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For Joseph Walker’s expedition to the Pacific, one primary source dominates the historian’s landscape. Zenas Leonard, the young man hired to be the expedition’s clerk, kept a journal on the trip. After the trip, when Leonard returned to Pennsylvania, Leonard’s story was published in a local newspaper in two installments. Leonard’s account is thorough and, apart from the dates Leonard provides, is generally consistent with corroborating sources when such sources are available. But for much of what happened, Leonard’s story, as published in the Pennsylvania newspaper, is the only source we have.
When no other source addresses a part of the Walker Expedition that Leonard describes, historians writing about the Walker Expedition have often treated Leonard’s account as though it presented unimpeachable fact. For instance, while the expedition was leaving the Sierra Nevadas and heading toward the Pacific, Leonard recounts two occasions on which Captain Walker allayed the expedition members’ fears about natural phenomena. First, Leonard reports that after making camp one night, “we were startled by a loud distant noise similar to that of thunder.” Leonard says that some of the expedition’s members thought that it might be an earthquake and that “we would all be swallowed up into the bowels of the earth.” According to Leonard, when Walker hypothesized that the sound came from the waves of the Pacific, all the expedition members were calmed. (Walker’s explanation cannot have been correct; at the time, the expedition was two days’ walk from the ocean.) Second, on November 13, 1833, there was a meteor shower. Mountain men would refer to that meteor shower for years as “The Night it Rained Fire” or “The Night the Stars Fell.” Leonard reports that a few words from his Captain was all that was needed to calm the expeditionary group: “after an explanation from Capt. Walker, [the expedition members] were satisfied that no danger need be apprehended from the falling of the stars, as they were termed.”
Bil Gilbert, author of an otherwise excellent biography of Walker, draws on these examples to conclude that “it is apparent that by that time the hard-bitten trappers had come to have an almost childlike faith in [Walker’s] wisdom and turned him into a soothing authority.”
To me, that sounds like a bit much. Available texts allow a historian to conclude that Walker was well-regarded among mountain men as an explorer and as a leader, but concluding, on the basis of Leonard’s journal, that this group of weather-beaten mountain men had “an almost childlike faith in [Walker’s] wisdom” strikes me as a stretch. I find it hard to believe that a few words from Walker, however well-regarded he was, could have allayed the fears of this large group of notoriously independent mountain men in the immediate and universal way that Leonard indicates. A far more likely explanation, I think, is that Zenas Leonard was telling a story that would sound good in the Pennsylvania press, so he oversimplified events and lionized his expedition’s leader. I don’t mean to imply that I think Leonard’s stories about the meteor shower and earthquake noise were entirely false – I suspect they were based on real events (the meteor shower, at least, is a recorded astronomical fact) – but I do not think an objective historian should swallow Leonard’s account whole. Both of Leonard’s remembrances on which Gilbert based his “childlike faith” hypothesis reek of hero-worship.
It is true, of course, that we have no version of events to compete with Leonard’s. But the absence of an alternative explanation does not convert a readily available explanation into unimpeachable fact. It may once have been the case, for instance, that the best available explanation for a cloudburst was “we did a rain dance,” and it may once have been the case that the best explanation for Earth’s biodiversity was instantaneous creation of each species by a divine figure, but the unavailability of alternative explanations for rain or species diversity did not transform rain dancing or creationism into accurate explanations for the world around us. Now we have meteorology and evolution, which appear to be more rational explanations. It is of course true – in case you are a rain-dancer or creationist – that neither modern meteorology nor evolutionary theory is perfect. Both theories are almost certainly imperfect, and should be improved in the years to come. But the unavailability of a better theory cannot transform a readily available theory – be it rain dancing, creationism, or hard-bitten trappers turned to children sitting raptly by Joseph Walker’s knee – into a perfect explanation.
Leonard may be our only source for certain details, but that doesn’t mean everything he said was accurate. It is conceivable, of course, that Leonard’s storytelling is perfectly accurate, as some historians seem to assume. It is much more likely, however, that he succumbed to at least some of the temptations that beset all storytellers – to embellish some facts, omit others, and shuffle others around in order to impress an audience. Leonard was only human, and historians who forget the limitations in human retellings turn a willfully blind eye to one of the most predictable patterns in human attempts to reconstruct the past.
One of Cosgriff's horses in the foreground; Crazy Mountains in the background.
Ol' Cropped Ears. Half cutting horse and half grizzly bear, he's both fleet and ferocious, a freedom-craving cow's worst nightmare.
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