Philip St. George Cooke
(1809-1895)

Philip St. George Cooke

Radical Freelance, Esq.

William Gibson, USN

Augustus Ely Silliman

Texts by Anonymous

Resources

Events

General P. St G. Cooke
Civil War era (National Archives)

The standard biography is by Otis E. Young, The West of Philip St. George Cooke (Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1955).

Cooke's first book, Scenes and Adventures in the Army, is widely and rightly hailed as a "frontier classic."  Historians and military buffs are often exasperated, however, by the author's wild flights of imagination.  Way too much romance and poetry for a supposedly factual military memoir!   Cooke's previous commentators seem to have missed the essential literary claims of Scenes and Adventures in the Army as a masterpiece of rewriting.  Every important historical sequence derives from some earlier and more immediate narrative source.  Major sources of Scenes and Adventures in the Army include not only official army journals and reports of Philip St. George Cooke, but also eyewitness accounts by others―including, for example, the "Prairie Logbooks" by fellow dragoon officer J. Henry Carleton. 

Although Cooke was a competent writer in his way, the expert blending of borrowed material and fluid prose style (especially in Part II) are far beyond his literary abilities.  Somebody else did the amazing job of creative rewriting from multiple primary sources.  Herman Melville was exceptionally skilled at this kind of work, as he proved in Israel Potter (1855), the tale of a hapless soldier that Melville worked up from from an old pamphlet and other sources, including published biographies of Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones.  Was Herman Melville Cooke's gifted ghostwriter?

If Melville ghostwrote Scenes and Adventures in the Army, he had a large and heretofore secret part in rewriting the history of the American west. 

No biography of Herman Melville, not even the matchless archival study in two volumes by Hershel Parker, has anything to say about Philip St. George Cooke.  As far as we know from surviving documentary evidence, the misunderstood author and the wandering dragoon never met, never corresponded, never collaborated.  And yet...

The texts tell a different story.  

Some bits of Scenes and Adventures in the Army are nearly incomprehensible without reference to the life and writings of Herman Melville.  These ultra-Melvillean scenes are most discernable in Part II, derived from the magazine series "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (originally published 1851-1853 in the Southern Literary Messenger).  My favorite example is the episode entitled "Cub, a tragedy in three acts," reprinted from the March 1853 installment.