Made In America (24 page)

Pronunciations were adapted too to conform to American patterns, especially among Italians with names like Capone and Stallone, where the final vowel, always voiced in Italy, often became silent in America. This happened with English names as well, so that
Cecil, Purcell, Maurice
and
Barnett
became in America ‘seesil’, ‘pur
-sell,
’mo
-reece’
and ‘bar
-nett’.

Despite the manifold pressures to conform, and the incontestable convenience that came with adopting a simple American name, millions stuck loyally to whatever monicker fate and geography had brought them. A glance through the index of a book on the history of American football, which I
happen to have before me, throws up such uncompromisingly un-American names as Dick Modjelewski, Ed Abbatticchio, Knute Rockne, Bronsilaw ‘Bronko’ Nagurski, Fred Benirschke, Harry Stuhldreder, Zeke Bratkowski, W. W. Heffelfinger, Jim Kiick, Dan Pasquariello and Alex Wojchiechowicz, and virtually any other list of Americans (except for Presidents and film stars) would show equal ethnic diversity. Indeed, there is a growing tendency to resurrect old family names, as with the actor Emilio Estevez, the son of the actor Martin Sheen (né Ramon Estevez) and the writer David Wallechinsky, son of Irving Wallace.

Finally, there remains a group of immigrants that tends to get left out of discussions of this type: American blacks. Conventional wisdom has it that blacks, long denied the dignity of a surname under slavery, conveniently took the names of their former owners upon being freed. However, the evidence – not to mention common sense – suggests that blacks showed no special affection for the names of their masters. Those names that feature most prominently among southern slave-holders – Pinckney, Randolph and Rutledge, for instance – appear only incidentally among any list of black names. It appears that most freed slaves either adopted an innocuous American name – Johnson, Jones, Smith, Robinson and the like – or named themselves for a hero. Hence the relatively large number of Afro-Americans named Washington, Jefferson, Brown (from the abolitionist John Brown) and Howard (after General O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the years just after the Civil War) – but not, oddly and inexplicably, Lincoln.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson made one of history's better buys. For about three cents an acre, he purchased from the French all or most of what would become twelve states – Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and the two Dakotas – at a stroke more than doubling the size of the United States. It was known as the Louisiana Purchase.

The natural thing was to commission someone to explore and chart the new territory. In fact Jefferson already had. Months before the Louisiana Purchase had been considered even a possibility, he had authorized Meriwether Lewis to lead an illegal exploratory party across the western territories. By the time word reached Lewis that most of the country to the west was now in American hands, he was already halfway to St Louis.

Lewis had grown up near Monticello as Jefferson's protégé, ‘almost a son' to him, in the words of one biographer,
¹
and was something of an odd choice to lead the expedition. Though he had military experience, he was not particularly acquainted with wilderness travel and for the past two years had led a decidedly soft life as Jefferson's private secretary in the White House. His schooling was minimal. He had no training as a botanist or cartographer and spoke no Indian
languages. More ominously, he was given to disturbing mood swings euphemistically called ‘hypochondriac affections'. For co-leader he turned to his friend William Clark. Despite coming from a distinguished family (his brother was the Revolutionary War general George Rogers Clark), Clark had even less schooling than Lewis and had about him the perennial air of a frontiersman, but he was steady, resourceful and brave. They made, almost miraculously, a perfect pair of leaders.

On 14 May 1804 they set off up the Missouri at the head of a ragtag party consisting of thirty-two soldiers, ten civilians, one slave (Lieutenant Clark's servant, York), a teenaged Indian guide and interpreter named Sacagawea and her new-born baby, two other interpreters and Lewis's dog Scannon. They would be gone almost two and a half years and would travel some eight thousand miles through unknown and often hostile territory, yet just one member of the party would die, from a ruptured appendix.

They were by no means the first whites to venture into the vast North American interior. As early as 1680, some eight hundred French fur trappers were at work in the West,
²
and by 1804 both French and English traders and trappers were a common sight all along the sprawling watershed of the Missouri River. In 1792-3 a Briton named Alexander Mackenzie had travelled over the Canadian Rockies to British Columbia, and in doing so had become the first person of European descent to reach the Pacific overland. Many more had reached the west coast by sea, as Lewis and Clark discovered when Pacific North-west Indians greeted their arrival with a hearty ‘son-of-a-pitch' in the evident belief that this was an English call of friendship.
³
They also encountered an Indian woman with the name ‘Jonathan Bowman' crudely tattooed on her leg.
⁴
In 1801 the explorer Mackenzie published an influential book,
Voyages from Montreal... through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans,
in which he suggested that the British pre-empt the United States in the western territories while the chance was there. It was this alarming prospect that had led Jefferson to initiate the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Though Lewis and Clark were not the first to venture into the western territories they were the first to approach the matter scientifically. With unflagging diligence they labelled, mapped and inspected everything that passed before them, recording their findings in their famous journals, which still make marvellous reading today. It is impossible to read Clark's notes in particular without developing a swift affection for his rough spelling and erratic grammar, which at times, in the words of George R. Stewart, ‘approached the inspired'. From his first entry upon setting off – ‘We proceeded on under a jentle brease up the Missourie,
⁵
– his directness of description and eccentricity of composition make the whole hazardous undertaking come alive:

Under his uncertain hand,
circumference
became
secumpherance, rheumatism
became
rhumertism,
and Missouri became almost anything –
Missouris, Missouries, Missourie
– often taking on two spellings in the same line.
Sacagawea,
the heroic Indian girl who guided the party across the wilderness, he wisely steered clear of, referring to her as ‘the squar'. Lewis, though himself an erratic speller, brought a more assured style to the journals. Between them they coined almost a thousand terms for animals, plants and features previously
unrecorded on the landscape. They discovered 178 plants and 122 animals, among them the grizzly bear and great-tailed fox, and several species of pike, catfish and squirrels. No other explorers or naturalists in American history have named more objects.

