Dragooned!  Ten Traces of
Herman Melville
in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853)

Philip St. George Cooke

Radical Freelance, Esq.

William Gibson, USN

Augustus Ely Silliman

Texts by Anonymous

Resources

Events

CONCLUSION

Historians justly prize Scenes and Adventures in the Army as a “frontier classic.”  But the fictional devices, romantic conceits, and metaphysical digressions are oddly incongruent with well-attested personality traits of Cooke, a decidedly unpoetic disciplinarian.  A “ramrod of uprightness,” one historian called him (Myers, 161). Another, Bernard DeVoto, has rightly observed that the “literary pathos” of Scenes and Adventures is “hard to associate with as hard-bitten an officer as the army had” (234).

Yes!  Hard-bitten, just like Colonel Josiah Bunkum in Melville’s late, unfinished Burgundy Club manuscript. 

“A sun-burnt whiskerando he was, whiskers bristling like a thorn-hedge; valiant, indeed, but of a contorted sort of valor, quite at odds with the martial magnanimities and amenities.  Ay, brave enough, you understand, but no Chevalier Bayard.  Less mature in mind than muscle.  Rash in opinion, very rash, headlong.  Not a man of broad judicial temper, Sir, nor replete with the sapient humor and wise patriarchal quality of our good old Father Abraham.”  ―Herman Melville on Colonel Josiah Bunkum, from the pseudo-biographical prose sketch, “Major Gentian and Colonel J. Bunkum.”  Excerpted from the text of Robert Allen Sandberg in “Melville’s Unfinished ‘Burgundy Club’ Book:  A Reading Edition Edited from the Manuscripts with Introduction and Notes.”  Ph.D. Dissertation (Northwestern University, 1989), pp. 137-138.

In his portrait of Bunkum as a brave but brittle and obsessive “whiskerando,” Melville nails the essential Cooke.  Scenes and Adventures in the Army, especially in the second half derived from “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” bestows upon its notoriously hard-bitten author the very flower of geniality, the “martial magnanimities and amenities” that Cooke may seldom have displayed in real life.  The narrator IS the knight-errant of romantic chivalry that, in fairness to Cooke, no officer of the United States Army could pragmatically afford to be.  Melville matters because he secretly reinvented Philip St. George Cooke and in the process rewrote the history of the American West. 

Who knew, until now?