Frontiers, Alienation, and the Alien

The southwestern Plains have seemed to many, as Walter Prescott Webb noted about that high and arid region, strangely "oceanic."^[2] It is a vast, fiat landscape where the horizon merges with the sky, where no points of reference are offered except the ephemeral. Dust devils skitter and vanish, massive black clouds sweep in with lightning and gusts of rain and are gone just as quickly, rain evaporates before reaching the ground. An occasional car or truck can be seen miles away. It shimmers in the distance, whines along an absolutely straight road, and flashes by. In the next moment all is again silent, as if the vehicle had been imagined. The land seems empty, yet awesome and overwhelming.

Webb held that the American sojourn on the Plains had shaped the national "insides." In his seminal work, The Great Plains, he quoted from the writings of the painter John Nobel, who was born in Kansas. From

his expatriate home in France, Nobel recollected an incident on the southwestern Plains:

Did you ever hear of "loneliness" as a fatal disease? Once, back in the days when father and I were bringing up long-legged sheep from Mexico, we picked up a man near Las Vegas [New Mexico] who had lost his way. He was in a terrible state. It wasn't the result of being lost. He had "loneliness." Born on the plains, you got accustomed to them; but on people not born there the plains sometimes have an appalling effect.

You look on, on, on, out into space, out almost beyond time itself. You see nothing but the rise and swell of land and grass, and then more grass—the monotonous, endless prairies! A stranger traveling on the prairies would get his hopes up, expecting to see something different on making the next rise. To him the disappointment and monotony were terrible. "He's got loneliness," we would say of such a man.^[3]

The topography around Bent's Old Fort struck me, almost two decades ago now, as terra incognita, in the sense that Mircea Eliade, probably the most influential of all historians of religion, has used that term. This is the land, found in myth worldwide, that is beyond the boundaries of the known world; it is unfounded, chaotic, and unsanctified. As such, it serves perfectly as the backdrop for that most American of creations, the alienated hero. "Our heroes have always been cowboys," according to a recent American ballad. In the sense that the cowboy is the loner guided by his personal sense of values, this could not be better stated.

The loner continually reemerges in American art forms. He is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, an alienated individual who has no apparent code of ethics . . . yet in the midst of his despair he finds a source of direction in a world without fixed points of reference. In the end his vision might be nostalgic, even morosely sentimental: "We'll always have Paris." Despite bouts of self-pity, he displays a quiet strength borne of will and determination. A stranger, rebel, orphan, or seeker, the loner is characteristic of the most popular American heroes from John Wayne to James Dean, from Dustin Hoffman to Clint Eastwood.

The loner is no less ubiquitous in more intellectual American cultural expressions. As America matured and assumed a leading role on the world stage after the First World War, the most remarkable of a generation of American intellectuals and artists, including John Nobel, quit the country for the moral void of Europe. Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and others of the "Lost Generation" chose to live where the center had not held, in the Paris of the 1920s. They gloried in it, and found glory there. Existentialism and

nihilism became them. They searched out nothingness and stared it down.

Their lives no less than their works are generally recognized as mythic epics. The most important myths, including American ones, are about transcending the fundamental isolation imposed by human consciousness; they are important because they teach us how this is properly done. There is strong similarity in this regard between the artistic expressions described just above and the history written by Frederick Jackson Turner.^[4] In his Ur-history of the American West, Americans seek and transform the wilderness.

The transformation of Nietzsche's abysmal emptiness to a settled world, one laid out with reference to all of the reassuring benchmarks of modernity, constitutes one of the most important chapters of the American creation myth. We tend to view "the frontier" as primeval, dormant, awaiting the inspiring touch of civilization. This influences us even as we know on another level that the trans-Mississippi West was peopled when Europeans arrived, and that these people had formed distinctive ways of life. It is the way of creation myths to gloss over such details. Creation myths make certain ontological demands, one might say: they have to start from scratch. The cosmos before the advent of the organizing agency must be, as expressed in Genesis, "without form."

Of course, what Turner and the European settlers for whom he spoke overlooked was that "frontier" is a matter of perspective. To the Romans moving into what is now Great Britain, those isles were the frontier. They were nonetheless inhabited, as was the Biblical promised land. To understand how indigenous populations can be so conveniently overlooked, one must bear in mind that to all human groups, unknown land is un-sanctified land, land that does not fit into the forms our assumptions about the world have so far taken. It is unfathomable and threatening until it is sanctified, until our belief and value system has been stretched to make room for it or, more likely, until we tailor the land to our preexisting notions of what the real world should be.

