On the Edge of the Atlantic World in the Interior of North America

In Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt, Catherine Cangany explores what might best be called the “soft economics” of Detroit’s integration into the Atlantic world. She contends that Detroit was “poised at the intersection of East and West, empire and frontier, core and periphery, and imperialism and localism” (3). This tension between the city’s imperial significance and its remote location, Cangany stresses, “hastened Detroit’s economic and cultural incorporation into the broader Atlantic world,” even as it generated the idiosyncrasies that set early Detroit apart from many other settlements in the North American interior (3). For Cangany, Detroit was neither an imperial city within a frontier region, nor a peripheral outpost servicing a core. It embodied both, and she hopes to draw historians toward an “awareness of the full interdependencies, interrelatedness, and mutual constitutiveness of West and East” (5).

Cangany’s book contributes to two not wholly distinct bodies of work: scholarship on the Great Lakes borders and borderlands, and on imperial consumerism. Although initiated by scholars interested in the interaction between indigenous peoples and Europeans, in the past decade historians such as Alan Taylor have extended the borderlands concept into the nineteenth century and onto disparate white populations. Meanwhile, others, illustrated by T.H. Breen, have moved consumerism to the center of the experience of empire. Cangany seeks to bring these two strands of scholarship into conversation by tracing the development of Detroit’s role as a market for commonplace consumer items and the critical role of the fluctuating borders in the Great Lakes region in determining its character.

In order to present this “Janus-faced” view of Detroit, Cangany has assembled sources remarkable for both their number and variety: letters and ledger books from the city’s early merchants; probate and criminal court records; papers of the French, British, and American military commanders stationed at the city; travel narratives; newspapers from as far away as South Carolina; Congressional statutes; and images and material goods (168). These allow her to study the material culture of Detroit’s residents and their attitude toward the claims of sovereignty asserted by constantly changing imperial powers over their affairs. Likewise, they provide her evidence of Detroiters’ simultaneously cosmopolitan and provincial status.

Frontier Seaport can be divided into two parts. Chapters one through three examine Detroit’s incorporation into the Atlantic economy. Cangany eschews another treatment of the fur trade for a detailed analysis of the commerce in such items as textiles, dining ware, moccasins, and books. Despite being the better part of a thousand miles from the Atlantic coast, she finds that the city’s merchants carried a remarkable array of goods including chocolate, nutmeg, olives, and hair powder. While these may seem oddly out of place on the frontier, they serve as evidence for Cangany’s argument that early Detroit was “profoundly tied to Atlantic commercial culture, saturated with the same transnational goods and the accompanying fashions that were popular in urban spaces” (43). Moreover, the city’s merchants’ ability to draw on credit from overseas and sell on credit locally facilitated the residents’ conspicuous consumption that further bound them to the Atlantic economy.

Having made a convincing case for Detroit’s cosmopolitanism, Cangany devotes chapters four through six to describing the city’s localisms and the conditions that allowed them to flourish through the early nineteenth century. Here her evidence is more subtle, and her extrapolations bolder. She contends that even as their business dealings bound Detroit more tightly to the Atlantic economy, the city’s merchants resisted the accompanying loss of economic and political autonomy. They mastered the art of petitioning as they first defeated efforts by the French, British, and Americans to impose non-local judiciary oversight, and then confounded the endeavors of American officials to rebuild the settlement in a grandiose but alien manner after the fire of 1805.

Her most potent evidence, however, comes from the widespread, casual smuggling of common goods—blankets, whiskey, and apples among them—by local residents across the Detroit River. However much they desired the reliability that came with imperial order in their transnational commerce, locals expected autonomy when trading with neighbors who just happened to live on the other side of an international border. After all, residents had exchanged goods back and forth across the Detroit River, Cangany notes, for nearly 100 years before the river had been transformed into a border. She sees their illicit trade as “a measured local response to deleterious federal interference” (171). Apathetic customs officers and incongruous customs laws designed for the Atlantic seaboard rather than the Great Lakes aided their cause. For Cangany, smuggling “offer[s] further evidence of Detroiters’ resistance to full incorporation into the American regime and the Atlantic world” (172).

Cangany writes in a precise and economical manner reflecting the diligence of her research. Yet she clearly enjoys crafting her analysis, as can be seen in the wordplay in which she engages. The subtitle of chapter three, “the fashioning of moccasins,” for instance, refers to both the manufacturing and popularity of this footwear.

Given the emphasis on the tension between localism and cosmopolitanism, one may wonder at the selection of the work’s subtitle, “Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt.” This subtitle undersells the scope of the project and perhaps misses a chance to draw the attention of scholars interested in empire, capitalism, and borderlands. Even as Frontier Seaport makes noteworthy contributions to two of the analytical frameworks in which it positions itself, it also raises important questions regarding their utility. Detroiters certainly seemed eager to tie themselves to the Atlantic world, but just what that means is unclear. Was the Atlantic world simply a set of rules and practices for economic exchange, or a collection of common consumer goods? By 1796, when the United States took formal possession of Detroit, the networks of exchange and communication that contemporary scholars refer to as constituting the “Atlantic world” had been in existence for 300 years. Surely it too developed, changed, and took on new meaning.

Detroit’s days as a cultural borderland are far behind it, but its position adjacent to Canada still makes it a geographical borderland, and as Cangany notes, that location provides ample opportunity for illicit trade. Is this still localism at work? Does this mean the casual smuggling in which the city’s population engages today is evidence of their continued resistance to incorporation into the Atlantic, or now, the global economy? More to the point, do borderlands foster the development of one variety of a localism that manifests in every locality? And if every place has its localisms, are borderlands truly significant? Frontier Seaport is a stimulating work with a thought-provoking thesis that is undergirded by a solid body of research. It is a valuable addition to anyone interested in commerce and empire, borderlands, or Great Lakes history.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Daniel P. Glenn is an assistant professor of history at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. His article “‘Savage Barbarities and Petty Depredations’: Supply Shortages and Military-Civilian Conflicts in the Niagara Theater, 1812-14” appeared in the Summer/Fall volume of New York History.

Unsettling English Settlement

Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 260 pp., $42.

Kathleen Donegan’s Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America is a powerful retelling of initial English incursions at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados. Donegan re-reads the works of several English writers who sought to account for their struggle to find sure footing in the Americas. These writers include Ralph Lane, George Percy, Phineas Pratt, William Bradford, and Richard Ligon, among others. The argument Donegan makes for studying the life and works of this ensemble is convincing: the many catastrophes they experienced shaped not only colonial identity but colonial cultural expression as well. Their trials and failures were not anomalies to be ignored or treated with chagrin by historians and literary scholars. Their bewilderment, starvation, and violence were integral to becoming colonists, and seeped into the “language through which new settlers revealed how the social links that tied them to England, and to their own sense of Englishness, were breaking down” (5).

Donegan’s approach is interdisciplinary in the best sense of the word. She alternates between micro history and literary analysis to create what she calls narrative readings. Trauma theory tinctures her narrative readings. Like trauma theorists, she focuses on the horrifying ordeals that people experience and on their effort to comprehend themselves and their world in the wake of such ordeals. However, she seeks to explain the violence her writers inflicted on others as well as the hardships they endured. In her effort to be mindful of their aggression and misery, Donegan uses post-colonial and race-oriented reading strategies while revising concepts to reflect her materials. For instance, she reads travel writing in relation to projected imperial authority, as Mary Louise Pratt does, yet Donegan describes English settlers as living in a chaos zone, not a contact zone, Pratt’s term for spaces of cross-cultural interaction.

Donegan begins by approaching Roanoke’s mysteries through a reading of Ralph Lane’s incursion account. Lane, the colony’s governor in 1585, limns disasters and conflicts with Roanoke Indians, an account, as Donegan points out, at odds with the Virginia Eden depicted in Elizabeth I’s charter and Arthur Barlowe’s narrative. Style matters here too for Donegan. She illustrates how, unlike the prose of official record, Lane’s scattered thought exemplifies a unique “idiom for colonial incursion” (32). Here Donegan might have included a reading of John White’s watercolors in order to show how Lane’s style compares with early modern visual representations of Virginia. Even without this reading, the chapter makes a compelling point while also introducing readers to an early American who is so often overlooked or misunderstood because of the messiness of his writings.

Donegan’s second narrative reading is oriented around the figure of George Percy, Jamestown’s president between 1609-1610. She shows how the settlement’s first planning documents serve as remedies for Roanoke’s failures. Ultimately, she argues that reading these documents and John Smith’s writings alone skew our perspective on Jamestown. As part of her revision of the settlement, she makes the case that Percy, not Smith, be considered the primary spokesman for life in the early colonies. It is Percy who discloses “how Virginia’s New World romance turned into a graveyard of meaning” (80). Smith conceives of Virginia history as an opportunity for autobiography; in his account of a self-made man surviving in the wilderness, Percy, more accurately, thinks of this early English incursion history as a period of abjection. Donegan’s apt use of Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection—being “Not me. Not that. But not nothing either”—helps illuminate her reading of Percy’s work (87). Her sobering retelling of the Starving Time, Percy’s thwarted departure, his murder of Powhatan women and children, and the Powhatan revenge campaign illustrates the importance of this Englishman’s life and work to any narrative of Jamestown.

Intrigued by William Bradford’s observation “the living were scarce able to bury the dead,” Donegan investigates the literal “problem of remains” in Plymouth in her third chapter (118). She examines writings by Phineas Pratt, Thomas Morton, and Edward Winslow to uncover the death and depravity that Bradford sublimates in his triumphalist history. Haunting highlights from this chapter include settlers coming upon the grave of blond corpses with Indian beads and goods, a startling difference between Pratt’s and Increase Mather’s account of the sick, and the disturbing reactions to the displayed head of Witawamut. Donegan ends her narrative reading with a stirring thought: “perhaps, the dead were the most important crop the people at Plymouth planted” (154).

Donegan also shows how West Indian incursion follows botched North American settlement efforts. She focuses on Barbados. In Barbadian accounts by John Nicholls and Henry Colt she finds a colonial tropic: a “discursive framework of extremity and extravagance through which West Indian colonials described lives that could not be imagined in England” (156). Within this framework, they expressed their fears of every indulgence that they desired and fulfilled. Donegan uses Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) to pinpoint the style of this colonial tropic at a period when the English sought to start a plantation settlement. Ligon’s peril-filled, eroticized descriptions of black women, pineapples, and sugar-making reflect the catastrophes created by this endeavor while also illustrating the crucial role that the islands played in fomenting English interest in colonization.

Donegan’s narrative readings are so engaging that I concluded her fourth chapter ready to read one more—perhaps a short descriptive reading of another southern incursion, in Savannah, for instance. Such a reading might have shown how colonial identity and writing evolved in eighteenth-century Georgia, which had a similar climate to Barbados, but a radically different settlement plan and outcome. Instead of providing this type of conclusion, Donegan ends with an afterword that explains why she wrote the book primarily from the vantage point of the English. This explanation ties the book together nicely by returning to the author’s first impulses and critical questions. But it also suggests that her study needs additional defenses. It does not. Seasons of Misery reveals the tenuous hold that English settlers had on Native American lands and on their sense of self during fatal forays that bore little resemblance to imperial plans. Thanks to Donegan, these settlers’ writings are no longer embarrassing preludes. They are crucial to understand in their contexts, as well as for understanding the cultures that develop after them.

