes of man.

The pages that follow are devoted in large part to those men who, in the overarching interests of welding the nation together, traversed those uncrossed deserts and scaled those unclimbed ridges, offering in their own times and their own ways the promise of a better place and of better times ahead.

PREFACE: THE PURE PHYSICS of UNION

E pluribus unum.

—SINCE 1782, THE MOTTO ON THE OFFICIAL SEAL OF THE UNITED STATES

Early in the crisp small hours of November 7, 2012, a weary but exultant Barack Obama was thanking his countrymen for just handing him a second term as forty-fourth president of the United States. His speech was brief, but it rang with an eloquence that moved well beyond the platitudes of the pitiless election season that had mercifully ended in this culmination just moments before.

It was a speech that spelled out President Obama’s unyieldingly optimistic belief in the future of a country that had allowed him, a young black man, to be invested, now for a second term, as the most powerful human being on the planet. He had been given this role, he said, with a new chance to perfect still further the immense entity that is the American union, more than two centuries after his country had declared its independence from colonial rule.

Such was the crowd’s exuberance that much of what the president said was drowned in a cacophony of cheering and frenzied delight. Sensing the mood, he prudently kept what he had to say brief and to the point. After no more than ten minutes of high rhetoric, the tone of his voice fell and quieted—he was coming to the end.

“I believe we can seize this future together,” he said, “because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be”—and here he paused for just a beat, to add solemn emphasis to the adjective—“the United States of America.”

The United States. This unique national quality—of first becoming and then remaining so decidedly united—is a creation that, in spite of episodes of trial and war and suffering and stress, has been sustained for almost two and half centuries across the great magical confusion that is the American nation. The account that follows, then, is on one level a meditation on the nature of this American unity, a hymn to the creation of oneness, a parsing of the rich complexities that lie behind the country’s so-simple-sounding motto: E pluribus unum.

America is, after all, a nation founded as a home for the single simple ideal of universal human freedom. The country was established as a grand experiment, with people invited from all over the world to take part, to help build a nation of free souls, each to be given an equal opportunity to seek as each saw best the greatest happiness for themselves. The question I try to address in the following chapters is: just how has it managed to adhere, to keep itself annealed into one for all the years and decades since?

Unity among peoples, in a country as complicated as America, is just not an organic thing. In countries with less convoluted pedigrees it might well be. By way of analogy, people in tribes tend toward natural unity—whether they are Kikuyu, Comanche, Wurundjeri, or Micmac, individuals within each tribe bond together tightly. Clans in Scotland are proud of being firm-welded entities of great antiquity—all McKenzies and MacNeils are one, Scots like to say, whether fortune or happenstance has led them to be dukes or dustmen. Elsewhere class and the tendency toward an intellectual aristocracy have magnified a sense of union—Etonians, graduates of Hotchkiss and Science Po, Harvard and Christ Church may all bond clubbably, as may most European marquesses and counts or their American equivalents, the Biddles, Lowells, Cabots, and Saltonstalls. Race likewise has an annealing affect: Harlem and Hough and Watts and a score of other places have long offered local concentrations of great resilience, strength, and pride.

But America as a whole, once its early Puritan settlement had been diluted by those who followed or those already there, became too much of a mongrel nation to enjoy the simpler organic benefits of union. Lacking the communal simplicities afforded in some other countries—Japan, say, or Norway—by the existence of one race, one ethnic group, or a single class or a dominant intellectual or spiritual tendency, the great experiment that is America has had to make a union for itself, not wish it to grow in the dark out of time and nothing. It has done so purposefully by the deliberate acts of its own people. Man has had to do the hard work in bringing America together, forging something that in other, less complex places has been accomplished much more simply.

And surely all must agree that man in America, bent to this single task, has done most creditably. Excepting of course the tragic period in the 1860s when the union was so cruelly tested by civil war, this work has been performed with a consummate degree of success. The states are now generally united, and as a body united, the nation has enjoyed a steady growth of prosperity and power known by no other country on earth. And all the while, the American people have managed to remain staunchly together while countries in so many rival regions around the world—in Europe, Russia, China, and India—have been plagued by bickering and struggling and division, and have been rendered much the lesser thereby.

But just how has America’s uniquely stable union been achieved? What factors have ensured that, say, a Chinese migrant in rain-swept Seattle can find himself locked in some near-mystical concord with a Sephardic Jewish woman in Manhattan or a Cherokee student in Minnesota or a Latina stallholder in a market in Albuquerque—all of them being able to enjoy the same rights and aspirations, encapsulated in their shared ability to declare so simply, I am an American?

How did the notion of creating a more perfect union of such peoples and of such administrative entities—the now fifty states, comprising the 2,955 counties of forty-eight of them, the 64 Louisiana parishes, and the 18 Alaska boroughs—first come about? And how did this idea of union translate into the practical, physical, and concrete terms we know today, which have worn so well and lastingly?

The main purpose of the pages that follow is to consider what might be called the physiology and the physics of the country, the strands of connective tissue that have allowed it to achieve all it has, and yet to keep itself together while doing so.

For the ties that bind are most definitely, in their essence, practical and physical things. It would of course be idle to dismiss the adhesive nature of the ideas on which the nation was founded. It would be a grave mistake to forget that the guiding national concept is based on a set of common purposes, on ideals and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms that are so publicly cherished by all. But over the years, these inchoate things have all been of necessity underpinned by innumerable real, visible, tangible connections—by survey lines and marks; by roads; by canals; by railways, telephone lines, power grids; and, more recently, by submerged rivers of electrons—all of which have proved crucial both in maintaining the union and in preventing, or at least lessening the likelihood of, its fracturing and spinning into a thousand separate parts.

This book tells the story of making such connections as these and of the remarkable and visionary figures from the country’s history who first made them.

Most of them were already Americans when they did so. Though we might nowadays wish it were otherwise, most—but not all—were men. Most of their achievements—but not all, most especially that which permitted the private ownership of land—were made after the Louisiana Purchase, which suddenly doubled the country’s size into the truly transcontinental entity it is today. Most of their achievements—but not all—remain as vital to the nation’s preservation as they were when first they were created.

From the very visible nineteenth-century explorations of the Lewis and Clark expedition, by way of the geological surveying expeditions and the highway-building ventures and waterway excavations, to the less easily describable twenty-first-century mystery makings of the Internet communications backbone—there are fully two centuries of inventive zeal that have left as legacy a nation now as comprehensively interconnected and as practically unified as it is possible to imagine.

But how best to organize the wealth of work that has brought about this unity? The sheer complications of it all—the overlappings of the work of road builders and survey makers, of the pioneers of flight and the makers of radio, of the work of those who dug canals and those who excavated the tunnels for the railroad lines—made it well-nigh impossible to narrate the story in purely chronological terms. By the same token, to list the characters who were involved in the forging of the union would lend the account the feel of a catalog or an encyclopedia. A device was needed, it seemed to me, that would link the achievements thematically and give the story some greater degree of structure and logic.

An idea came to me one morning when I was writing a letter to a friend in China.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, I had lived for many years on the far side of the world and had spent much time tramping the territories between Vladivostok and Vietnam, between Manchuria and Malaysia, and between Kashmir and the Khyber Pass. All the countries of Asia—as well as the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean—had held for centuries a philosophical view that everything and everyone can be reduced to the barest essentials, the five so-called classical elements. While the ancient Greeks revered just four elements, most other civilizations, from India eastward, nominated five.

The various eastern countries in their histories have made subtle variations in just what these five elements are, but those most commonly selected are wood, earth, water, fire, and metal. While I was writing the letter to my friend in Shanghai that day and explaining the idea behind the book, it suddenly seemed to me that the five elements could be a logical way of placing into context the basic themes behind the making and joining together of the United States.

The earliest explorers of the country, for example—Lewis and Clark and all the others in the years immediately following—were confronted by endless stands of ancient forest. Despite the myths, these forests were seldom as impenetrable as those in Russia or the tropics: Native Americans regularly set fires to manage and to thin them, to create pasture and to make usable landscape. But they were woods nonetheless, and they were vast and ancient.

The early explorers paddled through them and up and along the various rivers of their expeditions in wooden boats. In winter and at night, they kept themselves warm by building fires of oak and ash wood. They framed their earliest houses of timbers of cedar and pine.

Wood, in other words, could be claimed as an abiding elemental theme of their voyage of discovery, and it would go on to be a dominant feature of every subsequent early voyage across the country. Wood, then, could provide an overarching theme for a chapter that considered these first explorers and settlers, an emblem of the frontier in the forested wilderness that was the American continent.

Once the basic geography of this continent had been established, there came the equally vital task of learning what riches might lie beneath the woodlands and the carpets of vegetation. Geologists—men who were quite unschooled at first but highly sophisticated in later years—began to probe for the mineral riches and determine the agricultural worth of the land, the value and potential of the earth. The vision of mineral treasures lying locked within those millions of acres, or the possibilities of fertile farmland for crops or livestock, and of livelihoods to be made from raising them, would in due course lure out the settlers and prompt their treks westward into a country that was now established to be blessed with the promise. The earth and its riches, in short, would offer a second theme well worthy of exploring.

And the remaining three elements—water, fire, and metal—prove equally suited to this broader organizing principle.

Water, for instance. There is no gainsaying the use of the country’s rivers and streams as early highways and the later employment of these waterways for trade, for the making of power, for the creation of frontiers. Then, if the waterways were not wide enough or deep enough or straight enough, there came the making of artificial rivers—the canals—which might ease the passage of people and goods across mountain chains. For scores of decades, right through to today, there are stories to tell of figures who were prominent in such unifying endeavors, which could all be linked by the essential element of water.

After or overlapping with these stories, there came the invention of the engines and the concept of employing these engines as agents of motive power. The common physical feature of all such early engines was the employment of heat; whether they were powered by steam, gasoline, or aviation fuel, these engines would eventually allow the country to be journeyed across swiftly, expeditiously, and easily. The nation could now be intimately linked along roadways and highways traveled by a variety of contraptions, all powered by fire.

Finally: metal. The copper cable of the telegraph, the steel wire of the telephone, the iron mast of radio and television, the subterranean and aerial titanium and cadmium and platinum mysteries of the Internet—the elemental common denominators of the transmission of information might be varied indeed, but in the terms of the ancients, metal was the common factor. Metal was key.

Armed with this basic notion, I set off for several months of exploration. Like a mantra, the words wood, earth, water, fire, and metal became a phrase, repeated over and again, that lay always in the back of my mind as I traveled back and forth between the coasts and crossed the prairies and the mountain ranges of the United States.

I equipped myself for the journey with tent and compass and sleeping bag, as well as numberless maps, books of history, and novels by the classic writers of the American experience: Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, John Williams, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson. And as vade mecum, I also managed to collect all fifty volumes of the American Guide Series—the famous WPA Guides, still among the most thoughtfully composed and intelligently edited books about the individual states.

The books date back to the late 1930s and were each assembled, as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, in a federal government effort—the Federal Writers’ Project—to give work to unemployed authors, journalists, and photographers. Though as sources of precise travelers’ information, they are long past their sell-by date, their essays still have a sustaining importance, and they offer wise counsel and a grand perspective for anyone wishing to venture into the great American hinterland.

The WPA guides—government-made books, it has to be remembered—offer a reminder of a highly divisive argument about the making of America: the role of government in the creation and sustenance of human society.

That is not to say that in these pages I wish to offer an uncritical apologia for the concept of big government. Far from it. There are all too many examples of unforgivable excesses. The savage and divisive melancholy of the Trail of Tears was, after all, a consequence of overzealous government behavior toward America’s own native peoples, with results that ran entirely counter to the principal thesis of this book. The amassment of vast armories of atomic weapons, the involvement of the United States in scores of cruel and unnecessary foreign wars, the lunacies of Prohibition, of the Tuskegee experiment, of the infamous MK Ultra program, and of the fully legislated and half-century-long antipathy to Chinese immigration—all of these and more were the acts of a government that had simply become on occasion too big for its boots.

Yet there was much good done, too, and not a little of it was and still remains on display in the telling of this story. Without an engaged and functioning federal government, the development of these various strands of the country’s connective tissue would probably have been either delayed or never achieved at all. That is why my reading of the WPA Guides provided me with a symbolic madeleine, a means of remembering a single sobering fact: while today’s political hostility to big government is an understandable reality of contemporary life, the historic role of big government in the creation of the American nation is a reality, too, one that might as well be acknowledged and celebrated for its value and great worth.

The first two volumes of the series that I decided to use were published in 1940 and 1941, respectively: the first was devoted to Ohio; the other, to Missouri. I took them along because I had decided to travel first to a pair of places that seemed to me to have played crucial roles in the making of a united America.

Each town stands on the right bank of a great American river, and in each case the river gave its name to the state in which the town is situated. The first town was East Liverpool, which is both in Ohio and on the Ohio; the second was Saint Charles, which likewise is both in Missouri and on the Missouri. Neither place is especially well known, whatever its chamber of commerce might say. The importance of each has faded over the centuries. Neither seems to me lovely enough to attract many visitors.

But each town was once most important to the man who originated the idea of creating a properly United States of America, a Founding Father who would go on to be the country’s third president, Thomas Jefferson. And each town now has a fine-looking memorial—in one case a plaque, in the other an obelisk—to the events that occurred there and helped make each community briefly famous.

Both memorials are now surrounded—and in the case of one of them, half hidden—by trees. A reminder, if any were needed, that at the time Thomas Jefferson gave these places their brief significance in making the physics of the union, America was a land swathed by long reaches of barely penetrable forest, most of its mysteries still half hidden by wood.

PART I

I never before knew the full value of trees. My house is entirely embossomed in high plane-trees, with good grass below; and under them I breakfast, dine, write, read, and receive my company. What would I not give that the trees planted nearest round the house at Monticello were full grown.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON, LETTER TO MARTHA RANDOLPH, 1793

… I was not prepared to see the pine timber so valuable and heavy as it is above and about here. The trees are of large growth, straight and smooth … With the exception of swamps, which are few and far between, the timber land has all the beauty of a sylvan grove. The entire absence of underbrush and decayed logs lends ornament and attraction to the woods. They are more like the groves around a mansion in their neat and cheerful appearance; and awaken reflection on the Muses and the dialogues of philosophers rather than apprehension of wild beasts and serpents.

—CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS ANDREWS, Minnesota and Dacotah, 1856

A VIEW ACROSS THE RIDGE

Thomas Jefferson was a man with a lifelong fascination with trees. He thought of them as his favorite kind of plants, wrote of them as his pets, and went to much effort and expense to place those he liked best around the great west lawn of Monticello, the house he made for himself in the foothills of the mountains of Albemarle County, Virginia.

He was an extravagant man, given to extravagant visions—which Monticello’s present-day garden conservators have done much to reproduce. So just as he wished when he first bought Monticello in 1768, there are today long allées of willows, great terraces of magnolias, and stands of sugar maples. There are linden trees, mulberries, and honey locusts; there are oaks and pines and pecans, catalpas and gingkoes and chestnuts, sycamores, walnuts, slippery elm, and Osage orange and border plantings of persimmons, black gums, and fruit-bearing peach trees.

Monticello’s fortunes have fluctuated dramatically over the years—not least because the third president’s excesses left the estate hopelessly mired in his legacy of debt. For many decades the house itself was a magnificent ruin, the estate gardens were left to run wild, and the surrounding forests were choked with underbrush. Some of the greater trees survived the rigors of time and neglect, however, and in recent years it became something of a sport to try to say with certainty which of these gnarled monsters Jefferson himself might have planted. It somehow made the country’s best-beloved Founding Father ever more human to imagine him out in the garden on a summer’s evening, digging the saplings deep into the hilltop’s rich loamy soil, to think of him spreading mulch above their roots and then leaving the shoots to the soothing balms of warm Virginia rains.

An X-ray device invented by a Dutch arborist was recently brought in to work out the age of the nobler-looking trees, and there was much exultation on the mountain when four of them could be proved to be at least two hundred years old—and thus quite old enough to have been planted by Jefferson. But irony has no respect for antiquity: no sooner had these trees been identified as most probably the work of the man himself—or the small army of slaves he had working on his estate—than all four of them keeled over and died.

Two of them were massive but fragile tulip poplars, one of which was fully ten yards around at its base and had begun to pose a dire threat to the building beside it. The others were a larch and a copper beech, immense shade trees under which the aging Jefferson was said to have whiled away many of the afternoons of his latter days. To most there was a gentle poignancy in their passing, because it severed one certain and romantic connection with the man who, above all others, still stands today as the architect of most of the central ideas behind the making of the United States.

