As a sailor might say

DRAGOONED: Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853). No. 3.

But yonder is land on our lee bow—as a sailor might say—
“Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” September 1851.¹

“Prairie Schooner” by Jackie McElroy. Screenprint, 1998. Image courtesy of the University of North Dakota.

Two months elapsed after the June debut of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” before a second, considerably longer installment appeared in the September 1851 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. Unaccountably delayed, the follow-up in September was really two installments lumped into one. The contents of this jumbo double-episode make up two consecutive chapters (2 and 3) in Part II of the 1857 book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army: or, Romance of Military Life. Both segments continue with the matter of 1843, the abortive fall escort of Santa Fe traders by 1st Dragoons under command of then-Captain Philip St. George Cooke. The main source-text for the creative retelling (concluded in the January 1852 number of the Southern Literary Messenger) is Cooke’s formal summary of the fall trip, supplemented with descriptive details from his much fuller narrative of the summer march.²

The first segment of the 1851 rewrite begins “Sept. 1.” with the month abbreviated and printed in italics. The diary format makes it appear that the narrative was actually “WRITTEN ON THE PRAIRIE” in 1843 as the subtitle of the magazine series again alleges. From here on out, dates and place-names in select entries mark specific stopping places and progress along the route: toward “Council Grove” on September 1st; “Diamond Spring” on September 3rd; “Cotton Wood Fork” on September 6th; and a lonely riverside “bank of the Little Arkansas” on September 9th, near Owl Creek, scene of an already notorious murder five months before.

At Owl Creek, on or about April 10, 1843, Mexican trader Don Antonio José Chávez had been robbed and killed by a gang of Missouri land pirates led by John McDaniel.³ Later, in memory of the victim, the site would be renamed Jarvis Creek Crossing. The Jarvis part indicates the way many western travelers heard and pronounced the name Chávez as “Jarvis” or “Charvis.” Without naming the victim in his 1843 journal of the summer expedition, Philip St. George Cooke there alluded to his brutal killing as “the most atrocious murder of the time.” Cooke did not elaborate in his original report, but this segment of the published re-write in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” ends with a heartfelt requiem for the slain trader “Charvis” whose killers are figuratively represented as “human fiends.”

Action in the next segment (chapter 3 in the book version) stalls in the vicinity of Owl Creek on the Little Arkansas River, as recounted in dated entries for September 11, 12, and 14. The entry for “Sept. 17” records progress from Owl Creek to a new campsite at Walnut Creek. The last two entries in this second segment consist entirely of prairie dialogues between the narrator and “I. F.” his Imaginary Friend. At “‘Coon Creek”on September 21 the September 1851 installment concludes with more talk about buffalo grass, discussion of the landmark known as “Pawnee Rock,” and a made-up tale of Indian heroism. Only interrupted by a charging buffalo, the prairie convo at Coon Creek ends in a brief reminiscence of the narrator’s “wonderful bull-fight in June.” The event to which the narrator’s invented companion alludes was the ludicrous affair of the buffalo hunt with a howitzer, described by Cooke with extra energy and attention to detail in his official journal entry for June 28, 1843. Nearly 40 years later, Cooke was pleased to see his original account of the June affair published under the heading, “An American ‘Bull Fight’” in the United States Army and Navy Journal (April 8, 1882). Given his obvious enthusiasm for the episode, sustained over many decades, Cooke would have been more than a little disappointed by the tone and brevity of its treatment in the rewrite.

Wonderful indeed

As promised in the opening installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the continuation of the narrative in September 1851 offers a literary “salmagundi” or hodgepodge of subjects and themes. Major style markers that I counted as “tokens of ghostwriting” in the first installment also appear here in the second. For one, the literary device of apostrophe recurs in direct addresses to absent books and authors in general (“Oh, my books! my favorite authors, how I miss you!”) and Charles Dickens in particular. In between the eulogy for Chávez and unsolicited praise for the romantic poetry of Byron, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons (soaked to the skin after days and days of “chronic rain”) lovingly apostrophizes the word dry:

“Oh! expressive and honest Saxon monosyllable! —dry!— thy very sound is pleasing—the idea rapturous! Only think, though it be extravagant, at this hour of inevitable repose, of a dry blanket! think too of dry wine!"

The Captain’s enraptured vamp on the “very sound” of the “expressive and honest Saxon” word dry is much in the vein of Melville’s narrator in White-Jacket, when extolling the “very sound” of the “fine old Saxon word” afternoon:

The rest of the day is called afternoon; the very sound of which fine old Saxon word conveys a feeling of the lee bulwarks and a nap….⁴

Elizabethan pronouns and verb endings, another distinctive feature in the debut of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border, appear also in the September installment. Some perfectly Melvillean examples occur in the aforementioned apostrophe to Charles Dickens, the popular British novelist. Directly and familiarly addressed in absentia, Dickens here stands accused of betraying his most loyal American fans by his ridicule of American citizens, institutions, and culture in American Notes for General Circulation (1842).

“Oh Dickens! the Atlantic was thy Rubicon; on its broad waste thou didst shipwreck much Fame and Honor. Wonderful indeed that thou shouldst, in a day, turn two millions of admirers, friends, into despisers! Whilst the arms of millions were outstretched to receive thee, and their eyes glistened with welcoming pleasure, in thy heart thou betrayedst them, and sold them to a publisher!”⁵

Along with the archaic grammar, many word choices like Rubicon, and shipwreck used as a verb, and even the phrase wonderful indeed lie well outside the range of Philip St. George Cooke in his everyday writing. Not one of these expressions can be found anywhere in his 1843 Journal of the Santa Fe Trail, the main source-text for this part of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” All these choices do feature in the known writings of Herman Melville, particularly in the two books Melville worked on in 1851 and 1852 while “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” was appearing serially in the Southern Literary Messenger. In the title “He Crosses the Rubicon” of Book XI in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Harper & Brothers, 1852) Melville directly references the famous crossing of the Rubicon by Julius Caesar. Also exampled in Pierre, twice, the phrase wonderful indeed, both times (as in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border”) at the start of a new sentence: “Wonderful, indeed, was that electric insight which Fate had now given him into the vital character of his mother”; and, just one page later, “Wonderful, indeed, we repeat it, was the electrical insight which Pierre now had into the character of his mother.”⁶

Likewise, Melville’s sixth and seventh books are notably full of the Elizabethan pronouns and verb forms again adopted by the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” For example, the locution thou didst occurs twice in Moby-Dick (1851) and a dozen times in Pierre (1852). Melville also used the phrase thou should’st one time each in Moby-Dick and Pierre. Melville never used “betrayedst” (the second-person familiar, past tense verb form of betray) in his published writings. However, in Pierre the suffix -edst is added to the base form of the verb to marry, resulting in a parallel form, marriedst.⁷ To Dickens, the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” charges “thou betrayedst.” In equally archaic language, Pierre’s mother asks of the Reverend Falsgrave, “And thou marriedst him?” And then condemns her well meaning minister with a curse (“Damn thee!”), wrongly suspecting him of having officiated at the wedding of her son with Isabel Banford.

As a sailor might say

Extemporaneous sailor talk pops up again in the second round of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” as happened also in the opener. There, and surprisingly, it took the form of digressive nautical rhymes bemoaning the “dreary” plight of a solitary naval officer, a “great Commodore / Alone in the cabin of a seventy-four.” Here, we find our narrator, ostensibly a “Captain of U.S. Dragoons,” impersonating an ordinary seaman by locating picturesque scenery in relation to wind direction, as if the prairie caravan were a ship at sea: “But yonder is land on our lee bow, as a sailor might say.” Only a sort of aside, in effect, but a closer look at its context will illuminate another feature carried over from the first installment, which is the mining of Cooke’s earlier, more extensive journal entries in June and July 1843 to get raw material for the narrative underway, supposedly a record of the later, fall expedition.

