UT professor explores American West in ‘Dreams of El Dorado’
From canoes to covered wagons, the means of settling the American West were all over the map. But pushing a handcart loaded with the staples of a new life? Just didn’t seem practical. Yet Brigham Young thought it was a great idea.
In the 1850s, the Mormon leader became sold on the plan when he learned of a thrifty Scotsman who wheelbarrowed his way west. Wagons and the teams to pull them were expensive, and this way, there were no worries about tending animals or horse thieves.
Young even drew up plans for a standard handcart (“Take good hickory for the axle …”) and passed down an edict to his followers that this was the way to go. For many reasons — ranging from sheer physical hardship to crossing rivers to blizzards and yes, mounted Indians — the handcart proved to be, for emigrants who heeded Young’s call, “one long funeral march,” as a survivor of an ill-fated cart train recalled.
H.W. Brands’ father would have loved the handcart story.
Brands, the prolific author who holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin, always has had his dad in mind when writing.
“My model reader is my father, who was a businessman, not a history major,” said Brands, whose latest book is the monumental history of the American West titled “Dreams of El Dorado.” “When he retired, he wanted something to read besides the Wall Street Journal. He rarely read novels but wanted to know something about the world, and wanted a good story, with something to take away from it. So, that’s who I write for, the interested generalist.”
The generalist will find plenty to admire in the spirited “El Dorado,” which opens (ever so briefly) with continental drift and the Asian land bridge to North America and continues through Lewis and Clark, the Oregon Trail, Texas’ fight for independence, the Indian wars, the California gold rush and the intercontinental railway before ending, satisfyingly, with Teddy Roosevelt.
“The cowboy in the White House,” Brands writes, fervently believed “that the West, for all its shattered dreams, was where the American spirit shone brightest and most true.”
Stephen Harrigan, author of the massive new history of Texas, “Big Wonderful Thing,” is “perpetually in awe of Bill Brands’ powers of recall, research and perspective,” he shared via email. “The U.S. expansion into the North American continent is such a complicated and prismatic story, but Bill has the ability to see it and write about it in a way that makes it elegantly coherent. And also exciting to read.”
What becomes clear in reading Brands is that trails west were littered with those shattered dreams. In “El Dorado,” he simplifies the motivations for packing up the family and heading off into the unknown. Basically, people went west for the thrill of the hunt, for knowledge, for economic opportunity, for religious conscience or for political gain. Some went for all four.
Along the way, Brands maneuvers quickly around the huge historical monuments — the 1846 Mexican War is covered in about a page — in favor of underlying impulses and incentives, such as the connection of the
1849 gold rush to Silicon Valley — in spirit, at least.
“There are reasons that this international tech center rose in the West rather than the East,” Brands said. “Boston had the universities, the talent, but from the days of the gold rush, Westerners had a risk-taking mindset. In the East, failure was a mark of a failure of the soul, requiring much beating of the breast. In the West, failure was factored in. Modern venture capitalism took root in the West.”
Brands introduces us generalists to some fascinating characters along the way, such as Joe Meek, who embodies the fur-trapping mountain man and, Brands argues convincingly, is caught up in the beginnings of a global economy — one involving the fickle fashion of gentleman’s beaver hats in London.
And there’s Narcissa Whitman, a missionary who traveled west with her husband to proselytize the Nez Perce and Cayuse Indians — and whose daughter Alice was the first child born to an American woman in the Oregon country. Neither came to a happy ending.
“Most of the history of the West is guys doing stuff,” Brands said. “I wanted to show a woman’s perspective, and the Whitmans epitomized what it was like to live in the West.”
Perhaps the most riveting section of the book chronicles John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869. After rescuing three companions dumped in the drink during a particularly nasty stretch of whitewater, Powell wrote, “We are as glad to shake hands with them as though they had been on a voyage around the world, and wrecked on a distant coast.” Powell, by the way, had only one arm.
Brands has written more than 30 books, ranging from “Lone Star Nation” to “Reagan: The Life,” and he has always had his mind set on writing about the history of Western expansionism.
“I grew up in Oregon, so I’ve always thought of things from a Western perspective,” he said. “I don’t think the history of the West has been sufficiently appreciated. For example, the root causes of the Civil War lie in the West, due to the question of admitting slave states to the union.
Some of the most dramatic events in American history happened in the West. The East is politics and business, which doesn’t have the cinematic elements of fighting grizzly bears.”
The West was settled on ideas good, bad and harebrained, like the handcart. For white settlers, “the West was not so much a place as a condition; it was the blank spot on the map upon which grand dreams were projected,” Brands writes.
For many, those dreams came true. But for the Indian tribes — with whom Brands remains empathetic throughout the book — that dream was something else entirely. It’s fitting that he gives the last word to Black Elk, the Lakota visionary who witnessed not only Custer’s Last Stand but the massacre at Wounded Knee: “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”