There was more to it than romantic wanderlust. Now that he was back in the United States, Irving was determined to write an American work, a defiant answer to those critics who complained that he had squandered his talents on English and Spanish themes. His series of bitter American essays had been cast by his own hand into a Spanish fireplace. Since that purging, his journals had remained free of any notes on American themes. As always, he needed inspiration to write—and the best place to find such inspiration, he decided, was out on the prairies with Ellsworth.
Five days later Ellsworth and Irving arrived at Cincinnati, in company with Latrobe and Pourtales, who had abandoned their plans to travel to Canada in favor of the American plains. Irving's reputation had preceded him in Cincinnati; while he was attending a performance at the Columbus Street Theater on his first evening in town, the theater manager stepped onstage during the intermission and announced excitedly that Washington Irving was in the house! “You may conceive how I felt on finding all eyes thus suddenly turned upon me,” an embarrassed Irving reported to his sister. “I have… induced my companions to hasten our departure, that I may escape from all further importunities of the kind.”21
They were off the next morning, chugging down the Ohio River in a steamboat. For ten days Irving coursed toward St. Louis, scanning the shore for the ragged huts occupied by slaves who worked the nearby Kentucky plantations. He was never an outspoken abolitionist—such a hot topic inevitably led to the kinds of arguments in which he was loath to engage—yet his natural tendency was to side with the oppressed. One afternoon, as he and Ellsworth gathered firewood during a stop in Wabash, Irving struck up a conversation with a slave woman, and asked her about her children. “As the tears started in her eyes,” Irving recorded in his journal, “she got up [and] crossed the hut—‘I am not allowed to live with them—they are up at the plantation.’”22 Such wrenching true stories turned his stomach, yet Washington Irving was no James Fenimore Cooper; he never risked his reputation espousing controversial political views. His opinions remained his own.
The group arrived in St. Louis in mid-September. The town was a small but lively trading post, with a population of only 6,600. While it had only been chartered for ten years, its residents had been remarkably industrious and Irving was impressed, both with its people and its productivity. “St. Louis promises to become a very important place,” he predicted.23
While there, Irving wasted no time calling upon a gentleman who was nearly as famous as he: William Clark—“The Governor,” locals still called him—who had explored the American West with Meriwether Lewis in 1803. Still active at sixty-two, with gray-red hair down to his shoulders, Clark looked every inch his rugged reputation. Irving found him good company, and as the two dined on fried chicken and bison, Clark entertained Irving with stories about Indians and life on the frontier.
As superintendent of Indian affairs—a title he held until he died in 1838—Clark had been involved in the recent settlement of the Black Hawk War. A war in name only, it had been an uprising, led by the Sauk chief Black Hawk, of five hundred Indians and their families in protest of treaty violations. The protesters had been beaten back, then slaughtered, by an army of 3,000 militia. Black Hawk surrendered to the authorities on August 27, just two weeks prior. Clark had helped negotiate the new treaty with Black Hawk and his supporters, and the chief was now held prisoner in the nearby Jefferson Barracks.
Awestruck, Irving was determined to visit this noble captive chief. What he saw was disappointing. Black Hawk, Irving reported to his sister in incredulous tones, “is an old man upwards of Seventy: emaciated & enfeebled by the sufferings he has experienced and by a touch of cholera.” He had a hard time believing this was the man who had committed the atrocities attributed to him in the newspapers. “I find it extremely difficult, even when so near the seat of action, to get at the right story of these feuds between the White & the red man,” Irving said, “and my sympathies go strongly with the latter.”24
On September 15 the group set out from St. Louis on horseback, heading west for Independence, Missouri, on the state's western border. Once again, Irving's fame sped ahead of him. When they arrived in Columbia several days later, the local paper was already promoting his tour, declaring that Irving was out to “acquire a valuable fund of materials in his progress, for interesting works or Sketches, which, ere long, we may have the gratification of perusing.” It was a journalistic hunch, but it was a good one; Irving was writing again, scribbling in his journals early in the morning or just before going to bed.
