The Angel of History Flies with Her Own Wings
“There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.” — Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”
One of my large personal commitments is to learning the history of Oregon. I have a basic intuition about Oregonian (well, Portland, but that’s 45% of the state’s population and most of its money and college degrees) conventional wisdom: it’s a bunch of Epicurean burghers who’d prefer to see Oregon as a special place gifted to us by the mercy of historical streams, somehow separated from it all, somehow a resolution to it all.
I think this idea is starting to give way as Portland becomes self-consciously a real city. There are a few historiographical streams that suggest this, but they don’t necessarily converge. They produce parallaxes that I think become unresolvable by the current narrative. I conclude, opinion unchanged, that there is indeed a moment of change and creative potential.
Early History in Flux
First and foremost, you can’t say “history of Oregon” in 2023 without immediately summoning strong and complicated feelings about the indigenous past. The complexity exists in a couple of ways: we don’t agree on the bounds of this past, we don’t agree on the history of migrations into and within what is now Oregon, we can’t apply the category of “Oregon” or “Cascadia” in good faith to pre-European polities or societies in the region, and I find the history still struggles to bracket contemporary sentiments when discussing older residents of the area.
Over the last hundred years of historical writing, sentiments about indigenous Oregon history range from white triumphalism to cartoonish regionalist appropriation to outright guilt. Yes, the state has a history far more troubled than our Epicurean ideals would let us believe. Yes, the Oregon Historical Society has been on quite the campaign to raise awareness of this fact. Yes, it’s going to be critical for the state’s future character to work through all of this. But for my own edification, I’ve decided that sentiments have to be worked through on their own. History as it is written has to be our best, good-faith, factual effort.
As for the chronology itself, we live in an exciting time. Ours is an era of rapid upheaval in the earliest human history, and Oregon stands out as the entry point for humans into the entire New World — a couple years ago, we found some genetic evidence that smashed the so-called Clovis-first theory; a couple weeks ago, we confirmed a find that’s the oldest in North America. The destruction of Clovis-first seemed to cause a great deal of upset on academic Twitter, which was interesting to witness. What could possibly be at stake if Clovis arrivals assimilated or displaced Paleolithic inhabitants? Razib Khan had an interesting commentary (that I cannot easily find) on the academic dispute itself, but it highlights what a sensitive issue the question of indigenous origin has become.
I should add that a friend of mine recently intimated that the state of Oregonian archaeology is, and has been, pretty haphazard behind the scenes. A lot of it is basically glorified looting — people dig up arrowheads in campsites, do nothing of cultural value with them, die, and watch them end up in landfills where they serve no value to future generations. It’s not exactly desirable to widely broadcast a bunch of indigenous oral literature and send Heinrich Schliemann types off to cause more harm than good. Obviously this seems to be a very complicated issue, but the upshot is that there’s a lot of stuff out there that could be dug for and contribute significantly to the state’s historical records if handled sensitively. David G. Lewis at Oregon State lists an example: following Kalapuya oral literature, we may be able to find very old sites deep beneath the Willamette Valley. But, as with any other archaeological scene, it seems often best to leave most of the stuff where it is. They do the same thing in Greece and Turkey and Iran.
The early-history parallax is thus: we want to nod to the historical guilt we feel for how nineteenth-century arrivals treated the resident communities of Oregon, but we want to do so in a way that doesn’t treat them as the somehow-ordained owners of the land or even the “original” inhabitants. We want to do this in a way that’s relevant to, but not conflated with, the current situation of indigenous communities in Oregon. We want to excavate and preserve the objective history of the state so that there can be reconciliation, but not in a way that violates the claims of indigenous communities to the memories of their ancestors.
