Table Of ContentTHE BEGINNINGS OF LITERATURE BASED ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
A DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Thesis
Present to
the Faculty of the Department of English
The University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment
of the. Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
■by
Richard R. Kimball
May 1950
UMI Number: EP44267
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77z» thesis, written by
RICHARD R. KIMBALL
under the guidance of his..... Faculty Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been
presented to and accepted by the Council on
Graduate Study and Research in partial fulfill
ment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Date June.*..195.0.
Faculty Committee
Chairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE..... 1
II. DEFINITIONS............. 8
III4 TYPES AND SUBJECTS OF FRONTIER LITERATURE . . 12
IV. EXPLORATION AND TRAVEL. . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Exploration ................... . . . . . . 16
Early Adventures..................... 20
Western Reports ............................ 22
Travel Accounts..................... 26
Y. EMIGRATION AND COMMERCE................. 37
Emigrant Guides . ...................... * 37
Geological Works....................... 41
Other Scientific Works. . . ............... 43
Commercial Information................. 44
Political Literature. ..................... 45
VI. INDIANS................................... 48
Indian Captivities. . . . . . . . . . . . . 4^
Fictitious Indian Captivities . . . . . . . 55
Anthologies of Indian Captivities ......... 56
Indian Warfare. . .......... 57
Indian Lore . ................... 59
VII. NON-FICTION LITERATURE........................ 63
Biographies .......... 63
Histories.............................. 65
iii
CHAPTER PAGE
VIII, FICTION...................................... 71
Novels ................... 71
Short Stories. .......... 77
Tall Tales . ............................. 82
Poetry . ........... . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Drama. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
IX. CONCLUSIONS.................................. 93
BIBLIOGRAPHY. .................................... 99
Chapter I
THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
by Fredrick J, Turner revolutionized the study of our hist
ory, but the literary history of the frontier and its signi
ficance is yet to be written, although many scholars since
Turner have insisted that an application of his point of
view must be made to our literature.1
r. .1 Parrington gives the frontier little space in his
Main Currents in American Thought. Spiller has increased
the emphasis on the frontier in the Literary History of the
United States, but the New England group is still considered
the norm. There is little indication in literary textbooks
that Mark Twain represents a culmination of frontier literary
influence rather than an originator. Until the rise of real
ism about 1870, the standards in our literature are works
modeled in form and subject matter after the British, and
written by men shaped by the similar environmental forces
of New England and the East. Literature on the frontier and
of the frontier is ignored despite its quality, quantity,
and importance in creating our American culture.
1 Henry S. Commager, Dorothy Ann Dondore, Jay B.
Hubbell, Lucy Lockwood Hazard, Norman Foerster, Gregory
Paine, etc.
2
Today, in a world severed by the conflict of ideo
logies, the study of American culture becomes of dominant
importance. Our basic assumption is that "Americanism”,
though an overused and misused word, denotes a quality of
spirit, unique and recognizable. It accounts for the ease
with which Americans can be selected out of a group of mixed
nationalities. It has resulted in Europeans becoming the
distinctly American-typed men such as Jackson, Lincoln, Theo
dore Roosevelt, Crockett, Twain, and London.
The greatest influence in developing this American
ism was our frontier, and the chief influence of the fron
tier was a new democracy in which individualism, optimism,
equality, tolerance, and a belief in the manifest American
destiny were fundamentals. No one has suggested the fron
tier influence more clearly than Turner:
The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a
European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel,
and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and
puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments
of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and
moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee
and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Be
fore long he has gone to planting Indian com and plow
ing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes
the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the
frontier the environment is at first too strong for the
man. We must accept the conditions which it furnishes,
or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clear
ings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little
he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not
the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic
germs....The fact is, that here is a new product that is
American....Thus the advance of the frontier has meant
3
a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a
steady growth of independence on American lines.1
The complexities of at least twenty different natio
nal cultures were reduced to their elements on the frontier.
The selective rebuilding process resulted in a materialistic
rather than artistic outlook, the insistence that we call
"a spade a spade." The established prestiges of wealth,
heritage, and education disappeared, to be replaced by
youth, strength, and shrewdness. Frontiersmen gloried in
being able "to lick their weight in wildcats"; they believed
arrogantly in their natural rights; they were optimistic
yet abnormally sensitive to criticism. What the backwoods
man lacked in education he made up in mental acuteness,
practical inventiveness, ability at "horse trading1,? and
versatility of ideas. He believed in a personal destiny and
in a manifest American destiny with a buoyant, exuberant op
timism.
For good or bad, men on the frontier were changed by
their environment, and society changed with them. Each in
dividual achieved fluidity, the ability to adapt himself to
a rapidly shifting environment,and, with it, the desire for
something new, a wanderlust, a discontented spirit at odds
1 Fredrick J. Turner., The Influence of the Frontier
in American History, p. 4.
with European stability. The new American dreamed of conti
nental fur empires, cattle ranges larger than European na
tions, and farms equal to kingly estates. In religion, the
newer Protestant movements and agnosticism gained at the ex
pense of the older established churches. With the advent of
the Jacksonian democracy, this altered society established a
new concept of government.
Our politics reflect the frontier influence more than
our literature. The bulk of our literature was produced by
eastern authors for an eastern public. More frontier mater
ial up to 1841 was written and published in the East than in
the West. No decisive break was made with European forms,
and even the tall tales, the most western writing in subject
and form, first found their way into print via letter writ
ing, a popular device borrowed from Europe.
The frontier contributed two basic essentials to our
literature: 1, a new point of view; 2, new materials. Un
fortunately, a study of the frontier other then as subject
matter goes beyond the scope of this thesis. We must recog
nize that the frontier did influence authors and their works
though it did not appear as subject matter. Emerson and
Whitman are conspicuous examples, and even Longfellow once
wrote that he wished he could share Fremont*s exhilarating
experiences in the far West. Jay B* Hubbell has written:
5
Henry James explained the difference between Turgen-
iev and the typical French novelist by saying that the
back door of the Russian’s imagination was always open
upon the endless Russian steppes. Likewise the American
frontier must explain the difference between Whitman
and Emerson and British contemporaries and the differ
ence that still exists today.1
Before discussing the importance of the frontier as
subject matter two points must be made. First, conquest of
the continent did not find adequate expression, although
Cooper nearly achieved it in the Leatherstpoking Tales, and
many aspects of frontier life vanished without being accur
ately described. Secondly, the frontier writers,. themselves,
too often emulated British authors. Thus William Coggeshall’s
extensive anthology, The Poets and Poetry of the West, con
tains little that is western; the bulk of the poems are un
happy imitations in British graveyard, classical and roman
tic traditions.
The frontier has furnished authors with a new and
challenging background, a setting of primeval forests, great
plains, immense rivers, towering mountains, strange topo
graphical wonders, a trackless country undefiled by civi
lized man. In frontier life, authors discovered new adven
tures in Indian warfare, tales of Indian captivities, prairie
fires, buffalo hunts, fur trading, and gold mining. Frontier
1 Jay B. Hubbell. "The Frontier in American Litera-
tur§,” Southwest Review, pp. 86-87, January 1925.
