The Year of Decision: 1846
by
Bernard DeVoto

The Book and the Author

This is both a very good book and a very bad book.

First — let's let the book jacket speak (and provide us a photo of the author, from a newspaper it would seem):

So much for what the publishers chose to highlight. A considerable amount of additional, more general, and frankly better information can be found on Mark DeVoto's site: photographs, an assortment of his father's writings and private correspondence. Returning strictly to the book before us here, my own take follows:

DeVoto has done superlative research — to the extent that I can judge as a mere layman —, conveys an excellent atmospheric sense of conditions on the trails to Oregon and California, including his harrowing description of the Donner disaster, and has pulled together the apparently disparate strands of American history with eye-opening perceptiveness. Finally, he does not shy away from his strong opinions: negative on Taylor, Frémont, and the Mormon religion, and admiring of Kearny and Scott but also, fair-mindedly, of Santa Anna: the reader knows where the author stands. To gain a good understanding of the westward expansion of the United States, American politics leading up to the War Between the States, and the Mexican War, this is one of the books that should be read; and I'm glad to have spent a month of my life transcribing this valuable resource.

DeVoto's style, however, is atrocious and makes that reading often very unpleasant, and occasionally incomprehensible. He is arch (and intrusively so especially in his commentary on Washington politics); mannered, precious, wilfully arcane; and yet also occasionally liable to, like I'm doing here with a similar grating effect, barbarously split his infinitives. All this by way of saying that he exhales a constant air of watching very carefully how brilliantly he writes — while failing at it: the result is nasty. Add his approach to organizing his multiple stories by jumping back and forth between them, and you have hard reading ahead of you.

DeVoto also seems to have picked out the more striking and incident-laden prairie crossings. But while at that time the endeavor was always dangerous, crossings frequently were easier and more straightforward, especially on the earlier established and better-traveled Santa Fé trail. A good corrective then to DeVoto's drama-charged account is Adventures in the Santa Fé Trade, 1844‑1847, a first‑hand telling by cloth merchant James Josiah Webb of several trips to Santa Fé, including traveling deep into Mexico during the Mexican War: incidents there are, Indian attacks or threats and the venal extortions of Mexican authorities, but very little sign of unusual terrain or weather difficulties or of internal frictions in the wagon trains, and otherwise much more nearly routine than the impression we would gather from the book before you here.

In 1948, Bernard DeVoto won the Pulitzer Prize — for a different book: Across the Wide Missouri. I hope it was better written; but I'm not about to immerse myself in it to find out.

(p. v) Dedication Dear Kate: While I was writing this book you sometimes asked me what it was about. Reading it now, you will see that, though it is about a good many things, one theme that recurs is the basic courage and honor in the face of adversity which we call gallantry. It is always good to remember human gallantry, and it is especially good in times like the present. So I want to dedicate a book about the American past written in a time of national danger to a very gallant woman, to Katharine Grant Sterne Yours, Benny

(p. xix) Invocation When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle — varies a few degrees and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wilderness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the everything sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, not toward Europe. Henry Thoreau

Technical Details

Edition Used

Transcribed here is my own hard copy, in what may well have been the only edition, Little, Brown and Company, Chicago, 1943. The 1943 copyright was not renewed in 1970 or 1971 as then required by law in order to be maintained. The work thus rose into the public domain on January 1, 1972: details here on the copyright law involved.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Maps

The book includes five black-and‑white maps in the text, which I've colorized for readability; no index is provided, but here's mine:

In addition, a sort of summary map is found in identical copies on each of the endpapers:

[A much larger version, fully readable, opens here (1.1 MB).]

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was very well proofread. The dozen typographical errors I found were all trivial, and are marked merely with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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