There have been Shakers in the United States as long as the U.S. has been a nation. Never numbering more than a few thousand at any given time, the Shakers have contributed to American culture to a degree unmatched by any other small religious sect. With their American origins in upstate New York of the Revolutionary era, the Shakers are iconic within American culture for their innovation, work ethic, and sheer creative impulse. In all areas of the Shakers’ material output—from architecture and furniture to tools, housewares, textiles, and inspired drawings—a recognizable aesthetic emerged, renowned for its simplicity, elegance, and great beauty. But one area of Shaker creative output has received considerably less attention: music. Besides the ubiquitous “Simple Gifts,” first popularized by Aaron Copeland when he incorporated it as one of several folk themes in Appalachian Spring, Shaker music is virtually unknown today other than to a miniscule segment of scholars and Shaker enthusiasts. Yet, in music as in other areas, the Shakers exhibited astounding innovation and productivity. The quantity of original music produced by nineteenth-century Shakers is truly prodigious. From its earliest period in America, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—or Shakers—developed a tradition of music and dance unlike that of any other religious congregation in America.

American Shakers

Founded in England and led by the visionary Ann Lee, the Shakers began to stir the religious atmosphere of the northeast just a few years following their arrival in America as English refugees in 1774. They shared some impulses with other radical sects, such as concern over political corruptibility of clergy and the rejection of “papist” religious ritual, denominational creeds and doctrines, and oath-swearing. Distinctively, the group denounced sexual relations, and expressed its freedom from sin in physical form through exuberant group dances in worship, a practice that accounts for the derisive moniker “Shakers,” a term that the sect decided to embrace. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the Shakers drew hundreds of converts across upstate New York and the New England states, establishing nearly a dozen settlements of celibate believers living communally in self-supporting villages.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Shakerism was making its mark on America. From radical conceptions of God, to gender equality, ecstatic dancing and celibacy, Shaker practices drew converts and detractors alike. As the faith developed more elaborate social organization in the growing eastern villages, the Shaker “Ministry” confronted the challenge of further growth. Beginning in 1805, the Shaker movement spread from its core region of upstate New York and adjacent Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine to the trans-Appalachian west. The experience of frontier evangelism gave rise to a dramatic phase in the evolution of Shaker music, stimulating the Shakers’ first production of hymns, a musical genre that would remain central to Shaker worship thereafter. However, western expansion was also critical to other aspects of Shaker musical development. Shaker doctrines involving gender and race equality and the dual-gendered nature of the godhead achieved their first formal articulation in the hands of Shaker songwriters in the west, many of them western men and women converts. This contributed to the infusion into Shaker music of rich and varied expressions of gender and collectivity without parallel in other American religious sects. Voices from the Shaker west also took active roles in finding fresh ways to articulate the notions of spiritual family and believers’ relationship to heavenly “parents.” Such concepts had been evolving in Shaker thought since the preaching of “Mother” Ann Lee, the sect’s visionary founder.

Shaker music

Thousands of music manuscripts survive, and individual songs number perhaps in the tens of thousands.

Although the Shakers’ material culture has received the most modern attention, arguably the most vital facet of Shaker life was not the production of material objects, but rather the production of music. The Shakers were—and are—first and foremost a religious movement, bound together by a unique theology and approach to worship. Music was the indispensable underpinning of Shaker worship, generating a unique aural environment and visual spectacle that drew onlookers by the hundreds or even thousands to Shaker villages from Maine to Indiana during the sect’s height and well beyond. Music helped to define and shape the dance practices that distinguished Shakers from other American sects. And music was among the Shakers’ most important cultural tools. It was through music that many of the vital complexities of Shaker doctrine were diffused and reinforced among rank-and-file believers. Music, with its catalytic capacity for emotional inspiration, helped the Shaker collective achieve the spiritual fervor that sustained the movement over generations. And because music could be even more mobile than Shakers themselves, it could be a potent tool for social cohesion as members of the sect migrated west. The sharing and circulation of music was the crucial instrument that allowed the Shakers to create and maintain a unified and coherent cultural identity across a thousand-mile territory in the early American republic.

Ironically, two distinctive features of Shaker music—its usual form of notation and its prodigious diffusion in manuscript, as opposed to printed publications—have been largely responsible for shielding it from extensive scholarly attention. By the late 1820s, Shakers everywhere began to favor the use of a notation system in which lower-case letters of the alphabet represented notes of the scale. This replaced a hodgepodge of less effective earlier approaches, ranging from recording texts only and holding tunes in oral tradition, to using conventional music notation in round notes or shape-notes, to using capital letters or other symbols in place of musical notes. The “letteral notation” system adopted after the late 1820s dominated Shaker music everywhere for at least half a century. Thanks to the efforts of several gifted music theorists within the Shaker ranks, the system was formalized so that it could easily be taught (fig. 1). Consequently, hundreds upon hundreds of Shaker music manuscripts survive in which this letteral notation system predominates. Many of these manuscripts are substantial song books comprising hundreds of pages and containing a thousand or more individual songs. Yet because this rich corpus of music appeared to the uninitiated to be so much gibberish, it was consigned largely to obscurity until after the middle of the twentieth century. Also, the hymn books published by the Shakers in the early nineteenth century comprised—like the hymn books of many religious denominations—only hymn texts with no printed notation whatsoever. Consequently, folk musicologists examining American musical traditions in the early twentieth century had virtually no way to document the early music of the Shakers. Collections of Shaker music manuscripts were not then available to scholars. Among twentieth-century Shakers, few survived who knew how to interpret letteral notation any longer. Instead, the remaining Shaker communities were mainly using a set of late nineteenth-century hymnals printed by the Shakers using standard mainstream musical notation, whose contents represented a sharp departure from the music that had dominated the movement at its height decades before. Because of this singular set of circumstances, the landmark early studies of American folk music traditions sidestep the Shakers altogether. It has been left to later scholars to explore and analyze the rich and distinctive musical culture of the Shakers.

Shaker letteral notation was part of a group of related technical innovations that enabled early Shakers to record and disseminate an immense amount of music. Because it used letters of the alphabet, something the highly literate Shakers knew anyway, its use encouraged the production and recording of music across a far wider swath of the Shaker population than might have been the case had traditional music notation been employed. Use of a five-line staff was optional. The Shaker music theorist Isaac Newton Youngs devised a five-line staff pen around 1834, and many Shaker music manuscripts do place letteral notation on a staff (fig. 2). But just as often, tunes simply appear as strings of lower-case letters interlined with words (fig. 3). The problem of how to convey the movement of the melody stimulated another innovative feature of Shaker notation, namely, the graphic meandering of the letters on the written page. Melodic movement is signaled by the meandering of those strings of letters uphill or downhill relative to the horizontal plane of each written line. Still other music scribes developed diacritical markings to indicate movement of intervals within a melody, allowing songs to be notated using simply strings of letters and their markings in straight horizontal lines, below which the song texts would appear (fig. 4).

But while the technical innovations of letteral notation set Shaker music apart in some obvious respects relative to other forms of early American music, they do not represent Shaker music’s most significant features. Far more profound are the social and performative innovations. The Shakers engineered a wide range of entirely different musical genres to complement the various aspects of worship—wordless dance songs, hymns, one-verse songs, “occasional” songs, anthems, inspired songs. These genres developed over time, as Shakerism itself evolved. Collective worship might employ many genres simultaneously, often in the same meeting. Some of the older genres never fell entirely out of use but continued to be used alongside much newer ones. The “Compendious Index” from a comprehensive 1845 manuscript compilation by Shaker Russel Haskell of Enfield, Connecticut, reflects the range of Shaker musical genres at mid-century (fig. 5).

During the Shakers’ beginnings in 1780s New England, music consisted mostly of wordless improvised melodies, to which were fitted vocalized syllables or “vocables” (such as “lo-lo” or “vum-vum”). This sort of non-verbal singing freed the worshippers both for group dancing and for the experience of spiritual extremes, unencumbered by complex lyrics. The use of such tunes to accompany dance continued unabated for nearly a century in some Shaker communities. Russel Haskell, the first Shaker to historicize Shaker musical tradition, writes that in the earliest period, “the young converts were led to sing, some of the time, such as they had been accustomed to sing before they believed.” Indeed, the Shakers integrated some “worldly” tunes, especially in the Shakers’ first generation. Some of the tunes adapted to the gender-divided collective dancing bore enough superficial resemblance to popular tunes of the early republic that detractors declared that Shakers worshipped to the bawdy strains of “Yankee Doodle” and “Black Joke.” Eventually, wordless tunes were subdivided according to time signature for different categories of dance, with most taking on 2/4 or 6/8 time for marches and “back-order” dances, versus shuffles and circle dances, respectively.

More innovations ensued as Shakerism entered the nineteenth century. The use of hymns with lyrics seems to be a common enough feature of American sacred music. But for the Shakers, hymn lyrics were an innovation that emerged as the first flush of northeastern expansion gave way to more systematic and wide-ranging missionary work mainly targeting the trans-Appalachian west. The wordless songs alone could lead to spiritual excesses among young believers that were difficult to reign in. During the early western expansion, worship with young converts could easily get out of hand. But hymns could convey Shaker doctrine and history to people who had never seen Shakers before, while at the same time encouraging orderly deportment among exuberant converts. As a proselytizing tool, lyrics could help convey the themes and nuances of Shaker doctrine, as well as the powerful narrative of the Shakers’ short but dramatic history, in ways that wordless dance songs could not possibly accomplish. Several Shaker leaders involved in codifying doctrine also happened to be capable poets, and this contributed to a thriving hymn enterprise. While familiar tunes from hymnody or balladry were sometimes adapted by the Shakers and fitted with new lyrics, new tunes also emerged, albeit with strong folk music influence.

Other innovations followed. Anthems first emerged among eastern Shakers sometime in the early 1810s. Anthems consisted of lengthy prose texts set to continuous, meandering melodies. Shaker anthems appear to be related to the choral anthem tradition found in New England hymnody of the late eighteenth century, in which prose texts often of Biblical origin are set to long, wandering arrangements in three or four-part harmony. In Shaker worship, it is probable that solo individuals sang the anthems, as inspired and scripture-based exhortations to the assembly of listeners. Common anthem motifs include the use of “spirit language” phrases, or one form of what the Shakers considered to be “speaking in tongues,” integrated into spiritual exhortations (such as, “But if ye do as ye are taught by my salinda va, sa lac navoo ar tala van, not one of them shall fail,” a typical phrase from an 1830s anthem). Another common anthem motif was the spelling out of key words in sung phrase (i.e., the sustained spelling of “P-E-A-C-E” or “P-R-A-I-S-E” over a drawn out melodic phrase).

Obedience, order, and union were all highly valued in Shaker life, and one musical innovation that seemed to underscore them was unison singing. While unison singing was by far the dominant mode until the 1870s, harmony was not unheard of. Close examination of some music manuscripts produced by western Shakers in the 1830s reveals a surprising number of hymns and wordless songs recorded in three-part harmony, suggesting that harmonized singing was practiced in specific communities and favored by specific Shakers (figs. 6 and 7). An eastern Shaker experienced “gifts” of harmony in the form of clumsily harmonized anthems in the 1840s. But it was not until the 1870s, when the some of the Shakers’ own unique musical innovations began to be laid aside, that vocal harmonies became a regular feature of Shaker singing.

The music of Shaker worship has never involved any use of musical instruments. The Shakers, like other primitive Christian denominations, have favored the human voice as “the sacred harp” for creating worshipful musical expression. A capella singing tends to set songs in keys of convenience rather than according to absolute pitch, and Shaker singing is no exception. However, for the ease of recording the songs in letteral notation, Shakers developed the practice of recording all major key tunes in C, to prevent the need to integrate sharps and flats (fig. 8). For minor key tunes, Shaker practice is divided. Some manuscripts set virtually all minor tunes in A minor, or the “aeolian” mode (figs. 3 and 4), while others use D minor, or the “dorian” mode (fig. 9). This division reflects a debate that was carried on during the 1840s between two dominant Shaker music scribes over which mode constituted the true “natural” minor. Again, the purpose was to obviate the need for sharps and flats.

In a social sense, Shaker music emerged as a form of democratic expression within the Shaker collective. Shakers permitted music to grow organically from within each community. In sharp contrast, other religious denominations of the nineteenth century removed music production from practitioners’ hands and redirected it to distant, institutionalized boards and publishing houses. For the Shakers, the process of producing music was deeply embedded in the everyday lives of all individuals, in all communities, east and west. Every believer possessed equal potential for experiencing a musical “gift” that could be integrated into the ever-growing repository of music. Ironically, for a sect in which rigid leadership hierarchies helped to impose “Gospel Order,” music production was remarkably free of hierarchical control. Musical gifts could issue from the humblest believer to those holding higher offices. Songs came from women and men, teenaged to elderly, white and black, mixed-race and immigrant believers. And during many periods of Shaker history, songs poured forth spontaneously in seemingly endless quantities, sometimes in the very midst of worship. The contrast with most American religious sects could not be greater. One could hardly imagine a routine worship service in most American denominational settings in which an individual congregant would feel freed and empowered to deliver a newly inspired song on the spot with complete spontaneity, teach it to fellow congregants, and perform it collectively. Yet such was the norm in Shaker worship for more than fifty years. And far from being considered trivial or banal, such music was valued, carefully learned, enthusiastically shared, and meticulously recorded for posterity.

Shakers, the most dispersed communal society in American history, also shaped their music to meet the challenges of geographic separation. Creating and maintaining gospel union lay at the core of Shaker identity, but accomplishing that across a span of a thousand miles was daunting indeed. Yet, because music was democratized and organic, it could be applied more flexibly and prescriptively to suit a range of uses, spiritual and cultural alike, in the life of any Shaker community. Manuscripts reveal songs carefully produced by the hundreds to mark specific holidays, visits, funerals, and other cultural milestones. Songs could also act as custodians of Shakers’ intimate friendships, helping many Shakers living in disparate communities sustain friendships across vast distances for many years. Songs were regularly transmitted in correspondence, carried by visitors, and given as gifts, in addition to being bound into printed collections. While one Shaker in Kentucky might have little available opportunity to feel in “union” with another in New Hampshire, shared songs allowed Shakers to communicate with distant strangers in a common language. In some cases, believers tried to engineer specific days and times when a given song would be collectively performed by a multitude of Shakers as various locations. In one example, believers across both East and West were directed in 1835 to pause on March 1 at six o’clock in the evening and sing two specific hymns to mark the birthday of Ann Lee, because, “the consideration that all the faithful in every Society throughout the land are, at the same time, engaged cannot fail to . . . animate the zeal and cheer the spirits of all her faithful children.” Similarly, one hymnal records that an 1850 New Hampshire song called “All Glean With Care” was “appointed to be universally sung among Believers, Sept. 1, 1850.” And many mid-century hymnals, eastern and western alike, record a song entitled “Saturday Evening,” which promoted a shared period of collective spiritual reflection across the entire Shaker world as the Sabbath neared.

The Shaker music enterprise moves west

On New Year’s Day, 1805, three Shaker missionaries set out on foot from New Lebanon, New York, the spiritual center of the Shaker world. Their destination lay somewhere beyond the Appalachian mountains in the region of the Ohio Valley. News of the remarkable “Kentucky Revivals” had reached eastern cities, and the Shakers hoped that the region’s apparent religious fervor might augur well for a further expansion of the Shaker movement. A journey of nearly three months took the missionary trio through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, into Tennessee, across the Cumberland Gap, through celebrated revival sites of central Kentucky, and into southwestern Ohio. It was at Turtle Creek in Warren County, some twenty-five miles north of Cincinnati, that the first converts were gathered and the seeds of a permanent western Shaker enterprise were planted.

Music was a crucial component of the Shakers’ westward enterprise. Although the Shakers were just one among many sects active in the revivals of the trans-Appalachian frontier, Shaker worship was nonetheless distinctive for its practices of ecstatic collective singing and dancing. The missionaries had to be effective singers and dancers in order to teach the characteristic features of Shaker worship to entirely new audiences. Also, the missionaries were conscious of their goal of establishing distant communities that would nonetheless be part of one larger collective, with common values, common beliefs, and a common heritage. In the trans-Appalachian west of 1805, few had heard of Ann Lee. The Shakers promoted radical ideas: a dual-gendered godhead, a Christ-spirit that had been manifested in a working-class woman immigrant from Manchester, England, the renunciation of the marriage bed and all sexual relations, the notion of undoing biological family ties to live collectively in spiritual families with shared community of goods, and the conviction that one could confess sins to an elder and thereafter live free from sin apart from the “world’s people” in a separate sphere of “Zion” on earth. In 1805, these ideas had not been formally written down and circulated in any printed tract, except for the lurid distortions and misinformation published by detractors. It quickly became clear that hymns could serve a vital function of transmitting Shaker beliefs and ideals, along with some background of the sect’s short but colorful history. And because the content and structure of hymns was limited only by poets’ imaginations, hymns could also serve a range of didactic functions, inculcating western converts in the expectations of communal life, Shaker work ethic, cultural norms ranging from dress to diet to entertainment, and nuances of Shaker social relations.

During the opening years of the western Shaker missionaries’ work, large groups of converted families were “gathered” at many different locations throughout the region. To assist the original three Shaker missionaries, more eastern Shakers were sent. The eastern Shaker Ministry at New Lebanon, New York, carefully selected each missionary dispatched to the west. Doctrinal grasp, spiritual zeal, charisma, hardy constitution, singing ability, organizational skills, and writing abilities were all considered. In 1806, the first eastern Shaker women arrived, a crucial step in successfully establishing the Shaker faith in the west. Though most converts—men and women alike—made their initial confession of faith to a male Shaker preacher, the difficult work of beginning to transform converts’ households to conform to Shaker ideals needed the guidance of seasoned Shaker sisters. Also, experienced eastern sisters could better counsel women converts on balancing the exhilarating exertion of Shaker worship—which sent women’s hair and clothing flying into disarray—with the need for modesty and decorum. In just a few years, around two dozen eastern Shakers—women and men in equal numbers—were sent to the western region. At each of the settlements organized under communal covenants, the easterners were assigned chief leadership positions of elder or eldress, with western men and women mostly assuming secondary leadership assignments.

Western convert Richard McNemar was instrumental in persuading the eastern Shaker ministry to collect and publish the first set of Shaker hymns. As a singer, poet, and preacher, Richard had joined in the evangelism process after his own conversion in 1805, partnering with the Shaker missionaries and traveling throughout the region to spread the Shaker message to new audiences. Richard was also a deeply erudite man, fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, with a commanding knowledge of scripture. He quickly set his pen to the composition of dozens of hymns laying out all aspects of Shaker doctrine and theology. As the eastern Shaker music scribe Russel Haskell later wrote, “Our first hymns originated among the young believers residing in Ohio or in some of the western states.” Correspondence between eastern and western Shaker leaders during the crucial opening years of the west reveals plans to collect these newly composed hymns, print them, and share them among the eastern Shaker communities. Other Shakers with poetic and musical abilities joined the hymn writing enterprise, including several easterners such as Issachar Bates, the Shakers’ most charismatic frontier preacher who had been part of the initial missionary trio dispatched to the west. By 1812, the eastern Shaker ministry published the sect’s first hymn book, Millennial Praises. Of the 200 or so hymns it contains, the majority were composed in the west, and over half were the work of Richard McNemar. Millennial Praises represented one of the earliest published expressions of Shaker theology. The other major printed theological treatise from this period, Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing, was also authored in the west and bore the strong influence of several of the western converts. Clearly, Shakerism’s western expansion was noticeably shaping both the movement’s music and its theology.

Babes, mothers, and virgins

Shakers in the west were deeply conscious of being a branch of the broader Shaker spiritual family. All of Shaker culture was predicated on the notion of family, reflected in the forms of address for leaders and rank-and-file believers—Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. Stories of Mother Ann Lee, as recounted in hymns, played a vital role in reinforcing the collective identity of the Shakers across the various communities. Because the western converts’ experience of Shakerism was far removed, both temporally and spatially, from the scenes involving Mother Ann and the other Gospel Parents, narratives contained in hymns were all the more important. Also important was the guidance of the eastern Shaker men and women, who represented a physical link among the distant portions of the Shaker family, and many of whom recalled Mother Ann personally. While Shaker leadership was equally divided between genders, the role of “Mother” was particularly potent. “Mother” was a title reserved for a select few, including the female “lead” of the New Lebanon Ministry.

Shakers in both east and west were acutely aware that their sect’s entirely non-sexual understanding of gender and family constituted probably the biggest single distinction between Shakers and the larger world. Reverence for the concept of motherhood, together with all sorts of family-based metaphors, were woven into the fabric of Shaker culture at all levels, from everyday conversations to correspondence, worship, poetry, and hymns. Letters between east and west were replete with expressions of maternal love: “Therefore you are Mother’s children—and are near her heart. Yea she loveth you as her darlings,” and “Mother’s little children here have a desire to acquaint their spirits with the spirits of Mother’s pretty little children in the east” are typical passages. Familial figures of speech could become excessive and even turn to outright childishness. In an 1818 letter from South Union, Kentucky, Eldress Molly Goodrich, a native easterner, addresses her desire to visit the east and see the Ministry female lead, Mother Lucy Wright. In it she reveals the childish banter exchanged between herself and Elder Benjamin (“Benny”) Seth Youngs:

Now don’t you think it would be very comforting to little Molly to have the privilege to be in the good old first families meeting once more? Yea … ask the baby’s pretty Mamma to let it come home so it can get the chance to suck a little once more; yea … we think that would be a very good way to fat up the poor little Babe. For that little Benny since he has been home & had such a good chance to feast has got as fat as a little pig … I tell him every once in a while that I mean to go home too, and he says nay, Mother won’t let you got home but she lets me go home, for she loves me better than she loves you; then I’ll say nay she don’t, she loves me the best; and so the children goes on.

Biblical references to virgins preparing to receive the bridegroom also served as sources of another figure of speech common in Shaker discourse. All Shakers, men and women alike, thought of themselves as “virgins” espoused to the Christ-spirit. Biblical passages describing the virgins’ preparation of fine garments for wedding nuptials were grist for a great many Shaker hymn texts. Especially in the Shaker west, references to garments were popular and could be read on several levels. From the beginning, western Shaker converts had sought to signal their devotion by dressing like their eastern counterparts. In a frontier setting where cloth was scarce and produced only through great labor, one’s garments were important possessions, and abundant clothing was a sign of wealth. Among the Shakers, gifts of clothing sometimes passed from east to west, with great impact on the recipient, even if the fit was less than perfect, as is evident in a note of thanks written by a western Shaker sister in Indiana territory:

I feel myself honored … for the beautiful garment you sent me. O what a pretty thing—Sure enough what a beauty! I never had so much as dreamed of this … But if I could do with it as little girls of the world do with a present of their Mother’s garment, to have it laid up for them till they grow big enough to wear it, and so look at it once in a while to see how pretty it looks. But but alas! This will not do! For it is too little now, or else I am too big—and yet it was sent to me to put on and wear. And I must and will do it …

Serendipitously, among the early missionaries dispatched to the west were a few gifted poets and singers. Chief among these was Issachar Bates, a member of the first missionary trio, who had been a long-time choirmaster and published poet before becoming a Shaker in 1801. Likewise, some of the earliest western converts included men and women who were already talented hymn writers, as well as enthusiastic singers. Richard McNemar, a leading “New Light” preacher (the term applied to several Kentucky preachers who left the Presbyterian denomination in 1803 when they believed that new revelation or “light” was leading them to deviate from established doctrine) of the region who converted about a month after the Shakers arrived, had taught singing schools and written poetry. Samuel Hooser, an early Shaker convert at the Mercer County, Kentucky, location that became the robust village of Pleasant Hill, had been a Methodist minister from North Carolina with longstanding interests in hymn composition. Hooser, who entered the Shakers with a group of other family members, was among the chief songwriters at Pleasant Hill for decades, together with his niece Hortency Hooser, who also wrote abundant songs. In western Kentucky, the very musical Eades family converted, including Sally Eades, a young mother with an infant named Harvey. Both Sally and Harvey Eades would contribute an enormous quantity of hymns and songs to the western Kentucky Shaker settlement of South Union. Within the work of these western Shaker composers can be found hymns and songs whose themes include family and motherhood, virginity, and the wearing of fine garments.

The title of this essay comes from a hymn called “Do Or Die” written by Issachar Bates. Taking the perspective of a western Shaker, it incorporates familial and maternal metaphors, including a mother nursing her infants (song score 1).

Among the virtually countless hymns composed by Richard McNemar are two that take the form of ballads presenting aspects of Shaker history, including episodes from the life of Ann Lee. Significantly, early correspondence from the Shaker west includes specific requests for historical detail from the easterners so that western converts might better be oriented to their spiritual heritage as Shakers. Such detail was probably intended for integration into these hymns (song scores 2 and 3).

“The Wedding Garment” reflects an early point in the western Shaker experience, probably circa 1807. It integrates scriptural references to the virgins preparing to receive the bridegroom together with numerous garment metaphors also drawn from scripture. Its strong melody also incorporates a wordless phrase, indicating that dance may have accompanied the singing of this hymn (song score 4).

“Is Christ Come Again?” is a doctrinal hymn written by Sally Eades of South Union, Kentucky. Eades was among the earliest converts in far western Kentucky, and her family had originated in Virginia. Nothing is known of her earlier education or musical knowledge. But her complex hymn texts number in the dozens, and many of her songs are recorded in three-part harmony. This one displays a sophisticated understanding of the dual-gendered godhead, along with the parallel gender structure of Shaker authority and membership tiers (song score 5).

Hortency Hooser, a Pleasant Hill sister, was probably around thirty years old when she wrote the popular song “In Love.” It uses a repeated refrain, a somewhat more common feature of western Shaker hymnody (song score 6). Hooser also produced “Golden Street,” a joyous vision of Zion filled with gorgeously attired virgins (song score 7). Her uncle Samuel Hooser produced several hymns circulated and sung throughout the Shaker world for nearly a century. One of his many hymns alludes to the strong cord of unity binding the Shakers west and east, a popular theme in Shaker hymnody (song score 8).

Thousands of Shaker songs are unattributed to any specific individual, but bear attributions of a place of origin. Such is the case with two songs that present the popular theme of spiritual garments or “robes.” Both songs are classified as dance music, are identified as coming from Ohio, and appear to date to around 1815 (song scores 9 and 10).

Today the Shakers are perhaps best known for the many distinctive things they crafted, built, and manufactured, from furniture and cabinets to architectural structures and household tools. Renowned for their simplicity and elegance, Shaker-made objects are presumed to contain some transcendent vestige of the fervent spiritual movement of which they were a part. And perhaps they do. After all, the value in the marketplace of Shaker-made objects points to that possibility.

And yet, Shaker songs are the one completely genuine Shaker-made creation that can be acquired at virtually no cost, apart from the effort required to locate and view them in scores and manuscripts, sing them, and learn them. They are every bit as Shaker-made as any finely crafted chair, cabinet, basket, or oval box, because music has always been just as central to the Shakers’ cultural output as any material object. Indeed, because Shakers produced their music precisely to enliven and guide their spiritual lives and collective worship, it reflects core Shaker values far more directly than any other aspect of their creative practice. Yet today only a handful of Shaker songs are widely known.

A Shaker sister wrote in the 1840s of a vision in which Ann Lee reassured her that the enormous time taken to learn and record so many songs was not wasted time. In the vision, Ann Lee declared that the time would come that these songs would be “needed” for the edification of people yet unborn. With renewed public interest in early forms of American folk music, perhaps that time has come. This obscure music still has the power to awe, impress, astonish, and inspire a contemporary audience. The Shaker movement remains without question a powerful and even iconic element in American folk culture. Because the Shakers’ music was among the sect’s most potent forms of spiritual expression and creative output, it deserves fresh attention.

Further Reading

Efforts by non-Shaker scholars to document Shaker history began over a century ago with the work of J. P. MacLean, an Ohio historian who began collecting Shaker manuscripts and talking to aging Shakers at the dwindling communities in southwestern Ohio. His book, Shakers of Ohio (Columbus, Ohio, 1907), remains the most comprehensive descriptive history of the Shaker west, though the information MacLean presents is not referenced. In the mid-twentieth century, Edward Deming Andrews produced the first comprehensive history of the entire Shaker movement, The People Called Shakers: A Search for the Perfect Society (Mineola, New York, 1963). A more recent general history is Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, Conn., 1992). The early relationship between the Shaker east and west is addressed in “‘Our Spiritual Ancestors’: Alonzo Hollister’s Record of Shaker “Pioneers” in the West,” Communal Societies 31:2 (November 2011): 45-60. The drama of the west’s first thirty years, along with the role of music in the expansion process, is addressed in Carol Medlicott, Issachar Bates: A Shaker’s Life Journey (University Press of New England, forthcoming 2013).

Edward Deming Andrews was also the first non-Shaker to produce a book-length survey of Shaker music, The Gift to be Simple: Songs, Dances, and Rituals of the American Shakers (New York, 1940). Two major surveys followed in the 1970s, including Daniel W. Patterson’s impressive and indispensable The Shaker Spiritual (Princeton, N.J., 1979); and Harold E. Cook, Shaker Music: A Manifestation of American Folk Culture (Lewisburg, Penn., 1973). More recently, scholars of Shaker music have focused on specific genres, hymn books, or settings within the Shaker world. Christian Goodwillie and Jane Crosthwaite present the story of the Shakers’ production of their first hymnal Millennial Praises, and—significantly—restore the majority of its tunes, in Millennial Praises: A Shaker Hymnal (Amherst, Mass., 2009). Carol Medlicott and Christian Goodwillie, in Richard McNemar, Music, and the Western Shaker Communities: Branches of One Living Tree (Kent, Ohio, 2013), execute a similar project for the Shakers’ “western” hymnal of 1833, reconstructing over 100 original tunes and analyzing the hymnal as a window into the history of the west’s first thirty years. Essays in that book also explore the evolution of Shaker hymnody and music notation more generally, and trace the Shakers’ involvement in a printing enterprise. The importance of the hymn genre as a binding element in Shaker culture across the nineteenth century is explored by Carol Medlicott in ‘Partake a Little Morsel’: Popular Shaker Hymns of the Nineteenth Century (Clinton, New York, 2010), who examines evidence for a set of hymns relatively unknown to Shaker scholars that in fact may have dominated worship across much of the nineteenth century. Carol Medlicott offers a series of fresh arguments about the specific innovative aspects of Shaker music in “Innovations in Music and Song,” in Inspired Innovations: A Celebration of Shaker Ingenuity, by M. Stephen Miller (Lebanon, N.H., 2010): 199-206.

There are many significant collections of Shaker primary sources, some of which include vast numbers of music manuscripts. Western Reserve Historical Society alone possesses over 500 Shaker music manuscripts. The Library of Congress is also an important source for Shaker music manuscripts, including an exquisite early hymn compilation by Paulina Bryant of Pleasant Hill, “Record of Ancient songs” (Item 361, Shaker Manuscript Collection). The Library of Congress also houses in its music collection the 600-page manuscript volume assembled by Connecticut Shaker Russel Haskell in 1845, “A Record of Spiritual Songs … in Twelve Parts” (Music Division, 2131/.S4E5). In it, Haskell explains the origin of the hymn genre around 1805 and how it was a marked departure from earlier Shaker songs that were mostly wordless.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Carol Medlicott is a cultural and historical geographer at Northern Kentucky University. Her work considers various aspects of the western Shaker experience and of early Shaker expansion more broadly. Her publications on the Shaker west include Richard McNemar and the Music of the Shaker West: Branches of One Living Tree (co-authored with Christian Goodwillie, Kent State University Press, 2013) and Issachar Bates: A Shaker’s Journey (University Press of New England, 2013).

Flipping idly through the end of this book, noting the dozens of titles published in Wesleyan’s Music/Culture series (to which Listening and Longing is a recent addition), I was struck by the exotic scenes and subcultures under investigation: Romani music of Greek Macedonia, Wangga music of North Australia, underground dance music in NYC, Moroccan Ganawa trance music, hip hop from Down Under, salsa from Cali, Colombia. Daniel Cavicchi’s historical subjects, mainly northern U.S. urban-dwelling white middle-class aspiring music lovers in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, seem relatively familiar and bland in comparison.

Then there is Ossian E. Dodge, introduced in the first chapter. A self-made jack of all trades—novelty vocalist, writer of comic songs, editor of small magazines—and P.T. Barnum manqué, Dodge achieved national celebrity in 1850 by bidding $625 in a Boston auction to purchase a ticket to a concert by Jenny Lind, “the Swedish Nightingale,” probably the biggest musical phenomenon to hit America in the nineteenth century. This sum was well beyond his means and $400 more than was bid in a similar auction in New York City, also organized by the tour’s sponsor, Barnum himself. Dodge seized on the buzz generated by his inexplicable munificence to commission a lithograph of an imaginary scene depicting himself being introduced to Lind by Barnum. He then leveraged this newfound celebrity to promote his own short-lived career as a singer of strange songs before he left the arts for greener pastures, eventually settling in St. Paul, Minnesota, wealthy from real estate.

As Cavicchi explains it, a figure like Dodge could only have arisen in the burgeoning world of commercial music made possible by the market revolution of the 1820s and 1830s. “Dodge, the hustling ‘Boston vocalist,’ was part of a passing generation,” he writes, “but Dodge, the music-loving ticket bidder, was a symbol of the future” (39). Previously music had been a mostly amateur endeavor, confined mainly to churches and homes, with the occasional street parade. As the century wore on, commercial music figured increasingly in the musical lives of Americans, significantly multiplying the choices available to audiences and elevating their aesthetic sophistication. “The first music lovers, as witnesses to the beginnings of the commercialization of culture in the nineteenth century,” Cavicchi asserts, “were among the earliest to assume the role of the audience-consumer and to create the strategies many use today for understanding the world of stars, merchandizing, and spectacle” (185).

At one level the book offers a conventional history of how the market revolution reshaped social life and popular culture in the nineteenth century. New forms of capitalist enterprise seduced young people from family farms and small communities to expanding cities. Industrial development drove the expansion of railroad networks, which in turn made it easier for musicians to tour distant cities and reach larger audiences. Before the 1820s, musical life even in urban areas was hit or miss. But entertainment of all types was increasingly available in public venues, usually for a price. Many of Cavicchi’s sources are young clerks who recorded their wide-eared wonder at the variety of sounds available to them in city streets. Some subjects are famous, like George Templeton Strong and Walt Whitman, who roamed the streets feasting indiscriminately on an eclectic sonic diet of street parades, concerts, sermons, and opera. These pioneering music lovers sought out the musical riches proffered by entrepreneurs in pleasure gardens, concert halls, and theaters, using their burgeoning musical awareness as a means of fashioning a new kind of urban identity. African Americans and women were also drawn to the musical riches, but were constrained by pervasive northern racism and the “cult of true womanhood,” which limited the public activity of single women.

Cavicchi presents the social context effectively to support his claims about changes in what he calls “audiencing.” But the real interest and originality of the book lies in how it probes the inner lives of individual men and women drawn to music. The development of a “musical ear” gradually became an important marker of middle-class refinement as well as a means of emotional expression. After the Civil War, for the new cohort of more sophisticated music listeners, it was not enough to simply listen to and appreciate, as Whitman did, a wide variety of musical sounds. It became increasingly important to make discriminations, to know which composers or performers were worthy of admiration and might increase one’s social capital. By the final decades of the century, according to Cavicchi, urban music audiences were dividing between refined listeners and those drawn to spectacle and celebrity.

Of particular interest is the final chapter, which canvasses critical public reactions to these passionate music lovers. Listeners who responded too ecstatically to the performances and persona of Jenny Lind in the 1850s, or to the operas of Richard Wagner in the 1880s, were suspected of harboring tendencies toward psychic instability, “monomania.” Excessive enthusiasm was also denigrated as a sign of a lack of refinement, of an unseemly, even dangerous mob mentality, or of a suspiciously feminine, passive, and over-emotional nature. Critics found grist for acerbic cartoons and published satires in “Lindmania,” over-the-top Wagner devotees (the source of the term “long-hair” as applied to classical music intellectuals), and the “Monster Concerts for the Masses” in vogue after the Civil War that featured orchestras of 2,000 and choruses of 20,000 (including thousands of school children). Guest composer Johann Strauss wrote of the 1872 World Peace Jubilee in Boston:

Now just conceive of my position face to face with a public of four hundred thousand Americans. There I stood at the raised desk, high above all the others. How would the business start, how would it end? Suddenly a cannon-shot rang out a gentle hint for us twenty thousand to begin playing The Blue Danube. I gave the signal, my hundred assistant conductors followed me as quickly as well as they could, and then there broke out an unholy row such as I shall never forget (120).

A man living 26 miles outside Boston knew when the “Anvil Chorus” was being played by listening for the sound of the cannon.

To write a book about as private an experience as listening to music requires major sleuthing. It’s one thing to track down published reviews by professional critics, another to access the reactions of lay listeners. According to Cavicchi, other historians have tried but given up for lack of evidence. Perusing dozens of unpublished journals in a kind of needle-in-a-haystack quest, he made some lucky finds. Especially intriguing are the embossed leather-bound sheet music binders kept by amateur women pianists. Containing years’ worth of deeply personalized sheet music—often given by friends or suitors, carefully indexed, sometimes annotated with detailed marginal comments—these binders provide a fascinating window into the musical lives of nineteenth-century women who created music in the home. “Music lovers used diaries not simply as tools, but as stand-ins, indices, for music performances themselves,” he concludes, and the diaries helped them relive their musical pleasure in an era before sound recordings (135).

A particularly rich source is Lucy Lowell, an intelligent and independent woman who developed into a quintessential music lover whose life revolved around the schedule of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Born in 1860 to one of the storied families of New England, raised in the Boston suburb of Chestnut Hill, she filled seven volumes of her diary during her twenties with detailed and exacting commentary on musical performances, including two tours of Europe during which she saw Wagner performed at the Vienna Opera House and at Bayreuth. Of an Italian production of Barber of Seville she saw in Boston: “Gerster was utterly, entirely perfectly bewitching … You get a good idea of her genius by seeing her first in ‘Lucia’ & then in ‘The Barber,’ for two more different parts can’t be imagined & when you see how exquisitely she does them both, you appreciate her power” (115).

How do we reconcile this highly refined aesthetic sensibility with the crass tone-deaf self-promotion of an impresario like Ossian Dodge, whom Cavicchi early on states represented the wave of the future? Listening and Longing posits a bifurcation into “two different kinds of music engagement in the twentieth century: one based on the intellectual ecstasies of inner contemplation, fostered and supported by the performance of ‘good music,’ and one based on passionate participation in the world of stars, spectacle and collecting, relegated to the realm of ‘popular’ culture. While music lover continued to be used to refer to enthusiastic patrons of classical music, practitioners of the older form of music loving were given a new name taken from sports: fans” (184).

One can immediately think of audiences that straddle and destabilize these categories, like jazz fans and devotees of the 1960s Folk Revival. But do we really need the term “audiencing” for this argument to work? The beauty of influential musicologist Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” was that analyzing music through the gestalt of social practice dissolves many of the false binaries that have crept into the academic study of music—between composer and musician, performer and audience, text and context. The activities that Cavicchi highlights through “audiencing” are already present in Small’s more capacious category of “musicking.” (His book is titled Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening.) “Whatever it is we are doing,” Small writes, “we are all doing it together—performers, listeners (should there be any apart from the performers), composer (should there be one apart from the performers), dancers, ticket collectors, piano movers, roadies, cleaners and all” (Musicking, 10). In effect, then, Cavicchi reinscribes a dichotomy, between “musicking” and “audiencing,” that Small helped us think beyond. Regardless, this is a well-researched, elegant and thought-provoking book.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

David W. Stowe is a 2012-13 research fellow at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, writing a book about Psalm 137 in American music.

The Effie Afton, the Rock Island Bridge, and the making of America

On April 1, 1856, engineers of the Railroad Bridge Company conducted a comprehensive examination of the just completed Rock Island Bridge. Built with more than two hundred and twenty thousand pounds of cast iron, four hundred thousand pounds of wrought iron, and one million feet of timber, the structure was the first railroad bridge to span the mighty Mississippi River. On April 21, confident in the integrity of the bridge but still exercising caution, company officials watched as a single locomotive, the Des Moines, rolled across the bridge from Rock Island, Illinois, to Davenport, Iowa. When three locomotives coupled to eight passenger cars completed the same short trip the following day, people standing along the tracks cheered and church bells rang out from both banks of the Mississippi.

Just fifteen days later, on May 6, there was a celebration of a decidedly different nature between the two river towns. The late-model steamship Effie Afton, powering upriver through the draw of the Rock Island Bridge, collided with one and then another of the piers supporting the structure. The passengers and crew managed to escape harm, but the boat caught fire and was lost, as was its entire cargo. Before the incapacitated Effie Afton swung free of the bridge, drifted down river, and eventually sank, the long flames of the fire had reached the wooden trusses of the bridge. As the bridge began to burn, the other steamboats afloat on the river and tied up at Rock Island and Davenport blew their whistles in approval. When a section of the bridge collapsed, river captains, pilots, and crews cheered wildly. So loud was the scene that, as one newspaper reported, “it sounded like a vast menagerie of elephants and hippopotamuses howling with rage.” The Rock Island Bridge stirred up trouble in the waters of the Mississippi.

Boat destroyed and bridge damaged, the owners moved their conflict indoors, off the river and into the courtroom. Jacob S. Hurd, captain and co-owner of the Effie Afton, sued the Railroad Bridge Company. Alleging that the bridge was a material obstruction to the free navigation of the Mississippi River and therefore illegal, he and his fellow owners sought a judgment for “the value of the boat, her cargo, and such other damages as they may be entitled by law and the evidence to recover,” all of which they calculated to be sixty-five thousand dollars. The trial began sixteen months later in September 1857 in the United States Circuit Court in Chicago, with Supreme Court Justice John McLean presiding. The Chicago Daily Press informed its readers that it would surrender considerable space to covering “the celebrated Effie Afton case.” The editors explained that the trial was indicative of a fundamental national struggle in desperate need of resolution. In pressing their suit, the plaintiffs were defending the primacy of the navigable rivers, “the great natural channel of trade of the Mississippi Valley,” against the lengthening railroads, “the great artificial lines of travel and communication.” The editors believed that the conflict was “one of the most important ever to engage the attention of our courts.” Accordingly, they “made such arrangements as will enable us to lay before our readers . . . verbatim reports of all the more important portions of the arguments and evidence.”

Representing Hurd and his associates, Hezekiah M. Wead, Corydon Beckwith, and Timothy D. Lincoln professed a willingness to accommodate the growing railroad interests. In his closing statement Wead claimed “it was no part of [our] cause to prohibit the bridging of the Mississippi River.” He insisted that a bridge, properly designed and properly located, would pose no danger to river traffic. The Rock Island Railroad Bridge, he contended, however, was neither. Four and one-half years earlier, on January 17, 1853, the Illinois legislature had incorporated the Railroad Bridge Company “with the power to build, maintain and use a railroad bridge over the Mississippi River” between Rock Island and Davenport. The charter specified, though, that the bridge be erected “in such manner as shall not materially obstruct or interfere with the free navigation of said river.”‘

The Rock Island Bridge consisted of three sections, two of which were, in fact, distinct bridges. In the midst of the river between Rock Island and Davenport was an island—Rock Island—for which the Illinois town and the entire bridge structure were named. Moving east to west, the first section was a three-span bridge, 474 feet in length, connecting the city called Rock Island to the island called Rock Island. The middle section was the tracks across the island. Connecting the island to Davenport was the major section; this was the one at issue. It consisted of five 250-foot stationary spans and a 285-foot draw span. The draw span, which was the third span from the island and crossed over the main channel of the river, rotated atop a 386-foot-long turntable pier. The other piers supporting the main section of the bridge were significantly shorter: only 53 feet.

Whatever achievement the bridge represented in the field of engineering, Wead argued, the Railroad Bridge Company had built it in a manner uniquely suited to inhibit navigation. To begin with, the turntable pier was “placed laterally across the current of the stream.” This meant, according to the plaintiffs, that the water did “not run square under the draw.” Rather than directly “running between the long and the short pier,” water “strikes” the long pier, generating dangerous and unpredictable crosscurrents and eddies. Moreover, the Railroad Bridge Company located the bridge precisely where, in that stretch of river, the velocity of the current was greatest. The presence of Rock Island effectively narrowed the width of the river and increased the force of the stream. That condition was aggravated further by the addition of the bridge’s piers and by the ships themselves. The turbulent water, which made the draw virtually un-navigable, forced the Effie Afton into the bridge. In combination, the design and the location of the bridge qualified it as an unnatural, material obstruction to navigation on the river. Wead cast the Railroad Bridge Company as a “grasping corporation,” which placed the bridge where it pleased, disregarding navigation and disrespecting the public. More to the point, though, the Rock Island Bridge stood in violation of its charter.

Wead did not want the jury to trust him when he said Rock Island Bridge was an obstruction. He conceded that “obtaining accurate knowledge of the navigation of such a stream” was terribly difficult for “all men.” Referring to the specific circumstances that the Effie Afton faced, he said, “No man can tell what the difficulties of that navigation will be until he tries it.” “Without experience,” he believed, one really could not be “a competent judge” of such things. Accordingly, to help the jury fully comprehend the degree of obstruction to navigation, Wead turned to the men who made their living on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. They came from places like Galena and Savannah, Illinois, and from Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and in addition to river boat captains, they included the highly esteemed river pilots.

By Justice McLean’s count, over fifty of these men testified that the design of the bridge “caused cross-currents and eddies in the draw,” which led to the “loss of the Effie Afton.” Witness after witness, pilot after pilot asserted that the bridge was an obstruction to navigation: “a material obstruction,” “a great obstruction,” “a serious obstruction,” “the worst obstruction on the Western waters.” Fifty-year-old Thomas Taylor had spent half his life as a pilot on the Mississippi. In his estimation the bridge was “a serious obstacle,” and he said to the person taking his deposition, “You may emphasize that as much as you please.” The pilots were equally adamant that the speed of the river increased dramatically in the draw. There was no consensus, though, on just how much faster the water was moving. Some estimated the current reached six miles per hour; others judged it to hit twelve miles an hour; one simply said the current was “a heap stronger at the bridge.” None had measured the speed of the current.