But one other connection, a small and little-noticed arboreal conceit at Monticello, also links the man and his vision—and quite literally his vision—with those who visit today. It is a small and cleverly created spy hole in the woods that surround Monticello, and it affords visitors a subtle view of their surroundings that in its own way is every bit as inspirational as that which Jefferson, in laying out the plans for his estate, had once designed for himself.

Monticello faces almost exactly to the west. Were it not for one low hillock in between, Jefferson would have been able to contemplate an uninterrupted panorama clear across to the Blue Ridge Mountains, thirty miles away. The 1,200-foot Montalto—on top of which he once planned to build an observation tower but never did—does slice off some of the ridge’s more southerly aspect. But only a little. Otherwise the view was unobstructed. The trees Jefferson planted around his lawns had not in his lifetime grown tall enough to be much of a barrier, so that toward the end of his life he could sit on his porch and watch the sunset over the distant folds of hills, with only Montalto slightly in the way.

Today, however, this is no longer true. The trees have grown high, and someone sitting where the president liked to take his evening ease could no longer see in the summer his blue remembered hills. Instead he would be confronted by a mighty wall of green—or in October, when the trees take on their autumn colors, a tableau of brilliant yellows and reds and oranges. The view might well be chromatically beautiful, but because of the sheer number of fully mature trees that have sprung up today, it is not at all what Thomas Jefferson saw.

Those who run Monticello today have long sought to re-create the estate just as it was in the fifty-eight years it was his home, views and all. To help achieve this, they have cut a spy hole in the trees. By judiciously pruning and carefully planning, the foresters have cut in the faraway wall of oaks and hemlocks and white pines what looks like a tiny eye-shaped rent—though up close it is a hole probably measuring a good twenty feet by ten, at least. By careful cutting back and shaping, they have managed to keep it clear year after year—with the result that it is quite possible to squint through it and see, or at least to glimpse briefly, a fraction of what Jefferson saw.

Because Jefferson was most especially proud of having created the University of Virginia, the tree cutters and spy-hole makers have managed to frame its great rotunda, which Jefferson did not live to see finished, in the dead center of the view. Behind, though, are the soft, wood-smothered hills, with the sinuous curves of the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway marking their summit lines. These are hills with a special significance in American history and in the story of the eventual unification of the country. For in Jefferson’s time these hills toward which he gazed marked the outer limits, the western edge, the border of the pale of properly settled America. They were a line of hills which Jefferson never managed to cross but which intrigued him, pulled at him, and nagged at him all his life.

DRAWING A LINE IN THE SAND

There are a great many aspects of Jefferson’s character that led him to play so crucial a part in the physical creation of the eventual transcontinental republic. It is a commonplace to repeat that he was a man of contradictions. He was a scientist, first and foremost, as well as a learned aesthete and a slave-owning aristocrat with apparently profound feelings for the furtherance of human decency, kindness, and civilization. At thirty-two years old, he was described by the überbiographer James Parton as “a gentleman … who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet and play the violin.”

There was something else though. Thomas Jefferson may well have been a sophisticated foreign traveler—he had been minister to France, after all, and later for four years was the US secretary of state—but his travels within the republic were limited indeed. And yet for most of his life, he was quite enthralled by the concept of the American West. He suffered from a bewildering, almost uncanny, and romantic fascination with the continental Occident. He was obsessively interested in particular in just how its immense and generally unknown acreage could and should eventually be apportioned among his country’s fast-growing citizenry.

To know its geography was a first imperative. As far back as 1783, while he was a Virginia member of the Continental Congress, he had formally suggested the mounting of a private expedition to the Pacific. “I have always had,” he declared, “a peculiar confidence in men from the western side of the mountains.”

But Jefferson did not mean by this the grand crystal crags of the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada (of which he, in common with most, knew precious little). Rather he meant the relatively modest ripples of the Appalachians, of which the Blue Ridge hills that he could see from Monticello were the easternmost. For these endless ridges of Devonian rock that rose out of the coastal plains from South Carolina up to New York essentially marked the edge of the United States proper, in Jefferson’s time. Beyond them, America was barely known.

Five million people (a fifth of them black, mostly enslaved) lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean, hemmed in by these confusing swaths of mountains. Only four dirt roads pierced the passes between the hundreds of miles of ranges. Poor weather, frequent rockfalls and mudslides, or else the occasional understandable hostility of the Creek, the Iroquois, or the Cherokee who once owned these lands (to the extent the ownership of land was a concept recognized by indigenous Americans) increased the difficulty for settlers wishing to travel across the hills, between South Carolina and Kentucky, say, or from Tennessee to Pennsylvania. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, it could still take nine days of fitful journeying by railroad, canal, riverboat, and stage line to get from New York across to Pittsburgh, because these Appalachian ranges were so ruggedly impenetrable. In Jefferson’s time, travel across them was for the fainthearted all but impossible.

Those scattered few who then lived permanently beyond this cordillera, those whose homes were south of the Great Lakes and down in the Ohio Valley, turned out to be so decisively cut off from the American mainstream that there was serious talk of secession, though in the end it came to little more than campfire grumblings. Meanwhile those who lived farther out still, in the wilds beyond the Ohio River and in the American-possessed (but hitherto Indian-reserved) lands that were then designated as the Northwest Territories, were as scarce as they were brave. They may have enjoyed Jefferson’s “peculiar confidence,” but they were initially outnumbered ten to one by Native Americans; they had extremely limited opportunity for work, mainly in the fur trade; they were protected, but only somewhat, by outpost contingents of American soldiers; and they lived under a scrappily benign version of martial law. It was only when their numbers reached five thousand—in 1798, two years before Jefferson became president—that they were given a representative government with a proper little parliament sited in the first instance in Marietta, the tiny town that was their territorial capital.

It was these doughty western settlers who were to become, however, the eventual first beneficiaries of one of the greatest and most revolutionary ideas put forward by Jefferson, as the territory in which they eked out their rugged existences became its initial testing ground. Jefferson’s great notion was that Americans could and should have the right to do something that was hitherto quite unimaginable to the Indian tribes: they should be able to own the land of which their territory was made.

Land ownership was an unfamiliar and almost alien concept. Bands of the Iroquois, the Creek, the Shawnee, the Delaware, the Miami, and their native kin had certainly passed through these lands for hundreds of years, had hunted it, settled it, raised families on it. But they had never imagined it as something that could be possessed. It was much the same for the early white settlers: they may not have had the same nomadic urges as the Shawnee and the Iroquois, but land ownership was conceptually well beyond their ken also. It might have seemed possible and reasonable for a settler to own a canoe or a cow or a cottage—or back in those unenlightened times in the Americas, even a slave. But land, an immovable part of the eternal fabric of our celestial body—that seemed somehow to be an entity beyond ownership, the possession of it lying perhaps within the divine prerogatives of kings but certainly not ever in the name of ordinary citizens.

Thomas Jefferson thought quite otherwise. He had developed this thinking long before completing his work on the Declaration of Independence. It is spelled out in a sulfurous pamphlet, published in 1774, in which he denounced King George III’s plan that American colonists on the far side of the Appalachians should live in a feudal arrangement, with the king owning the land and his tenants obliged to pay their feu to his court.

The thirty-one-year-old Jefferson denounced this as a barbarism. It was a formula for studied inequity, based on a fiction of kingly and ecclesiastical privilege that had been developed in Britain a thousand years before by the Norman conquerors and believed by many in the homeland ever since. Jefferson declared that such a concept—that only kings, churches, and the aristocratic mighty could own land—would not be allowed to infect the vast tracts of real estate that he suspected lay on the far side of his new country’s mountain ranges. All men should have, in his opinion, the right to own land there as they see fit—to buy, sell, or borrow against its value and to hand it down over the generations. And to pay taxes on it, moreover, from which good governance might be purchased and paid for.

This belief had helped propel Jefferson into his seat in the Continental Congress. And his unwavering devotion to its principles led to his sponsorship, a decade later, of a new law, the practical effect of which can be seen nowadays in just about every American town and city beyond the East Coast and on just about every field west of the Ohio River. This was Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785—An Ordinance for Ascertaining the Mode of Disposing of Lands in the Western Territory—a piece of legislation that laid down the rules for how the immense tracts of new American countryside, at the time neither owned nor properly known, were to be described, divided, and eventually distributed.

Though a dreamy Jeffersonian idealism lay at the legislation’s heart, this prescient and profoundly significant piece of legislation not only provided land for those who wished to own it, but also raised money for a new government that was financially exhausted and depleted by the war with the British. The western lands were the new nation’s greatest physical asset—albeit an asset taken without regard for the Native Americans who inhabited them. The new government could sell these lands, in parcels, to anyone who had the wherewithal to buy them. So Jefferson’s ordinance set out principles for creating the parcels. Most crucially, it laid down the requirements for a survey, for the creation of a grid of meridians and baselines from which to create these parcels.

To start the process, there also had to be established a place where the surveys of western America would be formally begun, a place that was then touchingly named, as it remains named today, the Point of Beginning.

The honor of locating this point went to Ohio—or what would later become Ohio, the crucible of the Old Northwest. The point can still be seen today, just. It is on the outskirts of a grimy industrial town called East Liverpool, close to a family firm named S. H. Bell, which processes, crushes, and screens, as well as stores and ships, many of the basic materials of the country’s industrial lifeblood—bricks, wire, cement, oil-fracking sand, pig iron, steel billets, fertilizer, and limestone. Here, at the point where Pennsylvania becomes Ohio—and 1,112 feet north of where, a few score yards out into the river, a slim tongue of West Virginia licks its way between—is the monument which, though it doesn’t exactly say so, truly is a memorial to these two most Jeffersonian ideas, private land ownership and public westward expansion.

From near this unlovely spot, beside a railroad line and an industrial storage yard outside East Liverpool, Ohio, all of western America is still measured. The obelisk marks the Point of Beginning, the origination site for the meridian and baseline used since the first surveys of the nation.

It is a cement stele, about chest high, sitting on a circular stone mat on which are engraved the four cardinal compass points. The monument is a four-sided obelisk, not unlike the very top of the Washington Monument, with suitably portentous inscriptions on each side. Few of the motorists hurtling by on state highway 39 bother to stop to read, even though the obelisk is surrounded by a small copse of other cast-iron markers and stone boundary posts, and by rights it should be most alluring. It is indisputably one of the more historically significant sites in the nation, a place that should have tour buses and fountains of cool drinking water, even a souvenir stall. Instead it sports a scruffy parking space, one forlorn utility pole, and a scattering of litter.

Jefferson’s name is not there; instead the marker notes that “On September 30, 1785, Thomas Hutchins, first Geographer of the United States, began the Geographer’s Line of the Seven Ranges.” Mr. Hutchins was very much Thomas Jefferson’s man, a keen supporter of the distant vision of the American West as an immense “empire of liberty.” He was a soldier, a cartographer, and the architect of a system of surveying that continues to be employed in America to this day.

Taking this arbitrary spot as his starting point, he drew lines—one north and south, the meridian; another at right angles to it, the baseline. Once having determined, with the use of sextants and star charts and chronometers, the precise longitude and latitude of the site—40° 38′ 33″ North of the equator, 80° 31′ 10″ West of Greenwich—he then set off with his rolls of twenty-two-yard-long iron Gunter’s survey chains,¹ then later with his theodolites and compasses and plane tables, and his party of army-protected cartographers, to survey America.

And by America, Hutchins meant the entire continent, though at that time the nation extended only to the Mississippi River, the boundary with the lands then owned by Spain. For the baseline, that magical arrow-straight line at 40° 38′ 33″ North, known to this day as the Geographer’s Line, was by law decreed to extend westward through “the whole territory,” all the way to the Pacific Ocean. America might not yet have title to all of the lands between the Ohio River and the Pacific, but now that it had a baseline computed, it was not entirely fantastic to imagine that one day it might.

This was Jefferson’s dream, after all. Now that his ordinance was firmly a part of the nation’s law and the survey well under way, he made a famous remark: that despite his young country being hemmed in by lands in the north still belonging to Britain, by lands in the south belonging to Spain, by territories in the near west under the vague control of often hostile aboriginals, and by lands in the farther west controlled by France, “it was impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people with similar laws.”

It was certainly not fully anticipated that a cash-strapped Napoléon would ever actually sell the land he called Louisiana—let alone that he would sell all of it and all at once. At the time of the survey’s beginnings, no one except Jefferson thought much beyond the coming months. Settler life was precarious, and even policy makers tended to think in seasons, not decades, their business more concerned with planning for harvest than for history.

Some say Mr. Hutchins invented the survey system under which he worked, which has endured as a model for many of the world’s great surveys. It called for the creation of townships, six miles square, stacked north and south in what were called ranges. Each township was divided into thirty-six numbered sections of one square mile each (640 acres). The sections were divided into half sections (320 acres), quarter sections (160 acres), and quarter-quarter sections (40 acres), which led to such phrases as “the lower forty” and “forty acres and a mule.” This system—ranges, townships, sections, and subsections—is now woven deep into the fabric of modern American life, the basis for everything, a systematically numbered² design for almost the entire nation.

It was intended that the distribution of the territory begin at a great clip. Sales offices were promptly set up—the main center being in the nation’s capital, New York City—where petitioners put down their money (a dollar an acre minimum, no land sold on credit) and walked away with a title document. The results of the plan and the purchases can be seen today on any map—Western farm after Western farm regularly spaced and perfectly aligned beside undeviatingly die-straight roads spearing east and west, north and south; the country towns with their impeccable grid patterns of streets laid out from North Dakota to Arizona, from Oregon to Alabama; the siting in each township of schools (usually in section 16, with one in section 36 added later), town halls, courts, and railway stations; and the government’s retention of some sections (8, 11, 26, and 29) for future sale, the lawmakers in the capital believing, optimistic always, that once the township had been developed, the value of that land would skyrocket.

Matters in fact began rather hesitantly. The ordinance came into formal effect on May 27, 1785, and Hutchins began his survey of the first seven ranges of Ohio—the tract of land spanning the first forty-two miles west of the meridian—a scant three months later. But then scouts reported that a Delaware war band had attacked settlers some miles ahead—a trading post had been sacked and a migrant American murdered, his doorway smeared with red paint as a warning. Already the local indigenes—Shawnee especially—had expressed reservations at Hutchins’s plans. To add to their quite understandably cynical attitude toward white men’s treaties, and to their pervasive and quite reasonable fear of dispossession, they felt little sympathy for the settlers’ apparent need to draw straight lines through lands across which they had been content to meander for centuries, following the routes of animals and streambeds and other natural features. They welcomed the haphazard and felt slighted by the straight.

Hutchins’s surveying team was understandably spooked by the killing, and all pulled back to Pittsburgh. It took them nine more months—and a guarantee of cavalrymen’s protection—before they recovered their nerve. They then picked up their chains and came back, extended their 40° 38′ 33″ baseline to a town called Magnolia, and soon managed to survey with a fair degree of accuracy four of the ranges in 1787. By the next year, they had completed all seven.

The surveys were done hastily and often quite imperfectly; each section was merely marked with a white stone at its corners, and at first no surveys at all were performed inside the sections themselves. But it was a start. Congress was formally notified. Maps were then published, and the selling of America began, formally and in earnest. Tacked to office doorways and trees and published in such local newspapers as then existed were advertisements displaying the beginnings of a new phase in American history. Each showed a map

of the Seven Ranges of Townships, being part of the Territory of the United States, NW of the River Ohio, which by a late Act of Congress are directed to be sold.

That part which is divided into sections or tracts of a mile square will be sold in small tracts at public auction in Pitsburg the residue will be sold in quarters of Townships at the seat of Government.

During the next few years, all of the rest of the Northwest Territory was surveyed, and the salable sections were duly disposed of. Towns and villages and hamlets were born where the land was deemed most suitable for settlement, and thousands of hopeful migrants streamed westward. Within fifteen years, the quarter-million square miles of the old territory had been transmuted into the five-and-a-bit states that now occupy its immensity: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a part of Minnesota. Independent America had started out with thirteen states; now the constellation of stars that was symbolizing them on the nation’s newly adopted flag was starting to swell, and fast.

The more westerly of these states (Minnesota aside) stopped short where the territory had stopped short: the east bank of the Mississippi River. Beyond the cliffs and mudflats of the river, the writ of America did not run. West of the Mississippi, the land still belonged to France, and in theory and law, it was no business of Americans to travel there, either to survey or to settle.

Except that everything changed on April 30, 1803, when the American government—in what many consider the most prescient triumph of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency—bought from France all 820,000 square miles of its possessions on the American continent.

