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

Introduction

1 Introduction In 1980 art historian Ron Tyler traveled to Scotland in preparation for a major exhibition of the western paintings of Alfred Jacob Miller, an event planned for the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The artist had traveled west as far as the Rocky Mountains, engaged by the Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart in 1837 to document his journey to the annual fur traders’ rendezvous. Miller had subsequently spent many months at Stewart’s Murthly Castle in Perthshire producing large oil paintings from his original watercolor sketches of life in the Rockies, among the earliest known images of the region. From the Caledonian Hotel on Edinburgh’s elegant Princes Street, Tyler wrote back to his colleague William Johnston in Baltimore: “This trip has proved once again that there is no substitute for on-the-spot research. In addition to the usual gleanings from the archives and dusty tomes, I picked up the real reason for Stewart’s disenchantment re his family: he was homosexual, or so a lady in Birnam told me, in a hushed voice and with a raised eyebrow, as if Stewart himself might come around the corner to contradict her.”1 Since 2006 I have felt very much like that informant in the teashop in Birnam, sensing that Sir William Drummond Stewart was lurking just around the corner — not to contradict me if I revealed that he was homosexual but to correct me if, in sifting through the hints and circumlocutions , I got his story wrong. I have followed Sir William’s trail 2 from his birthplace (and his burial crypt) at Murthly Castle to the Wind River Range in Wyoming, from the brisk windswept walks of New York City’s Battery Park to the steaming streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans. In the process I have come to realize the wisdom of Ron Tyler’s dictum that there is no substitute for on-the-spot research. As I followed Stewart’s story, I ran across a litany of familiar names: explorer William Clark, Baptiste Charbonneau (son of Sacagawea), mountain men Jim Bridger and Jedediah Smith, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Kit Carson, Washington Irving, John James Audubon, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Daniel Boone, John C. Frémont, William Henry Harrison, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Augustus Sutter—a Who’s Who of early nineteenth-century America. These were names familiar to me since grade school, and yet I had never heard of William Drummond Stewart. I began to feel as though I had stumbled across an old photograph of a large family gathering, a photograph from which one member of the family had been digitally erased. To restore William Drummond Stewart to his place at the table — with all his virtues and his faults — has been the mission behind the writing of this book. The current book is not the first biography of William Drummond Stewart. In 1963 historians Mae Reed Porter and Odessa Davenport published Scotsman in Buckskin, the first full-length exploration of Stewart’s life. Mrs. Porter’s involvement with the project began in 1935 when, while visiting a museum in Baltimore, she was shown a series of watercolors by Alfred Jacob Miller. She promptly purchased the entire collection and began investigating their story. This led her to Sir William and to nearly three decades of research into his life. By the late 1950s Mrs. Porter and her husband, historian Clyde H. Porter, had amassed an impressive file of research material (currently housed at the American History Center at the University of Wyoming and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California), but the death of Mr. Porter in 1958 and Mrs. Porter’s own declining health made the idea of launching a major writing project daunting. She was therefore delighted when she met Odessa Davenport, who had the professional 3 interest and the personal enthusiasm to take on the task of writing the book. Scotsman in Buckskin presents frustrating obstacles to anyone wishing to use it as source material. The 306-page book does not include a single footnote, and the bibliography is sketchy and incomplete. The central problem of the book, however, is that Porter and Davenport were writing at a time when to many people it was quite literally unthinkable that a vigorous, dashing figure in American history could be a homosexual. It does not appear that either woman ever considered that Stewart might...