Made In America (25 page)

To Americans ‘the West' was an ever-changing, concept. At the time of the first federal census in 1790, 95 per cent of America's four million people lived hard by the eastern seaboard and ‘the West' was virtually everything else. By the 1820s, it extended not much beyond the Appalachians. Kentucky's leading paper of the day was called the
Argus of Western America.
Even as late as mid-century a chronicler like Charles Dickens could venture only as far as St Louis, still the better part of a thousand miles short of the Rockies, and plausibly claim to have seen the West.

The move to the West as we now know it began in earnest in the mid-1840s when the expression
Oregon fever
erupted. Encouraged by the government to settle the north-western territory claimed also by Britain, homesteaders set off in their thousands for a new life at the end of the Oregon Trail, following a route blazed by trappers twenty years before. The phrase that summed up America's new assertive attitude to western development was coined by the editor of the
Democratic Review,
John O'Sullivan, in 1845 when he wrote
that it was ‘our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions'.
¹⁵
The peopling of the West became not just an opportunity to be seized, but a kind of mission.

Oregon Trail
is a somewhat misleading term. For one thing, it wasn't a trail in the sense of a well-defined track. It was almost entirely a notional corridor, highly variable in width, across the grassy plains. Moreover, after the first few years relatively few of those who travelled the trail were heading for Oregon. Once past the Rockies, they instead broke off and made for the gold fields of California.

One of the great myths of the westward migration, compounded by a thousand movies, was that the immigrants lumbered over the prairies in Conestoga wagons. These sturdy vehicles were, in the words of the historian George R. Stewart, ‘uselessly heavy for the long pull to Oregon or California'.
¹⁶
They did haul some freight west, but almost never did they transport families. Instead westward immigrants used lighter, smaller and much nimbler wagons universally known as
prairie schooners.
These were hauled not by horses, but by mules or oxen, which could withstand the hardships of prairie crossings far better than any horse could. A final myth engendered by Hollywood was that wagons gathered in a circle whenever under attack by Indians. They didn't, and for the simple reason that the process would have been so laborious to organize that the party would very probably have been slaughtered before the job was even a quarter accomplished.

Wagons were covered with canvas, as in the movies, though that word was seldom used; the material was more generally known in the nineteenth century as
twill.
Though
wagon train
was also used (it is first recorded in 1849), the term wasn't particularly apt. For much of the journey the wagons fanned out into an advancing line up to ten miles wide to avoid each other's dust and the ruts of earlier
travellers – and providing yet another obstacle to their forming into circles.

Many of the early homesteaders had only the faintest idea of what they were letting themselves in for, and often through no fault of their own. Until well into the third decade of the nineteenth century ignorance of the West remained so profound that maps were frequently sprinkled with fanciful rivers – the Multnomah, the Los Mongos, the Buenaventura – and with a great inland sea called the Timpanogos. Those who went west, incidentally, didn't think of themselves as still being in America. Until about the time of the Civil War,
America
was generally taken to signify the eastern states, so that accounts of the time commonly contain statements like ‘Some people here [in Oregon] are talking about going back to America' or ‘We'll go back to America. Dressed up slick and fine' (from, respectively, the
New York Tribune
in 1857 and the
Rocky Mountain News
in 1860).

The landscape they found was so strikingly different that it required new words. Although
great plains
had been used as early as 1806, the grassy flatlands west of the Missouri were usually called
the barrens,
or sometimes
the great dismal,
until the French
prairie
began to supersede it.
Prairie,
from an old French word for meadow, had been in use in America since colonial times, originally signifying a piece of wild open ground enclosed by forest.
Desert,
too, was modified to suit the peculiar landscape of the West. Originally it had signified any uninhabited place (a sense preserved in
deserted).
Thus
Great American Desert,
first noted in 1834, described not just the scrubby arid lands of the south-west, but also the rich grasslands to the north. Much of the landscape that we now think of as desolate and forbidding was nothing like as barren then as it is today. When the western migrants arrived, much of the south-west was covered in waving grass. They simply grazed it away.
¹⁷
Even so, there was no shortage of places that proved treacherous beyond endurance. One party
that tried taking a short cut to California in 1849 discovered to its cost a killing expanse that they named Death Valley.

