Storming the Gates of Paradise Read Online Free PDF

testament of manhood and authenticity, seems to have been the literary construct of a teenage girl who had stayed in the East.
    Fremont’s first expedition, the expedition of 1842, reached its climax with the ascent of what he called Fremont Peak in the Rockies. On Fremont Peak, he saw a bumblebee: “It was a strange place, the icy rock and the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains, for a lover of warm sunshine and flowers, and we pleased ourselves with the idea that he was the first of his species to cross the mountain barrier, a solitary pioneer to foretell the advance of civilization.” The mountain and the bumblebee are both reinvented as portraits of the hero, a billion years of geology undone so that the man precedes the mountains; this utterly new place is only a mirror, and, layers upon layers, the man himself may be a fiction made up by a woman. It is clear the West is being invented, not even discovered, let alone encountered. As a text in which one finds in the landscape symbols and signs of oneself, Fremont’s bumblebee incident has a place in symbolist literature; as documentary, it’s more problematic. For the brave bee who is the author’s double in this fiction of authenticity, literature, not life, is the ultimate destination: Fremont pays it fitting tribute by squishing it between the pages of a large book he happened to have with him.
    One could wish that the West he concocted had been worthy of a greater philosopher—but Fremont was carrying out Baudrillard’s agendas: “Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory— PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA —it is the map that engenders the territory. . . . Simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’ ” (The other West—the West of Native Americans as inhabitants rather than invaders, of an economy dependent on massive federal handouts rather than rugged individualism, of women and variousothers disqualified from cowboyhood, of a colossal military infrastructure in which further expansionism is rehearsed—has seldom appeared since, except in recent revisionist Western histories and photographs.)
    It was this report and the military actions that followed that Americanized the Mexican West, opened up the land for mining, cattle grazing, military training, the crime and punishment industries, boasting, and forgetting—the characteristic activities of the American West. Before the Fremonts made the place literature, what lay beyond the Mississippi was little known to Yankees. Nobody was interviewing the Indians, and the trappers who knew it well were largely illiterate outsiders too; one of these illiterates, the Indian slayer Kit Carson, became Fremont’s principal guide and was rewritten, by Jessie Fremont among others, into a national hero. Fremont and Carson have towns, streets, mountains, and rivers named after them. They became both the landscape they explored and the developments that effaced it (and in their wake came John Wayne Airport and Roy Rogers State Park). This opportunity to invent oneself, to enter into the new America as a fiction is what the West offered, and what its rootless amnesiac open spaces and society offer still: the self-made man as an artistic rather than merely economic possibility.
    Such frontier heroes as Fremont and Carson were adored for their authenticity, for the physical courage and stamina that made their involvement in the blood-drenched exploration of the West possible, and for their encounters with the grit of real mountains and real prairies. Yet the details of their adventures and their characters were often fabricated. For the inhabitants of the Wild West they founded, there seems to have been no clear border between the world and its highly embroidered representation. Buffalo Bill (William Cody) and Wild Bill Hickok (James Butler Hickok), respectively a scout and buffalo hunter and a gunman and lawman, had been the subjects of laudatory