American Westward Expansion and the Dream of California
If the American Revolution was a misfire, a shot in the dark, threatening a world that was unready, westward movement was an even larger misfire. No nation, no romantic ideas of forming some idealistic governance, could entertain or encompass westward expansion in the newly formed nation of the United States.
It was, ironically, the last best hope of the western part of the new nation when Lewis and Clark took their voyage of discovery. Because the Corps of Discovery brought back a scientific rendering of the western mountains, desert, forests, rivers, grasslands and coastlines which simply could not live up to its promise.
Nothing in the imaginations of these Europeans, now turned Accidental Americans, could prepare them for the staunch reality of the western frontier. A frontier which refused to hand back any genteel or gracious recognition of their assumed sovereignty.
The settlers reached the western coasts with a sense they had gone as far as possibility, or probability, allowed and had arrived at some kind of ending. An ending which imparted no sense of attainment, but instead a reminder of all they believed they had lost.
The west coast handed back the sense of loss and turned the dreams of what the settlers were searching for back upon themselves. Turned back upon themselves, even the wild beauty of the land itself could not return what was lost.
Whatever value which Lewis and Clark, and the early western explorers had found, this value was not imagined or found by the settlers, who used the land for just another real estate deal.
California, named after a character in an ancient Spanish romance novel, Califia, rendered California as bereft of human meaning as Shakespeare’s Denmark.
Califia was an imaginary amazonian warrior from an imaginary island of California, and a part of the truly lost coast of California. Gone to history, gone to some figment of an ancient mariner’s dream - gone.
The Golden Gate became a fracture spanned by a golden thread of a bridge, brought into some wavering semblance of reality by the wild imagination of early engineers. The fracture however could not be healed, and remained a thread, transecting every heart which dared imagine the bridge was real.
Like a vision from Marquez’s dreams of Macondo, the Golden Gate simply refused to cooperate with this imagined reality of California – which has remained less substantial than any visionary page from Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.
Those dreams of the of the imagined reality of California, fade into black and white like the range of light walked by John Muir, and like the insubstantial gold the land grudgingly handed over to the rapacious men who spent their lives digging for it.
Gold, which went to the storehouse known as a federal treasury, and which would be used to finance the nation’s death suffered in the American Civil War. All for nothing - all for none - or one for all. Part of the historical mythology, something fatefully wrong in this California “Denmark”, some major defect in this golden island of Califia? Or had these elements simply been written out by the fates in some ancient mariner’s dream?
For if one wanted the real actual California- the one which would not wash away or submit to crumbling away in the next high tide, it lay in the land of granite ionization and falling water known as the Sierra Nevada.
It lay in the writings of John Muir, and in the brilliant dreams of Robinson Jeffers, or as imagined in the wheelhouse of the Golden Hinde, which parted the sandy shores of the beach named after the great mariner (& Queen’s Pirate, Sir Francis Drake.
The real actual California, lay as a ghostly delta fog, existed in the gravel overturned to find the gold, gold which has all turned into so much glittering dust. As insubstantial as the fool’s gold which leaves traces for the unwary in the seams of quartz crystals
California as the granite plutons which blistered up from ancient volcanic rifts in the craton. El Capitan, climbed by colorful surfer gods who arrive from Balboa every summer. Coastal immigrants, panhandlers and hitch hikers, existing on peanut butter, arrived to climb the solid form offered by the granite batholiths.
Westward expansion in America, has suffered a downward trending torsional vortex into seeming chaos and disharmony.
This American West Coast, instead of becoming the advertised socialist/hippie paradise, became a decaying border state, undergoing rapid transformation into a dystopian ghetto.
The westward expansion, like the overall pattern of 20th and early 21st century history followed a steady subversion of human meaning into consumer driven techno-feudalism.
Maybe defined most accurately, from the inside, by musician Trent Reznor in his Nine Inch Nails album, “Broken”. The downward spiral which must happen before the upward spiral which follows it may begin.
