Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 31

 31.

The Development of No Man's Land

"Before I die, I'd like one time to go through it after all!" The old Tennessee farmer pointed with his chin to the great forests.

Endlessly they stretched across the mountains to the horizon. The meadows and fields of the farms were like a small lost clearing carved into the immensity of the virgin forest. Before I had come here to the Great Smoky Mountains, I would not have believed that there could still be this ocean of trees in the United States.

"There are still bears in there, panthers," the white-haired man continued, "trees that nobody knows about, and medicinal plants, wonderful medicinal plants, but nobody has ever come all the way through there, not a paleface or a redskin."

I felt as if the old man was talking out of his mind, as if he were conjuring up an America of the Leatherstockings that had long since sunk. But he was not deterred: "It will take at least eight days, it can also be fourteen; maybe you won't get through at all, but I want to try it once!"

As we drove in the car from Asheville to Knoxville over the Smokies on the new highway, I saw that the farmer was right. In the Smokies, the southernmost chain of the Alleghenies, a bit of the Wild West still remains. Like Ariadne's thread, the paved road leads through the wilderness. On both sides of the road it brushes the car, ancient trees, balsam firs, mosses, ferns, lichens and rhododendron bushes, a flowering wall of rhododendron, but all overgrown, matted, a dense tangle. An eerie feeling creeps up on you at the thought of having to search for your way here on foot, having to fight your way through the thicket every step of the way.

Driving through the Smokies, the "Smoky Mountains," so named for the mists weaving around their peaks, one understands what a barely surmountable barrier the Alleghenies formed for the thirteen colonies for so long. At the same time, one understands what a constant lure the endless silent forests have been to all adventurous natures. "Before I die, I'd like to get through there once!" some of the frontiersmen may have thought.

Many Germans were among them. One of the first to cross over the beckoning mysterious mountains, Daniel Boone, was probably of German blood. His family name may have originally been Bohne. In any case, he came from a purely German area of Pennsylvania, and it is unquestionably established that he spoke fluent Pennsylvania Dutch.

But even if the German descent of this first and most famous of the pioneers is not unquestionably established, it is vouched for by many others. The Germans not only sat on the frontier, they also had the right frontier spirit. No one less than George Washington is a witness to this.

The latter had been assigned large tracts of land as a reward for his services in the French and Indian Wars, but they lay beyond the forest mountains in no man's land, and he had to conquer them first, so to speak. He thought to do this with the help of Palatines and planned to send an agent to Germany to recruit settlers. At that time, this may have been similar to the conditions I experienced in Bolivia after the World War. During my stay in La Paz, one of the big landowners invited me to his house and told me that he had a huge property that would be perfect for German settlement. I should ride out and have a look at it. When I happily agreed and asked him if he could take the land, he replied that unfortunately he could not. The Indians, who were sitting on his land, would not let him in. If he dared to show himself, they would surely shoot him down, but they would hardly do anything to me as a stranger. When I asked him how the Indians would deal with the German colonists, he said that they had just come out of the world war, so it would be a small matter for them to deal with the Indians.

Washington may have thought something like that about the Palatines and his possessions in no man's land. But then the War of Independence broke out, and he had other things to do.

The conclusion of peace awarded the young United States all the land up to the Mississippi, and this legal claim gave a powerful spur to the westward migration. It was enticing enough in other respects; for whoever built a log cabin in the new country and brought only one crop, however small, into the barn, was allotted four hundred acres, with a right of first refusal to another thousand. In many cases, ownership was still simple. The so-called tomahawk right still applied. Whoever cut the trees with an axe and carved his mark on the trunks owned the land. Of course, a price had to be paid, even if not in money; it meant unspeakable toil, privation, boundless loneliness and constant danger to life. Nevertheless, enough men and women were found who were willing to pay it, and it was they who left their mark on America for a long time.

To those who know the Americans of today with their extraordinary fastidiousness, who can no longer imagine a life without central heating, electric light, refrigerator, car and radio, it seems inconceivable that the pioneer days were only a hundred and fifty, a hundred, in some cases barely fifty years ago.

The pioneers are the second founders of America. The Puritans, the Virginian colonists, the Quakers, and the Palatines founded colonial America; the pioneers founded continental America. Since the conditions of life were the same for all of them, equally unrelentingly harsh, equally dangerous, they laid a much more uniform foundation than the colonists of the coast. Although they were of different tribes, English, Scotch, Irish, and German blood, although they were spread over so vast a space, and although a broad stream of objection ran after them, yet they had erected so firm a framework of what was to be considered American that all who came later were guided by it, down to the present day, when the American idea has fallen into a grave crisis.

American democracy was then created in the West, taking the place of the aristocracy of the coast. Men in the wilderness, each of whom is on his own, can be nothing but democrats. In small manageable circumstances, in communities of a few hundred, in states of several thousand heads, where everyone knows everyone else, democracy in its all original sense is still possible.

In those days new states were founded almost every year, carved out of wilderness and prairie, as it were. Where six thousand men were together, they had the right to be admitted to the Union as one new state. By 1820 there were eight such new states, containing no less than half the entire population of the Union. It was clear that these hard-bitten backwoodsmen, not letting the rifle out of their hands, gave themselves a somewhat clunky constitution and did not give their governor and officers too many rights.

Here in the West was freedom; for the people were willing to pay the price of freedom, which is always the price of life, and beyond that hardship, privation, and loneliness. This concept of freedom was taken up by the German immigrants who had escaped as emigrants and political refugees from the Europe of the Holy Alliance and the Germany of Restoration and Reaction (reactionary politics), the Burschenschafter (student fraternities), the Turner, and the Forty-Eighters. 

From the West, this spirit of unbridled freedom and distrust of all authority spilled over into the East, overthrowing the aristocratic landowners, the so-called "Virginian" dynasty, and helping Jacksonian democracy to victory. In the confusing conditions of the great cities of the East and the intricate money economy, however, the simple forms of Wild West democracy were less appropriate. Here they led to the unfortunate notion, which still dominates political life in the United States today, that what matters is not so much expertise as party affiliation. Out of this attitude came the disastrous system whereby the winner takes the bump, which allows almost the entire civil service to change after each election and distributes the posts among party affiliates. The result was the replacement of the Virginian aristocracy by the New York plutocracy.

But since the country was boundless, since the "frontier" was shifting ever westward, since every spirit of adventure, every unbridled desire for freedom could run riot, so it all did not matter, so the mass of the population did not feel the noose thrown around them by the unscrupulous owners of the moneybags.

"Westward ho!" resounded the cry. It meant freedom and boundlessness. In narrow Germany, beset by reaction, men thirsting for freedom heard it. They poured across the Atlantic en masse.