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

Wrobel, David

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

Gerstäcker vividly described the trial and the execution of justice that took place on the Fourth of July. The "wretched isolated Mohammedan," Gerstäcker noted, was escorted by a group of white men and Indians to the flogging post "while Yankees, French, Germans, Spaniards, Mexicans, and men of other nations" looked on and the perpetrator "invoked his Allah." As an American flag waved over the scene, the sheriff administered the first thirteen lashes, while the remaining twelve were dealt out by one of the California Indians. This was crime and punishment in the global West that was mid-nineteenth-century California.

Culturally diverse as the scene was, it was still very much a tragic landscape of winners and losers. Reflecting on the events, Gerstäcker wrote, "The Indians of California no longer exist in reality, though a few scattered tribes may wander about yet in the distant hills, looking toward the setting sun, down upon a country which was once their own." In recounting the story, Gerstäcker was not implicitly justifying the inevitable destruction of California Indians as a primitive race (a nineteenth-century practice that scholars have rightly criticized); he was merely explaining the process by emphasizing the effects of white conquest. The story serves as a microcosm of the war of extermination that white settlers were waging against California Indians. California's indigenous population numbered around 150,000 in 1848; twelve years later, it was 30,000.7

The year after his stay in California, 1851, Gerstäcker traveled via the Hawaiian Islands to Australia, another place that had been turned upside down by the discovery of gold.8 Here, too, Gerstäcker commented, the native people, the aborigines, would soon be "swept from the face of the earth." His account reminds us that the precipitous decline of native peoples around the world was very much in the public eye a century and a half ago. Entire races appeared to be heading for extinction, and Gerstäcker cited the genocidal acts of white people as the cause.9

To Salt Lake City via the World

Shortly after the publication of Gerstäcker's Narrative, three of the most thrilling travel accounts of the century appeared: Richard Francis Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, which recounted his 1852-53 journey to Mecca disguised as an Arab and his entry into that hallowed site (after having performed a self-circumcision to further hide his white Christian identity); First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), describing Burton's dramatic exploits traveling in disguise as a Moslem merchant through Somalia to the "forbidden" city of Harrar; and The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), in which Burton recounted his "discovery" of Lake Tanganyika, Africa's second-largest lake.10

Burton spent a good portion of his life engaged in remarkable adventures and writing thrilling accounts of his exploits (thirty-nine volumes) for an eager public on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. With knowledge of some twenty languages and an unparalleled understanding (among those in the Western world) of the cultures of the Middle East and Africa, he was "the preeminent nineteenth-century British travel writer, a brilliant linguist and translator, a pioneer anthropologist, a poet, a civil engineer, a field cartographer, a soldier, one of Europe's best swordsmen, a diplomat, and a geologist." Today Burton is known to historians of the American West for his weighty (six-hundred-page) work The City of the Saints, and across the Rocky Mountains to California (1861), which resulted from a three-month visit to the United States in 1859, three weeks of which were spent in Salt Lake City.11

Burton's study of the Mormons was a memorable one, but it did not present the Mormon kingdom as a truly exceptional place. As a lieutenant in the British army in India, Burton had demonstrated a rare ability to cut away the veil of cultural stereotypes, and in his account of western American cultures and landscapes he was able to move beyond the pervasive stereotypes and view Mormonism on its own terms. He declared there was nothing immoral or unnatural about polygamy and exhibited a lack of prejudice that contrasted sharply with the prevailing viewpoint that emphasized the licentiousness and depravity of those professing the Mormon faith.12

Nineteenth-century readers of The City of the Saints would have been struck by Burton's comparisons of Native American and African totemism and of the indigenous cultures of the American West and those of the Tartars, Afghanis, and Mongolians in northern India. Indeed, Burton's global positioning of the West was evident in his stated rationale for taking the trip, which he offered at the beginning of the book: "I had long determined to add the last new name to the list of 'Holy Cities'; to visit the young rival of Memphis [the ancient city of northern Egypt], Benares [in northern India], Jerusalem, Rome, Meccah."13

Burton's narrative also offered comparative descriptions of the Great Plains: "Nothing, I may remark, is more monotonous, except the African and Indian jungle, than these prairie tracks," Burton wrote, adding, "As far as the eye could see the tintage was that of the Arabian desert." For a journey across the plains, Burton recommended travelers carry a pistol (for protection against would-be robbers), a parasol (for protection against the sun), and a good supply of opium (for protection against the boredom of the journey). According to him, Scottsbluff from a distance resembled the Arabian city of Brass, and Independence Rock seemed much like the Jiwe la Mkoa (the Round Rock) in eastern Unyamwezi. Burton's West was very much like other places on earth.14

A Lady's Life in and beyond the Rocky Mountains

Both Richard Francis Burton and Friedrich Gerstäcker viewed the American West globally, but that perspective was by no means limited to men. The remarkable experiences of another intrepid Britisher, Isabella Lucy Bird, can also help us think about the global West of the nineteenth century.