However fast the river, the pilots agreed, passing the bridge was “very unsafe.” William White, a river pilot between St. Louis and St. Paul for more than two decades, believed there was “a risk of life and property in going through the bridge.” He was not alone. David Moore “considered [passing the bridge] so dangerous that I took my money and other valuables on my person, to be ready for any trouble.” While Wead argued that only [river men] could truly appreciate the challenges of navigation, the pilots themselves noted that the danger posed by the bridge did not escape common passengers. Pittsburgh pilot George Neare recounted a story in which his passengers were so frightened at the prospect of passing through the draw of the Rock Island Bridge that they insisted on disembarking, walking around the bridge, and reboarding once—if—Neare safely guided the steamship to the other side. Moreover, he noted, marine insurance companies judged the bridge a significant risk: rates “have been greatly increased by the bridge.”

Wead aimed to win the legal case for Jacob Hurd and his associates on a narrow, technical point about river navigation. He sought to win the public relations case by situating the loss of the Effie Afton within a particular historical narrative about the father of the waters and the American nation. Wead reminded the jury that “the law is that the citizens of the United States have a right to the free navigation of the Mississippi River.” That had not always been true, though.

For Americans living west of the Appalachian Mountains, the Mississippi offered the only reasonable, economical way to deliver their surplus products to the markets of the world. In the two decades following the Revolutionary War, one of the most critical and troubling questions facing the emerging nation was thus whether Americans would enjoy the free navigation of the Mississippi River. Although the 1783 Peace of Paris established the western boundary of the United States at the middle of the channel, New Orleans and the mouth of the river fell under the control of the Spanish and then, briefly, of the French.

While European imperial powers could and did limit American use of the Mississippi through the 1780s and 1790s, western Americans regularly appealed to their Confederation and Federal governments for assistance. So vital did they consider easy access to the river that they even contemplated dissolving their political ties to the United States and pledging allegiance to whichever of the European powers would guarantee that access. In 1794 John Breckinridge of Kentucky explained to Samuel Hopkins of Virginia that while westerners were not yet prepared to form an alliance with the Spanish or even with the British, such a scenario was not inconceivable. He warned, “The Miss[issippi] we willhave. If Government will not procure it for us, we must procure it for ourselves. Whether that is to be done by sword or negotiation is yet to [be seen].” America’s jurisdiction over the Mississippi remained vulnerable until the British evacuated the Old Northwest following the War of 1812.

If Wead’s diplomatic history was somewhat weak, so too was his domestic political history. As he continued to make his case for the eternal and free-born American right to navigable waterways, he announced to the jury sitting in the Chicago courtroom that “care has always been taken to keep [the Mississippi] free from obstruction,” but he was overstating the case.

Although there were local efforts to improve sections of the rivers dating to before the Revolution and although a number of western states—Missouri, Minnesota, and Arkansas among them—called for state-level sponsorship of river-improvement projects in their original state constitutions, they ultimately did little to improve river navigation. On the national level, in February 1819, the United States Congress allocated sixty-five hundred dollars for “making a survey of the water courses tributary to and west of the Mississippi. Also, those tributary to and north and west of the Ohio.” The following year Congress provided “for making a survey, maps, and charts of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers from the rapids of the Ohio at Louisville to the Balize, for the purpose of facilitating and ascertaining the most practicable mode of improving the navigation of those rivers.”

Not until 1824, though, did Congress fund projects for the actual physical transformation of western rivers. Congress targeted six sandbars and the trees, “commonly called planters, sawyers, or snags,” that were fixed to the river beds and threatened to puncture the hulls of passing vessels. Perhaps the most important consequence of this legislation was the development in 1829 of Henry Shreve’s Heliopolis, the first snag boat. These boats, designed with a powerful crane set between double hulls could relatively easily remove deeply embedded trees weighing as much as seventy-five tons. Within just a few years snag boats removed most of the underwater forests of the Mississippi. By 1844 Congress devoted $2.5 million to various improvement projects, primarily on the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers. For the remainder of the antebellum period, though, funding was uneven; indeed there were stretches of several years when Congress made no appropriations for the general improvement of the western rivers.

Even though Wead bent his facts, he did not break them. There had been a long history—though not quite as long as Wead would have had the jury believe—of Americans upholding and defending the free navigation of the country’s main waterways. And, similarly, there was some history of the government funding “internal improvements,” such as the dredging of rivers. From these precedents, he explained to the jury, only one conclusion could be drawn: Americans prized the free navigation of their rivers above most anything. Wead could have added some potent voices to his case. In 1783, following the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, George Washington himself wrote that he was “struck with the immense diffusion and importance” of “the vast inland navigation of these United States.” As Washington contemplated the nation’s inland waterways, he was impressed by the “goodness of that Providence which has dealt her favors to us with so profuse a hand.” Washington hoped “to God” that Americans “may have the wisdom to improve them.”

If Americans had not always enjoyed free access to navigable waterways, some of them, at least, had always believed such access to be a right of citizenship and a requirement for union.

Representing Rock Island Bridge Company, Norman B. Judd, Joseph Knox, and Abraham Lincoln charged that opposing counsel Hezekiah Wead was “entirely mistaken in his statement of the facts,” and they proceeded to develop a multilayered defense. With detailed statistics of bridge passings, multiple scientific tests conducted by qualified engineers, and the observations of lay people living in the vicinity of the Rock Island Bridge, the counsel for the defense sought to dismantle Wead’s case by demonstrating that the bridge was not a material obstruction to the navigation of the Mississippi River.

Seth Gurney, among the first witnesses called by the defense, was the caretaker of the Rock Island Bridge and had been since April 19, 1856, two days before the steam locomotive Des Moines rolled across the bridge from Illinois to Iowa. Gurney stated that the bridge had been repaired by August 4, 1856, less than three months after the collision. He testified that he kept “a book in which by order I enter . . . every boat which passes.” According to Gurney’s log, in the thirteen months since the bridge had been repaired, “958 passages of boats have been made,” and only seven boats suffered damage. Referring to these figures and the river pilots’ insistence that the bridge constituted a dangerous obstruction, Knox said, “The pilots say that it is mere chance that they get through unhurt. Surely they are the luckiest men in the world.” He wondered, “Would not these boatmen soon amass a fortune if they could deal in lottery tickets?”

Defense counsel argued that the low number of accidents at Rock Island Bridge was not, in fact, due to the pilots’ luck. Nor did they offer that it might be the result of the same pilots’ well-developed skills. Rather, they argued there were few accidents because the bridge was well designed. To convince the jury of this, the defense called six engineers who had extensive experience with railroads, bridges, and rivers. Each of them visited the Rock Island Bridge and studied its construction and its effect upon the river. Each either conducted or observed tests of the direction, the predictability, and the speed of the current. They described the various tests they ran, most of which involved dropping weighted floats into the stream “some two hundred feet above the draw” and watching their movement as the current carried them down river through the draw. These tests, one engineer stated, were “regarded as a reliable means of determining currents in our profession.” The engineers agreed that there were no crosscurrents or eddies in the main channel and that the bridge was placed nearly as well as it could be. Knox acknowledged that the plaintiff’s counsel also “brought three engineers here” to add their testimony to the pilots’. Of the three, though, “only one ever saw Rock Island, and that was in February, when the river was frozen over.” None of the three conducted any tests on or even saw the effect of the bridge on the river.

To help the jury properly interpret their engineers’ tests, defense counsel called a number of local residents. John Deere, a fifty-three-year-old resident of Moline who was “engaged in the manufacture of plows,” witnessed some of the tests conducted by the defendant’s engineers. He described himself as “unskilled in navigation” and admitted that he had never passed through the bridge on a boat himself, but he still concluded that there were no crosscurrents in the main draw. Were there currents, he said, “the tests would have discovered them.” Patrick Greg, physician and mayor of Rock Island, testified that he had “watched floats pass in regular file down through the draw, never diverging to the left or the right.” He said, “The current according to my observation passes through the piers on the Rock Island side as smoothly and evenly as it is possible for water to run between piers.” Oliver P. Wharton was the “publisher of the Rock Island Advertiser,” and his “office window commands a view of the bridge and vicinity.” He had seen “floats in numbers,” “several hundred boats,” and “objects on the surface” pass through the draw “straight with the pier.” He said that he was “certain there are no cross-currents.” He thought “no difficulty whatever is offered by the bridge to the navigation of steamboats.”

Quincy McNeal, clerk of the Circuit Court of Rock Island, admitted, “From what had been told me I expected that there was difficulty until tests and experience proved to me that there is none whatever.” He had “seen the floats tried and pass through straight.” He concluded, “There are no cross currents in the draw.” McNeal said, “If a boat is left to drift from the opening of the chute she will go right through,” and David Barnes unintentionally demonstrated as much. Barnes was a resident of Rock Island and had been “engaged in the lumber trade for four years.” He recounted losing control of a raft, four hundred feet long and seventy-five feet wide—significantly larger than the Effie Afton—above the Rock Island Bridge in September 1856. He got caught in “the steamboat channel leading to the draw, and I could not get out of it to go to the usual place” where rafts passed the bridge. Barnes gave up and let the current carry the raft where it would. The raft “went straight down through the draw without touching.”

McNeal went so far as to say, “It is impossible for anything to get against those piers, except it be from some other influence than the current.” Defense counsel believed they could reasonably point to other influences. Judd charged that the fate of the Effie Afton was the consequence of no more than “the carelessness of her officers.” After all, immediately upon leaving Rock Island, the Effie Afton bumped into a steam ferryboat. From careless to reckless: with the bridge just three-fourths of a mile off, the Effie Afton engaged another steamer, the J. B. Carson, in a race to the draw, which affected the angle at which the Effie Afton approached the draw. Knox did not hesitate to attack the pilot Nathan Parker personally: although Parker may be in some respects “very excellent,” he was a “very timid man” with “delicate nerves.” He said that not until he listened to the plaintiff’s counsel had he “heard the praises of Mr. Parker as a tip-top pilot.” Knox asked the jury rhetorically, was Parker’s performance “not the height of unskillfulness?”

Although the defense alleged incompetence, they also suspected devious intent. The plaintiff had claimed that the fire that ultimately destroyed the Effie Afton and that damaged the bridge was the accidental consequence of a stove tipping over during the collision. But Judd argued the fire was no accident at all: “The fact is she got there where she would probably be lost and she had no insurance save against fire and some of them thinking it better to take half a loaf than nothing, set her on fire.” A physician who happened to be on the steamer Vienna the morning of May 6, 1856, testified that he witnessed Captain Hurd and a few members of the crew discussing the fact that the Effie Afton was only insured against fire. He believed that “one of them said: ‘It is a pity she don’t burn; she is good for nothing,’ and with an oath said: ‘I would burn her and get the insurance.’” Shortly thereafter the Effie Afton was burning out of control.

In his closing Knox cast the Railroad Bridge Company as “a little company” now under attack by the “the greatest river interest,” and he described the bridge not as an obstacle but as an “improvement” and one “which has benefited the whole land.” He moved the railroad into the position long held by the rivers. Abraham Lincoln followed Knox with a closing of his own and pushed the argument further. He said he had no desire “to have one of these great channels, extending almost from where it never freezes to where it never thaws, blocked up.” But the jury needed to see that Americans moved from east to west as well as north to south and that east-west travel “is growing larger and larger.” Between September 8, 1856, and August 8, 1857, Lincoln said, 12,586 freight cars and 74,179 passengers crossed over the Rock Island Bridge. Were it not for the Mississippi River’s “advantage in priority and legislation,” the railroad “would surpass it.” Navigation had been shut down for nearly four months the previous year when the river had been frozen. Moreover, Lincoln added, there is “a considerable portion of time when floating or thin ice makes the river useless, while the bridge is as useful as ever.” The artificial line was surpassing the natural channel, and speaking of the railroad, Lincoln said, “This current of travel has its rights” too.

The jury deadlocked at nine to three in favor of the bridge, so Jacob Hurd and his associates did not recover damages. After continued legal struggles, the final fate of the Rock Island Bridge was determined in January 1863 when the United States Supreme Court determined it could stand. By then, not a bridge but a war had stopped commercial traffic on the Mississippi River.

Further Reading:

Reporter Robert Hitt covered the Rock Island Bridge trial and provided the transcriptions of the proceedings for the Chicago Daily Press. All trial quotations excerpted above appeared in the Chicago Daily Press, September 9-25, 1857. For more on the Rock Island Bridge, see Frank F. Fowle, “The Original Rock Island Bridge Across the Mississippi River,” in the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin 56 (1941): 55-63; Benedict K. Zobrist, “Steamboat Men versus Railroad Men: The First Bridging of the Mississippi River” in Missouri Historical Review 59:2 (January 1965): 159-172; and David A. Pfeiffer, “Bridging the Mississippi: The Railroads and Steamboats Clash at Rock Island Bridge” in Prologue Magazine 36:2 (Summer 2004). The image from William Riebe’s “Government Bridge” that appears above was taken from Pfeiffer’s article. For steamboats and river improvements, see Erik F. Haites, James Mak, and Gary M. Walton, Western River Transportation: The Era of Early Internal Development, 1810-1860 (Baltimore, 1975); Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, 1949; New York, 1993). See also Michael Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763-1861: Ohio and Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse (Baton Rouge, 1990); Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington, Ind., 2006); Timothy R. Mahoney, River Towns of the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the West, 1820-1870 (Cambridge, 1990); Willard Price, The Amazing Mississippi (New York, 1963); and Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

Jenry Morsman is a stay-at-home dad, is ABD at the University of Virginia, and teaches occasionally at Middlebury College. He published “Securing America: Jefferson’s Fluid Plans for the Western Perimeter” in Douglas Seefeldt, Jeffrey L. Hantman, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Across the Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America (Charlottesville, 2005).

July 28, 1842, was a hot day along the North Platte River. John C. Frémont’s voyageurs raised the buffalo hide slightly around the bottom edge of his tipi when they pitched it, hoping to let a breeze blow through. Inside, Frémont’s cartographer, the phlegmatic Charles Preuss, started a fire under a pot of water while, outside, Frémont set up a tripod. From a leather case he withdrew a brass tube nearly a yard long, and hung it from the tripod’s apex. A small glass canister, about the size of a soup can, was attached to the bottom end of the tube. The bottom of the canister was made of leather, through which protruded the head of a screw that a person could loosen or tighten with thumb and forefinger. This was a cistern barometer, state of the art for its time.

The day was calm, and the instrument hung straight and still. It looked safe enough. To read what it had to tell him, Frémont would have put his hands on his knees and peered at a place near the top of the tube where the brass was cut away, revealing a glass tube cased inside. Inside the glass, the height of a column of mercury could be read on a measured scale. But first, he had to make some adjustments.

Frémont was twenty-nine, a second lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, an intellectually elite, semi-autonomous branch of the U.S. Army in which he was one of only thirty-six officers. He was in command of two dozen men, on the first of five exploring expeditions he eventually would lead to the trans-Missouri West. He was a geographer, well trained in navigation and cartography, and benefiting professionally from some of the U.S. government’s earliest support of science. Though admirers would come to call him the Pathfinder, he was not an explorer; the route he was following in 1842 had been used regularly by white trappers and traders for two decades or more. He was, however, a popularizer, and the information he brought back would eventually open that route to hundreds of thousands. It became the Emigrant Road, the main trunk of the trails to Oregon, Utah, and California. But as much as anything, he was an adventurer.

Financing for the trip had been quietly engineered by Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who also happened to be Frémont’s father-in-law. Benton had his eye on Oregon, which at the time meant all the country west of the Continental Divide and north of the forty-second parallel—now the northern border of California, Nevada, and Utah. South of that line, in 1842, was still Mexico. Oregon was claimed jointly by Britain and the United States; still, Benton wanted to see it filling up with U.S. settlers as soon as possible. Benton was a standard bearer for what came to be called Manifest Destiny, the idea that the United States was justly fated to fill the continent. Similar thinking led to the election of an expansionist president, James K. Polk, in 1844, and in 1846 Polk led the way to war with Mexico.

Benton had more immediate, tactical aims, however. Though much of the information on how to get to Oregon was sound, it was available only from word of mouth, and from a few maps that mixed fable and guesswork with fact. Frémont, Benton knew, would return with good information, and afterward the government could issue thousands of reliable maps. Then, given the right publicity, Benton could turn the politics over to a fast-growing, land-hungry public, and count on a reliable outcome.

Frémont and his men were now a month and a half out from the Missouri settlements and approaching Red Buttes near present-day Casper, in central Wyoming. Though his instructions from Colonel John Abert of the Topographical Corps were simply to travel up the North Platte to the mouth of the Sweetwater River, Frémont seems from the start to have planned to lead his men 150 miles beyond that point, into the mountains beyond South Pass on the Continental Divide. He had Benton’s tacit approval for this intention, and perhaps Abert’s as well.

A more extravagant disregard for instructions on his second expedition would lead him deep into California—still a part of Mexico—and would win him not censure, but fame. In California again in 1846 and ’47, he defied orders outright. By then it was wartime, however; he was court-martialed and left the army. His fourth expedition, a civilian attempt to cross the mountains of Colorado in the winter of 1847-48, ended in disaster and cannibalism among his men. His fifth, into Colorado and Utah, was of little consequence. His fame continued, however, and in 1856 he was drafted to run for president on the first national ticket of the Republican Party. But for now, near the North Platte, peering at the barometer, he was just curious. He wanted to know his elevation above sea level, and he planned soon to measure the true altitude of the Rocky Mountains.

Barometers measure the pressure of the column of air reaching upward into space, where there is no longer any air at all. The greater the observer’s elevation, the shorter and less dense the column of air above, and the less, therefore, it weighs. In Frémont’s time the connection between weather events and changes in local air pressure were not well understood; barometers were rare and used primarily to measure elevation. In this case, measuring the height of the mountains would mean getting the instrument safely to the top of a peak still 150 miles off. The men had left one barometer for safekeeping at the fur-trading post at Fort Laramie a week earlier. Since then, trail travel had broken another. This was the only one left, and Frémont, just now, was being careful with it. 

Earlier in the day, the expedition had crossed the braided channels of the North Platte River and camped on the north side. The two dozen men were mostly French-speaking, civilian voyageurs from St. Louis, most mounted on mules and the others driving two-wheeled carts. They took the wheels and canvas covers off the carts and concealed them in dense brush in a cottonwood grove. In sand drifts nearby, they buried everything else they could do without for a few weeks, intending to pick it up on their return journey, and they named the place Cache Camp, because they hid so much equipment there. They would be traveling light now, carrying fewer provisions, and they would have to hunt more often. This was a risk; they had been warned that morning by a band of Oglalla Lakota after crossing the river that they soon would enter a landscape empty of buffalo and ravaged by drought and grasshoppers. But without the carts, they could leave the trail, perhaps find more game for themselves and grass for their animals, and locate mountains, canyons, lakes, and river courses they would otherwise have missed.

For locating topographical features, whether well known or little known, was at the core of what Frémont had been sent out to do. Locating them meant pinpointing their latitude, longitude, and sometimes their elevation, raw material for the good maps Benton demanded. Frémont had trained in field observation and mapmaking with one of the best, the French-born geographer Joseph Nicollet, whom Frémont had accompanied on earlier expeditions to the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Now in charge of his own expedition, he had brought along the German-born cartographer Charles Preuss. Preuss and Frémont both kept daily journals. Frémont’s formed the basis for his first report, published the following spring. Preuss’s remained unknown to scholars until the 1950s. Both are in print today, provide lively reading and a useful contrast to each other, and are the main sources for this account. Preuss also made landscape sketches, engravings of which accompanied Frémont’s reports.

The scientific instruments were “good instruments,” Frémont notes in the report, with uncharacteristic understatement. They were in fact state of the art for the time; given the need for portability, they were the most accurate available. As such, it is not too much to see them as emblems of the nation’s newly institutionalized support, by way of Congress and the Topographical Corps, for science—especially when the science served national expansion.

Besides their journals, Frémont and Preuss kept logs of their instrument readings. They took readings at river confluences, important landmarks, most campsites, and many noon halts until, as we shall see, some of the instruments fell prey to accident. Frémont’s alternating care and carelessness toward them was bound up with the cavalier adventurousness that was so much a part of his character. But it seems fair, too, to connect his attitude with a larger national recklessness at the heart of Manifest Destiny.

To measure latitude, Frémont had two sextants and a reflecting circle, essentially sophisticated protractors; they were used to measure the angle of the sun or the polestar above the horizon. But among trees or in the mountains, the horizon was impossible to locate, and so Frémont also carried with him a couple of so-called artificial horizons. These flat boxes, filled with a shallow puddle of mercury, provided a level, still, bright-silver surface in which the heavenly object would be clearly reflected. The geographer could use his reflecting circle to measure the apparent angle between the heavenly object and its reflection and divide the result by two, thus doubling the accuracy of his measurement.

Measuring longitude was trickier. Ancient geographers divided the round earth into 360 degrees of longitude, which correspond nicely with a twenty-four-hour day. That is, fifteen degrees of longitude correspond to one hour, or one twenty-fourth, of the globe’s daily rotation. If only you had a clock reliable enough to keep telling you the time at a distant, fixed spot on the globe, you could, by noting the time difference between when that clock said noon and when it actually was noon where you were—when the sun was as high in its arc as it was going to get that day—you would know the number of degrees you were east or west of the fixed spot on the globe. By Frémont’s time, the fixed spot had been established for 150 years in Greenwich, England. Spring-driven clocks that would keep reliable time on board ship or on a long journey overland—chronometers, they are called—had been available for about sixty years.

At first, chronometers were expensive and rare; Lewis and Clark did not have one. By 1842, Frémont felt able to afford three. These were a ship’s chronometer—a big one in a box, suspended with gimbals like a ship’s compass—and two smaller, sturdier, pocket-sized ones. The big one would have been the most reliable had they been at sea, but it did poorly on the trail. They left it and one other behind at Fort Laramie. They took the best chronometer with them but it, too, did not keep perfect time.

For that reason it was standard practice to use a backup system of astronomical observations involving the moons of Jupiter. The observations required a powerful telescope; Frémont’s was 120 power, fifteen times as strong as a pair of modern binoculars. The observations also demanded good weather, a lot of math, a time of the month when Jupiter was in the sky, and lengthy nighttime observations. The clocks, of course, could be read at a glance and worked about the same night or day in all weather. But they were fragile. If they were dropped, or if they got wet, a person was out of luck.

At Cache Camp, where they hid the carts, Frémont’s astronomical and chronometric observations worked out to a longitude of 106 degrees, 38 minutes, 26 seconds west of the Greenwich meridian, and a latitude of 42 degrees, 50 minutes, 53 seconds north of the Equator. This is not bad; as might be expected, it is better in its latitude than in its longitude. A modern GPS device at the spot just across the Platte River from present-day Casper, Wyoming, where he may have camped, puts his readings within about two minutes of the real latitude, but shows his longitude was eighteen or nineteen minutes off.

That still left the matter of elevations, which is what both Frémont and Preuss were trying to measure once the tipi was pitched that July afternoon. While Frémont unpacked and hung the barometer, Preuss, seeking a second opinion, started the fire. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, and boils at lower temperatures—because of the lower air pressure—at higher elevations. The difference between the temperatures gives an indication of the actual elevation. But as with the chronometers, the expedition was having trouble keeping the thermometers safe from damage. Already they were down to just one with a scale that went high enough to measure water’s boiling point. The men had already broken their best thermometer. The one Preuss was using inside the tipi had a scale high enough to measure water’s boiling point, but it was too small to allow for graduations of much accuracy. 

In any case, it is possible to imagine the tall, red-faced Preuss, thermometer in hand, watching closely as the water came to a boil, and slight, dark-eyed Frémont adjusting the screw on the bottom of the transparent, soup-can-sized canister—the cistern on the bottom of the barometer where it hung from the tripod. By turning the screw he could bring the level of mercury inside the glass beaker up just high enough to touch the point of an ivory pin set there to mark zero on the scale, allowing, each time, an accurate reading at the top. 

Perhaps Preuss said something from inside the tipi about the water starting to boil. Perhaps Frémont, intent on his work just outside, answered him absently. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a gust of wind slammed the lodge and blew it over—Preuss, fire, water pot and all, along with, Frémont wrote later, “about a dozen men, who had attempted to keep it from being carried away.” In the confusion Frémont managed to save the barometer, “which the lodge was carrying away with itself,” but the thermometer broke. They had no others that would measure above 135 degrees, so from now on, elevation data would depend on the barometer alone.

The tipi blew over through no fault of its own, however. It was a good-sized lodge, eighteen feet across and twenty feet high, of that superb conical design which keeps a person warm in winter, cool and mosquito-free in summer. Frémont had acquired it at Fort Laramie, probably from the Lakota camped there. At the fort Frémont also had hired an interpreter, a trader named Joseph Bissonette, and also had agreed at the request of some of the Lakota headmen to allow a young Lakota man and his wife to come along. When Frémont’s men had tried to set up the tipi the first night out from Fort Laramie, the woman had laughed at their clumsiness and since then had often helped—probably supervised—setting it up every evening. Pitching and striking tipis was women’s work, and the Lakota women were quick about it.

But Bissonette had agreed to accompany the expedition only as far as Red Buttes, now just a few miles away. That afternoon at Cache Camp, he and the Indians would have been preparing to leave, and so the voyageurs must have set up the tipi on their own for the first time. They had done a poor job.

As the tipi toppled, and the men struggled with poles and flapping lodgeskins, Frémont would have unhooked the barometer from its tripod and then tilted it very carefully to allow the mercury to flow slowly to the top of the tube, preserving the vacuum inside the tube and allowing for accurate pressure readings in the future. Next he would have had to screw up the screw at the bottom of the cistern, sealing the leather against the bottom of the tube and sealing the mercury into the column. It would have been a delicate moment, among the wind gusts. If the instrument were tilted too fast, the mercury could slam into the top end of the tube and break it. If the bottom were not securely sealed, the mercury could slosh and air would get into the tube, ruining the vacuum. Then, very carefully, the barometer would be slid back into its leather case and slung from a strap over the geographer’s shoulder, upside down with the cistern at the top, ensuring that the mercury filled the tube and the vacuum stayed safely protected.

At this point, the river fishhooked south, while the trail struck out southwest across country. Geographer that he was, Frémont chose to follow the Platte instead of the trail. They headed south, upriver past Red Buttes, and camped at a grassy spot a few miles above the mouth of what is now called Bates Creek. Another day’s journey brought them to Goat Island, which they named for bighorn sheep they found there and killed. The island lay a short distance downstream from a narrows they named Hot Spring Gate, where the Platte cut through a ridge between high walls near a hot spring. Upstream from there, canyon walls closed in completely, and so the next day the men left the river, climbed over steep, barren hills, and fifteen miles later descended more gradually back down to the Sweetwater, flowing in from the west. Turning right, up the Sweetwater, they headed for the Continental Divide.

Frémont reported the Sweetwater sixty feet across, twelve to eighteen inches deep, flowing moderately—much the same as a person would find it now, at the end of a modern July. But then, buffalo grazed near the river. The men camped in a cold rain, and the hunters killed some cows; the next day they moved seven miles further up to camp a mile below Independence Rock. Here they rejoined the trail. They spent two nights, the hunters killed more buffalo, and everyone pitched in to cut the meat in strips and hang it on racks in the sun to dry. An extra day by the stream must have been a welcome respite from traveling.

By now it was August, and the weather was changing as they steadily gained altitude. Six miles above Independence Rock, they came to Devil’s Gate, where the normally placid Sweetwater cuts a dramatic, V-shaped notch through a granite spur out of the hills nearby. Again it rained. No one had any tents; they seem to have left them behind with the carts. Some nights, big sagebrush was their only shelter. There were no trees along the river, but driftwood lay scattered along its banks. With this, and what the voyageurs called bois de vache—buffalo chips—they made fires.

A day and a half beyond Devil’s Gate they got their first view of the Wind River Mountains, looking low and dark; these marked the Continental Divide and beyond them lay Oregon. On up the Sweetwater they progressed, timbered mountains miles off on their left, bare-granite rocks rising close and steep on their right. They passed buffalo, antelope, spied the only grizzly bear of the trip, found an abandoned dog and a sore-footed horse, and now and then unpacked their instruments to take more readings.

Towards the head of the valley, they came to the place where the Sweetwater, now a rocky creek, foamed out of a canyon in “wildness and disorder,” Frémont wrote later. The route got steeper and the trail again left the river for easier going. As he had on the Platte, Frémont stayed with the river. They found traces of old beaver dams, falling apart now as the beaver trade had killed off all their tenants. Finally the rock walls came too close. The men followed a ravine up to a high prairie and camped by a tributary. Here, Indians had left some poles, and so Frémont, Preuss, and some of the men were able to spend a night in the tipi, which they had brought along. The next night, just a few miles from South Pass and the Continental Divide, they again took longitude and latitude, but, for some reason, no barometer readings for altitude. 

Instead, Frémont estimated the pass’s elevation at seven thousand feet—not bad, though his calculation the following year of 7,490 was far better. The place is broad, flat, and undistinguished, and so dry and windy that people seldom linger. The men had come 120 miles from the mouth of the Sweetwater, Frémont reported, 320 miles from Fort Laramie, 950 miles from the settlements on the Missouri. Now they were far beyond the extent of Frémont’s written instructions. Crossing South Pass, they were leaving the drainage of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. They were leaving the United States and entering Oregon. 

Frémont now led the party northwest up the west side—the Oregon side—of the Wind Rivers. Off the established trail now, he relied more heavily on the wilderness skills of his best men: Kit Carson, a Taos-based former fur trapper whom Frémont’s reports would make famous, and the most competent of the St. Louis-based voyageurs: Basil Lajeunesse and Clément Lambert. From the west side the mountains rose more steeply from the plains at their feet and appeared more dramatic than they had on the long approach from the east. Frémont admitted they were beginning to appeal to his ideas of alpine beauty, though Preuss, German by birth, remained skeptical. Soon they turned their mules east and headed into the mountains. More than anything, it seems—certainly more than he wanted to follow orders—Frémont wanted to know how tall these mountains were.

And then, near the end of a day, they crossed the outlet of a lake. The stream was wide, swift, deep, and cold, and the rocks were sharp. The mule carrying the barometer must have slipped; perhaps it fell. In any case, the barometer broke—a “great misfortune,” Frémont reported later in his published report. The entire party supposedly felt the loss. Trappers, travelers, hunters, and traders had been arguing so long about the mountains’ true height that “all had looked forward with pleasure to the moment when the instrument, which they believed to be true as the sun, should stand upon their summits, and decide their disputes.” They camped on the north shore of the narrow lake. Frémont took latitude and longitude readings, took compass bearings to the various mountain peaks, and settled in to fix the barometer.

The main tube was still intact, but the glass cistern had broken. To replace it, he tried to cut the bottom out of an extra glass beaker. But he had only a rough file to cut with and the beaker broke, as did two more. Then he stored the barometer for the night in a groove the men had cut in a tree trunk, and in the morning he began again. He commandeered a powder horn from one of the men. The powder horn was worn thin by years of use and nearly transparent. Frémont boiled it to make it soft and workable, scraped it thinner for greater transparency, stretched it on a piece of wood to exactly the diameter he needed, bound it to the bottom of the instrument with stout thread, and glued it snug with buffalo glue. A piece of leather that had served as a cover for one of the glass beakers made a good adjustable pocket for the bottom of the powder horn-cistern. He next took mercury from one of his artificial horizons, heated it to drive off any excess moisture, and filled the cistern with the bright, heavy, liquid metal. Then he left the instrument upside down for several hours while the glue dried. Finally came the moment of truth. Carefully, he turned the barometer right side up. Everything held, nothing leaked, the vacuum stayed intact.

Time to climb the mountain. Leaving eleven men and twenty or so mules in a little fort-corral they built by the lake, the other fourteen men took fifteen of the best mules, and headed out.

The climb eventually cost them six days and five nights, and a sharp quarrel between Carson and Frémont. Eventually it was Lajeunesse, not Carson, who found the route up. Six men made it to the summit: Frémont, Preuss, Lajeunesse, Lambert, a voyageur named Descoteaux, and Auguste Janisse, called by the men Johnny, a mulatto and the only African-American in the group. Descoteaux and Lambert at one point extended a ramrod from above to help the others over a steep, slick slab. Janisse carried the barometer.

At the top, large enough for only one person to stand at a time, they unfurled an American flag, fired off pistols, and cheered. Then someone set up the tripod and hung the precious barometer. Preuss took two readings; later computations produced an estimated altitude of 13,570 feet, only 160 feet below the true height of the mountain, subsequently named Frémont Peak. Frémont was elated, and convinced (incorrectly) that he had climbed the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains. Preuss was, as usual, less impressed. “As on the entire journey,” he wrote later, “Frémont allowed me only a few minutes for my work. When the time comes for me to make my map in Washington, he will more than regret this unwise haste. After about fifteen minutes we started on our return trip.”

The barometer broke for a final time on the last afternoon of their march out of the mountains, before they had even returned to their camp by the lake. Frémont was chagrined, as he had hoped to be able to compare the instrument’s readings with those of another scientist’s barometer back in St. Louis, for a better read on his accuracy. He does not say whether he decided to leave his broken barometer behind. His other instruments still worked fine—sextants, reflecting circle, artificial horizon, telescope, chronometer, several compasses and probably a couple of thermometers—and he continued recording latitudes and longitudes.

On August 22, they again reached Independence Rock on the Sweetwater. Hoping for the best, Frémont unpacked yet another piece of remarkable equipment—an India rubber boat. It was twenty feet long and five wide, Frémont tells us, and appears to have had separate compartments, each inflatable with a bellows. He had ordered it the previous March, and it was delivered a few weeks later to the household of Senator Benton, in Washington, where Frémont lived with Jessie Benton Frémont, his bride of a few months. Its maker, Horace Day of New York, uncrated it on a broad gallery that opened off the Benton dining room, apparently for the admiration of friends and family, warning everyone as he did so that the new rubber might give off a strong odor. This proved to be the case. It was so bad everyone at the party had to leave, and the boat—still uninflated, apparently—was hustled out to the barn. To fumigate the house, servants hustled among the rooms and hallways, carrying ground coffee on hot shovels to cut the stench with something more pleasant. Sixty years later, Jessie told her biographer that though she barely remembered the boat, she clearly recalled its smell; she was newly pregnant at the time and the odor brought on an enormous nausea.

Frémont says he brought the boat along specifically to survey the Platte, but its purchase really shows his affection for everything newfangled. The men had used it first to cross the unexpectedly swollen Kansas River in early June. With the resourceful Basil Lajeunesse swimming out ahead, bow rope in his teeth, until he reached the far shore, it had worked fine on six cart-ferrying trips. But in his haste, with dark approaching, Frémont had the men load two carts on for the last trip, and the boat capsized. They lost a lot of sugar and nearly all the coffee, and two men nearly drowned. Frémont blamed the man who was steering the boat for being “timid on the water.” A wiser leader might have learned not to risk lives in haste.

Now Frémont was eager to try the boat again—and this time for a voyage, not just a crossing. Remarkably, they tried to launch at Independence Rock, still nine miles upstream from the Sweetwater’s mouth. But, packed with gear and four or five men, the boat drew too much water. They dragged it for two miles along the river’s sand- and pebble-bottomed meanders before giving up, deflating it, waiting for the rest of the party to arrive, repacking boat and gear onto the mules, and heading down along the south bank—again, with no trail—toward the Platte. They had to scramble up over some big rocks before coming down finally to a small, open place near where the Sweetwater rushed into a turbid Platte, running swollen and smooth. They camped for the night. From this distance, they could not yet hear the roar of rapids below.

Next morning they started before sunrise, expecting to reach Goat Island, thirteen or fourteen river miles away, for breakfast. Seven men climbed aboard—Frémont, Preuss, Lambert, Lajeunesse, Descoteaux, and two more voyageurs, Honoré Ayot and Leonard Benoît. The boat had already been loaded with all the instruments, with their trail journals, their notebooks of data, their guns, personal baggage, and food for ten days. 

“In short,” Preuss wrote, “since we now live separate from ‘the common crowd,’ all the good things were retained for us”—sugar, chocolate, macaroni, the best meat of three recently killed buffalo cows and some recently smoked buffalo sausage—”and only the ordinary left for the others.” The rest of the men and all the mules were dispatched overland, under the leadership of Baptiste Bernier, another of the voyageur-lieutenants. Frémont may have taken far more food than they needed on the boat with the intention of easing the mules’ burdens, floating all the way to Fort Laramie and letting the others pick up the carts at Cache Camp. But the fact that they also took the best food, that Carson was not put in charge of the overland contingent, and that Preuss hints at some kind of rift also may reveal that Frémont and Carson had not patched up their earlier quarrel.

Frémont’s motives are unclear. He made a career of rash decisions; this was the first notorious one. Perhaps he was so eager to know what his new rubber boat could do that he did not think of much else. He had a keen mind for mathematics, for cartography, and geography, and understood thoroughly all the processes of measurement that would get him the best data possible. At the same time he risked the notebooks that contained all the information he had gathered so far—and worse, he risked his men’s lives. “We paddled down the river rapidly,” he reported later, “for our little craft was as light as a duck on the water.”

The sun was well up when they came to the river’s first cut through a ridge. They stopped on a point on the right, just inside the first steep curve where the river was starting to move fast. They got out, scrambled up the ridge for a better look, and saw rapids but no falls that looked too large to navigate. Looking at the broken ridges around them Frémont was sure it would have been too much trouble to carry the boat and all their stuff around the fast water, “and I determined to run the cañon,” he wrote. It was narrow and high; back down at the water level they saw where big logs from spring floods lay stranded on walls twenty or thirty feet above their heads. Preuss pocketed the chronometer and clutched his notebook. They made it safely through three rapids in quick succession, emerged into an open place where the river slowed and, exhilarated, pulled over for breakfast—some of that good sausage and a swallow of brandy.

After an hour they embarked again. Twenty minutes of smooth water brought them to a much larger, darker canyon, ominous in its height. They stopped again, Frémont wrote, and climbed to a spot where they could see the river winding seven or eight miles through walls two- to three-hundred feet high on the near end, five-hundred feet high farther down. These vertical distances are about right, but there is no view of the entire canyon from the hill they most likely climbed, or from anywhere near the canyon’s upper entrance. Though both men noted they were now bold from their earlier success, Preuss noted specifically that they did not reconnoiter. Hoping to protect the chronometer, he got out to walk the shore, but soon found the shore gone and rock walls running straight into the water. Meanwhile, the other men tried lining the boat; Lajeunesse and two others got out and walked the shore, holding one end of a fifty-foot rope attached to the stern. Then the boat stuck between two rocks. Water swept over the sides and began carrying away a sextant and a pair of saddlebags; Frémont grabbed the sextant but the saddlebags flowed away. Next, the boat unstuck and came up to where Preuss was standing. With the chronometer in a bag around his neck, he climbed aboard—the roar of the water now deafening—while the men with the rope made it to a big rock twelve feet above the level of the river. But the force of the water proved too great. Two of the men let go. Lajeunesse kept holding, and the line jerked him headfirst into the water. The boat shot on and, remarkably, he appeared again behind them in the current, disappeared, reappeared, his head a black speck in the white, white foam.

At last they turned the boat into an eddy. Lajeunesse caught up, swearing he had swum half a mile. All three rope men climbed aboard yet again. Everyone knelt now in the boat, took up a short paddle, and on they went, finally so exhilarated they shouted “hurrah” as Preuss has it, or, as Frémont has it, were just reaching the chorus of a Canadian boat song when the boat careened down a fall, struck a hidden rock, and flipped. Frémont and Preuss found themselves on the left-hand shore, the other men with the turtled boat on the right. Lambert was holding Descoteaux, who could not swim, by the hair. “Lâche pas,”cried Descoteaux, “lâche pas, cher frère.”—Don’t let go, brother! “Crains pas,” came the reply, “Je m’en vais mourir avant de te lâcher.” —Fear not! I’ll die before I let go of you!

At least, that is how Frémont wrote the story. Lajeunesse, meanwhile, righted the boat and with one or two of the others, managed to paddle some ways farther before a rock tore a hole in a second compartment and the boat slowly deflated into uselessness. There is only one route by which any of them could have climbed the four or five hundred feet up out of the canyon, and it leads up from the west, that is, left-hand side of the river. Frémont and Preuss appear to have taken this; how the others made it out is less clear. Preuss managed to hang on to the chronometer, but the water had stopped it. He also saved his detailed, melancholic diary—which did not turn up for more than a century, and which provides such a valuable anchor to Frémont’s buoyant optimism.

It was a long, hungry walk to Goat Island. Frémont had lost one moccasin and had to pick his way among rocks and cactus on one sock foot. After several more miles the canyon ended; then it was another five miles along braided river meanders now drowned under Alcova Reservoir. Then Hot Spring Gate, where Alcova Dam now lies, a final scramble over a sharp, red-rock ridge, and finally, below them, they saw Goat Island, waved to their friends, and smelled buffalo ribs roasting on the fire. That night it rained, but they slept right through it. Early next morning, Frémont sent the tireless Lajeunesse and a mule or two back to the canyon to recover whatever he could. They made Cache Camp the following day, exhumed the stuff and re-rigged the carts, and camped the following night at the ford on the Platte.

When they finally sorted everything out, they had lost many of the notebooks, though not all. Descoteaux had happened to have Frémont’s double-barreled rifle between his legs when the boat flipped and so it, too, was saved. Most of the scientific instruments were lost: the sextants, the big telescope, the five compasses, the artificial horizons; even the thermometers. The chronometer was ruined, and the one they had left at Fort Laramie ran poorly, so Frémont got no more reliable longitudes for the rest of the trip. He did save the reflecting circle, so he kept measuring his latitudes.

That winter Frémont wrote his report, or rather, dictated it to Jessie, who almost certainly added color and pace to the account. The document, including a detailed map of the corridor the expedition had traveled from the Missouri River to South Pass, was delivered to the Senate in March, 1843. The Senate immediately ordered one thousand copies printed for sale to the general public. Benton’s propaganda plans were working; that summer saw the first really large emigrant party—a thousand people—heading out for Oregon. Frémont, too, set out again. His orders were to travel to Oregon and come back the same way. But he followed his own wishes and took a much longer side trip, this time to California. A near-suicidal crossing of the Sierras in midwinter cost him the lives of two of his men. It also made clear to him and Preuss the nature and existence of the Great Basin, that enormous, counterintuitive sink east of the Sierras and west of the Green and Colorado drainages, where rivers flow out of mountains and simply disappear. When, in 1845 and 1846 Frémont traveled again to California to—accidentally on purpose—get the California end of the Mexican War started, Preuss stayed behind in Washington to keep working on the maps.

And in the shadow of America’s and Frémont’s reckless imperialism in those years, of Frémont’s growing incompetence and despair, and finally in our pity for his obscure decline and poverty-ridden death, it is easy to forget those maps. They are wonderful. The Senate published the first in 1845. It covers most of the trans-Missouri West, but Frémont and Preuss, to their great credit, mapped, with one or two exceptions, only the places they had seen. Good scientists, unwilling to vouch for what they did not know for sure, they left the rest blank. In 1846, the government published their seven-part map of the road from the mouth of the Kansas on the Missouri to the mouth of the Walla Walla on the Columbia. Tens of thousands were published. No one needed a Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, or Tom Fitzpatrick any longer to lead the wagons over plains and deserts. You had only to follow the map—with landmarks, water sources, and dates keyed to the descriptions in Frémont’s reports—all at an easy-to-read ten miles to the inch.

“War – Ground of Snake and Sioux Indians,” it says, in capitals that curve two hundred elegant miles from the Green River to the hills north of Red Buttes. True. “Ridges and masses of naked Granite destitude [sic] of vegetation,” it says in smaller letters the length of the Sweetwater Rocks, just north of the Sweetwater River. Also true. Under “Remarks” in the lower left-hand corner it lists “Fuel,” then adds, “Cotton wood and willow sufficient near the water courses and sage (artemisia) all over the country . . . often as high as the head . . . sometimes eight feet high, and several inches in diameter in the stalk. Makes a quick fire.” True again. “Game. At Sweetwater River buffalo appear for the last time, and emigrants should provide themselves well with dryed meat. West of that region nothing but a few deer and antelope, very wild, are to be met with.” True, though within a year or two, buffalo would be scarce on the Sweetwater too. “Water,” it reads. “Abundant.” True, if a traveler kept close to the rivers. Otherwise, false, false, false.

When he got back to Washington, Frémont made Jessie a present of the flag flown from the top of the peak, unfurling it across their bed. The report in its various best-selling editions contained any of several illustrations of the Pathfinder on top of the mountain, hand on the pole, flag whipping in the wind while the other men gaze up admiringly from below.

But an equally true picture would have shown Preuss on the peak, hands on his knees, notebook under his armpit and pencil behind his ear, peering through the wind at the top end of the barometer while Janisse or Lajeunesse steadied one of the tripod legs. From below, Frémont, already headed downward, shouts back over his shoulder for them to hurry up, get a move on; one reading of the barometer was good enough. His haste, his well-equipped sloppiness, may have been the most American thing about him. They had a continent to conquer, and time was getting short.

Further Reading:

The first book I read on Frémont was Edward D. Harris’s compact John Charles Frémont and the Great Western Reconnaissance (New York, 1990), aimed at the young adult market but still a good short introduction to the subject, packed with maps, portraits, and nineteenth-century illustrations. Web browsers will enjoy Bob Graham’s delightfully sprawling Website on Frémont, his science, and a wagonload of related topics. It was here that I first found pictures and detailed descriptions of Frémont’s instruments, and Graham helped me a great deal with this essay, responding clearly and patiently to my emailed questions.

Map lovers can find a copy of Frémont’s and Preuss’s seven-part map of the route to Oregon by going to the Library of Congress’s American Memory Website and then typing “Topographical Map of the Road from Missouri to Oregon” into the search window. Red Buttes, the Sweetwater Valley, and the Wind River Mountains are on map 4.

Ferol Egan’s thorough Frémont: Explorer for a Restless Nation (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), was probably the most useful biography overall; Tom Chaffin’s more recent Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York, 2002) serves a similar purpose. The first modern Frémont biography was Allan Nevins’s adulatory Frémont: Pathmaker of the West 2 vols. (New York, 1961), published in earlier versions in 1928, 1939, and 1955. And William H. Goetzmann’s excellent Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863 (New Haven, 1959) gives a detailed account of Frémont’s scientific apprenticeship on the upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers with the French geographer Joseph Nicollet.

Readers of any or all of these positive accounts would do well to temper them with David Roberts’ A Newer World: John C. Frémont, Kit Carson and the Claiming of the American West (New York, 2000), which tells in detail the story of Frémont’s disastrous fourth expedition of 1847-48, when he abandoned his snowbound men to starve in the Colorado Rockies, and some resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Lovers of primary sources will enjoy reading Frémont’s ebullient account of the 1842 expedition side by side with Preuss’s skeptical one. Frémont’s is available in paperback as The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, with an introduction by Herman J. Viola and Ralph E. Ehrenberg (Washington, D.C., 1988). A reprint of Frémont’s first bestseller, it contains his reports both of the 1842 expedition and the 1843-44 expedition.

