The Mammoth Book of the West Read online

  Fleeing Florida in the summer of 1528 for the sanctuary of recently settled Mexico, the makeshift craft of Narvaez’s men was blown ashore on the Texas coast, near the mouth of the Sabine. Four Spaniards, led by Cabeza de Vaca and including the Black Moorish servant Estevan, survived shipwreck, disease, starvation, and enslavement by hostile Indians to reach Mexico on foot in 1536. Their saviour was Estevan. It was he who did the work, took the risks. As de Vaca later acknowledged, Estevan “talked to them [the Indians] . . . he inquired the road we should follow in the villages, in short, all the information we wished to know.”

  De Vaca’s lost men could provide little cartographical information, but their tale prompted more purposeful Spanish expeditions. In 1539 Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, the 31-year-old governor of New Spain, headed a great expedition which sought the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, whose streets were reputedly paved with gold. From Mexico, Coronado marched northwards. Arriving in the land of the Zunis, who were astonished by the expedition’s horses (a mammalian form absent from the Americas’ indigenous fauna), Coronado demanded obedience to the rule of Spain. The ancient Zunis pelted him with stones, but then withered before the fire from modern Spanish arms. Disappointed at the Zunis’ lack of precious metal, Coronado set off for another fabled golden land, Quivira. Eventually, he penetrated as far north as present-day Kansas. Meanwhile, a rival Spanish party under the leadership of Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and stumbled westwards, fighting repeated skirmishes with Indians, eventually reaching Arkansas. In 1542 de Soto “took to his pallet” and died. He was buried in the great river he had found: the Mississippi.

  By now, there were White men from other European nations probing the new continent. John Cabot sailed from England along the Atlantic coast of the continent in 1497. Portugal’s Gaspar Corte-Real reached Newfoundland and Labrador in 1500. Twenty-four years later the French-sponsored Florentine Giovanni da Verrazano entered New York harbour. In 1534 the intrepid Breton navigator Jacques Cartier explored the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The response of the Spanish to this trespassing on their Forbidden Empire was to send a host of robed friars to America to establish missions and save the souls of the heathens (and surreptitiously pave the way for the later rule of Spain). In 1598 missionaries and settlers led by Juan de Onate founded the dried mud village of San Juan in the Rio Grande Valley, in what is now New Mexico. It was the first permanent European settlement in the American West.

  More missions followed, in Arizona, Texas and California. Resistance by the aboriginals of the Pueblos (stone villages) to the word of God was met by military force and forced conversion. When the Acoma Indians of Sky City refused Spanish food requisitions, Onate sent an armed detachment which slaughtered 800 adult Acomans. Surviving males over the age of 25 had a foot severed, to make them living reminders of the folly of resistance. They were then herded into slavery.

  Although the Spanish were the first to settle in the American West, ultimately its conquest lay with others. The great Pueblo uprising of 1680, which drove 2,500 Spanish from their homes and ranches, badly shook the Empire’s frontiering will. And Spain was too riven by internal difficulties and too interested in skimming off the surface wealth of the Americas, gold, to develop a coherent colonization policy. France, too, tended to view the New World merely as a place to plunder, whether for gold, beaver furs or Newfoundland cod. As a result, the whole of the Eastern seaboard from Canada down to Florida – a temperate terrain highly suited to large-scale agricultural settlement – was left unclaimed.

  It was the fortune and fate of Britain that when she came to build an empire, this rich land remained free. The first British expeditions failed, but in 1606 the London Company was granted the right by James I “to deduce a colony of sundry of our people” in America, north of the 34th parallel. Three ships made their way across the ocean in 1607. “The six and twentieth day of April about foure a clocke in the morning,” wrote Master George Percy, “wee descried the Land of Virginia . . . faire meddowes and goodly tall trees, with such Fresh-waters runninge through the woods as I was almost ravished at the first Sight thereof.” After landing, the settlers built a village, Jamestown, named in honour of the monarch. They were attacked by tidewater Indians and suffered a “Starving Time” (until the selfsame Indians brought them gifts of food), but they endured to become the first permanent British settlement in America. A timorous alliance with the Indian was even formed with the marriage of the Indian princess Pocahontas to the Englishman John Rolfe.

