1831

by Louis P. Masur

  “We have no word to render the idea that the English express by the word wilderness,” Beaumont informed his sister. “Here the natural state of the earth is to be covered with woods; that’s the state of wild nature, and this untamed wilderness, as sovereign, still dominates the regions into which civilization has only penetrated in the last forty or fifty years.” “The entire country is still nothing but one vast forest,” proclaimed Tocqueville. But, to conquer the wilderness, Americans assaulted the woods with “all the energy of civilized man.” “With us,” remarked Beaumont, “one cuts wood to use it; here it’s but to destroy it. Prodigious efforts are made to annihilate it.” Tocqueville agreed: “What one calls clearing the land here is cutting a tree at three feet from the ground. The operation completed, they work the ground and sow it. It results that in the midst of the finest harvests one perceives by hundreds the dead trunks of the trees which formerly beautified the land.” “There is therefore in America a general feeling of hatred against trees,” concluded Beaumont.

  The assault upon the wilderness meant for Tocqueville that, “by a strange inversion of the ordinary order of things, it is nature that changes, while man is unchanging.” He was thinking about the ongoing transformation of the land and the structure of American character: “The same man may give his name to wilds that none has traversed before him; he has been able to fell the first tree in the forest, and build in the midst of solitude a planter’s house round which first a hamlet was formed, and which is now surrounded by a huge city. In the short space between birth and death he has seen all these changes, and a thousand others like him have been able to do so. In his youth he has lived among tribes who now live only in history; during his life rivers have changed or diminished their course, the climate is different from what it was before, and all that is still in his imagination only a first step in an endless career.”

  Nature succumbed over and over to the unchanging American characterized, above all else, by an obsessive desire for change: “Often born under another sky, placed in the middle of an ever moving picture, driven himself by the irresistible torrent that carries all around him along, the American has no time to attach himself to anything, he is only accustomed to change and ends by looking on it as the natural state of man. Much more, he feels the need of it, he loves it, for instability instead of causing disasters for him, seems only to bring forth wonders around him.”

  This American love of instability, leading deeper and deeper into the forests, had brought extinction to the Indians. Beaumont felt he could not express the “emotion we experience in traversing this half-wild, half-civilized country, in which fifty years ago were to be found numerous and powerful nations who have disappeared from the earth, or who have been pushed back into still more distant forests; a country where are to be seen, rising with prodigious rapidity, new peoples and brilliant cities which pitilessly take the place of the unhappy Indians too feeble to resist them.” On July 4, in Albany, Tocqueville reflected, “The European is to the other races of man what man in general is to the rest of animate nature. When he cannot bend them to his use or make them indirectly serve his well-being, he destroys them and makes them vanish little by little in front of him. The Indian races are melting in the presence of European civilization like snow in the rays of the sun.”25

  Tocqueville and Beaumont were eager to experience “nature vigorous and savage,” to probe the “dark forest.” On July 8, they traveled northeast from Fort Brewerton in New York and, a mile and a half from their host’s home, found a path that opened into the forest. Soon the travelers found themselves “in the middle of one of those deep forests of the New World whose sombre savage majesty strikes the imagination and fills the soul with a sort of religious terror.” They marveled at the trees, generations of which succeeded one another through “uninterrupted centuries.” They contemplated the way “a thousand different plants,” covered and cornered by the “immobile corpses” of dead trunks, “press in their turn towards the light.” Sometimes, Tocqueville and Beaumont happened to come upon an immense tree that the wind had torn up by the roots. But because the forest floor was so crowded, its branches remained balanced in the air, like pitchforks perched upon haystacks. They walked for hours, hearing nothing more than the sounds of rustling leaves and snapping branches beneath their horses’ hooves. The companions remained silent, their “souls filled with the grandeur and the novelty of the sight.”26

