Hard Travellin Read online

  Yet what was the fruit of the pioneer surge and the rainbow hopes ? Thirty years later appeared a book which aroused a similar outcry of outrage and treachery, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, which provides a direct continuity from the West Garland saw made sordid and dull.

  This is Lewis’s Gopher Prairie: ‘… Main Street with its two-storey brick shops, its storey-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons … The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side … Not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie’s existence, the citizens had realized that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common home, amusing or attractive … Always west of Pittsburg and often east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-storey shops.’

  It is the ‘flimsy temporariness … so that the towns resemble frontier camps’ which so depressed Lewis, and of course this is precisely the way all America’s Gopher Prairies grew and in many cases are still used. One is reminded of the girl in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending crying: ‘This country used to be wild, the men and women were wild and there was a wild sort of sweetness in their hearts for each other, but now it’s sick with neon, it’s broken out and sick with neon …’

  Was there ever such a wild sweetness? It really does seem doubtful. Questioning the rhetoric of Turner - ‘the Westward marching army of individualistic liberty-loving democratic back woodsmen’ - Athearn and Riegel suggest that, if it existed, the desire for liberty was infinitesimal in comparison with the desire for wealth. The frontier was ‘crude, materialistic, unlettered, exuberant and lacking in artistic development’. They argue further that there was nothing particularly ‘Western’ about these traits and in fact, as the West emulated the East, they were possibly only a slightly more primitive reflection of prevailing Eastern culture.

  There has been of course a generally accepted revision of the fancy that the West, ‘the region of revolt’, was a great innovator in material progress and social ideals. Athearn and Riegel take the line that the usual Westerner was basically conservative and was striving to clean up so as to obtain what Eastern society defined as the good things of life.

  So the Westerner had neither the imagination nor the energy left over for the strange and new. The truth was that in a region of great social conformity, despite its opportunities for lawlessness, the West ‘contained many individuals but very little individualism’. The ‘safety valve of discontent’ theory worked in the sense that the economically successful Easterner saw no attraction in the disruption and danger of moving West. It was the man who was unhappy, socially or emotionally, but vigorous enough to meet the challenge, who struck out. Lice, bedbugs, toil and privation were commoner to Western experience than acts of valour and euphoric liberation.

  Where, then, was the wild sweetness? Perhaps in expectation rather than the result, yet it is that which has always been the American lure.

  It is arguable that the cowboy was an exception to the conformity and dullness of the West, for it seems probable that there really was a more genuine tang to his life when set beside the farmers’ drudgery. At least most retrospective musings suggest so: ‘… something romantic about him. He lives on horseback as do the Bedouins; he fights on horseback as did the knights of chivalry … he swears like a trooper, drinks like a fish, wears clothes like an actor, and fights like a devil,’ a 1931 view (Webb), and reasonably typical of the redolent afterglow.

  Yet, as we have seen, he was not considered much cop when most available as the emblem of the unremitting, dust-stained pioneer - in his original form as ‘cattle hunter’ when stock were grazed in the public meadows of Virginia and the Carolinas. By the time the cult of the magnificent loner was in production, the cowboy had been too long an embarrassment to a previous attitude, contemporaneously he had been an irritating inconsistency. He marred the portrait of the sinister, uninhabitable barrens beyond the Mississippi which transfixed the Eastern mind.

  There were by this time sizeable numbers of advance guard, the Indian traders who had got their bearings from the earlier Mexican comancheros and French voyageurs, and rummaged into Sioux and Apache country with pack mules or with wooden carts hauled by dogs or oxen. There were also the gold-washers and the mountain men, all of whom had gone beyond the Missouri and across the Great Plains and who knew differently about the ‘desolate barren land’.

