The American Elsewhere

Adventure and Manliness in the Age of Expansion

Jr., Jimmy L. Bryan

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700624782, 9780700624782
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624799
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

As important cultural icons of the early nineteenth-century United States, adventurers energized the mythologies of the West and contributed to the justifications of territorial conquest. They told stories of exhilarating perils, boundless landscapes, and erotic encounters that elevated their chauvinism, avarice, and violence into forms of nobility. As self-proclaimed avatars of American exceptionalism, Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. suggests in The American Elsewhere, adventurers transformed westward expansion into a project of romantic nationalism.

A study of US expansionism from 1815–1848, The American Elsewhere delves into the “adventurelogues” of the era to reveal the emotional world of men who sought escape from the anonymity of the urban East and pressures of the Market Revolution. As volunteers, trappers, traders, or curiosity seekers, they stepped into “elsewheres,” distant and dangerous. With their words and art, they entered these unfamiliar realms that had fostered caution and apprehension, and they reimagined them as regions that awakened romantic and reckless optimism. In doing so, Bryan shows, adventurers created the figure of the remarkable American male that generated a wide appeal and encouraged a personal investment in nationhood among their audiences.

Bryan provides a thorough reading of a wide variety of sources—including correspondence, travel accounts, fiction, poetry, artwork, and material culture—and finds that adventurers told stories and shaped images that beguiled a generation of Americans into believing in their own exceptionality and in their destiny to conquer the continent.

THE ADVENTUROUS IMPULSE

1

In the opening scene of Timothy Flint’s debut novel Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot (1826), the narrator meets the title character on a steamboat traveling between Philadelphia and Baltimore. For the former, the encounter is significant because in many ways Berrian represents his future self, traveling home after a long career out west. Both were born in Massachusetts, raised and educated in a land of honest labor and sober industry, and both had left familial and communal obligations in search of emotional inspiration and individual renown. They were adventurers. While Berrian returns as the veteran of war, champion over peril, and victor in love, his companion has just embarked on his journey to “the remote regions of the southwest on the Spanish frontier.”¹

The doting narrator tells the story of this beautiful and remarkable man in the form of a conversation. Berrian reports his birthplace outside Boston and recalls a boyhood filled with athletic vim. He had graduated from nearby Harvard but suffered from a romantic affliction, which he describes as a “native and strong propensity [that] inclined me to visionary musings, and dreaming with my eyes open” (1:17). He had read books of exploration that awakened his desire to travel across the continent and had felt swells of patriotism when he watched volunteers march in parade, but Berrian also had endured disappointments in the marketplace, and he conjured elsewheres rich with opportunities for prosperity and celebrity.

As Berrian relates, he arrived in the Louisiana-Texas region and joined a trading outfit. He accompanied them to the front range of the Rocky Mountains to barter with Comanches. While visiting their encampment in the Arkansas River gorge, he rescued the young and alluring Martha d’Alvaro and returned her to Santa Fe, where he learned that she was the daughter of the governor of Durango. Grateful for his actions, the family employed him as a tutor. He fell in love with Martha, rescued her and her family from a number of predicaments, battled a rival suitor, and joined filibusters attempting to revolutionize Texas against the Spanish. When he concludes his story, he cries out to his interviewer, “How Far [sic] . . .I have wandered! How much I have seen! How often I have been in danger!” (2:273).

Published in 1826, Flint’s novel features an early telling of the emotional aggrandizement and masculine transformation waiting for peril seekers in the North American interiors. Read literally, Berrian’s story follows a New Englander who traveled to far-off lands in search of personal as well as national exceptionalism. Although Flint himself did not participate in these risky projects, he had traveled as far as western Louisiana and the middle Arkansas River, where he collected and shaped the stories of filibusters, fur trappers, caravan merchants, mustang traders, and river freighters who populated his Recollections of the Last Ten Years, released in the same year as his novel. With these and other works, he significantly contributed to the growing interest in stories about the romantic adventurer and a continent that was inevitably American.²

Working within imprecise definitions and nebulous parameters, Flint and his contemporaries reconfigured the terms “adventure” and “adventurer” from the crass and derogatory into the enticing and flattering. Their ideas sprang from the ardent romanticism that pervaded the early nineteenth-century United States. With its emphasis on emotion, imagination, elsewheres, and inwardness, that movement fundamentally inspired Flint’s generation, compelling many of them to personally travel into disputed regions to experience something extraordinary. Adventurers expressed their motivations in both “pull” and “push” terms. The mental geographies they mapped about the West and the Gulf South promised hazardous and sensation-filled careers, personal unrestraint, and wilderness sublimes. From their old lives, they fled the insecurity and anonymity of market economics and sought escape from both maternal and paternal domesticities.