California, Max
Second, and speaking of Joan Didion’s California, we seem to exempt ourselves from all that. Aside from the “No Californians” stickers that perennially dot Portland bumpers and telephone poles, there is a really strong desire to avoid any sort of comparison with the Golden State. We sneer when East Coast types lump us in with the redwoods or compare Crater Lake to Yosemite. Our camping is significantly less competitive, and we’re built on top of a squatter democracy instead of a series of repossessed Spanish land claims, it’s true, but the forests are still contiguous and the Cordillera is still the Cordillera. And Portland and San Francisco are the two oldest sisters among all the American coastal cities, with largely intertwined histories, so what gives?
It’s not like we write out the other neighbors — Oregon used to be much larger, after all. A history of Oregon often implicates the rest of the bioregion: Washington, Idaho, British Columbia, often Alaska. We see Haida and Tlingit artwork all over houses in Portland, used to symbolize a certain regionalism, despite the utter art-historical inaccuracy. (Chinookan geometric patterns tend to be less popular, though extant.) It’s much like the Scots inventing the kilt well into the nineteenth century, I suppose. But to think of ourselves as part of “The Far West” or “The Pacific Slope” only happens in video games that want more playable factions.
We love Cascadia. It’s all over the Internet. We have had this affinity since the 1970s when the idea of “bioregions” was first popularized. There’s a desire to see Oregon as part of something larger, certainly, and study of the Oregon Country is tantalizing because of the perspective it gives on how we chose to become something. Your average Oregonian has a good chance of recognizing the old Oregon Country map and the old expression “54–40 or fight!” We’re probably able to tell you about the Pig War. There’s some strong regional pride there.
Indeed, despite the strong interdependency with our southern neighbor — Jacksonville boasts the first Chinatown thanks to Cantonese from the Bay Area, etc. — California tends to get left out of histories of Oregon. Much of the southern part of the state has more to do with gold-rush culture (since, as we often seem to forget, there actually were gold rushes down there) than with the Columbia-Salish mercantile world. Steamships used to run frequently between Portland and San Francisco. We even unearthed an original official document for the City of San Francisco, dated 1848, in Portland!
There’s an argument to be made that the divergence came with the population and financial boom in California that did not reach Oregon. Merchants in Portland who would earn the moniker “mossbacks” refused to take financial risks and still do. California, on the other hand, became 90% male and only reached gender parity in the 1980s. It’s described as having become the world’s largest fraternity, full of gambling, boisterousness, and rapid social mobility both upward and downward. Oregonians have never really wanted any of that, certainly. But it’s not entirely clear to me why this results in largely avoiding the state when contemplating our own history.
The California parallax is thus: we want to see the state as its own self-contained thing, but we want to be part of Cascadia and have our own regional story. It reminds one of the paradoxes of German history — a theme I hope to touch on in a future post. In short, to prove that we’re not just an extension of California, we spend a bunch of effort fixating on them and resenting that foreigners need to be told we’re from “north of San Francisco.” No one doubts that Oregon is its own place. But as we try to tell a bioregional story, or situate ourselves in the broader world, we’re going to have to face the fact that California controls a lot of the face of the West Coast and that Oregon’s history is — believe me, I hate to say it — to some degree appendage to the Golden State.
Semper Fidelis
Third, it’s surprisingly difficult to read the early history of the state without the historiography becoming very military. You have your Isaac Ingall Stevens and your Edward Richard Sprigg Canby and a host of other eponymous figures. Clicking through Wikipedia starting from a page about some innocuous point of interest pretty quickly pulls one into a thicket of battles involving Texans, Mexicans, or Confederates. It’s frankly a bit annoying to feel pulled back into AP US History when the goal of studying your state’s history is to let Oregon fly with her own wings, but I’ve learned to take this theme seriously.
As much as I personally find military history has a certain stench to it, I get why the history of Oregon as a territory has to lean on it. Good books on the subject (Ambrose, Cozzens) identify a pretty clear fact: the United States Army was the major institution in American society at the time. Reading Peter Drucker a few years ago, I came to realize how important this was: if you want to understand any sort of serious political decision-making, you have to situate it within the institutions of the era. For Oregon, the military was pretty much the entire political game. I’m not sure why I was surprised to discover this.
