Sunday, January 30, 2022
Saturday, January 22, 2022
Monday, January 17, 2022
Reading THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY--things you are reminded of when you are very old
I've had my good eye out for my copy of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY for several weeks and today realized it was where it should be but with a spine so faded it could have been any number of other books.
I read MOBY-DICK in eleven afternoons in 1957 when I had to lie down to let pneumo-peritoneum settle into crevices in my stomach. In August 1958 when I was night telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad in Port Arthur, Texas, something possessed me to order the Tudor MELANCHOLY and I read it, marking it in red pencil. It was not for any class--I just thought I wanted to read it, and did read it, and kept the book. After all, I had to stay in the freight office till four in the morning.
Now I see notes in it: "How strange--to have bought this to read on my own then decades later to have written about Melville's reading it, & to see myself quoted on the use it served for Melville in writing Moby-Dick, which I first read in 1957. --"
Then below: "In 1958 (one note is August 1958) in Port Arthur--then in 2006 John Gross quotes me in The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes as saying this book served Melville as a 'sonorous textbook on morbid psychology.'"
I made that memo 18 October 2006, saying "48 years on." Now in 2022 it's still longer than 48 years. And I still have the book. And I can look up John Gross in a second or two to verify what he said.
Sunday, January 16, 2022
Saturday, January 15, 2022
My Lord! Someone reads aloud MELVILLE: THE MAKING OF THE POET-- IN JUST UNDER 10 HOURS
- Narrated by: Ben Beckley
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Release date: 06-24-21
- Language: English
Up at 5 to make these because they require 2 hours in refrigerator. Smaller Brother Rick Rolls. Gas on right, electric on left.
Who can guess how many were eaten at breakfast?
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
GOP congressman under fire for comparing COVID restrictions to Nazi policies
He is wanting Biden to stop sending anti-vaxxers to work camps. He is afraid something worse than work camps might follow. This Republican congressman, like Halsey and Cruz, is a very intelligent man.
Anti-vaxxer tells supporters the new COVID antidote is in 'urine therapy'
This is good news I guess but who would drink Greg Abbott's?
Monday, January 10, 2022
Winter storms deal death blow to iconic California rock formation Montana de Oro State Park Arch
I have pictures but that's not the same.
Sunday, January 9, 2022
Saturday, January 8, 2022
Jerry Ward's post Katrina mention was more fun, but here is a 2021 attempt to deal with something so strange the writer does not want to believe it, on principle.
“Textual Continuity”--John K. Young, in 2021 Textual Cultures.
Obviously,
this selection belies many nuanced points of divergence among these theorists,
but my point is the centrality of textual change (or possibility, fluidity,
energy) to contemporary ideas of textuality and creativity. In coming at these
ideas from the opposite direction, so to speak, I will be disagreeing in
principle with Hershel Parker’s contention that “what goes unrevised to a
greater or lesser extent goes unrethought, unrestructured, carrying its
original intentionality in a new context where that intentionality is more or
less at war with the different intentionality in the altered or newly written
passages” (1984, 228–9). While it may well be the case, as Parker suggests,
that authors in the process of revision “routinely” leave “hunks” of a text
unchanged while focusing primarily on those areas undergoing revision (1984,
228), it is also often the case that an author does reconceive of the static
portions of a new version as carefully as those denoting the “author’s
flare-ups of revisional energy” (Eggert 2009, 210). In that respect, we might
think of textual continuity as potential change that does not happen (but
could, in principle, at another point in a text’s history). As Hannah Sullivan
suggests in her study of 20th-century revision habits, an absence of revision
“points to the balance between what changes and what stays the same” (2013, 4).
My examination of textual continuity takes that term not in a teleological,
Whiggish sense, but as cases of variation not occurring. . . .
When Fallon
included this story, now titled “The Last Stand”, in her 2011 collection You
Know When the Men Are Gone, largely focused on the lives of military families,
she changed Flip to Kit Murphy, though his wife’s name remains Helena, and
revised his response to her question about his foot (which is linguistically
identical in this version): “No.” He wanted to say that it was never going to
be okay, that he couldn’t screw it up any more tonight than it already was. His
eyes started to get used to the darkness and he could make out her outline by
the alarm clock’s light, how she sat at the edge of her bed. (2011, 153)
Clearly there is a good deal of variability even in this short example,
including changes in the text’s title and the protagonist’s name, a shift from
dialogue to indirect discourse, with its accompanying increase in readers’
access to Kit’s consciousness, and the merger of two paragraphs into one. The
rewritten second sentence in the book version seems clearly to be a local case
of “horizontal revision”, in Tanselle’s terms, as it “aims at intensifying,
refining, or improving the work” (1990, 53), in this case adapting Kit’s
broader pattern of reticence to encompass his failure (or inability) to express
the depth of his physical and emotional pain, transferring what is an angry
rejoinder in the magazine story to an entirely internalized response in the
book chapter. But I also see the unchanged third sentence as manifesting a
horizontal continuity, to adopt Tanselle’s taxonomy, insofar as these kinds of
continuity “spring from the same conception of an organic whole as the original
version manifested” (1990, 58). (I am inferring Fallon’s decision not to change
this sentence on the basis of these two published documents, though the
eventual availability of her archive might reveal additional layers of changing
away from and then back to this version as she was assembling the collection of
stories into a book.) Just as the shift to Murphy’s silence is consistent with
the story’s broader portrayal of his character, so too is his perception of his
wife sitting on “her bed” (she has deliberately reserved a motel room with two
beds) an important element of his gradual, if begrudging, acceptance of her
decision to end their marriage. Thus, I presume that Fallon here is working
through the same process as Borges’s playwright, revising on the one hand and
deciding to let the original text stand on the other, in both cases with an
equally attentive eye to these textual moments’ standing in relation to a
broader conception of the work. It could be the case, as eventual archival
evidence might show, that Fallon’s revision process falls more in line with
Parker’s conclusions about a lack of interest in revision in unchanged portions
of a text. Fallon’s comments on the revision process for this story seem to
suggest otherwise, however. In an interview with Christi Craig, for example,
Fallon recalls Kit Murphy as one of the characters in the collection for whom
she had a particular “soft spot”: “I’d say that I worked on his story, ‘The
Last Stand,’ longer and harder than any other. Even after it was published in
Salamander Magazine, I felt compelled to keep rewriting it, to infuse it with
as much genuine experience as possible” (Craig 2012).
Got up to find that my 1984 book FLAWED TEXTS & VERBAL ICONS just won't be suppressed. Jerry Ward after Katrina, and John K. Young in 2021
It fascinates me to see it used gratefully by people interested in modern British fiction, Renaissance drama, medieval poetry, and even, Lord Help Us, the Bible (the new Dutton Exodus). So here is someone in 2021 who thinks he disagrees with me in principle but after much hoopla decides that eventual archival evidence just might show that I am right.
I have been thinking a lot about what I contributed to Melville. It was not just transcribing documents. Over and over again I found stories while looking at a single document, say a shopping list, and realizing what marvelous episode of Melville's life that the list revealed, when you looked at the date in relation to the growing chronology.
I was going totally against the fashions by looking not at eventual archival evidence but at archival evidence which I could look at in the present. Every year, I see that FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS is alive. My goodness, it was one of the books a New Orleans professor, Jerry Ward, hated to lose.
Friday, January 7, 2022
Sidney Poitier-- A Heroic 94
In 1957-1959 I was night telegrapher on the KCS RR in Port Arthur and went to school in Beaumont during the day, so I saw very few movies. I did see, probably both in 1958, Island in the Sun and The Defiant Ones. I think there was absolutely no attention paid locally to the racial casting in either movie. It was good to see such movies in the regular local theatre in that town in that time, back when gas stations had at best 3 rest rooms--White Men, White Women, Colored.
"Not One Word More"--a 2011 post about Melville biography which someone quoted to me last night. It's worth re-posting. It's about biography.
"That truth should be silent I had almost
forgot"--Enobarbus in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, back in Rome after having been
too long in Egypt.--------- Melville's PIERRE, Book 4, chapter 5:
"Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually
curious for nothing."
Monday, May 16, 2011
TLS takes on UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS's
AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead
NOT ONE WORD MORE Revisited.
J.C. in the NB page of the TLS for 6 May 2011 makes witty, wry, sardonic,
merciless fun of “Past profiles” in Dale Salwak’s University of Iowa Press
collection, AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, in which
modern critics interview dead writers, engaging them in sprightly imaginary
conversations. J.C. chooses to embarrass Cynthia Ozick: “When playing this
parlour game, the trick is to conjure plausibly, without seeming arch. We find
it hard to believe that Henry James would respond to questions about his
homosexuality by saying (to Cynthia Ozick), ‘Let us pass over this unseemly
subject’.” “Or,” continues J. C., “Or that Edith Wharton would launch into a
discussion of the same topic—chucking in James’s constipation—before even
offering John Halperin a cup of tea. Not content with his scoop on the
‘repressed’ James, Halperin asks Wharton about her ‘first sexual relationship’.
She tells all. We’d tell him to get out.” J. C. is still more appalled by Paul
Delany’s calling in the doctor over Gissing’s syphilitic lesions and
tuberculosis, but he cannot resist turning back to the egregious effrontery of
Cynthia Ozick: “Like many of the would-be-journalists here” in AfterWord, “Ozick
assumes that the purpose of a literary interview is to throw down banana-skin
questions, leading to a slip-up, a ‘revelation’. Any decent interviewer could
have told her that a hostile line of questioning is more likely to produce a
forced smile, folded arms, and a glance at the fobwatch.”
Perhaps the TLS will, after these tough words, pass the Iowa book out to a
sympathetic reviewer, but for now AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary
Dead, is a collection one would not want to be, as it were, caught
dead in.
There but for the grace of my own high sense of delicacy and the mean spirits
of two reviewers might I have gone!
For the earlier version of this book, then called ONE WORD MORE, I
wrote the essay NOT ONE WORD MORE. Why the “NOT”? Because I would not have
dreamed of putting words in the mouth of Herman Melville. I responded to
Salwak’s request for an article only on that condition, that I would not have
to invent words which I would then attribute to Melville. As I wrote James Hime
on 4 July 2008: “The premiss (or premise) of the collection, ONE WORD MORE, is
that the biographers get one more chance to quiz their living or dead subjects.
Of course I could not put words into HM's mouth so my article is called ‘Not
One Word More’ and I get to talk about myself. The editor really likes it, and
even H----y, who values privacy, likes it too.”
Last year two reviewers for Iowa recommended dropping my essay, as Joe Parsons,
the head of the Press, blithely told me. One of these sagacious reviewers said,
“Not only does Walker not write so much about Melville as about himself, but
the tone is disrespectful and laden with Walker's usual opprobrium for his
critics, real or imagined.” You have to watch that Walker. I remember when a
reviewer back in the 80s started off wondering “what possessed Herschel Walker
to write Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons.” I can only assume
that the same, now aged, churl, an academic who writes reviews and reader’s
reports but not scholarly articles and books, leapt at the chance to knock me
again, a quarter century later.
The other reviewer was indeed too disrespectful to me, if not Walker, for
anyone to tell me what she said.
In the old days when you were thrown out of a collection you sulked. These
days, you do what I did when my review of Sally Bushell’s new book was
rejected: you post most of it on Amazon.com half an hour later, and start a
blog and post the rest of it. And on that blog you post “Not One Word More”
with a disingenuous reference to AfterWord. That’s just what I did
back in January.
Now, with J.C. aghast at Cynthia Ozick and other contributors, I congratulate
myself on having refused from the start to play that particular game—and for
getting “Not One Word More” out where more people will read it than will read
the Iowa book. Here the long-suffering Walker’s controversial essay is, again.
16 May 2011
Now, what follows below was my way of handling rejection, back in January. I
regret only that I was still too traumatized by Brenda Wineapple's slaughter of
my biography in THE NATION to ask Melville what he thought of her transforming
his reference to the Lamb of God into a reference to a baaing Berkshire ewe,
wether, or ram. He might, at that, have broken silence.
Herman Melville: Not One Word More
Hershel Parker
Early in 2011 the University of Iowa Press is announcing AfterWord:
Conjuring the Literary Dead, edited by Dale Salwak, in which
biographers conduct interviews with their dead subjects so as to elicit more
words, if not last words, from the grave. What a terrifying and attractive
notion! But I know just how many words Herman Melville would say to me.
Any biographer wants all he or she can get. If I were looking at newly
discovered marginalia of Melville’s in an auction house and the clerk said I
could copy half of a 24 line note, I would conscientiously copy twelve lines.
