INTRODUCTION

Albany, New York.  1837.  Back in 1837, the year Herman Melville turned eighteen, Herman and his older brother Gansevoort spent untold hours lost in thoughts of...INDIANS.  The record of Gansevoort’s reading in 1837 happily survives in a volume of his Index Rerum, now located in Pittsfield at the Berkshire Athenæum.  His 1837 Index, which surely includes books known to Herman as well, is crammed with entries on Indians: at least nineteen in the “I” pages; twenty under “G-O”; eight under “K-E”; and sixteen more under “R.”  Gansevoort referenced Goodwin’s Life of Jackson “for an a/c of the cowardly & ruthless massacre of the old men, women, & children of the Chehaw tribe by Georgia troops in 1818.”  He cited Latrobe’s Rambles in Mexico for “some considerations on the fate of the [Indians] & the conduct of the U.S. gov’t towards them.”  More quotes on the history and culture of particular tribes fall under such headings as “Delawares,” “Mohawk”; “Osages”; “Pawnee”; “Sauk or Sacs”; and “Winnebagoes.”

In mid-May 1837, famed western artist George Catlin hit town with his traveling exhibition of Native-American paintings and artifacts.  Given the devotion to Native American subjects in Gansevoort’s Index, nothing short of natural disaster would have kept Gansevoort and Herman from meeting Catlin at Stanwix Hall and seeing hundreds of portraits and paintings by Catlin of “38 different tribes of Indians,” along with authentic costumes, ornaments, and weapons.  The Albany Evening Journal first announced the exhibit on 16 May 1837.  On the eve of Catlin’s departure for New York City (30 June 1837), the same newspaper printed a testimonial of thanks to Catlin from Herman Melville’s uncle Peter Gansevoort and other prominent Albany citizens, including T. Romeyn Beck, John A. Dix, and Thurlow Weed.  On May 19^th the Evening Journal had printed an enthusiastic review of Catlin’s show, signed “Z.” 

“Z” is a suggestive choice of initials by the Albany fan of George Catlin.  In February 1840, the first of four western sketches entitled “Leaves from my Note-Book” appeared in the Army and Navy Chronicle (whose subscriber list included the Albany Young Men’s Association) over the signature of ― “Z.”  The “Leaves” of “Z.” were supplanted in the same journal by “Notes and Reminiscences of an Officer of the Army,” signed “F.R.D.”  The combined “Leaves” and “Notes” were reprinted in the Southern Literary Messenger two years later (while Melville was at sea) under yet another title, “Scenes and Adventures in the Army, Sketches of Indians, and Life beyond the Border.”  That 1842-3 series eventually became Part I of a suspiciously well-written book by veteran cavalry officer Philip St. George Cooke, entitled Scenes and Adventures in the Army:  Or, Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857). 

Setting aside the complicated genesis of the earlier 1842 series, compelling traces of Melville in his maturity will be found in the sequel, focused on dragoon expeditions to the west in 1843 and 1845.  Thirteen installments, “Written on the Prairie,” ostensibly, “by a Captain of U. S. Dragoons,” ran in the Southern Literary Messenger from June 1851 through August 1853 under the title, “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.”  In 1855 and maybe earlier, Cooke unsuccessfully proposed a volume combining the two series to several New York publishers under the working title, “Fragments of a Military Life” (Letter to John Pendleton Kennedy, 14 March 1855; Microfilm of the John Pendleton Kennedy Papers, ed. John B. Boles, Maryland Historical Society, 1972).  Melville buffs will recognize in that title a suggestive echo of Melville’s first known publication, “Fragments from a Writing Desk.”  Eventually the two series would be united in Scenes and Adventures in the Army.  The difficult business of securing a publisher forced Cooke to delay the pleasure of seeing his name and rank on the title page of a book until 1857, the same year that Melville published the Confidence-Man. 

“Scenes Beyond the Western Border” ended in August 1853, two months after Melville “was prevented from printing” some unnamed “work” that he had offered to Harper & Brothers in New York (Correspondence, 250).  So forget Isle of the Cross, the “lost” work that Melville wrote after Pierre (1852).  Better yet, consider it found and read it in “Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow, the eighth sketch of The Encantadas.  Melville’s heart-wrenching tale of a grief-struck lady named Hunilla has “Island” and “Cross” stamped all over it.  Melville was up to something else before mournfully empty pockets in the early 1850’s drove him to peddle half a book under multiple titles (“Tortoise Hunting Adventure” and “The Encantadas”) to the Harpers and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. 

Granted, no biography of Melville—not even the peerless archival study in two volumes by Hershel Parker—has anything to say about Philip St. George Cooke.  About the only thing close to a known biographical link is Melville’s 1847 purchase of Froissart Ballads, a collection of chivalric verse by Cooke’s Virginia nephew Philip Pendleton Cooke.  No known correspondence or other documentary evidence survives to connect the ex-sailor and the “wandering dragoon.”  Nonetheless, a superabundance of textual evidence strongly implicates Melville in writings long attributed only to Cooke. 

Wishing to convey the range, depth, and quality of the textual evidence, I have compiled a “Top 10” list presenting “Ten Traces of Herman Melville in ‘Scenes Beyond the Western Border’ (1851-1853).”  The List incorporates visual aids and supplementary evidence in various forms.  In this online version, my commentary (expanded from a paper read at the 2006 “Why Melville Matters Now” conference in Albany) is offered as a kind of “field guide” to the list and accompanying materials.