WHY go West? At the bottom of page 263 of The West there's a sepia-tinted photograph of the general offices of the Kansas Pacific Railway Company in the late 1860s. On the board-walk stand five men, one in top hat, tails and walrus moustache; another in stetson, riding coat, high boots and fine fob chain; the rest, rude mechanics all, in weskits and bib-and-brace overalls.
Hung on the wall and window. frames of the offices behind them are a couple of dozen mighty buffalo heads, circling a sign reading "C.W. Hawkins, Taxidermist". To the left of the picture is a massive sign with another mounted buffalo head and the words "Kansas Pacific Railway: From Kansas To Denver. Only Direct Route to All Points in Kansas and Colorado. Everybody Should Visit the Famous Rocky Mountain Resorts."
The sign rests on a box placarded with the simple slogan: "Go West! Go West! Go to Kansas & Colorado!" And, in much bigger type, the mainspring of all this buffalo killing and railway building and urgency of movement: "FREE HOMES!"
Oh, how the West is fun. Now, each succeeding year brings another lavishly-illustrated book on the winning, or losing, of the West. Last year saw the publication of 500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians by Alvin M. Josephy, with the subtitle "based on a documentary filmscript". Now here is The West: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward which, as the publishers put it "heralds the BBC's screening of a major eight-part documentary by the makers of the highly-acclaimed The Civil War". The series begins this month.
The West brings to life America's expansion to the Pacific, focusing on the 19th century, when the West was defined in the popular imagination. It draws on firsthand accounts and letters, commentaries by specialist historians, newly commissioned maps and it has more than 450 photographs. And a fine book it is. Aficionados of the literature of the American West no longer have to put up with scruffy reprints of cowpoke reminiscences, tantalisingly sketchy histories of native American tribes, or the mystical meanderings of New Agers seeking solace in pseudo-Sioux shamanism. Here is another well-researched, brilliantly illustrated volume which fulfils Ward's claim that "history really is biography..."
The cast is deliberately highly diverse: there are explorers and soldiers and Indian warriors in this book, settlers and hucksters and gaudy showmen, but it also includes a Chinese ditch-digger, Irish railroad construction bosses, a rich Mexican American landowner, a gold-digging 49er from Chile, a Texas cowboy, born in Britain, a woman missionary to the Indians who loathed the West, and a Wellesly college graduate who loved it in spite of everything it did to her and her family. Heroes and villains on all sides: you can cheer and boo at just about every page.
What all these lesser-known Westerners went through is told in their own words, through diaries, letters and memoirs. The railroad construction bosses, for instance, were two tough, red-bearded ex-soldiers: General Jack Casement and his brother Dan. Their Union Pacific crews, digging, building, blasting and driving westward, were mostly Irish, immigrants from the eastern slums, many of whom had fought for the Union in the Civil War. With them was a sprinkling of ex-Confederate soldiers, Mexicans, Germans, Englishmen and former slaves: 10,000 men in all.
Ye gods: think of the logistics for General Jack and brother Dan. A 22-car work train housed and fed the men, who rose at dawn. A supply train nosed up behind it, carrying all the supplies needed that day - rails, ties, spikes, rods, fishplates - which had to be loaded on to flatcars and run up to the railhead where the "iron men" were already waiting.
Each rail weighed 700 pounds. Five men were needed to lift it off the flatcar and into place. Then, even before the men with hammers drove the spikes all the way home, the flatcar rolled forward over the new rails so that the next ones could be unloaded and dropped into place.
It is a grand anvil chorus that these sturdy sledges are playing across the Plains," wrote one newspaperman. "It is in triple time, three strokes to a spike, 400 rails to the mile, 1,800 miles to (California) - 21 million times are they to come down with their sharp punctuation before the great work of modern America is complete."
"The time is coming, and last too," one Union Pacific engineer noted in his diary,"when, in the sense it is now understood, there will be no West."
Ten thousand Irishmen obeyed that slogan "Go West! Go West!" And as these crews inched across prairies blackened by million-strong herds of buffalo, a movable city followed hard on their heels: hundreds of prostitutes, pimps, card sharks, saloon keepers and gunmen - "a carnivorous horde" eager to devour the men's weekly pay. Union Pacific set up a base camp every 70 miles or so. Each had a different name, but the men called them all "Hell On Wheels".
