In 1774 Twenty-Three-Year-Old Elizabeth House

Reconceiving the Concept of Frontier: from Geography to Cultural Contact

Annette Kolodny

I In 1774 twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth House, daughter of Phila- delphia Quakers, married a British officer stationed in the colonies, Nicholas Trist of County Devon, England. Elizabeth's widowed mother ran one of Philadelphia's finest boarding houses, and the couple had met when Nicholas Trist's regiment was billeted in that city. Under the law of primogeniture, as a fifth son in a family of landed gentry, Nicholas could not inherit his family's estate. Like so many young men of his class and situation, therefore, he sought a career in the military, joining the 18th or "Royal Irish" Regiment of Foot and eventually found himself posted as a lieutenant to America.1) By the time of his marriage, it was no longer Nicholas Trist's am- bition to remain a soldier. Having travelled widely throughout British holdings in North America, he had begun to purchase lands in Louisiana (then still a part of British West Florida), in the vicinity of Bayou Manchac, on the east bank of the Mississippi below Baton Rouge. Finally, having saved a sufficient sum to make good on his land in- vestments, Nicholas Trist resigned his commission in Boston in 1775 and, soon thereafter, once again made his way down the Mississippi to Natchez and the settlements that had fanned out around it. Both because of the dangers of travel during the Revolutionary War years and because Philadelphia was considered a fitter place to raise and educate their son, Elizabeth House Trist had remained behind in Philadelphia, helping to run her mother's boarding house on Second Street. Mary House's was no ordinary establishment, however. With its Quaker leanings and its reputation for hospitality and superior fare, this boarding house attracted many of the most prominent dele- gates to the Continental Congress-Thomas Jefferson and James Madison among them. Jefferson was an especially frequent visitor,

219 lured to Philadelphia not only by the Continental Congress but by the meetings of the American Philosophical Society. Even so, the heady

blend of political debate and ardent discussions of natural philosophy circulating around the dinner table and parlor were never sufficient to blunt Trist's continued distress at her husband's absence.

Time and again he had written and "propos'd coming to you"-but each plan fell through. Then, on September 15, 1780, in a letter posted "River Mississippi 5 Leagues below Manchac ," Nicholas Trist pro- posed an alternative. "In all of your Letters you complain of the dis- agreeable situation you are in," he reminded his wife, "and in the last

you say that•cYou thought you had resolution enough to under- take the Journey." He therefore suggested that his wife "go to Fort Pit as soon as it is convenient" and proceed from there down the Ohio River into the Mississippi as far as Natchez, where he would meet her.

The plan seemed reasonable, Nicholas continued, because "as genteel families are frequently coming down perhaps you might get a passage with some or other of them." "I would not have you to venture by Your-Self," he made clear.

Not until 1783, however, with the signing of peace treaties that

(temporarily) settled competing Spanish, British, and United States claims along the lower Mississippi, was it really safe for Trist to set out.

II In the years intervening, Trist's anticipation of her journey provided a subject of eager conversation with her mother's frequent boarder, Thomas Jefferson. Each, for different reasons, wanted to know more about the continent's western regions. For Elizabeth House Trist there loomed the propsect of permanent removal to her husband's holdings in Louisiana. For Jefferson there was always the possibility of national expansion combined with his abiding fascination with the vast unknown continent. Indeed, Jefferson considered himself something of a "natural philos- opher" -what we might today term a scientific generalist-and had, since 1781, served as an elected officer of the American Philosophical Society, based in Philadelphia. During the final years of the Revolu- tionary War, in fact-in addition to his political responsibilities as the governor of Virginia-Jefferson had devoted himself to gathering the materials that would finally emerge as his Notes on the State of Virginia,

220 a pioneer study of geography and natural history .2) The irony was that, while Jefferson speculated in the Notes about the sources of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and postulated vast mineral deposits beyond the Ohio, he himself had never been farther west than Staunton, Virginia, just beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains.

All his information had been gathered from friends and acquaintances who had travelled west.

Little wonder, then, that Jefferson saw Trist's impending journey as yet another opportunity for gathering information. We shall never know whether, compelled by his avid interest in western exploration, Jefferson directly requested his friend to keep a diary for him. More probably, the idea was Trist's. Whatever the circumstances, the particularities of Jefferson's interests-his scientific fascination with fossil remains, his studies in botany, geography, and mineralogy, and his

political concern for the future economic prospects of the western lands all influenced the entries that Trist would make in her extensive travel- diary.3) As Trist wrote Jefferson in April 1784, near the end of her

stay in Pittsburgh, "It would be one of the greatest pleasures of my life if I cou'd be one of your company on such a tour." But as she knew "that will never happen ," Trist contented herself with trying to record her journey for a mind like Jefferson's, confident that "a Philosophical mind like yours can gather information from all you see."

To understand, then, that-whoever else might read it-Trist's diary was intended essentially for Thomas Jefferson is to understand some of its unique detail. The description of the coal deposits outside of Pittsburgh, for example, responded both to Jefferson's interest in ge-

ography and to his political interests in the potential economic resources of the western territories. With that same impulse, Trist

described a shoreline with "a great quantity of stone that look like Iron ore," seventy miles below the falls at Louisville, and regretted her inability to better observe the height of the timber along the banks.

Aware of Jefferson's absorption in natural history, she lamented that she could not observe, firsthand, the cache of "big bones•cfound three miles from this place back in the woods." But two weeks later, perhaps to compensate, a June 10th entry offers lavish detail about the exploration of a limestone cave, "one of the most grand and beautiful natural structures and the greatest curiosity I ever beheld." Finally, on

June 13, 1784, Trist paid a direct compliment to her intended reader,

221 reminding him of the fort erected by American revolutionaries and "call'd after Governor Jefferson ." Nineteen years later, in a June 20, 1803 communique to Captain Meriwether Lewis, President Thomas Jefferson officially charged the

Lewis and Clark expedition to consider as "worthy of notice":

the soil & face of the country, it's growth & vegetable produc-

tion, especially those not of the U.S.

the animals of the country generally, & especially those not known in the U.S.

the remains or accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct;

the mineral productions of every kind; but more particularly metals, limestone, pit coal, & saltpetre•c

climate, as characterized by the thermometer, by the propor-

tion of rainy, cloudy, & clear days, by lightning, hail, snow, ice, by the access & recess of frost•cthe dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flower, or leaf, times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles

or insects.4)

Behind many of Trist's entries, we can hear that same charge. Thus,

19 years before the Louisiana Purchase empowered him to dispatch Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, Jefferson had already received one lengthy report, full of descriptive detail, which predisposed him to anticipate substantial resources in the trans-Mississippi west. That report-the earliest extant diary we have by a white woman on this terrain-was the diary that Elizabeth House Trist modestly called "an account of my peregrination ."

II I

Had the diary been published twenty years ago-when I first began my work on the cultural mythology of the American frontiers-its connection with Jefferson would have established it as a document of historic, if minor, interest. But as I prepared the diary for its first publication in 1990, it took on added significance as a text that reveals the frontier as a locus of cultural interpenetrations and unstable, generally unacknowledged transitions. To be sure, for the feminist scholar it retains a unique place in the

222 literature of the frontier by offering the first account we know of by a white woman travelling the Ohio and Mississippi River frontiers. As such, it offers new information about the particular rigors that faced women on such a journey-the lack of privacy amid a swarm of mostly male fellow travellers; and white women's distinct hostility to those features of the landscape which were experienced as overpowering or engulfing.

Like most eighteenth-century women of her class, Elizabeth House Trist preferred cultivated grounds and carefully designed open vistas to an apparently chaotic and untamed nature. Thus, Trist is always comparing the wild fruits and herbs she encounters to the cultivated varieties she has known in Philadelphia. And her eye for landscape is always an eye to site future settlement. In her view, the rolling hill country outside of Pittsburgh is merely "very extensive"-never beautiful-and only "if country which is mountainous was clear'd•cwou'd

[it] be beyond description beautifull." A visit to the fledgling Chartiers Town settlement sends Trist back to Pittsburgh with a headache be-

cause of what she experienced as the oppressiveness of "so much wood towering above me in every direction and such a continuance of it."

