The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America
met many people and had seen many things: two of the more memorable happened to be right here, where Lewis and Clark were pressing westward through the very frontier I was studying.
The first encounter was of rather lesser importance, though it still had some poignancy. I had been invited to visit a marble memorial to an enormous white Charolais bull. He was named Sam 951, and until 1972 he had lived on a ranch in the town of Chillicothe and had been famous for miles around as an example of bovine excellence. Sam’s frozen semen, once produced in exuberant gallons by what all agreed was an excessively jolly creature, was worth millions, and was packaged in nitrogen-cooled vials to be sent off from Chillicothe to eager customers all over the world.
The Litton Charolais Ranch was in consequence once perhaps the most profitable cattle-breeding outfit in America. Sam 951 was primus inter pares of the large and carefully managed herd. Each bull—the best of them lived in air-conditioned barns kitted out with red carpets—weighed a ton or more, had ears the size of dinner plates, had a vast muscular body joined necklessly to an appropriately immense head, and sported dewlaps that would take two strong hands to move.
Cattle like Sam had made a great fortune for the ranch owner, Jerry Litton, and had now brought him within a hair’s breadth of true fame. I spent two happy summer days with him—a handsome and engaging man who had married a former Miss Chillicothe (and a runner-up in the Miss Missouri pageant) and who for the previous four years had been a member of the US Congress, a Democrat. His home at the time I stayed was abuzz with political excitement: in two weeks voters were due to decide whether or not to elect him a US senator. Many, indeed, thought he would and should run for national office—President Jimmy Carter was a supporter—and in early 1976 he was sufficiently intrigued to announce that he would indeed take this obvious next step along the political glide path.
When I turned up, his work was nearly all wrapped up. He was in the closing stages of what all agreed had been an impeccably nuanced and well-funded campaign for the primary election. And two weeks after I left, he did indeed triumph, leading a stunning upset in a twelve-man primary race. Jerry Litton was on the verge, I have long since believed, of well-deserved political greatness.
On the night of his victory, he was to be flown back to Kansas City for a celebration. But then came calamity. The crankshaft in one of the engines sheared in half; the little plane lost power and crashed on takeoff; and Litton, his wife and children, his Beech Baron’s pilot, and the pilot’s son were all killed. Jerry Litton had been born in a house without electric power, in 1937, when this part of Missouri still had the feel of the frontier about it. He would have brought something of this spirit to Washington had fate permitted it. He was a figure of whom it can rightly be said, He could have been a contender. But fate saw to it that he never got the chance.
My second excursion of that 1976 adventure concerned the polar opposite of a cattle farm. I spent time touring a sprawling Minuteman nuclear missile site, centered at the Whiteman US Air Force Base, an immense complex of men and their flying machines set close by a village just south of the river with the engaging name of Knob Noster. Back in the 1970s, it was quite possible to visit the immense missiles and to descend deep into the bunkers where clean-cut young officers—curiously decked out in uniforms that included starched white ascot collars—sat beside their pairs of launch switches, enduring a bleak shift of existence in air-conditioned subterranean silence, waiting to execute a world-destroying command that, mercifully, never came.
The Cold War is now over, but America still has deployed around the country three wings of Minuteman missiles, all nuclear tipped and more powerful than ever, as ready to go as ever they were before. They are, however, no longer deployed in Missouri but in more distant and protected wilderness bases in North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. One can still try walking across lonely Montana meadows up to the edge of the wire-protected silo where a missile lurks beneath its concrete blast doors, to test how long it takes before a security jeep or a helicopter, with flashing blue lights and a crew of soldiers with full authority to maim, comes to find out what you are up to. Back in Missouri in the 1970s, I was invited to try and found it took no more than a couple of minutes for my breach of security to be discovered and repulsed. But it is no longer possible to play such a game at the Whiteman Base there since the men have all been stood down and their missiles dismantled and destroyed under the terms of the various treaties signed with a Russia that is no longer the Soviet Union, no longer seen as quite the threat it once was.
Yet Whiteman Air Force Base itself still exists, and if not armed with missiles today, it still sports a title and wields an ability that sends chills down spines. It is part of a terrifying arsenal of weaponry that is now called—after numerous organizational changes and semantic alterations of title—the United States Air Force Global Strike Command.
The command has its headquarters in Louisiana, from where it controls all of America’s air-launched atomic weapons—the three Minuteman missile wings in the northwest and a large number of B-2 stealth bombers, all of them designed to drop thermonuclear bombs. The bulk of these bombers happen to be based at Whiteman—at a site a short way from that point on the river where, in 1804, William Clark recorded hearing an “emence snake” that inhabits a small lake nearby “and which gobbles like a Turkey & may be herd several miles.”
The planes belong to a US Air Force wing, the 509th, that proudly reminds visitors that it is the direct descendant of the only unit in history that has ever dropped live atomic bombs in wartime, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Today it is a battle-proven assemblage of aircraft and crew that, its commander says, can now bring massive firepower to bear, in a short time, anywhere on the globe.
B-2 stealth aircraft of the 509th Bomb Wing, a twenty-strong nuclear-armed operational component of Global Strike Command, at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. The wing is a direct descendant of the group that dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There seems a certain irony in this nuclear firebase being located so very close to the Lewis and Clark expedition route, not least because what Jefferson’s explorers were seeking to do, even if unknowingly at the time, was tied to the unique American concept of the frontier and to the development of what to this day is known—and argued over—as the frontier thesis. The irony stems from the argument that the frontier mentality, if such a thing truly exists, still plays a nourishing—and controversial—role at the intellectual roots of much of today’s American foreign policy.
The famous argument, put forward in an 1895 paper by a University of Wisconsin history professor, Frederick Jackson Turner, held that there was an immense social significance in the simple existence of the frontier—that ever-westward-shifting margin between civilized society in the East and the untamed savagery and wilderness to the West. Kansas City, the city that rose from one of the campsites of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, became a classic, if momentary, point of frontier contact: on its eastern side were traders, trappers, farmers, settlers, surveyors, villages, and towns; on its western side were empty prairies, nomads, lawlessness, and an unprotected and shelterless void of stony plains, tornadoes, and starvation. Between them lay the line of contact, division, and separation: the frontier.
The rolling clash between these two extremes gave rise, Turner argued, to a peculiarly American set of character traits. The experiences suffered or enjoyed on the frontier left Americans inherently different from what they and their antecedents had been in their homelands. Those tested in the borderlands were by comparison more violent, more informal, more democratic, more imbued with personal initiative, and less hamstrung by tradition, class, and elegance. More American, Turner suggested. Strength, power, might—the ability to tame rather than to persuade, the tendency to demand rather than request, the tendency to shoot rather than to talk—these were all tendencies compounded by the frontier experience, uniquely different building blocks employed in the making of the modern American. The Western myth, the legends of the cowboy, the cinematic and entertainment-park allure of concepts like Frontierland—all of these were born from this single simple (some would say simplistic) thesis offered by Frederick Jackson Turner.
In the century since the publication and