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Sixty Miles From Contentment: Traveling The 19th Century American Interior
A witty and irreverent look at the wild Midwest in its heyday, as seen through the eyes of travelers to whom the American interior was the most interesting and exotic place on earth.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published May 18, 1995
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About the author
M.H. Dunlop
2 booksMary Helen Dunlop was an associate professor of English and women's studies at Iowa State University.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 26, 2019
I've either lived in the Midwest, or visited it, just about every year of my life, and I rather tend to agree with Wilbur Zelinsky that the Midwest is "the section most nearly representative of the national average." The settlers in the Midwest were the first ones to get a real feeling for just how massive the United States is, and although they have a heritage as mixed as anywhere else in the country, the land imposed a common unity upon the people. European immigrants and American-born farmers alike were dealing with a different landscape than they were used to, and they all had to learn new ways in order to succeed in it.
I had not realized how much of the Midwest -- most of Indiana and Illinois -- started out as "oak savanna." I suspect, although the author doesn't mention it, that the local Indians must've regularly burned the prairies to create that environment. They burned further east to keep prairies going for the buffalo, anyhow, and I don't know why the woods wouldn't have built up if they didn't. I did know the prairie has been nearly eliminated, but there are enough preserves around nowadays I can kind of visualize it. The oak savannas, not so much.
The modern Midwest also lacks the ubiquitous tobacco chewing and spitting of the nineteenth century, thank God. Although that was not just the Midwest -- according to one senator, even in Washington, D.C. among the elite, tobacco spittle flowed so freely that “you had to wear your overshoes into the best society of Washington.” Yuck.
Still, for the most part, the Midwest of the nineteenth century reminds me of the modern rural Midwest. People are polite but remote, and show little interest in the sort of hierarchies they have in the East, nor do they respect the rich for their money, although they do respect the wise and the knowledgeable. Servants are unavailable and unwanted -- efficiency is valued more than luxury. There is also a certain kind of sexual egalitarianism; while many people see a difference in male and female roles, the female role is valued, and men will pitch in and do "women's work" when necessary (a more surprising fact in the nineteenth century than today, of course).
The government-imposed grid over the land is also far more noticeable in the Midwest than in the South or East. While modern interstates ignore the government grid, and major highways often have loosened the curves, out in the country there are plenty of older roads around that match Caroline Kirkland's description: "We scorn to be turned aside when we are laying road. Not that we run them in a direct line between the places we wish to connect. Nothing is further from our plan. We follow section lines most religiously and consequently -- the sections being squares -- we shall in time have the pleasure of traveling zigzag at right angles from one corner of the state to another."
Although for the most part it goes east to west, anyone who follows the old Lincoln Highway should be able to visualize the sort of thing she's talking about. But old roads that once traveled between larger towns, like the Plymouth-Goshen Trail, below Indiana's Lake of the Woods, are probably much closer to what Kirkland dealt with -- the main road travels roughly SW (or NE, depending what direction you're going), but it does it by a series of right angle jogs, often having the right of way at the curves, while those going straight must stop.
And apparently Midwesterners were eating breakfast food all day, and beef for breakfast, going back to the early 1800s. Ditto valuing plenty of food over fancy food -- true then, true now.
But one thing I think this book makes abundantly clear -- although the author doesn't discuss it -- is why the Midwest sent a disproportionate number of soldiers into the Union Army during the Civil War. While there were certainly Southern sympathizers along the Midwest's southern border, and while abolitionists were not always appreciated there, plenty of people in the Midwest had no time for the Fugitive Slave Act, and many who rejected the title abolitionist would still fight to protect their black neighbors from being hauled off.
A classic example would be the "South Bend Fugitive Slave Case, Tried in 1849, '50 and '51." as a pamphlet of the time put it. Another example would be Covert, Michigan, where black and white farmers lived, worked, and died together -- both town and graveyard integrated from the git go (roughly the 1860s). Covert was not an abolitionist colony, it was not a free African-American settlement by Quakers, and it was not some kind of utopian social experiment. It was just people on the frontier, surviving by depending on each other.
Frontier communities as a whole tended to be more open to black neighbors -- one of the first non-Indian babies born in what is now Nevada was a mixed race child, and that child's black mother and black uncle were highly revered by the locals -- but I think further west Northerners and Southerners were more mixed. In the Midwest, people influenced by Southern attitudes tended to stay South, while a lot of Midwesterers in the north were immigrants who hadn't grown up seeing blacks as a slave race, and so were less inclined to agree with that whole approach.
As I said, none of that Civil War digression is discussed in Sixty Miles from Contentment, but I've been reading a lot on the Civil War lately, and couldn't help but make all these connections. It's clear from Dunlop's book that Midwestern ideas about physical labor, independence, neighborliness, and equality were miles away from the Southern and Eastern mindsets, and even a bit more fair and independent than some of the attitudes further West at the time. Apparently the land imposed practices on the people that effectively eliminated some differences.
