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CHAPTER 1
The Great Desert
KNOWN AS A FIRST-RATE MATHEMATICIAN AS WELL AS A man of God, Blaise Pascal famously staked his belief in God on the laws of probability and once proposed a transportation system for Paris that relied on horse-drawn carriages following fixed routes and rigid schedules. As fate would have it, he was also the victim of a terrifying and improbable carriage accident. Apparently, he was driving across the Neuilly-sur-Seine bridge one day — at least a section of which had no parapet — when the two lead horses took the bit in their teeth and plummeted into the river, threatening to drag the other horses and the carriage down with them. Luckily, the traces snapped and Pascal was saved. But the episode proved so traumatic that he spent the rest of his fairly brief life believing a perilous abyss had opened up on his left side — something he tried to dispel by always placing a chair on that side, finding solace in its tangible mass and its likely location in space.
Strangely enough, a somewhat similar situation existed the year Frémont set out for the Rockies, in that most Americans perceived the territory west of the Mississippi to be a kind of void or abyss to their geographic "left." In his agile, sometimes melancholy recollections of the Mississippi valley, Timothy Flint wrote that in 1818 the river "was to the great proportion of the American people," as it was to him, "a limit almost to the range of thought." As he slowly steamed down the Ohio and approached the Mississippi for the first time, he clearly felt himself to be approaching an existential boundary of some sort: "We had been looking forward to this place as the pillars of Hercules. The country on this side had still some unbroken associations with our native land. This magnificent river, almost dividing the continent, completely severed this chain." Confirming Flint's view was John Melish's Map of the United States (1816), the first of many wall maps published in America showing the continent from coast to coast (fig. 3). East of the Mississippi there was a dense network of topography and towns, most of it accurately, if somewhat sketchily, mapped; west of the Mississippi large areas were left blank, almost nothing was named, and the entire region had, at best, a relative truth. Even calling it a relative truth might be misleading, since along with all the rivers and mountains missing from the map were the many imaginary features found only on the map.
Admittedly, 1818 was also the year Britain and the United States signed a treaty drawing the forty-ninth parallel from the Great Lakes to the Rockies. Three years later Missouri joined Louisiana as the second state west of the Mississippi, and by 1826 Flint himself was forced to confess that any suggestion the "magnificent river" still represented the brink of thought "would be matter of surprise" to "the thousands of hacknied travellers on this stream." Though Flint, like most of the "hacknied travellers" he referred to at the time, never ventured more than a few miles west of the Mississippi, Josiah Gregg began his majestic Commerce of the Prairies (1844) by noting that the trade route from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe was already deeply rutted by the time he joined his first caravan in 1831.
Still, even these enterprising ventures remained isolated forays into the West and, until Frémont's first expedition, did little to alter eastern opinions of the region. In 1836 "The Report of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs" justified its policy of "removing" Indians to territory west of the Mississippi (precisely the territory Frémont was to explore) by baldly stating: "They are on the outside of us, and in a place which will forever remain on the outside." As late as 1849 Francis Parkman could observe that setting out along the Oregon Trail was known in "the phraseology of the region" as "jumping off." And whatever Flint's familiarity with travel on the Mississippi itself, he didn't hesitate to acknowledge that "it is a common proverb of the people, that when we cross the Mississippi, 'we travel beyond the Sabbath.'"
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PART OF THE REASON THE MISSISSIPPI SEEMED SUCH A significant boundary to Americans was that it had long been a source of conflict between Europe and the United States. With all the hostility, diplomacy, and outright warfare over the years, a singular aspect of this conflict was that Europeans had staked a claim to the river on the basis of international law, while Americans had looked to both geography and "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." "From the very position of our country," Sen. James Ross had announced in 1802, "from its geographical shape, from motives of complete independence, the command of the navigation of the river ought to be in our hands."
Statements of this sort would become a kind of rolling justification for possession of the entire continent — a justification that, as Albert Weinberg pointed out many years ago, increasingly relied on the idea of propinquity. A year after the Louisiana Purchase was ratified, Joseph Chandler delivered a Fourth of July oration in which he declared that Louisiana was just "the commencement of our anticipating hopes," projecting a future where "our boundaries shall be those which Nature has formed for a great, powerful, and free State." The inherent nature and flexibility of those boundaries would be revealed by a commission considering the nation's additional right to Texas a year later. Reasoning that the interior of Texas ought to be seen as an extension inward from the coastline which had been part of the Louisiana Purchase, the commission argued that "Nature seems to have destined a range of territory so described for the same society, to have connected its several parts together by the ties of a common interest, and to have detached them from others." That this reasoning often exceeded the boundaries of credulity was beside the point. Like most Europeans before them, Americans saw what they wanted to see — and "geographical shape" always conformed to the "motives of complete independence," not the other way around. In 1829, as the debate over Texas grew more antagonistic to the Mexicans, the Nashville Republican claimed that the Rio Grande was "designated by the hand of Heaven, as a boundary between two great nations of dissimilar pursuits" — but then defined this providential disparity by absurdly concluding: "On this side of the Rio Grande, the country is seasonable, fertile, and every way desirable to the people of the United States. On the other side the lands are unproductive, crops cannot be matured without irrigation; in short they are entirely calculated for a lazy, pastoral, mining people like the Mexicans."