  Yet until about 1850 gentlemen essayists and letter-writers had peered fastidiously into the emptiness, like astronauts scanning the moon for soft landings, had assessed what they flinched from by their criteria of familiar, lush-wooded vales, and had elaborated the legend. Zebulon M. Pike’s journal of his 1810 expedition to the upper Rio Grande Valley likened the treeless prairies to Africa’s sandy deserts, and seven years later Henry M. Bracken-ridge, who had taken a jaunt with a trapping party up the Missouri River, related: ‘… the prevailing idea, with which we have so much flattered ourselves, of these western regions being like the rest of the United States, susceptible of cultivation, and affording endless outlets to settlements, is certainly erroneous.’

  7 In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted

  We too will thither

  Bend our joyful footsteps

  Adeste fideles

  Nature continued to imitate bad reporting. For the next thirty years desert burning athwart the continent was described by preconditioned travellers.

  As late as 1846 Edwin Bryant, who made the trek to California, prononuced Nebraska to be ‘uninhabitable by civilized man’. Long ago when Britain was attempting to snip the wings of emigrants, Edmund Burke told the House of Commons, in 1775, that if settlement was forbidden in the trans-Allegheny, the American rebels would ‘wander without a possibility of restraint; they would become hordes of English Tartars’.

  This Asiatic metaphor was much savoured. To Thomas Hart Benton, in his Thirty Years View, the Southern Plains Indians were the ‘Arabs of the New World’, and Flint called the same tribes ‘ruthless red Tartars of the desert’.

  Washington Irving in his 1836 novel Astoria warned that on these arid flats ‘… may spring up new and mongrel races of broken and almost extinguished tribes; the descendants of wandering hunters and trappers; of fugitives from the Spanish and American frontiers; of adventurers and desperadoes of every class and country yearly ejected from the bosom of society into the wilderness.’ He presaged picaroon bands, Arkansas Attilas, preying on the tillers of the soil on the hem of Eastern culture.

  Moreover in 1856 Jefferson Davis, an Indian Wars dragoon before becoming Secretary of War, and who had first visualized America as a Hellenistic slave-based republic, advocated a frontier policy copied from that of France in Algeria - relinquish the desert to its nomadic bands but for garrison forts - and he had seventy-five camels sent from the Near East to San Antonio for the Texas Rangers. (The camels never took.)

  It may be seen that the cowboy only too alarmingly seemed ready-made militia for the howling mongrel guerrillas, and consequently was excluded from the myth of the admirable independent. It was much later that the cowboy was enshrined in the mould of Daniel Boone. In 1955 Frantz and Choate, praising ‘the cowboy’s civilizing influence’, wrote: ‘In this enormous region, larger than all of the lands east of the Mississippi, came riding the Texas cowboy … The forbidding desert, which had withstood the Spaniards and which, with towering mountains, was threatening to withstand Anglo-American encroachments as well, turned out not to be so forbidding after all when the right type of man, the cowboy, came along.’

  Perhaps, up to a point. However the leverage which cracked open the obstruction was not a wandering cowpoke crooner, any more than it was Daniel Boone, or any other outrider. It was an instrument of politics.

  The Republican Party’s post-Civil War policy was forged by the agrarian ideal and th
e symbol of the idealized yeoman, and in turn the policy stamped the brand mark deeper.

  To win the 1860 election, when Abraham Lincoln became president, the Republicans had to carry the hitherto Democratic North-West, and the issue which mattered most in those parts was the Homestead Bill. ‘Land for the landless’, a young country and untrammelled opportunities for ‘old Europe’s hapless swains’, those who had congealed in a looming bulk of unemployed in the preceding slump, the tip of another impending avalanche -these were the pressures.

  ‘Go West, young man, go forth in the Country,’ exhorted Horace Greeley, the Republican leader, turning a phrase picked up from an Indiana newspaper into a national rallying cry. The experience of many who responded gave it a different connotation later. ‘Gone West’ came to mean something very different.

  But then Greeley’s cry was heeded and the Homestead Act provided the access of the urban masses of the East to their 160 acres each, ‘Uncle Sam’s generous domain’, a New Jerusalem where the noble savage and the sturdy ploughman would fuse into the Typical American. It was an idyll of simple, self-sufficient and harmonious tilling, which abides until today in the observance of the farmer’s sanctity in Federal subsidies and aid.

