Twenty West

Mac Nelson

Description

Gold Medalist, 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Travel-Essay category

"I know US 20, I live on it, grew up near it, commute to work on it, and have run on it most mornings for twenty-five years. It has become the Main Street of my life. I am fond of it, and want to tell its very American story." — from the Introduction

Whether he's on foot, in a car, or even in a canoe, Mac Nelson will delight readers with his rambling, westward depiction of America as seen from the shoulders of its longest road, US Route 20. As the "0" in its route number indicates, US 20 is a coast-to-coast road, crossing twelve states as it meanders 3,300 miles from Boston, Massachusetts, to Newport, Oregon. Nelson, an experienced "shunpiker," travels west along the Great Road, ruminating on history, literature, scenery, geology, politics, wilderness, the Great Plains, and national parks—whatever the most interesting aspects of a particular region seem to be. Beginning with the great writers and founders of religion in the East who lived and wrote on or near US 20, including Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, and Sylvia Plath, then crossing the plains to the forests, mountains, and deserts of the West, Nelson's journey on this beloved road is personal and idiosyncratic, serious and comic. More than a mile-by-mile guidebook, Twenty West offers a glimpse of a boyish and very American fascination with the road that will entice the traveler in all of us to take the long way home.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Road and Us

1. The Power of the Word along the Great Road

2. The Great Road to Justice and Freedom: God, Man, and Woman

3. Power and Empire on the Great Road: Six Presidents and a Plutocrat

4. Westering: Prairies and Plains, the Big Empty and the Sandhills

5. Soldiers and Indians: The Struggle for a Continent

6. The Best Idea: Yellowstone, the Peaceable Kingdom

7. The Great Road to Wilderness

8. "Ocian in View! O! The Joy!"

Notes
List of Works Cited (and Other Important Books)
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• Region
• Regional
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 10 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791478257
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

twenty west
20 WEST
THE GREAT ROAD ACROSS AMERICA
Mac Nelson
cover, 20 West, Sloansville, New York , Laurie Searl page i, 20 West , New York , Laurie Searl
P UBLISHED BY S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
2008 State University of New York
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany NY www.sunypress.edu
Production and book design, Laurie Searl Marketing, Susan M. Petrie
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nelson, Mac. Twenty west : the great road across America / Mac Nelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7469-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. United States -Description and travel. 2. United States Highway 20 - Description and travel. 3. West (U.S.) - Description and travel. 4. United States -History- Anecdotes. 5. United States Highway 20 - History -Anecdotes. 6. West (U.S.) - History - Anecdotes. 7. United States- History, Local. 8. United States - Biography. 9. Nelson, Mac -Travel - United States. I. Title. II. Title: 20 West.
E169.Z83N46 2008 973-dc22 2007035524
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
. . . the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius.
WILLIAM BLAKE , The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793
contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Road and Us
1 The Power of the Word along the Great Road
2 The Great Road to Justice and Freedom: God, Man, and Woman
3 Power and Empire on the Great Road: Six Presidents and a Plutocrat
4 Westering: Prairies and Plains, the Big Empty and the Sandhills
5 Soldiers and Indians: The Struggle for a Continent
6 The Best Idea: Yellowstone, the Peaceable Kingdom
7 The Great Road to Wilderness
8 Ocian in View! O! The Joy!
Notes
List of Works Cited (and Other Important Books)
Index
acknowledgments
Nobody writes a book like this without a lot of help from a lot of great people. My deepest thanks are due to:
Fellow travellers:
The Nelson family I rode with as a kid. The friends-Andy, Mike, Ralph, Stan-whom I drove with as a teenager. And another Nelson family, my late wife Jeanne and our children, Michael, David, Laurie, and Julie. We did a lot of great miles and wet tents together.
Thanks to all my canoe partners, from Jim O Brien through Jack Berkley, Tom Loughlin, Ted Sharon, Stan Kessler ( the Marine ), Terry Klaaren, Ralph Wanger, and Bernie George.
Sources of knowledge and inspiration:
From Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold through many knowledgeable friends, named in the text. The Yellowstone Loons (members of a benign chatroom cult) have taught me much, especially about getting into the wilderness. The staffs of Daniel Reed Library, SUNY-Fredonia, and the University of Nebraska Love Library, Lincoln, have been unfailingly helpful. Caroline Sandoz Pifer was invaluable for Sandoz material and lore.
Helpful associates and critics:
Joyce Haines, Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson, and Diana Hume George traveled with me while I researched parts of this book, helped me see things more clearly, and helped collect information. Bob Schweik, bless him, read the entire manuscript in its cruder stages and provided stiff but supportive and extensive criticism. Ted Sharon did the same with the Yellowstone sections. Terry and Howard Mosher made helpful suggestions. My computer guru, Matthew Warren, steered Mac s book through digital minefields. My colleagues and the administration at SUNY-Fredonia have been generous in supporting and granting leave time, without which this book would never have been finished. Thank you, President Dennis Hefner, and all your associates. The staff of SUNY Press has been great, including the anonymous readers, who helped make this a better book. Laurie Searl and Susan Petrie have been patient, smart, and creative.
And, for at least 111 K hard miles:
Three canoes, many tents, and a mythic host of cars: Oh, my Bert and my Tingy long ago, and my current great rides, Lilley and Loopy.
Thank you all. Mac Nelson Brocton, New York, on the Great Road

