The American historian Bernard DeVoto died in 1955 at the age of fifty-eight, and in the years since he died, the academic study of history has become entirely the province of those whom the critic Harold Bloom once labeled “the resentniks.” The topics of multicultural grievance that purchase tenure for assistant history professors these days, the citationless assertions that pass for historical scholarship, the inversion of heroism into the great sin of history, the awful modern academic writing: DeVoto would have recognized very little of it — especially the writing.
Bernard DeVoto was, in fact, among the last of a long line of American historians — figures like Francis Parkman, Hubert Bancroft, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Edmund Wilson — who sought to express the best scholarship of their day in well-written books for a popular audience.
These were the writers who wanted, more than anything else, to educate America in the vigor of a distinctly American history, the strength of a distinctly American prose, and the spirit of a distinctly American character.
And the passing of their historical vision — their attempt to define for its people a vigorous, strong, and spirited nation — has meant, in the years since, the gradual diseducation of America. We are so badly misinformed and uninformed about our history these days, the only mercy is that DeVoto didn’t live to see it.
Of course, DeVoto had advantages more recent historians lack. The recent reissuing of two of his classics, Across the Wide Missouri from 1947 and The Course of Empire from 1952, in a handsome new set reminds us that the national literacy of the pre-television era demanded lucid prose and a good story. It’s hard to imagine a Pulitzer Prize in history being awarded nowadays to a learned look at the early-nineteenth-century fur trade that portrayed the Indians as occasionally proudly noble and occasionally murderously larcenous. But it’s equally hard to imagine the prize being awarded to a book that reads the way DeVoto’s books read. He always wanted to tell a story, and insofar as historians remember him at all, DeVoto is now viewed as a quaint figure untouched by modern historical professionalism, a popularizer known for corny turns of phrase and a dated propensity for admiring the heroic.
Born in Ogden, Utah, in 1897, Bernard Augustine DeVoto was the only child of Florian and Rose DeVoto, a weakly Catholic father and a devoutly Mormon mother whose theological squabbles left the boy a confirmed agnostic from a young age. Bright and bookish (he was reading Shakespeare at ten), DeVoto borrowed money from his parents and fled east, enrolling at Harvard in 1915. World War I goaded him into joining Harvard’s ROTC regiment, but he never got closer to France than an army camp in Virginia, and he returned to receive a B.A. in English in 1920.
DeVoto’s western roots — particularly his love of hiking and camping in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains — were a strong influence in his mature work, but initially he yearned to be a novelist, and this false flame burned through his entire life. Beginning with The Crooked Mile in 1923, he published six novels under his own name (and four that sold better under the pseudonym John August), all competent, bland, and forgettable. If DeVoto accomplished anything with his fiction, it was only that when he came to write his great histories late in life his narrative style was fully developed.
In the mid-1940s, for instance, he was working simultaneously on both his last novel, Mountain Time, and his monumental history of the West, Across the Wide Missouri. His book of history reveals the narrative sweep and vivid rendering of a first-rate novel, and his novel reveals the relentless cataloguing and extraneous detail of a second-rate historical study. DeVoto was such a great historical writer in part because he was such a mediocre novelist.
He spent much of his life teaching, and the irony is that this man so in love with the West as a subject mostly knew it as an adult from books and the occasional summer trip. From 1922 to 1927, he taught at Northwestern University (where he married one of his students, the brainy Avis MacVicar), returning to teach at Harvard from 1929 until 1936. He was never happier than in his study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he loved Boston for its history, traditions, and cultural refinements.
In the late 1930s, he had a short tenure as editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, but detested New York and its backstabbing literary politics. He was a perennial instructor in the Breadloaf summer writing program from 1932 until 1949, where he cultivated a close friendship with Robert Frost that ended in 1938 with a celebrated literary feud. From 1935 until 1952, DeVoto wrote the monthly “Easy Chair” column in Harper’s magazine. These pieces — always prickly and opinionated and on a variety of subjects political and cultural — were often controversial, and many concerned the West that his greatest books took up in greater detail.
What makes those books unique is the particular literary device that DeVoto developed and perfected. The novelist Wallace Stegner, in The Uneasy Chair, the marvelous 1974 biography he wrote of his friend DeVoto, called the device “History as Synecdoche,” and it involved illuminating whole periods through intense concentration on one brief time and a few representative historical characters. DeVoto first used it in 1943 in The Year of Decision: 1846, in which he chronicled the moment that the Mexican War sputtered and spat, the Mormons were about to begin their long journey to the Great Salt Lake, the trapped Donner party stared at one another hungrily in the passes of the Sierra Nevadas, the vainglorious John C. Fremont pursued his pseudo-explorations — and somehow, from all these individual destinies, America’s general — and Manifest — destiny emerged.
