Today's Reading
INTRODUCTION
There's a simple formula for biographies that has existed since John Boswell finished The Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791: pick an inspirational subject and spend hundreds of pages describing why that person's life was pivotal to history. It's a good formula, and this book ignores it entirely.
Instead of an individual, this tome traces four lives in parallel—those of the famous Judge Roy Bean and his brothers, James, Samuel, and Joshua. And instead of providing inspiration, each is at some point during his saga bound to rub folks the wrong way. They did so while alive; why should readers feel any differently?
However, these questionable men are also fascinating. Each was immersed in the formative history of the US Southwest, making appearances on the Santa Fe Trail, in the Mexican-American and Civil Wars, on the California coast during the Gold Rush, in wild west Texas train-construction camps, and prowling the deserts and mountains of prestate New Mexico and Arizona. That's an alluring amount of epic American frontier history to cover with a single litter of brothers.
The strange phenomenon of siblings is that their similarities make it easier to compare differences. The Bean brothers aspired for comparable things but set about achieving them in very different ways. They crossed and shared paths, often dramatically, but each eventually carved his own way through the evolving American landscape.
Each brother experienced the frantic spread of the United States during the era of "Manifest Destiny." This remains a loaded term in the twenty-first century as much as when it was coined in the mid-1800s. It today generates a lot of emotion: anger, nostalgia, guilt, and regional pride. Those less steeped in the era may be surprised at how a disparate mix of greed, ambition, brute force, and civic responsibility (sometimes embodied in the same person) created the contemporary United States.
The emergence of coast-to-coast America empowered a generation to believe they could influence the development of an entire continent—and they proved they could. They routinely did terrible and amazing things, to paraphrase W. E. B. Du Bois, that expanded the edge of their style of civilization.
But who were the people who rode the wave of Manifest Destiny? They weren't cardboard cutouts of heroes and villains, as easy as that would be to process. The truth is more nuanced, and therefore interesting. Seeing Manifest Destiny from the point of view of the humans swept up in it transforms the national experience into a story of personal choices, circumstances, and consequences.
This is where profiling four brothers comes in handy. When one takes a fork in the road, historically, it opens up more than just a new setting. It represents a choice—to join the army, to settle in Mexico, to run for office, to support the Confederacy—that another brother faced.
Four Against the West tells the brothers' true stories but doesn't dissect them in academic dissertations or with overt moralizing. We don't have to judge them by modern standards or explain away their behavior as being "of their time." We can measure each brother against the other, just by following the adventurous narratives of their lives. They are mirrors to each other, even at a distance. And I think from page one you'll find that the brothers don't deserve an equal amount of deference.
But don't feel obligated to like or dislike Roy, Sam, Josh, and James. You don't have to root for them to enjoy this book, but you do have to be willing to travel with these brothers over many long miles to understand them. Do that and you'll witness four stunning examples of the raw human drive that ushered in the rise of modern America.
PART ONE
Empire plants itself upon the trails.
—William Gilpin, Mission of the North American People, 1874
ROY
Louisville, Kentucky
March 1841
Phantley Roy Bean Jr. eyes the flatboat with excitement and trepidation. This floating wooden shack, scarcely fifty feet long and made of scrap wood, will be the sixteen-year-old's home for the next two months. It has no keel—that'd cost too much time and money—and therefore will depend on the crew, of which he's now one, to steer it with long poles.
It's more than eight hundred miles from the banks of the Ohio River to the skiff's destination of New Orleans. That's a long way to be dodging sandbars, steamboats, and river pirates, but Roy—the name he now uses—is too eager to leave to feel many nerves. When he does, there's bourbon.
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