World in the West, The West in the World, The

Friedrich Gerstäcker, Richard Francis Burton, and Isabella Bird on the Nineteenth-Century Frontier

IN THE EARLY twenty-first century, when tens of millions of affluent Americans can travel to virtually anywhere in the world in the space of a day, and can travel anywhere virtually via the World Wide Web in mere seconds, a quaint old companion remains surprisingly popular: the travel book. Even today, the travel book serves as an essential accompaniment for actual travel or, as in classics of the genre-John Steinbeck's Traveh with Charley or Jack Kerouac's On the Road, for instance-provides core background reading for a journey. Still, I suspect most travel narratives are read in the comfort of the home, not in the course of "roughing it." The travel narrative is a vehicle for vicarious travel, one that enables the reader to see the world through the eyes of the writer, but without the hassles and discomforts of the actual journey. Such has been the case for centuries.

One of the favored destinations of travel writers, and thus travel book readers, is the American West, with its spectacular scenery, native peoples, and central place in the collective imagination as "the most distinctly American part of America," to quote the famous British visitor Lord James Bryce. Travel writings constitute a wonderfully rich storehouse of edinographic and topographic observation and commentary, particularly about the nineteenth-century American West. Approximately one thousand booklength travel accounts published in that century were devoted to, or included significant coverage of, the West. If we are to know how Americans and readers around the world understood the region in this period, the ubiquitous travel book may be our best archive.1

But in approaching this mass of printed descriptions, we should be wary of historians' general assumption that the nineteenth-century reading public, both national and international, was fed a steady diet of mythology about the American West.2 The phrase "mythic West" is thrown around with remarkable abandon by scholars, so much so that one might imagine a nineteenth-century audience so hoodwinked by mydimakers diat we can only be grateful for the passage of time and the emergence of a more enlightened populace in our own day. By way of contrast, I'd like to suggest that the travelogue offered readers an important counterpoint to western mydiology in general, and more particularly to die notion that the West was like nowhere else on earth. Many well-traveled writers-including the now relatively unknown German Friedrich Gerstäcker and two renowned Britons, Sir Richard Francis Burton and Isabella Bird-placed the West in a global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many.

A Journey round the World

Born in Hamburg in 1816, Friedrich Gerstäcker first came to the United States at the age of twenty-one and worked at various jobs-hunter, fisherman, silversmith, cattle herder, and chocolate maker-in the Arkansas and Texas-Louisiana borderlands in the late 1830s and early 1840s, returning to Germany in 1843. Upon his return, he found that the journal entries he had sent his mother from the western frontier had been published by a magazine. Gerstäcker quickly revised the entire journal of his American travels, and it was published as a book, Adventures and Hunting Expeditions through the United States of North America, in 1844. Gerstäcker's first novel, The Regulators in Arkansas, appeared in Germany in 1846 and in two different translations in London and New York the following year. In 1848, another Gerstäcker novel, The River Pirates of the Mississippi, came out. The next year, with a small government grant and a publisher's advance, the young German set off again, this time with intent to examine the state of the German colonies in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.3

Gerstäcker, however, departed quite radically from his announced agenda. He traveled across the Atlantic to South America, across the pampas and cordilleras on horseback, then to California in the midst of its gold rush, and on to the Hawaiian and Society Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and Java, before returning to Germany in 1852.4 It was this second great journey that would provide the experiences that Gerstäcker recounted in his most important travel book, Narrative of a Journey round the World. The book appeared in Germany, England, and the United States in 1853.5 Little known today, it is one of the most remarkable travel books of the century, and one of the most illuminating for those interested in how the American West was viewed in relation to the rest of the world.

In his Narrative, Gerstäcker literally put the world into the West, illuminating the deadly consequences of multicultural meetings on the American frontier. One example is his story of an Indian man from Bombay who suddenly appeared in a miners' camp in California's Southern Mines claiming to have been robbed of nineteen hundred dollars in gold dust by local Indians. The miners gave chase and in the process burned an Indian village and shot one of the fleeing Indians, who later died from the wound. In the course of their rampage, however, the miners began to question the veracity of the East Indian's account. They escorted him back to their camp and sent a deputation to the native village to investigate his allegations. It turned out that the accuser had in fact been run out of the village for making inappropriate advances toward the women there and that he had not been robbed. In the trial that followed, the East Indian was held responsible for the death of the California Indian, and he was "condemned to receive twenty-five lashes."6