feebleness of the Spanish (later the Mexican) hold on the area, and the desirability of securing
San Francisco Bay, the most convenient, capacious and safe [harbor] in the world.' Lieutenant Wilkes of the US Navy, there in 1841 as part of a strategic survey of the Eastern Pacific, again stressed the marvels of San Francisco,one of the most spacious and at the same time safest ports
in the world,' and underlined the vacuum of authority: Although I was prepared for anarchy and confusion, I was surprised when I found a total absence of all government in California, and even its forms and ceremonies thrown aside.' The first American to penetrate California by the overland route had been Jedediah Strong Smith,the Knight of the Buckskin,' who, working for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, had
reached the San Gabriel mission on the Pacific coast in 1826. The first American settlers came
two years later. But ordinary Americans began to learn of the wonder of the Far West only in the
I840s, when two gifted and adventurous writers reported on them. Richard Henry Dana Jr (1815-
82) was a young Harvard man who shipped as a common sailor on a threemaster in 1834 for
health reasons, voyaged the Pacific, and spent a year gathering hides on the California coast
before returning to real life at the Harvard Law School. His Two Years Before the Mast (Boston,
1840) gave an unforgettable picture of San Francisco Bay in its pristine state: All around was the stillness of nature. There were no settlements on these bays and rivers, and the few ranches and missions were remote and widely separated ... On the whole coast of California there was not a lighthouse, a beacon or a buoy ... Birds of prey and passage swooped and dived about us, wild beasts ranged through the oak groves, and as we slowly floated out of the harbor with the tide, herds of deer came to the water's edge."', This splendid book was widely read and made countless adventurous young men itch to get to the Far West. Even more remarkable was the work of another Harvard Bostonian, Francis Parkman (1823- 93), who set out in 1846 from St Louis to see for himself the reality of unspoiled life in this region, and especially to study the Indians, before the white man overwhelmed it. His travels began in what one modern historian has calledthe year of decision,' the watershed between the
old and the new. Parkman carried three books, the Bible, Shakespeare's Works, and The
Collected Works of Byron. He was himself a Byronic young man with an intense desire to see
and experience the dangers of the Far West, pioneer trailing, a war between the Dakotas and the
Snakes, and the need to move secretly through territory infested with Indian war parties. No one
has ever conveyed better the loneliness, the danger, and the immensities of the Western spaces,
and the occasional cataclysmic concentrations of wild life:
From the river bank on the right, away over the swelling prairie on the left, and in front as
far as the eye could reach, was one vast host of buffalo. The outskirts of the herd were
within a quarter of a mile. In many parts they were crowded so densely together that in
the distance their rounded backs presented a surface of uniform blackness; but elsewhere
they were more scattered, and from amid the multitude rose little columns of dust where
some of them were rolling on the ground. Here and there a battle was going forward
among the bulls. We could distinctly see them rushing against each other, and hear the
clattering of their horns and their horse bellowing.
Parkman is romantic in that he consciously describes a life which he sees is now fragile-the
buffalo will be hunted to extermination, the nomadic Indians will be corralled up in reservations,
the sparse and primitive settlements will give way to towns and farms-but he is also
unsentimental. He shows the Indians as they were: improvident, unreliable, sometimes