The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in a Modern World (House of Anansi, Toronto, 2009)
Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world’s indigenous cultures. In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true Lost Civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the Earth really is alive, while in the far reaches of Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rainforest nomads struggle to survive.
Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. Of the world’s 7000 languages, fully half may disappear within our lifetimes. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination that is the human legacy. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time.
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest (Knopf, New York 2011)
If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. Four as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.
In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: ‘The price of life is death.’ Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but ‘a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day.’ As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive. For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.
One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rainforest, (Simon & Schuster 1996) and The Lost Amazon, (Chronicle Books, 2004)
This lecture, illustrated by archival footage and photographs, follows the life and adventures, the tragedies and discoveries of Richard Evans Schultes, the greatest Amazonian plant explorer of the 20th century. In 1941, having studied the peyote cult of the Kiowa and journeyed into the mountains of Oaxaca to solve the mystery of teonanacatland ololiuqui, the long lost sacred hallucinogens of the Aztec, Richard Evans Schultes took a leave of absence from Harvard and disappeared into the Northwest Amazon. Twelve years later he returned from South America having gone places no white man had ever been, mapping uncharted rivers and living among two dozen Indian tribes while collecting 25,000 botanical specimens, including 300 species new to science and over 2000 plants used as medicines, poisons and hallucinogens by the Indians. Author of 10 books and over 496 scientific articles, he has been called by HRH Prince Philip” The Father of Ethnobotany”. The world authority on hallucinogenic plants and rubber, Director Emeritus of the Harvard Botanical Museum, recipient of numerous awards including the Cross of Boyacá, Colombia’s highest decoration, he is a living link to the great natural historians of the 19th century and to a distant era when the rainforests stood immense, inviolable, a green mantle stretching across an entire continent.
This lecture, based on the book, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, is an eloquent and vivid account of Schultes’ explorations, a celebration of the perseverance and wisdom of Indian peoples, and a lament for the terrible rate of destruction of landscape, culture and spirit that time has wrought throughout the Americas.
The Serpent and the Rainbow: An Exploration of Haitian Vodoun, Secret Societies and Zombies (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster 1997)
According to popular Haitian belief, zombies are the living dead, individuals raised in a trance from their graves by malevolent sorcerers and led away to face a life of terror and uncertainty. In early 1982 a team of prominent physicians and psychiatrists approached the Harvard Botanical Museum with an astonishing report of the discovery of the first medically documented case of zombification. Professor Richard Evans Schultes, then Director of the Museum, assigned Wade Davis the task of traveling to Haiti to search for the formula of the folk preparation reputedly employed by Vodoun sorcerers to induce a state of apparent death so profound that victims could actually be misdiagnosed as dead. This lecture recounts the discovery of that toxin- a powder containing an extremely potent nerve poison 160,000 times stronger than cocaine, which drastically reduces metabolism and brings on total peripheral paralysis, even though consciousness is retained.
In searching for the poison, Davis was propelled into a world beyond his imaginings, a world of spirit possession and animal sacrifice, of sorcerers and priests, secret societies and Tonton Macoute, the dreaded militia of the Duvalier regime. Davis discovered that zombification is but one thread woven through the fabric of an extraordinarily rich culture.
He came to realize that the Vodoun religion itself is not a black magic cult but, on the contrary, a complex metaphysical worldview that is but the distillation of profound religious ideas that have their origins in the ancient civilizations of West Africa. In becoming the first outsider ever to have been initiated into the Bizango secret societies, he was able to meet actual zombies, study their past, and explore the reasons for their demise. Based on unprecedented access to the inner workings of these societies, he concluded that zombification as both a magical and physical phenomenon is a form of social sanction, a form of punishment for individuals who transgress the established codes of the traditional society. In providing a material basis and sociological rationale for zombification, this presentation attempts to demystify one of the most misunderstood and exploited of folk beliefs, one that has been used unjustly to denigrate an entire people and their remarkable religion.
This study became the basis of his dissertation research atHarvard and led to his writing two books, Passage of Darkness and The Serpent and the
Rainbow, an international bestseller that appeared in twelve languages and was later made into a feature film by Universal Studios.
The Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass (Greystone Books, Toronto 2011)
In a rugged knot of mountains in northern British Columbia lies a spectacular valley known to the First Nations as the Sacred Headwaters. There, three of Canada’smost important salmon rivers- the Stikine, Skeena and Nass- are born in remarkably close proximity. Now against the wishes of all First Nations, the British Columbia government has opened the Sacred Headwaters to industrial development. Fortune Minerals proposes a coal operation that would level mountains. Imperial Metals is moving ahead with an open pit copper and gold mine on Todagin Mountain, home to the largest population of Stone sheep in the world; tailings from the Red Chris mine will bury Black lake and leach into the headwaters of the Iskut River, the main tributary of the Stikine. For years Royal Dutch Shell sought to extract coal bed methane gas across a tenure of close to a million acres, which would have implied a network of roads and pipelines and thousands of wells places across the entire valley of the Sacred Headwaters.
For ten years Tahltan men women and children, along with local non native trappers, guides, and writers have stood up for the land, and in a remarkable grassroots victory in 2012, Shell Canada withdrew from the valley. The struggle continues, and will continue until the entire Sacred Headwaters is protected. The resounding message of the people is that no amount of gold, copper or coal can compensate for the sacrifice of a place that could be the Sacred Headwaters of all North Americans and indeed all peoples of the world.
River Notes: A Natural and Human History of the Colorado (Island Press, Washington, 2013)
Plugged by no fewer than twenty-five dams, the Colorado River is the world’s most regulated river drainage. It provides most of the water supply of Las Vegas, Tucson, and San Diego, and much of the power and water of Los Angeles and Phoenix. If the river stopped flowing, we would likely have to abandon many of the largest cities in the West. The Colorado is indeed a river of life, which makes it all the more tragic that by the time it approaches the sea, it has been reduced to a toxic trickle, its delta dry and deserted.
In a blend of history, science and personal observation based on his experience as a white water guide and leading character in the 3D IMAX production Grand Canyon Adventure, Wade Davis tells the story of the American Nile, its geology and ethnography, the early explorations of John Wesley Powell, the critical role of the Mormon Church, the stunning engineering achievement of Hoover Dam and all the complex decisions that ultimately transformed the river, leaving it but a shadow in the sand as it reaches the sea.
The plight of the Colorado is a story of folly and loss, but also of immense hope, for we have it readily within our power to restore the river and its delta to life. Public perceptions aside, the water crisis in the Southwest is not due to people wanting golf courses in Phoenix, fountains in Vegas, swimming pools in San Diego. All such domestic uses amount to a minor percentage of the water diverted from the river, perhaps 630,000 acre-feet a year. The water crisis in truth is due to one single factor- cows eating alfalfa in a landscape where neither belongs. The 250 million acres of land allocated by the Bureau of Land Management for cattle grazing yield less than ten percent of the national beef production. This supports a way of life rich in nostalgia, but hopelessly inefficient in terms of productivity and water consumption. The delta of the river, verdant in the lifetime of my father, could be restored with the amount of water that now goes to support a third of one percent of the nation’s beef production.
The Healing Forest: The Ethnobotanical Search for New Medicines
Between 25 and 40 percent of all modern drugs are derived from plants, and a majority of these were first used as medicines or poisons in a folk context. The gift of the shaman and the curandero, the herbalist and the witch include such basic pharmaceuticals as cocaine and morphine, digitalis and curarine, aspirin and quinine. With both the tropical rainforests and the indigenous peoples being destroyed at a horrendous rate, ethnobotanists are now engaged in a final race to discover the medical secrets of the plants before they are lost forever.
