robber barons

COWBOY MYTHOLOGY

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

Since childhood I have read editorials and op-ed pieces on both sides of the political spectrum. Like conservative David Brooks of The New York Times once did, I also read William F. Buckley. As a result, I read newspaper pieces that make me a little crazy sometimes.

This morning David Brooks posted “How Trump Will Fail”. I’m glad to read his admission that Trump’s “ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.”

Denali, the highest mountain peak in north America at 20,310 feet (6,190 m). It was named Denali for centuries before a gold prospector named it after a politician in 1896. Alaska fought for decades to return the U.S. name back to what it had been (and remained in Alaska). Image in the Public Domain from Wikipedia: “The Koyukon Athabaskans who inhabit the area around the mountain have for centuries referred to the peak as Dinale or Denali. The name is based on a Koyukon word for ‘high’ or ‘tall’. During the Russian ownership of Alaska, the common name for the mountain was Bolshaya Gora (Russian: Большая Гора; bolshaya ‘big’; gora ‘mountain’), which is the Russian translation of Denali. It was briefly called Densmore’s Mountain in the late 1880s and early 1890s after Frank Densmore, [another] gold prospector who was the first non-native Alaskan to reach the base of the mountain.

I laughed. Well, of course I did! But then all too soon, Brooks couldn’t help but unwittingly slip into fiction. I appreciate cowboy mythology as much as the next person, but let’s not mistake it for history.

I’m glad Brooks once had a Junior year history text*, but he might want to have another read. He makes this claim: “It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones.”

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