“A Road Trip That Predates Cars”
The Boston Globe (May 31, 2015)
In May 1865, a month after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives set off on a coast-to-coast journey across the newly reunited nation. Schuyler Colfax, a Republican from Indiana, gave speeches and met with local dignitaries along the way, but otherwise his traveling party had no official business to conduct. And that was exactly what made the trip so unprecedented.
By the middle of the 19th century, many people had crossed the continent as explorers, traders, and pioneers. But the idea of traveling from ocean to ocean simply for its own sake was new. When Colfax made his trip, the transcontinental railroad was under construction from both the east and west, but those two spurs were four years away from meeting—indeed, one purpose of the trip was to gin up publicity to urge its completion. Most of the expedition west of the Mississippi was by stagecoach, across plains, deserts and mountains.
Accompanying Colfax were a few friends, including Samuel Bowles, editor and publisher of the Springfield Republican, one of the most respected newspapers in the country. Bowles sent a series of letters from the road back to the paper, which were quickly bundled into a book, “Across the Continent: A Stage Ride Over the Plains, To the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States.” It’s one of the earliest books about traveling across the United States and — a century and a half later — remains a highly-readable account of what Bowles calls “these infant and struggling years of this country,” a moment that represented not only a “new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln had put it in his Gettysburg Address, but also the birth of an expansive empire.
The book itself is therefore something of a travel guide to Manifest Destiny: conceived as national policy more than two decades earlier, it finally became a reality in the wake of the Civil War. Bowles’s passages on the Indians, excerpted below, make clear that one of the primary motives behind their near-extermination was the desire to make the passage West safer and more economical. Implicated in the very idea of the American road trip, then, are some deeply unsettling notions about what Bowles calls, in a standard formulation of his time, “the subjugation and civilization of the continent.” Though it has been out of print for 150 years, “Across the Continent” remains a powerful read today, not least because of the challenging questions it poses about the classic American association of freedom with the road.
Surely the culture at large, from politicians down to ordinary citizens, could use a reminder of what Bowles wrote 150 years ago: “There is no such knowledge of the nation as comes of traveling it, of seeing eye to eye its vast extent, its various and teeming wealth, and, above all, its purpose-full people.”
A thunderstorm on the prairie.
The chief sensation and experience of our ride so far was a storm of thunder and lightning, hail and rain, upon the Plains. Such storms are memorable in all travel or life in this country for severity; and we had one of the very best of them. It struck us this morning, about six miles back, and just as we had come to the banks of the Platte. First came huge, rolling, ponderous masses of cloud in the west, massing up and separating into sections in a more majestic and threatening style than our party had ever before seen in the heavens. Then followed a tornado of wind. Horses, coach and escort turned their backs to the breeze, and bending, awaited its passing. It stripped us of every loose bit of baggage; and we sent out scouts for their recovery. Next fell the hail, pouring as swift rain, and as large and heavy as bullets. The horses quailed before its terrible pain. Our splendid quartette of blacks [Bowles is referring here to the horses] careered and started over the prairie; we tumbled out of the coach to save ourselves one peril, and so met the other—the fire of the heavenly hail; it bit like wasps, it stunned like blows. But horses and coach were to be saved; and after a long struggle, in which the coach came near overturning, and the horses to running away, in dismay and fright, and our driver and military friends proved themselves real heroics, and everybody got wet, the hail subsided into a pouring rain, the horses were quieted and restored to their places, and we got into a drowned coach, ourselves like drowned rats, and hastened to refuge, over a prairie flooded with water.
On the mineral riches of the West.
All reports, all facts, whether floating in the air from mouth to mouth, or ground out by hard experience, and put down in black and white, go to sustain the broadest and fullest meaning of the dying statement of President Lincoln [in a conversation with Colfax just hours before his assassination], that the United States hold the treasury of the world; and establish beyond reasonable doubt that the countries of and adjacent to the Rocky Mountains are freighted with the most precious of ores—gold first, next silver, in which Nevada and Utah are most conspicuous, and Colorado not found wanting, and then copper (with which the Colorado mineral veins are richly loaded), and also lead, iron and coal…Through and by all these means combining, and worked with the energy and enterprise of the American people, stimulated by the great profits sure to be realized from wise and persevering use of the opportunities, the western half of the American nation will fast move forward in civilization and population; this wilderness will blossom as the rose, and the East and the West will stand alike equal and together, knowing no jealousy, and only rivaling each other in their zeal for knowledge, liberty and civilization. But of what effect upon the currencies and the values of the world will be all this tide of gold and silver pouring into the lap of nations? Will their commerce and populations grow in extent and want in equal proportions, and absorb what is to be lavishly fed out to them? Perhaps so. But these promises of the American nation and these resulting queries are rich in thought and study.
On the character of Americans in the West.
