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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ lure out the settlers and prompt their treks westward into a country that was now established to be blessed with the promise. The earth and its riches, in short, would offer a second theme well worthy of exploring.

      And the remaining three elements—water, fire, and metal—prove equally suited to this broader organizing principle.

      Water, for instance. There is no gainsaying the use of the country’s rivers and streams as early highways and the later employment of these waterways for trade, for the making of power, for the creation of frontiers. Then, if the waterways were not wide enough or deep enough or straight enough, there came the making of artificial rivers—the canals—which might ease the passage of people and goods across mountain chains. For scores of decades, right through to today, there are stories to tell of figures who were prominent in such unifying endeavors, which could all be linked by the essential element of water.

      After or overlapping with these stories, there came the invention of the engines and the concept of employing these engines as agents of motive power. The common physical feature of all such early engines was the employment of heat; whether they were powered by steam, gasoline, or aviation fuel, these engines would eventually allow the country to be journeyed across swiftly, expeditiously, and easily. The nation could now be intimately linked along roadways and highways traveled by a variety of contraptions, all powered by fire.

      Finally: metal. The copper cable of the telegraph, the steel wire of the telephone, the iron mast of radio and television, the subterranean and aerial titanium and cadmium and platinum mysteries of the Internet—the elemental common denominators of the transmission of information might be varied indeed, but in the terms of the ancients, metal was the common factor. Metal was key.

      Armed with this basic notion, I set off for several months of exploration. Like a mantra, the words wood, earth, water, fire, and metal became a phrase, repeated over and again, that lay always in the back of my mind as I traveled back and forth between the coasts and crossed the prairies and the mountain ranges of the United States.

      I equipped myself for the journey with tent and compass and sleeping bag, as well as numberless maps, books of history, and novels by the classic writers of the American experience: Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, John Williams, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson. And as vade mecum, I also managed to collect all fifty volumes of the American Guide Series—the famous WPA Guides, still among the most thoughtfully composed and intelligently edited books about the individual states.

      The books date back to the late 1930s and were each assembled, as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, in a federal government effort—the Federal Writers’ Project—to give work to unemployed authors, journalists, and photographers. Though as sources of precise travelers’ information, they are long past their sell-by date, their essays still have a sustaining importance, and they offer wise counsel and a grand perspective for anyone wishing to venture into the great American hinterland.

      The WPA guides—government-made books, it has to be remembered—offer a reminder of a highly divisive argument about the making of America: the role of government in the creation and sustenance of human society.

      That is not to say that in these pages I wish to offer an uncritical apologia for the concept of big government. Far from it. There are all too many examples of unforgivable excesses. The savage and divisive melancholy of the Trail of Tears was, after all, a consequence of overzealous government behavior toward America’s own native peoples, with results that ran entirely counter to the principal thesis of this book. The amassment of vast armories of atomic weapons, the involvement of the United States in scores of cruel and unnecessary foreign wars, the lunacies of Prohibition, of the Tuskegee experiment, of the infamous MK Ultra program, and of the fully legislated and half-century-long antipathy to Chinese immigration—all of these and more were the acts of a government that had simply become on occasion too big for its boots.

      Yet there was much good done, too, and not a little of it was and still remains on display in the telling of this story. Without an engaged and functioning federal government, the development of these various strands of the country’s connective tissue would probably have been either delayed or never achieved at all. That is why my reading of the WPA Guides provided me with a symbolic madeleine, a means of remembering a single sobering fact: while today’s political hostility to big government is an understandable reality of contemporary life, the historic role of big government in the creation of the American nation is a reality, too, one that might as well be acknowledged and celebrated for its value and great worth.

      The first two volumes of the series that I decided to use were published in 1940 and 1941, respectively: the first was devoted to Ohio; the other, to Missouri. I took them along because I had decided to travel first to a pair of places that seemed to me to have played crucial roles in the making of a united America.

      Each town stands on the right bank of a great American river, and in each case the river gave its name to the state in which the town is situated. The first town was East Liverpool, which is both in Ohio and on the Ohio; the second was Saint Charles, which likewise is both in Missouri and on the Missouri. Neither place is especially well known, whatever its chamber of commerce might say. The importance of each has faded over the centuries. Neither seems to me lovely enough to attract many visitors.

      But each town was once most important to the man who originated the idea of creating a properly United States of America, a Founding Father who would go on to be the country’s third president, Thomas Jefferson. And each town now has a fine-looking memorial—in one case a plaque, in the other an obelisk—to the events that occurred there and helped make each community briefly famous.

      Both memorials are now surrounded—and in the case of one of them, half hidden—by trees. A reminder, if any were needed, that at the time Thomas Jefferson gave these places their brief significance in making the physics of the union, America was a land swathed by long reaches of barely penetrable forest, most of its mysteries still half hidden by wood.

PART I

       I never before knew the full value of trees. My house is entirely embossomed in high plane-trees, with good grass below; and under them I breakfast, dine, write, read, and receive my company. What would I not give that the trees planted nearest round the house at Monticello were full grown.

      —THOMAS JEFFERSON, LETTER TO MARTHA RANDOLPH, 1793

       … I was not prepared to see the pine timber so valuable and heavy as it is above and about here. The trees are of large growth, straight and smooth … With the exception of swamps, which are few and far between, the timber land has all the beauty of a sylvan grove. The entire absence of underbrush and decayed logs lends ornament and attraction to the woods. They are more like the groves around a mansion in their neat and cheerful appearance; and awaken reflection on the Muses and the dialogues of philosophers rather than apprehension of wild beasts and serpents.

      —CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS ANDREWS, Minnesota and Dacotah, 1856

A VIEW ACROSS THE RIDGE

      Thomas Jefferson was a man with a lifelong fascination with trees. He thought of them as his favorite kind of plants, wrote of them as his pets, and went to much effort and expense to place those he liked best around the great west lawn of Monticello, the house he made for himself in the foothills of the mountains of Albemarle County, Virginia.

      He was an extravagant man, given to extravagant visions—which Monticello’s present-day garden conservators have done much to reproduce. So just as he wished when СКАЧАТЬ