Preuss’s diary, which he kept in German, did not turn up until the 1950s, and was published in translation in the U.S. as Exploring with Frémont: The Private Diaries of Charles Preuss, Cartographer for John C. Frémont on his First, Second and Fourth Expeditions to the Far West, trans. and ed. by Erwin G. and Elisabeth K. Gudde (Norman, Ok., 1958).

Other editions of Frémont’s reports include at least one available online, The Life of Col. John Charles Frémont, and His Narrative of Explorations and Adventures, in Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon and California. The Memoir by Samuel M. Smucker (New York, 1856), reproduced online here. Frémont ran for president that year; Smucker’s “memoir” is actually a campaign biography, attached to a reprint of the 1845 edition of the first two expedition reports. The most comprehensive edition of Frémont’s reports is still in print as The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, ed. by Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence (Urbana, 1970), in four volumes, of which the fourth is a beautifully produced map portfolio. And map lovers may want to purchase the seven-section, ten-miles-to-the-inch Topographical Map of the Road from Missouri to Oregon Commencing at the Mouth of the Kansas in the Missouri River and Ending at the Mouth of the Wallah Wallah in the Columbia, available in inexpensive facsimiles from Southfork Publications, P.O. Box E, Dayville, Oregon 97825.

Frémont published the first volume of his Memoirs of My Life in 1887; it covered his first three expeditions. But when it sold poorly, he did not follow it up with the successive volumes that had been planned. A new edition from Cooper Square Press in New York, 2001, is now in print, with an introduction by Charles M. Robinson. 

The story of uncrating the odorous rubber boat in the Benton household is told in the Memoirs, and in more detail in Catherine Coffin Phillips’s Jessie Benton Frémont: A Woman who Made History (San Francisco, 1935). The book is based on long interviews the author conducted with Jessie before she died in 1902.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.4 (July, 2004).

Tom Rea’s Bone Wars: The Excavation of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur, is just out in paper from the University of Pittsburgh Press. This essay is adapted from a new book, The Middle of Nowhere, due from the University of Oklahoma Press in 2005. He lives in Casper, Wyoming.

The dried skin of a fish hangs over my head as I type. It has been there for nearly two years, and no longer smells as it did for weeks after I slit the animal in half (fig. 1). This sea bass from the grocery store, now a specimen, was my attempt to understand a widespread but little-remembered practice in eighteenth-century science that might seem strange to us today: to dry, bisect, and flatten animals like fish, and then glue or stitch them on paper or slip them in books like pressed flowers (fig. 2).

In the 1740s, a Dutch botanist named John Frederick Gronovius published a set of fish flattening instructions in the Philosophical Transactions of London’s premier scientific collective, the Royal Society. Many more naturalists would publish variant recipes. According to Gronovius, one would cut the animal in half from head to tail with “Scissars,” remove its innards and flesh, keep the tail and fins expanded with pins while the fish dried in the sun or near a fire, and press the skin for a full twenty-four hours. When American naturalist John Bartram opened a package with one such sample, he matter-of-factly told Gronovius, “I have received . . . the skin of the Fish, with its fins curiously displayed on paper; all which was very acceptable.” Naturalists from America, England, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere would exchange hundreds—more likely thousands—of similar specimens across the world in that century.

Resembling drawings or engravings more than live animals, these objects gave naturalists a literal demonstration of their favorite metaphor: that science was an act of reading the “book” or “page” of nature, written by God, the ultimate author. The half-skins also served more practical ends by facilitating colonial expansion and the creation of universal taxonomies, or systems for arranging nature. One could ship paper fish around the world in essentially picture form, stacked in a box where they took up “very little more room than a Drawing,” and looked “infinitely better,” in the words of London-based collector George Humphrey. Each fish became fused with metadata and annotations written on its paper background or on the skin itself (fig. 3). As a form of early modern information management, this fish paperwork made the animals of the far reaches of an empire visible and readily accessible to those seeking to exploit them. Flattened fish were not merely objects to be shipped efficiently: they were surfaces for storing knowledge. 

In some ways, my own fish seems an inadequate window into this history. Period instructions stressed the “facility” of this technique, the “most simple” method for preserving fish, in which the animal’s skin “may be slid off almost like a glove,” to use their terms. My experiment, which involved an hour of indelicate hacking at fish flesh, proved a stickier venture. Most specimens I have observed are thinner than cardstock and astoundingly flat, and some are flush with the paper, with barely a bubble, ripple, or ridge. Mine, however, continues to curve back to its living form, while its crunchiness (also evident in a large crack) prevents me from fully flattening it after the fact. Caretaking has produced its own anxieties, as I kept my specimen atop my tallest bookshelf and away from a curious cat for months, but as a result, dropped it from six feet in the air when collecting it for reexamination, and lost a pelvic fin in the process. For easier retrieval, transport, and long-term storage, I opted to keep the fish in a shadow box designed for war medals instead of on paper (fig. 4).  

Then again, everything seemingly wrong about this fish also underscores the improvisational nature of natural history in early America. Especially in colonial settings or budding republics, where many of these animals were first collected, people had to make use of the materials available to them. They flattened fish on the fly—which at times might mean borrowing prep materials from the kitchen, or making a fish into a much-needed meal instead of an artifact in a far-off scientist’s cabinet. What’s more, naturalists’ breezy assurances about the ease of the flattening process actually erase the craft, as well as the often-unfree labor, that produced these artifacts. Flattening animals on bare sheets of paper squeezed out rich social and environmental contexts behind such specimens, promoting a particular politics of seeing and making. 

Flattened Animals in Early America 

The naturalists who flattened fish on paper were typically botanists, first and foremost. They transferred the methods of their home discipline to new subjects, drying and flattening not only fish on paper, but also a range of other creatures—from snakes to butterflies—often with the aid of a botanical press. Gronovius told Bartram that he sent “dryed fishes, to be kept as plants in an Herbarius,” or herbarium—a collection of dried plants varnished, glued, or sewn on sheets, often stored within bound books on library shelves (fig. 5). Herbarium collections, made by actors as wide-ranging as elite male naturalists in scientific institutions to women who pressed plants in albums at home, consciously riffed on the metaphor of nature as a book or text. As a result, some call the objects I examine here “fish herbaria.”  

Most fish herbarium specimens reside in Europe today. In basements and boxes and vaults there, I’ve seen the obstinate skins of armored catfish, the top halves of stingrays, a collapsed pufferfish, shoeleather shark skins, and lengthy garfish and eels folded over themselves to fit on paper; fish with giant spined sails that could pierce skin, and others no larger than a thumbprint; specimens strapped in place with a network of strings, fragile seahorses secured with pins, and many more hastily varnished onto the page, as if to become one with it (fig. 6). One significant collection remained in North America: that of the naturalist William Dandridge Peck. After graduating from Harvard in 1782 and a brief stint in a counting house, Peck apparently learned how to prepare specimens on his own as he lived and farmed with his reclusive father in Kittery, Maine, possibly with Gronovius’s recipe at hand. He assembled most of this collection of fish skins in the 1790s, before working as a professor of natural history at Harvard and curator of its botanical garden from 1805 until his death in 1822. 

Several dozen animals remain in Peck’s collection at Harvard today, spread across the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. The skin of a flounder—a naturally flat fish, with two eyes on its upward-facing side—seems readymade for the page (fig. 2). Peck’s once-bulbous and once-colorful lumpfish (fig. 7), on the other hand, underwent severe transformations to fit on paper (fig. 8). While any translation from three to two dimensions results in some form of loss or distortion (see, for instance, the Mercator projection of our globe), certain creatures accommodated flattened preservation much better than others. So too, larger species like sharks would only fit on the page in juvenile form. All such specimens threatened to turn a dull brown with time, and to break down by virtue of their very mode of preservation: they were so dry that they became brittle. Peck warned students as he displayed one in a lecture: “The scales are very loosely attached, & fall with a touch tho even so gently handled.” 

Flattening a fish may have warped some of the animal’s features, but it actually helped conserve the ones that mattered most to many naturalists. Peck offered a course of natural history lectures at Harvard, where he leaned heavily on the methods of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, seen as the father of modern biological nomenclature. Instead of salvaging the whole fish in a bottle of rum or styling it to appear lifelike, Peck preserved and highlighted particular surface features needed for sorting the animals according to Linnaeus’s system, and for teaching this system to students. Numerous observers remarked that this method of preservation allowed one to easily count the number of rays or spines within each fin of a specimen—the fins Bartram found so “curiously displayed”—and this quantitative move was, and remains, one of the hallmarks of fish classification. Gronovius’s recommendation to spread the fins with pins as the animal dried ensured those features remained countable in the fish’s afterlife. 

These specimens, however, reveal a world far larger than the elite circles of Linnaeus, or even the modest Peck. Flattened knowledge depended on people and other animals on the outskirts of empire, and multiple human groups and practices left imprints on the specimens.  

The Concealed Labor of Flattening 

Peck seldom mentioned these fish specimens in his letters and lecture notes. We do know, however, that he used a range of people to gather specimens for him, including local anglers and even children. Naturalists routinely sent others to collect on their behalf. Alexander Garden, a Scottish physician and aspiring botanist based in Charleston, South Carolina, who supplied Linnaeus with numerous fish half-skins, explained in a 1771 letter to the Swede: 

…I sent a black servant last summer to the island of Providence. During his stay there, he collected and preserved some fishes amongst other things; but, meeting with tempestuous weather in his return, and being, for several days together, in dread of immediate shipwreck, he neglected all his specimens, many of which perished. Some were fit only to be thrown away, and others were greatly damaged. What remain, such as they are, I shall, by this opportunity, send for your examination. Some fishes among them, whether found in our sea, or in that of the Bahama islands, you may perhaps find to be new. 

This unnamed “black servant” was likely enslaved, given that Garden owned slaves and encountered and treated many more while working as a physician in Charleston. Garden offered this anecdote, and individual, as a buffer to explain why he sent Linnaeus a mere fourteen specimens in his shipment. He underscored their “neglect” due to environmental hazards faced by the man—hazards from which Garden remained immune. Garden’s accusatory move to preserve his own credibility unintentionally offers a means of tracking how he obtained his specimens. Some of the half-skins preserved by this individual on the 1771 collecting trip are housed today at the Linnean Society of London, including a trumpetfish and porkfish; numbers written on their skins allow us to correlate mute fish with anonymous collector (fig. 9). Despite Garden’s disparaging remarks, the specimens outlasted many others from the period—a testament to this man’s skill and the permanence of his labor, which underwrote a foundational collection in the history of science. How many unrecorded collecting trips might he have made on Garden’s behalf? 

In addition to marginalized people, extra-scientific practices also left their mark on these specimens. Perhaps the most important role fish played in early American life was at the dinner table. Once fish began their journeys toward becoming scientific specimens, their status as alimentary objects continued to leave traces. A flattened type specimen of the ladyfish held in a vault at the Linnean Society offers one peculiar culinary story (fig. 10). While the notion of a type specimen did not yet exist in the eighteenth century, many of Linnaeus’s fish have been retroactively classified as such, being the selfsame specimens used to generate the first Western, published descriptions of the species. Type specimens are, paradoxically, “concrete abstractions,” in the words of historian of science Lorraine Daston—presenting some ironies when a fish turns out to be an unrepresentative representative of the species. Garden told Linnaeus that the ladyfish he sent was “the only specimen of this fish that I ever saw, and the gentleman who was kind enough to let me have it, had unluckily ordered it to be dressed for supper, so that the scales were taken off before he thought of me; and hence you will observe that I could not see the natural appearance of the fish, nor make the characters complete.” Though scales were and remain a quantifiable trait important to ichthyologists, the almost-fried fish still secured its spot in the hall of biological fame. Split into chunks and especially shiny, this specimen embodies a seemingly unscientific relationship between humans and fish that nonetheless left its mark on a natural history repository.  

The reverse, however, was also true: many specimens never made it into academic collections precisely because they were potential foodstuff. Garden lost fish specimens to animals and people, as when he griped to Linnaeus about a certain rockfish: “I never had but only one to examine, and the company who permitted me to make out the description, insisted on their having the pleasure of eating it, otherwise I would have preserved the specimen for you.” Some of the tastiest animals probably never made it to the page. At times, naturalists even consumed their own specimens, in whole or in part, effectively incorporating their objects of study into their own bodies. 

Hungry insects frequently descended on scientific archives as well. As a result, overseeing collections involved not only the more dramatic events of describing new species and ordering the natural world, but also ordinary—sometimes extraordinary—acts of maintenance and care. In 1795, the Massachusetts Historical Society printed tips, supplied by Peck, for protecting collections of animals from insects, which included regular handling and inspection of objects, as well as lying in wait past twilight for nocturnal pests.  

How to Cut and Paste, Eighteenth-Century Style 

At their most basic level, gathering fish, making specimens, and maintaining collections required intimate bodily interactions with nonhumans. Historians of science such as Pamela Smith and Otto Sibum have explored how certain physical practices cannot be conveyed in words, as historical hands and bodies possessed “tacit knowledge” that does not translate into linguistic form. Says philosopher Michael Polanyi: “we can know more than we can tell.” Since embodied knowledge differed fundamentally from written knowledge, recovering it would require distinct methods of investigation. And so, one way to understand historical making is by doing.  

All of which led to my day with the fish (fig. 11). During the Obama years, I went to the grocery store, asked a skeptical fishmonger which species might be simplest to cut in half and flatten, and at his recommendation of a European sea bass, or branzino, chose one small enough to fit on a sheet of butcher paper. With a printout of Gronovius by my side, I brought the fish to a kitchen. After bisecting its body with scissors, splitting the head in two with a chef’s knife, and tediously removing organs, flesh, bones, gills, and wet membrane, I spread what was left on a board with the fins expanded with pins, as Gronovius instructed (fig. 12). Trying not to alarm my neighbors, I opted to dry it in the oven rather than outdoors, knowing early American naturalists like Manasseh Cutler suggested preserving animals between sheets of paper in the oven “after the bread is drawn.”  

Soon—and perhaps no thanks to my modern oven—I realized the difficulty of keeping the animal flat. As a result, I have a better grasp of the extended presence of the naturalist, or a helper, or some sort of press after cutting, as well as a fuller sense, by extension, of the value placed on flatness. Some versions of instructions stress customizability, as when English physician John Coakley Lettsom, who supplied Harvard’s early collections with specimens, wrote: “the two sides of [the fish’s] skin may…be dried upon paper like a plant, or one of the sides may be filled with plaster of Paris, to give the subject a due plumpness.” Room for improvisation would have been critical in colonial or early republic contexts, as local institutions like the Massachusetts Historical Society encouraged preparing specimens with materials from one’s own pantry, such as black pepper and egg yolks. Despite some room for variation in technique, however, the deliberate flatness I have witnessed in the vast majority of specimens seems all the more remarkable and coerced having tried my own hand at the process and wrestled with a fish body hell-bent on curling back to three dimensions.  

Early modern caretakers must have constantly attended to these stubborn materials through vigilance and persistent pressing. It is hard to appreciate how protracted this process was from two pages of sparse instructions, though Gronovius did intimate the constant management of the specimen when he cautioned: “as a sort of glutinous Matter, in pressing, is always forced out from betwixt the Scales and the Skin, a Piece of Parchment is to be laid under the Fish, which is easily separated from the scales, but Paper always sticks: For this Reason it is necessary, that after an Hour or two, a fresh Piece of Parchment should be applied.” In Gronovius’s experience, and now mine, the fish continued to assert its sticky (and, frankly, stinky) existence.  

In preparing the fish, I also began to understand the risk and apprehension that attended specimen creation and care: scissors and knives and pins can slip and injure the specimen or one’s hand, and fish bones are as sharp as scissors, as cookbooks often warned. I escaped with just one injury. This was also an irreversible process: early modern naturalists had to carve up what was often the only specimen of that species they would see in their lifetimes—and, in some cases, an animal entirely new to European science. They had one chance to bisect a creature correctly. Then again, naturalists and the many people who prepared these specimens no doubt accumulated experience from cutting and flattening many fish over time. I hope to follow in step by replicating this procedure with more specimens in the future. 

Standing in a kitchen with a knife in one hand and a store-bought fish in the other, I also began to ask a new set of questions: Would someone in the eighteenth century fillet a fish the same way I do? Would she eat it with the skin on? Was cooking the model, implicitly or explicitly, for creating these specimens? What were the gender implications of this food-made-flatness, given that natural science was often (though not always) closed to women at this time, yet women—especially women of color—did much of the cooking and would have intimate knowledge of fish interiors? Understanding how fish were prepared for supper and cooked as meals might also indicate what precedents or tacit knowledge the creators of fish herbaria drew upon as they slit animals in half and placed them on paper—paper that must have, to some, resembled a book plate, and to others, a dinner plate.  

These questions sent me back to historical cookbooks, opening my eyes to how angling and cooking might themselves be considered modes of natural historical practice and connoisseurship, and how their status as such can help us understand the unwritten models behind the creation of scientific objects. Fishing required intimate knowledge of species-specific fish habitats, behavior, and development, while preparing fish as food involved collecting, identifying, drying, and preserving animals—all tools in the naturalist’s repertoire.  

Maria Eliza Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery, first printed in Britain in 1806, and in America in 1807, described numerous techniques similar to the ones I performed, such as: “After scaling and cleaning, split the salmon.” The shared maneuver of bisecting fish for alimentary and scientific purposes required analogous mastery of fish bodies, though that anatomical expertise would ultimately serve different purposes. Glimpses of kitchen techniques crept into the books of naturalists from time to time, too: William Swainson noted that “Lampreys, eels, and other cylindrical fish may be preserved by skinning them from the head to the tail, in the same manner as eels are prepared for cooking.” Natural history is also the history of food, and food history a form of natural history. 

Cookbooks also make clear how class and race may have informed the conversion of fish into specimens and meals, resulting in the (erroneous) appraisal of both as unskilled productions. In a word, cutting fish in half is gross. As such, it was historically often relegated to laborers who were lower on the social hierarchy. In A Practical Treatise on the Choice and Cookery of Fish (1854), William Hughes wrote disparagingly that “[t]he cleaning of fish is a very important matter, but, being a disagreeable office, is often entrusted to unskilful hands, who execute their task so negligently, that almost as many fish are injured by this process as by bad cookery.” Once more, Hughes also inserted fish bisecting instructions that resemble Gronovius’s process, noting: “Fishes that require to be opened by the back…should be split through from nose to tail with a very sharp knife, so that the flesh may be cut clean and without being jagged close to the back bone.” 

Yet, my reenactment was also an exercise in not knowing. Fish flattening instructions lacked numerous steps—such as how to prepare the eyes, which I guessed on my own—and many of the bodily gestures don’t translate into writing. This presents somewhat of a dilemma for the historian: after performing this process, I’m fully convinced that one needs to replicate historical recipes in order to understand them. At the same time, we could never duplicate the social context of producing these in the eighteenth century, let alone the power structures that governed their making.  

Perhaps the loss of knowledge is the point: flattening, as suggested by my reconstruction, largely erases traces of labor, even as it embodies artifice. The final product seems simple and self-evident. Instructions depict cutting and flattening as unskilled acts, even though getting them right required dexterity and mastery of various craft techniques, not unlike that needed for sculpted taxidermy. Instructions promised an easy process, but it was often anything but, being carried out in the bonds of slavery, amidst literal tempests. Reassuring, can-do recipes had a political edge that persisted in the final product, as flattening sutured these animals to paper bearing Latin, not indigenous, names, with nary a mention of the original encounter between collector and collected fish. Even so, those larger histories remain congealed in the specimens.  

Flattening in the Here and Now 

Eighteenth-century ichthyologists loved to bemoan the neglect of their discipline. Peck’s own specimens were reportedly misplaced at Harvard for many decades. In the 1930s, Thomas Barbour, then the director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, tried to write a biography of Peck for many years. He gave up, insisting the story “would not pull into a yarn.” Barbour described the fish prepared by Peck as “mounted after the crude manner of the day,” and elsewhere echoed eighteenth-century instructions when noting Peck “was drying out and pressing fish skins and sticking them on cards, making very crude reference specimens.” He concluded that Peck was “a dreary, tiresome letter writer” and that most of his life story was “fragmentary” and “absolutely without any human interest”—even if Peck was “an awfully good naturalist.” Faded and pungent, Peck’s fish aren’t nearly as sexy as towering dinosaur bones or flashy bird feathers (fig. 13). Peck has largely fallen into obscurity, though he published America’s first article on systematic zoology (on fish). Nevertheless, fish flattening appears to be having a moment. After generating my own specimen, I learned I was not the only researcher in the world with a taste for flat fish: a group of scholars at the University of Leiden also recently replicated the Gronovius technique as part of a larger project on the history of ichthyology, as did a wholly separate group in Portugal after discovering a cache of long-lost flattened specimens at the University of Coimbra. Both teams of reenactors (which happened to include scientists), like most of my literate historical actors, stressed the accessibility of the technique given the low-tech tools involved, though their documentation of the process speaks to the uncertainties and gore along the way. 

Why have so many turned to flattened fish now? I don’t have the answers. Curiosities then, and still curious now, the specimens are quite simply wonderful and strange. I first began my research after staring in confusion at a dried pickerel from Peck’s collection hanging on a wall in Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. The resurgence of fish flattening might be tied to do-it-yourself culture, the so-called maker movement, and a recent materialist turn in academia. But I think it runs deeper than that. These specimens continue to speak to us because they still have more to say. As Gronovius said: “Paper always sticks.” 

Acknowledgments 

This research was supported in part by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Jens Aubrey Westengard Fund. Sincere thanks are due to the American Antiquarian Society, the Linnean Society of London, the Natural History Museum, London, and Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments for their generosity in granting image permissions free of charge. I am grateful to staff at a number of libraries and archives for their help during my research, including the American Antiquarian Society (especially Nan Wolverton and Jackie Penny), the Harvard University Archives, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Royal Society of London. Particular thanks go to Karsten E. Hartel at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, James Maclaine at the Natural History Museum, London, and Lynda Brooks at the Linnean Society of London for their help navigating fish collections and answering many a question about ichthyology. This piece benefited from feedback from fellow panelists and audience members after a talk at the History of Science Society meeting in Toronto, as well as from students and teaching staff when I presented it as a guest lecture for Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s and Sara J. Schechner’s “Tangible Things” course at Harvard. Ethan W. Lasser and Jennifer L. Roberts have provided invaluable insights on fish flattening since the inception of this project, and I am also grateful to Joyce E. Chaplin, Harriet Ritvo, Carla Cevasco, Zachary Nowak, Chloe Chapin, and Grace Kim for reading versions of my fish flattening reconstruction and for graciously offering comments. Ellery Foutch and Sarah Anne Carter provided sage edits, and Kathy Foley expertly shepherded the piece through the production process. I am especially thankful to Zachary Rotholz, who helped me select a fish and strategize about the cutting process, to William Robles for allowing me to keep the fish in a putrefied state in our apartment for several weeks before we varnished it, and to the fish itself, whose body will live on. 

Further Reading 

The history of natural history in early America and the early modern world is a rich field of study. See in particular Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, 2006); Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia, 2011); Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730-1860, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia, 2003); Sara Gronim, Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York (New Brunswick, 2009); and D. Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton, 2007). On type specimens in particular, see Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory,” Critical Inquiry 31:1 (Autumn 2004). 

