The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890

By Richard Slotkin

A two-time National Book Award finalist’s “ambitious and provocative” look at Custer’s Last Stand, capitalism, and the rise of the cowboys-and-Indians legend (The New York Review of Books).

In The Fatal Environment, historian Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of Native Americans helped justify the course of America’s rise to wealth and power. Using Custer’s Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the “savage” element be permitted to dominate the “civilized,” Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a mythos redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.

“A clearly written, challenging and provocative work that should prove enormously valuable to serious students of American history.” —The New York Times

“[An] arresting hypothesis.” —Henry Nash Smith, American Historical Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jan 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781504090360

Richard Slotkin

Richard Slotkin has been recognized as one of the leading scholars of American cultural history. He has won awards for nonfiction writing on American history, and for historical fiction. His books include Regeneration Through Violence (1973), which won the Albert Beveridge Prize and was a National Book Award Finalist; The Fatal Environment (1985), which won the Little Big Horn Associates Literary Award; and Gunfighter Nation (1992), a National Book Award Finalist. His novel Abe (2000) won the Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War Fiction. He retired in 2008 as Olin Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Wesleyan University.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO THE WESLEYAN PAPERBACK EDITION

I envisioned The Fatal Environment as the central book of a trilogy that would describe and analyze the historical development of the central myth-ideological trope of American culture: the Myth of the Frontier, I began the project as a graduate student in 1965, at a time when the terms and symbols of that mythology permeated both popular culture and political rhetoric. The 1950s and ’60s, in which I grew up, saw the Western movie (and its television spin-offs) become the most prevalent genre of popular-culture narrative. The Western had provided to President Eisenhower his preferred leisure reading. But it provided to President Kennedy a good deal more: it gave him the symbolism of the New Frontier, through which he projected a vision of a revitalized and expansive American liberalism, creating a world in which the strong and powerful (like the chivalric gunfighters of the movies) put their strength and expertise and quick-draw violence at the service of the poor and oppressed. Kennedy’s death in Dallas did not diminish the force of the myth he had invoked, but events exceeded his intentions. By 1965 this mythology had begun to reveal its contradictions and incoherences in the most terrible way, as Vietnam became our last and greatest Indian war, invoking the Frontier Myth’s dark side of racism, false pride, and the profligate wastage of lives, cultures, and resources.

The study began with my recognition that the language of values and world-concepts I had learned watching movies, reading comic books, and playing Cowboys and Indians as a child was really the operative language of the political moment—and that belief in its terms was getting most people fooled and some of them killed. The first volume, Regeneration Through Violence (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), looked for the bases of the mythology by going back to the earliest emergence of the language of symbols and narrative forms that constituted the Myth of the Frontier. The book began with the Puritans and ended with the American Renaissance of the 1850s; and it showed how a complex literary and ideological language developed out of the efforts of successive generations to describe and narrate their experience of the New World. The book was concerned with the way in which literary culture processes historical events, but its emphasis was on the analysis of texts and documents; and its methods of textual analysis were a mixture of structural anthropology, progressive historiography, archetypalism, and psychoanalysis. The emphasis on textual analysis was necessary and inevitable, since the primary task of the book was to understand the language of the myth. And although my present approach to texts no longer emphasizes either psychoanalysis or archetypalism, those approaches still seem to me to have been appropriate to the kind of material I was working with and the work I had to do.

But The Fatal Environment has different concerns, and therefore a different balance of textual and historiographic elements. The problem it addresses is the explanation of how a mythology developed by and for a colonial agrarian society was successfully adapted to the cultural needs of an emerging industrial republic. In the earlier volume the literary texts could be seen as representations (of varying quality) of a place that was in some sense present to writer and reader. In the nineteenth century the frontier is increasingly distanced from the center of the culture, in space and finally in time; and the social transformations occurring at the center are far more complex and consequential than those that occurred in the colonies between 1600 and 1800. Hence this book devotes a good deal more attention to describing the social historical matrix into and out of which the mythology played. Because the framework of the study is so different, I thought it necessary to reformulate the theoretical basis laid down in Regeneration Through Violence, and to recapitulate and revise the development of the myth from the Puritans through the novels of Cooper (chapters 2–4).

There is also a major difference in the kind of texts discussed. In the period of Regeneration Through Violence the dominant forms of printed literature were published pamphlets, books, and small-circulation journals. These forms continued to develop through the nineteenth century, but the context in which they were presented was transformed by the development of mass media—magazines, newspapers, and mass-market books. Although individual works of history and fiction provide special insights into the content of myth and the processes of myth-making, the active center of public myth-making in modern industrial society occurs in mass media. For this reason the central texts of this volume are not novels like Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales or Melville’s Moby-Dick, but case studies from the popular journalism of the period, in which the raw material of history was immediately processed, conflated with ideology and legendry, and transformed into myth.

Taken together the attention given to social and political history, the absence of literary works comparable in stature to those discussed in Regeneration Through Violence, and the focus of interpretive energies on journalism may make this work seem (as one reader suggested) less literary and more historical than Regeneration Through Violence. The historical analysis is certainly more detailed and systematic than that in the earlier book, and reflects my increasing engagement with historiographical issues and my response to the New Social History of the 1970s. However, the method of The Fatal Environment is continuous with that of Regeneration, centering the analysis of cultural history in the interpretation of texts whose recurring concerns and formal devices reveal the presence of a continuously evolving system of myth and ideology.

The sheer volume of material to be covered in the study forced me to exclude from The Fatal Environment not only some interesting cases, but even some major themes. One reviewer (George Fredrickson) has noted the absence in the book of reference to the way in which the Myth of the Frontier provided a symbolic language for those who resisted the imposition of a corporate ideology on American society.