For three years Wade Davis traveled in the Andes and Northwest Amazon, living among a dozen or more tribes as he searched for new sources of medicine for the modern world. Journeys by jeep, mule, dugout, river raft and on foot led him to a dozen or more indigenous groups including the Ika, Kamsa, Barasana, Cubeo, Tukano and Paez of Colombia, the Kuna and Choco of Panama, the Kofan, Shuar and Waorani of Ecuador, the Bora, Witoto and highland Quechua of Peru and the Chimane and Aymara of Bolivia. Major areas of research included coca, the sacred leaf of the Inca and the notorious source of cocaine, the San Pedro Cactus healing cults of northern Peru, the arrow and dart poisons of the Jaguar shaman of the Waorani of eastern Ecuador, and the hallucinogenic plants of the Northwest Amazon. In the course of these travels, the Andean Cordillera was traversed at fourteen points and the Amazon descended from its source on the upper Apurimac in Peru to its mouth at Belem, Brazil. Alone or with botanical colleagues, Davis made some 6000 botanical collections which have since been distributed to herbaria throughout the world. In this lecture Davis both reviews the results of his expeditions and outlines the hopes and expectations of the ongoing program of ethnobotanical exploration that today seeks from the forests new treatments for cancer, A.I.D.S. and a host of afflictions that affect the well being of all human societies.
The Art of Shamanic Healing
Shamanic medicine is based on a thoroughly non-Western conception of the etiology of disease in which health is defined as a coherent state of equilibrium between the physical and spiritual components of the individual. As a result, shamanic medicine acts on two quite different levels. There is an entire range of relatively minor ailments that are treated symptomatically much as in our society, only with medicinal plants and folk preparations, many of which are pharmacologically active. Much more serious, however, are the troubles that arise when the harmony of the patient’s spiritual being is broken. In this case it is the source of the disorder, not its particular manifestation, that must be treated and the shaman must sail away on the wings of trance to a spiritual realm to work his deed of mystical rescue. Because disharmony will affect all aspects of an individual’s life, problems brought to the shaman include both psychological and physical ailments, as well as other troubles such as chronic bad luck, financial problems or marital distress. Each case is treated as unique. As a form of treatment, shamanic medicine does not ignore the existence of pathogens; it simply comments that the pathogens are present in the environment at all times and asks why certain individuals succumb when they do.
This lecture discusses selected traditional healing practices of Haiti, North Africa, Borneo, Northwest Amazon and Andean Peru. The role of the shaman and the character of his or her calling is examined, and it is stressed that the shaman’s success depends on the dynamic interplay of healer and patient who share a closed web of belief in which the mystical concepts that mediate the therapy enter the very texture of collective thought and have, for the believers, an absolute and exclusive validity. Dramatic examples of mind/ body interactions are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and literature. Phenomena such as spirit possession, fire walking and Voodoo illness and death are viewed within the established framework of psychosomatic theory, which maintains that the psychological and biological components of the individual are but two parts of the whole. Implications for modern medicine are presented. It is argued that scientific knowledge of human biology does not automatically translate into medical practice. For all peoples health and healing remain rooted in deep mysteries and for both shaman and physician eliciting wellbeing is as much an art as it is a science.
White Blood of the Forest: The Untold Story of Modern Rubber (cc Fortune Magazine, August 4, 1997)
Rubber is and has always been a vital raw material of industrial society. It comes from a tree native to the Amazon, but because of a fungal disease endemic to South America, it has never been possible to grow rubber successfully in plantations in the New World. Ninety-five percent of the world’s natural rubber supply comes from Southeast Asia where rubber plantations cover 19 million acres of land. It is known that these clones, derived from just a handful of seeds taken from Brazil by the British in 1877, are especially susceptible to the South American leaf blight. The leaf blight is not present in the Far East, and by an accident of biology it has to date never been accidentally or deliberately introduced. If it were, the rubber industry would collapse in a matter of months. Every car in America runs on tires that are at least 35% natural rubber. Every plane lands on tires that are 100% natural rubber. There is no known substitute, no product that can match natural rubber’s resilience and tensile strength, resistance to abrasion and impact, and capacity to absorb impact without generating heat.
The rubber crisis of 1942, when the Japanese seized the plantations and the USA found itself with only a six month supply of rubber, nearly cost the Americans the war. In every Sherman tank were twenty tons of steel and half a ton of rubber. Every battleship sunk at Pearl Harbor had 20,000 rubber parts. Natural rubber insulated every mile of wiring in every civilian and military installation in the country.
