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CHAPTER 1
MANIFEST DESTINY
It has been said that Anglo-Americans were the last people to arrive in the West. Even if we except the three million or so Native Americans who occupied most of the two million square miles between the Mississippi River and the Pacific, the British had penetrated the Oregon Territory from Canada in the north, the Spanish had occupied Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and California as part of colonial New Spain, and the Russians and even the Chinese had made the journey from the east to the Pacific seaboard. Until the 1840s, the West was a backwater in the life of the United States. Even in 1845, when emigration to California and Oregon had already begun, fewer than 20,000 whites lived west of the Mississippi, if we exclude the (then) still independent state of Texas.
The Spanish had been in Texas and Arizona intermittently since the days of Juan Coronado and the conquistadores in the sixteenth century, but found the territories difficult to settle because of the hostility of Indian tribes, especially the formidable Comanche. This was the origin of the fateful decision to admit Anglo colonists to Texas after 1821, when Mexico gained its independence from Spain. Stephen Austin completed his father Moses's groundwork by founding the first colony of three hundred American families, each of whom received one square league of free land in return for taking an oath of allegiance to the Mexican government. The colony of San Felipe de Austin numbered 2,021 souls by 1824. Further land grants meant that by 1835 there were nearly 30,000 Americans living in Texas as against just 3,500 Mexicans. The seeds of future trouble were obviously present.
The Spanish had more success in New Mexico. By 1827, with 44,000 inhabitants, the territory had ten times the population of California or Texas. New Mexico, a land riven by grotesque social inequalities, drew its wealth from sheep-rearing and mining: millions of sheep grazed the upper valley of the Rio Grande between El Paso and Taos while the mines of south-western New Mexico churned out a thousand tons of copper a year; south of Santa Fe there were also rich-yielding gold mines. The territory's chief drawbacks, apart from its corrupt and archaic administration, were the old-fashioned mercantilist economic policy carried out there, and the lack of a seaport: the nearest maritime outlet was faraway Vera Cruz, 2,000 miles distant on mountain tracks. But, in contrast to Arizona, New Mexico was a prize worth saving, which was why, in the 1820s, the Mexican authorities opened up this previously closed economy to trade with the USA.
California, colonised by the Spanish as late as 1769, and only then in response to feared Russian encroachment from the north, was another sleepy backwater, whose main feature was the string of twenty Franciscan missions established from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north. But in the early nineteenth century a new power had interposed itself between Spanish California and Russian Alaska. Through the Hudson's Bay Company, Britain controlled the territory from 54° N40' (roughly where the present state of Alaska sweeps down to meet British Columbia near Queen Charlotte Islands) to the present Oregon-California border. From the company's north-western headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, the British dominated the lucrative fur trade. The company's position was a strong one, for Fort Vancouver could be supplied and reinforced from Vancouver and most of the local Indian tribes were friendly.
US interest in the Far West really began with the Lewis and Clark expedition and the architect of this was the much maligned US president Thomas Jefferson. When Napoleon's dreams of an American empire faded with the defeat of his forces in Haiti in 1803, he sold the massive French holdings in North America – the so- called Louisiana Territory -to the United States. For $15 million, Jefferson bought 800,000 square miles between the Mississippi and the Rockies, and doubled the size of his country. At the same time, he asked Congress for the funds to send an expedition to explore his new acquisition and to continue on to the Pacific. Meriwether Lewis, an army captain, was appointed as expedition leader, but he shared the leadership with his friend Lieutenant William Clark. Leaving Missouri in May 1804, Lewis and Clark reached the Mandan territory of North Dakota in late October and spent the winter there. In April 1805, they resumed their journey and followed the headwaters of the Missouri to, successively, the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers. Rafting down the Columbia, they reached the Pacific in early November. They wintered at Fort Catslop (which they built) and began the homeward journey in late March 1806. They returned via the Yellowstone and upper Missouri, reaching St Louis late in September 1806, after an absence of two years and four months.
The United States did not immediately follow up on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Exploration of the vast area between the Mississippi and the Pacific was largely the work of the 'mountain men' who, between 1820 and 1840, reconnoitred the routes that would later be recognised as the Santa Fe, California and Oregon trails. Living beyond the pale of civilisation, often with Indian wives and thus linked by kinship to the potentially hostile tribes, the mountain men had their own way of life and even their own canting argot. Among them were some of the most famous names of the old West – Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Joseph Walker, Jedediah Smith, Thomas 'Pegleg' Smith, Caleb Greenwood, Thomas Fitzpatrick and the Sublette brothers.