As romantics, adventurers eagerly shared their innermost musings, and they obsessed about claiming an identity, yet they never established a precise archetype. As a group, they represented different ages, came from all sections of the nation, engaged in a variety of vocations, and demarcated permeable boundaries of ethnicity. Although they could not agree on specific attributes, they nevertheless attempted to create an exclusive community by reinforcing the maleness, whiteness, and Americanness of their self-ascriptions.

THE OCCURRENCES HERE ARE CALLED ADVENTURES

Timothy Flint’s novel revealed that when Americans thought about expansion, many called on the familiar and reassuring stories of adventure to make sense of it, but their reactions were often contradictory. Literary scholars demonstrate how British and American authors wrote popular stories about journeys into faraway and perilous regions, creating the realms within which their readers could personally invest in constructed ideas of empire, enterprise, manliness, and ethnic superiority. They also identify a significant domestic counter within stories written as adventure, warning against the pernicious influence of territorial aggression. William C. Spengemann locates this fault line between national literatures, arguing that a British feminine emerged to quell an American masculine narrative, but Martin Green also sees this caution written into the Leatherstocking saga of James Fenimore Cooper, who worried about the alienation of the individual who rejected home and community for the wilderness. Richard Phillips interprets nineteenth-century British stories as creating the spaces within which readers imagined empire and masculinity, while Shelley Streeby examines the proliferation of the novelette industry during the US-Mexican War as a project that advocated invasion yet at the same time prefigured the contradictions between the American faith in their own nobility and their crass desire for conquest.³

As metaphor, Flint’s Francis Berrian imperfectly reflected the meaning of adventure and empire. Literary historian Andy Doolen concedes that the character embodied the westerner as an emergent, superior American male, but he does not see him as an agent for his nation’s exclusive control of the continent. Instead, he reads the story as Flint’s call for transnational cooperation between two anticolonial republics, an idea that enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the United States.⁴ If Flint’s project to forge ties between fellow republics failed because of his lack of foresight or understanding of American avarice, his resuscitation of the adventurer had an enduring impact by offering a narrative that would ennoble greed as enterprise and chauvinism as virtue.

In the example of Francis Berrian the novel and Berrian the character, Flint documented the multiple and often contradictory definitions of “adventure” and “adventurer” in use during his era. Contemporary readers would find the flexibility of the terms routine. Perhaps in its oldest iteration, the idea conveyed a story worth telling—a series of incidents that excited the emotions or a series of misfortunes over which the protagonist must prevail. Berrian persistently referred to his account as “my adventures,” and often digressed to apologize for the apparent triviality of his many exploits. “However insipid my adventures may have been to you,” he insisted, “they are material to preserve the thread of my story.”⁵

Although Flint, through his character, might have been self-conscious about the tediousness of his work, his arrangement of serial occurrences emulated a common plotting method used by novelists, historians, and travel writers of the period. It served a larger function than merely enlivening a story. Literary scholars Bruce Greenfield and Stephen Greenblatt find that such anecdotes, or “petites histories,” form the essence of travel writing. It provides the narrative scaffolding that draws readers into a shared exploration.⁶ Authors from Cooper to Charles W. Webber often referred to the incidental fodder of their storylines as adventures. When he introduced his chronicle of John J. Astor’s fur-trading projects, Washington Irving apologized for the episodic nature of his reporting, which “is necessarily of a rambling and somewhat disjointed nature, comprising various expeditions and adventures,” and the technique proved popular. Readers came to expect these small stories, and authors such as Francis Parkman Jr., Albert Pike, and others would attract their interests by styling their works as “sketches.”⁷

Incidents of peril, novelty, and struggle rendered such narratives significant. After Berrian first deplores the insipid triviality of his stories, Flint’s narrator objects and assures him, “You have awakened curiosity from a new source; and this is just the time and place to listen to a story of that sort.” His emotional reaction to adventure identifies its essential allure. Recklessness exhilarates. Novelty amazes, and hardship challenges. Reading and hearing about those episodes incites similar reactions. Without the emotion, W. L. McCalla inferred, incidents become a dull assemblage of impersonal data. He titled his 1841 book Adventures in Texas because he deemed that only those episodes that evoke interest deserve an accounting. “The occurrences here published, are called ‘Adventures,’ instead of a tour, journey, or journal,” which, according to McCalla, merely cataloged daily trivia. Such information might inform the reader, but adventure scintillated and astonished.⁸

Flint also revealed the derogatory ways in which his generation used the appellation “adventurer.” Berrian’s rival, Don Pedro, and his lover’s parents denounce him as an interloper, outlaw, and opportunist—prejudices to which he was quite sensitive. He admits, “I reflected, how often and how bitterly would they make me feel that they considered me a heretic, poor, and an adventurer.” Don Pedro and the d’Alvaro family symbolize what many rational, sober-minded groups felt about the social havoc created by the rootless and heedless among them. Like the filibusters that Berrian later joined, the US soldiers of fortune who crossed into Canada to enlist in the Patriot War of 1837 generated criticism from their less daring neighbors. A writer from Sodus, New York, spoke for the latter when he decried that “the road has been almost full of adventurers going to Canada . . . . It would seem that all the collected filth and scum of the country are in motion to join the insurgents.” A decade later, Edwin Bryant classed the trappers at a Rocky Mountain rendezvous in the same way, equating adventure with greed, treachery, and depravity.⁹

