I’ve got a running theory about Herman Melville’s Confidence Man and American frontiersmen like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Buffalo Bill, etc., that also feeds into Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. At it’s core, it’s not very complicated. It begins with a quote from Richard Slotkin that I’m rather fond of:
In American mythogenesis the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who (to paraphrase Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness — the rogues, adventurers, and land-boomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness; the settlers who came after, suffering hardship and Indian warfare for the sake of a sacred mission or a simple desire for land; and the Indians themselves, both as they were and as they appeared to the settlers, for whom they were the special demonic personification of the American wilderness. Their concerns, their hopes, their terrors, their violence, and their justifications of themselves, as expressed in literature, are the foundation stones of the mythology that informs our history.
What I think Melville attempts to underscore is that those who “tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness,” at least those who we best remember for doing that work, were about %95 huckster. Half the game was butchery, sure, but the other half was the long con. It had to be, to do the work of expansion. That’s most clear with the obvious confidence men like John Smith, Davy Crockett, or Andrew Jackson, but if dig you deep enough, it’s been my experience that you’ll find the same in any of them.
Boone, the latest big biography of Daniel Boone, which I just finished, did nothing to disabuse me of this suspicion. I knew Boone’s legendary status as a frontiersman was largely the creation of John Filson in his glorified land-grab brochure, and I also knew of Boone’s part in the illegal and idiotic Transylvania Land Company, but I didn’t know much about Boone’s occupation as a land surveyor. I knew that he dabbled in land surveying, and I knew that he wasn’t very good at it, but most biographies of Boone gloss over this aspect of his life, and dismiss his constantly being sued as the result of either bad luck or a wilderness-minded temperament that can’t be bothered with details.
Robert Morgan, the author Boone, tries that line, but it comes across pretty clearly that Boone’s practice was more fraudulent than not. The best Morgan can say about Boone is that he was probably no less honest than any other land surveyor. All of the land he surveyed for himself was litigated out of his own hands, and most that he surveyed for others — others whom he charged a hefty sum for his services — was also lost. On at least one occasion, he was actually caught red-handed trying to fake surveying marks on property-line landmarks.
I guess what I find most interesting is that this was his primary occupation. Yes, he hunted, at times commercially. And he did some exploring and trail-blazing. But land surveying was what he did most of his life for money. When he attained wealth and respectability, they were the result of wealth earned by surveying land. As it was, of course, when he lost the both, and was, time and time again driven further West by lawsuits and creditors as the result of his continuing land fraud schemes.
What I’d like to see is a biography that focuses on Boone’s role as a land surveyor, and that relegates the mythological role concocted by John Filson to the secondary place where it belongs. But that’s probably never gonna happen. Even Morgan, who provides us with an entire litany of evidence as to Boone’s illegality and dishonesty, can’t keep from repeating ad-nauseum that Boone was the most honest of men. What Melville understood a hundred and fifty years ago, that the “westering holocaust” (as McCarthy put it) of Westward expansion was driven by cheap hucksterism, seems still beyond the grasp of most who deal with the history of Westward expansion now.
Which is a shame, because the mythogenesis Slotkin writes of created a nation with a hell of an appetite for both holocaust and hucksterism, with no end in sight.