With a few strokes of a pen and the payment to Napoléon, America overnight doubled her size. With the acquisition—for $3 million in gold and $12 million in bonds—the country turned herself into what seers of the time recognized as a potential world power and even at that very moment a force to be reckoned with. The Louisiana Purchase, as the transfer was known, suddenly untangled America from the most pernicious of colonial snares and guaranteed her (because the port of New Orleans—Louisiana’s third and final capital city, after Mobile and Biloxi—was naturally a part of the sale) unencumbered access to the Gulf of Mexico. Included were seemingly unending stretches of real estate for the settlement of many more millions of yeoman stock—men and women who could be encouraged to undertake their advance from the rigors of respectable Eastern poverty to the nobility of hard-won Western wealth.

If this great tract of land earmarked for Jefferson’s imagined millions of settlers was to be properly incorporated into a United States of America—if, in short, it was to be united with all the existing rest—it all now needed to be surveyed and sold, just as the Northwest Territory had been surveyed and sold in the years before. To be surveyed and sold it needed also to be known. To be known, it needed to be crossed.

PEERING THROUGH THE TREES

The decision to cross the continent had actually been made some months earlier, on a late-summer afternoon in 1802 at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson was sitting in rapt attention, poring over a thick, heavy book of more than four hundred uncut and untrimmed pages, bound in blue paper and published by the firm of Cadell and Davies in London. Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean had been written by a Scottish fur trader, from Stornoway in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, named Alexander Mackenzie. Or more accurately, Sir Alexander Mackenzie—since King George III had awarded him a knighthood for becoming the first white man ever to cross the entirety of North America.

Mackenzie had completed his voyage almost nine years earlier. He suspected that his seven-month overland journey to the Pacific was probably of historic moment, and so he had left a memorial. He had created what he hoped would be a lasting inscription on a tiny sea-washed rock near the present-day British Columbia fishing village of Bella Coola: “Alex. MacKenzie, from Canada by land. 22nd July, 1793.” He had inscribed the message with his finger, using an old trappers’ trick for long-duration messages, dipping it into a poultice made of bear grease mixed with vermilion powder and smearing out words that he hoped would survive the cold and lashing rains for which the Pacific coast is notorious.

One can imagine Thomas Jefferson’s reaction as he read the closing pages of the blue-bound volume, on learning that a mere Canadian, a British loyalist, had been the man to first traverse the American continent. It was unseemly. It was an affront. It was a claim that simply should not be allowed to stand.

As legend has it, he put down the book, his face purple with apoplectic annoyance, and turned to his twenty-eight-year-old secretary, Meriwether Lewis, who was sitting beside him. He told Lewis in no uncertain terms promptly to organize an expedition to cross his own country—an expedition that would, among other things, trump the ill-considered wanderings of a forelock-touching Scotsman. He had little reason to suppose the venture would in time become and remain, to all Americans, the most noted of all the many exploratory journeys through and around their now mighty, sprawling, and mysteriously alluring new nation.

This Monticello moment was the birth of the so-called Corps of Discovery, the United States Army’s expedition best known today by the names of its joint leaders, Lewis and Clark.

Meriwether Lewis himself needed little by way of convincing. He was not just curious and eager to match and better Mackenzie’s achievement, but he, like Jefferson, wanted to ensure that the detested British in no way preempted any potential American claims to the distant West. Lewis also had a highly personal motive to mount a new expedition, stemming principally from having been thwarted by Jefferson in a bid a decade earlier to try such a venture.³

Now, ten years on, Lewis was being asked to go. And to go, moreover, as the expedition leader—Jefferson being by now fully familiar with his assistant’s practical abilities as a trapper and hunter, a man who could travel far away in extreme discomfort and not come whining home. The president also admired him for being an exceptionally quick study—his “luminous and discriminating intellect” being one of the many reasons that prompted Jefferson to employ Lewis at the White House in March 1801.

Another reason Jefferson decided to order him out west was Lewis’s unusually sympathetic awareness of America’s aboriginal people. Lewis already had firsthand knowledge of various Indian tribes: the Cherokee in Georgia, where he had lived as a young man; the Chickasaw and the Shawnee when he was stationed as a soldier near modern-day Memphis; the Miami when he was involved in the mighty Battle of Fallen Timbers in far western Ohio; and later the Potawatomi near his army camp in lands close to today’s Detroit.

At the time of Jefferson’s pouting decision, the Louisiana Purchase had not yet been consummated. The drapeau tricolore still flew on the far side of the Mississippi. There was also evidence that maybe Britain was about to make some kind of claim on the territory too, leading to a certain urgency. Lewis had to leave, it was decided, and in double-quick time.

The depth of ignorance of the soon-to-be-acquired territory was profound. Its precise borders were unknown, for a start—and the French had made it abundantly clear they were not going to give Americans any information about them. Lewis and the party he would choose would have to start essentially from scratch. Where were the land’s natural frontiers, where were the mountain ranges, and how exactly did its rivers twist and turn down from the hilltops to the sea? They would have to find out. Moreover, were there truly, as stories of the time suggested, great peaks out in the vastness that were made entirely out of salt? Where were the territory’s snowfields, its deserts, the pastures and the prairies? What kinds of flowers and trees grew there, and what species of animals, which types of birds?

And who exactly were the peoples—the Indians, as Columbus had supposed—who had belonged to the land before? Was it true, as some said, that many of them were Welsh? Or, according to others, the Lost Tribes of Israel? And whoever they might be, where did they now live and have their being?

By March 1803 the necessary congressional authorization for the venture was in hand. A sum of $2,500 was appropriated—with $696 set aside for gifts to the natives. A month later and the transfer papers were formally signed in Paris, and the land that had so intrigued Jefferson was now fully American owned and so could be legally explored.

Lewis, now certain the expedition was to begin, procured a note of limitless credit signed by President Jefferson himself as a guarantee, just in case they ran out of cash. He then began assembling his gear. He found his rifles at an army arsenal in Virginia. He found builders for an iron-framed fifty-five-foot wooden keelboat in Pittsburgh. He found his ammunition, his trinket gifts, and his comestibles in Philadelphia. He had to imagine what else he might need: mosquito nets, waterproof lead tubes for holding ammunition, various bibelots and silver medallions struck with Jefferson’s profile to be handed out as marks of amity to the encountered Indians, large quantities of powdered ink, 193 pounds of dried soup, twenty-five axes, and four gross of fishhooks. He also took instruction in field medicine—mainly from a doctor of somewhat crabbed views who believed most ailments could be cured by powerful laxatives, especially one made of mercuric chloride and a ground-up Mexican purgative root named jalap.

With the gear assembled, it was now time to gather the men. In June, shortly before the secretary of war gave formal authorization on July 2 for the corps to select volunteers for the expedition from any of his army garrisons along the Ohio, Lewis wrote to his old army friend William Clark, offering him the position of joint leader of the expedition. The latter accepted cheerfully: “This is an undertaking fraighted with many difeculties, but My friend I do assure you that no man lives whith whome I would prefur to undertake Such a Trip.”

Clark was four years older and, in their previous encounter, had been the senior officer. Clark was more rough-hewn and both less literate and by all accounts less given to dark moods than Lewis. Clark had been tested in battle with Indians, while Lewis had not. And Lewis was very much Jefferson’s protégé, while Clark had barely a nodding acquaintance with the president. Nevertheless, the pair—who joined up in the Ohio River town of Clarksville, Indiana, in October to begin their formal collaboration—got on famously well on just about every day of the 856 they would spend away together.

In Clarksville they assembled their full team, the soldiers chosen from the scores of fort-weary volunteers ready for an opportunity of real excitement. In the end some twenty-nine men, including Clark’s slave, York, were sworn in for the duties ahead.

There were ten weeks of training and preparation before the team was prepared to start. History records with some precision the formal beginning of the expedition: three thirty in the afternoon of Monday, May 21, 1804.

By now the winter was well over; the ice was gone, and the rivers were brimming with snowmelt. Having crossed the Mississippi separately, Lewis rejoined Clark some slight way along its principal tributary, the Missouri. The place he chose was the village of Saint Charles, a threadbare settlement on the river’s north bank with a population of about four hundred, most of them French Canadians.

There was a simple topographic reason for the choice of the expedition’s starting point. Close to the junction of the two streams, there was a mess of fluvial indecision, with the tributary rivers swiveling direction at the behest of their conjoined currents, leaving a maze of swamps and oxbow lakes and blind-alley bays all across the landscape. But in Saint Charles, the Missouri seemed at last to start pulling itself firmly away to the west—the direction in which the expedition wanted to go.

The river’s course was directed by the local geology—the same geology that also enticed the first settlers. There was a low bluff of Devonian sandstone hills on the river’s northern bank, the first elevated ground west of its junction with the Mississippi, which would both keep any settlers safe from floods and, in case of attack, offer their pickets a good view of the waters downstream. So a cluster of buildings was built along the bluff—a Catholic chapel, a hundred poorly made houses, a few shops. All of them looked southward across the deep brown stream—the Big Muddy, as it would later be widely called (Clark claimed to find a wineglassful of ooze in every pint of Missouri river water)—toward the scattering of houses in distant Saint Louis, toward the familiar and the known.

Behind, beyond their village pale, was the true unknown—a terra incognita of brown Indian hills, expanses of lands unfamiliar and potentially hostile. Hunters and trappers ventured there—but no settlers, not yet. Saint Charles was thus for many years the most westerly European settlement, the last bastion of immigrant civilization, a town that lay at the very point of intersection between settled America and untamed native lands of the frontier. It could scarcely have been more appropriate as a departure point.

A thunderstorm was raging when Lewis arrived from Saint Louis. He took what churchly men still charmingly called a cold collation—a snack, allowed on fast days—and then crossed the river, where he found Lieutenant Clark and his party encamped for the evening. Most of the party (except for one member, who the night before had received fifty lashes for going AWOL and then displaying “behavior unbecoming” at a party) were “in good health and sperits.” Small wonder: Clark had been royally looked after during his four-day stay: the local Gallic swells offered far better food and wine than had ever been available back east, together with invitations to balls and visits to his boats by numbers of ladies of the town.

One could imagine that Clark would have rather liked to stay, but just after lunch the next afternoon, they set off—“under three Cheers,” wrote Clark, “from the gentlemen on the bank.”

They headed first directly toward the west, toiling against a slow river current and the whirling of the deadly water-boils they would endure for the next fifteen months, and until they eventually crossed the unknown, unimagined wilderness of the Continental Divide after more than three thousand miles of travel.

They spent the first six weeks journeying easily enough through what is now the state of Missouri. During the early miles, a number of limestone cliffs and sandstone bluffs rise up beside the stream—indeed, Clark fell from one three-hundred-foot pinnacle early in the trip, saving himself only by digging his knife into a crevice and dangling there until he felt brave enough to clamber back up. But generally the countryside here is more floodplain than valley, more prairie than canyon, and the river winds and wanders irrationally, all over the place.

The party found they were making only minimal forward progress, even though their daily distances turned out to be wearyingly long. Today the highways and the Union Pacific rail lines follow much the same exhausting path along the riverbank. They do so not because contour lines compel them to, but because if they tried to go straight where the river winds—with every single bend given a name, Bushwhacker Bend, Bootlegger Bend, Cranberry Bend—far too many costly bridges would be required. It is more prudent and economical to follow the stream than to fight it, today just as it was back in the expedition’s time.

THE FRONTIER AND THE THESIS

After some weeks of sailing and rowing and poling along a willow-banked river, the party reached a junction, with a river they called the Kaw, today the Kansas River. The leaders were at last quite impressed with the landscape—“the countrey about the mouth of this river is verry fine,” wrote Clark, and said it would be a good site for a future army fort.

The army must not have agreed, but civilian settlers eventually did, in their thousands, for they later turned the spit of land between the two streams into an enormous campsite, a base for the long and heroic westward treks along the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the California Trail. And the metropolis that some of their number then stayed behind to build, Kansas City, has become a classic of frontier America.

I had been here before, some thirty years earlier. It was shortly before the bicentennial celebration of 1976, when I spent six months traveling through the Midwest, trying to understand the importance of that uniquely American phenomenon, the frontier. Along the way I had met many people and had seen many things: two of the more memorable happened to be right here, where Lewis and Clark were pressing westward through the very frontier I was studying.

The first encounter was of rather lesser importance, though it still had some poignancy. I had been invited to visit a marble memorial to an enormous white Charolais bull. He was named Sam 951, and until 1972 he had lived on a ranch in the town of Chillicothe and had been famous for miles around as an example of bovine excellence. Sam’s frozen semen, once produced in exuberant gallons by what all agreed was an excessively jolly creature, was worth millions, and was packaged in nitrogen-cooled vials to be sent off from Chillicothe to eager customers all over the world.

The Litton Charolais Ranch was in consequence once perhaps the most profitable cattle-breeding outfit in America. Sam 951 was primus inter pares of the large and carefully managed herd. Each bull—the best of them lived in air-conditioned barns kitted out with red carpets—weighed a ton or more, had ears the size of dinner plates, had a vast muscular body joined necklessly to an appropriately immense head, and sported dewlaps that would take two strong hands to move.

Cattle like Sam had made a great fortune for the ranch owner, Jerry Litton, and had now brought him within a hair’s breadth of true fame. I spent two happy summer days with him—a handsome and engaging man who had married a former Miss Chillicothe (and a runner-up in the Miss Missouri pageant) and who for the previous four years had been a member of the US Congress, a Democrat. His home at the time I stayed was abuzz with political excitement: in two weeks voters were due to decide whether or not to elect him a US senator. Many, indeed, thought he would and should run for national office—President Jimmy Carter was a supporter—and in early 1976 he was sufficiently intrigued to announce that he would indeed take this obvious next step along the political glide path.

When I turned up, his work was nearly all wrapped up. He was in the closing stages of what all agreed had been an impeccably nuanced and well-funded campaign for the primary election. And two weeks after I left, he did indeed triumph, leading a stunning upset in a twelve-man primary race. Jerry Litton was on the verge, I have long since believed, of well-deserved political greatness.

On the night of his victory, he was to be flown back to Kansas City for a celebration. But then came calamity. The crankshaft in one of the engines sheared in half; the little plane lost power and crashed on takeoff; and Litton, his wife and children, his Beech Baron’s pilot, and the pilot’s son were all killed. Jerry Litton had been born in a house without electric power, in 1937, when this part of Missouri still had the feel of the frontier about it. He would have brought something of this spirit to Washington had fate permitted it. He was a figure of whom it can rightly be said, He could have been a contender. But fate saw to it that he never got the chance.

My second excursion of that 1976 adventure concerned the polar opposite of a cattle farm. I spent time touring a sprawling Minuteman nuclear missile site, centered at the Whiteman US Air Force Base, an immense complex of men and their flying machines set close by a village just south of the river with the engaging name of Knob Noster. Back in the 1970s, it was quite possible to visit the immense missiles and to descend deep into the bunkers where clean-cut young officers—curiously decked out in uniforms that included starched white ascot collars—sat beside their pairs of launch switches, enduring a bleak shift of existence in air-conditioned subterranean silence, waiting to execute a world-destroying command that, mercifully, never came.

The Cold War is now over, but America still has deployed around the country three wings of Minuteman missiles, all nuclear tipped and more powerful than ever, as ready to go as ever they were before. They are, however, no longer deployed in Missouri but in more distant and protected wilderness bases in North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. One can still try walking across lonely Montana meadows up to the edge of the wire-protected silo where a missile lurks beneath its concrete blast doors, to test how long it takes before a security jeep or a helicopter, with flashing blue lights and a crew of soldiers with full authority to maim, comes to find out what you are up to. Back in Missouri in the 1970s, I was invited to try and found it took no more than a couple of minutes for my breach of security to be discovered and repulsed. But it is no longer possible to play such a game at the Whiteman Base there since the men have all been stood down and their missiles dismantled and destroyed under the terms of the various treaties signed with a Russia that is no longer the Soviet Union, no longer seen as quite the threat it once was.

Yet Whiteman Air Force Base itself still exists, and if not armed with missiles today, it still sports a title and wields an ability that sends chills down spines. It is part of a terrifying arsenal of weaponry that is now called—after numerous organizational changes and semantic alterations of title—the United States Air Force Global Strike Command.

The command has its headquarters in Louisiana, from where it controls all of America’s air-launched atomic weapons—the three Minuteman missile wings in the northwest and a large number of B-2 stealth bombers, all of them designed to drop thermonuclear bombs. The bulk of these bombers happen to be based at Whiteman—at a site a short way from that point on the river where, in 1804, William Clark recorded hearing an “emence snake” that inhabits a small lake nearby “and which gobbles like a Turkey & may be herd several miles.”

