The Canoe and the Saddle: A Critical Edition - Softcover

Winthrop, Theodore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803298633 ISBN 13: 9780803298637

Verlag: University of Nebraska Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

In 1853, with money in his pocket and elegant clothes in his saddlebags, a twenty-four-year-old New Englander of aristocratic Yankee stock toured the territories of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. The Canoe and the Saddle recounts Theodore Winthrop’s Northwest tour. A novelized memoir of his travels, it became a bestseller when it was published shortly after the author’s untimely death in the Civil War.

This critical edition of Winthrop’s work, the first in over half a century, offers readers the original text with a narrative overview of the nature and culture of the Pacific Northwest and reflections on the ecological and racial turmoil that gripped the region at the time. It also provides a fresh perspective on the aesthetic, historical, cultural, anthropological, social, and environmental contexts in which Winthrop wrote his sometimes disturbing, sometimes enlightening, and always riveting account. Whether offering portraits of Native American culture—in particular, commenting on the Chinook Jargon—making keen and often prescient observations on nature, or deploying transcendental, animist, or Hudson River School aesthetics (likely learned from his friend Frederick Church), Winthrop develops a clear and compelling picture of a time and place still resonant and relevant today.

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Paul J. Lindholdt is an associate professor of English at Eastern Washington University. He is the coeditor of Holding Common Ground: The Individual and Public Lands in the American West and Cascadia Wild: Protecting an International Ecosystem.

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The Canoe and the Saddle

A Critical EditionBy Theodore Winthrop

University of Nebraska Press

Copyright © 2006 University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9863-7

Contents

List of Illustrations.....................................viAcknowledgments...........................................viiIntroduction..............................................ixNote on the Text and Printing History.....................xxixEmendations...............................................xxxi1. An Entrance............................................12. A Klalam Grandee.......................................33. Whulge.................................................154. Owhhigh................................................365. Forests of the Cascades................................556. "Boston Tilicum".......................................777. Tacoma.................................................868. Sowee House-Loolowcan..................................1099. Via Mala...............................................12410. Treachery.............................................13611. Kamaiakan.............................................15012. Lightning and Torchlight..............................17213. The Dalles-Their Legend...............................188Notes.....................................................211Bibliography..............................................227Index.....................................................231

Introduction

In 1853, carrying money in his pocket and elegant attire in his saddlebags, a twenty-four-year-old New Englander named Theodore Winthrop toured the territories of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia after his job as a clerk in the Panama jungle proved too taxing for his delicate health. His tour of the Northwest yielded two adventure books: a novel, John Brent, and a nonfiction travel account, The Canoe and the Saddle. Both books appeared posthumously in the 1860s and blazed through many printings. In 1890, the town of Winthrop in Washington's North Cascades would be named for him, as would the Winthrop Glacier on Mount Rainier that he described so vividly.

The Washington Territory, where he spent most time during his six-month tour of the Pacific Northwest, was a place of ecological and racial turmoil. Indians on both sides of the Cascades were dying from diseases, bullets, and drink; their economies had been transformed by white contact and their ancestral lands usurped and historic lore ridiculed. Lumber vessels loaded with fir trees to be sunk as piles to build San Francisco docks were already thronging the waters of Puget Sound. Miners were raking creek beds and hillsides for gold. Would-be cattle barons were carving out beef ranches. Winthrop acknowledges few of these historical transitions, even though he traveled some three hundred miles with the S'Klallams and Klickitats, whose tribal names he had planned to use as the title of the book that would become The Canoe and the Saddle, until a Confederate bullet fired in an early battle of the Civil War eclipsed his literary plans.

The Canoe and the Saddle, initially published in 1862 and edited anew here for the first time since 1957, reveals much about how European American privilege and presumption shaped the West. The book is a novelized memoir, and it has granted Winthrop standing as an ecological prophet who celebrated a pristine wilderness that was beginning already to yield to roads, farms, and harvests of timber and fish. Northwest historians-John H. Williams in 1913, Robert Cantwell in 1972, and Timothy Egan in 1990-have lavished praise on The Canoe and the Saddle for its appreciation of landscape. Winthrop wrote, in transcendental tones, "Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future." Unlike his celebrated New England contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, however, racial and religious prejudices complicate his writing.

He was born in 1828 in New Haven, Connecticut, twenty-four years before his tour of the West commenced. He traced a genealogical line that stretched back on his father's side to John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On his mother's side, he claimed among his forebears the evangelical Jonathan Edwards, who was the foremost theologian in America, and Timothy Dwight, of a literary coterie at Yale College known as the Connecticut Wits, later a Yale president. A scion of New England gentry, he graduated atop his small Yale class of 1848. Thereafter he lived and clerked abroad, tried his hand at legal practices in St. Louis and New York, socialized with famous landscape painters, and composed the four novels and three nonfiction books on which his slender reputation rests. He died young, in a botched Civil War battle he had helped to plan.

Poor health nagged him his whole life. He suffered from religious doubts, and constant stomach pains very nearly disabled him. His full red beard might have helped to swell his appearance beyond his meager but athletic 126 pounds. Still wobbly from the smallpox he contracted when he first came into the Oregon Territory five months before, he reported in his journal that he had managed to buy some laudanum and baking soda while traveling the Oregon Trail back toward New York. The baking soda was no doubt used to ease his indigestion or dyspepsia, but the laudanum-a concoction that contained opium or an opium derivative-must have been meant to assuage much greater pains.

Like many of his Puritan forebears, he struggled earnestly with his faith. During college he underwent a religious conversion and spent so many hours praying in his room that his sisters feared he was losing his mind. In his later years, nervous fatigue and recurring bouts of depression complicated brief and feverish jags of sociability. When he confessed in a letter to his widowed mother that his belief in Christianity was waning, she grieved openly to her family and friends, and he became the object of gossip in New York, New Haven, Newport, and Boston. One distant and elder relative, George Templeton Strong, sniffed in his journal that the young Theodore, who at the time was home and making the rounds of New York salons and soirees, was overly prone to issue rank atheist opinions. Religious conflicts also seep into his books. The narrator of his ur-western John Brent laments that no one in America would offer prayers for him throughout his travails across the great basins and ranges of the western territories, but instead his countrymen reject him as a pagan.

By late August 1853, the sickly young aristocrat was wrapping up his Northwest excursion. He had enjoyed the hospitality of many community leaders including Jesse Applegate and William Fraser Tolmie. Now, though, a genuine challenge lay before him-a voyage across Washington Territory by water and land at the hands of Indian guides, a voyage that would suggest to his eventual editors an escapade of a title, The Canoe and the Saddle. So at rustic Port Townsend, on the northwest shore of Puget Sound, he harshly bartered with the S'Klallam Indians for help and hired a forty-foot dugout canoe and paddlers to transport him some eighty-five miles south to the inner reaches of the sound near present-day Tacoma.

Winthrop accepted the services of the "Duke of York," actually Chetzemoka, whom he...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Nebraska Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0803298633
• ISBN 13: 9780803298637
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar