Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (12 page)

Five years after returning to Spain, Fontaneda published an account of his New World experiences.
Travels with Charley
it is not. Although written in the first person, the narrative is dry and impersonal. There’s only one perfunctory sentence about the shipwreck that claimed Fontaneda’s brother and so dramatically altered his own fate, and he spills considerably more ink on Ponce de León’s supposed search for the fountain of youth, a story that, although Fontaneda made famous, he himself didn’t believe. But whatever Fontaneda lacked in literary style he made up for in expertise. No other European had spent more time in the New World, and his observations were widely disseminated and
carefully scrutinized. Author and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, herself a notable figure for her work saving the Everglades, notes that Fontaneda penned “the first book about Florida, or, indeed, about the whole mainland of North America.”

And Fontaneda does flash an intriguing light on the land’s flora and fauna. He writes of giant eels as thick as “a man’s thigh,” tortoises “the size of a large shield … with as much flesh as a cow,” and the ubiquitous
Guaiacum officinale
tree, “which physicians know is useful for many purposes.” Possibly he’s being coy; the tree’s gum was used primarily for treating syphilis, which was ravaging Europe in the sixteenth century. What Fontaneda did
not
find, much to his extreme displeasure, was gold or silver. By my count, he harps on this half a dozen times.

Fontaneda also goes on at length about the Native Americans, describing their diet, customs, weapons, and clothing—or lack of it. “These Indians,” he remarks of one tribe, “go almost naked, wearing only a sort of apron. The dress of the men consists of braided palm-leaves, and that of the women of moss.” He goes on to portray them as being “a tall race of men and women graceful and well-featured.”

It is by far his most charitable comment. Unlike Cabeza de Vaca, who had good relations with and espoused fair treatment of the natives, Fontaneda refers to various tribes as “rascals and beggars” and others as “barbarous” and perceives the whole lot of them as “treacherous.” He warns that the natives are skillful warriors and would not be easy to subjugate. “They are very adroit at drawing the bow,” he says, “and I am convinced they can never be made submissive and become Christians.”

He concludes: “They should all be taken, men and women, after terms of peace have been offered them, placed on ships, and scattered throughout the various islands, and even on the Spanish main, where they might be sold as his Majesty sells his vessels to the grandees [noblemen] in Spain.” Fontaneda was by no means the sole voice calling for such measures (Columbus proposed something similar about two
minutes after making landfall), but he was certainly one of the most authoritative.

From the 1600s through the early 1800s, tens of thousands of Native Americans were enslaved, but men, women, and children imported from Africa were ultimately preferred over the indigenous population. Torn from their homes and tribes and thrust into unfamiliar territory after a debilitating mid-Atlantic crossing, they were easier to dominate. The natives, as Fontaneda noted, were well armed, knew the terrain, and could band together. They were also being decimated by European diseases. There were simply too few of them left to satisfy the avarice of slaveholding merchants and plantation owners.

As I walk back to North Landing and reflect on the legacy of men such as Fontaneda, my first thought is how unfortunate it was that the Calusas ever let him go. But that, I realize, might be too harsh a judgment. Fontaneda didn’t ask to be a castaway at age thirteen and held captive until he was thirty. The real pity, I suppose, is that he ended up here in the first place.

After Bobby drops me off at a marina in Fort Myers Beach, I drive over to the ranger station in Estero that manages Mound Key. (No one is posted on the island itself.) I need to pick up some literature related not to Fontaneda but to my next site, in Indiana. Mound Key is a perfect example of how stories, somewhat haphazardly, lead to other stories.

While planning my itinerary months ago, I needed to confirm with the rangers in Estero that Mound Key was accessible, and when I phoned, a male voice on the other end said: “Hello, and thanks for calling the Koreshan State Historic Site.”

“Sorry, I was looking for Mound Key,” I said, assuming I’d called the wrong number. Mike Heare, the Park Service specialist who answered, informed me that they covered the island, too. I asked who or what a Koreshan was, and he explained that they were a cult that tried to establish a utopian colony here more than a hundred years ago. Their founder, Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed, had changed his name to Koresh
and founded a religion that promoted reincarnation, communal living, celibacy, and the belief that the universe is contained
within
the earth, which is actually a concave sphere.

“Koresh like David Koresh from Waco?”

“Not related.” (The Waco guy did share one thing with Teed. He, too, felt that
Koresh
—referenced in Isaiah 44 as God’s shepherd—had a stronger, more messianic ring to it than his given name, which was Vernon Wayne Howell.)

“That’s pretty crazy,” I said, dismissing the story as a kind of fringe footnote.

Mike set me straight. “Communities like this sprouted all around the United States, and they’ve been a major part of American history.”

They have indeed, I learned after plunging into the topic. They also represented a natural continuation from the early explorers and pilgrims who had once perceived this country as a Garden of Eden or New Jerusalem. By as early as the 1840s, many citizens were bemoaning that the American experiment had failed, and they went off to build new societies untainted by the sins and vices they believed were contaminating mainstream society. These utopian communities attracted the lunatic crowd, no doubt, but they also appealed to many sensible and distinguished individuals, including the eminent publisher and one-time presidential candidate Horace Greeley, who famously advised, “Go west, young man.”

So, after thanking Mike Heare for his help, I’m going west to Grand Prairie, Indiana, in search of Greeley’s promised land.

INDIANA NATIVE JOHN
Babson Lane Soule, not Horace Greeley, was actually the first journalist to exhort his readers to “go west,” but few Americans promoted the new frontier as emphatically as Greeley, even if he found the raucous, brawling territories a tad coarse for his own tastes.