The planes belong to a US Air Force wing, the 509th, that proudly reminds visitors that it is the direct descendant of the only unit in history that has ever dropped live atomic bombs in wartime, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Today it is a battle-proven assemblage of aircraft and crew that, its commander says, can now bring massive firepower to bear, in a short time, anywhere on the globe.

B-2 stealth aircraft of the 509th Bomb Wing, a twenty-strong nuclear-armed operational component of Global Strike Command, at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. The wing is a direct descendant of the group that dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There seems a certain irony in this nuclear firebase being located so very close to the Lewis and Clark expedition route, not least because what Jefferson’s explorers were seeking to do, even if unknowingly at the time, was tied to the unique American concept of the frontier and to the development of what to this day is known—and argued over—as the frontier thesis. The irony stems from the argument that the frontier mentality, if such a thing truly exists, still plays a nourishing—and controversial—role at the intellectual roots of much of today’s American foreign policy.

The famous argument, put forward in an 1895 paper by a University of Wisconsin history professor, Frederick Jackson Turner, held that there was an immense social significance in the simple existence of the frontier—that ever-westward-shifting margin between civilized society in the East and the untamed savagery and wilderness to the West. Kansas City, the city that rose from one of the campsites of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, became a classic, if momentary, point of frontier contact: on its eastern side were traders, trappers, farmers, settlers, surveyors, villages, and towns; on its western side were empty prairies, nomads, lawlessness, and an unprotected and shelterless void of stony plains, tornadoes, and starvation. Between them lay the line of contact, division, and separation: the frontier.

The rolling clash between these two extremes gave rise, Turner argued, to a peculiarly American set of character traits. The experiences suffered or enjoyed on the frontier left Americans inherently different from what they and their antecedents had been in their homelands. Those tested in the borderlands were by comparison more violent, more informal, more democratic, more imbued with personal initiative, and less hamstrung by tradition, class, and elegance. More American, Turner suggested. Strength, power, might—the ability to tame rather than to persuade, the tendency to demand rather than request, the tendency to shoot rather than to talk—these were all tendencies compounded by the frontier experience, uniquely different building blocks employed in the making of the modern American. The Western myth, the legends of the cowboy, the cinematic and entertainment-park allure of concepts like Frontierland—all of these were born from this single simple (some would say simplistic) thesis offered by Frederick Jackson Turner.

In the century since the publication and promulgation of his views, Turner has been attacked roundly and mercilessly for ignoring such matters as race, gender, and regionalism. Yet what has gone essentially unanswered still remains: just why do Americans believe they are so different, so exceptional? Why the persistent belief in the idea of America as the “shining city on a hill”? Why the notion of Manifest Destiny?

And why, indeed, did Thomas Jefferson believe so keenly in the idea that America should and could and in time would extend herself from sea to shining sea, and accordingly dispatch Lewis and Clark to see if and how this could be achieved? Was all of this, as Frederick Jackson Turner would later argue, rooted in that same peculiar experience, shared by all, born in the process of the steady closing of the frontier?

Some may consider it injudicious to conflate, on the one hand, John Winthrop’s inspirational city-on-a-hill sermon of 1630 and the tenets of the frontier thesis with, on the other, the notion of conducting Manifest Destiny at home and so many interfering adventures abroad. And yet viewed from some perspectives it does seem right and proper to ask, particularly here in Missouri: why does America still believe, as the slogan of Whiteman Air Force Base has it—why did it ever believe, in fact—that it has a right and a duty to be able to deliver “massive firepower, in a short time, anywhere on the globe”? Why America? And if such a belief is somehow rooted in a deep-seated conviction that it should, that it needs to, and if called upon, that it must—then was not this all born, as Frederick Jackson Turner and his supporters would also argue, from the experiences gained by early Americans in their closing of the frontier? Isn’t this determination to extend itself across the planet simply a reflection of the strength and crudity and informal decisiveness of the pioneer Americans, brought up to date, made global, and now writ large for all the world to see?

Does the mission of the huge atomic firebase, sited so close to where William Clark first heard of the snake that gobbles like a turkey, have its intellectual origins in this very same tiny, brave expedition that first crossed the frontier and in the consequent development of the huge city now lying just a short drive away to the east, which once so vividly encapsulated the notion of the frontier, two centuries before?

These days it is by no means easy to see the inner workings of Whiteman. In the 1970s it was simplicity itself to win an invitation for a tour. The air force was only too proud then to show off its wares and its weaponry, reasoning that doing so helped display to the Soviets its perpetual readiness to strike. Today, terrorism has introduced a new reality: long scimitar glints of razor wire, battalions of ever-scanning cameras, and heavily armed sentries at the entrance gates all stand guard to protect the planes and their weapons from the innocently curious and the ill intentioned alike. Tours still happen, but application lines are long, details demanded weeks in advance, cameras forbidden.

Once in a while, though, along this steady reach of the wide Missouri, there will come a distinctively huge and quite unexpected rumbling sound, a thunder of jet engines that shakes the willows and the stillness of the stream. Then from its lair behind the wire, rising from an invisible runway folded among the cornfields, a great gray bomber will slowly lumber upward and hoist itself into the skies.

It is always an awesome sight—all the more so if other planes follow and the singleton becomes part of an airborne armada, a squadron of unimaginable power bound on an unannounced mission to a place no one will ever disclose for a purpose never to be known.⁴ As the craft vanish into the clouds and the thunder ebbs away over the woods, it is tempting to wonder just what corner of the planet might soon be basking under the unasked-for invigilation of these nuclear-tipped watchers from the skies.

It is at moments like this the irony of history presents itself. For it seems not too much of a stretch to suppose that America’s present-day global reach, insisted upon as a right and represented by weapons like this, is a concept that actually enjoyed its infancy here, more than two centuries ago. This was when two young soldiers, on orders from their president, were engaged on a mission to extend the reach of their young country, not then clear across the world, but from just one gray ocean clear across to another. The world would come later, when canoes became bombers and wooden paddles jet engines.

THE WOOD WAS BECOME GRASS

Beyond Kansas City the river turns northward, and William Clark offered his views about the kind of terrain that he believed now lay on its western bank. His spelling and grammar were never exemplary: on the evening of June 21, 1804, when he wrote this simple observation, he was probably quite weary:

Supplied with water the Small runs of (which losees themselves in the bottom land) and are covered with a variety of timber such as Oake of different Kinds Blue ash, walnut &c. &c. as far as the Praries, which I am informed lie back from the river at some places near & others a great distance.

The Praries, as he had it, were indeed nearby, and they were of a landscape very different from what had gone before.

Until this point in the journey, the expedition had been quite overwhelmed by trees, by forests, by glades, by copses—by wood. The valleys through which the men traveled and the hills they saw from the water were usually thick with trees. They were burned in some places by Indians, who needed places to conduct their agriculture, but otherwise they seemed totally to carpet the land. Red and white pine forests; oak and chestnut forests, copses of hickory and cottonwood; groves of aspen, birch, maple, and cedar; stands of balsam fir, oak, ash, and walnut—all these and more make their way into the journals of Lewis and Clark, for whom scarcely a day went by without some mention of a tree or a wood or the worrisome absence of woodland where the explorers had believed it should be.

Though Lewis had some scant botanical training, the two were focused primarily on the commercial possibilities of timbering, not forest science per se. Early America ran on wood. People had an urgent need of it for every aspect of life, from fuel to housing, from boatbuilding to the making of crude paper and the construction of that most esteemed emblem of pioneer life, the log cabin. And in those settled parts of the country, wood was abundant. From the white pine forests of Maine to the magnolias of South Carolina and the elms and chestnuts, the cottonwoods and willows of Missouri Territory, the stripling America was bristling with trees.

Except, as William Clark was aware, this suddenly was not so anymore, on the west bank of the upper reaches of the Missouri River. Up on these riverbanks, sometimes close to the river, on other occasions some great distance away, and first seen in the long reaches upstream from where the river makes its directional shift from the west to the north, there appeared glimpses of a landscape now in a state of arboreal undress, much changed from what had gone before.

What Clark glimpsed was a relatively treeless brown-green country, stretching away into a violet horizon that was longer and flatter than any that these hill-born Easterners had ever witnessed or imagined before. It was landscape laid out, flatly undulating, beneath a sky so big it was overwhelming. It was a new kind of prairie, a limitless tableland of grass, a huge grazing-plain, with a wind that soughed near-constantly above the vegetation, the temperature of the drifting air the only clue to the season. Its sky was flecked with mare’s tails of clouds, where lightning could be seen a hundred miles distant and you could watch the black storms chewing their way toward you, the sky suddenly darkening overhead as the squalls arrived and smashed down wafting curtains of hail until the earth was quite white and crunched underfoot, though within moments the reappearing sun then melted it away, steam suddenly began to rise from the grass, and you could almost hear the plants bursting upward in the newly made and richly damp sauna of heat. America was someday to be a united nation, for sure, but in places its newly seen landscape evidently comprised the greatest imaginable differences.

The explorers had reached the eastern edge of that immense, hitherto mostly unseen and uniquely American geographical phenomenon: the Great Plains. Uniquely American, but not unique: there is no shortage of vast midcontinental expanses elsewhere—the Russian steppes, the African veldt, the Argentine pampas, and even some African savannas all offer much the same confluence of flattened topography, pitiless windblown climate, and endlessly unvarying botanical covering. But in America, the Great Plains have been sintered into what is now a cultural, as well as a geographic, entity—a tract of thinly settled grassland of between half a million and a million and a half square miles, depending on the chosen boundaries, a place and an entity that is now an essential component of what America has made of herself, part of the country’s shared triumph and, for many years, part of the narrative of her shared national tragedy, too.

The Great Plains boundaries are fugitive, vague lines that shift from year to year, drift from climate to climate, or wander and wobble like the polar axis. The sudden upsurge of the Rocky Mountains more or less marks their western limit. In the east, where Lewis and Clark became the first confirmed American explorers to encounter them,⁵ their boundary is ill defined at best. Some like to suggest that the Missouri itself provides the line. The land on the river’s eastern side is thick with lush vegetation, the soil so Russian black and damp and rich that some have remarked that it might as well be eaten without any need to pass vegetables through it. The lands on the far side, by contrast, are said to be parched and dusty, their grasses scrawny and patchy, and such meadows as exist having a persistent brown and sun-scorched look about them. But this is all a fancy; scarcely anywhere along the river is the division ever so neat and clear-cut. In fact, seldom can a traveler from the east be entirely sure he has truly entered the plains proper until their presence, after miles of slow and subtle alterations, becomes fully—and to some stunningly, even alarmingly—obvious. And that has little to do with the changing nature of soils or vegetation: it is generally when all the visible world around seems sky and endless curved horizons, where nothing else seems to exist before or behind or on either side but an apparently limitless, wind-hissing emptiness.

Though geology and glacial history have determined the extent and topography of the plains, it is quite simply rainfall—or rather, its lack—that is the real key to their existence. The climate patterns here are so classic that they might be lifted from a textbook. The huge, moisture-laden weather systems that trundle relentlessly eastward across the continent from the Pacific Ocean are forced upward as they pass over the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies; this ascent cools the air, reducing its capacity to hold water. Gravity then insists it fall as rain or snow on the crags below.

What happens next determines the fate of the plains; by the time the weather systems are done with the mountains and swish downward from the heights on their eastward drift, they are exhausted, wrung out, and bone-dry. They roll on for hundreds of airborne miles without immediate purpose, without maturing clouds, and without the will or ability to deposit any further moisture on the grounds below.

The flatlands beyond the Rockies thus lie in a rain shadow, and the vegetation that grows or clings to life within it is peculiar and appropriate to the waterlessness it imposes. And since the vegetation is almost always the key to both animal and human settlement, the role of these flatlands in at least the beginnings of the American story was as fully determined by it as in any other settled corner of the planet. Just as the Inuit and the polar bear inhabit the northern snow country, just as the Tuareg and the camel make their own very different kind of living in the hot African deserts, and just as the San and the Yamana and the Ainu and the Kazakh all adapt to their own unique habitats according to climate, topography, and the local flora and fauna, so too in these prairie parts one finds people and creatures uniquely suited to the conditions: the Comanche and the prairie dog, the Sioux and the rattlesnake, and all of the other Plains Indians—the Blackfoot, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Crow—together with uncountable millions of the single species of animal that once so dominated and symbolized the grass-covered landscapes here, the American bison.

The plains grasses from which these bison fashion their cud are of very different kinds and appearance, depending largely on the rainfall, the mean temperatures, and the thickness of the soil. Latitude plays its own part, of course; but longitude has the greater role in dividing each from each. Generally speaking, the Great Plains extend between the 95th and 105th meridians—with the midline, the line marking 100 degrees west of Greenwich, denoting by tidy coincidence the approximate limit of twenty inches of rainfall a year: west of the line is drier, true rain-shadow country, while to its east the rainfall becomes ever more abundant and more steady. Altitude plays a part also: because the plains generally slope downward from west to east, from the Rockies to the Missouri River, the western plains are higher, the made-for-movies hardscrabble country of the High Plains, indeed.

This is the great Dust-Bowl-to-be country, rarely much good for agriculture, where otherwise munificent bankers were traditionally reluctant to lend to settlers who were proposing to live there and farm. In this western dry country, the plains are dominated by very short tufted grasses like fescue and needlegrass, and later by hardy imports like crested wheatgrass.

On the 100th meridian itself, in the midplains, there is more of a mix. In what is now Nebraska, say, with its wide, empty farm fields, Willa Cather’s famous “shaggy coat of the prairie” has a pile six feet high at least, made of deep big bluestem, Panicum witchgrass, wild rye, perennial tussock grasses like yellow Indiangrass, and a weave of flowering timothy and blue grama. (The last is a prairie grass that currently displays its own limitations, for it manages at once to be sufficiently abundant to be the official state grass of Colorado and yet is classified as endangered only five hundred miles east in Illinois, whose western counties, if not quite the Great Plains, are very much a part of the tallgrass prairie.)

Lewis and Clark saw all of these grasses—even timothy, the only non-native of the group, which had been introduced from Europe more than a century before and had spread across the nation with astonishing speed. But one plant they would not have seen, despite its now being a near-legendary symbol of the plains—was tumbleweed.

The image of tumbleweed—a ghostly botanical thing looking like a bouffant hairpiece, bouncing steadily across a dusty road before a cold and gritty wind, lodging itself eventually in a barbed-wire fence—is persistent, emblematic, frequently adopted by Hollywood, and generally best viewed on the screen in black-and-white. In most cases, the plant involved is the Russian thistle, Salsola tragus, a pest of a weed, loathed by farmers. The reason Lewis and Clark never reported seeing it is that they arrived too early on the scene by many decades: the vanguard of the tumbleweed invasion came with the accidental importation of thistle seeds in a sack of flax brought to the Dakotas by settlers in the 1870s, six decades after the Corps of Discovery had passed by. It is now just about everywhere, occurring clear across the middle country, from the dusty American West to the lush soils of the Missouri Valley.

It was the eastern tallgrass prairie that Lewis and Clark would have first glimpsed when they made initial contact with the plains during their gentle upriver paddle through what is now Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. On July 4, for instance, when the party was near Leavenworth, Kansas, Clark wrote:

The Plains of this countrey are covered with a Leek Green Grass, well calculated for the sweetest and most nourishing hay—interspersed with cops of trees. Spreding their lofty branches over Pools Springs or Brooks of fine water. Groops of shrubs covered with the most delicious froot is to be seen in every direction, and nature appears to have exerted herself to butify the Senery by the variety of flours … raised above the Grass, which Strikes and profumes the Sensation, and amuses the mind.

Clark’s “Leek Green Grass” of 1804 is simply today’s big bluestem, the classic of the tall grasses. Its appearance among the scattered copses here hints at the borderline between prairie proper and Great Plains. And Clark is prescient indeed in remarking on its “sweetness” and on the “froot.” This tract of countryside, with its two-foot-deep soil that once gave support to these long grasses, would (once John Deere had perfected his steel plow blade in the 1830s to create a splendid tilth) become America’s present-day granary, with section after section laid to the endless acres of wheat and corn of the richest and most productive grain belt in the world.

