Traces of Gold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature
232
Traces of Gold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature
232Overview
Artfully demonstrates the linkage of American literary realism to the texts, myths, and resources of the American West
From Gold Rush romances to cowboy Westerns, from hard-boiled detective thrillers to nature writing, the American West has long been known mainly through hackneyed representations in popular genres. But a close look at the literary history of the West reveals a number of writers who claim that their works represent the “real” West. As Nicolas Witschi shows, writers as varied as Bret Harte, John Muir, Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and Raymond Chandler have used claims of textual realism to engage, replicate, or challenge commonly held assumptions about the West, while historically acknowledged realists like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain have often relied on genre-derived impressions about the region.
The familiar association of the West with nature and the “great outdoors” implies that life in the West affords an unambiguous relationship with an unalloyed, non-human, real nature. But through a combination of textual scholarship, genre criticism, and materialist cultural studies, Witschi complicates this notion of wide-open spaces and unfettered opportunity. The West has been the primary source of raw materials for American industrial and economic expansion, especially between the California Gold Rush and World War II, and Witschi argues that the writers he examines exist within the intersections of cultural and material modes of production. Realistic depictions of Western nature, he concludes, must rely on the representation of the extraction of material resources like minerals, water, and oil.
With its forays into ecocriticism and cultural studies, Traces of Gold will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, American studies, and western history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817313715 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2009 |
| Series: | Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 805 KB |
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Traces of Gold
California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature
By Nicolas S. Witschi
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2002 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5741-2
CHAPTER 1
Bret Harte and the Gold Rush Claim to Realism
In November 1872, just two months shy of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of gold in California, Bret Harte attempts in some measure to separate the facts about the Gold Rush experience from the narratives by which that experience might best be conveyed. Speaking before a packed house in the city hall of Springfield, Massachusetts, Harte begins his lecture on "The Argonauts of '49" with the following disclaimer: "It is not a pretty story; I do not know that it is even instructive; I do not know that it is strictly true. It is of a life of which perhaps the best that can be said is, that it exists no longer" ("Bret Harte's Lecture" 8). Already famous for his humorous and moving sketches of the gold country, Harte holds a certain stake in maintaining himself as an authority on the story of the Gold Rush. Thus, for Harte the writer turned public speaker, the story, while it may not be very pretty, is nevertheless worth telling. That it may not be true is apparently irrelevant, all the more so since the life behind the story no longer exists (if, as Harte implies, it ever existed at all). In this curious interplay of the ideas of truth, historical existence, and narrative representation, "life" and "story" are two distinctly separate entities. To say the least, this is not a position one would necessarily recognize as that of a realist.
And yet, by questioning the truth-value of Gold Rush storytelling, Harte participates in an ongoing debate that had up to that point been a crucial component of the Gold Rush genre: the examination of the relationship between the reality and its representation, between "life" and "story." With his preface to the hugely successful The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches published less than three years earlier, Harte had positioned his own tales in part as a corrective to "a series of designs — suggested, I think, by Hogarth's familiar cartoons" — that had in their own way failed to represent the Gold Rush to Harte's satisfaction (Selected Stories 3). In thus calling attention to the representability of the Gold Rush experience in such a way that implicitly privileges the ironic and satiric "romances" for which he has become famous, Harte provides a gloss on the Gold Rush story that has significant ramifications for the idea of realism in western American literature. The generic imagination regarding the realness of the American Far West receives one of its earliest, most significant, and most lasting contributions through the productions of Gold Rush authors (including, in a provisional sense, Harte), who saw the accuracy of representation as one of their key motivating concerns. In the case of Harte and his successors, the separation of "life" from "story" will prove to be a crucial move in western American literary realism.
The story of gold in the American West was at first, however, rather slow to develop. Beginning with James Marshall's discovery in January 1848, it took almost a full year before the massive exodus known as the California Gold Rush could get fully under way. But by June 1849, packed steamers were leaving East Coast ports by the dozens for the long trip around the Cape, while out in Missouri tens of thousands of people were gearing up for the overland journey across plains and mountains. In all, roughly 67,000 people headed West in 1849, a group that has collectively become known to us as the forty-niners. On 26 June of this year, however, at least one tired, frustrated, and not very rich gold seeker arrived by steamer back in Philadelphia. Theodore Taylor Johnson had "seen the elephant," as the Gold Rush experience was called at the time, and he had decided that it was not worth the effort. Rather, at the precise historical moment when most Americans were just beginning to take seriously the prospects of finding gold in distant California, Johnson came back home to New Jersey. And by September he was finishing a book about his adventures. Sights in the Gold Region, and Scenes by the Way (1849) is generally regarded as the first notable published account of a California gold miner's experiences, and as such it offers a telling glimpse of a rapidly emerging literary feature in the West: the Gold Rush claim to realism.
