November 2006
The Course of Empire, Bernard DeVoto (1952)

The idea of American imperialism has become very fashionable over the past few years. Not American imperialism itself, mind you, just the idea of it. I remember as recently as five years ago if I were to say something about "American imperialism" I'd get querulous looks as if I were some sort of wacko leftist conspiracy nut. Nowadays, everyone is writing about American imperialism, whether they're for it (Bob Kagan), agin it (Chalmers Johnson), or somewhere in between (Niall Ferguson).

I'm not sure if it's my natural bent toward anti-imperialism or just a preference for the unfashionable that draws me toward books on American imperialism. I've certainly found that American history is much more interesting when it's approached from a non-traditional angle (those Meinig books with the geographic angle, for instance). The study of American history — among Americans, at least — is so pervaded with myth, that it generally takes something contrary to shake it loose enough to truly explore anything.

One of my favorite cheap used book finds is a product of the 1960s, Richard O'Connor's Pacific Destiny, which is chock full of interesting episodes that are glossed over in the traditional narrative, some large (our Philippines occupation), some small (our Siberian occupation). Another that I picked up at about the same time but didn't read until rather later is Bernard DeVoto's Course of Empire.

I tend to think of them together, since they're both mid-century works with a professorial tone and an explicit theme of American imperialist, but the difference ends there. In era, they only barely overlap; DeVoto begins with Columbus and ends with the Lewis and Clark expedition, while O'Connor begins shortly before American independence and continues to the (then) present. And while both bring to mind a lecturing college professor, the professors are polar opposites. O'Connor's is the boisterous bearded ex-hippie who grabs and keeps your attention by telling exciting stories you've never heard before, while DeVoto's drones a bit but mesmerizes you with his dry wit and vast knowledge of arcane details. I like to imagine DeVoto with a slow, deep voice and the accent of his adoptive New England home, in a tweed jacket, and sitting crooked in an armchair like a true brahmin — a Buckleyesque posture to go with his Buckleyesque vocabulary.

Pacific Destiny gets no review today; I finished it shortly before Benzene's book project began, and though I've often read bits and pieces since then I've never done a full reread. Course of Empire is the last book from 2006 still awaiting its review. I started it early in the year, maybe even in 2005. There was a large hiatus when, about two-thirds into the book, I discovered that my copy has 22 page ripped from it. Such are the risks of buying at library surplus sales. (The missing pages turned out to be a long discussion of the political maneuverings leading up to the Louisiana Purchase, a rather interesting section.) That put the book on the shelf for several months until I got around to borrowing an intact copy from the library.

Now, more than a year since I finished, I don't remember much beyond what is in my notes (more copious than usual). Mainly I recall perceiving a general theme of the different imperial strategies toward the new continent. I had read elsewhere how the Spaniards, the French, and the English had different economic goals in America, and each found the appropriate climatic belt in which to pursue them. The French wished to leave the natives in place in order to trade with them and thus extract wealth. The Spaniards wished to rule over the natives and exploit their labor to produce and extract wealth in a feudal model. The English wished to displace the natives in order to fill their land with colonists who would exploit it themselves.

The Spaniards get somewhat less attention here, but the French and English latititudinal bands are discussed with equal thoroughness. Although his narrative is ultimately about the people who would form the United States of America, DeVoto (like Francis Parkman before him) finds much of America's history in Canada.

I don't know if it's really in the book or just what I brought to it as a reader, but I remember being struck by how intimately the creation of the American nation is tied to Britain's change in imperial strategy. Prior to the Seven Years' War (the "French and Indian War"), France was solidly behind a mercantile strategy, penetrating ever deeper into the native American trade channels in the furtherance of the profitable fur trade, while Britain was more interested in the colonial strategy.

After 1763, this changed. The French were evicted from North America, marginalized to the Caribbean, and the British took over Canada. The new Montreal merchants who inherited the fur trade inherited with it the erstwhile French imperial strategy of trade. For the traders, who craved furs and the markets for their trade goods that were exhanged for furs, the native population was an asset. For the colonials, who craved land, the native population was an obstacle. This conflict of interests, which hitherto had been between France and Britain, was now internalized to competing interests within the British nation. As Britain's government moved in the direction of the mercantile strategy, the British colonials found themselves at odds with their government's policy.

This is where it helps to be free of the traditional American history narrative. Of the "Intolerable Acts" cited by the revolutionaries, the one that seems out of place is the Quebec Act. Our national mythology has embraced the ideal of taxation without representation and the various liberties infringed by the other Intolerable Acts, but unless one simply hates Roman Catholics, one doesn't readily see what was so intolerable about the Quebec Act. But in fact, it was the most intolerable of all, because it more than anything signaled the new British imperial strategy. By making into law the Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act transferred the trans-Appalachian territories to the Crown and took under its protection the native populations there.

