Bulkington as Henry Chatillon

W I L L I A M P O W E R S University of North Carolina Bulkington as Henry Chatillon Francis Parkman’s Oregon Trail was serialized in the Knicker­ bocker Magazine from 1847 to 1849 and was published in 1849 in book form under the title The California and Oregon Trail. It was then noteworthy in part because it was the record of a Boston Brahmin’s adventure in the West, and it has been often enough treated as such ever since: a frequent observation is that Parkman’s descriptions of westerners, western immigrants in particular, reveal his Boston bias. Possessed of his own kind of eastern bias favoring the ocean as direction, Herman Melville reviewed Parkman’s book in 1849 for Evert and George Ducykinck’s New York paper, The Literary World. In his review Melville noted his displeasure with what struck him as narrowness in Parkman’s view of the Indians, but he was moved favorably by the account of Parkman’s western guide, Henry Chatillon. Melville wrote, “For this Henry Chatillon we feel a fresh and unbounded love. He belongs to a class of men, of whom Kit Carson is the model; a class, unique, and not to be transcended in interest by any personages introduced to us by Scott. Long live Henry Chatillon!” It is likely enough that this admiration for Parkman’s western acquaintance would have been alive in Melville’s memory when he was writing Moby Dick less than a year after the publication of the review. Melville borrowed liberally in Moby Dick, more often in substance than in spirit, yet in this instance there is every indication that Melville’s character Bulkington is a tribute to both the substance and spirit which Parkman earlier recounted in the person of Henry Chatillon. 154 Western American Literature There is strong physical resemblance between Chatillon and Bulkington. Parkman described Chatillon as possessed of a face “so open and frank that it attracted our notice at once. . . . His age was about thirty; he was six feet high, and very powerfully and gracefully moulded.” Of Bulkington, Melville began, “This man interested me at once. . . . He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man.” Chatillon “from the age of fifteen years had been constantly in the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains.” Bulkington “must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleganian Ridge in Virginia.” Bulkington is noticeably absent during much of the narration; he is a “sleeping partner” in but not of the tale after chapter twenty-three. Chatillon drops from physical sight in the middle portion of Parkman’s narrative: he first goes to his dying wife who is with her tribe; then he escorts the ivy-poisoned Quincy Shaw back to Fort Laramie while Parkman undertakes his personal venture among the Ogalala Sioux. The physical absence of Henry Chatillon is acceptable because Chatillon is as much a guide to Parkman in discovering a spirit of the West as he is in the particulars of the journey, and Park­ man’s own reference to him was to “my noble and true-hearted friend.” So it is that Bulkington is a guide to spirit in the novel. The image of the seeker provides one of the fundamental ways by which the book is unified. It is introduced in that first chapter “Loomings” in such particulars as the crowds of water gazers and the description of Narcissus, drawn by the “image of the ungraspable phantom of life,” and it extends to the determination of Ishmael to go to sea and to the whole of Ahab’s passionate need of the whale. This spirit is concisely summarized in Melville’s description of Bulkington, “who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.” But Melville encountered the specific material of that description first in Parkman’s introduction of Chatillon, who “had arrived at St. Louis the day before, from the mountains, where he had remained for four years; and he now only asked to go and spend a day...