Daniel Boone Country

This chapter is the product of working visits to the United States, visits marked especially by the generosity, intellectual and otherwise, of many friends. It is the fruit of my distinctive experience of the position of the Englit professor in North America. I discovered North Carolina; and being unwilling to have my horizons bounded by the question of who was next to be bought in by Duke University English Department, I got a map and set off for the Blue Ridge Mountains. There is a very beautiful parkway, though it is rather strange: it doesn't lead anywhere, in fact it carefully avoids all human purpose other than uninterrupted experience of the wilderness. I deduced that it was begun during the Depression to stimulate the local economy. Paths are interesting. It occurred to me only recently that the reason the Romans built straight roads is that they were an imperial power: they ignored the existing patterns of life, and with slave labor they did not have to take the easier route. British footpaths (trails) mostly derive from ancient rights-of-way, established perhaps as the route between the village church and a cottage long-disappeared; as these become tourist paths, one set of rural practices remains embedded within another. On the Blue Ridge, there are frequent places to pull off and look at the wilderness, without even getting out of the vehicle, with signs explaining what you're looking at. Or there should be signs: it being winter, many of them had been taken away for repair, and there was a tiny temporary notice apologizing politely for this. There were just the two upright posts and in between, instead of a sign about the landscape there was—the landscape. So I was in my individual

outpost of civilization, the automobile, staring out at the savage wilderness; and someone was trying to make it signify, but they were not getting through. It might seem that I was privileged with the revelation that Dean MacCannell says all tourists yearn for: a sudden vision of authentic America.^[1] But, of course, I could make no sense of what I was looking at—the gap between the posts taunted me with the delusion of unmediated understanding. And I hadn't even read Stephen Greenblatt's essay "Towards a Poetics of Culture," where he notes how the boundaries of the natural are marked in Yosemite National Park.^[2] In fact, at that time I thought Yosemite was pronounced like possum-fight, and might mean the fortunate practitioner of a perversion known to American Indians but denied to us by our depleted, civilized sensibilities.

I decided to intensify my engagement with the countryside. But in the wilderness you can't just walk, so I hiked a trail. It wasn't too organized—not too many signs telling you which birds to look at, to take your litter home, to brush your teeth twice a day, and always use a condom. But the trail was named—for Daniel Boone: again, my route was being given significance. So, being of scholarly disposition, I found out about Boone. I assume U.S. readers know all about him, because E. D. Hirsch in his Cultural Literacy says they should to be proper citizens.^[3] At the time of the War of Independence, Boone was finding trails across the Alleghenies, into land where the Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo tribes were living. In a series of fights with those Indians, Boone pioneered European settlement of what was to become Kentucky and became a national hero. Actually, Boone himself didn't do very well out of it all. He wasn't really an independent individual, as the myth has it; he was employed by a land speculator. He was cheated out of land he had been given, and owed large sums of money almost all his life. He illustrates the remark Brecht made about Mother Courage: that you need a large pair of scissors to take your cut from a war, or from capitalism generally. It seems, anyway, that Boone didn't want to extend civilization, but to get away from it; of course, he was the instrument of his own disappointment, for it was his forays that opened the trails for white settlement. He moved on to Tennessee, and at the age of sixty-five to Missouri, still questing for his own supersession.

Already in his lifetime, people began deploying Daniel Boone to render plausible ideas about distinctive U.S. virtues and the colonization of North America; he figures in the contest of stories through which ideology is produced.^[4] This appropriation of Boone started with

the "autobiography" ghosted by John Filson in 1784, in which "Boone" concludes:

Many dark and sleepless nights have I spent, separated from the cheerful society of men, scorched by the summer's sun, and pinched by the winter's cold, an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness. But now the scene is changed: peace crowns the sylvan shade.^[5]

The language attributed to "Boone" here is that of the eighteenth-century poet ("sylvan shade"). In part such speech effects the move from pioneer to cultivated gentleman that validates both Boone and his biographer; the U.S. citizen is now peacefully at home in the land he has settled in despite of nature. The wilderness becomes a country churchyard. Yet the disparity between language and context is there—William Carlos Williams complains of "the silly phrases and total disregard for what must have been the rude words of the old hunter."^[6] There is a split between the virtues of pioneer and gentleman-poet—they represent my sense of an ideological faultline in U.S. Man. Also, in the passage quoted, we cannot but remark the idea that Boone is an instrument ordained": he is credited with a belief in what came to be called "manifest destiny." The first book I found about Daniel Boone was by Edward Stewart White; published in 1922 to help establish the Boy Scouts of America, it tells us: "He spoke, feelingly and with solemnity, of being a creature of Providence, ordained by Heaven as a pioneer in the wilderness to advance the civilisation and the extension of his country."^[7] European domination of North America is what God wants.

