Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
the idealism of the Declaration of Independence from the desecration
of the market place where it was openly flouted, so in a day of vaster
imperialisms and greater complexity we may take counsel of his
humanitarianism, his open-mindedness, his trust in tolerance and good
will, his democratic faith that held firm in spite of disappointment.
The market place is mighty now as it was then, and liberalism finds as
few friends there; but when did its gods become immortal?
Chapter III • The Frontier in Letters
When the West began to appear in literature in the late twenties and
early thirties, it was the Ohio valley that became the beneficiary of
the new interest, and over the vast region through which flowed the
Beautiful River--as far as the Mississippi and beyond--was thrown the
romance of the settlement. It was a beguiling theme with its background
of dark forests and bloody Indian fights, with its venturesome
flatboats that drifted with the current, its picturesque rivermen,
“half horse, half alligator,” who towed their heavy crafts upstream,
its rude miscellany of settlers who intrusted their families and goods
and cattle to great rafts and set forth hopefully on waters that were
to bear them presumably to the Promised Land--a theme to appeal to
imaginations easily stirred to romance. There was a darker side to
be sure; wrecks in plenty littered the shores, wrecks of fortune and
character and life; outlaws and blackguards thronged the river and
preyed on the adventurers; but in spite of such misadventures the great
movement was invested with dramatic interest, and the Ohio valley
became the particular repository of the romance of the frontier, a
monopoly which later times never despoiled it of and which only the
Golden Coast of California ever remotely rivaled. It was fortunate
in that its early history was recorded by a romanticizing generation
that wove its myths about the wilderness scouts, that delighted in the
picturesque talk of river boatmen and discovered themes for epics in
the founding of new commonwealths.
From the first, therefore, the literature of the new West fell
naturally into the romantic note. The early writers who essayed to deal
with frontier materials were eastern men who proposed to exploit the
romance of the Inland Empire as frankly as their fellow adventurers
were exploiting the material resources. Gradually in their work two
main conceptions crystallized, which came to overshadow all lesser
themes: one localized itself in Kentucky and took form in the poetic
conception of the Dark and Bloody ground; the other associated itself
first with the rivermen but quickly diffused its spirit through the
backwoods and took form in the conception of western humor. The first
was a heritage from the early days when the Indian tribes fought for
their ancient hunting grounds and fell upon the isolated stations with
knife and tomahawk; the second grew up with a later generation that had
penetrated far into the wilderness, where, stimulated by much whisky,
its rough vigor found issue in exaggerated boasting. Each created its
legendary hero about whom popular imagination wove its myths: the
figure of Daniel Boone came to symbolize the heroic qualities of a race
of scouts and backwoodsmen who matched their wits in woodcraft with
the Indians and proved the quality of their Kentucky rifles in many a
brush with the warriors; and the figure of Davy Crockett came to embody
in the popular mind the loquacious eccentricities and exaggerated
wit that were already passing into a literary tradition. Many hands
contributed to the common work: writers as different as James Kirke
Paulding with his _Westward Ho!_, Robert Montgomery Bird with his _Nick
of the Woods_, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker with his _George Balcombe_,
Albert Pike with his _Prose Sketches and Poems_, Augustus Longstreet
with his _Georgia Scenes_, and Joseph G. Baldwin with his _Flush
Times of Alabama and Mississippi_--to name only a few. From such
diverse elements was created the new literature of the West that was
contemporary with the rise of Jacksonian democracy and that gave wide
currency to certain romantic conceptions.
I • The Romantic Frontier
Of this very considerable group of writers the two who earliest
wrote from immediate first-hand knowledge of frontier life were
Timothy Flint, Harvard graduate and missionary, and Judge James Hall,
Pennsylvania lawyer, both of whom spent a considerable portion of their
mature lives in the West. Of Timothy Flint’s restless wanderings and
periodic settlements, at Saint Charles, Missouri, at New Orleans, at
Alexandria on the Red River in Louisiana, at Cincinnati, with frequent
returns to his native Massachusetts and a short editorial experience
in New York City, it is impossible to speak in detail; they suggest,
however, the breadth and intimacy of his knowledge of the West got from
twenty-five years’ experience there from 1815 to his death in 1840.
Few men traveled so widely through the frontier, or carried with them
such keenly observant eyes. He wrote much, conducted for several years
a literary magazine in Cincinnati, was for a short time editor of _The
Knickerbocker Magazine_ on the withdrawal of Charles Fenno Hoffman, and
established a considerable reputation as a representative of western
letters. Much of his work was frankly casual, but his _Recollections
of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings
in the Valley of the Mississippi_, published in 1826, and his four
novels published between 1826 and 1830, make up the first important
contribution to the new literature of the West.
In temperament Timothy Flint seems to have been something of a realist.
In his daily life he was frankly outspoken and critical, often to his
own hurt, and some of the many troubles he met with in his honest
preaching to frontier heathen, resulted from this plain speaking. He
refused to measure life and conduct by the crude western standards,
and the enmities resulting from such refusal brought about a rupture
with the home society that had supported his missionary undertaking.
