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Article Excerpt
People and ideas may follow the flow of money and commerce, but their relationships often endure long after the specific business concerns that created them have been forgotten. The multicultural dimensions of exchange resulting from international trade are central to the nineteenth-century American western experience. Yet, the historical West and the mythic West, for many Americans, have so intertwined that we are left with but a superficial ideal, a nationalistic West of cultural homogeneity rather than diversity. Being "American" during the nineteenth century required newcomers to set aside old ways in favor of a nationalistic view centered on a homogeneous and uniform ideal, one that either denied outright or drastically modified people's backgrounds and traditions. By the time historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his paper on the American frontier at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, the politics of the nation demanded a historical model by which past conquests could be explained and rationalized, and upon which future conquests might be built. The eyes of politicians and historians were not on what the nation was but, rather, on what they thought it should be. Although Turner saw the greatest contribution of the West as democracy, he also noted its contribution to nationalism, its importance to the emergent nationalistic paradigm. The story of America's move West became, through the urging of Turner and others, the new American nationalism, a homogeneous way of looking at the country that persists to this day. (1) Yet, even a superficial glance at the complex cultural roots of the Santa Fe trade between Mexico and the United States debunks such facile myth making.
Regardless of nationalistic rhetoric, the homogeneous ideal of the late nineteenth century was, of course, unrealistic. The nation, to quote Walt Whitman, "contained multitudes" reflected in language, customs, economics, politics, religion, gender, and a hundred other subclassifications of human existence. The U.S. ideal of "E Pluribus Unum" had correctly identified the "many" but only imperfectly approached the "one." The American nation-state evolved amidst an unprecedented global whirlwind of social and economic expansion based on advancing technology. In the nineteenth century, the frontier conflict in the American West paralleled similar upheavals in South Africa, on Russia's far Kamchatka Peninsula, and elsewhere on the planet. (2) It was a period of colony and empire, of rapid economic expansion and accelerated human displacement.
While driven by a diverse array of social phenomena, such rapid change was probably influenced most directly by transformations in the global economy. From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, markets evolved from localized mercantile concerns to consolidated capitalistic systems that covered the globe. The development of national identifies ran parallel to and intersected with the economic race. As Braudel observes, markets became colonies, colonies revolted, and new nations and economies resulted. (3) The European race for markets and power created both opportunity and adversity for those caught up in its wake. Both conflict and cooperation were central to the ensuing social and economic evolution. This age-old story of intertwined economics and empire continues to play out in the oilfields of the Middle East. In the nineteenth century American West, however, the initial course of empire followed well-established land routes of trade and migration.
The U.S. overland trade with Mexico during the first half of the nineteenth century, commonly known to Americans as the Mexican, or Santa Fe, trade is a particularly good example of this global phenomenon. The Mexican trade required the cooperation of an international business community to ensure its success. Middlemen and commercial agents (or comerciantes, as they were known in Mexico) handled the transportation and transfer of goods from factory to warehouse, from warehouse to ship, from ship to dock to warehouse to railroad to steamboat to wagon train to store, sometimes with as many as a half dozen separate firms involved in the transfer, storage, and shipment of goods. A single shipment from Europe for the Mexican trade involved insurance agents, banking houses, the U.S. Mint, blacksmiths, wagon makers, wheelwrights, saddlers, gunsmiths, tailors, boot makers, teamsters, and managers--plus ancillary service providers such as merchants, grocers, saloonkeepers, hotel owners, farmers, stock drivers, slaves, and various others catering to those individuals and firms freighting goods to the Southwest. (4)
The speculative overland trade that developed between the United States and Mexico in the nineteenth century created an international network that included men and women of various cultures, involving two continents and spanning thousands of miles of ocean, mountains, rivers, and deserts. Towns like Independence, Kansas City, and Saint Joseph in Missouri; Santa Fe and Las Vegas in New Mexico; El Paso, Texas; and Tucson and Yuma in Arizona, became entrepots and service communities along a network of international trade routes extending from Europe across the Atlantic and the North American continent to California and into central Mexico. Many of these trade routes had been in sporadic operation in one form or another, at least in a European context, for more than 200 years. Native routes on which these roads were probably based were centuries older.
International trade required an international business community and a cooperative network of people to foster its development and guarantee its success. The center of the Mexican trade formed around businesspeople who managed to cooperate and survive in an uncertain, volatile, and often hostile social and economic climate. They included Spanish, Mexican, Anglo, African, Jewish, French Canadian, and German peoples, to name only a few. They included men and women, slaveholders and slaves.
Jewish merchants comprised a specific group of American merchants not generally referenced in the official saga of the American West, (5) despite their importance to nineteenth-century commerce and trade. Their participation is not remarkable, but rather, is part of the logical development of the region's economic and social history. Even before the Diaspora, Jews had long been active in the business of international trade caravans in the Middle and Far East. After the destruction of Jerusalem, many Jewish merchants of necessity maintained their international businesses and contacts from various urban centers over the next millennia. The brother of the great Jewish scholar Maimonides, for example, worked in the gem trade in the twelfth century, supporting for a time his brother's academic pursuits. This was long before the Far Eastern adventures of the Venetian Marco Polo, whose illustrious career would later be referenced by U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton as he lobbied...
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