At the very least seeing history take these shapes offers a way of moving relentlessly forward, relentlessly forward but allowing detours, off ramp diversions along the freeway of history. Plus, it adds a bit of drama to an otherwise dull and linear narrative. It may not quite mimic the thrills of a roller coaster ride, but it at least offers an added torsional dimension.
There is plenty of real historical value in the writers who emerged during the California goldrush -and plenty of human meaning which existed in the rough camps, along the rivers and creeks.
As fate would have it, the author once lived near the San Juan Ridge, near Moonshine Creek & Bullard’s Bar, rich with goldrush history. The Sierra Nevada foothills had attracted a new breed of residents, including modern creatives such as Terry Riley, & Gary Snyder To add another layer of California resonance the author is a 7th generation Californian, whose ancestors lived in the Northern Redwoods during the gold rush.
Bret Harte was one of the most interesting writers of the California goldrush
The mining-camp stories he published in the Overland Monthly (especially “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” 1868) made a new set of correlations available to later readers. The actual camps had been violent, short-lived, and largely male.
Harte’s versions rendered them as temporary communities capable of sudden, temporary order around an infant or a gambler’s code. Those versions did not replace the earlier records; they became additional records that later agents could consult. Mark Twain and others noted the discrepancy. The discrepancy itself is the point: two different configurations of what could be stably recorded about the same stretch of ground and the same decade were now both accessible.
The records that later historians could consult about the California camps were not fixed by the camps themselves. Bret Harte’s stories, beginning with “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” introduced a further set of stable correlations: an infant or a code of honor could temporarily reorganize a settlement that the earlier reports had described only as noise, violence, and extraction. Those new correlations did not erase the earlier ones. They simply became available alongside them. What a historian could then know about the Gold Rush depended on which of the two sets of records remained reconstructible.
The San Francisco Writers of the Gold Rush
San Francisco and the Gold Rush produced a small, overlapping set of writers whose published work permanently altered which correlations about the camps, the city, and the decade remained available to later readers. The principal ones, in roughly the order their records entered circulation, are these:
Bret Harte (already noted). Editor of the Overland Monthly; “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868), “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” “Tennessee’s Partner.” Established the sentimental-mythic mining-camp correlation.
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). Arrived 1861–66; “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), sketches for the Golden Era and Territorial Enterprise, later Roughing It. Supplied the deadpan, deflationary correlation that treated the same camps as arenas of fraud, exaggeration, and failed seriousness.
Joaquin Miller (Cincinnatus Hiner Miller). Poet of the Sierras; Songs of the Sierras (1871). Added the romantic, self-dramatizing frontier-hero correlation.
Ina Coolbrith. Poet and later Oakland librarian; central to the San Francisco literary circle that included Harte and Stoddard. Her work and her role as host kept a quieter, domestic, and female-centered set of correlations in circulation.
Charles Warren Stoddard. South-Sea Idyls and San Francisco sketches. Extended the circle’s reach into travel and same-sex affection, widening the range of what could be stably recorded about California life.
Ambrose Bierce (slightly later but formed in the same city). The Wasp, San Francisco Examiner; Civil War and satirical pieces. Introduced the corrosive, anti-sentimental correlation that treated both the war and the West as scenes of pointless destruction.
These writers did not agree. Harte’s temporary order, Twain’s exposed fraud, Miller’s heroic pose, Coolbrith’s quieter continuity, and Bierce’s later scorn are mutually incompatible descriptions of overlapping ground. What they share is that each configuration became part of the permanent record. Later agents could consult more than one of them; none of them erased the others.
The records available about the Gold Rush camps and early San Francisco were not fixed by the events themselves. Bret Harte’s Overland Monthly stories made one set of correlations stable: temporary order could appear around an infant or a code. Mark Twain’s sketches and “Jumping Frog” made a second set stable: the same camps could be recorded as arenas of transparent fraud and failed seriousness. Joaquin Miller added the self-dramatizing heroic pose; Ina Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard kept quieter, domestic, and affectionate correlations in circulation; Ambrose Bierce later supplied the corrosive refusal of all of them.
