Go West!

THE YANKEE EXODUS (398 pp.)--Stewart H. Holbrook--Macmillan ($5).

Whenever Vermont-born Historian Stewart H. (Holy Old Mackinaw) Holbrook, 56, goes back to the stone-fence-and-maple-sirup world of his boyhood, he is saddened by what he sees. On the rocky, rugged hill where four successive generations of Holbrooks once farmed and raised their children, the wilderness is taking over, "marching from the edges of the old fields and pastures . . . advancing to the barn to break its ribs." As he gazes on his deserted schoolhouse and the ghostly, grass-choked neighboring farms, Historian Holbrook ponders three questions that have haunted his life:

"Why did they leave?"

"Where did they go, these Yankees . . . of Vermont and five other strongholds?"

"What did they do when they got to where they were going?"

Wise with years of research, Stewart Holbrook answers his own questions in a searching, richly documented book that traces the 19th Century exodus from New England into almost every corner of expanding America.

Greens & Beans. The land companies, owners of mammoth tracts of western acreage, started it all. New Englanders knew that their own land was stubborn and poor--and the ads spread the word (truly) of rich soil and (falsely) of good roads and easy fortunes. After the Revolutionary War, thousands of Yankees poured into New York and Pennsylvania. In a few years, the trek to Ohio was on. Stay-at-home Yankees ridiculed the exodus; Ohio Indians tried using tomahawks to stop it. But the wagons rolled on, and mushrooming towns grew to look a lot like old New England towns, complete with village greens and gleaming white Congregational churches.

Ohio was only the beginning. After that, the story of Yankee migration paralleled the story of the opening of the West. Although farmers were the first to go, droves of lawyers and schoolteachers followed close on their heels. Though not in the majority in many of the new towns of the West, they wielded a temperance-preaching, baked-bean-eating, school-loving influence out of all proportion to their numbers.

Mercer's Maidens. In a negative way the emigrants influenced the New England they deserted, for by stripping their home states of cash and customers they left a lot of the stay-at-homes out of work. The New England spinster, not always old and homely, was also a product of the exodus of Yankee men. The thought of all those girls back East going to waste drove western bachelors wild, made them plead for someone "to bring a few spareribs to [the western] market." Finally a personable young bachelor named Asa S. Mercer, first president of the brand-new University of Washington at Seattle, decided to do something about the situation in Washington Territory at least. Mercer made a trip East, returned in 1864 with eleven girls from Lowell, Mass. All except one found husbands among the "grizzlies in store clothes" who had financed Mercer's trip.

The venture made Asa Mercer a local hero, helped win him election to the territorial legislature without an opposing vote, and inspired him to try the stunt all over again a year later. But this time he had his troubles. Willing Yankee maidens were not at fault; they signed up by the hundreds. The trouble started when the New York Herald howled that Mercer's maidens were headed for Northwest brothels. Reluctantly, two-thirds of his charges saved their reputations by backing out; Mercer managed to get a scant hundred of them on the boat. Because some deserted at San Francisco, an even smaller number actually got to Seattle. Mercer married one of his charges and quickly went out of the importing business forever.

The Yankee Exodus has some arid stretches, notably the endless lists of early settlers' names that appear in every chapter. But dozens of such rousingly written real life tales as the saga of Seattle's Mercer Girls will be bounty enough for readers who follow the Yankee trails all the way West.

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