Born to impoverished New Hampshire farmers in 1811, Greeley dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to apprentice with a printer, founded a weekly newspaper at the age of twenty-three, and was a dominant publishing force by his thirties, espousing everything from vegetarianism and temperance to the abolition of slavery. Greeley aspired to hold elected office, but a three-month stint in Congress filling a vacated seat and a disastrous presidential campaign represented the extent of his political career.

After writing sympathetically about the “filth, squalor, rags, dissipation, want, and misery” of New York’s destitute in 1840, Greeley was contacted by Albert Brisbane, an American educated by philosopher François Marie Charles Fourier in France. Fourier was an early champion of women’s rights (according to some scholars he coined the word
féminisme
) and pushed for utopian communities, or “Phalanxes,” that fostered cooperation over individualism. Upon Fourier’s death in 1837, Brisbane took up the cause and found a kindred spirit in Greeley, who began publicizing utopian concepts in his influential
New York Tribune
and organizing Phalanxes wherever there was interest. He embraced Fourier’s idealistic belief that, as Greeley paraphrased him, “the true Eden lies before, not behind us.”

One of these Fourier- and Greeley-inspired Edens, the Grand Prairie Harmonical Association, was established in Warren County, Indiana, named after the Revolutionary War hero Dr. Joseph Warren. And he deserves a mention. An outspoken voice for American independence, the thirty-four-year-old Warren fought as a private on Bunker Hill despite having been appointed a major general; his official promotion was several days away, and he preferred serving with the common soldiers. After he was killed by a shot to the head, British soldiers rolled his lifeless body into a ditch and stabbed it repeatedly with their bayonets.
Warren’s brother John and their friend Paul Revere later identified Warren’s decomposed corpse by a false tooth.

My guide for this particular sojourn into western Indiana is Terri Wargo, president of the Warren County Historical Society. Before I arrived, Terri sent me several articles about Grand Prairie and went out of her way to visit the site to make sure we could locate it. “There’s nothing really there,” she warned me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “That’s true for a lot of the places I’m visiting.”

After staying overnight just across the border in Danville, Illinois, I meet with Terri at West Lebanon’s public library, where she’s worked for more than two decades.

“How long have you been with the historical society?” I ask.

“About ten years. I never thought I’d be running it, though. I guess I went to one too many meetings and was elected president,” she says, laughing.

We drive north on State Road 63, which becomes U.S. 41, and then go west on Route 26 for a few miles. As we near a slight rise in the two-lane highway, Terri pulls onto the shoulder.

“Here we are,” she says.

Well, Terri was dead-on; there’s not much around except an everywhere-you-look vista of lush green bean fields and tiny white farmhouses dotting the landscape.

Nineteenth-century maps and records confirm that this ridge is where the main building, the Community House, would have sat, overlooking the 350 acres purchased by the Association in 1851.

“This shouldn’t take long,” I say as I photograph the surrounding terrain from the middle of the road. Terri watches the highway to make sure I’m not flattened by a truck zooming over the incline.

Greeley never lived in or even visited Grand Prairie, but he outlined its intellectual foundation. Using language similar to that of other Fourier Phalanx charters, the Association’s manifesto declared that its intent was to educate members in “the three following departments, viz., educational, agricultural, and mechanical … for the culture of
both mind and body.” There was a “college” to teach applied trades such as carpentry and blacksmithing along with more academic pursuits, and all money was held collectively by the board of trustees, of which Greeley was one. Few other specifics are known about the Association except its mission “to forward the elevation, peace and unity of the human family.”

It lasted just over a year.

The only first-person narrative I could find from a surviving member was dictated by a ninety-year-old man named Philander Child. He faulted a poor harvest, summer drought, and lack of employment for the Association’s demise and not any philosophical deficiencies in the overall plan. He conceded, however, that he remembered mostly the positive side of the experience because it was at Grand Prairie that he met his future wife, Eve.

In his 1868 autobiography,
Recollections of a Busy Life
, Horace Greeley skips over Grand Prairie and profiles three other ventures instead (all of which, like most Fourier Phalanxes, have historical markers). Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was launched in 1840 and counted the famed author Nathaniel Hawthorne as a founding member. Sylvania in Pike County, Pennsylvania, covered a whopping 2,300 acres and folded in 1845 after two years. And the longest-lasting was the North American Phalanx, a 673-acre property in Monmouth County, New Jersey, which started in 1843 and held up for seven years. (A real estate company selling posh mansions in Monmouth recently tried to capitalize on the area’s utopian history, luring prospective buyers with the promise that, although “a group of idealists” were unable to build “the particular future they dreamed of, … their spirit continues to influence the Monmouth County luxury homes and the region’s colorful lifestyle of today.” The fact that most of these nineteenth-century idealists disdained flamboyant displays of wealth is, I guess, beside the point.)

Greeley had made Fourier’s Phalanxes a trendy utopian brand name, but they weren’t the only product on the ideological market. A capitalist version was set up fifteen miles outside of Chicago in the
1880s by railroad magnate George Pullman. His aim was to build an attractively designed community for his workers—with public parks, fountains, and manicured gardens—but where unions were banned and, in his words, “strikes and other troubles that periodically convulse the world of labor would need not be feared.” It endured for almost two decades; the recession of the 1890s sparked what Pullman most dreaded, a workers’ strike, and his dream died just before he did in 1897.

Although utopian communities tended to follow a socialist economic model, many were founded on religious principles. (Some blended the two, using Acts 2:44–45 as their justification: “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; / And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”) Among the most enduring faith-based utopias were those built by the Shakers, who at their peak in the mid-1800s had approximately six thousand members in more than twenty communes nationwide. Maine’s Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village is still up and running after 220 years. With only about two or three members left, however, its future is grim. Shaker numbers have dwindled over the past two centuries mostly due to their strict no-sex policy. Ever. Even between married couples. The Shakers could expand only through the recruitment of new members, and celibacy was a hard sell.