I'm docile and deferential. Then I would copy the other 12. How am I supposed
to know which words will turn out to be the most revealing? I need all the
words much more than any collector who will buy a book Melville marked up so he
can take it apart and sell it a leaf at a time, framed, with a window on the
back if there’s marking on both sides. I'm saying "need" and not
"needed" because I still have a biography to write, not a 500-page
condensation of the terse 2000 page two-volume Johns Hopkins study but a wholly
different shorter book for Northwestern called Melville and Biography:
An Inside Narrative (with an ambiguous nod to the subtitle of Billy
Budd, Sailor). (It’s about biography as theorized and practiced in the last 3
decades as well as problems in Melville biography.) Anything I could learn
directly from Melville would go into that book. I have the questions ready but
no confidence at all that I could conjure new words from him, although I have,
now that I think about it, discovered more than a few of his words recorded by
others or written down by the man himself.
The fact is that I have been talking to Melville for over half a century, under
my breath or, very often, out loud. Mainly I've asked him questions. Far too
often I've moaned, "Ah, why did you do that? Didn't you know what the
consequences would be?" I asked myself why he did not protest in the
newspapers once he realized that Americans were learning from the London
Athenaeum that he had not accounted for Ishmael's survival--from the Athenaeum
as quoted twice, at devastating length, in his wife's home town. He could have
asked editors to print a formal "card" if not just a news item. He
could have asked Richard Bentley to print the "Epilogue" in his
magazine and publicize it in the London newspapers. The loss of the
"Epilogue" to The Whale could have been a publicity bonanza, like the
discovery of Toby was for Typee. If the Literary World review of Moby-Dick had
not been so sanctimonious, would he have asked Evert Duyckinck to put an
article about the lost "Epilogue" in the Literary World?
Not expecting to conjure up answers, I've challenged myself with simple
questions. I would ask, "What did you have on or about your person when
you arrived in New York City in October 1844?" I talked things out at (if
not with) Melville for years, as in bringing him up to date by saying, “Well,
one thing you had was Allan's long letter to you which you received in Boston,
a letter we did not know about until after the covetous and secretive
psychiatrist Henry Murray died.” (Murray had the interest, the money, and the
access in the 1920s so I was convinced that he had bought some of the letters
to Hawthorne from that former jailbird, his son Julian. Before Nina sold the
Francis Street house in Cambridge I diplomatically suggested that she might
look for a wall safe in the study behind the boards that Murray had torn off
the barn at Arrowhead, but she thought I was a mad Jamesean biographer and
refused to mess up a perfectly good wall. If I had twenty minutes with a metal
detector . . . .)
"What were you thinking about on that ferry or that ship or that
train?" I would ask. “When you had just seen Toby in Rochester (really
Rochester, as Thurlow Weed said, you could tell me, and not Buffalo?) I knew
that you were thinking about how to get control of his story so you could add
it as an appendix to your book. He was running off with your Typee! Whatever
mix of emotions you were reflecting on after seeing your old shipmate, you had
work to do on the way home, now that his own vivid narrative was being
reprinted all over the country.” I asked hundreds of such simple questions
before I was finished, and got surprising answers, a few times, from documents
but not from Melville. Sometimes I was just curious and had to remain so: “Did
you really break off your first stint of work on the whaling book to make an
excursion to West Point?” He could tell me now that other writing are speaking
“AfterWords” to their biographers.
Let me try the address you directly in public, in a blog, which is sort of like
what the Home Journal was to Nathaniel Parker Willis. “If other dead writers
are talking to biographers, why not you, Melville?” Still silent? I know that
side of you--"the most silent man" Maunsell Field ever knew, before
you and Dr. Holmes gave him the best talk he ever heard. Am I going to get to
hear you in full tide of racy talk as in the early years, or in full rant in
the last years about "Damn fools" of politicians? No? I'll never hear
your voice? Never know if you really did talk, all your life, with something of
your father's Bostonian-Scottish accent? I'm still on my own?
Just because I squatted over your bones to take a rubbing of your tombstone on
rice paper on a sticky July day in 1962, you think I've been crowding you for
half a century? Now you are irritated enough not to talk but curious enough to
give me a tour of likely sites for an interview? It’s my version of the Iowa
group’s fantasy but instead of chatting you are offering and rejecting one site
after another?
Is this Westport? One harbor looks like another to me.
I've played along. At every new scene I'm telling you where we are or else I've
made my best guess. You're the world traveler, after all. Next are you going to
sit cross-legged in Paradise waiting for Hawthorne, and expect me to follow?
Don't even suggest a cozy chat on a ferry boat, you who will change your seat
eight times before we steam along past with the new Statue of Liberty! Julian
Hawthorne told the truth for once about your fiddling with the long stick with
a hook as you adjusted the high transom window. I thought I was the fidgety old
man. Please, stop a few minutes at the next Scene of High Significance in the
Life of Herman Melville. I'm much older than you ever lived to be, and you are
giving me vertigo.
Thanks for pausing. Oh, it's a crow's nest, and it's rocking, and I don't like
heights. I'll close my eyes--that concentrates the snugness and lets me feel my
own identity aright, you say. Maybe it will combat the vertigo. Now, your not
talking is nothing new. We do have some things in common. Philip Weiss, the
writer of the stealth attack on your reputation in the New York Times Magazine
in December 1996, had his Eureka moment when he was quizzing me: "Oh,
you're an autodidact, like Melville!" Yes, you could say that. I had to
quit school at sixteen to become a railroad telegrapher and had seven years'
seniority when I quit that job—the first of what turned out to be dead end
jobs. But I sputtered when I saw that Weiss had referred to you as my "hero."
Another autodidact, yes, but never my hero. Maybe my hero from your time was
Andrew Jackson, who as a boy fought at Cowpens, very near King's Mountain,
where my Scots and German grandparents and uncles and cousins fought alongside
the Over-mountain Men.
I'm glad to be with you now, although these ropes are slimy. You were not my
hero, but I never thought of us as friends or allies. I never thought much
about whether or not you would like me at all, you with your knowledge of
poverty always infused with a profound sense of entitlement, although I did
derive some wry amusement at wishing you knew someone with Choctaw and Cherokee
blood was writing about the metaphysics of Indian-hating. Always when I
fantasized imaginary conversations for you it was never between you and me. I
fantasized about your being deep in talk with people I knew you would have
relished, wishing that you could have sat down with the great guerrilla John
Mosby in cozy confabulation about Sir Walter Scott and that arrogant young
murderer of Mosby's men, George Armstrong Custer.
Now that I think of it, I wish I could have overheard you telling stories to a
group of men at sea, trying out tall tales about Fayaway on the Charles and
Henry and on the United States, before you had come up with the spelling of
that name—maybe a greater stroke of genius than adapting “Mocha Dick” for your
whale. Before you got home were you already telling about your naked son--the
story that turned on the tailor's practice of dressing the male genitals to the
left or right pants leg? You hinted, you teased, you bragged, but you undercut
the sexual boasting, turning the stories comically against yourself, to judge
from the story that the boy Ferris Gleenslet heard in 1886 in the barbershop in
Glen's Falls. When I started working on you I was young and a prude. Now I'd
like to hear what your contemporaries said was "racy."
Just before he died, as you knew, your brother Gansevoort met Nathaniel Parker
Willis in London ("We had a long, friendly & I may almost say intimate
conversation"), and acted as Willis's brother-in-law's groomsman. Willis
had been something of a Lothario, at least before and between marriages, as he
asserted in the Tribune on 18 October 1849 in a curious denial that he was a
profligate: "That, in my first residence abroad, and when a single man, I
saw freely every manner of life which, by general usage, a gentleman may see, I
will not deny." The fragments of your letter to Willis that survive, your
letter from London, are among the glories of your still youthful exuberance.
What if we had a dozen such letters, and his to you, instead of comments on you
by Evert A. Duyckinck? We have some of his reviews of your books, but that's
not the same thing. I still don't know you as a man among men.
Where are we off to? Oh, I see. Ho, ho, it's a joke worthy of your brother
Allan. From the crow's nest, a natural progression (as you said about going
from the baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery) . . . .
Scene: Owl's Nest, Claymont, Delaware.
I recognize Felix Darley's house. I've been inside this place when the plaster
was down and some of the lath torn off and there were holes in the floor you
could drop an easel through, if you folded it up. I thought about buying it, to
save it, but it was cynically overpriced. The whole area was run down, what
you'd expect from the south edge of Chester, Pennsylvania, that industrial dump
where Wilmingtonians went to shoot up, in my time. You could not see the
Delaware River at all for the trees. Dickens came to Owl's Nest, but you never
visited here, did you? Yet, as I found in the 1980s, Darley made his arduous
way to Arrowhead, asking directions (stuttering nervously as he did?), finally
directed through bog and through bush by locals who thought they were Puckish. You
keep your secrets: did you meet through Henry Tuckerman? Or at Dr. John
Francis's? You aren't going to tell me, I know. You must have seen his
illustrations of Irving after your ungrateful declaration of independence in
the essay on Hawthorne. Did they affect your repentant homage to the old man in
the "Paradise" and "Tartarus" stories? Darley must have
talked to you about his friend Poe. He was good to be around, genuinely sweet,
quietly humorous, almost as gorgeous as Hawthorne had been, and the age of your
younger brother Allan.
And how many other painters did you know very well? You gave the painter E. S.
Doolittle the whale's tooth Captain Worth had given you. Long ago I saw it at
the New-York Historical Society I told Jay Leyda about it, stewing all the time
about “Doolittle” until Scott Norsworthy identified him recently. Then on
fultonhistory.com while looking for something else I found an astonishing 1880s
newspaper article about it, after someone else had inherited it. Doolittle is
not famous now, but you knew Bierstadt, Church, and many others, didn't you? Or
did you avoid every invitation to meet them? This is tantalizing. Your Uncle
Peter owned Bierstadts. He and his circle of Albany friends seemed to own half
the best Hudson River paintings in existence, buying them as they were painted.
You collected prints because you saw superb American oil paintings you could
not afford and saw Richard Lather's very expensive mediocre European oil
paintings you certainly could not afford. But what about Darley? He cared about
you, yet he never illustrated anything of yours, just for fun? No luscious
drawings of scenes from your South Sea stories? How I wish I had a dozen
letters from him to you and you to him! Not a word in any Darley papers left in
libraries or attics in Delaware, either, not that I could find. You know what I
mean when I say I wish I "had" these letters: I wish I could see them
in a library.
Scene: Broadway and Eighth Street in empty Manhattan, a ghost town, you with
Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, and nobody else in sight until you
encounter a solitary man, someone you all recognize.
Are you challenging and reproaching me, since this is not in my biography? I
know about it because Scott Norsworthy found it recently. (Harrison Hayford
said it: "What Hershel needs is a Hershel.") On a July Sunday in 1849
this man met the three of you, and all four then strolled down a Broadway that
was a "scene of utter desolation." The man remembered long
afterwards: "We looked up toward Union Square--we were standing near
Eighth Street--not a living being was visible. We looked down toward the
Battery. The same solitude prevailed. As we advanced a few blocks, a solitary
pedestrian emerged out of Howard Street and crossed Broadway. The spell was broken.
Humanity once more came on the scene."
The cholera was raging, and sensible people were indoors. Did you remember this
vacant Manhattan when you wrote in "Bartleby" that Wall Street on
Sunday is as deserted as Petra? And now that you bring me here I realize that
in 1857 in Florence when you saw the wax carvings depicting "Naples in the
Time of the Plague" you must have remembered Albany and Manhattan in
plague years. You aren't going to tell me this man's name, I know, but he gave
some clues. In 1855 he was "actively engaged in mercantile business"
with both store and office on Broad Street. He lived near Union Square and took
the Broadway stage to and from his office. He was a personal friend of General
William Worth, who died that year. Perhaps, like Worth, he was a Mason and an
Episcopalian (but went to hear Methodist ministers). He was familiar with many
journalists (including Thomas Powell) and theatrical people (including Allan's
friend James Hackett), especially opera singers and their managers. He was a
Columbia graduate. Stephen Hoy thinks he was a Schermerhorn, probably John. You
could just tell me his name, you know. It might not do me any good, but I want
to know. No, it would do me good--all my experience says that it would lead to
more connections and maybe even some new stories. He probably left a diary.
Scene: The Battery, as it was in 1866.
You want to show me the homeless Southern veterans hovering there. You
identified with these ghostlike men, somehow, having survived your life as a famous
writer. These quiet men haunted the Battery for you the rest of your life. You
jerked your head when I reminded you how much alike you and your obsessed
cousin Kate Gansevoort Lansing were in moving among ghosts in a haunted world.
But we all do that, as we age, don't we? If you want to know, some of my
captured kinsmen died from mistreatment by the Yankees and some who survived
the prisons walked all the way back south from places like Alton, Illinois,
into black poverty for as long as they lived.