In June the military escort had proceeded south and west on the Old Santa Fe Trail. On June 10th Cooke and his men reached Cow Creek, about 5 miles off from the Arkansas River, where Cooke noted the “picturesque & beautiful” view of the “broken hills of white sand” near present day Hutchinson, Kansas, pleasingly blended with green trees along the Arkansas River. Near the same place a month later, only this time headed east back to Fort Leavenworth, Cooke again recorded his impression of the scenery around Hutchinson. Here below is what then-Captain Philip St. George Cooke originally wrote on July 12, 1843 in his official journal of the summer expedition:

It was a cold morning—a heavy dew sparkled on the grass blades, a brisk south wind waves the sea-like grass, which untouched, untrod, extended away, far away! The only other vegetation was the spire & the "masonie" or medical weed, of which the purple and blue flowers blended in the distance to the very hue of ocean. No spot of earth, no forest shore was visible as I cast my eyes around the horizon, but in one quarter: & there seemed a city, a beautiful city with cottage & mansion & spire & tower—all of white amid orange & evergreen groves; a new Havana—it was the forest covered hills of broken white sand beyond Arkansas.⁸

Amidst a figurative “sea” of wind-blown prairie grass and blue flowers “the very hue of ocean,” Cooke fixed on the distant sight of “hills of broken white sand” past the Arkansas River. Imparting a kind of mirage, the Kansas sand hills now looked like “a beautiful city with cottage & mansion & spire & tower.” Key words and phrases originally recorded by Cooke in June and July 1843 have been skillfully incorporated in the account of the fall journey as reconstructed in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” The following passage is from the entry dated September 8, 1843 in both the magazine and book versions.

I. F. [= Imaginary Friend] — “What a beautiful plant with the striped white and green flowers!”

"—Those are the leaves; the flower—look closer—is diminutive and of a delicate white; it is a species of milkweed, and is called, I believe, the variegated euphorbia. But yonder is land on our lee bow,—as a sailor might say—(the flat, wet prairie is usually like the sea; a little further on, and it is salty). It seems a city! those white sand bluffs and forests mingled; a beautiful city with spire and dome, and cottage too! all white, and mingled with shade trees. How pleasant the first far-off view of the Arkansas! for there are its hills of shifting, impalpable sand. Those dark, green spots far in front, are a few trees on the Little Arkansas: a big name, in fact, for a branch a few feet wide and inches deep; it imitates the Great, however, and is treacherous at bottom."

In the quoted passage, a pretty variety of milkweed is examined by the narrator’s botanically curious Imaginary Friend, then technically identified as variegated euphorbia by the narrator. For some reason this white-and-green leaved plant with tiny white flowers has entirely displaced the so-called “medical weed” with “purple and blue” flowers that Cooke had noticed in his original journal entry. Perhaps Cooke or his ghostwriter wished to correct or improve the information there presented. To be clear, there is no mention anywhere in Cooke’s 1843 journal of a prairie “Friend,” real or imagined.

Ignoring for now the fictional nature of this invented conversation, I want to document the reuse of key words and phrasing from Cooke’s entries in June and July 1843 to fill out the fabricated entry for September 8th in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Shown below are three specific borrowings, all of them transposed from Cooke’s actual entry for July 12th in his 1843 Journal of the Santa Fe Trail:

July: there seemed a city
Sept: It seems a city

July: a beautiful city
Sept: a beautiful city

July: all of white
Sept: all white

Other specific words carried over from the July entry are spot, cottage, and spire.

Also worth noting is the creative adaptation of Cooke’s view of the Kansas sand hills he had described in July 1843 as “hills of broken white sand,” verbally echoing his earlier depiction in June, “broken hills of white sand.” Cooke’s repeated word broken got deleted in the rewrite. In the fabricated journal entry for September 8th, Cooke’s “broken hills of white sand” have become “hills of shifting, impalpable sand.” Each of the newly imported adjectives, shifting and impalpable, appears in Moby-Dick and Pierre.⁹ Another word only introduced in the rewrite is mingled. Like shifting and impalpable, the word mingled appears to have been supplied by a ghostwriter or editor. In context, mingled effectively replaces blended in Cooke’s original journal entry. As with the added adjectives shifting and impalpable, the past tense form of the verb mingle occurs in Moby-Dick; in Pierre Melville used it adjectivally in the hyphenated compounds “tear-mingled ink” and “new mingled emotion.”

Professionally refurbished, the Captain’s view of scenic Kansas sand hills is newly introduced in nautical jargon:

“But yonder is land on our lee bow—as a sailor might say—”

Here again, no such language occurs in the source-text. The words yonder, lee bow (or leeward as preferred in the 1857 book version) and sailor never appear anywhere in Philip St. George Cooke’s 1843 Journal of the Santa Fe Trail. In July, however, Cooke did observe “the sea-like grass” waving in the wind, along with ocean-hued flowers of blue and purple. Cooke’s original language explicitly invoked the familiar association of prairie and sea. How exactly the sailor talk came about is unknown and open to conjecture. I would guess that in revision of the passage for use in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the conjunction of “brisk south wind” and “sea-like” waves of prairie grass prompted the ghostwriter or editor to imagine the whole caravan as a ship at sea, thus extending the original simile and at least temporarily making a metaphorical mariner of the narrator.

In July the wind blew from the south, as Cooke duly noted. In September, as repeatedly indicated in the fabricated “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” it was a cold wind from the north that harassed the dragoons on their second trip west. Earlier in the entry (dated “Sept. 8”) with the added sailor and sailor jargon, the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” records how the “north wind” foiled his hopes of finding their campsite warmer and drier in September than it had been in June. Instead, the north wind made Turkey Creek “a cold and rainy place.” On the night of the 9th a “cold north wind” brings “ceaseless rain.”

Its being a north wind in September explains the reason for locating sand hills to the south “on our lee bow,” meaning the lee side, towards which the wind is blowing. According to the Century Dictionary, the nautical term lee when used as a noun designates the “quarter toward which the wind blows, as opposed to that from which it proceeds.” When it functions adjectivally, as here, lee means

“of or pertaining to the part or side toward which the wind blows, or which is sheltered from the wind: opposed to weather: as, the lee side of a vessel.¹⁰

In the book version “land to leeward” replaced “land on our lee bow” and “would” replaced “might.”

“But yonder is land to leeward,—as a sailor would say—”¹¹

With modal verbs switched, the hypothetical sailor’s expression has changed from something he might say (“on our lee bow”) to something he more definitely would (“to leeward”). Either way the direction remained accurate after revision, since leeward is downwind. The new combination of leeward with yonder has an interesting parallel in the soliloquy uttered by Starbuck in Moby-Dick Chapter 119 The Candles:

“ Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning.” [emphasis mine]

“To leeward” in Moby-Dick often points in the direction of home and hearth, and presumed safety (which may prove illusory in a gale, as Ishmael warns in Chapter 23 The Lee Shore).

Whoever introduced the expression “as a sailor” in the course of creatively adapting passages from the official report of Philip St. George Cooke to make “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” writes exactly like Melville in the first chapter of Moby-Dick. In Chapter 1 Loomings, Melville has Ishmael declaring his motives for going to sea “as a sailor” in three paragraphs, each one launched with the same rhetorical structure and lawyerly style:

1. No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor

2. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor

3. Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor

Although presented early in the published book, the “Loomings” chapter may have been one of the last Melville wrote.¹² If so, Melville and the ghostwriter for “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” penned the words “as a sailor” at very close to the same time. In any event, neither writer could have influenced the other in the late spring or early summer of 1851, when both works existed only in manuscripts. The second installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” with “as a sailor” appeared in the September 1851 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger; and The Whale, as Melville’s great new work was titled in England, appeared in October, published by Richard Bentley. The first American edition Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, published in New York by Harper & Brothers, was available in bookstores by mid November.

Dialogue on Books and Authors

In the literary salmagundi that is the September installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” books and authors receive special, early treatment. The structure of this treatment is dialogic, taking the form of fictitious conversations between the narrator and his imaginary traveling companion. Throughout the series, prairie dialogues will be a regular and increasingly complicated feature of each installment.

Nothing in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” resembles Herman Melville’s way of writing more than the use of dialogue as a literary device in connection with travel. As John Wenke has well observed, “Melville associates travel and talk” most programmatically in Mardi (1849), the Confidence-Man (1857), and Clarel (1876). These are three “books of talk” in which

“the travelogue facilitates the staging of elaborate philosophical exchanges.”¹³

Introduced in June 1851, “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” began like the first chapter of Moby-Dick with a daring and demanding address of the reader. In the next installment, with the fall journey of U. S. Dragoons on the Santa Fe Trail in 1843 ostensibly underway, the voice of the narrating Army Captain continues to anticipate that of the sailor-narrator in Melville’s sixth book, not yet published either in England (by Richard Bentley as The Whale) or America (by Harper & Brothers as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale).