These configurations contradict one another. They do not cancel one another. What a later historian can know about that decade is the set of correlations that remain reconstructible, not a single trajectory the decade was required to follow.
Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (first published 1890 in the San Francisco Examiner) supplies one of the sharpest later additions to the California literary record.
The story is set in Alabama during the Civil War. Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate civilian, is about to be hanged from a railroad bridge by Union soldiers. In the instant the rope drops, the narrative follows what appears to be his escape: the rope breaks, he falls into the river, swims free under fire, travels home through the woods, and reaches his wife. Only in the final sentence does the text return to the bridge: Farquhar’s body swings from the rope. The entire escape has occurred in the fraction of a second between the drop and the snap of the neck.
Bierce, writing in San Francisco after years of Western journalism, uses the form to make a precise claim about records. Two incompatible sequences—one in which Farquhar dies at once, one in which he returns home—are both fully realized inside the same text. Neither sequence cancels the other; the reader is left holding both. The story does not assert that one is the “real” trajectory and the other an illusion. It demonstrates that the set of correlations an observer can consult can include mutually exclusive completed sequences without requiring a single global path that chooses between them.
Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” written in San Francisco, adds a further configuration to the records later historians can consult. In the story a man stands on a bridge with a rope around his neck. One sequence ends with the rope holding and the body swinging. Another sequence, fully detailed, carries him through the river, the woods, and home to his wife.
Both sequences are completed inside the same text. The story does not declare one of them the true trajectory and the other a mistake. It simply leaves both sets of correlations reconstructible. What a historian can then know includes the fact that more than one finished sequence of events can remain available at once.
It is up to us, as the historians who now reconstruct the gold rush from our vantage point, whether we select to designate Bierce’s story as preternaturally quantum in character. The way in which it leaves the reader with a character both alive and dead would indicate such a modern apprehension.
When added to the collection of writers we already have assembled the historical point of view reveals that perceptions of history, as it happens, are individually perceived, and decidedly parallax identity in character.
Encoded in the language is a very old ancient story about what it means to be human and how the thread of pale blue fire is woven solidly into our literary history.
Califia
The Name
California, named after a character in an ancient Spanish romance novel, Califia, rendered California as bereft of human meaning as Shakespeare’s Denmark.
Califia was an imaginary amazonian warrior from an imaginary island of California, and a part of the truly lost coast of California. Gone to history, gone to some figment of an ancient mariner’s dream - gone.
How did a mythological heroine from a 16th century Spanish novel come to be transformed into the name for the Golden State?
“Las sergas de Esplandián” (The Adventures of Esplandián), by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, is the sequel to his “Amadís de Gaula”. The oldest surviving edition is from 1510, and it may have been written a few years earlier.
It is believed to be the first time the name "California" appears in print. In the book, California is an island "on the right hand of the Indies," near the Earthly Paradise. Gold is its only metal, and it is ruled by Queen Calafia, who leads an army of Black women warriors and griffins.
An even more mythological connection seems to exist in the fact that in the 1530s and 1540s, Cortés's expeditions reached the tip of Baja California and took it for an island. The name stuck to it. The correct spelling of the name which Montalvo wrote as Calafia, has been transformed into Califia as the common modern variant, and both are acceptable.
Could there be an even more ancient Arabic root for this name? The name most likely is derived from the word khalifa, meaning caliph as a ruler or successor, and since Montalvo was writing just after the fall of Granada in 1492, it makes sense.
It is perhaps ironic that Calafia is portrayed as a Muslim warrior queen, fighting against Christian Constantinople. This would place a historical irony in the origins of the name California, with a whole coast being named for an enemy of Christian Europe. It is perhaps even more ironic that Calafia is defeated in battle, converts to Christianity, marries Talanque, and is absorbed into the Christian court. She is tamed rather than destroyed.
Two Opposite Women
Although we might be tempted to draw parallels between Calafia and Ariadne, they are portrayed as opposites and may not easily be contained as parallels - unless they become twin goddesses of some invented quantum paradox.
