TIME TRAVEL AT THE BOSTON RADIO RODEO
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
The bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne, “No Man Is an Island”
Exactly forty years ago this summer, a very famous advocate of a romantic version of the Western past, and a very unfamous advocate of a realistic version of the Western past, convened for a conversation at a Boston radio station.
Contrary to what would have been a reasonable prediction that the fur would fly, they got along famously.
The idea of bringing together the seasoned Western novelist Louis L’Amour with the just-finished-with-the-Ph.D. Western historian Patty Nelson Limerick was surely situated at the furthest edge of plausibility. But the idea fell well within the range of the imaginable for David Brudnoy, a gifted interviewer at WBZ Radio in Boston. In its characterization of Mr. Brudnoy, Wikipedia hits one of its high points for clarity: he “was known for espousing his libertarian views on a wide range of political issues, in a manner that was courteous.”
At this point, some readers are sure to be thinking, “Where is this David Brudnoy guy when we need him?” We’ll get back to that.
Even though Mr. Brudnoy introduced both of his guests with his characteristic courtesy, he could not fudge the fact that the difference in elevation, between our two reputations, resembled the grand scale of the West’s peaks and canyons. If I remember this accurately, Mr. L’Amour at that time had sold 130 million copies of his books. Since my publication record at that time consisted primarily of the obituaries I had written for the Riverside Press-Enterprise when I was a senior at Banning High School, Mr. Brudnoy’s introduction of me had to be a model of brevity, noting that I had recently received a Ph.D. from Yale and had just become an assistant professor of history at Harvard.
Those two career achievements were not going to win over the fans who had tuned in to hear their favorite author, Louis L’Amour.
To prepare for this rodeo, I had read three or four of Mr. L’Amour’s novels. Despite the fact that this was my maiden run in talk-show appearances with a celebrity, I was soon rocketing around the arena, challenging the factual accuracy of various assertions I had found in his books.
Very much in the manner of an older cat amused by the ridiculously ineffective pouncings executed by a kitten, Mr. L’Amour found my challenges far more entertaining than alarming. During one commercial break, he gave me an affable whack on the shoulder and said, “This is fun. Keep it up.”
So I kept it up.
The L’Amour devotees did not initially match their hero in affability. “Louis,” declared one fan, “I would like to know where to find that professor who keeps criticizing you.”
Mr. L’Amour forcefully told him to de-escalate and stand down.
After several rounds of disputing the chronology of Mormon settlements in the further reaches of Deseret, as well as the likelihood of silver manifesting itself in the form of nuggets in Nevada’s Comstock Lode, our contest between fact and fiction arrived at the overland trail.
I said that many of the Americans who followed those trails in the mid-nineteenth century were poorly prepared for the journey. A good share of them had never slept outdoors, and a significant number brought firearms they did not know how to use, putting themselves and others at risk of accidents.
Mr. L’Amour said that wasn’t true.
I said it was.
This set off an unhelpful episode in which I vigorously recited bibliographic references (e.g. John D. Unruh’s The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860, a book for which I would still like to offer, as we say now but did not say back then, a “shout-out”). As my fever for citations rose, Mr. L’Amour diverted us to an even more ridiculous dispute over which of us owned more books and thereby could claim greater authority as experts. Publishers of books in Western American history, we soon established, had a good thing going with both of us.
At last, Mr. L’Amour arranged for an intermission in our “fact-versus-fiction” rodeo by making an assertion that left me speechless.
“My books,” he declared, “are 100% accurate, except for the plot and the main characters.”
They had taught me a lot in graduate school, but they hadn’t taught me how to respond to that.
Now, in late May of 2020, as I reckon with the fate of the participants who figured in that WBZ Radio Rodeo, I am brought to a halt by another breakdown in my capacity to respond.
Our courteous libertarian radio host David Brudnoy died at age 64 from skin cancer that metastasized to his lungs and kidneys. John D.Unruh, the historian whose book on the overland trail I had cited, died at age 38 from a brain tumor, before his book could be published. Louis L’Amour died at age 80 from lung cancer. My husband Jeff Limerick, who accompanied me to that interview in 1980 and engaged in a lively chat with Mr. L’Amour in the waiting room and elevator, died at age 56 from a stroke.