  More British immigrants arrived; settlements and farms spread along the James River, and then to Maryland and the Carolinas. In 1620 a group of religious dissenters, the Pilgrims, landed in New England after their vessel Mayflower was blown off its course for Virginia. They decided to build their homes at Plymouth, where luck had washed them up. A decade later came the great 25,000-strong Puritan migration to Massachusetts. The European population of America grew inexorably – just as its native population declined inexorably. The White man’s microbes (particularly smallpox) devastated up to 90 per cent of some of the Eastern Algonquin tribes. Some Indians tried to make a stand against the disease-carrying invader, with his insatiable hunger for land. The Wampanoags of Native American King Philip killed some 600 New Englanders in 1675. But still the Europeans came. The only result for the Wampanoags was slaughter and slavery.

  Soon, stable British colonies stretched along the Atlantic seaboard from New Hampshire to Georgia (and included New York and New Jersey, seized from the Dutch). The coastal strip became used up, overcrowded. The colonialists needed more land. The Virginians needed it for their tobacco boom crop (for a while even the streets of Jamestown had been turned over to the cultivation of the “weed”), and the agriculturalists of New England needed it for their farms. There was only one way the territorial expansion of the British colonies could proceed – westwards, into the unmapped, unknown hinterland. It was now that the story of the West, of the frontier, really began.

  Into the Wilderness

  In the beginning the West was in the East. It was the unknown and magic forest land which lay beyond the cultivated fields of the tidewater colonialists and stretched away to the forbidding ridges of the Appalachians, which walled the coastal plain.

  Not that it was unknown for long. There was no hill that land speculators or trappers, with profit before their eyes, could not climb or woods that farmers could not clear. In 1650, only 43 years after the founding of Jamestown, Captain Abraham Wood led a five-day expedition through the “wilderness” as far as the Roanoke Valley in search of real estate for future resale. Also of the mind to make money from land speculation was Virginia’s governor, Sir William Berkeley, who organized an expedition in 1670 to discover a pass through the Appalachians themselves. The expedition was led by John Lederer, a German physician of courage and sensitivity. Lederer found himself overwhelmed by the beauty of the Blue Ridges. He did not find a way through. Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam did, in 1671, by following the Staunton River. They emerged into the Great Appalachian Valley, which runs from south of the Carolinas to northern New York, a place of almost Edenic character and fertility.

  After the explorers came the settlers. By the turn of the 1700s pioneer hardscrabble farmers were streaming into the Valley, through the gaps in the mountain range carved by the Delaware and other rivers. Also entering the Great Appalachian Valley, but from the north, were German peasant immigrants displaced by war in the Rhinish Palatinate. Thousands settled in the Quaker province of William Penn, where the attraction was not religious pacifism – the Palatines were Lutheran or Reformed Church – but the rolling landscape which reminded them of home. The Germans, often misnamed the “Pennsylvania Dutch”, brought with them a long agricultural heritage, and their huge stone barns, carefully tended land and hard-working women marked them out for the wonder and envy of other colonialists. Many of the Palatinate Germans arrived as indentured servants, who worked a seven-year contract with the farmer who had financed th
eir sea passage, before purchasing a place of their own.

