Industrialization and the Landscape

Much of what was transpiring in the East at the time Bent's Old Fort was in operation was linked to the rapid industrialization of the early nineteenth century. As the nineteenth century opened, the United States set forth on a course that would establish the country as an industrial nation and an influence in international affairs. The new direction away from an agrarian and toward an industrial society was set with the real finale to the Revolution, the War of 1812. Particularly after the resounding defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans, patriotism ran high in the new country. Patriotic motifs and symbolism in art and on utilitarian objects, like ceramics, became popular. Not only were the British defeated in 1815, the United States also placed itself among the world naval powers with its raid on the Barbary Coast, which freed American ships and hostages.

Having established its military potency, the new nation quickly acted to use it to economic advantage. In 1816, tariffs were introduced to prevent the British "dumping" of manufactured goods in American markets, a move that strengthened emerging American industry. The ground breaking for the Erie Canal in 1817 promised a link between the resources of the "frontier" and the industrial and distribution center of New York. This initial grand attempt to stoke the fires of industry and commerce with fuel from the hinterlands was a magnificent success. As the economic benefit to New York became clear, it sparked what has been called a "canal building mania" among other East Coast cities, an obsession only diverted by the railroads when that technology became available a decade later. American industrialization and trade thenceforth grew rapidly, and

apace. To encourage it further, Congress in 1828 passed what was known in the South as the "Tariff of Abominations," which controlled the import of foreign goods. In that year, also, construction began on the nation's first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, intended to link the East with the Ohio Valley. This linkage had been a lifelong goal of George Washington, who had encouraged the National Road and who had been president of the Potomac Company, which had built a series of skirting canals along the Potomac River in 1785. In 1828 Washington's dream found expression not only in the railroad but also through the efforts of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, which intended to build a canal between the Ohio Valley and Washington, D.C., itself. On July 4 of that year, the President of the United States turned the first shovelful of earth in the construction of the canal, proclaiming it to be an engineering marvel matched only by the pyramids of Egypt.

The two decades between 1830 and 1850 spanned the time of the operation of Bent's Old Fort. The groundwork for massive industrialization had been laid by 1830. In 1850, industrialization was well under way, and the cultural tensions produced by the transition were beginning to weaken the fabric of the nation. There was great disparity now between lifestyles, beliefs, and values along several lines. Gaps widened between the industrial North and the agricultural South, rural and urban areas, the American-born and immigrants, and, increasingly, management and labor. In 1830, the country rode a wave of optimism and patriotism and looked toward a future that appeared bright with the promise of industry. Roads and railroads would be built, water and gas systems installed, police and fire protection instituted. The new country was determined to avoid the class systems of the Old World. The mills of Francis Cabot Lowell would be the prototype; rustics would be exposed to the larger world, and employment there could be the ticket to a morally uplifting way of life. By 1850, the nation was already looking backward with nostalgia to a lost, simpler way a life, a sentiment that would climax with romanticism about the disappearing world of the Southern plantation system. The Lowell experiment had failed, immigrants replaced the farm girls in the mills, class lines were drawn, and conflict along ethnic lines began to rise. Thompson noted that the builders of Bent's Old Fort had patterned their operation along the cultural lines of the 1830s. By 1850, the very forces which the Bents had put in place in the Southwest had overrun them, and "the Fort became not a microcosm, but an anachronism."^[54]

Enthusiasm for industry helps to explain certain aspects of the Bent's Old Fort landscape and contemporary reaction to it. As we have seen, it

was in most ways an ordered environment, with spaces assigned to the various specialists who were associated with the fort's operation: the traders, trappers, teamsters, workmen, and so on. But this impression of order is countered by the archaeological discovery, of two large trash dumps, not hidden from view behind or away from the fort, but located only feet from the fort's front entrance (fig. 18).