In response to the wartime emergency the government set in motion three initiatives. First, every effort was made to secure rubber on the international market and set in place conservation measures at home. The speed limit fell to 35 mph not to conserve gas, but to limit wear on tires. In 1943, in the most extensive recycling effort in history, used rubber could be turned at any one of 400,000 depots. Even Roosevelt’s dog Fala gave up his rubber bones! Recycled rubber got the nation through 1943. Second, the order went out to create from nothing a synthetic industry. This challenge, upon which the fate of the war and thus the fate of civilization depended, represented the greatest technical achievement of the Allied cause. Strategically it was far more important than the Manhattan Project. By 1944 America had managed to produce nearly a million tons of serviceable synthetic rubber, a product that as late as 1941 had barely entered the development stage.
The third initiative, and the one central to this story, was the desperate attempt to secure natural rubber from any conceivable source. Russian dandelions were planted in forty-one states. The USDA dispatched rubber explorers to every corner of the free world. Richard Evans Schultes was sent into the heart of the Amazon, the place of origin of the rubber tree, with the goal not only of securing raw supplies of latex, but with a far greater challenge. It was his task to find a way to grow rubber in the Americas, with the hope that the nation would never again be in a position to be blackmailed by a foreign power taking control of the Eastern plantations.
It was not as if we had not known about the risk. Throughout the early decades of the century, captains of industry had attempted to break the Asian monopoly. Thomas Edison spent his fortune trying to establish goldenrod in the southeastern states. Henry Ford spent over $20 million trying to build rubber plantations in the Brazilian Amazon. His agronomists planted millions of rubber trees, only to watch helplessly as the blight ran like wildfire through the plantings. Out of this disaster, however, came hope. Among the millions of trees, there were a few that showed resistance to the blight. This suggested the possibility that plant explorers might be able to find in nature rare individual trees that both yielded copious amounts of latex, and had natural immunity to the disease. It was to find these trees, a quixotic quest not unlike searching for a needle in a haystack, that Schultes and his small band of explorers were flung into the most remote reaches of the Amazon. At tremendous cost of lives and treasure, these men did the impossible. By 1945 they had not only located such trees, they had introduced them into cultivation at a remarkable experimental station in Costa Rica. By war’s end horticultural breakthroughs had solved all the technical problems related to establishing high yielding, disease resistant plantations at home in the Americas.
Then in 1952 the program was taken over by the State Department. The order went out that rubber was not for Latin America and the rubber research program was shut down. The clonal gardens which preserved invaluable germ plasm of an entire continent were abandoned, and in time allowed to be cut to the ground.
Recently declassified documents in the US National Archives reveal the process by which the decision was made to destroy the rubber effort. What emerges is less evidence of a conspiracy that an egregious example of bureaucratic idiocy and folly. That together with a blind faith in the future of synthetic rubber. The synthetic industry had been enormously successful, and most assumed that in time it would reduce the rubber plantations to a footnote of history. There were also more votes in Texas and Louisiana, where the new petrochemical industry was based, than in Costa Rica and Colombia.
As it turned out, the technical improvements in synthetic rubber peaked out by the early 1950s, and two unexpected developments since then have left us more dependent on natural rubber than ever before. First came the widespread adoption around 1970 of the radial tire, which requires for strength natural rubber in the sidewall. Second was the rise of the airline industry. Only natural rubber is able to withstand the sudden transition from sub-zero temperatures of high altitude to the heat and friction of impact. So the bottom line is this. Not only did synthetic rubber fail to displace natural rubber, we now find ourselves more dependent on the fate of distant plantations than ever before.
In destroying Schultes’s work of a decade, along with that of so many other brave explorers attached to the rubber program, long forgotten officials at the US State Department left us a disturbing legacy. In the words of one of Schultes’s colleagues, ” a sword of Damocles hangs over the industrial world. We’ve created a scenario whereby a deliberate act of biological terrorism so simple it could be perpetrated by your grandmother could precipitate an economic crisis of unprecedented dimensions. And no one even knows about it. What’s worse, it all could have been avoided.”
