Boom Town

Most people picture the West getting built from the east: wagon trains rolling out of Missouri, the country filling in from New York toward the setting sun. But the West had already been lit from the other side. In 1849, gold turned San Francisco into a boom town overnight, and what poured through the Golden Gate was more than gold-seekers. It was ambition and grit, the two forces that settled the West. Ambition brought people. Grit kept them going when the land pushed back. Both started pushing inland, from the Pacific outward.

This song follows that push through the eyes of a young freighter. Before he was a lawman, Wyatt Earp hauled freight out of Southern California, northeast toward the most unlikely city in the West. The goods came off the wharf at the port of Los Angeles, up through the Cajon Pass, and across the Mojave to the springs at Las Vegas. From there the mule teams leaned into the long climb through Utah to Salt Lake City. Nobody was supposed to be living out there. In 1847, Mormon pioneers led by Brigham Young, driven out of the East, were urged to push on to fertile California. Young refused and chose a desert valley more than five hundred miles from the nearest town of any size, precisely because no one else wanted it. They didn’t build a rough camp. They laid out a planned city: a wide, orderly grid with streets broad enough to turn a wagon team, ten-acre blocks, and irrigation ditches carrying mountain water to every lot. By Wyatt’s day it was the best-planned town in the interior West, an outpost of order at the end of a trail of heat, dust and a lot of cursing. Ambition built it, and grit kept it supplied, one mule team at a time.

Then the wire and the rails arrived from the east. When the tracks met in Utah in 1869, New York was suddenly about a week away, and the West that had been hauled over sand by mule took off.

The last verse jumps decades ahead. In about seventy years, the West went from tumbleweeds, Spanish missions and dusty pueblos to the bright lights of Hollywood. Wyatt Earp saw almost all of it. He was born in 1848, the year before the gold rush, and died in Los Angeles in 1929. By then, stars were falling out of the sky onto movie sets in the hills where freight wagons once rolled. In his final years he would drop by the sets of silent westerns. A young John Ford later said Earp told him how it really went: the gunfights, the trail, and the West he had helped haul into being. Ford carried those stories into films that shaped how the world pictures the West. So the song ends with Wyatt stepping onto a set to tell it one more time.

It’s a story about a boom, and like most stories out of that town, it might be true.