I had not realized how much of the Midwest -- most of Indiana and Illinois -- started out as "oak savanna." I suspect, although the author doesn't mention it, that the local Indians must've regularly burned the prairies to create that environment. They burned further east to keep prairies going for the buffalo, anyhow, and I don't know why the woods wouldn't have built up if they didn't. I did know the prairie has been nearly eliminated, but there are enough preserves around nowadays I can kind of visualize it. The oak savannas, not so much.
The modern Midwest also lacks the ubiquitous tobacco chewing and spitting of the nineteenth century, thank God. Although that was not just the Midwest -- according to one senator, even in Washington, D.C. among the elite, tobacco spittle flowed so freely that “you had to wear your overshoes into the best society of Washington.” Yuck.
Still, for the most part, the Midwest of the nineteenth century reminds me of the modern rural Midwest. People are polite but remote, and show little interest in the sort of hierarchies they have in the East, nor do they respect the rich for their money, although they do respect the wise and the knowledgeable. Servants are unavailable and unwanted -- efficiency is valued more than luxury. There is also a certain kind of sexual egalitarianism; while many people see a difference in male and female roles, the female role is valued, and men will pitch in and do "women's work" when necessary (a more surprising fact in the nineteenth century than today, of course).
The government-imposed grid over the land is also far more noticeable in the Midwest than in the South or East. While modern interstates ignore the government grid, and major highways often have loosened the curves, out in the country there are plenty of older roads around that match Caroline Kirkland's description: "We scorn to be turned aside when we are laying road. Not that we run them in a direct line between the places we wish to connect. Nothing is further from our plan. We follow section lines most religiously and consequently -- the sections being squares -- we shall in time have the pleasure of traveling zigzag at right angles from one corner of the state to another."
Although for the most part it goes east to west, anyone who follows the old Lincoln Highway should be able to visualize the sort of thing she's talking about. But old roads that once traveled between larger towns, like the Plymouth-Goshen Trail, below Indiana's Lake of the Woods, are probably much closer to what Kirkland dealt with -- the main road travels roughly SW (or NE, depending what direction you're going), but it does it by a series of right angle jogs, often having the right of way at the curves, while those going straight must stop.
And apparently Midwesterners were eating breakfast food all day, and beef for breakfast, going back to the early 1800s. Ditto valuing plenty of food over fancy food -- true then, true now.
But one thing I think this book makes abundantly clear -- although the author doesn't discuss it -- is why the Midwest sent a disproportionate number of soldiers into the Union Army during the Civil War. While there were certainly Southern sympathizers along the Midwest's southern border, and while abolitionists were not always appreciated there, plenty of people in the Midwest had no time for the Fugitive Slave Act, and many who rejected the title abolitionist would still fight to protect their black neighbors from being hauled off.
A classic example would be the "South Bend Fugitive Slave Case, Tried in 1849, '50 and '51." as a pamphlet of the time put it. Another example would be Covert, Michigan, where black and white farmers lived, worked, and died together -- both town and graveyard integrated from the git go (roughly the 1860s). Covert was not an abolitionist colony, it was not a free African-American settlement by Quakers, and it was not some kind of utopian social experiment. It was just people on the frontier, surviving by depending on each other.
Frontier communities as a whole tended to be more open to black neighbors -- one of the first non-Indian babies born in what is now Nevada was a mixed race child, and that child's black mother and black uncle were highly revered by the locals -- but I think further west Northerners and Southerners were more mixed. In the Midwest, people influenced by Southern attitudes tended to stay South, while a lot of Midwesterers in the north were immigrants who hadn't grown up seeing blacks as a slave race, and so were less inclined to agree with that whole approach.
As I said, none of that Civil War digression is discussed in Sixty Miles from Contentment, but I've been reading a lot on the Civil War lately, and couldn't help but make all these connections. It's clear from Dunlop's book that Midwestern ideas about physical labor, independence, neighborliness, and equality were miles away from the Southern and Eastern mindsets, and even a bit more fair and independent than some of the attitudes further West at the time. Apparently the land imposed practices on the people that effectively eliminated some differences.
March 8, 2014
I may be biased in favor of this book because its author, Mary Helen Dunlop, was once a favorite professor of mine at Iowa State. It should not be presumed, however, that I only liked this book because she wrote it. (She would be so proud of me for "burying the however" in that sentence, as she always insisted her students do in their writing.) If you've ever wondered why Laura Ingalls and her family kept moving every few years, what the native savannahs of Illinois and Iowa were like before they got plowed up, or what it was really like to travel across country by train at different points of the 19th century, then this book is for you!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews