Susan L. Roberson
Travel writing was the most popular genre in the nineteenth century because it enabled readers to join the writer/narrator in adventures of the road and become second‐hand voyeurs of the peoples and places the writer visited. Approximately 1765 travel books were published in the United States between 1830 and 1900 (Wrobel 2013: 198), and according to publishers Harper & Brothers early in the century, “Travels sell about the best of anything we get hold of” (quoted in Ziff 2000: 8). While writers took readers to foreign lands – Europe, South America, Africa – they also took them on journeys across the United States. One could almost follow Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1893) thesis of westward expansion in narratives that take readers further west, watching the transformation of the “frontier” as different generations define the West. Turner speculated that the frontier was both a line between the savage and the civilized and a westward‐moving wave that demonstrated the progressive Americanization and industrialization of the nation. Travel also went south as tourists, nature lovers, and social commentators explored scenes almost as exotic and strange as foreign lands.
Regardless of where they traveled, they were transient spectators and observers on the move who would return home or find new homes from which to write their tales. While many of the narratives were composed as a series of impressions of the journey, travel also afforded the opportunity to comment on conditions of life and nation. As Terry Caesar has said about nineteenth‐century “travel writing about abroad,” that it “shaped a national identity” (1995: 8), one can also say of travel within America at a time when the shape of the nation was changing geographically, socially, and politically.
Whether people traveled west or south, in journeys of exploration at the beginning of the nineteenth century or on sightseeing trips as tourists, their narratives share some common concerns about the American road. Thus, we find narrators commenting on the condition of the road, notably the “Michigan mud‐hole” (Kirkland 1839: 5) or “the ever‐present and never‐mended mud hole” in Florida (Brehm and Dean 2004: 93), and the effects of the road on their vehicles. Travelers also detailed the goods they carried and the clothes they wore as part of the travel experience. In addition, travel writers describe their modes of transportation. Mark Twain delighted in “dangl[ing] [his] legs over the side” as he sat “a‐top of the flying coach” on his trip out West, which he described in his 1872 account Roughing It (1993: 29). Helen Hunt Jackson reveled in the “privacy of these small drawing‐rooms” on the Pullman cars even as she shuddered at the “horrors” of the sleeping car (1878: loc 2). William Cullen Bryant illustrates the state of travel in the South before the Civil War. After leaving Petersburg, Virginia by railway train, passengers were “transferred to another train of cars”; arriving at Blakley on the Roanoke River, they “were made to get out of the cars, and were marched in long procession for about a quarter of a mile down to the river. A negro walked before us to light our way […] and a crowd of negroes followed us, bearing our baggage” to a steam boat, which took them to the cars for Wilmington (1964: 27). As a celebrity on the “Great Excursion” of 1854, Catharine Maria Sedgwick was afforded the best of accommodations; but public transportation was not as accommodating for people of color, as W.E.B. Du Bois, who was consigned to the Jim Crow car, would later attest.
The quality of food and lodging while on the road is another recurring theme. Kirkland pokes fun at the rustic quarters for travelers to the Old Northwest who must lodge with local residents in a “sleeping apartment” in the attic space of a log cabin (1839: 8–9), while Charles Lummis provides readers with a more sympathetic look at his hosts, Mexican and Pueblo Indian families who share tortillas and “stews of mutton with rice” (1892: loc 1842). For those who traveled off the grid, food consisted primarily of what they could hunt; hence Meriwether Lewis and William Clark ate “an eminsity of meat” (Lewis et al. 1983: 13 July 1805); and Lummis enjoyed antelope steak and trout in the Southwest backcountry. Not only does Francis Parkman partake of the buffalo that he killed, but as a guest of the Dahcotah Sioux he arranges a dog feast to honor his hosts (1849: 258). During his hike through the South, John Muir noted the dinners of string beans, buttermilk, and cornbread he shared with local residents. Even for travelers who did not face primitive conditions, the quality of food and lists of food they ate run through their narratives. Jackson complains, “All restaurant cooking in America is intolerable” (1878: loc 2), while Sedgwick enthuses about the fine foods she enjoyed on her excursion. Though he was glad not to have to eat on a flatboat, Audubon complained of a New Orleans dinner party: “We had a good dinner, and great deal of Mirth that I call french Gayety, that really sickened me. I thought myself in Bedlam, every body talkd Loud at once” (1999: 73).
It is an axiom of travel theory that with journeying one’s sense of self changes, creating new, even fluid identities. For travelers going west, contact with Native Americans and the western landscape effected just such change. After spending some time with the Great Lakes Indians, Margaret Fuller says, “I feel that I have learnt a great deal of the Indians from observing them” (1844: 153). After satirizing the Michigan settlers, at the end of A New Home Kirkland’s Mary Clavers muses that she has changed her point of view about “the ruder stages of society” and now considers herself “a denizen of the wild woods” (1839: 186). Self‐transformation is signaled by a change in appearance, particularly for male adventurers who adopt Native American or Western apparel. Meriwether Lewis returns from his two‐year journey to the Pacific with his “hair deshivled and skin well browned with the sun,” wanting “no further addition to make me a complete Indian in appearance” (Lewis et al. 1983: 16 August 1805). Similarly, when Parkman and his guide changed back into their Eastern attire at the end of their adventure, they “hardly recognized each other,” so completely had they adopted Indian garb (1849: 461); and Twain boasts that in his miner’s outfit of “damaged slouch hat […] [He] felt rowdyish and ‘bully’” (1993: 147). Women also adopted Western wear, as Mary Alice Shutes demonstrates: “I am dressed like Charles and straddle of my horse” (quoted in Roberson 1998: 230).
These concerns are common to all travel writing, but some particular themes make nineteenth‐century American travel writing unique. These have to do not only with the land and peoples of America but with the national ideologies and rhetorics of the period, which Henry David Thoreau articulates in his essay “Walking” (1862). In it he looks west, toward Oregon, as the direction he and the nation must move, for there lie the future and freedom, “enterprise and adventure,” “Progress” and “Wildness.” Demonstrating the dialectic that informed much of the national rhetoric about the West, he says, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and […] in Wildness is the preservation of the World.” But he also celebrates the national movement west as a sign of progress in which the farmer “displaced the Indian […] because he redeems the meadow” as the wild is tamed and settled. This West toward which “we saunter” he calls a “Holy Land,” conflating the march of empire with the spiritual saunter: “‘Westward the star of empire takes its way’” (Thoreau 2007: 202–222). This rhetoric was part of the national ideology or rhetorical code for the West often referred to as “manifest destiny.” The dialectic between a view of the West as a place of freedom, nature, and Wildness and as the location of Progress is readily seen in narratives about travel to the Old Northwest and the Far West.
Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes evinces this tension between the natural, the wild, and the progress that transformed them. Though she hoped to have an adventure of wildness, to “enter into that truly wild and free region” (1844: 148), by the time she traveled to the Great Lakes Black Hawk and his tribe had been defeated and the remaining Indians subdued and made reliant on government subsidies. When Bryant first visited the area in 1832, sending letters to his wife that would later be collected in “Illinois Fifty Years Ago,” he cataloged the animal life and trees that he observed, saying that he was tempted to buy a plot of land and redeem it. When he revisited the region in 1846, just three years after Fuller’s sojourn, he witnessed the transformation of the frontier. Milwaukee was “rapidly becoming one of the great cities of the West,” and Chicago with its German and Irish immigrants was losing its earlier “slovenly and raw appearance of a new settlement” (Bryant 1964: 59, 146). Similarly, Fuller both delights in the natural environment, “the blooming plain,” and congratulates the building of the cities and the influx of immigrants: “At Milwaukie, as at Chicago, are many pleasant people, drawn from all parts of the world.” Although she had anticipated “distaste” for the “mushroom growth” of the Northwest, Fuller looks to a “new order, a new poetry” and “new intellectual growths” to emerge from the march of progress that sacrifices the “noble trees” (Fuller 1844: 70, 18). Caroline Kirkland critiqued the land speculation that “blighted” the Michigan forests, but she believes that settlement of the Northwest has “been the mighty instrument of Providence of preparing the way for civilization, for intelligence, for refinement, for religion” (Kirkland 1844: 27). The issue for Kirkland in both A New Home, Who’ll Follow? and Forest Life is not so much the loss of the forests but the social institutions and attitudes emerging in the new settlements, what in the latter she calls “utilitarian fanaticism” (1844: 216). By the time Sedgwick participated in the “Great Excursion” in 1854, the “abounding vitality” in the growth of the West and the progress of a “democratic republic” was evident in the “railroads, telegraphs, aqueducts, and gaslights” (1854: 320–322). When Constance Fenimore Woolson traveled the Great Lakes in 1872, Pontiac and the Indians he led had become history lessons for schoolgirls and the environment was polluted by oil refineries. She notes the “crowded, odiferous, and smoky” condition of the Cleveland port, the “crude green petroleum” that has displaced the prairies and ruined the Cuyahoga River (Brehm and Dean 2004: 13–14).