It is only by chance and an accident of biology that the disease has yet to infect the plantations of Southeast Asia. But as one of the old rubber men told me, every disease eventually gets everywhere. When it reaches Southeast Asia, by accident or through deliberate intent, we will all wish that more than forty years ago Schultes’s dream of American rubber plantations had not been betrayed by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.
The Promised Land: The Buried History of the Holy Land
The conflict between Palestinian and Israeli is not about religion. Indeed, there are any number of shared ritual practices indicative of the common origins of Islam and Judaism. The battle that has raged in the Middle East for nearly a century is all about land, memory, and the power to control history. As much as a conflict between peoples, it is a clash between two completely distinct historical narratives.
Americans often ask why the Palestinians remain so belligerent, standing in the way of peace with their refusal to acknowledge the obvious. Israel exists, and the Israelis have nowhere else to go. The Arab response is that this happened only yesterday, in the lifetime of their parents and grandparents. For Palestinians to acknowledge Israel’s existence is to acknowledge, in the words on one Arab scholar, “that it is acceptable for people to settle someone else’s country, expel its inhabitants, and ensure by all means that they never return. And that to complain, or even remind the world of the historical facts, is to be labeled an extremist, as if it is quite impolite and unacceptable to mention things that everyone knows actually happened.”
This leaves the Palestinians today not unlike the Zionists of old. As modern Israel drowns in a sea of consumerism, and privatization has turned over the landscape to secular commercial interests, California if you will, surrounded by Ayatollahs, the Palestinian bond with their lost land has come to symbolize their entire nation. And for them history, even recent history, has slipped into the realm of myth. The collective memory of the stolen land, compounded by the hundreds of thousands of personal memories of loss, serves as the inspiration for eternal resistance, a lifetime of struggle in which the fight itself has taken on epic and transcendent significance. In one of the ironies of history, the Palestinian Arabs in their passion and longing for their lost land have become the last of the Zionists.
Mother India
India is more a state of mind than a national state, a civilization that has endured for four thousand years as an empire of ideas rather than territorial boundaries. Time and again it has yielded to the onslaught of invaders but has always won in the end, absorbing foreign impulses and through the sheer weight of its history prompting mutations that inevitably transform every novel influence into something indelibly Indian.
The country is a paradox of wisdom and folly, generosity and greed, a land that invented monasticism
yet passionately celebrates the sensual. Among the world’s most ancient civilizations India is one of the youngest nations. A sea of immense poverty it supports a prosperous middle class larger than the entire population of the United States, and no nation produces more PhDs. The motherland of Hindu and Buddhist, Sikh and Jain, it is home to ten thousand faces of the divine—Rama, Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna and Ganesh. And yet, having shown the world the universal possibility of non-violence, it remains a cauldron of unrelenting violence between Islam and other creeds.
Thanks to India we reckon from zero to ten and use a decimal system without which our computer
age would hardly be possible. Indians were the first to spin and weave cotton, gamble with dice, and domesticate chickens, elephants and mangoes. They taught us to stand on our heads for good health and to believe in the coexistence of contradictions.
With fifteen official languages and more than sixteen hundred distinct dialects the entire subcontinent is a cacophony of sound. The average Indian market is more wondrous and strange than any museum. The average village pulsates with more vitality, colour and scent than any carnival. Every day India bears witness to millions of small dramas worthy of Shakespeare, all enacted free of charge on countless stages beneath the laughter and sorrow of all the heavens.
The Buddhist Science of the Mind
The Buddhists spend their time getting prepared for a moment we in the West spend most of our lives pretending doesn’t exist, which is death. We dwell in a whirlwind of activity, racing against time, defining success by measures of the material world—wealth and achievements, credentials of one sort or another. This to the Buddhists is the essence of folly. They remind us that all life grows old and that all possessions decay. Every moment is precious and we all have a choice—to continue on the spinning carousel of delusion, or to step off into a new realm of spiritual possibilities. They offer an alternative that is not a dogma but a path, long and difficult but in so many ways irresistible.