Since my central theme was the successful adaptation of the Myth of the Frontier to the ideological needs of the new industrial and corporate order, I emphasized those aspects of the myth that served that end. Hence the dominant heroes in the myth are soldier aristocrats, whose deeds justify a regime in which democratic power is put into the hands of a technological and moral elite. The original draft of the book also included a chapter on Populist Outlaws from John Murrell to Jesse James. I omitted it for two reasons. First, it appeared to me that the use in mass media of outlaws associated with the frontier as symbols of class or cultural resistance belonged more to the twentieth century than the nineteenth. In folklore, such heroes have always been present. However, my concern is not folk myth, which (as I argue in this book) is different from and often antagonistic to our commercial popular culture; and in popular culture, the populist-outlaw myth acquires weight and force primarily in the late 1880s, and becomes most significant in the movie culture of the 1940s and ’50s. To work a discussion of the outlaw myth into The Fatal Environment would have increased the already considerable length of the book; and would have cut off that discussion in 1890, just as the outlaw myth was acquiring its greatest significance. I therefore chose to reserve the discussion of the outlaw myth for the last volume of the study, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century, which I hope to complete next year.

As I have tried to suggest in this preface, the historical circumstances in which one lives inevitably affect the choice of historical and critical projects and the kinds of concern one brings to them. I finished Regeneration Through Violence in 1972, just before a series of economic, political, and cultural events appeared to put a period to America’s belief in the Frontier Myth. Defeat in Vietnam between 1973 and 1975 seemed to end our belief in the Indian-fighter mode of international politics; the Arab oil embargo of 1973–74 appeared to inaugurate a regime of resource scarcity, the antithesis of the premise that new sources of limitless wealth are always just across the border; and, as if in response, American film makers virtually eliminated the Western as an active genre of popular culture. It was in this period that I began the present volume, thinking that I could describe not only the birth and growth but also the eventual demise of a central component of the American cultural system. However, before I completed The Fatal Environment events showed that the Myth of the Frontier was still quite durable. Although the Western still awaits generic revival, its characteristic forms have been translated into other popular genres; and the rhetoric and ideology of the Reagan administration is not only drenched with frontier imagery, but is, I think, structured and directed in its policies by that mythology. However, that is a subject I will have to reserve for the last volume of the study, Gunfighter Nation.

PART I

Myth Is the Language of Historical Memory

CHAPTER 1

Exposition: The Frontier as Myth and Ideology

Singing my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong light works of engineers,

Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)

In the Old World, the east the Suez Canal,

The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,

The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;

Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul,

The Past! The Past! The Past!

WALT WHITMAN, Passage to India

On July 4, 1876, the American republic celebrated one hundred years of national independence. That century had been characterized by an expansion of territory, population, material wealth and power that appeared almost miraculous. From a colony of England, with a population of four million thinly scattered between the foothills of the Appalachians and the sea, the nation had grown to upwards of forty million, and stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The sites of old trader’s posts, mission churches, frontier forts, and Indian battles were now great industrial centers—Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo, St. Louis, San Francisco—generating all of the material wealth, the vast energy, and the inevitable squalor of the modern city. Regions that were known only to Indians and far-ranging trappers when the century began were now beginning to fill up with miners and settlers, and the most distant ends of the continent were linked by those marvels of technology, the telegraph and the mighty railroad.

The center of the celebration was the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where the republic had been declared a century before; and most of those millions who came to see it arrived by train. As far away as San Francisco American citizens boarded their coach or palace cars, had their tickets duly punched by uniformed conductors, and sped eastward behind a smoking locomotive on a graded road of steel, timber, and pulverized rock that carried them over mountain passes and across chasms, through tunnels shot plumb through hill and mountainside, across vast deserts and prairies of grass where Indians still watched them pass and clouds of buffalo lowered, past green farms and smoking cities to the parks and pavilions on the banks of the Schuylkill. There they found such a Garden of Earthly Delights as might have been jointly designed by Lord Tennyson in a Gothic mood, a pastoral painter of the Hudson River School, and the editors of Popular Mechanics. Exhibition halls in the warehouse Gothic style were set amid walks and fountains and groves of artificial plantings, threaded by a miniature version of the ubiquitous railroad.

The visitor’s first impression was likely to be one of chaotic plenitude, like being dropped suddenly into the midst of one of Walt Whitman’s commodious catalogues. There were carpets, perfumes, paints, toys, guns, clocks, a model clothing factory with banks and banks of sewing machines (too many sewing machines … half a mile of sewing machines), Meissen China, Krupp cannons, McCormack reapers and combines, thousands of silkworms breeding and spinning, ice cream, ice yachts, a section of the Brooklyn Bridge cable, the head of Bartholdi’s unfinished statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, the world’s largest cheese, and a Tuscan column of thirty-eight grindstones, all different, topped by an eagle. There were sideshows with wild children from Borneo, a five-legged horse, and wax figures of famous Indian chiefs. The Wisconsin pavilion featured the eagle mascot of a Civil War regiment, whose cries had sounded amid the carnage of battle—he was a great favorite with tourists, and every day was fed a live chicken. There was a chewing-tobacco machine run by four Negroes who sang hymns while they worked, and another machine, run by a little girl, that could set 180,000 pins into paper each day. At the center of things, like a principle of order, the great Corliss engine turned all of the machines in Machinery Hall at once.¹

The Exposition was designed to show that the American experiment had produced a society that was not only morally and ethically superior to that of the Old World, but economically more potent as well. Europe and Asia exhibited themselves in Meissen and silk; American was all dynamos and heavy machinery, the Corliss engine a concrete prophecy that the heavy American machines would soon be turning the world. Such colossal size and power in an inhuman mechanism was frightening, despite—perhaps even because of—the productive potential the machine embodied. To one reporter the engine was a monster which looms up menacing, ready at the touch of a man’s finger to show its awful power. To the aging poet of pastoral America, John Greenleaf Whittier, Machinery Hall was that Ezekiel’s vision of machinery: a Valley of Dry Bones made of steel, animated not by the spirit of God or the words of a Prophet but by secular steam and hard currency—an inhuman apocalypse and a resurrection not meant for man. William Dean Howells puzzled through his own ambivalence by metaphorically humanizing the machine into an athlete of steel, linking it to human magic by calling it the Afreet—a djinn from the Arabian Nights. He cast an Arcadian glow over the scene by picturing the engineer reading his newspaper while tending the Afreet as in a peaceful bower.²

The Exposition’s proof of American perfection lay in just such a mixture of mechanical symbols of the new age and allusions to an idyllic past. In close proximity to Machinery Hall stood Agricultural Hall—although to be sure the latter exhibited agricultural machinery rather than pastoral bowers. The state pavilions commonly took the form of giant log cabins, evoking memories of a Frontier past. The Pacific Railroad exhibited the tools of its trade, but displayed beside them a tableau of The Fur Trade in the Rocky Mountains—thus celebrating that wilderness way of life which it had been the railroad’s great task to undo.³ The hymn-singing Negroes at the tobacco machine, the little girl running the pin-paper machine, the concentrated labor of women seated at half a mile of sewing machines declared further that, in America, industrial progress was not in conflict with humane values and domestic relations, did not lead to class hatred and oppression. American proletarians were docile and efficient, presented in the imagery of Uncle Tom and Little Eva and the housewife seated at her spinning wheel.