Like any important scholarly work, Seasons of Misery does raise questions, which might spur new projects. For example, her book made me wonder about the ways that non-English writers expressed their assortment of miseries in the Americas. Donegan’s approach as well as her historical and literary conclusions, I concluded, might be used to help re-read earlier works such as Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación (1542) and to reconsider representations of bewilderment and aggression in Native American, African American, and Euro-American colonial-era writings. Additionally, moments in the book where weather becomes a relevant subject lead me to reflect on how a sense of the natural world and climate change influenced representations of failed settlement. Introducing more of an ecological focus—perhaps by working concepts from environmental history into conversation with Donegan’s selected readings—might further illuminate patterns of settler anomie and aggression. This focus may help us see how early moderns might have read accounts of these bereft European settlers and, moreover, might clarify how those of us who confront environmental disasters today can learn from them. Such queries are a sign of the strength of Seasons of Misery; its distinctive approach to the writings and incursions of distraught and disoriented Englishmen reminds us that there is much we still do not grasp about early American settlement.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Matt Duquès is assistant professor of English at the University of North Alabama. He works on eighteenth-century American Indian and settler relations as well as early U.S. literature.

Eavesdropping on the Meetinghouse

Notetaking and Sermon Culture in Puritan New England

Common-place talks to Meredith Neuman, author of Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England, about sermon culture among Puritans, the physical processes they undertook to take notes, and the resonances of that culture in modern research practices.

Your argument hinges on the idea that seventeenth-century Puritans lived in a “sermon culture.” Can you elaborate on what that encompassed and how it worked?

15.2 Neuman — As a literary scholar, I am interested in how sermons permeated other genres as well.

I use the term “sermon culture” to indicate not just the sermon texts themselves but also the practices and phenomena involved in the production and reception of those texts. I knew that people sometimes took notes on the preaching they heard, and I thought this might be a better way to explore the aural experience of the sermon, even though I wasn’t sure I could even find such notebooks. The first auditor sermon notebooks I found were at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the first one I encountered transformed how I thought about the larger experience of the sermon. One page was filled with barely legible scrawl and dotted with what might have been shorthand symbols. All I could make out was repetitive variations of a single verse of scripture that the minister had taken as his text. It seemed to me as if the notetaker was happy to dwell in the purely aural experience of the minister’s voice and the echoing scriptural passage. Elsewhere in the notebook, other sermons were recorded in just a few succinct, numbered points. It was all very orderly, and the handwriting was careful and ornamental, like a penmanship exercise. (To this day I cannot decide if the two notetaking styles came from one person or more.) From that unusual notebook came the double revelation that auditors could experience sermons in quite divergent ways and that those ways were not always predictable based on what we know from print sermons and preaching manuals.

Essentially, I went to the archive to be a fly on the wall and to eavesdrop (as it were) on the minister speaking, but I soon became more interested in the auditor listening. Contemplating the sermon via the auditor’s experience forced me to think about the complicated ways that sermon texts circulated in the community and abroad. This is part of what I mean by sermon culture. Sermon distribution was truly multimedia. Delivery was oral, of course, usually based on an outline that the minister had by memory or in outline form. In turn, the individual auditor might retain preaching by memory or take notes (often at home, but sometimes in the meetinghouse). The ministers and the laity sometimes wrote their notes up more fully. Ministers complained about unauthorized publication of their sermons based on auditor notes, but they were sometimes beholden to those very sources when developing their preaching for the press. Notes, memory, and print also formed the basis of formal and informal conversations that occurred within families, throughout the community, and abroad. When we think of what it meant to “publish” a sermon in this period, we must think of overlapping modes of print, manuscript, and oral circulation. Ultimately, the complex material circumstances of sermon publication cause us to question what we mean by authorship. In Jeremiah’s Scribes I posit a model of “disseminated authorship,” where the sermon is not the product of individual ministers but of entire communities.

Another part of what I mean by “sermon culture” has to do with how sermons affected thinking and self-expression beyond the meetinghouse. As a literary scholar, I am interested in how the sermons permeated other genres as well. Dan Shea muses inSpiritual Autobiography in Early America that “ours has been a notably sermon-ridden literature from the beginning.” I love that quote so much that I used it to open the introduction to Jeremiah’s Scribes. Harry Stout estimates that an individual might have listened to 15,000 hours of preaching over his or her lifetime. How could our literature not be “sermon-ridden”? The effect of this prolonged exposure is easy to find in conversion narratives, such as the so-called Cambridge confessions recorded by Thomas Shepard, which are peppered with scriptural citation as well as references to specific sermon encounters. (“I heard Mr. So-and-so on X verse on Y occasion, and I thought Z.”) We can also see ready evidence of sermon culture in Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. Every time I teach that text, some savvy student inevitably observes that a little sermon breaks out when Rowlandson gives that numbered list of “a few remarkable passages of providence.” Moving beyond the structural level, we get the impression that Rowlandson cannot not interpret biographical incidents like scripture, with clear doctrines to be opened and applied. Anne Bradstreet makes a similar move in her poem “Upon the Burning of Our House.” New England “plain style” preaching emphasized its own exegetical and rhetorical maneuvers. As a result, the influence of sermon on other genres is not merely topical but interpretive and methodological.

The book examines the seventeenth century essentially as a long moment for Puritan sermon culture, but can you discuss some of the ways in which that culture changed during the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth?

I allowed myself to remain quite narrowly focused for this book because I was ultimately less interested in tracing the evolution of sermons than I was in framing a few very specific questions about language for a particular people during a prolonged historical moment. Despite my narrow focus, however, I hope that I have managed to open up new avenues for scholarship on the sermon in early America. There is so much I did not address in terms of the diversity of sermon traditions in the seventeenth century and particularly in relation to Native engagement with Puritan sermon culture. The scene only gets more diverse as you move into the eighteenth century, of course. That’s why I am so excited by a collaborative project headed up by Zach Hutchins with Rachel Cope and Chris Phillips called TEAMS (Transcribing Early American Manuscript Sermons), a searchable database of original transcriptions of pre-1800 American manuscript sermons. They will be launching the prototype in 2015 with a base of 50 sermons from South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts by Episcopalian, Baptist, Catholic, and Congregational preachers. Projects like this one are crucial to an understanding of the full spectrum of early American sermon cultures.

And, yes, I am deflecting the original question just a bit, but I will make a few points about how the sermon culture that I examined in Jeremiah’s Scribes fits into a longer trajectory (at least in terms of non-conformist Anglo-American preaching). By the late sixteenth century, you have a situation in England where the demand for good, original, vernacular, non-conformist preaching has outpaced the number of ministers who are trained and securely established in pulpits. Into the seventeenth century, writers of spiritual autobiography frequently relate the need to travel long distances on a Sunday or even to migrate in order to be closer to “godly” preaching. This demand helps to fuel what we call the Great Migration to New England in the 1630s. What’s always fascinated me, though, is the lag time between the increased availability of such preaching (say, in New England where the per capita rate of godly preaching is extremely high, but even in certain corners of England at an earlier date) and a critical mass of printing based on that lively oral culture.

It is actually quite hard to find print versions of “ordinary” preaching from mid-seventeenth-century New England. In The New-England Soul, Stout calls attention to a preference for publishing occasional preaching (fast days, funerals, etc.), a phenomenon that causes a distorted view of sermon themes and tones. If you look only at print sermons based on a single delivery, there appears to be a lot more brimstone in New England than I think there really was. For me, the flip side of that coin is the disproportion of unwieldy, polemical “sermon cycles” that come from the first generation of New England preachers. Thomas Shepard’s preaching on the Parable of the Ten Virgins is a good example. His multi-year sequence of preaching on a single parable from Matthew comes out of the aftermath of the Antinomian Controversy, but on a weekly basis, I think those sermons would have sounded like “ordinary” pastoral exhortation. The frequency with which members of Shepard’s church cite the Parable of the Ten Virgins suggests ordinary, pastoral preaching, yet the posthumous 1660 publication emphasizes topical concerns—this time millennialist eschatology rather than a local Antinomian threat.

In New England, the scene changes when the first generation of preachers begins to die off, I suspect. Suddenly you have posthumous collections, like John Norton’s Three Choice and Profitable Sermons, that include occasional as well as ordinary preaching. Increasingly in the last part of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, you have straightforward pastoral preaching making its way into print more frequently, I think, as part of a general acceleration of print as consumer commodity across the board. (This point is driven home for me in Sewall’s Diary where he sometimes brings print sermons as a gift and other times sugared almonds when he comes a-wooing.) Part of the issue also seems to be a shift in supply and demand relative to the status of print vs. oral transmission. Anxiety over the scarcity of “godly” preaching in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England was tied up in the perceived primacy of hearing the Word. I’ve not worked it out completely for myself, but I suspect that the traditional Protestant preference for hearing sermons becomes less of an issue as both print sermons and good preaching become increasingly available (not to mention increased denominational diversity). There is more of a marketplace feel to New England sermon culture by century’s end.

In chapter 2, you discuss some of the challenges of looking for notetaking practices in archival collections, including varying description procedures, uncertain provenances, and unnamed notetakers. What strategies did you develop as a researcher to overcome these obstacles?

Honestly? My strategy was to embrace the messiness and idiosyncrasy of the process. I developed a dragnet of keyword combinations, often with wildcards and simple Boolean syntax (e.g. sermon? OR preach* AND note* NOT print* NOT pub*). I would run variations upon variations of advanced searches and e-mail hundreds of results to myself. Later I would comb through the records, discarding what was clearly not what I wanted and calling up anything that seemed remotely plausible. I looked at a lot of material that was not what I wanted but that nevertheless helped me to define the larger project. For example, the “wrong” material allowed me to figure out key differences between notes for delivery and true auditor notes. Or that a minister’s own auditing notes could have more in common with lay notes than with his own notes for delivery. Or that many individuals made manuscript copies of sermons for preservation and distribution, based both on manuscript and print sources. In short, the great inefficiency of the system paid off. Ironically, if the searchable metadata had been more consistent and reliable, I would not have stumbled across so many important ancillary documents. For me, it will always be important to flail about in the archive, to allow one’s self to be surprised and confused by it. As I tell my students, you can go to the archive with what you think your questions are, but, if you are very lucky, the archive will tell you what your questions really are.

