In 1774 Twenty-Three-Year-Old Elizabeth House
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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 moth- er 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 be- hind 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 re- sources 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, gen- erally 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.