Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West

A demi sauvages, et souvent en guerre avec les naturels à qui ils [trafiquans et trapeurs] enlèvent le gibier et les fourrures par leur rivalité, étant aussi experts qu'eux à la chasse, ils ne sont guère en état de publier leurs voyages et leurs découvertes, quand ils survivent aux dangers de ce genre de vie.

Half savage, and often at war with the natives, whose game and furs they [traders and trappers] take in their rivalry, being as expert as they at the hunt, they are hardly in a position to publish their voyages and discoveries, even if they survive the dangers of this kind of life.

Constantine Rafineseque, "Abrégé des voyages
de Pattie, Willard et Wyeth"

In an 1835 article for the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, the French naturalist Constantine Rafinesque lamented that although fur trappers and traders had wandered North America's Far West for years, they only rarely offered their stories—and when they did, they made few observations of geography or indigenous culture. In other words, the landscapes of Western trade were insufficiently narrated (181). Yet it could also be argued that through the 1830s it was trade, more than any other activity, that gave imaginative definition to the North American West. An 1834 Act of Congress "to regulate trade and intercourse with Indian tribes" offered the Jacksonian era's simplest official division of national and extranational lands. This trading document dictated that "all that part of the United States west of the Mississippi, and not within the states of Missouri and Louisiana, or the territory of Arkansas" would be, provisionally, "the Indian country" or an un-nationalized West (United States, 23rd Cong. 729). The negative terms that this Act of Congress uses to give shape to the Far West ("not within ... ") suggest the trader's emphasis upon negotiable and shifting contact zones rather than the localized culture associated with nationalist ideas of homeland and Volk. Trading documents and narratives offer an alternate version of US manifest destiny, which can be described as imperialist, commercial, and anachronistically postnational. Although the Far West in the narratives I examine turned out to be prenational territory, I argue that the incorporation of lands west of the Mississippi into the US was only of secondary concern in these texts, since they emphasize multinational efforts toward profit.

The tumultuous trading economies that defined the Far West through the early 1840s generated narratives that have been either ignored or hastily read by literary historians eager to incorporate them into the ideology of manifest destiny, with its familiar agrarian, racist rationales. ¹ The most admirable readings of narratives about the US commercial frontier treat these narratives as "the new republic's first national literature" (Sundquist 129); yet, while this may be an essentially accurate designation, it ignores the complex version of nationalism produced by the experience of commercial traffic among rival nations. ² Recently James F. Brooks and Curtis Márez have recognized legal and extralegal commerce among American Indians, Mexicans, and US citizens as constitutive of cultural performances that do not match modern national or minoritized "ethnic" identities, even though the historical exchanges Brooks and Márez analyze do seem to generate postmodern theories—and experiences—of nationality and/or ethnicity as hybridity or hinge. ³ My own reading of a range of US trading narratives is informed by these borderlands studies and the postcolonial theories that, in turn, have informed them.

I also owe a more explicit debt to studies of eighteenth-century commerce and civilization, from J.G.A. Pocock's classic treatment of commerce and manners to Roxann Wheeler's recent and remarkably informative analyses of the role of commerce in the production of civility and the quasi-racial notion "complexion." Wheeler's concern with the necessary power of residual proto-ideologies that precede the modern discourse of race is echoed in my own attempt to undress the racist, agrarian rationales for...