Like the loss of the environment to progress, the loss of the Indigenous tribes and their ways seemed fated, a cost of “advancement.” By the time Fuller and Bryant visited the Great Lakes, the romanticized Indians of the past had been reduced to relying on annual payments from the government or becoming tourist attractions. Bryant notes, “To some, the savage visitors – who occasionally set up their lodges on its beach […] and paddle their canoes in [Mackinaw island’s] waters – will be an additional attraction” (1964: 82). Both Bryant and Fuller secure Indian men to paddle them down the rapids of the Sault, a thrilling if brief episode of their vacations. Despite their observations of the Indians, Bryant and Fuller agree that “decay and gradual extinction” seem to be the fate of the Indian in the face of white Progress (Bryant 1964: 77).
The American dialectic about the West is more pronounced in narratives about travel to the trans‐Mississippi West, the Far West, and the Southwest. Here ideas of Wildness, adventure, and freedom jar against the realities of Progress and the colonization of the West, creating what Donald Worster has termed “the Western Paradox” (Campbell 2000: 50). On the one hand, the Far West represented a space for male testing and freedom, a place populated with “savage” Indians and plenty of game to be hunted, a place of open and massive natural features that inspire semi‐religious moments even as they present dangers to the travelers. On the other hand, the West was the destination for the hundreds of thousands of emigrants who changed the geographical and social environments and created towns and cities out of what they conceived to be the wilderness. Looking forward to adventures in the West, Parkman described it as a place where “each man lives by the strength of his arm and the valor of his heart. Here society is reduced to its original elements” (1849: 106). Krista Comer notes that “Traditional western space” was “gendered male” and “connoted outdoor or wild spaces” (1999: 27) where men, like our travelers, could test themselves. Washington Irving spent his tour of the prairies camping out with a company of rangers in a “Robin Hood” scene of male camaraderie where hunting and other outdoor exploits were “animating and delightful”: “We were in a region of adventure; breaking our way through a country hitherto untrodden by white men” (1859: 47, 84). When Twain traveled to join his brother in the Nevada Territory, he was excited that he “would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures,” perhaps even “get hanged or scalped” (1993: 2–3). Although Twain’s narrative uses irony to critique the West, it is nonetheless peppered with adventures about camping out and engaging in various mining adventures: “It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men” (1993: 182). Charles Lummis felt that he was “really out West” when he stepped on a rattlesnake and saw a prairie dog town, sage‐brush, cactus, and “cattle rancho” outside of Kansas City (1892: loc 169), all of which connote the danger and adventure that would test his manhood.
Indeed, the classic travel narratives of the nineteenth‐century West are remarkable for the absence of women. While we know the name of the woman who led Lewis and Clark through the unmapped regions of the Far West, Sacagawea, they most often refer to her as “the Indian woman.” Parkman generally calls Indian women “squaws” at the same time that he refers to male Indians by name – Big Crow, Mene‐Seela, Kongra‐Tonga. He also comments on the “cadaverous faces” of women emigrants, their household goods littering the way west while the women themselves remain ghostly aggregates of womanhood. Although the diaries and memoirs by pioneer women testify to their presence on the Overland Trail and their own experiences of privation and freedom, male narrators write them out, do not imagine them occupying the same open “outdoor or wild” spaces as they (Comer 1999: 27).
Perhaps because of the prevailing ideology of separate spheres, it was difficult for men to think of women in a space that also connotes freedom. Geographer Yi‐Fu Tuan notes that “Spaciousness is closely associated with the sense of being free. Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act” (1977: 52). For Americans the West was just such a space, a place where the prairie is “unfenced now, undivided, unmeasured, unmarked, save by the different tints of different growths of grass or grain” (Jackson 1878: loc 28), where one can experience the “exhilarant joy of living outside the sorry fences of society” (Lummis 1892: 2). Freedom also connotes the ability to move, to tramp the open spaces of the West. Twain made this connection when he related the “wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings!” (1993: 30), and Muir’s freedom to roam the Sierra Madres to “learn something of the plants, animals, and rocks” provided him “true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality” (1869: 1, 49). Their freedom allowed them, unlike many women, to escape the confinements of the domestic space that both Fuller and Kirkland critiqued.
Travel as a test of courage and manhood may explain why the narratives are replete with narrow escapes and dangers presented by nature, the road, Indians, and desperadoes. Bears, rattlesnakes, centipedes, and mountain lions populate these narratives. The difficulties of the Lewis and Clark expedition in getting across rivers and up mountains, of John Wesley Powell and his survey crew going down the Colorado River, of Lummis breaking his arm on the trail and setting it himself represent some of the dangers they faced. One of tensest moments comes as Powell, who had lost an arm during the Civil War, dangled by his one arm from the precipice of a great canyon. Lummis reports that he was caught in a terrific snow storm, in a “trackless wilderness, far from help, or food, or warmth […] night near at hand, and a deadly chill in the air” (1892: loc 1319). Lewis records that during a skirmish with a group of Indians, he felt “the wind of [an Indian’s] bullet” at his head (Lewis et al. 1983: 17 July 1806). For these travelers the journey through a dangerous terrain, the Wild, promoted exploring and defining the self.
For those intent on experiencing the Wild, the Indian represented the savage, the natural, and the dangerous. For Parkman, the Ogillallah “were thorough savages” not yet “modified by contact with civilization” (1849: 251). They all wanted to see Indians as part of their experience – even Fuller was seduced by the idea of the Wild that the Indian can represent, imagining “naked savages […] with uplifted tomahawks” (1844: 4). And so the Native American is ubiquitous in narratives about the West. Sightings of Indians dot the narratives, as when Jackson announces, “we saw our first Indian woman,” who, nonetheless, is the “most abject, loathly living thing I ever saw” (1878: loc 81). Several travelers spent extensive time with Native tribes, living with them or visiting in their homes and observing their practices. Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery wintered with the Mandan in 1804, participating in their lives and ceremonies, though their dealings with the tribes generally focused on setting up trade relations, finding routes across the West, procuring food, and learning their customs. Parkman was drawn by a childhood curiosity about Native Americans fueled by his reading and relates that a desire to live in an “Indian village” motivated his journey. For him, exploring the West is inextricably linked with exploring the Native Americans, with whom he lived, coming to know their habits, their leaders, and their stories, mixing pejorative language with admiration for the warriors who “wore superb crests of feathers and close tunics of antelope skins.” At the end of the narrative, he writes, “I cannot recall those savage scenes and savage men without a strong desire again to visit them” (1849: 168, 218, 460). One of the first travelers to write about the Southwest Pueblo Indians, Lummis gives an overview of their history, peeks into their homes, and observes ceremonies like their “strange rites of the Day of the Dead” (1892: loc 1439). These narratives provide much interesting ethnological information about the “quaint civilization” (Lummis 1892: loc 1439) of Native American tribes at the same time that they position them as the savage.
Traveling through the West would not be complete, for these male adventurers, without hunting game or participating in the buffalo chase. Lewis writes, “As usual, saw a great quantity of game today; Buffalo, Elk, and goats or Antelopes feeding in every direction; we kill whatever we wish” (Lewis et al. 1983: 5 May 1805). While it was often necessary to kill game in order to eat, the excitement of the hunt sounded through their narratives. Irving, the New York cosmopolitan, writes of a hunt in which, armed with “a brace of veteran brass‐barrelled pistols” and “well mounted on a horse of excellent speed,” he approached a “diabolical” buffalo and pursued it in a wild chase across the prairie (1859: 173–174). Parkman similarly gives readers play‐by‐play accounts of the various hunts in which he participated, tallying after one of them the “five hundred pounds of dried meat” they were able to procure. He exclaims, “I was in the midst of a hunter’s paradise” (1849: 317).
Thoreau’s saunterer also goes west to landscapes immense and grand that inspire a kind of sacred awe. Muir is perhaps the most religious of the travelers, saying of the Sierras, “The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awe‐stricken, I might have left everything for it.” He goes on to say, “This place seemed holy, where one might hope to see God” (1869: 16, 60). He was not alone in feeling something holy about the Far West landscape. Lewis calls the great falls of Missouri “sublimely grand” (Lewis et al. 1983: 13 June 1805); Parkman writes about “a wilderness of mountains and pine forests, over which the spirit of loneliness and silence seemed brooding” (1849: 337); Twain “drifting around” in a boat on Lake Tahoe felt the “Sabbath stillness of the lake” (1993: 153); Powell wrote of “a world of grandeur […] from which the gods might quarry mountains” (1895: 128); and Lummis said of the Grand Canyon, “language cannot touch that utmost wonder of creation” (1892: loc 2453). As Jackson summarizes, travelers in “the great spaces […] think, ‘This is what the word “West” has sounded like’” (1878: loc 28).
The Far West environment, in all its grandeur, danger, and spaciousness represented one half of the dialectic of the West, of what “America” stands for. The West was also the destination of emigrants, the scene of progress as open land gave way to farms, ranches, towns, and cities, and as technology shortened distances and brought the landscape and its inhabitants under a degree of control. Not only did pioneers exert control over the terrain, but in the act of writing, mapping, cataloguing, and adding to readers’ knowledge about the landscape, travel writers participated in bringing the West “under control,” participating to some extent in the “geographical violence” of imperialism (Comer 1999: 26). As Anne Baker notes, “geographical knowledge and nation formation were inextricably connected in the United States” (2006: 48). When we read the catalogues of wildlife, the lists of flowers, the measurements of geographic formations, we are also witnessing Progress in the guise of scientific, geographic knowledge. As well, the lists of natural resources evince for writers the richness of the landscape and the promise for the future. William Clark, for instance, mentions the “318 fish of different kind,” and Lewis tallies the “Great number of Buffalow, Elk, & Goats […] Grouse, Larks & the Prairie bird” (Lewis et al. 1983: 15 August 1804 and 21 September 1804). Sent on journeys of discovery, Lewis and Clark map out their journey, noting their location with latitudinal readings, while Powell’s team conducts “a survey, embracing the geography, geology, ethnography, and natural history of the country” (Powell 1895: 62). They mention scientific instruments, measurements, and the names they give to places, exerting linguistic control over the site. John Muir, notebook in hand, explores the Sierras, recording the names of flowers and plants, often intermixing colloquial with scientific terms. He also contributes to knowledge about the mountain landscape by examining the “scored and striated” boulders and finding “new plants, new animals, new crystals, and multitudes of new mountains” (1869: 260, 128, 197). Not content simply to list what he has found, Lummis “gathered many interesting trophies at Acoma [Pueblo]” – “relics, nuggets, pelts, and other curios to be shipped to Los Angeles” (1892: loc 1970), as well as the skins and antlers of animals he killed.
Emigrants like early Texas settler Mary Austin Holley extol a landscape improved by human action. Writing of the natural landscape, she says, “Nothing was wanting, but neat white dwellings, to complete the picture.” Promoting the settlement of Texas, she writes, “I am perfectly satisfied that Texas is […] the most eligible part of North America” because of “its natural advantages – climate, soil, timber, harbors and rivers – positioned well for trade” (1883: 31, 84–85). But the Edenic, domestic paradise that Holley imagined came with costs that travel writers also recorded as they noted the furniture, skeletons, and graves that littered the trails west. Women making the trek on the Overland Trail often recorded the number of graves they passed on their way to California and Oregon: in 1852 Algeline Ashley counts eleven graves on 2 June, five graves on 5 June, and six graves on 8 June (Roberson 1998: 218).