Interaction with library staff and curators is absolutely crucial to this sort of research. They are the ones who know the collections and who can tell you about material that sometimes isn’t even catalogued. Importantly, they are also the keepers of Institutional Knowledge. Every library’s collections are described and organized according to criteria that are often particular to the institution. To search for sermon notes at the Houghton Library, then, is in some sense to search Harvard’s sense of its own history. At the Massachusetts Historical Society, notebooks are attached to individuals in a way that highlights local histories. The American Antiquarian Society emphasizes print and family collections, and at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, of course, it’s always about ancestry. (A staffer there once asked me if I’d ever found the grave of an auditor whose notes I’d been trying to decipher. I’ll admit that such a marvelous notion had never occurred to me before.) Bumping up against diverse collecting agenda and disciplinary practices will shake you out of a lot of methodological complacency, if you let it.

I expect that auditor notes will continue to be discovered and identified after generations of obscurity. We don’t always know what we have. Literally. This summer I identified at the Boston Public Library what I believe to be a misattributed leaf of a sermon notebook supposedly kept by Samuel Sewall. My search for evidence of misattribution led me to discover that there were in fact two sets of notes taken by two different auditors (the other, in fact, was Sewall’s) at the same sermon delivery. To me, that’s a much more valuable discovery than a single manuscript fragment associated with the famous judge. For me, however, the most exciting discoveries these days are in deciphering shorthand. Common-Place readers may already know about the team of undergraduates and scholars at Brown University (including Linford Fisher) that cracked Roger William’s shorthand code. Fewer likely know about David M. Powers’s work transcribing shorthand sermon notebooks kept by John Pynchon on the preaching of George Moxon in the 1640s. I hope to see the entirety of this important work in print, but in the meantime we will have to satisfy ourselves with sample pages from the Springfield notebook, available online via the Congregational Library. An image of Pynchon’s youthful notebook is on the cover of Jeremiah’s Scribes, and so I was grateful when David was able to translate previously undeciphered symbols for me. More importantly, though, Powers’s work is an exciting contribution to our understanding of notetaking generally and the use of shorthand in particular.

As you discuss in Jeremiah’s Scribes, notetaking is a deeply embodied practice; it is, literally, a physical process. Yet historians and literary scholars now encounter many of our sources online. How did you navigate those differences, and what challenges did you face in trying to understand a seventeenth-century practice with twenty-first-century technology?

In graduate school in California, my research was both enabled and limited by access first to microfilm and then to digital images of print sermons. Once I moved to Massachusetts, I suddenly had access to manuscripts but—ironically—less digital access (especially to early English imprints). Such flukes of access can define our scholarship, of course; these particular flukes also caused me to reflect on issues of access for seventeenth-century readers. Notetaking was pious practice, but it was also just a practical method of text-getting. Like making manuscript copies of print books, compiling sermon notes was a way of expanding one’s library. There is a different sense of intimacy and authorship with texts you create by hand with pen and paper rather than by mouse and keyboard. Early on in my research, I started keeping a notebook of my own in order to get a better sense of that experiential process. In particular, I was fascinated by the phenomenon of flipping the notebook upside down in order to record different information from the “back” of the book forward. John Hull, for example, recorded public occurrences in one direction and private reflections in the opposite direction, a practical method that nevertheless evokes other kinds of public-private overlap. I found it convenient to record reading and transcription notes in one direction and my own reflections and compositions in the other. That juxtaposition preserves an interesting record of the evolution of my arguments.

What began as a somewhat whimsical experiment in recording by hand in order to get a better sense of the physical process of notetaking has since become a bare necessity. One morning, just around the time I was completing the final draft of the book manuscript, I woke up to discover that I could barely lift my arms; intense bouts of writing on my laptop had triggered underlying chronic back and shoulder issues. I was under a tight deadline with no time to heal, so I had to get creative in order to finish the book. My department found money to pay four wonderful students for assistance in finalizing the manuscript. I marked up drafts by hand and then dictated edits (once, memorably, correcting a transcription of a seventeenth-century sermon with a student in Washington state via Skype and Google Docs). I spoke the final passages aloud while one of my amanuenses took everything down. It was a remarkable and rather moving experience that drove home—in a very personal way—my larger argument about communal textual production.

Textual production is now indeed very embodied for me. I draft by hand mostly, restrict myself to a special keyboard and mouse setup, and use a standing desk at all times. This is a challenge in reading rooms, of course, because I can’t use my laptop, which means that all my research is now done by hand in notebooks. And so I continue to think about the way handwritten notes are different from typed, electronic notes. I muse frequently on Ann Blair’s investigations of information management, and I consider organization itself to be an expressive form. You can’t alter the experiential chronology of the notebook. For example, notetakers often follow a sermon series on a single verse. Sometimes the sermon continua is interrupted by preaching on other topics, especially by occasional preaching, but sometimes the notetaker records those interrupting sermons in another book or in another direction, and sometimes there seems to be a mix of organizational strategies. There are accidents, too, that determine which notebook is on hand for any given circumstance, and so you see all kinds of odd texts intrude (pen trials, drafts of letter, lists of books, mathematical calculations). Similar phenomena appear in my own notebooks, which helps me to theorize what odd ordering and juxtapositions mean and, just as importantly, don’t mean.

Manuscript notebooks preserve errancy of all kinds. If I write something foolish in a Word document or put that document in the wrong place on a computer, I can change it. The computer’s default settings leave no trace of the original wording or organization. With notebooks, however, those features that speak to experiential process leave traces everywhere. Unfortunately, cramped handwriting toward the end of a line, truncated ideas toward the end of a page, the heavy correction of a word, and indecisive spaces left in a sentence are all hard to convey via transcription. I tried to cultivate a transcription style that preserved these idiosyncrasies, but so much gets normalized when put through a word processor. I used to work in desktop publishing, and so I know good tricks for making word processed text approximate the oddities of the manuscript page (much to the chagrin of copy editors and production managers). Trying to render manuscripts typographically is an exercise in diminishing returns, however. One solution was to create a Sermon Notebooks Online resource on my personal website, but even that feels like a poor substitute for having the thing itself in front of you.

In many cases, technology made it harder to do things with text that are easy to do by hand. When I used to transcribe by laptop, for example, I created simple keyboard shortcuts (or “macros”) for common abbreviations that incorporated superscript (y^e for “the,” for example, or w^t for “with” or “what”). When the university upgraded my laptop, the newer version of Word interpreted those macros as viruses, and so I had to ask IT to reinstall the old version just so I could keep transcribing. Copyediting and typesetting was a struggle, too. Bolded letters indicating darker ink in the original or extra spacing in the middle of a line were easy enough to reproduce, but other textual effects proved much trickier. In a few cases, I had to indicate text that the original notetaker had marked off with a border. I easily created a rule around the text in Word, but the production department—with its much more sophisticated software—could not replicate the effect. UPenn Press was wonderful to work with on these odd problems. We went back and forth, and I simplified what I could, but in the end there were three places where they had to create tiny pieces of art incorporating text and border. In two cases the little piece of art stood on its own as a block quote, which I think was easier for them to work with. In one case, however, the little piece of art was inserted and had to flow with the regular characters. Tricky. I haven’t seen the ebook version of Jeremiah’s Scribes yet, but they warned me that these little pieces of embedded art wouldn’t all resize along with the rest of the text. I actually thought that was a lucky quirk of digital publishing—an additional way to call attention to the “thingyness” of this and of all texts. Digital textuality may not be embodied, strictly speaking, but it is filled with wonderful idiosyncrasies that we are only beginning to understand how to identify and contemplate.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Meredith Neuman is associate professor of early and antebellum American literature at Clark University. In her current book project, “Coming to Terms with Early American Poetry,” she turns to the problem of “mediocre” verse, examining the ways that critical categories often fail to make sense of the voracious demand for such poetry in the pre-Romantic era.

A Taste of Spanish America

Reading Suggestions for Teachers of Colonial North America

When the English, Dutch, French, and other Northern Europeans ventured to North America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they knew that Spanish colonization of the Americas was already well underway. What they understood about Spanish colonization, however, is less clear. Spain’s imperial example served northern Europeans as both inspiration and bogeyman, but often in relatively vague ways.

As a specialist in early American—that is, North American—history, I have sometimes felt myself to be in the same fix. I know that colonial Latin America is a booming field of historical inquiry, and I feel responsible for knowing at least a little about it, but where to begin? Several years ago, spurred by the need to develop the Latin American dimension of an Atlantic World course, I finally jumped in, following publishers’ catalogs and other people’s syllabi wherever they led that looked interesting. Here I offer a short, eclectic, English-language reading list for North Americanists who want an entrée into Spanish colonial America. The list does not offer a comprehensive overview of the field, but instead emphasizes themes and modes of inquiry that will resonate with those steeped in early (North) American history.

J.H. Elliott’s magnificent synthesis, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (2006), is a natural entry point to the subject. Elliott offers a sweeping comparison of the New World’s two largest and most enduringly influential empires, ranging from imaginative dimensions of colonization such as symbolic methods of claiming space to the long-term development of political institutions and economic and social life. Elliott takes note both of the ways in which these two empires differed from one another and of the ways in which they were similar. On balance—though perhaps this impression is shaped by past historians’ tendency to emphasize how different Spanish and British America were—Elliott’s work seems to emphasize the deep similarity of the Spanish and British colonial enterprises, especially when viewed from the imperial perspective.

Fans of the new social history should not miss James Lockhart’s two complementary classics, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Social History (1968) and The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru (1972). Based on the same corpus of research, these books draw a detailed portrait of the social and economic lives of the first generation of Spanish settlers in Peru. Spanish Peru focuses on the development of Spanish colonial society in the generation after conquest, while The Men of Cajamarca focuses more narrowly on the 168 free Spaniards who participated in the capture of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, at Cajamarca in 1532, offering capsule biographies of every member of the expedition. In class, it might be fruitful to juxtapose the list of treasure awarded—lavishly but unequally—to the men of Cajamarca with, say, an early seventeenth-century New England town compact, and contrast these sharply different models for the beginning of a European settler society.

Camilla Townsend examines the process of conquest in a very different style, influenced by narrative history and growing interest in Native women as cultural go-betweens, in Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006). Malintzin, also called La Malinche, was one of twenty young women whom the Maya gave to Cortes’s expedition to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Of Nahua ethnicity, apparently born into a subordinate status (possibly as a concubine’s child) in a nobleman’s household and later enslaved by the Maya, Malintzin was an accomplished linguist who became a translator, cultural guide, and power broker for Cortés. Her life story gives Townsend occasion to explore crucial dimensions of early sixteenth-century Mexico, such as the complex linguistic and political situation on the fringes of the Aztec Empire and indigenous artisans’ learning about Spanish materials and technology by, for example, repairing Spanish ships. While Malintzin’s life was in many respects exceptional, Townsend maintains that there were “many potential Malinches”—and her story may help us imagine the less amply documented experiences of a host of Native women who served as cultural guides and translators in colonial North America.