But the crowning achievement of DeVoto’s device can be seen in his magisterial Across the Wide Missouri. This Pulitzer-Prize winner began life when DeVoto was hired by Houghton Mifflin to write twenty thousand words of scholarly captions for a book of reproductions of over a hundred watercolors owned by a Mrs. Clyde Porter of Missouri. The artist was the obscure Alfred Jacob Miller (1810-1874), the only painter known to have witnessed a “Mountain Man Rendezvous” — the annual gathering that was, in the early nineteenth century, the fur trade’s combination of WalMart and Mardi Gras.
DeVoto was hamstrung by misinformation and a dearth of primary sources. The American fur trade was conducted in a howling wilderness and many of its prominent protagonists — Jim Bridger and Kit Carson, for example — were illiterates. The bibliography in DeVoto’s finished work reveals that he read a lot on the edges of the trade, in the business accounts of the eastern firms that promoted the trade, in the handful of ethnographical surveys undertaken at the time, and in files of the missionary agencies. There were a few firsthand journals (Osborne Russell, Zenas Leonard), memoirs (George Ruxton, Warren Ferris, Charles Larpenteur), some breezy biographies, and one that’s a neglected American classic: Frances Fuller Victor’s 1871 The River of the West, a biography of Joe Meek, “the merry mountain man” and puckish Huck Finn of the period. And DeVoto relied heavily on Hiram Chittenden’s two volume The American Fur Trade of the Far West (1902), the definitive history that DeVoto said “was indispensable to understanding the fur trade.”
He did not set out to best Chittenden’s voluminous view, however. DeVoto’s own narrative doesn’t start until the trade is a generation old. Absent are Lewis and Clark’s tour, the savage adventures of John Colter and George Drouillard, the epic wanderings of Wilson Price Hunt’s Astorians and Jedediah Smith, and William Ashley’s opening of the interior in 1822. The first half dozen summer Rendezvous are not noted. Instead, DeVoto’s genius in this, his masterpiece, lay in chronicling the years 1832-39, the trade’s climax and slow decline, the epoch offered as the transition from the pristine to the settled West.
It was in these years that the fur trade became steadily more competitive, even murderous. The advantage in the beaver-rich, intermountain West was held by the men who’d helped William Ashley explore the interior in 1822: Jim Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Henry Fraeb, Baptiste Gervais, and all the others known collectively as the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. But four new concerns fought the established former-Ashley men: John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, the British Hudson’s Bay Company, and efforts by two noteworthy (and doomed-to-fail) entrepreneurs, Benjamin Bonneville and Nathaniel Wyeth. By the mid-1830s, nearly a thousand white men connected with the trade roamed the Rockies.
DeVoto is unabashedly biased in his admiration for the Ashley alumni — “Falstaff’s Battalion” as he calls them — those shock troops of Manifest Destiny who first came up the Missouri in 1822. At the 1833 Rendezvous on the Green River, Bridger was a ten-year veteran and only twenty-nine years old. The sinewy Irishman Fitzpatrick was thirty-four, as was william Sublette. Kit Carson (though not present in 1833 and not of the original forty Ashley men) had spend seven years trapping in the southern Rockies out of Santa Fe by the time he was twenty-four. After four years in the mountains, Joe Meek was twenty-three. They were vigorous, on-the-make, American types, and DeVoto thought of them in classical terms: Caesar and Alexander in buckskins, with himself as their Plutarch.
If there was, in fact, a classical ideal of the mountain man, these men were it. They were young, possessed of a nervy sense of grace under pressure, vast knowledge of the Indians, and supreme wilderness skills. They commanded brigades of fifty to a hundred trappers (not to mention Indian wives, children, and camp keepers) that moved with military precision through the remote defiles of the Rockies, trapping the streams, fighting regular skirmishes with hostile Indians, and guarding against the trade’s main occupational hazard, horse thieves. DeVoto entertained a theory that the fur brigades were superior to the native Indians, since they came from outside and mastered an environment they were not born to. In one of many devotional asides, he writes that:
Treatises could be written on the specific details. . . . Why do you follow the ridges in and out of unfamiliar country? What do you do for the companion who has collapsed for lack of water while crossing a desert? How do you get meat when you find yourself without gunpowder in a country barren of game? What tribe of Indians made this trail, how many were in the band, what errand were they on. . . . How many horses did they have and why, how many squaws accompanied them, what mood were they in? Buffalo are moving downwind, an elk is in an unlikely place or posture, too many magpies are hollering, a wolf’s howl is off key — what does it mean?
In a fascinating chapter entitled “Massacre: Sport and Business,” DeVoto writes that following the mountain men’s “Pierre’s Hole Rendezvous” in the summer of 1832, Bridger and Fitzpatrick led a large Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigade in what can only be described as an invasion of the previously sacrosanct Blackfeet country of western Montana. They were dogged by an American Fur Company brigade under Henry Vanderburgh and Andrew Drips, and despite passing through prime beaver country in the Blackfoot River region, not much trapping was accomplished.
