Finally! A book that goes directly onto my best of the year list. I bought this when it was published back in 2013 because I’d become interested in a Victorian traveler called Isabella Bird. She was a Scottish spinster who suffered debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome when at home, but underwent miraculous recoveries when she was in life-threatening off-the-map situations. She’d written a book about traveling through the Rockies on horseback – riding ten hours a day often up to her shoulders in snow – having taken for companion and travel guide a grizzled, disreputable, one-eyed raconteur of tall tales called Rocky Mountain Jim (the eye was lost in a bear fight). They fell for each other in a sweet, too-late-in-life, probably respectful way, with Isabella declaring that any woman might fall in love with him, but you’d have to be nuts to marry him. In any case, it was adventure that had stolen her heart. I just loved Isabella and when I found out this book had a chapter about her, I snapped it up, little knowing that her life offered a representative taste of what was in store for me, and that I would emerge from it six extraordinary women the richer.
Well, seven, if we include the author, Sara Wheeler, and I think we should. Wheeler was a successful travel writer approaching 50 and in search of a good topic for a new book, when, much as I had come across Isabella Bird, she came across Fanny Trollope who ‘captured my imagination – and not just because the author’s name was an event in itself’. Fanny (Anthony Trollope’s mother) had written a smash hit book Domestic Manners of the Americans, off the back of a trip she had taken to Ohio, that gave a clear-eyed portrait ‘of the Republic halfway through its journey from Independence to Civil War.’ ‘I warmed to the personality that leaped off the page, and to the author’s blend of topographical description, social commentary and waspish humour,’ Wheeler writes. ‘Fanny was living proof that there is life after fertility’. Entranced, Wheeler began collecting astonishing women who spanned the inner 19th century and who had traveled from one end of America to the other in search of what she calls a ‘second act’. America was seen by the jaded eyes of Old Europeans as the great promised land of reinvention:
‘Coleridge and Southey planned paradise on the banks of the Susquehanna River and Mary Wollstonecraft and her lover discussed founding a farm in some western territory of the US, released from the bounds of class, religion and frowsty institutions such as monarchy, marriage and money. This post-revolutionary generation dreamed of turning ideals into a new way of life, and where better than in the shining new republic itself?’
And yet, the reality of America was beyond anything they could have imagined, mostly because these idyllic fantasies lived in the heads of people whose spirit of courage far outreached their common sense. ‘Their prototype Edens,’ Wheeler writes, ‘were founded on noble, politically sound principles almost always hijacked by dubious theorising and crackpottery.’ Louisa May Alcott’s father, for instance, founded a utopian farm in Massachussetts, that ‘extended the remit of vegetarianism by allowing the consumption of “aspiring” vegetables such as tomatoes and banishing “downwards” specimens like carrots. Alcott believed it was wrong to “oppress” oxen by making them plough, a policy which made farming tricky.’ And if the philosophy wasn’t always easy to subscribe to, the sheer physical hardships on the frontier demanded an outstanding constitution. When Fanny Trollope finally reached Nashoba (near Memphis), the experiment in communal living that had sounded like a dream destination to her impoverished mind in cold, ugly England, the actual place was the stuff of nightmares:
‘Buildings were in stages of disintegration, sanitation was non-existent and everyone was ill. In addition, the site was malarial and there was hardly any food. The slaves wanted to go back to proper slavery.’
One of my favorite chapters in the book concerns the God-fearing Yorkshire housewife, Rebecca Burlend, who ‘left England with a husband, five children and one hundred pounds in cash, for a lonely bit of sod in western Illinois.’ After an arduous journey, the family found themselves quite literally in the middle of an outstandingly beautiful nowhere. ‘The first settlers to west-central Illinois found heavily forested land with prairie running like fingers between the creeks, its surface lush with waist-high grasses. In 1831, only tiny patches had been cleared.’ Conditions were so basic that barter was the main form of trade, and for the first two years the family lived on corn paste and what wildlife they could kill (once mistaking a buzzard for a turkey), managing to farm their fields with nothing other than their bare hands. When John fell ill with an infected leg wound, Rebecca had to bring in the harvest all by herself, with an unweaned baby at home. The hardship they endured was epic, but they did make it in the end, accumulating more than 360 acres in fifteen years and dying in their eighties. Such stoicism! Such longevity! The resilience of our ancestors is mindblowing. But Wheeler points out that the previous settlers on this same land were not so lucky:
‘During the Burlends’ first twelve months, following the Black Hawk War, government militia drove the Sauk and Foxes from Illinois and the Winnebago ceded all their territory south-east of the Wisconsin and Fox rivers. In 1833, at a grand council of chiefs in Chicago, the Potawatomi, Ottawa and Chippewa also relinquished their holdings […] That secular saint Lincoln hanged thirty-nine Sioux who had led a violent revolt against federal regulations that starved their nation.’