In 1856, the same year that Burton's account of his adventures in East Africa appeared, Bird published her first travel book, a rather tame and forgettable record of a trip to Canada and the United States she undertook for the purpose of improving her health. Fortunately for lovers of good travel writing, Isabella Bird would return to the West a decade and a half later and write A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, a fascinating account of her 1873 travels around Colorado. The book was published in London and New York in 1879; it was in its seventh edition by 1882, its eighth in 1912, and has remained in print to this day.15

On her Colorado trip, Bird came to the Rockies by way of Hawai'i, and then eastward from San Francisco. A Lady's Life is sprinkled with comparisons between the Rockies and the landscapes of Hawai'i, and she compares her experience herding cattle in Estes Park with her experience as a vachero in Hawai'i. In Perry Park, near Casde Rock, while riding with the daughter of John Perry, Bird remarks upon the young woman's "vivacious descriptions of Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, Turkey, Russia, and other countries" in which she had traveled. One wonders if those descriptions inspired Bird, or if the inspiration for global adventuring had come earlier. Whatever the case, Bird herself became a famous world traveler who climbed mountains, rode across deserts, and wrote book-length accounts (nine all together) of her adventures in Japan (1880 and 1898), Malaysia (1883), Persia and Kurdistan (1891), Tibet (1894), Korea (1897)1 and China (1899 and 1900), as well as the Hawaiian Islands (1875) and the American West.16 Scholars of the West have had little to say about Bird's global travels, and this is unfortunate since some of the same issues that occupied her attention while in the Rockies are evident in her later accounts. While Richard Francis Burton's descriptions of western landscapes and cultures were very much shaped by his global experience, Bird's global experience was shaped by her time in the American West. For example, five years after she left the Rockies, Bird was traveling across the Malay Peninsula, where no European steamers landed and a place generally believed to be "a vast and malarious equatorial jungle." In the resulting 1883 book, The Golden Chersonese (also, like A Lady's Life, composed initially as a series of letters to her sister in England), Bird commented on population decline on the Malay Peninsula, writing, rather dismissively, "If they were swept away to morrow not a trace of them except their metal work would be ... found. Civilized as they are they don't leave any more impress on the country than a Red Indian would." Less sensitive about the matter than Gerstäcker, she nonetheless exhibited the same tendency to place the demographic collapse of American Indians into a global context.17

The American Frontier in a Shrinking World

Bird, Burton, and Gerstäcker are just a few of the hundreds of nineteenth-century global travelers who viewed the West within a larger context. In placing the drama of the American West on a global stage, these travel writers reminded Americans that they were very much a part of the world of empire building and that their western frontier served as the primary stage for imperial endeavors, not an escape from them. After 1869, however, it would have been difficult, even for less intrepid travelers, not to see the western frontier in relation to that wider world. The completion of the American transcontinental railroad in that year closed the final link in a global transportation chain. In 1872, British tour operator Thomas Cook, the father of modern mass tourism, led his first personally conducted, 222-day world tour; his itinerary created a travel infrastructure that made possible a flood of late-nineteenth-century travel books.18

Interestingly, it was the very feeling that the far-flung recesses of the earth were now closer than ever because of steamships and railroads that actually nurtured the notion of a distinctive American frontier. The frontier concept served as an antidote of sorts to "globalization," to use a more contemporary term. The growing emphasis in the second half of the nineteenth century on the exceptional nature of that western frontier experience-the creation of a mythic West-provided a kind of nationalist escape from an emerging global reality in which the immense geography of the United States was just a single stage of an integrated journey around the world.

Today, the United States stands at the very center of the process of globalization as less developed countries seek to insulate their own cultural distinctiveness from global forces. When scholars investigate these contemporary global processes a century from now, one suspects that the travel book will once again prove an important guide.

David Wrobel is professor of history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and the current president of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. His books include Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (2002) and The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (1993).

Copyright Montana Historical Society Spring 2008
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