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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Rhode Island
Charles Fenno Hoffman, traveling eastward in the early 1830s after having spent a winter across the Appalachian Mountains in the West, was pleased to find "indications of a populous and long-settled country" near Charlottesville, Virginia (310). He notes the presence of "gay equestrians," "a gang of dandy-looking blackees," and "a score of mountain lasses, with scarlet saddle-clothes" (309). The settled nature of the region is evidenced not only by the number of men and women he encounters while traveling but also by fashionable clothing and tack. Even the occasional "solitary horseman" cuts a dashing figure in a "broad-brimmed white beaver" (309). Amidst these people, Hoffman recounts, "I met with one group that seemed singularly placed in scenes so cultivated" (309-10):
Beneath the boughs of a mossy oak, that stood in a verdant swale by the road-side, reclined an Indian female with an infant at her bosom; while a long-haired Tennessean in a hunting-shirt, who proved to be her husband, was engaged in broiling some fish over a fire a few yards off. A halfblooded wolf-dog lay at the feet of the woman, with a young boy curled up asleep between the outstretched legs of the savage-looking animal; his chubby cheek reposing upon its grizzled crest. Near them grazed a couple of shaggy Indian ponies, whose wooden saddles and tattered blankets of blue and scarlet were thrown carelessly on the green turf around the gnarled roots of the tree which formed the foreground of the picture. (310-11)
The disjuncture between the groups of people Hoffman encounters on the road and this family is jarring. The family is opposed in activity, trappings, and social composition with the settled people of the region. The lethargy of the mother, older child, and dog contrasts with the activity implied by Hoffman's description of scores of mountain girls and gangs of black men. The man and horses are unkempt, clothing and tack primitive. Unlike the homogeneous gangs and scores of people traveling on the road, the bivouacked family strikes a discordant note in their social composition. The interracial union between an Indian woman and white man is so striking in this settled setting that the white man has to be "proved to be her husband." Even their dog, a "half-blooded wolf-dog," references misogyny.
The description of this "Western" family in "scenes so cultivated" reveals more than the degree of Hoffman's pleasure in his return to Eastern civilization, more than the curious nature of their very presence. Their discordant physicality, problematic familial connections, and disregard for the conventions of fashion in person and horse, purposeful or otherwise, suggest an uneven quality to the material and social realities of national economic and cultural progress supposedly ensconced in the "long-settled" country east of the Appalachian Mountains in the early nineteenth century. Unlike the other groups Hoffman describes, which appear to be on pleasure jaunts decked out in their finest, this family is literally on the move, pursuing a path of more purpose than pleasure. Their presence challenges Hoffman's, and his readers', view of the East as a long-settled region and symbolically complicates larger national narratives of progress. While a long-haired Tennessean in a hunting shirt accompanied by an Indian wife, their children, and a half-wolf pet could, in the national narrative of the 1830s, understandably inhabit the edge of the receding western frontier, such a domestic scene in the East calls into question the assumption of an orderly, westerly advance of economic and cultural progress, an ordering system operative well before Hoffman's time. (1) In an untimely, and unsightly way, the family's cultural makeup, clothing, tack, and animals reference Western-style exploration and adventure in an Eastern area that should be firmly and pleasantly past the exploration/adventure stage. The man's long hair and hunting shirt, Indian wife, half-wolf pet, and shaggy Indian horses physically represent the "savage" nature of this out-of-place group, a group that mixes cultural and animal categories, visually announcing its distance from the East through its Western (frontier) accoutrements. Hoffman and his readers find in the East the very people, animals, and circumstances synonymous with the West, an anachronism that comments on the slippery nature of defining the East, the West, and the frontier.
The appearance of a stereotypically frontier family beside an Eastern road could be simply a curiosity, an anomaly--a true "Western" family traveling for their own peculiar reasons against the tide of national progress. But Hoffman's characterization of the man as a Tennessean further complicates the boundaries between East and West this family crosses by tying the man's frontier attributes (his long hair and hunting shirt) to a Southern state. The description repositions the family away from associations with the Western spirit of exploration and adventure (a spirit referenced by their miscegeny, racially impure offspring, dangerous animals, familiarity with and incorporation of the "Indian," and rude accoutrements) and toward an association with the backwoods, particularly a Southern manifestation of the backwoods. And the idea of the Southern backwoods in the early nineteenth century--especially the Southern Mountain backwoods, I will argue elides the nobility of Western exploration and adventure, privileging the "backwards" for purposes of counter-definition in a nation concerned with cultural, social, and economic progress.
This essay explores the tensions and accommodations arising in the first half of the nineteenth century when travelers attempt to reconcile experiences of an economically varied, socially complex Mountain South in the East with the notions of national advancement embodied in the myth of the march of westward progress. Attunement to the dynamics between East, West, and (Mountain) South as regional participants in the construction of a narrative of national progress offers the opportunity to examine elements of such affiliated identities as "frontier" and "backwoods," which both rely on an oppositional cultural, social, and economic normative "(North)Eastern" identity. Travelers in the Mountain South encountered conditions that, when present in the West, aligned with expectations of frontier adventure and exploration. In the East, however, those affiliated conditions necessarily became markers of backwardness, coded as the backwoods and corralled in the Mountain South, to help maintain the national fantasy of transformative, westward-oriented progress.
The myth of the "march of westward progress" was predicated on a Eurocolonial cultural construct of a continent sparsely inhabited by savages living in a howling wilderness--both divinely destined, according to this world view, to be tamed by European (and eventually United States) superiors. "Progress" was supposed to sweep westward across the North American continent, leaving behind a settled white populace and a transformed landscape. However, the first half of the nineteenth century saw citizens attempt to reconcile the existence of eastern "backwoods" spaces with these ideals of westward progress. As the United States explored and moved into the trans-Mississippi West, national concerns with economic, cultural, and artistic progress reoriented from comparisons with the Old World-an identity relationship which in many ways had dominated the fledgling republic-to a growing focus on comparisons between sections of the young nation. (2) Measuring progress was not simply a pastime for the traveler out and about in the expanding nation, but a serious commentary on the past, present, and future of the United States.
This imagined system of progressive ordering operated as symbolic evidence for national destiny. The...
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