The California Gold Rush narrative begins almost apologetically as a realistic form. It is realistic in the sense that typical Gold Rush authors usually expressed an interest in providing a documentary account of their time in California. For his own part, Theodore Johnson writes in his preface that he has "faithfully endeavored to give as succinct and correct an account as possible, of my experience and observation" (n.p.). And the Gold Rush narrative is apologetic to the extent that most of its authors felt compelled to caution their readers with disclaimers regarding the frank description of difficult or brutal conditions and a lack of "literary" qualities in the prose. Most importantly, Gold Rush authors relied on the realist's strategy of invoking a crisis of representation. Positioning their own works as much-needed correctives to earlier, ostensibly inaccurate written versions of what "seeing the elephant" had been like, they issued a claim to realism that hinged most basically on the idea that someone, themselves, had finally gotten it right. Indeed, the problem of a potentially misleading text was already apparent to Johnson in 1849. Motivated by "the public announcement of the wonderful and extensive gold discoveries" whereby the "wonders of the gold region were accordingly trumpeted to the world, with unabating, but by no means unforeseeing zeal," he rapidly discovered that "the inaccessibility of the placeres, the diseases, the hardships, and the very moderate remuneration resulting to the great mass of the miners, were quite forgotten or omitted, the communications and reports of a few only excepted" (225–26). For Johnson, as for the many who followed him in publishing their own stories, the project of providing a "succinct and correct" account necessarily involved a correction of press puffery and misrepresented conditions (even as Johnson's closing recommendation that the reader go "view for yourself" [278] constitutes itself a sort of puffery).
By such measures, the Gold Rush tale may not necessarily qualify as a literature of realism. Indeed, out of the events of 1849 comes a great deal of genre-oriented farce, slapstick, satire, and ribald humor, not to mention the "romances" of Bret Harte. However, the act of writing and publishing a Gold Rush tale was perceived by many of its initial practitioners to be something of a reality-documenting literary event. The documentary, reformist impulse that pervades an important precursor to realism such as Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" (1861) obtains equally a decade earlier in the disclaimers and prefaces of many Gold Rush texts. Daniel Woods writes rather eloquently in 1851:
Having so long been a miner, and acquainted with all his privations and sufferings; having experienced his elation at success and his depression at failure; having passed through the trying season of acclimation, and lain once beneath a lone oak, expecting, as he looked up to the stars shining clear above him, there to end his days; having rocked the gold-digger's cradle, wielded his pick and spade, messed and slept with miners, he is prepared to present a correct view of his subject for those who have friends at the mines. (5–6)
Dame Shirley, perhaps more sensitive to the rhetorical limits of melodramatic prose (and sounding just a bit Howellsian), apologizes to her sister in 1852 for sending letters that are "dreadfully commonplace and severely utilitarian in [their] style and content" (Clappe 106). She has persistently done so, she writes, in order to convey convincingly "an idea of life in the mines, as it is" (35; emphasis in original). Alonzo Delano begins his 1853 Pen-Knife Sketches by noting a promise made "around our camp fires among the hills ... that somebody would show up the other side" of misleading newspaper accounts, which had waxed far too optimistic about "big strikes, rich leads, lucky hombres" (3–4). And even John Rollin Ridge swears, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, that he has written the sensationally bloody and largely fictive Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) "not for the purpose of ministering to any depraved taste for the dark and horrible in human action, but rather to contribute my mite to those materials out of which the early history of California shall one day be composed" (7).
Thus it is that Bret Harte, in his preface to The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, also claims no "higher motive than to illustrate an era of ... California history" (Selected Stories 3), a move seemingly consistent with the inherited form of the Gold Rush disclaimer. But there is a difference in this self-presentation, one that accords with Harte's differentiation of "story" from "life." In 1853, Alonzo Delano, who had given up a brief career as a forty-niner to become a merchant, Wells Fargo agent, and occasional sketch writer for San Francisco's various magazines and newspapers, had concluded that some Gold Rush tales are "still left untold, and always will be" (Pen-Knife 112). Harte, on the other hand, promises that the materials may finally be collected to tell the untellable, that the stories of the Gold Rush can now be told (since, to some extent, the tales do not fully correspond to "life" in the first place). Much as Ridge had done before him, Harte confesses that "I shall be quite content to have collected here the materials for the Iliad that is yet to be sung" (Selected Stories 4). The trick to Harte's position, however, lies in his use of the term "Iliad."
