Made In America - Bill Bryson [81]
After the expedition Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of the Louisiana Territory. In October 1809, three years after the expedition’s completion and while aged just thirty-four, the great explorer died in exceedingly odd circumstances in a back-country inn called Grinder’s Tavern along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Clearly suffering a severe outbreak of his ‘hypochondriac affections’, he began behaving in an odd and paranoid manner – to the extent that the proprietor of the lodgings moved out of the house and into an outbuilding. For hours Lewis could be heard talking and shouting to himself. Then at some time late in the night gunshots were heard and all went quiet. In the morning Lewis was found with terrible wounds – half his skull was blown away and he had other self-inflicted injuries all over – but still conscious. He begged the proprietor to put him out of his misery, but the proprietor refused. Lewis died later that day. His friend and colleague William Clark fared rather better. He became governor of the Missouri Territory and commanded it with distinction, though he never did learn to spell.
For the better part of a century Lewis and Clark’s scientific and linguistic achievements went almost wholly unremarked. Not until 1893, when a researcher and naturalist named Elliott Coues rediscovered their all but forgotten manuscripts mouldering in a cupboard at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and produced an annotated edition of their journals, were they at last accorded recognition as naturalists, cartographers and ethnologists.7
Jefferson thought it would take a thousand years for Americans to populate the vast emptiness of the West,8 but he hadn’t reckoned on the great waves of immigration of the nineteenth century and the odd ‘restlessness of character’ that so fascinated Tocqueville.9 From the start, Americans seldom stayed anywhere long. Jamestown was a ghost town less than a century after it was founded. Few states haven’t seen their state capitals move at least once and often more. Just between the Revolution and War of 1812, a period of roughly thirty-five years, eight of the original thirteen colonies moved their seats of government. Further west, capitals changed even more often. Indiana moved its from Vincennes to Corydon and finally to Indianapolis. Illinois went from Kaskaskia to Vandalia and on to Springfield.10 Frontier, which meant (and still means) a national border in British English, took on in America the new sense of the ever-moving dividing line between wilderness and civilization.
Towns were established with high hopes and, if things didn’t work out, abandoned without hesitation. In 1831 Abraham Lincoln moved to New Salem, Illinois. Six years later, trade on the nearby Sangamon River proving disappointing, he and everyone else abandoned the community and scattered to more promising parts. All over the West towns came and went. For every Chicago and Milwaukee that thrived thousands of others passed quietly away. Iowa alone had 2,205 communities fade into ghost towns in its first century.11
Before the 1800s city was a term usually reserved for substantial communities, but in nineteenth-century America it began to be applied to almost any cluster of houses, however modest. To this day America is dotted with ‘cities’ for which the term is patently overambitious – places like Republican City, Nebraska (pop. 231), Barnes City, Iowa (pop. 266), Rock City, Illinois (pop. 286). But what we tend to forget is that in America dusty hamlets could become cities, and almost overnight.
The boom town par excellence was a little community on the shores of Lake Michigan called Fort Dearborn. In 1832 it had fewer than a hundred inhabitants. Sixty years later, renamed Chicago, it boasted a million inhabitants and was the largest grain market in the world.12 No community in history has risen to greatness so swiftly. As Daniel Boorstin has noted: ‘Mankind had required at least a million years to produce its first urban community of a million people. Chicagoans accomplished