Edwin Carter was an Episcopalian, a miner, and a passionate naturalist. He drifted west during the Pike’s Peak gold rush, settling down in the mining camp of Breckenridge, Colorado, where he began to hunt and stuff local game. When he died in 1900, probate examiners found more than 3,300 glassy-eyed rabbits, mountain goats, and grizzly bears patiently waiting in his one-room cabin.

At first, Carter collected randomly, indiscriminately. He dragged home bear in the morning and filled his pockets with chickadee in the afternoon. But by 1870, he began to hunt more systematically, intent on building a complete and carefully catalogued collection of Colorado fauna. Each evening, he consulted a few well-thumbed zoology textbooks, took up a stumpy lead pencil and brown wrapping paper, and scribbled down notes on the animals he had shot that day. Each animal merited a separate and individually numbered scrap of paper, which he threaded onto a loop of bailing wire. By the late 1880s, gunny sacks holding thousands of loops of these wrinkled scraps filled the corners of Carter’s cabin.

The animal bodies that banked the walls of Carter’s small abode became the foundations of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, one of the largest natural history museums west of the Mississippi. And the crumpled slips that accompanied these bodies eventually became one of the most complete records of Colorado fauna ever created. Squinting through the dim of his cabin each evening, Carter had managed to compile a scientific census so scrupulously detailed that twentieth-century biologists did not hesitate to use it in their own work.

Carter’s passion for the natural world was by no means unique. Neither was his ongoing effort to collect and meticulously examine nature’s wonders up close. Though few committed themselves to collecting with such single-mindedness, late-nineteenth-century Americans of disparate circumstances and regions shared Carter’s impulse to explore and accumulate pieces of the natural world.

Their obsessions and compilations found their way into the natural history museums that mushroomed across the United States at the end of the century. Historians have long described wealthy philanthropists and civic boosters as the engines of museum building, but credit for the establishment of natural history museums, especially those built in the American West, should be shared with men and women like Carter. City councils and industrialists funded museums’ brick facades and purchased their showiest specimens, but amateur naturalists—and the carefully tended collections they proffered—were equally important contributors to these new museums.

“Natural Science Knows No Caste”

Americans in the last few decades of the nineteenth century used the descriptor “naturalist” frequently and flexibly, indicating just how inclusive the study of nature was at that time. The label was applied to professional students of nature, who, Adam-like, named and identified animals, plants, and minerals in order to create an encyclopedic catalogue of the myriad forms of nature. But diarists, authors and journalists also used the term to describe serious butterfly collectors, international explorers, government entomologists, woodsmen with a good eye for timber, landscape painters, bird watchers, and sportsmen with deep knowledge of the places they hunted. Nearly anyone who avidly pursued the study of the natural world, past or present, indoors or out, could be described as a naturalist.

By their own broad standards, most nineteenth-century Americans could describe themselves as naturalists in one way or another. They had to be, given how close they lived to the land. In the 1870s and 1880s, city could not be distinguished as easily from country as it could half a century later, for as writer John Burroughs exulted, “nature, wild and unkempt, comes to its very threshold, and even in many places crosses it.” Even in the nation’s most populous cities, tracts of wilderness, farmland, and densely settled neighborhoods still nestled against one another—Brooklyn, the third largest municipality in the nation, lay just to the southwest of a large primeval forest and was still considered the vegetable capital of the United States. Weather, weeds, and pests had little respect for doors, windows and walls. Across the night skies, both citydwellers and the loneliest homesteaders could see thousands of stars. Animals—sources of transportation, food, labor and clothing—crawled, crept, flapped and plodded through crowded streets and open plains.

Work required Americans to keep a close eye on the natural world, for most still wrung a living from understanding and manipulating nature. Settlers and farmers kept painstaking records of planting and harvesting dates, crop yields or sightings of predatory animals, and the practice of daily observation inevitably provided them with insights into natural processes and phenomena, and transformed a great many into amateur naturalists. Those extracting natural resources for industrial purposes were no less attuned to the natural world. Their work often required climbing directly into or onto nature, mining or cutting or picking or bending it into some serviceable form they could sell. And the work of the household also demanded knowledge of climate, flora and fauna, for well into the 1890s, most Americans still grew, gathered and ground bits of nature into medicines, fuel, foodstuffs, and decoration.

Late-nineteenth-century Americans turned to nature for recreation too, for it provided a universally accessible form of entertainment. Seasons provided ice to skate on, fruit to pick, and flowers to gather. Swimming usually involved mud, tadpoles, fish, or leeches. In their leisure time, Americans explored the outdoors in all kind of ways, and often brought their booty home for closer examination or as incontrovertible proof of their exploits. Children petted unclaimed dogs, touched dead birds, and adopted wild animals as pets. Parents rarely blinked when their progeny came home with pockets full of agates, birds’ nests, and trembling mice, though they did expect boys and girls to restrict themselves to different provinces of the natural world. Middle-class parents encouraged their daughters to “botanize” and paint local plant life, while fathers of all means gave teenage sons rifles to bring down game for sport, bounty, or table.

Though most Americans learned about the natural world through immediate experience, they also pursued more information about it in more formal fashion. They listened intently as Chautauqua group leaders and lantern-slide lecturers discussed the natural world from a scientific perspective. They leafed through popular magazines and scientific journals, illustrated almanacs and “nature novels,” to understand more about the bounty tenderly laid out on porches or parlor tables. Though science was poorly—and infrequently—taught in schools, scientists and educational reformers pushed for better instruction on the topic; by the end of the century, high school students pored over zoology, botany, physiology, and anatomy textbooks, while their younger brothers and sisters collected plants and animals for nature study classes.

I had seen it—my bunk—on the training day in late April 2014 at Mystic Seaport, when we visited the Charles W. Morgan as a group of eighty voyagers selected to join the 38th Voyage of this historic whaling ship. Built in 1841 and docked in Mystic, Conn., from 1941 until now, the Morgan had been extensively rebuilt for one final cruise, a journey to heighten awareness of whales and the history and culture of whaling. I would be one of nine voyagers on the New Bedford-to-Buzzards-Bay run.

Starting our tour below-decks aft, we peeked into the after cabin, with its red velvet divan, the very one on which Clara Bow frolicked in Down to the Sea in Ships (1922). Then came the captain’s stateroom, with its gimbaled bed. We edged around the narrow table where the officers ate, passed the mates’ quarters fitted up with tidy bunks and a little wall desk, and made our way through the blubber room, tilting our heads at right angles under low beams. Our guide waved to the starboard side, where three new toilets, brightly lit, stood in a row. “Those will have stalls when the voyagers arrive.” We moved forward to the fo’c’sle—all partitioned into twenty-four wooden boxes painted like the white pews in a plain New England church. “Each will have curtains, a mattress, a pillow,” said our guide. “Bring a pillowcase and bedding.” The bunks looked clean, simple, graceful, light. I tried to imagine sleeping in one.

For the next ten weeks I tried to imagine sleeping in one. A bunk seemed to my literal mind the most direct route to Melville’s kinesthetic experience on board ship. Not that he writes much about bunks—more, in fact, about hammocks. But something about those neat tidy boxes impressed on me forcefully what he must have felt for the hours he spent resting. Those bunks looked hard.

It was not at all the physical discomfort I minded, or that I imagine the young and agile Melville minded. It was sleeping in such intimate quarters with twenty-three strangers. How did Melville find the private time he craved? How would we, the voyagers, find quiet moments for reflection on this remarkable voyage? How would we behave among strangers?

But when I arrived on July 7, it was impossible to tell where the strangers were. Each bunk was enclosed with a calico curtain on a string. Crewmembers had stowed their gear underneath, and voyagers tossed theirs onto the thin brown mattresses. I hastily selected one by the doorway, near the fan. The bottom bunk would be the easiest to slip out of at night. No chance of planting a foot in some unsuspecting sleeper’s face in the dark. The pillow fitted snugly into its case, my bag lodged neatly under the bunk, and I ran up on deck for the orientation meeting.

My strategy was simple. Whereas other voyagers stayed up into the night, talking, getting to know one another, photographing the ship in the lights from the New Bedford pier, absorbing the experience in wonder, I sought solitude and expedited bedtime. At nine o’clock the fo’c’sle looked empty. Grabbing toothbrush and washcloth, I tilted my head as I traversed the blubber room, changed into T-shirt and gym shorts inside a stall, washed in the tiny sink, and slunk back to my bunk. I had my necessary items at the ready: cellphone (for a clock), glasses, flashlight, water bottle, clothes for the morning in a small pile, toiletries, writing equipment. Wake-up call at 5:45: I would be up before then and gone, looking for a quiet spot on deck where I could somehow commune with Melville’s spirit.

But how to sleep in this odd wooden box?

The first thing was to arrange myself horizontally like a cheese slice in a tea sandwich. The bunk was long enough, but I could not sit up. One side opened to the fan and blubber-room door. On the other I sensed the presence of a bunk behind the curtain. Boards loomed directly above my head. At my pillow: the end of another bunk. Someone in that bunk had already gone to bed, and as soon as my head slid onto the pillow, that person began snoring. Snoring. Snoring some more. Snoring directly into my ear and the inner chambers of my head.

I could not lower the volume. I could not switch to another channel. I could not turn on a light and read until I got sleepy. No wee dram. Nor could I nudge this person and hope that he or she might slip into quieter sleep. My only recourse was to turn around so that my feet would be at this person’s head, my head just a few feet farther from the noise.

But in the dark and confusion, I could not figure out how to turn my body around. I could not sit up, had to switch legs that suddenly seemed way too long and shift a torso that could not bend and straighten itself properly. In the end, nothing worked except to get out of the bunk, move the pillow, and lie down again, with cellphone, glasses, flashlight, bag of toiletries in a pile near my head. Success.

The snoring went on, voyagers came to bed, and I lay awake for hours. I remembered in Moby-Dick Ishmael’s comic efforts to soften his first bed at the Spouter Inn, a haphazard arrangement of boards, by planing down the knots. I thought of Melville coming in from a night watch, and I willed my breathing to slow and deepen, my body to relax, my mind to quiet. I slept.

At 2:30, I woke up and saw the time on my cellphone screen. My brain was clear as day, and I got up, remembering to tip my head as I walked through the blubber room and went to one of the stalls. Then I clambered up on deck.

It was beautiful. The wooden planks felt warm and worn under my bare feet. I smelled the hemp and tar. There were the masts, colored ivory as bone, the sails furled, white as the flax and Egyptian cotton of which they were made. There were the lights from the pier, making bright pools and deep shadows on a stage ready and waiting for actors to appear. And there in the rigging was a full moon, looking like a ghostly galleon on a blackened sea. All was quiet. For a moment, I had the ship to myself. This was what Melville had enjoyed at the masthead: “such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie.” Melville went aloft for his reveries. I had mine amidships at the mainmast, looking up into the sky at the same moon he had watched on many a night.

Back to the bunk. Would I be able to sleep? Would I hear the morning call? Would I find my clothes? Would I … ? Sleep descended.

Next I heard a pair of legs floating through the air near my head and softly landing on the boards in the dark. A pair of pants glided over them, and a fly zipped. Another pair of legs descended. In less than a whisper, brief words passed between two heads, and then a few, maybe four shadows slipped past me, out the door, up the ladder. It was five o’clock. I grabbed my clothes and toiletries, changed in the stall, brushed my teeth in the tiny sink, returned articles to my bunk, grabbed my writing equipment, and went up on deck, where crewmembers were drinking coffee, talking, getting ready for work. Great, I thought. Now I can write. Bring on the reveries.

I had a wonderful day on the Charles W. Morgan. I watched as the crew received their orders, pulled on lines, leapt into the rigging, set or furled the sails, and sent the ship winging on her course. I stood at the helm, hauled lines myself, filmed sailors at their tasks, talked with voyagers and visitors, read aloud from Melville’s poems, studied sea and sky, stared for hours into the rigging, learned about winds, currents, knots, salinity, plankton. I ate hungrily whenever offered food.

I also tried to think: What would Melville do? What was it like for him? I examined the try pots, the very ones used in 1841, and thought of how Melville describes them being scoured clean after the blubber got rendered into oil. Stealthily I fingered the tarred ropes heaped on the deck, the smooth wood of the mast, the warm sandy bricks of the ovens in which the try pots are set. Melville felt these things, I thought. Melville remembered these details because they were engraved on his skin. Melville encountered the winds and tides, opened his shirt to the sun, stretched his legs as he sprang into the rigging. Melville could have been here.

But that idea did not, in the end, seem very important. And no writing happened on my Morgan journey. No bright ideas or profound reflections on whaling history came to me. The day was a blur of smells, sights, lights, and sounds, and all I could think was that I was missing most of it. What had happened to my mind, that machine that automatically takes notes, looks things up, makes connections, hears quotations, thinks? It seemed to have been left behind in the bunk with the iPad I never got to use, the Gore-Tex rain gear that never made it out of the bag, the silk sleeping-bag liner that in the end was too confining to wear. When the day was over I was not even sure what I had seen.

Nothing settled as firmly in my mind as the experience of lying awake half the night thinking about sleep in a wooden box. Nothing seemed as palpable, as full of meaning, as hearing the sailors wake from a mysterious signal seemingly transmitted like a hum through their bodies, through the wood. Out of that dream-world, that place of darkness enclosed in the walls of my tiny bunk, came a profound sense of what it must have been like to sail on a whaling ship in 1841. Nothing above, below, and on all sides but the boards of a sturdy ship. Its wood held me, and I stopped thinking. Maybe Melville did too.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Wyn Kelley, senior lecturer in the Literature Faculty at MIT, researches Herman Melville and digital teaching tools. She is most recently author of Herman Melville: An Introduction and co-author, with Henry Jenkins, et. al, of Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom.

On March 10, 1824, Ann Carbery Mattingly, sister of the Catholic mayor of Washington, D.C., was miraculously cured of late-stage breast cancer, an event attributed to the healing power of Prince Alexander Hohenlohe, a European priest credited with healing individuals on both sides of the Atlantic, many of whom, like Mattingly, he never encountered in person. In Mrs. Mattingly’s Miracle, Nancy Lusignan Schultz, professor of English at Salem State University, investigates this miracle and the individuals involved, revealing that accounts of miracles were a divisive element in local and transatlantic conversations both about and within Catholicism.

