288 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., 1 map, notes, bibl., index

$55.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2820-3

The answer to this question presumably was "no," despite the need to ask it. The region's promoters imagined a new civilization emerging from the existing country, and this led them to understate more immediate drawbacks. They chose the site of Marietta carefully, laying out a town near the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers, believing that commerce and farms would spread from that point through the seven ranges of townships that Congress had recently zoned. With his copy of Notes on the State of Virginia close at hand, Solomon Drowne would remind his listeners that "cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens," and he promises churches and universities, along with great strides in botany and archaeology. Evidence of this region's potential could be found in the Indian mounds nearby. The remains of a bygone civilization, these memorials suggested a promise in the physical place. City planners had left the old graves intact (they still stand there today), provided them with classical names, and organized the Marietta street grid around them. One empire presumably would replace another; yet Solomon Drowne, like his compatriots, also believed that the native people then living in the Ohio Valley were incapable of constructing such monuments. He naively glides over the tensions that the new settlement had created. His oration overlooks the threat of attack and suggests that these fears would disappear along with the other inconveniences of frontier life—snakes, poison ivy, gnats, isolation, property disputes, starvation, the cold.[2]

A public and private view left Solomon Drowne divided about the trans-Appalachian West. In his polished pronouncements before others, he would equate the Northwest Territory with a continental library: The founding of Marietta was the "first page" in a "history," and "no foul blot" (again in a Jeffersonian strain) should "stain the important volume which time is unfolding in this western world." A footnote to his speech (which was published by the Massachusetts printer Isaiah Thomas) insists that those who see "country life [as] repugnant to politeness, are surely much mistaken"; a letter to London, likewise, predicts that "the American wilderness shall bloom like the rose." Yet a couplet running throughout Drowne's diary suggests why this worldly physician never settled in the "blooming" wilderness: "He who can live in peace at home / Abroad for pleasure need not roam." And the glowing reports of "great progress" sound hollow when read against private complaints like "disagreeable time on the whole." Even the promises to his wife Betsy that they will "contemplate the wonders of nature" on the Ohio River falter before confessions of homesickness. It should come as no surprise that she never moved to Marietta. The news of Indian raids in Ohio had reached her home state, and these reports lament that "robbing, scalping and murder" deterred "bold and courageous" settlers "from adventuring into this delightful country."[3] The Drownes made it as far as Morgantown, lived there for a few years, and finished out their days back in Rhode Island.

About the same time, a Boston-based trader named John May learned a similar lesson about how border life eroded lofty expectations and rhetoric. In a 1788 diary of his commercial ventures, he claims that the "banks of the delightful Muskingum" answer "the best description I have ever heard of it," and he seems confident that "the foundations of a mighty empire" had been established. The trader had his worries, of course—he grumbles about the "savage nations" who "roar and yell" outside Campus Martius—but those fears pale beside praise for a New England community that had transplanted itself in distant environs. He glories in a congregation of three hundred that sings the shape note music of William Billings "to perfection." Business prospects would sour the next year, however, and the tone of May's journal shifts accordingly. The river dropped, hostility between natives and whites persisted, and pioneers bartered for trade instead of using cash. After his second season on the Ohio, May sensed failure and would push his own boat upriver "to rid myself of this howling wilderness." One year later, May was dead—scalped by natives who resented white settlements beyond the Ohio River.[4] These accounts indicate that while the territory qualified as a subject for belletristic prose, the textualized wilderness and the real one conflicted. Visitors who described Marietta as a civilization in its first stages could explain away hardship with a recourse to the future, but the public optimism masked often violent realities. Even as John May sang Billings "to perfection," he still slept with a rifle next to his head.