It was this intellectual honesty that filled his _Recollections_ with
an invaluable body of observation and criticism, and constituted
it an important source-book for later historians. Paulding early
made use of it writing his _Westward Ho!_--published in 1832--and
in his introduction, after paying tribute to Flint’s “picturesque
description,” he went on to say that the work “has not met its deserts,
and he should be highly gratified if this passing notice served in any
way to call public attention to its interesting details.” Unfortunately
the occasional realism of the _Recollections_ gave place in his novels
to romance saturated with sentiment and heavily coated with moralizing.
With a fund of exact information at his disposal he chose to turn
away from reality and project his stories into regions he had visited
only in imagination. _Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot_, deals
with a Southwest far beyond his extremest journeyings; _The Life and
Adventures of Arthur Clenning_ is a romanticized version of Robinson
Crusoe; and _The Shoshonee Valley_ is a romance conceived out of tales
told him by far western travelers, woven into an extravagantly romantic
plot. The only one of his tales that makes use of familiar settings is
_George Mason, the Young Backwoodsman; or “Don’t Give up the Ship,”_
in which he put some of the materials gathered in his journeyings up
and down the Mississippi, but sentimentalized and moralized out of
all realism. It is a pity that Flint should have fallen in with the
extremest mode of the times, for in many essential respects he was the
best qualified man of the West to write an honest account of a world
just taking form.
The literary reputation of Timothy Flint soon came to be overshadowed
by that of Judge Hall. “Among writers of short narratives, the most
characteristically Western fiction of the time,” remarks a recent
student, “James Hall was clearly preëminent; and he became the
central figure in a kind of school of experimenters in the materials
of frontier life” (Ralph Leslie Rusk, _The Literature of the Middle
Western Frontier_, Vol. I, p. 274). In the early twenties he had ridden
the circuit in Illinois as a very young lawyer, when the settlements
were scattered thinly through the southern portion of the state. At
Vandalia he started the _Illinois Monthly Magazine_, which survived for
two years, when he removed to Cincinnati and established _The Western
Monthly Magazine_, which in the four years from 1832 to 1836 became
one of the “most important of the pioneer period.” “The purpose,” says
the student above quoted, “was not so much to introduce the East to
the West as to make the West conscious of itself” (Rusk, _ibid._, Vol.
I, p. 173). To this end Hall was writing and publishing short tales
and descriptions, and he had already collected a miscellany of prose
and verse by several hands which he issued as an annual, _The Western
Souvenir, a Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829_. Thus launched on a
literary career, he wrote in the next twenty years a very considerable
amount, including tales, sketches of manners, history and casual
comment.
His best-known story is probably _Harpe’s Head_, which he later
incorporated with other tales in a volume entitled _Legends of the
West: Sketches Illustrative of the Habits, Occupations, Privations,
Adventures and Sports of the Pioneers of the West_, and published
in 1832. The work proved popular and passed through half a dozen
editions. Sketchy and loose in construction, it belongs to the school
that hovered between the essay and the romance, delighting in the
picturesque, exuding sentiment, and going out of its way to exploit the
pleasantly horrible. It is a mingling of Virginia chivalry and frontier
bravery, woven about a central plot of a daughter of a Virginia house
who removes to Kentucky under tragic circumstances, is abducted by a
roving band of Indians, and subsequently rescued. Additional romantic
interest is sought in the melodramatic deeds of the title hero--a
well-known border ruffian with an insatiable blood-lust who murders his
unsuspecting victims wherever he comes upon them--and in the curious
exploits in rattlesnake killing of Hark Short, a waif from the Carolina
swamps who lives like a fox in his den. The interest of the story
today lies in the pleasantly idealized descriptions of such scenes as
the barbecue and the camp meeting, rather than in the portrayal of
backwoods characters. Although Hall frequently professed his devotion
to realism, there is little evidence of it; occasional figures like
Pete Featherton, whose rifle had been bewitched, and occasional
indulgence in a conventionalized backwoods dialect, serve only to
heighten the somewhat gaudy romance of the whole. Yet even such timid
ventures brought on his head criticism from a Cincinnati editor “for
tiring the reader with vulgar backwoods expressions” (Rusk, _ibid._,
Vol. I, p. 282).
That Hall’s interest in backwoods eccentricities of speech and manner
suffered a heavy handicap from the romantic taste of his readers may
easily be believed. Matter excluded from his tales he sometimes put
into his introductions. Thus in the third edition of _Harpe’s Head_
he analyzed at some length certain characteristics of the crude
pioneers who were creating the psychology of the West--their fondness
for drinking, betting, horse-trading, stump-speaking, swearing.
Particularly it is the exuberance of their picturesque language that
he emphasized, an exuberance that was already becoming a literary
tradition and that flowered in the cento of western folk ways that were
gathered into the Davy Crockett myth. A single passage will suffice to