Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade

7

125 7 Stewart spent the spring and summer of 1834 hunting in the Rockies and attended that year’s rendezvous, held on Ham’s Fork in Wyoming. In a diary entry for June 24, 1834, William Marshall Anderson (traveling with William Sublette) writes, “Mr Stewart an Englishman & I am told a gentleman and a scholar, has just arrived from Mr Bridgers party.” Sublette was carrying letters for Stewart from Scotland, including one from his younger brother George filling him in on the latest news of Murthly Castle, the first he had received in nearly two years. To his disgust he learned that the construction of the new Murthly Castle, a project launched by his brother John shortly after inheriting the estate and title, had become something of a money pit. Architect James Gillespie Graham’s creation, a glorious confection of faux medieval towers and turrets (with a few Dutch guildhall elements thrown in), was rising on a large flat field adjacent to the old house. Sir John’s hope was to outshine his neighbor, Lord Breadalbane, whose newly expanded Taymouth Castle was one of the opulent wonders of the Scottish countryside. For William, who was chronically short of cash, the idea of John’s architectural extravagance was galling.1 Stewart’s mood was improved somewhat by the appearance of a mysterious and handsome stranger, “a young man named Ashworth, an Englishman, blond, with tattered clothing and elegant, supercilious manners.” Charles Howard Ashworth was the fifth son of Richard 126 Ashworth, a barrister of Pendleton, Lancashire. He is mentioned only in the journal of John Townsend, a naturalist traveling with Nathaniel Wyeth’s party, which describes his unkempt appearance as he stumbled into camp hungry, bedraggled, and vague. Little would be known of his life were it not for a short article that was published in the Manchester Herald on September 12, 1835. The article describes how Ashworth, though the son of a barrister and himself well educated, was in the habit whenever he had a little pocket money of traveling on foot to odd places where he would seek out the seediest part of town and remain until his funds were exhausted. Members of his family could not understand his attraction to low life, but they had come to accept his secretive comings and goings. They were therefore concerned but not surprised when, at the age of seventeen, he dropped completely from sight and they heard nothing from him for many months. He was last known to be in Liverpool, which was at that time experiencing an outbreak of cholera, and the family feared that he had succumbed to the disease. Then to everyone’s relief they received a letter from him written in the Sandwich Islands, letting them know that he was alive and well, though penniless. The newspaper article reprinting his letter carried the ironically understated title “Extraordinary Instance of Youthful Enterprize.”2 “He has since,” the article read, “without the means being afforded his family of sending him any supplies, from the utter uncertainty of his position at any given time, travelled, chiefly on foot, up as far as Fort St. Louis, Upper Mississippi — visited Lake Michigan — joined a company of fur traders — passed over the continent of North America — gone down the coast, in company with a Captain Stewart, for 200 miles—and embarked from the mouth of the Columbia, whence he reached Onolula, one of the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific, and was heard from through the brig Eagle, lately arrived from that quarter.”3 Ashworth wrote to his family of his deep gratitude to the American Indians he had encountered, whose kindness and hospitality to strangers were at odds with the stereotype he had been led to expect. “He says, in the last letter, received by his eldest brother, the Rev. T. A. Ashworth, 127 that what are called the savage and blood-thirsty children of the desert have ever been most kind to him, and in their wigwams he has chiefly slept, at their simple board most commonly eaten, and been welcome without money and without price; but that frequently also he had the wilderness for his couch, and the desert air for his supper.”4 The Manchester newspaper article was picked up and reprinted by the Army and Navy Chronicle of November 19, 1835, where it caught the eye of a reader who responded with his own view of the young traveler...