The World Made Whole

I get enamored with eras too easily.  I imagine this happens with anybody who reads a lot of historical books, once you dip your toe into a certain area of the pool, the temptation to plunge in headfirst comes fast.  My fascinations include delusions of belonging to that era, throwing myself in the narrative, so to speak.  I love reading about the first 30 year period of the last century; have read more books about Theodore Roosevelt than any other American historical figure, count F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of my favorite authors, enjoy watching early cinema from that era, including some silent movies.  If I was actually able to stomach music made before 1990, I would have probably become a fan of Jazz and big band music by now.  We all need something to be parochial about, I guess.  The funny part about this, is that I am a terrible fit for that time.  My bouts of anti-socialness would not go over well with the Flapper-age, and I'm pretty sure that if I had met Fitzgerald, I would have hated him for being the pompous dandy he so eloquently writes about.  But, I don't think about that too much, just going where my internal compass points.


Lately, that compass is pointing towards the mid 1800's, and more specifically, the settling of the American West.  This will probably earn a (deserved) guffaw from at least one of my fellow bloggers.  James has been a huge Western fan for as long as I've known him, and most of that has been spent giving him shit for his love of cowboys.  Westerns were something popular when my parents were kids, a dead genre, already boiled down to nothing more than cowboys against indians, and if this opinion was formed without having actually spent effort confirming it, well, I had alien movies to watch, dammit.  And those never go out of style.

Okay, I was wrong.  Okay, James?  YOU WIN.

It was not any Clint Eastwood or John Ford movie that changed my mind (though, having now begun to check them out, they're pretty good), but actually getting into the history of what happened in the West.  The landgrab by Polk, the migration towards new lands, and the whole sordid, regrettable affairs with the Native Americans, it's an amazing story on it's own. Or stories, as there are many different tales that come together to paint the picture of Manifest Destiny come to life.  Which is where Kit Carson, and Hampton Sides's book "Blood and Thunder" comes in.

(segue!) 

Kit is the frontiersman/trapper/hunter/all around manly man who was one of the first celebrities of the West. He plays one of the most important character archetype that populate Western story-telling:  The Quiet, Reluctant Hero. Carson, an uneducated boy from Missouri, is stifled by a normal life in a small town and  runs away to become a trapper, and learns all he can about living outdoors, which sets up a career as a scout for various groups trying to map and conquer the new territories grabbed by President Polk's ambitious strategy of a coast-to-coast United States.  He helps lead John C. Fremont through 3 different forays on the Oregon Trail, where his stories gain a measure of fame.  Carson was never looking for such fame, and in fact is made very uncomfortable by it.  Novelists will use his name in many stories, and Kit will refuse to read most of them, and those he reads, he despises for their portrayal of him. (I have downloaded the first of the stories.  It is almost unreadable.)

Kit Carson did as much as any one person in making the West.  His multiple forays on the Oregon Trail marked the maps that many settlers used to populate the northwest.  His guidance and quick thinking helped the American Army arrive and stabilize California.  He even played a major part in the most-western battle of the Civil War.  And Carson wanted none of this; he mostly wanted to settle down with his wife and children, but a combination of loyalty to people who needed his help and natural restlessness kept him from staying in one place to long.  He had no desire for fame or wealth.  When it came to the Indian wars, he had no real ill will towards the Native Americans, in fact Carson might have understood the Indians better than his superiors.  His big fault might have been that he considered himself inferior to many of the educated men he encountered (which may have been true out east, but on the frontier, most of these men needed Kit more than Kit needed them), and was easily talked into service time after time.  Carson would die in Colorado, after trying to settle down again, but not until he took up another cause: personally escorting 4 Ute chiefs to Washington so they could meet the president.


If I get excited about idealized versions of eras that never really existed, then it would seem that Steampunk is right up my alley.  Steampunk is a version of alternate history that involves historical times with technology that mirrors the current times, only in the vein of steam power and other old methods of power and ingenuity. In other words, all the dignity and style of Victorian times (the most popular setting of Steampunk) without the walking around and other tech-less hardships that my generation so despises.  Steampunk fits in nicely within the American West. (Take The Wild, Wild West.  But don't actually watch The Wild, Wild West.)  I thought it would make for a good story, and so I read Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World  THMW takes place on American soil, but not in America.  It is a history where America never really existed, where no one country ever took hold of the New World, and the frontier has been fought over for decades, mostly by the symbolic factions of The Line; a society driven by possible sentient machines and monstrous black Trains that run the stations, and The Gun; a group of fighters who are bonded with demons through their weapons and fight on the side of chaos.  These two factions have just defeated a common enemy: the Red Valley Republic, based on democratic principles and government.  Now the General most responsible for the republic has turned up in an insane asylum, carrying in his fractured mind a possible weapon to destroy both Gun and Line.  There is something fitting about the symbolism of Democracy and Truth being shut out of the West by twin foes of Industriousness and Violence.  That symbolism also extends to the world being "made", as the unexplored West is full of mysticism and fighting spirits, as if half-made was actually half-baked, leaving an uncooked earth where magic and mysticism hasn't been cooked out yet. 

But while the setting is slightly more science fiction, the characters are straight ripped from a How To Write A Western guide.  There's the too-civilized woman from the east, who may be more suited to frontier life than she believes, who gets kidnapped by the ambiguous, charming is-he-evil-or-good cad (a member of the Gun) who must find the General, who was the moral, unflappable lawman before he was driven insane by a weapon of The Line, who have sent the obsessed villain who drives his gang (or other Linemen, take your pick) to the breaking point to find the other three.  And the chase leads further and further into the unknown territory, populated by the First Folk, the chalk-skinned, black maned indigenous population that I can only describe as American Indians that rock horrific mind powers and all look like emaciated versions of Slash from Guns and Roses.  The First Folk are more or less guardians of the unmade world, keepers trying to see that the last slice of mystery on earth is left alone.

Really, Half-Made World could be a microcosm of nearly every western ever made; the conflicts of "making" the world, of civilization roaring into a land that has never seen it and may not want it, and the struggles between cultivation, industrialization, turbulent lawlessness, and native peoples who do not fit into the new dichotomy.  And because this all happened in America, and could really only come together in America, maybe that's why the Western is the American storytelling trope.  Whatever it is, I'm beginning to understand it's appeal, and see the value in stories like Blood and Thunder, and The Half-Made World.  I don't know why it took me so long, but I remember that I was never really interested in stories of my parent's childhood until I was a few years of adulthood.  I think I needed to my own adolescence completely before I got too involved with anybody else's, even my country's.