Mattingly—a thirty-nine-year-old widow with two children—was in what all around her believed to be the last days or even hours of her life when the healing intervention occurred. After doctors, treatments, and the prayers of local priests failed to stall the deterioration of Mattingly’s health, one of her priests turned to Prince Hohenlohe, whose growing reputation included being able to effect cures without having direct contact with the afflicted. In accordance with the instructions for participating in remote cures that had been distributed by Hohenlohe’s representatives, local priests offered a novena (nine consecutive days of masses) dedicated to the healing of Mattingly and three other ill individuals in Washington and then timed a special middle-of-the-night mass to occur in unison with Hohenlohe’s monthly mass in Bavaria for the healing of the sick in North America. (Interestingly, Schultz reveals that their careful calculations of the time difference were futile because Hohenlohe—who was likely unaware of the novena taking place 4,000 miles away—was actually on an extended leave of absence in March 1824.) Since Mattingly was too ill to leave her bed to attend the mass, a priest brought communion to her sickbed in the mayor’s house. Upon receiving communion, the patient was immediately and entirely healed, to the amazement of those who had cared for her and watched her deterioration. Not only did the cancer itself disappear, so did the consequences of her long illness, such as bed sores and the sickroom’s foul stench.

The story of this miracle forms the starting point for Schultz’s investigative efforts, and much of the book follows her persistent efforts to track the individuals involved, undeterred by the spotty historical record. This quest, rather than an explicit line of argumentation, also drives the structure of the book, with each section serving to reveal an additional piece of information about the characters or context for their actions and beliefs. This structure invites the reader to become a vicarious participant in the research process, as stories that could otherwise feel like tangents instead become clues to understanding the religious beliefs, superstitions, and fears of early Americans and contemporaneous Europeans.

Schultz’s investigations led her from the mayor’s house in Washington to Europe, tracing Prince Hohenlohe’s early cures. The most famous of these, and the one Schultz devotes the most attention to, was the cure that allowed Hohenlohe’s cousin, seventeen-year-old Princess Mathilde de Schwarzenberg of Bohemia, to walk again in 1821. Hohenlohe often worked in concert with a layman named Martin Michel, who had a longer-standing record of miraculous cures, and in Schultz’s account of the princess’ cure, Hohenlohe is merely the matchmaker, calling Michel to his cousin’s bedside after receiving a divine message while saying mass. After the visit from Michel and the prince, the princess was immediately able to walk and her pain vanished. Hohenlohe’s reputation as a healer grew rapidly. Thanks to this and other high-profile cures across Europe, he was continually thronged by the afflicted.

Much of Mrs. Mattingly’s Miracle is devoted to reconstructing the life stories of the individuals involved, but Schultz is also invested in addressing the significance of the miracle within its historical context. Anti-Catholic sentiment is not surprisingly one element of this story, which itself serves as context for Schultz’s more novel findings about divisions within the Catholic Church. In particular, Schultz’s research sheds light on the ways in which the church, both in the United States and abroad, was divided on the place of miracles in the public face of Catholicism, a debate shaped in part by concerns about Protestant perceptions.

Schultz paints a picture of an increasingly divided church in the United States, with miracles being only one of the issues on which the camps disagreed. These divisions took place within—and were influenced by—fears of anti-Catholic sentiment, but they were not entirely the result of this context. Most important to the story of Mattingly’s cure was some Catholics’ fear that too much public emphasis on miracles would call attention to religious differences between themselves and Protestants and jeopardize Catholics’ social and political positions. In fact, Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal, the sole archbishop in the United States in 1824, urged caution in the Mattingly case, fearing that too much publicity would provoke or awaken anti-Catholic sentiments, and some ecclesiastical officials tried unsuccessfully to control the spread of news about the cure. In an extended section in chapter 5, Schultz dissects the discussion of the Mattingly miracle in the press, illuminating the divisions both along religious lines and among Catholics. While the divides between Catholics and Protestants centered on the question of whether a miracle had occurred, the tension and divisions among Catholics (particularly within the Catholic clergy) revolved around not theology or the miracle itself, but rather around how news of the miracle would be received and how to manage the public discussion of it.

While the American context contained its own particular concerns, Schultz also demonstrates that Europe was not immune to these questions. Prince Hohenlohe and Michel encountered civil and ecclesiastical superiors who worked to limit or even to suppress their performance of miracles and feared their effect on the public at large. Many local officials worried about large crowds gathering in search of a miracle while others were concerned about how the purported cures would be received in a climate with increasing focus on rationality and secularization. While many civic officials (with the notable exception of the emperor of Austria) banned the prince from performing cures or placed tight restrictions on how they could be carried out, Pope Pius VII was more moderate, requiring only that Hohenlohe avoid publicity. These decrees were largely ineffective, but for Schultz’s story, the importance lies not in whether such restrictions were honored but that such widespread efforts to suppress the performance or discussion of miracles were put in place at all.

This book focuses on Ann Mattingly and Prince Hohenlohe, following them, their relatives, and their close acquaintances as far as the sources allowed. In her quest to unravel the histories of these individuals, Schultz mines a broad and eclectic assortment of sources for clues. This is particularly notable in her quest to recover Mrs. Mattingly’s life and the lives of her descendants, individuals who left few personal records. After exhausting census records, church records, and local histories, Schultz acquired family keepsakes and even asked a Mattingly descendent to take a DNA test to confirm her suspicion that Mattingly’s son’s estrangement from the family may have been the result of a marriage to a woman of mixed race. The result is that Mrs. Mattingly’s Miracle takes the reader on a journey through early national Maryland and the young nation’s capital through the lives of the Carbery and Mattingly families and, with detours to Europe, provides insights into divisions among Catholics within the context of Catholic-Protestant relations.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3 (Spring, 2015).

Sarah Mulhall Adelman is an assistant professor of history at Framingham State University. She has published on the political culture of American Catholic women religious and is currently working on a project about nineteenth-century orphan asylums in New York City.

In 1931, the statue of a man who stood only a bit taller than five feet and suffered from a chronically ulcerous leg was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol. This was Father Junípero Serra, a Spanish-born Franciscan, who in 1749 gave up a successful career as a priest and university professor in Mallorca and sailed to Mexico. There he became an apostolic missionary and worked to convert Indians to Catholicism. Twenty years after he arrived in Mexico, at the age of fifty-six, Serra was called on to play a crucial role in the settlement and colonization of Alta California, most notably as the architect of the chain of Catholic missions that eventually extended from San Diego to just north of San Francisco. More than eight feet tall, the Serra rendered in the nation’s Capitol stands much larger than life. His posture suggests a steady movement forward and over land. He wears a Franciscan habit, holds high aloft in his right hand a large cross and carries in his left hand a miniature replica of Mission San Carlos Borromeo, which he founded on the shores of Monterey, California, in 1770. This mission would be his home until his death in 1784.

On the day that Serra was memorialized in Statuary Hall, speaker after speaker extolled his piety, his tireless work among the Indians, and most important, his role as the “pioneer of pioneers” who brought civilization to California. He was lauded as the man who carried a message of salvation to the “uncharted shores of the Pacific,” and in particular he was credited with preparing the slopes of “this western land for the advance of empire which years later was to press on and fructify.” Serra did so, his supporters asserted, by bringing to California the key components of the Pacific agricultural empire: oranges, lemons, olives, figs, grapes, and vegetables, as well as cattle, sheep, goats, and horses. 

To one degree or another, Serra did accomplish all of that. But today, as historians reexamine the historical development of the Pacific coast of North America, it is worth contemplating again Serra’s legacy. In the almost seventy-five years since the statue of Serra was unveiled, the man’s fame has only increased, even as his figure has provoked controversy, pitting celebrations against denunciations of his life and legacy.

I.

To millions, Serra is more than the founding father of what would become the state of California. To the Catholic faithful Serra is the saintly embodiment of timeless virtues: devotion, obedience, and charity. This religious memorialization of Serra began in his own day and took off in earnest just after his death. Upon the publication and circulation in 1787 of a hagiographic account of Serra’s life by Francisco Palóu, one of his fellow Franciscans, the saintly Junípero Serra joined a long line of missionaries whose virtues and sacrifices were chronicled and celebrated so as to stimulate enthusiasm among others for missionary life. In a woodcut included in Palóu’s Relación histórica de la vida y apostólicas tareas del venerable padre fray Junípero Serra, Serra stands above a sea of admiring worshipers. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Serra remained the object of religious admiration in Spain, Mexico, and California. The Catholic Church accepted Serra’s cause for canonization in 1985 and declared him Venerable in 1986. Soon thereafter, Pope John Paul II beatified Serra before some thirty thousand pilgrims at St. Peter’s Square. Barring some unanticipated occurrence, the Catholic Church likely will canonize Serra and thereby create its first saint whose legacy is rooted in California and the American Southwest, presently the home of one-third of the nation’s thirty-one million Catholics.

Generations of critics of Spanish colonization have sketched a third Serra, one whose image inverts the portraits of Serra as pioneer and Serra as saint. To his detractors, Serra embodies an evil system that promoted cultural genocide, sanctioned corporal punishment, and initiated the demographic collapse of California’s Indians. For it is Father Serra whose name is most closely associated with California’s institutions of colonization, the missions where scores of thousands of Indians became enmeshed in an oppressive labor system and died prematurely of diseases, many of European origin. Standing alongside the heroic and saintly Serras of the Capitol and the Catholic Church is a villainous Serra with the worst features of Christopher Columbus, a man whose own life story is overshadowed by everything he has come to embody and symbolize to his detractors.

II.

Miguel Joseph Serra was born in 1713, in the town of Petra on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. A community of only two thousand people, Petra’s rhythms, folkways, and institutions were those of early modern Europe. The home in which Serra was born and raised was a typical farmer’s house of the early eighteenth century: two stories, built of stone, with an entrance wide enough to serve the Serras and the family’s mule. Down the street, in the same block, was the parish church where the infant Serra was baptized the day of his birth.

Young Serra spent his early childhood working the family land with his father and attending a Franciscan primary school a stone’s throw from his home. These years were ones of political turbulence for the island of Mallorca, which had rejected the authority of Philip V, the first of the Bourbon monarchs to rule Spain. This resistance led to a loss of Mallorca’s local privilege, and Mallorca became a province of Spain, not an independent kingdom. Philip V may have been king of Spain, but his state’s presence on the island was weak, and what Mallorcans denied the monarchy in respect and power they granted to the Catholic Church. In the world of Serra’s childhood and youth, Catholicism therefore loomed large: it was a way of life, a way of ordering the world, the most powerful and pervasive institution Mallorcans knew. Serra’s own zeal for the preservation and propagation of the faith may have been honed early on as he came of age in a world where church and state distrusted one another and were locked in bitter controversy. During his seventeenth year, Serra joined the Franciscan Order; he chose for himself the name Junípero, inspired as he was by the life of St. Francis’s companion. The order Serra joined was a passionate defender of the Immaculate Conception, and it was dedicated to the teachings of John Duns Scotus and Ramón Llull.

It was not unusual for a promising young boy in Mallorca to take holy orders, but it was unusual for a man to give up the prestige of a university professorship and the security of the priesthood for the uncertain life of a missionary in the New World. Serra did so at age thirty-six, after spending more than a decade preaching throughout Mallorca and nearly as long teaching philosophy and theology at the Lullian University in Palma, the most important city on the island. Serra understood his commitment to a new life across the ocean as being for life. Serra was an extraordinary correspondent. His letters fill four volumes, but few ever went back to Mallorca. “With many people I could have kept up friendly relationships by letter,” Serra wrote. But, he continued: “If I was continually to keep before my mind what I had left behind, of what use would it be to leave it all?”

Serra went to Mexico in 1749, drawn by the scope and enormity of the challenge, and the chance the New World offered him to give freer reign to his ambitious spirit, which had begun to chafe under the authority of others. By and large his movement to the New World gave him autonomy—even as he lived the life of an obedient missionary under the Franciscan Rule. Within just a few years of his arrival in Mexico, he was elected by his fellow Franciscans as father president of the Sierra Gorda missions, chosen ahead of men who had decades of experience in Mexico. Clearly, it was not only Serra’s religious devotion that his peers valued or his abilities as a missionary but also his political skills, which in the rough-and-tumble world of colonial politics meant tenacity and clarity of purpose. It was these qualities that earned Serra the esteem and at times the wariness of his colleagues. Further, these skills brought Serra to the attention of his Franciscan superiors and the viceroy of New Spain, and led to Serra’s selection in 1767 as one of the chief architects and promoters of Spain’s imperial thrust into California.

In Serra’s California endeavors one sees a sudden expansion of energies to meet multiplying challenges and the deployment of an unusual constellation of qualities appropriate to the requirements of his new responsibilities. Clearly, in California—a land where the Spanish state had no entrenched interests and where the local Indians had no prior experience with Catholicism—Serra believed he had found a land and people that could be remade in the Lord’s image. Through the pieties and controversies that surround Serra and his legacy, one can still clearly see a man of extraordinary endurance, explosive energy, and unyielding determination, a man who placed his own mark on the heroic dimension of missionary life. In so doing he extended Spain’s imperial reach, protected the privileges of the Catholic Church, and ushered in a period of calamitous change for California’s Indians.

While Serra constantly distinguished himself through great constancy of purpose and clarity of vision, he was not a simple man, and his own character was replete with tensions, ironies, even paradoxes. Most of these emerged from the vows Serra took in becoming a Franciscan, promises that immediately set him apart from society even as they committed him to its reformation. Serra’s willingness to accept the oath of obedience to his superiors within the Franciscan Order gave him not only great powers over other missionaries who were obedient to him, but also allowed him a freedom from and even contempt for other hierarchical institutions, namely the Spanish monarchy. Serra believed in the nearly absolute powers of the church over the state, yet he lived in an age when the Bourbon state was increasing its authority over the Catholic Church. Serra in this sense was a mighty anachronism. Yet he was more than just a man swimming against the currents of history. Rather, he sought to reverse the rising tide of regalism that threatened to overwhelm his missionary order. In a further and more intimate irony, Serra sought to control Indians’ marriages and sexuality even though his own vows removed those roles and affairs from his own life. And finally, Serra believed with such certainty that his interpretation of Catholicism was the only path to salvation that he all too often proved uncompromising and alienated the very people he sought to convert.

III.

