ATTENTION: Owing to some kind of error in the huge, unresponsive bureaucracy of Kindle Direct Publishing, part of Amazon, many of my outstanding small-press publisher’s books are no longer listed on Amazon.com. This includes my Amazon Best-seller immigrant saga The Price of Passage and also the heartwarming coming-of-age story, Izzy Strikes Gold!
FORTUNATELY, we do not rely on Amazon to get our books in people’s hands. You can purchase either or both of these books direct from the publisher by clicking these links: Izzy and Passage.
Thank you for your unwavering support of fine literature from small, independent presses.
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
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AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:
Howdy, Pardner—
The main premise of this blog is that we are seeking new meanings in our common past. To do that, we must periodically examine the past. Let’s get back to that, shall we?
A long journey Your New Favorite Writer completed last May reminded me of how very much I have been impressed by the American West. I suppose that’s partly because it has always been “the Old West.”
In the United States, the East is older than the West. But it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, the Far West—California, for example, was settled by the Spaniards before the Pilgrims ever thought of coming to Plymouth Rock.
But even the history of the Anglo-Saxon West is complicated. Because in the eyes of our dominant, English-speaking culture, the West used to be in the East. Our “Western Frontier” started in the middle of Massachusetts and gradually extended to include upstate New York and Eastern Pennsylvania. That was “the West.”
Don’t believe me? Just ask James Fennimore Cooper. He was the author of our first “western” novels, such as The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826). They featured sturdy frontiersman Natty Bumppo and his Indian companions Uncas and Chingachgook, ranging over the country and fighting frontier battles against Frenchmen and hostile Indians, in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
A few years later, the West migrated all the way to the eastern shore of the Mississippi River. The area we now call the Upper Midwest—the part of the country where I live—was the Northwest Territory when we won it from the United Kingdom in the Revolutionary War. The name was codified in the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787, two years before the Constitution was adopted.The Northwest Territory comprised all the land east of the northwest of the Ohio River, to the Mississippi.
If you will check a large map, Dear Reader, you will see that even the mighty Mississippi is only one third of the way over. So the West was still, demonstrably, in the eastern half of the country. Or at least, in the eastern half of the vast continent that eventually became our country.
A portion of the Northwest Territory that later became part of the State of Ohio was originally reserved as a disconnected parcel of land belonging to the State of Connecticut. It was known as the Connecticut Western Reserve. (There’s that term, “Western,” again.) Eventually Connecticut divested itself of this property, but to this day the northeastern corner of Ohio is called the Western Reserve. It’s the home of Case Western Reserve University. Another famous institution in the Northwest Territory, a bit further west, is Northwestern University of Evanston, Illinois.
Even as lately as the Civil War (1861-65), all the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi was known in common parlance as “the West.” The area beyond the Father of Waters was called “the Trans-Mississippi West,” or just “the Trans-Mississippi.” Those of us who read Civil War history books know that Generals Grant and Sherman came out of the Western armies—that is, the armies that fought in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and only very occasionally in Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, the eastern edge of the Trans-Mississippi.
When Ulysses S. Grant came east in 1864 to fight Lee’s Army in Virginia, he left William Tecumseh Sherman in charge of “the Western campaign,” which turned out to be—get this—marching southeast from Chattanooga in East Tennessee to attack Atlanta in north-central Georgia and eventually Savannah, on the Atlantic Coast. That was the Western campaign!
But I digress. As early as 1838, New York editor Horace Greeley was saying, “Go West, young man,” a position he maintained for the rest of his life. He needn’t have bothered: It was bound to happen with or without his advice. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 sparked a mass migration to the West Coast, by ship or overland. By the time of the Civil War, even though common terminology still placed the West in the East, the vast lands between the Mississippi and the Pacific were starting to fill with settlers.
In fact, it was the squabble over whether those lands would be admitted to the Union as free or slave states—especially the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which upset the delicate balance engineered by the earlier Missouri Compromise of 1820—that precipitated the outbreak of hostilities between North and South.
By the time I was a little boy, in the 1950s—eighty and more years after Sherman’s March to the Sea—the Trans-Mississippi West had become largely, if sparsely, settled, all the way to the Coast. It had become the only thing people meant when they talked about the West.
So that’s what I, the Fifties Kid, thought the West was. And to me, it was a wonderful place: the domain of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy. The place where the buffalo roamed, where the deer and the antelope played, where hostile Indians were forever circling and attacking innocent pioneers in wagon trains, where the tumbleweeds tumbled, and all a thirsty prospector could hope for was a drink of cool, clear water.
But that’s material for next week. See you then.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