Scene: The William Worth monument, since 1857 a traffic island at the
junction of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 24th and 25th Streets.
You liked to sit on this monument late in life. Did you ever see Worth in
Albany or Manhattan? Did you read, in your last years, what Grant said about
him in his Personal Memoirs--that he was nervous or even frenetic and wore his
men out with needlessly long marches when they were just heading for an
encampment, not a battle? When you sat and smoked here did you change your spot
every few minutes? I know it meant something special to you, probably
associated with the outbreak of the war with Mexico and Gansevoort's death, the
time you witnessed all that violent war paroxysm in Albany. Anyone can see the
monument on the Internet now, or the great book called New York 1880, but
nobody could imagine how bad the automobile and truck pollution is. Only a
smoker like you could stand it here. Can we go somewhere else?
Scene: 49 Mount Vernon Street, Boston. Charles Bulfinch, but enlarged! The
great house on the greatest street in America! Your great-grandson Mel
could have bought it back into the family, in the late Truman or early
Eisenhower years. The owner let me in when I held out a copy of the bound
advance proof of the first volume. The lower floor was off limits, rented,
except the foyer, but I could see that there down the hallway was a succession
of two arched doorways. And of course I had the photographs made about the time
Sam Shaw died and the house was sold.
You know critics think you were never engaged to Elizabeth Shaw. You just
suddenly married! I worked out that you spent time in Boston in October 1844
before you went to New York City. You would not have been welcomed by your
aunts, who had cut your mother off, but if you did call on one of them or if
you had found your cousin Guert in the Navy Yard you would have been told that
someone in Boston had up-to-date news from Lansingburgh: Lizzie, who had spent
weeks there with your mother and sisters and Tom (when he was home), and was in
regular correspondence with Helen. In October 1844 Lizzie had known the
contents of every letter the family had received from you and she knew the
contents of letters from Helen and the others that probably never reached you.
You had been a romantic figure even before you told your stories to Lemuel
Shaw, who had a cousin in the Hawaiian Islands you might have met, and who knew
all about what his friend Captain Percival had done with the missionary-school
girls there. Your plan to surprise your mother was easy to effect: your aunts
never wrote her, and Guert and Lizzie could be told not to write. And you swore
the New Yorker Allan to secrecy when you wrote him that you were coming there
next.
You dedicated Typee to Judge Shaw for a reason, and I dated the courtship
better by finding a letter in which your mother specified the month you became
engaged. I knew how many times you had seen Lizzie before then. Critics gave me
a hard time for thinking you had an actual courtship, but I knew Othello; I did
enact Michael Cassio in a Bay Area theatre in, after all. "She loved me
for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them."
Your fate was sealed before you left here for the last time in October, 1844,
and when you walked out into the Common on your wedding day in 1847 you were
the true grandson of the Hero of the Tea Party, the immensely wealthy old man,
the "Last Leaf," who took you for your first walks there. After Shaw
died you were never welcome here, so it's bittersweet now. I know what this
house meant to you.
And that's not even talking about this as the place where you read Shakespeare.
After Malcolm was born you had nothing to do for days but sit on a sofa and
read Shakespeare. You had known some of the plays, but you had never read most
of them. Shakespeare is the main reason I wrote your biography, you know? You
don't know? While I was a telegraph operator I contracted tuberculosis. During
one five month period of my confinement, in 1956, I was in a tiny room with one
book, a one-volume Shakespeare I had bought in New Orleans in 1953. I had
pencils and a pocket knife to sharpen them with and for those months I read the
plays every day, over and over, some more than 20 times. The next year I read
Moby-Dick in eleven afternoons (still flattened by that barbaric treatment,
pneumo-peritoneum), savoring it, hardly believing that a young American had
absorbed Shakespeare as you had done. I gained access to that room in 2005. It
was as small as I remembered, but sacred to me, as sacred as a room in the
Mount Vernon house was to you--the room where you read Shakespeare.
Scene: No. 1 Bond Street, the great house on what Maria Melville in the
1820s envied as a street of marble-faced dwellings.
I saw the outside as we came, and I see Benjamin Franklin's china, so I know
it's Dr. Francis's mansion, near the Thurston house of Allan's in-laws, but you
are frustrating and reproaching me again. Here in his salon are thirty men,
forty men, the most famous New Yorkers of their time, and a couple of European
lions. You are a fixture here, dropping in even when you are living in
Pittsfield and only in town on business--and yet the only record we have is the
account I suspect Henry Tuckerman wrote, naming you and him and Duyckinck and
Rufus Griswold as regulars. Scott Norsworthy (again) finally nailed down the
date of the newspaper article Perry Miller said was from 1850: 1854, reprinted
in 1855. I spent months all told, looking for it, and in early July 1988 I
found a treasure when Tulane would not let me see the Picayune, where I thought
the article might be. The treasure was several years’ worth of Oakey Hall's
weekly letters in the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, written from inside the
Duyckinck circle.
Have you forgotten how many days you took to write White-Jacket? Oakey told all
of New Orleans you wrote it in "a score of sittings"! I would have
said about 60, July and August, but if you lined up your next source one day,
took a sharp scrutiny of it the next day, and wrote like hell the third day,
there you were! By uncanny coincidence, a month earlier, 28 June 1988, on the
back of a 9 x 12 envelope on a train from Strasbourg to Luxembourg I had
outlined Reading "Billy Budd," concluding: "I want to do it at a
stretch. I want to do it in 21 days. That's six pages a day average. There's
your goal." I wanted to know how it felt for you to write a book that fast
(then in the next two months write a longer one), and the only way to have any
idea of it was to do it myself--to write one that fast (but spare myself from
following it with another written that fast)!
Back in this country, we went at once to New Orleans. When I discovered what
Oakey Hall said about White-Jacket, then I altered my goal. Home in Wilmington,
I decided my book would be "written in 'a score of sittings'" between
13 July 1988 and 31 August 1988. In fact, I wrote it between 13 July and 24
August in a third floor room where the temperature was in the 90s nineteen days
in a row, so muggy that that the keyboard of the computer often gummed up. I
printed and mailed it on 24 August. The publisher said it would be fine if I
cut it by a quarter. Then my wife read it and said don't touch it--it's too
good for that series anyhow. So I sent it to Northwestern. If at Tulane I had
lain on the floor and kicked my heels and protested that I was almost a Cajun
or a Redbone, having been a depot agent and telegrapher on the Kansas City
Southern in Calcasieu Parish and a telegrapher up and down the Sabine towns,
the librarian might have let me see the Picayune, and then I would never have
discovered the Commercial Bulletin. I might have written the Billy Budd book
fast, but Hall’s "a score of sittings" gave me an extra impetus. The
benefits of docility! What did I find out? That now I remember almost nothing
about the composition except that the first weekend Mark Niemeyer hovered
around as I tried to pile up what we were calling "gross byteage."
Did you have any memory, years later, of writing White-Jacket?
When I was in the East I should have assembled a list of known guests who
frequented Dr. Francis's and should have read dozens of New York City papers
(and of course there were dozens) and two or three dozen out-of-town papers
that printed regular letters from their New York City correspondents, looking
for mentions of the men who came here. I could have maximized my efforts by
starting when a foreign celebrity was in town, and then I should have looked at
their letters and diaries. I didn't do. There have to be records still--diaries
or letters of men who attended and described how you talked, once you were
warmed up with the wine. A biographer should be omnivorous, omnipresent,
immortal, and strong as a horse. I couldn't do everything. I'm apologizing.
Now, do you want to point me toward where records survive? How about that for
the next scene, a pile of letters and diaries?
Scene: Monument Mountain by the Devil's Pulpit, summer, black flies swarming.
Ah, this time you are grateful to me, as you should be! Twentieth-century
Melville criticism harped on how excited you were about meeting Hawthorne, who
ignored you and looked "mildly" about for the Great Carbuncle of his
story. Finally, after my first volume was out, I went to the manuscript and saw
that Duyckinck's letter had been mistranscribed in the 1930s. All agitated,
Hawthorne was hamming it up, looking wildly about for his Great Carbuncle. We
should have known he was enthralled by you: how many men did he meet and
immediately invite for a sleepover? Hawthorne was as excited about encountering
you as you were about encountering him. So I vindicated you belatedly in the
“Documentation” of Vol. 2! Maybe after another century criticism will catch up
with "wildly," but meanwhile I've put it on record that you aren't
any longer to be seen as the young man who fell into unrequited love with a
once-gorgeous old storywriter. The powerful attraction was mutual. If you were
talking you'd say "Thank you." Well, you're welcome. Finding
"wildly" was my pleasure, really.
Scene: The Manhattan Church of the Ascension, high Episcopalian, an infant
baptism.
The Thurstons' church, and therefore your brother Allan's, June of 1849, the
christening of little Maria Gansevoort Melville, named for your mother. The
woman in motion is one of your Van Rensselaer cousins, Dutch Church like your
mother, fleeing, aghast at the minister's making the sign of the cross. Jesuits
are prowling the country and here in broad daylight a putatively Protestant
minister makes a pagan gesture!
While at Northwestern I spent the 1959 Christmas holiday in California reading
Pierre, then the Fall of 1960 I took a Melville course from Harrison Hayford
because other students said he would not accept a term paper. He wanted an
article styled for a particular journal, presented to him in an envelope
addressed to that journal, the proper number of stamps affixed. Then if it was
good he could put it in the mail. Mine was "The Metaphysics of
Indian-hating," an explication of the allegory in The Confidence-Man in
which you portray diluted Indian-haters as nominal Christians.
Nineteenth-Century Fiction took it. Harold Bloom reprinted it, and I still
reprint it as often as I can. Hayford and his Yale colleagues, even Elizabeth
Foster, had been too high toned to understand total depravity and Original Sin
the way a person exposed to your mother's Dutch Church or mid-twentieth century
Southern Baptist doctrine could, back when Baptists believed not only in sin
but in separation of church and state. Foster was a Texan, but Episcopalian.
They were great scholars and good diluted Indian-haters, the Yale Melville
students. William Shakespeare and John Calvin--they let me become a Melvillean.
Now you know.
Scene: The edge of the fountain of the Nelson memorial in Liverpool, Victory
crowning the hero as Death stabs him.
I came here before there was an Internet and I wanted pictures. Liverpool
didn't have a single postcard of the memorial for sale, and my hotel room was
so dark that I lost my roll of film in it. The library had signs up: "If
you leave it, it will be pinched." Someone had "pinched" the
handle for the microfilm reader. Look: I wore the first joint of my right index
finger down to a nub reading the Mercury. The Adelphi up on the ridge where
Duyckinck stayed was shabby. The whole town had turned into Launcelott's-Hey.
The only tourists were two Japanese teenage girls searching for Strawberry
Fields. You broke my heart when you came back here after seventeen years and
stood thinking how your life had changed triumphantly, and changed again
miserably. Take me somewhere else. Take me to tacky Southport, even, where I
walked on the same grains of sand you did and then decided I had located what
was left of the pub you and Hawthorne went to, the Fox & Geese, now a
fast-food take-out place called "The Steamboat."
Scene: Lenox: a corner of the old dining room at Wilson’s Hotel, formerly
the Little Red Inn.
You owe me big for this one. This is where you spent the happiest hours of your
life, that dark afternoon in mid November 1851 when you and Hawthorne sat here,
with the local belles and beaux peeking in and giggling because they thought
that you two reclusive authors had chosen such a peculiar way of getting
acquainted. Local men did not dine in a hotel! You sat there showing Hawthorne
the dedication to Moby-Dick and letting him hold the book as you talked.
Critics who ignore documents are hopeless, but even scholars are stupid because
we become dependent on documents. We can't imagine any human action that isn't
documented. All babies are mysteries to us unless we have a notebook record of
successful impregnation. We never once asked how Hawthorne got a copy of the
book so fast, as if you wouldn't have walked barefoot to Lenox in the snow to
get it to him before he left for the east.
You know how this episode was discovered? In Boston while reading Lawrence,
Massachusetts, papers (to find out what I could about your brother-in-law
Hoadley) I found an unknown letter signed "Maherbal," a description
of the Hawthorne cottage near Lenox about the time the Hawthornes left, in
November 1851, written from Lenox and reprinted from the Windsor (Vermont)
Journal. Where there is one letter to a hometown newspaper, there may be more,
so for five years I hunted for the Journal and even sent a graduate student up
to ransack New Hampshire libraries. Back then, there were limits on how many
pages anyone could get into a computer file, and I kept subdividing 1851,
always transferring to the top of the new file the note "FIND WINDSOR
VERMONT JOURNAL."