Serra lived a life in opposition to what California and the Pacific coast of North America would become: an economically dynamic region of diverse individuals, integrated into a global economy that transcends national boundaries. Serra’s distance from our age emerges clearly in a letter he wrote to his nephew in Petra in 1773. Serra wanted to give the young Miguel de Petra a sense of where his uncle lived. “Just get out a map of America and look at it,” Serra advised. “You will see on the coast of the South Sea, mistakenly called the Pacific Ocean, the California peninsula . . . Follow the coast to the north, and a little before it says Cape Mendocino, you will find on some maps the name: Port of Monterey. Well, it is there among these pitiful people that your uncle is living.” Serra’s insistence on Spanish imperial nomenclature—South Sea or Mar del Sur—not Mar Pacífico—is an indication of how he incorporated California into his Spanish worldview. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spaniard, named the vast ocean west of the Americas, the Mar del Sur. Seven years later, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese sailing for Spain, called the same body of calm water Pacífico. Serra hewed to the term coined by Balboa, his countryman. Religiously, Alta California was a Spanish extension of the world of Roman Catholicism; its missions were administered by the College of San Fernando. Politically, Alta California was the northernmost frontier of New Spain; its military and civil life was overseen by officials who ultimately reported to a viceroy. Serra’s mission was to secure souls for the church and land for the Crown. Those who espoused faiths other than Catholicism were “pitiful people” to be converted or cast out; other Europeans—whose preference for different geographic names bespoke rival agendas or interpretations—had no place in Serra’s California.

California Indians, of course, challenged Serra’s religious and political vision at nearly every point—even as they struggled with the dire biological consequences of Spanish colonization. Throughout Serra’s tenure in California, no Europeans other than Spaniards set foot in the province. During Serra’s years as father president of the California missions (1769-84), the region was so isolated that it came to resemble the island that Europeans had long believed it to be. In 1781, the Yuma Indians severed Spain’s tenuous overland route from central Mexico to California. From then on California’s contact with Mexico would be by sea only. Serra himself expended no effort to find an economic staple that would make the colony profitable and therefore more valuable to the Crown. To have done so would have been to take time away from his attempts to win converts among the Indians. Moreover, a preoccupation with economic affairs would have amounted to an embrace of the materialism that his life and vows opposed. Serra was never a strong advocate of sending settlers to the region. Indeed, he was distrustful of them, believing that their bad conduct would delay the Indians’ conversion. It was only after his death that Spanish officials envisioned for a short while how to incorporate California economically into Spain’s imperial system.

IV.

Having arrived in New Spain in 1749 and settled in California twenty years later, Serra seems hardly ever to have looked back to Mallorca, his family, or his life across the Atlantic. But, ironically, his vision for California was inspired by an earlier age, a time when missionaries, Franciscans in particular, worked in isolated regions where the powers of the state were weak or nonexistent. Although he could not foresee California’s future, Serra and his fellow Franciscans did bring to the region many of the seeds of its eventual greatness. Yet, it was long after Serra’s death, after the passing of Spanish authority, the destruction of his mission system by secular forces, the privatization of the resources the missions had created and fostered over decades, the opening of the region to free trade, and its integration into the United States, that California would be set on a path of great economic and political power.

Thus, it is appropriate that as he stands in the U.S. Capitol, the seat of perhaps the most diverse and materialistic nation the world has known, Serra bears none of the trappings or symbols of California’s agricultural or economic empire. Rather, Serra holds aloft a large cross, the symbol of God’s empire. Serra stares at the cross like a determined navigator seeking his bearings and direction. He holds it high for all to see. Serra will follow wherever it leads. In 1784, Serra died, crucifix on his breast, in his sleep at Mission San Carlos. Today, more than two centuries later, Serra’s notoriety is secure. But the legacy of his missionary endeavors—just like the identity of the region he helped to settle—resists easy categorization, prompting debate and reinterpretation.

Further Reading: 

Serra’s correspondence reveals his character as well as his relations with Indians, Franciscans, and military officials: Writings of Junípero Serra, ed. and trans. by Antonine Tibesar, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C,. 1955-66). The classic cradle-to-grave biography of Serra from a Franciscan perspective is Maynard J. Geiger’s The Life and Times of Fray Junípero Serra, O.F.M., 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1959). The original hagiography of Serra is Francisco Palóu’s Relación histórica de la vida y apostólicas tareas del venerable padre fray Junípero Serra (México, 1787). For a translation, see Palóu’s Life of Fray Junípero Serra, ed. and trans. by Geiger (Washington, D.C., 1955). On economic development in Spanish and Mexican California, see Steven W. Hackel, “Land, Labor, and Production: The Colonial Economy of Spanish and Mexican California,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, eds. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley, 1998). On Serra as a missionary and Indian life in the California missions, see Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill, 2005). For the controversy of Serra’s canonization, see James A. Sandos, “Junípero Serra’s Canonization and the Historical Record,” American Historical Review 93 (Dec. 1988): 1253-69. Serra’s detractors: Rupert Costo and Jeannette Henry Costo, eds., The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide (San Francisco, 1987). For the practices and the ideology of Franciscan missionaries and priests in late-colonial Mexico, see Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991); and William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

An associate professor of history at Oregon State University and author of Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill, 2005), Steven W. Hackel is writing a biography of Junípero Serra for Hill and Wang’s American Portraits Series.

When The Revenant was released in 2015, it received widespread praise for its stunning cinematography and its visceral imagining of the American West—and was one of the big winners of the award season, collecting several Oscars including Best Director for Alejandro Iñárritu and Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio. Based on the real-life travails of Hugh Glass, a fur trader who legendarily survived being mauled by a bear and then abandoned by members of his party in 1823, the film invokes Glass as a Western archetype: the frontiersman going to fierce, heroic lengths to survive. Glass’s relentless pursuit of the men who deserted him (and DiCaprio’s relentless pursuit of that Oscar) received most of the critical attention given to the film. Yet for those interested in the history and myth of the American West, the film’s villain, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), deserves a closer look. His invented backstory marks him as another survivor of the brutal Western environment—indeed, as another “revenant” raised from the dead. Fitzgerald is a scalping survivor.

Viewers discover this early in the film, when he unwraps a leather bandanna from his head and reveals a scarred stretch of skin where his hairline should be. While modern filmgoers might find the idea of surviving a scalping unfamiliar, even implausible, The Revenant is not being fanciful here. Scalping survivors were not uncommon sights in early nineteenth-century America. These mutilated individuals appeared in regions including Kentucky, Tennessee, and lands farther west, products of near-continual conflict created by American invasions of Native lands. As one Tennessean recalled in the 1850s, his childhood settlement had “fifteen to twenty persons who for years survived” scalping, which he called a “rude and bloody treatment.” Fifteen survivors in a community of a few hundred people meant that nearly everyone would have known, seen, or been related to someone who had been scalped.

Americans who didn’t venture out to the frontier, however, might encounter equal or greater numbers of scalping survivors in print. While some newspapers described scalped individuals in detail, announcing their names, locations, and recovery processes, most mentioned these individuals only in passing: “a young man of South Carolina” who had gone to Tennessee, or a little girl collecting firewood. Such vague or anonymous stories are difficult to verify, and make historical numbers loose estimates, at best. Yet what these numerous recountings make clear is that survivors, and the fear and interest their tales provoked, were both powerfully present in nineteenth-century America.

Literature amplified the impact of scalping, with survivors appearing in everything from memoirs of the post-Revolutionary generation to accounts of recent expeditions up the Missouri and the emerging genre of frontier tall tales: history, fiction, and the embellished border in between. These regional literatures, as Jon Coleman has put it, emphasized “the violence done to and committed by frontiersmen” in order “to knit new territories into the nation.” That violence sometimes took the form of encounters with wild animals (as with Hugh Glass) but stories even more frequently promised exciting narratives of “thrilling incidents of Indian warfare.”

Real or imaginary, survivors could be deployed as stock characters in the national drama of conquest. Depending on the angle, they might seem tragic or valiant, but either approach could justify settler colonialism. Such narratives extended U.S. claims to the rest of the continent while also flattering an emergent nationalism that claimed a distinct, superior identity to both Europeans and Native peoples. Survivors might have damaged bodies, but stories could redefine that damage as evidence of American fortitude, and position a survivor as “a convincing witness of the barbarity of the savage red man.” In the era of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, accounts of white Americans fighting wild animals and “savages” made for popular reading. Such texts reveled in a pleasurable melancholy, inviting readers to mourn what had been sacrificed in the conquest of the West while simultaneously celebrating the inevitable triumph of American expansion. As a result, tales of frontier life were populated with scalped characters, who could supply readers with a reliable shock as they pulled off their hats, handkerchiefs, or wigs to reveal their scarred heads.

Permanently and unmistakably scarred by an act of violence associated with Native Americans (whether or not they were the actual perpetrators) the bodies of scalping survivors were visual evidence for the narratives the nation wanted to tell itself. But those stories were always already contested: Were survivors evidence of American superiority and resilience? Or vulnerability? The uneasy fascination with the scalping survivor as stock character in early American stories demonstrated a struggle to find meaning behind their continued existence. One author worried that Native attackers perhaps did not always intend to kill, as they “always scalped when they could, repeatedly inflicting this mark of dishonor with … little danger to life.” Another explained in a children’s history book that “Indians … would sometimes scalp women and children, whom, for some reason, they did not choose to kill.” Such comments reflected concerns about the intent behind the act: Was scalping intended to annihilate or humiliate?

As pseudo-historical or stock characters, scalping survivors could be tragi-comic, occasionally mentally unstable, intractably anti-Indian. Always, they functioned as an embodied locus of memories for their local communities, signs of a violent past. The story of David Hood is a prime example. In 1782, near Fort Nashborough (what would later become Nashville) Hood was shot, scalped, and left for dead by a party of “Indians” otherwise unidentified in the sources. The next morning, he was found by residents of the fort. When asked if he “wasn’t dead” yet, Hood supposedly replied, not if he could have “half a chance.” Hood recovered and locals described him as “a man raised from the dead.” Soon nicknamed the Opossum, for his success in playing dead, Hood reportedly joked about the advantage his scalping had given him, since, in his words, “the savages” could no longer “get another trophy,” he said, or “jerk [him] by the hair of the head.”

These accounts came from Tennessee histories published decades later in the mid-nineteenth century, however, meaning that Hood’s words and actions come to us indirectly, at best. More likely, they reflect the desire of regional authors to tell a satisfying tale of a settler who “hoodwinked” his careless assailants. Hood insisted on his own role in saving himself, claiming to have deliberately feigned death in order to deceive his attackers, and thereby asserted an identity as a clever “opossum” and not a victim. Yet textual hints show Hood as not fully in control of his own narrative. Other community members portrayed Hood as wacky, garrulous, compulsively making reference to his traumatic experience. Becoming the Possum may have been Hood’s only option for explaining this life-changing event to himself, but his version of the story was repeatedly destabilized by other Tennesseans.

Survivors were regarded as something less than heroes, more than victims: perhaps because they were an uncomfortable reminder that settler colonialism remained contested, that indigenous societies refused to vanish, to cede lands without a fight. Perhaps for that reason accounts often contained storytelling sessions, embedded narratives which permitted (or forced) scalping survivors, whether real or fictional, to narrate their own marked bodies. “To gratify the curiosity of inquirers” within the text meant explaining their scars to its readers, as well.

The Revenant employs a similar method. Early in the film, Fitzgerald’s brutal and precise recounting of his scalping by the Arikara puts pain at the center of the story and in doing so complicates audience perceptions of him. “The Ree done that to you?” asks Jim Bridger while they wait for Glass to die of his wounds. “Yeah they done it,” Fitzgerald replies, explaining that his attackers “took their sweet time with it too. To start I didn’t feel nothin’, just the sound of knives scrapin’ against my skull, them all laughin’ and hollerin’ and whoopin’ and what not … then the blood came, cold, start streakin’ down my face, breathin’ it in, chokin’ on it.” He pauses. “That’s when I felt it. Felt all of it. Got my head turned inside out.” He then shouts at Bridger for scratching his knife across a canteen, the noise an echo of his mental perturbation.

In an interview, screenwriter Mark L. Smith explained how he interpreted Fitzgerald:

“He’s a trapper who has survived a Native American attack earlier in his life, and so he’s kind of partially scalped. He’s someone who is—he’s almost driven by fear in a lot of ways … because he’s always worried about something bringing the next attack on him. … He’s not really a villain at the beginning. He’s not a great guy, he’s not a guy that you’d want to hang out with, but some of his logic makes sense.”

Survivors might be portrayed as gruesome novelties, but they were also intended to spark solicitude in nineteenth-century readers, with their scars implicitly justifying the extremes of their Indian-hating violence. Similarly, Fitzgerald is both the clear antagonist of The Revenant—villainous in his abandonment of another white man to the wilderness and his murder of that man’s son—and sympathetic, even if in limited fashion, due to his scarred past and his tenuous present.

Late in the film, Fitzgerald becomes the scalper, as well as the scalped. Having killed one of his pursuers, he unsheathes a knife and takes the man’s scalp: his dexterity as a fur trapper now deployed on humans. While his action could be explained as an act of misdirection—making the murder look like it was done by hostile Natives—it seems clear that Fitzgerald performs the scalping as instinctive, feral act. The film has by this point long made its argument apparent through literal signposting: the men invading the West, a placard proclaims, are “all savages” (“on est tous les sauvages”). Yet such rhetoric is diluted by The Revenant’s insistence that some white men (Glass, Bridger, Captain Henry) possess a fundamental decency that belies their grime. Fitzgerald and the “Ree,” on the other hand, share the suspect status of those who scalp and are scalped: persons who might become hairy objects, not unlike the furs bundled on a trader’s back.

The real-life inspiration for Fitzgerald was not a scalping survivor, nor, as far as anyone can tell, was he uniquely depraved—just a man who made the ethically dubious but not unheard-of decision to abandon a wounded colleague. Yet The Revenant’s screenwriters chose to imagine him as a survivor. Why? In part, no doubt, because the film draws heavily on period source material and insists on a type of historical authenticity, even as the characters and plot are thoroughly Hollywood-ized. That insistence on accuracy, ironically, leads the film to rely on sources that fictionalized the very real suffering of such individuals in order to make arguments about Native savagery and eliminationist American policy. The film follows an old script: its vaunted attention to detail and sympathetic treatment of Native characters notwithstanding, it never fully interrogates the underlying assumptions and premises of nineteenth-century accounts. While the Indian-hating words and deeds of a character like Fitzgerald clearly mark him out as the baddie for contemporary film-goers, The Revenant does not, ultimately, ask audiences to reconsider their relationship to settler colonialism. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s scars are explained as the source of his antagonism, not as a response to it.

Fitzgerald, too, is a “revenant,” “a man raised from the dead” like the historical scalping survivors he is modeled upon. Despite the film’s apparent goal of providing a more nuanced picture of America’s imagined frontiers, The Revenant throws away an opportunity to take a nuanced look at the trauma and violence upon which the West was built, settling instead for repeating the tropes of its nineteenth-century source materials: white Americans facing and overcoming adversity in the wilderness. Fitzgerald’s hatred is given a rationale, even as he’s condemned for it. Displacing all American vulnerability onto Fitzgerald, and making him the villain as a result, lets the film avoid true acknowledgment of the vulnerability—and savagery— of the entire project of settler colonialism. Fitzgerald’s weakness is exposed only to be disavowed: his wickedness and woundedness are intertwined, the story implies, and the West will ultimately belong to those, like Glass, who take back their fates from the hands of others.