  Just as there had been earlier men who had found out for themselves that the belly of America was not the other side of the Styx, so there were men who promptly tested the revised prospectus and, like Garland, questioned its accuracy. The early waves Westward were not long afterward followed by a steady trickle of sorry wagon trains on the way back, painted with such messages as: ‘In God we trusted/In Kansas we busted’. Sour replies to the call-of-the-wilders came in other forms. Greer County Bachelor was a sardonic song which had a masochistic popularity among frontier homesteaders:

  Hurrah for Greer County! The land of the free

  The land of the bedbug, grasshopper and flea.

  I’ll sing of its praises, I’ll tell of its fame,

  While starving to death on my government claim.

  The California-bound, too, were warned in Crossing the Plains:

  When you arrive at Placerville or Sacramento City,

  You’ve nothing in the world to eat, no money - what a pity!

  Your striped pants are all worn out, which causes people to laugh,

  When they see you gaping round the town like a great big brindle calf.

  Such vulgar cynicism did not puncture the fantasy: it was too entrenched. George Washington himself, discussing the opening of Ohio ‘to the poor, the needy and the oppressed of the Earth’, had continued: ‘… anyone therefore who is heavy laden or who wants land to cultivate, may repair thither and abound, as in the Land of promise, with milk and honey…’

  It goes without saying that the Washingtonian generosity of acceptance of all has not been followed to the letter. An observer of the Chicago press in the early 1900s commented that if the unemployed were American they were tramps, bummers and loafers; if they bore foreign names they were ‘European scum’, and continued: ‘Discontented working men had no real grievances, but were always dupes of foreign agitators … Strikers and labour demonstrations were always mobs composed of foreign scum, beer-swilling Germans, ignorant Bohemians, uncouth Poles, wild-eyed Russians.’

  But before the bulk imports of manpower from old Europe could be foreseen, the early bugle note was constantly resounded, as by Franklin who in 1780 reinforced the idea of America’s spine and vitals being ‘the industrious frugal Farmers inhabiting the interior Part of these American States’. The young man’s concept of the good life became not to carry on his father’s farm or business, but to build an idealized homestead for himself in the Golden West. Poverty, loneliness, hardship were felt to be only temporary, like a Gopher Prairie house. Across the river, over the next hill range would be found that perfect valley, where the will-o’-the-wisp idyll would become true.

  There is left behind the sad explanation of the wife of a farmer who in 1820 sold his Maryland plantation and went to try out Florida: ‘It was all for the love of moving. We have been doing so all our lives - just moving - from place to place - never resting - as soon as ever we git comfortably settled, then, it is time to be off to something new.’

  One Virginian pioneer who moved into Ohio in 1819, from there to Indiana six years later, and in 1835 to Wisconsin, wrote in 1849: ‘I reached the Pacific and yet the sun sets West of me and my wife positively refuses to go to the Sandwich Islands and the bark is starting off my rails and that is longer than I ever allowed myself to remain on one farm.’ Another pioneer, who saw the frontier closed in Oklahoma, reflected: ‘We learned that God’s Country isn’t in the country. It is in the mind. As we looked back we knew all the time we was hunting for God’s Country we had it. We worked hard. We was loyal. Honest. We was happy. For forty-eight years we lived together in God’s Country.’

  8 Out into the kindly sunlight

  We declare it a vice and a sin for a man to be poor, if he can help it.

  Newspaper editorial

  Between the Painted Desert and the White Mesa, a hundred empty miles short of Flagstaff, Arizona, is the Tsegi Trading Post. The clapboard doorway is festooned with old Navajo saddles made from tree roots and leather strips. Inside the counters and floor are piled with brilliant Indian rugs, silver bracelets, barrels of oranges and water melons, bales of cloth, wooden beads and safes of frozen foods.

  In front of the notice Pawn Will Be Sold After 6 Months is a barrel-shaped man with a greying ginger beard. A deputy sheriff’s shield is hooked on his khaki shirt; around his neck is a tie of black lace and an enamelled throat brooch; on either hand are immense turquoise rings. He introduces himself as Trader Jim. His full name is James D. Porter and he was born seventy-three years ago in Indian Territory before it was consolidated into Oklahoma. Visible through the thin hair is a long grooved dent in his skull.