Fears of dissolution or invasion almost always surface in the early descriptions of the Northwest Territory. Authors sought to accommodate the trappings of civilization to wilderness, but as often as these attempts broke down, writers would adjust their stories. Cycles of optimism, collapse, and revision recur throughout the literature. In 1788, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur lent his words to a promotional pamphlet for the Ohio Company, the group that founded Marietta. Although the ruined author of Letters from an American Farmer would seem to be an unlikely celebrant of the revolutionary frontier, his revised and expanded Lettres d'un cultivateur Américain had taken a considerably more optimistic view, making it suitable for commercial interests. One of the published extracts from the French edition describes the Ohio Valley as the "most fertile country [that] Europeans have heretofore discovered and peopled." Sounding a lot like Solomon Drowne, Crèvecoeur looks to the future: "I saw those beautiful shores ornamented with decent houses, covered with harvests and well cultivated fields; on the hills exposed to the north, I saw orchards regularly laid out in squares; on the others vine-yard plats, plantations of mulberry trees, acacias, &c." He anticipates "activity, industry, culture and commerce" in the territory, which he predicts will yield the "force, riches, and the future glory of the United States." The degree of terror that one expects to counter this optimism, however, keeps changing. In the more widely read version, the traveler drifts too far beyond the surveyed zones and risks losing control of himself. The journey closes with a prairie fire: "What a spectacle does this vast conflagration offer! It is at once interesting and terrible!" The "whirlwinds of dark and thick smoke" threaten to suffocate him, and Crèvecoeur cannot sketch a "great picture of destruction without being penetrated with an involuntary dread."[5] Yet a second version, which appears only in a rare pamphlet, replaces smoke and fire with the more benign description of storks rising in a circle. The overlap in images is striking. The storks "raise themselves slowly," moving like flame in "a kind of circular ascent," creating "large spirals in their flight."[6] The descriptions shift as the author weighs out his hopes and fears for the interior, as he continually revises his strategy for grafting culture onto the land.

A great deal of the literature in the early United States was vested in this process of making one's home in a wilderness, and the narratives often take unexpected—on the surface, contradictory—turns as they grapple with the paradoxes of expansion. The more sophisticated authors especially recognized the need for something beyond belletrism or colonial cant; it was not enough to quote Edmund Spenser. They struggled to establish a genuine link between culture and the physical terrain, while accounting for the social conflicts that interior settlements engendered. Crèvecoeur's name appears again and again in this process of accommodation. Almost fifteen years after the extracts were were used by the Ohio Company, he published a forgotten classic of American pastoral writing, Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie et dans l'Etat de New-York. Crèvecoeur's semifictional travelogue departs from the 1782 Letters by taking a more retrospective turn, and it balances the spread of European agriculture against a growing conservation sense. A typical chapter finds the narrator (identified only as an adopted member of the Oneida tribe) and his companion Gustave Herman slogging through some bottomlands in the Wyotucing River valley when they hear the chime of a town clock. The two friends can scarcely contain their delight over a "cornfield, a young orchard," and a small cabin with "four casement windows." All appears to be civility. "Welcome gentlemen," their host asks. "Aren't you perhaps lost?" The affable Mr. Herman replies, "One is never lost" when he has "the good fortune to meet a fine colonist like you."[7]

What follows is an introduction to republican landscapes. Moving beyond the jubilant predictions for Ohio, Crèvecoeur frames Euroamerican expansion through contrasts. The host, an âmigrâ named Nadowisky, compares his past hardships in Poland to prosperity in the New World. Nadowisky describes how he acquired property and part ownership in a seine at the nearby river; he extols the values of citizenship, and he criticizes pioneers who labor only two days a week; he emphasizes the importance of a stable, representative government. That evening, Mrs. Nadowisky spreads across the table goods that she and her husband obtained through trade and the sweat of their brow: beef, shad, cakes, jam from their orchards, sugar from maple sap, and tea exchanged with the Chinese for ginseng gathered in the Pennsylvania woods. This episode chronicles the steps through which settlers transformed space into place, into surroundings they could recognize and appreciate; it suggests how Euroamericans turned an unknown and therefore undesirable country into one that reflected their own uses, needs, tastes, and individual biographies.[8] As the clock provides the wilderness travelers with a welcome landmark, the genteel pioneer would steadily create a more familiar environment over time. "My ambition," Nadowisky explains, "is to have some day many meadows and fields" from marshes on his property, and "in just a few years the most uncultivated land will burst forth with flowers, fruits, and harvests." Like countless other farmers, he will fence his boundaries, girdle trees, and burn the understory; he will straighten the riverbanks and introduce new crops and stock. These alterations, at the same time, awaken an appreciation for old-growth forests. Clear-cutting and disruptions to the water table had already ruined several mills in the area, Nadowisky observes. He laments the disappearing old-growth stands and sagely predicts that the cost of firewood will continue to rise with deforestation. The coming "generation will regret bitterly that their fathers destroyed so much," Nadowisky concludes, for in these woods "everything bears the compelling imprint of magnificence and enduring time."[9]