But that is the eastern edge, where the soils are rich and fertile. Just six scant weeks and seven hundred miles later, when the expedition had come to what is now Fort Thompson, South Dakota, all had changed. The men had by now passed the mouth of the sand-laden Platte River. Frontiersmen scorned this long and wandering stream, “a mile wide and six inches deep,” as “too thick to drink, too thin to plow,” and held that passing northward over it held a symbolism similar to crossing the equator. The explorers were now in a harsher, drier territory, a wilderness of small braided streams, alkaline flats, and immense buffalo herds, where small cottonwood groves grew only in the deeper stream valleys and where the rich planting soil had given way to rougher grazing land, as Lewis himself noted:

I found the country in every direction for about three miles intersected with deep revenes and steep irregular hills of 100 to 200 feet high; at the tops of these hills the country breaks of as usual into a fine leavel plain extending as far as the eye can reach … [T]he surrounding country had been birnt about a month before and young grass had now sprung up to a hight of 4 Inches presenting the live green of the spring … [T]his scenery already rich pleasing and beautiful, was still hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe deer Elk and Antelopes which we saw on every direction feeding on the hills and plains.

North of the Platte, they had now passed into the true short-grass prairie, and they would have made it farther west, perhaps into the High Plains themselves, had not winter intervened. The first snows came in October. The Missouri was by now substantially shallower, slower moving, and, free of the Platte sands, clearer and purer. As destined by its hydrodynamics it soon started to freeze, and the expedition was obliged to set down its planned winter camp.

By now the expedition had already begun to encounter scatterings of Indians—and in November would meet with one group of Native Americans—and one Native American in particular—who would profoundly change the tempo, the temper, and the reputation of their adventure.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SIOUX

The smallest commercial nuclear power station in America is in Nebraska, standing slightly sheepishly on the west bank of the Missouri. Since 1973 it has supplied with a fair degree of constancy (though lately interrupted by flooding) a modest amount of electric power to the city of Omaha, forty miles to its south. It is officially the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Generating Station, and it stands more or less on the very point, just around river milepost 645, where Lewis and Clark had their first official meeting with a delegation of Indian chiefs.

The encounter took place on August 3, 1804, three months out from Saint Charles. The chiefs were from one of the country’s lesser seminomadic peoples, the Otoe tribe. They were not the first Indians the explorers had seen. Every so often, Clark noted in his diary having passed by trapper boats, with usually a Frenchman and a native client aboard, but these Otoe were the first to be properly and formally met. And the explorers were fully prepared for them, backed as they were by the full authority of the White House, with dozens of preprinted forms on stiff white card ready to hand out when appropriate.

“Know ye,” the opening of each card declared, that the United States government “will be at all times extended to (your protection), so long as (you) acknowledge the authority of the same.” In other words: enter into a treaty of peace and amity with Washington and the white men, and expect protection, harmony, and good neighborliness. Refuse, and face the consequences.

It is not entirely clear from the diaries that the Otoe people were either at first given or were thought to entirely merit the gift of this handsomely printed peace offering. They were certainly not to be offered the very highest quality of the three kinds of peace medals, each with President Jefferson’s profile on one side, which the party carried with them. The Otoe were, after all, regarded as something of a second-rate tribe. They were seen as a small group of interlopers from Lake Superior. Though they may well have adopted the modus vivendi of the Plains Indians and so had once (smallpox had drastically reduced their numbers) been given to riding horses,⁶ hunting buffalo, carrying their goods behind them on a pair of parallel ground-scraping sticks called a travois, and living in small villages of tepees, they were not, in fact, considered quite the real thing. Such ceremonial as they might be offered would be little more than a rehearsal for the bigger events to come.

But whether giving adequate gifts or not, Lewis and Clark nonetheless made impressive-sounding speeches to their six visiting chiefs, making each side feel diplomatically important. Lewis, a dour and introspective man at the best of times, delivered a gloomy and foreboding address that would prove the model for almost all of his future speeches: it was perhaps not the kind of address to suggest amity and cooperation. “Children,” he told the assembled indigenes, “obey … the great Chief the President who is now your only great father … he is the only friend to whome you can now look for protection … He has sent us out to clear the road, remove every obstruction … lest by one false step you should bring upon your nation the displeasure of your greater father, who could consume you as the fire consumes the grass of the plains.”

Yet there were as many carrots as sticks. The men handed out packages, some for the arrivals, others of greater worth to be delivered to the absent seniors. Included in the gift boxes, besides presidential medallions of the second and third class, was a jackdaw clutch of beads, tomahawks, scissors, a comb, some mirrors, and American flags. For good measure, Lewis offered a bottle of whiskey and then fired his rifle into the air, astonishing the visitors and underlining the power and potential authority of these boat-borne strangers.

It was not necessarily the most auspicious meeting, but it was important enough for the party to name the place Council Bluff. Today there is a bright steel memorial marking the site, with a peace pipe and a shiny steel arrow shaft above the inscription, which records the event. The nuclear power plant hums just a few miles away.

(The important-sounding name of the place has since, however, been shifted both across the river, into another state, and a dozen miles downstream. Council Bluff, Nebraska, has become recast and pluralized as Council Bluffs, Iowa, a sprawling riverside city of railway trains and gambling casinos, which is now the better-known memorial to the meeting. When I visited Lewis and Clark Overlook here, a senior manager of the Federal Reserve Bank’s Omaha branch was offering at full volume an expansive history of the Corps of Discovery’s route. He seemed not to be aware—most aren’t—that the crucial first meeting with Indians actually took place upstream, where instead of this overlook there is the rather less impressive metal monument, of just the peace pipe and the arrow.)

There was actually another meeting with Indians from the same tribe two weeks later. But by then the explorers were consumed with misery over the sickness of one of their own, Sergeant Charles Floyd, who died of a ruptured appendix during the talks. He was buried nearby; his grave, a miniature Washington Monument–like affair near Sioux City, still stands. He was the only member of the party to die during the expedition, was the first American soldier to die west of the Missouri, and most probably also was the first to die west of the Mississippi.

This time they did hand one of Jefferson’s peace-and-amity cards to a quite naked Indian chief, only to be mightily offended that he handed it right back and said he preferred to have more of the enticing-looking goods the Corps had lodged in their canoes. He had to be told off, and sharply. Through an interpreter named Mr. Fairfong, words were spoken, and the Indian left with a flea in his ear.

If the Otoe were not quite the genuine article, the next native inhabitants to be formally encountered most definitely were. It was at the end of August, after the Corps had crossed what is now the James River, near the town of Yankton, South Dakota, when they encountered a third and rather more important group of native inhabitants. By this time they were becoming fascinated by the astonishing abundance of wildlife on the Plains—huge gatherings of buffalo, antelope (which they called goats, as some locals still do), prairie dogs, jackrabbits, magpies, bull snakes, mule deer, elks, coyotes. To men who had spent their years in the eastern woodlands, where wildlife was quite scarce, this was beyond belief: only the French trappers who traveled with them as hired interpreters exhibited (typically, one might say) an unimpressed sangfroid.

But late one Monday afternoon at the end of the month, a young Indian boy swam fearlessly out to their boats, and the expedition made its first encounter with the tribe for whom President Jefferson had most especially instructed the soldiers to watch out: the Sioux. Once others had gathered to supervise the youngster’s meeting, William Clark took a long look at them and declared himself mightily impressed:

The Souix [sic]⁷ is a Stout bold-looking people (the young men hand Som) & well made. The Warriors are Verry much deckerated with Porcupin quils & feathers, large leagins and mockersons, all with buffalow roabs of Different Colours. The Squars wore Peticoats and white Buffalow roabs.

Whatever the Otoe had been, these men at last were true Plains Indians, most certainly. They were a people of great number and power, and most assuredly not to be trifled with. Yet the white man did trifle with them from the very beginning—by first calling them something they did not call themselves. They had long termed themselves the Dakota. The name Sioux is a complicated French corruption of a much more complex Ojibwa word and, so far as is known, has been employed since the mid-1700s: the Irish-born colonial official Sir William Johnson, who traded with the Indians from his home in New York, wrote in his diary for 1761, “I picked up a pair of shoes made by the Sioux Indin to the westward.”

Properly the Sioux formed a part—an extremely large part—of the Plains Indians. The Sioux linguistic group (the easiest means of classification, ethnologists say) enfolded an immense area that arched from the upper Mississippi River in Minnesota’s Thousand Lakes region clear across to the Rocky Mountain foothills in Montana and Wyoming, down in the east to Texas, and down in the west to parts of western South Dakota. Confusingly, several Plains tribes were not members of the Great Sioux Nation—the Blackfoot and the Gros Ventre tribes to their west were not, nor were the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Pawnee to their south. (The Ojibwa, the Kickapoo, and the Illinois beyond to the east were not part of the Sioux Nation, nor were they Plains Indians at all.)

Within the Sioux Nation there were three main groups, based on subtle differences in their language. In the west were the Lakota and Teton Sioux; toward the east, such groups as the Santee and the Osage; and here where Lewis and Clark first met them, the Yankton. Each—together with their many subgroups, most of these more sedentary than the endlessly nomadic Sioux proper—had a reputation for power, determination, and utter fearlessness.

The best-known of their number, Crazy Horse—the leader who in 1876 oversaw the defeat and death of George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn—remains their most vivid exemplar. Sitting Bull, who did much to unite the various Plains Indian tribes to resist the depredations of the whites and whose spirit oversaw the same battle, is another; he was one of the historical figures chosen (if somewhat controversially) by President Obama in a book published in 2009 as a role model for his young daughters.

Both men seemed tougher than tungsten. Sitting Bull, bowlegged from a life in the saddle, seemed to have had an unlucky left side: he limped because he had been shot in the left foot by a Crow Indian, he had a wound in his left hip after being shot there by a soldier, and he had taken an arrow in his left forearm after a tussle with a posse of Flatheads. Before his backstage role at Little Bighorn, he offered a sacred pledge of a hundred pieces of his own flesh and sat with bovine stoicism while his brother carved fifty tiny morsels out of each of his arms. Small wonder that the Lewis and Clark Expedition diaries offer similar tales of Indian grace under pressure: of Sioux warriors who walked unflinching into any battle, unprotected; and of a group marching on ice who disregarded cracks and fell through and drowned, with those following disdaining the idea of walking around, but marching ahead regardless.

Matters might have turned out more peaceably if Lewis and Clark had realized from the start the immense pride of these peoples and the significance of the Sioux’s samurai-like code. For although the meetings in the autumn of 1804 between those first Yankton Sioux, and then on a later occasion in September with the much more belligerent Teton Sioux, both went well enough, the encounters in hindsight turned out to be the starting points in a spiral of hostility between the ever-westward-moving whites and a people—an enemy, in time—who turned out to be case-hardened, imperturbable, and initially well-nigh undefeatable.

The explorers might have suspected something from the uneasiness of their meeting with the Teton on September 23. For although it did end well, there was a potentially dangerous row—the Teton chiefs wanted tobacco and wouldn’t let the boats pass upstream until they were given some. Lewis lost his temper, cast off his fleet, and contemptuously threw a number of carrots of tobacco onto the bank. The Teton, on a hair trigger, might have slaughtered the expedition members there and then—but accepted the tobacco without the slight and let the ropes go.

It was a small enough event. But even though over time white Americans and some Indian tribes developed a degree of mutual understanding and friendship, in general there grew a deep and pervasive mutual loathing between them, a hatred that metastasized during the rest of the century, marked by attacks, skirmishes, battles, and eventually in 1876 by an all-out nation-enfolding war—with Custer’s famous Last Stand at Little Bighorn its most especially savage episode.

Savage from the white perspective, that is. Fourteen years later a welling-up of white revenge led to an even greater tragedy, one never to be forgotten by any Native American. It was in the winter of 1890 that US cavalrymen, many legatees of the Little Bighorn battle, descended en masse on a group of 120 Lakota Sioux, all members of the mystical and mysterious and much-feared group known as the Ghost Dancers. The soldiers herded them, together with more than 230 women and children, along the banks of the Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in what is now South Dakota. And there, on the bitterly cold, snow-dusted final Monday morning of the year, and after a brief altercation that acted as a tragic tripwire, the soldiers opened fire on them—shooting with their rifles and, most notably, with four newly bought rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannon, which in a matter of minutes mowed down the trapped Indians by the score, the detonations of their enormous shells creating a true bloodbath.

At the very least, 150 Sioux and their families died in the chaos of the shooting. Once the cavalrymen had lowered their weapons, nature conspired to render the scene more permanent, as frigid weather rolled in from the west to consolidate and harden the day’s terrible handiwork. It snowed a full Dakota blizzard, and when it eased the bodies were left frozen in grotesque and unforgettable contortions. There is a famous, shameful photograph of the leader Spotted Elk, his body etched with snow, his arms frozen by cold or rigor, seemingly trying to get up from the ground, pinioned in icebound pain, his face the picture of purest agony.

The Massacre at Wounded Knee left a panorama of memory that of course Lewis and Clark can never have imagined—yet some may say that their occasionally high-handed behavior toward those who had inhabited the lands over which they ventured must have played some part in sowing the seeds of ill will, and which culminated in so much eventual misery. The intent of the men and their president may have been noble; national unity may have been their distant aim; and yet division, in later years, was to be at least one unintended consequence.

FIRST LADY OF THE PLAINS

Yet not all of their encounters with American Indians were so fraught. It was some few weeks later, in November, when the winter chill had begun to freeze the rivers and farther upstream travel was proving difficult, then impossible, that they first met up with a middle-aged French fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau and his two wives—one of whom, most memorably, was a heavily pregnant fifteen-year old Shoshone girl named Sacagawea. A captive youngster from an Indian tribe based in the distant western mountains, she would become in time an unforgettable, romantic American heroine and perhaps one of the better-remembered human legacies that the Great Plains would bestow upon President Jefferson’s great unifying expedition.

By now the men had moved beyond the main Sioux lands and had reached the territory of three of the lesser Indian tribes, the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Hidatsa (the latter also for some reason known by the French who met them as the Gros Ventre, or Big Belly), which were all affiliated with and linguistically part of the Sioux. But unlike the nomadic Sioux proper, these tribes were in the main sedentary farmers, who raised crops (developing a strain of maize still planted today) and kept dogs and livestock, and (long after their encounter with Lewis and Clark) who died in massive numbers of a smallpox epidemic.

But in 1804 they were healthy, numbered in the thousands, and lived in large circular earthen lodges arranged in villages, in groups of twenty or thirty. They were a people who had not entirely abandoned travel: on occasion their hunters set off on horseback to bag buffalo. But the Mandan in particular were generally more homebodies and quite amiably disposed to all. The Hidatsa people by contrast were still wanderers and frequently took off westward for the distant mountains, to hunt not only for food but to seize new horses, once in a while to collect Indian slaves, and from time to time to give a few old enemies a bit of a hiding.

On Sunday, November 4, while the expedition team was building its heart-shaped stockade (a fort “so strong to be almost cannonball proof,” it was noted), the French Canadian trader named Toussaint Charbonneau arrived from his home in a nearby Hidatsa village, asked for work as an interpreter, and was hired more or less on the spot.

Charbonneau had worked for the North West Company for some years and had lived with the Hidatsa most of that time. We know from the expedition diaries just a little of his appearance—that he was small and dark—and a little more of his character; he was said to have been cowardly and aggressive by turn, valued initially only as a translator, though later found to be indispensable for expedition morale as a talented maître de cuisine. But though his early worth may have been trifling, that of the younger of his two wives, Sacagawea, has since become inestimable—even if her value may have been magnified and driven by the popular demand for compelling narrative, and maybe also by a need to introduce a decisively female personality into the largely male-dominated world of the Western story.

No one has the slightest idea of what Sacagawea looked like, though there has been much speculation and invention. Fanciful images of her—in oils, watercolors, mosaics, pastels, cartoons—are plentiful. The Iowa-born white all-American beauty Donna Reed played her in one older movie (with Charlton Heston playing Clark and Fred MacMurray as Lewis), and more recently a Japanese Cherokee actress named Mizuo Peck did so in two others. Sacagawea stamps, mountain peaks, and rivers abound. The eighteen best-known American statues⁸ of Sacagawea usually display a tall, robed woman of classically noble bearing, invariably carrying, papoose-style, the boy child she bore in camp in February 1805. His name was Jean-Baptiste, but the expedition members more familiarly called him Pomp. (Clark could never get his tongue around Sacagawea’s proper name and called her Janey instead.)

But while the artistic world might allow some license, the United States Mint is more severe in its demands. To present as accurately imagined a profile as possible for the gold-tinted Sacagawea dollar coin required some rather more intelligent speculation. The coin artist chosen by the Treasury eventually chose as her model a twenty-two-year-old college student named Randy’L He-dow Teton, a Shoshone from Idaho who won some lasting fame as the girl on the coin and has since become a motivational speaker for the American Indian cause.