The real world to all peoples is the homeland, which is the geographic center of the known earth. It is made sacred by its connection with heaven, usually visualized as a vertical axis that runs from heaven through earth to the underworld, and connects the three planes of existence. This, the axis mundi, can be a natural formation, like Mount Fuji, Temple Hill, Ayers Rock, Mount Meru, or the Black Hills (the last of these sacred to the Lakota). Or, it can be of human construction: the pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica, Babylonian ziggurats, henges in ancient Europe, the Kaaba

in Mecca, Angkor Wat, Borobudur, any number of Christian cathedrals and churches or Buddhist, Islamic or Hindu temples. Eliade said that even the house was designed after this pattern of the world; he called it an "imago mundi." The Plains Indians of North America, who were nomadic in historic times, regarded the sky "as a vast tent supported by a central pillar; the tent pole or post of the house is assimilated to the Pillars of the World and is so named. This central pole or post has an important ritual role; the sacrifices in honor of the celestial Supreme Being are performed at the foot of it."^[5] On the secular front, edifices like the spires of the Kremlin and the Washington Monument, although not geographically central, aspire to political centrality.

The rest of the earth is legitimated by reference to the center. Topographic and other important features are located according to cardinal direction and sometimes distance from the center. Cardinal directions are associated with gods, colors, holy places, and a host of other phenomena that appear in the mythology of the occupants of the homeland. Peaks, valleys, lakes, and so forth are typically scenes of mythical activities of gods subordinate to deities who utilize the axis mundi as a passage between heaven and earth. Such is the feeling of a people for their homeland that, as an example, "When Rome decreed that Carthage should be destroyed, the Carthagenians beseeched the Romans to 'spare the city' and instead to 'kill us, whom you have ordered to move away. . .. Vent your wrath upon men, not upon temples, gods, tombs, and an innocent city."^[6]

When one passes beyond the boundaries imposed upon the land by the cosmological framework, one is in uncertain and dangerous territory, terra incognita. It may be inhabited by unknown gods or by creatures beyond human ken. European sailors, typically, imagined monsters. And they feared that they would fall off the edge of the world. Our human response is to establish benchmarks as quickly as possible that harken back to the known. A new axis mundi is fixed: A cross is planted on a foreign shore, a flag is planted on the Moon. The new world replicates the old: In the New World we have, to mention only a few examples, New Orleans, New York, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, New Mexico. The Masai, moved from their homes in East Africa, "took with them the names of their hills, plains and rivers; and gave them to the hills, plains and rivers in the new country.^[7] The deities that sanctified the homeland are transplanted: San Diego, Santo Domingo, Santa Fe. Humans bring with them their architecture as well, which mirrors the sublime pattern of the cos-

mos, just as the homeland does. Polynesian societies erected the supporting posts of their structures in alignment with the cardinal directions, placing sacrifices beneath them. Astronomers in the sophisticated civilizations of India showed masons where to place the first stone; at that spot the mason drove a stake into the ground in order to fix the head of the mythological snake supporting the world, the snake that symbolized chaos, the formless.^[8] The Dutch, settling into the luxuriously forested river valleys of the strange North American continent, mined clay and built ovens for the bricks necessary to construct dwellings properly. Creation and habitation had to be done according to the proper form in order to produce form.

The people who occupy the terra incognita, those who are indigenous, are strangers and less than human until we establish their humanity. They are until then like the human figure God pressed from dust in Genesis (chapter 2, verse 7) before he breathed life into them. They must either prove themselves human in our terms, or our terms must be expanded. If this cannot be done, they will be regarded as especially cunning creatures, but treacherous because they cannot be expected to behave in human, predictable ways. Many in "our" group will argue that we should eliminate "them."

We know our kin are human (whatever else we may know or feel about them). The safest course is therefore to establish kinship with unknown peoples. While our fathers and father's fathers may be different, if our gods, who are ancestors even more venerable than our grandfathers, are the same, our kinship is established. Joint participation in ritual that refers, even obliquely, to such gods may be enough to establish kinship. The anthropological term for this is fictive kinship.

Kin, fictive or biological, may quarrel, may even come to blows, but nonetheless will recognize the basis for a continuing relationship and in general feel bound by a set of ongoing obligations. The behavior of kin is predictable to a degree that humans find reassuring, especially because life in most other respects is unpredictable. This is so even when behavior is predictably irritating, as with the stereotyped behavior of mothers-in-law in many societies.

