Made In America - Bill Bryson [79]
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.
8
‘Manifest Destiny’: Taming the West
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