America's Historic Trails by J. Kingston Pierce with Tom Bodett
September 1997, KQED Books.
This is the companion book to the video series, America's Historic Trails,
hosted by Tom Bodett.

 

 

 

 

 

History is written by those who follow, and the history of America's historic trails lies in the hearts of the people we followed along them. Without their hopes and dreams, these would be nothing more than empty routes to another place to eat. Americans have been setting out to explore new territory since before our country was born. The lure of the frontier, the urge to see what's out there, has been a defining national characteristic for more than four hundred years. The new emmy-nominated public television series, America's Historic Trails with Tom Bodett, traces the paths taken by succeeding waves of pioneers and settlers, visionaries and adventurers, as they pushed across the continent to claim what became these United States. These colorful characters, their struggles and triumphs, are recalled in this richly told history with dozens of evocative drawings and photos.

 

Foreword

Heroes and Fools

A young man stood along the California Trail, faced into the rising sun and looking beyond the bleak terrain to the distance he’d put between himself and the secure Michigan home which sat flat in the middle of nothing he could make out from there. He was the first one he’d known in his short life to come this way – to come this far. It felt clear as the desert dawn to this dreamy young traveler that the Great Divide separates not just a continent, but whole lifetimes and fortunes and heroes and fools.

Westbound emigrants in the mid-1800s used the phrase "I’ve seen the elephant!" to put picture to their soaring sense of accomplishment. In nineteenth-century America, an elephant was an exotic, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime, spectacle. It represented something so new and extraordinary that a person could not be the same afterward.

This emigrant kicking alkali desert dust from his store-bought black boots outside of Elko, Nevada had seen the elephant. He couldn’t have known it, but since waking up that morning among the sage and prickers, there had been a sense that his adventure had become irreversible. Barely twenty years old himself, there was no way he could imagine where that many years again would find him. He raised his thumb to tempt the traffic whining by on Interstate 80 to provide him with some small leg of his journey: Winnemucca, Reno, across the line to Truckee, and then the golden mythical shine of the Sacramento Valley and the heart of California.

That navel-gazing young hitchhiker, a refugee from an English Lit program stuck deep in the gut of the lower-Michigan factory culture, was, of course, yours truly. The journey wouldn’t end in California; in fact it would barely pause. I hung a right at San Francisco and wandered north to Oregon. After a brief tenure working in the woods there – long enough to get myself burned to the bone on a high power line – I returned to Michigan for a few months to recover my strength. Then it was back down the way of the Mormons and every other determined pilgrim whose crooked path I followed to my own personal Zion – which lay nestled, I was certain, somewhere in the Cascade Mountains of southern Oregon. It wasn’t.

After several dirty months worth planting nursery-raised lodgepole pines in the barren earth of clear-cut mountainsides all around Crater Lake and Klamath Falls, and watching Shakespeare in the park on weekends in Ashland, I realized I had not reached the land where the West began after all. In fact, by my measure, it appeared to be the bitter end of the West as I’d always fancied it.

So, once again like those impatient souls who stomped off ahead of me, I moved onward and northward, and I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the westernmost trail ever blazed on this continent that could now be negotiated by an automobile. That would be Homer, Alaska, the end of the road – quenching, at least for me, the thirsty wanderlust that has always pushed Americans to the next horizon.

As I write this, it’s nearly twenty-two years since I stood in the desert dawn beside the old California Trail at Elko and wondered where I was going. I went a long way in the year right after that – and not very far since. Whatever I found at the end of the road continues to hold me here and continues to defy my explanation of it. I never remember deciding to stay. I only know I haven’t left. Alaska is full of people like me.

I always suspected that California and Oregon were full of people like us a hundred years ago – and Kentucky a hundred years before that. Every new territory that ever presented itself to the grandiose eyes of ambitious explorers over the centuries was eventually tamed and settled not by the arrogant aims of Manifest Destiny but by the individual and curious natures of ordinary men and women looking for a better way to live. Or at least a better place to live their way.

The ancient and remarkable indigenous cultures that were lost underfoot as these simple folk clodded around the landscape will never be recovered. As this series was produced we found fragments of America’s native heritage preserved all along our way, and we made it our business to learn about and film what we found. During our visits to native sites and museums along these routes, I never failed to feel voyeuristic and more than a little saddened. Why hadn’t we European emigrants managed a few hundred years ago to foster this fascination with Indian culture and to honor the way they lived?

