Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (13 page)

Such was not the case with the Oneida Community, founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes fifteen miles east of Syracuse, New York. Oneida was a carnal free-for-all compared with the Shakers’ communes or, for that matter, even your average swingers’ resort. Noyes, a former Yale Divinity School student, and his followers practiced “complex marriage,” which
prohibited
couples from being monogamous. Instead, everyone was essentially married to everyone and encouraged to have multiple sex partners. Oneida grew to several hundred people in just two years.

Noyes’s “Heaven on Earth” began to unravel in the mid-1870s due to various factors, including a backlash among younger members who actually grew tired of the forced promiscuity and wanted to settle
down with a single person. Noyes fled America after learning he’d been accused of statutory rape, and in 1881 the Oneida Community disbanded. Its reputation wasn’t exactly enhanced when, later that year, a former member named Charles Guiteau assassinated President James Garfield. (As chance would have it, Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln was standing near the president when he was hit. Lincoln was also at the Pan-American Exposition when President William McKinley was shot, and while he declined an invitation to Ford’s Theatre the night of April 14, 1865, Robert was at his father’s bedside before he died. No other American has been in such relatively close proximity to three presidential assassinations.) Even before Charles Guiteau killed Garfield, his fellow Noyesians had written Guiteau off as a bit creepy, nicknaming him Charles Git-out.

Calculating exactly how many utopias, or “intentional communities” as academics now refer to them, have been attempted is challenging because the definition is subjective. One person’s bright, happy collective is another’s oppressive, maniac-led cult. The stuffy but reliable
Oxford English Dictionary
adheres to the word
utopia’s
original meaning—conceived by Thomas More—as a perfect place that can never truly exist, while the
OED
’s more optimistic American cousin,
Merriam-Webster
, allows for it potentially to be real. But what can be said with certainty is that, from the Puritans’ shining city on a hill to “just leave me alone, man” hippie enclaves, no other nation on earth has attracted and hosted more of these colonies, ecovillages, and communes than the United States.

Horace Greeley himself conceded defeat on their long-term prospects in this country or anywhere else. They might be “excellently calculated for use on some other planet,” he concluded in his
Recollections
, “but not on this one.”

In 1869 the
New York Tribune
’s agricultural editor, Nathan Meeker, helped establish a “temperance colony” about fifty miles north of Denver that eventually became Greeley, Colorado, named in honor of his abstemious boss. Greeley, the place, was intended to be not a Fourier Phalanx but a clean, family-friendly town where faith, education, culture,
and hard work were celebrated and alcohol was illegal. (The ban lasted a whole century.)

In an odd historical postscript, Greeley has sporadically been in the media spotlight for the past decade because of an Egyptian student named Sayyid Qtub, who lived there more than sixty years ago and attended classes at what is now the University of Northern Colorado. Qtub came to the United States in 1948 and passed through New York City first before his six-month stay in Greeley.

New York’s frenzied, menacing streets, with their noisy gin joints, brothels, and seedy drug dens, had traumatized the shy and soft-spoken Qtub, and Greeley should have seemed, in comparison, like heaven on earth. Classical concerts, free public lectures, sock hops, and potluck suppers were the town’s main entertainment, and religious services were always fully attended. But again, one man’s Shangri-la is another’s Hades, and Qtub saw only decadence in Greeley. “Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists,” he later wrote of one church-sponsored event. When he went on to fume that “the atmosphere was full of love,” he did not mean the chaste and innocent kind. Qtub was especially revolted by the latest musical craze. “Jazz is the American music,” he seethed, “created by Negroes to satisfy their primitive instincts, their love of noise and their appetite for sexual arousal.”

After returning to Egypt, he traveled throughout the Middle East lecturing and writing extensively about the West’s spiritual wickedness, as evidenced in little Greeley, Colorado. Qtub isn’t exactly a household name in the United States, but the movement of like-minded souls he inspired, “the Base,” is universally recognized. The original Arabic translation is probably more familiar to most of us: al-Qaeda.

J. A. ARCHIBALD
wrote these words in early August 1858 after climbing the Colorado mountain named after Zebulon Montgomery Pike Jr., the twenty-eight-year-old Army officer who began mapping out the southern regions of the Louisiana Purchase in 1805 while Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, somewhat more famously, charted the north. Pike attempted to scale the 14,115-foot mountain in late November 1806, but after several days without food and blanketed up to his waist in snow, the starving and frostbitten explorer gave up. “No human being,” Pike concluded, “could have ascended its pinical [
sic
].” Pike is believed to have been the first non–Native American to make the attempt, and he never tried again. J. A. Archibald would go on to accomplish what Pike himself could not, earning a spot among our nation’s most notable mountaineers.

Archibald’s parents, John and Jane, undoubtedly contributed to their child’s bold, adventurous spirit. In 1854 the family was living in Massachusetts when the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, granting settlers in these relatively wild, unruly territories the right to decide whether or not slavery should be allowed there. Mr. and Mrs. Archibald saw an opportunity to promote their abolitionist beliefs, so they packed up their eight children and headed for Kansas. Soon after arriving, they offered their new home as both a meeting place for fellow Free Staters and a safe house, or “station,” on the Underground Railroad. There is no record of violence against the Archibalds, but their actions could have easily gotten them killed; pro-slavery thugs from Missouri poured into what became known as “Bleeding Kansas” to murder and terrorize anyone aligned with the Free State cause. From these brutal clashes emerged the abolitionists’ fiercest advocate—some would say madman—a New York–born cattle raiser and tanner named John Brown.

