Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression

Chapter One EXCEPTIONALISM AND GLOBALISM

21 Chapter One EXCEPTIONALISM AND GLOBALISM Revisiting the Traveler Y [T]he march of civilization is everywhere, as it is in America, a war of extermination , and that of our own species. —George Catlin in London, Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians (1852) You shave my head in a severe winter, and then sell me a warm cap. Of course, the cap keeps my head warm, and I need it from time to time; but I do not see any reason why I ought to be obliged to you for it—the cap only keeps my head as warm as my hair would have done; but why did you not leave it to me?— only to sell me the cap. —Friedrich Gerstäcker in Java, Narrative of a Journey Round the World (1853) Exceptionalism and Empire S ince the publication of Edward Said’s landmark study Orientalism (1978), cultural historians have typically viewed travel writers within the theoretical contours of the postcolonial framework Said helped construct.1 Travel writers have routinely been characterized as the architects of imperial visions, the exoticizers, commodifiers, and objectifiers of colonized “others,” the agents of empire who helped their readers in the mother countries accept, consume, and digest imperial practices. While travel writers certainly could and did serve this purpose, often portraying other races and places as desperately in need of the civilizing hand of a “higher” culture, scholarship on their work and significance has had the Chapter One 22 effect of flattening the discourse about empire in travel writing. In the postcolonial framing, imperial advocates and critics, as well as those whose visions were marked by a great deal of ambiguity about empire, have been placed together, as if in concordance. However, when we examine the archive of nineteenth-century travelogues about the American West, we find more dissonance than harmony. Travel writers at times offered strong and influential criticism of the empires of rival nations as well as of their own nations’ imperial projects. In addition, the ubiquitous and enormously popular travel book genre offered readers an important countercurrent to the common notion of the American West as an exceptional place, one without parallel. Nineteenthcentury travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context , viewing it as one developing frontier among many and considering the United States as a colonizing power (like its European progenitors). Such observers were effectively putting the West into the world and thereby deemphasizing its exceptionalism. These global visions of travel writers can help us rethink our assumptions about western mythology and American exceptionalism , which has itself often rested on the matter of the significance of the nation’s western frontier experience. The travel book is thus important for understanding how the West was envisioned by America and the world in the nineteenth century. The tension between exceptionalism and empire stands today at the very heart of the American experience, as it has for more than two centuries. The idea of benign national distinctiveness, of republican purity and innocence, has continually collided with the notion of the United States as an empire, much like others that have risen and fallen in the course of human history.2 From the earliest settlements in British North America, colonists viewed the western frontier within a wider context of global exploration, commerce, and imperial war. Rival empires traded, negotiated, and clashed on the western frontier before colonial subjects considered the path of independence from the mother country. Prior to the Revolutionary War, the issue of westward movement into the great interior of the continent sparked tensions between those colonists who wanted the freedom to expand their geographic and economic horizons and an anxious British empire that sought control over them and wished to reduce the potential for conflict with indigenous peoples on the frontier. A generation after the end of the Revolutionary War, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of the emerging American nation. The Exceptionalism and Globalism 23 following year, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark went off to explore the lands that the new republic had just purchased from France. Two generations later, the admission of Texas and Florida as states (1845) and the settlement of the Oregon boundary question with Britain (1846) further expanded the geography of the young nation. The war against Mexico (1846–1848) added more territory with the spoils of victory of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (present -day Arizona, California...