Similarly overwhelmed by the Chickasaw Bluffs on her passage down the

Mississippi, Trist fancies that "there has been some great revolution in nature and this great body of water has forced a passage where it was not intended and tore up all before it." Beneath "ragged" banks fifty feet in height-as she had earlier been oppressed by the "confined

Prospect" in Chartiers Town-Trist confronts what is, for her, a landscape "alltogether•cawfull and Melancholy and some times ter- rific."

In addition to these uniquely gendered inflections, the diary also

tells the story of a landscape in such rapid transition that even those responsible for the changes cannot accommodate them to consciousness. And it tells a story of complex cultural contacts. Let me begin

with the first:

More than once in her diary, Trist accounted herself fortunate be-

cause "the owners of the Boat seem to be well acquainted with the Rivers, this being the fifth time they have gone down the Ohio." De-

spite this apparently privileged opportunity to observe, firsthand, the fact of increasing Euro-American population-the very fact that requires the flatboat's services for trade-the crew repeatedly sets off on hunting

223 expeditions as if the crush of emigration had not already had an impact.

Repeatedly, therefore, the "hunters return'd without any game."

Even at "the best hunting ground any where on" the Mississippi, "the men return'd without even having fired a gun." Indeed, it is not until June 5, safely past the falls at Louisville, that one of the hunters finally returns "with a deer the first wild meat we have had." Apparently unprepared to contemplate the changes that they themselves have helped to effect, the flatboat's crew persists in envisioning a pristine wilderness that no longer exists. The delusion is revealed as ludicrous on June 7 when the crew once again "went on shore to hunt" -only to kill "a tame cow which they mistook for a Buffaloe." Never tempted by the appeal of a wilderness frontier, Trist sees what the flatboat crew cannot: "There are such numbers of boats continually going down the river that all the game have left the shore."

My second point pertains to the intermingling of cultures and races which the diary almost seems to take for granted. Because the only available passage downriver for a traveller like Trist was aboard one of the many flatboats that plied the Ohio and Mississippi for trade, the diarist enjoyed ample opportunities to view, firsthand, the multiracial and international mix of settlers. On June 22, 1784, for example, several of the crew load the canoe and head for a Spanish garrison where "the people•cwere in want of flour ." On June 30, a stopover at a plantation engages Trist in conversation with "a Mulatto woman nam'd Nelly." And various parties of French and Canadians are also mentioned. No less important-and despite Trist's fearful attitude toward the Native people she encounters-Trist includes in her narrative, wholly without comment, the Indian words "Squaw" and "calu- met," entirely assuming her reader's acquaintance with those terms. And she suggests that the Indians were similarly employing English words.

Which brings me, at last, to the conceptual core of this paper. To consider what we mean by "frontier" in 1990 requires that we let go of a merely geographic concept. Instead, we must reconceptualize "frontier" as a locus of first cultural contact , circumscribed by a particular physical terrain in the process of change because of the forms that contact takes, all of it inscribed by the interpenetrations of language. My paradigm would thus have us interrogating language-especially as hybridized style, trope, or structure-for the complicating intersections

224 of human encounters and human encounters with the physical environment. It would enjoin us to see the ways in which the collision of languages portrays the physical terrain as just as much a player in the drama of contact as the human participants, with the landscape variously enabling, thwarting, or even evoking human desire and action. Whether written or oral, the texts that would constitute this new literary history of the frontier would thereby be defined by their articulation of these initial encounters. In this definition, there always stands at the heart of frontier writings-even when disguised or repressed-a currently indigenous population and a newly encountered physical terrain. What I am looking for are the many stories and narrative devices we have all used to encode some specifiable first moment in the evolving dialogue between individuals, physical environment, languages, and cultures.