Acknowledgements

This essay grew out of the final assignment for a course I taught in Spring 2016, “Imagining the Indian: Native Americans on Page and Screen.” Having (perhaps rashly) promised my students that I, too, would complete my own assignment, I owe them many thanks for their thoughtful discussion of an initial draft. I’d also like to thank Ansel Payne, Laura Helton, Samantha Seeley, the members of my faculty writing group at the University of Alabama, and the editors at Common-place for their critiques and advice.

Further reading

For more on the real Hugh Glass, as well as the popularity of frontier narratives in the early nineteenth century, see Jon T. Coleman, Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation (2012). An influential example of such narratives, James Hall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West (1835), appears to have been the inspiration for the “metaphysics of Indian-hating” section of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857).

For the story of David Hood and other scalping survivors in early Tennessee, see A.W. Putnam, History of Middle Tennessee, or, Life and Times of Gen. James Robertson (1859) and Edwin Paschall, Old Times, or, Tennessee History: for Tennessee Boys and Girls (1869), among others. For another example of conflicting accounts of a survivor’s mental and physical recovery, compare the versions of James Gregg’s Revolutionary-era scalping in two nineteenth-century recountings: The Child’s Picture Book of Indians… By a Citizen of New-England (1833) and “Adventure of Captain Gregg,” John R. Chapin, “Indian Tales,” unbound sheets from Chapin’s Historical Picture Gallery (1856).

For a different take on the role of scalping in American storytelling, see Gordon M. Sayre, “‘Take My Scalp, Please!’: Colonial Mimetism and the French Origins of the Mississippi Tall Tale,” in Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, eds., Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas (2014) for an analysis of tales where European travelers claimed to have outwitted antagonistic Native Americans by pretending to pull off their own scalps.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Mairin Odle is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama. She is currently working on a book which explores how cross-cultural body modifications in early America remade both physical appearances and ideas about identity. Focusing on indigenous practices of tattooing and scalping, the book traces how these practices were adopted and transformed by colonial powers.

Discovering a name and a slave narrative’s continuing truth

In a follow-up installment in 1839 to the anonymously authored Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave, the narrator testifies that a Charleston slave speculator known as “Major Ross” had sold his brother. The narrator notes that Ross lives in “a nice little white house, on the right hand side of King street as you go in from the country towards the market.”

The right-hand side? Was that level of precision necessary? Because people challenged the veracity of slave narratives at the time they were published, details mattered very much. But the level of specificity in this instance caught my eye. The facts were borne out: property records in the Charleston County Register Mesne Conveyance Deeds office show that in 1831, a James L. Ross, known also as “Major Ross,” purchased a house situated on the west side of King Street, just a few blocks north of the market. If you were entering the city of Charleston from the country, Ross’ house would indeed have been on the right-hand side (fig 1).

And so it comes down to that. In order to prove his own humanity, the truth about the human capacity for cruelty, and the very reputation of abolitionist crusaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, this survivor made his story unassailable by giving the correct location for the speculator’s house on King Street in Charleston.

Back in 2007 when I started to select and edit pieces for a collected volume of South Carolina slave narratives titled I Belong to South Carolina, I became interested in a little-known memoir titled “Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave.” I traced the source of the narrative back to the Advocate of Freedom, a small abolitionist newspaper from Maine, and wove this source discovery into the brief introduction to my book. After the collection was published in 2010, I moved on to other projects.

And yet the “Recollections” narrative continued to haunt me. The particular circumstances of its publication, sketched out below, coupled with its agonized detail struck me as so honest that I couldn’t let its author remain anonymous.

1838, the year in which “Recollections” appeared, was an especially difficult one for the anti-slavery movement. In the early months of that year, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Executive Committee sponsored the publication of what they believed to be the first full-length book by an escaped slave, The Narrative of James Williams, An American Slave. The Committee members arranged for Williams to dictate his narrative under careful supervision in exchange for safe passage to England. They framed it with testimonials and an introduction by noted poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Convinced that its fiercely powerful testimony would galvanize a complacent America into action against human bondage, Executive Committee members mailed a copy to every member of Congress and vigorously promoted it through advertisements placed in periodicals across the nation (fig. 2).

And then, disaster struck. The narrative’s truthfulness was almost immediately, and persuasively, challenged. By late March 1838, a newspaper editor in Alabama publicly attacked its claims, and later the Anti-Slavery Society itself—after concerted and lengthy efforts—ruefully acknowledged that it could not authenticate the narrative. Details were inconsistent. Names and places cited by Williams did not clearly correspond to actual people and locations, and thus could not be verified to counter accusations of fakery. Most troubling of all, the Anti-Slavery Society’s efforts were stymied because James Williams had left for a destination unknown, and could not be found. On October 25, 1838, the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society declared that the book would no longer be published, and directed the publishing agents to discontinue sale of the work. The incident eroded the credibility of the society and jeopardized the future of the anti-slavery movement.

(The superb work recently done by scholar Hank Trent to trace Williams’s controversial story reveals that the core of the Williams narrative was, indeed, true—but this work came over 170 years too late to help the Anti-Slavery Society.)

Despite the society’s shattered reputation in the fresh wake of the Narrative of James Williams scandal and the public’s resulting skepticism about the truthfulness of slave narratives in general, in the summer of 1838 the editors of the Advocate made the surprising decision to print yet another slave narrative, “Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave.” This story, I believed, carried with it a burden of truthfulness that no earlier (or later) narrative had ever faced. And yet the abolitionists decided to not only publish the piece, but also to conceal the name of the runaway. And so: Whose story was it?

Its origins were a bit unclear. The first of five installments was published in the Advocate of Freedom on August 2, 1838, in Maine. The Emancipator, the official publication of the National Anti-Slavery Society based in New York, recognized the power of the narrative almost immediately and started to run the series as well, with the first installment appearing in their paper on August 23 (fig. 3). The original memoir seems to have been transcribed in Maine by a person known as “J” who was a close ally of the editorial team of the Advocate. Another person identified only as “A” sent J’s transcription to the Advocate. As an editorial note mentioned on the page preceding the first Advocate installment, the editors received the manuscript from “a source of the highest respectability.” They included an explanation provided by “A”:

Messrs Editors:— I enclose the “narrative of a runaway slave,” for which I request a place in your paper. It was taken from his lips by a gentleman of indisputable integrity and fairness, and with the greatest care and caution. The manuscript has been repeatedly read to the young man, and he was cautioned in every instance to state only the simple facts; and after the care that has been taken to correct any mistake or error, into which he may have been led, I believe the “recollections of a slave,” are entitled to the confidence of the reader… .”

According to the narrative, the narrator was born in South Carolina, outside of Charleston, in a rural area known as “Four Hole Swamp” (fig. 4). Owned first by “Widow Smith” and then her son, Alfred, he was hired out to many different men, all of them vicious in their own ways. Indeed, much of the narrative chronicles in harrowing detail the violence he saw. He speaks of abuse—and even murder—of women, children, and infants at the hands of his owners and their neighbors. His litany demonstrates clearly that such treatment was common practice and not simply the behavior of morally bankrupt outliers. On one occasion he visits a neighbor and testifies that:

I saw a man rolling another all over the yard in a barrel, something like a rice cask, through which he had driven shingle nails. It was made on purpose to roll slaves in. He was sitting on a block, laughing to hear the man’s cries. The one who was rolling wanted to stop, but he told him if he did’nt [sic] roll him well he would give him a hundred lashes.

After several years of being hired out to various subcontractors in the region, he was sold to David or “Davey” Cohen, the scion of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the United States at that time. Finding the conditions there intolerable, he fled twice, but upon being recaptured the second time he was taken to the slave workhouse in Charleston. This site was known as the “Sugar House,” an old sugar warehouse repurposed into a prison and workhouse for slaves. It was notorious for the systematic torture that occurred there, and especially for the treadmill run by slave labor that not infrequently maimed and killed the weary people chained to its rotating pedals. There he was visited by David Cohen’s father, the wealthy and eminent Charlestonian Mordecai Cohen. Cohen Senior sent for his son, and then David Cohen himself arrived and ordered the narrator to receive fifty lashes. David Cohen then further directed the men of the Sugar House to whip the fugitive twice weekly between days on the treadmill (fig. 5).

After weeks of enduring abuse, the narrator was then sold to John Fogle, who soon thereafter hired him out to the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company (fig. 6). Our narrator found circumstances there even worse than at Fogle’s. He wrote, “After we were whipped we had to go straight back to our work. They did not care whether we got well or not, because we were other people’s niggers … I worked there about two months, digging pits and wheeling, and taking up old rails and laying new ones …”

Afraid the work and the whippings on the railroad would ultimately kill him, he escaped once again, this time hiding aboard a train bound for Charleston. Once in the city he found a sympathetic ship steward who smuggled him to Boston. He was taken ashore and directed to a boarding house for colored men. Weakened by the journey, he barely made it:

I went along holding on by the houses, and when I had got down the street a good ways, I met a colored man and asked him where the boarding house was. He asked me if I was a sailor, I told him not much of one, but that I had just come from a ship. He said “I understand it all.” He knew from my dress and the cotton on my head and clothes, that I was a runaway. He carried me to a boarding house, and the next day to ——, who gave me some warm clothes. He sent me into the country to stay with some colored people.

The fugitive narrator doesn’t explain precisely how, by the spring of 1838, he made it from Boston to Maine, but presumably he was smuggled north to safety and found harbor with the anti-slavery activists who took down his story.

And Maine is where I found myself this past spring, doing research about an entirely different fugitive, when I was prompted once again to think about “Recollections.” I had hit a lull in my work at the Maine Historical Society in Portland, and I thought to request the entire run of the Advocate of Freedom to see if I could find any clues about the narrative by looking at the newspaper it ran in to see it afresh. The series was such a harrowing read that I thought perhaps published letters to the editor might debate it. Or perhaps there would be more information in the mission statement of the original issues that might give me more details about the process of or context for the narrative’s construction and publication. For hours I pored through issues, using a magnifying glass to read the Advocate’s small print on its large pages, unsure of what precisely might be there.

As is often the case with primary source research directed by instinct, not evidence, I stumbled upon something entirely unanticipated. In an issue dated February 21, 1839, I found an article following up on “Recollections” some three months after the original serialized narrative was published (and which was never reprinted in The Emancipator as far as I can tell). The piece was brief, but appeared to have served multiple purposes: it provided yet more testimony to the evils of slavery, and it also bolstered the credibility of the narrator and the reliability of the editorial team that backed his story (fig. 7).

The sequel ran about a year after the narrator likely arrived in Boston, and was framed by an introduction that opened as follows:

Mr. Editor: Your readers probably remember the runaway slave, whose story was published a few months since in the Advocate. He is now before me, and a more contented and happy creature I never saw. The farmer with whom he has worked ever since he came to this place, speaks of him in the highest terms as a faithful, sober, industrious, well disposed young man. He has thus far shown himself trustworthy in every respect. He is eager to learn, and his employer has placed him at school this winter, where his progress is quite satisfactory. In a little while he hopes to be able to write, so as to send a bill for services to his old masters. If he should recover his just dues, he would be worth a little fortune.

The piece continued by adding a new recollection: that of how the young man had watched in pain as his brother was marched off by speculators in Charleston. While the original narrative had in part described the inhuman conditions of the Sugar House, this sequel added yet more poignant details about how others in the community of outcasts understood the plight of the inmates. The narrator explains:

They [Speculators] kept all the slaves in the Sugar House, only sometimes when the Sugar House was full; then they put some in the Jail. The Jail is right along side of the Sugar House: —there is only a wall between them. The Crazy House and the Poor House are both close by. Sometimes the people in the Poor House would throw scraps out of the window into the Sugar House yard, and every morning when we were let out, we used to rush up to the wall to get what had been thrown out over night. —I never eat the meat, it was so dirty—but sometimes got a scrap of bread.

The brief sequel featured a quick sketch of how speculators worked and what those practices meant for the brothers who were to be forever separated by them. The sketch also demonstrated further intimate knowledge of the city of Charleston. Having discovered this brief yet powerful sequel (presented in its entirety below for the first time since its original publication in 1839), I became determined to find the author’s identity and share this previously unknown work.

Many details—especially about slave owners and established residents of Charleston—from both the original narrative and its sequel have been easy to verify. I’ve identified in census and property records many of the people he names, occasionally with small variants in spelling. (An Elizabeth Smyth bought property on Four Hole Swamp in 1804, for example, and it seems likely she was the “Widow Smith” Jim refers to as his first owner. Elias Rudd bought Four Hole Swamp property in 1814, and surely was the neighbor “Elias Road” referenced in the original narrative.) Other names mentioned correspond directly to those appearing in historical records: David and Mordecai Cohen, for example, were well-known figures in Charleston. “Bellinger,” the man who tortured slaves by rolling them in nail-pierced barrels, was in all likelihood William Cotesworth Bellinger Jr. (1788-1828), who lived near Dorchester Road in Colleton County, as Jim described. Many other names and places mentioned by Jim appear elsewhere in historical records.

But where and how to find the narrator, who was not only an escaped slave but an author with no name? The easiest tack, I figured, was to start with runaway slave advertisements.

After searching fruitlessly through issues of The Charleston Mercurybetween July 1837 and June 1838, I turned to the Charleston Courier. Quite quickly I found an advertisement for a fugitive in mid-December of 1837 placed by a “John Fogle.” The details concur with everything in the narrative. Helpfully, the ad even listed the chain of previous owners, corresponding precisely with how the anonymous narrator of “Recollections” described them. And Fogle had given the fugitive a name: Jim (fig. 8).

FIFTY DOLLARS REWARD—Runaway from the Subscriber, a few weeks ago, his fellow Jim, lately purchased from Mr. David. D. Cohen, of Charleston. The fellow was raised at or near the Four Hole Swamp; was sold to Mr. D. D. Cohen, by Mr. Isaac Bradwell, Jr. agent for A. W. Smith, and may be lurking in the neighborhood. Fifty dollars will be paid for information of his being harbored by any white person, or $25 for his apprehension and delivery to the master of the Work House.