The ceremonies on the Fourth of July carried these themes of growth and reconciliation into the realm of civic ritual. The great parade that preceded the afternoon of music, fireworks, and speechifying included a prominent contingent of former soldiers and officers of the Southern Confederacy—a display that was meant to symbolize the binding up of the wounds from the terrible Civil War that had torn the nation apart in four years of battle and twice that many of rancorous and uneasy peace. Union and Confederate veterans, Negro marching societies and lily-white political clubs, exslaves and ex-masters, associations of bankers and manufacturers and organized workingmen marched together through the Exposition grounds to hear the century’s achievements praised in oratory and song.⁴

But the imagery was a mask, the oratory hollow. The United States in 1876 was in the midst of the worst economic depression in its history, and of a crisis of cultural morale as well. The reality outside the fairgrounds put the Exposition’s triumphant pageantry in a context that was corrosively ironic. The technological marvels enshrined in their pseudo-Gothic temples promised industrial progress; but they also represented new forms of human misery and social danger. If they spoke on the one hand of the growth of Big Business, on the other they implied the bankruptcy and ruin of many small businesses and a new kind of competition that seemed, at times, like a form of warfare. The machines had made possible new forms of production; but they had also created a new and burgeoning class of factory workers, a proletariat whose conditions of life and work did not at all conform to the canonical expectations of the American dream—expectations formed long before the war, when small farmers and independent artisans had formed the majority of the producing classes. This new class had neither independence nor property nor plausible hopes of becoming economically self-sufficient. They were subordinated in their work to the service of the mighty machines and socially subjected to their employers by a wage system that made them dependent. Even in good times, this sort of labor had been plausibly stigmatized as wage slavery—a term of powerful import in a society that had so recently fought a bloody war to abolish chattel slavery.

And these times were far from good. The contraction of business after 1873 had thrown large numbers of workingmen and -women out of employment, and onto the scant and incompetent mercy of the community. The problem was compounded by the fact that the new order had fostered the concentration of larger populations in cities and factory towns, an explosive and unplanned urbanization that produced appalling conditions of housing and public health. With so many breadwinners either out of work or absorbing deep wage cutbacks, conditions in the largest cities degenerated (especially in wintertime) toward starvation for many families. Even those workers lucky enough to remain on the job could not evade the imminent threat of a comparable immiseration: capital-starved employers threatened their workers with a choice between dismissal and acceptance of wage rollbacks that the workers regarded as ruinous.⁵ In this context organizations of workingmen, and some philanthropists, had raised anew the cry of wage slavery, as if the victory of free labor in the Civil War had indeed proved hollow in the end. Within a year violent strikes would flare along the railroad network from coast to coast, raising the specter of revolution and a new kind of civil war, pitting class against class.

The crisis compelled a revaluation of every positive symbol the Exposition deployed. The railroads that bound the nation together and stimulated the forces of industry were also the very institutions that had precipitated the depression. They had managed the business of capitalization, subcontracting, and management in a manner at once so dishonest and so inept that they had discredited themselves both literally and figuratively: they fell into bankruptcy as bond buyers lost confidence, and dragged down with them many of the great banks that had plunged so enthusiastically on the marvel of the age. It was the railroad corporations whose operations had produced the largest urban concentrations of proletarians; and railroads whose importation of labor from Ireland and China had given to the new working class a foreign character; and it was in the railroad yards that the fiery labor uprising of 1877 would begin. At the same time, railroad corporations had been undermining public confidence in the moral authority of republican government by the systematic corruption of public officials through bribery, gifts of stock, admission to boards of directors, nepotism, and the like. The scandals that wrecked their financial standing also ruined the reputations of high officials in the Grant administration, and tainted the president himself.

The greatest and most popular military hero since Washington, Ulysses S. Grant had managed in eight years to preside over a veritable circus of corruption and mismanagement, until then unprecedented in American history. Hardly a week passed that did not see some new scandal revealed, implicating cabinet officers, senators, members of the president’s family in acts of bribery, influence peddling, and profiteering. Although most observers were willing to accept Grant’s personal honesty, they ridiculed his trust and protection of eminently blameworthy and corrupt associates. So low had his standing sunk that he did not appear to address the Exposition in person on the Fourth of July, as it was his privilege and his duty to do.

Grant’s discomfiture was more than personal. In his person and administration the idealistic motives and reformist ambitions of a generation of Civil War-era liberals were discredited. The program of the postwar Republican Party had been to justify the sacrifices of the war by achieving a thoroughgoing reform of American politics and culture: to establish and protect American industry; to emancipate the slave and uplift the freedman; to open the Great Plains and Far West to homesteading by independent small farmers; to resolve the morally troubling question of the American Indian; to bring moral reform and economic uplift to the denizens of cities as well as to the freeholders of the countryside. Depression in industry, terrorism and political corruption in the Reconstruction South, crime and radicalism in the cities had been the result. Railroads and banks, not farmers, were cashing in on the land opened by the western railroads; and the Indians, betrayed by the reform or Quaker Indian policy of Grant, were on the warpath.