In the early summer of 1857, twenty-year-old J. A. Archibald set out with a younger brother, Albert, to join gold hunters from Lawrence, Kansas. “I was much pleased to learn on my arrival, that the company contained a lady [Mrs. Robert Middleton],” Archibald noted in a long letter detailing the journey. Middleton was one of the few fellow
travelers Archibald wrote about, but a lasting friendship wasn’t in the cards; Middleton was put off by Archibald’s progressive views, even if they benefited Middleton herself. “I soon found that there could be no congeniality between us,” Archibald wrote. “She proved to be a woman unable to appreciate freedom or reform … and confined herself the long days to feminine impotence in the hot covered wagon.”

Alternately riding in these ox-drawn wagons and walking in thin leather moccasins across the kiln-hot plains, Archibald and the Lawrence party trekked more than five hundred miles from Kansas to Colorado. Whether or not they found gold (and they didn’t) mattered little to Archibald, whose aim was to rove “across the prairie sea.”

Traveling for the sake of traveling I understand, having already covered thousands of miles by car, boat, helicopter, kayak, train, plane, bus, and hiking boots. The beauty of this country is simply breathtaking. Even the gas stations and chain restaurants I’m passing on I-25, as I drive south from Denver to Manitou Springs, can’t diminish the magnificent sight before me of a dark-blue mountain range backlit by the rays of a vanishing sun. But what these early pioneers endured seems beyond comprehension. Aside from the physical exhaustion, thirst, and hunger they experienced, they had to maintain constant, hyperalert preparedness for everything from rattlesnakes underfoot to thieving bandits around every trail bend, while also staving off long periods of mind-numbing boredom.

Although there is one passage dedicated to the “disgusting inactivity, and monotony” of their expedition, Archibald’s letters and journal are free of grievances or grumblings. Mostly they contain descriptions of the land’s infinite splendor and surreal, dreamlike images—“The Indians have the custom of suspending their dead in trees, where the dry air of this elevated plain speedily shrivels them up”—as well as the small unfolding dramas of the natural world: “The buffalo cow as well as the bull is naturally a very timid animal, save when wounded or driven to bay. I learned that the mother of the captured calf made a heroic stand, and presented a beautiful illustration of maternal feeling over fear.… She died in his defence.”

In Archibald’s time, the only way to ascend Pikes Peak was by foot. Now going up “America’s most visited mountain” can also be accomplished by bike, car, or cog railway. I’m choosing the latter because I, blessedly, share none of Archibald’s craving for self-punishing exploration. Adventure, yes; misery, no. I justify my laziness by reasoning that I’m on a tight schedule and don’t have several days to spare trudging up and down a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain. I’m also curious to see what our tour guide will say about Archibald’s momentous climb to the top.

“She’s not a tour guide,” a staff member at the Manitou & Pikes Peak Railway corrects me. “She’s a
conductor
, and her name is Erin.” Attractive and (I’m guessing) in her mid- to late twenties, Erin teaches high school history most of the year and works here in the summer. She is personable, funny, and very smart, and she keeps all 180 of us engaged and entertained for the entire ninety-minute trip. We first learn some basics about the Cog Railway itself. After enduring a painfully bumpy two-day burro ride up Pikes Peak, inventor and businessman Zalmon Simmons (of Simmons BeautyRest mattress fame) resolved to finance a more comfortable mode of transportation. On June 30, 1891, the inaugural steam-powered train safely transported its first paying customers, a Denver church choir, up the 26-degree incline to the summit. Tickets back then were $5 apiece, or approximately $135 in today’s dollars. (I paid $33.50.) Erin assures us that, since the maiden voyage well over a century ago, there hasn’t been a single passenger fatality or serious injury. Our ninety-ton train, we also learn, is powered by a diesel/electric engine and chugs the 8.9 miles up the mountain no faster than 10.5 miles per hour.

Regional one-upmanship is inevitable in these types of talks, and Erin lands a few good-natured jabs. “How many of you are from Texas? I know you all think everything’s bigger in Texas, but see those large rocks over there?” she asks, pointing to a sprawling pile of boulders on our right. “We Coloradoans call that gravel.” She also puts Delaware in its place. “You can fit the entire state in Pike National Forest,” she says.

Erin also directs our attention to the various trees along the way: blue spruces, Douglas firs, ponderosa pines, and quaking aspens, whose bark, we learn, can be rubbed on the skin to prevent sunburn. “It has a natural SPF of seven,” she informs us. There are also some two-thousand-year-old bristlecone pines, mere babes in the woods, I think, compared with the dearly departed Prometheus.

By the time we reach 10,000 feet (we left at 6,320), the temperature has plunged substantially. Windbreakers and sweaters are being pulled out of backpacks and handbags, and Erin starts walking up and down the train making sure everyone is doing all right and answering questions. I ask her what types of dangers hikers would have encountered back in the 1850s.

“There were—and still are—black bears, mountain lions, and poisonous snakes, but the weather would have been the greatest threat,” she says. “It can be warm and sunny one moment, then a blizzard can come in before you know it.”

I’m about to ask her about J. A. Archibald, whom she hasn’t mentioned, but a teenage girl gets Erin’s attention, and I miss my chance.

While Archibald was motivated mostly by the thrill of discovery and not wealth when setting out with the Lawrence party from Kansas, there was one other goal, and it was fully realized at the top of Pikes Peak. “I have accomplished the task which I marked out for myself,” Archibald wrote home on August 5, 1858,

At a time when even other women—see “Middleton, Mrs. Robert,” above—disparaged the suffragists, Julia Anna Archibald Holmes (she often dropped her married name in her letters and journals) became one more irrefutable example that women could achieve whatever men could.