For a picture of mature Spanish colonial society, try Charles F. Walker’s Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (2008). A strong earthquake struck the city of Lima—population about 50,000—on the night of October 28, 1746, followed by a tsunami that sank nineteen ships and drowned most of the population of Lima’s port, Callao. While survivors agreed that these disasters were a sign of God’s wrath, they did not all agree about why God was angry, and the project of rebuilding Peru’s capital sparked intense discussions of enlightened colonialism, the role of the Catholic Church in Peruvian society, and what constituted public order. It also spurred the creation of a cascade of documents, which Walker mined for this study. The timing of the crisis makes it convenient to compare the city of Lima, and the issues it was facing in the 1740s and 1750s, with colonial North American cities—all of which were smaller than Lima—just before the Seven Years’ War.

Plaza de la Independencia, Quito, Ecuador: A visual evocation of both secular authority, represented by the presidential palace on the left, and clerical authority, represented by the Archbishop’s Palace, on the right, and the city’s oldest convent, La Concepción. Courtesy of the author.

Another picture of mature Spanish colonial society can be gleaned from Ward Stavig’s The World of Tupac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru (1999), a “‘ground up’ ethnohistory” that has proven very popular as a teaching text. Stavig examines the lives of Andean Indians, ranging from diet and marriage customs to labor classifications, taxation, and the administration of justice, in the eighteenth century. This was a world in which Spanish policy was delicately interwoven with preexisting Andean law and custom; Andean culture was strained but hardly vanquished under Spanish rule. Stavig depicts the Tupac Amaru Uprising of 1780 as emerging not from a reactionary community but from a vibrant one struggling to cope with a population resurgence that strained available farmland and an imperial reorganization that disrupted established trade networks. The creative reorganization of Andean society that Stavig depicts echoes—with some different nuances, and on a larger scale—the emergence of new ethnic identities and political strategies among North American Indians depicted by James Merrell and Daniel Richter, among others.

There is a rich corpus of scholarship on women—white, black, and Indian—in Spanish colonial America. A good starting point is Susan Migden Socolow’s brisk overview, The Women of Colonial Latin America (2000). What jumped out at me, the first time I read this book, was how varied the life trajectories of Latin American women were. This was due in part to the widespread presence of convents, which the Spanish began to establish within a generation of conquest. Convents provided not a single way of life, but several: a relatively leisured and studious retirement for elite creole women; respectable employment for poorer or mestiza “nuns of the white veil,” who performed much of the physical labor; schooling for well-to-do white and mestiza girls; refuge for illegitimate, often mixed-race, children whose parents shunted them into convents. For a fuller picture of the role that convents played in colonial Latin American society, see Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (1999). Burns emphasizes the crucial role that convents played in the Andean economy as lenders and landlords; collectively, nuns exercised economic as well as spiritual power. As there were no comparable female-run institutions in British or Dutch North America, it might be interesting for a class to consider what the absence of convents—and indeed, of any lifestyle not based on family life or servitude—implied for women’s social roles in the Protestant colonies.

On another side of the Plaza de la Independencia, another visual evocation of clerical authority: Quito’s sixteenth-century cathedral. Courtesy of the author.

It was not only by embracing the religious life, however, that Latin American women charted their own paths. Spanish colonial cities, in which women generally predominated among every non-white social group, were places where poor and middling women labored in diverse ways, as slaves, servants, street vendors, shopkeepers, and textile workers in the obrajes (factories) that were established from the late sixteenth century onward. Urban, mixed-race women, middling or poor, often eschewed legal marriage, perhaps in an effort to preserve their economic independence. Patricia Seed’s To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 (1988) burst my preconception that propertied Latin American women tended to have little say in whom they married. Seed argues that, on the contrary, the church emphasized the value of free will and individual consent, occasionally even compelling families to accept interracial marriages—although economic interest and parental preference gained ground in the eighteenth century. The panorama of women’s lives in colonial Spanish America makes an intriguing counterpoint to colonial North America, where women’s lives—especially those of free white women—seem to have been more emphatically constrained by household work, marriage, and motherhood.

Another book that challenged my preconceptions about Spanish America is Kathryn Burns’s Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (2010), which highlights the central role of literacy and written texts in Spanish colonial society. Somehow, I had never envisioned Spanish colonial America as a highly literate society. But Lockhart notes in Men of Cajamarca that nearly 10 percent of Pizarro’s expedition members were notaries, and Burns examines at length the work of these officials, men who were not only literate but trained in formulating documents in legally binding language, and who gave “an official ‘voice'” to others’ instructions and testimony. Into the Archiveilluminates the formality and legalism of Spanish colonial society while also underlining the breadth of participation in that culture. Notaries helped Spanish colonists, even those of modest means or of Native American ancestry, to manipulate the presentation of information in the documentary record. Reading Into the Archive led me to wonder how studied or unstudied were the productions of the more widely literate population of British North America. Could a modestly literate New England farmer who drafted his own will dictate the disposition of his estate as effectively as an illiterate Peruvian colonist who hired a notary to draft his will for him?

An excellent introduction to economic and environmental issues is Shawn William Miller’s An Environmental History of Latin America (2007), which spans the colonial and modern periods. This is a useful book to read if one wants to get a bird’s-eye view of the ebb and flow of human society in Latin America over centuries in a couple hundred pages. Miller begins with pre-Columbian Native American civilizations and vividly depicts the expansion of “nature”—and the rise of what he calls the Pristine Myth—as Latin America’s population and agriculture collapsed in response to the incursion of Old World microbes. The story he tells is essentially similar to the story of North America’s population collapse, but it is even starker and easier to envision because Mesoamerica and South America had larger, denser pre-Columbian populations and more extensive agricultural societies.

As I started to read more colonial Latin American history, I was struck by how differently slavery fits into the historiography of colonial Spanish America as compared to colonial North America. Spanish colonizers used African slaves; in the late eighteenth century, there were more than 100,000 African and African-American slaves in Spanish America, diffused throughout the empire but concentrated in Venezuela and Peru. In most regions of Spanish America, however, African slavery existed as an adjunct to encomienda, mita, and other Native American labor systems, and historians of colonial Spanish America tend most often to discuss slavery within the broader context of regional economies or urban life. For an introduction to the topic, see Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World or one of the textbooks mentioned below. The point one might wish to make in teaching is that different New World empires, with equally ready access to African slaves, used them to different degrees and in different ways. Spain’s extensive legal tradition regarding slavery seems to have offered some degree of protection to slaves in the Spanish Empire, but the different social and economic context in which slavery existed in the Spanish Empire probably also led Spanish colonists to perceive slavery differently from British colonists—and this difference in outlook has carried over into modern historical writing about slavery in Spanish America.

Casta paintings are an invaluable visual source to use in teaching about racial attitudes in the Spanish Empire. Produced mainly though not exclusively in eighteenth-century Mexico, and marketed to affluent Spaniards to display in their homes or take back to Spain as souvenirs of their colonial service, casta paintings are formulaic depictions of the racial taxonomy of the mature Spanish Empire. What would a person who was one quarter Spanish, one quarter African, and one half Native American look like? Casta paintings depicted such mixed-race persons, often in plausibly American landscapes with culturally appropriate clothing and occupations, and spark lively class discussions of contrasting attitudes toward racial mixing in Spanish and British America.

Readers may notice the distinct regional tilt of this list: the books that focus on specific places all focus on Mexico or Peru, the Native American population centers and the initial centers of Spanish settlement. Rio de La Plata, New Granada, the southern half of Central America, and the Spanish Caribbean do not appear. There is a wider literature on these regions in Spanish, but book-length works in English are few; if you are exploring the history of colonial Latin America in English, you will encounter the peripheries of Spanish settlement mainly in survey works and national histories. The textbooks cited below model some helpful ways of integrating the Caribbean and the later-settled mainland regions into the story. The point one might wish to make in teaching is that two core settlements—the seats of the two sixteenth-century viceroyalties—dominated the development of Spanish colonial America, not only politically and economically but also imaginatively, much more fully than any one or two settlements dominated the development of colonial North America. The centralization of Spain’s colonial empire highlights the decentralization of Britain’s.

Two short trips to Latin America taught me two lessons about the region that I had not fully gleaned from textbooks: one about the formality of Spain’s carefully planned cities, with their geometric layout, public gathering places, and visual evocation of clerical and secular authority; the other about the agricultural orientation of Latin America—which survives to this day, even though South America is the world’s second most highly urbanized continent—and the intense connection of the people to the land. The former of these, at least, may be conveyed to students by showing them a selection of city maps and plans as well as photographs of some of the splendid colonial plazas that still dominate Latin American cities.

This is an eclectic list—a collation of personal favorites—and another teacher of history might come up with a list quite different and equally rich. Whether you follow these paths or other ones into the subject, though, I urge you to try teaching early American history in a manner that does not only look backward, to the heritage of medieval and Tudor England, nor forward, to the independent United States, but also sideways, to the huge colonial enterprise that was unfolding to the south as the European colonies in North America took shape.

from Markd Y (Archives & Invocations)

The first pages of the poem (the pages directly preceding these), can be read at the online journal Poor Yorick.

Statement of Poetic Research

In Search of the Woman Markd Y

Since October 2, 2012, I have been searching for traces of an unnamed, African-descended woman, branded Y, and what were likely four, possibly nine, other enslaved people with her onboard the ship the Brigantine Sarah in 1719. Color made them cargo, and they were being sent from Barbados to Kittery, Maine, to be sold on consignment by merchant William Pepperrell. For a few weeks I did not know other enslaved people were companioning the woman. Originally, I found her alone in a bill of lading, a shipping document held at the Maine Historical Society. I stumbled across it during an Internet search for other persons enslaved by Pepperrell.

Between 2005 and 2010, I had researched slavery in the Missouri Ozarks after discovering my ggg-grandfather, Richard Steele, had held nine men, women, and children in bondage there (the black Steeles of Greene County, Missouri). This led me to want to explore other locales where slavery once thrived, but where one likely would not know it today. So I turned to my adopted home of Massachusetts and what, during the colonial period, would have been its Province of Maine. Over the years, I began to feel like I had read my way through about every horror slavery could perpetrate (including in how it is “remembered”). But coming across the bill of lading, and how the woman caught up in its works was seared with one of the 26 letters I’d devoted my life to as a poet—this caught me completely off guard.

Audre Lorde’s words—The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house—banged around in my head. Before my eyes, slavery was implicated in the English language right down to individual characters of its alphabet. In this case, a woman forcibly branded with a slaveholder’s initial. But Lorde’s words rose out of that alphabet as well. I started to write my way toward a response to all of this, in the process highlighting the more sinister linguistic workings of the bill of lading and creating an invocation to the woman caught up in its violence. I also crafted what I called a “Lost Lesson” from The New England Primer, a text I imagined accompanying that centuries-used school book in its usual presentation of the alphabet.

Death and Alphabet — Since the mid-1600s, and through countless editions of The New England Primer, death has chased down the living in its alphabet. The New England primer improved … (Philadelphia, mid-nineteenth century). Photograph courtesy of the author.

