Western American Literature

Some years ago, I began a chapter in my The Great Prairie: Fact and Literary Imagination (1989) by quoting from Edward Everett’s glowing review of Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies (1835) in the North American Review. Everett is gushingly laudatory and, among many other things he says, he connects Irving to Cooper “in breathing life and fire into a circle of imagery” in depicting “the whole unhackneyed freshness of the West.” At the time Everett was writing, Cooper’s The Prairie had been in print since 1827, yet its descriptions of the trans-Mississippi West had been cribbed from Edwin James’s Account (1823) of the 1819–1820 expedition led by Stephen H. Long, among others. But in Irving, Everett saw a literary man who had really taken on the West, who had actually gone there and experienced it, so with A Tour he is able to conclude that “a better day was dawning on American letters” (Thacker 103).

As the 1830s gave way to the 1840s, the exact nature and use potential of the western portions of the North American continent continued to excite the imaginations of Americans east of the Mississippi, who cast covetous eyes on those western lands then held by Mexico and, to the north, by Great Britain. Such longings were nothing new, certainly. President Jefferson had sent Lewis and Clark west in 1803–06, Zebulon Pike headed overland just after them, and Long and James went too. Many others continued to travel and write about the West, among them the newly returned Washington Irving with his A Tour: all of them “breathing life and fire into a circle of imagery” from what they saw, found, and felt there. [End Page 466]

In Sight Unseen, Andrew Menard takes up and focuses sharply on one of the best-known but not always best-regarded members of this troop of explorers, John C. Frémont, nicknamed “The Great Pathfinder” after Cooper’s hero. In this sharp and canny synthesis, Menard argues that Frémont’s Report (1843) of his 1842 expedition to the Wind River Range in Wyoming “was the expedition that began to codify the Oregon Trail as an overland route to the Pacific and began to fix the points of latitude and longitude that would encompass everything west of the Mississippi” (xxi). Tracing the rhetorical effects Frémont (and his wife Jessie, daughter to Missouri’s Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who helped write it) created in the Report, paying close attention to its contemporary reception, Menard makes a careful and compelling case that the Report transformed the American understanding of the trans-Mississippi West. From the time of Jefferson, Menard says, “Americans were already ideologues of the future” (xviii), so the 1840s were ripe for Frémont’s reshaping of the region’s “circle of imagery.”

Most impressive in Sight Unseen is the meticulous way Menard makes his case that this imaginative transformation was a textual one. Thus, he argues that Frémont “used the elements of topographic geology to create a landscape that derived from the West’s primitive and contrasting beauty” and that “the very idea of what counted as ‘the West’ was largely a matter of who you chose to believe” (64, 138). People chose to believe Frémont and, in addition to defining the way to Oregon, his Report served as textual basis for the case for a transcontinental railroad. As Menard concludes, “Frémont helped to influence history mostly by offering an artful and compelling view of data that others might have described (or in the case of Pike and Long, had already described) without the benefit of his foresight, his symbolism, and his distinctly picturesque eye” (194–95).