  The forest walk only whetted their appetites. On July 19, Tocqueville and Beaumont left Buffalo on a two-week journey that carried them to Detroit, Pontiac, and Saginaw, a journey in which they experienced the “joy of advancing at last into the wilds.” On the first day, the travelers had their initial encounter with Indians, and the experience left them deeply disturbed and disappointed. Tocqueville expected the Indians of romantic literature, “savages on whose face nature had stamped the marks of the proud virtues which liberty brings forth.” But instead he encountered what he viewed as small, thin, dark people with deformed mouths and ignoble faces. Their manner of dress repulsed him. The Indians wore European clothes, but not as civilized people should: “Some dressed themselves in blankets; the women with breeches and hats; the men in women’s clothes.” Tocqueville described their movements as “quick and jerky, their voices shrill and discordant, their glances restless and savage.” It was easy at first glance, he confessed, to “mistake each of them for some wild beast of the forest.”27

  Near Oneida Castle, an Indian village, Tocqueville and Beaumont came across a group of Indians. One young man lay motionless by the side of the road, groaning in despair. Tocqueville watched as, now and again, Indians passed by, rolled the body over, felt for a heartbeat, and then moved on. A young Indian woman approached the debilitated man. He thought it was perhaps a wife or sister, and he expected that at last help had arrived. “All my life I shall remember” what happened next, Tocqueville wrote: “She looked at him attentively, called his name aloud, felt his heart and being assured that he was alive, tried to shake him out of his lethargy. But seeing that her efforts were useless, she burst out in fury against the inanimate body lying in front of her; she struck his head against the ground, twisted his face in her hands, and kicked him with her feet. As she gave herself over to these acts of ferocity, she uttered inarticulate and savage cries which I think I can still hear echoing in my ears.”

  On their return to town, Tocqueville and Beaumont told several people about the Indian. They even offered to pay the costs of an inn for the fallen man. But townsfolk told them not to bother, that the Indian was drunk and sleeping it off in the middle of the road. Others seemed to realize that in all likelihood this man would die if left unattended, but Tocqueville thought he could read on their lips the thought, “What is the life of an Indian?” The general feeling of indifference led him to issue a stinging indictment: “In the midst of this American society, so well policed, so sententious, so charitable, a cold selfishness and complete insensibility prevails when it is a question of the natives of the country … . This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death.”

  The travelers continued on their way. By the end of their “fortnight in the wilds,” they came to realize that it would be a mistake to judge all Indians by what they observed in Buffalo. They arrived in Detroit and soon thereafter left for Pontiac. They wanted to reach Saginaw, “the last point inhabited by Europeans to the northwest, … an advanced station, a sort of observation post, which the whites have established in the midst of the Indian tribes.” Concerned about crossing Chippewa land, Tocqueville and Beaumont asked a trader who lived in a log house whe
ther they had anything to fear. “‘No, no,’ he said, ‘for my part I should sleep more soundly surrounded by Indians than by whites.’” The comment startled Tocqueville, who recorded that this was the first positive view of Indians he had heard since arriving in America. He would hear something similar days later from a European settler who proclaimed that he would “rather live among [Indians] than in the society of the whites.”

  But it was not only what others told them that changed their minds; their experience with several Chippewa compelled them to confront their fears and rethink, at least temporarily, their ideas about Indians as savages. On their way through the forest, they turned at one point to admire the view and spotted an Indian following them. He ran, said Tocqueville, without making more noise than a wolf. The man’s physical appearance was striking. “Large and wonderfully well proportioned,” he had shining black hair that fell to his shoulders, and his face was painted with black-and-red stripes. The Chippewa was armed with a knife and a carbine, and he carried two dead birds in his left hand. Fearing an attack, Tocqueville and Beaumont hurried forward, but the Indian followed: “We slow down. He slows down. We run. He runs without making the slightest noise.” At last, the travelers tried to speak to the “silent and mysterious being.” And then, eye to eye, neither displaying hostile feelings, the Indian smiled and Tocqeville’s vision of an entire race shifted. “An Indian in serious mood and an Indian smiling, are two entirely different beings,” he reflected. Talking through signs, the travelers gave the Indian some brandy and a coin; in return he gave them his birds, each one pierced by a single bullet.28