At last, five years later, Richard E. Winslow found a file of the Journal for
me, and in it of course were more letters, one describing your meeting with
Hawthorne alone together in the dining room in a hotel in Lenox, surely the
Little Red Inn that in 1851 was known as Wilson’s and a few years later became
Curtis's Hotel, where your father-in-law Judge Shaw stayed every September,
when he held court. Moral: you determine to invest one precious hour of a
research trip trying to find out how grand, really, was John and Kate Hoadley's
house, where your mother visited, and in that hour you stumble over something
that leads you, in good time, to a buried treasure, if you live long enough and
keep on the alert. This meeting in the hotel was a great discovery for me as
biographer, a bonus bestowed by the Goddess of the Archives. Just in terms of
practicality it was a godsend because it provided a seemingly inevitable
conclusion for the first volume. Why, I didn't need a newspaper document. I was
allowing for this scene all along, even though I would have set it in the
chaotic Little Red Cottage, where Sophia was doing all the packing for the move
to Newton by herself. Sure I was. No, I’ll confess: scholars are document
dependent, when we don't ignore documents altogether. You know what happened
later.
Scene: Same dining room, 1869, before the hotel (by now Curtis’s) became the
Victorian Behemoth, you and a most elite gathering where you are outranked in
wealth but not in ancestry or achievement.
That was fast. I was about to say that this document in the Windsor (Vermont)
Journal set off an explosion far away, once I paid attention again to an item
in the 20 September 1869 Springfield Republican which Jay Leyda had quoted in
the 1969 "Supplement" to The Melville Log: "Among the notabilities
who have been summering at Curtis's hotel in Lenox . . . Herman Melville of New
York." Overshadowed by post-war plutocrats, your own old fame recalled
only as an adjunct to Hawthorne's fame (no longer the "man who lived among
the cannibals" but beginning to be almost famous as the "man who had
known Hawthorne in the Berkshires"), you sat again in the dining room
which had witnessed the highest triumph in your life, when Moby-Dick was
published and your friend read the dedication. Could anyone doubt that you
remembered that afternoon in November 1851?
No--not when I could show that you tended to experience a peculiar mental state
when disparate times, places, and people collided. Typically, an image of one
object, place, or person superimposes itself upon another, the images
dissolving back and forth, exactly what we could call "morphing."
This psychological tendency may have been abnormally strong in you, judging
from the way you described it in your books, in Omoo, or Pierre, or others. Did
you use it in the lost The Isle of the Cross? Did the heroine perceive the
husband blurringly as youth and as mature man, morphing back and forth? Did the
bigamous husband confuse which female head was wrapped in one of those
expensive shawls? You remember you used it in Israel Potter, and let it suffuse
"The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." Having learned
of the memorable meeting in the hotel in 1851 and your return visit in 1869,
and knowing your habit of playing off one time against another, I had to allow
for the power of your memory.
Evidence came from such disparate places! The New York Public Library dated a
fragmentary diary of your youngest brother Tom as "[1860?]." From my
perpetual calendar, from knowledge of Tom's various promotions, and finally
(after I had zeroed in) from NYC shipping notices, I dated it to late May 1849.
Bill Gilman, who had done the work on your early life and Redburn, was dead,
long dead, but how I wanted to tell him! Don't feel too sorry for me: I had a
few dozen moments like that over the years, times when some document I was
reading lit up months of your life. Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts were
alive when I discovered the title of the Agatha story and the date of
completion: The Isle of the Cross, on or around 22 May 1853. I had the thrill
of telephoning them. Telling you which one I called first would be like
admitting which child I staggered toward and lay on top of during the Sylmar
earthquake! Think about it: only a biographer has these ecstatic insights--or sometimes
heart-rending realizations. No critic has any idea of this kind of intellectual
and emotional adventure.
So I knew you began the wholly unplanned Redburn just after an emotional, and
perhaps all but hallucinatory, re-enactment of a momentous life-event on the
docks of Manhattan. You saw off Tom (who looked just like you) on a voyage to
China--ten years after your elder brother Gansevoort, dead now more than three
years, had seen you off to Liverpool. You were reckless: you thought you could
write a fast and easy book, and you did, pretty much, but you were so naive you
didn't think about what reliving your youth would do to you. You realized later
that you never know what monsters you may catch when you drop your fishing hook
into the well of childhood. Writing the "beggarly" Redburn made you
able to write Moby-Dick.
Whether or not you "saw" Hawthorne in the dining room at the Curtis
Hotel in 1869, his grand aging head morphing, for instance, into the head of
Uncle Peter's friend General Dix, to whom you had inscribed a copy of
Battle-Pieces, or Colonel Crosby (from same family as the Van Rensselaer in-law
of that name?), or whoever sat where Hawthorne had sat, you remembered. You
know I'm right. For years, probably, you had been planning to put your
experiences in the Holy Land into a modern poetic pilgrimage where man-made
structures and demonic terrain would be the backdrops to hours and hours of
some of the best talk anyone had ever heard on all the great topics of the
century. Steven Olsen-Smith has found that you ensconced yourself in the
"Eastern Travels" alcove of the Astor Library on 1 February 1869--a
fair indication that you were thinking about the big project that was to follow
Battle-Pieces. An "alcove" was just right for absorbing and reflecting:
you always loved snug places, even those where you kept your eyes open.
You had a project, inchoate, maybe, sketched out in some detail, maybe. But
after your vacation, you were haunted by something not connected to Jerusalem
and the desert. You brooded through September, October, November, and December
1869 over how you could come to terms with the utter failure of your own career
while Hawthorne, dead five years, was exalted to the highest American literary
empyrean. Jay Leyda had plundered the late-published Hawthorne notebooks and
memoirs for their information about you in 1850 and the next few years. He had
not taken account of the way they affected you as they came out, beginning a
few years after Hawthorne's death. I looked at them in context and saw the
exquisite agony you suffered at being remembered only because Hawthorne's
family used your letters to document his stay in the Berkshires. The only one
to understand the poignancy of my recovering your fate as "the man who had
known" Hawthorne was Tony Kushner, who talked to Frederic Tuten about this
"terrifyingly sad moment" in the biography. I could show you on the
Internet. (Having Kushner understand the poignancy of that part of the
biography is as close as I come to your having Hawthorne understand Moby-Dick.)
At some point in the Fall of 1869, it all made sense: you could work your new
obsession into your old plans if you took Hawthorne along with you on the
pilgrimage. In January 1870, sure that you could work out your self-analysis at
a bearable pace, whatever new was published about Hawthorne (and your minor
role in his life), you started buying source books for Clarel. The idea of
taking Hawthorne with you was the catalyst that allowed you to start writing
Clarel, just as the power of the memory of Gansevoort's seeing you aboard your
first ship propelled you into the composition of Redburn. The difference is the
amount of thought you might already have given to a poem about travelers in the
Holy Land; with Redburn, you just started writing, without planning.
Scene: Flyover, below us an "exceeding high mountain" from the top
of which all the kingdoms of the world are visible.
You must have seen all the kingdoms of the world on many different mornings in
the Fourth Avenue house and at Arrowhead and in Allan's attic in his new house.
When you finished drafting "The Town-Ho's Story" or "The Grand
Armada" you must have been whirled up to an exceeding high mountain,
higher than Greylock, and trembled to see Dante and Shakespeare beside you and
Milton huffing and puffing a little below, Spenser hoisting him by the arm. You
were exalted, but how were you tempted? To go even deeper into debt? secretly
borrowing $2050 so you could finish The Whale (as you were still calling it)
and make it as good as you could? Tempted to be exalted as a great artist and a
lousy provider? To follow Jesus, according to Mark 10:29-30, you would have to
leave house, brethren, sisters, mother, wife, child, land for his sake and the
gospel's. To be a great artist would you have to gamble everything, including
the house and land, on the success of your whaling book? You were never a Dr.
Faustus, despite reading all about him in Thomas Roscoe's The German Novelists,
as Scott Norsworthy has found. But after the reviews of Moby-Dick and The Whale
came were you ever a loving father to Malcolm again? Did you ever "fairly
devour him" with kisses after January of 1851?
Scene: The Gansevoort house in Gansevoort.
This one I know from the outside, but from Cousin Kate's letters and other
evidence I made a detailed floor plan showing almost every room and including
Augusta's earth closet. Then just recently John Gretchko came up with Cousin
Augustus Peebles’ inventory of the contents, room by room!
It's hard to feel calm here when you remember that the grownups said Aunt
Catherine had refused to let you visit when you were a boy. And you were wrong,
just hopelessly blind to the consequences, when you sent Stanwix to stay there
with Augusta and your mother before Uncle Herman died. Fanny was all right, but
Augusta had a Dutch Reform duty to fill Stanwix's little head with total
depravity and Original Sin. You thought, some days, that you had partly
escaped, but you put Stanwix right into that soul-killing theology. How could
Lizzie have allowed that? Do you really think impressionable little Stanwix
ever recovered from that theological indoctrination? Poor little boy: you never
played with him the way you had played with Malcolm the first two and a half
years. No one ever was afraid you would devour him with kisses after being
separated. You decided that fathers who fail as providers don't deserve to love
their children.
The outside has not changed much. I imagined the hammock and croquet, and the
trees as they were. My wife and I walked out along Snook Kill to get a sense of
the terrain, and counted goldfinches. Jay Leyda didn't get here in the 1940s.
If he had, he would have climbed into the attic and found all of your sister
Augusta's papers, every year's batch neatly tied up in ribbons, and the
complete first draft of Typee! Everything went to the dump in the 1950s!
Risking wrath, Virginia Barden reached into the truck and pulled out one volume
labeled "Novels" on the thin leather binding (done at the local
tanner's), but including poetry as well as novels--Gansevoort's farewell gift
to Fanny of Longfellow's Voices of the Night. The isolated year 1863, complete
in the Augusta Papers acquired by the NYPL in 1983, is massive and detailed,
detailed enough (joined to the old Gansevoort-Lansing Collection and other
documents) to let someone, someday, do a superb social history of a tiny
American village. The documents were a revelation: a family haven in the north
to balance the family haven at Staten Island, the Governor's House. The fresh
fruit and vegetables were incomparable, and for endless years, it began to
seem, your mother at last had a household she could proudly dominate and enough
money to allow her to feel unthreatened. It was good while it lasted, wasn't
it?
Scene: The Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.
I wanted to know what it felt like to make my own torturous way down from the
Baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery. Shelley and Keats!--not, as far
as I could tell, poets of your Albany and Lansingburgh adolescence but important
to you in 1857. I walked the Rows at Chester. I ran my fingers over the green
marble drapery of the Church of the Jesuits in Venice--the carving that we
admired and that young William Dean Howells sneered at. I climbed up Dumbarton.
How many other confluences did my wife and I see because of you? We went to
Cairo, Illinois, whether you ever did or not. Coblenz, of course. How many
"superb" views did we see from the world's Ehrenbreitsteins because
of you, even if we missed so much that you saw? However much I wanted to start
with the physical, I could not have cramped myself into even a spiffed up,
tourist-ready whaler forecastle.
I could pursue you as far as Italy and San Francisco, but I knew I could never
follow your more intricate thought processes, though I did figure out how you
were likely to respond to certain situations. I did not set out to experience
the worst things that you had experienced. I did not want to follow you into
misery. I knew more about poverty as a Depression Okie than you did. But in
order to get a quiet place to work on your life I ended up paying two
mortgages, having imitated you in being foolish or desperate enough to buy a
new house before selling the old one. That part about early 1851 in the first
volume may have been more suffused with emotion than most people could
understand. Autobiography intrudes into the most disciplined, disinterested
studies.
Scene: A Reading Room in Lower Manhattan, tables stacked with files of
newspapers, three-legged stools available, and brass spittoons.
The Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Methodists crucified you for Typee
and Omoo because you were traducing the missionaries. Worse, you were mocking
Christianity and insidiously luring people into thinking lascivious thoughts.
What did you really think would happen when you let Ishmael kneel down and
worship Yojo with Queequeg? It's joyous to read now but you were suicidal to
write it, knowing your friend Duyckinck.
While I was writing I couldn't worry much about how the biography would be
reviewed, but I assumed I would see "we are grateful to Parker,"
"there is much here to be grateful for," "we extend our thanks
to Parker." Almost never, and mainly from people in the
hinterlands--Columbia, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, and even Sydney, in
the Antipodes. I had violated all the rules when I behaved like the 1940s Yale
scholars and acted as if there were still facts about you to be learned. When
the reviewers savaged me I identified with you much more than I ever wanted to.
Why did they crucify me? I could give you a three-hour lecture on the New
Criticism as it morphed into Reader-Response Criticism, Deconstructionism, the
New Historicism, and (have I ever lied to you?) Neuron-firing (I'll show you
Raymond Tallis in the 11 April 2008 TLS).