Grant was still revered as the victor of Appomattox, but even that great victory had been tarnished and cast in doubt. In the South the issues of the Civil War had recrudesced in a new form. The terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan combined with revelations of corruption in Reconstruction governments to demoralize and displace black and white politicians who still sought genuine reforms. Northern racism, a weariness with southern problems and the bloody shirt, and disgust with the corruption of Grant’s administration deprived southern Reconstructionists of support. When Frederick Douglass attempted to speak at the Exposition on July 4 he was physically blocked from the podium, and responded angrily. A delegation of women’s rights activists attempted to speak, and were also denied. But their presence alone was testimony to the fact that the Exposition’s imagery of singing darkies and little girls running pin-setters was a mask for the reality of racial inequality, sexual oppression, and child labor.⁶

But it was the West that in fact provided the immediate source of Grant’s discomfiture. The outbreak of hostilities with the Sioux and Cheyenne in 1876 was directly attributable to the contradictory forces in Grant’s administration, which demanded both justice for the Indian and an opportunity to make money by expropriating Indian land or profiteering on reservation supplies. The latest and most damaging of these scandals involved the sale of traderships on western army posts by a syndicate that included Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, and Grant’s brother Orvil. The New York Herald had exposed the scandal, apparently with the aid of the famous Indian fighter and Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer, lieutenant colonel of the Seventh Cavalry in Dakota Territory. Stung by Custer’s testimony before a congressional committee, Grant had removed him from command of his regiment on the eve of the Sioux War, and reinstated him only after Generals Sherman and Sheridan protested.

Custer had achieved fame during the Civil War as the youngest divisional commander in the Cavalry Corps, a dashing figure who had been dubbed The Boy General with the Golden Locks. Thirteen years after Appomattox, Custer was still in the rank and command he had reverted to after the war—lieutenant colonel and field commander of the Seventh Cavalry—and the golden locks were thinning. But Custer’s wartime fame had been given a new polish by his accomplishments as a leading figure in the military conquest of the Great Plains. After a failed campaign and a damaging court-martial in 1867, Custer had returned from a punitive exile to defeat the Southern Cheyenne at the Washita in 1868; in 1873 he had escorted the Northern Pacific Railroad survey; and in 1874 he had commanded the celebrated military exploration of the Black Hills—an expedition that provided the immediate cause of the Indian war of 1876. Custer’s reports of gold among the roots of the grass and of an agricultural paradise in the heart of the Sioux territory had stimulated a gold rush, and a movement for seizure of the Black Hills had become irresistible. The expedition had made Custer controversial, and until the Belknap affair broke he was tarred with the brush that soiled Grant, accused of hypocritically protecting the Indians out of land and livelihood. But after Custer’s open break with Grant, only the most antimilitary of the Friends of the Indian saw Custer as culpable. For most Americans the Boy General of the Civil War, the victorious Indian fighter of the Washita, was now to be seen as a new Daniel Boone or John Charles Frémont, opening up for the American people a new Frontier of fertile land and abundant gold; and doing it at the precise moment when such an acquisition was most needed by an imperiled republic.⁷

Custer and the Seventh Cavalry thus brought together images of all that Americans could take pleasure and pride in remembering: the thunder of Sheridan’s cavalry and the flash of their sabers in the Valley of the Shenandoah; the chivalry of soldierly victors to a gallant enemy at Appomattox; the ordered and disciplined blue-and-brass battalions, each company mounted on horses of a single color, paraded on the banks of the Yellowstone behind the flag and their own wind-whipped guidons ready to conquer a new Frontier. To contemplate Custer was to turn from the tragedy of fraternal strife to the classic quest of the republic’s heroic ages, the mission to bring light, law, liberty, Christianity, and commerce to the savage places of the earth.

The image of the Boy General riding out to war against the savages of the plains was of the same character as Howell’s wishful vision of the Corliss’s engineer as the resident of an Arcadian bower. It invoked powerful associations with an America of the past, whose complex realities had been subsumed into the simple and heroic patterns of a myth. The Sioux War was merely the latest in a linked chain of struggles, each of which had pitted white men against Indians, with possession of the land and the power to shape a progressive future as the stakes of battle. Preceding generations of Americans had made of our recurrent Indian wars a historical fable or myth, in which the confrontation of redskin and paleface became the symbolic key to interpreting the meaning of history.

Indeed, even as the Seventh Cavalry marched to battle, Custer’s contemporaries began assimilating his adventure to this preexisting body of mythology. They invoked the legendary heroes and triumphs of earlier Frontiers to enlarge and sanctify the adventure. But they were also very much engaged with issues of the present moment—the crisis in the economy, the disorder of politics, the failures of President Grant, and the exigencies of nominating and electing Grant’s successor. They made the terms of the Frontier adventure speak to these issues as well: Custer was not only a scourge to Sitting Bull, but a living rebuke to Grant; his triumph over the savages of the plains would not only end the Indian wars, it would point a stern lesson to other forces within the Metropolis—disorderly tramps, immigrant laborers, recalcitrant blacks—about the will and capacity of the republic to punish its enemies and vindicate its moral and political authority. It might well be that Custer’s would be the last of the Indian wars, and the Great Plains the last of America’s liberating Frontiers. Certainly this latest Frontier had not been able to escape the touch and taint of the railroad corporations or of the corrupt bureaucrats in Washington. But the prospective confrontation between Custer and Sitting Bull promised one more grand tournament between representatives of the dying past and the progressive future, between senescence and youth, paganism and Christianity. In that confrontation the pattern of America’s hundred-year rise to greatness would be recalled and ritually reenacted, and the golden future made secure.

Walt Whitman caught the mood and turned it to poetry. While preparing the Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass, he had been troubled about the state of the nation. Impotence, senility, disease were metaphors for the state of the body politic: Repondez! Repondez!/ … Must we still go on with our affectation and sneaking? The country’s state he identified with his own: a stroke in 1873 had left him half crippled just as the crash of 1873 had left the nation half paralyzed and in despair. The fact of mortality, of impending death, of the closing off of life’s golden chances for change and achievement, came home to poet and nation with force. Yet Whitman shared too the wish that the ending of American youth not be a fatal descent into inanition, but a symbolic renewal, a passage to a new stage of life. Therefore his poetry would now link Death to the ideas of freedom and democracy he had sung before:

In former songs Pride have I sung, and Love, and passionate, joyful Life,

But here I twine the strands of Patriotism and Death.