By general consensus Sacagawea is thought to have been a Shoshone from the mountains of Montana or Idaho captured by a Hidatsa raiding party. Many others claim evidence that suggests quite the opposite: that she was a Plains Indian, a member of the Hidatsa tribe all along, who had actually been captured by Shoshone raiders and spirited back to their lair in the Rockies, from which she escaped and managed to get all the way back to the Plains with the help of (the story at this point somewhat straining belief) a party of sympathetic wolves.

To judge from the expedition diaries, in which Sacagawea is seldom named as anything but “the Squaw,” there is little evidence she did a vast amount for the explorers. There is no suggestion, in particular, that she enjoyed an affair with Clark, as Donna Reed so luridly did with Charlton Heston, though the fact she gave him two dozen white weasel tails as a Christmas present was apparently enough to set Hollywood’s imagination going. Her quick thinking may once have saved some of the expedition papers from getting waterlogged when one of the pirogues tipped over. She was helpful in recognizing parts of the Western landscape from her childhood memories, and she was able to nudge the scouts to cross a particular mountain pass she knew. She was helpful as a translator and interpreter of the Shoshone language and of those other tongues that were its linguistic kin, and she knew a little French, as did Captain Lewis.

Probably her most valuable contribution was her simple presence. She was a Native American, a woman, and a mother. She traveled with her child. Any expedition that included so innocent a member could not—at least to the many Native Americans who might be encountered—pose a threat of any kind. Sacagawea thus became, unwittingly if not unwillingly, the key that opened the gates of the West and allowed the white men through.

HIGH PLAINS RAFTERS

When the winter broke and the prairie ice had begun to melt, the party set off again. They sent their big iron boat back downriver, laden with reports, specimens,⁹ and booty for the White House. But in their two original pirogues, together with half a dozen newly made cottonwood canoes, Lewis and Clark, along with most of their soldiery, their new interpreters, and Sacagawea and Pomp, set off upstream. It was April 7, 1805.

There was a general mood of excitement and no little regret at leaving, even among the men. During the previous six months, there had been plenty of sexual activity—the Mandan Indians were generous in offering their wives’ favors to the visitors, and the irritations of syphilis (with which many of the locals had been infected, reputedly by the French trappers) and the frequent need for mercury-ointment treatments were getting frankly tiresome. “We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width,” Meriwether Lewis wrote later, apparently without any intended punning, “on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden.”

At first there were many miles of loneliness and heartache—the plains desolate, the rivers shallow and fast with snowmelt, the winds “violent” and incessant, and the breath of Canada—for the territory they explored was just a few miles south of the present boundaries of Manitoba and Saskatchewan—intense and unpleasantly chill. Initially they did not encounter any Indians, other than a dead man they found on a specially built coffin-platform, offerings to the gods scattered beside him. But they did see a good deal of new wildlife: the terrifically dangerous and nearly unkillable grizzly bears most notably, as well as gophers, bald eagles, mule deer, bighorn sheep, prairie rattlesnakes, a kind of avocet, and a snipelike bird now called a willet.

There were new plants, too—such as the just-about-edible white-apple-like prairie turnip (which Sacagawea munched and seemed to enjoy) and in the drier plains the prickly pear, which painfully abraded the soldiers’ feet during the ever-more-necessary portages. And there were minerals, most especially long outcrops of the coal that is so important a part of the economy of the western plains today. The immense Union Pacific and BNSF coal trains that rumble along the horizons on their way out of the region today provide a visually appropriate kind of mobile legacy, a memorial to the expedition that first noted the wealth underground.

A month later the men, still on the ever-narrowing Missouri, were past the confluence with the Yellowstone River and two weeks later still were gliding through a peculiarly harsh landscape that is nowadays known as the Missouri Breaks, lying within the boundaries of the giant state of Montana. Lewis loved the place. His writings here were more cheerful and lyrical than at almost any other place in the odyssey. He even sees a peculiar beauty in the strange bleakness of the landscape, where the river twisted through the loneliness, with its white canyon cliffs speared through with dark patches of volcanic rocks that hint at the mountains that we now know are ahead. That the Breaks, a region so far away from the main western trails, a territory that is sparsely settled and has been largely unpopulated and unfarmed for most of its history, would later become infamous as a hiding place for outlaws and brigands only adds to an allure that Lewis can never have imagined.

Both Lewis and Clark believed that an immense range of mountains lay some way before them, and Clark first spied them from the Missouri Breaks. The distance had unrolled furiously in the weeks before: they had now done 2,387 miles since leaving Saint Louis. It was Sunday, May 26:

… assended a part of the plain elevated much higher … from this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time with Certainty.¹⁰ I could only discover a fiew of the most elevated points above the horizon. The most remarkable of which by my pocket Compas I found bore S.60W. Those points of the rocky Mountain were Covered with Snow and the Sun Shown on it in Such a manner as to give me a most plain and Satisfactory view. Whilst I viewed those Mountains I felt a Secret pleasure in find myself So near the head of the heretofore Conceived boundless Missouri.

Before they could reach the mountains, there were still many more days of difficult slogging—none more so than when they came to the Great Falls of the Missouri and had to portage around the rapids for the better part of a month. But by now the landscape was dramatically different from anything they had seen since coming through the Appalachians: up on the foothills there were trees again, and before long the foothills gave way to mountains, grander mountains than they had ever seen before. They would soon slice deep into them, and pass the Continental Divide, and begin their steady drop down to the ocean they knew on the far side.

PASSING THE GATEWAY

There is something indescribably magical about Montana, and every experience I have had in the state, in more than thirty years of visiting, has been a good one. Most of the events on which I now look back so fondly took place along the same long, scimitar-curved route Lewis and Clark took when they first came through and spent their twenty weeks there. Here they are, recalled not in chronological order but according to their location along the line that the Corpsmen followed as they paddled upstream and then finally as they lifted their boats out of the ever smaller and shallower rivers and walked across the great Divide.

The men—led by Lewis only; Clark and a small group had gone a different way—entered the Rockies by way of a narrow rock-walled defile that Lewis named the Gates of the Mountains. It is still called that, and for good reason. A curious optical illusion confronts anyone who boats upstream toward the towering line of cliffs, more than a thousand feet high, that marks the leading edge of the range. The river initially seems to vanish into the rock itself until, just a few score yards before you are dashed against the cliff face, an opening appears, an opening that, as your boat moves left and right with the current, seems to open and close, as if with sliding doors. Or gates. The river is little more than a hundred yards across—the entrance to the Rockies, the river’s exit, is spectacularly slender, half hidden, secret.

I had never seen the Gates; and on the day I arrived by car from the state capital, Helena, ten miles away, it looked unlikely that I would see them. I was upstream, above the defile; it was a Sunday, in early spring, and there were no boats to hire. It was more or less impossible to walk along the cliff edge, and much of the land was in any case private. I was glum indeed—until a fisherman pulled his car down to the water’s edge and began to ease his aluminum boat off the trailer and into the lake. He introduced himself—Jeff Key—and his ten-year-old son, Jason. They were spending the day trolling for trout. When I explained who I was and what I was doing, there was no hesitation. Hop in, Jeff said; Jason won’t mind a few hours’ delay. There’ll be plenty of fish.

And so downstream we went, driving gently down the twists and turns of the canyon, the water slapping happily against the hull, the sun glinting on the water. We had to crane our necks and squint into the sky to see the tops of the peaks, each crowned with lodgepole pine, balsam, and aspen.

At one stage, on the west side of the river, there were some Indian pictographs, tricked out in black and ocher, and then a scar of landscape where greenery seemed a little newer, the trees a little shorter. This was the valley, the Mann Gulch, where there had been a terrible uncontrollable forest fire in 1949—the most fearsome kind, known as a crown fire—in which thirteen men had died. Norman Maclean had written a classic book: Young Men and Fire, which told the saga of the smoke jumpers who had been dropped in and who, when the fire suddenly boiled and turned, had been burned alive or had suffocated that day. It told of how an escape fire had been burned that might have offered them a way out, but the men’s radio, which might have told them about it, had been smashed when its parachute failed to open. The Mann Gulch Fire is a legendary episode, a lesson in how not to fight infernos, which forest firefighters use in classrooms still.

And though the event occurred more than sixty years ago, it still resonates. A short while after my visit, a relative of one of the dead men—who was Jewish—came to these hills with a Star of David to replace the cross that had memorialized him. The other tiny monuments can be seen from the river, a scattering of white against the fresh green of the undergrowth, dotted up the impossibly steep hillside. Fire can rage uphill with astonishing speed. A man can hardly run up such a slope at all. Such was the core of the tragedy, all those years ago.

But finally we came out of this gloomy canyon with its macabre memories and out into a burst of sunlight: we were back in the flatlands all of a sudden, the river now coursing through the Big Sky country that gives Montana its current nickname. Jeff turned his boat around—and as he did so, we were able to see just what Meriwether Lewis had seen more than two centuries before: the immense black gates of the Rocky Mountains, opening and closing slowly before us as the boat pirouetted in the water. It was mesmerizing; small wonder Lewis was so enthralled. Since the beginning of the adventure, his world had been dominated by the horizontal. Now it had been upended, and the dominance belonged entirely to the vertical.

We stayed for half an hour, admiring, remembering; and then my companions remembered that they were bent on fishing. So Jeff then gunned his motor and sped back upriver, finally depositing us on the dock where we had started, by the very place where Lewis camped on that celebrated night of July 19, 1805. The expedition leader had been overjoyed at getting to the mountains, but when he heard a single shot ring out, he suddenly imagined a Blackfoot war party bearing down on them. It turned out to be a signal from Clark, telling his colleagues that he was over the mountains, too.

I tried to thank Jeff and to apologize for taking his time and spoiling his son’s holiday fishing. But he said it was nothing, that it had been his pleasure. At least let me pay for your gasoline, I said.

“No,” he replied, quite firmly. “Remember: this is Montana!”

Later that day, when I was in Helena, I decided to buy a copy of one of my more recent books and send it to Jeff and Jason as a gift for their kindness. Jeff had given me his address. There was just one bookstore open on this April Sunday. By good fortune it had what I wanted. I signed the back suitably, and asked the elderly lady behind the counter if she would gift-wrap it and mail it. I then paid, said my farewells—only just as I was leaving, I realized to my shame that I hadn’t paid for postage. I turned back to the desk.

The lady looked at his address and smiled. “I’ll drop it by his house on my way home tonight,” she said. “It’ll be no problem.”

I thanked her, effusively. She shushed me.

“I said it’s no problem,” she repeated. “You have to remember: this is Montana!”

The party had to deal with a river that was now fast diminishing, in width, in depth, in strength. It was a river that would soon cease to be and instead would split into what would be recognized as its three main tributaries. Sacagawea had already told the leaders what they could expect, and she had already recognized the Gates. She also knew that the three forks, as she called the place, were only a few miles distant.

And it was just eight days after entering the Gates—on July 27—that they reached this point of the great divergence—a watery plain, with groves of willow, box elder, and cottonwood, towering mountains on all sides in the distance. They had come 2,833 miles upriver: the Missouri had turned out to be a mighty long stream indeed. But now, close to its source, it was quite something else; and Lewis and Clark gave its three feeder rivers the names they retain today: the Gallatin, the Madison, and the Jefferson—named for the secretaries of war and state and for the president. There is nowadays a town of 1,700 or so at the junction: Three Forks, Montana.

The expedition party went through some small agonies of indecision at Three Forks. The choice was which of the tributary streams to follow. All looked of similar size and flow and navigational complication; all seemed to head down from the highest of the snow-topped ranges. In the end, they agreed to follow the Jefferson. It was the right choice, because within days they were high up in the clear cool air of the hills, paddling as best they could through streams only inches deep, getting themselves lost, having their notes to one another eaten by beavers, losing one of the men (a soldier named Shannon, who seemed to have a penchant for losing himself, as he had earlier gone missing for two weeks, and had lived for nine of those days entirely on wild grapes), sinking their canoes, and having to deal with men who were becoming ever more exhausted by the fetching and carrying they were having to do.

And then Sacagawea spotted a prominent rock, which she said her Shoshone people had named the Beaver’s Head, since from some angles it resembles such a thing. But she had actually made a mistake, so excited was she to give the good news. The real Beaver’s Head rock was another day’s passage upstream. Nonetheless, she was right to exclaim that they were now deep in her own remembered tribal territory. And so they were now also very close to the Continental Divide, the ridgeline that separates the streams that flow down eventually into the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean—like the Jefferson, its tributaries, and all the rivers below—from those that flow down eventually into the Pacific. They were close, in other words, to the expedition’s topographic and spiritual tipping point.

Lewis, who had gone on ahead, was the first to cross. Coming up from the streamside, he had seen an Indian on horseback standing in the trees and tried to make small talk. But the man had looked down in silence at all of Lewis’s attempts at friendship—unrolling a blanket, scattering gifts on it, offering his rifle, spreading his hands and showing he meant no harm—and then turned away, took off at a smart canter, and vanished into the brush. In doing so the man inadvertently led Lewis toward a hitherto unseen trail—a well-used Indian path that headed up to a mountain pass; and on Monday, August 12, Lewis and his small party of scouts plodded up it:

… at the distance of 4 miles further the road took us to the most distant fountain of the waters of the mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless nights … the mountains are high on either hand [and] leave this gap at the head of this rivulet through which the road passes … here I halted a few minutes and rested myself … we proceeded on to the top of the dividing range from which I discovered immence ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow. I now descended the mountain about ¾ of a mile which I found much steeper than on the opposite side to a handsome bold running Creek of cold Clear water. Here I tasted the water of the great Columbia river.

He was exactly right. Geographers today judge that first stream to be Horseshoe Bend Creek, which flows into the Lemhi River, thence to the Salmon and the Snake Rivers, and finally into the waters of the ever-westward-rolling great Columbia.

The pass he had crossed, which the rest of the party would traverse two weeks later, is now called the Lemhi, named for a figure in the Book of Mormon. It has never achieved commercial prominence: there was a stagecoach route for a few years, but when the railroad was built, it crossed the divide some miles south, over the Bannock Pass, and the main highway crossing was at Chief Joseph Pass, a few miles to the north. There is a rough grass track today, strewn with bluebells, lupines, and wild strawberries—looking not too different from the time when Lewis, Clark, and in later years the Blackfeet Indians crossed—a lonely mountain memorial to the Corps of Discovery Expedition.

The Lemhi Pass was not altogether wanting in importance, though, for it and the entire Continental Divide marked what would be for the next forty years the western boundary of the United States of America. Lewis and Clark strode across that grassy hilltop, out of America and into what was still then a foreign entity—and not even an organized country.

Getting this corner of the continent organized and alloyed into the Union proved a mammoth task. In six years’ time, this immense tract of land, extending from the Divide to the Pacific, would have its first formal name—the Columbia District. As such, it would be a formally organized fur-trading region of the North West Company, one of the two major beaver-fur suppliers in Canada. When ten years later the North West merged with its rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the region became known as the Columbia Department—although the Americans, who claimed free and open access to the territory along with Britain, preferred to call it Oregon Country. In 1818 the northern boundary of the country was set—by agreement, it should pass along the forty-ninth parallel, which went back east to the Great Lakes, en route traversing what the treaty documents called the Stony Mountains. In 1846, with yet another treaty, the federal government finally wrested total control of the lands away from London and named its new possession Oregon Territory. Last of all, in 1859, the most southwesterly quadrant was awarded formal statehood and named what it remains today: Oregon.

But of course none of that was in place when Lewis first breasted the ridge. What lay before Lewis that August was territory that had in fact been explored—though only to a very minimal extent and almost entirely from the distant Pacific—by sailor-explorers, a few of whom had been bold and curious enough to take their boats upriver along the Columbia. No one nation had initially claimed the land for any particular purpose—not Britain, Spain, France, or the United States, although a company operating from Montréal, the North West Company, was generally considered to have supervision. So what Lewis saw—the far snow-dusted mountain peaks and the rivers he thought would lead to the Columbia, were still Indian territories, still a confection of places to be brought into the federal fold.

In the mid-1990s, by which time Montana and Idaho had each been states for almost exactly a century, I spent $40,000 for a small tract of land in this corner of Montana, just to the north of the Chief Joseph Pass. Its fate tells much about one corner of the economy of the modern American West.