In such a paradox, whether via a historical reverse engineering, or via a literary license, we would opt for seeing these two mythological figures through the same lens. Serving as opposites: a positive and negative force, balancing out some historical fracture by restoring harmony.
Ariadne is a princess, serves as a guide through a Greek labyrinth. She betrays her father to help Theseus and ends up betraying her own independence as she turns over her personal power to Theseus. Ariadne ends up being abandoned on Naxos, is rescued temporarily from utter obscurity as a fallen woman by Dionysus.
Calafia is a once independent warrior queen. With fierce independence, she leads an armada against Europe, fighting the hero directly and losing. All for nought apparently as she ends up baptized, married and absorbed into obscurity. Calafia appears to be closer to Penthesilea, an Amazon queen at Troy, as a mythological historical figure. More aligned with Ariosto's warrior women.
Arriving at a precarious conclusion, one in which Ariadne unspooled the thread, serving honorably as a way for history to make it through the labyrinth, while chased by the Minotaur. In applying this set of conclusions, Ariadne may serve as a balancing act to that of Calafia.
Califia, when viewed from this POV, may have represented some female version of wilderness the romance sought to tame. She is systematically tamed rather than destroyed, her original field of autonomous energy completely overwritten by a didactic, top-down script.
Here we receive another dimensional gift, as time itself appears to fold back upon itself, revealing even more fellow humans who exist as men who attempt to sell the world.
I borrow the phrase from David Bowie, and I will come back to him when the conquistadors arrive, because they are the first of these men to step onto California’s map.
Whatever harmony we might achieve by setting them into this paradox, this allows us to take two oppositional mythological female characters, both of whom wound up losing any autonomy they may have once possessed, absorbed into a no woman’s land of literary history.
The Burned Book
In another tale which lends itself to literary entanglement, we find helpful ties between Cervantes & Montalvo. Discovering a woven tapestry of literary entanglement, in Don Quixote (Part I, Chapter 6), where the priest and the barber go through Quixote's library. Here they spare Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula and throw its sequel, Las sergas de Esplandián, out the window to be burned. In a blazingly complex entanglement of literary history, Cervantes burns the book which preternaturally named California.
Interwoven as we might expect, as both Cervantes and Shakespeare came into play earlier in this volume. Whether we have found another thread of pale blue fire, or a red herring, I will leave up to the reader.
The Mirror of Macondo
Gabriel García Márquez becomes here a California writer, by default. His 1982 Nobel lecture, "The Solitude of Latin America," opens with Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed with Magellan. Márquez plays directly into that spectral thread of pale blue fire, as he names the legendary navigator’s spectral “strictly accurate" account of impossible wonders. Like Didion and the others, he reinvents ideas and language to weave a new, never seen or imagined literary tapestry.
These threads point to a potential historical narrative, one which may reveal that the New World was described as fantasy from the start. We glimpse a view of both California and Macondo as mirrors – once again, two vastly different subjects, serving as positive and negative poles in a remote probability that they have been entangled from the start.
Both become fantasy lands, invented & isolated places cut off from the rest of history. Offering a spectral image which rises unbidden from the dense fog of the Golden Gate. An image in which Macondo serves as a mirror for the mystical territory which ties California to a mystical island. A spectral reflection in a glass, connecting back to mythological territories. Territories sought by ancient mariners, themselves connecting back to Moorish Spain, and to contested Christian & Islamic lands.
Here California becomes a set of potentialities, a territory which holds, in one insubstantial image, a reflection of the mystical geography of Macondo. Both images interconnect with the Spanish Conquistadors as they searched for foreign land. Quite certain, all the while, they would find the Seven Cities of Cibola and the Fountain of Youth.
Ferdinand Magellan, Ponce de León, Hernán Cortés & Christopher Columbus: entangled with the romantically inclined, as the Crown's mariners and conquistadors. Men Who Sold the World, in their relentless search for imaginary fantasies, which they thought existed - somewhere in the Americas. Somewhere: hovering in the imagination, from the tropical paradise of Florida, through the vast Southwestern deserts, or hidden away in the complex labyrinthic geography of the West Coast.
