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  • Castorland Journal: An Account of the Exploration and Settlement of Northern New York State by French Emigres in the Years 1793 to 1797
  • Edward Watts (bio)
Castorland Journal: An Account of the Exploration and Settlement of Northern New York State by French Emigres in the Years 1793 to 1797. Simon Desjardins and Pierre Pharoux, Edited and Translated by John A. Gallucci. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. 480 pp.

About twenty years ago, Robert Micklus published new editions of Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s The Tuesday Club and The Itineratum, and Hamilton was vaulted from relative obscurity to semiprominence in the evolving canon of colonial American literatures. John A. Gallucci’s edition of The Castorland Journal could and should do the same for Simon [End Page 513] Dejardins. This book represents the “official” report of two Frenchmen (mostly Dejardins, much less so Pharoux), hired by their partners in the Paris-based New York Company to purchase and settle, for profit, land along the north shore of the Black River in upstate New York as it drains into the eastern edge of Lake Ontario. Another and better-known partner in the company, Hector St. John de Creveceour, may have had a hand in editing the report; however, the manuscript took a convoluted path to Gallucci—including a stint in a Parisian bookstall—before landing in the Massachusetts Historical Society. There, Gallucci spent years researching and translating it, and his painstaking effort is well worth the investment.

While nominally the record of a failed land speculation and settlement scheme, the wry, witty, and encyclopedic observations of the manners and obsessions of post-Revolutionary Americans—not only on the northern frontier but also in the cities—make The Castorland Journal a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of early travel writing and related nonfiction. The narratives of William Bradford, William Byrd, Lewis and Clark, and dozens of others transcribe the difficulties of establishing settlements in the American wilderness; and Jonathan Carver, John James Audobon, and others record American flora, fauna, and resources. Dejardins works within all these genres as he and Pharoux travel the new states in 1793 and 1794 looking for support and resources as the Castorland settlement acts out its brief and now nearly forgotten existence. In that sense, the book also reads a little like the fictionalized projected western settlements in the novels of Hugh Henry Brackenridge or Gilbert Imlay. Like many of the best early American books, then, including Creveceour’s Letters from an American Farmer, The Castorland Journal eludes generic definition and seems to seek a textuality as shifting and digressive as its subject.

From the start, the company and the purported settlement play out as tragic farce. The journal really begins aboard ship, where Desjardins establishes his ironic tone: “We had a merchant with an actress from Le Havre who had thought it opportune to leave behind a husband, children, and creditors, as those were very cumbersome” (5). Later, she overdoses on the mercury she is taking for her gonorrhea as they are becalmed, supposedly off the Bermudas, when in fact they are much farther north in the Atlantic and soon almost run aground off New Jersey. Along the way, while they encounter plenty of kind and generous Americans, they meet others who are belligerent, xenophobic, and comically petty and materialistic. In the [End Page 514] northern woods, they come across Indians living in traditional ways and others in uniform in charge of British cantonments, as well as Métis trappers, Dutch and German farmers, and all manner of backwoods type already chronicled by Crevecoeur, Brackenridge, and others. One observation pulls much of the hostility with which they were met together:

Europeans are dreaded here. The businessman fears that the foreigner, newly-arrived, will want to share the profits of his business; the farmer, that he will make the price of land go up; the land-jobber, that he will unmask him; the man of reputation, that he will prove his ineptitude; and the ambitious man, that among these immigrants, there might be found a person who will eclipse him through his talents. In short, Americans of every station and condition look at us the way children...

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