The mountain men made their living trapping beaver, for the fur trade was the salient fact of economic life in the West c. 1820–40. At first, the fur trade was a three-way commercial contest between the British-chartered Hudson's Bay Company, operating in the Oregon territory, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, whose operatives used Taos in New Mexico as its jump-off point, and the American Fur Company based in St Louis. In the early days, the Hudson's Bay Company trapped along the Pacific Rim while the other two disputed the interior, but after 1830 the Hudson's Bay Company expanded inland, complicating the situation. The American Fur Company won its long battle with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, but was about to succumb to the greater resources of the Hudson's Bay Company when the fur trade itself came to an abrupt end: in their competition mania, the mountain men had all but exterminated the beaver. But the indirect consequences of the fur trade era were incalculable. The mountain men, seeking new employment, were able to guide the first wagon trains of emigrants along trails they themselves had pioneered. And throughout the 1830s they brought back letters and travellers' tales from California and Oregon, thus acting as transmission belts in the spreading of knowledge about the West.
Mountain men apart, until the late 1830s the only other significant white American presence west of the Mississippi (always excepting the special case of Texas) was that of missionaries. In 1833, the Methodists established their first mission in the Oregon territory under the Reverend Jason Lee. Dr John McLoughlin, chief of the Hudson's Bay Company in Oregon, did not want Americans north of the Columbia River, so steered them towards the fertile Willamette valley; the Methodists accepted the suggestion, but set up a branch office at the Dalles on the Columbia. Stung by the success of the Methodists, the Presbyterians sent out their own missionaries in 1835. Accompanied by Dr Marcus Whitman, the Reverend Samuel Parker reconnoitred the Oregon territory and decided that his denomination's missions would be in eastern Oregon, at Waiilatpu, among the Cayuse Indians, and at Lapwai, among the Nez Percé. Warnings from McLoughlin about the danger of working with such warlike tribes went unheeded.
Parker and Whitman returned east by ship. In the spring of 1836, Whitman set out for Oregon again. But his situation was difficult. Because the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, fearing the miscegenation and 'immorality' of the mountain men, would send only married couples to work among 'savages', Whitman had to find a wife. He found one in the twenty-eight-year-old Narcissa Prentiss, a dedicated New York Presbyterian. Whitman married her in February 1836 after returning from his first trip to Oregon with Samuel Parker. But there was a complication. Accompanying Whitman to Oregon was another missionary, Henry Spalding, who had earlier been rejected by Narcissa when he proposed marriage. By now Spalding had made a marriage of convenience, so he and his wife joined the Whitmans for an embarrassing and uncomfortable journey into the unknown. Some historians have speculated that many of the later difficulties between Spalding and Whitman can be traced to Narcissa's initial rejection. There were other problems on the journey, as Thomas Fitzpatrick, leading a party of fur traders into the interior, did not want to take the missionaries along, fearing that their wives would be targeted by the Indians. He tried to slip away unnoticed, but the intrepid Whitman caught up with his party in a series of forced marches.
By becoming the first white women to cross the Rockies, Narcissa Whitman and Mrs Henry Spalding proved that the way west was feasible for women and children. The Whitmans set up their mission station at Waiilatpu, near modern-day Walla Walla, Washington, while the Spaldings settled at Lapwai, near present-day Lewiston, Idaho. Narcissa became one of the great characters of the early West, 'vivacious, attractive, gregarious, idealistic and sentimentally religious', as she has been called. But the Presbyterians made few converts. The Cayuse and Nez Percé were interested only in what benefits they could winkle out of the white men and accordingly merely feigned interest in Christianity. Spalding wrote in despair: 'I fear that they will all prove to be a selfish, deceptive race of beings.' But the missionaries sowed seeds that would germinate later. President Andrew Jackson sent an agent out to investigate missionary endeavour in Oregon. William Slocum's report, enthusiastically stressing the potential of the Oregon territory, interested Senator Lewis Linn of Missouri, who soon began to lobby for US annexation of the territory. And the existence of the missions encouraged a trickle of early settlers: fifty-one to Jason Lee's Methodist foundation in the Willamette valley in 1839, many more in 1840. By the end of that year, there were already five hundred whites in the Willamette valley.