As I was starting research on my dissertation in 1962 I met two candidates for
the PhD at Columbia who were amused that Northwestern was offering doctorates,
so I explained that the Northwest Territory needed some sort of regional
school. They were curious about what kind of dissertation I was writing that
would involve going to New York City. When I told them I was going to the New
York Public Library or the New-York Historical Society every day to read
nineteenth-century newspapers and copy out nineteenth century letters about you
and politics they were dumbstruck. They saw they had a great story to regale
their fellow students and their teacher Richard Chase with at Columbia, this
skinny guy from the Midwest in a wash-and-wear dark gray glen plaid Baskin suit
and a subdued narrow rep tie going to the libraries every day and looking at
old newspapers and manuscripts! In 1962, a graduate student going to the
archives as if the New Criticism had never triumphed! Coming all the way to New
York to do it! They were too polite to laugh outright, but the way they kept
rolling their eyes at each other showed they thought this was the quaintest
damned thing they had ever heard. It probably was. No, you've never heard of
them.
Despite this episode, for many years I did not admit how far out of step I was
as a researcher. For many years, I would find that the last person to have
called for some box of papers was one of Hayford's colleagues in the 1940s.
That shows you how out of step I was. Most of the time I did not care. My sin
was to put out my hand for many years, searching newspaper files in the 1960s
and 1970s and later for reviews of your books and stories and articles about
you and your acquaintances. You think it was all fun? Think of my bursting into
tears around degenerating genealogists and ragged bookies (or whoever those
people were who were reading about horse-race results in the 1940s papers),
hiding my head in the microfilm reader to weep after I saw "HERMAN
MELVILLE CRAZY." My sin was going to the old archives and turning through
box after box of family papers that had been in the Shaw papers at the
Massachusetts Historical Society for many decades and the Gansevoort-Lansing
papers that had been in the New York Public Library for three quarters of a century
and the Melville-Morewood papers that had been in the Berkshire Athenaeum for
half a century and any other papers I could find along the Atlantic seaboard
and the Hudson River. My sin was to transcribe the so-called Augusta Papers,
the remnant of the files of your sister which were found in a barn in upstate
New York in 1983 and (mainly) acquired by the NYPL. I dated them and identified
the correspondents and people mentioned in them. I compounded that sin by
laying out old and new evidence in chronological order as I transcribed them
into a computer file of the 1951 The Melville Log. First I had entered the
items in the 90-page 1969 supplement (half of which I had supplied), then
hundreds and hundreds of other documents, including the Augusta Papers. I replaced
excerpts in the Log with full transcriptions of documents, all in sequence.
Looking at entire documents meant seeing a different story, discovering dozens
of new episodes in your life. Some of them were heartbreaking. Some of them
were comical: a grocery shopping list led me to understand that your
long-impoverished mother had thrown a lavish party for you and your bride on
your arrival in Lansingburgh from Canada.
After the reviewer in the New York Times slaughtered volume
one (he knew nothing about Melville but ferociously wanted to be another Lionel
Trilling or Edmund Wilson) I ought to have known what to expect. The only way I
could work was to go into deep denial as I finished the second volume. Of
course, the second volume was savaged much more cruelly than the first. Richard
Brodhead in the New York Times let it be known that I had invented The Isle of
the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860) out of thin air, the insane products of me as
"demon-researcher." In the New Republic a look-ma-no-hands would-be
"biographer" Andrew Delbanco, who later bragged about fleeing the
Houghton lest he intrude on your privacy by handling your mail, said I couldn't
be trusted at all on anything because I had merely surmised the existence of
those lost books. And Elizabeth Schultz echoed those two critics about the
merely "putative" existence of those book. We've talked about the
book you finished in May 1853, and how my discovery of the title merely
confirmed what Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman had said in Letters and
Mert Sealts had said in the Northwestern-Newberry Piazza Tales volume. Well, in
1921 Raymond Weaver had not known about Poems. Were reviewers in 2002 expected
to read documents that Meade Minnigerode published the next year,1922,
documents that later had been reprinted many times, in the Log, in Letters
(1960), in the NN Correspondence (1993), in my volume two? Apparently not. Of
course I identified with you as the victim of monstrously undeserved attacks.
And it nearly broke me, after the second volume was reviewed. I was exhausted,
I was having long-postponed surgeries, and I wanted to be thanked.
Scene: I get to choose this one, since I've never been to Ireland, although
many of my Scots ancestors lived there from Shakespeare's heyday for another
century and a quarter: "the dingy little dining room of the hotel in
Galway town on the west coast of Ireland."
I buy copies of Raymond Weaver's biography when I can. After all, he never
returned your drawing of Arrowhead to your grand-daughter Eleanor, so the
nearest thing to it is the reproduction in Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic.
I bought a copy on eBay around 2002, one Weaver had inscribed to Thomas Monro,
who stashed clippings in it. One was a newspaper article entitled "Passing
on the Torch," a partial reprint from the "Gossip Shop" in The
Bookman of February 1922, presumably by John Farrar. I traced your underground
reputation in England for years, and Joyce and Fred Kennedy discovered more
links, but if true, this is big news, so I want it in this book which has many
British contributors. Some contributor or reader of the collection may want to
verify it. It's news to you? I'll read it slowly and let it fall as a
benediction on you. Here is the full text:
The history of "Moby Dick", Melville's titanic dramatization of human
fortitude and implacable resolve, has been the history of a book's laudation by
literary artists who recognized in Melville an artist who transcended all that
they themselves could do in words. The most interesting genealogy of "book
recommending," the passing on of a torch from one hand to another, was
supplied one day recently by James Stephens, the wizard who wrote "The
Crock of Gold," "Mary, Mary," and "The Demi-Gods."
Reveling over "Moby-Dick" with Samuel McCoy, who has just returned
from Ireland, Stephens said:
"Did I ever tell you how I first heard of the book? George Meredith, who
was about twenty years old when 'Moby Dick' was first published, read it,
recognized a master in Melville, and passed the book on to Watts-Dunton.
Watts-Dunton, equally enthralled, urged Dante Gabriel Rossetti to read it.
Rossetti ran with it to Swinburne, crying out that Swinburne must read it.
Swinburne, finding in it the roar of the sea described as he himself could not,
with all his music, silently passed it on to Oscar Wilde, then the most
glittering star among the literary lights of London. Wilde, a Dubliner, handed
the book on to another Irishman, young William Butler Yeats, making, as he did
so, an epigram on Melville's greatness that would be worth repeating--if I
could remember it. Yeats, coming back from London to Dublin, brought a copy of
the book with him and presented it to George Russell, 'A.E.,' essayist, poet,
painter, and seer, commanding him by all the ancient gods of Eire to read it at
once. And 'A.E.,' chanting solemn rhapsodies through his beard, handed it on to
us, his disciples. I pass it on to all I know, as the greatest prose work in
the English tongue.
"Melville," added Stephens thoughtfully, "was the last of the
bards. He was wider than Shakespeare."
Pronounced on the afternoon of August 7, 1921, in the dingy little dining room
of the hotel in Galway town on the west coast of Ireland, where bearded sailors
from all the ports of the world once drank Spanish wine in the Galway inns.
Scene: My narrow study in Morro Bay, but with views of the Pacific 12 miles
up to Estero Point and 12 miles down to Point Buchon. You lifting an eyebrow as
you point to something Ishmael says in Chapter 91 of "Moby-Dick":
"It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale;
worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to
bury the departed"? And later you point to Stubb's decision: "It's
worth trying. Yes, I'm in for it."
You mean was it worth it, climbing onto a blasted whale with my bare hands?
Yes, of course the unsavory odor is from what critics have written about you
for 160 years now, and the scholarship is the ambergris, almost all of it, even
when it was obviously incomplete.
The older people who were still alive, the people who had done dissertations at
Yale in the 1940s with Stanley T. Williams, cheered me on, as Leon Howard did
and the greatest of all the researchers, Jay Leyda. After a while they all saw
that I was the main one carrying on their work year after year, although
several other people my age or younger made wonderful spot discoveries. I
worked the way I did because my phrenological organ of filial piety is
abnormally large. Jay Leyda was going to expand the Log and needed me to
shepherd him around as his Parkinson's advanced. I ended up having to do the
Log as well. Now, you know, my Log is not the 1951 edition with 900 pages or
the 1969 reprint with a new 90-page supplement. It's 9,000 pages,
unpublishable, but I am now working on the first of three volumes for print,
having condensed 3,000 pages to 600. One of Hayford’s last students, Robert
Sandberg, is doing the layout and coding, work beyond my capacities.
No one assembles that many documents while living a sociable life. A scholar
works alone, works every day, gets up in the middle of the night and works, for
years. I worked absolutely alone for year after year just transcribing the
"Augusta Papers" (that fragment of her archive) and plundering the
eastern libraries. Day after day I worked, and often 1 to 4 in the night,
lighted magnifier to the right of me, transcribing items into my burgeoning The
New Melville Log, dating them as I went so I could place them right, but not
reading them in full context. The day and night line, as your lawyer says in
"Bartleby," proved too much, and my body collapsed, everything going
at once. After a week in the hospital I resigned from five editorial boards on
one day and cut out everything extraneous and forged on.
I didn't make discoveries and rush into print, usually. I had been the supplier
of documents to the critics, rushing new discoveries into print. I reached the
point that I could not put out bulletins for fear of losing my focus and
momentum. After a while I knew all about living indefinitely with stories no
one else knew, except those I told to Jay, until he died, and to Hayford and
Sealts, until they died. It affects anyone's mental state, when he puts things
together that no one had ever known, especially sad things, and lives with the
new stories untold. I came to exist in a prolonged wrought-up state from
different causes, since I worked all over your life, jumping from decade to
decade depending on the evidence I was copying. Years might go by before I read
all the items in the electronic file for 1847, for instance, and longer before
I read 1847-1848. Sometimes I discovered the significance of documents only
when I started to write the biography--that is, when I started reading long
stretches of documents, seeing documents in context as I looked for a
"natural" chapter break. Obviously since I was writing about you I
had to have the biblical number of chapters, 40, but where they broke was
always a surprise to me, and the only way to find the break was to read a
period of months or a year or two, listening.
Was it worth it? On 1 October 2000 I copied Gutzun Borglum's ungraceful but
powerful declaration into the back end-pages of the first volume of my
biography: "The reason for building any work of art can only be for the
purpose of fixing in some durable form a great emotion, or a great idea, of the
individual, or the people." I wasn't thinking about you, although it could
have applied to you in the composition of Moby-Dick or Clarel. I was thinking
of myself, isolated from professional Melville critics and defamed by New York
literary critics of volume one while I struggled to achieve a state of grace
and remain in that state for as many months as it took to finish the second
volume of the biography. I understood then what you experienced when Moby-Dick
was trashed--too many too powerful commentators had trashed my first volume
without reading it. You fought to stay in a state of grace, and succeeded,
almost all the way through your work on Pierre. But then you were caught off
guard by the contract the Harpers offered you, 20 cents on the dollar instead
of 50, and you exploded in what you inserted into the completed Pierre! If I
had not stayed in that state of grace, that "zone" they talk about
now, I could not have finished the second volume.
Was it heroic? Well, writing the biography was the great adventure of my life,
outdoing my five months of doing nothing but reading Shakespeare. Put it this
way: at my lowest moments, when I felt that no one could carry on Jay Leyda's
work while writing his own narrative biography, I played a tape of the group
Forebitter in my Bronco II, the "Harbo and Samuelson" song about the
hearty young Norwegian oystermen who set out to row across the Atlantic, west
to east. "They were not only brave, but by God they could row!" I
blubbered in the Bronco then went back to work. And of course if I had not been
my own Leyda I could not have written a biography filled with new episodes and
new understanding of my vastly larger cast of characters. At the simplest
level, I found episodes when I dated documents. How many of my cherished
stories started with transcribing and dating?
After it was over, I came close to dying in 2002 when the reviewers in the New
York Times and the New Republic and the Common
Reader all said that I had made up The Isle of the Cross and Poems.
[Even in January 2011 I was still too traumatized by Brenda Wineapple's attack
in THE NATION to talk about it. See several recent posts on this blog.] I had
always blamed you for not going public about the "Epilogue," even if
only to say you couldn't quite make sense of what the American papers were
reporting about what the Brits were saying. Well, I had postponed some
surgeries until the book was finished, and I didn't have the strength to fight
back. Besides, I was sure the next review in another paper after Brodhead's in
the Times would correct him, since everyone had known all
about Poems since 1922 and had known since 1960 that Melville had finished a
book in 1853! I have already told you what happened. As it was, I didn't sleep
well again until mid-2007, when I began setting the record straight. In the
June 2007 Nineteenth-Century Literature I published "The
Isle of the Cross and Poems: Lost Melville Books and the Indefinite Afterlife
of Error." Later in the Introduction to Melville: The Making of the Poet
(Northwestern, 2008) I commented on how Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz and
other critics had distorted the trajectory of your career. (You haven't even
heard of that book?) And I have become a "blog hooligan" and
occasional Internet columnist, flogging myself into the new century.