A clock strikes in the wilderness. A trader sings church hymns to perfection. A philosophe's tour shuffles from prairie fires to a flock of storks. Twelve years later, travelers on the upper Wyotucing encounter a home with casement windows, and they register the progress of civilization against ecological loss. Stretched over a thirteen-year period, from 1788 to 1801, these examples indicate the range of environmental writing that was produced during a time of profound social and ecological change. Postrevolutionary culture demanded viable stories of place, bases for claiming the land. The resulting narratives would construct a national subject over the interior; that is, they would assert a federal presence over the border regions. At the same time, the frontier demanded resilience and accommodation. What emerged was a body of work that, when read together and in deep historical context, takes surprising turns of narrative. This book builds upon earlier studies of eighteenth-century environmentalism to outline a poetics for wilderness writing from the early republic. I draw from some fine models. Cecelia Tichi traces how early national authors cast the interior as a "new earth," a wilderness redeemed through "improvement," and Myra Jehlen observes that national identity grounded ideology in the physical fact of the land. Annette Kolodny argues that this drive exhibited a violent desire; John Seelye and Robert Lawson-Peebles trace the fate of Enlightenment models on the land, noting that the "beautiful machine," or emasculated verbal order, inevitably collapsed.[10] But these discussions invite continued reading, particularly within the context of colonialism and the search for place. The praise for a "new earth," after all, did not always end with scalped heads and rhetorical failure. The examples of Drowne, May, and Crèvecoeur indicate a certain fluidity in environmental and frontier narratives. Writers such as Drowne or May imagined a future civilization expanding across the interior, but the realities of border life tempered their lofty rhetoric. Narratives adjusted accordingly and took on new forms. The recognition of vanishing habitats and local knowledge would appear alongside prescriptions for change, and plans for improvement would be accommodated to suit local landscapes. As the 1801 Voyage suggests, authors could find room for negotiation between transformation and loss.

What remains constant is the construction of nature against race, ethnicity, region, and class to form what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg calls the "republican subject." The interior of America offered a field against which early national culture defined itself, and the political work of stories about the land is the topic of this book. While emphasizing the politics of frontier and environmental writing, I combine the "new western history" and ecological criticism to demonstrate how contests over wilderness crystallized into verbal forms. What narratives emerged, in other words, from the vexed or partial attempts to create place from space? As Edward Countryman has powerfully argued, Revolutionary plans for empire were "bound up with both the self-constitution of a sovereign American people and that people's redefinition of the appropriate usage for the space where it claimed sovereignty. One social order that had filled the whole of that space gave way to another, vastly more suited than its predecessor to the democratic capitalist energy that we now see as the Revolution's product." In the texts produced by this effort to channel "capitalist energies," politics were defined through an understanding of the terrain. The "social order" necessary for an "empire of liberty," to put matters simply, could chafe against those of the existing populations. A response to Countryman by Philip J. Deloria, indeed, may serve as my own starting point: Deloria notes that historians of the West have "transformed the question of region to one of 'space,' focusing on the ways in which people moving through a landscape redefine other people's 'places.'" The ideological geography of the new republic formulated itself upon an unstable social milieu: one where cultures collided and converged and over habitats that were themselves in transition.[11] The cant used by Solomon Drowne or John May invariably collapsed or contradicted itself. But other accounts from very fluid border regions, particularly those by more skilled authors, bent as often as they collapsed, and place-oriented meditations would appear alongside the usual rhetoric of change. Eventually, an identification with native habitats and people (in an unfortunate equation) would lay the groundwork for a national pastoral; elegies for things disappeared would provide authors with a medium that was flexible enough to establish a republican citizenry as indigenous to the continent. At the center of this narrative paradox was an ecological sense, an awareness that invasion altered habitats, and this growing sentimentality gave authors what they needed to orchestrate the unlikely dialogue between possession and art.[12] These often buried politics were at the root of a pastoral tradition. But the natural, even in its incarnation as a vacated wilderness, emerged from a still populated frontier.