And it is in speaking of this triumphant and regenerative Death that Whitman nearly reaches to prophecy, coining a phrase that would ring loudly before the year was out:

‘Tis not for nothing, Death,

I sound out you, and words of you, with daring tone—embodying you,

In my new Democratic chants—keeping you for a close,

For my last impregnable retreat—a citadel and tower,

For my last stand—my pealing, final cry.⁸

On the centennial’s morning after, July 5, the word reached Bismarck, Dakota Territory, and Omaha, and by the next day the Herald had it in New York and the War Department in Washington, and Generals Sherman and Sheridan at the Army of the Tennessee reunion in Nashville: A BLOODY BATTLE / General Custer Killed / … General Custer, his two brothers, his nephew and brother-in-law … all killed, and not one of his detachment escaped.⁹

Custer’s Last Stand went against all expectation: even Friends of the Indian had not supposed the redskins could do more than die defiantly under the sabers of the cavalry. More than this—against the proud spectacle of the Philadelphia Exposition—it was as if the perennial scenario of American history had been reversed: red stood and white fell, civilization perished and recoiled and savagery went forward, age triumphed and youth perished, the corrupt escaped unscathed and the righteous fell by the sword. The makers of American myths and ideological formulae—writers, journalists, preachers, and politicians—had another indigestible paradox to add to the ironies of the centennial year. Some saw it as the snatching away of the last promise of an American future shaped by the easy access to wealth that had characterized the period of Frontier expansion. Others saw it as a conclusive rebuke for the corruption and moral failure of American society. For others, Custer’s defeat became a kind of atoning sacrifice, almost Christ-like: the representative of American youth, courage, and soldierly virtue violently perishes, but leaves behind a redeeming example that summons his fellow citizens to the purgation of evil, the regeneration of virtue and vigor, and a renewed pursuit of our ancient struggle against the forces of darkness.

These were the terms in which Whitman represented Custer’s Last Stand in the Death-Sonnet for Custer, which he published in the New York Tribune on July 10. The Boy General becomes a hero of our race, isolated and surrounded (the fatal environment) and violently killed by savages; but his death becomes an affirmation of values that are as life giving as the sun at the center, a redemptive sacrifice that offsets the selfish materialism of the Gilded Age:

From far Dakota’s canons,

Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch, the silence,

Haply to-day a mournful wail, haply a trumpetnote for heroes.

The battle-bulletin,

The Indian ambuscade, the craft, the fatal environment,

The cavalry companies fighting to the last in sternest heroism,

In the midst of their little circle, with their slaughter’d horses for breastworks,

The fall of Custer and all his officers and men.

Continues yet the old, old legend of our race,

The loftiest of life upheld by death,

The ancient banner perfectly maintained,

O lesson opportune, O how I welcome thee!

As sitting in dark days,

Lone, sulky, through time’s thick murk looking in vain for light, for hope.

From unsuspected parts a fierce and momentary proof,

(The sun there at the center though conceal’d,

Electric life forever at the center,)

Breaks forth a lightning flash.

Thou of the tawny flowing hair in battle,

I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand,

Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds,

(I bring no dirge for thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,)

Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious,

After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color,

Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers,

Thou yieldest up thyself.¹⁰

"Fatal environment: the phrase literally refers to Custer’s being surrounded and kill by Indians. But Whitman means it to suggest something more: the idea that Custer’s death completes a meaningful myth-historical design, a grand fable of national redemption and Christian self-sacrifice, acted out in the most traditional of American settings. Whitman addresses us as potential believers in a new myth whose form he suggests in the poem. And it is essential to the illusion of this myth that Custer’s fate seem somehow implicit in the environment, a moral and ideological lesson which seems to emerge from the very nature of things—as if Nature or God composed the story and assigned its meanings, rather than men. This is the essential illusion fostered by all mythology, even that primitive kind whose origins are less easily specified. An environment, a landscape, a historical sequence is infused with meaning in the form of a story, which converts landscape to symbol and temporal sequence into doom"—a fable of necessary and fated actions.

The Frontier in whose real geography Custer moved and acted was already in his own time a space defined less by maps and surveys than by myths and illusions, projective fantasies, wild anticipations, extravagant expectations. Neither Whitman nor the vast majority of his readers had seen, or would ever see, the real landscape of Dakota. But both could envision and understand it as part of that mythic space called the Frontier—a space so well understood that a few simple clues—wild ravine, lonesome reach, dusky Sioux—suffice to give it seeming substance. Watching Custer’s advance through the medium of popular journalism, they saw a hero at once true to life and infused with a symbolic significance only fictive heroes possess. They knew he had gone to conquer a mythic region whose wildness made it at once a region of darkness and an earthly paradise, a goad to civilization and a barrier to it; whose hidden magic was to be tapped only by self-reliant individualists, capable of enduring the lonesome reach; whose riches were held by a dark and savage enemy with whom white Americans must fight a war to the knife, with the future of civilization itself as the stake. In such a space, whatever the outcome of Custer’s battle might have been, his face-to-face meeting with the Enemy would have seemed the fulfillment of a destiny or fate, pregnant with meaning.

The landscape of myth was no less important than battlefield terrain and Indian tactics in creating the fatal environment in which Custer was enmeshed. The web of myth that nineteenth-century Americans wove about their Frontier enterprise tangled his feet and obscured his vision as well. And though the bodies of Custer and his dead soldiers went into the ground on a certain hill in what is now the state of Montana, their catastrophe has gone back into the ground of mythology. Custer’s Last Stand became part of a renewed and revised Myth of the Frontier, which would be entailed on future generations as the earlier myths had been entailed upon Custer and his contemporaries. It is this industrial and imperial version of the Frontier Myth whose categories still inform our political rhetoric of pioneering progress, world mission, and eternal strife with the forces of darkness and barbarism. It is this myth whose fictive fatalities lurk in the cultural environment we inhabit, whose significance can still be seen behind the silhouettes of skyscrapers, casinos, pipelines, gantries, and freeways.

CHAPTER 2

Myth and Historical Memory

We can easily guess why Custer’s Last Stand should have been a six-month wonder to centennial America, and why it was for a generation the metaphor of disaster that came most readily to mind. Victory in the colossal strife of Civil War and in a decade of Indian battles made a defeat such as Custer’s as unimaginable as the attack on Pearl Harbor and defeat at Bataan were before 1941. But the significance that Custer’s contemporaries saw in his catastrophe has not diminished with the passage of time. If anything, its meanings have multiplied and broadened their range of reference in the last century.