  With night falling, the travelers pressed on toward the Flint River. They briefly became separated, and Tocqueville shouted Beaumont’s name. But he heard nothing; only “the same silence of the dead reigned in the forest.” At last, the sound of barking dogs brought them together at a log house on the river, where they spent the night and secured two Indian guides, boys aged eighteen and fourteen, to lead them through the wilderness to Saginaw. Tocqueville felt powerless and knew his fate rested in their hands. What he had always thought of as the natural order, civilized Europeans on top of savage Indians, was now reversed. Describing himself, Tocqueville realized that, “plunged into deep darkness, reduced to his own resources the civilised man walked like the blind, incapable not only of being his own guide in the labyrinth that surrounded him, but even of finding the means to sustain life. It is in the heart of the same difficulties that the savage triumphs; for him the forest obscured nothing; he felt at home there; he walked with his head high, guided by an instinct more sure than the navigator’s compass.”

  But this new and unfamiliar role of follower to leader would again be reversed in a way that further humanized for Tocqueville the life of the Indian. After hours of strenuous running, trying to outdistance the setting rays of the sun because Tocqueville refused to heed the guide’s advice to stop but bribed him with a wicker-covered bottle to continue, the Indian leader, Sagan Cuisco, “was suddenly seized with a violent nosebleed.” Fearful that the Indians would lead no longer, Tocqueville and Beaumont dismounted and allowed the guides to ride horseback. And so, through the darkening forest, two “half-naked men solemnly seated on an English saddle” rode while the Europeans in traveling clothes and boots “laboured along on foot in front of them.” Darkness came, and “nothing but the occasional flight of a firefly through the woods traced a thread of light in their depths.” “Too late we realized how right the Indian’s advice had been,” conceded the European.

  Tocqueville’s experiences with the Chippewa in the forests of the Northwest did not stop him from describing Indians as savages and barbarians; those were the only words he had as antonyms for civilization and refinement. But he came to recognize the error of imagining that the Indian envied the European’s lot. Instead, for a moment at least, he envied them. “Sleeping in his cloak in the smoke of his hut,” observed Tocqueville, “the Indian looks with mistrust at the European’s comfortable house; he for his part prides himself on his poverty, and his heart swells and rejoices at the thought of his barbarian independence. He smiles bitterly as he sees us plagueing our lives to get useless wealth. What we call industry, he calls shameful subjection. He compares the workman to an ox laboriously tracing out a furrow. What we call the comforts of life, he calls children’s playthings or women’s affectations. He envies us nothing but our weapons. When a man can find cover at night in a tent of leaves, when he can find enough to light a fire to keep off the mosquitoes in summer and cold in winter, when his dogs are good and the country full of game, what more can he ask from the eternal being?”29

  Tocqueville and Beaumont returned to Detroit and, on August 1, boarded the steamboat Superior for a journey to Green Bay. Tocqueville left the forest knowing that, in time, the Indian way of life was doomed by ever-advancing settlements, and that nature itself would succumb to the conquering forces of American expansion west. He thought that at Saginaw he had reached the ultimate point of the westward push, but even as he turned eastward, the American Society for the Encouraging of the Settlement of the Oregon Country advertised for emigrants willing to journey to a place “where the fertility of soil, the healthfulness of climate, the good market for every product of earth or of labor, and the enjoyment of free and liberal government, will conspire to make life easy and the settlers happy.”30

  Tocqueville’s journey into the wilderness had proved all his expectations mistaken. He had imagined that the farther away from civilization one traveled, the more backward society became, “a vast chain descending ring by ring” from the patrician in the town to the savage in the wilds. But he discovered that “nothing is true in this picture.” Instead, he found an ever-extending circle, not a spiraling chain. Everyone everywhere was the same. “In America,” Tocqueville observed, “there is one society only … made up everywhere of the same elements … . The man you left behind in the streets of New York, you will find again in the midst of almost impenetrable solitude: same dress, same spirits, same language, same habits and the same pleasures.” The country consisted of a “nation of conquerors … which shuts itself up in the solitudes of America with an axe and a newspaper, … a restless, calculating, adventurous race which sets coldly about deeds that can only be explained by the fire of passion, and which trades in everything, not excluding even morality and religion.”

