Book Review : Business of American Frontier

Caesars of the Wilderness: Company of Adventurers, Volume II by Peter C. Newman (Viking: $25, 450 pages)

The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition, 1859-1900 by Rodman W. Paul (Harper & Row: $24.95, 400 pages)

“The business of America is business” was the credo of Calvin Coolidge--but, as a child of the ‘60s, I was encouraged to see the phrase as a kind of ludicrous self-satire. Surely, we thought, the destiny of America was something loftier than the mere making of money. Now I realize that we were wrong and Silent Cal was right.

Indeed, the business of all of North America--and perhaps all of the Western civilization--is business. The point is made vividly and convincingly in two very different works of history, Peter Newman’s “Caesars of the Wilderness,” the second volume of his account of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Rodman W. Paul’s “The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition.”

Both of these books show us that commerce was the great engine that drove the exploration and settlement of the frontier throughout North America. Newman’s subject is the Hudson’s Bay Company and its rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial rivals, the North West Company--both were vast commercial enterprises that almost inadvertently explored and pioneered the northern wilderness of Canada in their competition for the highly profitable fur trade. Paul, too, focuses on the making and breaking of great enterprises--mining, railroads, timber, agriculture, real estate, transportation and manufacturing--as the more authentic story of the Old West.

Difference in Style

In that sense, “Caesars” and “The Far West” are companion volumes, one focusing on the Canadian Northwest, the other on the American West. But the authors and their books are wholly different in style, intent and achievement.

“Caesars” aspires to (and probably deserves) a broader readership--the book is not purely a work of history, but rather an armchair adventure with novelistic touches. Newman, former editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star and Maclean’s magazine, has the journalist’s instinct for the colorful (and often off-color) anecdote, a sense of drama and grandeur, and a sometimes florid style that would be annoying if the author were not so endearing in his own enthusiasms:

“It would be September by then,” Newman rhapsodizes about the truly magnificent exertions of the 18th-Century fur traders, “and there was a frigid tang of autumn in the air as the wind scudded across the spruce forests under the flaxen rays of the cooling sun.” What is truly ingratiating about Newman’s book is his fascination with his own research, and his utter inability to leave out a good yarn merely because it has little or nothing to do with the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its entrepreneurial rivals.

Thus, for example, Newman cannot resist a charming and comic digression into a Revolutionary War raid by John Paul Jones along the Scottish coastline in search of blue-blooded hostages to be traded for American prisoners of war--an ill-fated adventure that nearly snagged a young boy named Thomas Douglas, who grew up to become a pivotal figure in the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but instead yielded only the Douglas family’s silver tea service.

Capitalism Conquered

The late historian Rodman W. Paul, by contrast, has produced a scholarly monograph on the less colorful but more realistic Old West--a place where lawyers, bankers, merchants, railroad and mine owners, and miscellaneous capitalists were more important than cowboys or prospectors.

While Newman gives us vivid portraiture and fascinating anecdote, Paul works with the raw material of history--census data, precipitation statistics, crop yields, railroad routes, the financing mechanisms for 19th-Century mining, agriculture and industry. His point, hardly surprising but worth repeating, is that gold and silver and the open frontier may have created the lure (and the legend) of the Old West, but it was capitalism that stayed on and conquered. What’s more, Paul shows us how some of the familiar elements of the frontier played a wholly unexpected role in its growth.

For example, Paul shows us that the United States Cavalry rode to the rescue of the Old West in a manner that had little to do with Indian skirmishes. “Sixty-five ‘major’ Army posts, thinly scattered from Minnesota to Texas and from Ft. Leavenworth to the blue Pacific . . . provided a minimal protection,” Paul observes. But, perhaps more important, “the Army was the West’s best customer for supplies and services.” So the Army’s expenditures for flour, beef, feed grains, work animals--and especially its contracts with civilian freight haulers to deliver the supplies--helped to create an economic infrastructure in the frontier. “The Army’s role in encouraging civilian freighters during the 1850s and 1860s was comparable to Federal subsidization of the aviation industry in modern times.”

California History

Newman is the more compelling stylist, the more accomplished storyteller, which makes “Caesars” the more readable of these two books. But Paul’s book is especially intriguing to the California reader, and not only because it is homegrown history in every sense. (Paul worked under the auspices of Caltech and conducted his research at the Henry E. Huntington Library and the California State Library.) Paul allows us to understand that the history of California--and the culture of California, if the phrase has any meaning at all--derives from the character of our business and commerce as much as our scenic splendor or our hospitality to unconventional ways of living and thinking and believing. Paul quotes an “economic commentator” who wrote in 1861, but whose credo (like Silent Cal’s) was true then and is true now:

“The business of California is conducted boldly. Men make money rapidly, spend it freely and hastily. Hereditary wealth is unknown. We are speculators by our very position. We were dissatisfied with life in Europe and the Eastern states, because it was too slow. We came here to enjoy an exciting life and to make money rapidly.”