The trash pits were initially discovered during archaeological investigations in the early 1960s by Jackson W. Moore. The largest was 70 to 80 feet wide and over 130 feet long, with a depth as much as about 5 feet below existing ground surface. Moore referred to this, because of its size, as the "Main Dump." It was located a mere 40 feet from the fort walls. The other trash pit was smaller—about 25 feet north-south, and 35 feet east-west, with a depth of about 5 to 6 feet. This "West Dump," as Moore referred to it, was as close as 7 feet to the fort walls. The proximity of the trash deposit Moore found "demanding of our credulity," and he concluded that "its presence there must have been truly trying to the occupants of the fort."^[55]

A more complete excavation in 1976 revealed a variety, of interesting facts about the trash deposits.^[56] In both deposits the large preponderance of material was faunal: the bones of animals, which displayed butchering marks. Most of these were buffalo, but there were also deer, antelope, and a wide variety of smaller mammals, fishes, and birds. Though both dumps bore unmistakable signs of repeated incineration, the stench must have been unavoidable to the inhabitants of the fort.^[57] Artifacts from the dumps indicated that the west deposit had been made during the earliest period of occupation at the fort. Ceramic dates obtained there indicate that this might have been as early as 1831. Main Dump artifacts suggested that the material there had been deposited after 1841 and prior to 1849, the time period of the most intensive occupation and activity at the fort.

The incongruity of these nuisances with the evident attempts to make the fort a more comfortable, even luxurious place, especially during the Period beginning with 1840, is obvious. Perhaps this incongruity is one that might be seen as such only in the present; to the competent owners of the fort the situation may have made more sense. One might guess that the owners regarded the irritating presence of refuse as necessary by-products of an industrial process. The fort was a kind of factory, after all.

While we may speculate about the attitudes of the fort's owners, it is also true that the tolerance of garbage in close proximity to living (and working) space did not arise with the industrial revolution, as archaeologists who have worked at preindustrial village sites can testify. The

[Full Size]

Figure 18.
Plan view of Bent's Old Fort landscape showing the location of the trash
dumps. (Courtesy Colorado Historical Society, Denver; from Jackson W. Moore, Jr., Bents
Old Fort—An Archaeological Study [Denver: State Historical Society of Colorado, 1973], 14.)

agricultural Pueblo Indian (living not far away in the Southwest), for example, not only discarded their trash just outside their dwelling, but buried their dead in these midden deposits, too. Medieval European villages and cities were filthy, and the filth contributed to any number of plagues; just one outbreak of the bubonic plague in England in the fourteenth century killed more than a third of the population there. In the nineteenth-century, East, anyone who could arrange to leave the city in the summer did so, not only because the stench arising from the horses, the outhouses, the gutters in the streets where night soil was thrown, and the pigs who rooted in alleyways was unpleasant but also because the threats to health were very, real.

This brings us back to panopticism. The plagues of the seventeenth century, brought about by the increasingly dense populations of the cities, prompted the institution of panopticism, according to Foucault. The organization and rigor upon which the central authorities had to depend to counter the devastation of the plague—and the behavioral habits, the rituals that enforced the organization—provided the real archetype for Bentham's eighteenth-century architectural expression of perfect surveillance. I quote at length from Foucault in this regard, since the passage contains the essence of the panoptic system:

The enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which the uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous, hierarchical figure, in which cach individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead—all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion; that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is of analysis.^[58]

In 1625 the plague struck London with such force that Parliament relocated to Oxford. The next year, 1626, the Dutch purchased the island of Manhattan from the Native Americans for sixty guilders worth of trade goods. Some of the Europeans were fleeing not only the plague, the over-

crowding, and the social disruptions that accompanied industrialization on the east side of the Atlantic but also the type of society that had entered into a dialectic with these conditions. Emerging in Europe was Douglas's high-grid, low-group society, the society in which each individual is, eventually, held in place by something like the panoptic gaze but feels little kinship with others. It is also the kind of society in which the less competent and lucky take recourse in millennia movements, fantasies of absolute egalitarianism, magic, and cults; as Eliade might put it, these societies generate an urgent nostalgia for paradise among the less fortunate, an overwhelming desire to rediscover the Golden Age. It is the kind of society that produced the Puritans.