On ties between natural history and Atlantic slavery in particular, see Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill, 2012); Kathleen S. Murphy, “Translating the Vernacular: Indigenous and African Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 8:1 (2011); and James Delbourgo, “Divers Things: Collecting the World under Water,” History of Science 49:163 (June 2011). On early American visual and material culture in relation to natural history, see Ann Blum, Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton, 1993) and Michael Gaudio, “Swallowing the Evidence: William Bartram and the Limits of Enlightenment,” Winterthur Portfolio 36:1 (2001). On the role of “invisible technicians” in knowledge production, see Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” American Scientist 77:6 (1989). 

Little has been written about William Dandridge Peck. For brief biographical sketches, see Jeannette E. Graustein, “Harvard’s Only Massachusetts Professor of Natural History,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin (1958) and I. Bernard Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science: An Account of the Early Scientific Instruments and Mineralogical and Biological Collections in Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). On education and collections at Harvard in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766–1820, ed. Ethan W. Lasser (Cambridge, Mass., 2017). Peck’s personal papers are spread across a number of institutions, but most reside in the Harvard University Archives (HUG 1677). 

Several scholars in a number of fields have incorporated making and tacit knowledge into their research (or ruminated on the difficulties of doing so). See, for example, Pamela H. Smith, “In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning,” West 86th 19:1 (2012); H. Otto Sibum, “Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat: Instruments of Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early Victorian England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26:1 (1995); and James Elkins, “Why Art Historians Should Learn to Draw and Paint,” (1994–present). For a foundational text on unwritten and unspoken knowledge, see Michael Polanyi, “Tacit Knowing,” in The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, 1996). 

Flattening, too, has gained traction as a problem and concept in a number of fields. See B.W. Higman, Flatness (London, 2017); Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier, “Natural History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43:1 (March 2012); Matthew C. Hunter, “Knives Out: Thinking On, With, Through, and Against Paper in the Mid-1660s,” in Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago and London, 2013); and Bruno Latour, “How to Keep the Social Flat,” in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005). 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

Whitney Barlow Robles is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University writing a dissertation on the formative role nonhuman animals and specimens played in eighteenth-century natural history. Her most recent publications include an essay about a 1755 earthquake that shook Boston, published in The New England Quarterly, and a chapter about flattened scientific specimens in the book The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820. 

A physician-projector and the improvement of Connecticut, c. 1670

On February 10, 1670, the fellows of the Royal Society assembled at Arundel House for the viewing of experiments. Those present that Thursday evening were “entertained with . . . the View of divers Curiosities of Nature”: namely, four boxes of natural history specimens recently received from the society’s only fellow in the American colonies, the alchemist, physician, and Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr.

Like the agents and reagents of a chemical demonstration, Winthrop’s specimens illustrated a fundamental transformation as they were unpacked from their crates: not a transformation in their material state, per se, but rather an alteration of the New World environment and the political economy of colonial New England according to Winthrop’s careful designs. The tangle-rooted dwarf-oaks and the plump ears of Indian corn represented the before and after of Winthrop’s plan to clear the New England forest and establish profitable plantations. The Indian-language Bible and the girdles of Indian currency testified that the natives could be taught to live both as Christians and as producers and consumers participating in the emergent world market. The candlewood and even the boxes themselves, presumably made of New England pine, illustrated the potential for harvesting the raw materials of a shipping industry from the Connecticut hills—an industry on which the success of England’s commercial economy was widely seen to depend. Holding all this and more, the boxes contained a representation of the project that ended in their own creation—a project emblematic of Winthrop’s promises for England’s success in building a commercial empire on the western shore of the Atlantic.

As the majority of the specimens in the boxes indicate, Winthrop’s colonial project rested on the New England Indians’ assimilation of European conceptions of the land and its potential. John Eliot’s Algonquian Bible and the strings of wampum (complete with an account of exchange rates) represented the bookends of a missionary project that began with the Indians’ conversion to Christianity and ended with their full participation in the commercial economy of the English Atlantic world. In pursuing a goal of remaking Indian-held lands into productive farms and manufacturing centers, the English aimed consciously to avoid the brutal conquest that characterized, in their imagination at least, Spanish imperial activity in Central and South America. Their approach was based in part on a different notion of wealth than that motivating the Spanish conquistadors—namely that wealth could be created through human labor and ingenuity and was not limited to what nature provided. While the Spanish may have been able to exploit the natural abundance of their possessions in the tropical zone, New Englanders would have to make something more of the resources their stony lands provided them. As projectors like Winthrop saw it, if their colonies were going to prosper, New Englanders would have to indoctrinate their Native American neighbors into a European program of “improved” agricultural and manufacturing processes, rather than merely exploit their labor to extract valuable commodities.

The missionary project therefore complemented Winthrop’s many economic projects, to the point that its religious objective did not alter its potential to profit both the community at large and private investors. In a 1662 letter, Winthrop encouraged the Council on Foreign Plantations to organize the missionary society dedicated to converting the New England Indians, known as the New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, as a joint-stock venture. He suggested raising funds through a stock sale in order to establish a plantation on which the Indians would begin to live the sedentary life of English agricultural producers. Their labor would bring them “in a neerer way to service & the knowledge of the Christian religion” and would provide “such necessaries as may make their lives more comfortable as civil people have.” The scheme would benefit both the local English population by opening new markets and England in general by increasing production of “severall commodities very proper to that country.”

Numerous examples of such commodities and potential materials for manufactures filled the specimen crates examined by the society in 1670. Among the agricultural products were the winter and summer wheat used as packing ballast; “Red Beans and White in two papers”; “Hasle-nuts grown in New England”; “Five Ears of Indian Corne of a special kind, said to ripen a month at least before other kinds.” Others—the “Flys like moths, which engender the worms that Spoyle Apple-trees” and the plough-tripping dwarf oaks—focused on potential agricultural hazards. There were potential raw materials for a colonial textile industry: “Shreds of stuffe made by the English Planters, of Cotton Wooll: put up to shew the Colour, which is onely died with the bark of a kind of Walnut-tree, called by the Planters the Butternut-tree” and “A Branch of a Tree, call’d the Cotton-tree, bearing a kind of Down, which yet is not fit to spin.” There were also minerals, among them various salts (which Winthrop hoped to produce on an industrial scale), sands for use in glassmaking, and ores to be refined in the ironworks that Winthrop had already established.

Yet of all of the potential commodities included, two were most illustrative of Winthrop’s design: namely, candlewood and corn.

For Winthrop the ultimate end of improving agriculture and manufactures was increasing trade. In order to pursue trade, the English in the era of Charles II’s restoration were in desperate need of ships. The candlewood in the specimen crates represented a solution to the problem that could be found in New England’s uncountable acres of pitch pine. Candlewood was another name for pitch pine, from which one could produce turpentine, the raw material for pitch and tar. Applied to boards of New England oak, these could build a merchant fleet to ferry commodities in pinewood crates, as well as a navy to protect it. Without access to such products, England’s future in the lucrative North Atlantic trade was in danger.

A timber crisis provoked by the disruption of the Baltic trade was still plaguing England at the end of the 1660s and therefore became a significant concern for the Royal Society. On March 1, 1669, Henry Oldenburg, the society’s corresponding secretary, asked Winthrop for “a true account of ye qualitys of yr Timber, and the progresse of yr building of ships,” explaining, “Great is the outcry here for the late waste of Timber . . . a noyse loud enough to turn our faces and seek Timber else-where, even whilst we enjoy peace.” The crisis, precipitated by the pillaging of royal forests during the Interregnum, had prompted much discussion. John Evelyn’s Sylva of 1664, the first book published under the society’s imprimatur, was born in response to a series of inquiries addressed to the society by the commissioners of the Navy. Incorporated into the text were comments on pitch pine that Winthrop had presented the society in the early 1660s. In his paper to the society, Winthrop had explained that knots formed where the pitch pine’s limbs met its trunk, and from these turpentine could be extracted. Such knots, often all that remained of generations of fallen trees in fields burned clear by the Indians, were “provided without any labour but the gathering together.” By properly exploiting what lay there for the taking, the realm would no longer have to depend on Scandinavian imports to maintain its navy. Should an influx of migrants arrive to jump-start the industry or the Indians be instructed in the process, Winthrop’s colony specifically stood to gain; as he explained, “there are of those pines in severall parts of New England, but the most Tarr is made about Connecticutt.”

As Winthrop detailed in another paper to the society, New England possessed not only the requisite timber resources but also sawmills on navigable rivers and skilled tradesmen knowledgeable in the various processes of shipbuilding. He envisioned a complete process whereby a ship built in New England from indigenous materials “may be presently fraighted with Planks, Boards, Knee-timber, or other Timber, and Prunnells, or with excellent masts; all which will be of good use, for supply of building ships” in England. Such vessels might just as well ship home the mineral and agricultural products produced by both European settlers and converted Indians through the schemes Winthrop proposed. Realizing the potential of the New England forests would not only bring settlers to his colony but also establish it as a key node on the Atlantic trading network, a New World locus of agricultural production, shipbuilding, manufacture, and trade.

Among the products that could be shipped in this way, in addition to iron manufactures, salt, glass, and textile fibres, was that uniquely American commodity, corn. Winthrop had personally delivered a discourse on maize at a meeting of the Royal Society in December 1662. He cataloged the virtues of the American corn as food and later focused on its medicinal properties, taking issue with the herbalist John Gerard who doubted the healthfulness of the grain. The paper detailed an exchange of agricultural knowledge between the Indians and the English, stressing in the end the superiority of English practices. He explained that the Indians cultivated it in rows heaped up by hoeing, “[b]ut the English have found an Easier way of raising Quantity of that Corne by the helpe of the Plough.” The Indians, according to Winthrop, had taught the English how to increase their yield “many times more than double” by fertilizing the ground with fish carcasses; in turn the English taught them how to fertilize with “the Dung of their Cattle, well Rotted.” The account ended with a detailed description of the ways in which the English improved the preparation of the grain into food, making not only porridge as Indians did but also bread and that most English of foodstuffs, beer, the brewing of which Winthrop demonstrated for the society the following March.

Moreover, according to Winthrop, the Indians’ exposure both to English agricultural and culinary practices and to the Anglican faith would ultimately be mutually reinforcing, as the Indians would take English imperium over nature to be a sign of the superiority of Christianity and its attendant natural philosophy. Henry Oldenburg predicted to Winthrop that “the savage Indians themselves, when they shall see the Christians addicted, as to piety and vertue, so to all sortes of ingenuities, pleasing Experiments, usefull Inventions and Practices, will thereby insensibly and ye more cherefully subject themselves to ym.” Robert Boyle likewise gave an example that this process was already working in his 1670 essay Cosmicall Suspicions. Citing the commonplace notion that English farming practices were altering the unnaturally harsh New England climate for the better, Boyle recalled the testimony of William Wood that such changes have led “the Heathen natives” to accept that “the English-mans God . . . is a good God that sends them so many good things, so much good Corn, so many good Cattell, temperate rains, fair seasons, which they likewise are the better for since the arrivall of the English: the Times and seasons being much altered” for the better. As in Winthrop’s proposal, material satisfaction realized through the application of natural philosophy reinforced Indians’ spiritual conversion.

As the Indians’ labors began to bear fruit through the systems Winthrop envisioned, the profits they generated would first go to repay the initial investors, with interest. Thereafter, Winthrop explained, the native populations would pose no further financial burden on the company or the crown, and “the maintenance of the chief business of the corporation thereby out of their owne labor [would] be raised without any charge to the people of England.” The civilizing process, once begun, would be self-perpetuating: the Indians would finance their own conversion to a productive, Christian lifestyle, and the realm would enjoy the ancillary market benefits without bearing any of the cost. Much like Winthrop’s schemes for the extraction and refining of minerals, his plan for the conversion of the Indians was a classic example of what his contemporaries would have called a “project”: it would improve the fortunes of the Indians themselves and in turn benefit both the commonweal as a whole and those investors whose private capital got the scheme running in the first place.

Gaining official sanction for these missionary-industrial schemes required deft political maneuvering on the part of the colonies’ leaders, and many of the commodities in Winthrop’s boxes speak to this aspect of the endeavor as well. Winthrop’s scientific activities proved beneficial in politics, providing him an entree into the highest echelons of government in England. Among the ruling classes in restoration England, corporate affiliations often overlapped. Thus was the New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel headed by the eminent fellow of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle, who was also an active member of the Council on Foreign Plantations. In North America, the New England Company’s finances were controlled by the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, who counted among their ranks Winthrop himself. For figures such as Winthrop and Boyle, science and empire were of a piece. In addition to benefiting from scientific exchanges with Boyle, Winthrop relied on the favor of administrators like Boyle in his pursuit of a new charter for Connecticut following the Restoration. Similarly, Boyle, in his capacity as an agent of the crown, relied on a governor like Winthrop to endorse the new system of imperial governance. Through it all, natural philosophy helped secure the bonds of imperial patronage. Boyle, for instance, wrote Winthrop on December 19, 1661, to arrange a meeting to discuss both “the Affaires & Rarity’s of Your Contrey,” linking the subjects as one and the same. Again on December 28, he wrote to inform Winthrop that the Lord Chancellor would see him the next day, adding, “If you thinke fit to bring along with You any of Your Mineralls You & I may chance to have some opportunity to discourse of them betwixt ourselves.”

The relationship between scientific exchange and imperial politics is reflected in the seemingly most “rare” and “novel” specimens in the crates sent to London in 1670—the “two pretty big shells,” the “curiously wrought” fish, and others. These and similar items represented the foundations on which the entire colonial project rested, serving as the sorts of gifts that would elicit the pleasure of both the Royal Society’s and the Connecticut Colony’s patron, King Charles II. Even those objects whose use-value was highlighted in other contexts were redefined for presentation at court, where rarity and curiosity were the more important determinants of value. The dwarf oaks were noted for their dwarfed state, not simply for their potential as agricultural hazards or mineral indicators. The candlewood knots infused with turpentine became an aromatic treasure: “ye gummy fragrant bark with knobs.” The wampum became not a foreign currency but “ye bagges with litle shells in them.” The extraordinary fish, in the end, proved the chief attraction, as the king viewed all the objects “wth no common satisfaction, expressing his desire in partictular, to have yet Stellar fish engraven and printed.” The king’s interest guaranteed that this “curiously contrived fish” received conspicuous placement in the society’s Philosophical Transactions.

Of all the natural specimens in Winthrop’s boxes, however, the “pods of silk grass” underwent perhaps the most conspicuous transformation from a potential commodity into the currency of courtly patronage. In a letter of March 26, 1670, thanking Winthrop for his contribution, Oldenburg added in a postscript: “Sr. R. Moray . . . tells me, yt his Majty would be well pleased, if you sent over such a quantity of yr silkpods, as would make him a pillow.” It had long been recognized that silk-grass, despite initially promising reports, could not be spun into a durable fiber for cloth production. A note was made upon receipt of the boxes, however, that “it is used by some to put into cushens or pillows,” redefining the fiber as a potential material for luxury manufactures, rather than a basic commodity. Providing the necessary pods would be wise, Oldenburg advised Winthrop: “It may occasion his Majty to think on you”—and by implication the colony and the myriad projects invested in it—”as often he lays his head on such a pillow.” The pillow would therefore stand as proxy for the colonial project, always near to the king’s kind thoughts.

In their evocation of his imperial-scientific goals, Winthrop’s specimens conjured up an image of the man himself, whose combined attributes as a physician, projector, and magistrate positioned him as the ideal leader of the colonization program he proposed. His extensive medical experience made him an expert on technical matters, especially those relating to the generation and transformation of the elemental minerals—iron, mercury, lead, niter, salt—which formed the basis of both his alchemical pharmacology and his plans for establishing New England industries. His access both to the latest science and to large stores of capital made plausible the application of his expertise on an industrial scale in projects like the mining and refining of iron, the extraction of salt from seawater, and the transformation of Connecticut black lead (or graphite) into silver. As the scion of a merchant family he commanded the social and economic resources necessary to bring such commodities to the world market. And as the political leader of Connecticut’s diverse population of Europeans and Native Americans, he was nominally in a position of sufficient authority to organize the meaningful participation of the wider community in his schemes. More than a mere collection of rarities meant to adorn a cabinet of curiosity, the specimens in Winthrop’s boxes represented a schematic outline for the scientific improvement of the New World environment—a project specifically designed around Winthrop’s particular attributes as a technical expert and an administrator of men and information. The participation of the Royal Society in this exchange helped reinforce its own identity as not simply a princely academy devoted to knowledge production but also as a clearinghouse for the economic information that would bring the imperial designs of fellows like Winthrop to fruition. Among Winthrop’s associates were other physician-entrepreneurs who aspired to, and in some cases achieved, positions in the English imperial administration. These included William Petty, Benjamin Worsely, and the philosopher John Locke.

Objects such as the specimens that Winthrop sent to the Royal Society make evident that we still have much to learn about the role of natural philosophers (and physicians especially) in shaping the political economy of the English Empire in the seventeenth century. As a group, these men promoted a vision of industrial development for England’s possessions in the North Atlantic region that never successfully took hold. A full analysis of why this was cannot be sufficiently undertaken here. No doubt the brutal war between New England’s English and Indian inhabitants, which broke out within months of Winthrop’s death in 1676, contributed to the demise of his particular design. After the war, the two groups would never achieve the productive coexistence Winthrop had envisioned. Even before the war shattered Anglo-Indian relations, the friction of cultural contact was certainly significant; Native Americans’ own long-established political and economic systems were undoubtedly not the unformed, easily manipulated state-of-nature systems that Winthrop and so many others assumed them to be. New England’s mineral industries likewise never proved as profitable as Winthrop believed they would, and in the eighteenth century, Britain’s empire builders turned their attention to the sugar colonies of the Caribbean and the tobacco colonies of the Chesapeake, where slave labor produced staples for export and an altogether different political economy prevailed. Yet for a time, however briefly, Winthrop and his project had represented the greatest hopes of both Englands, old and new.

Further Reading:

The classic accounts of Winthrop’s life remain the relevant chapters of Richard Dunn’s study of the Winthrop family, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630-1717 (New York, 1962) and Robert Black’s biography, The Younger Jon Winthrop (New York, 1966). Winthrop’s industrial schemes are the focus of a biographical sketch in Samuel Eliot Morison’s Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston, 1930), and the Winthrop family’s relationship to the North Atlantic merchant community is examined in Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955). Winthrop’s medicine and alchemy have been the subject of numerous articles by Ronald Sterne Wilkinson, including “‘Hermes Christianus’: John Winthrop, Jr., and Chemical Medicine in Colonial New England,” in Allen G. Debus, ed., Science, Medicine, and Society in the Renaissance: Essays to Honor Walter Pagel (London, 1972). The link between medicine and alchemy in this period is analyzed at length in William R. Newman’s study of the New England alchemist George Starkey, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). Winthrop’s collaboration with female medical practitioners has been examined by Rebecca Tannenbaum in “‘What is Best to be Done for These Fevers’: Elizabeth Davenport’s Medical Practice in New Haven Colony,” New England Quarterly 70 (1997). Margarett Newell has analyzed the relationship between economic projects of Winthrop’s collaborator Robert Child and his political economy in “Robert Child and the Entrepreneurial Vision: Economy and Ideology in Early New England,” New England Quarterly 68 (1995). Among the most recent studies of Winthrop’s science and its relation to his politics, which offers something of a different interpretation of the shipment of specimens considered here, is Walter W. Woodward’s “Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture (1606-1676)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 2001).

Joan Thirsk’s Economic Policy and Projects (Oxford, 1978) remains the standard work on English projectors in the seventeenth century. For institutional histories of the Royal Society and the New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, see Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989) and William Kellawny, The New England Company, 1649-1776: Missionary Society to the American Indians (London, 1961), respectively. For analyses of the social structures governing the behavior of fellows of the Royal Society and their implications for the production of knowledge, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, 1994). On controversies over the perceived social implications of the Royal Society’s work, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985). On the Royal Society’s (and other large corporations’) relationship to scientifically minded travelers to the New World, see Daniel Carey, “Compiling Nature’s History: Travellers and Travel Narratives in the Early Royal Society,” Annals of Science 54 (1997) and Steven J. Harris, “Long Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Configurations 6 (1998). On the economics and applications of alchemy in the early modern period, see Tara Nummedal, “Practical Alchemy and Commercial Exchange in the Holy Roman Empire,” in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels (New York, 2001) and Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, 1994). On the function of scientific objects as the currency of courtly patronage, see Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, 1993). For the definitive study of the uses of curiosities in early modern scientific thought, see Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 1998). On the war between the English and the Indians that engulfed New England in the late 1670s, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Matthew Underwood is a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His dissertation examines seventeenth-century physicians’ projects of empire building and how they reshaped the political economy of the English Atlantic world.

When John James Audubon died, in 1851, he had many admirers, but probably none more ardent than a Kentucky-born adventurer and author named Charles Wilkins Webber. Soon after Audubon’s death, Webber published a decidedly energetic description about first encountering Audubon on a canal boat in late 1843, when the aging naturalist was returning from a trip out West to study wildlife. As soon as Webber boarded the boat, he “heard above the buzz the name of Audubon spoken.” Apparently already familiar with Audubon’s reputation, Webber wrote that “there was one NAME that had so filled my life, that it alone would have been sufficient to inspire me.”

Audubon! Audubon! Delightful name! Ah, do I not remember well the hold it took upon my young imagination when I heard the fragmented rumor from afar, that there was a strange man aboard then, who lived in the wilderness with only his dog and gun, and did nothing by day, but follow up the birds; watching every thing they might do; keeping in sight of them all the time, wherever they went, while light lasted; then sleeping beneath the tree where they perched, to be up again to follow them again with the dawn, until he knew every habit and way that belonged to them.

And so Webber went on for a dozen exuberant pages, describing Audubon’s “fine, classic head” and “patriarchal beard” and “hawk-like eyes,” asserting that “the very hem of his garments—of that rusty and faded green blanket, ought to be sacred to all devotees of science.” Webber finally concluding in almost breathless satisfaction, “Thus it was I came first to meet him, laurelled and grey, my highest ideal of the Hunter-Naturalist,—the old Audubon!” (fig. 2)

To a modern reader, Webber’s passionate praise might seem like a bit of excessive adulation for a man whose fame came, after all, from studying and painting birds: on the scale of outdoor activities, ornithology is not normally ranked as an especially dangerous endeavor, nor are artists typically depicted as rugged adventurers. But Webber’s eulogy reflected its context—the American West in the middle of the nineteenth century—which, for Webber, could hardly have been an unconscious or coincidental choice. Writing at a time when talk of Manifest Destiny filled the political air—when the United States had just been pushing against the Oregon border in a battle of menacing words with Great Britain and had just taken a vast expanse of land, from Texas to California, in a true shooting war with Mexico—Webber depicted Audubon as a man of the West, returning from a trip up the Missouri River after retracing part of the path of Lewis and Clark. Like those two explorers four decades earlier, Audubon expressed the expansionist reach of American science. Much more than a master of ornithology or avian art, he embodied the “hero of the ideal,” an unapologetically masculine embodiment of the “pioneer” American naturalist. In Webber’s wide-eyed assessment, Audubon became the living image of the connection between natural history and national history.

