By Martha Quillen
I used to love the feeling of isolation you could get in the Colorado Rockies. Forty-one years ago, Ed and I went camping in the Gunnison Country with friends. We pitched our tents right next to the road near Pitkin, and for several days we didn’t see a single car and couldn’t tune in a radio station. One night our friend observed that the U.S. could have been nuked, and we wouldn’t know it.
In 1971, Ed and I went to Silverton to look at the newspaper. The town was small, remote, and occasionally got snowed in. It didn’t have television, and VCRs and home computers hadn’t been invented yet. Red Mountain Pass was icy and terrifying; several of the downtown buildings looked like they wouldn’t make it through the winter, and eggs at the local store cost $1 each.
“Why?” I asked, astonished. (According to the proprietor, it was because they froze on the regular truck, so only refrigerated trucks could haul them). Federal minimum wage was $1.60 then, and cheese sandwiches in UNC’s cafeteria were a quarter. Yet during bad weather eggs in Silverton cost $12 a dozen.
But we would have bought the Silverton Standard in a heartbeat if we could have lined up financing. The town was incredible: old, beautiful, solitary, surrounded by mountains and haunted by history.
In 1974, we bought the Kremmling paper.
Mountain living wasn’t cheap in the 1970s, and it wasn’t convenient. You often found yourself waiting for auto parts or plumbing supplies – or driving 150 miles to fetch them. New books, exotic foods, fine dining, art galleries, and formal dress were seldom seen. A choice of radio stations would have been welcome.
But we had something then that’s extremely rare now: a sense of being cut off from the world, and a feeling that we were immune to modern influences. There’s an Easy Rider myth, provinciality makes you crazy, and a Shangi-la version, isolation nurtures mental health. We embraced the latter.
When we moved to Salida in 1978, the streets were often empty; locals took things slower, and seemed less rushed and harried than suburban Americans.
Today, Salidans are no longer so disconnected. We have cable and satellite TV, ATMs, Internet connections, and cell phones (with people talking on them everywhere – in stores, on trails, and during live performances). In recent years, homes, traffic and visitors have increased in Chaffee County. Today even our wildlife is different; you see a lot more deer, elk, bear, and foxes than you used to. The proliferation of people in their habitat seems to have made them bolder.
Now it’s 2011: the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War. But lately I’ve been thinking about a Civil War centennial celebration that occurred in Albion, Michigan when I was ten. I was visiting my Grandmother and enjoying the festivities with a cousin. We’d just ridden the Tilt-a-Whirl when all of the rides were halted for an hour to welcome the honored guests of the day: two living Michigan Veterans of the Civil War.
One of them had been only eight years old when he joined as a drummer boy. I was somewhat horrified that they let little kids go to war in those days, and even more horrified that my Dad was there to hear about it. He already thought I was well past the age when I should be clipping hedges and mowing lawns. After all, he sold newspapers on the street corner and walked five miles to school when he was my age.
(A year or so later my grandmother told me that if my father walked five miles to school at my age she sure didn’t know why – since his school was less than two blocks from their house. But that was another day and another story.)
Talk about dangerous missions … during that centennial festival in 1961 it didn’t look like that former infantry drummer or his fellow veteran (who was a few years older) were going to make it through the afternoon. They were both over a hundred and had such quavery voices that I didn’t understand a thing they said. And yet they were there, and that seemed like a miracle.
They had served in the same war depicted in Gone With the Wind. They’d been around when people dressed like Scarlet O’Hara, lived in antebellum mansions, owned slaves, fought with cannons, and left behind acres and acres of dead in places I had been: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Tennessee …
I was duly impressed, but I didn’t really understand why the North and South had gone to war. Of course, there’s been controversy about that for 150 years. Southerners frequently claim that the war wasn’t about slavery; it was about Northern aggression. Or state’s rights. Or freedom. It was about protective tariffs that served Northern industries but drove up Southern costs. It was about abolitionists who wouldn’t cease and desist despite all of the gag orders and laws imposed on them by Southern legislators.
Modern scholars blame growing economic and cultural differences dividing the industrial North and agrarian South. Others cite Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, which declared the Missouri compromise invalid. Or John Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry. Or the election of Abraham Lincoln. Clearly all of those things and many more contributed to the conflict.
But what could actually induce men to take up arms against their own countrymen?
I tend to think the primary cause behind most wars is sustained (often over the course of years or decades) political agitation that portrays the opposition as corrupt, dangerous, ignorant, subversive, and despicable. Recently I saw a documentary about the Civil War that highlighted the accusations and insults being slung during the 1860 election, and I thought, “Wow, maybe things aren’t so bad today” – until I remembered that those Americans had gone to war within the year.
It’s a fallacy that people who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Instead the exact opposite is true, because people who know history tend to resurrect it to support their own agendas. Today, John C. Calhoun’s nullification theory – which held that states had the right to override federal legislation that they deemed unconstitutional – is alive and well, and modern secessionist and nullification movements abound. You can find them on the Internet, or order books about them.
More American soldiers sacrificed their lives between April, 1861, when Confederates fired on Ft. Sumter, and April, 1865, when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, than in WWI or WWII. More American combatants were killed in the Civil War than in the American Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish American War, Korean, Vietnamese, Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars added together.
You would think that we would want to put the ideas, theories and arguments that inspired civil war behind us. But we don’t. They are frequently revived for political purposes.
In terms of providing rousing material to inspire modern rage, however, the Civil War is a piker. The American Revolution is clearly the more marketable war. Revolutionary incitement is favored by the Tea Party, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, thousands of websites, and countless citizens of every political persuasion.
What does it mean when so many government officials and would-be officials contend that rebellion against our government might be justified? Should we be organizing militias? Stockpiling weapons? Making bombs?
Probably not, but you can be sure that some patriotic Americans are taking all that war talk seriously and doing just that.
One thing you’ve got to admire about America; we’ve got no shortage of incendiary history to mine, nor a dearth of passionate people ready to excavate it.
In the wake of the 2010 elections, the Republicans have resurrected Gilded Age tactics: suppressing collective bargaining, railing against unions, clamoring for lower wages and vilifying laborers. And the Democrats have started romanticizing strikes, marches, street riots, and unarmed resistance against well-armed authorities.
The growing rift between labor and government seems serious, but as I write this, the prime-time issue is about whether slaves had better marriages than modern African Americans. It looks like the 2012 campaigns are going to be real ratings winners – totally devoid of serious debate about boring budgets, bothersome banking practices, and pertinent positions.
Personally, I’d rather escape to the back woods until October of 2012, but it won’t help. In recent years I’ve realized that the notion that you can escape into the wilderness (or country village) is a fantasy and always has been. If rustic seclusion made things better, the poor, rural yeomen who made up more than three-quarters of the population of the United States in 1861 might have lived out their lives safely and serenely. Instead, their boys – Northern, Southern, black and white – ended up rotting in American fields.
Martha Quillen still enjoys walks in the woods – whether they improve her character or not.