Quite diverse attitudes towards native peoples whom he was helping to displace are attributed to Boone. One time—not a time of particular strife—he sees a man fishing from a log, and just takes a shot at him and kills him. He is reported as saying: "We Virginians had for some time been waging a war of intrusion upon them, and I, amongst the rest, rambled through the woods in pursuit of their race, as I now would follow the tracks of any ravenous animal."^[8] In other reports, Boone has a quite different attitude. He speaks admiringly of Indians and of their social and military customs; he says he could trust an Indian much more safely than a Yankee. The interviewer, disconcerted, felt Boone was "greatly prejudiced. . . in favour of the tawny inhabitants of the western wilderness."^[9] The ideological convenience of the first of those attitudes is obvious: if the Indians are savage, like animals, then they can be killed and their land taken. "When dealing with savage men, as with savage beasts, no question

of national honor can arise. Whether to fight, to run away, or to employ a ruse, is solely a question of expediency," the commissioner of Indian Affairs declared in 1871. White says "a deeply ingrained racial cruelty is one of the Indian characteristics; and it was a powerful factor, when the scales of Eternal Justice were poised, in bringing about his elimination from the land"; notice how providence slithers into Social Darwinism there.^[10] Nevertheless, the second attitude, Boone's sense that the Indians were as human as himself, won't go away. White acknowledges repeatedly that both parties behaved violently. For instance, a man "might wantonly kill a perfectly friendly Indian on the very fringe of town; his action might be deplored or even frowned upon by his neighbours, but he would not be called to account" (p. 96). The distinction between civilization and savagery threatens to collapse.

Contradictory stories such as Boone was being made to tell appear also in other European colonies. As I have said (in chapter 2) the topics requiring most assiduous and continuous reworking are the awkward, unresolved ones: those are what people need to read and write about. Colonial Europeans spent a good part of their time producing self-justifying stories about the difference between the natives and themselves. In George Orwell's Burmese Days the club servant says: "I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now." Ponder for a moment: what is unacceptable about the servant's sentence?—"I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now." The colonist says:

Don't talk like that, damn you—"I find it very difficult!" Have you swallowed a dictionary? "Please, master, can't keeping ice cool"— that's how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can't stick servants who talk English.^[11]

The settler wants the native to understand his commands, but fears that they may be understood all too well. The colonist must seek continually confirmation of superiority, because every time he or she looks at a native (and the Europeans' privilege is not to look, but always they must look), there is a risk of seeing more than he or she can cope with. And the native might return a look not of acquiescence but of knowledge, threatening authority. Almost all this analysis is in Doris Lessing's novel The Grass Is Singing, published in England in 1950, written out of Lessing's experience in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Anything drawing attention to the constructedness of racial hierarchy causes anxiety—for instance "the growing army of poor

whites," who are thought shocking (unlike millions of poor Blacks) because of "their betrayal of white standards."^[12] I have written about this elsewhere, but invoke it here lest it appear that I am unaware that these ideological maneuvers were characteristic of the British Empire, and by no means special to North America.

Actually, the Indians and frontier whites were rather similar—because their culture was hugely influenced by the material conditions in which they were living. Apart from guns and experience of trying to assert imperial sway nearer to hand (for instance in Ireland), the Europeans brought with them little that was of much help in North America. They had to learn from the natives how to live. Daniel Boone didn't just walk into the wilderness (any more than I could). He picked up Indian trails; he depended on Indian techniques of living in that terrain, and on Indian trading practices—he moved in on their trade of supplying animal pelts.^[13] When captured by the Shawnees, Boone was adopted into their tribe and managed perfectly well; they hoped he would stay, becoming a renegade like his contemporary Simon Girty—Boone lived for four months in their manner in their town of Chillicothe. Europeans had always a propensity to do this— already in 1610–11, the Jamestown Colony made it a capital offense to live with the Indians (Spenserians will notice the similarity to Calidore among the shepherds).^[14] Because of his sojourn with the Shawnees, Boone was actually tried for treachery when he got back to his camp; so powerful was the anxiety about interchange between frontier and Indian lifestyles.

