"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion."
--George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Science, 1918
The day after the election we can all breathe a sigh of relief. The relentless television ads and overstated messages on oversized postcards have ended.
The telephone recorded messages from political celebrities urging us to vote their way have ceased. Only history is left to reflect what happened, thrash the truth about, discern voter motivations, and determine why we voted the way we did.
But even our reflected past has an unusual way of turning the facts. We love to dramatize the good stories, while downplaying the relevant, fact-filled, but less interesting sagas.
Everyone's heard of the ill-fated Donner Party. If only those poor travelers could hear their story retold as it is today through revisionist theories, and made for television docu-dramas. The mockery, terrible gaffs and comments on their behalf! Theirs was a story too dramatic to be lost, a tale of sacrifice to behold.
We are more likely to forget the successful figures.
What was the name of the first group to successfully transverse the Sierra range at Donner Summit? Who remembers the Stephens-Murphy-Townsend Party, a group of 49 men, women and children who did fight off winter, and successfully crossed the Sierra crest into California two years before the Donner Party?
Their victory was ignored due to our penchant for drama and disaster.
In a present day bickering, the historical facts are so much in dispute that two groups studying the emigrant trail are fighting in court over the path of the route in the Reno area. A hearing on the lawsuit is set today in Washoe District Judge Jim Hardesty's court. The crux of the matter is a temporary restraining order to keep one group from uprooting or defacing the historical markers of the other.
The Nevada Emigrant Trail Marking Committee claims wagon ruts atop a small hill in the Truckee River canyon shows the emigrants followed the canyon from Reno.
The Trails West group members say emigrant diaries prove the California-bound pioneers of 150 years ago took a slightly more northerly, direct route through Reno.
History on trial. It sounds like one for the record book. Both sides insist historical truth must be the winner, not any one group. They are determined to discover the facts and truth of the matter, even if it is from 150 years ago.
As for what happened in yesterday's election, now that the winner-take-all drama is over, the sacrificed and the successful portrayed, historical predictions can begin anew. But one can only guess how history will remember this election 150 years from now.
Kelly Clark has lived and worked in the Carson City area for 11 years where her efforts are focused on raising two children and enjoying the trails of the Sierra Nevada range.