The land consisted of eighty acres, in the valley of the Bitterroot River between the towns of Hamilton and Darby. Lewis and Clark passed directly along this same valley, heading north through easy, beautiful country, before turning to the west and crossing over the snow-filled Lolo Pass into the headwaters of the Columbia. They remarked only casually on its beauty; I was captivated by it—by the views of the great jagged mountains to the west, by the chuckling of the waters of the impossibly clear and cold trout streams, by the green of the lush grasslands, by the smell of balsam firs, by the fugitive presence of bears and mountain lions and great stags, and by woods filled with birdsong. The small towns, too, had an easy, late-Victorian charm to them, and people still left their doors open and the keys in their cars and their children quite free to roam as wild as they wished. The big city of Missoula to the north was a friendly place, with a good university, fine bookshops—all that was needed for civilized life. My plan was to build a small log cabin on the land, to write there, and to live out an imagined Western dream.

Two things rapidly became apparent. The first was that others of far greater resources had much the same idea. Hollywood was starting to embrace the Bitterroot Valley. My immediate neighbors all turned out to be famous: a rock star named Huey Lewis and two actors, Christopher Lloyd and Andie MacDowell. Then there was talk that bankers and great figures of the financial world—Charles Schwab most notably—were considering buying ranches nearby. This led to the second realization: that the style of life I envisioned was something I could ill afford. Besides, I lived at the time in Hong Kong, eight thousand miles away across the Pacific Ocean. Montana might be heart-stoppingly beautiful, but it was beauty I was going to have to live without.

So a year after I bought the land, I did the dull and responsible thing: I sold it—this time for $80,000. My melancholy was somewhat assuaged by having made a tidy profit. Yet the decision saddened me. It rankled. Montana had long been central to my dream, and it was trying to have to accept that it was not to be.

It must have been twenty years later that I returned. I stayed with the realtor who had sold me the land and who had then sold it for me. She had prospered, mightily. She and her husband lived in a stupendous mansion, had property on the Pacific coast of Canada, and lived, by their own admission, tremendously well. The land boom I first noticed had been sustained, had become overwhelming. Huge houses were being built high up in the hills, expensive restaurants were everywhere, the local airstrip was busy with private planes, and the road through the valley—the very track Lewis and Clark had taken two centuries before—was jammed with shiny four-wheel-drive trucks. People were complaining about the difficulty of getting help, because for working people there was suddenly nowhere affordable to live locally, and in cafés I heard wealthy newcomers expressing amazement that their gardeners or pool boys had to drive sixty miles each way to get to work.

For four days the realtor and I explored the valley, fascinated, mouths agape at the way everything had changed, so dramatically and so very quickly. But the rich outsiders who had bought into the Bitterroot Valley were never there, someone remarked: they spent just a few days, then went off to some other equally opulent corner of the world—and, my friend remarked, by doing so they created a kind of absence, a kind of poverty. The sense of community that had made the valley towns so special had evaporated. The beauty and solitude of the place, the kind of world that Norman Maclean and Wallace Stegner had so loved, was fast vanishing. It had much more to do with money.

And with that, my friend drove me down to my land. She had been waiting to tell me about it. She hadn’t wanted to depress me further, she said. I wasn’t quite certain what she meant.

So we drove down the old road, bumped across the stream, and came to a small paved highway that hadn’t been there before. We breasted the ridge where there was a fence and a “Private, No Trespassing” sign. We parked the car. The air was heavy with the smell of pine needles and horse dust. Everything began to look and feel familiar, and then, as we rounded a bend in the track, there at last was my land—a long sloping parcel of yellowing grass and rock, and on it, a house of such appalling vulgarity as quite beggared belief. Eaves and arches, wings and columns and a mighty porte cochere, all done in white and ocher stucco, with a long black Escalade parked outside.

The house must have been unimaginably expensive. But what of the land, the eighty acres I had briefly cherished? My friend coughed discreetly and looked at her feet before replying. It had last been put on the market, she said quietly, for one and a quarter million dollars.

There is indeed something—for some—quite magical about Montana.

SHORELINE PASSAGE

From here it was downhill all the way for the explorers. Sacagawea was in her element here: this was Shoshone country, and she knew the language, remembered friends, and could and did persuade the local people to supply packhorses for the difficult trek downhill. As soon as the expedition members discovered among the forests and the crags the most navigable of the swarms of westbound streams—the frighteningly all-whitewater Lochsa, and then what they called the Kooskooskee, but which is now the Clearwater—they began their descent in earnest.

They built themselves another clutch of canoes by hollowing out ponderosa pine trunks with hot embers, then set off, screaming down mountain rivers that had a combined length of no more than 120 miles (in a straight line less than 80) until the hills flattened out and the rapids became ever more sluggish and steady waters.

When they had left the Bitterroot Mountain headwaters of the Lochsa River, they were at 7,000 feet. When they reached “the leavel pine Countrey” at the end of the Clearwater River, which coincides with the western edge of the Rockies, they were only 740 feet above sea level. The party had thus descended almost a hundred feet with every westward mile of travel, reaching with stark suddenness the bone-dry grasslands of what is now eastern Washington State. The Snake River joins and takes over the Clearwater here, with a river-bisected pair of towns once colorfully known as Ragtown and Jawbone Flats but now called the more respectful and anodyne Lewiston and Clarkston.

Down on these waterless and treeless flats, the men’s moods seemed changed. They were now more like stable-scenting horses, creatures who were beginning the run for home and could scarcely be persuaded otherwise. They began to chew up remarkable daily distances—the now placid nature of the river helping, of course—and the team plowed across the prairies like men possessed.

The sea now tugging them west was still some hundreds of miles distant, but there was growing evidence that it did indeed lie not too far away now, just below the western horizon. One of the local Indian parties showed the explorers a sailor’s jacket, another a red-and-blue blanket made of cloth—both from one of the maritime expeditions that had already explored and charted the West Coast. They then saw sea otters in the river one day; and then, crucially for history, they glimpsed far away the snowcapped summit of one of the volcanoes of the coastal ranges known as the Cascades.

This moment—it was Saturday, October 19, and by now they had joined the great flow of the Columbia River—is of great importance because in his diary William Clark gives this mountain peak a name:

I discovered a high mountain of emence hight cover with Snow, this must be one of the mountains laid down by Vancouver, as seen from the mouth of the Columbia River, from the Course which it bears which is West I take it to be Mt. St. Helens.

Not unsurprisingly, there is dispute. Some historical geographers insist that Clark could not possibly have seen this particular peak from his reported location—and that the mountain he saw was actually the then unnamed Mount Adams. The distinction is important. For if the mountain he saw was Saint Helens, then he was noting without fanfare something that was transcendentally intercontinental. For the Royal Navy explorer Captain George Vancouver had already seen this mountain, by chance on exactly this October day thirteen years before, in 1792. He had been the one to name it. He had done so in homage to his great friend Alleyne Fitzherbert, who had just been made British ambassador to Spain and had been created Lord St. Helens to add dignity to his posting.

Vancouver had seen the mountain from its western side. Now William Clark reported seeing its eastern side, and in doing so he was also seeing the first far-side-of-the-continent entity that had already been seen and named by another non-native discoverer. The circle of unveiling had thus now been closed. A great blow had been struck for the geographic and topographic unification of America, for the making of trans-America, and for uniting what would in due course become, even out here, the United States of America.

Mount Saint Helens is a volcano known these days for its devastating and lethal eruptions (the latest in May 1980). Perhaps now it could be more suitably memorialized as the capstone for this first-ever attempt to unite the American states. It could be seen, if a little fancifully, as the capstone of the idea itself, or more prosaically as the fastening that finally closed and secured the fabric of human knowledge and imperial adventure that now covered the whole breadth of America. If, that is, it was the mountain that William Clark professed to have spotted from his vantage point on the high Columbia.

But no memorial to the moment stands on the banks of the river. Nothing stands to say, Here was America first United. Instead there are two less agreeable monuments, if you will, to modern American life.

One, at a place named Umatilla, is a secret and highly secure army base that was built specifically to destroy the nation’s stocks of nerve gas. The troops deployed here started work in the 1990s, and so numerous were the warheads filled with sarin and VX and mustard gas that they are still hard at it twenty years later.

The other monument, if such it deserves to be called, is an enormous silvery-looking factory—just as secret and secure in its own way as the Umatilla Army Depot—owned by the giant agribusiness corporation Con Agra. It is called Lamb Weston, and though it looks more like a steam-belching power station, it does make food, all of it out of potatoes. Its owners wouldn’t allow me access but instead referred me to a press release, which said in part:

Potato products are the most profitable food item on foodservice menus today. And no other product is so universally loved, so broadly versatile and available in so many styles, cuts and flavor profiles.

Local employees said that their plant makes french fries, one of the most popular of the humble potato’s “styles, cuts and flavor profiles,” for McDonald’s.

From here matters for the Lewis and Clark expedition changed fast, climatically and topographically. The dry plains gave way with startling suddenness to forest—rain forest, in fact, with low clouds and dripping moss. The river picked up speed as it squeezed through the Cascade ranges. There were rapids and small waterfalls—nowadays all smoothed and calmed by a succession of great dams, the Bonneville most notable among them. And then, once past the rapids, it seemed that in the ever-increasing risings and fallings that the team noticed each day, it might well now be affected by tides, from the sea. Sea frets—thick wet fogs smelling of fish and seaweed—began to trouble the scouts in the party, canoeists who were now having to pick their course carefully as they passed along on an ever-widening, shoal-rich estuary.

On November 6 it seemed that they might have attained their goal. “Ocian in view! O! the joy!” Clark’s line is often quoted. But he was wrong. Though they had done “4,212 miles from the Mouth of the Missouri R,” they were still in the Columbia estuary. It seemed so unfair: ocean waves were breaking into the bay, setting their craft rocking with an intensity as if they had been offshore. But it would be two more weeks of foul weather and disappointment before, at last, Lewis was able to disembark at a spot in full and undeniable view of the true Pacific and carve into a tree, just as Alexander Mackenzie had daubed onto that stone off Bella Coola twelve years before, a simple inscription: “By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.”

They built a camp on the left bank of the estuary and called it Fort Clatsop out of respect for the friendly local tribe. They spent the winter there, hoping in vain that a ship might come and take them back home by way of Panama, thus sparing them another long trek across the country. In the end, of course, they opted to walk home and reached Saint Louis in late September 1806. They had not found a water route across the country; they had not found the Northwest Passage; but they had forged some kind of relationship with almost twenty distinct Native American tribes, though to what ultimate benefit remained uncertain. They had unified the nation in a purely geographic sense; they had achieved in the very crudest sense what Thomas Jefferson had expected of them. And they had gained a formidable amount of information, thousands of pages of fascination and wonder for all America to pore over for decades to come.

And Fort Clatsop would go on to become Astoria, after John Jacob Astor, a butcher’s son and flute maker of Walldorf, near Heidelberg, established just to its north the headquarters of the great fur-trading empire that made his one of the wealthiest families in America. The names Astor and occasionally Walldorf are now memorialized almost everywhere—in New York at the Public Library, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Astor Place, and Astoria in Queens; in a novel, Astoria, by Washington Irving; in four American towns called Astor and three others called Astoria; in Britain in both Houses of Parliament; at Cliveden and Mackinac Island; in Waldorf salad; and in scandals aplenty—the catalog of achievement and memorial and fortune is as endless as the family’s present fecundity and its former (since the family’s star is now slightly dimmed) celebrity. There is also, on a hill outside the Oregon terminus town, a marble column of great height built by the Astor family in the 1920s, with an inner staircase that allows visitors to clamber up and see unimpeded the view that Lewis and Clark would have seen in that early winter of 1805.

Beyond where Fort Clatsop stood and where the city of Astoria now straggles, there was only ocean—the wide, gray, slow-moving, and entirely open Pacific Ocean—to be seen ahead. There was no farther point of land to the west. With their arrival at the mouth of the river and their crossing of the bar, America had been crossed and the continent physically unified by the travels and the travails of a party of newly made American men. President Thomas Jefferson’s intention had perhaps not been fully realized—his men had not opened a water route across the country, for the Rocky Mountains had proved to be an impenetrable barrier—but they now had accomplished something of unimaginable courage and determination. They could now declare that they knew—and America knew as well—just where America was.

The basic shape and size and topography of the continent now being satisfactorily established, all that was needed next, at least in the short term, was to find out just what America was. How had America’s land been made, what was it made of, and how could it best be settled and turned to American use and enjoyment? Or because America would in time become a nation built by peoples from all over the rest of the world, how could the land be employed for the use and enjoyment of all the rest of the planet?

The explorers had come first, as they always should. The scientists, bent on answering the questions that the explorers had posed, would inevitably come next. And then, guided by what these explorers told of their findings, would come the settlers, who would plant their flags and shovels deep in this hitherto untouched soil, deep in the virgin American earth.

PART II

… we pass each other alternately until we emerge from the fissure, out on the summit of a rock. And what a world of grandeur is spread before us! Below is the canyon through which the Colorado runs. We can trace its course for miles, and at points catch glimpses of the river. From the northwest comes the Green in a narrow winding gorge. From the northeast comes the Grand, through a canyon that seems bottomless from where we stand. Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock—not such ledges as the reader may have seen where the quarryman splits his rocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains.

—JOHN WESLEY POWELL, ON FIRST SEEING THE GRAND CANYON, JULY 1869

At Pacific Springs, one of the crossroads of the western trail, a pile of gold-bearing quartz marked the road to California; the other road had a sign bearing the words “To Oregon.” Those who could read took the trail to Oregon.

—DOROTHY JOHANSEN, “A WORKING HYPOTHESIS FOR THE STUDY OF MIGRATIONS,” 1967

THE LASTING BENEFIT OF HARMONY

The small southwestern Indiana town of New Harmony is not much to see these days—just a clutch of frame houses on the banks of the slow-drifting Wabash River. It is neat and tidy, quiet and peaceful. Nine hundred or so people live there, deep in the lush countryside where Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana meet, down in the broad alluvial farmlands of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers that sidle past, not too far away.

A closer look at the town will hint at links with an interesting past. There is a museum designed by Richard Meier; a roofless church of curious design, which turns out to have been built by Philip Johnson; and a pair of spectacular gates designed by the cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. All were created to memorialize that brief time in the early nineteenth century when New Harmony, as its name might now suggest, was founded to be the spiritual center of a great social experiment.

It was among the earliest of a scattering of similarly optimistic, hope-filled communities that sprang up in the early days of the United States, but New Harmony enjoyed a peculiar connection with that most elemental and unifying aspect of the stripling American nation: its geology.

To understand the geology of a country is to understand and then to realize all of its possibilities—its wealth, its strengths, the nature and kinds and value of its resources. Geology, after all, and without any intended pun, underlies everything. Human settlement on an unknown landscape perforce depends on a deep knowledge of what and where is potentially being settled—on whether the geology of this region suits it to farming, to mining, or to industry heavy or light; whether this range of hills is traversable, this cold prairie is cultivable, this wide river is fordable.

There can be no gainsaying the importance of the first crude discoveries made by the geological pioneers of early America: their findings, surveys, maps, and forecasts were the guides and lures that tempted and then scattered millions of people across the country. Eighteenth-century geology, infant science though it still may have been, offered the keys to unlock the country’s promise, bringing men out to inhabit the farther reaches of this country and create their nation.

And the town of New Harmony, Indiana, was where this realization of geology’s importance was born.

The town, first simply named Harmonie, was settled initially by early-nineteenth-century Germans, men and women fleeing to America much as the Pilgrim Fathers had fled two centuries before, to escape religious restrictions back home. Their piety and hard work paid off quickly, and they eventually moved on to larger quarters, selling their tiny settlement to another idealist adventurer, the campaigning Welsh socialist Robert Owen. He, flushed with the success of a millworkers’ commune that he had organized outside Edinburgh, planned to establish a utopian beachhead in America, based on socialist ideals. He renamed the former German village New Harmony; and once he had settled during the winter of 1825, he invited like-minded idealists to join him.

Such was the educational reputation of Owen’s earlier Scottish experiment that New Harmony became an immediate magnet for intellectuals, philosophers, teachers—and, in particular, scientists. Geologists, most notably, pitched in with a special enthusiasm, such that at the peak of New Harmony’s fortunes, no fewer than seven geologists of considerable later distinction could be counted among the inhabitants.

This tiny town briefly became “a scientific center of national significance,” as the University of Southern Indiana describes it today. New Harmony can fairly be regarded more specifically as the birthplace of American geology—not least because Robert Owen’s closest colleague and ideological soul mate, an equally eccentric visionary who came to join him on the banks of the Wabash River, is generally acknowledged today to be American geology’s founding father. He, too, was a foreigner, a middle-aged Scotsman of wealth and distinction whose fortune was in no way connected to the science of the earth—William Maclure.