I'm older than you ever lived to be, as I admonished you at the start. The
surviving members of the old editorial team (with the help of some newcomers)
got out the next-to-last Northwestern-Newberry volume, Published Poems, in
2009, and are working on the last, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other
Uncompleted Writings. Very few academics are doing research, but I'm
not alone, now. The librarian Dennis Marnon is a font (a polite word for what
Jay Leyda called me in a note I found: "Hershel is a faucet"). Marnon
found an account of your secret guardian angel at the Custom House, an admirer
of Moby-Dick, being the Collector of the Port, Chester Allen Arthur. Scott
Norsworthy, who works with disabled people in a nursing home, had found an
earlier account of Arthur’s watching out for you, and is finding books we never
knew you read, as I told you. John Gretchko sells ice cream, I think. Richard
Winslow is a semi-retired librarian and canoe-voyager. My former student Steven
Olsen-Smith, a professor, took to heart my research command ("First, put
out your hand") and is finding more about your reading than we ever knew.
He's the one who found that you secluded yourself a while in the "Eastern
Travel" alcove of the Astor Library early in 1869. It's still high times
for a handful of us!
You'll like my 2011, The Powell Papers, about the English
crook who fooled you, apparently. After that I'm doing Melville and
Biography: An Inside Narrative, whether you say a word to me or not. I
did not really have much hope that you would talk to me like the other famous
writers did to the Iowa biographers in AfterWord, and I would
never dare to put my words into your mouth. So I’ll turn back soon to Melville
and Biography: An Inside Narrative. It’s “complete”—left resting since
May 2010 when I started working on the first volume of The New Melville
Log. After I do MB:AIN I am determined to live to write a book
called Ornery People, stories from the astonishingly thick
paper trail left by the humblest people you could imagine, my American
ancestors. Like you in the last years, I am getting books out while I can. I
don’t want to leave gigabytes behind in a matchbox full of flash drives.
Thursday, January 6, 2022
A Draft of a chapter on Avenging the death of Parley Parker Pratt
Copyright 2022 by Hershel
Parker
6 January 2022--a rough draft
The Mountain
Meadows Massacre:
Mormons
Avenge the Blood of Parley Parker Pratt
In 2011, I
bought Roger V. Logan, Jr.’s big expensive The
History of Boone County, Arkansas thinking I might find more about my Coker
kinfolks. I was stunned to find in it Logan’s account of something I had never
heard of––the Mountain Meadows Massacre of the Fancher-Baker wagon-train of
local emigrants bound for California in 1857. This was, William Alexander Linn
said in 1902, “the most horrible massacre of white people by religious fanatics
of their own race that has been recorded since that famous St. Bartholomew’s
night in Paris.” The Catholic massacre of Protestant Huguenots went on for
weeks in 1572, not one night. On their trip as far as Utah Territory the
emigrants from Arkansas had paused on Sundays for Methodist worship, and the
people from Missouri who accompanied them probably joined the worship,
Methodists or Baptists or whatever they were. On 11 September 1857 in extreme southwest
Utah, dozens of Mormons (with help from subservient Paiute Indians) slaughtered
some 120-140 emigrants, mainly from north central Arkansas, a few from nearby
Missouri. This massacre by Mormon “Destroying Angels” was plotted for weeks in excruciatingly slow stages then carried out
in--what? an hour or two? It was an act of religious fanaticism, not worship.
What sort of
Arkansawyer hands over his weapons to smooth talking strangers who promise to
protect you from their true enemies, the Indians? It is almost inconceivable,
but the Mormons persuaded Fancher, Baker, and the others to let the Mormons
hold their guns so they could move peacefully past the Indians. The men from
Arkansas were hunters who had fine weapons for daily use and other guns they
treasured because they had been used by their grandfathers in the Revolution
and fathers in the War of 1812. Alexander Fancher as a youth knew his
Revolutionary Grandfather Richard, who had stories to tell of service under
Francis Marion. His father, Isaac Fancher, had been at the Battle of New
Orleans while Alexander was a baby and later in the Black Hawk War. Much later,
family members itemized what the emigrants took with them--“guns, firearms,
knives,” “guns, pistols, and knives,” “guns, pistols, and Bowie knives.” Frugal
Mormons would have used some of the emigrants’ most accurate guns as they shot
the men down before shooting the women and children or slitting their throats. Even
pausing in the carnage to carry aside a woman and rape, as Elder Lee did, took
little time. This was systematic business, dragging the wounded out of wagons
before shooting them or slitting their throats and stripping the women on
orders of Elder Dame (who looked at their bodies and described them as polluted).
Some of the murderers wiped off the dark paint they had smeared on to look like
Indians (who got the blame).
What took
the murderers longest was the meticulous looting. They had to strip the men to
search money-belts and pockets and to seize jewelry from the women even if it
meant slicing off fingers. They rode
away the fine horses which were to be the basis of a new equine lineage in
California. They threw on the wagons what the wounded had been lying on, part
of the precious piles of hand-sewn quilts (some gorgeous heirlooms and all
utilitarian, some in use in Utah today) which for many years served many an
Elder’s family. They harnessed oxen or horses or mules to a few elegant
chariots (which blessed the families of a few Mormons) and hitched up animals
to the sturdy wagons, built to serve in California for decades. Now they piled
loot onto wagons, big items like quilts (the reason they pulled the wounded
from wagons before shedding their last blood) and small family pieces like
chests and chairs. The longest work was driving off the 1,000 or so cattle. Descendants
of the Fancher animals must still live in Utah, a few grand wagons may be
stored in barns, and gorgeous quilts must lie in chests in moth balls, brought
out to admire and re-fold, the fingers that sewed them fallen from skeletal
hands or hacked off so as to get rings quickly, and some of the finest rifles
and revolvers kept oiled and shined, treasured still.
You can
never ignore the power of spiritual fanaticism in a militarized theocracy, but
it would not do to ignore disguised or open celestial cupidity as a motive for
the robbing and murdering of travelers. Avarice began at home. The Deseret News 18 February 1857 quoted my cousin Elder
Parley P. Pratt on what Elder Brigham Young had said in the morning, that they
“wanted all your gold, silver, and precious things. We not only want your all as
pertaining to gold, silver, &c., but we want you, your wives and children,
and all you have, to be engaged in the work of the Lord.” This is in the
Yorkville SC Enquirer (30 April
1857): “The right of private property among the Mormons is almost unknown.
Whatever the rulers need they always find means to obtain. ‘The Lord needs it’
is a warrant sufficient to enable Young and his Council to seize upon any
property in Utah, and remonstrance or resistance is not only useless but
dangerous.” This is S. H. Montgomery’s affidavit at Camp Floyd, U. T., 17
August 1859: “Crime of every hue and dye is perpetrated here, under the
sanction of the Mormon Church, upon payment to the Church fund of ten per cent;
it is serving the Mormon Lord. Kill, rob, murder, plunder, etc.; if the ten
percent is paid up, all right with the Church and the Mormon Government, and go
ahead.
On 11
September 1857 the Mormons looted an enormous amount of gold and cash, for this
was a phenomenally rich wagon train, as later affidavits, published by Roger V.
Logan, Jr., show in poignant detail. W. H. Rogers, who accompanied Jacob Forney,
the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, to the slaughter ground in 1859, was sure
it was “the richest train that ever passed through this country” and that the
Mormons “took cattle, wagons and horses back to Cedar City and sold them at public
sale.” James Lynch reliably estimated the actual cash alone at $80,000 or
$90,000, money enough to enrich any settlement in the Golden State. It would
have the purchasing power of perhaps many millions of dollars today. Implying
that Forney was the source, the Cincinnati Press
on 21 May 1859 reported that soon after the massacre the loot was divided and
thirty dollars each went to the “leading Church dignitaries.” That meant that
Brigham Young, foolishly appointed Governor of the Territory by Millard
Fillmore, and his higher-placed 12 Apostles shared much more. The most valuable
items never reached the public auction.
The Mormons
left the Fanchers, Tackitts, the Mitchells, the Dunlaps, the Camerons, the
Huffs, the Prewitt boys, the Wood boys, men, women, children (oh, the “well
grown” Dunlap cousins), and others (a Coker couple, who joined belatedly?), strewn
about, blood drying. Over the next months and years body parts were spread far
away, dragged by wolves or toted about by curious visitors as they surveyed the
site. Femurs made a good man-sized club to carry along with you as you looked for
an area where there were no more skulls. The writer in Harper’s Weekly in 13 August 1859 (a man who had conversed with the
living people in the train, in 1857) declared that “empty sockets” from ghastly
skulls told him “a tale of horror and blood.” For “the space of a mile,” he
said, “lie the remains of carcasses dismembered by wild bests; bones, left for
nearly two years unburied, bleached in the elements of the mountain wilds,
gnawed by the hungry wolf.” Not all the everyday clothing had been carried off:
“Garments of babes and little ones, faded and torn, fluttering from each ragged
bush, from which the warble of the songster of the desert sounds as mockery.”
Human hair now strewed “the plain in messes, matted, and mingling with the
musty mould.” The Harper’s writer paid what respect he could: “To-day, in one
grave, I have buried the bones and skulls of twelve women and children, pierced
with the fatal ball or shattered with the axe. In another the shattered relics
of eighteen men, and yet many more await their gloomy resting-place.” Another
witness: “When I first passed through the place I could walk for near a mile on
bones, and skulls lying and grinning at you, and women and children’s hair in
bunches as large as a bushel.”
In May 1859
Major James Henry Carleton focused on one area: “I gathered many of the
disjointed bones of thirty-two persons. The number could easily be told by the
number of pairs of shoulder blades, and of lower jaws, skulls and parts of
skulls.” In June 1859 United States troops went to the scene again: “They
found the ground strewed with the bleaching bones of the emigrants, their
bodies having been left to be preyed upon by the wolves and ravens. One
gentleman brought back more than a bushel of human hair that he gathered from
the ground . . . . He also brought home a number of skulls, some with round
bullet holes in them, and others with ghastly gashes from the axe.”
Kin himself
to murdered Dunlaps, Logan eloquently described not just the immediate grief of
the Arkansas relatives and friends as they learned the news but their
subsequent decades of suffering. Like Logan, I am kin to several victims,
closest to the Prewitt youths and those of Coker blood (the Wood brothers).
This was family history for Logan, and it is family history for me also. I have
just described the aftermath of the slaughter, but I cannot make myself retrace
in detail the story of the slow entrapment before the swift slaughter. You can
read the powerful narrative by Will Bagley, the great historian and Facebook
friend who died while I was writing this chapter. For historians as well as
kin, the suffering still goes on.
Californians quickly learned much of what had happened, but
the story of the treachery and murder was first told in elaborate but deceptive
detail in 1872 by the only Mormon who was punished for the crime. The Latter Day Saints cover-up of the massacre
continues to this day. You cannot trust any document on Google about
individual Mormons involved or about any aspect of the Mountain Meadows
Massacre. You cannot trust Wikipedia, the universal infallible encyclopedia of
our new century! As late as 2007, according to
Wikipedia, the Deseret
Morning News said that Elder Parley Parker Pratt (a 10th
cousin of mine) “was killed . . . by a small Arkansas band antagonistic toward
his teachings.” No! He was killed because he had seduced the wife of one too
many men and then sent the latest one (the latest we know about) far away with
her husband’s children. You have to start from old documents
(weighing one against another) to find the truth. In my account, from the days of
newspaper exchanges (copies routinely sent to other editors), an effective
predecessor of syndication, I use items
from odd places--Bellows Falls, Pomeroy--rather than only New York, Washington,
and Chicago. I want to convey what the rest of the East (and California) were
learning about Utah, and to judge the observations of editors of many local
papers. Every scholar should be grateful for the honest work by rigorous
researchers such as Juanita Brooks (writing early, and later corrected on
details), Will Bagley, and recently by three collaborators, Ronald W. Walker,
Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen M. Leonard. No one has done as much accurate
work on the families of the slain as the devoted regional historian Roger V.
Logan, Jr. And you have to hope, as the best scholars do, that the Mormons will
yet release more documents from their archives. We lived with the Big Lie, 2020-2021
and 2022 still. Can the lie of the “Stolen Election” possibly control what is
written for a century and three quarters, as lies about the Mountain Meadows Massacre
have done?
As they were already practiced in doing in Utah, the Mormons
blamed others. For years, little newspaper items show, the Mormons had been
blaming travelers for misbehavior and especially blaming Indians for deeds the
Mormons had incited them to do or had perpetrated themselves. What deeds?