What I think is so very good about this book is the way Wheeler manages to show the founding of America as a magnificent tribute to man’s strength, courage and survival skills, as well as a tragedy of rapacious, inconsiderate greed. One chapter follows the extraordinary fortunes of Fanny Kemble, a former star of the London stage, who came to tour America with her theatrical family and married into a plantation family in southern Georgia. Fanny was a talented, strong, if temperamental, woman, and her husband, Pierce Butler, was a patriarchal bully, unaccustomed to having his whims and privileges challenged. Fanny hated slavery, and was beyond horrified by the way the slaves were treated. This wouldn’t have been hard to do – the much vaunted ‘hospital’ for slaves on the plantation was an unmonitored room ‘without sheets, medicines, beds or food’ where sick folk were left to die. Her husband’s grandfather was one of the Founding Fathers ‘who devised the language of the Constitution. “For census purposes,” read a section Butler drafted, “a slave is one fifth of a person.”‘ Fanny eventually divorced her husband and returned to England to fight slavery there – it was necessary, given that for three years, Britain supplied ships and ordinance to the Confederacy. We’ve none of us got anything to be proud about during this era in history.
Another chapter concerns Jane Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubbock, whose lawyer husband suffered a ‘catastrophic mental collapse’ leaving her with three sons to raise on the profits of her writing. Publishers only accepted three-volume novels at that time, in order to appease the circulating libraries (which must have been the supermarkets of their day) and so Catherine wrote ten of them in the next thirteen years, ‘an output that makes Anthony Trollope look like a part-timer’, Wheeler notes. When the sons grew up and went to America, Catherine followed them all the way to California. Here, the gold rush had passed through, creating four plutocrats who had all initially been Sacramento storekeepers, supplying the forty-niners – Stanford, Collis Huntingdon, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. Much of future America was quite literally put in their hands:
‘Huntingdon … went on to control the Southern Pacific and almost the entire transport industry of the West. The desire to open up the country was so intense that Washington lawmakers handed swathes of public land the size of small European countries to railway barons. Contracts were rigged, funds siphoned, specifications fiddled, stock manipulated’.
The land was being urbanised and modernised and colonised so fast and so intensely, that a desire to preserve some of the breathtaking landscape was folded into the ‘narrative’ of America as a ‘source of strength and healing.’
‘Post-railroad Americans integrated grand wonders and the monumentalism of natural spaces into their national vision, and in 1872 the federal government formalised the notion when President Grant signed Yellowstone on to the statute books as the first national park. […] Nobody was interested in the fact that Shoshone sheep eaters had been living off Yellowstone for centuries, or that other Indians had been using the ecosystems of the West for generations in all kinds of different ways. The indigenous peoples’ relationship with the landscape was spiritual as well as practical. They did not tame or harness it: they were part of it.’
This is only a taste of the riches in this book. It’s a clever, immersive, eye-opening account of how the West was won through the perspectives of six brave women (seven including Wheeler). The writing is so good, so atmospheric and evocative, that I felt I’d traveled with them, encountering a new land of such vastness, such ludicrous oodles of resources, that it must have seemed intoxicating; an invitation to excess. All these women went to America because they could not stay at home – mostly for financial reasons, occasionally for the need to conquer their own weaknesses. They were highly motivated to succeed, and yet the crazy conditions that met them – the opulence of the landscape, the hardship of the life, the unimaginable risks and rewards – put them into a state of hardscrabble survival. It’s possible to understand the manic greed of the settlers. Who, under such circumstances, would be capable of seeing the people they were displacing? In such a wild, sink or swim life, who could pay compassionate heed to the ones being pushed under? Well, not Wheeler’s midlife travellers, who had no power, only their own personal strength and agency. These are not stories of reckless or selfish women – Wheeler’s leading ladies are immensely sympathetic, and often ahead of their time in siding with the angels. There are, however, also plenty of wealthy white male ‘philanthropists’ and lawmakers populating these pages who made ruthless and cold-blooded calculations. America sings a complicated song in its cradle – one of hope and ingenuity and hard, hard work, but also one of wilful blindness, of crackpottery, to borrow Wheeler’s term, and of idealism that transforms in its furthest reaches into oppression. It’s a fascinating account. So good, in fact, that I immediately ordered Wheeler’s next book about traveling across Russia, following the paths of famous writers, Mud and Stars.