This cultural phenomenon has almost nothing to do with the intrinsic importance of the event itself. Although the Battle of the Little Big Horn was the biggest Indian battle since the War of 1812 in terms of the numbers engaged, it was less decisive than many battles that are hardly remembered now—like Fallen Timbers (1794) or the Battle of the Thames, in which Tecumseh fell (1814). The most that has ever been claimed for it is that it crippled the warmaking power of the hostiles, stirred public support for increases in military spending and troop strength, and made the outcome of the war both speedier and harder on the Indians than it would otherwise have been. But these assertions are questionable, and a more modest conclusion would be that the battle simply delayed by a year the defeat of the Sioux and Cheyenne.¹

Many other events of the centennial years had far greater impact on the future course of American history. In these years Americans confronted for the first time the explosive potential of industrialization for promoting rapid growth and provoking grave social crises. The railroad networks continued to grow through the cycles of boom and bust, and corporate giants emerged to organize and integrate the hodgepodge of weak and failing lines. In 1877 John D. Rockefeller completed the structure of Standard Oil, the first of the great industrial trusts that would dominate the American economy into the next century. That same year saw a great national railroad strike whose scope and violence appeared to many as a portent of proletarian revolution. In foreign affairs, these years saw the revival of American imperial ambitions in the Caribbean basin, and a more assertive stance in dealings with Europe over a range of economic and political concerns. In 1876 there was a crucial presidential election, whose outcome marked the end of the political struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and established the balance of partisan power and the terms of conflict for the period of industrialization. It was an election marked by racial violence in the South, and the reemergence of conservative white Democrats as the dominant force in southern politics. It was also an election deadlocked at the polls, and it had to be resolved by the sort of political deal that raised questions about the legitimacy of the democratic process—a deal whose terms included the foreclosure of Reconstruction in the South.

Why then, with all this to choose from, has our culture made of the Last Stand the most significant event of the period: that is, the event whose name and character have been longest remembered and have been invested with the heaviest charge of symbolic meaning? Contemporary politicians and journalists of every stripe used the Last Stand as a metaphor, through which they could interpret the election issues of 1876 and the larger crisis of the times. Beleaguered capitalists and besieged bureaucrats were identified (by different parties) as playing Custer to the savage bloodthirstiness of the dangerous classes in American society—blacks or Klansmen, strikers or policemen, depending on the politics of the speaker.

The metaphor has persisted down to our own time. Military histories and army textbooks alternately offer Custer as the prototype of soldierly heroism or of the evil consequences of failing to be a team player. Popular literature and art have continually kept the Custer story before the public. Don Russell’s exhaustive study of illustrations of the Last Stand has led him to conclude that the Battle of the Little Big Horn is the most frequently depicted moment in all of American history: one thousand different depictions have been reproduced thousands and hundreds of thousands of times in everything from lithographs, calendars, textbooks, to cereal boxes and gum cards, dime novels, comic books. The Budweiser lithograph has become an icon of popular illustration, displayed in saloons and delicatessens since 1885; and in 1942 the War Department struck off two thousand copies for distribution to army camps. It might seem that such a depiction of defeat, mutilation, and massacre would have a depressing effect on morale; but the Last Stand motif was an important element in the popular culture in that time of defeat and beleaguerment, and its effect seems to have been that of arousing the grim resolve to fight to the last, neither giving nor expecting quarter. Life spoke of MacArthur’s defense of Bataan as a Last Stand, and war movies like Wake Island and Bataan made the defense of the doomed outpost a movie icon.

Even before Pearl Harbor, Hollywood studios anticipated the coming of war in epic romances about doomed cavalrymen—They Died with Their Boots On (1941), one of the best of the Custer movies, was the last of this series. No military figure, and few heroes associated with the West, have been as favored as Custer as a subject for movies. It was the Custer story John Ford used as the basis for Fort Apache—the film in which he adapted the language of the Western to the subject matter of the war. During the Vietnam war the Custer story provided moviemakers like Arthur Penn and Sidney Salkow with a fable suitable for addressing the folly and cruelty of an imperial and racial war. In literature and politics, Custer and the Last Stand have become icons of the language. It is Custer that Hemingway’s Robert Jordan thinks about as he listens to the Fascists wiping out El Sordo’s guerrillas; and the doomed submariners of Islands in the Stream are fighting Custer’s Last Stand in the mangroves. Custer Died for Your Sins is the title of Vine Deloria’s Indian rights manifesto; Custeristic was the adjective applied by nonviolent radicals to proposals for terrorism in the councils of the New Left.²

Through long years of cultural usage, the names Custer and Last Stand have acquired a kind of linguistic resonance. When a writer or moviemaker invokes the name he or she wakes echoes in the memory—bits of lore that we have picked up half-consciously, from sources as various as comic books and history texts and cartoons. But the undertones of this resonance evoke patterns of association that are larger than the specifics of the Custer myth itself. The Custer story has been received as part of a much more comprehensive and complex mythology, the Myth of the Frontier. This myth provided the terms in which Americans understood the historical catastrophe of 1876; and its terms continue to shape cultural discourse down to the present time.

The Myth of the Frontier is arguably the longest-lived of American myths, with origins in the colonial period and a powerful continuing presence in contemporary culture. Although the Myth of the Frontier is only one of the operative myth/ideological systems that form American culture, it is an extremely important and persistent one. Its ideological underpinnings are those same laws of capitalist competition, of supply and demand, of Social Darwinian survival of the fittest as a rationale for social order, and of Manifest Destiny that have been the building blocks of our dominant historiographical tradition and political ideology.

Like the Custer legend, this larger structure has its roots in historical reality. The Frontier was a material condition of life that shaped the behavior and the ideas of colonists and pioneers. As the colonies and later the nation expanded, the frontiers were pushed farther out from the Metropolis; and although more people lived in the West and on the borders than in the early colonial days, the proportion of society actually living in Frontier conditions declined as the cities and towns grew. Nonetheless, the economic and political consequences of frontier expansion continued to be felt throughout the society. Under such conditions it is not surprising that ideas and doctrines would be developed, and stories told, that would explain the meaning of the Frontier to the citizens of the Metropolis, and project policies for dealing with the consequences of growth. It was inevitable too that over time such ideas and stories would take on conventional patterns, become ideologies and myths.