IV In this reformulation, the concept of frontier slips the bonds of geography and chronology as we have previously understood them. The materials that would comprise the primary texts of frontier literature would be those that themselves participate in that first moment of contact-like Christopher Columbus' letters to Lord Sanchez, Mary White Rowlandson's captivity narrative, or Daniel Boone's putative autobiography. The secondary texts of frontier literary history would be those composed after the fact, reworking for some alternate audience or future generation the scene and import of original contact. Ex- amples in English might be Joel Barlow's Columbiad (1807), James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking series (1823-41), or even J.N. Barker's operatic melodrama, "The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sau- vage" (1808), the first play by a United States author to focus on Indian characters and the first to utilize the story of Pocahontas. John Smith's General History of Virginia (1624), on which the play is based, would of course constitute a primary text of frontier literary history in my definitional scheme. What makes the paradigm so appealing, however, is that English texts, by themselves, could never constitute a sufficient history. Indeed, the new frontier literary history I envisage might properly include Norse sagas. Recording clashes between Vikings and "skraellings," or native peoples, whom the Scandinavians encountered when, late in

225 the 10th century they reached Vinland (on the North American main- land), some of these sagas detail how European colonizing efforts were repulsed by the indigenous peoples. Without question, this literary history would also include the foundational corpus of the Spanish American written tradition, the cronicas de Indias; and scholars might well debate whether El Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega, had produced a primary or a secondary frontier text in his massive two-volume Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru (the two parts first published separately in Spain in 1609 and 1616-17). Additionally, the moral dialogues composed by Mendicant friars in the Nahuatl language would become frontier texts. In the years following the Spanish conquest, from Mexico through the present day southwest, missionaries rendered catechistic texts into language and ter- minology by which Old World Catholicism (they hoped) might convert New World Aztec thought. Resembling no catechism then available in Latin or Spanish, but decidedly influenced by the tradition of Aztec flower songs, these texts offer a rich body of proto-literary material that amply plays out-for both Spanish and Nahuatl-the consequences of the encounter of the two languages and the confrontation of two widely variant systems for constructing spiritual meaning. Our scholarship would recuperate what it could of the stories and songs of first contact in the oral traditions of native languages, and in the songs, narrative play, and captivity (or slave) narratives of Africans brought to this continent as commodities in the rum-cotton-slave trade. In this way, we might newly recognize frontier antecedents in the hybridized vernacular traditions that Skip Gates and Houston Baker have identified as intrinsic to African-American literary expression. In revising my course on frontier literature, I might want to teach Elizabeth House Trist's diary of a voluntary journey alongside a Native narrative of forced relocation. Each text, in its own way, would ex- press the experience of a new geographical terrain, and each text would also explore the borderlands on which Indians and Euro-Americans meet: one to take ownership, the other to be dispossessed. Next, I might pair Ann Bradstreet with Black Elk Speaks,5) each voice adjusting, modulating its language in the encounter with the idea of America and each intending itself for an American audience. If, as Bradstreet told her children, her "heart rose up" against the idea of America as she rocked on the tides of the cold, rocky coast of Massachusetts, so too did

226 Black Elk's heart rise up against the idea of America as encountered in the tides of Euro-American emigrants claiming his peoples' land as their own. Finally, because neither chronology nor geography provide the historical frame, an entire corpus of what we now loosely term "immi- grant literature" might be given fresh analysis because it could, on the one hand, be uncoupled from the imputed continuities of a defining New England "errand"; and, on the other hand, because it would be newly read in terms of a specific physical terrain and the changes enacted upon that terrain. Thus, the Yiddish short stories by Sholem Aleykhem (the pen name of Sholem Rabinowitz) would enter a literary history that recognized an urban frontier. Similarly, letters, diaries, short stories, poems and novels composed by Chinese and other Asians brought to labor on the railroads in the 19th century would allow us to explore yet another set of complex frontier transitions: The Asians grappling both with their own preconceptions of America as well as with the language and conceptual patterns of the Euro-Americans who employ them, even as they help to transform the dominant culture's already mythologized agrarian landscape into an industrial frontier. Other examples will suggest themselves, of course, but for the most part I think I've made my point: To establish a truly comprehensive frontier literary history, both geography and chronology must be viewed as fluid and flexible, or as a continuingly unfolding palimpsest that allows us to incorporate Papago, Nahuatl, Quechua, Spanish, Gullah, French, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, German and even Yiddish as well as English-into our textual canon. And the term "frontier"- becomes what we in the southwest call la frontera, or the borderlands, that liminal landscape of changing meanings on which different human cultures first encounter one another's "otherness" and appropriate, accommodate, or domesticate it through language. The implications of this reformulation are many. First, by under- standing the frontier as a liminal borderland between cultures, we constrain the continuing assertion of vast unsettled or uninhabited areas, no matter how powerfully that notion permeates the texts we would analyze. As such, we forever decenter what was previously an essentially Eurocentric design; and we afford ourselves the scholarly occasion to examine frontier contacts between Native peoples, as the Indian removal policies forcefully relocated tribes and thereby brought

