Across the Wide Missouri

Bernard DeVoto was an author and editor who worked in the first half of the 20^th Century. He wrote several works about Mark Twain and was the editor of a volume of Twain’s mainly unpublished works Letters from the Earth. He was also a historian of the early days of the American west.  I have just finished reading his book Across the Wide Missouri which deals mainly with the mountain men and fur companies of  the west in the 1830’s and the Indians they encountered but also covers the  Whitmans and other early missionaries to the Indians.

It is a fine and interesting book on a colorful and fascinating subject. DeVoto is a good writer, a thorough and  scrupulous collector of information, and a thoughtful and reasonable historian who makes a thoughtful and reasonable effort to separate fact from myth and tall tales and to be fair while still having an obvious point of view. He clearly admires the mountain men but does not romanticism them. He equally clearly is put off by the priggishness and  self righteousness of many of the missionaries but still recognizes their importance in history and their remarkable commitment and dedication.  He seems somewhat less fair when writing about the fur companies  (it was the 1940’s, and DeVoto was a colleague of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.),  but even there he generally gives them their due, and some of the things the companies did were pretty rough.

His treatment of the Indians is particularly noteworthy. While he is sympathetic to them and fully aware of the raw deals they got and the doleful consequences of their encounter with 19^th century civilization, he avoids the silly, Manichean ultra-Rousseauianism so popular in the last few years. His Indians are not presented as noble savages, pacifists, proto-ecologists, philosophers, or fonts of profound insights coincidentally dovetailing perfectly with the present day’s politically correct conventional wisdom. (There was enough of that even his time that he lampoons it a bit.) Instead he tries to show them as they really were -  a Neolithic, superstitious, often warlike people with complex and varied habits and traits, some admirable and some not, and with significant differences among the tribal groups. He tries to tell the truth about the Indians and their interactions with the whites and with each other.  (His thorough and convincing debunking of the myth of smallpox epidemics among Indians being caused intentionally, usually by infected blankets, is  a good example.)   

The book is also just fun. DeVoto writes with good humor. His prose is lively, and he likes a good yarn, even the ones he points out as false. I recommend it. For people weary of the boring and tendentious leftist morality plays that often masquerade as works of history today, it should be an especially welcome change.  His book The Year of Decision 1846 is also good. 

Pay Cash

In 2005 and 2006 Debby and I worked at a large university in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, a densely populated, semi-tropical region  at the far southern end of the state. The RGV, as it is called, is separated from the rest of Texas  by large expanses of fairly empty country. The main cities in the valley are over two hundred miles south of San Antonio, a city many  people think of  as  being in “south Texas”, and over a hundred miles from Corpus Christi or Laredo.  It is officially a poverty stricken area, and there are some very poor people there as in most places, but it is not the  poor place the official statistics would have one believe. There is a whole lot of commerce going on there on a cash basis, unreported to and unmeasured by the government. Some of it is in the illegal drug trade along the border of course, but a good deal of it is in honest, ordinary, mutually beneficial transactions between  individuals who prefer to do their business in cash and away from the eyes of the government.The RGV is an extreme example, but the same thing goes on most places in the country. It is called the cash economy. It is probably more prevalent in rural and inner city areas than in suburbs, but you can see it all over.

I think people should pay cash  when they can.  They should do it out of benevolence toward their fellow citizens, concern for their own privacy, and  in the general interest of keeping the government from getting even bigger and more intrusive. (The argument that the captive taxpayers pay more taxes because some of those in the cash economy pay less than the government wants is specious. If the politicians ever did get their hands on the money “owed” on activities in the off the books portion of the cash economy, they probably would spend it, not grant anyone a tax cut.)  

Besides, paying with cash is just good business. A generation or so ago, people did it all the time.  A person can’t overspend the cash in his billfold, and no one will charge him interest or fees on the purchases he makes with it. It is sometimes possible to get a discount on purchases by paying in cash.  Cash is fully anonymous, and using it allows a person to keep at least a part of his private personal business private.  (There are already some legal items such as ammunition  which probably should be bought only with cash. If recent trends were to continue, the list of those things would get longer.)

Debby and I are making it a habit to use cash instead of checks or cards for most of our transactions with local small businesses and independent operations. At a minimum that saves them the percentage they would have had to pay the credit card company. I urge others to do the same and pay the babysitter, the kid who mows the lawn, the repairman, the local restaurant,  or the woman in the antique shop in cash. It’s easy, once you get used to it.