The West Coast north of Monterrey, California, is the America of America. In the early 1800s, people from all over the country drove covered wagons to Oregon’s Willamette Valley over the Oregon Trail, but two groups predominated: an elite from New England and a rugged class of farmers and laborers from Greater Appalachia. Both were drawn by promises of free land and hoped to make real what America’s third president Thomas Jefferson called an Empire of Liberty from the East Coast to the Pacific. Much of the western United States was inhospitable at the time (and it still is), but not the Willamette Valley. “From the fertility of its soil,” Oregon City Mayor John McLoughlin said in 1850, “and the salubrity and mildness of its climate, [Oregon is] the finest place in North America for the residence of civilized man.”
The New England elitists set much of the cultural tone here from the start. They founded universities, newspapers, religious missions, timber and woolen mills, business empires, and governing institutions. The name of Oregon’s now-largest city was determined by a coin toss when two locally famous New Englanders couldn’t agree on a name. Asa Lovejoy from Boston and Francis Pettygrove from Portland, Maine, wanted to name the new city after their respective hometowns. Pettygrove won two out of three tosses, so the United States has two Portlands instead of two Bostons. Even so, members of the local Chinook tribes commonly referred to the white settlers as “Bostons.”
But the Bostons were a minority. While they hoped to create another “city on a hill,” an even larger wave of pioneers from Greater Appalachia brought a Don’t-Tread-on-Me ethos that traced back not only to the American Revolution but to the Scottish borderlands from which many of their ancestors hailed. They “carried to Oregon an allegiance to… local sovereignty, grass-roots organization, an independent producer ethic and the ‘doctrine of the negative state,’” historian David Alan Johnson writes in Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada.
New England has long had a utopian streak, a tendency that Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont represents well. Appalachia was “libertarian” and anti-government before Kentucky and Tennessee were admitted to the union as states, and Senator Rand Paul represents that tendency well. The Yankee project out west was further scrambled by the Gold Rush, which brought in wild folks popularly caricatured as a barbarian horde that enjoyed knife fights and brothels a lot more than art museums and fine dining. But these diametrically opposite cultures didn’t clash as much as one might expect when they met on new ground. They blended more or less smoothly and created something new in America. Call it utopian libertarianism, individualistic collectivism, rugged idealism, or another compound of your choice so long as one half applies to Puritan Massachusetts and the other to defiant West Virginia.
The Pacific Northwest is a place where many Republicans smoke pot and plenty of Democrats shoot guns. This complicates the national culture war narrative, I suppose, but it doesn’t feel strange to those of us who are from here. For the most part, the Pacific Northwest’s regional culture combines the best of Appalachia and New England while rejecting the worst. But a small minority of the population retrieved the rejected parts of the recipe from the cutting room floor and combined the worst instead of the best, melding Kentucky’s vigilantism and feuding with New England’s Puritanism and witch hunting.
Originally Posted by Joe in PNG
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