22 April 2010
The Opening of the West
(Union Pacific Engine #119 and crew on the Promontory Trestle in Utah, just east of the Summit)
I am not from those wild empty lands Out West, but I have traveled across them many times, headed for temporary homes in Denver and Park City, or driving from Salt Lake up to Evanston at the western portal of Wyoming to seek beer with a realistic level of alcohol in it, rather than the mild irritant of Utah’s 3.2 percent brew.
I have sat on the beach near the house on Coronado Island and thought about the pointy-headed geeks in Washington, and now that I am one I sometimes forget the perspective.
So apologize in advance to those to whom this is family history; I mean no disrespect and have no ulterior motive except to explore the concept of land and ownership. I am assuredly not of a mind to mimic E. Annie Proulx, who moved to Wyoming in 1994 and wrote “Brokeback Mountain.”
The point to this narrative is to chart the migration of the status of open space in America. Claimed in whole by Spain, France and the British Crown, the land of the Native Americans was transformed into state and private property. The process was guided by traditions as old Rome, filtered through English Common Law, and modified to meet the emerging requirements to graze cattle, mine minerals, and later, capture the gas and oil that lies beneath.
We have rambled through some of the stories of how that happened in these endless chronicles. Lord Fairfax gained title to the Indian lands where I write by an original grant from a King who never lived here. My pal Jinny is the descendent of those bold migrants who settled the Ohio territory, to the intense irritation of those who were already there.
I grew up in what had been the Northwest Territory as Manifest Destiny pushed inexorably to the Mississippi River. The rivers were the roads that carried the law with them, and the seizure of the common land by the pointy-headed people in Washington.
The French were the first white men to venture up the great rivers from the Great Lakes country. I had the perfect view of Fairfax Drive from my chair on the patio in front of the Willow bistro. Ray was expansive. He appreciates his French heritage from New Orleans, and said idly that “the French trappers who first traveled the rivers of the plains did not care to settle in and begin farming. They were trappers, as were the English mountain men who followed them. They were not gentle people but they left little footprint as they passed. That changed with Lewis and Clark.”
“I heard the people back east considered the stories they brought back about the Yellowstone territory to be pure tall tales.”
“People back east don’t know half of what they claim they do,” I said. “They even forget they are east.” I looked around quickly to assure myself that I safely on the right side of the Potomac. “But every wonder they saw was real. it was all real. I remember it blowing my mind the first time we streaked out to Utah on I-80, realizing we were following the path of the Oregon Trail and the original line of the Union-Pacific Railroad.”
“I looked on Google Map,” said Ray. They claim the real Bridger Pass is a couple miles south of the highway. But it was the railroad that did it, and that was the amazing tale that both opened and closed the West.”
I was momentarily disappointed that I had not driven where Bridger walked. But close enough. I once took the Amtrak train west, but it was the one that replaced the Super Chief on the Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe headed for New Mexico. It was still a grand way to roll along. Those rails led southwest from Chicago. The First Rails had been those of the Union Pacific, and the land over which they ran was doled out by the Congress, though fiat and treaty with the people who occupied them.
“Before the Civil War,” said Ray, “there were competing lobbies for a northern and southern route. When the South seceded, it gave Congress a free hand to run it from Omaha through Nebraska and the Wyoming Territory and Utah, where the plan was to link up with the Central Pacific. That is as far south in the North as they could manage.”
I nodded. I had just read a marvelous- and quite horrifying- account of the brutal conditions endured by the 10,000 Chinese and battalions of Irish workers who had to hack their way through the Sierra Madres is contained in the recent thriller “The Man from Beijing,” by Henning Mankel. It boggles the mind to think of what they did with pick-axes and dynamite, and no one knows how many died.
I poked around a little on the history of the first transcontinental rail line as a consequence. Steven Ambrose wrote a compelling account of it (“Nothing Like It in the World.”) He described the astonishing story of Grenville Dodge, a former Union Army Major General who had served in the brutal Atlanta campaign that scourged Georgia as the war turned to one of mass destruction. He was the man who made it happen, in the field at war, and then with steel across the continent.
Dodge had made quite a name for himself during the conflict. It was said that he was hard to find at any given time, but you could always tell where he had been.
He led a small army of 20,000 across the plains. They were mostly immigrant men. There were all the problems you can imagine; no native lumber in Nebraska, so it had to be felled elsewhere. Rails and spikes, food and fuel, replacement horses and all had to be transported from the Missouri River.
The great Commons of the Plains was one of the first things to be addressed. The path of the Union Pacific crossed Native American lands, of course, held in common by the tribes for millennia. Their reaction to the intrusion of the rails was predictable, and a matter of self-defense. There were constant raids against the railroads.
Dodge contacted William Tecumseh Sherman, his former Boss in Georgia and now Commander of the Military Division of the West, to insist that the Indians be cleaned out. Sherman knew exactly what to do based on his scorched earth campaign through Georgia. He knew the native depended on the bison for food and clothing, and accordingly planned a campaign to eradicate them. The lengthening line of track bisected the natural migration of the great herds and permitted the hunters to slaughter them wholesale.
The track-laying crews learned how to lay more than a mile of track a day, most drawing a dollar a day in pay. They worked seven days a week and used all the daylight available. When they were not working or sleeping, they were drinking. When the rails reached Cheyenne in November of 1867, there were four times the number of murders as deaths attributable to accident.
West of there, the weather was breezy and bitterly cold. Dodge wrote in his account of the great "Central Wyoming was desolate, dreary, not susceptible to cultivation and only portions of it fit for grazing."
It had a wild beauty, though, and soon the land would be divided in fee simple and common territory. The rails continued to push west, through Laramie, Rawlins (Ft. Fred Steel), Green River and Evanston toward Promontory Summit, where Central Pacific hurled itself up the hill to meet the Union Pacific. The golden spike that linked two rails was driven on May 9, 1869, less than four years since Dodge set out from Omaha. The coasts were unified the paroxysm of Manifest Destiny.
The sun was declining on Fairfax Drive and Ray needed to get back to Annapolis, where he is renting a place to complete his last government job. We paid the tab to Peter, the solicitous barman from Atlanta that Sherman burned.
As we got ready to walk to our cars, I told Ray that my pals from John Street in Ann Arbor moved out to Park City, Utah, soon after college days were done. A few are still out there, having filtered out to places like Heber City, where real people not focused on skiing live. At the time, there still was a lot of the infrastructure left in town from the original days of the Silver Boom that was enabled by the coming of the railroad. The Silver King stamping mill served as the logo for the town, and the vast timber structures that brought the spur line up to take the processed ore away were still in place.
They went away swiftly with the boom in recreation and leisure homes, but at the time, there were still deer in Deer Valley.
It was a direct connection to the time when the west was triumphantly open. The great commons of the public lands were now available to all, for the grazing of cattle and sheep.
It stayed that way for less than twenty years. I waved to Ray and climbed into the Bluesmobile to motor back to Big Pink.
As I drove, I thought about how the West closed up again, but I realized I have an early meeting, and will have to write to Ray about how the west closed up tomorrow.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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