Those filibusters, mountain men, and others of the capricious sort acknowledged and sometimes shared in the aspersions against them. They nonetheless embraced the label of “adventurer” by refashioning its meaning and renovating its reputation. Flint attempted this by separating his character from unseemly impulses. Berrian often assures his companion that he “was not a swindling adventurer” or “a mere speculator, an adventurer,” but he nonetheless admits, “I came to this country with mixed motives . . . , but to acquire a fair and honest fortune was, undoubtedly, one of my hopes.” By figuring profit into his plans, Flint anointed Berrian as a man of enterprise.¹⁰

The narrative of enterprise celebrated audacity of vision and peril seeking. Since the inauguration of the trade in the 1820s, US merchants who ventured over the Santa Fe Trail consistently referred themselves as adventurers. When Augustus Storrs described such undertakings, he beamed, “Danger, privation, heat, and cold, are equally ineffectual in checking their career of enterprize [sic] and adventure,” and Irving constructed monuments to this archetype with his histories of John Jacob Astor and Benjamin L. E. Bonneville. Storrs, Irving, and others applauded endeavor, ingenuity, and grit as crucial traits of the risk-taking American male.¹¹

Although he might acknowledge that Berrian’s quest for wealth contributed to his wandering disposition, and regardless of how others might have equated the term with outlawry and selfishness, Flint collaborated in this reconfiguration by depicting adventurers as a remarkable class of men. Confronted with the need to rescue Martha d’Alvaro for the fourth time, Berrian enlists the support of four American filibusters, who “were young, and high-spirited men, to whom such an adventure wore the highest charm.” Flint’s literary contemporary James Hall detected the same impulses with the trappers of the upper Missouri. He believed that their “privations manfully endured . . . in the exercise of their perilous calling” warranted the honorific of “bold adventurers.” An eagerness to face hazards, endure hardship, and enact violence marked them as superior men.¹²

In defining adventurism, commentators of the period accepted its multiple and often contradictory meanings. Defenders of family and community equated the idea with lawlessness or self-indulgence, but those who journeyed into the interiors of the continent on personal quests for pride, fortune, or savagery used the idea to legitimize their inward longings. They reconstructed the adventurer into a paragon of American manliness and exceptionalism, and as Berrian had discovered with his traveling companion, they found sympathetic audiences for their tellings. The image attained a prominent place within the national consciousness as the United States aggressively expanded its borders, impelled by a romantic ethos that energized their rhetoric, devised shared vocabularies, and validated their individual worth.

SEEKERS OF THE FAIRER PHANTOM

Scholars of the early West have long acknowledged that romanticism significantly contributed to the development of enduring fictions that portrayed the trans-Mississippi as national domain and expansion as natural right. Henry Nash Smith and others, however, strive to deflate the hubris inherent in those narratives. Smith characterizes romantic itinerants as “anarchs” or “primitivists” whose influence dissipated with the arrival of the agrarian frontier. Although William H. Goetzmann argues that the region “was important as a source of new experiences, new data, new sensations, and new questions,” he nevertheless viewed romanticism as a European outlier that defined an ethereal West, forever beyond reach because serious explorers would dispel the imaginary with empirical data. Similarly, Anne Farrar Hyde and Robert Lawson-Peebles find that wilderness confounded nineteenth-century observers who called on those European ideas to make sense of the unfamiliar landscapes they encountered in the Far West. Although Peter J. Kastor acknowledges the emergence of romanticism during the later antebellum period, he deems trite and selective such visionary readings of Jeffersonian exploration, which he describes as a sober and cautious endeavor.¹³

By the 1830s, according to environmental historian Roderick Nash, romantics defined a wilderness aesthetic that mitigated the Old World and Puritan antipathy toward the morally vacant wilderness and degenerative savagery. This new aesthetic, he continues, emerged from the literati of the urban centers of the East and therefore did not reflect frontier realities, and while Nash recognizes a minor and ultimately insignificant adventurous impulse, he concludes that the Puritan aversion persisted. He referred to the capsizing of one of John C. Frémont’s boats during his 1842 expedition as an example of how the romantic ethic only served to alleviate the harsh realities of the wilderness, but as Bruce Greenfield and Stephen Greenblatt have shown, such anecdotes function to enliven, and render meaningful, the romantic West.¹⁴ For adventurers of the 1820s through 1840s, prevailing over unforeseen disasters demon...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Adventurous Impulse
• 2. The Storyteller Nation
• 3. An Aristocracy of Buckskin
• 4. Sentimental Frontiers
• 5. The Companionship of Peril
• 6. Romantic Invaders
• Epilogue: Legacies of Adventurous Manhood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover