Such is the peripatetic style of my reading that some time ago I happened upon a series of books published from the late 1940s until the early 1970s called "The American Trail Series." These are not "academic" books. They're casual histories of the routes that criss-crossed America--from the earliest Post Road from New York to Boston, to the Oregon Trail, to the fur trapping routes throughout Canada and the Great Lakes.
Such books, I'd say, were the product of a different America, a more literate world where we inculcated ourselves with the myths (good and bad) that contributed to our collective belief in American exceptionalism. These were stories that bound us together as a nation. That gave us something to believe in. They're flawed, of course. What isn't? But they beat the alternative.
These books are not, so far as I can tell, available in electronic versions. So I ordered a few in hard cover. You can pick them up on abebooks.com for less than the price of a Starbucks coffee.
I've gotten out of the habit of reading ink on paper, but prior to our week away from the ardour of running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I grabbed the book shown above, figuring it would teach me something of the history of where my wife and I are holed up for the week, the booming desert city of Tucson, Arizona. Tucson was part of the Gadsden Purchase--an extortion of almost 30,000 square miles tract of land that we took from Mexico, after defeating that poor nation, in the 1845 war of imperial conquest, for a mere $10 million.
By 1861 or so, the rectangles above formed something called the Arizona Confederacy, aligning themselves with the one-percent of the southern population who owned 99-percent of the slaves and tried to fight to uphold an economic hegemony that supported the primacy of that one-percent. We are still fighting those battles today. Yes, a majority of the nation sacrifices to give succor and their tax dollars to the one-percent. We call that normal.
But, I pray, like today, blue troops from California defeated the retrograde forces of the Arizona Confederacy and the territory remained non-slaveholding. New Mexico became the 47th US State on January 6, 1912. Arizona became a state five weeks later on Valentine's Day in 1912.
BTW, most of what is amerika today (I am switching here to my trump-era spelling) was Spanish or Mexican or Apache or Tucamora or Toltec longer than it was "ours." Perhaps the only construct less sensible than race is the construct of borders. Like race is imposed on our species--to better control it, borders are imposed on our planet--to better divide us.
These areas, of course, were unknown to most of the United States, only becoming of interest after gold was discovered on the American River in California. Then came the trick. How do you leave Hartford, Connecticut, or Peoria, Illinois, or even Galveston, Texas, and make your way to the gold fields of California.
Gold fever had struck America.
What makes this interesting to me is the similarity of its effects to the fever that afflicting so many today: AI Fever.
Like what happened when it was said nuggets of gold were yours for the plucking, common-sense simply vanished. Why stick to your knitting when, it was said, a "lazy person could make $70 a day just by bending over."
The mania then is like the mania now.
People were willing to give up all they had for the prospect of untold Midas-like riches that were theirs for the stooping.
Logic flew out the window. Even the daunting task of getting to California rapidly shifted from almost certain death to little more than a walk in the park.
None of the three paths to California was enough to stop the torrent of those emigrants risking life and limb.
Path One, the one I'd have probably taken was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and its notorious deathly turbulence, then 5000 miles up the coast to San Francisco. This was the longest and the most expensive route. The gold might be gone by the time you arrived.
Path Two. You'd sail down the central American Isthmus to what was then Nicaragua and what is now Panama. Then trek 70 miles across from the Caribbean to the Pacific. Then hope to find a ship to sail up the coast to San Francisco. Death came easy across the Isthmus--if the mosquitos didn't kill you, something else would would.
Path Three, was the most popular. Start at Corpus Christi, or Brownsville, Texas, or Vera Cruz or Tampico, Mexico and hoof it across jungle, deserts, mountain ranges, hostile Apacheria, and Ladrones, bandits who would kill you for your boots. In all, a 1500 mile trek under conditions I couldn't endure for a mile and a half.
But such was the lust for the AI of the day: Gold.
That people went. People died. People came back poorer than they left.
I suspect, if amerika is around to write a history of the AI gold rush 175 years after this chapter closes, the similarities to the California gold rush of 1849 or so will become more and more obvious. A few, yes, will get terrifyingly wealthy. A few will invent the binary equivalent of blue jeans. But most will suffer and have little to show but calloused hands and calloused hearts and calloused souls.
I'd bet on that.
Before I'd bet on the gold fields of AI.
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