T H R O U G H IMMIGRANT E Y E S : U T A H HISTORY A T T H E G R A S S ROOTS BY WILLIAM
MULDER*
M
his twelve to spy out the land of promise, to see whether it was fat or lean; but the Old World has sent its millions to try the promise of America. There must have been excitement in the camp of Israel when two men came back from Canaan with a cluster of grapes so huge they bore it on a staff between them; but that Biblical tall tale dims beside the wonders reported from New Canaan, even when, in the words of a William Bradford, that report was set down "in a plaine stile; with singuler regard unto the simple trueth in all things." In the "good newes" from America the facts were always more marvelous than fiction, for the immigrant crossed more than an ocean and a continent— his traveling was OSES SENT
. . . across the sprung longitudes of the mind And the blood's latitudes.1 From earliest voyager to latest refugee, the personal record of that odyssey holds an unfailing fascination, however much each newcomer's experience seems a repetition of an old story. The constant renewing of this experience has in fact determined the course of United States history and given it a characteristic literature, a literature so commonplace it is easily overlooked. The record of the inner and outer weathers of his transplanting as the immigrant himself observed it in his letters and diaries and memoirs begins with the very "roote and rise" of the nation, with the first arrivals, for the founders of Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay were immigrants, as were the settlers of New Netherlands and New Sweden—and as were the unwilling cargoes of every * Professor Mulder is a member of the English Department, University of Utah, and Managing Editor of the Western Humanities Review. For die current academic year he is a visting instructor at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 1 John Ciardi, "Letter to Mother," from Homeward to America, quoted in Common Ground, I (Autumn, 1940), 18.
