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Chapter 12. The Borderlands and Lost Worlds of Early America
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chapter 12 The Borderlands and Lost Worlds of Early America Samuel Truett In traditional frontier histories, America stretched east to west across continental bones. Pioneers threaded high mountain passes, crossed prairies and deserts, facing the setting sun—paying scarce attention to the deeper America that had accumulated underfoot. Frontier mythologies suppressed these lost worlds. At best, they viewed their shattered remains as curiosities and relics: fragments of a long-forgotten past that heaved up periodically from below to lend color to, at times haunt, but rarely shape our imperial, national, or regional histories.1 Yet frontier histories buried America far less deeply than one might expect. For it was often at the frontier—that archetypal new world, virgin land, space of new beginnings—that newcomers were most deeply haunted by American loss and antiquity. At the front lines of expansion west and south across the continent, they found an older America peering stone white and adobe brown from overgrown fields, freshly cut jungles, and sun-parched cliffs. These encounters confounded dreams of youth and immortality, evoked nostalgia for worlds that empire had unmade, and compelled U.S. Americans to think in new ways about their place in the world and in history. America’s lost worlds surfaced most visibly in the Southwestern borderlands with Mexico, a land of ancient cliff palaces, crumbling Spanish missions , and, ultimately, the architectural ghosts of the western frontier. Few visitors to this region imagined the emptiness, virginity, and novelty that myth makers ascribed to the frontiers of early America. And yet the differences between early and later borderlands were never that clear-cut. In this Lost Worlds 301 essay, I reconstruct some of the cultural threads that linked these spaces. Visions of antiquity and loss that became Southwestern hallmarks, I argue, had their roots in earlier American borderlands. Part of my argument is that Kentucky and Arizona had more in common than we think. But I am also interested in tracing the obsession with America’s lost worlds beyond the borders of national history, by showing how much of what we now consider to be a peculiarly national obsession with American antiquity and loss was connected to—and drew on—prior British, French, and Spanish colonial histories.2 By examining this obsession across the longue durée, I hope to suggest new ways of thinking across borderlands histories in North America. Early Americanists often see borderlands as spaces that end with the coming of modern nation-states—the same event that initiates those relationships so central to later borderlands histories. The result is a bifurcated field, divided between those who study the borderlands among European empires and Indians and those who study the borderlands between modern American nations. The fascination with America’s lost worlds crosses this divide. It is not just that earlier travelers to the imperial borderlands wrote about these spaces in ways that informed later visions of national borderlands. It is also that by engaging America’s ghosts, travelers were placing temporal border crossings front and center, by imagining what their own empires and nations had in common with the various ‘‘civilizations’’ that came before.3 This was not merely a search for continuity. Ruins, relics, and histories of lost worlds, more often than not, also marked perceived points of disjuncture . While they offered a bridge to a deeper past, they also marked what made this America different. It is this matrix of tensions—between old and new, between continuity and difference—that I am most interested in interrogating. For only by charting these complex dynamics can we begin to fully comprehend the borderlands and contested spaces that entangled earlier and later Americas. To understand how America’s new world became old—how virgin lands yielded visions of antiquity and loss—we might begin with the prototypical U.S. frontier myth. We might begin with the rise of the American nation and the man who introduced the story of Daniel Boone to the world in 1784, a frontier promoter named John Filson. Born in Wilmington, Delaware , Filson was one of thousands caught in the fever of westward expansion following the American Revolution. In 1783, he boarded a barge at [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:57 GMT) 302 Samuel Truett Pittsburgh and sailed down the Ohio River to Kentucky, which was then part of western Virginia. He acquired more than twelve thousand acres of land north of the town of Lexington, and he then sat down to write...