Backcountry Robbers, River Pirates, and Brawling Boatmen: Transnational Banditry in Antebellum U.S
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University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 2018 Backcountry Robbers, River Pirates, and Brawling Boatmen: Transnational Banditry in Antebellum U.S. Frontier Literature Samuel M. Lackey University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lackey, S. M.(2018). Backcountry Robbers, River Pirates, and Brawling Boatmen: Transnational Banditry in Antebellum U.S. Frontier Literature. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4656 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Backcountry Robbers, River Pirates, and Brawling Boatmen: Transnational Banditry in Antebellum U.S. Frontier Literature by Samuel M. Lackey Bachelor of Arts University of South Carolina, 2006 Bachelor of Arts University of South Carolina, 2006 Master of Arts College of Charleston, 2009 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2018 Accepted by: Gretchen Woertendyke, Major Professor David Greven, Committee Member David Shields, Committee Member Keri Holt, Committee Member Cheryl L. Addy, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School © Copyright by Samuel M. Lackey, 2018 All Rights Reserved. ii Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my parents for all of their belief and support. They have always pushed me forward when I have been stuck in place. To my dissertation committee – Dr. Gretchen Woertendyke, Dr. David Greven, Dr. David Shields, and Dr. Keri Holt – thank you for your patience and assistance. I am especially grateful to Dr. Woertendyke for guiding me through the early dark days of dissertation writing, and to Dr. Greven for offering friendly advice and a sounding board. The genesis of this project was a pair of seminar papers I wrote during my second and third years in the PhD program, in the classrooms of Dr. Greven and Dr. Leon Jackson, respectively, and I owe both scholars many thanks for suggesting that the papers had the potential to be dissertation chapters. To my colleagues and all the English faculty at the University of South Carolina, I give my thanks for fostering the collegial and supportive environment that I have enjoyed for the last six years. On a more personal note, I would like to extend my gratitude to Ms. Courtney Tunmore. I could not have done this without her. iii Abstract This dissertation argues that in the midst of an uncertain but formative period of continental expansion, a revolutionary brand of popular crime fiction appeared and flourished in the pages of cheap periodicals and paperback novels. It consisted of conventional adventure romances and pulpy proto-dime novels that focused on frontier violence and backwoods criminals. Often popular in their day but quickly forgotten, these texts have been given short shrift by scholars and critics due to their shoddiness or ostensibly minor role in literary history. I contend that this obscure brand of crime fiction in fact has much to offer in the ongoing conversation about geographical borders and the roles they play in our conception of nation, culture, and literature. I will demonstrate the ways in which a specific group of American literary figures – Steelkilt, John Murrell, and Joaquin Murieta, among others – all of whom were featured in popular fiction between the 1830s and 1850s, dramatically altered the representation of crime in antebellum U.S. fiction, while also helping to shape national conceptions of expansion, imperialism, region, and identity. Though often subsumed under the umbrellas of various genres, I consider the narratives containing these characters to be forerunners of a transnational crime genre that continues to be popular today. The texts under consideration in this study begin with Morgan Neville’s 1828 sketch “Last of the Boatmen,” continue through the crime novels of the 1830s and 40s penned by iv Emerson Bennett and H.R. Howard, and reach their murderous pinnacle in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854). The transnational frontier bandits developed in these pages represent the unstable and at times impossible nature of the U.S. ‘civilizing’ mission. My dissertation aims to perform a threefold critical intervention: to argue that these characters’ appearances in popular texts reveal disturbing fissures in the conventional narrative of U.S. western expansion and national identity, to show that the regions they inhabit function as alien or non-national spaces characterized by culturally polyglot populations and unmapped terrain; and, finally, to demonstrate the overall impact they have on popular U.S. literature and culture in the 1830s, 40s and 50s. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Introduction: Region, Identity, and the Geography of the Unknown West .......................1 Chapter 1: A Lakeman in Lima: Transnational Banditry in Moby Dick’s “The Town- Ho’s Story” .......................................................................................................................47 Chapter 2: The Many Travels of John A. Murrell, “The Great Western Land Pirate” ....97 Chapter 3: Camilla and Kelly: River Pirates of the Middle West .................................143 Chapter 4: Joaquin Murieta, California, and the Homecoming of the Ultimate Transnational Frontier Bandit ..........................................................................................188 Coda: Shinbone, John Ford, and the Americanization of the Transnational Frontier Bandit ...............................................................................................................................235 References ........................................................................................................................243 vi Introduction: Region, Identity, and the Geography of the Unknown West In this dissertation I argue that a specific group of American literary figures – Steelkilt, John Murrell, and Joaquin Murieta, among others – all of whom were featured in an emerging subgenre of frontier crime fiction, dramatically altered the representation of crime in antebellum U.S. fiction while also helping to shape national conceptions of western expansion and U.S. imperialism. Though often subsumed under the headings of Southwestern Humor or Walter Scott-style adventure romances, the narratives containing these characters form a separate corpus distinguished by its ambiguous and frequently troubling treatments of newly-incorporated U.S. regions and the often-permeable borders they share with non-national spaces. The texts under consideration in this study begin with Morgan Neville’s 1828 sketch “Last of the Boatmen,” continue through the crime novels of the 1830s and 40s penned by William Gilmore Simms, James Hall, Emerson Bennett and H.R. Howard, and reach their pinnacle in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854). These works are distinct from one another in terms of tone, subject matter, and generic conventions but united through their frank portrayals of violence and lawlessness along the various frontiers of America. Not only do they depict backwoods disorder, they convert it into a primary narrative focus. In the pages of these texts, a new frontier bandit character emerges with new forms of mobility and power in a rapidly-expanding nation. The adventures and travels of the 1 bandits featured in these texts provide the grist for escapist fantasies and projections of imperial might; however, strangely enough, they also demonstrate disturbingly violent antisocial and unruly tendencies which often call into question the civilizing and progressive missions underwriting U.S. expansion in the early nineteenth century.1 Ultimately, they exemplify the mystery and dread surrounding the process of westward settlement and the conceptions of western geography that it created. In The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (1992), James S. Romm makes the case that ancient geography, as it was practiced by the Greeks and Romans, should be considered a literary and narrative genre rather than strictly a descriptive branch of physical science (3-5). As he states in his introduction, early geographers “such as Hecataeus, Herodotus, and Strabo went about their task chiefly by way of narrative: they sifted through a vast storehouse of traveler’s tales in order to separate fact from fiction,” then retold both the credible accounts and the “incredible” ones, “revealing that the geographer’s science and storyteller’s art, in many periods of antiquity, could not be fully detached from one another” (5; emphasis in original). Though existing in a vastly different historical and cultural context, these early imaginative geographies share much in common with the literature about the American West that proliferated throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. The geographers, travel writers, and fiction