Most agreeable of all our experiences here are the intelligent, active, earnest, right-minded and right-hearted young men and women we meet; people, many of whom have been here for years, but, instead of losing anything of those social graces that eastern towns and cities are wont to think themselves superior in, have not only kept even pace in these, but gained a higher play for all their faculties, and ripened, with opportunity and incentive and necessary self-reliance, into more of manhood and womanhood...I see less drunkenness; I see less vice here among these towns of the border, and of the Rocky Mountains, than at home in Springfield; I see personal activity and growth and self-reliance and social development and organization, that not only reconcile me to the emigration of our young people from the East to this region, but will do much to make me encourage it. To the right-minded, the West gives open opportunity that the East holds close and rare; and to such, opportunity is all that is wanted, all that they ask.
On the Indians.
The government is ready to assist in their support, to grant them reservations, to give them food and make them presents; but it must and will, with sharp hand, enforce their respect to travel, their respect to lives and property, and their respect to trade throughout all this region.
And if this cannot be secured, short of their utter extermination, why extermination it must be. Else, we may as well abandon this whole region; give up its settlement, its subjugation to civilization, its development to wealth and Christianity. It is the old eternal contest between barbarism and civilization, between things as they have been and are, and material and moral progress; and barbarism and barbarity must go to the wall, somewhat too roughly perhaps, as is always the case with new, earnest, material communities, but yet certainly….
Montana is disturbed with reports of Indian outrages; this whole region of mountains and plains is sensitive and suffering with the apprehensions or the realities of their general recurrence; commerce suffers; prices go up; emigration stops; and all the development of the great West is clogged. No wonder is it, then, that the entire white population of the Territories clamors for positive measures of restraint and punishment. The red man of reality is not the red man of poetry, romance, or philanthropy. He is false and barbaric, cunning and cowardly, attacking only when all advantage is with him, horrible in cruelty, the terror of women and children, impenetrable to nearly every motive but fear, impossible to regenerate and civilize. The whites may often be unjust and cruel in turn; but the balance is far against the Indian….
Do not suppose, however, we lost sleep or rations, or eyes for passing scenery, as we rolled over the mountains, and passed the divide between the great oceans of America. We rested proudly on our own prowess and the rifles of our escort. We had immense faith in the double-barreled shot-gun of Governor Bross.
On Yosemite Valley.
The Yosemite! As well interpret God in thirty-nine articles as portray it to you by word of mouth or pen. As well reproduce castle or cathedral by a stolen frieze, or broken column, as this assemblage of natural wonder and beauty by photograph or painting. The overpowering sense of the sublime, of awful desolation, of transcending marvelousness and unexpectedness, that swept over us, as we reined our horses sharply out of green forests, and stood upon high jutting rock that overlooked this rolling, upheaving sea of granite mountains, holding far down its rough lap this vale of beauty of meadow and grove and river,—such tide of feeling, such stoppage of ordinary emotions comes at rare intervals in any life. It was the confrontal of God face to face, as in great danger, in solemn, sudden death. It was Niagara, magnified. All that was mortal shrank back, all that was immortal swept to the front and bent down in awe. We sat till the rich elements of beauty came out of the majesty and the desolation, and then, eager to get nearer, pressed tired horses down the steep, rough path into the Valley.
On the need for the transcontinental railroad.
To feel the importance of the Pacific Railroad, to measure the urgency of its early completion, to become impatient with government and contractor at every delay in the work, you must come across the Plains and the Mountains to the Pacific Coast. Then you will see half a Continent waiting for its vivifying influences. You will witness a boundless agriculture, fickle and hesitating for lack of the regular markets this would give. You will find mineral wealth, immeasurable, locked up, wastefully worked, or gambled away, until this shall open to it abundant labor, cheap capital, wood, water, science, ready oversight, steadiness of production, — everything that shall make mining a certainty and not a chance. You will find the world's commerce with India and China eagerly awaiting its opportunities. You will see an illimitable field for manufactures unimproved for want of its stimulus and its advantages. You will feel hearts breaking, see morals struggling slowly upward against odds, know that religion languishes; feel, see and know that all the sweetest and finest influences and elements of society and Christian civilization hunger and suffer for the lack of this quick contact with the Parent and Fountain of all our national life….
Men of the East! Men at Washington! You have given the toil and even the blood of a million of your brothers and fellows for four years, and spent three thousand million dollars, to rescue one section of the Republic from barbarism and from anarchy; and your triumph makes the cost cheap. Lend now a few thousand of men, and a hundred millions of money, to create a new Republic; to marry to the Nation of the Atlantic an equal if not greater Nation of the Pacific. Anticipate a new sectionalism, a new strife, by a triumph of the arts of Peace, that shall be even prouder and more reaching than the victories of your Arms. Here is payment of your great debt; here is wealth unbounded; here the commerce of the world; here the completion of a Republic that is continental; but you must come and take them with the Locomotive!