When the Puritans fled their society, they set about immediately to recreate it. They may have thought that they were escaping the dialectic (although, of course, they would not have put it into those terms), but in fact they carried it with them, vectors for modernity. They had been a part of a high-grid society in Europe, and they had benefited in some ways from that grid. Partly these benefits were in the material conditions of their lives, their immediate comfort, which they would not give up.

But I suggest that there was another, broadly ideological, logic at work here (as there always is). Panopticism, rationality, and the modernity that produce high-grid societies are belief systems as well as being systems of logical control over the environment. I have described in some detail the ritualistic aspects of panopticism, which produce sentiment and belief. Dissident European immigrants were also believers. They were part of a heretical cult within the belief system, a counterculture to the culture and thereby dependent upon it. The dominant society served as a foil for them. Now the cult was the society; its members attempted to take control of the grid, not realizing how fully they were enmeshed in it.

The builders of Bent's Old Fort merely continued the dialectic. And they certainly moved to take control of the grid. They were entrepreneurs who went about their business in an eminently ordered way, constructing a landscape in which European plagues could take root. The rituals of modernity, the establishment of the grid in the "wilderness," provided the medium for the plague. Archaeological evidence indicates that what is called the West Dump was a borrow pit from which clay for the making of adobes was taken during the fort's construction in about 1831. Broken or defective adobes were tossed in the fully excavated pit, then trash was deposited there. The Main Dump also began as a borrow pit for alterations to the fort between 1841 and 1846. This time the pit was dug near the river, so that water to mix with the clay would not have to be

carried far. Then this pit was used as a trash dump for the duration of the fort's occupation.

Differences in the contents of the two dumps indicates degradation or overexploitation of the riverain environment over a period of about a decade. A reconstruction of diet from faunal remains indicates that buffalo would have been the most common animal source of food during the early occupation of the fort, followed by pronghorn antelope and deer, but then by a riverain assemblage of species that contributed significantly. In order of estimated quantity of meat contributed these were catfish, box turtle, miscellaneous wild birds, wild turkey, and the Canadian goose. By the end of the decade in question, buffalo, antelope, and deer are again most plentiful, but the riverain assemblage is almost absent. Its place in the diet at the fort is taken by domesticated species: chicken, pig, goat, and sheep.^[59]

Organizational competence at the fort was enough so that use was made of the excavated pits. They were filled with trash. Sufficient concern for hygiene was felt so that these trash deposits were repeatedly burned. Unfortunately, these measures were not enough to prevent fouling the environment. The Main Dump was surely polluting the Arkansas River during the late period of the fort's occupation. Archaeological excavations have established that by that time the trash from the dump spilled into the river itself.

Humans as well as wild species were affected by pollution from the fort. It is a fact that the final, mortal blow to the fort was not the war that had raged so frequently nearby, not the famine that struck the Native Americans after the Mexican War, not even market forces that changed in the 1840s. The end to Bent's Old Fort came with the cholera epidemic of 1849, a pestilence spread by tainted water. The two wells inside the fort may have been fouled, in addition to the river.

The culture of panopticism outran the panoptic control of Bent's Old Fort in 1849. Panopticism had been instrumental in bringing modernity to the Southwest, and now modernity was setting free the apocalyptic forces so familiar in the Old World. A new era of pestilence, war, famine, and mass death among the Native Americans began, events that the company could not survive. It seems likely that the principals of the company, particularly William and Charles Bent, would have resisted the wave of modernity they had done so much to set in motion could they have foreseen the fates that awaited them. They could not, of course, and so they believed in the new order until it was too late to alter events.

A persistent legend has it that William Bent, disheartened by the re-

cent death of two of his brothers and his wife, the decline in the trade caused by the now incessant warfare, the refusal of the Army to compensate him fairly for the use of the fort during the Mexican War, and the death of half of the Cheyenne because of the cholera epidemic, purposely burned the fort, using barrels of gunpowder to accomplish this. But some historians disagree, among them Thompson:

In spite of the well known legend, no one who knew William Bent believed he burned—Seeley, Carson, or Reynolds. He packed up and left to escape the Asiatic cholera that Yellow Woman had brought inside in panic, and his fumigant, burning barrels of tar, "got away" from him. But perhaps he knew they would.^[60]