John Fogle

I’m not naming Jim here, for he had a name. But I like to think that I’ve re-assembled or even re-collected some of the scattered fragments of his world. Pressured by an immense burden of truth, Jim shaped his story as directly and honestly as he knew how. His tale was doubtless shaped and perhaps even manipulated by its editors, but Jim’s voice emerges nonetheless as a piercing testament not only to the cruelty of slavery, but as an assertion of his own manhood, his own honor, and his willingness to claim his humanity.

He placed a speculator’s house on the right-hand side of King Street, and with that petty detail shamed the very premise of fact checking. Thus it is with some irony that I hope my project to trace the mundane details of his life nonetheless honors the greater story he tells.

Coda

What happened to Jim after his addendum was published? Two of my student assistants and I came up with at least one plausible future for Jim.

The federal censuses from 1850, 1860, and 1880 record James Matthews, a man of color living in Maine who listed his parents as being from South Carolina and who was possibly born around 1807: this person was most likely Jim. Significantly, Matthews doesn’t appear in any Maine records before 1850, and when he does show up, it seems that he is a middle-aged laborer taken in by the “City Poor Farm” of Hallowell, Maine—the very town where the Advocate of Freedom was published (figs. 9 and 10). The city was known for its many abolitionist activists during this era (the first abolitionist society in Maine, the Hallowell Anti-Slavery Society, was founded there in 1833), and so we can suppose it was a congenial place for a man seeking community and protection. Indeed, one Hallowell citizen, the Reverend Joseph C. Lovejoy, is quite likely “J,” the man who first transcribed Jim’s story. Lovejoy, a close associate of the Advocate’s editors, published an 1838 memoir of his brother, the famous abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy who was assassinated by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837. Moreover, Rev. Lovejoy went on to transcribe the life narrative of Lewis P. Clarke, another fugitive slave, in 1845. It thus seems quite possible that he would have been involved in bringing Jim’s story to light in 1838. If nothing else, he knew the power of print for a political cause.

Sadly, while Matthews is listed as a laborer and pauper who lived in Maine until his death in 1886, it seems he suffered from some sort of mental illness. Records consistently describe him throughout the decades as “insane,” and the 1850 census indicates that he was getting treatment at a facility known as the Maine Insane Hospital in nearby Augusta.

Neither Jim’s narrative nor the introductory comments written about him indicate he was anything but a resourceful and intelligent young man, albeit one who had, like innumerable other slaves, suffered terribly. And slavery left its physical as well as emotional scars on the man: the Advocate’seditors interrupt his narrative at one point to attest that “Some of the scars [on his back] are the size of a man’s thumb, and appear as if pieces of flesh had been gouged out, and some are ridges or elevations of the flesh and skin. They could easily be felt through his clothing.” It would not be surprising if he were to suffer in later years perhaps in part because of the abuse he suffered as a younger man. 

In the Hallowell Cemetery there stands a grave marker for James Matthews. It is a handsome stone, an honorific that might be surprising for a black, mentally ill pauper who was far from any family. But Hallowell was a special place. Matthews was part of the community, and the city records note that he died of “Old Age” at the age of 79 years. He was accorded a proper granite gravestone, made, I presume, from the rock harvested from the quarries Hallowell was famous for. The inscription reads: “He hath done what he could” (fig. 11).

I therefore conclude, albeit with respectful trepidation, that the man, James Matthews, who was buried in Hallowell, was Jim, the narrator of Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave and its sequel. It seems likely he lived out his days in Hallowell, Maine—ill but cared for in a small community and managing to do what he was known for: enduring.

Special thanks to Collin Eichhorn and Kristin Buhrow, who assisted with the research for this essay. Sam Weber of Hallowell assisted me greatly with information, illustrations, and city records from Maine. Thanks also to Clemson University’s Department of English for sabbatical release support; the Clemson University College of Arts, Architecture & Humanities, which provided me with travel funds, and the Maine Historical Society reference staff for their patient consultations.

Further Reading

The complete run of the Advocate of Freedom (published variously in Brunswick, Augusta, and Hallowell, Maine, from 1838 to 1841) can be found in all of its large format glory (the pages are huge and the font is small) at the Maine Historical Society Research Library in Portland, Maine. If you wish to read it online and have access to a library with a subscription, it has been digitized by Gale/Cengage Learning and is available in their Slavery & Antislavery: a Transnational Archive collection.

My version of the “Recollections of Slavery” narrative was included as a then-anonymously authored narrative in Susanna Ashton and Robyn E. Adams, et al., eds., “I Belong to South Carolina”: South Carolina Slave Narratives (Columbia, S.C., 2010). The most recent publication of James Williams’ narrative is edited by Hank Trent, who does a superb job of untangling the fraught story of Williams’ life and documenting how the burden of abolitionist truth-telling necessarily reshaped the narrative and ultimately doomed its reception. See Hank Trent, ed., Narrative of James Williams, An American Slave. Annotated edition (Baton Rouge, La., 2013).

The Text of the Sequel

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Susanna Ashton is professor of English at Clemson University in South Carolina. She is working on a biography of a fugitive slave and abolitionist lecturer to be titled, A Plausible Man: The Life of John Andrew Jackson. She tweets on abolition and the study of enslaved people’s lives as @ashtonsusanna.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

Cities, like people, are conceived, then born. St. Louis was the brainchild of imperial officials and two ambitious merchants. In 1763, Jean Jacques Blaise D’Abbadie, the last governor of French Louisiana, granted to Gilbert Antoine Maxent an exclusive privilege to trade with the Indian tribes west of the upper Mississippi and along the Missouri for six years. Such monopolies followed a certain colonial logic: granted a privileged track in the pursuit of American wealth, private parties would do the costly work of breaking ground, building posts, and pursuing alliances with local tribesmen. D’Abbadie, faced with a depleted treasury, inflation, shortages, and trade disruptions, all consequences of the disastrous French and Indian War, hoped to jumpstart the colony’s fortunes and secure the ties that bound the southern and northern parts of this vast region.

Maxent, long involved with this Illinois Country commerce, seized the opportunity. (He would work closely in the future with Spanish governors of the colony, two of whom would become his sons-in-law.) A quarter share in the venture would go to Pierre de Laclède, who had come to New Orleans in 1755, for serving as the new company’s field partner. Laclède’s conception was clear. We know exactly what he had in mind and how he proceeded because his clerk and stepson, Auguste Chouteau, wrote a “Narrative of the Settlement of St. Louis.” (The fourteen-page manuscript is a fragment of a longer narrative account Chouteau had been writing decades after the actual events. It may have been based on a journal or diary. Neither a complete draft nor a journal exists. It is our most reliable firsthand account.) The party left New Orleans in August and arrived in Illinois three months later on November 3, 1763. Storing their trade goods on the eastern bank of the Mississippi at the administrative center of French Illinois, Fort de Chartres, Laclède and Chouteau (thirteen or fourteen years old at the time) surveyed the western bank between the small mining and farming village of Ste. Genevieve and the mouth of the Missouri, selecting the site of St. Louis for its beauty, its elevation (relatively immune from the very real dangers of flooding), and its easy access to the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers. In retrospect, it seems an obvious choice. And so, as Chouteau recalled, “We set out immediately afterwards, to return to Fort de Chartres, where he [Laclède] said, with enthusiasm, to Monsieur de Neyon [Neyon de Villiers, the commandant], and to his officers that he had found a situation where he was going to form a settlement, which might become, hereafter, one of the finest cities of America–so many advantages were embraced in this site, by its locality and its central position.”

Chouteau’s “Narrative” is an astonishing document. To be present in this way at the birth of a great city is a historian’s dream. (It is, of course, a gift to be used with some caution.) St. Louis, like many colonial American cities, was an intentional creation–a planned birth, not an accidental one. The moment of its birth recorded, St. Louis resembles so many American children, videotaped and well documented upon arrival. The sense of purpose that guided settlers, that covered the distance from old to new, created a most bourgeois environment of great expectations, of possibilities, even entitlement. The act of self-shaping seems to lie at the heart of the American experience. Laclède directed young Chouteau and thirty workmen to clear the land and construct cabins and a large shed in February after the winter thaw. He returned in April with a design for the town and christened the newborn city, naming it St. Louis after King Louis XV’s patron saint, Louis IX.

Having made the obligatory nod toward royal patrons and the church, Laclède revealed his priorities and the incipient city’s raison d’etre. A towpath for boats separated the river from the limestone ledges. On the ridge, workers laid out three streets parallel to the river: Grande Rue, Rue de L’Eglise, and Rue des Granges. The public market was front and center, followed by Laclède’s own house. Behind that would be the church. In the back were the barns. Commerce lay at the heart of this place. Farming was an afterthought. St. Louis soon acquired the nickname Paincourt or “short of bread,” for food supplies were occasionally brought in from neighboring villages such as Ste. Genevieve. Ste. Genevieve was, in turn, dubbed Misère. Within decades, the Creole citizens of St. Louis would poke fun at the rustic manners of their rural neighbors. The riverfront of the city today would most probably surprise the founders. The dense and bustling antebellum city with goods and people crowding the space between steamboats and Front Street: that was what Laclède envisioned. Today, all remnants of the original city have disappeared. Only the old cathedral and a national park stand on the site. Busy storefronts would have been more appropriate as historical markers.

The first place established during the French regime in North America, Champlain’s Québec, and the last, St. Louis, carried the same birthmark: the comptoir–the fortified warehouse and counting house. Other economic activities would fill the landscape, but the driving force of this frontier was commerce–specifically, the fur trade. As W. J. Eccles wrote over thirty years ago, French North America “can hardly be said to have had a frontier at all. Rather, it can be said to have been a metropolis, dominating the hinterland around it.” Establishing trading posts and other urban enclaves, the French plugged Indian producers and consumers into an international market economy. Merchants such as Laclède and the Chouteaus facilitated exchange and encouraged regional development from a pioneering urban base. And so the French left a legacy of cities across North America from Montreal to New Orleans, Detroit to St. Paul. And native peoples were hardly passive participants in this enterprise. It was the Mi’kmaqs who insisted that Cartier forget about a passage to China and trade for furs.

The conception of St. Louis likewise owed a huge debt to native groups. A great Indian metropolis, Cahokia, had once existed across the river. More than simply a confluence of great river systems, this location encompassed a primary crossroads of native peoples. Indian groups from the upper Mississippi, the Great Lakes, the Missouri, the Wabash, and Illinois rivers all frequented the area. A network of small-scale traders, French and métis, already blanketed the region. Above all, it would be the increasingly powerful Osages living to the west of the new city that determined the success of this enterprise.

With so many parents watching over the birth, it is not surprising that St. Louis prospered immediately. Imperial contingencies favored the growth of the settlement. Laclède arrived in the fall of 1763 bringing the news of France’s cession of the east bank and Canada to Great Britain. He convinced forty families from the east-bank villages to move across the river to the new settlement. More families followed when the British formally took control in present-day Illinois in October 1765. News that France had secretly ceded New Orleans and Louisiana west of the Mississippi in the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762 finally reached St. Louis in December 1764. The first Spanish officials did not arrive until 1767. By then, St. Louis had passed through its infancy. It grew up speaking French, and its new imperial guardian made no attempt to change it. The Mississippi River had now become an international boundary. Spanish lieutenant governors, palms well greased, usually winked at contraband trade, and furs, skins, and trade goods would flow across borders with relative ease.

The trade exceeded Laclède’s expectations. Sir William Johnson, back in New York, wrote to the Lords of Trade in November 1765 that a Frenchman established near the mouth of the Missouri “carries on a vast Extensive Trade, and is acquiring a great influence over all the Indian Nations.” The following summer, a visiting British officer noted that Laclède “takes so good Measures, that the whole Trade of the Missouri, That of the Mississippi Northwards, and that of the Nations near la Baye, Lake Michigan, and St. Joseph’s, by the Illinois River, is entirely brought to him. He appears to be sensible, clever, and has been very well educated; is very active, and will give us some Trouble before we get the Parts of this Trade that belong to us out of his hands.” That year, 1766, Laclède wrote to his brother Jean, a lawyer back in France, that his business was worth more than 200,000 livres.

To be a successful merchant on this frontier, one needed good judgment, careful calculations, and connections. Procuring goods on credit in anticipation of the next year’s production of furs, skins, and robes meant establishing a reputation for reliability and integrity. Information was the key. Knowing about the conditions that would affect the market for all the goods being exported and imported required a network of correspondents in a dazzling array of places, from tribal villages to American, Canadian, and European cities. The fur trade was a global business. Letters and ledgers were as important as pelts. Good relations sustained trade, literally and figuratively. The objective of a merchant was to create a successful house–la maison–through the gradual accumulation of capital of all kinds. There was no distinct commercial district in early St. Louis. Business was conducted out of one’s house. The private sector was just that, and, more often than not, partnerships were family affairs.

Literacy and a cosmopolitan outlook were a merchant’s tools. So it should not surprise us that Maxent had a library of almost five thousand volumes. The Laclèdes of Béarn had been notaires and avocats for generations. Pierre’s Uncle Jean was a man of letters and science, known by Voltaire. Pierre’s library in St. Louis included practical business guides, histories, a volume by Mirabeau on the theory of taxation, essays on electricity and physics, and books by Bacon, Locke, and Descartes. Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, published in 1767, could be found in his room in St. Louis. Some of these volumes were later purchased by his stepson Auguste at the estate sale. Chouteau would amass his own impressive library. An affinity for Voltaire seems to have been passed down. Auguste owned a clock adorned with a figure of the great French philosophe. Not surprisingly, freemasonry would attract French merchants in St. Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans. The first generation of merchants who migrated to St. Louis was, indeed, a cosmopolitan group. The majority came from western and southern France. Northern Italy and Spain provided four each. Others came from Canada, the West Indies, Swiss cities, Holland, and Germany. In short, colonial St. Louis, although a muddy village-sized enclave in the middle of Indian country, was not a sleepy and isolated frontier town. It could not afford to be.

Nor could it afford to be inhospitable to Indian clients who hunted and processed the animal skins that would become luxury goods in distant markets. Their productivity, their taste as consumers, and their goodwill were all key elements. Knowing your customers in this business often meant having connections within Indian settlements. Kinship ties, real and fictive, were maintained. The most important merchants in St. Louis had métis allies in the field. (Some also had more direct relationships with Indian women.) Historian Tanis Thorne described the family of one trader, André Roy, a client of the Chouteau family. After Roy’s death, an Iowa Indian, Angelique, with whom he had two children, moved with her family from their village on the Des Moines River to St. Charles, a suburb of St. Louis. In St. Charles, Roy’s Iowa family lived near his French widow and children. Both women remarried, the children shared in the inheritance, and apparently, the “siblings enjoyed a close relationship.”