DeVoto takes his time, steadily and dispassionately moving to a conclusion, but in the end he is merciless:

This change in policy, then, is what proved intolerable to colonial interests (not least to those engaged in trans-Appalachian land speculation, including one Mr Boone and one Mr Washington).

Thus do the British become the new French; and so, accordingly, do the Americans become the new British. The Native Americans (for whom DeVoto has plenty of respect but strikingly little sympathy) have no trouble seeing where their own interests lie. There are always contrarians groups, of course, but on the whole the Native population sided with the French against the British. Now, they all switch to side with the British against the Americans. They consistently favor those imperialists who want to trade them goods, against those who want to settle their land.

I may be giving the wrong impression. This is one theme of the book, but it's not the only one. (Nor is it the only cause of the American Revolution.) It just happens to be the one I remember.

Beyond that, all I recall is being delighted at so much detailed information on several small trips of exploration, mostly in Canada. In traditional histories we always get plenty on Lewis and Clark, and some other big names like DeSoto or Coronado, but the dozens of other little (and not so little) quests and treks are largely ignored. It was nice to read about those. That's probably what I enjoyed most.

I'm now left with just my year-old notes: some especially lovely bits of writing, some interesting concepts, some quirky little facts that struck my fancy, a few new vocabulary words, and some other words that caught my attention for one reason or another. There's no real theme, so I'll just string them together end to end.

Among my notes, one tantalizingly promises a "poetic passage" on page 399, but alas that page is among the ones ripped out.

This sentence, on the other hand, interests me only because, while grammatically correct, its little clauses are so deeply nested that it takes a moment to unwrap it all:

I'm pretty sure this next juxtaposition is accidental, but the innuendo stretching from the end one paragraph to the beginning of the next amuses me. We're in the midst of the Lewis and Clark expedition now. (The misspellings are Clark's.)

This next passage I love for the biblical allusion. Describing an unusually trouble-free segment of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition across what is now western Colorado:

That last sentence is from Psalm 91:11-12. I wouldn't know it except that a setting of the same text makes up my favorite number in my favorite oratorio, Mendelssohn's Elijah (a masterfully crafted and exquisitely beautiful double quartet, truly Mendelssohn at his finest).

It makes me wonder how many other allusions went right past me. Another one I picked up just now writing this review. I originally had this up above, in the discussion of the Quebec Act, but I've removed it to here instead. The rebellious colonists made no secret of their desire for trans-Appalachian land. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence. DeVoto says:

I knew that the words within the quotation marks were directly from the Declaration. Until tonight, I hadn't realized that the rest of the sentence is an indirect quote as well.

In this next one, DeVoto is discussing Kentucky. Kentucky was our first trans-Appalachian state, and understanding its genesis and subsequent identity requires understanding the geographic fact that for all of trans-Appalachia, the natural outlet to anywhere is the Mississippi. So long as New Orleans remained outside America's control, Kentucky could never be satisfied. From Kentucky's settlement in the 1770s to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the American West was obsessed with schemes to obtain New Orleans by hook or by crook.

He goes on, but that sentence deserves to stand alone. The paragraph proceeds with George Rogers Clark, then by way of Jamie Wilkinson ("a lifelong betrayer of everyone, a very small villain on a very large scale") to other betrayees Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr (recalling Gore Vidal's novel), and Mad Anthony Wayne (for whom 16 states named a county).

Much later, DeVoto discusses the meeting of Wilkinson and Burr:

The petty operator is Wilkinson. The irretrievable mistake of trusting Wilkinson — if Vidal can be trusted (and he can't) — is what led to Burr's downfall. But the part I love is Burr as the "genius of chicane". I'd never heard the word, but surely it is the root of the much better known chicanery.

Among the other vocabulary words I took note of, the one that makes me smile the most is nowhither, as in, "He could see a dozen small herds on their slow way nowhither".

At least twice, DeVoto uses frustrate as an adjective. Here is one, about Meriwether Lewis:

Completely new to me were congeners, sutler, exordium, and remuda, which I'll leave you to look up on your own if you care to.

An old favorite of mine, propinquity, appears in a quoted passage by Simon Fraser:

Simon Fraser, the explorer whose name is all over British Columbia, figures prominently in the book. At one point Devoto calls him "Vermont-born", which caught my attention, but I think this may be wrong. The biography on the website of Simon Fraser University says their school eponym was born "in the small rural hamlet of Mapletown in Hoosick Township, New York, near Bennington, Vermont." Atlases online and off are no help here, as that Mapletown has disappeared from the map (though there's another one elsewhere in New York). Bennington and Hoosick Falls are across the border from one another, so Fraser would have been born somewhere near the state line. And since he was born in 1776 it wasn't a state line yet anyway.

