FRAGILE MEN CLUB? YOU’RE ALREADY SIGNED UP

Fragile men had no place in Western American history stories about the savage frontier and cruel hardships.

Nor in the early industrialization with mighty oil, steel, and railroad barons casting their deepening shadows across the land.

Writers found other virtues to extoll other than common frailties.

The western frontier needed stories of valor and sacrifice and solitude, not stories about momma’s boys.

And yet . . .

 I remember pulling off the road in North Carolina for an historical marker on a fence.

It signified a big battle on the ‘western frontier’ between local militia, whoever they may have been, and the local native tribe.

The results moved the national line further west. It was significant as hell in its time, and still important to history buffs and scholars, but where do we really see ‘The West?’

It used to be a state line, then a region, then the entire continent.

I’ve done a fair share on the question.

While this may sound obtuse at the moment, the western frontier was settled by fragile men unwilling or unable to find their place in .

This is what Britannica.com has to say:

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted that, “especially in the United States,” the term referred to that “belt of territory sparsely occupied by Indian traders, hunters, miners, ranchmen, backwoodsmen and adventurers of all sorts” which formed “the temporary boundary of an expanding society at the edge of substantially free lands.”

For three centuries, some Americans were leaving the older settlements and beginning over again on the frontier.

As a reality for some and as a symbol for others, the frontier became a vital factor in shaping American life and American character.

 

The reality is it took hard, strong, men to live out there on the frontier. I know because I’ve been camping in the rain and cold.

And the symbol of renewal never grows old; a fresh start in a new place brings hope alive.

Can’t you feel it?

 

The Fragile Pioneers

More from britannica.com:

 

First came the pioneer who lived “largely upon the natural growth of vegetation” and “the proceeds of hunting.”

He built a crude cabin, cleared a patch of ground by girdling the trees, and moved on when “his neighbors’ smoke vexed his eyes” and their voices disturbed his sleep.

The second wave of settlers bought those half-developed acres, cleared the roads, bridged the streams, built houses with glass windows, planted orchards, erected mills and schoolhouses, and, as Peck puts it, soon exhibited “the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life.”

The final wave was composed of “men with capital and enterprise.”

They built houses of brick and stone, increased the agricultural surplus well above immediate needs, and looked for wider markets in which to sell.

They were the permanent settlers who brought the communities to maturity and created the towns with their general stores, their newspapers, their professional classes, and their politicians. They soon made their influence felt in national affairs.

 

For them a practical, inventive quality in dealing with material things, an idealism that merges into an incurable belief in progress, and a conservative approach that is mixed with a willingness to try new things when the accepted fails were frontier traits that have become American traits.

With them has gone a rather unusual emphasis on the simple virtues of courage, loyalty, energy, and physical strength; a larger respect for women; and a rather marked indifference to things abstract.

European travelers, commenting on Americans and their ways, have stressed these things and found them more common to the West and the newer regions than to the East.

 

Don’t you love the way Britannica uses ‘European travelers’ as their source?

They’re off the hook.

 

Fragile Men Club

A line from Batman goes, ‘You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’

I feel villainous for calling anyone fragile, but let’s be honest: we are fragile.

No oxygen? Gone.

No heartbeat? Out of here.

No loving, caring, partner to share life with? Worse than no oxygen or heartbeat.

The early people on the first frontier, the leaders of the pack on wagon trains, were heroic in their drive for a better life.

My complaint about them is what they could have left home: their racist bent.

From the National Park Serivce:

 

White settlers did not want any Black people among them, whether free or enslaved.

In 1843, before Oregon became an American territory, recently arrived overlanders formed an extralegal “provisional” government that quickly moved to ban slavery and also barred the entry of Black persons to the Oregon Country.

This law also required slaveholders to free any enslaved people they had brought to Oregon, and it banished the recently freed individuals—who lacked the means to leave—from the country.

Any Black people who remained in Oregon would be publicly whipped, receiving 39 lashes every six months until they left the country. Oregonians soon amended the harsh “lash law” to impose forced labor, another form of slavery, instead of whipping.

Oregon’s lash law, although never enforced, did impact at least one African American emigrant family.

 

Times change and we learn more about heroes and find them cast in a different light, which isn’t a happy occasion for them.

One moment they’re basking in adulation for their accomplishments, the next they’re shamed for bringing their prejudice to the party.

Tune in for more tales of bitterness and regret on the way out.

 

Have I told you the one about fragile men, stolen valor, and the uniform in the closet? (Not my closet)