Gods of the Mississippi

3 Movement, Maps, and Wonder: Civil Religious Competition at the Source of the Mississippi River, 1805–1832

3 Movement, Maps, and Wonder civil religious competition at the source of the mississippi river, 1805–1832 Arthur Remillard In his Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (1788), British surveyor James Rennell noted that maps of India had placed the source of the Ganges either at the Lake of the Mind near the foot of Mount Kailasa or deep within the Himalayas at the Gangotri glacier. Mapmakers plotting the latter location relied on a local legend that the river originated in an ice cave, which itself resembled the appearance of a cow’s mouth. Rennell agreed that the source was probably in the glacier, but then qualified, “The mind of superstition has given to the mouth of the cavern the form of the head of a cow, an animal held by the Hindoos in a degree of veneration.”1 Equally dismissive of this bovine imagery were the first British explorers who led unsuccessful expeditions to the glacial source. In 1817, however, John Hodgson ventured deep into the Gangotri and came upon a curious sight. “I cannot think of any place to which they might more aptly give the name of a Cow’s Mouth than this extraordinary [opening],” he confessed. Reasoning that he was at the source of the Ganges, his expedition “saluted her with a bugle march.”2 The expedition was nothing if not dangerous, which begs the question: Why? After all, locating the river’s origin served no practical purpose in the British colonial enterprise. But the Ganges is a sacred river, made such in part by voices from India and the West. As “the lifeblood of northern India,” Hindu legend dictates that the Ganges is a goddess who trickled down to earth from Shiva’s matted hair, settling first in the Himalayas. However, early Chris- Movement, Maps, and Wonder | 57 tians such as the so-called father of medieval geography, St. Isidore of Seville, repeated Josephus’s claim that the Ganges was the Phison, one of the four rivers flowing first from the Garden of Eden.3 Such symbolic competitions found new language in the nineteenth century as Great Britain extended its power throughout India. Only, while St. Isidore articulated Christian meaning for the source, Hodgson was a British agent who embodied a civil religious ideology anchored in what poet Rudyard Kipling would later call “the white man’s burden.” The implication was that Great Britain had a providential duty to extend their empire, not for material gain, but for the benevolent aim of “civilizing ” primitive peoples. Coupled with this ideology was an assumption that “civilization” required Christianization. Thus a Christian missionary served similar ends as the explorer in that both aspired to actualize the empire’s supposed destiny. Hodgson’s salute, then, was both a commemoration of western “discovery” and a celebration of the presumed triumph of his homeland’s “civilizing mission.”4 At nearly the same time that Hodgson trekked into the Himalayas, army lieutenant Zebulon Pike, Italian adventurer Giacomo Beltrami, and Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft led separate expeditions into northwestern Minnesota to locate the source of the Mississippi River. As with Hodgson and the Ganges, finding the source served no pragmatic end. But this was no mere river. Later called “the body of the nation” by Mark Twain, the Mississippi had become a potent symbol of America in the early nineteenth century.5 As such, the expeditions of Pike, Beltrami, and Schoolcraft had civil religious meaning. Of course, Pike and Schoolcraft translated the landscape through an American lens, while Beltrami referred more often to Italy and Europe. But the explorers held tight to the belief that their homeland was exceptional, assigned a special destiny from a providential source. In their minds, mapping the source was part of fulfilling this destiny.6 The expeditions were also exercises in civil religious competition. The explorers all made different claims to where the river began. To validate their discovery and elevate it beyond all others, they recounted their powerful feelings of wonder upon first seeing the source. This emotional response also did the work of discrediting the physical and social maps produced by Indians and traders living in the region. While instrumental in guiding each explorer, for Pike, Beltrami, and Schoolcraft, Indians and traders were part of a “wilderness ” that required the “civilizing” force of western ideas and institutions. So in this era of exploration, the source of the Mississippi River—and the route to and from it—was an arena of competing civil religious discourses. Through...