Among the words not previously recorded in English are
great plains, prairie dog
(though Clark preferred
ground rat)
and
cache
for a secret hole in the ground (taken evidently from French trappers and spelled, almost inevitably, ‘carsh' by Clark). Some of their words didn't catch on. Their term
small wolves
was eventually displaced by the Mexican-Spanish
coyote
(from the Nahuatl
coyotl).
They also named every feature of the landscape that didn't have a known name already, though quite a number did.
Yellowstone,
for instance, is no more than Lewis's literal translation of the French trappers'
Roche Jaune.
Yet relatively few of their geographic names survived. They gave the noble name Philanthropy River to a tributary of the Missouri, but it didn't stick. Later passers-by renamed it Stinking Water. The Lewis River later became the Shoshone. Philosophy River became Willow Creek.

Despite having three interpreters to call on, Lewis and Clark often encountered extraordinary language difficulties with the native Americans. At one meeting, in a kind of pass-the-parcel round of translating, Lewis's English was translated into French by one listener, from French into Minitari by another, from Minitari into Shoshone by the next person in line and finally from Shoshone into Nez Percé. The Indians themselves obviated such difficulties with a universal sign language of about a hundred gestures, which could communicate, if baldly, most needs. The party also experienced remarkable good fortune, most notably during a potentially tense encounter with Indians when Sacagawea realized that one of the opposing braves was her brother.

After the expedition Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of the Louisiana Territory. In October 1809, three years after the
expedition's completion and while aged just thirty-four, the great explorer died in exceedingly odd circumstances in a back-country inn called Grinder's Tavern along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Clearly suffering a severe outbreak of his ‘hypochondriac affections', he began behaving in an odd and paranoid manner – to the extent that the proprietor of the lodgings moved out of the house and into an outbuilding. For hours Lewis could be heard talking and shouting to himself. Then at some time late in the night gunshots were heard and all went quiet. In the morning Lewis was found with terrible wounds – half his skull was blown away and he had other self-inflicted injuries all over – but still conscious. He begged the proprietor to put him out of his misery, but the proprietor refused. Lewis died later that day. His friend and colleague William Clark fared rather better. He became governor of the Missouri Territory and commanded it with distinction, though he never did learn to spell.

For the better part of a century Lewis and Clark's scientific and linguistic achievements went almost wholly unremarked. Not until 1893, when a researcher and naturalist named Elliott Coues rediscovered their all but forgotten manuscripts mouldering in a cupboard at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and produced an annotated edition of their journals, were they at last accorded recognition as naturalists, cartographers and ethnologists.
⁷

Jefferson thought it would take a thousand years for Americans to populate the vast emptiness of the West,
⁸
but he hadn't reckoned on the great waves of immigration of the nineteenth century and the odd ‘restlessness of character' that so fascinated Tocqueville.
⁹
From the start, Americans seldom stayed anywhere long. Jamestown was a ghost town less than a century after it was founded. Few states haven't seen their state capitals move at least once and often more. Just between the Revolution and War of 1812, a period of roughly thirty-five years, eight of the original thirteen colonies moved their
seats of government. Further west, capitals changed even more often. Indiana moved its from Vincennes to Corydon and finally to Indianapolis. Illinois went from Kaskaskia to Vandalia and on to Springfield.
¹⁰
Frontier,
which meant (and still means) a national border in British English, took on in America the new sense of the ever-moving dividing line between wilderness and civilization.

Towns were established with high hopes and, if things didn't work out, abandoned without hesitation. In 1831 Abraham Lincoln moved to New Salem, Illinois. Six years later, trade on the nearby Sangamon River proving disappointing, he and everyone else abandoned the community and scattered to more promising parts. All over the West towns came and went. For every Chicago and Milwaukee that thrived thousands of others passed quietly away. Iowa alone had 2,205 communities fade into ghost towns in its first century.
¹¹

Before the 1800s
city
was a term usually reserved for substantial communities, but in nineteenth-century America it began to be applied to almost any cluster of houses, however modest. To this day America is dotted with ‘cities' for which the term is patently overambitious – places like Republican City, Nebraska (pop. 231), Barnes City, Iowa (pop. 266), Rock City, Illinois (pop. 286). But what we tend to forget is that in America dusty hamlets
could
become cities, and almost overnight.

The boom town
par excellence
was a little community on the shores of Lake Michigan called Fort Dearborn. In 1832 it had fewer than a hundred inhabitants. Sixty years later, renamed Chicago, it boasted a million inhabitants and was the largest grain market in the world.
¹²
No community in history has risen to greatness so swiftly. As Daniel Boorstin has noted: ‘Mankind had required at least a million years to produce its first urban community of a million people. Chicagoans accomplished this feat in less than a century.‘
¹³
What made it possible to house such a mass of people in so short a period was a Chicago invention that went by the odd name of
balloon frame construction.
This revolutionary method of building, in which light but sturdy timber frames are hammered together, then hoisted into place, was invented by Augustine Taylor in Chicago in 1833, and was so ingeniously unimprovable that it is still almost universally used in the building of American homes.
Balloon frame
was not Taylor's term. It was coined by sceptical carpenters to denigrate the method because of its extraordinary lightness and presumed frailty.
¹⁴
When Taylor used the method to construct Chicago's first Catholic church, nearly everyone thought that the building would be carried off like a tent by the first strong winds. Needless to say it was not, and soon the method was being copied everywhere.