But Webber did not stop simply with this strenuous celebration of Audubon. In creating this image of the “Hunter-Naturalist,” Webber set Audubon against another sort of scientist, what he derided as the formulaic, effete, and implicitly feminine European naturalists, who, as Susan Branson has shown elsewhere in this issue of Common-place, had long been mocked as “Macaroni” (fig. 3). Too many “scientific pedants in silk stockings” and “pur-blind Professors,” Webber complained, had “technicalised” the study of nature “into what may almost be called a perfect whalebone state of sapless system … so heavily overlaid by the dry bones of Linnaean nomenclature as to become a veritable Golgotha of Science.” Given the taxonomic complexity those “pedants in silk stockings” had imposed on nature, he insisted, ordinary people had become isolated from science, “repulsed, in dismay of its formidable hieroglyphics, from what is to them as a sealed book.” By contrast, “Our glorious Audubon,” the Hunter-Naturalist of the new nation, “lived and wrote like one of the people,” and he thus represented a distinctly American—and masculine—approach to natural history, a two-way relationship between the rugged naturalist of the still-wild American landscape and the ordinary folk of the new nation. Therefore, Webber declared, “we love and venerate him passed away.”

Long before Webber’s energetic eulogy, of course, Audubon had already become the early republic’s first true celebrity scientist, a self-promoting showman, perhaps, but also a remarkably skilled ornithologist and artist, a man whose work could be both scientifically accurate and emotionally engaging at the same time. He is most famous, of course, for his monumental (and now exceedingly valuable) mega-book, the four-volume compendium of 435 engraved plates, The Birds of America (1827-1838). He is a little less known for the companion book, the five-volume Ornithological Biography (1831-1839),a series of essays about ornithology, to be sure, but also about American places and people and, quite often, about Audubon himself. In fact, those self-portraits in prose can be as evocative as the several portraits of Audubon in paint; taken together, as we shall see, they reveal a pattern of personal self-fashioning that had been evident in Audubon’s life long before Charles Wilkins Webber ever met him.

As a twenty-first-century historian, I can’t allow myself to “love and venerate” Audubon as openly as Webber did, but I do find him an elusive but illustrative figure, frustrating but always fascinating. For the sake of this essay, I think Audubon bears investigation on two interrelated levels. First, because he was so self-consciously someone who defined himself by his achievements in science as much as art, he gives us a good focus for looking at an emerging American approach to natural history in his era. In Audubon’s America—essentially the first half of the nineteenth century—ornithology and other branches of natural history lay embedded in a trans-Atlantic scientific discourse that had long engaged students on both sides of the ocean. No matter how much natural historians in the early American republic might have tried to declare their scientific independence from their European predecessors, sometimes engaging in competitive and petty disparagement of those whom Webber would call the “scientific pedants in silk stockings,” the Americans’ very ability to work as nineteenth-century naturalists rested on the foundations that had been in place for at least two centuries. Indeed, Audubon worked (and frequently quarreled) with gentlemen of science of the both sides of the ocean, and he put great stock in his status in the scientific community: the engraved images in The Birds of America always carried the initials FRS and FLS—Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Linnaean Society—right after his name.

But beyond establishing his personal credentials, Audubon played a critical role in helping establish those of American science. As much as he drew attention to himself as an artist and man of science—and he did so ceaselessly and shamelessly—he also drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature in America, helping them see it in national as well as environmental terms. Much like Thomas Jefferson a generation earlier, Audubon sought to declare America’s scientific independence from the Buffonian insistence on the inferiority of American species. In The Birds of America, Audubon offered a dramatic celebration of the new nation’s avian species, and in doing so he engaged in an act of scientific possession. He did not simply present his birds as stiff specimens for close ornithological examination; he gave them life and location, creating engaging images embedded in the American landscape. “The Birds of America” implicitly meant “The Birds of the United States.” Audubon never used the term “Manifest Destiny”—a term that entered the American political lexicon in 1845, when Audubon was well past his writing prime—but he stood squarely at the intersection of art and science at a time when natural history became entwined with national history. He was much more than a passive spectator in that process: in the first half of the nineteenth century, no one in the world of American art or science did more to stimulate a national conversation about nature in the United States.

In that regard, Audubon also embodied another important notion: that the American scientific community was by no means an entirely enclosed community, nor could it claim isolation from the rest of society. In Audubon’s America, science had not yet become subdivided into academic disciplines and institutionalized in university departments. Indeed, the study of natural history in academic repositories seemed only a far-distant second to the dramatic discoveries still available in a largely uncatalogued continent. Thomas Nuttall, Audubon’s fellow natural historian and eventual ornithological ally, perhaps best expressed the contrast. He fidgeted with frustration while holding position of curator of the botanic garden at Harvard, describing his experience there as “vegetating” among the plant collections. As soon as he had a chance, he headed west with the Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth expedition of 1834, going all the way to the Pacific Northwest and then on to Hawai’i, collecting specimens all the way. In fact, he became memorialized in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast as “Old Curious,” the naturalist who walked along the beach “in a sailors’ pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells.” The real sailors considered him eccentric in his commitment to collecting, but in his appearance, if not his behavior, he blended in among them.

What Nuttall did implicitly, Audubon did much more explicitly, making clear the connections between the American natural historian and ordinary people and, above all, their reciprocal relationship in exchanging knowledge about the natural world. In Audubon’s America, the study of natural history remained within the reach of almost everyone, and Audubon acknowledged that as he addressed his reader in the opening pages of Ornithological Biography: “I am convinced that you love nature—that you admire and study her. Every individual, possessed of a sound heart, listens with delight to the love-notes of the woodland warblers. He never casts a glance upon their lovely forms without proposing to himself questions respecting them.” Studying nature and proposing questions about what one sees, of course, form the basic tasks of the natural historian. Particularly in the era of the early republic, at a time when the answers to many questions of natural history still remained unanswered and when many parts of the continent still remained relatively unexamined by naturalists, Audubon recognized that the observant amateur could see just as much as he could. To get answers to various questions about bird identification, migration, and such, he invited his reader to take part in the investigation, and the questions recur frequently throughout Audubon’s writings—”Can you, reader, solve the question?”; “Reader, is this instinct or reason?”; “Reader, can you assist me?” By the same token, Audubon created a bond of imagined companionship in the wild—”Reader, many times have I wished that you and I were in it”—and called to the reader to “make up your mind, shoulder your gun, muster all your spirits” and go into the “interesting unknown.”

Today, his occasional admissions of ornithological ignorance and his repeated reaching out to the reader for help may seem little more than an act of authorial artifice, perhaps even a disingenuous literary device for subtly asserting Audubon’s own authority by raising questions he knew most readers could not answer, or by posing challenges he knew most readers could not take. In reading Audubon, it always makes sense to take a careful, even skeptical, view of his self-conscious construction of his role as a naturalist: whenever he seems to be talking to the reader, he is most often talking about himself. But at the same time, he is talking about himself within a particular historical and cultural context. Like his counterparts in the political arena of the early republic, Audubon embraced and often celebrated his reciprocal relationship with the common people. In doing so, he popularized and enhanced the standing of natural history—and therefore his own standing—in the new nation that celebrated the image of the “common man” as a political and cultural icon. He would become a similar icon of his own sort.

Consider, for instance, the various portraits we have of Audubon in his heyday. Throughout his life, he perfected his persona as the wilderness artist, the long-haired, buckskin-clad, gun-toting naturalist, even on the far side of the Atlantic. Audubon took up temporary residence in Great Britain (first Scotland, then England) in 1826-27, beginning work on The Birds of America in earnest. Soon after he arrived in Great Britain, he sat to be painted himself, and to be painted not as an artist, but as a woodsman—or, as he would soon come to call himself, the “American Woodsman” (fig. 4).

He wrote his wife, Lucy, who was still living back in the United States, that he was “now a strange looking figure with gun, strap and buckles, and eyes that to me are more those of an enraged eagle than mine.” Being in Great Britain, in fact, made him even more aware of his American identity as a man of the woods, underscoring his “sense of recollection” of his place in the world: “[nothing] could make me relinquish the idea that in my universe of America, the deer runs free, and the Hunter as free forever.—No—America will always be my land. I never close my eyes without travelling thousands of miles along our noble steams and traversing our noble forests.” As he became increasingly well-known in artistic and scientific circles in the Atlantic world, he became increasingly committed to his embrace of America as his “universe,” and to his self-styled image of himself as the “hunter … free forever” (figs. 5, 6, 7)

Audubon was not by any means the first American to adopt an especially woodsy-looking aura when he went to the far side of the Atlantic—we think, of course, of the fur-hatted Franklin in Paris in 1784—and Audubon’s aquiline image, with gun, strap, and buckles, might be seen as only playing to type (fig. 8).

But for Audubon, costume spoke to character, even when he lived in an urban environment; the elements that became constants in his many portraits—wearing the garb of a man of the woods, displaying a gun as the critical tool of his trade, locating himself in the American outdoors—defined the self-conscious core of his artistic and scientific identity.

His approach to both art and science rested on one central premise: he drew the birds well because he knew the birds well. Knowing the birds, of course, meant tracking them in the environment they inhabited, and that meant going into many dark, dangerous, and uncharted places:

Many times, when I had laid myself down in the deepest recesses of the western forests, have I been suddenly awakened by the apparition of dismal prospects that have presented themselves to my mind. … At other times the Red Indian, erect and bold, tortured my ears with horrible yells, and threatened to put an end to my existence; or white-skinned murderers aimed their rifles at me. Snakes, loathsome and venomous, entwined my limbs, while vultures, lean and ravenous, looked on with impatience. Once, too, I dreamed, when asleep on a sand-bar on one of the Florida Keys, that a huge shark had me in his jaws, and was dragging me into the deep.

In this one passage Audubon conjures up many of the standard menacing images that recurred in the long-standard literary descriptions of the American wilderness—dark forests, deadly quicksand, howling Indians, murderous backwoodsmen, loathsome snakes, ravenous vultures, even a shark thrown in for special effect—that modern readers might now consider a cliché. But he created this compendium of wilderness terrors not so much to evoke a nightmarish vision of nature. Rather, he listed the rigors of the naturalist’s life to impress upon the reader that there could be no other scientifically legitimate way to know nature: “[H]ow difficult must it be,” Audubon wrote, “for a ‘closet naturalist’ to ascertain the true distinctions of these birds, when, having no better samples of the species than some dried skins, perhaps mangled, and certainly distorted, with shriveled bills and withered feet.” Whatever the distinction between birds themselves, the distinction between students of birds seemed clear: relying on the dried and withered specimens of fellow collectors, the “closet naturalist” would never come close to the fresh specimens an outdoor ornithologist could have at hand. Audubon always took care to assure us that he, Audubon the ornithologist, Audubon the artist, would pursue his calling with courage and face nature in its wildest form.

In that regard, Audubon was by no means altogether unique. Throughout the early years of the nineteenth century, the work of the American naturalist had become increasingly associated with the image of risk-taking manliness that Audubon eventually embodied. The image began perhaps most explicitly with Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), the man who gained the coveted, albeit occasionally disputed, title of “Father of American Ornithology” some years before Audubon became famous. Beginning in 1808, Wilson published the first volumes of American Ornithology (1808-1814), the nine-volume collection of bird paintings and descriptions that defined the field until Audubon began producing The Birds of America over two decades later.

Wilson and Audubon famously, perhaps predictably, came to be cast as scientific rivals, but their parallel approaches to describing their work are of more immediate concern here. Wilson was, like Audubon, an immigrant to the United States, having arrived in 1794 from his native Scotland, where he had worked as a weaver and then as a political activist and commercially unsuccessful poet. Soon after coming to America, Wilson made the pursuit of birds his passion for almost twenty years, and as Audubon did later, he tended to describe the American naturalist’s work in rugged-sounding terms, portraying himself as man of science struggling against the physical rigors required in research. He wrote about it to his brother in 1810: “Since February, I have slept for several weeks in the wilderness alone, in an Indian country, with my guns and my pistols in my bosom, and have found myself so reduced by sickness, as to be scarcely able to stand.”

Wilson also described almost losing his life in the pursuit of a bird, a pied oyster-catcher, when he took to the water in pursuit of it at Cape May, New Jersey (fig 9).

He had wounded the bird with his gun, and as the bird tried to escape into the ocean, he plunged in after it—only to remember, too late, that he was still “encumbered with a gun and all my shooting apparatus.” As the ebb tide started carrying him farther away from the shore, Wilson had to choose between his own survival or his escaped specimen, and, almost reluctantly, he made his way back to the beach “with considerable mortification, and the total destruction of my powder-horn.” As if to mock him, the wounded oyster-catcher rose to the surface “and swam with great buoyancy out among the breakers.” Oyster-catchers are not especially menacing birds (except to oysters), but for Wilson, it was the pursuit of the bird, the pursuit of science, that mattered, and living in the woods or diving into the ocean was the only way Wilson would have it.

In language that Charles Wilkins Webber could well appreciate decades later, Wilson also complained of the tendency among naturalists to become too technical, to spend so much time separating birds into so many “Classes, Orders, Genera, Species, and Varieties” that the resulting complexity and disagreement had “proved a source of great perplexity” to ordinary people. One of the main reasons for this confusion, Wilson continued, was the failure, or perhaps refusal, of other naturalists to observe personally “the manners of the living birds, in their unconfined state, and in their native countries.” The naturalist had to get out into nature, into the woods or even the ocean, to see the birds and do good work.

Doing good work turned into bad health for Wilson, who suffered from stress and sickness, finally dying of dysentery in 1813. In death, he received a rugged-sounding eulogy from his Philadelphia friend and ally, George Ord, that would anticipate elements of Charles Wilkins Webber’s later celebration of Audubon as the Hunter-Naturalist. Ord described Wilson as an outdoor ornithologist, certainly “no closet philosopher—exchanging the frock of activity for the night-gown and slippers.” Wilson’s knowledge, Ord explained, came not from reading books about nature, “which err,” but from engaging nature itself, “which is infallible.” Though hardly as excessively strident or as aggressively masculine as Webber’s later praise for Audubon, Ord’s celebration of Wilson drew on some of the same elements—in this case, the contrast between the woodsman’s “frock of activity” and the more effeminate-sounding “night-gown and slippers,” between knowledge derived from the “unwearied research amongst forests, swamps, and morasses,” and the precious little one could learn in the library. Ord never devised a phrase quite as evocative as Webber’s “Hunter-Naturalist,” but it would have fit his depiction of Wilson quite well. As it was, Ord shared with Audubon a dismissive term for the other sort of naturalist, the much-despised “closet philosopher” or “closet-naturalist.”

No one pursued birds or science or, above all, the image of the manly naturalist more effectively or aggressively than Audubon himself. Never to be outdone by his ornithological rival Wilson, he told his own tale about pursuing a great horned owl so far into a swamp that he got “sunk in quicksand up to my armpits,” only to be rescued at the last minute by his companions. The story may or may not have been exactly accurate—many of his tales tended to be self-serving embellishments on the truth—but it had a purpose: “I have related this occurrence to you, kind reader,—and it is only one out of many—to shew you that every student of nature must encounter some difficulties in obtaining the objects of his research, although these difficulties are little thought of when he has succeeded.”

Audubon defined ornithology as manly work, and he liked to locate himself in the world of men, particularly the rugged hunters of the American frontier. Indeed, Audubon had his own story about how he once “happened to spend a night … under the same roof” with that true icon of frontier masculinity, Daniel Boone. “We had returned from a shooting excursion,” Audubon began, rather casually putting himself in company with Boone in the outdoors. Like a star-struck fan of a famous athlete, Audubon gushed not only about his hero’s skills with a gun, but about his physique: “The stature and general appearance of this wanderer of the western forests approached the gigantic. His chest was broad and prominent; his muscular powers displayed themselves in every limb; his countenance gave indication of his great courage, enterprise, and perseverance.” Boone declined to sleep in a bed, Audubon said, but “merely took off his hunting shirt, and arranged a few folds of blankets on the floor, choosing to lie there than on the softest bed.” And so the two men bedded down for the night—Audubon presumably in a bed, but Boone shirtless and on the floor—before resuming the hunt the following day.

Audubon’s Boone story was a good one, to be sure, but it was also a complete fiction: it never happened. Audubon did once write to Boone and ask to go hunting with him, in 1813, but Boone turned him down. Audubon was in his late twenties then, but Boone was almost eighty, and almost blind. They did not have a hunting date, but that never stopped Audubon from writing about one. And that underscores an important point: to read Audubon for the absolute truth is to miss his larger meaning. Audubon’s agenda, rather, was to create an effect—or an affectation—the image of the naturalist as a “wanderer of the western forests,” just as bold as Daniel Boone. If going shooting with Daniel Boone would make the point in print, then the story would work well enough.

Audubon tells one equally evocative tale in paint, in this case the Golden Eagle (fig. 10). We can deconstruct the image easily enough: the eagle rising into the sky above a rugged, mountainous landscape, crying out as it clutches a bloodied rabbit in its talons, the powerful predator with its now-deceased prey. And below, down on the log over the precipice, creeping along with a hatchet, a gun and a bird (probably a golden eagle) strapped to his back, we see the hunter-naturalist (probably a self-portrait of Audubon himself), vulnerable but brave, taking a risk in the wilderness, giving his all for ornithology (fig. 11).

The true story, however, is that Audubon didn’t capture the eagle in the wild, didn’t crawl over the precipice with his specimen. He bought it from a friend in Boston, a bird in a cage that cost fourteen dollars. Then he took it back to his hotel room, kept it in the cage for three days, and tried to kill it by covering the cage closely with a blanket, putting a pan of burning charcoal in the room, closing the door and windows tightly, and waiting for the eagle to die. It didn’t work. After a few hours, Audubon writes, he “opened the door, raised the blankets, and peeped under them amidst a mass of suffocating fumes.” There the eagle still stood, Audubon continues, “with his bright unflinching eye turned towards me, and as lively and vigorous as ever!” The next morning, to make the fumes even more toxic, Audubon added some sulfur to the smoldering charcoal, making the indoor environment a small-scale version of Hell itself, but again “the noble bird continued to stand erect, and to look defiance at us whenever we approached his post of martyrdom.” Finally, to finish off the defiant bird and to make the martyrdom complete, Audubon “thrust a long pointed piece of steel through his heart, when my proud prisoner instantly fell dead, without even ruffling a feather.”

It’s a bizarre story, something Poe might write if he were to venture into ornithological Gothic. But again, it’s not so much the accuracy of the written narrative that matters, at least not to Audubon. It’s the accuracy of the art and the accuracy of the science that matter, and the embellishments of the painting serve another purpose: to underscore the rigors of scientific research, the manly work of the American Woodsman.

In that regard, I want to close by trying to be fair to Audubon. No matter how often he might have stretched the truth about his own exploits and pulled the reader’s leg, either in print or in paint—and he did that much of the time—he came much closer to the truth when he turned to birds. He valued his status as a naturalist, and he craved credibility in the scientific community. Although his descriptions of birds could contain lively stories that a modern ornithologist might dismiss as unscientific fluff, he also took care to provide the kind of close observations about physical characteristics, habits, and habitat that still bear scientific scrutiny. The proof, of course, lay ultimately in the painting, where his detailed knowledge of birds became most evident. And no matter how he got the golden eagle, that’s a good and accurate painting of the bird.

And what about his picture of himself? Audubon was, like Alexander Wilson and Thomas Nuttall, an immigrant to the United States, and he may have posed, both in his paintings and in his own prose, as a rugged, outdoors naturalist in order to define his American-ness and underscore his sense of distance from his trans-Atlantic background. Still, it was not all pose alone. Even when taken at a discount for all their rhetorical excess, Audubon’s many tales of the rigors of art and science in America contained an element of truth, and they certainly had a larger rhetorical point: the alternative to taking risks in the name of nature, he warned, would be to risk becoming that most sedentary sort of scientist, the effete European “closet-naturalist.” It might be easy enough to rest in one’s armchair and read from a text and take the word of others, right or wrong; nothing, however, could take the place of “personal observation when it can be obtained,” of actually seeing the birds and counting the eggs, no matter what the personal challenges. To be anAmerican naturalist, then, meant taking a decidedly risky, even defiantly manly approach to the pursuit of science.

On that point, Audubon himself had unmistakably made his choice, both for his primary activity as a naturalist and for his personal identity as the “American Woodsman.” Anyone curious and courageous enough to study nature, he implied, could do the same. Perhaps more like an avuncular invitation than a chest-thumping challenge, Audubon’s direct call to the reader to get out of the chair and take to the forest still drew a clear distinction between those who would encounter nature out of doors or those would continue to sit inside and merely read about it. Facing dangers and dismal prospects of the “deepest recesses of the western forests”—hostile Indians, white-skinned murderers, snakes, vultures, and other menaces, real or imagined—defined the crucible of scientific credibility. “It is,” Audubon assured his reader, “the ‘American Woodsman’ that tells you so.”

Further reading

Audubon has always been good for the biography business. At least six Audubon biographies appeared in print in the twentieth century, the best of the lot being Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time, 2 vols. (New York, 1917); and Alice Ford, John James Audubon: A Biography (Norman, Oklahoma, 1964; 2^nd ed., New York, 1988). Earlier in this current century, three new Audubon biographies came into print: Duff Hart-Davis, Audubon’s Elephant: America’s Greatest Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America (New York, 2004); William Souder, Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America (New York, 2004); and Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York, 2004). While I generally respect the research and the basic narrative of all these works, I think they sometimes become so concerned with the day-to-day developments in Audubon’s individual case that they fail to see many of the larger issues at stake. Too often, the authors go from looking at him to seeing the world through him, adopting his personal perspective and therefore losing a broader focus on the larger world he inhabited.

The history of American natural history seems to be on the rise of late. A generation or so ago, George H. Daniels’s American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York, 1968) did not even mention Audubon or Alexander Wilson, and Thomas Nuttall got only a brief biographical blurb. Thirty years later, however, an issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, 59: 2, 3 (1998), edited by Amy R. W. Meyers and devoted to “Art and Science in America: Issues of Representation,” brought together a collection of essays on the visual presentation of American natural history, most of them based on book-length studies then in progress. Similarly, Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730-1860, edited by Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia, 2003), offered a brief but useful introduction into the field. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006), has quickly become a standard work for the eighteenth century, and Andrew Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the early republic (Philadelphia, 2011) carries the investigation into the nineteenth century. Christopher Iannini’s forthcoming Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011) promises to be an important addition to the field.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.2 (January, 2012).

Gregory Nobles is a decent birder who is also professor of history at Georgia Tech, where he directs the university’s Honors Program. This essay was first presented at meetings of the British Group in Early American History (2010) and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (2011), and it will later be incorporated into a book, The Art and Science of John James Audubon: Bringing Nature to the Nation.

In Fatal Revolutions, Iannini connects the growth of the West Indian plantation as a new social and economic institution to the rise of natural history as a scientific and literary discourse and argues that these developments establish the conditions for the practice of letters in the eighteenth-century Americas (3). The first part of this study examines the primacy of the West Indies in the emergent literary and scientific practices of natural history in the Atlantic world. Early natural histories by Hans Sloane and Mark Catesby not only circulate knowledge about the colonies but also raise complex questions about the “moral significance of colonial slavery,” about the geographical bounds of the Caribbean region, and about the possibility of improving its climate through plantation-style agriculture (9). In part two, Iannini demonstrates that this Caribbean-centered natural history lays the groundwork for the articulation of new political and social identities in late colonial North America and the early United States. Crèvecoeur, William Bartram, Jefferson, and Audubon appropriate the “ideological assumptions, discursive conventions, and representational techniques” of earlier Caribbean natural histories to debate the implications of plantation slavery for a nation ostensibly committed to equality. Iannini concludes that these later writers remove the Caribbean from its privileged place within natural history and replace it with North America to argue that the continent’s natural abundance will fuel a “planetary future of republican liberty” (16).

