When Was America Great? When Socialists Were In Charge

Yes, you read that headline right.

I spent lunchtime perusing a delightful little volume called "The Prairie Traveler," by Randolph Marcy, a former Captain in the U.S. Army. It was written in 1859 to aid folks traveling west in wagon trains. Capt. Marcy had considerable experience both in guiding such trains, and in traveling the west in his military duties, so he got the job of writing a "how to" guide for western pioneers.

You can buy this book today, by the way. I found a copy in the gift shop at Capitol Reef National Park, and many park gift shops carry it. You can also find it on-line. New editions are still in print.

It is a fun book, with all sorts of advice on the proper rifle to carry (definitely breech loading), where to camp (near a river with good defensible land around it) and how to fix a broken wagon wheel. Many routes are discussed, types of gear to carry and on and on.

 But the most critical stuff, right at the front, is how to put together a company of folks who can make the trip and expect to arrive alive.

Marcy lays out some very blunt advice: Do this or die.

Do what?

Work together. Take are of each other. Have community property. Share.

And you can call it socialistic if you like, because it is, but it's also the sort of stuff that makes people nostalgic for that long lost America, when folks worked together, took care of each other and realized that community rose or fell depending on how everyone in it did.

In short: When America really was great.

And I don't care who you are, you like the idea of your neighbor helping out in tough times. This crap about how helping folks puts them in a charity trap, makes them dependent, ruins their morals, would have been laughed at.

Travelers west had to form a community, he said. Right at the start they had to pick a captain, someone to be in charge.

Not only should everyone agree to obey their selected captain, he says, but "they should obligate  themselves to aid each other, so as to make the individual interest of each member the common concern of the whole company.

"To ensure this, a fund should be raised for the purchase of extra animals to supply the places of those which may give you or die on the road; and if the wagon or team of a particular member should fail and have to be abandoned, the company should obligate themselves to transport his luggage, and the captain  should see that he has his share of transportation equal with any other member.

"Thus it will be made the interest of every member of the company to watch over and protect the property of others as well as his own."

Why? Because, Marcy makes clear, a united body of travelers has much better chance of dealing with trials than a pack of individual who all just happen to be going the same way.

"The advantages of an association such as I have mentioned are manifestly numerous," he writes. "The animals can be herded together and guarded by the different members of the company in rotation...this is the only way to resist the depredations of the Indians and to prevent their stampeding and driving off animals; and much more efficiency is secured in every respect, especially in crossing streams, repairing roads, etc. etc."

Some groups did try to travel without such organization, he said: Rugged individuals, all being ruggedly independent and free, every man his own master, the whole mob heading out.

It never went well.

"I have several times observed, where this has been attempted, that discords and dissensions sooner or later arose which invariably resulted in breaking up and separating the company," he says.

Sound at all familiar?

And that captain who everyone has to obey?

"Sometimes men may be selected up, upon trial, do not come up to the anticipations of those who placed them in power," he says, while others do. "Under these circumstances it will not be unwise to make a change, the first election being distinctly provisional."

Or to put it in today's language: "Throw the bum out."

This book is available for about $10 from Amazon, or you can download an ebook of it from Project Gutenberg.  Free is good, and it takes up less space that way.