As described by Wenke, “the genial, present-tense voice of ‘Loomings’” in Moby-Dick immediately “establishes the dramatic meeting of narrator and reader” in the now-famous line, “Call me Ishmael.” The reader is thereby enlisted as an active participant in the journey with three supporting roles:

In naming himself through a directly addressed imperative, the narrator casts the reader as auditor, companion, and interlocutor.”¹⁴

To the same effect in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the reader’s invited involvement as hearer, friend, and speaker makes this a dramatic as well as narrative journey. Prairie dialogues occur in each one of the thirteen installments that comprise the 1851-3 magazine series. Subject to revision (often minor but occasionally resulting in significant deletions and additions) these dialogues were all reprinted in Part II of the 1857 book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army.

The recurring prairie dialogues in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” give form and structure to the narrative, as well as entertaining content. Good evidence of their structural importance may be found in the synoptic chapter headings for Part II of the book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857) as printed in the Table of Contents.

The word “Dialogue” occurs in each of the first ten chapter summaries, thirteen of twenty-one in all. Of the eight chapter summaries in Part II without any explicit mention of “Dialogue,” two reference a dramatic “Soliloquy” (in chapters 14 and 17) and another clearly implies some kind of dialogue with the descriptive tag, “The Storm Discussed” (in chapter 20).

Just one month before the “Dialogue on Books and Authors” appeared in the September 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne had stayed up late talking of many things including “books, and publishers”:

“Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night.”¹⁵

Later testimony has them plotting a book made up from their wide-ranging conversations.¹⁶ Problems of “Book-making,” authorship, and publishing—the literary matter of Melville’s all-nighter with Hawthorne—intruded early in the very first episode of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” (June 1851). As previously shown, Washington Irving there received special commendation for his fluid “writings, flowing through broad margins of letter press,” illustrated in a quoted passage from the History of New York.

Discussion in the next installment (September 1851) turns to other writers and titles, introduced by the narrator in the Melvillean manner of promiscuous apostrophe: “Oh, my books! my favorite authors, how I miss you!” Ten different writers are named in quick succession:

1. Shakespeare

2. Walter Scott, “what a camp library would his works be.”

3. [Maria] Edgeworth, “great and philanthropic” forerunner of Scott.

4. [G. P. R.] James, author of Attila, Philip Augustus, and Edward the Black Prince.

5. [Edward Bulwer-Lytton] author of Last of the Barons.

   

6. [Benjamin] D’Israeli, “the younger, the sparkler!” Author of Vivian Grey.

7. [Charles] Lever, “the bright coiner—so they say, of other men’s ore!”

8. [James Fenimore] Cooper, “the American Scott, who still more than his model, wrote his brain as dry as a broken ink stand!”

9. [Nathaniel Parker] Willis, celebrated as “the Irving of periodical literature” and “the Poet.”

10. [Charles] Dickens, here invoked as creator of “immortal” characters “Little Nell” in The Old Curiosity Shop, Twist in Oliver Twist; and the author of controversial American Notes for General Circulation; also Martin Chuzzlewit, humorously derided as “the very Muzzlewit to Dickens” in another dialogue from later in the September 1851 installment.

The real Philip St. George Cooke certainly did read and remember his Shakespeare, as evidenced by quotations from Hamlet (“words, words, words”) and Henry IV, Part I (“reason upon compulsion”) in extant letters to military correspondents. Byron, too, and “Lord Lytton” were knowingly quoted in Cooke’s 1886 talk on “Our Army and Navy” delivered in Detroit to the Michigan Commandery of the Loyal Legion.¹⁷ But Cooke’s references there to the 4th Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (“The armaments which thunder-strike the walls….”) and the “explosive” potential of “Vril” in Bulwer-Lytton’s sci-fi novel The Coming Race were intended to illustrate his chosen theme, the evolution of modern warfare and weaponry. Cooke’s agenda then and perhaps always was eminently practical and scientifically or technically oriented. What’s different and quite unlike PSGC the career Army officer here in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” is the romantic and poetic sensibility attributed to the narrator, and the heightened literary expression of that sensibility through fluid narrative prose and deftly managed dialogues with an imaginary companion.

Works by most of the ten writers (or eleven, counting Washington Irving) referenced in the first “Dialogue on Books and Authors,” were demonstrably familiar to Herman Melville, with the possible exception of Irish novelists Maria Edgeworth and Charles Lever. The choice to represent Lever, author of the Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1839) and Charles O'Malley, the Irish Dragoon (1841), as an alleged “coiner” or counterfeiter, meaning plagiarist, suggestively anticipates Melville’s repeated use of the word coiner in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Applied to Lever, the tag “coiner” alludes mainly to his exploitation of the “service novel” as popularized before him by other writers, particularly William Hamilton Maxwell in Stories of Waterloo (1833).¹⁸ Melville’s usage similarly plays on the double sense of "coiner" as 1) a minter of words or an author; and 2) a counterfeiter or plagiarist. Late in Pierre, Melville’s young enthusiast tries writing the great American novel, only to be accused of fraud by “Steel, Flint, & Asbestos” his own stony-hearted publishers. Their business letter denouncing him as “a swindler” triggers the author-hero’s final meltdown which begins with Pierre’s nailing the rejected manuscript to his writing desk, in the same way that a merchant in Melville’s day might expose fake money by affixing it to the sales counter.

" —Now, then, where is this swindler's, this coiner's book? Here, on this vile counter, over which the coiner thought to pass it to the world, here will I nail it fast, for a detected cheat!” — Pierre; or, The Ambiguities; emphasis mine.

The “author-hero” of Pierre’s first serious fiction is suggestively named “Vivia.” The name Vivia, as pointed out by Henry A. Murray in the 1949 Hendricks House edition of Pierre, “calls to mind Vivian Grey, Disraeli’s first author-hero.” Dr. Murray, taking a hint from his well-read daughter Josephine, further suggests that “the autobiographical novels of Disraeli” may have “provided more raw material for Pierre than any other author” except Byron.¹⁹

We don’t know for sure if or when Melville picked up Disraeli’s first novel, pronounced “his best” and “immortal” by the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” In dialogue with his Imaginary Friend, the Captain of U. S. Dragoons claims to read “an odd volume of Vivian Grey every year.” With respect to the “odd volume” in a mixed set of favorite books, the dragoon-narrator’s diction is that of Melville’s narrators in Redburn (“odd volumes in my father’s library) and White-Jacket (“some odd volumes of plays”).

Also in the invented “Dialogue on Books and Authors,” novelist James Fenimore Cooper is called “the American Scott” after Sir Walter Scott. Herman Melville presumably would not have approved such a nickname as that. In the guise of “A Virginian spending July in Vermont,” Melville had recently condemned the practice of identifying American authors with their British models in catchy handles like “the American Goldsmith” or even “the American Milton.” “Call him an American, and have done,” Melville urged in his now-famous article on Hawthorne, “for you can not say a nobler thing of him.”²⁰

In the same 1850 review-essay, Melville had also expressed his admiration for Nathaniel Parker Willis as an American poet, citing The Belfry Pigeon. Willis is acknowledged as “Poet” also in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” besides being “the Irving of periodical literature.” A friend of Herman Melville’s brother Gansevoort, N. P. Willis enthusiastically promoted Herman’s books from Typee on (even Mardi) in the newspaper he co-founded and edited with George Pope Morris, the New York Home Journal.

Dialogue on Newspapers and Books

A second literary dialogue appears later in the September 1851 installment, synopsized in the Table of Contents for Part II, Chapter 3 of the book version as a “Dialogue on Newspapers and Books.” The prolific N. P. Willis again features prominently, this time as New York correspondent of the Washington, D. C. National Intelligencer. After praising his “newspaper gem” of a sketch about Glenmary (New York New Mirror, July 29, 1843) the narrator observes that “Willis has an inexhaustible fund of novelty and originality in him; he is a sparkling and polished writer—but often of nonsense.”

Besides the National Intelligencer, other American newspapers rating a place in the narrator’s “catalogue raisonné ” are the Washington, D. C. Globe, the New York American, the New York Herald, the St. Louis Republican, and the Weekly Louisville Journal. George D. Prentice, famously caustic editor of the Journal, receives thoughtful consideration, and commendation as an entertaining hater:

“Prentice has a characteristic quality which now needs a name—better than repartee writer. But, heaven and earth! he is the best abuser too of his time—an exotic in a genial soil.”