The emerging dominant ideology of the United States needed the renegade to be the anti-type of Daniel Boone (as, for instance, in Emerson Bennett's novel The Renegade [1848]) in order to demarcate the savage and the civilized. Indeed, since the Indians were not conceived of as fully human, it was possible to pretend that they were not really there: the places where they lived were spoken of as "free land"—meaning free for the whites to take (this was crucial to Frederick J. Turner's frontier thesis).^[15] But the contradictions kept breaking through. When the government wanted to make treaties, it implied that the Indians were occupying their land in a recognizably human way, with a coherent social system and leaders who could sign away land rights; when the government wanted to break the treaties and seize more land, it said the opposite.^[16] Yellow Wolf, of the Nez Percé people, understood how stories produce ideology; he said: "The whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves."^[17] The Indians

lost their lands and their lives partly because they lost out in the contest to establish plausible stories.

The Barbadian writer George Lamming made the same point in 1960 apropos of Shakespeare's Tempest . Caliban, Lamming says, is "an occasion, a state of existence which can be appropriated and exploited for the purposes of another's own development."^[18] Caliban is a figure in Prospero's story, and the latter's humanity depends on the former's savagery. To justify imperial enterprise, European and U.S. Man have constituted themselves in contradistinction to identities they have foisted onto other races. This is cultural plunder: not just the material resources and labor of subjected peoples are taken, but their identity is constructed so as to attribute an essential humanity to the imperial power. "The European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters," Jean-Paul Sartre observed.^[19] This imperial strategy, I'm suggesting, has enabled European expansion throughout the world, but it seems specially complex and compelling in the United States because the state was founded, explicitly, in Enlightenment, humanist ideas of Man and his freedom. The trouble is that to be free you must be Man, and the Indians were not; Chief Justice John Marshall, a most respected interpreter of the Constitution, pronounced in 1823 that, being savages, they were not entitled even to the protection that the conventions of warfare prescribe for the conquered.^[20] Chief Joseph of the Nez Percés appealed:

Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for my-self—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.^[21]

In fact, the Indians represented to European peoples a subversive kind of freedom, reminiscent of that found so threatening in Elizabethan "masterless men," for, as against the settler ethos, they figured escape from political, social, and familial institutions. Partly for this reason, Michael Rogin suggests, they had to be displaced.^[22] The Nez Percés welcomed the white people who crossed the Rockies in 1805 and lived peacefully alongside them for fifty years; but eventually, because of gold mining, they were killed, driven out, their villages burned. In the 1870s, they were moved from the Wallowa Valley, now on the borders of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, where they had treaty rights. In violation of a truce, they were shipped like cattle to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; after almost a hundred had perished in the

swamp there, they were moved to a barren plain in the Indian Territory, where they sickened and died.

"Remember that whatever our ancestry of blood, in one sense we all have the same fathers—our Founding Fathers": so William Bennett, fearful that too many will distrust the paternal authority of the state.^[23] Indians were encouraged to think of the U.S. president as the Great Father. The primal scene, according to Freud, is your parents having sexual intercourse. We call this love, but it may appear to the child "as something that the stronger participant is forcibly inflicting on the weaker. . . an act of violence."^[24] The primal scene of European imperialism is the Europeans arriving, being welcomed by the local people, then driving them out, killing them and burning their village. Women were raped—as they were to be very often in slavery. Thus the Founding Fathers—they had to be fathers—conceived U.S. Man, in an act which they may have believed to be love (generously bestowing true religion and civilization) but which looks also like the rape of the inhabitants and the land. This scene has been by no means exclusive to the Americas, as I have said, and it is still being played out around the world.

I did find one sign still in place between its posts on the parkway: it said "Daniel Boone country." I had thought I was in a remote margin of European civilization, but ideologically I was in the center.