Robbing and murdering many travelers one or two or a few at a time, some never
missed, others named in a stray surviving newspaper that survives by
chance. The New York Herald on 28 February 1858 reported “The
Murder Story of Five Americans in Utah,” two of them brothers named Aiken,
going west with a stake in gold. Imprisoned in Salt Lake City, they were
robbed, and four were killed. The fifth man, wounded, could not write to
California for help “owing to the strict espionage exercised over the Post
Office Department in the revolted Territory.” After Mormons said the Indians had massacred the United States
military surveyor Captain John W. Gunnison in 1853, they produced his
scientific instruments. Gunnison’s widow, right or wrong, was sure the Indians
would not have saved those instruments and that the Mormons had arranged the
killing. In 1857 Mormons blamed the Arkansas emigrants for stirring up trouble,
spreading the ludicrous (and widely reprinted) story that they had poisoned a
well and made uncouth remarks to Mormons they encountered. By these imagined
acts, the emigrants supposedly had somehow aroused the Paiute Indians to kill
them all, or almost all, Indians being noted (the Mormons would have it) for
sparing the very young. For a ransom, the Mormons (cupidity for the church’s
coffers being admirable), could produce a few of the children they claimed to
have bought from the Indians, after heroic negotiation and outlay of large sums
of money. So many lies have been told and are still told that I have to take a
long look at the background of the massacre before doing what I will do in the
next chapter--focus on the afterlives of the children the Mormons did not kill
because they thought they were too young ever to reveal the truth of the
massacre. I look at the background but, as I said, not the actual plotting and
accomplishment of the massacre: for that, go to Bagley.
As
historians we must not let modern political correctness blind us to what we
know of the massacre. We heard that the violent white supremacists in Charlottesville
in 2017 were “very fine people,” that “both sides” were at fault, racists and
non-racists. A news agency’s role as late as 2016 was not to challenge lies or
label them as false but to be even-handed, giving equal time for those who
deplored racism, equal time for violent white supremacists. Not every violent
confrontation features good people on both sides. I am revising these words on
6 January 2022.
In 1857 the
Mormons in Utah (a vast undefined area) were not shiny-clean smartly dressed
young missionaries standing persistently but respectfully at your door. They
were not the perplexed clean-cut young men in the popular movies The Falls and I Am Michael. Many of them spoke most readily northern European
languages other than English. They were not like my good cousins who look like my
father and who are assiduous researchers into genealogy but who distress me
when they “seal” my fiercely Presbyterian Revolutionary ancestors, retrofitting
them into Mormons. The Mormon men in 1857 were not (I think) wearing the male
underwear the configuration of which makes some non-Mormons morbidly or just
uneasily or perhaps jealously curious. Mitt Romney, who might have been
president except for a video of his disdainful comments on 47% of Americans
wanting handouts, shares some DNA but is not identical with his ancestor,
Parley Parker Pratt, whose killing in Arkansas in May 1857 justified the slaughter
of 130-140 male and female emigrants from Arkansas and all their “well grown”
children in September. These were religious fanatics. (Pratt had concealed
himself in last uneasy skulking about the Southwest by “calling himself
Parker,” as he said, but his distant kinship to me--and Mitt’s still more
remote kinship--is through the Dabbs family, not the Parkers.)
In 1850
accidental president Millard Fillmore (a fourth cousin of mine, a few times
removed), the hapless predecessor of the equally hapless Franklin Pierce and
James Buchanan (both my cousins, more remote), appointed Brigham Young (a tenth
cousin of mine) Governor of the Utah area. Young swiftly made it his
militarized theocracy. Fillmore compounded his folly by supporting the Fugitive
Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850, which meant that Abolitionists
clashed with authorities through the decade, postponing freedom for the slaves.
Then in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820
by opening the West to slavery, if the new inhabitants chose to be in a slave
state. That year the rejected opportunist puppet Fillmore headed the
Know-Nothing party. Know-Nothings dodged the most explosive issues of the day
by spreading the word that soon the Pope might seize the United States in a
coup and make it a Papal colony. After all, they knew for certain that the
Jesuits had been “prowling” as early as the 1830s, before aroused Protestants
had burned a Catholic school in Philadelphia, even before being sloshed by the
wave of immigrants from the potato famine. In the mid-1840s the Irish often
came not in family groups but alone. “Ship Arrivals” in seaport newspapers show
one young man (or more rarely woman) sent away for survival, and perhaps later
to aid the family back home somehow. But any newly arrived young Irishman
(single men being vulnerable to joining conspiracies) might take orders from
the prowling Jesuits and seize the country. In 1854 seemingly frivolous worry
about Catholics distracted the Know-Nothings from concern about slavery and
also from the dangers of letting Mormons obstruct travel to and from California
and prey on travelers. Politicians had let Brigham Young control the best land
route to California.
After the
passage of the Compromise of 1850 a pattern was set: unsettling truths were to
be avoided, or quickly forgotten. Who was Castner Hanway after 1851? Who, after
a little while, was Anthony Burns after 1854? As I type on 6 January 2022 is
our democracy in danger? Oh, no. With state sovereignty legal after 1854, the
land to the east of Utah (there being no Colorado) became Bleeding Kansas,
where reports of horrific crimes were not always believed. Could John Brown and
his sons have hacked to pieces neighboring men and a mere boy in 1856 because
they were not Abolitionists? Oh, no, surely not. The irrefutable truth about
Brown’s guilt at Pottawatomie was publicized swiftly but denied by almost
everyone for two decades, even in the Atlantic
Monthly (April 1872) which had fairly early exposed the Mormon massacre. Transcendentalists
could worship Brown as Emerson did as a new Jesus, his punishment on the
gallows for his 1859 raid on Harper’s ferry a modern equivalent of Jesus’s
suffering on the Cross. Could the Mormons have been polygamists as reports said
in the 1840s? No, surely not, until in the 1850s Mormons not only admitted it
but used it at home and abroad as a recruiting tool. Could the Mormons have
perpetrated the Mountain Meadows Massacre? No, surely not, even though their
guilt was announced almost at once (in California, travelers knew in weeks,
even the names of some of the families slaughtered), but denied even after the
evidence was undeniable to any rational person. Was there a normal tourist
visit of patriotic Americans to the Capitol on 6 January 2021 or was there an
armed murderous insurrection intent on overthrowing a valid election because of
the lies of the losing President and his henchmen? Some lies last longer than
the truth. Some eras have a great supply of manipulative cynics ready to
mislead a great supply of gullible gulls.
Amid all the
political controversy, the 1830s and 1840s had also been a time of extreme
social and religious experimentation, especially in upstate New York. Christian
sects fragmented there partly because the Christian God and Jesus were appearing with some regularity.
Children froze to death in Pennsylvania as families waited up all night in
October 1844 for Jesus’s public return, which He then postponed. Jesus
was especially active and sexually versatile, appearing to Shakers as Mother
Ann, and there were sexual consequences, for the Shakers practiced celibacy
with enough success to put themselves out of business. In the Oneida experiment
of John Noyes, monogamy was rejected and polyamory practiced. Both God and
Jesus visited a poorly educated upstate New Yorker Joseph Smith, then an angel
repeatedly visited him and at last showed him where to find buried golden
plates (subsequently mislaid) inscribed with a very long text of a history of
Pre-Columbian America in an ancient language, “Reformed Egyptian,” which Smith
with angelic assistance transcribed and published as The Book of Mormon in 1830. Today the gilded Moroni, who had an
angelic hand in retrieving and reading the golden plates, stands more than
twice as tall as Joseph Smith as he presides over traffic in Westwood,
California, his back to a center of learning, UCLA.
In the 1840s
many Mormon leaders yielded to an angel’s and sometimes God’s new command to
take multiple wives, then for a decade denied they were not only practicing but
mastering the practicalities of polygamy. Smith’s goal was to bring more women
and their children into God’s kingdom through sealing them to him in libidinal
sanctity, and then “sealing” women to himself and later to his chief followers.
Smith needed, it turned out, to bring 20 wives (or was it 50-some?) into carnal
celestiality.
How did the early Mormon men accrue so many women?
Partly by not being rigorously selective as to age, physical appearance, or frequency
of previous parturition, but mainly by capitalizing (the Chicago Tribune said on 4 March 1857) on the seduction
strategies they soon developed. A good number of bold but awkward converts soon
became eloquent speakers and even smooth religious seducers. Brigham Young,
said the Tribune, “by promises of
happiness and visions of a heaven of sensual bliss which could hardly fail to
entrance the senses of a weak-minded person, together with that easy, personal
address characteristic of the accomplished roué, succeeded in seducing Mrs.
Cobb, the wife of a Boston gentleman, and inducing her to flee with him to ruin
and shame, taking with her a beautiful daughter.” This was Augusta Cobb,
already a mother of seven or so, who insisted that she had “a right to live
together in unlawful intercourse” with Young, If she was going to the devil,
“she would go there with Brigham Young.” Consumed by religious fervor, or
frenzy, she declared, “I never will
forsake brother Young come life or death.” The doctrine “taught by Brigham
Young, was a glorious doctrine; for if she did not love her husband, it gave
her a man she did love.” This “Boston divorcee” was the
“mistress of the house,” said Mrs. B. G. Ferris (wife of the man Fillmore
appointed as Secretary of the Territory of Utah) in her Mormons at Home (1856). Mrs. Ferris had visited Platt in 1853 so as
to see a “Mormon harem.” Mrs. Cobb again became a mother, to children of
Brigham Young. She died in Salt Lake City at 82.
Brigham
Young indeed had the “easy, personal address” of “the accomplished roué,” as
well as a powerful public voice. The writer of “Mormonism Exposed” (Boston Evening Transcript, 24 January 1852)
declared that it would be hard to find even one Mormon leader “who has not only
ruined and thrown into utter degradation, wives and mothers but has supplied
his harem with young girls whom he has seduced, and induced under the disguise
of religion, and by the grossest misrepresentations and falsehoods to leave
father, mother, home, and rush into absolutely slavery and despair.” Was Mrs.
Ferris accurate in her story of Parley’s attempt to “swap” one wife, an English
girl named Martha, to the Indian chief Walker for ten horses? This story may
have been based on rumor which had itself been based on something like truth.
In Missouri
and Illinois, Smith set up military enclaves with a private army of storm
troopers, the Nauvoo Legion or the
Danites, fanatical theological vigilantees organized in the 1838 “Mormon War.”
Under Smith’s successor Brigham Young these were “Destroying Angels.” The
states on the Mississippi River ultimately drove Mormons out after they were
exposed as polygamists and military terrorists. Thereafter the Mormons cursed Missourians, in particular, for
expelling them. Such enemies had no right to live. In 1850 Fillmore
had taken a cowardly way of putting the violent and vulnerable Mormons out of
sight, out of mind, letting them settle in the west near Great Salt Lake, not
acknowledging they might be a barrier to westward travel to gold seekers and
other settlers. Once there, Mormons began sending well-chosen proselytizers
abroad. Over the next years these missionaries imported thousands of new
believers from Europe, many of them willing to push a handcart from Missouri to
Utah, die on their way if they had to. These recruits included some unmarried
women as well as many unmarried men or men with one wife already who were
tempted not only by new revelations from God, Jesus, and angels in the Book of Mormon but also by the dizzying
thought that they might have a religious duty to engage in divinely blessed sex
more frequently with more women than their own fathers had one, however
formidable the fathers had loomed as erotic models.
Forgetting
the militarized Mormon towns of Illinois and Missouri, forgetting the threat of
extermination on Missourians, many conventional Americans were edgy if not
appalled at new evidence of sexual license in their country. The
Sunbury, Pennsylvania Republican (20
June 1857) warned of the progress Mormons were making: “There are organizations
of these Latter Day Saints in most of our principal cities, and leaders are
laboring quietly but surly in their villainous work of breaking up peaceful
families, tearing mothers from their children, and wives from husbands who have
hitherto doted upon them. Even women who have been the ornament of their
peculiar sphere of society are lured from the path of duty and virtue, and
induced to journey with the missionaries of evil, far away to Utah, where, if
their eyes are opened, they are compelled to remain in dreadful captivity.”
Still worse, for the future: “the delusion is not made to operate merely upon
this continent. Almost every week, a vessel lands upon our shores numerous
bands of converted Mormons from European countries, where among the ignorant
peasantry, the missionaries of Brigham Young find an ample field for diffusing
their poison.”
