The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America. Simon Winchester
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America - Simon Winchester страница 11

СКАЧАТЬ was a simple topographic reason for the choice of the expedition’s starting point. Close to the junction of the two streams, there was a mess of fluvial indecision, with the tributary rivers swiveling direction at the behest of their conjoined currents, leaving a maze of swamps and oxbow lakes and blind-alley bays all across the landscape. But in Saint Charles, the Missouri seemed at last to start pulling itself firmly away to the west—the direction in which the expedition wanted to go.

      The river’s course was directed by the local geology—the same geology that also enticed the first settlers. There was a low bluff of Devonian sandstone hills on the river’s northern bank, the first elevated ground west of its junction with the Mississippi, which would both keep any settlers safe from floods and, in case of attack, offer their pickets a good view of the waters downstream. So a cluster of buildings was built along the bluff—a Catholic chapel, a hundred poorly made houses, a few shops. All of them looked southward across the deep brown stream—the Big Muddy, as it would later be widely called (Clark claimed to find a wineglassful of ooze in every pint of Missouri river water)—toward the scattering of houses in distant Saint Louis, toward the familiar and the known.

      Behind, beyond their village pale, was the true unknown—a terra incognita of brown Indian hills, expanses of lands unfamiliar and potentially hostile. Hunters and trappers ventured there—but no settlers, not yet. Saint Charles was thus for many years the most westerly European settlement, the last bastion of immigrant civilization, a town that lay at the very point of intersection between settled America and untamed native lands of the frontier. It could scarcely have been more appropriate as a departure point.

      A thunderstorm was raging when Lewis arrived from Saint Louis. He took what churchly men still charmingly called a cold collation—a snack, allowed on fast days—and then crossed the river, where he found Lieutenant Clark and his party encamped for the evening. Most of the party (except for one member, who the night before had received fifty lashes for going AWOL and then displaying “behavior unbecoming” at a party) were “in good health and sperits.” Small wonder: Clark had been royally looked after during his four-day stay: the local Gallic swells offered far better food and wine than had ever been available back east, together with invitations to balls and visits to his boats by numbers of ladies of the town.

      One could imagine that Clark would have rather liked to stay, but just after lunch the next afternoon, they set off—“under three Cheers,” wrote Clark, “from the gentlemen on the bank.”

      They headed first directly toward the west, toiling against a slow river current and the whirling of the deadly water-boils they would endure for the next fifteen months, and until they eventually crossed the unknown, unimagined wilderness of the Continental Divide after more than three thousand miles of travel.

missing-image

      They spent the first six weeks journeying easily enough through what is now the state of Missouri. During the early miles, a number of limestone cliffs and sandstone bluffs rise up beside the stream—indeed, Clark fell from one three-hundred-foot pinnacle early in the trip, saving himself only by digging his knife into a crevice and dangling there until he felt brave enough to clamber back up. But generally the countryside here is more floodplain than valley, more prairie than canyon, and the river winds and wanders irrationally, all over the place.

      The party found they were making only minimal forward progress, even though their daily distances turned out to be wearyingly long. Today the highways and the Union Pacific rail lines follow much the same exhausting path along the riverbank. They do so not because contour lines compel them to, but because if they tried to go straight where the river winds—with every single bend given a name, Bushwhacker Bend, Bootlegger Bend, Cranberry Bend—far too many costly bridges would be required. It is more prudent and economical to follow the stream than to fight it, today just as it was back in the expedition’s time.

      After some weeks of sailing and rowing and poling along a willow-banked river, the party reached a junction, with a river they called the Kaw, today the Kansas River. The leaders were at last quite impressed with the landscape—“the countrey about the mouth of this river is verry fine,” wrote Clark, and said it would be a good site for a future army fort.

      The army must not have agreed, but civilian settlers eventually did, in their thousands, for they later turned the spit of land between the two streams into an enormous campsite, a base for the long and heroic westward treks along the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the California Trail. And the metropolis that some of their number then stayed behind to build, Kansas City, has become a classic of frontier America.

      I had been here before, some thirty years earlier. It was shortly before the bicentennial celebration of 1976, when I spent six months traveling through the Midwest, trying to understand the importance of that uniquely American phenomenon, the frontier. Along the way I had met many people and had seen many things: two of the more memorable happened to be right here, where Lewis and Clark were pressing westward through the very frontier I was studying.

      The first encounter was of rather lesser importance, though it still had some poignancy. I had been invited to visit a marble memorial to an enormous white Charolais bull. He was named Sam 951, and until 1972 he had lived on a ranch in the town of Chillicothe and had been famous for miles around as an example of bovine excellence. Sam’s frozen semen, once produced in exuberant gallons by what all agreed was an excessively jolly creature, was worth millions, and was packaged in nitrogen-cooled vials to be sent off from Chillicothe to eager customers all over the world.

      The Litton Charolais Ranch was in consequence once perhaps the most profitable cattle-breeding outfit in America. Sam 951 was primus inter pares of the large and carefully managed herd. Each bull—the best of them lived in air-conditioned barns kitted out with red carpets—weighed a ton or more, had ears the size of dinner plates, had a vast muscular body joined necklessly to an appropriately immense head, and sported dewlaps that would take two strong hands to move.

      Cattle like Sam had made a great fortune for the ranch owner, Jerry Litton, and had now brought him within a hair’s breadth of true fame. I spent two happy summer days with him—a handsome and engaging man who had married a former Miss Chillicothe (and a runner-up in the Miss Missouri pageant) and who for the previous four years had been a member of the US Congress, a Democrat. His home at the time I stayed was abuzz with political excitement: in two weeks voters were due to decide whether or not to elect him a US senator. Many, indeed, thought he would and should run for national office—President Jimmy Carter was a supporter—and in early 1976 he was sufficiently intrigued to announce that he would indeed take this obvious next step along the political glide path.

      When I turned up, his work was nearly all wrapped up. He was in the closing stages of what all agreed had been an impeccably nuanced and well-funded campaign for the primary election. And two weeks after I left, he did indeed triumph, leading a stunning upset in a twelve-man primary race. Jerry Litton was on the verge, I have long since believed, of well-deserved political greatness.

      On the night of his victory, he was to be flown back to Kansas City for a celebration. But then came calamity. The crankshaft in one of the engines sheared in half; the little plane lost power and crashed on takeoff; and Litton, his wife and children, his Beech Baron’s pilot, and the pilot’s son were all killed. Jerry Litton had been born in a house without electric power, in 1937, when this part of Missouri still had the feel of the frontier about it. He would have brought something of this spirit to Washington had fate permitted it. He was a figure of whom it can rightly be said, He could have been a contender. But fate saw to it that he never got the chance.

      My СКАЧАТЬ