Tiring of the running battles with their competitors, Bridger and Fitzpatrick manipulated the American Fur brigade into an ambush by the Blackfeet, resulting in a number of deaths, including that of Vanderburgh’s, John Jacob Astor’s most valuable partisan in the Rockies. This, after shared drinks and camaraderie at the Rendezvous. The fur trade was literally a cutthroat business.
Present at every Rendezvous from 1833 to 1837 was the eccentric Sir William Drummond Stewart, Scottish baronet, world traveler, and veteran of Waterloo, who came west from St. Louis every spring with the trade caravan. Being an ex-military man who was a crack shot and a good hunter, he easily earned the respect of the mountain men he himself so admired.
Stewart’s wealth enabled him to pursue almost no end of amusement and sport. Each year he brought fine cheeses, tinned meats, brandy, and champagne. To the 1837 meeting on Horse Creek of the Green River, he brought a suit of armor as a gift for Jim Bridger (thus attired, the legendary partisan spend a delightful afternoon drunk and charging around on his horse to the uproarious laughter of the assembled trappers and Indians). It was, in fact, Sir William Stewart who was ultimately responsible for DeVoto’s book, for it was he who brought to the West Alfred Jacob Miller, the twenty-six-year-old Baltimore painter hired to accompany Stewart and sketch the 1837 Rendezvous.
The wanderings of Stewart and Miller form Across the Wide Missouri’s perfect synecdoche. By that year the fur trade was in steep decline. Stiff competition, changing eastern fashions, and finally a dearth of beaver wreaked the trade (the last Rendezvous was held in 1839, a poor affair compared with its predecessors), and what business remained centered on fixed posts such as Fort Laramie, Astor’s Fort Union on the Missouri, and Bent’s fort on the Arkansas. Buffalo robes were more in demand than beaver skins.
The romantic West as depicted in Miller’s paintings — the West of wild, primeval majesty — was fading. By the late 1830s, Protestant missionaries regularly accompanied the spring trade caravan to a Rendezvous — abhorring the fortnight or so of hedonistic debauchery — and then moved on with hired guides to the Oregon country. The era dominated by emigrants looking to settle, traveling what would soon be called the Oregon Trail, was beginning.
Though lacking the literary sparkle of Across the Wide Missouri and reading like a highbrow textbook, DeVoto’s National Book Award-winning The Course of Empire provides a comprehensive look at the major explorations of the North American continent. Included are not only the standard portraits of Coronado, De Soto, Cartier, Champlain, Marquette, and La Salle, but the unknowns as well: the people DeVoto so admired, usually of small means and driven by self-interest, who did so much of the legwork. Gone is “History as Synecdoche” in this more expansive book as DeVoto drops his favorite device in favor of the full view, the results of his thorough and varied researches.
And yet, even here he could not entirely abandon his narrative device, and The Course of Empire revolves around the futile, three-hundred-year search for the mythical Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1634, for instance, at the behest of Samuel de Champlain, the trader Jean Nicolet arrived in a canoe on Green Bay on the western shore of Lake Michigan thinking he had landed in China, after hearing tales of a strange race that lived on the shore of a stinking sea.
The shore turned out to be the smelly mud flats of Green Bay, the race the fish-eating Winnebagos. Nicolet shook his head and shed his ceremonial robe of Chinese silk “all strewn with flowers and birds of many colors,” put on his buckskins and proceeded up the Fox River to Lake Winnebago for further trade. Thus in 1634, the French reached all the way west to the 88th Meridian, while the English had reached no further than Concord, Massachusetts, a mere sixteen miles west of Boston. It was from well established bases on the Great Lakes that La Salle jumped off for his descent of the Mississippi half a century later.
With tales of the likes of Henry Kelsey, Pierre Verendryre and his sons Louis Joseph and Francois, Anthony Henday, Samuel Hearne, and Alexander MacKenzie, DeVoto took delight in relating the hardships and wanderings of these mostly forgotten men. And the research required to uncover and record their obscure journeys in The Course of Empire was enormous.
During this decade of superb work in the late 1940s and early 1950s, DeVoto continued his miscellaneous journalism, especially his “Easy Chair” columns (a small career itself). Over forty of those columns were devoted to his beloved American West, the conservation of its resources, the state of its political climate, and — a subject close to his heart — the integrity of its National Parks. Historian, novelist, teacher, critic, editor: DeVoto left behind seventeen books and reams of uncollected journalism. He was a man of strong opinions and wasn’t afraid to express them. His last great project was preparing the definitive edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark.
After his death from a heart attack, his ashes were scattered on the Lochsa River in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest at a place where he had enjoyed a 1950 camping trip. Nearby, a plaque reads: In Memory of Bernard DeVoto, 1897-1955. Conservationist and Historian of the West.
The plaque is hard bronze, affixed to a solid boulder, as lasting a monument as such things can be to the now-distant days when American historians still believed their work was to teach us about the strength of a distinctly American character — in the strength of a distinctly American prose.
Bill Croke works at a Cody, Wyoming, museum where fourteen of Alfred Jacob Miller’s paintings are displayed.
