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art, wine, ravishing countrysides. Enthralled by the Old World, Williams went
on writing about the New.
He maneuvers his Columbus chapter so as to end with the 1492 beginning,
the Admiral’s years of storm-ridden sailing and human treachery culminating
in that first astonished October morning. “Bright green trees, the whole land
so green it is a pleasure to look on it,” árboles muy verdes... y toda ella verde,
qu’es plazer de mirarla. As if encountering Eden’s primavera, its “first green”
or Eternal Spring, Columbus marvels at the greenness of the land (which he
named San Salvador), but with a European grasp: “The nightingale was sing-
ing” (though America has none), fish “so unlike ours that it is wonderful,”
maravilla, unheard-of wild-branching trees “the greatest wonder in the world,”
dugout canoes “wonderfully worked.” All this means to persuade the Admiral’s
Spanish sponsors, but he ’s also striving to say what moves him. On shore he
sends men for water, and en este tiempo anduve así por aquellos árboles, “During
that time I walked among the trees which was the most beautiful thing which I
had ever seen,” que eran la cosa más fermosa de ver.
Among these green fertile wonders, In the American Grain omits passages that
taint the discoverer’s purity. Columbus assures Ferdinand and Isabella that he ’s
looking out for gold, that these unspoiled natives “could easily be made Chris-
tians,” that the islands would supply “as much of aloes wood, and as many slaves
for the navy, as their Majesties will wish to demand.” Of course it ’s a given that
Spain may claim this land, this “ravished” Eden, as Williams puts it.
Once past the “miraculous first voyage,” he doesn’t overlook “the crassness
of the discoverers” driven like Cortez, “the slaughterers” such as Ponce de Leon,
the Puritans’ mean and “vigorous hypocrisy,” and he could have no inkling of
ecologic devastation to come. Still, he cherishes an eighteenth-century French
Jesuit in Maine, Père Sebastian Rasles, who shares life among the Abnaki Indi-
ans, “TOUCHING them every day,” struggling to learn their energetic language,
respecting their culture. Williams scorns any view of an Indian ceremonial as
unrelated to us—“unrelated, that is, except to the sand, the corn, the birds, the
beasts, the periodic drought, and the mountain sights and colors.”
To recover what we need, he settles on the legendary Daniel Boone (ignoring
his role as land speculator): woodsman, huntsman pushing ever farther into the
wilderness, “filled with the wild beauty of the New World to overbrimming,”
seeing “the truth of the Red Man, not an aberrant type, treacherous and anti-
white to be feared and exterminated, but as a natural expression of the place.”
In this vein he praises Sam Houston too, who lived among Cherokees to touch
the ground of American being. “It is imperative that we sink,” says Williams,
“we must go back to the beginning.”
Back home, Williams kept at In the American Grain “which I MUST MUST MUST