Travelers to the Far West also observed how the land was affected by an industrializing nation that hewed roads, mines, and towns from the mountains, shaped cities that became new tourist destinations, and created multicultural contact zones that testify to the changing American scene. Muir notes the “roads blasted in the solid rock, wild streams dammed and tame” (1869: 70), while Jackson describes a California mining village, where “all the hillsides were long, narrow wooden troughs,” and “Old mining‐fields still lay along our road, dismal and ghastly” (1878: loc 492, 1239). Like Jackson, Twain’s Roughing It observes how mining changed the West; by the 1860s, Virginia City had become a city that “swarmed with men and vehicles,” and “Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey‐day of our ‘flush’ times. The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails.” Twain also pays attention to the large Chinese population of Nevada City, which he estimates at about a thousand. They are, according to Twain, “quiet, peaceable, tractable” and industriously work as washers and house servants, and yet they are “penned into a ‘Chinese quarter’” and denied legal rights. Twain takes advantage of this moment to criticize a racist society in which “policemen and politicians” are “the dust‐licking pimps and slaves of the scum” (1993: 354, 339, 368, 375). In contrast, Jackson views San Francisco’s Chinatown as a tourist attraction, and when she describes the shops, restaurants, and a Chinese play she does so in pejorative terms, noting the “hideous hubbub” about her (1878: loc 950). Jackson also notes the variety of languages she hears at Council Bluffs, “German, Irish, French, Spanish, a little English, and all varieties of American” (1878: loc 55), demonstrating the ways that the West was becoming a global region, populated by people from around the world.
The West was changing under the pressure of Progress. Not only were Native American tribes being subdued as the century went forward, but they were becoming tourist sights. Powell writes that the Navajos “were conquered but not civilized. Still, they are making good progress, and have once more acquired large flocks and herds” and predicts that “settlers will penetrate this country and make homes” in the Uinta area (1895: 22, 111). Lummis, who gazed at the “excellent homes” of the Pueblo Indians and watched Laguna Pueblo Indians “leaping, marching, wheeling” during a ceremonial dance, also knew that Native Americans had become curiosities: “Now some very excellent travelers from the East buy these fantastic images and take them home as ‘Indian idols’” (1892: loc 1602, 1117). One could argue that Parkman viewed the Sioux touristically, but as the nineteenth century merged into the twentieth, the Indians were more explicitly viewed as sites on a tour of the West. And while wild game still attracts visitors to the West, by the time Lummis tramped across the continent “The last of the buffaloes was killed at Cheyenne Wells” (1892: loc 207). Tourists with guidebooks “winding single file through the solemn woods in gaudy attire” (Muir 1869: 128) were already exploring Yosemite when Muir spent the summer in the Sierras in 1868. Jackson was one of those tourists, noting that “From this summit is to be had what the guide‐books call ‘one of the grandest views which the globe affords’” (1878: loc 590) and paying attention to both the natural world and the world of tourist hotels. Finally, cities like Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were becoming destinations where travelers could enjoy the benefit of nice hotels and restaurants, shopping and the arts, as tourism and its amenities increasingly became part of the travel experience.
Similar to travel abroad or to the West, travel to the South contributed to creating a national identity by emphasizing environmental and cultural differences. Travelers first marked their arrival in the South by noting its lush, exotic landscape. When Bryant reached Charleston, South Carolina, in March 1843 he called attention to the “different climate,” trees “which are unknown to our northern climate,” and the early blooms of the peach, plum, and orange trees (1964: 28–29). During his 1000‐mile walk to the Gulf, Muir commented, “I hardly knew any of the plants, but few birds” (1916: loc 639). Going down the Mississippi River, Twain knew he was in “the absolute South” when he reached Baton Rouge, which “was clothed in flowers, like a bride – no, much more like a greenhouse” (1883: 194). Henry James remarked on “the velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges, the cacti” of Florida (1907: 434), while Woolson was struck by the gardens of St. Augustine with their fig, orange, guava, and pomegranate trees. Usually given to listing wildlife, Audubon gives space in his Mississippi River Journal to paint a scene of flocks of American teals “flying up the River […] the Parokeets Numerous in the Woods – a Large Flock of Sand Hill Cranes Sailed over us for some time, rounding & Elevating themselves to a Considerable Hight” (1999: 34). The natural beauty of the South – the “enchanting” sunrises on the Mississippi River (Twain 1883: 153), the “[e]xtensive marshes with course winter‐grass” and the “live‐oaks streaming with moss” (Bryant 1964: 35), beaches where visitors could view porpoises “heaving up their unwieldy bulk” and “armies of fiddler crabs” (Brehm and Dean 2004: 107) – made the South a tourist destination in the nineteenth century, a way to leave home without really going abroad. Coupled with the hotels of St. Augustine, Charleston, Savannah, the South itself seemed a resort meant only to serve the visitor or the invalid seeking to recoup health. Indeed, James goes so far as to call St. Augustine itself “an hotel” (1907: 459).
