If American history west of the
Mississippi begins with Lewis and Clark, then the history of the
United States seems pretty simple: “Indians owned the West, and
then they lost it.”
History is never so simple. That some
of the people Lewis and Clark met had “never seen a white man” did
not mean they had not seen change.
Lewis and Clark saw a
snapshot of time and place. It was a landscape that had evolved
over millions of years, and an environment that had been shaped by
Indian and animal life for thousands of years. By the time the
explorers headed out from St. Louis in 1804, many of the people who
had previously inhabited the West were gone.
Some had
died only a couple of years before, from epidemics of smallpox.
Others had been gone for centuries, and places like Mesa Verde and
Cahokia, an ancient city of 30,000 near the site of present-day St.
Louis, were long silent. In other places, Indian inhabitants
remained where they had lived from time beyond memory; it was the
Spanish, French and English, who had competed for their trade or
their souls, who had come and gone.
Long before the West
became a part of “America,” Indians and Europeans who had lived
together for generations produced mixed communities and people of
mixed descent. The Osages remembered seeing the first visitors
called Americans on the left bank of the Mississippi, “chopping
trees and building and plowing and swearing.” They had hair on
their faces like French voyageurs, “and soon the Little Ones were
calling them Heavy Eyebrows as well, but knowing them to be Long
Knives.”
Jefferson did little to allay Osage
apprehensions. He told Osage and other delegates in Washington in
1806 that the United States had peaceful intentions, but “we are
strong, we are numerous as the stars in the heaven, and we are all
gun-men.”
If Lewis and Clark brought the promise of a new
power in the West, Indian people at first saw little to suggest
that these newcomers would last any longer than those who had come
before. But historian James Ronda notes that when Lewis and Clark
arrived on the Pacific Coast in December 1805, they came at the
wrong time and from the wrong direction: Native peoples were
accustomed to trading with traders from the sea in the spring and
fall.
Another difference was the way Lewis and
Clark’s exploration reshaped our concept of time. Millennia
became concentrated into one pre-American time frame, and with it a
nation’s sense of its ancient experiences was lost. Did the
people who inhabited Cahokia for 700 years think there would be a
time when Cahokia no longer existed? Did the Anasazi and Hohokam of
the Southwest know that their irrigation systems would fail? Could
the people who lived for thousands of years on buffalo or salmon
have imagined that the source of their life could become polluted,
or disappear entirely?
American occupation of the West
occurred in the blink of an eye, historically speaking. In the late
19th century, buffalo were exterminated to make way for cattle,
Indians were dispossessed to make way for ranchers and farmers. At
the end of the 20th century, buffalo started returning, and the
cattle industry struggled to survive. Farming communities on the
Northern Plains experienced population decline, while Indian
populations in reservation communities increased to reach
pre-contact levels.
At the beginning of the 21st century,
the American West has an economy and a way of life that depend on
oil and water. But gauged against the span of human history in the
West, this way of life is still a baby, and chances of it surviving
infancy may not be good. In the end, automobiles and oil may not be
that different from horses and buffalo.
Charting the
creation and subsequent decline of both Cheyenne and settler
society in 19th-century Colorado, historian Elliott West says
simply: “Everything passes, … no one escapes.” But this is a
lesson lost in American history if we look on the Lewis and Clark
expedition as an opening chapter in a story of progress, a story
that, because it is our story, we assume will be different from
everybody else’s.
It won’t. The cycles of
history will continue as they always have; perhaps the only truly
exceptional thing about American history will be that it happened
in America.
Colin Calloway is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He is professor of history and chair of Native American
Studies at Dartmouth College.
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