The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America
has been attacked roundly and mercilessly for ignoring such matters as race, gender, and regionalism. Yet what has gone essentially unanswered still remains: just why do Americans believe they are so different, so exceptional? Why the persistent belief in the idea of America as the “shining city on a hill”? Why the notion of Manifest Destiny?
And why, indeed, did Thomas Jefferson believe so keenly in the idea that America should and could and in time would extend herself from sea to shining sea, and accordingly dispatch Lewis and Clark to see if and how this could be achieved? Was all of this, as Frederick Jackson Turner would later argue, rooted in that same peculiar experience, shared by all, born in the process of the steady closing of the frontier?
Some may consider it injudicious to conflate, on the one hand, John Winthrop’s inspirational city-on-a-hill sermon of 1630 and the tenets of the frontier thesis with, on the other, the notion of conducting Manifest Destiny at home and so many interfering adventures abroad. And yet viewed from some perspectives it does seem right and proper to ask, particularly here in Missouri: why does America still believe, as the slogan of Whiteman Air Force Base has it—why did it ever believe, in fact—that it has a right and a duty to be able to deliver “massive firepower, in a short time, anywhere on the globe”? Why America? And if such a belief is somehow rooted in a deep-seated conviction that it should, that it needs to, and if called upon, that it must—then was not this all born, as Frederick Jackson Turner and his supporters would also argue, from the experiences gained by early Americans in their closing of the frontier? Isn’t this determination to extend itself across the planet simply a reflection of the strength and crudity and informal decisiveness of the pioneer Americans, brought up to date, made global, and now writ large for all the world to see?
Does the mission of the huge atomic firebase, sited so close to where William Clark first heard of the snake that gobbles like a turkey, have its intellectual origins in this very same tiny, brave expedition that first crossed the frontier and in the consequent development of the huge city now lying just a short drive away to the east, which once so vividly encapsulated the notion of the frontier, two centuries before?
These days it is by no means easy to see the inner workings of Whiteman. In the 1970s it was simplicity itself to win an invitation for a tour. The air force was only too proud then to show off its wares and its weaponry, reasoning that doing so helped display to the Soviets its perpetual readiness to strike. Today, terrorism has introduced a new reality: long scimitar glints of razor wire, battalions of ever-scanning cameras, and heavily armed sentries at the entrance gates all stand guard to protect the planes and their weapons from the innocently curious and the ill intentioned alike. Tours still happen, but application lines are long, details demanded weeks in advance, cameras forbidden.
Once in a while, though, along this steady reach of the wide Missouri, there will come a distinctively huge and quite unexpected rumbling sound, a thunder of jet engines that shakes the willows and the stillness of the stream. Then from its lair behind the wire, rising from an invisible runway folded among the cornfields, a great gray bomber will slowly lumber upward and hoist itself into the skies.
It is always an awesome sight—all the more so if other planes follow and the singleton becomes part of an airborne armada, a squadron of unimaginable power bound on an unannounced mission to a place no one will ever disclose for a purpose never to be known.4 As the craft vanish into the clouds and the thunder ebbs away over the woods, it is tempting to wonder just what corner of the planet might soon be basking under the unasked-for invigilation of these nuclear-tipped watchers from the skies.
It is at moments like this the irony of history presents itself. For it seems not too much of a stretch to suppose that America’s present-day global reach, insisted upon as a right and represented by weapons like this, is a concept that actually enjoyed its infancy here, more than two centuries ago. This was when two young soldiers, on orders from their president, were engaged on a mission to extend the reach of their young country, not then clear across the world, but from just one gray ocean clear across to another. The world would come later, when canoes became bombers and wooden paddles jet engines.
Beyond Kansas City the river turns northward, and William Clark offered his views about the kind of terrain that he believed now lay on its western bank. His spelling and grammar were never exemplary: on the evening of June 21, 1804, when he wrote this simple observation, he was probably quite weary:
Supplied with water the Small runs of (which losees themselves in the bottom land) and are covered with a variety of timber such as Oake of different Kinds Blue ash, walnut &c. &c. as far as the Praries, which I am informed lie back from the river at some places near & others a great distance.
The Praries, as he had it, were indeed nearby, and they were of a landscape very different from what had gone before.
Until this point in the journey, the expedition had been quite overwhelmed by trees, by forests, by glades, by copses—by wood. The valleys through which the men traveled and the hills they saw from the water were usually thick with trees. They were burned in some places by Indians, who needed places to conduct their agriculture, but otherwise they seemed totally to carpet the land. Red and white pine forests; oak and chestnut forests, copses of hickory and cottonwood; groves of aspen, birch, maple, and cedar; stands of balsam fir, oak, ash, and walnut—all these and more make their way into the journals of Lewis and Clark, for whom scarcely a day went by without some mention of a tree or a wood or the worrisome absence of woodland where the explorers had believed it should be.
Though Lewis had some scant botanical training, the two were focused primarily on the commercial possibilities of timbering, not forest science per se. Early America ran on wood. People had an urgent need of it for every aspect of life, from fuel to housing, from boatbuilding to the making of crude paper and the construction of that most esteemed emblem of pioneer life, the log cabin. And in those settled parts of the country, wood was abundant. From the white pine forests of Maine to the magnolias of South Carolina and the elms and chestnuts, the cottonwoods and willows of Missouri Territory, the stripling America was bristling with trees.
Except, as William Clark was aware, this suddenly was not so anymore, on the west bank of the upper reaches of the Missouri River. Up on these riverbanks, sometimes close to the river, on other occasions some great distance away, and first seen in the long reaches upstream from where the river makes its directional shift from the west to the north, there appeared glimpses of a landscape now in a state of arboreal undress, much changed from what had gone before.
What Clark glimpsed was a relatively treeless brown-green country, stretching away into a violet horizon that was longer and flatter than any that these hill-born Easterners had ever witnessed or imagined before. It was landscape laid out, flatly undulating, beneath a sky so big it was overwhelming. It was a new kind of prairie, a limitless tableland of grass, a huge grazing-plain, with a wind that soughed near-constantly above the vegetation, the temperature of the drifting air the only clue to the season. Its sky was flecked with mare’s tails of clouds, where lightning could be seen a hundred miles distant and you could watch the black storms chewing their way toward you, the sky suddenly darkening overhead as the squalls arrived and smashed down wafting curtains of hail until the earth was quite white and crunched underfoot, though within moments the reappearing sun then melted it away, steam suddenly began to rise from the grass, and you could almost hear the plants bursting upward in the newly made and richly damp sauna of heat. America was someday to be a united nation, for sure, but in places its newly seen landscape evidently comprised the greatest imaginable differences.
The explorers had reached the eastern edge of that immense, hitherto mostly unseen and uniquely American geographical phenomenon: the Great Plains. Uniquely American, but not unique: there is no shortage of vast midcontinental expanses elsewhere—the Russian steppes, the African veldt, the Argentine pampas, and even some African savannas all offer much the same confluence of flattened topography, pitiless windblown climate, and endlessly unvarying botanical covering. But in America, the Great Plains have been