  Another group of immigrants from a troubled land, the “Scotch-Irish”, also found Pennsylvania to their liking. These were the descendants of the Scottish lowland Presbyterians who had moved to Ulster at the encouragement of James I as a means of subduing the Irish. Finding the best Pennsylvanian land already claimed by the Germans, the Scotch-Irish settled on the raw, westernmost frontier, an environment very similar to the Ireland their grandfathers had encountered. They began concentrating in the Cumberland valley of Pennsylvania west of Harrisburg during the 1720s. In the 1750s Pennsylvania was receiving as many as 10,000 Ulstermen a year. With each new wave, the Scotch-Irish pushed further on into the wilderness, built their rude log cabins and grubbed a few acres for corn and beans. By 1740 there were Scotch-Irish settlements in North Carolina; by 1760 they had reached South Carolina. They were incredibly fecund. “There is not a cabin but has ten or twelve children in it,” wrote the Anglican itinerant Charles Woodmason. “When the boys are 18 and the girls 14 they marry – so that in many cabins you will see children . . . and the mother looking as young as the daughter.” A tenth of the population of America in 1776 was Scotch-Irish.

  A rugged, determined people who feared only God, these Scotch-Irish were perhaps the first true Westerners. Years of clearing forests in Northern Ireland had taught them woodland lore even before they came to America. They also knew how to fight, for they had battled the Catholic tribes often enough. And they were possessed of a primitive democracy, for their church taught them that no man was great, only God.

  Wherever the Scotch-Irish pioneers spread throughout the forest, the picture was the same. They chose the land they wanted, regardless of the forms of land patents or the claims of Indians, with whom they fought bloody running battles and whose scalps they hung in trophy from cabin walls. For the Scotch-Irish it was against “the law of God and nature that so much land be idle, while so many Christians wanted it to labor on, and to raise their bread.” Above all, they were ever prepared, even eager, to pull up stakes and keep moving westwards. They were restless almost beyond belief.

  In the isolation of the backcountry, the Scotch-Irish, and the Germans, the English, the Yankees [native New Englanders], the Welsh and the Scots, who mixed with them, began to evolve a new society. As they worked on the wilderness, cutting trees in the shadows of the Appalachians or by the bright water of the Juniata River, they became transformed themselves. They became less European. The mentality of the woodlanders was that of the future American: pragmatic, wary of government, inclined to optimism, and loving of religious and political freedom.

  The woodlanders also brought frontiering to its maturity. To visitors they seemed indistinguishable from Indians. One visitor wrote: “The clothes of the people consist of deer skins, their food of Johnny cakes, deer and bear meat. A kind of white people are found here, who live like savages.” Their tools were few, usually only the prerequisites of forest life: the long-handled axe and the rifle. With the axe they razed trees, built their log homes and carved the family utensils. With the rifle they fought Indians and shot game. Imported rifles were adapted by Pennsylvanian German gunsmiths for specific frontier needs. They lengthened the barrel to four feet for accuracy, reduced the bore size to half an inch (so saving on the lead for the projectile ball), and increased the size of the sights. An innovation was the “grease patch”, which was wrapped around the ball, giving it a snug fit in the barrel yet allowing it to be rammed home easily by a light hickory ramrod. In time the rifle would be given a name deriving from its great popularity with the settlers of the bluegrass state, but the “Kentucky Rifle” was in fact born east of the Appalachian crest. A skilled marksman could put a bullet through the head of a deer at 300 yards with a fine Kentucky piece. A man’s head could be drilled at 250 yards.

  Such guns and the hardy souls needed to fire them were necessary if the British advance westwards was to continue.

  Beyond the cloudy ridges of the Appalachians there were unfriendly Indians and equally unfriendly Europeans. For by the time the British were ready to move into the Ohio Valley in the mid-1700s the French had staked a claim to the continent from the Appalachians to the Rockies. They would be removed only by one hundred years of war.

  The Clash of Empire

  While the British had been laboriously hewing their way westwards, the French in Canada had swept towards the setting sun with awesome speed. Unlike the settled British frontier, however, that of New France consisted of isolated trading posts, thrust rapidly into the wilderness by the profit-hungry fur business. After establishing their base in Quebec in 1608, the French had reached west of Lake Michigan in the 1630s; in the 1670s they had entered the Ohio Valley. In 1681 Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, and a party of 23 Frenchmen descended the Illinois River. After entering the Mississippi they sailed down its entire length, reaching the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, 9 April 1682. Disembarking onto the shore, the Cavalier ordered his personal Recollect friar, Zenobe Membre, to bless the cross and claim on behalf of the Sun King, Louis XIV, all the land the Mississippi drained.