  ‘That was done when I was a boy,’ he says between sips from a carton of milk. ‘My father was ranching near Lubbock, Texas, and got in a range feud with some cattle-owners. We were a week under siege before they over-ran us. They knocked me on the head, killed the foreman and cut my father’s throat. He recovered, hunted down those three men and killed them.

  ‘My father was half Scotch and half Cherokee, and my mother was half Irish and half Cherokee. She died when I was a baby. I never went to school. I loved my father very much but by the time I was eleven I was tired of sand blowing in my face and looking up a cow’s ass. I rode off. All I took with me was a hot roll - that’s a snap-fastener canvas with blanket - and a frying pan, a little flour and coffee, a .22 rifle and 44 and -3030 revolvers.

  I rode down to Douglas, Arizona, which was a wide open town with two or three gun fights a week.

  ‘I fell in with four men. They were bandits but honourable thieves and nicer than many gentlemen you meet. They took me under their wing. Now and then one of these men would say to me “We’re going on a ride, want to come?” That meant they were doing a train hold-up or robbing a bank. I never did go but when they told me they were going over the Mexico line to enrol with Pancho Villa I went too. We met up with Villa’s army, 150 men with pistolerros stuck round their waists and draped with bullet belts.

  ‘I rode with Villa for nineteen and a half months. We were mostly fighting the Carranza government troops but we really did rob the rich and give to the poor and underprivileged. We were also, what shall I say, well paid. I buried 20,000 dollars and never found two-thirds of it again, it was in such wild country.

  ‘It was an exciting life but it was also very boresome and rough. Your saddle was your pillow and for two or three days at a time you’d have nothing to eat and only bad water to drink. Then in a fight with the troops one of my friends had the side of his face laid wide open with a curved sword. We packed it with horse dung and stitched it up, and took him into a border town near Yuma, Arizona. Another of the crowd knew a robber who was in the Yuma bastille and we went to see him. I was appalled. It was a real hell hole. I looked
around and thought “Boy, this is where you’re going to end up.”

  ‘Id never anyway enjoyed shooting someone just to see him kick so I broke away. I said “I’m off to see the Golden Gate.” I bought a Pierce-Arrow and drove west. In San Francisco I worked in a book store. I still couldn’t write or read but I identified books by their brand mark - the publisher’s design on the spine. Mean-times I’d started professional boxing and I’d also broken into the movies, airplane and auto stunting, and doubling for Jack Oakie. I began buying and selling used cars and became one of the biggest dealers in Los Angeles. That went the way of all flesh in the Depression.

  ‘I’d married this little girl who’s with me now (actually I’d married six times before in Mexico and around but I told her only three) and we drove up to the North California mountains and began panning gold. I sold out a two-third share in that mine for 3,000 dollars cash, a 160-acre ranch and’ an old Cadillac. I started another auto business. I had ulcers, couldn’t sleep, hadn’t had an erection for two years, went down with a heart attack and was told I’d got cancer and couldn’t live more than three months.

  ‘I thought what the hell. We cashed in everything and started off North. It took us sixteen months to get up to Alaska. I was pretty sick. I was bald, worn out by the rat-race, and then I had another heart attack.

  ‘We were living with the Indians up there and they brought down their shaman. He gave me something, herbs, meats, and for two days and nights I was in sweating delirium - and suddenly I was all right. Back in the United States I had a check-up. There was no trace of the ulcer, heart condition or malignancy. That was fifteen years ago. My hair grew back. I became a man again - as good as a twenty-eight-year-old my wife and doctor tell me. It’s not only that I used to be a mean man, a fighter. In my heart I’ve changed too.

  ‘You know why? Because in all my roamings I’ve managed to get back to what matters. For two years I covered every part of America before staying here. The Indians call me grandfather. They don’t like the white man because he has stolen almost everything in the world from them but they assess you by your conduct.