Irving loved riding on horseback; his health had never been better, and he was delighted with what he had seen of the West so far. “The Magnificence of these western forests is quite beyond my anticipations,” he reported happily to Catharine. It was mostly open prairie, but he wasn't bothered a bit; he thought sleeping in a tent under the stars was “a very sweet and healthy kind of repose.” The sophisticate who had slept in Byron's bed at Newstead Abbey and in the governor's apartments of the Alhambra was a Boy Scout at heart. “Camp—Fire—meat roasted on sticks—,” Irving wrote with excitement in his journal. “Savory—our salon of trees lighted up by fire—sky & stars in the centre… we sit on bearskins & the meat put on spits before us—cut it off with knife & eat—coffee… Stretch a tent on cords. Spread our mats and sleep.”25
For ten days the party wound its way down the western Missouri border, “over wide monotonous prairies,” angling toward Fort Gibson in what is now eastern Oklahoma. Irving scouted for prairie hens, hunted wolves, and traded with the Osage Indians. As he sat in his tent in the evenings, he jotted down various stories he had gleaned from the wandering Indians. He was particularly fascinated by the burial customs of the Osage. “A chief lately deceased was buried sitting up under a mound,” he recorded one evening. Another night, he wrote of a little girl buried with her toys and pet horse—just the sort of weepy tale that resonated with Geoffrey Crayon.26
Arriving at Fort Gibson on October 8, Ellsworth learned to his annoyance that the other members of his commission hadn't arrived. Having made it this far, he was determined to continue to survey, mark the land, and resolve any disputes with the Indians. There were bound to be problems with the surrounding tribes—apart from resentment, the forced relocation was also going to shove relatively peaceful, agrarian tribes up against more warlike hunting groups, causing conflict—so Ellsworth needed an armed escort.
Fortunately, a group of more than a hundred rangers, under the command of Captain Jesse Bean, had left the fort only two days earlier, in search of Pawnees with whom they hoped to discuss a possible treaty. Ellsworth was determined to catch them, and dispatched a small group of Creek Indians to ride ahead to inform Bean's men that they were on their way. Deputizing Irving as his secretary for the tour—for which Irving received a saddle, bridle, blanket, bearskin, and India mat, but no pay—Ellsworth and company left the fort in early October, following the Arkansas River northwest toward present-day Tulsa.
Irving, Ellsworth, Latrobe, and Pourtales had been traveling together now for more than two months. While tempers flared from time to time, for the most part there was good chemistry among the group. Irving was genuinely fond of the Yale-educated Ellsworth, calling him “a very gentlemanly and amiable person.”27 A former president of the Aetna Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut, the thirty-nine-year-old Ellsworth still looked more insurance agent than frontiersman; yet Irving found him a rugged enough traveler—Ellsworth could jerk venison and brew prairie tea from goldenrod—and an excellent companion.
He was intrigued by Latrobe, whom he regarded as a kindred spirit. Irving described the gentleman, the nephew of the architect Charles Latrobe, as “a citizen of the world, easily adapting himself to any change.” A sometime botanist, geologist, musician, and butterfly collector, Latrobe was “a man of a thousand occupations.” While living in Switzerland in the mid-1820s, he had met the Pour-tales family, and had been appointed guardian to the young count
for his trip abroad. While Irving thought Latrobe and Pourtales were “most agreeable traveling companions,” he sometimes found the latter exhausting. Twenty-one-year-old Pourtales was more interested in pursuing young Indian women than he was in hunting prairie hens, and Ellsworth sighed somewhat derisively that he was certain the young count's parents had sent him to America “to sow his wild oats in a foreign country… [which] I am sure will be done, unless his wild store is beyond measurement.”28
