Joan Didion - Where I Was From

This “Kinkade Glow” could be seen as derived in spirit from the “lustrous, pearly mist” that Mark Twain had derided in the Bierstadt paintings, and, the level of execution to one side, there are certain unsettling similarities between the two painters. “After completing my recent plein air study of Yosemite Valley, the mountains’ majesty refused to leave me,” Kinkade wrote in June 2000 on his web site. “When my family wandered through the national park visitor center, I discovered a key to my fantasy — a recreation of a Miwok Indian Village. When I returned to my studio, I began work on The Mountains Declare His Glory, a poetic expression of what I felt at that transforming moment of inspiration. As a final touch, I even added a Miwok Indian Camp along the river as an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God’s glory.”

Affirming that man has his place in the Sierra Nevada by reproducing the Yosemite National Park Visitor Center’s recreation of a Miwok Indian Village is identifiable as a doubtful enterprise on many levels (not the least of which being that the Yosemite Miwok were forcibly run onto a reservation near Fresno during the Gold Rush, and allowed to return to Yosemite only in 1855), but is Thomas Kinkade’s Sierra in fact any more sentimentalized than that of Albert Bierstadt? Were not the divinely illuminated passes of Bierstadt’s Sierra meant to confirm the successful completion of our manifest destiny? Was it by chance that Collis P. Huntington commissioned Bierstadt to undertake a painting celebrating the domination of Donner Pass by the Central Pacific Railroad? Was not Bierstadt’s triumphalist Donner Lake from the Summit a willful revision to this point of the locale that most clearly embodied the moral ambiguity of the California settlement? This was the lesson drawn from the pass in question by one of the surviving children of the Donner Party, Virginia Reed, who wrote to her cousin: “Oh, Mary, I have not wrote you half of the trouble we’ve had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is. But thank God, we are the only family that did not eat human flesh. We have left everything, but I don’t care for that. We have got through with our lives. Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody. Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.”

Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.

Did the preferred version of our history reflect the artless horror and constricted moral horizon of Virginia Reed’s firsthand account?

Or had it come more closely to resemble the inspirational improvement that was Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit?

The confusions embedded in the crossing story can be seen in unintended relief in Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon , the 1913 novel that has at its center the young woman Saxon Brown. At the time we meet Saxon she is orphaned, boarding with her hard-pressed socialist brother and his bad-tempered wife, and spending six hard days a week as a piecework ironer in an Oakland laundry. On their Saturday night off, Saxon and a friend from the laundry splurge on tickets to a Bricklayers’ picnic, where Saxon meets a similarly orphaned teamster, Billy Roberts, to whom she confides that she was named for “the first English, and you know the Americans came from the English. We’re Saxons, you an’ me, an’ Mary, an’ Bert, and all the Americans that are real Americans, you know, and not Dagoes and Japs and such.” If this seems a thin reed on which to hang one’s identity, it would not have seemed so to London, who, Kevin Starr noted in Americans and the California Dream , once protested an arrest for vagrancy by arguing to the court “that no old American whose ancestors had fought in the American Revolution should be treated this way.” The moment in which the judge nonetheless sentenced him to thirty days is described by Starr as “one of the most traumatic” in London’s life.

Assured by Billy Roberts that he too is a “real” American, that his mother’s family “crossed to Maine hundreds of years ago,” Saxon asks where his father was from. This extraordinary exchange ensues:

“Don’t know.” Billy shrugged his shoulders. “He didn’t know himself. Nobody ever knew, though he was American, all right, all right.”

“His name’s regular old American,” Saxon suggested. “There’s a big English general right now whose name is Roberts. I’ve read it in the papers.”

“But Roberts wasn’t my father’s name. He never knew what his name was. Roberts was the name of a gold-miner who adopted him. You see, it was this way. When they was Indian-fightin’ up there with the Modoc Indians, a lot of miners an’ settlers took a hand. Roberts was captain of one outfit, and once, after a fight, they took a lot of prisoners — squaws, an’ kids an’ babies. An’ one of the kids was my father. They figured he was about five years old. He didn’t know nothin’ but Indian.”

Saxon clapped her hands, and her eyes sparkled: “He’d been captured on an Indian raid!”

“That’s the way they figured it,” Billy nodded. “They recollected a wagon-train of Oregon settlers that’d been killed by the Modocs four years before. Roberts adopted him, and that’s why I don’t know his real name. But you can bank on it, he crossed the plains just the same.”

“So did my father,” Saxon said proudly.

“An’ my mother, too,” Billy added, pride touching his own voice. “Anyway, she came pretty close to crossin’ the plains, because she was born in a wagon on the River Platte on the way out.”

“My mother, too,” said Saxon. “She was eight years old, an’ she walked most of the way after the oxen began to give out.”

Billy thrust out his hand.

“Put her there, kid,” he said. “We’re just like old friends, what with the same kind of folks behind us.”

With shining eyes, Saxon extended her hand to his, and gravely they shook.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she murmured. “We’re both old American stock.”

To assume that London was employing irony here, that his intention was to underline the distance between Saxon and Billy’s actual situation and their illusions of superior lineage, would be to misread The Valley of the Moon. “Times have changed,” Saxon complains to Billy. “We crossed the plains and opened up this country, and now we’re losing even the chance to work for a living in it.” This strikes a chord in Billy, which resonates again when the two happen into a prosperous Portuguese settlement: “It looks like the free-born American ain’t got no room left in his own land,” Billy says to Saxon. A further thought from Billy: “It was our folks who made this country. Fought for it, opened it up, did everything—”

This truculence on the question of immigration was by no means an unfamiliar note in California, which by the time London wrote already had a tenacious history of vigilance committees and exclusionary legislation. “The fearful blindness of the early behavior of the Americans in California towards foreigners is something almost unintelligible,” Josiah Royce wrote in 1886 of the violence and lynchings to which “foreigners”—mainly Sonorans but also Chinese and native Digger Indians — had been subjected in the gold fields. Sixty-some years after Royce, Carey McWilliams, in California: The Great Exception , characterized the pervasive local hostility toward Asians as “a social and psychic necessity of the situation,” the “negative device” by which a state made up of newly arrived strangers had been able to achieve the illusion of a cohesive community joined against the menace of the foreign-born.