The Healthy Frontier

...We perhaps rightly see many white homesteaders as race-obsessed, forgetting that a great deal of their thinking was predicated on empirical experience with Native Americans and chattel slaves who were felt to be hardier and somehow different in their ability to withstand heat and adapt to local seasons, waters, and airs...

...Yalencius's purposes in The Health of the Country transcend her fascinating descriptions of private letters and diaries attesting to frontier people's terror of and close attention to the sickly seasons of the new western environment...

...CAT scans, MRIs, spinal taps, blood tests, and a host of other diagnostic tools seek to establish cause and effect: A particular pathogen makes us sick, and thus its elimination can make us well...

...But the result in The Health of the Country is one of empathy rather than disdain for beleaguered pioneers, as she more often tells us of the ordeal weathered than the evil committed...

...Meanwhile, periodic naps and rests, confinement indoors, a less frenzied pace, and periodic seasonal changes of residence were essential for survival...

...our understanding functions by different metaphors...

...We live in a world in which these relationships have been utterly transformed," she writes, not only by dramatic changes in science, medicine, and technologies but also by cumulative revolutions in daily life, by most Americans' distance from agricultural practice, by our collective creation of vastly different environments...

...It was not merely the racist pseudo-science of genetic inferiority that was the basis for chattel slavery, but also a strange belief in the physical superiority of blacks over whites...

...No so our ancestors on the frontier...

...Today, divorced from hard physical work, ignorant of farming, surrounded by appliances, and the beneficiaries of high-tech medical science, few of us worry much about the effect of water, air, heat, and soil upon our daily wellbeing...

...The remedy was two-fold: migrating to a healthier climate (usually somewhere drier, higher, colder—and poorer) and undergoing a frightening regimen that might include blood-letting, purges, or the ingestion of opium and mercury that often were more likely to kill than cure the patient...

...Today we care little for such environmental determinism, when air-conditioners, an array of medicines, and chlorinated drinking water and swimming pools can make tropical life not merely endurable, but often a vacation paradise...

...It is popular now to talk of American rapaciousness and environmental desecration, but not of the multitude of ways settlers perished from poor food, infected water, diseases that are now easily treated, and wrongheaded therapies...

...In turn, the breakneck effort to plow up the prairies and clear cut forests was not always the result of greed or intrinsic wastefulness, but often the consequence of a genuine effort to make the land healthy by turning the unfamiliar into well-known wheat fields, orchards, and homesteads...

...BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON We often envision frontiersmen and settlers mostly as impoverished immigrants who went west to find wealth, cheap land, or escape from the law, creditors, and Eastern monotony...

...Ague (malaria), consumption (tuberculosis), boils (tumors and infected wounds), chills (infectious disease), and flux (dysentery) were thought to be the results of extremes of temperature, malodorous air, sudden changes of scenery, out-of-season rains, and standing water...

...Valencius's refreshingly original account contains a real admiration for the sensitivity that our ancestors displayed for the landscape...

...But for Europeans two centuries ago to survive in the "effluvia" and "miasma" of swampland, others more "naturally" acclimated to such an environment would have to do the menial work...

...Still captive after 2,400 years to a Hippocratic exegesis of wellness as the proper mixture of four humors— blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile— early Americans saw health's balance as precarious...

...Given the last three depressing decades of academic postmodernism and new historicism, most readers are now wary when encountering repeated allusions in cultural history to "the body," "metaphors of meaning," "imaginative geographies," "race and gender"—all the catch phrases of the new academics who see history as little more than a jaunt to the past to uncover the role of power between victims and their oppressors...

...We are profoundly estranged from the ways people of not so many generations ago, inhabiting land many of us now think of as ours, felt and saw and spoke about the world around them...

...And it's true that Valencius investigates all the trendy topics and often employs the new lingo (the book is based on her Harvard doctoral thesis...

...Being well or sick depended almost entirely on the immediate surrounding landscape, one that was foreign and exotic to most arrivals from the east...

...But according to Conevery Valencius in The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, none of these conventional approaches makes much sense without uncovering the mentality of American settlers—specifically the obsessive ways in which they viewed their own health and its total depen Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist at California State University, Fresno, and the author most recently of An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism...

...Traditional histories of the American expansion revolve around their wars —massacres and counter-massacres between whites, Indians, Mormons, and Mexicans—and the politics of statehood, open rangeland, water and mineral rights, and the railroads...

...We become sick because of a particular virus, bacterium, parasite, or tumor—and expect to be diagnosed properly and cured promptly through the proper antibiotic, antiviral agent, surgery, or chemotherapy...

...The loss of such knowledge of our past is to be regretted not only for the craft of writing history, but perhaps also as a more general reminder that our forebears knew something that we do not about our health and its connection to a natural world...

...We forget just how deadly the climate of the early South was for newcomers who had never quite experienced mass epidemics of malaria, cholera, typhus, and Yellow Fever— challenges that help explain why southerners felt themselves a beleaguered people who had to craft a unique culture in everything from medical practice to housing, one quite different from the world of those who farmed in New England, Minnesota, or Michigan...

...At its best, early medicine at least understood that particular habits—plenty of rest, hard physical work, normal sleeping hours, avoidance of alcohol and obesity—could create a healthy "constitution" that might withstand the land and elements, and therefore not "break" under the assaults of both...

...Our common sense thus acts on different substrates...

...In the meantime, we go on with our lives, hardly worried whether it rains or snows, whether cumulus clouds are on the horizon, whether pools of rainwater collect in the street, or whether we get transferred to sultry Houston or crisp Minneapolis...

...This is a world we moderns have lost...

...Much of her narrative revolves around Arkansas, Missouri, and the Mississippi Valley, explaining in novel ways the rather peculiar culture of the South—a region deemed unhealthy for white people from northern Europe but in turn ideal for Africans who purportedly alone could withstand the temperatures and were believed better immune from attendant tropical maladies...

...dence upon the natural environment...

...Unlike modern man, nineteenth-century people could not trump their environment, and thus sought to bend to its frightening dictates in almost every aspect of travel, sleep, work, and eating...

...When thousands die unexpectedly from poorly understood causes there is ample opportunity for racial quackery, false knowledge, superstition, and folk tradition to reign over reason...

...Only then could proper wells be dug, swamps drained, miasma dried up, and shelter established, thus ensuring the health of the fragile frontier family...