The traditional western stagecoach, notwithstanding its perennial role in movies and TV programmes, saw active service for only a little over a decade. The first service was inaugurated in 1858 when the Overland Mail Company began twice-weekly trips from St Louis to San Francisco. Its Concord coaches (named for Concord, New Hampshire, where they were developed) were intended principally to carry mail and freight but also carried up to nine passengers at $200 each for the westward trip and $150 for the eastward. (Eastward was cheaper because the traffic was largely one way.) All being well, the trip took a little over three weeks. In 1866 the Overland Mail Company was sold to Wells, Fargo and Co., but it was put out of business by the opening of the first transcontinental railway three years later.

Even more short-lived was the Pony Express. Inaugurated on 3 April 1860, it was designed to carry mail as quickly as possible from St Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Riders rode in relays, each averaging fifty to eighty miles a day (though some occasionally went as far as three hundred miles without a rest), carrying a mail pouch or
mochila,
as it was more normally called. On an average run, seventy-five riders would cover the two thousand miles between Missouri and California in ten and a half days. It was a fabulous achievement, but economic folly. Setting up and maintaining riders, horses and way stations was an exceedingly costly business. The express's investors sank $700,000 into the service and, despite charging a whopping $5 an ounce for letters, never made back more than a fraction of their costs. By late 1861, barely nineteen months after starting, the Pony Express was out of business, a victim of the newly installed telegraph and its own inescapable costs.

For those who wished not to face the perils and discomforts of travelling overland, the alternative was to go by
sea. One option was to take a ship to Panama through the Gulf of Mexico, cross the fifty-mile-wide Isthmus of Panama (or Isthmus of Darien as it was then commonly called) on horseback and catch another ship up the Pacific coast. But connections were uncertain and it was not uncommon to be stranded there for weeks at the mercy of steamy heat and yellow fever. The other option was to go by ship around Cape Horn, a 15,000-mile journey that seldom took less than six months and sometimes twice that in conditions that rarely rose above the squalid. Altogether, getting to California was a dangerous and uncomfortable affair.

But that didn't stop anyone – not at least after gold was found there in 1849. In the first four years of the gold rush, the population of California went from 20,000 to just under 225,000. In those same four years, $220 million in gold was pulled from the ground or sluiced from its glittering creeks. The gold rush not only enriched a fortunate few, but enlivened the language. Many of the terms that arose from it soon made their way into more general usage, among them
pay dirt, pan out, to stake a claim
and
to strike it rich,
¹⁸
all of which were soon being used in senses far removed from the idea of scrabbling in the earth for nuggets of gold.

One of the many side-effects of the gold rush was the invention of hard-wearing canvas trousers and bib overalls in San Francisco in the 1850s. The inventor was of course Levi Strauss, who had travelled west with a load of canvas (or twill) intending to make tents, but found a much greater demand for trousers that would stand up to the wear and tear of life in the mining camps. He didn't call them
jeans.
In the 1850s the word signified not an item of apparel but a type of cloth. It is a corruption of
Genoa,
the Italian city where it was first woven. Not until this century did denim (itself a corruption of
serge de Nîmes,
from the French city) trousers become generally known as jeans and not until the 1940s were people calling them
Levis.

The traffic to California wasn't all from east to west. Many thousands came from China. At the beginning of the gold rush, just 325 Chinese lived in California; two years later the number had jumped to 25,000. In the next three decades it increased twelvefold, to over 300,000, or nearly one-tenth of the population. Because of political turmoil in China, almost all of them came from just six small districts in Guangdong province.

The Chinese, who for entirely mysterious reasons were commonly known in the West as ‘Johnnies', were treated exceptionally badly. Because they were prepared to work hard for little pay, and because their appearance precluded easy assimilation, they were often pointlessly attacked and occasionally even massacred. Even banding together didn't provide much protection. In 1885, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a mob swooped on a community of five hundred Chinese for no reason other than that they didn't like them, and left twenty-eight dead. Such was the prejudice against the Chinese that in some western courts they were not even permitted to plead self-defence. Thus there arose the telling western expression ‘He doesn't have a Chinaman's chance.'