Prentice delighted in trashing Herman’s older brother Gansevoort Melville in 1844, when Gansevoort toured the south and west campaigning for the future president James K. Polk. Herman knew this because his brother Allan had told him so. Bragging about Gansevoort’s celebrity in a long letter dated October 17, 1844, Allan allowed that “Prentiss the witty editor of the Louisville Journal was right down upon him.”²¹

Apart from the mention of Gansevoort’s editorial nemesis as “the best abuser of his time,” and the attention to Gansevoort’s friend (and also Herman’s early and ever-faithful promoter) N. P. Willis, the most distinctively Melvillean aspect of the dialogue on newspapers would have to be the narrator’s geological system of filing them “snug in layers—strata—as to date and character”:

“… you forget I have still newspapers to read. I am bringing up, as from daily mails, the daily news of some two weeks which I had not time to read at the Fort. I have them snug in layers—strata—as to date and character too. What a study—if one stopped to study—a detailed history of the world for a fortnight!”

Newspapers contain and preserve the record of current events like ancient rocks preserve records of the earliest life forms in fossils. With this geology-based conceit of printed newspapers as strata or layers of rock, the Captain-narrator in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” presents the flip-side to Ishmael’s figure of geological strata as books in press, mock-scientifically termed “the stereotype plates of nature” in Moby-Dick Chapter 104 The Fossil Whale. Before that, Babbalanja on the “Isle of Fossils” in Mardi also spoke of rocks as metaphorical “leaves of the book of Oro,” before regaling the company with a funnier and more appetizing sandwich-theory of creation.²²

Two books receive attention as unfairly neglected works. One is the anonymously published Vestal; or, a Tale of Pompeii (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1830) by Thomas Gray, credited by the narrator as a possible source for Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the better known Last Days of Pompeii (London: Richard Bentley, 1834). Another supposedly forgotten title is the Adventures of a Younger Son by Edward John Trelawny, named in a chapter of Herman Melville’s White-Jacket, A Man-of-War Race, as a favorite author of Jack Chase. “Matchless Jack,” Melville’s former shipmate and personal hero, puts “Trelawney” in the honor roll of great sailor-writers, in between Shelley and Byron. Here below is the whole prairie dialogue on Trelawny:

I. F. “The Adventures of a Younger Son,” by Trelawny, is another instance; a book which I have read twice with delight; but it is out of print; I know no one who has read it.

“Excuse me, but I have, and laughed till my sides ached. What a keen sense of the ridiculous. An original work altogether.”

I. F.—And how superior to the sentimental tribe of heroines, is the Arab bride; and Van Scalpvelt [Scolpvelt] is a jewel.

“Yes, the eccentric and inhuman martyr of science; he is food for much laughter.”

I. F. De Witt and the nameless hero, are every inch sailors and soldiers too.

“Do you remember the Malay chief and his red horse?”

I. F. Remember them! It is a splendid picture of glorious bravery—of heroic action!

“And now, sir, your eloquence must not detain me from ‘drill.’ There are a half-dozen fine young fellows here who have not had even so good an opportunity as this to put in practice their theoretical knowledge.”²³

Trelawny’s Van Scolpvelt, here perceived as “the eccentric and inhuman martyr of science,” is a model and possible source for Melville’s comic portrayal of Cadwallader Cuticle, the amputation-crazy navy surgeon in White-Jacket. In Benito-Cereno Melville may have borrowed the spectral image of Malay pirates (as Captain Amasa Delano mentally pictures them) armed with “a hundred spears” and lurking below deck, “ready to upthrust them through the mats” from Trewlany’s brilliantly written but “very wicked” book.²⁴

The whole conversation sounds sort of like an outtake from White-Jacket. But when it comes right down to “writing like Melville” the most compelling instance in all this talk about Trelawny might be the way it ends with a clever segue from talk to action. Dramatized like a scene in a play, the conversation has two speakers, or two actors with speaking parts, both of whom will become recognizable characters over time. Already one of them has been assigned the role of “I. F.,” short for “Imaginary Friend.” To end this particular scene, the playwright (or ghost playwright?) has found a suitable motivation in Captain Philip St. George Cooke’s Journal of the Santa Fe Trail, and dramatized it. The excuse? Duty calls!

No such time-out for “drill” is mentioned anywhere in Cooke’s relatively brief log of the fall expedition. However, several hints for the necessity of drilling the troops were available in Cooke’s more expansive account of the summer trip. At Council Grove on June 4, 1843 Cooke had written, “Men are washing. An Artillery drill in the afternoon.” Next day, after the traders arrived, Cooke again “had a regimental and artillery drill this afternoon.” The most inviting prompt in Cooke’s journal may have been this entry on June 24, 1843:

Packed up and mounted at 3 o’clock; the companies were then inspected, the squadrons were then assembled, (every soldier in the ranks) and I had a regimental drill; and I practiced the formation of an “order of battle” from column of route,—when right or left, is in front, as they thus marched alternately.²⁵

As Cooke subsequently confirmed, his dragoons were regularly “drilled on the prairies” during the summer. Squadron drills only resumed in December, after the return to Fort Leavenworth.²⁶ So then, the excuse of needing to “drill” in September 1843 represents yet another borrowing, creatively adapted from Cooke’s account of the summer expedition.

“And now, sir, your eloquence must not detain me from ‘drill.’ There are a half-dozen fine young fellows here who have not had even so good an opportunity as this to put in practice their theoretical knowledge.”

Melville would try a version of this excuse at the close of “A Digression” in his late, uncompleted work Billy Budd:

“Euthanasia, Mr. Purser, is something like your will-power: I doubt its authenticity as a scientific term—begging your pardon again. It is at once imaginative and metaphysical,—in short, Greek. But,” abruptly changing his tone, “there is a case in the sick-bay that I do not care to leave to my assistants. Beg your pardon, but excuse me.” And rising from the mess he formally withdrew.

The good doctor in Billy Budd, “one of Melville’s narrow men of science” in the estimation of William B. Dillingham, discounts theory as unscientific and uselessly abstract, being “at once imaginative and metaphysical.”²⁷ As staged in “A Digression,” the speaker’s commitment to the actual practice of medicine requires and excuses his departure. For the same purpose, which is to exit the scene, the speaker in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” pleads the necessity of supervising “practice.” This calling of the real is opposed both to the literary “eloquence” demonstrated by “I. F.” in their long “Dialogue on Newspapers and Books,” and to the “theoretical knowledge” of his “fine” but inexperienced young officers.

Caught up in stimulating talk of forgotten books and authors, we could easily forget where we are, which is still the road to Santa Fe. It’s still the month of September in 1843, and we’re still marching west from Council Grove toward the Arkansas River with our original three companies of dragoons (150 men) plus a select group of soldiers and horses that Captain Philip St. George Cooke has taken “reluctantly” from another company. We have been tasked by Uncle Sam with escorting some 140 wagons, heavily weighted with essential goods bound for New Mexico. As Cooke (the real “Capt. of Dragoons”) himself will state for the record in late October, the mostly Mexican traders feared attack by marauding Texans more than Indians. Conditions for overland travel have been soggy. As Cooke will also record in his official report of the fall expedition, “A succession of rains followed and the result was that the overloaded and ill managed wagon train advanced but 87 miles in the next twelve days.” Later in September, more of the same: “We were again exposed to a long spell of cold rains: very many of the Mexican drivers were sick, and six or eight died.”

As creatively retold in the September 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the endurance of miserably cold and wet weather during September 1843 is repeatedly emphasized in references to “this cold September rain”; the Turkey Creek campsite as “a cold and rainy place”; the nonstop rain of Sept. 9th when it rained “All day”; and the “chronic rain” again complained of on Sept. 11th which did not let up until the next day.

Literary tricks or devices, more tokens of ghostwriting, intensify the experience of traveling over the prairie in September 1843 for the reader in September 1851. One such device is the use of present-tense verbs even though the event being described happened in the past—in this case, eight years before. Another is parallelism of syntax, using the same grammatical forms to improve clarity, rhythm, and forcefulness. Another device, more often employed in poetry, is postponement of the grammatical subject to the end of a sentence or clause, giving adverbs and verbs first. Another, similarly poetic in effect, is alliteration. All four literary devices are exemplified in this one sentence:

“Fiercer and colder rages the storm; faster pours the pitiless rain.”

