Today, we look at a medieval institution -- the wild
and woolly West. The University of Houston's College
of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the
people whose ingenuity created them.
Our American West developed
its own characteristic technologies for daily life.
We all know the flavor: log cabins, windmills, card
games, barbed wire, heavy
horse-drawn wagons, whiskey, large saddles, and -- I
might ominously add -- death by hanging.
Historian Lynn White points us to a startling feature
of all these technologies. Log cabins were a medieval
form of housing -- the earlier Romans and later
Europeans used much different building technologies.
The Romans and later Europeans drank beer and wine,
but whiskey was the medieval drink of choice. Romans
and 18th-century gamesmen used dice, but you'd find
only cards in medieval or Western saloons. That sort
of comparison can be made right down the line. The
Romans executed people by crucifixion, and the later
Europeans used beheading and shooting; but
strangulation -- hanging -- was the standard medieval
punishment.
This strange parallel grows more puzzling when we
learn that the middle-class settlers of New England
tried to recreate what they'd left behind instead of
looking for the most efficient technologies. They
went straightaway to the beam and plank house
construction they'd left in England, when log houses
would have made much better sense.
But the settlers of the West were generally the
European poor -- peasants, workmen, and people who'd
lived away from the sophisticated centers of Europe.
They had generally been closer to the technologies of
the Middle Ages. But more than that, these people
found their way more quickly to the sort of
rough-hewn ways that worked so well in both the
medieval world and the undeveloped West. They were
also people who held little nostalgia for their lives
in Europe.
The technology of the 10th to the 13th centuries was
wonderfully direct, practical, and inventive, and so
too were the Western immigrants. Another
characteristic of both medieval and Western life was
that they both tended to be open to change and
variety.
The old West thus provides us with an oddly accurate
mirror of medieval life; but it also gives us a
picture of a very effective adaptation by free and
inventive people to new circumstances.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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