Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

Chapter One: “I Saw Visions”: John Charles Frémont and the Explorer-Scientist as Nineteenth-Century Hero

I n nineteenth-century America, science was not confined to the laboratory , bound up in a mythos of isolation and otherworldliness, inaccessible to the public mind. Rather, science quite often denoted “action” in the rapidly expanding United States. The practice of natural history and, later on, narrower and more professionalized disciplines such as geology, cartography, and paleontology facilitated our engagement with the frontier, the wilderness space that has gripped the American imagination since the earliest times of European colonization . This chapter focuses upon John Charles Frémont (1813–90), an explorer-scientist who made major contributions to the surveying and mapping of the American West, who hypothesized about the natural processes of the land he explored, and who as a representative of the U.S. government was deeply involved in the political process of westward expansion. Frémont’s journals from his first two transMissouri expeditions (published together as Report of the Exploring Expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and Northern California in 1843–44)1 are fascinating hybrid texts. In them, the discourses of science and of literature meet and interact creatively —data points are juxtaposed with straight narrative, geological speculation with rhapsodic description of the landscape, botanical observations with buffalo chases. Frémont worked within a long tradition of wilderness exploration  one  “ISawVisions” John Charles Frémont and the Explorer-Scientist as Nineteenth-Century Hero  3  upv.bryson.000-000 4/9/02 1:33 PM Page 3 in America by the Spanish, French, and English, dating back to the late fifteenth century. Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) brought the American exploration narrative to a European audience with his Journal of the First Voyage to America, 1492–1493. Another important Spanish explorer of the New World was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490?–1556?), whose Relation (1542) is perhaps the first in a long tradition of North American captivity narratives. Among the French explorers of the seventeenth century, Samuel de Champlain (1570?–1635) provided an early account of contact and conflict between Europeans and Native Americans in the territory of present-day New York State and southeastern Canada in The Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 1604–1618. The English, in contrast to the other major European powers of the early modern era, were latecomers to the New World, and their initial exploration and colonization efforts were on a far smaller scale. Nevertheless, exploration narratives in English date back to the early seventeenth century with the publication of Captain John Smith’s (1580–1631) A True Relation of Such Occurrences . . . in Virginia in 1608.2 The leap from these multivocal beginnings to the mid-nineteenth century is substantial; why isolate Frémont from two and one-half centuries ’ worth of Euro-American exploration? One answer is that the scientific practice of nineteenth-century explorers differed dramatically from that of their predecessors, due to developments in the broader culture of Western science. They include an increasing emphasis upon quantitative rather than simply qualitative information about nature, the professionalization of the American scientist, and the growth of the national project of American science. Frémont, Alexander von Humboldt , Charles Darwin, and others are part of a historical trajectory in which scientific exploration strove for empirical rigor in an attempt to objectively map and describe the natural landscape. Improvements in technology and scientific instrumentation replaced the naked-eye observer’s fallibility with the controlled and standardized methods of data collection. Quantitative, empirical practices—such as chemical analyses, elevation measurements, precise astronomical observations, and specific calculations of geologic time—competed with and eventually overshadowed older modes of qualitative description.3 Additionally, the deployment of organized scientific exploring expeditions (most importantly, those of Lewis and Clark, Frémont, Clarence King, and John Wesley Powell) was a motive force behind an narratives of exploration  4  upv.bryson.000-000 4/9/02 1:33 PM Page 4 aggressively expanding American nation. Historian William Goetzmann , who suggests this relationship in the very title of his important study, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (1966), argues that nineteenth-century exploration “helped to create in the centers of dominant culture a series of images which conditioned popular attitudes and public policy concerning the new lands” (ix). In short, the nineteenth century was a period in which American science (and, by extension, exploration science) took...