These first poems in the larger “Mark^d Y” manuscript, poems that directly precede the work published here in Common-place, can be read online in Poor Yorick: A Journal of Rediscovered Objects. An interview and blog entry there also discuss the larger “Mark^d Y” project, including further commentary on the section of “Mark^d Y” published here. As with my work in Common-place, the work in Poor Yorick will be archived online as well.

I hadn’t expected to find out anything further about the unnamed woman. But a few weeks later, while under house arrest, so to speak, by Hurricane Sandy, I caught sight of her once more, this time in an anthology, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, I had randomly opened. She had completed the journey begun in the bill of lading, and it turned out she hadn’t been alone: four other enslaved people were with her on the ship. Whether they were friends, strangers, family, or enemies, what their ages were, their gender, their names—all of this was left unsaid in the June 25 letter William Pepperrell wrote to Benjamin Bullard, his agent in Barbados. He does tell Bullard that the woman had survived the weeks-long journey, only to die a few weeks later. What Pepperrell omits is how she had to carry to her grave the experience of watching each of her companions die. “All the rest died at sea” is all Pepperrell says, and what “grief” he extends to Bullard is entirely linguistic: “I am sorry for your loss” has nothing to do with grieving the dead, but with making sure that Pepperrell’s agent understands that the financial blow that comes with five dead slaves is Bullard’s and Bullard’s alone. In fact, later on in a mad search through three states and eight archives, trying to find the original of this letter, I came across the draft of another missive sent from Pepperrell to Bullard, on January 9, 1720. In it, Pepperrell enumerates the financial reimbursement of 3 pounds, 4 shillings, 2 pence he expects to receive for what he and his father expended trying to keep alive “y^e Negros y^o Sent p^r Morris w^ch died.”

Detail of letter to Benjamin Bullard from the father-and-son firm the William Pepperrells, January 9, 1720:
Likewise there is due to us for what we Disbursd on accot of ye Negros yo Sent pr Morris wch died : £3″4″2
Courtesy of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. www.AmericanAncestors.org.

But that letter of June 25, 1719, that I pondered and grieved over while Hurricane Sandy roared outside—the anthology said that it had originally been brought to the public’s eye in 1856 in a biography of William Pepperrell written by Usher Parsons. I went online with this information, hoping I might find out something further about the woman and her four companions. The June 25 letter came up again, quoted this time in an 1881 article on Pepperrell by Fred M. Colby. It was this second encounter with the letter—verbatim except for an adjective, a comma, the number of people onboard the ship, the number of people dead and alive—that set me off on a yet unfinished journey through archives, museums, libraries, antiquarian bookstores, and online publications, trying to find the answer to “five? ten?” How many enslaved people were actually onboard the Brigantine Sarah? Where is the original letter that would settle this? And what does it mean that one of two authors found the existence of that small band of people to be so inconsequential he thought it acceptable to invent or erase some of their lives? Both versions of Pepperrell’s June 25 letter precede my poems in Common-place. They’ve become the basis for other work in the larger “Mark^d Y” manuscript dealing with language and historical memory.

What follows here—what might look like fragments of thought, but what I think of more as a poet’s meditations—has arisen during my field and archival research, searching for traces of the unnamed woman mark^d Y and her companions. There is a tension to the archive. It allows me to know that these people existed; it gives evidence of crimes committed against them. But it is also the archive that locks those people in language, in an alphabet that can brutalize literally and figuratively.

In her book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman writes that “to read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to enter the slave hold.” For me, traveling from archive to archive, looking for the unnamed woman mark^d Y and her companions, has been more like entering a morgue: At each one, not only am I afraid that the people I’m searching for won’t be there, but that, if they are, they will no longer be recognizable. In cool rooms created to preserve remains, gently turning back the covers of files and folders becomes the metaphorical equivalent of lifting sheets off the faces of the dead: so many anonymous, unclaimed bodies.

Causes of Death: Whole families pulled from an inkwell, dropped, and shattered into letters. Men dragged across a page, left there in pieces. Women drawn and quartered with a pen.

So much language withheld and recruited, mutilating identities.

But even if I could, would I gather that ink back in its brimming well?

Return the quill pen to the wing of its bird, watch it fly off?

I’ve spent hours at New Hampshire’s Portsmouth Athenaeum trying to decipher the unnamed woman mark^d Y out of the gnarled script of a nearly unreadable Pepperrell account book. One night, I dreamt her Houdini: a woman bound and gagged in tangles of ink, loosening 295-year-old knots.

As a poet, how to work with a language that threatens to tighten her bindings? That would stuff the gag deeper in her throat?

Think about this: There once was a typeface consisting of scars. Where are the Barbadian branding irons it was composed with? Were they flung into the sea during uprisings and emancipation (not just by the enslaved, but by thwarted owners frightened their own initials might be held, literally, against them)? Or were those brands abandoned onshore, destined to burn as humidity fed rust’s slow fire?

Who was the last person to carry scars of alphabet on their body to the grave?

What white family breathed a sigh of relief/got wistful for the good old days?

There once was a typeface consisting of scars, so a man strove to make a billboard of a woman’s face: “I. Hackett” seared his initials into her cheeks. If this branding was punishment for running away, it didn’t stop the woman from escaping again. According to the Barbados Mercury, Saturday, September 22, 1770: “Absented … from the Subscriber … PHIBBA, a short yellow-skinned Wench, about forty Years of Age, marked on each Cheek, and on each Side of her Stomach with the Letters I. H. She has been absented upwards of fifteen Years, since which she has had several Children.” Did it make “the Subscriber” (one of many slaveholding Hacketts on the island of Barbados) crazy that, in spite of initials burned into the most visible part of her body, this woman had eluded him for nearly a third of her life? Not only eluded him, but created her own family. Her children, a part of “his property,” she withheld from him as well.

Runaway slave ad for the woman Phibba and her children, Barbados Mercury, September 22, 1770. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Did Hackett feel like the laughingstock of Barbados? For fifteen years, the woman Phibba, living as if the letters emblazoned on her face were written with invisible ink.

The 26 letters I’ve devoted my life to as a poet—for centuries throughout the West Indies, it was an alphabet strewn beneath clothes, stamped on a face, punctuated with numbers, diamonds and hearts. Nothing brought that home to me more than this notice from Jamaica’s Cornwall Chronicle Extraordinary, Friday, August 19, 1791:

LIST of RUN-AWAYS in the Spanish-Town Workhouse, August 4, 1791

Archer, a Congo, to Samuel Virgin, SV heart on top, on both shoulders, both breasts, both
cheeks, forehead &c. &c.

Runaway slave notice for the man Archer in Jamaica’s Cornwall Chronicle Extraordinary, August 19, 1791. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Had the man Archer been branded as punishment each time he ran away, till his skin stammered with his “master’s” frustration? Did Samuel Virgin magically think that to cover a slave with initials was equivalent to loading him with chains? That he couldn’t possibly flee again?

S♥V

Today, cut loose from slavery’s roots, Samuel Virgin’s brand might be mistaken for the bottom half of a romance scrawled on a bathroom wall. After spending hours reading through slave brands in the American Antiquarian Society’s Caribbean Newspaper Collection, I began sighting slaveholders’ initials everywhere: carved into trees, scratched onto benches, embedded in text messages, license plates, and bumper stickers—even in letters from a lovesick niece, dotting her I’s with hearts. They became a kind of pox erupting on the alphabet’s face:

RecoGnizI♥Ng Slave branDs E♥MbedDEd I♥N T♦exT♦ I4S tO SeT♦ THe lanGuaGe SuPPuRatI♥Ng.

What did they experience onboard the Brigantine Sarah, the unnamed woman mark^d Y and her companions, dressed as though they weren’t leaving Barbados? Locked in an almanac somewhere, or in a ship’s lost log, is an answer to weather. As the group moved deeper into north, did they wake up to frost stiffening their “deficient/insufficient clothing”? Work to keep their (bare?) footing on an icy deck? Or was weather more subtle? Did the air dry out as the temperature slowly dropped? Or did wind whip the temperature into a plunge? As the woman’s companions sickened, did they fall into delirium, try and slip overboard, escape into a woods they could smell long before land was sighted? Or was that scent (balsam?) just one more unknown to dread?

Today, what may have been that little group’s first experience of Maine is a pine forest stuffed in little pillows, marketed to tourists, destined for underwear drawers. Four-by-four inches of fragrance leaking from blueberry-patterned cloth. At this point in my knowledge, upon entering any Maine gift shop, closing my eyes and lifting one of those pillows to my nose, I should detect the slave ship floating at its heart. But all my mind registers is vacation or Christmas. How to make the brain override nostalgia? Recognize that even the holiday’s tainted? That, according to the Barbados Mercury, July 5-9, Christmas is a man fleeing his master in 1788.

One of my only clues to what might have greeted the unnamed woman mark^d Y in 1719 comes from a letter written in 1754. That year, Pepperrell’s son-in-law, Nathaniel Sparhawk, sends six enslaved women by ship from Boston to his Kittery home. (Don’t bother looking for the scene of that crime: In the 1900s, the owners of Sparhawk Hall began to dismantle the house around themselves. Room after room sold off for its fabulous paneling. In the sixties, Portsmouth’s Strawbery Banke Museum bought the colonial mansion, gave it one final gutting, then burned its shell.) Like the unnamed woman, the six women Sparhawk enslaved were also to be sold. In his November 29 letter, Sparhawk anxiously directs his business associate that:

” … they must have Cloaths & shoes sufficient, & more shirts & shifts … see they have a good fire & good room & an old Sail to lay upon & the Ruggs to cover them … Be sure they don’t suffer, for w^ch end see them 2 or 3 times a day … pray see they have good care taken of them, & let me know they are well … “

At the Pepperrell home (that house still stands), did this same anxious attention greet the unnamed woman as she stepped (was carried?) off the ship? Was she shocked at the care likely lavished on her physical well-being? Warm and dry for the first time in weeks, sufficiently dressed, fed, doctored, and allowed to sleep. Or did she recognize concern for what it was: father and son merchants attempting to mend a piece of damaged merchandise?

In Sparhawk’s case, his “investments” were already healthy. He just hoped to save money on feeding the women until he could sell them off: “I Hope you will be able to get some Body to take them for their Victualls w^ch I shall like much … “

Be sure they don’t suffer, for w^ch end see them 2 or 3 times a day … pray see they have good care taken of them. When New England slavery is broached in nineteenth- and twentieth-century local histories, it’s often lauded as short-lived and benign. But in Sparhawk’s exhortation, there’s also admission: Threat of mistreatment and injury were constants in the lives of the enslaved.

But for the unnamed woman branded Y finding herself another voyage, another climate, another continent away from home—when it came to care (and even with the possible care of other enslaved people that the Pepperrells always seemed to be holding in bondage) was it all too little, too late, for all the wrong reasons?