THE SCIENCE THAT CHANGED AMERICA

Robert Owen and William Maclure were both strange and remarkable men. Owen was a social reformer of lasting repute—though his fame remains largely in his home country, to which he eventually returned. But when it comes to the story of geology as a unifying force in the making of the United States, the person of William Maclure is the one to be remembered preeminently—even though, ironically, he was not really a geologist at all.

Maclure, born in southern Scotland in 1763, was by his early thirties already a very rich man. He had amassed a fortune as a trader, helped by the annuity from his equally successful Ayrshire father, in whose mercantile footsteps he followed. He had come to the American colonies when he was a teenager, had set up his own import-export business when he was only nineteen, and soon afterward, profoundly influenced by the revolutionary events of 1776 and 1789 in America and France, moved to Philadelphia, throwing in his lot with a society that seemed to him to embrace his own beliefs in fairness and equality. He assumed American citizenship in 1796 and promptly established himself as a fully paid-up member of Pennsylvania’s fast-growing patrician society.

William Maclure, the wealthy Scotsman whose immense fortune allowed him time to indulge an early passion for American geology, and who in 1809 drew the country’s—and the world’s—first geological map.

Except that being merely patrician held little interest for a man of such a restless nature. No more than a year after becoming a citizen, when he might otherwise have started to enjoy the sedate comforts of early middle age, he made two important decisions.

He first decided to devote much of his remaining life to promoting educational reforms among America’s working classes. He vowed, as Robert Owen had already vowed, unbeknownst to Maclure, that the farmer, the miller, and the forge master would each have the same access to society’s potential as he and his wealthy peers had already been granted. It might take him years, but he would at least now begin to make plans.

At thirty-six, he believed himself young enough and fit enough to take on such a challenge. He had already achieved great eminence among the East Coast thoughtful: he was a leading light in the fiercely intellectual American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin, and would later go on to help found and run the American Academy of Natural Sciences, the oldest such institution in the country today. He believed deeply in the unifying powers of democratized science.

His second idea was more precise, as he explained in a letter to a friend. He “adopted rock-hunting as an amusement.” Geology, he declared, was far preferable to the conventional bourgeois pursuits of hunting and fishing, not least because it was “most applicable to useful practical purposes.” Moreover, “it has always appeared to me that the science of geology was one of the simplest and easiest to acquire: the number of names to be learned is small, and the present nomenclature, although rather generic than specific, is not difficult.”

He first toyed with the science during a brief stay in Europe, delving into the small mysteries of its nomenclature at the very time when the numerous schisms that plagued the calling were at their most dramatic. Perhaps no science has ever been caught up in such turmoil. On the one hand, geologists were busily unleashing themselves from centuries of dogmatic interference from the church. The less pious of their number were no longer content to believe unquestioningly in such literal Bible-based teachings as the creation of the earth on a precise October date in 4004 BC, for instance.

There were also continuing disputes raging within the science—between the plutonists and the neptunists, for example, or between the catastrophists and the calmer-minded supporters of uniformitarianism. And the aristocrats who had claimed the science for themselves—rich men who amassed gaudy collections of minerals and fossils to decorate the drawing rooms of their mansions—were also at the time beginning to yield to a wider public sense of inquiry, with every farmer and walker and settler keeping an eye on the land, curious to know what it was made of and why.

But for some, the academic din in Europe proved perhaps just a little too much. William Maclure soon came back to America, admitting to being overwhelmed by the topographic complexity of the European landscape. He decided he would instead be more suitably self-employed discovering the geology of his newly adopted homeland. He would find out what America was made of, he decided. And he would draw a map of it.

DRAWING THE COLORS OF ROCKS

This was in 1799. For the next ten years, Maclure tramped and stagecoached relentlessly up and down and across the narrow swath of territory that lay between the Appalachians and the Atlantic—the country’s most known and settled region. He wandered on the far side of the Alleghenies, too, through what is now Arkansas and Mississippi, though it is not certain if he managed to get as far north as the sparsely settled territories of Ohio and Indiana. He managed to get himself all the way down to Georgia. We cannot be certain that he got all the way up to Maine, but he did claim to have crossed the hills and valleys of the Appalachians at least twenty-two times—which, given the condition of the roads at the time, was no mean achievement.

But however he did it, wherever he happened to go, however many miles he walked, rode, or went in greater comfort by carriage and diligence and cart, he achieved something truly memorable, with a significance that went beyond what might have seemed its purely American relevance. He announced it in an address before an evening meeting of the American Philosophical Society in 1809 after offering his first thoughts on the geology of the nation. Crucially, he included with his seventeen pages of explanation a hand-colored map—the first geological map in the world, some say, and certainly the first recognizable geological map of the United States.

It is a document of curious beauty, even though its simple innocence rendered it of little real use. It is based on a topographic map engraved by Samuel Lewis, a Philadelphia mapmaker who was at the time perhaps the country’s preeminent cartographer.¹ Maclure used vivid watercolors—yellow, red, blue, pink, and green—to paint onto the base map’s eastern half the five main divisions, as early geology was inclined to see them, of America’s rocks.

The swaths of color he used—to show different kinds of rock, not different ages, as maps do today—all trend across the states from the southwest up to the northeast. They sweep along in approximate parallel to the lines of the Appalachian hills—which on the map sheet are picked out in caterpillarlike lines of ugly fuzziness; that was the device Lewis had employed to depict chains of mountains on all of his maps.

The results of Maclure’s estimated fifty survey journeys across the Appalachians led to the publication in 1809 of this crude but memorable first geological map of the then United States. It predated by six years the much more famous British map by William Smith.

Four basic types of rock make up the geology of America, as it was described in 1809. On the western side of the mountains, everything on Maclure’s map is colored pale blue, indicating the presence of so-called secondary rocks, fossil-bearing sediments, by and large. On the eastern side, the ocean side, all is by contrast hand-colored yellow, indicating alluvial rocks, gravels and sands and fresh-from-the-ocean clays.

The summits of the Appalachian mountain ranges Maclure showed to be quite geologically different and painted them in vivid streaks of deep blue and deep red denoting what early geological theorists called transition rocks. He also noted the presence of hard granitic outcrops of what he called primitive rocks; these he colored in pink. And for good measure, he also invented a fifth category for deposits of rock salt.

As art, Maclure’s maps—he made a revised version in 1818—are undeniably pretty; but as science, they were confusing and, in truth, pretty useless. Had they been Maclure’s sole achievement, he might then have slipped into obscurity. But that was not to be.

THE WELLSPRING OF KNOWLEDGE

Maclure’s eagerness to instill in American working-class youth a love for the practical—for the skills of farming; for a knowledge of geography; for the learning of natural history, statistics, biology—remained for years little more than an unrealized dream. But all changed in 1824, when he traveled to Scotland and had his first meeting with Robert Owen. That was when he was first seized with the idea of joining a utopian commune, transforming himself from a mapmaker into a missionary, and becoming America’s first geological messiah.

Owen was a Welshman who had made his fortune from the spinning of cotton in Scotland. He had carefully created in New Lanark a showpiece of social engineering for his mill workers—a near-ideal industrial environment, as he saw it, a community that was clean, healthy, well paid, disciplined, and morally sound, its children better educated than those in the finest paid schools in the land. So successful and admired had been New Lanark that Owen decided to expand. In the winter of 1824, he took his millennial dreams and blueprints for popular communal perfection across to America and started the process without delay by buying all of the land and real estate that the departing German settlers had created for themselves in New Harmony.

He reasoned that two thousand or so people could live together around an immense quadrangle he would build in the town. They would govern themselves, farm the land collectively and intelligently, live congenially without money, commune among themselves in the gardens within the buildings, and discipline themselves to hard work and moderate celibacy. His ideals were to all intents and purposes the ideals of the early Soviets, with communities to be run according to the familiar Marxist precept of fifty years later: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

After settling his purchase of New Harmony, he came back east on a whirlwind recruiting mission. The fame he had won from his Scottish experiment preceded him, and as a successful industrialist, he found immediate and ready acceptance everywhere. At least, he did at first. He was able to meet without difficulty all of the privileged and the progressive figures of the Philadelphia Main Line, as well as chiefs of two Indian tribes. He won an audience with President Monroe, took tea with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and gave two public lectures in the Capitol. John Quincy Adams, the president-elect, came to both talks, and was so taken that he had Owen build a scale model of his proposed New Harmony building and display it at the White House.

It was while he was in Pennsylvania that Owen achieved his greatest coup, the one whose effects would linger longest, in managing to persuade William Maclure to come on board.

At the time, Maclure, his mapmaking success well in his past, had won fresh fame as a campaigning education reformer; and as president of the American Academy of Natural Sciences, he was seen not just as one of the preeminent scientists of his time, but as a great educational theorist, too. At their first meeting, Owen lost no time in reminding Maclure of his own, rather similar credentials. He assured him that what Maclure had seen of his success back in Scotland just a matter of months earlier could and should now be re-created in America.

What followed was an epiphany. After an initial bout of dithering—he was shrewdly wary of Owen’s eccentricities and shortcomings, even then—William Maclure finally and decisively bought into the revolutionary plans. He agreed. He would uproot himself from the comforts of his Pennsylvania life, move the eight hundred miles across and down to New Harmony, and throw in his lot with Owen’s strange new settlement.

Moreover, and more important still, he persuaded a number of his scientific colleagues to come along with him. They were a die-hard group, young men and women, also largely from Pennsylvania, who thought the idea of going off to live in Owen’s eccentric new commune was both worthy and noble. Most of those who volunteered were younger than Maclure. All were as eager as he was to teach youngsters the knowledge they had accrued. All were dreamy and impractical idealists.

So he made the journey a suitably impractical adventure. Rather than have the party travel down to Indiana in the comfort of the stagecoach, Maclure had them all go down on a boat. It was a shallow-draft keelboat, with barely room for forty, rowed by six oarsmen. Officially it was named the Philanthropist, but Owen proclaimed that “it contained more learning than ever was before contained in a boat,” so it was and still is informally known as the Boatload of Knowledge.

The vessel took off down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh on a bitter Sunday in late November 1825. After punching its way though the ice for the next seven weeks—its passengers listening to the onboard piano, taking off for skating ventures, reciting poetry and reading, reading—everyone arrived at New Harmony on a bitter cold day in late January. Fifty tons of books and what was termed “philosophic apparatus” joined them a few days later, whereupon the team promptly began—under the supervision of Maclure and Owen (who had come down at ease, on the stagecoach)—a hyperactive program of teaching to all and any of the youngsters from the towns nearby, just what they had to offer.

But there was more hyperactivity than most had bargained for. The furious energy of Owen’s New Harmony experiment barely survived Maclure’s arrival. The enthusiasm sputtered out within weeks, and the community soon began to fail, and it did so miserably and quickly. As is so often the way with utopias, factions developed—no fewer than ten had formed within just two years of Owen’s arrival, and all began bickering, squabbling, and arguing for various rewritings of the commune rules, each splinter group jostling for ideological supremacy. In the end, a demoralized and disillusioned Owen, shocked at a brand of waywardness he had never experienced back home among the Scots, returned to Britain. His confidence was sorely shaken: his ideas for the universal betterment of the working classes began slowly to evaporate, and he became steadily ever more marginalized and ridiculed a figure.²

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,³ 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 Pass⁴ 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 already 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.

This being America, bustling centers of commerce began to pop up at the trailheads. “A multitude of shops had sprung up to furnish the emigrants … with necessaries for their journey,” wrote Francis Parkman, “and there was incessant hammering and banging from a dozen blacksmiths’ sheds, where heavy wagons were being repaired, and the horses and oxen shod. The streets were thronged with men, horses and mules.”

Parkman didn’t care much for the migrants, or indeed for such Indians as he met along the way. He was an indefatigable snob, a New England swell with money, ambition, courage, and a Harvard education. His academic brilliance (he was a fine horticulturist) won him a professorship; his historical writings won him prizes, standing, a great monument, a school with his name on it, and his face on a postage stamp. But his account of the Oregon Trail is wanting, in all too many aspects.

Even the title is scarcely true: he completed only a third of the journey, and then only the easy bits. A Summertime Trip to Laramie would have been a more suitable title—not only geographically accurate (that is the farthest point he reached, scarcely a third of the way out from Omaha) but also underscoring the fact that his relatively simple eight-week journey, involving more mountain sighting than crossing, was for him a mere wheeze, “a summer jaunt,” as he put it. His disdainful take on the expedition left him scarcely able to grasp the true historical importance of what he was seeing. He claimed that the true motives of most of the emigrants were a source of great puzzlement to him; they had in common only that they were “some of the vilest outcasts of the country,” many of whom eventually “repent[ed] of the journey,” and were “happy enough to escape from it.”

The quality of Parkman’s prose disguises the dubious quality of the facts; his style, a poor stand-in for substance. In fact we do know rather well why the emigrants went. We do know how many—or more properly, how few—repented of their adventure and went back home: no more than 10 percent, the figure falling steadily as the trail became more familiar. Moreover, we know that almost none of these turn-arounds or go-backs, as they were called, were happy with their choice. More often they simply reset themselves, pulled themselves together, and tried again.

In the year of 1840 that saw the departure of the first true pioneers, Joel Walker and his family—and their successful arrival six months later in Oregon—a total of just thirteen people made the journey. The following year, it was twice that number; three years later, nearly three thousand went. Soon so many tens of thousands of pioneers were going, so long were the trains of wagons, that perplexed Indians in Wyoming said they might themselves head off to the East, believing it to be fast emptying of all white people. The ruts left by the little white-canvas-sided prairie schooners—or more rarely by the three-ton Conestoga wagons, with their iron-rimmed monster wheels, ten-oxen teams, and wickedly large turning circles—were ground so deep into the prairie earth that they can still be seen today.

In places, the Oregon Trail was fully ten miles wide, with wagons veering wildly away from one another as the steersmen took different tacks to divert around the obstacles ahead. In others, it narrowed sharply, the ruts all commingling, incised ever more deeply into the earth. The Bureau of Land Management, which looks after the public lands of the American West, has seen to it that in many places these gatherings of ruts are preserved: they are easily visible at the great historic site of South Pass, in western Wyoming, for instance.

They can be seen just a few yards off State Route 28, which crosses the Continental Divide here. You step away from the pavement and onto the sagebrush, and there is the track, with its two parallel lines of hard-packed yellow dirt, a wagon-width apart, fading into the horizon. It is 7,500 feet up here, and you might take a few moments to catch your breath. But then if you stand here for a few moments, looking west as a chill breeze from ahead whistles through the short grass, making your eyes water, and the new snow on the peaks of the Wind River Range to the north glints in the evening sun, two things are worth pondering.

The first is the simple political importance of the place. Jedediah Smith, the great trailblazer of the Victorian West, was fully aware of its value. He reported that this was the one certain way through which wagons could cross the Rockies, the one certain road along which people in limitless numbers might one day cross the Great Divide. By urging settlers to cross here, creaking their wagons up from the valley head of the Sweetwater River (a stream whose waters were bound eventually for the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic by way of the Platte, the Missouri, and the Mississippi) and then down the far side to the headwaters of the Green River (which joins the Colorado and passes through the Grand Canyon to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean), he left an indelible imprint on the human geography of America.

For until that moment of discovery, places like California and the Oregon Country were months away, reachable for Americans only by boat up the West Coast, and then only by way of foreign countries like Panama or Argentina, Chile, and Peru. But now, thanks to the happy presence of the South Pass—with its slope “no more toilsome than the ascent of the Capitol Hill from the avenue, at Washington,” as John Frémont had it—Americans could get to the West Coast territories directly. In time, they could get there quickly.

Continentalism—the notion that had been so eloquently advocated by John Quincy Adams in his 1811 letter home—was then swiftly realized. America’s Manifest Destiny became a sure reality; the Pacific coast became America’s sole remaining frontier; and in time, and for a while, the Pacific Ocean became an essentially American ocean.

And one can go further. The many transpacific ventures in which America has been subsequently involved—the colonization of the Philippines, the annexation of Guam and the Marianas and Micronesia, the assistance given to China, the war with Japan, the conflict in Vietnam, the bombing of Cambodia—all have their roots in America’s own continental ambitions, which the discovery of the South Pass in western Wyoming ultimately made possible. A Bureau of Land Management official who takes visitors to see the rutted roadstead beside Route 28 says that more than a few veterans of the Vietnam War become visibly distressed on understanding this history, on realizing a connection far less tenuous than it first might seem. A great deal of recent world history had its origins in this wide, windy, and featureless pass.

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