As part of their tour, travelers visited the sites associated with the South, the cities – Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans for those going down the Mississippi River; Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville and St. Augustine for those skimming the eastern seaboard. They visited the Cotton Exchange in New Orleans, a tobacco sale in Virginia, the squares and cemeteries of Savannah, the odd coquina houses of St. Augustine. They wanted to see southern plantations, still iconic landmarks. Twain knew that he was in “the South at last” when he saw the plantations of the sugar region south of Baton Rouge (1883: 195). Audubon remarks on the “handsome dwelling Houses, Many Sugar and Cotton Plantations” during his 1820 trip, noting “the Slaves employed at Cutting the Sugar Cane” under the supervision of a black overseer (1999: 70–71). Later, Bryant “enjoyed the hospitality of the planters” around Charleston, finding them “very agreeable and intelligent men.” He enjoyed raccoon hunting with the planters and listening to “negro ballads, negro jokes, and the banjo,” observing like Audubon that the black slaves are “not hard‐worked, and in many respects indulgently treated” (1964: 29–30, 34). Frederick Law Olmsted also visited the plantations of Virginia. Instead of finding the compromise between master and slave, in which an “imperfect and slovenly obedience […] is purchased by good treatment,” as did Bryant (Bryant 1964: 34), Olmsted argues that slavery has entangled whites and blacks in a system that dehumanizes blacks and creates “an indifference to conditions of living, which Mrs. Stowe’s Ophelia [a character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin] describes as ‘shiftless’” (1953: 84).
Travelers to the South also visited monuments to the past in an American version of thanatourism that mixes “the rare charming haze of antiquity” (Brehm and Dean 2004: 196) with evidences of violence and grief. From Bryant’s trek to the remains of the Bonaventure plantation and the monuments to Savannah’s founders to excursions to Confederate War memorials and battlegrounds, the narratives are haunted by the past. Twain visits sites in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a city that endured six weeks of bombardment during the Civil War, among them the national cemetery for Union soldiers that commemorates the “16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY” and the monument that marks the surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant (1883: 179). James visits Mount Vernon, home of George Washington, and then goes on to the historic places of Richmond, the monument to General Lee and the museum of the Confederacy, calling the old Confederate documents on display “sorry objects […] already sallow with time.” In Charleston he contemplates the significance of Fort Sumter, saying that it represented “the bled condition” (1907: 385, 414). One after another, postbellum travelers south remember the violence of the war and memorialize the loss and grief it caused. In St. Augustine Woolson views the Confederate memorial, “a broken shaft carved in coquina,” but when she queries “an old Negro” about the war, she is reminded of the freedom it purchased: “‘Yas, we’s free now […] I breave anoder breff effer sense, mistis, dat I do’” (Brehm and Dean 2004: 104).
For travelers, the South seemed haunted by time and memory and race. Many of the travelogues narrate past history, rehearsing the conflicts between the Spanish, Native Americans, and French Huguenots in Florida, Indian “butcheries” (Bryant 1969: 40), the mutiny of Minorcans who were brought to Florida in 1767 to cultivate indigo and sugar. As one of Woolson’s friends asks during a visit to St. Augustine, “Is there any place about here where there were no massacres?” (Brehm and Dean 2004: 97, 107). Not only is the South overlaid with the past, but the narratives of Twain and Du Bois bring the past, the present, and the future together as they retrace earlier excursions and project the direction of the new South. Taking a hiatus from drafting the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain revisits the Mississippi River in 1882, sharing reminiscences of learning to read the river as a cub pilot during the “heyday of steamboating.” “After twenty‐one years’ absence [he] felt a very strong desire to see the river again” and commences a narrative that compares the past with the present, the changes in the river itself as well as the towns along it. He catalogues the effects of the railroad, manufacturing, and modern technologies in the new South. New Orleans, he declares, is the “best‐lighted city in the Union” and the “telephone is everywhere,” while Helena, Arkansas, he notes, “handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually” and has a foundry and oil‐mills. Even as he congratulates progress, he laments, “All of the grace, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!” (1883: 11, 110, 200, 155, 48). Du Bois tells his readers how “once upon a time [he] taught school in the hills of Tennessee” when he was “a Fisk student.” He takes readers with him into the backwoods as he searches for a school and gets to know the members of the rural community. Returning 10 years later, he finds much changed, but not for the better. A favorite student, Josie, is dead and the people he revisits are angry, their hopes blighted, for they had “had a heap of trouble since.” In the place of the “tiny community” and his “log schoolhouse” “stood Progress” (1903: 51, 58, 59). While Twain celebrates the “promising future of prosperity and importance” along the Mississippi River (1883: 179–180), Du Bois understands that “Progress […] is necessarily ugly” (1903: 59), especially for black Americans.