Regrettably, the notion of "geographical shape" could not obscure an obvious difference between latitude and longitude and the lay of the land. It was one thing for Columbus to assume that the East Indies could be reached by sailing due west from Spain and quite another to find whole continents blocking his way. The same thing was true of the colonists who expected the conditions in the Carolinas to correspond to the Mediterranean climate and soil, and no matter how confidently the Puritans claimed the territory to the north and west "by Mapp," much of what they claimed turned out to be quite different or not there at all. Although the lesson had to be learned again and again with each generation, it was evident that declaring our boundaries to "be those which Nature has formed for a great, powerful, and free State" could actually limit the extent of the nation as well as enlarge it. At any given point, even the abstract reach of geographical predestination had to confront the material reality of nature.
This was especially true of the period preceding Frémont's expedition to the Rocky Mountains. As Weinberg also pointed out, the history of the United States is largely the history of absolute boundaries morphing into relative boundaries. One generation's "limit almost to the range of thought" was the next generation's front yard. And yet, with all the "hacknied travellers" steaming up and down the Mississippi, not to mention all the people lobbying for the annexation of Oregon and Texas, the territory stretching from what is now Oklahoma to North Dakota remained a formidable barrier in the minds of most Americans. At least partially explored by three expeditions, the region was such a distinctly "known unknown part of America" that it had become best known as a vast wasteland or desert.
For a nation of farmers, this was a much greater obstacle than any apparent limit to the range of thought. The Nashville Republican was so quick to call the territory north of the Rio Grande "seasonable, fertile, and every way desirable" because, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's words, "the vast majority of the people of this country live by the land, and carry its quality in their manners and opinions." Half a century earlier, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur had called the farm "the source of every good we possess," and Jefferson had taken it a step further by declaring that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." Although this rather conveniently ignored those who labored in the earth as slaves, it helps to explain why western expansion had almost always been driven by the desire for arable land. Historically, northerners had moved west in an orderly and contiguous fashion, seeking more land for likeminded communities, while southerners had followed a pattern of "indiscriminate locations and settlements," seeking better land or land they could squat. But if nearly everything west of the Mississippi was an arid and barren abyss, then there was little incentive to seek any land. It was precisely because Indians were assumed to be hunters and gatherers, not farmers, that the U.S. government felt justified in "removing" them to a region west of the Mississippi that was "on the outside of us, and in a place which will forever remain on the outside." Whatever the geographical predestination of the nation, the lay of the land suggested that it had reached a natural limit once it reached this region. Even those who favored the annexation of Oregon assumed the territory would be an independent republic — no longer British but separated from the United States by an area that abjured the possibility of propinquity.
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THE ORIGINS OF THIS PERCEIVED LIMIT CAN BE TRACED most directly to an expedition that lasted from 1806 to 1807. Led by Maj. Zebulon M. Pike, the expedition set out from the frontier town of Saint Louis, meandered through what is now Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado, and then mistakenly (or as more recent commentators have claimed, deliberately, as a form of reconnaissance) crossed into Spanish territory — at which point Pike and his party were taken into custody, questioned, treated kindly for the most part, and returned to U.S. territory. When Pike eventually wrote his report on the expedition, one of its most glaring features was a feeling of alienation and despair that seemed to grow stronger the farther west he moved.