Their group—“the Irving party,” they were called, to Ellsworth's irritation—finally caught up with Captain Bean's rangers on the morning of October 13. Later that day, Irving participated in his first “bee hunt,” learning how to smoke honeybees from a tree, and then extract the honeycomb and its stores of sweet honey. These rangers reminded Irving of Robin Hood's merry men, and he jotted down their casual, playful talk in his journals, rising each morning to the sound of their bugles, and dining each evening on the venison and turkey that fell before the sharpshooters. It was a “delightful mode of life,” he wrote in his notebook happily: “Exercise on horseback all the fore part of the day diversified by hunting incidents—then about 3 oclock encamping in some beautiful place & with full appetite for repose, lying on the grass under green trees in genial weather with a blue cloudless sky—Then so sweet sleeping at night in the open air & when awake seeing the moon & stars through the tree tops—Such zest for the hardy, simple but savory meals the product of the chase.”29
Approaching Stillwater, they turned south into the territory of the Pawnees, “the terror of that frontier,” Irving wrote with a shudder. His fear soon gave way to excited anticipation. This was buffalo country, Irving noted, and “the expectation of falling in with buffalo in the course of the day roused every one's spirits.”30
In late October, as the troop curved just east of present-day Norman, Oklahoma, Irving and Pourtales spied two buffalos in a tree-lined ravine. Sneaking up on horseback, Pourtales fired a double-barreled shotgun and missed, sending the animals off in different directions. Irving and the count separated, each in hot pursuit of a buffalo. Armed with two brass-barreled pistols, Irving rode at a full gallop alongside the terrified animal, fired twice… and missed both shots. His prey scrambled down a ravine and out of sight. Dejected, Irving circled back toward Pourtales—and stumbled upon an entire herd. This time, Irving didn't miss; “a fortunate shot brought it down on the spot,” he reported modestly, and the bull fell in a heap at his feet, mortally wounded.
Dismounting, Irving stood beside the enormous beast, preparing to dispatch it with a final bullet… and suddenly regretted ever shooting it in the first place.
Now that the excitement was over, I could not but look with commiseration upon the poor animal that lay struggling and bleeding at my feet. His very size and importance, which had before inspired me with eagerness, now increased my compunction. It seemed as if I had inflicted pain in proportion to the bulk of my victim, and as if there were a hundred fold greater waste of life than there would have been in the destruction of an animal of inferior size…. To inflict a wound thus in cool blood, I found a totally different thing from firing in the heat of the chase.31
Grimly, he shot the animal behind its shoulder. An impressed ranger caught up with Irving, and helped him carve out the buffalo's tongue as a trophy. Irving accepted the prize, but he was through being a sportsman. “I am determined,” he told Peter later, “to rest my renown as a hunter, upon that exploit, and never to descend to smaller game.”32
By the beginning of November, thunderstorms hampered the party's progress. Supplies were running low—Irving complained that he had to drink his coffee without sugar—and wet wood made it impossible to start campfires. As they crossed the marshy, thorny Cross Timbers region, Irving's horse went lame. He had developed a rash, and grumbled about eating skunk. It was also getting colder; he recorded in his journal that the cup of water he left by his bed had frozen overnight.33
The company finally slogged its way out of the muddy plains and back into Fort Gibson on the morning of November 9. Irving had had enough of life as a frontiersman; his journals were crammed with more than enough notes for a book, and he wanted to return to New York to begin writing. Two days later, he bid his fellow travelers good-bye, and without a backward glance climbed aboard the steamboat Little Rock. As he floated upriver and eyed the elegant plantation houses that dotted either side of the Mississippi River, he made up his mind to purchase the Van Tassell property near Tarrytown. “I am more & more in the notion of having that little cottage below [Oscar Irving's] house,” he wrote Catharine, “and wish to tell him to endeavor to get it for me.”34
When he passed through South Carolina that winter, Irving stopped to spend a day with his old friend William Campbell Preston, whom he hadn't seen since their trip to Scotland in 1817. Since leaving Edinburgh in 1819, Preston had established a successful law practice, and in 1828, at age thirty-four, had been elected to the South Carolina State Legislature, where he was one of the state's most active and outspoken defenders of slavery. A charismatic speaker, Preston and South Carolina governor James Hamilton were presently campaigning for the rights of states to nullify objectionable federal laws. It was one of the first major rifts between the states and the federal government, a stutter step toward the outbreak of the Civil War thirty years later.
