According to Wikipedia, “The first references of ‘elephants’ in trail narratives and letters are positive allusions. Hopes at the beginning of the trail tended to be high and the elephant excitement directly linked to this level of anticipation. John Clark’s quote from 1852 is a perfect example of the eager emigrant. ‘All hands early up, anxious to see the path that leads to the Elephant.’”
Other stout and hardy pioneers, rugged individualists all, were of the frame of mind of Amelia Hadley, who wrote in her diary even earlier, in June 1851, “Some of our company did not lay by and have gone on, they are anxious to see the elephant I suppose.”
Around this same period in the American South, military academies were springing up in virtually every state — states that in less than a decade would join together and constitute the traitorous Confederacy. As the drumbeat for secession was echoing loudly throughout the 11 states that eventually did leave the Union, institutions like the Virginia Military Institute (V.M.I.), the South Carolina Military Academy (the Citadel and the Arsenal), the Georgia Military Academy, and the University of Alabama Corps of Cadets began operating as de facto “West Points of the South,” training their young men for the combat to come.
Once the hostilities of the Civil War started, many of these young men volunteered to “see the elephant,” a metaphor of the period for witnessing something exotic — out of the realm of everyday life. These rambunctious young Southerners, fashioning themselves also as rugged individualists, assumed that by volunteering to participate in what they thought would be a frolic — “a circus of war” — that they would soon return home to tunes of marching bands and gay parades, welcoming them back as conquering heroes. Alas, it was not to be.
It wasn’t very long before reality set in, as men who actually knew war, like Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, who stated, “War is hell. You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” When “seeing the elephant” came to mean returning home missing limbs, or in many instances not returning home at all, the phrase took on a completely different meaning.
We are, as a nation, are once again experiencing a rise in the number of citizens who like to present themselves as rugged individualists, those idiots who account for the puzzlingly high number of folks who eschew the wearing of masks or exhibit complete disdain for following the rules of social distancing. Such foolish actions, while indeed quizzical, are not completely unknown, as some citizens (often conspiracy theorists) feel they have the right to ignore any rules they don’t agree with, potential consequences for others be damned.
There was a time in our nation’s long ago past, when the West was thought to be wild and the country supposedly needed “taming,” a mindset that lead to the killing of Native Americans and the despoiling of the environment: polluting of rivers, spewing toxins into the air, and mountaintop removal mining practices prevailed. All of this damage was done via the license provided to rapacious men under the aegis of them exercising their “rugged individualism.”
Those days, however, are long gone; indeed, they began going out of style — thankfully — with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962.
But now, with no frontiers left to “tame,” no land left to despoil (not without challenge) — when even moving to Alaska is no longer a viable alternative — what’s left for the lost, confused and self-centered rugged American individual to do?
Wishing to turn the clock back to a previous time when they were able to run roughshod over the rights of others (anyone who wasn’t the exact mirror image of themselves or their ideas) in increasing numbers the rugged individualists are coming up with new bogeymen — read: anti-fascists; those demanding justice for black males; and women demanding full equality — to do battle with. They are arming themselves and taking to the woods (watch out, Sasquatch), playing at being patriots and preparing for a race war they hope their demented current president will precipitate.
But these are faux patriots at best and moral cowards at worst — seeking some way to demonstrate their manhood in hopes of impressing and winning over the white females that are increasingly disdainful of — and losing respect for — them and their twisted world views _ basically overgrown children who are nonetheless secure in the knowledge they won’t be seeing any elephants.