What haunts the South and travel writing about it the most are the legacies of slavery and the Civil War. As Twain writes, the “Signs and scars [of the War] still remain”; one cannot escape the war because it “is the great chief topic of conversation” (1883: 175, 212). In some ways, the war had not really ended, as Muir learned in 1867, when “small bands of guerrillas” terrorized travelers in the Cumberland Mountains (1916: loc 383); and the ravages of the war were evident in ruined fields and the haunted faces of the people. Twain blames Walter Scottism for the downfall of the region: “The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books,” the “romantic juvenilities” and “humbuggeries” that supported a “sham civilization” based on “rank and cast” (1883: 219). James finds Washington, Baltimore, Richmond haunted by the ghosts of the past and “the huge shadow of the War.” He says of the “historic names,” “They hang together on the dreadful page, the cities of the supreme holocaust, the final massacres, the blood, the flames, the tears” (1907: 310, 369). Asking one to remember the scenes of war and the wounded that Walt Whitman chronicled in Specimen Days (1882), the “heap of amputated feet, legs, hands, &c.” (1982: 712), James was “tasting of the very bitterness of the immense, grotesque, defeated project […] of a vast Slave State” (1982: 371). While Twain was glad to see postbellum African Americans traveling to “make up for the privation” of slavery (1883: 150), James realizes “that the negro had always been […] ‘on the nerves’ of the South,” the “haunting consciousness” that is “the prison of the Southern spirit” (1907: 376, 375).
Projecting the direction the new South will take, James points to Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as “the only ‘Southern’ book of any distinction published for many a year” (1907: 418). In it Du Bois writes about Atlanta after the war, finding it to be “a fearful wilderness” of “feudalism, poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serf‐dom, the re‐birth of Law and Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race.” For Du Bois the crude materialism of the new South has corrupted human relations and replaced the “ideal of Freedom” with a “deification of Bread” that has aggravated racial discrimination and injustice. Journeying further in Georgia, to Albany at the “heart of the Black Belt,” Du Bois writes of the “forlorn and forsaken” land, the “remnants of the vast plantations” where a tenant system which “Only black tenants can stand” has replaced the old slavery with a new one, a “slavery of debt” (1903: 65, 67, 123). Du Bois tells readers, “Ten miles we have ridden to‐day and have seen no white face”; “this is the Land of the unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one‐room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury.” Blaming materialism and racism for the “Negro problem,” he also says that the “problem of the color‐line” is an American problem because it draws a Veil that excludes the nation’s black citizens from opportunity and divides the nation along race and class lines (1903: 96–97, 1). A corollary to the Western paradox, the Southern paradox that Du Bois and other writers critique demonstrates the tension between the ideals of America and the promises of its natural world and the violence and brutality fed by greed and racism. As with narratives about the West, narratives about travel to the South reveal tensions between hope and loss, between “two dreams […] tugging at our feelings” (Campbell 2000: 50).
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 5 (RALPH WALDO EMERSON, MARGARET FULLER, AND TRANSCENDENTALISM); CHAPTER 6 (HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND THE LITERATURE OF THE ENVIRONMENT); CHAPTER 20 (LOCAL COLOR AND THE RISE OF REGIONALISM); CHAPTER 23 (MARK TWAIN AND THE IDEA OF AMERICAN IDENTITY); CHAPTER 24 (HENRY JAMES AT HOME AND ABROAD).