Of only eleven words, three are comparative adverbs (fiercer, colder, faster); two are present-tense singular verb forms (rages, pours); and two are definite articles (the, the) that precede singular nouns (storm, rain). In similarly compact fashion (just seven words altogether) Herman Melville in the Confidence-Man will deploy alliteration and assonance in combination with a present-tense verb he gives first, inverting the usual subject-verb word order: “Speeds the daedal boat as a dream.” Melville’s unpublished manuscript sketch “The River” features another instance of inverted word order. In this example, the grammatical subject (the Missouri River) again follows the main, present tense verb, “foams”: “Down on it like a Pawnee from ambush foams the yellow-painted Missouri.”

Poor Charvis

Jarvis Creek Crossing / Chávez Murder Site. Photo credit: National Park Service.

In “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the September rains duly chronicled by Cooke in his 1843 account of the fall expedition provide a somber backdrop to a dramatic soliloquy on the brutal killing of Don Antonio José Chávez, the Mexican trader who had been murdered in April near Owl Creek, where the dragoons are now supposed to be encamped. No such lament for the slain merchant appears anywhere in the 1843 journal of Philip St. George Cooke. Writing in June 1843, Cooke did reference the sensational event in passing as “the most atrocious murder of the time,” without naming the victim. Some ghostwriter, evidently, has more than made up for Cooke’s terseness there, with the following eulogy:

Late at night.—The cold north wind, laden with ceaseless rain, moans dismally through the dank cotton-woods: dark, deep beneath, through its slimy banks creeps the sullen stream; the earth, our bed, is soaked; the tall, rank grass seems to wail to the watery blasts. ‘Twas here that a cry to God, wrested by human fiends from a brother man, fell unanswered,—echoless on the desert air. It was here, in this solemn wilderness, where man, it would seem of necessity, must sympathize with his fellow, that human beings, eight or ten, fell upon a friendless one, and for vile pelf slew him! Here, without a tear, a word, a look of human sympathy, was poor Charvis deliberately murdered. The famished howling wolves do not tear their kind! Ah! it was enough to freeze into palpable shape the ministering spirits of the air. Oh! methinks I hear his spirit moaning in the midnight storm. Yes, moaning for his kind. One tear of sympathy! there, you have it!—may your spirit rest.

Oh! how much better to die thus, than that there should enter into the soul, the hell which must accompany the conception of such a deed!

Cooke’s highly romanticized treatment of the tragic event is selectively quoted by Marc Simmons in the “Aftermath” section of Murder on the Santa Fe Trail. Quite rightly deeming the whole passage “effusive,” Simmons leaves out most of the romance and poetry. Other historians of the American West have been similarly reluctant to present or analyze Cooke’s literary flights. English majors, on the other hand, may find the entire passage of interest for the very features that have bored historians. The literary expression of the lament for “poor Charvis” deserves a closer look, being rich with poetic devices and themes that distinguish it from other contemporary accounts.

The scene is staged like that of a play, starting with a theatrical prompt in italics: “Late at night.” Descriptive details of the miserable weather, the “cold north wind” and “ceaseless rain,” comport with the mournful subject of this set piece. Nature is personified in verbs that convey human feelings of grief and distress. The wind does not merely blow, it moans. The river creeps in a sullen funk. Even the grass “seems to wail to the watery blasts.” The alliteration of wail with watery is effective and, of course, deliberate. Nothing so romantic and poetic would or could really have been written at the time by Cooke himself “on the prairie.”

Being heartfelt if a little late when printed in September 1851, the eulogy is peppered with suitably romantic exclamations “Ah!” and “Oh! Both exclamations appear frequently in Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852). “Ah!” with exclamation mark occurs six times in Moby-Dick, as in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” at the beginning of a sentence; fifteen times in Pierre. “Oh!” with exclamation mark occurs more than thirty times in Moby-Dick; more than twenty times in Pierre. On at least one occasion Melville combines them, in Moby-Dick Chapter 24 The Advocate:

Ah, the world! Oh, the world!

Nevertheless, here and elsewhere, Cooke’s own words demonstrably inspired the “effusive” re-write, with key descriptive details adapted from his 1843 Journal.

Cooke’s account of the fall expedition recorded a “succession of rains” that began on September 2d and resumed the 15th when the dragoons and merchants “were again exposed to a long spell of cold rains.” Accurately, the passage on Chávez depicts their chosen campground as “soaked” in September, verbally enhancing the recorded experience of the real Captain of U. S. Dragoons on the Santa Fe Trail.

The narrator’s September requiem is fittingly offered at Owl Creek, the very place where Chávez had been murdered four months before. Pointing out the spot, the narrator affirms “‘Twas here,” employing the contraction ‘Twas for “it was” in the manner of a poet:

‘Twas here that a cry to God, wrested by human fiends from a brother man, fell unanswered,—echoless on the desert air.

In using the poetical device ‘Twas here”to designate the scene of the crime, the suddenly sentimental narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” has anticipated the talk of one unnamed soldier on a cavalry expedition in Melville’s Civil War poem “The Scout Toward Aldie”:

“Ay, there’s the place—
There, on the oozy ledge—’twas there
We found the body (Blake’s you know)….” ²⁸

The place in Melville’s poem, as in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” is the site of a cold-blooded killing in a wilderness grove, near a “slimy” (“Scenes”) or “oozy” (“Scout”) creek bank. Early in the “Scout,” Melville depicts Union soldiers in 1864 on the trail of the elusive Captain John Singleton Mosby and his band of Confederate “Rangers.” In quoted dialogue, Melville’s unnamed speaker names the poor fellow whose corpse was discovered the year before on another mission: Blake, murdered while drinking by Mosby or one of Mosby’s rebel gang. As with the soliloquized direction “‘twas here” in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” a soldier’s utterance of “‘twas there” in “Scout” occurs during a cavalry expedition in which participants find themselves retracing a previous campaign.

Parallel usages of “twas here” occur twice in Melville’s epic religious poem Clarel. In Part 1 Canto 14 “In the Glen,” the narrator’s phrase ‘’twas here” locates the lonely and heavily symbolic resort of Celio when locked out of the city after dark. Celio in exile dwells among the famous ancient tombs outside Jerusalem, also the legendary hideout of St. James when hunted by persecutors.²⁹

Tombs in the Valley of the Kedron via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

In Part 2 Canto 37 “Of Traditions,” “ ‘Twas here” points to the Dead Sea where Simon Magus the sorcerer threw away his book of spells according Christian lore, as vaguely recollected by Rolfe.³⁰ Often regarded as Melville’s alter-ego in Clarel, Rolfe is said to be an ex-sailor. For Melville, then, “‘Twas here” was something a sailor would say.

Other, more mechanical devices occur repeatedly in Moby-Dick and Pierre. For instance, the expression “eight or ten” is a favorite of Melville’s, used six times by Ishmael in Moby-Dick. Also in Moby-Dick, the adjective poor occurs more than 100 times. Cooke’s “poor Charvis” is more than matched by Ishmael who designates fellow crew members of the Pequod as poor Starbuck, poor Stubb, poor little Flask, poor Dough-Boy, poor Queequeg, poor Tashtego, and poor Pip. Similarly commonplace, the locution “it would seem” (a trigram) occurs four times in Moby-Dick; and six times in Pierre.

Commonplace vocabulary and familiar literary conventions aside, the passage on Chávez develops another thought that seems distinctively Melvillean, having to do with the indifference of “pitiless” Nature to human suffering. Although the word echoless does not appear in that form in Melville’s known writings, the absence of any human “echo” in a “pitiless” environment is a central theme of verse “Pebbles” in Melville’s 1888 collection, John Marr and Other Sailors. The last stanza represents winds bringing death and destruction from any direction as the “pitiless breath” of the biblical “Four Angels.” Melville’s winds here are “pitiless” as the “pitiless rain” that hammers the U. S. Dragoons all through September.

The third stanza of “Pebbles” figures rolling ocean waves as “liquid hills,” blue as Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains but different in being echoless:

The flattery of no echo thrills,
For echo the seas have none;
Nor aught that gives man back man’s strain--
The hope of his heart, the dream in his brain.

Inferring echoless there, Michael Jonik comments: “The sea, as echoless, functions as a hostile space of material forces and collisions in which humans must nonetheless negotiate and endure.”³¹ In the late-night lament for “poor Charvis” the more explicitly “echoless” Kansas prairie of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” remains, like Melville’s “implacable” ocean, indifferent even to cold-blooded murder.