But like the Custer legend, the myth/ideology of the Frontier also outlived the material reality that produced it.

The Myth of the Frontier was developed by and for an America that was a colonial offshoot of Europe, agrarian in economy, localistic in politics, tentative as to nationality, and relatively homogeneous in ethnicity, language, and religion; yet the Myth has been most thoroughly and impressively set forth in the ninety years that followed the closing of the Wild West, in and for an America that is a preeminent world power, urban-centered and fully industrialized, centralized in government, and heterodox in culture. No historian who lived in the heyday of the real Frontier saw as much significance in it as the theorists of a post-Frontier historiography, Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt. The media of modern mass culture, especially movies and television, have made the Western at least as significant an element in twentieth-century popular culture as it was in the days of Fenimore Cooper, Deadwood Dick, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.³

So if we account for the cultural resonance of Custer’s Last Stand by associating it with a large pattern of persistent myth, all we are doing is enlarging the terms of the original question. Why has this constellation of stories, fables, and images been for so long one of the primary organizing principles of our historical memory?

Myths are stories, drawn from history, that have acquired through usage over many generations a symbolizing function that is central to the cultural functioning of the society that produces them. Historical experience is preserved in the form of narrative; and through periodic retellings those narratives become traditionalized. These formal qualities and structures are increasingly conventionalized and abstracted, until they are reduced to a set of powerfully evocative and resonant icons—like the landing of the Pilgrims, the rally of the Minutemen at Lexington, the Alamo, the Last Stand, Pearl Harbor, in which history becomes a cliché. At the same time that their form is being simplified and abstracted, the range of reference of these stories is being expanded. Each new context in which the story is told adds meaning to it, because the telling implies a metaphoric connection between the storied past and the present—as, for example, in the frequent invocation of Pearl Harbor in discussions of the need to prepare for nuclear preemptive strikes; or the invocation of Munich-style appeasement when discussing the possibilities for negotiating with our adversaries.⁴

In the end myths become part of the language, as a deeply encoded set of metaphors that may contain all of the lessons we have learned from our history, and all of the essential elements of our world view. Myth exists for us as a set of keywords which refer us to our traditions, and (as Martin Green says) transmit coded message[s] from the culture as a whole to its individual members.⁵ And although these signals are brief, they are packed with information—for example: the Captain was taking his company out of Song Be for a Search and Destroy mission against the VC—one hundred infantrymen in full pack, with rifles, heavy automatics, and a helicopter gunship flying hover-cover—and he said to the reporter, Come on … we’ll take you out to play Cowboys and Indians.⁶

The war in Vietnam sometimes seemed so alien to American experience and expectations that it might have been happening on some other planet, and it had its own special vocabulary whose words and rhythm were native to its ordered lunacy. But even in that language the reporter knew what the captain meant, because they’d played that game as children back in the World, and they knew how the rules worked. The rules were clear but flexible, adapting readily to shifts of mood that might be subtle or sudden, and might move from a mode in which the deployment of genocidal violence was so indirect or so absurdly motivated that it seemed almost playful, The Indian idea, one veteran said, the only good gook is a dead gook. Taking the ears of dead VC was like scalps, you know like from Indians. Some people were on an Indian trip over there.⁷

General and Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, testifying before Congress in an attempt to explain the difficulties of pacification in Vietnam, reached for a metaphor that would at once define the difficulty and suggest the likelihood of final success: It is very hard, he said, to plant corn outside the stockade when the Indians are still around. We have to get the Indians farther away … to make good progress. Senator Russell Long, rebuking his colleagues for criticizing the war effort, reached for a similar analogy: "If the men who came on the Mayflower were frightened to helplessness the first time they had to fight Indians, they would have gone back to England … But they fought the Indians and won, meanwhile losing some fine Americans, until this Nation became great. Long’s use of the metaphor is vulgarly self-serving, and he stumbles on the ambiguous identification of those fine Americans lost in the wars of English settlers and native Indians. But the same language could be deployed with a certain passionate elegance by John F. Kennedy, proclaiming his slogan of the New Frontier" for a program of renewed economic expansion and forward movement on the borders of the American empire.⁸

Nor was the language of the myth the peculiar property of the hawkish factions of our political culture. Its terms were as familiar to left as to right, and were every bit as useful in lending historical resonance and traditional justification to particular political stances and gestures. Counter-cultural radicalism identified strongly with a rather traditional vision of the American Indians as the Noble Savage alternative to a civilization gone wrong. The iconography of beads and headbands, the adoption of tribal life-styles as a form of communalism untainted by political association with communism, the rationalization of drug use as a form of mystic religiosity, the linkage of political and ecological concerns, the withdrawal to wilderness refuges and the adoption of an outlaw or renegade stance toward the larger society—all of these phenomena so special to the sixties were acted out as if they were not innovative at all, but merely repetitions of an older pattern.

The point of repeating the Frontier Myth in that form was to suggest that our history embodied a fatal mistake, which could be corrected by symbolically reenacting the past—only this time, we would live the Frontier Myth as Indians, not as Cowboys. The 1960s also saw the appearance of a substantially new genre of anti-Custer movies, in which the traditional identification of the audience with the cavalry was inverted, and we were asked to see the bluecoats as murderous savages and killers of women and children, and the Indians as defenders of pastoral values, hearths, and homes. Sidney Salkow’s Great Sioux Massacre (1965) is an early effort in this subgenre, Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) the most explicitly Vietnam-oriented.

In Fire in the Lake Frances Fitzgerald uses the myth in two ways: she sees it as an ideological cause in American war policy; and she uses it herself as a way of defining a critical position against that policy. According to Fitzgerald, the language of the Frontier Myth put the Vietnam War into a definite historical and mythological perspective, for Americans; a perspective in which

The Americans were once again embarked upon a heroic and (for themselves) almost painless conquest of an inferior race. To the American settlers the defeat of the Indians had seemed not just a nationalist victory, but an achievement made in the name of humanity—the triumph of light over darkness, of good over evil, and of civilization over brutish nature. Quite unconsciously, the American officers and officials used a similar language to describe their war against the NLF.