Many of the terms that we most closely associate with the West were not coined there at all. Abigail Adams used
desperadoes
to describe the participants in Shays' Rebellion long before the word attached itself to western bandits.
²⁰
Though the chuck wagon (from a slang term for food, which survives incidentally in the expression
upchuck)
became widely used in the West – one of the most popular models was built by the Studebaker Company of Detroit – the term was widely used in Kentucky long before the Oregon Trail was even thought of.
Son of a gun
and
to bite the dust
were both Anglicisms brought to America by early colonists.
Posse
has been in English since the Middle Ages. Much of the inflated speech that seems such a natural accompaniment to
the high-spirited lifestyle of the West – formations like
absquatulate
and
rambunctious
– had originated long before in New England.
²¹
Likewise, the
Stetson
hat, also often called a
John B.,
was an eastern innovation. Its originator, John Batterson Stetson, was a Philadelphian who never intended the hat to be exclusively associated with guys on horses.

Even
cowboy
was an old term. It was first used during the Revolutionary War as a disparaging epithet for loyalists. In its modern sense it dates from 1867 when an entrepreneur named Joseph McCoy (another oft-named candidate for the source of the expression
the real McCoy)
began employing cowboys to run longhorn cattle up the Chisholm Trail from Texas to his railhead at Abilene, Kansas. He became immensely successful and by the early 1870s was shipping out up to 500,000 head of cattle a year from the dusty town.
(Cow town
didn't enter the language until 1885.)

To distinguish one herd of cattle from another, ranchers began using brands, and these developed a complicated argot of their own. A letter tipped on its side was called ‘lazy'. A line underneath a letter was a ‘bar'. A letter written with curving lines rather than straight ones was called ‘running'. And from these came the names of many ranches: the Lazy X Bar, the Running Wand and so on.
²²
There were literally thousands of brands – 5,000 in Wyoming and nearly 12,000 in Montana by the early 1890s – and publishers made a good income from producing annual brand books. Unmarked cattle were called
mavericks.
The name comes from a Texas rancher named Samuel A. Maverick who refused to brand his cattle – though whether because he was eccentric or lazy or simply hoped to claim all unmarked cattle as his own is a matter of long dispute among western historians.
²³

Hollywood has left us with the impression that the West was peopled by little but cowboys. In fact, farmers outnumbered them by about a thousand to one. Even at their peak there were fewer than 10,000 working cowboys, at least
a quarter of them black or Mexican (and the remainder not a great deal higher up the nineteenth-century social scale).
²⁴

The cowboy of popular imagination was largely the invention of two highly unlikely easterners. The first was the artist Frederic Remington, whose action-filled, hyper-realist paintings were in fact largely studio creations based on a lively imagination. He never saw any real cowboys in action. For one thing he was immensely fat – much too fat to get on a horse, let alone ride it into the midst of Indian battles. Even more crucially, by the time he made his first trip to the West the cowboy age was all but over.

No less disconnected from life around the camp-fire was his close friend Owen Wister, who mythologized cowboys on paper in much the same way that Remington mythologized them on canvas. Cowboys had begun to appear as heroes in dime novels as early as the 1880s (the genre appears to have been the invention of one Prentiss Ingraham), but it wasn't until Wister published
The Virginian
in 1902 that the cowboy (or
cow-boy
as Wister insisted on spelling it) truly became a national figure. Wister was the quintessential
dude
(a word of unknown origin dating in a western context only from 1883, though it was used earlier in the East). Scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family and grandson of the celebrated actress Fanny Kemble, he was a Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt, and of a decidedly delicate disposition. Unlike Remington, he actually travelled in the West, though he hardly hit the dusty trail. He was sent west by his parents to recover from a nervous breakdown and was chaperoned throughout by two spinsters.