  The British colonialists, however, were not inclined to heed France’s staked claim. Against the need for land, legal niceties mattered little. After a series of indecisive wilderness clashes – King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War and King George’s War – the French and the British headed towards a final solution. The descent into war was inescapable. The French tightened their grip on the interior by building palisaded posts in the Illinois country. By the 1740s British colonialists were poised at the very peak of the Appalachians ready to descend and occupy the interior. Land companies were formed to locate suitable territories for settlement: the Ohio Land Company in 1747, the Loyal Land Company in 1749. Traders from the Pennsylvania backcountry infiltrated the Ohio Valley to trade with the Indians.

  It was one such trader, a tough Irishman called George Croghan, who sparked off the last great war for empire between Britain and France. Croghan ordered a post to be built at the Miami Indian village of Pickawillany – in the very heart of French territory. For a while this prospered, but then in spring 1753 a new French Governor, Marquis Duquesne, ordered an attack on Croghan’s post by French traders and Ottawa Indian allies. The post was destroyed and its defenders slain. A visiting Miami chief was unlucky enough to be killed, boiled and eaten. To prevent any future intrusions by Croghan and his trading ilk, Duquesne built a chain of four forts from Lake Erie to the Forks of the Ohio, sealing off the Ohio Valley from the trespassing Pennsylvanians. The last fort, on the Ohio Forks (the site of present-day Pittsburgh), Duquesne named after himself.

  The French had thrown down the gauntlet. The British barely hesitated to pick it up. To lose the Ohio Valley would be to lose everything – the entire hinterland.

  The Seven Years’ War began almost as the final log was being hauled into place at Fort Duquesne. Virginia’s Scots Governor Robert Dinwiddie had already sent the 21-year-old George Washington with a warning to the French to vacate it. When they refused, Washington returned with a small force. En route Washington’s men met and defeated a French scouting party. Realizing that he had noisily lost his advantage of surprise, Washington reconsidered the wisdom of attacking the French fort, withdrawing to the treeless valley of Great Meadows. There he ordered his men to build an earth rampart. “The whole and the parts were not a design of engineering art but of frontier necessity”, he later wrote, “so I gave it the name, Fort Necessity.” Sheltered behind a dirt bank, Washington waited for the French to come to him. They did, on 3 July 1754. The outnumbered British fought valiantly all day, before surrendering honourably in the evening.

  The next few years of the war were equally inglorious for the British. General Edward Braddock, who arrived from England to take command of the campaign, was cocksure and incompetent. In June 1755 he grandly marched his troops towards Fort Duquesne as though on parade. In their van went 300 axemen cutting a 12-foot road through the v
irgin forest. (“Braddock’s Road” would later prove of inestimable value to those settling the Ohio area.) Surprised by a smaller concealed force of French and Indians, the British became trapped in a valley clearing. They were mown down in their red-coated hundreds. Braddock himself was mortally wounded. George Washington, his aide, had a lucky escape with “four bullets through my coat and two horses shot under me.”

  Afterwards, the Indians began to raid British settlements. “It is incredible,” wrote one French officer, “what a quantity of scalps they bring us.” The Indians may have disliked the fur trade of the French, but most perceived the populous British frontier as the greater threat.

  Despite defeat upon defeat, the British managed to turn the war around. Although they termed the conflict “The French and Indian War”, not all Native Americans were allied to the cause of New France. Sir William Johnson, an Anglo-Irish immigrant who became a Mohawk blood brother, forged an alliance between Britain and the League of Iroquois Indians. The League, which called itself “The Longhouse”, a reflection of the typical Iroquois dwelling, was composed of six tribes – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarara – and was versed in warfare, being frequent raiders of other tribes for the purpose of procuring prisoners for adoption or sacrificial torture. Armed with British guns the Iroquois successfully prevented the French resupplying their inland posts in the south and west.