The trouble had actually started in 1828, with the passage of a protective federal tariff—the “Tariff of Abominations,” South Carolinians called it—that promoted northern trade at the expense of southern markets. President Jackson, inheriting the problem from John Quincy Adams, attempted a modified tariff, but the South still smarted from a policy they considered pro-northern. Vice President John Calhoun, himself a South Carolinian, had proclaimed that states had every right to declare federal laws inoperative within their boundaries when such laws violated their interests or sovereignty.35 Following Calhoun's lead, Hamilton and Preston issued an Ordinance of Nullification, declaring the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void in South Carolina.
Listening to Preston and Hamilton congratulate each other over dinner on the passage of their defiant ordinance, Irving understood that there was something inherently dangerous in South Carolina's position. “It is really lamentable to see so fine a set of gallant fellows, as the leading Nullifiers are, so sadly in the wrong,” he told Peter. “I grieve to see so many elements of national prejudice, hostility, and selfishness, stirring and fermenting, with activity and acrimony.” As Irving bid Preston and the governor good-bye, Hamilton shook his hand warmly and invited Irving to visit again. “Oh yes!” came Irving's tightlipped reply. “I'll come with the first troops.”36
On December 10, Jackson issued a proclamation declaring nullification laws “incompatible with the existence of the Union… and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” South Carolina, he warned, was on the brink of treason.37 Jackson had drawn the line in the sand. The Nullification Crisis was under way.
When Irving arrived in Washington, D.C., in December, he sensed that something exciting, and important, was happening. “Washington is an interesting place to see public characters,” he told Peter, “and this is an interesting crisis.” His plans to remain in the nation's capital for “but a few days” stretched into three months.38
Thanks to his friendships with McLane and Van Buren—who had just been elected vice president of the United States (“Did I not prognosticate how it would be?” Irving ragged Van Buren)—Irving had an insider's view of the debate, lingering over long dinners each evening at the McLanes’ to catch up on the latest gossip from the president's Cabinet. He was spending so much time at the McLanes’ that a rumor made its way around the city that he was planning to marry McLane's daughter Rebecca—a charge Irving found hilarious. “I had thought that such an ancient gentleman as myself might play the part of uncle to a young belle, without being suspected of being her beau,” an amused Irving told fellow bachelor Gouverneur Kemble. “Some men cannot look o
ver a hedge without being charged with an intention to steal a horse.”39
As Calhoun and Daniel Webster thundered at each other on the floor of the U.S. Senate, President Jackson huddled privately behind the scenes with McLane and House Ways and Means chairman Gulian Verplanck—another old New York friend of Irving's—on a reduced tariff bill. At the same time, the president forwarded his “Force Bill” to the Congress (the War Bill, nullifiers said derisively), warning South Carolina that it was the duty of the chief executive to enforce the laws of the nation—by force, if need be. As Jackson swaggered, critics in Congress howled, and Irving spent weeks seated in the gallery of the Capitol watching the “outbreaking,” as he called it.
While Irving found plenty of time to watch the debates at the Capitol, visit with President Jackson, or dine with McLane or Van Buren, there was one thing that wasn't getting done. “I have been trying since my arrival in Washington, to resume my pen, and get into a career of literary occupation,” he told Catharine, “but find it almost in vain. My mind is too discomposed and my attention distracted by too many objects & concerns, and I fear it will be Some time before I again get into those moods and employments most congenial to my taste—.”40
By late February, Calhoun and Webster were regularly packing the Senate galleries as they brought debate on the Force Bill to a close. At 10:00 P.M. on February 20, the Senate moved to a final vote. Angry nullifiers stalked out in protest, allowing the bill to sail through the Senate by a vote of 32 to 1. This was the kind of political drama Irving relished. While politicking and campaigning were still repugnant to him, he was fascinated by the debates and horse trading that went with the legislative process. “I think my close attendance on the legislative halls,” he told Peter later, “has given me an acquaintance with the nature and operation of our institutions, and the character and concerns of the various parts of the Union, that I could not have learned from books for years.”41
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