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

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35 2 William Drummond Stewart wrote very little about the years he spent in America. A few letters written to a friend in New York announcing his return to civilization after his first two years in the wilderness survive, and a few passages in his later correspondence make reference to his experiences in the Rockies. The most extensive discussion of his journeys appears in fictional form in his two novels, Altowan (1846) and Edward Warren (1854). Both books draw heavily on his personal experiences, and in his introduction to Edward Warren Stewart even describes the novel as “a fictitious Auto-biography.” Stewart goes so far as to annotate his second novel with footnotes describing the actual events upon which the fiction is based, and many of the characters in the novel are given the real names of their historical counterparts. In scenes in which the action taking place in the novel has been described in other memoirs of the period by other participants in the same event, even the novel’s dialogue reproduces closely what was actually said at the time.1 Given that the novels so closely adhere to actual events, the question inevitably arises: why did Stewart hold back from writing a straightforward narrative of his American experiences? The decision is particularly puzzling in light of the long tradition that preceded Altowan — every European who spent three weeks in America returned home to publish a two-volume treatise explaining the strange new country to an eager population of adventure readers. From the French aristocrat Alexis de 36 Tocqueville to the German noblemen Prince Maximilian zu WiedNeuwied and Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach, from Stewart ’s fussy cousin Charles Augustus Murray to the indefatigable Fanny Trollope, it seems few literate Europeans could resist the temptation to describe at length everything he or she had seen. There was an eager European audience, and no stigma attached to someone of aristocratic birth dabbling in printer’s ink. What, then, caused Stewart to follow in that well-trod literary tradition, only to pull back when it came to revealing the full story of his American adventures? In the “Notice to the Reader” that prefaces Altowan (unsigned but perhaps written by Stewart himself) we are told, “The following story has been written for the amusement of some young friends on Long Island. . . . [J]ust as it is, without even a revision, I offer it to those for whom it was intended.” Journalist James Watson Webb, the editor of the novel, insisted that it was written for the private entertainment of Webb’s own children, and yet the sexually charged subject matter — adultery, desertion , illegitimacy, homosexuality, transvestism, and incest — is hardly the stuff of the Boy’s Own adventure stories. Webb is not always the most trustworthy of writers. (Historian Bernard DeVoto writes, “It is seldom necessary to believe what Mr. Webb says,” and he contends that at least half of Webb’s statements about William Drummond Stewart are “flatly wrong.”) But if not for the Webb children, then for whom?2 Stewart’s reasons for writing the novels are particularly difficult to decipher because the books themselves are so very challenging to read. The utter obscurity of their plots may be the result of the author’s clumsy attempt to encode a secret narrative — or it may simply be that he was a spectacularly ungifted writer. Both novels are elliptical to the point of opaqueness. Events occur without rational explanation. Characters loom and then disappear completely, or pop up in unexpected places for no reason other than the exigencies of the plot. Heavy hints are dropped portentously — and then completely abandoned. The entire first chapter of Altowan consists of an encounter in New York harbor between two nameless men referred to only as “the younger” and “the elder.” Again and again in both novels strings of pronouns with ambigu- 37 ous antecedents make the action almost impossible to untangle without the use of extensive penciled notes. Given that the books are nearly impenetrable, and were in any case presented to the world as fiction, it would perhaps be best not to rely on them when reconstructing Stewart’s life. Unfortunately, the novels are his major autobiographical writings and so, as frustrating and unsatisfactory as they are, they must play a central role in any biography. Altowan has been out of print for 150 years, and Edward Warren, though reprinted in...