Enthralled by the Ethic of Frontier Thought

Most people have heard of that epic tale of frontier darkness known as the Donner Party. But few people go beyond the sordid tales of cannibalism to study the role of likely the most important person in that gothic drama: The Standard Issue American Huckster, Lansford Hastings.

Hastings , an Ohio lawyer was the classic American Booster. In addition to being an early resident of Oregon, he had spent some time with that other blowhard of early empire and the California Bear Republic, Col. John C. Fremont. Hastings was constantly angling to create some new Pacific Republic with himself at the helm. Meeting a man of similar bent in Fremont, Hastings was much interested in the cavalry officer’s reconnoitering of the sere Great Basin.

The trapper Jedediah Smith was the rightful explorer of that glorious wasteland and Kit Carson was generally the real brains behind Fremont but nonetheless, Fremont was given the name “The Pathfinder”. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, his well-connected father-in-law was almost able to buy him the Presidency.

Hastings, charmed by his fellow blowhard in uniform, used the Colonel’s information to try and solicit more people to his quack schemes in California. He had never used the brutal route across the Wasatch Mountains and the interminable waste of the Bonneville salt flats himself but he met one emigrant group in Wyoming to try the route and left word for more to follow his lead. His group surprisingly made it but the ill-fated Donners were late enough to meet their doom in the Snowy Sierras after struggling across some of the most inhospitable landscape in the world.

The United States of America remains to this day a Frontier Nation.

Despite eradicating the Frontier over a hundred years ago, we still act and think like a Frontier Culture. While we still possessed the remnant luxury of waning frontier up until the 60’s it is now long-gone for all but Alaska and even there, it has transformed itself into caricature. Now, the ethos is a tarbaby that keeps on embroiling us in ever more ridiculous and debased behavior. From military expansionism and benighted crusades to waste and heedless extraction, we proudly hoist a flag up the pole at F Troop every chance we can get.

Being enthralled by the ethic of Frontier Thought, the nation produces Boosters and Hucksters like Hastings with prodigious regularity and there is no shortage of dreamers and schemers who are ready to attempt crossing unknown terrain on some idiotic notion of a sure thing, only to end up camping in the snow and eating one’s camp-mates instead of the more abundant mules because “they taste better”. To solidify the issue in farce, the Boosters themselves never suffer near so much for their idiocy as do the folks who listen to the blandishments and believe everything they are told .

This is why we can suffer through a Civil War, Depression and World Wars only to do our very best to recreate them and recast them as some kind of hale and hearty tribute to our Manifest Destiny on the one hand and our exceptionalism on the other. Shopping, Packaging, Entertainment and Marketing are our new “Frontier” and one assumes that while we may not gnaw on our fellow’s shank bone quite so directly as the ill-fated Donners, we are all cannibals nonetheless.

With all these “green shoots” a-popping, maybe we’re just vegan cannibals. …full of Hope and Rip-Roaring for Change. Flags snapping in the breeze over the sands of Babylon, mortgaged to the hilt with a Chinese culture that makes our history look like a momentary interlude, assigning Corporations all the legal protections of the individual but none of the responsibilities, we frontier on and somebody should wake up and inform the lead party that those Digger injuns they are pot-shotting across the playa aint Digger injuns, they’re the stragglers in their own party, going in circles in a hostile Great Basin of our own Determined Creation.

D.W. Sabin, commenter @ Front Porch Republic on

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