The opening pages of the report reveal a curious and somewhat attentive eye, willing to confront the landscape on its own terms. Making his way through the broken country of eastern Kansas, for instance, Pike is moved enough to write: "We struck a beautiful hill, which bears south on the prairie; its elevation I suppose to be 100 feet. From its summit the view is sublime to the east and southeast." The next day, on a ridge dividing two rivers, he again responds with great (if essentially identical) sympathy: "The prospect from the dividing ridge to the east and southeast is sublime. The prairie rising and falling in regular swells, as far as the sight can extend, produces a very beautiful appearance." But as he moves closer and closer to the Rockies, the arid conditions seem to flatten and bleach Pike's perspective. Entries such as the one he makes on the banks of the Arkansas become more common. These banks, he remarks, "are not more than four feet in height, bordered by a few cottonwood trees; on the north side is a low swampy prairie; on the south, a sandy, sterile desert at a small distance." Ten days later his mood is even more sere: "We observed this day a species of crystallization on the road, when the sun was high, in low places where there had been water settled; on tasting it found it to be salt; this gave some authenticity to the report of the prairie being covered for leagues." Pike does not emerge from this crystallized plain with his senses intact. The report ends with the bleakest and most sweeping assessment of all: "These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa; for I saw in my route, in various places, tracts of many leagues where the wind had thrown up the sand in all the fanciful forms of the ocean's rolling wave, and on which not a speck of vegetable matter existed."
This doubled image of desert and ocean could be regarded as a perfect figure of salty desolation — reminiscent of the Ancient Mariner's plaint, "Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink." Indeed, it's a lot closer to the allegorical landscape of Coleridge's poem than to any prairie west of the Mississippi and is best understood as a purely geometric horizon. Whatever the specificity of certain observations in his report, Pike essentially perceived the prairie as an extremely large-scale system, with a few iconic features magnified and presumed to look about the same at every scale. Today we would see this as a form of self-similarity, a theory Benoît Mandelbrot developed in the 1970s to describe the uneven or irregular features of the world without resorting to the straight lines and smooth circles of Euclidean geometry. Mandelbrot discovered a number of natural fractals, including the shape of coastlines and the structure of plants, and perhaps the easiest way to understand self-similarity is to imagine a tree. As a geometric shape, a tree is nothing more than a series of branches. But it's a series that looks more or less the same at every point, from the newest and smallest and most delicate branches at the ends of the outermost limbs to the largest branches rising out of the main trunk of the tree. The tree grows by reproducing this shape over and over again, and thus the whole has approximately the same shape as each of its parts. Another way of putting this is that the tree is symmetrical at every scale. And this is exactly how Pike saw the prairie. Not only does he tend to repeat himself (using more or less the same language to describe more or less the same features), but as the report gradually unfolds, it becomes clear that the sublime "swells" of eastern Kansas are just local aspects of the lengthier and more sterile "rolling waves" that define the plains and prairies as a whole. Again, Robert Smithson's terminology comes to mind: in this case, the notion of a "zero panorama," a panorama that canceled itself out by negating the distinction between near and far or large and small. This was undoubtedly a decisive and transcendent point of view. Once the horizon itself appeared uniform, forsaken, and interchangeable, Pike could treat the entire region between the Mississippi and the Rockies as little more than an abyss or void.
Not that Americans were instantly convinced of this. Martyn Bowden has shown that atlases of the late 1700s and early 1800s typically "considered the region to be extremely fertile and productive agricultural land," primarily because Jefferson had painted such a rosy picture in the "Official Account of Louisiana." But between 1805 and 1810, as more and more information came in, the notion of the West as a great garden "gave way to one of the western interior as a fertile land interspersed with large prairies"; by 1820 or so, as data from the journals of Lewis and Clark became public, geographers such as Melish were more apt to treat the region as uncertain.
This uncertainty was emphatically dispelled when an expedition led by Maj. Stephen Long up the Platte River and into Colorado confirmed Pike's point of view. Long's official report on the expedition, published in 1823, chronicled much the same landscape as Pike's, and if anything its tone was harsher and more encompassing. Describing the Platte River basin, for instance, Long writes: "The bottom lands of the river rise by an imperceptible ascent on each side, extending laterally to a distance of from two to ten miles, where they are terminated by low ranges of gravelly hills, running parallel to the general direction of the river. Beyond these the surface is an undulating plain, having an elevation of from fifty to one hundred feet, and presenting the aspect of hopeless and irreclaimable sterility." When his perspective expands to "an extent of about four hundred miles square, lying between 96 and 105 degrees of west longitude, and between 35 and 42 degrees of north latitude" — nearly all of what is now Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma — he notes that the hilly country to the east "gradually subsides" to the west, "with nothing to limit the view or variegate the prospect, but here and there a hill, knob, or insulated tract of table-land." His rather numbed response is to reach for a familiar metaphor: "The monotony of a vast unbroken plain, like that in which we had now travelled nearly one hundred and fifty miles, is little less tiresome to the eye, and fatiguing to the spirit, than the dreary solitude of the ocean." Rendering this disgruntled point of view both official and beyond reproach was a map that labeled the "four hundred mile square" region a "Great Desert." This map turned out to be the most influential element of the report, reproduced and incorporated into other maps and atlases well into the 1850s.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sight Unseen"
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