227 together different Native peoples for the first time on unfamiliar land- scapes. Second, we engage renewed interdisciplinary challenges that include opportunities for comparative cultural and literary analysis as well as opportunities for geography, ecology, and literary history to come together in new ways. And third, by acknowledging the many different configurations of emigrants, immigrants, and indigenous peoples who come in contact over time, we allow the literature of the frontiers to stand as multi-cultural, polyvocal, and newly inter-textual and inter-linguistic. In consequence, we find ourselves better able to trace the genesis of hybridized forms and usages-whether they occur as a borrowing of vocabulary from indigenous peoples, as in John Smith or Elizabeth House Trist; or as an adaptation by mestizo genera- tions of European discovery narratives, as in Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca. What most appeals to me in this reformulation, however, is something I suggested at the outset: The persistence of theories of continuity in American literary history has repeatedly distorted its capacity to treat frontier literature as anything other than marginalia or cultural mythology. Obsessed as it is with its own myth of origins, the scholarship that comprises literary history is always seeking some defining begin- ning-usually Puritan New England, sometimes Virginia Plantation, at other times the European voyages of discovery-in whose texts one may discern something peculiarly or characteristically "American" in con- temporary terms. The grand obsession, of course, is to discover colonial precursors for those traits, themes, or anxieties which are esteemed as the benchmarks of the literary efflorescence of the 19th- century American Renaissance. The limitations of this kind of literary history should be obvious: It is patently ahistorical, tacitly reading the present back into the past. It is inescapably monolingual, defining origins by what later became the tropes of the dominant, or conquering language. And, by imputing a linear progression from origin to efflorescence, orthodox literary histories necessarily obscure anything that cannot be accommodated to whatever is currently accepted as the features of the mature national literary consciousness. It is paradigms like these, moreover, that give rise to literary historians' sometimes arrogant notions of American exceptionalism. In this one hundredth year anniversary of the supposed closing of

228 the frontier, I am asking that we reopen it , thematizing frontier as a multiplicity of ongoing first encounters over time and land , rather than a linear chronology of successive discoveries and settlements . As we approach the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus' first landing , I am asking that we once and for all eschew the myth of origins-with its inevitable habit of either fetishizing or marginalizing race and ethni- city-and adopt a model of literary history that privileges no group's priority. In the frontier literary history I have laid out here, there can be no paradigmatic first contact because there are so many first contacts. And there can be no ur-landscape because there are so many frontier sites-and even the same site, over time, may serve for multiple first encounters. Having said all that, I am not optimistic that scholars can easily take up the challenge. It is, I admit, radically comparativist, demandingly interdisciplinary, and forbiddingly multi-lingual. And it proposes a spiralling diversity over which no one-no school or theory; no ethnic, racial, or cultural scholarly enclave-could ever be in charge. For these very reasons, though, I recommend it as one vital path for Ameri- can Studies in the 21st century.

NOTES

1) For a full discussion of the correspondence between Nicholas Trist and Eliza- beth House Trist, as well as further details regarding their relationship with Thomas Jefferson, please see my Introduction to "The Travel Diary of Elizabeth House Trist: Philadelphia to Natchez, 1783-84" in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives, eds. William L. Andrews, Sargent Bush, Jr., Annette Kolodny, Amy Shrager Lang, and Daniel B. Shea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 183-200. 2) Privately published in Paris in 1784, then followed by a general edition issued in London in 1787. The best current edition is Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955). 3) Full discussion of Trist's correspondence with Jefferson during her journey appears in my Introduction, cited above. Trist's travel diary is published in full in Journeys in New Worlds, pp. 201-32. 4) See Donald Jackson, Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), p.141. 5) Black Elk Speaks, Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux "As told through John G. Neihardt," Introduction by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).

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