St. Charles, a village some twenty miles northwest of St. Louis on the north bank of the Missouri, was founded in 1768 by a hunter named Louis Blanchette. Other suburbs were settled within the metropolitan orbit of St. Louis in this first generation of the city: Carondelet or Vide Poche (“empty pocket”) in 1767; St. Ferdinand de Florissant in 1785; Portage des Sioux in 1799. The Deshetres, a family of Indian interpreters, went to Florissant. The Antoine Le Claires, father and son, the latter achieving some fame as Black Hawk’s interpreter and the métis founder of Davenport, Iowa, lived in Portage des Sioux. By 1800, over half of the 2,447 people living in the St. Louis metropolitan district actually lived in these satellite villages. This suburban population included many of those who filled the lower rungs of the fur trade’s occupational ladder. Closer to Indian country, these villages provided convenient jumping-off sites and, for older workers, a place to retire and do a little farming. Land there being cheaper and more available, these villages also attracted full-time farmers. Florissant contained the summer homes of some of St. Louis’ wealthier merchants. Viewing the metropolitan district of St. Louis in its entirety, one can say that the place contained a rather diverse population. To call it a middle-ground city would be both redundant and a little misleading. It was, simply, a city, a crossroads, a place where people from different cultures met and products were exchanged.

As the surrounding suburbs drew off the métis portion of the population, the core became increasingly colonial. But the city proper was, from the beginning, a French home. When a group of 150 Missouri Indians arrived in 1764 while Chouteau and Laclède’s workmen were first laying out the town, Laclède hurried back to the site and carefully explained why they must leave, disabusing them of their notion to settle in the heart of the new post. (Before they left, the women and children were engaged to dig a cellar for the company’s main building.) Never intended to be an Indian home, St. Louis, nevertheless, quickly became a place of both interest and influence within Indian country. Coeur qui brule, a Kansas chief, wrote to the lieutenant governor in 1800 that “for a long time I have wanted to see the town (depuis longtemps je désire voir la ville).” Understanding that St. Louis was a place of French manners and values, he added that he did not want to visit, like some chiefs, to seek presents. On the contrary, he said, “I have the heart of a Frenchman (j’ai le coeur d’un français).”

Exchange and curiosity did not always produce harmony. The proximity of disparate cultures with unequal resources and power could easily produce tense situations. In one telling incident in December 1778, an Indian man named Louis Mahas announced that “he had dressed long enough as a Frenchman, he would now dress as an Indian warrior and go and take scalps.” He was quickly arrested. Early French St. Louis was a compact settlement, and lots were enclosed with palisades. When Auguste Chouteau purchased Laclède’s old stone headquarters in 1789, he enclosed the entire lot with a “solid stone wall two feet thick and ten feet high, with portholes about every ten feet apart, through which to shoot Indians in case of an attack.”

The vulnerability of St. Louis was exposed only once in its early period. In 1780, a force of around 950 British soldiers and Indian allies, with some Canadian traders, attacked the town. The invaders were repelled, but not before over ninety inhabitants of the town, free and slave, were killed, wounded, or taken captive. The losses were deeply felt in a town with a population of some seven hundred souls. But the challenge of this first generation was not how to defend the place; rather, the primary task was that of constructing a city, a family, and a business from scratch. Consider the story of its founding mother, Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau. Madame Chouteau, born in New Orleans in 1733 to a French immigrant, Nicholas Bourgeois, and his Spanish wife, Marie Tarare, did not have an easy early life. Her father died when she was six; her mother remarried. Family tradition has it that Marie Thérèse was placed in the Ursuline Convent. More likely, she lived with her mother and stepfather. She married René Chouteau, a baker and innkeeper, at age fifteen. By all accounts, her husband was contentious and physically abusive. He abandoned his wife and young son, Auguste, possibly as early as 1753 and returned to France. She must have met Pierre de Laclède fairly soon after his arrival in New Orleans in 1755. They remained together until his death in 1778. According to the laws of the Roman Catholic Church and France, the couple could not marry. Therefore, when their four children arrived–Jean Pierre (1758), Marie Pelagie (1760), Marie Louise (1762), and Victoire (1764)–they were given the name Chouteau. When Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, Marie Thérèse’s only child by her legal husband, left on their founding journey, she was pregnant with Victoire. Sometime soon after the baby’s baptism, she left New Orleans to make the seven-hundred-mile journey upriver with her three young children and infant in tow. In short, Marie Thérèse and her children, alone in the world with few resources, left a fragile past for a most uncertain future.

Arriving at Fort de Chartres, Madame Chouteau and the children then traveled to Cahokia in a bumpy, two-wheeled charrette and crossed the river in a pirogue. The family began their new life in the newly built stone headquarters. Four years later, they moved to a new house down the street. Laclède deeded this residence to Madame Chouteau, along with the lot, an additional piece of land in the common fields, three black slaves, and two Indian slaves, Manon and Thérèse, both in their teens. These gifts Pierre gave to his partner in consideration of his clerk Auguste’s “faithful service” and “the affection” he bore the other four children of “dame Marie Thérèse Bourgeois and of Sieur René Choutaud.”

By this time, the missing husband had reemerged. Boarding a ship at La Rochelle in 1767, he returned to Louisiana. He spent some time in jail in New Orleans in 1771 for slandering a rival baker. Then in 1774, he initiated legal action to force his wife to return. Governor Unzaga directed the lieutenant governor in St. Louis to send Madame Chouteau back to New Orleans to be “under the authority of her husband.” Although another set of letters followed, this time with a promise to keep Marie Thérèse and Laclède apart, no further action was taken. Laclède continued to live in a room in the house he had given to Madame Chouteau. His children could never acknowledge their true father in public. All of this caused some consternation among the many socially prominent descendants as late as 1921, when one published a tract entitled Madame Chouteau Vindicated. What the story suggests is that St. Louis provided not only an economic opportunity, but a domestic one. In this distant place, the family could be secure, beyond the reach of legal propriety. Their stake in the city’s survival represented an unusual risk.

To their relief, René Chouteau died in 1776. Thereafter, Marie Thérèse signed herself as Veuve (Widow) Chouteau. Laclède and Madame Chouteau never married, very possibly because he was heavily in debt to his former business partner, Maxent. The two had terminated their arrangement back in 1769, several years after their trade privileges had been discontinued. Laclède bought Maxent out but was never able to cover the notes he had signed. When Laclède died in 1778, his stepson Auguste was appointed by the governor to settle the estate at the request of Maxent. The results of the sale suggest that Maxent allowed the widow to acquire enough property cheaply to provide a good income in the future.

Auguste purchased Laclède’s gristmill (the only one in the region), a dam, lake (known thereafter as Chouteau’s Pond), and over eight hundred arpents of land for two thousand livres. By this time, both Chouteau brothers, Auguste and Pierre, were trading on their own account quite successfully. All three daughters married well, bringing well-educated men (from France, Canada, and Switzerland), with capital and connections, into the family and its city. In this first generation, the growing Chouteau clan followed the time-honored patterns of mercantile families. Episodic ventures between family members allowed them to pool their resources while minimizing risk. Early transfers of property, large dowries, and a system of partible inheritance favored the entry of sons and sons-in-law into commercial ventures at an early age. Trial partnerships encouraged the identification of skills. Children were an investment. As one descendant observed, “They come high, but they may become valuable in time to come.” In a new and distant place, women played a critical role in preparing their children for the complex world of international trade. It was Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau who gave the family its sense of direction and purpose. She set the tone in this bourgeois enclave in Indian country.

By the turn of the century, a new generation of family firms had begun to form. New relations, the building blocks of the urban community and the interconnected family businesses, arrived from Gascony, from Laclède’s home province of Béarn, even from Italy (Barthomolew Berthold or Bertolla whose brother represented the firm that produced glass beads for the Indian trade). A new generation of Chouteau women would create homes that served as gathering places and centers of socialization and education: Julie Cabanné in St. Louis and Berenice Ménard Chouteau in a new Chouteau outpost, Kansas City. Judging from the family’s letters over several generations, it was, for the most part, an affectionate set of connections–a family that saw no separation between the spheres of worldly ambition and domestic pleasure. Indeed, merchants who spent much time away from home pursuing trade in Indian posts and European and colonial capitals often wrote home with thoughts of loving partners and children at play.

At her death in 1814, Veuve Chouteau was mourned by close to one hundred children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Given her own experiences, it is not surprising that Veuve Chouteau acquired a reputation for being thrifty, but family stories also describe her as a woman who loved clothes and jewelry. She conducted her own business affairs, with help from her Indian slave woman, Thérèse, whom she taught to manage her household. The town and family the widow constructed retained its French character during her lifetime. As one visitor described it in 1816, “St. Louis, as you approach it, shows like all the other French towns in this region . . . The French mode of building, and the white coat of lime applied to the mud or rough stone walls, give them a beauty at a distance, which gives place to their native meanness when you inspect them from a nearer point of view . . . The site is naturally a beautiful one, rising gradually from the shore to the summit of the bluff, like an amphitheatre. It contains many handsome, and a few splendid buildings.”

The city changed quickly after Madame Chouteau’s death: new commercial and industrial enterprises, banks, Protestant churches, a new cathedral, civic institutions. Even some of the muddy streets would be paved. Above all, the first steamboat arrived in 1817, an impressive tool for conquering the tyranny of distance and reinforcing the city’s position within a regional and national economic network. Madame’s grandson, Pierre Chouteau Jr., would use steamboats to consolidate the family firm’s dominant position in the fur trade, eventually superseding and even acquiring John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Chouteau would become the most famous name in the West in the antebellum period, appearing on Indian medals and flying from the flagpoles of company vessels. Controlling the flow of people, information, and goods, the Chouteau company would continue to serve both their private interests and those of an expanding American empire–in that order. Within a new diversified portfolio that included railroads, railroad iron, and real estate, the fur trade would become an Indian business that drew profits from the dispossession of native people. But then St. Louis had been from the beginning a place that took advantage of its proximity to Indian communities. It was not a home for native people, and Indian residents of the city in this early period were more likely to be slaves, outnumbered by the sizable population of African slaves.

The family itself remained open ended. Veuve Chouteau’s grandson General Charles Gratiot Jr., a graduate of West Point, would spend much time in Washington as a company lobbyist. His daughter Marie Victoire would marry a Frenchman and become “one of the most brilliant ornaments of the court of the Empress Eugénie.” Another grandson, Frederick Chouteau, would spend most of his adult life in Kansas and Oklahoma. His son William would marry a Shawnee woman, Mary Silverheels. That couple’s great granddaughter, Yvonne Chouteau, would celebrate both her Chouteau ancestry and her Indian ancestry and achieve fame in the 1940s and ’50s as the prima ballerina of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

It was a curious and fascinating circle Laclède and Chouteau created when they first arranged the pattern of people and buildings named St. Louis. Perhaps the most representative sight in the city’s first generation was that of the two Thérèses, one French, one Indian, walking down its streets. The Indian Thérèse served as Madame Chouteau’s personal secretary and close companion for almost fifty years. If only we could have recorded their conversations. They were said to have been a “formidable combination.” In her will, Madame Chouteau gave the Indian woman her freedom and a small amount of cash and goods. During her lifetime, the French Thérèse, surmounting a rough start, became the mother of a city and a family dynasty. The Indian Thérèse, we should remember, was her slave.

Further Reading: The best history of the city is James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980, 3rd ed. (St. Louis, 1998). Charles van Ravenswaay, St. Louis: An Informal History of the City and its People, 1764-1865 (St. Louis, 1991) provides an invaluable anecdotal history in a well-illustrated volume. William E. Foley and C. David Rice, The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis (Urbana, 1983) is the definitive study of the first generation of this family, placing their activities in their local, regional, and national contexts. John Francis McDermott, ed., The Early Histories of St. Louis (St. Louis, 1952) contains Chouteau’s “Narrative” and other important early writings about the town. Katharine T. Corbett, “Veuve Chouteau, A 250th Anniversary,” Gateway Heritage 3:4 (Spring 1983) provides a portrait of the founding mother. Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia, 2001) combines the perspectives of history and urban studies in a most useful way.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Jay Gitlin is a lecturer in history and the associate director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University. His book, The Bourgeois Frontier, will be published by the Yale University Press in the spring of 2004.

Read Two Pieces

Cape Cod 1782

He painted his initials in black inside the windmill. My great grandfather times five, Thomas Greenough, who would come to be known as the last surviving Wampanoag Indian in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts. The Pawkunnawkut Indians in South Yarmouth are part of the Wampanoag Federation of the Algonquins. Though of course there were other relations in Yarmouth, including his own children. But he was the last full Wampanoag in this town, last on the Bass River reservation. His solitary status convinced the town to take his land. Thomas Greenough’s hand on the inner wall beside the winding staircase, beams and tower, overlook: “T.G.” and the date “1782.”

Later, the windmill would be sold, a collector’s item. It now stands next to America’s oldest post office. Vanes raised like arms, canvas hooked in a shroud. My relative had helped lift the windmill with forty oxen and move it to Indian Town. He was thirty-five years old. This was years before the windmill was given to the father of modern assembly on his eightieth birthday by a group of automotive dealers. The owner, Dr. Edward F. Gleason of Hyannis, sold it to the Ford Dealers Association of America for $12,000, the windmill dismantled and shipped to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The oldest windmill on Cape Cod, with my relative’s name inside it like a letter.

The Wampanoags wrote letters, in their own language, about their own land to the U.S. government. In the film, We Still Live Here—Âs Nutayuneân, Eva Blake, a Wampanoag language instructor, said that touching one of those old documents is like touching their hand.

I want to go to Dearborn, Michigan. Touch Thomas Greenough’s black paint initials inside the windmill. The only writing he left in the world that I can find. Thomas Greenough lifted the windmill four years after the town called him the last of his tribe. The town of Yarmouth took back the reservation land through a Writ of Ejectment on March 30, 1779, though at the Yarmouth proprietors’ committee meeting of July 1, 1713, they had agreed “with the Indians where to lay out such land, which land is to lie for their use forever.”

The Wampanoag linguist, Jessie Little Doe Baird said, If someone lost their land, they would say nupunuhshom, I fall down. To lose the right to one’s land is to literally fall off your feet. To have no ground under you. My land is not separate from my body.

Farris Windmill, named for the family who ran it for three generations, is the oldest windmill in America. It was built in West Yarmouth about 1650, according to the Henry Ford Collections’ Farris Windmill “Creator Notes.” Or, the windmill was built in 1633, as reported in several 1935 New York Times articles discussing the uproar that the sale of the windmill caused among Cape residents. In August 2014, the Henry Ford Collections uploaded a recently digitized photo of a 1935 newspaper article: “Protest Removal of Windmill,” which includes an image of Farris Windmill and reports on the “storm of protest” raised by Cape Cod residents.

