First, I had to do a quick study of the Santa Fe trail, reading what the National Park Service, Britannica, and other reliable sources had to say. Then I watched the 1940s Santa Fe Trail, a movie starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland and Ronald Reagan, and got hooked on watching all eight episodes of History on a Hog: Riding the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas: From it I got a better feel for the landscape, despite the sometimes-questionable interpretation of events.
1846 Map. Library of Congress
The author states, “By 1845, the Reeds and Donners, like countless other Americans, generally accepted the idea that God had bestowed on the United States the right to grow and prosper by advancing the frontier westward. . . . Manifest Destiny became the nation’s watchword.” Although some, like Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing disagreed – “We boast of our rapid growth, forgetting that, throughout nature, noble growths are slow . . . the Indians have melted before the white man, and the mixed degraded race of Mexico must melt before the Anglo-Saxon. . . . We talk of accomplishing our destiny. So did the late conqueror of Europe.” – but Channing was in the minority.
Politicians and religious leaders entwined their ideology to promote Manifest Destiny as a creation myth for the country. The author of the Donner Party book, written in 2017, perceived the origins of something many of us were startled to realize after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville: “It soon became so ingrained in the national consciousness that many Americans still accept it to this day.” Yes, I see that now, not that all of the trailblazers were so passionate, but the concept of entitlement is deep-rooted. “The belief that God intended for the continent to be under the control of Christian European-Americans became official U.S. government policy. It helped to fuel incentive to take the land from those who were considered inferior to white Americans – indigenous tribal people characterized as savages and Mexicans, who were described as backward. In short, Manifest Destiny became a convenient way to . . . exterminate anyone who got in the way.”
I receive many enewsletters and Facebook posts from the UK due to my interest in my ancestral land. This morning I read a blog post about Offa, Anglo-Saxon King of Mercia. So, this made my head spin back in time to another drive that may have felt like destiny. Offa was an early Anglo Saxon who made war all around the island, exterminating anyone who got in the way of his power grab, and is promoted today as the first King of England. Since my DNA is more indigenous Briton than Anglo-Saxon, according to Ancestry, I celebrate that he was thwarted in his attempt to cross the line into the indigenous stronghold we know as Wales, the Land of My Fathers. Unfortunately, however, he forced the indigenous people to build a 150-mile-long dyke between the River Dee and the River Severn as a dividing line. Nevertheless, the Welsh people were eventually absorbed by the English about 500 years later. Is this the slow and noble growth that William Ellery Channing applauded?
People boil out of their kingdoms and some cannot be content. We are intentionally and unintentionally cruel and insensitive to those who are not us. Life makes my head spin.