According to his preface, Harte sees himself as a "humble writer of romance" who can "illustrate" for his readers both the "prosaic recollections" and the "heroic Greek poetry" of the forty-niners (Selected Stories 3). Similarly, in his Springfield lecture he pledges to his audience that he will "discourse briefly on an episode of American life as quaint and typical as that of the Greek adventurers whose name I have borrowed" ("Argonauts" 261). These paired allusions to the classical analogy created by the name "Argonauts" operate quite ambiguously. On the one hand it appears that in Harte's opinion, California's mining legacy is worthy of the label "epic." However, the idea that California's "Greek adventurers" were little more than "quaint and typical" also suggests an ironic reading, that the title of Argonauts which the forty-niners almost immediately gave to themselves is ill-deserved, that the life which "exists no longer" was largely one of vulgar ignominy. In either case, Harte makes plain in 1869 and again in 1872 that epic or otherwise, the story of the Gold Rush can be told with a relative degree of confidence, largely because it has become the stuff of myth. By emphasizing the pastness of the very name by which the first gold seekers identified themselves, Harte asserts that mining is no longer a present-tense activity.
But why this deflection? Why suggest that the Gold Rush narrative form should convey a story of the past that is not "strictly true"? To begin with, temporal distance offers a relatively direct and untroubled explanation, in that the passage of almost twenty years between the publication of Delano's Pen-Knife Sketches and Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp accounts in some measure for the shift in perspective offered by their respective formulations of gold frontier history. The demographic complexity of California in general and of San Francisco in particular grew exponentially during these two decades, as did the size and scope of the region's economic base. In May of 1869, for instance, in the same year Harte writes the preface to his most famous collection of tales, the West Coast became connected in a certain figurative sense to the nonmining present of the East through the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Franklin Walker hails this moment as a significant one for literary history: "With the passing of two decades had come the perspective necessary for the setting up of a heroic tradition. Significantly, Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, Mark Twain's Roughing It, and Joaquin Miller's Songs of the Sierras all appeared within three years of the completion of the railroad" (Literary Frontier 261). Not directly concerned with the question of why the construction of a heroic past may be necessary, Walker nevertheless implies that reflection about the past has become a central component of California's literary life. Indeed, history writing was very much in the air in 1869 San Francisco. In the summer of this year, Hubert Howe Bancroft began construction of a building that would in less than two years become the home of his "Literary Industries" corporation. A former miner and founder of the largest book, stationery, and printing enterprise west of Chicago, Bancroft would direct dozens of clerks, abstractors, and "research assistants" in the production of one compendious history after another, beginning in 1874 with a five-volume history of the West Coast's indigenous people, The Native Races. Calling his business a "history factory," Bancroft would use a veritable assembly line of note takers and ghostwriters to produce an immense thirty-nine-volume documentary account of the past in the American West (Caughey; Walker, Literary Frontier 302–15).
The question of what made self-history telling so vital an enterprise for Californians at the beginning of the 1870s is in large part answered by an enthusiastic editorial published in the March 1874 issue of San Francisco's famed literary journal, the Overland Monthly (for which Harte served as editor prior to his departure for the East in 1871). Responding to a recent state report on California's economic activity for 1873, the lead editorial column for March 1874 (in the "Etc." section) announces that a "new era" is afoot in the state. Referring to the events that first initiated California's rise to economic prominence, the piece begins by noting that "twenty-five years ago, the missionary and pastoral era of California came to a sudden end with the rush of gold-seekers from all parts of the world." A quarter-century later, a "new era" is under way:
The wilderness was reclaimed and peopled; the arid soil was made to yield luxuriantly products native to various climes; society was established; diversified industry took the place of exclusive devotion to gold-hunting on one hand and supplying the gold-hunters on the other. And at last, California, which used to import her breadstuffs and clothing, can now boast that in the year 1873 she produced 25,000,000 bushels of wheat, and exported more wheat and flour than any other State in the Union. She can point to a wool-clip of nearly 40,000,000 pounds, a good share of which is manufactured in her own mills. ... Without any circulating medium but gold dust a few years ago, her home coinage, at the San Francisco Mint, was over $22,000,000 last year, and has been in 19 years $350,000,000. Her commercial port was the entrepot, in 1873, of a gold and silver yield of $82,000,000. Her savings banks held deposits to the amount of $55,000,000. ("New Era in California" 281)
Armed with the proof of a prosperous diversification of industrial activity, the editorial writer feels confident that 1873, the first year in which the state's export figures apparently equaled or exceeded those for import, marks the beginning of a new period in California history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Traces of Gold by Nicolas S. Witschi. Copyright © 2002 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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