The “eight or ten” perpetrators of this murder are depicted as “human fiends.” Their wickedness appears most appalling in the baseness of their motive (killing a man for money, “vile pelf”) and a damnable lack of human sympathy for their vulnerable fellow mortal. A similar conceit, expressed in similar language, will surface in Melville’s 1855 short fiction “Benito Cereno.” There, fearing treachery, Melville’s Captain Delano wonders if the seemingly needy Spaniards on board the San Dominick might be faking their destitute condition. Delano recalls that

“On heart-broken pretense of entreating a cup of cold water, fiends in human form had got into lonely dwellings, nor retired until a dark deed had been done.”

As will be seen again and again in later installments, verbal correspondences (here, human + fiends) are linked to similarities of context and thought. The context in Benito Cereno, as in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” is a remembered act of murder, committed in a remote place and after the fact portrayed as a hellish “deed.” What makes the “deed” especially heinous in both cases is the extreme vulnerability of the victim, ruthlessly taken advantage of by perpetrators despite the common humanity of all concerned. In “Scenes” the narrator posits that on the lonesome frontier, “man, it would seem of necessity, must sympathize with his fellow.” In “Benito Cereno” a similar appeal for human sympathy is implicit in the practically irrefusable request for “a cup of cold water” which proves to be a diabolical ruse. Each scenario recognizes a shared human vulnerability which has been exploited, demonically, by “human fiends” (“Scenes”) or “fiends in human form” (“Benito Cereno”).

Methinks I hear

The archaic verb form methinks, a favorite of Elizabethan playwrights including Shakespeare, enhances the dramatic quality of the lament for “poor Charvis.” Melville employs methinks repeatedly in Moby-Dick (ten times) and Pierre (six times). In the context of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the phrase methinks I hear has double reference to the dying groans of the victim—tragically unheeded at the time of his murder, but feelingly heard now by the narrator, in imaginative and sympathetic communion with the dead man’s spirit. Both the content and phrasing here seem directly indebted to a scene from The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. The archaic expression “methinks I hear” in combination with a woeful “cry to God” that originally went “echoless on the desert air” effectively reformulates two lines spoken by “mad” Hieronimo, who can still hear the “dismal outcry” of his son Horatio “echo in the air”:

There merciless they butcher’d up my boy,
In black, dark night, to pale, dim, cruel death.
He shrieks: I heard (and yet, methinks, I hear)
His dismal outcry echo in the air.³²

In Kyd’s play Hieronimo gets violent, bloody revenge for the murder of Horatio. Whereas Hieronimo grieved solely for his own son, the narrator in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” extends his lament to fallen humanity. In a rather surprising turn, the Captain-narrator imagines the spirit of the slain Mexican trader “moaning for his kind”; that is, bewailing the depravity of human beings who can behave more viciously to one another than do brutes, even the “famished howling wolves.” Grieving thus for humankind as well as for “poor Charvis,” the admirably compassionate narrator finally sheds “one tear of sympathy.”

To close out this remarkable eulogy for Chávez, slain on the road to Santa Fe, the narrator again considers his killers, already portrayed as “human fiends.” Two men were eventually convicted and hanged for the crime. For the narrator, however, their worst punishment is hell—not only hell in store, after physical death, but the experience of real hell here and now, in consequence of their even entertaining the plan of violently attacking and killing a fellow human being in the wilderness. In this view the terrible fate of “poor Charvis,” so cruel and all undeserved, was nevertheless preferable to “the hell” experienced in life by his killers.

“Oh! how much better to die thus, than that there should enter into the soul, the hell which must accompany the conception of such a deed!”

The narrator’s phrase enter into the soul (a 4-gram) occurs also in Pierre, just when Melville’s young hero has been immersed in Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

“Ah! Easy for man to think like a hero; but hard for man to act like one. All imaginable audacities readily enter into the soul; few come boldly forth from it.”

One-word exclamations precede the narrator’s comment on the way a radical plan might “enter into the soul” in both texts: “Oh!” in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” and “Ah! in Pierre. Young Pierre, the hero of Melville’s 1852 novel, begins with good intentions. Pierre’s audacious plan of self-sacrifice—supposed to be knightly and inspired of heaven, even Christ-like—seems far removed from the evil scheme to rob and kill Don Antonio José Chávez, conceived and actually carried out by John McDaniel and accomplices in 1843 at Owl Creek. Nevertheless, in the end Pierre will gun down his own cousin in the street, go to prison, and die there along with his sister-wife Isabel and his former fiancée, Lucy. Pierre’s earnest but misguided and ultimately futile attempt to right the world’s wrongs (by dumping Lucy and parading Isabel as his wife, instead of acknowledging her to the world as his sister) ends in tragedy, however nobly motivated.

A more than poetical hell

Illustration of Dante’s Inferno Canto 6 by Giovanni Stradano, 1587.

Of numerous subtexts in Pierre, two of the greatest are Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Each in its way exerts a bad influence on the emotional and behavioral health of Melville’s hero. Dante’s Hell makes Pierre “fierce” and “bitter” against a world riddled with sin and eternal woe. Hamlet unveils the young hero’s own irresolve and impotence, making Pierre despise himself for being too slow or too weak to change anything for the better. Although the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” has anticipated the author of Pierre in observing how shocking ideas may “enter into the soul,” Melville will leapfrog the Captain of U. S. Dragoons by expressly naming Dante as “Night’s and Hell’s poet” in the course of tracing the sway of Dante’s Inferno on young Pierre.

In revision of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” for the book version, Cooke or more likely his ghostwriter will follow Melville’s example by injecting Dante’s Inferno into the conversation, literally. Dante is the main topic of added dialogue between the narrator and his imaginary prairie Friend. As printed in Scenes and Adventures in the Army, this new bit comes just ahead of the elaborate prose requiem for Chávez, the slain Mexican trader. Thus placed, the new dialogue on Dante foreshadows the narrator’s reminiscence of “poor Charvis” as a late-night descent into a kind of prairie Hell. The figure seems well adapted to the horrific circumstances of his murder as originally portrayed in the September 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Owl Creek, the scene of the crime, is there represented as a real-life underworld, a more than metaphorical inferno governed by “human fiends” and haunted by the ghostly spirit of their innocent victim, “moaning for his kind.”

The following exchange between the narrator and his prairie “Friend” did not appear anywhere in the 1851-3 magazine series, “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Added in revision of the September 1851 installment, the new dialogue on Dante is unique to the book version as first published in Part II of Scenes and Adventures in the Army: or, Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857 and 1859) at pages 248-249.

Friend. Is there no end to this trudge through mud and rain? It seems to me we are always the same,—in the centre of a great circle of dank, flat, and changeless prairie.

"I have been thinking very seriously to what this infernal march may lead us. 'Circle,' indeed! and having escaped from that of incessant fierce winds, we have duly fallen upon the 'third circle.’ "

"—— della piova,
Eterna, maledetta, fredda a greve."

Friend. Of rain eternal, accursed, cold, and heavy—it is a wonder Dante left out the musquitos!

"Yes; but our Cerebus [Cerberus] has three hundred wolfish throats which bark and howl at us."

Friend. Well, I think it won't do; you have fetched hell too far.

"Only come here in the dogdays, and if you can't imagine yourself around the edges of a more than poetical hell, it will be because the eternal winds are scorching, instead of cold." ³³

I take this interpolated dialogue for a later composition, not simply a restoration of old matter omitted in the magazine version by accident. The two speakers seem better defined now as individual characters. We are only in the second installment, but their repartee exhibits a sharpness and wry humor that took some months to fully develop. Here the narrator and his now anonymous “Friend” (formerly styled “Imaginary Friend,” then “Frank”) talk more fluently and comfortably with each other than was the case in early episodes.

The narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons quotes verbatim from Dante’s Inferno Canto 6, giving the last two words in line 7 and all of line 8, first in the original Italian and then in English. As here represented, the narrator’s allusion to Dante has been triggered by his companion’s use of the word circle to describe the monotony of travel over a “changeless prairie.” Their recent experience of nonstop rain makes the narrator think specifically Dante’s Third Circle of Hell. The expanded treatment of this particular text, like the lament for “poor Charvis” which it now introduces, imaginatively develops multiple references in the real Captain Cooke’s 1843 journal to the “long spell of cold rains” endured all September on the Santa Fe Road.

