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'The Undiscovered Country' looks at seven figures who helped shape the American West
“The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy and the Shaping of the American West” is a richly told, vibrant, insightful epic of the frontier that begins on the western slope of the Appalachian Mountains, not, as you might think, at the Mississippi River.
Historian Paul Andrew Hutton’s book sheds a defining light on some of the major events, concepts and the people involved in the westward expansion of the young nation.
In colonial times and the days of the early republic, Hutton writes, frontier people were disdained by New England and Tidewater Virginia elites as “dangerous characters of low breeding, prone to democratic anarchy and fits of violence.”
In fact, it was the durable common folk — farmers, hunters, fur traders, scouts — who slashed through the Cumberland Gap and other Appalachian routes.
“The book’s title,” Hutton writes in the preface, “refers to the dark irony of how the conquest of the West built a new nation, but at the cost of the destruction of another people and the pristine land that had sustained them. For both those coming into this new land and for those already there, it became a story of foreshadowing death.”
Violence — man vs. man, man vs. animal, man vs. nature — haunts the story.
The narrative also explores related subjects such as the concept of Manifest Destiny, which, Hutton wrote, influenced 19th century cultural and political thought.
The book has many characters but it narrows to seven main protagonists, all historical figures, who are often at war. The seven are Daniel Boone, Red Eagle, Davy Crockett, Mangas Coloradas, Kit Carson, Sitting Bull and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
Boone is the first of the protagonists to appear in the book. It’s the spring of 1774 and he is in search of the grave of his eldest son, James, in the westernmost tip of Virginia.
James and six others, the book recounts, were killed the previous fall by a band of renegade Shawnees, Delawares and Cherokees as they tried to rejoin the Kentucky-bound Boone family.
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Daniel Boone, “his hair plaited and clubbed up in Indian fashion,” wore black-dyed deerskin.
The book says James’ death proved to be “one of a tragic string of blood payments that Daniel Boone would make to open the American West.”
He would be elevated to biblical proportions, “an American Moses leading the people to their western promised land,” Hutton writes.
Over generations, writers, artists, poets and filmmakers celebrated Boone’s deeds as a professional hunter and an accomplished marksman, helping to form the creation myth of the nation, he writes. He was the country’s first Western hero.
Boone was also caught up in a war between England and France over control of the fur trade with the Natives of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley.
Born in 1781, Red Eagle, another protagonist, was the son of Scottish trader Charles Weatherford and his Native wife Sehoy. His parents named him William. Among the Creeks he was Lamochatee. Americans later referred to him as Red Eagle.
He grew up in the Upper Creek tribe in Alabama and allied himself with Shawnee chief Tecumseh against Anglo pioneers. Native resistance of Anglo settlers is a constant theme.
A young Hutton remembers Crockett from the 1950s TV miniseries “Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier.” “Because it was a Western story, it hooked me on the West. I was 5 years old. It’s all Walt Disney’s fault,” the author joked.
Not unlike Red Eagle’s first years, Crockett’s childhood in rural North Carolina was largely spent with his mother at the cabin’s hearth.
The book describes Crockett watching in awe as his mother made bread from meal, salt and water, and baked it on a slanted board sloped toward the fire in a large stone fireplace. He learned to call it hoecake.
Crockett was more adept at hunting deer and bear than farming. Black bears were huge in the Tennessee hills; Crockett was credited with killing a 500 to 600-pound bear. It enhanced his reputation as a hero.
After he got word that the Creek had wiped out Fort Mims, Crockett volunteered to fight the Red Sticks, a faction of the Creek Nation, at their village of Tallushatchee in Alabama.
At one point in the conflict, Hutton writes, 50 Native warriors took shelter in a wooden house. The American volunteers set it on fire, burning the Creeks alive. The book notes, “This grim moment soured (Crockett) on war and would have a profound impact on his life.”
Crockett was elected to several terms in Congress before heading for the Mexican province of Texas. He died helping to defend the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, in 1836.
Kit Carson became the most famous of all the nation’s mountain men. He trapped, mostly beaver, all over the mountains and rivers of the West.
The book details how hard and dangerous trapping was.
Carson, who for many years lived in Taos, was also a trusted army scout, notably for John C. Frémont’s expeditions into the far West when Oregon belonged to England and California to Mexico.
Carson is also remembered for being ordered to remove 12,000 Navajo from their homeland and take them on a forced “Long Walk” to the Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner.
Another protagonist, Mangas Coloradas, was the leader of the Chiricahua Apaches. His band lived near the headwaters of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, but raided into eastern Arizona and northern Mexico.
He is said to have been one of the few to unite the independent Apache bands. Carson and Mangas Colorada seemed to have been on friendly terms for years.
Carson was later appointed the government’s Indian agent for Northern New Mexico. Under his jurisdiction were the Jicarilla Apaches, his old enemies, the Mohuache Utes and Taos Pueblo.
After introducing protagonist William “Buffalo Bill” Cody as a Buffalo hunter, Pony Express rider and army dispatch rider, the book detours into an informative passage on the deadly history of the buffalo across North America.
Cody acted in frontier-themed stage dramas before he gained international success organizing splashy Wild West shows.
He successfully recruited Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota leader, to headline in his shows.
Hutton is an award-winning author and Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. He is curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming.
