After the American Revolution, four of the nations that we have just surveyed headed west: New England, the Midlands, Appalachia, and the Deep South all raced towards the interior of the continent apparently with little mixing. Figure 8.1 shows the territories that each nation settled. Woodard’s argument and the work of cultural geographers suggests that these four nations carried their particular folkways and cultural attitudes with them and that the states they settled still bear those same cultural markings.
The Far West
The cultural migrations were halted for a time by the sheer extremity of the West, which was not well suited to farming. Only two groups braved the arid West. The Mormons hailed from Yankee roots. Like the New England Puritans, two centuries earlier, they set out on a utopian religious mission, and began arriving in the 1840s on the shores the Great Salt Lake in present day Utah. “With a communal mind-set and intense group cohesion,” notes Woodard, “the Mormons were able to build and maintain irrigation projects that enabled small farmers in the region to survive in far Western conditions.” Interestingly, the Mormon values of communitarianism, morality, and good works are all Yankee values. One wonders sometimes why Utah politicians seem to align themselves so often with politicians espousing values more typical of Appalachia and the Deep South rather than with New England.
The other hardy souls to venture into the Far West were the Forty-niners, so named after the year 1849 which brought a flood of frontiersmen to California seeking gold. Otherwise, the West was successfully settled only after the arrival of corporations and the federal government, the only two forces capable of providing an infrastructure that would eventually permit widespread settlement. Westerners would come to resent both the corporations and the federal government as unwelcome intrusions in their lives.
The Left Coast
“Why is it,” asks Woodard, “that the coastal zone of northern California, Oregon and Washington seems to have so much more in common with New England than with the other parts of those states?” The explanation, according to Woodard, is that the first Americans to colonize it were New England Yankees who arrived by ship. New Englanders were well positioned to colonize the area having become familiar with the region as New France’s main competitor in the fur trade.
The first Yankee settlers were merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen. They arrived determined to create a “New England on the Pacific.” The other group to settle the region consisted of farmers, prospectors and fur traders from Greater Appalachia. They arrived overland by wagon, and took control of the countryside, leaving the coastal towns and government to the Yankees. The Yankee desire to reproduce New England was ultimately unsuccessful because as ever more migrants arrived from the Appalachian Midwest and elsewhere, the Yankees were outnumbered fifteen to one. They did manage, however, to maintain control over most civic institutions.
Today the region shares with coastal New England the same Yankee idealism and faith in good government and social reform blended with Appalachian self-sufficient individualism.
