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Dave Says:
The Great Plains run from the north of Wyoming to the south of Texas, some 500 miles wide and 2000 miles long. The majestic and vast arid prairies and steppe were once home to over 30 million buffalo and were the legendary hunting grounds of the nomadic American Indians - they are the stuff of American legends. As we left the corn belt of Iowa, drove through the Badlands and crested the Black Hills of South Dakota the prospect of actually seeing the Great Plains with my own eyes became ever more real and ever more essential in understanding what it is to be American. For my whole life they were nothing more than a movie set or a Boys Own comic book strip, cowboys and Indians, good versus bad - pioneering Americans in a time and a place that never seemed real. As I grew older my understanding of this part of American history mirrored the shift in popular culture as fanciful soap operas such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza had to give way to the harsh realities of Dances With Wolves, Unforgiven and A Man Called Horse. The Great Plains serve as both the backdrop and stage to the greatest of the American morality plays, even greater than the Civil rights movement. As we looked over the last peak of the Black Hills, some 2000 feet below across this vastness of the American West, I realized that I was looking at the freedom promised by the Bill of Rights, freedoms granted, freedoms taken away and the freedoms we have today.

Freedom is a word the Americans love to say but I’m not sure that many people have stopped to think about what it truly means, where it came from and where it’s going. Spend twenty minutes looking at the Great Plains, the frontier of the American dream, and you are looking in a mirror that is reflecting back the ideals and scars of just 150 years ago. I can’t help but feel that freedom didn’t start on the east coast but it started here and not until the 1830’s - 50 years and 1500 miles from where the founding fathers first declared those truths to be self evident. The bones of this young country were still soft and it’s mind impressionable and the events that would occur in this stunning and pristine wilderness still reverberate today. The first white men to venture into the Plains after the Lewis and Clarke expedition were the mountain men. Men who made their living from fur trapping. Buffalo and beaver were in great demand back east and the mountain men were the first to experience true freedom in the new American West. They traded with the Indians and often ‘went native’, preferring the nomadic lifestyle to the restrictive social and legal etiquette of Victorian America. But this was to be a short lived utopia, nothing can stop American progress and soon settlers headed west to find their own slice of freedom. Yet the more freedom they found, the more they took away, not only from the native people but also from themselves. The settlers had to ‘own’ land so the more land owned the more fences were built, the more fences built the more trespassing occurred. Law and order had to be maintained so wherever the settlers went, the US Army was forced to follow. Along with the Army came private enterprise and along with that came the lawyers, politicians and all the east coast baggage everyone was trying to escape. There was no choice but to keep pushing westward and repeat the cycle. Pretty soon, the freedom they craved drowned in the Pacific and the illusion of freedom we carry today was in place. To give this a timeline and a sense of scale, consider that 30 million buffalo were hunted to extinction in less than 30 years and the first settlers arrived in what is now Wyoming in 1830 and by 1889 the territory of Washington became a state - within 60 years not only had settlers pushed forward other 1500 miles but the last corner of the continent was considered developed enough to be useful to the Union. Anything that stood in the way of progress was moved or destroyed.

One look over the Great Plains today and it easy to see this expansion. There may be 100 miles between small towns but every inch of land not protected as a national park is fenced and owned. And therein lies the embodiment of freedom we still use today. We may protect our freedom to own a gun, justifiable as self-defense, but what kind of freedom is there in a society when even the law admits the necessity to carry one? There is a guaranteed freedom of speech but only when it won’t upset anyone - $50,000 fine for any broadcaster caught transmitting the word “shit” (but “crap” is ok). The 1940 Smith Act (it is a crime to advocate or teach the desirability of overthrowing the United States Government, or to be a member of any organization which does the same) is still law and was last used in 2006 - not on a terrorist but a nurse working at the Department of Veteran Affairs, a branch of the government itself. It would be wrong to think that this is not a free country - we have the right to vote, the right to a fair trial and the right to pray (or not). These are the rights that the majority of people think of when they talk about the military preservation of freedoms in wars and conflicts. These are the rights a government would like to tell you is threatened by oil interests abroad or terrorists flying planes into buildings but those types of freedoms are not the ones disappearing. In fact, there are many freedoms that, in my opinion, are quite stupid yet the government is quite happy to let us choose our stance; take, as an example, the lack of a law in some states that mandate the wearing of motorcycle helmets. Generally speaking, it’s not the government that is curtailing our freedoms, it’s ourselves. Every time we enact rules to protect something we believe is rightfully ours such as a gated community, a ‘no parking’ sign or a notice that ‘restrooms are for customers only’, we take away just a little bit of our own freedom in the very same way the pioneers thought they were escaping the trappings of the east but ended up packing them lock, stock and barrel in their covered wagons as they moved westward, across the Great Plains and towards freedom.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 5:30 am and is filed under Global Travels, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.