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Striking a Line through the Great American Desert
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2010
Abstract
During the early 1840s, as the right to rule the continent found a slogan in manifest destiny, nothing was seen as a greater barrier to expansion than the region, between the Mississippi and the Rockies, known as the Great American Desert. As a rhetorical figure, it was nearly ubiquitous – shaping everything from the expedition reports of Zebulon Pike and Edwin James to the western narratives of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. The first serious challenge to this image was a report John Charles Frémont presented to Congress after leading an Army expedition to South Pass. Frémont knew that his report had to refute the empirical evidence for a Great Desert to strike it down it as a rhetorical barrier to emigration. Thus he developed a distinctive mode of description that focussed on “topographic geology” while utilizing an aesthetic of the picturesque. This allowed him to create a rocky specificity and contrast where once a grassy and arid uniformity had reigned supreme. In the process, he began to create a nexus between scenery and science that would make both more deliberate and exacting – and the American landscape as a whole more uniquely “western.” By the end of the report, Frémont's ardent impressions of the West were so multiple and intense that the Great American Desert suddenly seemed without significance as a place or a name.
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References
1 The Report, as it will be called from now on, has been reprinted in John C. Frémont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988).
2 Zebulon Pike, The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, to Headwaters of the Mississippi River, through Louisiana Territory, and in New Spain, during the Years 1805–6–7, ed. Elliott Coues, 3 vols. (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1895), 1, 397, 435, 523.
3 Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819, 1820; by Order of the Hon. J. C. Calhoun, Under the Command of Maj. S. H. Long, of the U.S. Top. Engineers, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 2, 148; 3, 236–37.
4 Fremont, 10.
5 Frémont, 13–14.
6 Washing Irving, Three Western Narratives: A Tour on the Prairies; Astoria; The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2004), 82.
7 See Edward Hitchcock's Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, and Zoology of Massachusetts (Amherst: Press of J. S. and C. Adams, 1833) – where Part II, subtitled “Topographical Geology,” is devoted to the scenery of the state. In itself this may refute Stephen Fender's claim, in Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 37–50, that Frémont vacillated between scenery and science, eventually settling on the more scientific mode. It seems more accurate to say that he deliberately oscillated between them, never preferring one to the other, never reducing one to the other – creating a sustained juxtaposition. Also at issue is Kris Fresonke's West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 44–87, which makes three important points: that both the Pike and Long reports embody a version of the picturesque; that the metaphor of the Great Desert resulted from a blindness inherent to the picturesque; that the picturesque was more or less at odds with the ambitions of the Jacksonian era, and therefore reached its aesthetic limits around the time of Emerson and Thoreau. Clearly this is contrary to everything expressed here.
8 Fremont, 30.
9 Frémont, 15, 32–34.
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12 Quoted in Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 45.
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17 William Gilpin, Mission of the North American People: Geographical, Social, and Political (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 104, 183, original emphases.
18 Walt Whitman, The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 575–76.