Mac at Mud Volcano, Yellowstone National Park, circa 1982 Photo by Diana Hume George
introduction
the road and us
Most Americans have strong relationships to and feelings about The Road-to one special road, or just to the idea of The Road-from The Arkansas Traveler and Huckleberry Finn to On the Road and Thelma and Louise . Ours is such a vast country that travel is a major topic of American history, literature, legend, and art. Coming to the New World in the sixteenth century, the Spaniards shortened its vast distances with horses, which they unwittingly bequeathed to the Plains Indians, changing and enriching their lives forever.
Some great early American roads were on water, some on rails. Voyageurs paddled canoes on the lakes and rivers. John Chapman ( Johnny Appleseed ) carried his bountiful cargo down the Ohio in a double canoe. (See Michael Pollan s wonderful book The Botany of Desire , which paints him as an American Bacchus. ) After the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, shallow draft boats towed by mules or horses hauled lumber, coal, and hay from Albany to Buffalo. The Erie Canal was 363 miles long and four feet deep (soon enlarged to seven feet, to take much heavier loads): quite boring and immensely practical. Hence the grand old comic song about bogus maritime peril:
Oh, the Ee-ri-ee was a risin ,
And the gin was a-gettin low,
And I scarcely think we ll get a drink
Til we get to Buffalo-o-o, til we get to Buffalo.
The historic Erie Canal route is now part of a National Heritage Corridor, much of it paralleling the route of US 20 in New York State. You can see a stone lock from the old canal, one of what were once eighty-three such, dry now, near milepost 308.3 on the New York Thruway, a modern version of old US 20.

The author circa 1939, riding a stationary vehicle near the the Great Road.
early American travel
Lewis and Clark planned more river travel than they could accomplish. Their main aim, to find a water route to the Pacific, was unsuccessful, as there wasn t one. 1 The Missouri River is not nearly so deep or navigable as the Mississippi or the Ohio, so the Corps of Discovery walked or rode much more than they floated, towed, or sailed. The decaying skeleton of their unwieldy iron-framed river boat is still buried somewhere in the West, a treasure for some fortunate future archaeologist to find. The first successful steamboat, Robert Fulton s Clermont, went up the Hudson from New York City to Albany in 1807 at the brisk speed of five miles per hour. Abe Lincoln, like Huck Finn and Jim, rafted on the Mississippi; Mark Twain and his fellows piloted riverboats there. Clipper ships connected the otherwise separate American coasts by laboriously rounding stormy Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Some Gold Rush 49ers tried to get to the California gold fields more quickly by crossing the Isthmus of Panama by land. This arduous route was not a success.
The Pony Express had a brief and unsuccessful history in fact, being rendered irrelevant by the telegraph in 1852, after less than two years of service. Its riders- young skinny wiry . . . orphans preferred -survive as heroes of legend, as they should. One of them, Buffalo Bill Cody, became the archetypal Western scout and showman. The transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, made another revolution and made possible the unification of the nation, the settling of the plains, and international markets for American livestock and crops. See Walt Whitman s To A Locomotive in Winter, unpent, and glad, and strong; and Emily Dickinson s I Like To See It Lap The Miles. I think her neigh like Boanerges (a locomotive shrieking like a Biblical monster) is one of the weirdest, finest phrases in American poetry.

US 20 in Brocton, NY, looking west. My town, my car, my road, my title.
the Model T and the need for good roads
Then, a century ago, came the mass-produced automobile-with few decent roads to drive it on. In the mid-nineteenth century, the federal government had built the National Road, from the East (Washington, D.C.) to the then far West: Vandalia, Illinois. But the National Road was not intended or built for heavy vehicular traffic. Not until the development of the internal combustion engine did road traffic approach water or rail in efficiency or bulk volume.
The Ford Model T, which began production in 1907, wrought a social revolution. The movement for good roads took off when more than a few rich people had autos. In 1913, Henry Ford inaugurated the assembly line process for manufacturing autos in ever larger numbers at an affordable price. Nineteen thirteen also saw the beginning of the commercial construct known as The Lincoln Highway. Nineteen twenty-seven saw the first comprehensive, systematic federal road planning and numbering.
A twenty-nine-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant colonel from Abilene, Kansas, participated in the Army s Trans-Continental Convoy in 1919, as an observer from the Tank Corps. He had a great, boyish time, camping out along the way, seeing, experiencing, learning his country. It took the convoy sixty-two days to reach the Pacific, at an average speed of six miles an hour. That s a very small gain over the pace of the steamboat Clermont , one hundred and twelve years earlier ( Automobile , December 2006, 88-89). That lieutenant colonel never forgot how tough it was to slog through the mud of the early roads, even the best of them, that would become parts of the Lincoln Highway, the convoy s main route from the Zero Milepost