Ellice Engdahl, digital collections and content manager at the Henry Ford, comments on the article: “This photograph, which appears to capture a newspaper clipping, shows that not every community wanted Henry Ford to purchase and relocate their architectural treasures to Dearborn.” “On a cheerier note,” Engdahl said, she includes a link to another photograph celebrating the sale: “Ford Dealers in Greenfield Village for the Presentation of Farris Windmill to Henry Ford, November 6, 1936,” in which hundreds of men in overcoats and hats cluster before the newly transplanted mill. Many carry walking sticks though the land appears level.

In 1782, Thomas Greenough helped carry Farris Windmill to Bass River where his land had been. That year the mill was bought by David Kelley, who also bought the Wampanoag reservation land. The Kelley name is still on the street sign nearby. As noted by the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth in Images in Time: Cape Cod Views, Thomas Greenough “commemorated the event by writing his initials and the date high inside among the rafters.”

In We Still Live Here, Eva Blake spoke of documents that had been written in Wampanoag hand, written by those fighting for their land. I wonder if Thomas Greenough wrote a letter.

On November 18, 1935, workmen began tearing down the mill for shipment to Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. Each shingle was marked and packed for shipment. Workers in Dearborn reassembled it. The New York Times said that for years the windmill had been a landmark and a shrine for Cape Cod residents. When the sale was announced, letters of protest were sent from “all parts of the U.S.” Ford collected to help preserve the past, so twenty-two thousand employees of Ford Company pitched in to buy the windmill for him. As workers took each shingle and stone, tore it down in a steady rain, a 24-hour police guard kept watch. People offered $5 for a shingle, but workmen filed them all.

Why does Thomas Greenough have an English name?

Interviewed in We Still Live Here, Aquinnah Wampanoag Linda Coombs said, I think the pressure was convert or die, get harassed out of town, harassed out of life.Was Thomas Greenough an Indian convert? Were his parents? In the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, English settlers tried to convert the native people. Thomas Greenough was born in 1747. My Aunt Marguerite, who was the first to search for Thomas, said that he was a Christian Indian and a teacher. His obituary states that “he wore, through the last year of his life, the title of ‘Lawyer.'”

The first Bible printed in America was in the Wampanoag language, John Eliot’s Algonquian Bible. The narratives of Wampanoag conversion to Christianity were collected by John Eliot and published in Tears of Repentance, 1653. In We Still Live Here, a portion of Monequassun’s confession is read: Because I loved the place where I lived I thought I will pray to God so that I could still stay at that place. I prayed not for the love of God but for the love of the place I lived in.

In the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress, I’d asked for Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts, Laura Arnold Liebman’s Cultural Edition published in 2008. I expected this recent copy. After a long wait, the librarian placed the original 1727 edition in the cradle on my table: Indian converts: Or, Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a Considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard in New England. The inside cover was stamped: “War Library.” I touched the pages. Who were Thomas Greenough’s parents? What were their names?

A court could say you are the last of your kind, and we will take back your land. So, in the summer of 2012, I drove one morning from Wellfleet to the mid-Cape in search of the deed for Thomas Greenough’s land. At the assessor’s office for the town of Yarmouth, the assessor, Matthew Zurowick, kindly sets me up at the first desk in the office and opens the deed database, searchable back to 1704. On the desk, I place one of the books I’ve brought, Images in Time: Cape Cod Views, and open it to a marked page. It’s Farris Windmill, with Thomas Greenough’s initials “high inside among the rafters.” Matt is still at the desk, my computer, and asks, What windmill is that?

It’s Farris, I say, But now it’s in Dearborn, Michigan.

Guess where I’m from? he asks. Delighted. He grew up near the windmill, the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village—the area by the museum that he says is living, people reenacting time. The windmill is lifted off the ground now, he says, pointing to the windmill wings. See how they reach the ground in the photo? Otherwise, they’d hit people in the head.

Ford couldn’t have been happy with a photograph, a painting of the windmill. He seemed to want not only to preserve the past, but to keep it all in one place, in his village and museum. But when it was taken from Yarmouth, Thomas Greenough’s name and the Wampanoags of South Yarmouth disappeared from the windmill’s history. What could the black painted letters “T.G.” or “1782” mean to Henry Ford? Two letters and four numbers. There is no mention of Thomas Greenough’s initials on Ford’s Greenfield Village Memories website. The past preserved inside the windmill remains unknown to its owner or visitors.

The Oldest Windmill on Cape Cod reassembled in Michigan: the turret is the revolving mill at the top, the red wheel and long post at the back of the tower turn the turret (and the sails). The base is colored rocks: white, gray, tan, charcoal. The danger of the wings isn’t just a tap to the head. It looks like they could decapitate. The shingled peak of the windmill rotates. Shingles dark brown. Front door latched shut, and so high off the ground now, you’d need a ladder to get in. Thomas Greenough must have walked through that doorway to paint his name inside. Above the door, about halfway to the top of the mill, is a tiny open, four-paned window with its own shingled door wide open. Another tiny six-pane is above the new red door inside the stone base.

Ocean wind was the power source, turning the wooden sails that set in motion half-ton millstones on the second floor. Greenfield Village has a Model T Ride, Working Farms, Hearse Shed, Frozen Custard, Porches & Parlors, Edison at Work, Sarah Jordan’s Boarding House. You could spend days here, eat at a nineteenth-century roadhouse, shop at the Greenfield Village Store. The mill looks lonely. No people in the photograph, no ocean breeze. Inside, Henry Ford holds a message from Thomas Greenough. Ford’s wealth, his antique love, his 22,000 employees bought the only known writing in the hand of the last surviving Wampanoag of South Yarmouth, Massachusetts. Without even knowing it. Under the blue sky, lost among the other artifacts.

I’d begun writing the poem “Farris Windmill, South Yarmouth, Massachusetts” after reading in Daniel Lombardi’s Windmills of New England: Their Genius, Madness, History, & Future that Thomas Greenough had painted his initials inside the mill when he helped to move it. Images in Time: Cape Cod Views from the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth also mentioned this, as does a Yarmouth Register newspaper article from 1894, as well as other sources. I’d been fascinated with Thomas Greenough since my Aunt Marguerite had given me a copy of her genealogical research and our family tree traced back to him and his wife, Jane Freeman.

The next document I discovered was his obituary in the Barnstable County Archives. The more I read about his life, the more I wanted to find Thomas Greenough in whatever way possible. The town had reclaimed the Indian lands in 1778 after the smallpox epidemic, but apparently Thomas Greenough did not abide by that decision. On March 30, 1779, a court case was settled against him “for setting his house and making improvements on land that was laid down for the Indian inhabitants to live upon, contrary to the directions of the Selectmen. This land had been formally sold and transferred by the town, to various parties for an ample consideration; and after some subsequent litigation, the town’s action was sustained by the courts of law.” He lived the remainder of his life on a pond that now bears his name, Greenough’s Pond, until he went to the town almshouse and died at the age of 90.

The tone used by Thomas Greenough’s obituary writer gives a sense of how the townspeople viewed Greenough’s right to his land:

“…and though always supplying himself with such wild productions as he found upon what he called and believed to be his own territory, but the legal seizing of which unfortunately was the home of his white neighbors —”

The obituary writer also romanticized Thomas Greenough as “the last of his kind.”

When I discovered, through the Yarmouth Cemeteries Department, that in 1826 the town selectman “voted that Thomas Greenough & all other people of colour, be requested to remove their dead from the place where they are now deposited & bury them in the (unmarked) Southeast corner of the burying ground, as is to be laid out by the Selectmen for that purpose,” it was striking that Thomas Greenough is the only person of color named.

I wondered how a person lives when so many things are taken away, when the land itself is taken, even though, as Jessie Little Doe Baird said, this loss means to have no ground under you. I’d been working on essays and poems about Thomas Greenough, but until I found the windmill, the only way to touch Thomas Greenough was to walk into Greenough’s Pond. Though I’ve yet to travel to Dearborn, Michigan, I’m heartened that his writing exists. This tangible evidence. That when I touch it, it will be, as Eva Blake said, like touching his hand.

While it seems most likely that Thomas Greenough painted his initials in the mill after helping to move it, others think he was a builder of the mill. I recently came across the Dennis Historical Society’s digitized copy of W. F. Kenny’s article, “The Old Farris Grist Mill,” in the Yarmouth Register, April 14, 1894, which noted Thomas Greenough’s initials and the date painted in black on “one of its massive oak posts” and states: “It is thought that the figures indicate the year it was built and that the letters stand for Thomas Greenough, the builder; but no one knows with certainty.”

The Dennis Historical Society follows this with a typed and footnoted version beneath the original 1894 article. In this update, footnote no. 9 confirms that “Thomas Greenough was, indeed, one of the builders. He also has the distinction of being the last surviving Native American in South Yarmouth. The mill was built by a group of men, under the direction of Samuel Farris, and Thomas Greenough was one of them.” Yet this conflicts with the known age of the windmill itself. Thomas Greenough wasn’t born until 1747, and the latest date for the windmill’s construction is about 1650. I did consider revising the poem to include this new possibility—Thomas Greenough as builder—but the dates are so off, it seems impossible. Though it further convinces me of the importance of discovering what I can of Thomas Greenough and the need for clarity.

As I wrote this, I watched the dawn in Provincetown’s West End, a five-minute walk from Pilgrims’ First Landing Park. The year before the Pilgrims first landed here in 1620, a smallpox epidemic killed two-thirds of Native Americans in the Massachusetts Bay. So many that the Pilgrims’ leader, John Winthrop, thanked God for their deaths as it left the land seemingly empty for the Pilgrims to take. Pink rose along the Cape Cod Bay, blue above. I’d been writing all night at a green Formica table facing an old church pew against a wall of 80 small windowpanes, each the size of a hand. I’d been surprised to learn that this borrowed loft had originally been the Nickerson/Freeman house in the early 1800s, family names of Thomas Greenough’s wife and of his descendants. Here at the end of the earth lived someone with the family name of Jane Freeman, my fifth great-grandmother, and the name of her daughter-in-law, Deborah Nickerson, my fourth great-grandmother. When I expressed doubt that these Nickersons and Freemans in Provincetown were connected to those in Yarmouth, my neighbor said, The world wasn’t that big. It’s the same name, they’re connected. I feel my ancestors connect in me, as if I am a kind of physical map. A map with a key, a legend I’m just learning how to read. The rising sun also reminded me that this place had been home to the Wampanoags for over 15,000 years. Wampanoag means “People of the First Light.” When I imagine Thomas Greenough, I see him painting the letters of his name, walking the streets of South Yarmouth after his court case. I see him at Greenough’s Pond. Dying in the almshouse, a man of “wild productions.” I would like to see him as clearly as I can. And someday to reach out and touch his hand.

Further Reading:

Director Anne Makepeace’s We Still Live Here—Âs Nutayuneân, is a PBS Independent Lens documentary (2010). John Eliot’s Algonquin Bible is Mamusse wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblium God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament. The Holy Bible Containing the Old Testament and the New Translated into the Indian Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1663). For more on Wampanoag conversion narratives, see John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew’s Tears of repentance, or A further narrative of the progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New-England (London, 1653); Experience Mayhew’s Indian converts: Or, Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a Considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard in New England (London, 1727); and Laura Arnold Liebman’s Cultural Edition of Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts (Amherst, Mass., 2008). For more on Farris Windmill, see Images in Time: Cape Cod Views from the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth (Yarmouth Port, Mass., 2003); Daniel Lombardi’s Windmills of New England: Their Genius, Madness, History, & Future (2003); and the Dennis Historical Society’s “The Old Farris Grist Mill,” in Yarmouth Register, April 14, 1894. For more on the Farris Windmill sale, see “Ford Buys Country’s Oldest Windmill” in New York Times, November 10, 1935; “‘Too Late on Windmill’: Cape Cod Can Do Nothing to Bar Removal By Ford,” in New York Times, November 13, 1935; “Start Dismantling Oldest Windmill,” in New York Times November 16, 1935. For more on land issues, see Simeon L. Deyo’s History of Barnstable County, Massachusetts (New York, 1890) and Charles Francis Swift’s History of Old Yarmouth: comprising the present towns of Yarmouth and Dennis from the settlement to the division in 1794, with the history of both towns to these times, published by the author in 1884.The Henry Ford Collections’ recently digitized newspaper article on the sale of Farris Windmill,“Protest Removal of Windmill,” is available. The related photograph, “Ford Dealers in Greenfield Village for the Presentation of Farris Windmill to Henry Ford, November 6, 1936” is also online.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Kelle Groom is a poet and memoirist. Her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (2012) is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. She is the author of three poetry collections: Five Kingdoms, Luckily (2010), and Underwater City (2004). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, James Merrill Writer-in-Residence Program, Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Library of Congress, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Ucross Foundation. Her awards include a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose, as well as a state of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs grant, two Florida Book Awards, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. Recently distinguished writer-in-residence at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, she is now on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program. She is currently at work on her second memoir, The Cartographer’s Assistant, and her fourth poetry collection, Letter from Aphrodite.

America’s floral women in the nineteenth century

In the introduction to her Familiar Lectures on Botany, first published in 1829, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps explained that “the study of Botany seems peculiarly adapted to females; the objects of its investigation are beautiful and delicate; its pursuit leading to exercise in the open air is conducive to health and cheerfulness. Botany is not a sedentary study which can be acquired in the library; but the objects of the science are scattered over the surface of the earth, along the banks of the winding brooks, on the borders of precipices, the sides of mountains, and the depths of the forest.” Phelps’s progression from gendered limitations (women, like flowers, should be “beautiful and delicate”) to limitless exploration (of the earth, brooks, precipices, mountains, and forest) echoes a more general development in nineteenth-century American women’s culture.

That familiar story follows middle-class American women as they emerge from the parlor onto the public stage to condemn slavery, to defend the indigent and the sick, and to fight for their own citizenship. From “beautiful and delicate” objects, they emerge as active agents of America’s social maturation. As this story goes, the delicate domestic woman exists as a kind of counterpoise to the strong public man. The two revolve around each other in a kind of codependent orbit, neither able to exist without the other but both strangely at odds. This neat bipolar world of the domestic and the public, the feminine and the masculine, served nineteenth-century middle-class men as they struggled to maintain their own authority in the face of all sorts of challenges to that authority. As women, working-class men, people of African descent, and others excluded from citizenship struggled to expand the bounds of citizenship, conservative moralists and their middle-class male supporters struggled to defend the status quo. To this end, the idea of separate spheres was perhaps the defining social ideal of Victorian America. There was the public world, and it was a place of strength and masculinity. And there was the private, domestic world—a place of delicacy and beauty. For a woman to leave the latter for the former was, implicitly, for her to sacrifice certain virtues ascribed to her gender—or so the words of Victorian men and women would have us believe.