“They believe in a Resurrection, and that they shall go into their own Country again, and have their youth renewed,” wrote Richard Ligon, speaking of the enslaved people he moved among in 1640s Barbados. What did the woman branded Y, whose name is lost to us, believe? What did her companions believe? One way or another, soul makes its escape. But where are the bodies to mourn? Where are the graves to mark? Whether I want to or not, I keep returning to the archive, hoping it will give up an answer (especially to the question of five? ten?), hoping I will recognize the figurative remains. This hope travels next to the Rhode Island Historical Society: an archive recovering from water damage in a state steeped in its own active role in the Middle Passage.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all of the archives I have so far visited in my search for the unnamed woman and her companions, but special thanks to William David Barry and Sofia Yalouris at the Maine Historical Society, Timothy Salls at the New England Historic and Genealogical Society, and Carolyn Marvin at the Portsmouth Athenaeum for their assistance. My gratitude as well to Stefanie Kennedy, PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, for her kindnesses as I was searching out Barbadian runaway slave notices. Her dissertation explores the intersections between slavery and disability in the British Atlantic World. And, finally, thank you Dave Petee for lending me the volume of Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade that set the larger “Mark^d Y” search and manuscript in motion.

Parsons, Usher,
Life of Sir William Pepperrell, bart: the only native of New England who was created abaronet during our connection with the mother country (1856), pg. 28

On one occasion Benjamin Bullard, a merchant of Antigua, shipped to Kittery Point five negroes, consigned to the firm of Pepperrells. He received the following answer, dated June 25, 1719:

Sir,—I received yours by Captain Morris, with bills of lading for five negroes and one hogshead of rum. One negro woman, marked Y on the left breast, died in about three weeks after her arrival, in spite of medical aid which I procured. All the rest died at sea. I am sorry for your loss. It may have resulted fromdeficient clothing so early in the spring.

Colby, Fred M.,
“The First American Baronet,” Potter’s American Weekly (Vols. 16-17, 1881), pg. 235

He [Pepperrell] also dealt to some extent in slaves, thus laying the foundation in New England of that system which has proved such a bane to the South. In one of his letters—a large number of which have been preserved—he refers to the traffic in such a way as to show the purely mercantile way in which he regarded it:

SIR : I received yours by Captain Morris, with bills of lading for ten negroes and twenty hogsheads of rum. One negro woman, marked Y on the left breast, died in about three weeks after her arrival, in spite of medical aid, which I procured. Two of the others died at sea. I am sorry for your loss. It may have resulted from insufficient clothing so early in the spring.

Weather had a name                               Sandy
the night had a name          Monday, October 29, 2012
in a pool of light,
a borrowed book. had a name    Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America

… MORE TO CONVERT… INCOMPLETE

X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

This public interest in understanding and uncovering the origins, behavior and capacities of the natural environment was hardly surprising. “And why not?” wrote clergyman and entomologist Henry McCook in 1889. “The study of natural science…knows no caste.” Nature, after all, was inseparably entwined with the daily existence of most people, and its study provided many of them with a tremendous source of pleasure. “The only truly happy men I have ever known were naturalists,” mused Dr. Robert James Farquharson to fellow members of the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences in 1883.

Though the boundaries between amateur and authority, between naturalist and scientist, remained relatively permeable until the twentieth century, science gradually solidified into a professional pursuit in the nineteenth. And as natural history gave way to biology and Ph.Ds became prerequisites for research positions, naturalists struggled to understand their increasingly uncertain status. By the end of the 1890s, specialized training, elaborate infrastructure, and new methodologies cordoned off many topics from even the most diligent amateurs. Yet a number of amateur naturalists still maintained that anyone—even an itinerant miner in Colorado like Edwin Carter—could make important contributions to the larger body of scientific knowledge through collection and observation.

Professional field scientists hesitated to discourage this kind of thought. Well into the twentieth century, far-flung networks of amateur naturalists with deep knowledge of particular places and habitats were extraordinarily important to the production of scientific knowledge. Many professional scientists acknowledged—some readily, some reluctantly—the enormous overlap between their own interests and practices and those of accomplished amateurs like Carter. And most scientists hoped to fan, not dim, the enthusiasm of young naturalists like sixteen-year-old William Beebe, who confided to his journal that “to be a Naturalist is better than to be a King.”

“Agreeable and Instructive Recreation”

Of all the ways of relating to the natural world, collecting was one of the most popular in the late nineteenth-century United States. Collecting afforded “those whose tastes run in that direction a very agreeable and instructiverecreation, and the means of employing pleasantly and profitably hours of enforced idleness which might otherwise be passed in far more harmful ways,” explained Smithsonian ornithologist Robert Ridgway in 1887. Locating desired objects provided considerable entertainment, and once collected, those objects could be studied and swapped.

Collectors found handling the specimens they had amassed to be an intensely pleasurable emotional and physical experience. Ornithologist Frank Chapman, for instance, described the sensation as exhilarating, and admitted to longing for the pleasures of proximity. “Only the bird in the hand will satisfy that desire for intimate, exact knowledge” of the specimen, he wrote in his autobiography, a desire “which obsess[es] the naturalist.” His own “intimate and constant association with specimens” was “an endless source of pleasure and information,” he recalled, “tinged with the romance of exploration.”

Fig. 4. Though ornithological collecting was limited almost exclusively to men in the nineteenth century, bird-watching was a popular recreation for both genders. Frontispiece from How We Went Birds'-Nesting: Field, Wood and Meadow Rambles, by Amanda Bartlett Harris. Illustrations by G. F. Barnes (Boston: D. Lothrop & Company, 1880.) Cairns Collection of American Women Writers. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. — Fig. 4. Though ornithological collecting was limited almost exclusively to men in the nineteenth century, bird-watching was a popular recreation for both genders. Frontispiece from How We Went Birds’-Nesting: Field, Wood and Meadow Rambles, by Amanda Bartlett Harris. Illustrations by G. F. Barnes (Boston: D. Lothrop & Company, 1880.) Cairns Collection of American Women Writers. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Best of all, collectors could use objects as springboards for stories, telling tales about how they had obtained particular specimens through adventurous travel or trade, serendipity or scientific discovery. “To spend a night with him,” Chapman wrote of a naturalist friend whose interests had taken him to South America, “was almost like a journey to the Amazon. Swinging in a Brazilian hammock with a skin of the Hyacinthine Macaw in my hands, listening to [his] thrilling account of how he had shot this rare bird, the pages of Bates and Wallace acquired a more vivid meaning, and here was firmly planted in my mind a desire to visit the tropics.”

Collecting was not only personally gratifying, but was also critical to the professional study of science in these decades. Collections of natural specimens had ballooned in the eighteenth century thanks to the influence of Linnaeus, and swelled again in the mid-nineteenth century, as professional and amateur scientists began to map out the distribution and variation of species in order to trace the physical paths of evolutionary change. Diligent amateur collectors had an excellent chance to expand scientific knowledge, by adding to existing information on the demographics, behaviors, and habitats of existing species or by sending to professional scientists specimens still in need of official “discovery” and scientific nomenclature. Well into the twentieth century, scientists at the Smithsonian and other museums depended at least in part on enthusiastic amateurs to send them the data and specimens they needed for their research. Carter himself donated four ptarmigan eggs to Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1879.

Whether inspired by pleasure or scientific ambition, the impulse to collect bits of nature proved as widespread in the United States as the impulse to study it, and the activity proved similarly democratic. Anyone with access to the out-of-doors could build a collection. In 1875, for instance, a struggling Pennsylvania farmer named Theodore Day, who “never had the means to get what I wanted [and] work[ed] hard for a living,” described to his Smithsonian correspondents his “native insects + 150 specimens” as well as the stones and minerals that he had collected in seven states, though he lacked the cases in which to store them. Day also confided that he yearned to “travel some and collect mineral[s], stone, flowers, etc…butterflies, beetles, etc.”

People who identified themselves as serious naturalists—amateur or professional—often collected on a much larger scale. Though not especially prosperous, Alfred Webster Anthony, a western mining engineer and avocational naturalist, amassed a collection of 10,000 birds over the 1870s and 1880s. Ferdinand Heinrich Hermann Strecker, a Pennsylvania tombstone carver, accumulated some 50,000 butterflies through travel, trading, and purchase. Despite his ailing health and eventual death at the age of 26, young Duncan Putnam, grandson of the second governor of Illinois, gathered 25,000 insect specimens, representing 8,000 different species.

Collecting had been a habit in the antebellum era, but it became a national addiction in the decades after the Civil War, one enabled by easier travel, more leisure time, and the development of a social and economic culture of collecting. Natural history societies and specimen clearing house catalogues offered specimens for trade or sale throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Ward’s Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York, was the most prominent of the lot, but Charles K. Reed of Worcester, Walter F. Webb’s Natural Science Establishment, the Black Hills Natural History Establishment, and a number of other specimen dealers also advertised in science periodicals until the end of the nineteenth century.

The widespread popularity of collecting allowed nature enthusiasts a way to make a living—or at least pocket money—while indulging in their personal passions. Farmers’ sons and other young naturalists sold to neighbors or local merchants whatever they had captured, collected, shot, skinned or stuffed. Sufficiently high demand for specimens also financed voyages to distant lands, for young men easily sold what they had accumulated abroad, paid back their investors with the proceeds, and made a healthy profit to boot.

Edwin Carter found such joy in collecting that he too structured his life and work around it. The prospecting and tanning that filled his summers played second fiddle to the wintertime pleasures of tramping through the woods, observing, tracking, and taking game. Accompanied by a burro and his dog, Bismark, who pulled a small sled with food and supplies, the tall, thin miner roamed the hills in snowshoes, watching the small movements of the birds in trees and the way the snow dropped from the branches when brushed by scurrying animals. Carter could scan the horizon for hours, looking for any sudden motion in the trees or grass. Once he located an animal or bird, he watched even more closely. Each spring, for weeks on end, he would take his field glasses and lie in the sage studying the strutting of sage-grouse on parade, to memorize their movements.

As residency allowed certain benefits of long-term observation, a rural locale could be a real advantage for a collector, allowing even the most isolated hinterland naturalists to change scientific understandings of the geographical distribution of organisms. “Results of importance may be derived from the labors of isolated individuals who have no other assistance than books,” wrote Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry in 1871, and, indeed, serious amateurs living in the nation’s emptiest regions collected, identified and observed thousands of new species during the nineteenth century.

Carter himself doggedly accumulated vast quantities of the same species in order to compare specimens’ dimensions, shape and color, to track demographic and ecological trends, and to explore theories of natural selection on a very small scale. While the uninitiated saw the area’s animal life as static, Carter perceived the changes wrought by season, migration, disaster, or human presence. To understand how ptarmigans’ plumage changed from season to season, he shot one every day for a full year. He observed that the antlers of deer found in regions where the mine tailings formed acidic dunes were more likely to be misshapen.

Fig. 7. "The Carter Museum in Breckenridge, Colorado," photoprint mounted on matboard (14 x 22 cm), c. 1890s. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, X-917, Denver Public Library. — Fig. 7. “The Carter Museum in Breckenridge, Colorado,” photoprint mounted on matboard (14 x 22 cm), c. 1890s. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, X-917, Denver Public Library.