Joseph Smith
and his Apostles had pretty quickly discovered in themselves not just a need to
bring more and more women into celestial union but also an opportunity to yield
themselves the powerful pleasures of rampant God-approved sexual freedom. Smith
began eyeing adolescent (and prepubescent?) girls as candidates for celestial
marriage and appraising even the wives of his chief followers, most of whom got
over their initial perturbation and bewilderment to enjoy for themselves the
new divinely revealed sexual doctrine. These men were not driven by religious
frenzy to seduce women only for the good of God and to retain them for
celestial unity. For many men, religious zeal meant rushing into the sort of
sexual predation I can only call horn doggery. Once the Apostles saw they could
with the blessing of Jesus initiate celestial sex with any woman who came their
way, starting for convenience with wives of other Apostles, they became
licentious, religiosely delusional predatory horn dogs--the best of them
powerful as preachers, irresistible as seducers promising sensuous celestial
unions.
You get some
sense of how Smith’s successor my distant cousin Brigham Young valued his women
in what the Deseret News printed of
his sermonic address to his “own women” on 21 September 1856 (which included
the “women” of other Mormons): “I am going to give you from this day to the 6th
day of October next for reflection, that you may determine whether you wish to
stay with your husbands or not, and then I am going to set every woman at
liberty, and say to them, ‘Now, go your way, my women with the rest; go your
way.’” He was confident that once liberated the women would all say, “‘You can
have as many women as you please, Brigham.’”
Anyone doing
the arithmetic could have seen that this rampaging godly sexuality could not go
on indefinitely. In 1859, looking only at the present-day Utah, the Salt Lake
City correspondent of the Chicago Tribune
counted 387 men in Utah who had seven or more wives and 13 of the 387 who had
more than 19 wives. 730 men had 5 wives, 1100 men had four, and 1400 had two or
three. Papers such as the Bellows Falls, Vermont Chronicle on 29 March 1859 reprinted these statistics. Easterners
knew. But converts were not coming by women-only shiploads. The Nashville Tennessean on 12 May 1858 quoted Apostle
Orson Hyde as smugly boasting “that if he lives ten more years and thrives as
he has been thriving, he will have ‘sons enough to make a regiment by
themselves.’” In an isolated enclave like Utah Territory men would run out of
women to seal in physical and celestial marriages. By the 1860s and 1870s what
were Mormons to do with an Elder’s fifty or sixty sons born in Utah and reared
in households focused on paternal erotic patronage and stewing with banked up
testosterone in more sons reaching puberty week after week? Find them all
multiple wives? At some point (starting in the late 1850s?) there would not be
enough women for every religious man to have four or five, or even two wives.
Sons of the Mormon Apostles would find sexual opportunity unfair--progressively
limited, one generation along. These are not hypothetical numbers and
hypothetical consequences. Secret rural polygamous Mormons in our own time
expel boys at 14 or 15 from their compounds to make their way as prostitutes on
city streets, the writer Betty Webb shows.
Shortage of
women was not the greatest concern in September 1857, or else the Mormons might
have tried their wiles on converting some of the emigrant Arkansas women rather
than merely raping at least one while engaged in killing them all. The
immediate cause of the slaughter at Mountain Meadows was Mormon revenge for the
killing of my cousin the Mormon Apostle Parley Parker Pratt, the notorious horn
dog. In “Mormonism Exposed” (1852) a “back out” (what Mormons called an
apostate from the sect, therefore bound for Hell) cited the case in which Pratt
“took the young wife of Mr Hum . . . unbeknown to him, and they have lived as
husband and wife since.” (In or near Pennsylvania, where Hum was not an unusual
name?) This particular young wife has slipped off the varying lists of my
cousin Pratt’s women. After worldwide proselytizing and worldwide celestial
sexual adventures in the next four or five years, into the mid-1850s, Pratt
“graced his harem with Mrs. McLean, the wife of a gentleman in New Orleans” (Chicago
Tribune 4 May 1857), “taking her as
his 12th wife (or was it only the 9th or so?). From San
Francisco he sent her and her three children far away from their father. You
could do that in a matter of weeks if you had money, thanks to fast if
unsanitary ships and the new railroad across the Panama isthmus. This time,
early in 1857, the injured husband and father pursued Pratt through Louisiana,
Texas, and finally brought him before a court in Arkansas. When Pratt was
freed, McLean rode after him and killed him near the border with Indian
Territory. The New York Herald on 28 May 1857 picked up from the
Van Buren, Arkansas Intelligencer the
story of “Another Startling Tragedy”: “elder
pratt, the mormon, killed--seduction of a wife in California--she deserts her
husband, steals away her children, and is sealed as the ninth concubine to her
debaucher.” The Herald also
quoted the Fort Smith Herald of 16
May 1857: “One Mormon Less!--Nine more
Widows!!--Alas for the Mormon Prophet!!!--If thou hast Power to raise the Dead,
Parley, Raise Thyself!!!!” “A Natural Result of Mormonism,” said the Lancaster,
PA Examiner on 3 June 1857: “The
killing of Parley P. Pratt, one of the Mormon Elders, betrays an episode and a
result perfectly in keeping with the nature of Mormonism. This man, being in
San Francisco becomes acquainted with a devoted wife, the mother of three small
children. With the devilish arts generated by his creed and perfected by
practice he induces her to embrace Mormonism, and elope with him to Utah, where
she becomes his ninth wife.” (Or was
it seventh? It is not flippant to ask who was counting. Where was Mrs. Hum?)
The Jonesboro, Illinois Gazette (6 June 1857) published
something written by a man who knew Pratt’s history: “Imagine an artful
polygamist stealthily insinuating himself into the affections of the wife of an
honorable and highminded gentleman, influencing her to despise and abandon her
own husband and friends, and smuggle off his goods to the Mormon church, and
when their nefarious plans for running off his innocent and beautiful children
were discovered, and the heart-broken father compelled to part with them for
their safety, the villain takes his wife and the mother of his babes to his own
licentious embraces, thus breaking up and destroying the happiness of a family
forever--(as he had done in no less than four instances before)--bringing
sorrow upon the gray hairs of parental affection. And not even content to stop
there--but must cme over the mountains, and by stealth rob the injured husband
and father of his last remaining jewels of affection--to doom them to a life of
infamy and prostitution!” No wonder McLean killed him.
In San Francisco the Alta (that is, higher, northern California) on 9 July 1857 gave
the latest from Arkansas. News had come of “the killing of that
hoary-headed seducer, Parley P. Pratt, who had exemplified the beauties of the
system of which he was one of the most prominent and learned expounders, by
stealing from her husband the affections of a wife, robbing him of his children
and ‘sealing’ to himself in an adulterous union, as his seventh wife, the wife
of another, the mother whose duties were owed to her family. The tool of
Brigham Young, who publishes this treasonable and filthy sheet in this
community, denominates the just retribution, which at the hands of an injured
husband, has overtaken the lecherous old villain, Pratt, as a “murder,” and
blasphemously compared him and his death to our Saviour and his crucifixion,
and calls down the vengeance of the Almighty upon his ‘murderer,’ at the same
time giving rather strong hints that the blood of “Parley” will be avenged, and
that right soon.”
The
writer for the Alta understood that
Mormons would take revenge for the murder of the man they considered angelic.
He speculated: “Whether the hot blood which must now be seething and boiling in
the veins of Brigham Young and his satellites, at Salt Lake, is to be cooled by
the murder of Gentiles who pass through their territory, whether the
‘destroying angels’ of Mormondom, are to be brought into requisition to make,
are prevalent among those saintly villains, adulterers and seducers [ck]
reprisals upon travelers, or whether, as has been done before, ‘Saints’
disguised as Indians are to constitute themselves the supposed ministers of
God’s vengeance in this case, we are not informed, but have no doubt that such
thoughts, such intentions as these, of Salt Lake, who, did they receive their
just deserts, would be where Parley Pratt is now, in a world, where hypocrisy
and saintly fraud will not pass current.” The writer knew of the practice the
Mormons made of attributing all robbery and even murder of emigrants to
Indians. They could do it again with any wagon train that came into Utah,
especially the next one from Arkansas, which happened to be the richest train
yet: there would be treat plunder after slaughter, and Mormons had been going
unpunished. As James Lynch testified in 1859, after some attempts to impose
order: “Murder after murder has been committed in the Territory; the names of
the murderers in many instances ascertained, the witnesses also discovered, and
efforts made to bring them to justice, but the Government itself has frustrated
every endeavor.” The New York Herald
(26 June 1856) quoted Sergeant Gannon, returned from duty in Utah: From the
pulpit Brigham Young called the late President Taylor “a God-damned son of a
bitch” and declared that Taylor was “rotten in hell.” Asked how he knew Taylor
was in hell, he said, “Because God told me so.”
In 1846 Parley
Parker Pratt wrote in a poem to a wife that the Gods “in solemn council” decreed
“A just VENGEANCE!” Now he was revenged. Revenge, Avarice, Religion--a Devil’s
brew. One of the murderers at Mountain Meadows, Sam M’Murdy, was not a petty
man, not a violent repeat rapist, not one of the trail-side thugs who robbed travelers
and killed a few a few of them (although he solemnly accepted his portion of
the loot from the Fancher and Baker train). M’Murdy was one of Brigham Young’s
Destroying Angels, focused on his blood-lusting religious revenge and godly
greed when he cried out, “‘O, Lord, my
God, receive their spirits; it is for Thy kingdom that I do this,’ as, with
one bullet, he sent two of the wounded emigrants into eternity.” Brigham Young
could curse President Zachary Taylor as rotten in Hell, but his devotee M’Murdy
in his religious rapture was more kindly speeding them to Heaven. Others of the
murderers probably felt their slaughter was divinely decreed. The men, women,
well-grown children, and all but the smallest children from Arkansas and
Missouri bled out on the meadow, already rotten in Hell, unless prayers of the
slaughterers like M’Murdy had sent some of their spirits to God. They were
slaughtered for God’s kingdom, but all their riches stayed in Utah.
Brigham Young
behaved defiantly despite the approach of United States troops, a
delusional fanatic who spoke words his followers thought were from God:
“Suppose that our enemies send 50,000 troops here, they will have to transport
all that is required to sustain them over one winter, for I promise them,
before they come, that there shall not be one particle of forage nor one
mouthful of food for them should they come. . . . It will cost them all they
have in this world, and land them in hell in the world to come, while the only
trouble to us is that we have two or three times more men than we need for
using up all who can come here to deprive us of our rights.” (Brigham on 5 July
1857, in the 7 January 1858 Brownville Nebraska Advertiser.) In a sermon on 26 July 1857 (printed in the Baltimore
Sun for 15 September) Young proclaimed his defiance: “But woe, woe to that man
who comes here to unlawfully interfere with my affairs. Woe, woe to these men
who come here to unlawfully meddle with me and this people. I swore in Nauvoo,
when my enemies were looking me in the face, that I would send them to hell
across lots if they meddled with me, and I ask no odds of all hell to-day. . .
. Would it not make any man or community angry to endure and reflect upon the
abuse our enemies have heaped upon us, and are still striving to pour out upon
God’s people?” On 2 August from the pulpit he proclaimed: “The time must come
when this kingdom must be free and independent from all other kingdoms. Are you
prepared to have the thread cut to-day?” He continued: “Now let me tell you one
thing. I shall take it as a witness that God designs to cut the thread between
us and the world when an army undertakes to make their appearance in this
territory to chastise me, or to destroy my life from the earth. I lay it down
that right is or at least should be might with Heaven, with his servants, and
with all its people on the earth. As for the rest, we will wait a little while
to see; but I shall take a hostile movement by our enemies as an evidence that
it is time for the thread to be cut.”
In a sermon on
8 October 1857, Young warned that “Men shall be secreted here and there, and
shall waste away our enemies in the name of Israel’s God.” (the 16 January 1858
Richmond Dispatch). Young was
readying his people to fight a war of attrition: “I know that the comparatively
few scattered here and there over the country and in the mountains, can spoil
their march before they could get here.” Nevertheless, he was also preparing to
be driven out of Utah, as he had been from Missouri. The editor commented: “a
very mysterious journey to the North was made by Brigham Young last summer. He
took a large and well appointed train with him, and was absent nearly two
months. It is reported that he penetrated far into the British possessions on
the north, and may have there settled upon a location for a colony. Neither the
object nor the result of that journey has ever been clearly explained in the
Mormon journal.” Brigham Young knew that there ought to be stern consequences
from the massacre, but he also knew that James Buchanan was ineffectual as well
as distant and distracted. With luck, it would all blow over, leaving
Easterners more willing than ever to exterminate those pesky and sometimes downright
murderous Indians in the West and leaving the bones of the Dunlap and Wood and
Coker and Baker and Mitchell and Prewitt and Cameron and other families, some
with names unknown, to be shifted by wolves or travelers and the hair of the
females to blow for hundreds of yards until tangled in sagebrush, their murders
unpunished.
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