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January 2011
The historian Francis Parkman, strolling around Independence, Missouri in 1846, remarked upon the “multitude of healthy children’s faces … peeping out from under the covers of the wagons.” Two decades later, a traveler there wrote of husbands packing up “sunburned women and wild-looking children” along with shovels and flour barrels in preparation for the long journey west. In the gold fields of California in the 1850s, a chronicler met four sisters and sisters-in-law who had just crossed the Plains with thirty-six of their children. “They could,” she wrote, “form quite a respectable village.”
In the great overland migration that lasted from 1841 until the start of the Civil War, more than a quarter of a million people pushed their way from the Missouri valley to the Pacific coast. Probably at least 35,000 of them were young girls and boys; except during the gold rush, at least every fifth person on the trails was a child. Yet, in all we can read today, these thousands of young emigrants are infrequently seen and almost never heard.
After four months and four days of living outdoors we are all in the most robust health,” Sarah Herndon exclaimed as she and her family neared Virginia City, Nevada, after traveling overland from Missouri, in 1865. The familiar image of women on the westward journey is one of suffering and sacrifice. Of course, women did suffer and many died. Almost all had to perform hard daily chores and endure bad weather, illness, and all sorts of emergencies. But by their own testimony, some women felt rejuvenated by the trip.
Sarah Herndon was a teen-ager when she made the trip; others whose health improved were older. “Old Mrs. White, a lady of sixty-five years,” for instance, said that she felt almost young again and attributed her improved health to the “buoyancy of the climate.” Sarah Herndon wrote in her diary on August 31: “Mother’s birthday. She is fifty-three years old.… She was looking frail and delicate when we started, but seems to be in perfect health now, and looks at least ten years younger.”
“See America First.” After the First World War broke out in Europe, this slogan, coined by an organization of Western businessmen and civic leaders, beckoned thousands of Americans to see the West. While German submarines endangered transatlantic ships, tourists began responding enthusiastically to articles promoting the Rockies, the deserts, and above all San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which drew thirteen million visitors in 1915. Many chose to cross the continent by automobile, taking a novel, breezy, monthlong voyage in an open touring car instead of the three-and-a-half-day trip in a stifling Pullman car. They drove on partially paved wagon roads, alternately dusty and muddy: the Midland Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the Lincoln Highway, and others.
I am fascinated by what I see in the rearview mirror of experience. The future, being a mystery, excites, but the past instructs. When I was a student at the University of Texas, one of the favorite campus legends concerned a professor of anthropology, whose great power was in bringing the past alive through his brilliant lectures on the ascent of the human species. Once, when he had been holding forth on a certain phase of evolution, a student in the rear of the room raised his hand and said, “Professor, I just don’t see what difference it would have made if my great-great-great grandfather had been an ape.” And the professor shot back: “It would have made a significant difference to your great-great-great grandmother.”
So, the past matters. In the words of the historian Christopher Lasch, “All of us, both as individuals and as a people, are shaped by past events more than we can fully understand. … Trapped in a past not of their making, most people cannot afford the illusion that tradition counts for nothing, even if much of their energy goes into a struggle against it.”
Packages that explode when dropped, cows that unexpectedly turn fertile, hands that sprout hair, and little boys who pull chairs out from under old ladies are the foundation of the American legal profession. Every student in every law school in the land learns his or her trade by studying a body of true cases that often seem the stuff of Rube Goldberg drawings but that are invaluable for vividly illustrating basic elements of the law.
A few seasons back, an oil painting by J. M. W. Turner went at auction for $10,023,000. When I read this in the paper the next day, I made up my mind to do something about my father’s Turners. He had bought several of the artist’s watercolors before World War II, and they had spent the intervening years in a battered, black portfolio under the couch in his study. Since an early Turner watercolor might sell for ten thousand dollars and a good late one for ten times that, it seemed to me ours should be appraised and insured.
But when I mentioned my plan to my father during a visit that weekend, he was cavalier. They were “pleasant little paintings,” he said, but he doubted whether they had “any real value.”
This was simple perversity: if they were Turners, they were valuable. And they came accompanied by a magnificent deckle-edged certificate that radiated the serene authority of a medical school diploma and announced that each painting had originally been part of the J. M. W. TURNER COLLECTION OF THE LATE JOHN ANDERSON, JR.
I am writing to protest Peter Baida’s slur against Thomas Edison (June/July), namely, that Edison himself thought his phonograph “not of any commercial value.”
Once when I was at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey, the tour guide showed us the first phonograph and described what happened when Edison’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” squeaked back from the rolled band of tinfoil. Not one but several of Edison’s employees fell to their knees and wept openly at this miracle.
Further, Edison vowed early in his career never to invent anything that was not marketable. He decided this after his first patented invention, an automated vote-tallying machine, was rejected by politicians who preferred the manual tallying method as politically advantageous. Edison, in fact, originally envisioned the phonograph as primarily a business machine for recording correspondence.
Peter Baida replies: I don’t quite understand why Mr. Glover thinks that my comment was a “slur.” If I read his letter correctly, Mr. Glover would consider it a slur if I suggested that Edison lacked a commercial motive. But I did not make that suggestion; all I said was that Edison did not perfectly foresee how large a success the phonograph would turn out to be.
Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. His first recordings took the form of indentations in a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder that rotated as the sounds were recorded. The quality of the sound was poor, and Edison neglected the invention for several years. In the early 188Os, according to Robert Conot’s Edison biography, A Streak of Luck , Edison said to his assistant Samuel Insull, “Sammy, they never will try to steal the phonograph. It is not of any commercial value.”