American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013 research post 2

James Simpson

May 3, 2013

The Oregon Trail and Questions of Identity

            How do cultures interpret new frontiers? In reading history, but also literature (which may be a truer compass of the actual thoughts and inspirations of the ages), we find that the philosophical crisis of personal identify when faced with “The Other” is an age-old concern of Man. Perhaps in travel literature, narratives and diaries, we find the most historically “honest” accounts of how travelers and adventurers perceived their world (for a candid journal can betray honest sentiments, even if untruthful facts). These journals and letters are as such a window into the souls of men and women at a particular place and moment—a historical record, if you will, of the thoughts, motivations, and sentiments of another time.

Although travel narratives are an ancient genre, the modern era of travel narratives blossomed as travel became more common for the wealthy and the lettered; during the late Seventeenth Century, for example, it became fashionable for the young rich of Western Europe to take the Grand Tour of the Continent and its antiquities as a necessary finish to their educational refinement. And, while later fashionable young Americans from Boston and New York tended to mimic the trends of Europe in their travel and tourism, there remained a class of travelers from distinguished Eastern American families that trail-blazed into the Western frontier—for adventure, for wealth, or, in the best tradition of noble tourism, for inspiration. The Romanticist Francis Parkman (1823 – 1893) was among these latter adventurers; what he found in the West was not as important as how he interpreted it—and so we come round to our question, how do cultures interpret new frontiers? Parkman’s 1849 travelogue The Oregon Trail is a window into the cultural psychology of Eastern Americans as the Western frontier was in its golden era of accessibility before the momentum of westward migration finally “closed” the frontier by 1890 (as Frederick Jackson Turner persuasively argued in 1893)[1].

The topic of my research was therefore to examine Parkman’s apparently conflicted views of the Western landscape with the question—albeit an unanswerable one—in mind: Is a particular landscape ever “imprinted” on us at some formative time; can we, in fact, ever become truly citizens of another land, not our birth? If Francis Parkman is to be considered a fair representative of the human species, then the answer is no.  A dissonance that scholars find in The Oregon Trail is that, while Parkman set out to find and record the grandeur of the near West (he only traveled as far as Colorado and New Mexico), he was not able to accept the country on its own terms, but instead consistently wrote about it through the lens of comparison with the verdant landscapes of his home in the East. This  is, indeed, the pitfall that separates the travelers from the tourists—the geographers from those merely trying to relieve their boredom with entertainment: to find spiritual and intellectual inspiration, the traveler must be willing to value the sublimely humble as well as the sublimely grand; to find repose in the microcosm of the flat landscape, as much as in mountain vistas; to essentially find beauty in the same quiet inward journeys of reflection on which the low hills of Kansas lead the sensitive observer—and which so bitterly disappointed Parkman. Of these disappointed reflections Edward Halsey Foster tells us that:

He was accustomed, of course, to the scenery of the East—the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, and so forth—and in contrast, the Western landscapes which he saw seemed to offer little. He could appreciate landscape which met his criteria for, say, the beautiful or the picturesque, but generally he found the parched, arid landscapes of the Great Plains unpleasant or disagreeable. Indeed when he contrasted these Western landscapes with those in his native New England, the apparent superiority of the latter was simply reinforced. (41-42)

            Robert Edson Lee continues this discussion of Parkman as an example of the Eastern mind being unwilling or able to identify with the much different Western landscape; Lee spends considerable time in also examining another eastern romantic writer, Washington Irving, and his A Tour of the Prairies, which, like Parkman’s work, displayed a diminished craft as both authors struggled with their dislike of the new landscapes. According to Lee both authors’ travel writing often was not as good in these journals as they displayed in their other works set in Eastern landscapes:

It is in comparison with Irving that we can best estimate the quality of the style of The Oregon Trail. Both Irving and Parkman suffer from the limitations of their training. The Western people that they wrote about had to be represented in gentlemanly terms—to coin a word, de-vernacularized…. The level of the sound of people to which Parkman could not reach and didn’t even try is indicated in such a sentence as this: ‘The was a burst of screams and laughter from all the women, in which his mistress herself took part, and Raymond was assailed by such a shower of witticisms that he was glad to ride forward out of hearing.’ For the literature we seek, such a lively scene must be represented in more lively terms than these. The Western landscape about which Parkman wrote is treated exactly as Irving treated it: the word ‘picturesque’ is used as frequently in Parkman as in Irving—and I use it here in its damning sense of being inanimate, two-dimensional, and simply pretty. (79)

Lee goes on to conclude that Parkman’s prose indicates an inherent disconnect, an emotional  dissonance with the West, that indicates his inability to adapt to the “Other”—to other places—that challenged his pre-conception that civilized and well-ordered landscapes must be, in fact, consummately Eastern in character:

The confines of Parkman’s literature can only loosely be ascribed to the East…. One senses in The Oregon Trail Parkman’s consciousness of something lost, of something which he did not actually touch—conscious of his own peripheral status—and the consequent longing, the mythic pull. Possibly, too, one can read in the book the despair of the Easterner unable to find in his past the means to express what he so vaguely understands. (80)

In his essay “Materialism and Mysticism in Great Plains Literature,” John R. Milton suggests that Parkman could not identify with the West because his Eastern experience didn’t have the vernacular to accommodate the Western experience—a lack reflected in his often stilted and ambiguous language employed in The Oregon Trail: “His language, from another country, did not allow him to discover the uniqueness of the plains. Yet he knew that something was wrong. What he did not seem to know was that the western landscape demanded a new kind of perception and a new language to take into account the peculiar beauty of the plains and mountains” (34-35). Alf H. Walle further suggests that Parkman traveled to the West with a “cultural bricolage” (882) drawn solely from the New England, Puritan, and “social elite of 19^th century Boston as the theoretic backbone of his work” (882).

            This research does, unfortunately, leave at least one important question un-asked: Is it possible that the Eastern bias against the West as represented by Parkman has intellectual substance to commend itself to our attention; that his viewpoint deserves more than outright dismissal?  To ask the question is to answer it: Of course not; No modern academic with a thought toward his career would dream of considering the propositions that some biases are more in accord with human intuition.  It is now de regueur in academia to presuppose that aesthetic judgments are sacrosanct from appeals to objective standards of beauty or morality.  (It is, in fact, also rarely admitted that to call something a bias does not constitute a logical refutation of the bias’ principle.) This is not to say that I agree with Parkman, nor that I in fact think that the West is or was culturally or aesthetically inferior to the East (although, having seen much of the United States, my heart is more inclined toward the more modest green hills of the East than in the overawing scenery of the West.) What I do suggest, however, is that these researchers interpret Parkman through the filter of their own presupposition that matters of taste are entirely subjective; this is an intellectually defensible position, but not an intellectually invulnerable one.   I submit that Parkman deserves a less biased reading, by which I mean a reading less colored by our own modern bias against making aesthetic judgments.

Works Cited

Foster, Edward Halsey. The Civilized Wilderness: Backgrounds to American Romantic Literature, 1817-1860. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co, Inc. 1975. Print.

Lee, Robert Edson. From West to East: Studies in the Literature of the American West. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press. 1966. Print.

Milton, John R. “Materialism and Mysticism in Great Plains Literature.” Vision and Refuge: Essays on the Literature of the Great Plains. Ed. Virginia Faulkner and Frederick C. Luebbke. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Walle, Alf H. “Habits of Thought and Cultural Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research. Vol. 23.4 (1996): 874-890. Print