Someone could probably write a Foucauldian biopower genealogy of the American West that uses military discipline as a point of departure. (Earl Pomeroy’s book is a good start.) You don’t have to memorize a bunch of battles or get weirdly excited about the development of rifling technology to appreciate the organizational impact that the military has had on the West. Isaac Ingall Stevens, for instance, ran the Washington Territory like a junta and only stepped down when he was forced to fight in the Civil War. You have to understand the reach of military decision-making to understand early policy decisions, all the way back to John McLoughlin.
Not to mention, there are a bunch of treaties between the United States and indigenous polities that I have yet to read. These are a really critical part of our history, especially given that Oregon was actually a squatter democracy for a good period of time: one of the few places in the Western world where settlers made claims without any formal recognition of their land ownership. It’s been a pretty feral place from the beginning! You have to wonder how such a brazen seizure of land might influence our conflict-avoidant (and conflict-seeking) social norms. With the recent trend of making land acknowledgements at official ceremonies, the history of the treaties is probably soon to enter the mainstream. I think that’s a very good thing.
However, we notice that the military history kind of cuts off around the creation of a civilian state. This makes sense, given that Oregon to this day does not have very many military installations to speak of. It’s actually quite a dramatic difference to look at the Salish Sea — basically swarming with submarines and carriers and army reservists — and Oregon, which has to my knowledge a single airstrip and a few Army Reserve centers that are being repurposed. It is a bit abrupt, though, to simply drop the military as an institution at statehood given especially the influence it continues to have on Washington State. The effect of the abrupt end of military history, I think, is part of what hands the region’s past over to the Angel.
The military-history parallax is thus: on one hand, the military is a critical institution for understanding state formation in the Oregon Country, and we need to keep it in there to explain how land got conquered, parceled up and governed. However, we use the military as a sort of fundamental fantasy: it helps us believe that the past is a sort of separate place, and we insist on focusing on environmental and social history as soon as the state becomes “no longer the frontier.”
The Parallax View
As I expressed in a previous post, my cards are already on the table here. I think Portlanders really like a certain Epicurean vision of who we are — a certain culmination of historical progress. Benjamin, quoted at the top, would call this a “messianic” conception of the here-and-now. “But,” as he writes, “no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia.” What we have with how we look at the history is a hallucination that the past is sort of taken away from us by the Angel. The military ceases to affect us, California only exists when it’s explanatorily necessary, and it’s apparently too hard to reconstruct the history of indigenous ancestors because we feel very guilty or something. All of that is over there, on the other side of Klee’s strange Angel.
It’s interesting to see Portland today, a city that prides itself on being shiny and new, juxtaposed against the utterly ancient expanse of the surrounding land’s human history. Indeed, there is a theme of “newness” in Oregon’s culture that dovetails with the memorylessness of Joan Didion’s Califonia: Lewis and Clark ventured into the “new”, pioneers are “new,” hipster-Cascadia is “new,” Portland is even “new” in the eyes of Fox News as the vanguard of progressive degeneracy. The idea of the frontier lives on. I wish Frederick Jackson Turner were here to answer the parallax of declaring a frontier in land that is very old. Perhaps this parallax has become more visible to the mainstream, and the strong sentiments about our state’s history are very possibly stoked by the seeming cognitive dissonance.
On this account, it’s not a coincidence to see the military stuff so siloed from the rest of our understanding of the history. Interpretive centers like Fort Clatsop, the museum at the Oregon Historical Society, or even the museum in Warm Springs tend to emphasize the social and experiential history of Oregon rather than names and dates. In a certain way, this approach creates a phenomenology of the frontier. You’re encouraged to contemplate a past that’s fallen away, unretrievable, somehow completely left behind but for museums and archaeological sites. As I mentioned above, the coming of civilization is presented as a fait accompli.