The essence of the Buddhist dharma, or teachings, is distilled in the Four Noble Truths. All life is suffering. By this the Buddha did not mean that all life was negation but only that terrible things happen; evil is
not exceptional but part of the existing order of things, a consequence of human actions, or karma. Second, the cause of suffering is ignorance. By ignorance the Buddha did not mean stupidity. He meant the tendency of human beings to cling to the cruel illusion of their own permanence and centrality, their isolation and separation from the stream of universal existence. The third Noble Truth is the revelation that ignorance can be overcome. And the fourth and most essential is the delineation of a contemplative practice that promises an end to suffering and a true liberation and transformation of the human heart.
The goal is not to escape the world but to escape being enslaved by it. The purpose of practice is not the elimination of self, but the annihilation of ignorance and the unmasking of the true Buddha nature, which like a buried jewel shines bright within every human being, waiting to be revealed. The Buddha’s transmission, in short, offered nothing less than a road map to enlightenment.
Polynesian Navigation and the Settling of the Known World
The greatest culture sphere ever brought into being by the human imagination is Polynesia, an eighth of the surface of the planet, tens of thousands of islands flung like jewels upon the southern seas. Even today Polynesian sailors can name 250 stars in the night sky. Their navigators can identify the presence of distant atolls beyond the visible horizon simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of the canoe, knowing that every island group in the Pacific has its own refractive pattern that can be read with the ease with which a forensic scientist reads a fingerprint. Sitting alone in the darkness they can sense as many as five distinct swells moving through the vessel at any given time, distinguishing those caused by local weather disturbances from the deep currents that pulsate across the ocean and can be followed as readily as a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea.
Most remarkably, Polynesia navigation is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by remembering precisely how you got there. It was the impossibility of using such a method on long oceanic voyages that kept most European transports hugging the shores of continents until the British solved the problem of longitude with the invention of the chronometer. But ten centuries before Christ the ancestors of the Polynesians from an ancient civilization called Lapita, set sail into the rising sun. In eighty generations, they settled the entire Pacific, and they did so 500 years before Columbus.
This implied that over a multi-week journey the navigator, from a culture that lacked the written word, had to sit monk like on the open stern of the vessel and remember every shift of the wind, every change of course, every sign of the sea, stars, moon and the sun. If this stream of recollection was broken, if the navigator fell asleep for even a few minutes, the voyage could end in disaster. Indeed, if you took all the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.
Cowboys of the Americas (Greystone Books, Vancouver, 2016)
The cowboy is an iconic figure, a key protagonist in an enduring story about the settling of the American west, which is itself an essential feature of the foundational myth of the nation. And yet almost everything we celebrate about cowboy culture didn’t really happen. Bank robberies, for example, were exceedingly rare; between 1860 and 1900 only eight occurred across fifteen western states. Wagon trains never circled in defense of Indians. They in fact moved through a landscape that had been largely depopulated by disease, starvation, and slaughter. Of the thousands of settlers who crossed the continent, fewer than 400 died in clashes with native tribes. Fatalities from other causes on the Oregon Trail alone reached as high as 30,000.
More cowboys were trampled by cattle or killed by lightning than ever died from a gun. Skill with a lariat, not a handgun, was the measure of a good drover.Death by gunshot was exceedingly rare. Between 1870 and 1885 the total number of such fatalities in Wichita, Abilene, Dodge City, and Ellsworth, four of the larger cattle towns, was but 45, far less gun violence than what these towns would experience today.
The working life of the cowboy was relatively mundane, much like that of a modern truck driver, who works long hours delivering valuable goods along well-mapped routes. As days were long, fifteen hours in the saddle, the most desirable hand was not tall and strong, but short and slim in order to minimize strain on the horse. During the Golden Age of the American cowboy, 1866-86, at least a quarter of them were black, and even more were of Mexican descent.
The reinvention of the American cowboy took place gradually as a broken and divided nation grew nostalgic for the closing of the frontier, even as it sought a unifying myth as it moved forward into what would become known as the American Century. Our contemporary image of the cowboy emerged largely from the imagination of western writers such as Owen Wister, Zane Grey, and Walter van Tilburg Clark. All were serious students of British medieval history and the mythology and popular literature it had inspired. Just as knights and chivalry provided England with its foundational myth, so the cowboy and his struggles came to inform a new dream of America.