Such was the context for the first wagon train emigration of 1841. The 1840s was, in economic terms, an odd decade, wedged between the fur trade bonanza years of 1820–40 and the gold rush of 1849 and the subsequent inland mining boom era. Almost by pre-established harmony, the last great annual market or rendezvous of the fur trappers took place the year before the first wagon train set out. The other peculiarity of the 1840s was that the United States suddenly became an aggressive, expansionist nation. Pace the historian Bernard de Voto, some say that America's real 'year of decision' was 1844 not 1846. The election of James Polk that year as US president gave the green light for a process that would, four years later, see all of Mexico north of the Rio Grande and all the Oregon territory south of the forty-ninth parallel of latitude in US hands. The watchword was sounded by the editor of the New York Morning News, John L. O'Sullivan, who wrote in December 1845 that it was the 'manifest destiny' of the United States 'to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us'.
Manifest Destiny was a peculiar mixture of assertiveness and fear, of ideology and crude political calculation. Economic motives such as the export of surplus capital or the acquisition of new markets do not seem to have played a primary role. Ideologically, the notion of Manifest Destiny can be seen as a weird mixture of evangelical Protestantism, ultramontane republicanism and Hegelian philosophy. History, as in Hegel's system, had a purpose or destiny, and Providence had obviously chosen the United States as its vessel. Since the white race was self-evidently superior to the black, the red or the Hispanic, only the lily-livered or the cretinous would draw back from fulfilling the obvious design of the transcendent order, whether this was called God, Spirit or Providence. There has always been a strand in US republican thought that has emphasised continual expansion as the only way to preserve the peculiar virtue of republicanism, just as there has always been a countervailing strand that stresses that expansion or foreign adventures pervert the sanctity both of republican virtue and of Providence's mandate itself.
But Manifest Destiny was not a product of pure ideology. Alongside these 'positive' aspects, at least two negative facets should be noted. Some historians see fear of foreign nations, and especially Britain, as the real impulse towards expansion. British meddling in California and Texas was particularly resented, and the fear was that, if the United States did not move quickly to annex the territories north of the Rio Grande held in Mexico's grasp, some other nation, probably Britain, would acquire them. Even if former Spanish territories were not added to the British Empire, London could maintain them as independent states, as a curb on American economic ambitions; both Britain and France looked on Texas as a profitable target for markets and investment. Alongside this was a desire for expansion by southern slave-owning states, fearful that the balance of power in the United States was swinging away from them. The incorporation of slave- owning Texas would be a powerful brake on the ambitions of the abolitionists. Even those who wavered were won round by scare stories about British desire to abolish slavery worldwide.
So, for their own reasons, Southerners who might otherwise have been disposed to oppose Polk supported him. But whatever the explanation of Manifest Destiny (and it continues to be disputed), the spectacular results could scarcely be doubted. Alongside the earlier settlement of the Oregon Question, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which sealed the US victory in the Mexican War, added 1.2 million square miles to the United States, out of which would arise the states of California, Oregon, New Mexico and Arizona, as well as much of Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Polk's aggression had secured an increase of 66 per cent in the nation's size.
In subtle ways, Manifest Destiny was important as an ideological support for the pioneers who struck west in their wagons in the 1840s. Just as the Boers and Mormons trekked into the wilderness with a conviction that God was on their side, so the emigrants could feel they were caught up in a movement of inevitability, that they were history's 'winners'. Racial prejudice and a feeling of cultural superiority were important aspects to this. The traveller Walter Colton is eloquent on the sentiments of cultural and ethnic superiority, when he describes the California pioneers: 'They seem to look upon this beautiful land as their own Canaan, and the motley race around them as the Hittites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, whom they are to drive out.' Everything they heard and read convinced the wagon train emigrants that right, justice and the main historical currents were on their side. John O'Sullivan reassured them: 'There is in fact no such thing as title to the wild lands of the new world, except that which actual possession gives. They belong to whoever will redeem them from the Indian and the desert, and subjugate them to the use of man.'
Thereafter, the would-be emigrant had just two main decisions to make: which route should he follow; and was the 'pull' of the Pacific sufficient to draw him out of the farmlands of the Midwest?
Wagons first went west on the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to Santa Fe, and the trail itself was born in the very year of Mexico's independence from Spain, in 1821. But it took twenty years for the first emigrants to reach California from Missouri via the Santa Fe Trail. There is an interesting historical 'synchronicity' here. It took twenty years from the time the British acquired the Cape Colony to the moment (in 1836) the first Boers trekked west and north out of the colony in search of the promised land. The great migrations in South Africa and North America were virtually simultaneous events. But overland migration in the southwest proved a false dawn. The Santa Fe Trail is important in the story of the wagon trains mainly as (literally) the road not taken. Why it was not taken is important to establish, for in this case the flag most certainly did not follow trade.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wagons West"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Frank McLynn.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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