The name I give them comes from David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” the title song of his 1970 album. In it, a man passes someone on a stair and finds he has met himself, a double who once sold the world and who the singer had thought was long dead. The one who sells the world is not a stranger from outside; he is a version of ourselves we left behind and must meet again. Bowie made it a strange, distant song, a riddle about identity. Twenty-three years later, Kurt Cobain sang it on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York (1993), and the same words became a sad manifesto out of seedy lived experience, a man who had in fact met the one who sells the world and had not walked away whole. The years between the two versions already carry the meaning forward exponentially: the same lines, a different world, a different cost. Here I make the man plural, and the conquistadors are the first faces in the crowd: men who met their own hunger on the stair and sold the world to feed it.
As for our former insubstantial conclusion that the Spanish Conquistadors indeed represented the Man Who Sold the World, there may be more there than first meets the eye. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, Márquez’s dictator character sells the sea to foreigners. The very ocean itself morphing into a territory which is not only misread by those who rule it, but sold for something as expendable and as quickly disappeared as financial tokens.
Bowie’s double on the stair turns up again here. Márquez’s patriarch is the man who sold the world grown old in office, selling the sea itself, and Cobain’s weary version of the song is the sound of the people left on shore when the sea is gone.
Here we discover a corollary to this author’s line, that a map can never become an actual territory. Reverse engineering the phrase with a historical sleight of hand: that a map may confer the power to create a territory, after all. That the territory conferred is a mythological one likely does not matter to real estate speculators.
The Lost Coast
Here we arrive at Califia as a motif for California art, leading back to the invention of female characters as figureheads for mythological territory. Rendering female figures as only mythologically relevant.
We find a sketchy, but perhaps relevant, bridge to the West Coast writers. If this sketchy mythology indeed connects such disparate elements as Montalvo’s Calafia, the mythological realism of Márquez, and the literary code breaking and reverse engineering of both Didion and Pynchon – then we may indeed have invented new literary territory to stand upon.
In terms of history, these literary figments of our imagination may indeed indicate a lost coast, lost & found, and sold to the highest bidder, before they could even be given geographically accurate coordinates.
Draft for the author · not yet in her words
Sir Francis Drake: The Missing Shore
In 1579 Francis Drake brought the Golden Hind onto this coast, somewhere north of the Spanish claims, careened her for repairs, and named the land Nova Albion for his queen. Where exactly he landed is still argued: Drakes Bay, near Point Reyes, carries his name, and a brass plate found in 1936 turned out to be a hoax. So the first English claim to California is a real voyage with a missing shore.
That suits this coast. Califia's island never existed, and Drake's landing cannot be found. The map came first, and the territory has been catching up ever since.
Drake was the Queen's pirate, plundering Spanish treasure ships on the way north, and he was also the man who proved the world could be sailed around by an Englishman. Both are true at once, which is how this book reads most of the people in it.
Robinson Jeffers: The Stone Tower
Robinson Jeffers built his own house from granite boulders hauled up from the shore below Carmel Point, beginning in 1919, and later raised Hawk Tower beside it with his own hands. He wrote poems the way he built the tower: heavy stone, set one piece at a time, facing the Pacific.
Where the Gold Rush writers wrote about men chasing what glittered, Jeffers turned his back on the crowd and looked at the rock and the sea and the hawks. He called it inhumanism: a refusal to treat people as the center of everything. Readers can take or leave the philosophy. The tower still stands.
John Muir: The Range of Light
John Muir walked into the Sierra Nevada in 1868 and spent much of his life there. He called it the Range of Light, for the way granite holds and returns the sun. In 1892 he helped found the Sierra Club, and his writing helped make Yosemite a national park.
Muir is where the dream of California meets the ground that will not wash away. Califia was invented, Drake's landing was lost, the gold ran out. The granite is still there. Muir did not find California in a book or a claim. He found it by walking it, and he wrote it down so others could go and see.