Historical reality turns out, not surprisingly, to have been somewhat more complicated. The neat separation of feminine and masculine spheres existed more as an ideal than as a fact. As Phelps suggests, it was perfectly possible for a nineteenth-century American woman to define herself in terms that transcended contemporary gender norms. Curiously, one of the arenas in which women did this involved flowers, nature’s most stereotypically feminine production. The connection between women and flowers seems so obvious—and stereotypical—that its significance is often overlooked or dismissed. Yet America’s early “floral women” reveal that their passions for flowers and their passions for public good were inseparable. Flower power nineteenth-century style may have reflected the “turn on, tune in” ethos of the better known era of flower power. But the “drop out” part was definitely stuff of a later and very different age.

We might begin with Almira Phelps herself. She wrote books on botany, chemistry, and the physical sciences. Her Familiar Lectures on Botany and its companion for younger learners, Botany for Beginners, went through multiple editions throughout the nineteenth century: an 1891 edition of Botany for Beginners boasted of being the “270^th thousand” one printed, and Familiar Lectures on Botany remained in print for more than four decades. By contrast, Amos Eaton’s widely-used Manual of Botany went through only seven editions between 1819 and 1836. In addition to writing science textbooks, Phelps was also a social reformer. As her Lectures on Botany suggest, she was especially interested in women’s education. Her assertions about the benefits of botanical study included not only healthful exercise and mental discipline but also loftier benefits. In a preface “To Teachers” in the 1848 edition of the Familiar Lectures, she noted that flowers “are designed, not merely to delight by their fragrance, color, and form, but to illustrate the most logical divisions of Science, the deepest principles of Physiology, and the goodness of God.” It was as if she were telling her readers, “Do not be deceived by the prettiness of flowers. Beneath their delightful surfaces lie profound lessons about the design of the natural world.” But for women to grasp those lessons, Phelps intoned, they would have to forgo their ephemeral scrapbooks and personal diaries for more scientific productions: “herbariums and books of impressions of plants, drawings, &c. show the taste and knowledge of those who execute them.”

Later editions of Familiar Lectures on Botany included a section on the “Symbolical Language of Flowers.” Dating at least to Shakespeare’s time in the West and even earlier in Asia, the language of flowers was an elaborate symbology in which specific flower species had particular emblematic meanings, as in Ophelia’s well-known line in Hamlet, “there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” Flower emblems reflected both positive and negative traits, especially those particular to personal relationships: forget-me-not means “true love,” but foxglove means “insincerity”; heliotrope means “devotion,” but wild honeysuckle means “inconstancy,” and so on.

By the mid-nineteenth century, scores of flower language books had been published in the United States. Often, brief versions of this language were appended to other types of books, including botany textbooks (as in Phelps’s Familiar Lectures), plant guides, gardening books, and even conduct manuals. Books devoted entirely to the language of flowers, however, have their own particular charm. Some were published as token books, fitting neatly in the palm of a woman’s smaller hand; others were larger editions with elaborate gold-stamped covers that featured lavish full-color plates illustrating meaning-laden bouquets of multiple flowers. A number were specifically intended for prominent display on the parlor table. Most of them included both scientific information and sentimental material, often in the form of poetry.

Sarah Josepha Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter: or, the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments relied on several earlier works for its contents: Flora’s Dictionary (1829) by Elizabeth Wirt (wife of Attorney General William Wirt) and The Garland of Flora (1829) by Dorothea Dix (better known as the champion of dedicated asylums for the mentally ill). Whereas both Wirt and Dix published their flower-language books anonymously, Hale proudly claimed hers. First published in 1833, Flora’s Interpreter came at a time when Hale was still editing the American Ladies’ Magazine. In her introduction, Hale notes that the collection is an “experiment” that will “give an increased interest to botanical researches among young people.” But beyond that benign purpose lies a more potent one. From Hale’s pen, the language of flowers becomes a national language. Many of the flowers in her book reveal distinctly “American sentiments,” which are in turn reinforced by copious excerpts from American poets. For, she asserts, “it is time our people should express their own feelings in the sentiments and idioms of America.”

When many American writers were preoccupied with defining and celebrating American productions, Hale’s nationalism is not unique within the genre of flower language books. Dorothea Dix, in the preface to The Garland of Flora, hopes that her book will “display many pleasing traits of national manners.” Lucy Hooper, in the preface to The Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry (New York, 1859), similarly expresses “pride and pleasure” regarding “the selections from our own native poets.” Poems by Lydia Sigourney, Frances Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Hannah F. Gould stand beside those by Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes in these American flower books.

As the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1837 to 1877, Hale wielded enormous power through her writings, especially her editorials. She promoted the study of botany and urged her readers to cultivate an interest in flowers, especially wild flowers. In July 1841, Godey’s Lady’s Book asserted that the preservation of wild flowers is “a subject worthy the attention of our sex” and noted the benefits of this activity as “a pleasing exercise for the mind.” The article further discussed the potential for women’s contributions to the larger project of native species preservation: “If memoranda were made of the places where such wild flowers are found, the latitude, with the common name, and whether they grow singly or in groups, profusely or sparsely, with the time of flowering, ladies might add something to the history of our Flora worthy of remembrance, and particularly so, would they make themselves acquainted with, and note their botanical characteristics.” Even more significantly, the author (most likely Hale) pointed to such activity as an example of women’s civic involvement. Their botanizing efforts, the author suggested, would save America’s floral treasures from the relentless march of cultivation:

“Our American woodlands are rich in the treasures of the florist and botanist. It is to be feared, however, that the hand of the early cultivators of the soil, has swept for ever from the face of nature many of the brightest gems of the forest and the plain . . . The most beautiful and delicate wild flowers known to our older states, generally inhabit the depth of the forests, the skirts of woodlands, the mountain fastnesses, or the rocky and precipitous banks of rivers and creeks. And why? Because our extensively cultivated lands, have been laid under tribute for bread; and the remorseless plough, sacrificing to the first instincts of nature all that could captivate the eye of the florist, has left only to the fringe of our worm fences and the edges of our highways, generally speaking, the coarser productions of the soil . . . The diminishing and fading wild flowers of our land call to [us] for protection.”

In an interesting reversal of gender roles, women have become the protectors of the more delicate and vulnerable wild flowers, these “gem”-like treasures of forest, plain, and wilderness. Although most historians place the beginnings of American women’s conservationist consciousness and activism in the late nineteenth century, this example from the 1841 Godey’s Lady’s Book suggests that this emerged much earlier.

The popularity of botany, flower collection, and herbarium construction can be traced not only through such mentions in the popular press but also in women’s private writings. In May 1845, the fourteen-year-old Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Abiah Root, “I am going to send you a little geranium leaf in this letter which you must press for me. Have you made you an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you; ‘most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here.” Although famous today as one of America’s foremost poets and a significant precursor of the modernist aesthetic, Dickinson was probably best known during her own lifetime as a gardener. Her love of flowers came early, as this letter attests, and like “‘most all the girls” of her day, Emily was preserving local species in an herbarium. Flowers, both cultivated and wild, figure prominently in her poetry: cardinal flower, clover, daisy, dandelion, gentian, harebell, heart’s ease, jessamine, orchis, and rose are but a few of those she specifically names. The image of an Indian pipe, one of her favorite flowers, adorns the cover of the first edition of her posthumously published Poems.

The symbolic power of flowers attracted other women writers in the nineteenth century. Louisa May Alcott’s first book was Flower Fables, published in 1854 but written several years earlier for Ellen Emerson, the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In these moralistic tales, personified flowers teach virtues such as unselfish love, care for the poor, patience, cheerfulness, and humility. After the Civil War, the prolific African American poet, essayist, and lecturer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper used the flower fable format to promote a message of racial tolerance. In “The Mission of the Flowers,” published in the Harper’s collection Moses: A Story of the Nile (Philadelphia, 1869), the beautiful rose is the center of attention, and “its earth mission was a blessing,” whether cheering the sick or brightening a prisoner’s cell. The rose, “very kind and generous hearted,” “wished that every flower could only be a rose.” A spirit grants her wish, and she changes every flower in the garden into a rose. But soon “that once beautiful garden was overrun with roses; . . . that variety which had lent it so much beauty was gone, and men grew tired of roses, for they were everywhere.” The rose realizes the error of her ways, wakes to find that she was only dreaming, and learns a powerful lesson: “to respect the individuality of her sister flowers.” Of various shapes, colors, sizes, and blooming seasons, each flower has its own valuable mission; “and of those whose mission she did not understand, she wisely concluded there must be some object in their creation.” Harper had a strong sense of her own mission as an abolitionist and a champion of equality for women and African Americans; as an activist who also felt the prejudice of her white sister feminists, she deeply understood the need for the movement’s metaphorical gardens to feature more than just roses.

Not all floral women had careers as public as Sarah J. Hale or Frances E. W. Harper. One woman whose accomplishments were known to just a small group of experts during her lifetime is now memorialized with several species of wildflowers from the intermountain region of the western United States. Thompson’s Dalea (Psorothamnus thompsoniae), Thompson’s Penstemon (Penstemon thompsoniae), and Thompson’s Woolly Locoweed (Astralagus mollissimum var. thompsoniae) are all named for their discoverer, Ellen Powell Thompson. The wife of Professor Almon Harris (“Harry”) Thompson and the sister of Major John Wesley Powell, Ellen Thompson accompanied her husband, brother, and other members of the second exploratory expedition of the Colorado River through the canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Harry Thompson was Powell’s geographer and chief assistant, and “Nell” Thompson was widely admired by the other explorers for her cheerfulness, “love of adventure,” and botanical interests. Ellen Thompson kept a diary in 1872, which covers her plant collecting as well as daily life in camp.

Excerpts from her diary reveal not only her fascination with local flora but also the extraordinarily difficult conditions in which she did her botanizing. On March 6 she wrote, “we are in a heavy snow storm for four hours, tho we stop several times to sketch. Found a new cactus (to us). Intend to secure the blossom if possible.” During the next several weeks, she was sick more often than not, frequently not able to get out of bed or do more than read or write a few letters or do some mending. Yet she persevered, insisting on proper botanical procedures even when she could not collect specimens for herself. On March 29 she wrote in her diary that “Jones brought me three flowers, but do not make out what they are as he brought no leaves.” A few days later, she noted that “we woke this morning to find that snow had fallen to the depth of 2 feet during the night. Not too comfortable . . . to be up on the mountains in such a storm with nothing for a cover but a small tent. Have worked with my plants all day.”

Thompson’s work remains important to botanists, for the new species she discovered and for the many other species that she successfully identified and preserved. Her herbarium specimens are among the earliest scientific record of Utah flora. Just as important, however, is the larger narrative told in the sparse detail of her diary and the more detailed accounts of those whose work received greater recognition at the time. Hers is the story of a middle-class, college-educated woman who did not stay at home to raise children and keep house. Instead, she joined her husband on a fascinating and challenging journey into unfamiliar territory and made the most of her time there, using her intellect, education, and interests to contribute valuable scientific information to the overall effort of the expedition.

In the decades after the Civil War, as the western part of the country opened to exploration and settlement, regional differences became a source of national pride rather than the impetus for armed sectional conflict. Writers of the “Local Color” movement paid careful attention to dialects, folklore, landscapes, and manners, producing a regionalist literature in both fiction and nonfiction. In New England, the work of Celia Laighton Thaxter often described the Isles of Shoals, a collection of small, rocky islands off the New Hampshire coast. Thaxter moved to one of these islands at age four, when her father became the lighthouse keeper of White Island. Nearly sixty years later, having spent most of her life on and around these islands, she published An Island Garden, a memoir about her many years of experience as a gardener. In beautifully detailed prose infused with a passion for nature and a wonderful sense of humor, Thaxter invites readers to notice, as she does, the changing of seasons, the birds and insects that threaten and sustain her plants, and the flowers that “have been like dear friends to me, comforters, inspirers, powers to uplift and to cheer.”

Published in 1894, An Island Garden featured color illustrations by Childe Hassam, the American impressionist artist who spent many summers at the Isles of Shoals, painting their rocky coastlines and wild hillsides. One of Hassam’s favorite subjects was Thaxter’s garden, and more than twenty of his illuminations and full-page scenes illustrate An Island Garden. Completing this treasure of late nineteenth-century textual and visual art is the exquisite cover design by Sarah Wyman Whitman. Whitman was one of the principal artist-designers for Houghton-Mifflin, and her Art Nouveau covers appear strikingly fresh today. Whitman’s predilection for floral motifs reveals the organicism of Art Nouveau, while her frequent use of soft-edged, ribbon-style banners hearkens back to the feminine ornament of an earlier generation.

The heyday of floral women came to an end with the close of the nineteenth century. Although women would continue to study botany and write about flowers throughout the twentieth century, their attentions were more often devoted to other concerns and pursuits. The modernist fascination with the machine age supplanted Victorians’ fascination with the natural world, and women’s professional opportunities outside the home increased in number and social respectability.

Looking back, the limitations of nineteenth-century American women’s culture seem in many ways to have enabled their widespread dedication to flowers. As an appropriately feminine form of science, botany literally opened doors for women, permitting them to step outside and ramble though the woods searching for specimens. But perhaps the most important “public” function of the collection, preservation, and artful display of flowers was conservation. The work of these botanizing women raised national consciousness about the need to save America’s vanishing native species.

Further Reading:

For more on women and science in early America, see Nina Baym, American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (New Brunswick, 2002). A useful survey of American women’s environmental involvement can be found in Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill, 1993). Judith Farr’s The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) gives rich detail about the poet’s love of flowers. The full text of Harper’s “The Mission of the Flowers” appears in Frances Smith Foster, ed., A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990). The excerpts from Ellen Powell Thompson’s diary are from Beatrice Scheer Smith, “The 1872 Diary and Plant Collections of Ellen Powell Thompson,” Utah Historical Quarterly 62:2 (1994): 104-31. A facsimile edition of Alcott’s Flower Fables is available (Bedford, Mass., 2004), as is one of Thaxter’s An Island Garden (Boston, 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Annie Merrill Ingram is associate professor of English at Davidson College, where she teaches courses in American literature and environmental studies. She has recently coedited Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.