Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" Read Free Page A

that fateful October day it was as if an asylum in the Old World had been thrown open and hordes of vengeful madmen had been loosed upon the New. Here on these shores were men slashing and hacking at the natives, at the landscape, at each other with a frenzy that cannot be adequately explained by greed alone, though there was certainly plenty of that. Something more seemed at work, something that fueled the desire to almost instantaneously transform an inconvenient New World into a recognizable replica of the old one. Both the speed and the scale of the conquest were—and remain—astonishing and can never be replicated, on this planet, anyway, the Europeans swiftly overrunning and obliterating the native cultures, beginning with the empires of the Aztecs and Incas; then on to the seaboard tribes of North America; then the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the Five Civilized Tribes of the Old Southwest, the Plains tribes; and then on to the virtual extirpation of the California natives, down to the last, tiny remnant bands. In 1911, when the last “wild” California Indian emerged as a dazed, skeletal wanderer near Oroville in the north-central part of that state, some onlookers might well have wondered how it had all come down to just this; others, though, might just as easily have asked, “How did we miss this guy?
    What was true of the assault on the natives was true as well of the New World’s flora and fauna: forests leveled,streams desiccated, rivers diverted and dammed, animal habitats destroyed and whole species driven into extinction. All of this was most extravagantly apparent in North America, where there was a grim glee about the wholesale destruction, evident in successful communal efforts to wipe out wolves, mountain lions, the woods buffalo, martens, raccoons … Out of this history a spectral species of folk hero emerged in the figures of hunters who had racked up prodigious kill counts of this species or that. Buffalo Bill was the last and most famous of these figures but by no means the first. By his time his predecessors had long been forgotten (who remembers the celebrated panther killer, Aaron Hall?), but their deeds transformed a continent and left their bloody imprint on the American character. By 1911 when that lone Indian staggered into Oroville, the tribes had been transformed into beggars on reservations, and the once limitless herds of Plains buffalo had been pruned to an endangered few in Yellowstone Park, where they were hungrily eyed by hunters too young to have gotten in on all the fun. A continent, millennia in the making, had been transformed in four centuries.

A Great Beast
    It could hardly be expected that a people capable of so astounding and reckless a transformation of the national landscape would prove solid, law-loving citizens of the fledgling democratic republic that emerged out of the American Revolution, and indeed they did not. From the end of the war to the simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on Independence Day, 1826, the new nation was severely tested by threatened secessions; the anarchical tendencies of backwoods settlers and local militias who marched under the tattered standards of the “Wild Yankees,” “Ely’s Rebels,” the “Paxton Boys,” the “Black Boys,” and the “Green Mountain Boys”; by numerous riots and lynchings; and by the rampant corruption of the democratic system. Surveying the politicallandscape in late 1786, George Washington told James Madison he thought the entire grand experiment might degenerate into “anarchy and confusion.” And when the delegates from the states met in Philadelphia the following May for the Constitutional Convention they did so in the ominous shadow cast by Shays’s Rebellion, which had come within an ace of success had the mutinous farmers taken the federal arsenal at Springfield. Not long thereafter new trouble bubbled up in Pennsylvania, eventually erupting in the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, a