The source for both the Italian and English versions of the quotation from Dante is a book Herman Melville owned or borrowed, Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno. A literal prose translation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849) by Dr. John Aitken Carlyle, younger brother of Thomas Carlyle. ³⁴

John A. Carlyle. Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno. A literal prose translation. Harper & Brothers, 1849.

In Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (on page 228 in the first edition, published by Harper & Brothers near the end of July 1852) Melville quotes four lines in Henry Francis Cary’s verse translation of Canto 3, concluding with the terrifying admonition on the gate of Hell: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” Much earlier in the novel (page 55), Pierre’s recollection of Isabel’s face (before he learns she might be his sister) called to mind the mournful story of Francesca da Rimini whom Virgil and Dante meet in the Second Circle of Hell. This is the place reserved for sinners guilty of lust. Violent never-ending winds buffet the lustful in Hell, as sexual passion did on earth. Francesca and her lover Paolo suffer eternal punishment for their illicit affair, incited by their reading together in a book about the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere.

Dante’s Second Circle is specifically referenced in the new dialogue added in revision of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” when the Captain of U. S. Dragoons mentions having just “escaped” the circle of “incessant fierce winds.” From Dante’s Second Circle, so meaningfully referenced in Pierre, the Captain only needs to go one circle down for the weather-appropriate citation in Scenes and Adventures in the Army. The text quoted in the 1857 book definitely is lifted from Dr. John A. Carlyle’s prose version of the Inferno.³⁵ Herman Melville owned or borrowed the same translation. During the writing of Pierre, Melville evidently drew from the preface in Carlyle’s volume (Sealts No. 173a) as well as from Cary’s work, the Vision; or, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise (Sealts No. 174). Repeated mentions of the “Dilettanti” and “Dilettantism”in Dr. Carlyle’s preface to the Inferno offered Melville suggestive hints for remarks in Pierre concerning the limited penetration of a hypothetical reader of Dante whom the narrator gently deprecates as “the Dilletante in literature”:

“Fortunately for the felicity of the Dilletante in Literature, the horrible allegorical meanings of the Inferno, lie not on the surface….”

Webster’s 1850 American Dictionary of the English Language defines the noun dilettante as “An admirer or lover of the fine arts; one who delights in promoting science or the fine arts.”

Carlyle employed the plural form, Dilettanti. In Pierre Melville uses a variant spelling of the singular form, “Dilletante,” but follows Carlyle’s example in capitalizing the initial “D.” Melville’s phrasing “Dilletante in Literature” reads like a reflex of Dr. Carlyle’s expression “literary Dilettanti.”³⁶

John A. Carlyle. Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno; a literal prose translation. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851

Melville’s usage of “Dilletante” in Pierre occurs specifically in relation to the job of rightly interpreting Dante’s Inferno. Dr. Carlyle in his preface to the Inferno contrasts his own rational, common-sense approach to the study of Dante with frivolous treatments by “the most noted literary Dilettanti of Rome and other places.” Here, as Melville did when describing the comical antiquary Oh-Oh as a “dilettante in things old and marvelous” in the second volume of Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, Dr. Carlyle draws on various negative connotations of the word dilettante.³⁷ Extravagant, superficial, or otherwise unsatisfying takes on formal fineries in the Divine Comedy are repeatedly dismissed by Carlyle as mere “dilettantism.” With Dr. Carlyle, Melville in full truth-seeking mode prefers the insights of reality-based readers looking for meaning, wisdom, and hopefully salvation.

Cooke or his ghostwriter thus may be said to write like Melville by creatively working Dante’s Hell into a prose narrative, through invented dialogue that directly quotes from a volume Melville is known to have owned, borrowed, or consulted, John A. Carlyle’s literal prose translation of the Inferno. Brief as it is, the dialogue on Dante added in revision of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” features a number of noteworthy verbal constructions with parallels in Melville’s writings. Look at these, if you please:

Circle, indeed!

Mostly a mechanical device, perhaps, this trick of extending dialogue could be seen as a variation of the “Yes, and….” technique famously favored in improv comedy. Lots of writers play with indeed, obviously. Melville especially likes to start a new sentence with a word from the previous one, punctuate with a comma, add “indeed,” and then punctuate again to make it exclamatory. For example, compare “Circle, indeed!” in the added dialogue on Dante with seven similar instances:

• Jokes, indeed! —Typee

• Pandora, indeed! —Mardi

• A brigand, indeed! —White-Jacket

• A sacrifice, indeed! —White-Jacket

• Marchant service indeed! [w/o comma] —Moby-Dick

• France, indeed! —Pierre

• Wisdom, indeed! —The Confidence-Man

The sentence before “Circle, indeed!” begins “I have been thinking….” Another 4-gram, this one particularly useful for composing and developing dialogue, I have been thinking was Melville’s way of prompting more talk “OF THOSE SCAMPS THE PLUJII” in his third book, Mardi.

“I have been thinking, my lord,” said Babbalanja….

This line Melville’s philosopher delivers in reply to King Media, who asked, “Why so silent?” In form and function, Media’s leading question is comparable to that of the narrator’s “Imaginary Friend” who asks, “Why so dull?” elsewhere in the September 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” That question Babbalanja himself asked of the poet Yoomy, ahead of their visit with “the care-free bachelor” King Abrazza.”

You have fetched hell too far

Forms of fetch occur in both Moby-Dick and Pierre. Most significantly in Pierre, where “Fetchers and carriers of the worst city infamy” are diabolical cab drivers whom Melville likens to Charon, the ferryman in Dante’s Inferno engaged to transport souls of the damned over the river Acheron into Hell. Forms of fetch occur 17 times in Moby-Dick. In context, several reference Hell, explicitly or implicitly.

• “The devil fetch that harpooneer”.

• “The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions.”

• “… the devil fetch the hindmost.”

• [Fleece the cook and Stubb, first mate on the Pequod, conversing in Chapter 64 Stubb’s Supper:] “When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and demeanor, “he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some bressed angel will come and fetch him.”
  “Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him where?” [emphasis mine]

Borrowing verbatim from Dr. Carlyle’s literal prose translation, but without crediting any source, the narrator’s imaginary “Friend” gives the English translation for verses quoted in Italian from the Inferno Canto VI. There in verses 7-8 Dante describes the Third Circle “of rain” (della piova) as “eternal, accursed, cold, and heavy” (Eterna, maledetta, fredda e greve). For a bit of comic relief, the speaker feigns surprise over the poet’s failure to mention mosquitoes among the torments of Hell. In reply, the Captain-narrator tries to extend the metaphor by representing the whole caravan of famished soldiers and Santa Fe merchants as Dante’s guard dog Cerberus. Monstrously enlarged, the Captain’s re-figured hound of hell has not three but three hundred heads, hence “three hundred wolfish throats which bark and howl at us.”

After that perhaps unwarranted stretch, it’s no great wonder to find the narrator’s sober and sensible “Friend” denying the application to their actual circumstances and complaining, “you have fetched hell too far.” Nevertheless, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons holds his ground:

“Only come here in the dogdays, and if you can’t imagine yourself around the edges of a more than poetical hell, it will be because the eternal winds are scorching, instead of cold.”

Allusions here (as earlier, in the rueful mention of mosquitoes) to oppressive heat and winds during the dog-days recall the prairie as U. S. Dragoons had encountered it in June and July on their summer campaign. Conflation of the summer and fall expeditions, observable throughout the September 1851 continuation of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” is also a feature of the interpolated dialogue on Dante found only in the book version. Despite the censure attempted by his imaginary traveling companion, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons—no literary dilettante, he—will insist on the applicability of Dante’s allegory. To his way of thinking, prolonged endurance of burning sun and “scorching” winds on a Kansas prairie in July ought to make any sufferer into a believer in the reality of hell on earth.

1. “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” in the Southern Literary Messenger Volume 17 (September 1851) page 568. The book version at page 247 reads, “But yonder is land to leeward—as a sailor would say—” deleting “on our lee bow” in favor of "to leeward” and replacing “might” with “would.”

2. Both records are extant in manuscript and printed versions. Cooke’s manuscript report of the fall expedition is held with US, Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1822-1860 in The National Archives, Record Group 94, C307. Cooke’s journal of the summer expedition can be found in the same collection, Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1822-1860, The National Archives, Record Group 94, C252. Digital images are accessible via fold3.com.

