"Like a Roaring Lion": The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest

Sarah Keyes

In the opening paragraph of Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), the Paiute leader Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins compared the coming of the whites into her homeland to "a lion, yes, ... a roaring lion." A small child when Euro-Americans first invaded her people's land near present-day Humboldt Lake in Nevada in the 1840s, Hopkins never forgot the onslaught. In her narrative and on-stage presentations to northeastern reformers during the mid-1880s, Hopkins detailed the environmental and social devastation wrought by Euro-American conquerors, including the depletion of game, homicides, sexual assaults, and other physical violence. Yet her opening observation suggests that indigenous peoples also experienced invasion as a sonic conquest. The phrase "roaring lion" alludes not only to the aural volume of conquest but also to the biblical passage that describes the devil as a roaring lion. Mary Peabody Mann, the book's editor and a leading Christian reformer, may even have selected the phrase herself to evoke the sinfulness of the Euro-American invasion. Although arguably none of the Euro-American emigrants on the Overland Trail, commonly referred to as overlanders, who traveled through the Paiutes' land would have described their trek or America's expansion as diabolical, many did liken their invasion to a roar. In their diaries, journals, and reminiscences, overlanders speculated about the aural impact of their wagon trains on the indigenous peoples and animals of the western "wilderness"; they portrayed their sounds as having the power to subdue the savage wilds and help transform the West into American territory.1	1
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins gave this portrait, signed, "your loving sister Sarah Winnemucca," to her brother Natchez, probably in late 1879 or early 1880. Winnemucca was very young when Euro-American overlanders first started passing through her people's land in present-day Nevada in the 1840s, but she remembered the emigrants' invasion as "a roaring lion" for her entire life. Courtesy Nevada Historical Society, Reno, Nevada.
From the moment European powers first stepped foot in the New World, they wielded sound to establish territorial dominion and cultural control. Of all the aspiring colonizers, the Spanish relied perhaps most heavily on sound. Speaking—sometimes from miles offshore—to indigenous peoples or to their empty villages in an incomprehensible language, aspiring Spanish colonizers recited the text of el requerimiento, which required Amerindians to accept Catholicism or become the targets of Spanish military power. Although Anglo settlers placed more emphasis on "improvement" of the land as justification for territorial control, Richard Cullen Rath and Bruce R. Smith have shown that English efforts to remodel the landscape after Old World Anglo settlements also included transforming the soundscape, or aural landscape, to resemble that of the English countryside. Building fences, felling trees, and effecting other physical improvements went hand in hand with transforming the "howling wilderness" into a civilized soundscape of ringing axes, lowing cattle, and tinkling bells. Indians reacted against this physical and aural encroachment, and the sounds of ritualized speech, whoops, shouts, and drum beats became crucial in the battles between the English and Native Americans for territorial control. In the nineteenth-century French countryside the sonic reach of the village bell defined the community's geographic boundaries and therefore the residents' territorial identity. Across the Atlantic, sectional conflicts manifested in disputes over whether the American soundscape should resemble that of the industrial North or southern slave plantations. By violating their master's restrictions on the volume and types of sounds they could make, enslaved peoples wielded sound to undermine the slaveocracy. As scholars have shown, the aural is inextricably intertwined with struggles for dominion and power.2	. . .