To borrow from the Bible’s Book of Job: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
So I ask for your tolerance as I set out on an impossible trip in time travel.
Let’s imagine that Mr. L’Amour and I could mount up for one more ride at David Brudnoy’s radio rodeo. But now it’s the Spring of 2020 and a pandemic is on everyone’s mind.
This time, during a commercial break, I get to say to him, “Mr. L’Amour, when we’re back on air, let’s work together to do the right thing by those now-long-departed travelers on the overland trails. Let’s see if we can enlist them to bring a little perspective to bear on our troubled times.”
Mr. Brudnoy gets us launched: “Let’s have the two of you tell us about the risks emigrants faced on the overland trail.”
We start with cholera, the terrifying disease that came down hard on the emigrants just as their journey began. Sometimes it actually hit before their journey began while they outfitted for the trip in the “jumping-off towns” of the Missouri River Valley, where failures of sanitation set up perfect circumstances for a disease spread by fecal-to-oral transmission. Infection with cholera brought on a ruthless dysentery that killed with dehydration. This disease hit the westward movement with painfully ironic timing: the “germ theory,” the recognition of the role of bacteria and viruses in human affliction, had barely begun to emerge, and people of that time could only blame “miasma” for the illness.
“Disease,” the historian John D. Unruh concluded, “was far and away the number one killer” on the trail, “accounting for nearly nine of every ten deaths.” Historians’ “estimates of trail mortality have varied widely,” Unruh acknowledged. While some estimates ranged as high as 6 percent, he believed that “a 4 percent rate of trail mortality comports more closely with the available evidence.” Here is a historical perspective without much power to console: even with the novel coronavirus on the rampage, you are not in anywhere near as much danger of premature death as you would have been on the overland trail.
Deaths from disease among Indian people did not register in written records, but Dr. Unruh paid attention to them: “Most catastrophic were the severely contagious diseases spread among the Indian tribes by the emigrant passage.”
In this multi-front encounter with affliction, neither natives nor newcomers had the option of the denial of death. Quite the contrary: many of the emigrants who kept diaries and journals compulsively counted graves along the route.
To venture on the overland trail was to make a wager with death, to place a far-from-certain bet on the prospect that the traveler would survive—to acquire land in Oregon, to prosper in the community of Latter-day Saints in Utah, to find gold in California.
In 2020, wherever we direct our attention in the midst of the pandemic, we collide with an intractable question: how are we to devise strategies for the pursuit of economic well-being, while at the same time making a full reckoning with the risks of illness and death?
Since time travel has permitted me to hold an imagined discussion of the overland trail with Louis L’Amour, I see no reason to refrain from summoning a party or two of mid-nineteenth-century emigrants for a brief visit.
Let’s say that we tell these visitors, “Decades after your time on earth, we are trying to figure out how to pursue economic gain without jeopardizing human life.”
Taking that in, our visitors might well exchange knowing glances among themselves, shift their gaze back to us, and then say to us, “Welcome to our world.”
Does the history of the overland trail carry relevance for our time?
Probably more relevance than we would like. Certainly, more relevance than either Louis L’Amour or I could possibly have foreseen when we met in 1980.
Perfectly suited for Americans to contemplate today, a story recorded by Alonzo Delano, a participant in the Gold Rush in 1849, sheds a merciless light on our trade-offs.
Thomas Waddington, a member of Delano’s party, had barely set out on the trail when he fell ill of cholera. He died on the morning of the day after he was stricken. His traveling companions dug his grave and held a brief service for him.
“How little we foresee our own destiny!” Alonzo Delano wrote. “Instead of turning up the golden sands of the Sacramento [River], the spade of the adventurer was first used to bury the remains of a companion.”
Does it make an ounce of sense to grieve for a person who would now be long dead, whatever his age when he perished?
Even though some may wonder if social distancing has me left me seriously off-balance, reading Alonzo Delano’s words has always made me mourn for Thomas Waddington. Though he was buried beyond the reach of church bell towers, the bell for him has never stopped tolling.
How little we foresee our own destiny!
We are nowhere near the end of this particular trail.