In the first chapter, Iannini draws on the work of art historian Kay Dian Kriz to argue that Sloane’s formally sophisticated and lavishly printed Voyage to … Jamaica (1707-1725) revived early modern techniques of representation to present the ‘”specimen-as-emblem”‘ (26). Sloane connected the objects he examined to larger spiritual or social contexts using a combination of visual cues and supporting text. Readers interpreted Sloane’s engravings and drawings by consulting the image’s label, the index, and descriptive sections, with the goal of locating the objects’ “hidden providential or socioethical significance” (7). Thus, as people read Voyage to … Jamaica, they not only analyzed objects from the Caribbean but also considered the contexts of plantation slavery and agricultural transformation in which these objects originated, and they contemplated their own roles as consumers in global commercial networks. Natural histories did not, as the now standard account holds, efface the contexts in which collectors and readers encountered objects. Instead, the specimen-as-emblem represented the new relationships that global commerce created among objects, merchants, and consumers and between planters and enslaved Africans.

Iannini shows that Sloane employed emblems to address the challenges posed by new West Indian commercial objects, from Africans who were valued as chattel slaves to specimens of natural knowledge such as sugar cane that were also important commodities. Formal experimentation—mixing narrative with description—and complex emblematic representations—combining human and natural objects—allowed Sloane to evoke the histories in which objects obtained their meaning and value. Iannini examines, for example, the engraving of “Land Crab and Pot Shards Found in a Cave,” which juxtaposes natural and human artifacts. By consulting the printed labels, index, and catalog descriptions for each object, a reader would discover that Africans employed both crabs and fragments of pottery as sustenance or as storage for food, respectively. Moreover, both objects reference a history of “mass death”—the crabs can poison eaters if not properly prepared, the potsherd originally held bones (66). The objects’ meanings attest to the consequences of colonialism and of slavery by linking the accumulation of specimens with mortality.

In the Natural History of Carolina (1731-43), the focus of Iannini’s second chapter, Mark Catesby adopted Sloane’s emblematic techniques but employed them to represent environmental relationships and to consider the consequences of North American planters’ decisions to import West Indian flora, fauna, and agricultural practices. Catesby offered “contradictory hypotheses” about these consequences by suggesting that Caribbean knowledge and organisms had the capacity both to create a “global garden” and to result in a “barbaric natural environment characterized by upheaval and violence” (80). As Catesby and other North American intellectuals contemplated the extension of West Indian slave plantations into British America, they admitted that knowledge of Caribbean natural history would allow them to claim an identity as enlightened. They acknowledged as well that Caribbean influences threatened to corrupt this identity with desires for luxury and profit rather than for increased knowledge.

Sloane and Catesby’s emblematic techniques, as well as the threats of violence and degeneration referenced by these techniques, penetrated the writings of late colonial North America and the early American republic. Not every writer considered in part two of Fatal Revolutions employed the specimen-as-emblem. Yet, all engaged Caribbean natural history and addressed the influence of plantation slavery and agricultural techniques—forms of commerce and labor seemingly at odds with republicanism. In chapter three, Iannini explains that Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s writings, especially his “Sketches of Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects” (not published in English until 1995), question whether North Americans could participate in commercial exchanges with the West Indies without being corrupted by opulence and luxury. In Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), the underlying threats of degeneration and insurrection that result from Caribbean commerce are made clear when Farmer James’s examination of the South Carolinian landscape results in the discovery of violence: a slave left to die in a cage. Iannini also reads the Letters in the context of the failed museum and unpublished natural history of Crèvecoeur’s fellow member of the American Philosophical Society, Pierre Eugène du Simitière. For both men, the natural history specimen continued to offer a framework through which to contemplate West Indian slavery. Chapter four argues that William Bartram’s writings, particularly his major published work, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791), and the draft manuscript of the Travels also respond to the threat of tropical corruption in North America. Bartram sought to show that his failure to found a rice plantation was not the result of his degeneration or ineptitude. He argued for the value of his experiences in Florida by giving flora and fauna spiritual significance, in this way making specimens stand in for the profit he had hoped to make on the plantation.

Iannini concludes by demonstrating that Thomas Jefferson and John Audubon employed the strategies of natural history to respond to the epistemological and political crises posed by the Haitian Revolution. Chapter five shows that Jefferson cultivated exchanges of knowledge and specimens with planters in the West Indies, despite his concurrent investment in the image of the self-sufficient American yeoman farmer. Iannini argues that Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) engages not just in transatlantic debates about the status of Anglo-American minds and bodies but also in hemispheric debates about slavery. Jefferson later revised his statements on slavery and African intelligence in the Notes in his correspondence with West Indian planters and natural historians; he ultimately argued that the West Indian climate differentiated the region from North America and made the Caribbean ideally suited for Africans. In chapter six, Iannini analyzes how Audubon reflected upon the Haitian Revolution and the social and cultural disruption it caused in The Birds of America (1827-38) and in two posthumously published works, “Myself” (1893), and the Mississippi River Journal (written 1820-21). In these works, Audubon attempted to employ the strategies of natural history to restore order in both natural and social contexts.

These four writers’ engagement with the Caribbean is evidenced not only in the content of their published work and letters but also, as Iannini shows, in their discarded or unpublished manuscripts that represented exchanges between the United States and the West Indies. As these forgotten texts show, writers on the continent were not simply fascinated with the West Indies as an exotic, tropical space but depended on epistolary, scientific, and trade relations with planters and fellow natural historians in the Caribbean. The discarded manuscripts not only manifest writers’ concerns about various factors, such as copyright law and publication costs, but also attest to their disavowal of connections to the Caribbean in order to define North America as a distinct geographical and cultural entity. As Iannini shows, late colonial and early republican writers’ engagement with West Indian specimens, patrons, and institutions created a “circumatlantic world of letters” (30), one that produced a “strange, new account of enlightened modernity” in which the Caribbean was present only as traces (32).

At stake in this new “enlightened modernity” was, of course, the agency of enslaved Africans, as displayed in insurrections, and the question of whether such agency could be included in narratives of U.S. revolutions and republicanism (32). While many early national writers processed their encounters with African resistance and knowledge by contemplating the effects that plantation slavery had upon human beings, their natural histories also suppressed these forms of agency by figuring enslaved peoples and revolutions as objects of study. For example, du Simitière collected objects from Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica (which began on Easter Sunday, 1760, not in August 1761, as Iannini has it) in order to question African humanity. In his Travels, Bartram aligned slave agency with “predatory deception [and] secret mobility” he observed in nature, particularly in the sink holes that led to subterranean lakes impenetrable to observation (210). These natural features paralleled slaves’ ability to maintain secret connections and mobility invisible to planters.

Iannini’s consideration throughout Fatal Revolutions of how colonial and early national writers subsumed African agency raises the question of whether the form that natural history takes in Iannini’s account forecloses a more sustained engagement with specific elements of and uses for African practices and knowledge. For example, Iannini argues convincingly that Sloane’s natural history stumbles over the fact that Africans were both objects and sources of knowledge from the Caribbean. But Sloane seems peculiarly disinclined to acknowledge the contributions of enslaved Africans, compared to other planters and natural historians. To take just two examples, Henry Barham, who contributed to Sloane’s natural history and whose botanical manuscript circulated widely before it was published in 1794, frequently cited his slaves’ knowledge of plants with which he was unfamiliar; similarly, James Grainger presented Africans’ medical knowledge as useful for planters in his 1764 georgic poem The Sugar-Cane. Iannini suggests that Sloane viewed African healers as competitors and their “inverted double,” the obeah man, who allegedly put spells on fellow slaves and poisoned colonists, as a threat to order on plantations (47). But obeah men both healed and poisoned; the same man could assume both responsibilities. The obeah man was thus less the “inverted double” of the African healer than his complement, and many planters and natural historians acknowledged that obeah men possessed useful medical knowledge. Do the emblematic techniques employed by Sloane and the other writers studied in Fatal Revolutions reduce African knowledge to a healer-poisoner binary? What was it about natural historians such as Sloane and Jefferson that made them so hesitant to acknowledge African assistance and knowledge, especially when their colleagues did so more readily? As these questions indicate, Fatal Revolutions offers an exciting new perspective not only on Caribbean natural histories but also on the literatures of the early American republic, one that will no doubt shape the ways in which scholars analyze natural histories and American prose more generally.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.1.5 (November, 2012).

Kelly Wisecup is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas. Her articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, and The Southern Literary Journal. Her book, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press.

Students re-create New England history

Beverly High School’s “Primary Research Through the History of Beverly” class was discussing the Industrial Revolution’s impact on the early nineteenth-century New England farmer. Our focus turned to stone walls, a ubiquitous reminder of the past in New England. In the woods and parks of New England, stone walls serve as a palimpsest of what was once an agricultural landscape. Students were amazed to learn that there are far more trees in Massachusetts today than there were one hundred and fifty years ago. This discussion generated some interesting questions. One student asked if stone walls were made to mark the boundaries of the farms or were they built to keep in livestock? Another wondered if the form of the stone wall had any relation to its agricultural function. These original questions generated a myriad of others leading to a semester-long research project, culminating in a group effort to build a stone wall on the grounds of our high school.

To answer these initial questions, we studied the history of New England stone walls. We learned that they typically enclosed cemeteries, pastures, farms, and animal pounds. We had never before heard of a “fence viewer,” whose job was, according to state law, to monitor all fences in the community for proper condition and height. The measurement of stone walls was particularly fascinating: in colonial Massachusetts, all fences were required to be measured in units of “chains” or “perches.” The term chain originated from the surveying invention of Englishman Edmond Gunther in 1620. Gunther’s chain is a predecessor of the tape measure. The chain was sixty-six feet long, consisting of one hundred links measuring approximately 7.92 inches apiece. Many modern-day units of measure, including furlongs, acres, and miles, are based on Gunther’s sixty-six-foot chain.

Robert Thorson’s Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls (2002) identifies the “golden age” of stone walls in New England as between 1775 and 1825. We tested Thorson’s theory by measuring the growth of lichen. Although there are environmental variables that make this dating technique less than perfect, it has proven to be relatively effective. Foliose and crustose lichens (found commonly in New England) grow at fairly predictable rates. For example, crustose lichens grow at a rate of one millimeter per year. By measuring from the center of the lichen to the edge, students could guess the age of the wall. To check the accuracy of their hypotheses, they measured similar lichens on nearby colonial gravestones and checked the estimated date against the date on the front of the stone. This proved the lichen-dating technique (or “lichenometry”) to be reasonably accurate.

Inspired by their readings and by in-class discussions, the class wondered what it would be like to actually build a stone wall. With the help of our enthusiastic principal, Dr. Carla Scuzzarella, who gave us permission to use a location near the front of the high school, we determined the shape and length of the wall. To measure, we made our own Gunther’s chain. Based on the length of our proposed wall (a half chain, or thirty-three feet), we then determined how much stone we needed. As there was no funding for the project, we began searching for a construction company or quarry that would be willing to help. Lillian, one of our students, made dozens of calls to local stone sources. Her diligence was rewarded by Margaret McGinnis of nearby Bevenento Sand and Stone. The company donated over thirty tons of stone and peastone gravel for the project.

We began with only a rudimentary idea of how to build the wall. We turned to Kevin Gardner, the author of The Granite Kiss: Traditions and Techniques of Building New England Stone Walls (2001), for professional guidance. Soon after learning about our project he offered to visit the class. Our students were thrilled that the author of one of their textbooks would show up to offer his expertise. Gardner is an author, teacher, public-radio producer, and most importantly to us, a stone-wall builder.

Kevin used small stones on a table to demonstrate wall building techniques. Students then created their own tabletop stone walls. He is a masterful teacher who so excited the students that they asked him to go outside in the rain with them to view our stones and plan a design. We had planned a thirty-three-foot, semi-circular double wall approximately three-and-a-half feet high (fourteen links on a Gunther’s chain). Kevin suggested that we start from a center point and begin to sort the stones by size and function.

Using a wheelbarrow and dolly (as oxen and plows were unavailable), we began sorting the stones by size and function. We divided the stones into categories of footing stones, cap stones, building stones, corner stones, and rubble stones.

First we dug a trench following an outline drawn by building grounds supervisor Bill Bourque and filled it with peastone gravel. Then, keeping Gardner’s and Bourque’s advice in mind, we began building the wall. We slanted stones to the center for stability and laid one stone over two. We began the wall at both ends as well as the middle to ensure uniformity.

The construction began in October 2004 and was completed by the following summer. The members of the class—Lillian Barres, Justin Desrocher, Megan Nylund, David O’Brien, Sarah O’Shea, and Corey Schweitzer—should be commended for a Herculean effort. The construction of Carla’s Wall (named after our principal) was not the only unit in the course since these students spent hundreds of hours researching all aspects of Beverly’s rich history, including a wonderful class project on colonial gravestone carving.

In addition to class time, the construction of the wall took place before school, after school, on weekends, and on school vacations in all kinds of New England weather. Yet, these students never complained or deviated from their self-appointed goal. We also managed to have fun along the way. We visited Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” at his family farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and had the opportunity to meet author Robert Thorson after hearing him discuss his book one evening at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. Along with Kevin Gardner, Robert Thorson was an inspiration to the students and their project.

From these latter-day artisans and from their own labors, the students learned a variety of skills that helped shape them into intellectual decathletes. More importantly, they demonstrated an intellectual hunger and civic virtue that were rarely fueled by the roar of the crowd. They became quiet leaders who got the job done, always thinking of making their school and community a better place without any consideration of personal gain or recognition. The exemplary effort of these dedicated students, along with the support of enthusiastic and altruistic people such as Gardner, Thorson, Bourque, and Benevento Sand and Stone, shows what can be done with a lot of good will and a minimal budget.

We are planning a formal dedication ceremony of Carla’s Wall in May 2006. All are invited. For more details on the project, including student research papers and photos, visit http://www.primaryresearch.org/stonewalls.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

W. Dean Eastman teaches history at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Disney American Teacher Award (1991), Harvard University’s Derek Bok Prize for Public Service (2000), and the Preserve America Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year Award (2004).

Kevin McGrath is a library teacher at Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts.

One of the most common printed images of the first half of the nineteenth century was also the one of the most derided—often, treacherously, in its own caption. Right under his woodcut of “The Anatomy”—the image of a male body linked to the signs of the zodiac that began most American almanacs—the almanac-maker David Young wrote sourly in 1848: “It is thought proper to notice in this place, that in this enlightened age of the world, people in general place no confidence in these signs, nor the prognostics of the weather.” In this, as he certainly knew himself, Young was wrong. “There are many men at the present age, so far behind the times,” complained another author, two years before Young’s Almanac “that if they have a tooth to pull, a vein to open, a pig or a calf to castrate, a patch of thistles to mow, a bunch of white birches or scrub oaks to cut down, or a dose of physic to swallow, the chapter of signs must be consulted, and their connection with the body, or the plant ascertained before anything can be done.” At least one of these men, as demonstrated in the margin of the second image on the left, was using my copy of Young’s almanac.

If by the 1840s the Anatomy and the columns of calendrical symbols to which it was keyed had been an embarrassment to American almanac makers for more than a hundred years, they nevertheless still stood as required elements of the agricultural Almanac, the most stable features of a famously volatile and various form. One reason for their persistence was their importance to the practices of “moon farming,” which used astrological information to mark time and schedule agricultural tasks. The astrological tables were, as such, as important as the other (more recognizably utilitarian) forms of information that almanacs provided—critical elements of these objects that rural Americans hung from hooks on the wall, whose ripped pages they repaired with careful stitches, and, as above, whose margins they marked with signs of their own.

To contemporary historians, the first pages of an almanac can be frustrating to work with. It’s tempting to skip to the later sections—rich, if confusing, collections of texts that mingle seasonal poetry, jokes about Irishmen, and stories of canny farmers, with helpful information about circuit court session dates and the “Use of Sulphuric Acid as a Manure.” The first pages, by contrast, consist of the Anatomy, some astronomical calculations, and a twelve-page calendar packed top to bottom with unfamiliar symbols. When students in my classes seem to be identifying too much with seemingly “modern” nineteenth-century farmers, a short almanac “problem set” quickly restores their sense that they’re dealing with a culture alien to them.

Some of this seeming impenetrability comes from our lack of familiarity with the night sky. The anatomy refers, on one level, to perfectly visible astronomical phenomena that were rather more reliable than nineteenth-century clockwork. For farmers, the signs of the zodiac retained their concrete physical meaning: the east-to-west procession of twelve constellations through which the sun and the moon and the planets seem to move, imprisoned in the flattened disk of the solar system. Where our modern newspaper horoscope tells us about our birthdate in terms of the sun’s place in this sequence, breaking the year into twelve months, nineteenth-century farmers were primarily interested in the faster circuits of the moon, which moves across the whole zodiac every twenty-eight days, spending about two days in most signs. Almost all almanac calendars devoted a column to this cycle, allowing readers to determine the sign of the moon when the moon and stars were hidden by daylight or by the rotation of the earth. The anatomy connected this macroscopic physical phenomenon to the smaller cosmos of the human body, linking each body part to a corresponding sign—the two arms to Gemini, the twins; the breast to Cancer, the Crab; the “secrets” to Scorpio, the scorpion.

But what did the signs and the phases of the moon mean to moon farmers in the 1840s? In the almanac we have the tools of moon farming, but explicit guidance for the everyday use of these tools had been stripped out of almanacs in the eighteenth century, as the reputation of astrology declined. Our clearest accounts of the changing oral tradition of nineteenth-century moon farming in fact come from its most voluble enemies, the self-consciously scientific “improving agriculturists” who controlled the agricultural journals, and who made attacks on moon farming a standard genre of agricultural journalism.

Several consistent sets of rules can be pieced together through these hostile sources. The first set followed the waning and waxing of the moon—usually described in the columns of the almanac by a moon face marking each quarter. Some described analogies between the increase and decrease of moonlight and increase and decrease of substance on earth; thus, for example, pork cured in the light of the waning moon would itself dwindle to nothing. Others connected darkness to subterranean activity, and light to activity above ground. Potatoes, beets, and turnips should be planted in the old or declining moon; oats, corn, and wheat planted in the old moon would produce “roots, and no stalk, or seed.”

The second set of rules followed the anatomy itself, and relied on analogies between the plants and animals of the farm, and the human body. The moon’s presence in each sign, it was argued, brought an effusion of blood to the corresponding organ in the anatomy. Physicians had to avoid operating on these flooded organs to avoid hemorrhage; manipulating nonhuman bodies, farmers had to take similar issues into account. For example, when the moon passed into Leo, a sign keyed to the heart, farmers knew that cutting trees and vines would be satisfactorily deadly, but on the other hand, “wo be to the unlucky calf or colt, that happened to undergo castration when the sign indicated the forbidden region [Scorpio]” Other sign rules were less clearly medical. When the moon was in Virgo, “sometimes called the Posey Girl,” a committee investigating “Lunar influence in Agriculture” in the Southern Planter, reported disapprovingly and disbelievingly, “everything then sown or planted, will expend all its energy in blossoms on account of that girl’s propensity for flowers.”

Relatively simple, these rules are the ones I use in my classes, the easiest to grasp for both undergraduates and anti-moon-farming reformers. However, it’s clear from a few references that other rules surrounded other kinds of calendrical information. For example, the ascending and descending nodes of the moon (also known as the dragon’s head, and the dragon’s tail)—that is, its movement north and south of the path of the sun, and the direction of the moon’s horns, as well as the exact clock time of the full and new moon—were certainly used to make the weather predictions that some almanacs included and others left to their readers. Agricultural improvers rarely touch on these matters. Perhaps these rules were less commonly used, or artifacts of older practice; perhaps they were merely too complex for improvers interested only in superficial dismissal. It is possible, indeed, that much of the uniformity of accounts of moon farming came not from a still unified moon-farming culture but instead from the echo-chamber of anti-moon-farming rhetoric, bounced from exchange column to exchange column in the nation’s agricultural journals.

It is easy to look at the Anatomy and see unchanging tradition, perhaps even active resistance to modernity and the market. The Man of Signs, after all, reaches back to at least 1300, and some of the rules of moon farming can be traced back to classical authors, Pliny in particular. Improving farmers assiduously created this impression. Moon farmers, described as slaves of a tyrannical “Ancient Astrology,” fit well into a broader improving narrative of a battle against superstition. Complaints about moon farmers merged seamlessly into an even more common trope—that of the bull-headed, “plow-jogging” neighbor, mindlessly adhering to old ways in the face of the new kinds of empirical evidence.

Bucking narrative convenience, however, almanacs and moon farmers regularly incorporated new scientific knowledge. Young’s Almanac of 1848 took into account not only the heliocentric universe, introduced to American almanacs in the mid-eighteenth century, but also the motions of a new planet called “Herschel” that had only been known since its discovery by William Herschel in 1781 (later to be renamed Uranus). Perhaps more importantly, even as improvers cast moon farmers as the enemies of improvement, moon farmers were improvising rules to govern improvers’ most prized scientific practices: growing fertilizing crops like clover and employing soil amendments like plaster of Paris. One improving lecturer complained that his moon-farming neighbors refused to allow cattle “to run on clover plastered during the full moon” since, “they will certainly burst, in consequence of the extending principle imparted to the elements of vegetation at this critical phase.” It is perhaps worth noticing that improvers and moon farmers, like modern veterinarians, recognized the tendency of cattle suddenly to inflate, a sometimes fatal malady cured then and now by a sharp three pointed knife stabbed into the fourth stomach, releasing trapped gas, which could be lit by a candle as it escaped. (Cattle really are more interesting than they look.)

According to improvers’ accounts, moreover, moon-farming neighbors defended their terrain with a market-oriented language of yields and profits. As new techniques emerged in the commercializing agriculture of the nineteenth century, moon farming extended to include them. Indeed, this blending of old and new methods was supported by improvers themselves, who, lured both by almanacs’ profitability and by their broad audience, themselves printed almanacs, complete with anatomy, signs, disclaimer, and instructions in improving practices, and advertisements for the Cultivator or the American Agriculturists.

Though I’ve been collecting rules and hints for several years, I don’t yet understand the cosmos that nineteenth-century almanacs describe. Indeed, I am sure that that cosmos, if it was even unified enough to call a cosmos, is no longer knowable, given the many prisms through which it has been refracted and distorted. However, assembling an imperfect picture of moon-farming practice, using rules learned from moon farming’s enemies, reaffirms that the dichotomy between “modern” and “traditional,” which has remained stubbornly evident in historians’ writing about rural Americans, wavers on closer inspection, even when looking at the Man of Signs.

Further Reading:

The (still-useful) classic account of American almanacs is Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York, 1977). For a rich account of the incorporation of new science into the eighteenth-century almanac, see Sarah Gronim, Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York (Camden, N.J., 2007). Maureen Perkins explores the parallel transformation of the almanac form in Great Britain in Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change, 1777-1870, (Oxford, 1996). Thomas Horrocks gives a broader picture of the use of almanacs in medicine in early America in Thomas A. Horrocks, Popular Print and Popular Medicine: Almanacs and Health Advice in Early America (Amherst, Mass., 2008).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

Emily Pawley is assistant professor of history at Dickinson College. She is currently finishing a book on agricultural knowledge in the nineteenth century.