They had adventure but we do not, certainly not in our push-button, app-driven lives of endless electronics, software, and now AI, which tells us everything to think so that we don’t have to. We see adventure on screens but don’t participate in it. We watch it but don’t create it. We admire it from afar but work hard to keep it at bay so that it never really touches us.
I often think about my great-great-great-grandfather, son of a Massachusetts Congregationalist minister, who at the age of 18 in 1830 happened upon a flyer advertising freedom and adventure in Texas. For whatever reason, he left. I don’t know why. It seems crazy because he had every privilege. He seemed to want something else, perhaps to make it on his own.
He made a stop in New Orleans and met with an uncle who gave him tools, horses, and a covered wagon, which he took to East Texas and started farming. He didn’t like it and sold it all and made it to Southwest Texas to learn blacksmithing as an apprentice. He later set up his own shop.
He participated in the war for independence from Mexico and then enjoyed a brief period as a Texas Ranger in the Republic before it became a state. Having married, he had a son who found himself embroiled in the Civil War, not fighting Yankees but going West to settle more lands. He was a medic because he had tools, not because he had medical skills.
Strange times.
No need to tell the whole story, which is quite dramatic, but if you have ever been to the Big Bend, you know the terrain. There seems to be no water. It is scary and threatening. It is hot, dusty, and dry, seemingly gentle on the beautiful surface but angry just beneath. Why did he not just turn around and go home?
It’s hard to say, but this much is clear: that generation was made of sterner stuff. And there were many thousands just like him, spreading out from New England in all directions. They cleared land. They planted crops. They figured out the water situation. They felled trees and homes. They started businesses. They struggled daily to survive and work their way toward the ability to thrive.
That experience is still visible in our culture, but the rationale is gone.
Do you know the wonderful books “Little House on the Prairie”? I hope so. They tell the story but don’t neglect “Farmer Boy” and the books by the author’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. What a writer and what a visionary!
The subject matter should be understood by every American kid and owned by every American family. Our pioneer history shaped this country and its love of freedom and its passion for the new and the possible.
We are no longer pioneers. You could say that we still invent things. We still start businesses and embark on innovations. But we do not venture into wholly unchartered territory and plant our own flag to make a new life for ourselves.
Elon Musk tries to revive all this with his talk about colonizing Mars. I admit that this just does not inspire me. First, it is not going to happen. Second, why would we want it to happen? Third, this just sounds like a big lame excuse for abandoning the job we have to do right here. It seems odd to me to say “Make America Great Again,” but if we fail, we can all move to Mars.
Just a few choice quotes from Sloane on this whole subject.
“Adventure is not outside a man, but within.”
“Without adventure, civilization is automatically in the process of decay.”
“Each scientific advance makes life simpler but duller, without adventure.”
There is truth in all this, and this chapter ends without a solution. Perhaps that is how it must be. In the end, if we are to be pioneers again, we have to figure it out one life at a time.
The French word entrepreneurship captures a way to achieve this in the commercial sphere. It means to start something new, take responsibility for the product and accounting and hiring. It is the hardest job you will ever have. Most people fail, of course, and you might as well.
Why do Americans keep starting businesses then? I’ve always thought about that. After 2020, when so many were closed by force, I wondered if there would ever be another new business in this country again. And yet, once the crisis was over, they popped up again, and people gladly forgot about what happened.
That’s amazing. It’s like Americans refuse to be demoralized. We keep believing no matter what. We want to have good lives, and we believe that this is the country to do it in. That’s the spirit of pioneering. It is not lost. It has just ebbed and flowed.
When Sloane was writing in 1973, there must have been a feeling of despair in the culture. The economy was awful. Politics was corrupt. Cities had been wrecked. There was this generation gap that tore apart families. I’m not sure things seemed hopeful.
And yet the Bicentennial came and went and life got better. Then worse. Then better. And so on. But it seems like no depths have ever really defeated this country. Even in the darkest days of lockdown and all that followed, the spirit was still there. The spirit of adventure, the romance of the pioneer, is still within us.
It can be fully unleashed again. One hopes that is where we are headed again. In which case, we can be newly inspired by our past as a culture and a country. From sea to shining sea, this country was built in a very short time by human hands inspired by the desire to be great at whatever the cost.
The music still rings out in our imaginations and can again in our lives.
