Made In America - Bill Bryson [82]
To Americans ‘the West’ was an ever-changing, concept. At the time of the first federal census in 1790, 95 per cent of America’s four million people lived hard by the eastern seaboard and ‘the West’ was virtually everything else. By the 1820s, it extended not much beyond the Appalachians. Kentucky’s leading paper of the day was called the Argus of Western America. Even as late as mid-century a chronicler like Charles Dickens could venture only as far as St Louis, still the better part of a thousand miles short of the Rockies, and plausibly claim to have seen the West.
The move to the West as we now know it began in earnest in the mid-1840s when the expression Oregon fever erupted. Encouraged by the government to settle the north-western territory claimed also by Britain, homesteaders set off in their thousands for a new life at the end of the Oregon Trail, following a route blazed by trappers twenty years before. The phrase that summed up America’s new assertive attitude to western development was coined by the editor of the Democratic Review, John O’Sullivan, in 1845 when he wrote that it was ‘our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’.15 The peopling of the West became not just an opportunity to be seized, but a kind of mission.
Oregon Trail is a somewhat misleading term. For one thing, it wasn’t a trail in the sense of a well-defined track. It was almost entirely a notional corridor, highly variable in width, across the grassy plains. Moreover, after the first few years relatively few of those who travelled the trail were heading for Oregon. Once past the Rockies, they instead broke off and made for the gold fields of California.
One of the great myths of the westward migration, compounded by a thousand movies, was that the immigrants lumbered over the prairies in Conestoga wagons. These sturdy vehicles were, in the words of the historian George R. Stewart, ‘uselessly heavy for the long pull to Oregon or California’.16 They did haul some freight west, but almost never did they transport families. Instead westward immigrants used lighter, smaller and much nimbler wagons universally known as prairie schooners. These were hauled not by horses, but by mules or oxen, which could withstand the hardships of prairie crossings far better than any horse could. A final myth engendered by Hollywood was that wagons gathered in a circle whenever under attack by Indians. They didn’t, and for the simple reason that the process would have been so laborious to organize that the party would very probably have been slaughtered before the job was even a quarter accomplished.
Wagons were covered with canvas, as in the movies, though that word was seldom used; the material was more generally known in the nineteenth century as twill. Though wagon train was also used (it is first recorded in 1849), the term wasn’t particularly apt. For much of the journey the wagons fanned out into an advancing line up to ten miles wide to avoid each other’s dust and the ruts of earlier travellers – and providing yet another obstacle to their forming into circles.
Many of the early