The road streaked on to the town of Enterprise, a low-slung and likeable place with an air of hard luck about it that wasn’t significantly alleviated by the decision to pipe the local radio station through tinny loudspeakers along the length of Main Street. Like the rest of the valley, Enterprise was still battling to recover from a sucker punch delivered in the 1980s, when all but one of the local lumber yards shut down, shedding more than four hundred family wage jobs in the process, and the country music echoing thinly around the deserted, sun-bleached streets did little to raise the mood. Today, though, a feeble festivity was in the air — discount offers, special menus, live bands and more were being heralded throughout town, as everyone sought to capture a slice of the passing trade drawn in by the main event about to start a few miles down the road — Chief Joseph Days.
Out here, every town has its Days — an annual commemorative weekend when the chamber of commerce crams the calendar with tourist-enticing parades, barbecue cook-offs, fun runs and fundraisers, all hung on a local historical hook. And the town of Joseph, Oregon, at the far end of the Wallowa Valley, has its own fine example — the day before Chief Joseph Days was due to spring into action, the pavements and parking spots of this studiously cute little place were already filling up with gaggles of ambling, half-lost out-of-towners.
At first sight, Joseph seemed to be a town that had cheerfully accepted its fate. The Outlaw Bar, the Stubborn Mule Steakhouse, the Indian Lodge Motel, the spotless parquet pavements and the bronze municipal sculptures of noble chieftains, bucking cowboys and soaring eagles all colluded in the tourist-friendly Western tableau. Pleasantness washed over the place, and had clearly not gone unnoticed — the power-walkers, micro-breweries and cookie-cutter coffee/book/gift/chintz shops were but a hint of the influence of the last decade’s new arrivals in town, a wave of affluent retirees, down-sizers and summer-home shoppers. (The only disreputable, properly intimidating bar in town, the Hydrant, was up for sale.) Main Street ran in a steady incline from the cattle pastures on the edge of town towards the great bowl of Wallowa Lake, its waters, dotted with fishing craft and scored by jet skis, held in place between a featureless, grass-covered glacial moraine and the alpine silhouette of the Wallowa Mountains. To complete the familiar scene, many of the tourists were disappearing into a reverie of an alternative life, ice creams in hand, at the garrison of estate agents’ windows.
A marginally less cheery cameo was being played out at the registration table for the upcoming children’s parade. From a peak of three hundred entrants a few years earlier, the parade was now down to two hundred, accurate testimony to the Wallowa Valley’s altered demographics — the population had been stable for the last ten years, but the number of school-age children had fallen by almost a third, as all those Cornetto-dripping summer-home snatchers had priced the working (or not working) local families out of their home towns. ‘I remember when it took two buses to get the kids to school up this valley,’ one bustling grandmother muttered; ‘now you could do it in a van.’
Still, two hundred kids is enough for a mighty good parade. Effort was variable — tying a handkerchief around your dog’s neck and dragging it down the baking tarmac was never going to bring home the rosette — and the organization slipped on occasion: during the ten-minute delay while a young gentleman resolutely refused to abandon his mission to pogo-stick the length of town, the crowd lining the street in their lawn chairs grew slightly restless in the heat, but the mood was generally as sunny as the day. We applauded pirates, crusaders, hula-girls, cowboys, a young man in desert fatigues steering a cardboard tank — and, of course, plenty of pint-sized pioneers, driving balsa-wood oxen from beneath the canopy of their covered wagons, rolling west down Main Street.
Dr Daniel Drake may have got his wish. Writing in 1815, in contemplation of the possibilities offered up by the wide open spaces of the freshly purchased West, this Cincinnati doctor dreamed of the civic fibre that the future inhabitants of such a spacious, separated province would be bound to possess:
Debarred by their locality, from an inordinate participation in foreign luxuries, and consequently secured from the greatest corruption introduced by commerce — secluded from foreign intercourse, and thereby rendered patriotic…the inhabitants of this region are obviously destined to an unrivalled excellence…in public virtue, and in national strength.
The idea that the American interior could serve as a kind of national health service for the United States was as old as the republic, and by the time that first wagon train set off for Oregon, it was a political commonplace that only the morality and patriotism of fresh rural communities in the West could keep this young country’s unique enthusiasm for itself alive.
The wagon trains were also seen as invigorating America’s nation-building in another way — as the winning move in that great nineteenth-century territorial board game. As Lucas Alaman, the Mexican secretary of state, ruefully observed in 1842: ‘Where others send invading armies, [the Americans] send their colonists.’
The settlers proved a roaring success in the expansion of America. More than twenty thousand farmers and ranchers had poured into Texas in the early 1830s, while it was still under Mexican control, their presence ultimately securing independence for the Lone Star Republic in 1836. The Mexicans were similarly overwhelmed by a wave of arrivals in California, leading to their retreat south to Baja in 1848. And as for the British in the Northwest, with their famous affectation of imperial absent-mindedness, they often told themselves that the territory was abandoned as a result of reports that the local salmon offered substandard fly-fishing, but the reality was that from the first caravan of families into Oregon, the land was lost. The Hudson’s Bay Company would read the runes and retreat north of the 49th parallel in 1846. America was nearing completion.
But such territorial endeavours cannot flourish if their mundane mechanics are on show; they need romance, poetry, narrative, a mission that can be evoked to justify the required investments, the compromises and, particularly, the crimes. And the expansionists possessed such a dogma, a creed of American chosen-ness, special-ness and divinely ordained progress that would be remembered by history as ‘Manifest Destiny’.
A cocktail of Puritan fervour, geographical predestination and, predominantly, political cynicism, Manifest Destiny proclaimed, in essence, that the American continent had been created by God for a single, obvious purpose — to host the greatest Christian nation in history.
The phrase itself was first coined by John O’Sullivan, a scholarly cheerleader to Andrew Jackson — a president whose principles amounted to a kind of territorial laissez-faire, with a deliberately inactive government simply holding the doors open to conquest by settlers. O’Sullivan wholly approved, citing in 1845, ‘our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated government’.
Just how much more was at stake was emphasized by the writer and orator William Gilpin the following year, as he gave full vent to the possibilities that God had laid before the Americans and, by extension, the burden of their duty:
The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean…to establish a new order in human affairs…to teach old nations a new civilization — to confirm the destiny of the human race — to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point…to perfect science — to emblazon history with the conquest of peace — to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind — to unite the world in one social family…to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!
Gilpin’s