Robert Redford

Robert Redford

America bloomed on a dream, consolidated in the pages of the Democratic Review in 1845 when journalist John O’Sullivan wrote that it was “our Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Prior to then, “America” existed in a huddle of sparsely populated states that were outgrowths of the East Coast Dutch and British settlements. Across the Appalachian divide was limbo, and the travelers who first set out on the Oregon Trail wrote wistfully of “going home to America.” Within two centuries, the wilderness was taken from the Native Americans, but its settlement was mythologized in blithe imaginings wrought by the stories of Owen Wister and the paintings of Frederic Remington. In truth, there were few cowboys, fewer than ten thousand at their peak, and the pioneers who trekked west traveled not in Conestoga wagons, but on draylike prairie schooners hauled by oxen. Fantasies are inherent in human nature, and much of the American landscape, unchanged for millennia until the great drive west in the nineteenth century, provoked heaven and hell.

California, especially, inspired heaven. It was huge, its very geography offering a multitude of opportunities for exploitation. Gold had been sprinkled there by the gods. Starting in 1849, the influx began, filling the twin ramshackle metropolises of San Francisco and Los Angeles with their various dreamers. In 1800 the California population measured a few thousand. By 1853, after the gold rush was finished, the population was a quarter of a million. The entrepreneurial energies of great financiers, including Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, made San Francisco the Paris of the West. Los Angeles, in competition, boomed by nurturing its reputation for blue skies and perfect, balmy breezes. The mission Spaniards, set on sanctifying paradise, persevered with Spanish orange and Portuguese lemon crops, which took hold when the early cattle kings dispersed. These Californian delicacies caught on back east and gave the environs of Los Angeles a bedrock export economy.

Excerpted from Robert Redford by Michael Feeney Callan. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Feeney Callan. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.