“…..on that stretch of the Lewis and Clark Trail, he talked about how the explorers’ mapping of a route to the Pacific forged the way that millions of American settlers followed. Being there, and listening to the lessons of the Missouri River, gave Bernard [DeVoto] an epiphany. The western land the explorers found was filled with species adapted to drought: sagebrush, prickly pear cacti, tens of millions of buffalo. In the 1800s the North and South raced to add western states in a battle for dominance in Congress. The future of slavery hung in the balance. But the land of the West settled the question – it did not have enough rain for a cotton economy, which meant that the slave system was bound by climate and geography and, therefore, politically doomed. Lewis and Clark proved that all waters – meaning all trade routes that the people who occupied the land would follow – pulled together from the tops of the Appalachians to the tips of the Rockies toward the Mississippi River; there was no inland sea or central mountain belt that could divide two nations, one slave, one free. So when Abraham Lincoln, explaining his decision to wage war on secessionists, said “We cannot separate,” he spoke not opinion but literal truth from the land.”
Excerpt from Nate Schweber‘s book This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild
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