Hundreds of workers contracted venereal disease. There were drunken brawls, shootings, knifings. When things got too bad, in went Jack Casement and a band of 200 armed men to clean things up. This was reckoned to be "fun for Casement," and after a shoot-out in Julesburg he proudly showed his employer, Grenville Dodge, through the town's burgeoning cemetery. "General," he said, "they all died in their boots and Julesburg has been quiet ever since." Quiet maybe, but the next Hell on Wheels was being banged together 70 miles to the west.
Compare and contrast with another railroad army advancing from the west, the 11,000 Chinese labourers of Central Pacific. Journalist Charles Nordhoff wrote of them: "They do not drink or fight or strike, and it is always said of them that they are very cleanly in their habits. It is the custom among them, after they have had their suppers every evening to bathe with the help of small tubs. I doubt if the white laborers do as much."
If the white railroad construction crews' life was the nasty brutish and short-tempered reality of the West, back east there were the mystical brethren who could remain more ethereal about it all: like Thoreau, who wrote "Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. The future lies that way to men, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side."
HE poor old Red Indians were, of course, caught in the middle of all this, lamenting their way of life.
And the nemesis for many of them came in the form of another Irishman, General Philip Henry Sheridan - "Fighting Phil" - whose dilapidated birthplace still stands in Co Cavan.
As Ward puts it, this "diminutive son of Irish tenant farmers was hard, hot-tempered". Sheridan assumed command of the Department of the Missouri, which included Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Colorado. Moving against the Cheyenne in winter, when they were most vulnerable, Sheridan wrote to his commander Sherman "in taking the offensive, I have to select that season when I can catch the fiends, and if a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers, but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack."
He was utterly remorseless in the elimination of the Indian tribes in his area of command. The Kiowas relied utterly on the buffalo. A woman named Old Lady Horse recalled: "Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo. Their tip is were made of buffalo hides, so were their clothes and moccasins. They ate buffalo meat. Their containers were made of hide, or of bladders or stomachs . .. Most of all the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion ... The buffalo were the life of the Kiowas."
In the summer of 1874, five years after the railroad linked Atlantic with Pacific, the Kiowas, Comanche, Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne rose up and drove out the buffalo hunters who had swarmed into the Texas panhandle to harvest the southern herds. As buffalo hunter Frank Mayer wrote, the Indians knew that "with every boom of a buffalo rifle their tenure on their homeland became weakened, and that eventually they would have no homeland and no buffalo. So they did what you and I would do if our existence were jeopardized - they fought..."
In response, Sheridan ordered a massive campaign against them, pursuing the Indians relentlessly, depriving them of rest, or the opportunity to hunt. By the next spring, virtually all the resisting Indians of the southern Plains - desperate now for food - had come in to the Indian agencies.
Mayer recalled "maybe we served our purpose in helping abolish the buffalo, maybe it was our ruthless harvesting of him which telescoped the control of the Indian by a decade or maybe more. Or maybe I am just rationalizing. Maybe we were just a greedy lot who wanted to get ours, and to hell with posterity, the buffalo, or anyone else, just so we kept our scalps on and our money pouches filled. I think maybe that is the way it was.
And the Kiowa? Old Lady Horse remembered a story told among her desperate people: "The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer. Sadly, the last remnant of the great herd gathered in council, and decided what they would do.
"The Kiowas were camped on the north side of Mount Scott, those of them who were still free to camp. One young woman got up very early and peering through the haze, saw the last buffalo herd appear like in a spirit dream.
"Straight to Mount Scott the leader of the herd walked. Behind him came the cows and calves, and the few young males who had survived. As the woman watched, the face of the mountain opened Inside the mountain the world was green and fresh, as it had been when she was a small girl. The rivers ran clear, not red. The wild plums were in blossom, chasing the red buds up the inside slopes. Into this world of beauty the buffalo walked, never to be seen again.
Which all goes to prove that there's no such thing as a "Free Home!"
Put The West up alongside Evan Connell's quirkily brilliant study of the deranged General George Armstrong Custer in Son Of The Morning Star - featuring, of course, the "melancholy, alcoholic Captain Myles Keogh of County Carlow" whose horse Comanche was the only living thing left of Custer's cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn - and that extraordinary, Danteesque novel of the century, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or, An Evening Redness In The West.