He quietly told neighbors of his intention to compile a complete record of Colorado wildlife in 1870, and by the 1880s, he gave himself over to this ambition entirely. He collected almost full time, supporting himself by selling mounted ptarmigans and fur rugs to locals and tourists. By the 1890s, he had lost track of how many specimens he had in his home. “I hear of no other collection that excells it except perhaps the Smithsonian,” he wrote his brother in 1890. “My aim will be to make it the best in the world.”

His commitment to cataloguing his specimens was just as ambitious. A few well-used textbooks and pamphlets on taxidermy and natural history and his own experience allowed him to identify, by scientific name, the birds and mammals in his brace. He was meticulous in his record-keeping. Once Carter’s sacks of identification slips had been tidied into a specimen catalogue by Colorado ornithologist Robert Rockwell (an effort made easier by Rockwell’s mother, who ironed every wrinkled paper strip so that they might be readable), naturalists realized the collection was the single most authoritative reference on the state’s wildlife that yet existed. One of the nation’s leading ornithological journals, the Condor, eventually credited the shy miner with collecting a handful of new species.

Fig. 8. "Interior View, Carter's Museum, Breckenridge, Colorado," photograph. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, X-914, Denver Public Library. — Fig. 8. “Interior View, Carter’s Museum, Breckenridge, Colorado,” photograph. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, X-914, Denver Public Library.

Carter’s determination to comply with the highest scientific standards was as notable as the scale of his collection, and reports of his loving commitment to scientific precision attracted the public’s interest as much as the contents of his cabin did. Though Carter was “a man of practical, rather than theoretical information,” explained one local writer, compiling and cataloguing his collection had transformed the former miner into a “zoological student” with considerable expertise. Coloradans eagerly claimed Carter as an indigenous scientific savant; those unsettled by science’s professionalization and specialization cited Carter as living proof that a naturalist could continue to stand, if not with, at least alongside, professional scientists.

“Mutual Scientific Interest”

Rightfully proud of his collection, Carter began to guide visitors through his home in the 1880s. The rough-hewn building stood several feet taller than most of the other structures in town in order to accommodate its spectacular contents. All the way up to the rafters, twelve feet above the floor, Carter hung more than 200 heads of elk and deer, buffalo and bighorn. Visitors brushed past thousands of specimens, including at least six full-standing buffalo mounts, forty grizzlies of all ages and color, numerous mountain lions, birds, eggs and nests of every shape and sort, even small mammals, all the way down to a tiny weasel suckling its young. Reporters enthused over Carter’s “splendid full-grown mountings of elk and deer, with branching antlers, so life-like in form that the visitor almost expects to see them bound away on his approach.” Limp and heavy bison, bear, and wolf skins banked the corners, claws and teeth indicating how powerful they had once been.

Carter’s displays were decidedly vernacular, an amalgam of personal taste, scientific principle, and showman’s flair. He made a point of exhibiting every range of color and size within a species, and, guided by scientific impulse, helpfully included deformities and freaks, “to show the departures from the true type,” explained one guidebook. He had a sense of humor as well, and scattered a few oddities among his specimens to prove it. This personal touch succeeded—his guests seemed to find the bear that appeared to be swigging whiskey from a jug quite amusing.

Fig. 9. Though Carter catalogued his specimens along scientific lines, their display was dictated largely by caprice and personal taste, as one of his bird cabinets makes plain. "Bird display in the Carter Museum," photograph. All rights reserved, Image Archives, Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver, Colorado. — Fig. 9. Though Carter catalogued his specimens along scientific lines, their display was dictated largely by caprice and personal taste, as one of his bird cabinets makes plain. “Bird display in the Carter Museum,” photograph. All rights reserved, Image Archives, Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver, Colorado.

He never charged admission, asking only appreciation for the animals he had assembled in the cabin’s dark confines. In diaries and letters, Coloradans and tourists confided that they were touched by Carter’s absorption in his collection. The press marveled at his encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world and his unwavering aim to build a complete collection of Colorado fauna. Visitors and reporters alike began to refer to the bearded naturalist as “Professor Carter,” an affectionate expression of respect for his deep knowledge of Colorado wildlife.

Both he and his visitors called the cabin a museum, a word still elastic enough to refer to a space of any size filled with objects intended for study. By the 1880s, the Carter Museum had become a tourist attraction, and Carter regularly led Denverites on day trips and Easterners come west for dry air and cooler climates through his home. State boosters lauded the collection, declaring it a local treasure. Guidebooks and local newspapers urged travelers to see it, declaring it worth a trip on the scenic route of the Denver, South Park, and Pacific. Colorado’s governor and Denver’s mayor made a special visit in 1892.

Though Carter’s museum was exceptional in its scale and public popularity, small private museums were not at all unusual in this period. Many Americans proudly curated and displayed personal collections of natural specimens to friends or curious visitors. Enthusiastic amateur naturalists placed stuffed birds and animals on mantelpieces, bookshelves or barn rafters. Hunters invited remarks on their prowess by mounting and hanging their kills in their studies. Genteel matrons placed geodes, bird eggs, conches, and pressed plants in glass-fronted whatnots specially made for the purpose of assembling parlor museums.

Fig. 10. This natty visitor to the Carter Museum poses with one of the naturalist's more dynamically posed mounts. On the back wall, Carter has created a theatrical tableau, arranging animals in front of a mountain landscape, complete with a crescent moon dangling from the ceiling. Photograph courtesy of History Colorado, Buckwalter Collection, Scan #20031518, Stephen H. Hart Library, Denver, Colorado. — Fig. 10. This natty visitor to the Carter Museum poses with one of the naturalist’s more dynamically posed mounts. On the back wall, Carter has created a theatrical tableau, arranging animals in front of a mountain landscape, complete with a crescent moon dangling from the ceiling. Photograph courtesy of History Colorado, Buckwalter Collection, Scan #20031518, Stephen H. Hart Library, Denver, Colorado.

Like collecting, organizing and displaying natural history specimens were wonderfully social pursuits, and provided regular sources of companionship for many Americans. “Among the strongest ties that bind men together is that of mutual scientific interest,” wrote Iowan naturalist W.H. Barris, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s, like-minded folks gathered in fields, farmhouses, and front rooms to contemplate and discuss the intriguing detritus of the natural world. This mutual interest resulted in the development of a collegial, if competitive, network of collectors, and in the foundation of hundreds of small scientific associations in the 1870s and 1880s. Membership rolls in these societies swelled with the growth of towns and cities and the rapid settlement of Western territories. Collectors—both those people actually recovering objects, and those people amassing, categorizing, and displaying them—felt engaged in the pursuit of universal knowledge, and shared common cause amidst the social upheaval resulting from the development of new communities.

The constellation of American scientific societies stretched from Atlantic to Pacific in the late nineteenth century. From 1860 to 1900, Americans established more than 64 scientific societies per decade. Though naturalists maintained 36 active scientific societies in the United States in 1865, by 1878, at least 141 local and state societies studied natural history in one form or another. By 1884, more than 200 societies had officially devoted themselves to the investigation of science and nature.

Scientific societies tried to ensure the larger public could also experience, even vicariously, the joys and travails of discovery, encouraging citizens to come see their collections and attend related lectures about the gathering of these specimens. The California Academy of Sciences, the Brooklyn Institute, and dozens of other scientific societies made their full collections available to both the studious and the curious in the 1870s and 1880s, lining their walls with specimen-stuffed display cases and drawers. “A large collection has the effect of attracting great attention, and the wandering thousands who are drawn by its exhibition to visit it daily or weekly, enjoy an innocent pleasure that is well worth providing,” observed one member of the Boston Society of Natural History.

Fig. 11. The date of this newspaper cartoon betrays the city's eagerness to acquire Carter's collection. The image was published in 1897, two years before the old man agreed to transfer the contents of his museum to Denver's own. "Denver To Have the Carter Collection," Denver Republican, 1897. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, DPL X-11395, Denver Public Library. — Fig. 11. The date of this newspaper cartoon betrays the city’s eagerness to acquire Carter’s collection. The image was published in 1897, two years before the old man agreed to transfer the contents of his museum to Denver’s own. “Denver To Have the Carter Collection,” Denver Republican, 1897. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, DPL X-11395, Denver Public Library.

These societies compiled natural history collections for purposes of regional development as much as for purposes of individual satisfaction and reassurance. Though their members hoped to contribute to broader scientific knowledge by collecting, societies also compiled large collections in faith that their studies of the natural world would eventually contribute to the economic prosperity of their respective regions. “While it is doubtless true that to the earnest student of science the discovery of new truths is its own sufficient reward,” Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences member Charles Putnam wrote in 1886, “still, it is fitting that we should give appropriate consideration to the economic values of these science studies.”

The study and display of such collections also promoted local and regional identity. Americans had a long tradition of collecting and studying the natural phenomena of their particular localities, writing descriptive, sometimes defensive, histories of place. These histories and the collections of regional geology, flora, and fauna that followed them helped to create unique identities for the smallest rural hamlets. This was particularly true in the the American West, a region extensively surveyed but only recently settled. The study and display of local specimens guaranteed that towns like Breckenridge and Denver, too new and raw to have a well-respected record of human accomplishment, could claim a significant natural history. Such communities rarely hesitated to parlay the stories of their environmental pasts into narratives grander than those possessed by their urban Eastern counterparts.

Fig. 12. "What the Animals Said as They Were Wheeled up Sixteenth Street," The Denver Evening Post, Wednesday, June 13, 1900, p. 4. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, Denver Public Library. — Fig. 12. “What the Animals Said as They Were Wheeled up Sixteenth Street,” The Denver Evening Post, Wednesday, June 13, 1900, p. 4. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, Denver Public Library.

“The Invaluable Collection of Professor Carter”

The efflorescence of public interest in the natural world in the 1870s and 1880s, combined with a widespread conviction that the study of natural specimens benefited society as a whole, also resulted in the creation of new public museums devoted to the preservation, study, and display of natural history. Loose local coalitions of amateur naturalists, philanthropists, politicians, and civic boosters joined forces to found such institutions or, at the very least, make scientific societies’ displays more welcoming to a broad public.

Public museums required objects and buildings, and passionate naturalists played on the aspirations of politicians and philanthropists to gain funding for both. In New York City, young naturalist Albert Bickmore persuaded the city’s wealthiest to found the American Museum of Natural History by expounding on the grandeur and economic importance of the natural history museums of Berlin, London, and Boston. Pricked by insecurity, department store magnate A.T. Stewart, lawyer Joseph Choate and banker J.P. Morgan hastily assembled a board of trustees, snapped up several magnificent collections from around the world, and commissioned an ambitious building to house them. Boosters in second- and third-tier cities were equally susceptible to this kind of prodding. To overcome their cities’ well-deserved reputations as muddy backwaters, local politicians and museum patrons commissioned fireproof brick museums.