  Not only were Tocqueville’s ideas about society mistaken, his vision of nature was as well. In Europe no forest excluded the sounds of civilization, but in the wilds of America silence reigned, “a stillness so complete that the soul is invaded by a kind of religious terror.” In Europe nature seemed tamed and curtailed, but nature in America brought together the forces of life and death in a “competition” and a “struggle” that placed “the elements perpetually at war.” Tocqueville’s brief references to struggle and survival, competition and creation, suggest the words of another traveler who, across the Atlantic, was preparing for a voyage that would forever change the way humans thought about natural history: on December 27, Charles Darwin set sail on the Beagle.

  On his last night in Saginaw, Tocqueville heard rumblings from the east. Unable to sleep, he left his hut and felt the wind rustling the trees. The forest floor began to shake as lightning illuminated the sky. He heard “deep groans and lingering wails,” the “fearsome voice of the wilds.” The storm broke at midnight, and he stood in the rain surrounded by the “endless echo” of a “burst of thunder … in the solitudes” of the forest. Planted in the deep virgin woods, Tocqueville felt the future. “The facts are as certain as if they had already occurred,” he wrote. “In but few years these impenetrable forests will have fallen.” Americans, he observed, were incapable of appreciating “great trees and the beauties of solitude.” Rather, they scrambled to “break through almost impenetrable forests, to cross deep rivers, to brave pestilential marshes, to sleep out in the damp woods … if it is a question of earning a guinea.” “We are perhaps the last travele
rs who will have been allowed to see it in its primitive splendour,” reflected Tocqueville, “so great is the force that drives the white race to the complete conquest of the New World.”31

  Though he could not see it, Tocqueville himself was part of that force. As he traipsed across America, his rifle was never far from his side. Indians often expressed admiration for his weapon, which “could kill two men in one second and be fired in the fog.” Tocqueville explained through his guide that the gun had been made “on the other side of the great water.” He once gave a demonstration for an Indian chief, and then asked for one of his feathers, a sign that the leader had killed a Sioux. “I will carry it to the land of the great warriors,” boasted Tocqueville.

  The two Frenchmen took special joy in hunting birds and found frequent opportunities to use their weapons. Once, out of boredom, Tocqueville killed “red, blue, yellow birds, not to forget the most brilliant parrots” he had ever seen. Several Chickasaw Indians accompanied him that day outside of Memphis, and though the act “hardly raised us in the esteem of our allies,” Tocqueville confessed that it “had the merit of amusing us thoroughly.” There were many moments in Tocqueville’s journey that he would never forget, and this was one of them. More than two decades later, he referred to Beaumont as the companion with whom he had hunted the parrots at Memphis. At the time, Beaumont viewed matters a bit differently. His friend, he thought, “was carrying on a war to the death against the American birds.”32

  JOHN JAMES AUDUBON AND CHOLERA

  For Tocqueville and Beaumont, the birds of North America offered a colorful sidelight to their journey. But another traveler, who set sail from England in August with gun and sketchbook in hand, made the birds his only focus. He would kill them not only for sport, but also in the interests of nature and art. John James Audubon arrived in New York on September 3 and journeyed south to Washington, Norfolk, Charleston, and the Florida Keys before heading north again, spending more than a year in Boston, and returning to England in 1834. He had come to draw the birds of the Southern states, to gather subscribers for Birds of America, and to promote Ornithological Biography, an extended work of prose that provided information about the birds in the drawings and which would ultimately expand to five volumes. Though born in Haiti in 1785, Audubon had lived in Kentucky between 1807 and 1811 and became an American citizen. It was in England, however, that he found support for his work; the artist lived in Great Britain even though it meant making repeated crossings to study the birds.