Although the specific application of that language by Fitzgerald reflects ideological disagreement, the language itself represents a kind of consensus—an agreement with Long and Taylor about the largest metaphors of value that will be invoked to interpret the social crisis.⁹

Such metaphors are not merely ornamental. They invoke a tradition of discourse that has historical roots and referents, and carries with it a heavy and persistent ideological charge. All of these public figures and writers speak and think within that tradition of discourse, using a symbolic language acquired by them through the usual processes of acculturation and education. Tradition not only links them with each other as natives of the same culture, it associates them backward in time to earlier makers of American culture and ideology. Their association of the struggles against communism with the Indian wars, their belief that racially tinged wars provoke excessive violence, their linkage of such wars with the nation’s rise to greatness, their identification with the figure planting corn (or rice) by the stockade would have been as intelligible to Andrew Jackson or Thomas Jefferson or General Custer as it is to us. The readers of Fenimore Cooper in the 1830s or of Helen Hunt Jackson in the 1890s would have been as ready as the audience of Little Big Man to see in the Noble Savage an antidote to the discontents of that same triumphant civilization.

The terminology of the Myth of the Frontier has become part of our common language, and we do not require an explanatory program to make it comprehensible. We understand quickly and completely the rules of the Cowboy and Indian game, and what it means to invoke it in a place like Vietnam; we appreciate the mixture of self-irony and self-aggrandizement in Kissinger’s identification of himself as the Lone Ranger of American foreign policy; we know what the Marines in I Corps meant when they called the territory outside their perimeter Indian country, and we know what Gerald O’Neill means when he calls his project for cities in space The High Frontier. That same language can be used to remind us of the evanescence of that past Frontier, and the catastrophe of its closure: Ronald Reagan and his supply-side economists are said to seek a return to Cowboy economics and his critics may respond in kind that continued hard times may mean Supply Side’s Last Stand.¹⁰

These metaphors not only define a situation for us, they prescribe our response to that situation. At the very least, they tell us how we ought to value the situation—whether we are to identify with it or against it, whether our attitude to the Lone Ranger and the Last Stand is hostile, friendly, or satirical. But they are also ideologically loaded formulations, which aim at affecting not only our perceptions, but our behavior—by enlisting us, morally or physically, in the ideological program. Myth is invoked as a means of deriving usable values from history, and of putting those values beyond the reach of critical demystification. Its primary appeal is to ritualized emotions, established beliefs, habitual associations, memory, nostalgia. Its representations are symbolic and metaphoric, depending for their force on an intuitive recognition and acceptance of the symbol by the audience.

Myth does not argue its ideology, it exemplifies it. It projects models of good or heroic behavior that reinforce the values of ideology, and affirm as good the distribution of authority and power that ideology rationalizes. Although its traditional character makes it most useful to conservative ideologies, myth can also be invoked as part of a radically critical ideology. In either case, myth uses the past as an idealized example, in which a heroic achievement in the past is linked to another in the future of which the reader is the potential hero. The invocation of the Indian war and Custer’s Last Stand as models for the Vietnam war was a mythological way of answering the question, Why are we in Vietnam? The answer implicit in the myth is, We are there because our ancestors were heroes who fought the Indians, and died (rightly or wrongly) as sacrifices for the nation. There is no logic to the connection, only the powerful force of tradition and habits of feeling and thought.

It is this aspect of myth that structuralist critic Roland Barthes has in mind when he speaks of the buttonholing character of mythic discourse, its implicit demand that we make of the story a guide to perception and behavior, and its insistence that we acknowledge and affirm the social and political doctrines its terms imply. The moral and political imperatives implicit in the myths are given as if they were the only possible choices for moral and intelligent beings; and, similarly, the set of choices confronted are limited to a few traditional either/or decisions. When we play the Cowboy and Indian game only two or three human roles exist—aggressor, victim, avenger—and there are few options for moral choice: A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.¹¹

If a metaphor like Cowboys and Indians is to work as a device for motivating great masses of people to engage in bloody and protracted war, its terms must do more than suggest that all this has happened before: they must connect what happens to principles that the culture has accepted as valid representations of the nature of reality, of moral and natural law, and of the vector of society’s historical destiny. Myth therefore performs its cultural function by generalizing particular and contingent experiences into the bases of universal rules of understanding and conduct; and it does this by transforming secular history into a body of sacred and sanctifying legends.¹²

Myth is history successfully disguised as archetype. In a religious culture, the sacred account of cosmogony and ethnogenesis treats the origins of the world and the nation as if they were shaped by a supernatural and extrahistorical power; and they account for historical events by referring to a sacred paradigm or program set forth in the Word of God. In a more secular culture, similar effects are achieved by associating human actions with natural processes—for example, treating the Laws of Economics as if these were as universal and as mechanical as the Law of Gravity. Although scientific method is different from mythology—its assertions are conditional, self-limited, and subject to disproof—science as

Reviews for The Fatal Environment

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mr. Slotkin emphasizes the figure of George Armstrong Custer in his second volume on the idea of "The Frontier" in American literary and political life. He once more exposes some of the seamier uses to which the impulse to take possession of the American Continent has been put. He carefully traces the influence which Richard Gordon Bennet, and Jay Cooke had on the impressionable soldier, and his behaviour. I didn't know that Custer often was the presenter of some of his more famous exploits to the press. George Custer was a writing soldier, and in this field could have had some influence on another writing soldier, Winston Churchill. Well, the myth of Custer versus Sitting Bull is certainly carefully examined in these 600 pages. George doesn't look unaware of his own image, or unaware of the financial uses to which his career could be put.Many Americans probably wouldn't like the political maneuvers that Custer was involved in. Or the financial ones. Another thread in this book is the literary positioning of the Indian, moving them from the "Noble Savage" of Fenimore Cooper to the "Comanche" of Mark Twain, during this period. A dense and intelligent view of a serious part of the American mythic structure.