In contrast to the experience-of-the-past-in-display-case approach, the military history of the Far West actually connects us to institutions from somewhere else, and gives a paper trail back to the concrete moments of the past. When we look at Governor Stevens, we can actually find his decrees and ask what he was thinking. He’s not a “type” or a “moment of experience” but a real person to interrogate. Military history contains an element of contingency — Geworfenheit, if you will — that is flattened by the display case into a cultural morphology or a “typical scene” that gives the illusion of inevitability to the flow of Far Western history.
The Myth
As I want to explore in a future piece, there’s a powerful idea that I first encountered through Robert Pippin — that the United States had to re-found itself in the aftermath of the Civil War upon some new myth. This was provided by California, of course — the spreadsheets by which we once oversaw cotton gins would turn over to run gold mines. The plantation came to be replaced by the venture, and we lifted the words of Bishop Barclay: “westward the course of empire takes its course!” Grey Brechin has an excellent book about how this made Barclay eponymous in the founding of the University of California, Berkeley.
I think this (re-)founding myth explains a bit of the dissonance between concrete history and the Elysian portrayal of the Old West. Pomeroy is known as the founder of the “federal school” of Far Western historiography by emphasizing the extrusion of existing institutions in a way that shows continuity with the rest of American history. This has pervaded the military history more than the social. Presumably, indigenous histories are also able show a pretty obvious continuity. It seems as though the idea of the Far West as some kind of historical caesura or intercession of the forces of history does persist.
Although the re-founding myth has gotten pretty old, I think we do still drape the Angel in it. It’s significantly older than the United States was when it had to be re-founded, and it doesn’t really make sense after Turner’s frontier closed. It’s arguably been replaced or at least transmuted by Keynes and the promise of full employment guaranteed by a vibrant industrial venture economy. Today the American frontier has moved to the domains of semiconductor manufacturing, scientific-management software, e-commerce, biotechnology, medical devices, and some combination of petrochemical and renewable energy innovation. I think we still manage these ventures to some degree the same way we used to prospect with railroads and balance sheets, and the idea of the gold rush is very much alive, even in 2023, in San Francisco. It’s still where you run off to when you’re fed up with New York and you want to start your own thing, after all.
See, even talking about the “myth of the West” starts to treat Oregon as an appendage of California. Pomeroy is right: Portland never was a gold rush town, and we’re not like other girls. But ultimately there is an idea of the West: drive around freely on Eisenhower’s highways, live your happy bourgeois suburban life, there’s enough excitement in just hiking that you don’t have to get involved in dour historical questions like the East Coasters and Europeans do, and you should really be thinking about “what is my best life, and what’s that project I’m going to start?” I get that Portland has a bunch of grunge that’s reacting against this, but it’s still a pretty strong contemporary literary theme. I read at least one decent novel in the last couple years that explicitly asks “are we the West Coast land of friendly opportunity any more?”
Indeed, it does seem like change wants to be on the horizon. As much as I love the idea of the New West as a place of opportunity, excitement, and freedom from old resentments, there are really concrete questions that it seems hard for current conventional wisdom to answer: why can’t we trace a clear continuous history back to early inhabitants and appreciate how long people have lived here? What is our relationship with California? How did the early institutions of the state get set up and by whom? It’s hard to get the average Oregonian to even list any founders of the state. We can probably lay the myth to rest and start to be a bit more honest with ourselves. As I wrote a while ago, Portland is a big city now and needs to act like a grown-up about this stuff.
I wish I had a better conclusion than “Benjamin was right and I think we’re in a place with some creative potential right now,” but here we are. To recapitulate, I don’t think that any of these historiographical directions actually converge — we can spend a lot of time wondering about how the military sculpted the Salish Sea and gave Seattle its particular character without really glancing at California, and we can spend millions of dollars trying to dig up those really old sites under the Willamette Valley without wondering too much about the military. I think that pushing in any particular direction will force us to do a bit of reckoning, though — it seems hard to pull any of these threads without making some serious acknowledgments about the fundamental contingency of our situation.