Simon Fraser University is in Burnaby, British Columbia, a large suburb of Vancouver. Both Burnaby and Vancouver are sited on the Fraser River near its mouth. The length of said river was explored by Simon, who confirmed that it was not connected to the other large river of the area, the Columbia. Sited on the Columbia, a bit further from its mouth, is another city called Vancouver, in Washington state, across the river from Portland, Oregon. Both Vancouvers were named for Capt George Vancouver, one-time lieutenant of the more famous Capt James Cook, and an explorer in his own right. Capt Vancouver's most famous expedition was to explore the coast of the Pacific Northwest, and I find it ironic that in doing so he managed to miss the mouths of both the Columbia and the Fraser, not only the two largest rivers of the area, but the same two which would become home to cities named Vancouver.

The Columbia gets a lot of discussion, and several times that discussion includes mention of a set of rapids on the river known simply as "the Cascades". The Cascades are no more. In 1896 a canal was constructed allowing steamboats to bypass them. Then in 1938 both cascades and canal were flooded under the lake behind the Bonneville Dam. The Cascades were where the Columbia River cut through the mountain range also known as the Cascades. The obvious inference is that the mountains were named for the rapids, though Wikipedia calls that unconfirmed.

Another mountain range, further east, DeVoto more than once refers to as the "Alleghanies". When I first saw that I thought it was a mistake, but he sticks with the spelling. Evidently it's an alternative to the usual "Alleghenies".

In the course of his Lewis and Clark account, he mentions the Owyhee River, which I now know rises near the intersection of Nevada, Oregon and Idaho, flowing generally northward to join the Snake where it forms the border of the latter two. (Lewis and Clark don't actually see the Owyhee, but one of the natives they encounter describes it.) I had never heard of this river, but I did know that "Owyhee" is an earlier variant of "Hawaii", the name that eventually was to be applied to the group of islands at that time best known as the Sandwich Island. This makes the Owyhee River seem as out of place as the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania.

It turns out that this river, like so many in America (including the Republican) was named after any early group of settlers on it. They were a few of the several Hawaiians (Sandwich Islanders) in the employ of the North West Company. More than members of any other native culture I can think of, Hawaiians, upon contact with Europeans, were eager to sign on with visiting ships in order to seek adventure in foreign lands. From the earliest decades of the 19th century, they turn up all over the Pacific.

Among the lesser-known explorers whose story is told is a Frenchman who sought to find, from the general vicinity of Lake Superior, a path to the Western Sea and thence to China. The Western Sea he heard so many stories about from his contacts among the natives of Minnesota seems to have been Lake Winnipeg, though he never reached it. This Frenchman bore the improbable-looking name of Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut. The latter part later evolved another spelling no less improbable for French but just fine in English: Duluth.

DeVoto never explicitly mentions that Pittsburgh was named for William Pitt the Elder, but he brings that fact to mind by discussing the great prime minister immediately following a discussion of Fort Duquesne, which preceded the city on the same site. DeVoto's brief paean to the greatness of Pitt recalls in my mind an argument I've read elsewhere (Paul Kennedy?) that Pitt the Elder created the British Empire and a century of British domination not by military might but by the greater accomplishment of keeping the nation economically sound, a task which France and the other rivals failed to accomplish. It's an argument I quite agree with, just as I agree with Wade Boggs in the famous Simpsons barroom brawl.

Among the names that tickled my Scrabblish fancy is what the Spanish called the early settlement that became St Louis, Mo. To them it was "San Luis de Ylinoia". The last name is recognizably the same as Illinois, but the spelling amuses me.

Even more vowel-heavy is "Iriquoia", a name DeVoto uses for the land of the Iriquois. Somewhat less vowel-heavy is Abiquiu, an early outpost in New Mexico. Exceeding them all is the lady mentioned in this aside about Pierre Dorion, a French — possibly métis, but well assimilated even if not — trapper who served as interpreter on part of the Lewis and Clark expedition:

Not so famous, I think, though she does get a few hits in a Google search.

I think maybe the story of Ms Aïoe is featured in one of Francis Parkman's books. DeVoto is clearly heavily influenced by Parkman (though often in opposition), so I guess that would qualify her as "famous". Course of Empire lacks a proper bibliography, but in his footnotes section he provides a list of general sources for each chapter. For six of the twelve chapters, the first word in that list is "Parkman". No title, no page reference, just "Parkman".

Parkman provides my excuse to get back to the theme that I started with. (And in case you don't recognize it, the second quote in the passage below is another of DeVoto's unlabeled allusions; he's paraphrasing Lincoln's Gettysburg address.)

2:39:03 AM  [permalink]  comment []