Even as I write I am aware these are the guilt-ridden feelings of a twentieth-century white man relieved to be placed in history far from the scene of the crime yet still on the receiving end of the plunder. There is no way I know to travel America’s most historic trails without being reminded of who they follow.

Every route we covered – from the quaint, colonial Post Road winding out of New York to the treacherous Chilkoot Pass into the Klondike – was worn into the earth by moccasins that were no doubt following in the tracks of simple animals who only traced their way by instinct and their need to multiply and survive. Perhaps the motives of those creatures who originated these routes are not so far removed from those of all who came after.

One such pioneer, James Clyman, made this diary entry on his way west in 1846:

"It’s remarkable how people sell out comfortable homes, pack up and start across an immense barren waste to settle in some place of which they have uncertain information. But that is the character of my countrymen."

Were these people heroes? Some of them, certainly. Fools? Probably. Adventurers? Opportunists? Yes, yes. All of these and more and all of these and less. They were simply Americans – they were us. And not so long ago.

If you had told me twenty-two years ago as I stood along I-80 that I would one day come back to that very place with a producer, camera crew, and fists full of notes trying to make some video sense of America’s historic trails, you might have scared me right back to Michigan. I find looking in to the eyes of large wild animals far more comforting than gazing at a camera lens, although traveling these old roads proved far more entertaining than encounters with beasts. And besides, television cameras very rarely eat your legs off.

I suppose if I could tell you in this simple introduction all that I found along the thousands of miles of historic routes we traveled, then we wouldn’t have to film a series about it. But we did and here’s what I think we found: For better and worse we found the soul of our nation. From the moment Christopher Columbus laid eyes upon the wrong continent to the day the Pilgrims fell off Plymouth Rock, up to the day the last unwashed college kid with peanut butter on his breath and Jack London in his knapsack comes stumbling up the Alcan Highway – America will be about people looking for their dreams. And the American Dream is not about what we find at the end of the road, because it is almost never what we though it would be. The American Dream has always been about making the most of a situation, whatever it might be.

The forty-niners found gold and Californians assembled themselves into a state. Brigham Young found a brackish lake in the middle of a desert and the Mormons also assembled themselves into a state. Success is obviously not built on what we find so much as on what we bring with us.

I witnessed a scene somewhere beside U.S. Route 1 through Virginia, or maybe it was along Interstate 25 out of Albuquerque. The Natchez Trace south of Nashville? I-80 west of Omaha? Actually, I can’t recall where I was. It could have been along any or all of these roads but what I saw has stayed with me.

Pulled over at a rest area was a sun-faded Buick leaned back on its springs under the load of a U-Haul trailer. The trailer was tilted on a rusty jack while a man wrestled a flat tire to the pavement. Off to the side a young woman entertained a toddler in the shaded grass while looking warily over to her mate. A road-weariness emanated from the family. I could almost hear their mental calculations: How far will the spare take us? To the end of the journey or just the end of our money? Everything will be OK if we can make it to Louisville, to Nashville . . . Socorro . . . Sacramento.

This very scene has played itself out a thousand times over the centuries along America’s trail and road system. Whether it was a family in Juan de Onate’s 1598 expedition into New Mexico nursing a lamed mule beside the Rio Grande, or a member of the Donner Party watching the snow fall in 1846 as she counted out her family’s rations – the courage of the human heart reigns supreme in these worried pilgrims.

I would like to think that the determined families of the 1790s scrabbling over the Cumberland Gap had no more sense of their place in history than did the family I saw stranded in the shadow of their U-Haul last spring. History is written by those who follow, and the history of America’s historic trails lies in the hearts of the people we followed along them. Without their hopes and dreams these would be nothing more than empty routes to another place to eat.

But don’t travel these roads just to see who came before you. Travel them to see who goes with you now: heroes, fools, adventurers, and opportunists. The trails are still open and these roads still change lives.

Twenty-two years ago they changed mine the first time. Doing this series has changed it again. The rest is the gravy. The rest is history.

Tom Bodett

Homer, Alaska

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