For the printed versions edited by William E. Connelley, see “A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail” in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 1925, pages 72–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1891786; and “A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail—(Concluded)” in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 12, no. 2, 1925, pages 227–255. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1886514.

For more history of the fall expedition, see also Otis E. Young, “Dragoons on the Santa Fe Trail in the Autumn of 1843,” Chronicles of Oklahoma Volume 32 Number 1 (Spring 1954) pages 42-51. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America <https://gateway.okhistory.org/ark:/67531/metadc2123528/>.

Will Gorenfeld and John Gorenfeld speculate that fear of retaliation by “Texians” after the controversial Snively affair may underlie Cooke’s puzzling choice to narrate the “second, generally uneventful 1843 escort” rather than the more exciting and productive march that summer. See Kearney’s Dragoons Out West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) page 144.

3. Apprehended for the murder of Chávez and found guilty after a widely reported federal trial, John McDaniel was hanged in 1845 with Joseph Brown, one of his three convicted accomplices. Reprieves and later pardons were granted to John’s brother David McDaniel and Thomas Towson. For the full account see Marc Simmons, Murder on the Santa Fe Trail: An International Incident, 1843 (The University of Texas at El Paso, Texas Western Press, 1987).

4. Chapter 7, “Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper” in Herman Melville, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (Harper & Brothers, 1850) page 38. https://archive.org/details/whitejacketorwor00melv_2/page/38/mode/2up

5. “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” in the Southern Literary Messenger Volume 17 (September 1851) page 565; emphasis mine.

6. Both instances of “Wonderful, indeed” occur in Book V of Pierre at pages 120 and 121 in the 1852 first edition; emphasis mine. https://archive.org/details/melvillepierre/page/120/mode/2up

About Captain Pollard after the tragic affair of the Essex, Melville in Moby-Dick Chapter 45 The Affidavit says “the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers”; emphasis mine.

7. Another example of Elizabethan grammar in Melville’s writings appears early in Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (Harper & Brothers, 1849) here employed for comic effect: “my hapless nether integuments, which thou calledst ‘ducks’ ”; emphasis mine.

8. Connelley, William E. “A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail--(Concluded).” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 12, no. 2 (1925): pages 227–255 at 244. https://doi.org/10.2307/1886514.
https://books.google.com/books?id=R2gKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA244&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

9. In Pierre, Nature and forest vistas are “ever-shifting.” In Moby-Dick, among terrifying aspects of whiteness in Chapter 42 The Whiteness of the Whale, Ishmael counts “the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies.” Dispensing newfound wisdom in a late chapter of Mardi: and A Voyage Thither the philosopher Babbalanja counsels the poet Yoomy to embrace the world, irregardless of conventional borders: “Nations are but names; and continents but shifting sands.”

10. The Century Dictionary Volume 3, edited by William Dwight Whitney (New York, 1889) page 3397. As helpfully explained in Walker’s Manly Exercises (London, 1839) “The leeward or lee-side is the opposite to windward.”

11. Scenes and Adventures in the Army page 247.
https://books.google.com/books?id=YC5FAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA247&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

12. The “Loomings” chapter “probably was composed at a fairly late stage,” as pointed out by John Wenke in Melville’s Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction (The Kent State University Press, 1995) at page 119. Wenke contrasts the “bitter tone” of “The Carpet Bag” chapter with “the genial, present-tense voice of ‘Loomings’.”

13. Wenke, Melville’s Muse, page 195.

14. Wenke, Melville’s Muse, page 119. The role of traveling companion that Melville assigns to the reader early in Moby-Dick has been recognized also by A. Robert Lee, who observes how “Narrator and reader become paired travellers, kinsmen in imagination.” A. Robert Lee, “Moby-Dick: The Tale and the Telling” in New Perspectives on Melville, edited by Faith Pullin (The Kent State University Press, 1978) pages 86-127 at page 112.

15. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twenty Days with Julian and Bunny, as printed in Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884) page 415.

16. To be titled “A Week on a Work-bench in a Barn” according to Theodore Frelinghuysen Wolfe in Literary Shrines: The Haunts of Some Famous American Authors (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1895) page 191.

17. Excerpted in the Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States Volume 8 (1887) pages 426-430.

18. In 1843, as Christopher Morash has noted, "Charles Gavan Duffy devoted an entire page of The Nation (which only ran to sixteen pages) to attacking the derivative and trivial nature of Lever's early work, his Lorrequers and his O'Malleys"; see Chris Morash, “Lever's Post-Famine Landscape” in Charles Lever: New Evaluations, ed. Tony Bareham (Colin Smythe Ltd., 1991).

19. About the influence of Disraeli see the Introduction, pages xxiv and xli and Explanatory Notes, page 494 in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, edited by Henry A. Murray (Hendricks House, 1949). https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.187124/page/n21/mode/2up

20. “Hawthorne and His Mosses” Part 2 in The Literary World for August 24, 1850, page 146. https://books.google.com/books?id=VTsZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA146&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false

21. Allan Melville’s letter dated October 17, 1844 is quoted from Herman Melville, Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) pages 567-571 at page 569.

22. See Chapter 28, “Babbalanja Regales the Company with Some Sandwiches” in Mardi: And a Voyage Thither Volume 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849) pages 112-117. Clarel Part 2 Canto 20 “Under the Mountain” adventurously and poetically universalizes the geological concept of strata, comparing ruined walls and fortresses across the Roman empire, holding numerous ancient relics of former civilizations, to an imaginary fossil record of stars and planets in the cosmos:

What breadth of doom
As of the worlds in strata penned—
So cosmic seems the wreck of Rome.

23. The prairie dialogue on Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son is quoted in full from the magazine version, “Scenes and Adventures in the Army” in the Southern Literary Messenger Volume 17 (September 1851) pages 570-571.

24. The London Spectator for March 17, 1832 deemed Adventures of a Younger Son “a very wicked, but a very clever book” and “a sort of fighting Don Juan.”

https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/17th-march-1832/17/the-adventures-of-a-younger-son

25. Philip St. George Cooke, “A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail,” edited by William E. Connelley, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Volume 12, No. 1 (1925) page 93.
https://books.google.com/books?id=R2gKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA93&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

26. National Archives, Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1844 Cooke, P S - C51. Digital images of Cooke’s letter dated February 16, 1844 are accessible via fold3.com.

27. William B. Dillingham, Melville and His Circle: The Last Years (University of Georgia Press, 1996) page 94.

28. “The Scout toward Aldie” in Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866) page 194; emphasis mine. https://archive.org/details/battlepiecesanda00melvrich/page/194/mode/2up

29. Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Edited by Walter E. Bezanson (New York: Hendricks House, 1960; reprinted 1973) page 46.

30. Clarel, page 267 in the Hendricks House edition.

31. Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge University Press, 2018) page 206.

32. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy Act IV Scene 4; emphasis mine.

33. Scenes and Adventures in the Army pages 248-249; emphasis mine.

34. John A. Carlyle’s prose translation of Dante’s Divine comedy: The Inferno is Sealts Number 173a in the searchable “Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville” at Melville’s Marginalia Online. https://melvillesmarginalia.org/

As there noted, we know Melville had it because he quoted “John Carlyle‘s version” of Canto 3, line 26 (“And sounds of hands among them”) in one of his annotations to Henry Francis Cary’s verse translation (Sealts Number 174).

35. Searching the archive at HathiTrust Digital Library for the combined terms “eternal, accursed, cold, and heavy” in that order, and limiting the search to works published before 1865, yields results only in Carlyle’s prose translation of Dante’s Inferno, and Scenes and Adventures in the Army by Philip St. George Cooke.

36. John A. Carlyle, Preface to Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno; a literal prose translation. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849) page iv. Accessible online courtesy of the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/dantesdivinecome00dantrich/page/4/mode/2up

Images from different volumes including one at the New York Public Library are accessible online courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006506936h

37. In the 20th century George Chambers Calvert, objecting to negative views of the dilettante as “a mere dabbler, a tyro, an ‘amateur’ with every scornful implication of the word,” found “absolutely nothing in the origin of dilettante to suggest frivolity or superficiality—nothing to justify its use for any other purpose than to designate a person who pursues art purely for the love of it rather than as a means of livelihood.” See Calvert, A Defense of the Dilettante (Indianapolis: Edwin & Robert Grabhorn at The Studio Press, 1919).