Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx

Author:Annie Proulx
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Bird Cloud’s Checkered Past

The American government has bruised the people’s trust from time to time. One of the most blatant examples was the great nineteenth-century giveaway of huge chunks of public land to a handful of railroad barons in the name of patriotic progress and “opening up the country.” Some of those vigorous entrepreneurs dreamed of Far East markets served by a cross-continent rail line.

Among the most rapacious grabbers were English and Scots landed gentry, well-traveled, sophisticated, with keen eyes for profitable situations. North America was a treasure house—timber, minerals, furs, grazing land, big-game trophies—and they knew it. Despite the United States’ autonomy, an older sense of a right to exploitation still colored upper-class sensibilities in the British Isles. Today we point accusatory fingers at the most outrageous mining and railroad moguls of the period, but the pervasive ethos of social Darwinism and imperialism, the presumed right of the elite to skim the cream from any country’s natural resources, was accepted. Those who took what they wanted were generally admired and envied.

In America the intense desire to accumulate wealth and power was democratized; the wealthy, the highborn, the titled, the poor immigrant boy, the disappointed New England businessman, the dispossessed farmer, the unemployed young man all believed they had a right to the pots of gold at the end of the American rainbow. Dozens of popular books of the period featured poor, barefoot farm boys who became rich through hard work, clever ideas, recognition of opportunities and the wheel-greasing kindness of wealthy men (with blond, blue-eyed daughters). The virtue of “hard work” was often invoked to sugarcoat aggressive, unscrupulous dealings with more naïve people.

The forceful entrepreneurial spirit burned strongly in Canada and the American west. Wyoming remains to this day a kind of juicy natural resources fruit that corporate and business interests feel entitled to squeeze dry. The history of section 21—Bird Cloud—touches both ends of the spectrum. When Wyoming was still a territory a titled Scotsman who had everything owned the Sand Creek Cattle and Land Company ranch abutting what is now Bird Cloud. And before that section 21 was part of a holding bought by a trio of Irish brothers from Vermont who started out with nothing and became powerful and wealthy, the Horatio Alger story come true.

The transcontinental railroad had been talked up as inevitable since the 1830s. Abraham Lincoln put the talk into action, granting subsidies and huge pieces of territory to corporations. Chief among the broadcloth-suited railroad finaglers of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were Thomas Durant, Jay Cooke, Grenville Dodge, Oliver Ames, Collis Huntington, their relatives, friends and political connections, abetted by a carload of criminal-minded congressmen. Stock manipulations, bribery, “creative” bookkeeping, countless government loans and subsidies and, above all, very large land grants made the great fortunes of a select few.

In 1862 the Union Pacific Rail Road received, along with a right-of-way, more than a thousand miles long through the public domain, a grant of half the lands in a strip ten miles wide on each side of the tracks they promised to lay down.

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