Regardless of the size of the museum or the surrounding city, curators relied on collections of amateurs. In smaller, newer places, local collectors frequently agreed to stock museums’ shelves for free, wanting only the small public glory—and storage space—these squat new buildings provided. But even museums in the nation’s largest cities readily accepted the precious finds of children and the donations of local hobbyists, and curators courted the larger collections accumulated by more serious naturalists. Strecker’s collection served as the nucleus for the Field Museum’s Lepidoptera collection, for instance, and still makes up a quarter of its holdings; Webster eventually donated most of his collection to the Carnegie Museum, though portions of it also wound up at the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, and the San Diego Society of Natural History.

In Denver, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, both amateur naturalists and civic leaders aggressively advocated for the establishment of a natural history museum and the purchase of Carter’s collection as its foundation. The city already possessed a fine opera house, a grand hotel, and a train station with an impressive stone clock tower. Dozens of mansions crowned Capitol Hill and ringed the city’s verdant cemeteries. A natural history museum would be an obvious addition to these accomplishments, affirming the city’s position as a regional capital and proclaiming the progressive nature of its citizenry. Such a museum would not only benefit local researchers and residents with an interest in nature, it would put Denver on the national map. Americans would know that Colorado was no barren wasteland, but a place both refined and democratic enough to provide excellent public museum for its residents. The museum would also, trustees hoped, eventually become a center for information about the area’s considerable mineral resources and raise investors’ interest in the region.

Fig. 13. "Museum of Natural History, City Park, Denver," photoprint by Louis Charles McClure (19 x 24 cm), between 1908-1919. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, MCC-1935, Denver Public Library. — Fig. 13. “Museum of Natural History, City Park, Denver,” photoprint by Louis Charles McClure (19 x 24 cm), between 1908-1919. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, MCC-1935, Denver Public Library.

As Carter’s collection lay less than a hundred miles away, its purchase seemed an obvious step to the city’s boosters. Not only was it enormous, it was well known, and promised to attract national attention and funds to the future museum. After visiting Carter’s cabin in 1898, Connecticut railroad magnate J. Kennedy Tod was so inspired by the old man’s life work that he promised a thousand dollars to help the city secure what Tod described as “the valuable—nay, invaluable—Colorado fauna collection of Professor Carter.”

When Carter finally agreed to sell his specimens in 1899 for the considerable sum of $10,000—about $270,000 in today’s money—the conditions he set made it clear how deeply he cared about preserving and sharing his collection. He would give over his animals only if the city would erect a fireproof building with sufficient display space, and if he could maintain the collection as a salaried curator for the rest of his life. As snow turned the mountain roads quiet, all parties relaxed into agreement. It seemed as if Denver would have its museum and Carter would have his indoor job.

Then the elderly naturalist fell ill. His illness came as no surprise. To prevent specimens from rotting, nineteenth-century taxidermists routinely coated specimens with a pasty mixture of arsenic and soap, and poisoning was an accepted occupational hazard. Carter, who regularly polished the feathers and hides of his mounts with the preservative and slept each night among their toxic bodies, had survived previous bouts of arsenic poisoning. In 1892, he nearly died after rubbing two pounds of arsenic into a buffalo bull that he had acquired for $500—a mount he later described as his masterpiece. But this time, Carter was frailer and the poisoning more serious. The arsenic, a friend informed the city’s museum committee in November, “is now doing its deadly work with him and I am fearful his demise is near.” In December, Carter traveled to Galveston, Texas, hoping the lower altitude would improve his health. It did not.

Fig. 14. Though Carter's own museum featured a tableau of mountain goats, most of his specimens could never have made it into this group even if they had survived the moth damage. Where Carter has stuffed his mounts with straw and wire, then propped them upon wooden boards, by the 1900s, taxidermists for the Colorado Museum draped specimen skins over plaster musculature, posing the mounts to demonstrate behaviors typical of the species, as made evident by the contortions of the center goat scratching behind his ear. "Interior View of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, Denver," glass photonegative by Louis Charles McLure (21 x 26 cm), between 1901 and 1910. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, MCC-1084, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado. — Fig. 14. Though Carter’s own museum featured a tableau of mountain goats, most of his specimens could never have made it into this group even if they had survived the moth damage. Where Carter has stuffed his mounts with straw and wire, then propped them upon wooden boards, by the 1900s, taxidermists for the Colorado Museum draped specimen skins over plaster musculature, posing the mounts to demonstrate behaviors typical of the species, as made evident by the contortions of the center goat scratching behind his ear. “Interior View of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, Denver,” glass photonegative by Louis Charles McLure (21 x 26 cm), between 1901 and 1910. Courtesy of the Western History Collection, MCC-1084, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado.

In early February of 1900, he died of apoplexy induced by poisoning. At the behest of his fellow Masons, his remains were shipped back to Colorado and laid out in the still-unfinished State Capitol Building. Though the practice of laying in state in the Capitol was far more common a century ago than it is today, such grand surroundings were an honor, certainly, a tribute to Carter’s contributions to the young state’s future natural history museum.

Yet Carter’s inconvenient death threatened to upend the plans for the museum. No contract had been signed, no checks written or deposited. Worse yet, Carter left no will. The city’s panicked museum committee, stacked with merchant-kings, mine owners, and local politicians, sent its secretary, United States Senator E.W. Merritt, to Breckenridge to pay some very rapid respects, then take the collection back to Denver before relatives contested Carter’s verbal agreement or Denver’s right to his collection.

When the senator arrived in Breckenridge, he didn’t bother with the funeral but instead rolled up his sleeves and began dragging specimens toward the boxcars waiting on the rails of the Colorado & Southern. “It would have looked a little more decent to have deferred the action for at least 48 hours after the burial of the man,” a disapproving Breckenridge newspaper later wrote. Word soon reached the county judge, home sick in bed, and he stopped Merritt’s team from moving the collection to Denver by issuing papers naming a local banker its temporary custodian. After five months of negotiation, Carter’s relatives, estate administrators and the museum committee settled the affair. The city and its not-yet-built museum would receive the corpses of more than 3,300 animals, some mounted, some still waiting for Carter’s arsenic and straw.

Denverites strolling downtown on June 13 that year encountered a peculiar sight. A mile-long parade of wild animals on platform wagons wound uphill from Union Station to the domed, white State Capitol building. A big buffalo and a mountain lion led the procession, “joggling stiffly with the motion of the vehicle,” as one reporter noted. Coyotes, panthers, bears, badgers, elk, deer, mountain sheep, antelope—”all afflicted with the same queer, conscious catalepsy”—followed, jolting as they moved past the hanging cigar signs and the six-story Tabor Grand Opera House. The wagons turned off Broadway, onto Colfax Avenue, before depositing the glassy-eyed stuffed zoo at the doors of the brand-new state capitol building. Then the wagons unceremoniously dumped the Carter collection in the capitol’s basement, to await the completion of the city’s museum building.

Sadly, by the first September of the new century, the Carter collection, dumped in the Capitol building’s basement, had disintegrated into a moth-eaten heap of hides, heads and horns. Denver residents doubted such items could be used to “encourage and aid the study of Natural Science,” despite the promises of the museum’s charter. Nationally respected naturalists and taxidermists, asked to inspect the collection, admitted skepticism about its possible rehabilitation for display or research purposes. Salvaging even part of the collection would require “the personal supervision of some up-to-date naturalist who is also skilled in the art of taxidermy,” trustee Frederick A. Williams wrote. Even then, he added, “it will take a number of years to put the collection in good shape.”

This report did not faze the museum’s trustees. Many of them had, through will and work, scratched their way up from poverty into enormous wealth, and they brought the same hard determination to their civic duties. Composed of passionate collectors, hunters, naturalists, city boosters, and many who fell into all of these camps, the museum’s trustees remained committed to building a center of scientific research and education. Some trustees donated their own valuable collections of minerals or mammals. Others promised to give more money, and pressed their friends and business partners to do the same. Trustee John Mason, a department store magnate and devoted amateur butterfly collector, magnanimously agreed to oversee the development of the museum’s collections in his spare time. Mason had a vague but ambitious plan for his tenure—his list included rehabilitating Carter’s collection, expanding the museum’s mineral holdings and acquiring some of the large mammals rapidly disappearing from other states in the American West and Alaska.

The task proved more difficult than he had anticipated, and Mason became overwhelmed by the “onerous duties that are inseperable from the position.” To complete and arrange the Colorado Museum’s haphazard natural history collections so they would be useful to both researchers and lay public, board members concluded, they needed to hire a full-time director with professional experience in scientific collecting and museum work instead of an enthusiastic amateur naturalist.

Had Carter survived, he himself would have failed to meet the emerging qualifications to direct or even hold a curatorship in a good natural history museum. He would likely have been treated as a historical curiosity, rather than as an expert with valuable knowledge of the fauna and ecosystems of the Colorado Rockies. Or perhaps not. After all, his catalogue remained valuable for researchers interested in the region well into the 1920s, and field scientists and museum curators continued to rely upon diligent amateurs for decades after Carter’s death. The first generation of curators and administrators in Denver were no snobs, but they were eager to build an institution that met the museum world’s emerging professional standards. It was unclear what role people like Carter should play in the increasingly striated, specialized worlds of science and museum work.

Carter himself became a Colorado legend for reasons that had little to do with his actual contributions to zoology or even to the establishment of the Colorado Museum. He became an icon of a time past or perhaps one simply imagined, one where even a bearded miner living in the wilderness could add to scientific knowledge through a Victorian combination of determination, self-discipline, and love for nature. Whereas mid-nineteenth century researchers like Spencer Baird had based their research on Colorado zoology upon reports by explorers like Zebulon Pike and surveys obtained by the Pacific Railroad, by the 1870s, a handful of zoologists “journeyed thither, collected their material, and then returned to their homes in the East, there to arrange, publish, and discuss before learned bodies, their new-found knowledge,” according to ornithologist Frederick C. Lincoln. Others, “held by the primeval ‘call of the wild,’ remained to study and observe more closely the creatures they found about them,” and Carter, Lincoln maintained, was among them. Carter was no scientist, but tourists, boosters and a willing press lionized the naturalist as a person swayed by an even higher cause. They gladly trumpeted his work as a profound and glorious oddity, one that testified to the spirit of Colorado, or democracy, or humanity, depending upon what was needed for their story at the time.

Sadly, little of Carter’s collection actually made it into the museum’s halls. Ravaged by insects during their tenure in the Capitol Building, outpaced by new methods of taxidermy, most of his mounts no longer met professional standards for display specimens. Even if they had remained intact, they would have been deemed unsuitable as scientific or display specimens—while a bear holding a jug of whiskey might have appealed to the visitors of Carter’s own museum, the museum workers at the Colorado Museum of Natural History considered such mounts to be grotesque symbols of an amateurism they were eager to escape. Nonetheless, the few specimens that made it into the museum served as reminders of the strong national tradition of amateur naturalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite the sad fate of Carter’s own collection, the contributions of amateur naturalists proved as central to American museum building as the more frequently acknowledged impulses of social reform, cultural philanthropy, and civic aspiration.