Kin will also in almost every case form an alliance in conflicts that arise with others, including more distantly related kin. Kinship does not in every instance do away with conflict, but it does manage and direct it in certain ways. As the Arab proverb goes, "I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousins and I against the village,

my village and I against the world." This sort of predictability also is reassuring.

The dominant culture in the United States is one that has been carried by unsettled persons, confronted by the alien and unpredictable on all sides. Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier" of the American West and the creations of the "Lost Generation" of American artists and intellectuals are metaphorical expressions of the human confrontation with nothingness. Anxiety, about the uncertainties of life, a nagging suspicion that human existence is without meaning and that a universal chaos will at any moment erupt through the veneer of humanly contrived order has been, almost certainly, a concern of all humans in all places and times. This anxiety is rooted in the human capacity for reflective thought, which is the ability to visualize oneself as a discrete entity in the world and, therefore, something subject to the uncertainties and finalities therein. Such anxiety in modern America, however, has been exacerbated by the circumstances of immigration, the separation from the massive reality of homeland with its reassuring sensory and cultural benchmarks firmly tied to a traditional apprehension of the world. Anxiety has been further heightened to angst by the efforts of modernists to debunk the myths and discredit the traditions, in all their variety, that have imbued humans with a sense of meaning and purpose. It continues today with certain post-modern schools of thought that deny any intrinsic meaning or coherence to the past.

Whatever the merits of the postmodern project, it has met with dubious success. According to a Gallup poll taken in 1991, 90 percent of Americans prayed at least every, week and had never doubted the existence of God, 80 percent believed in miracles and expected to be judged for their behavior after death. More than half believed that the Devil existed, compared to 39 percent who reported this belief in 1978. Some observers of religious behavior, in fact, have suggested that the United States is today undergoing yet another "Great Awakening," like those of the mid and late eighteenth centuries and early nineteenth century. Many have puzzled over why, as Lawrence Wright has put it, "in the Western world, religion is an especially American phenomenon."^[9]

It seems likely that the reason for the constant resurgence of evangelical fervor in the United States has to do with the sorts of experiences offered by religious organizations, which are ones of ritual interaction. The rites, regalia, and emotionally laden ceremony of formal religion hold great attraction to the alienated since they reduce their sense of isolation.

Americans throughout the history of the country. have had reason to feel alienated from both the traditional realms of home and community (which are at present especially fragmented and unstable) and the modern world of capitalistic intercourse. Successful participation in the latter usually requires a tool kit of rational skills unavailable to many. Success in the world of capitalistic exchange also typically requires a single-minded commitment to participation. Many have allegiances that curtail this kind of participation, such as women with commitments to their families that prevent them from pursuing a career full time, those with strong personal interests of little value in the marketplace, anyone not willing to relocate for career advancement; generally, those who fail to assign the highest priority to developing and marketing their skills. Exclusion from effective participation in the capitalistic marketplace engenders alienation in itself, but exclusion also opens up the individual to economic and political exploitation, which deepens that sense of alienation. Today and historically, the socially excluded and alienated are those most likely to become involved in evangelical movements.^[10]

This book is about a time and place on Turner's "frontier" where alienated groups, "strangers in a strange land," met and interacted in ways that I call "rituals" to form a common world for a time. As we shall see, alienation was rife on the frontier, not only among those of European ancestry. like the Bents and their partner Ceran St. Vrain, who were scrambling for a secure position in the burgeoning capitalistic order that was replacing that of inherited privilege, but also among the Native American and Hispanic populations.^[11]

The world that was jointly constructed by these three cultural groups was eclipsed, eventually, by the ambitions of political and business interests in the East. Tragedy befell the architects of the common world, especially the Plains tribes, who, in the perception of Eastern immigrants in the latter half of the nineteenth century, became the demons that dwelled in the Nietzschean abyss. The builders of Bent's Old Fort fared poorly too. Charles Bent lost his life; William Bent lost many of those most dear to him as well as his "castle on the Plains." By that time, however, the world they had created had gained a tenacious hold. Indeed, multiculturalism is still the hallmark of the Southwest. The "middle ground" constructed during the years of Bent's Old Fort's occupation has been diminished, but is still firm enough so that no serious attempt to separate the Southwest from the United States has been made since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.