Like Kit Carson, the best of them were “cougar all the way,” and they established an ideal of prowess which entered the marrow of our national character, which saw us up San Juan Hill and through two world wars. Our sentimental fondness and genuine respect for this ideal is, I suspect, the secret of the durability and fascination of the American “Western.”
But all qualities, including a mustang human spirit, have their defects, and these, too, must be entered in the record. The trappers’ raid on the beaver was a harbinger of things to come. Their undisciplined creed of reckless individualism became the code of those who later used a higher technology to raid our resources systematically. The spiritual sons of the mountain men were the men of the next wave—the skin-and-scoot market hunters, the cut-and-get-out lumbermen, the cattle barons whose herds grazed the plains bare.
It is neither fair nor quite true to say that the tradition of thoughtless land exploitation started with the mountain men, but certainly a part of it can be traced to them. Leatherstocking, James Fenimore Cooper’s idealized frontiersman, found God in the trees and water and the breath of summer air; but the true-life mountain man made his demands on America’s abundance without thought, without thanks, and without veneration for living things. These men embodied, as few others have, one facet of the self-reliance of which Emerson later wrote, but they wholly lacked the self-discipline which alone could give it grace and meaning.
In all this, the circular process of history was at work. The land was determining the character of men, who, in ton, were determining the future of the land itself. The result of this interaction was the clearest possible example of the American ambivalence toward the land that continues to dominate our relationship to the continent and its resources. It is a combination of a love for the land and the practical urge to exploit it shortsightedly for profit.
It is in their love of the land that the frontiersmen and the mountain men have given us a lasting gift. Each new generation of Americans is inspired by their ideal of individual prowess. In our few remaining wild lands we can still catch a glimpse of the world of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger and Jed Smith—the world that shaped our character and influenced our history. The spirit of Boone and the mountain men still walks the woods and Western ranges. A stanza Vachel Lindsay once wrote is their ultimate epitaph:
When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,
The phantom deer arise
And all lost, wild America
Is burning in their eyes.
Thoreau and the Naturalists
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!
—WALT WHITMAN “Song of Myself”
There was another kind of moccasin stalking the wilderness at the end of the eighteenth and through the nineteenth century. Its wearer was not Indian, though he quickly grasped the age-old insights of Indian living. Nor was he White Indian: the brain was too self-aware, the mind too attuned to overtones, the inner ear too acute. This stealthy foot belonged to a new breed of hunter, the naturalist, who sought the miracle of nature as the Red Indian sought a deer or the White Indian a westward pass.
The interests and personalities of such naturalists as Bartram, Audubon, Parkman, Emerson, and Thoreau were as varied as their origins: one was a pre-eminent philosopher, one a pre-eminent historian, and the others were regarded as more quaint than profound by their contemporaries.
But in different ways these five were land-conscious men who owed a debt to the Old World and shared a desire for fresh insights into the nature-man equation. Likewise, they shared a deep interest in, and respect for, America’s aborigines, and they rejected the common notion that the European emigrants had nothing to learn from the natives.
Some were basically pastoral men (although, by Jed Smith’s standards, most of them were greenhorns and backyard bird watchers); others were more at home in parlors; but as a group they were bent on seeking out the larger meaning of nature and making it part of the woof of life.
Only two of them were intimates, and the paths of some never crossed, but they shared a virgin continent as a common laboratory, and viewed it with an eye of discovery that probed beyond the obvious. In a much different way they were as individualistic as the mountain men, and each contributed to new currents of thought that reshaped our thinking about the American land.
It began, perhaps with the Bartrams. Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, and William Bartram, naturalist, were bom within ten years—and died within six—of each other. While Jefferson stood on the portico of Monticello contemplating the agrarian advance, while Boone shaded his eyes at the summit of Cumberland Gap, William Bartram was down in a valley somewhere, on shank’s mare, inspecting palmated chestnut leaves, bird nests, vines, and berries. Jefferson knew Europe, and spent a lifetime borrowing its sophistications; Boone had shed Europe as a spring snake sheds its old skin; William Bartram depended upon Europe for his bread and butter, and his self-appointed task was to win respect for the Old World’s new art of nature study.
Bartram’s father, John, once the King’s botanist, had created America’s first botanical garden on the banks of the Schuylkill River. After one five-week jaunt of over 1,100 miles, John complained that no one would “bear the fatigue to accompany me in my peregrinations.” He was elated when his son William acquired his thirst to witness and describe every facet of nature. William, whose long stride matched his inquisitive eye, wandered thousands of unfenced miles on the eastern side of the Appalachians, and his journals bubbled over with the richness of a countryside teeming with “frogs in springly places,” “gay, vociferous and tuneful birds,” “myriads of fish, of the greatest variety and delicacy, sporting in the crystalline floods,” and “Elysian springs and aromatic groves.”
He wrote so eloquently that his Travels, published in 1791, received high praise in Europe. Carlyle wrote Emerson that all libraries should have “that kind of book . . . as a kind of future biblical article.” Chateaubriand in France, and Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, used the Travels as a basic wild-land reference book. Jefferson turned to Bartram when he needed strawberries and other plants for Monticello, and years later asked him to join Lewis and Clark’s expedition, but William, old and walked-out, regretfully declined.
As a self-taught disciple of Professor Linnaeus, William Bartram made botany popular, and he broadcast abroad—through his writings and exchanges of plants and seeds—the wonder of the American scene.
Science and institutions like the Smithsonian had a chance to grow in the United States once his work was under way, and the generation of nature writers and nature students which followed had a frame of reference from which it could measure its own insights.
Of Jefferson’s contemporaries, none achieved more popular fame than Haitian-born Jean Rabin, the naturalist whose name evolved to John James Audubon. Unlike his modern followers, who hunt with binoculars, Audubon took pleasure in shooting birds in order to identify them, and he chose the best for painting. In Florida he poked through the bayous and keys and boasted of shooting enough birds to make a feathered pile the size of “a small haycock” in a single day. From 1820 to 1826, Audubon hunted species after species, securing specimens