joking about a tournure

SCENES BEYOND THE WESTERN BORDER

The girls must consider as a lively feature of this dull region, (or they are not common girls). For our part, it is reported that one of them has been seen actually—that is, evidently invested with a "tournure"; who would believe the tyrant Fashion held so wide a sway!

-- Scenes Beyond the Western Border - May 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

MELVILLE'S CORRESPONDENCE

They heard that you had begun to take to — drink? — Oh no, but worse — — to sonnet-writing. That off Cape Horn instead of being on deck about your business, you devoted your time to writing a sonnet on your mistress’ eyebrow, & another upon her “tournure”. 

-- Herman Melville, May 25, 1862 letter to his brother Thomas Melville in the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth, page 378.

leaves it for the commentators

"Indeed, the settlement of this question must be left to the commentators on Mardi, some four or five hundred centuries hence."  (Mardi)

... and finally, in despair, he "imitated humanity so abominably," as to throw himself headlong, and so drown—or hang himself:  (the author cannot decide which —even after a post-mortem examination;—and so leaves the decision of this important point to the commentators.)
("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," March 1853; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

mathematical machines

"And not more infallible the ponderings of the Calculating Machine than the deductions from the decimals of history."  (Mardi)

"Woman generally lacks that mathematical element, which in man, makes him often a little superior to some admirable machines...." 
("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," June 1852; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

masses indifferent to biology and botany

And how many millions there are who live from day to day by the incessant operation of subtle processes in them, of which they know nothing, and care less?  Little ween they, of vessels lacteal and lymphatic, of arteries femoral and temporal; of pericranium or pericardium; lymph, chyle, fibrin, albumen, iron in the blood, and pudding in the head.... (Mardi)

F.—With what strange complacency does the mass of even the 'educated,' ignore the charming mysteries of botany!  They may be surprised into admiration of a fine flower; but it is a mere sensation,

                               ' —the smallest part
Exceeds the narrow visions of their minds.'

C.— "And they lose half the beauty, which, such is their perfection, they reveal to minute examination."

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border," August 1852; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

misanthropic, again

 Found another misanthropic quadruped of Melville's making, this from Pierre (1852): 

"... round and round those still enchanted rocks, hard by their utmost rims, and in among their cunning crevices, the misanthropic hill-scaling goat nibbled his sweetest food...."

The first one, you remember, showed up in Omoo (1847):

"As for the goats, occasionally you come across a black, misanthropic ram, nibbling the scant herbage of some height inaccessible to man, in preference to the sweet grasses of the valley below."  (Omoo)

The explanatory note in the Hendricks House edition of Omoo points out the broader significance of Melville's imagery:

"Here, briefly, in passing, Melville associates the contrast of mountain and valley with the contrasting values of misanthropy and domesticity, independence and conformity, individual and herd, darkness and light, difficulty and ease, etc."  (Hendricks House Omoo, 406)

Got it, independence and conformity, individual and, ha! herd:

"It was the fate of a melancholy buffalo,— whether misused and misanthropic,—shunning the vulgar herd, or exiled, as an old and hardened sinner, to this solitude, to encounter us here...."
(Scenes Beyond the Western Border (June 1852); and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

The theme of misanthropy (like the references to fate, exile, and sin) is unique, not something that any other journalist of the 1845 expedition bothers about exploring or even mentioning.  Engineer William B. Franklin's observation is most succinct:

"One old buffalo bull was killed to-day but he was too old and tough for food."
(March to South Pass, ed. Frank N. Schubert, p9)

Another probable source for the re-write in the June 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" is J. Henry Carleton's entry for June 8, 1845 in a late installment of his "Occidental Reminiscences," first published in the New York Spirit of the Times, March 21, 1846 (pdf file at FultonHistory.com):

As we were marching along to-day, a large buffalo bull happened unexpectedly to find himself between our column and the river.  No sooner had he discovered his situation than he attempted to get by us with a view of escaping to the highlands through the narrow and difficult gorges that here and there led up to them through the bluffs.  One of the officers, who was exceedingly well mounted, gave chase to him, and, when at long distance, gave him a pistol shot as he ran, which dropped him dead upon the sand." 
(Prairie Logbooks, ed. Louis Pelzer, 229)

We are dealing with a writer of a mind to inject the element of misanthropy into an otherwise straightforward tale of encountering and killing a single buffalo bull.

Melville had such a mind, we know for certain by looking at how he re-wrote one of his sources for Israel Potter.  Melville sees this in some biography of John Paul Jones:

"I had yet two enemies to encounter, far more formidable than the Britons, I mean, fire and water."  (Fight between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis)

And writes this, adding the element of misanthropy by generalizing particular "enemies" of John Paul Jones into elemental human-haters:

"But though the Serapis had submitted, there were two misanthropical foes on board the Richard which would not so easily succumb—fire and water."  (Israel Potter)

Frenchman's shrug

OMOO

"At first he [Rartoo] demurred; and shrugging his shoulders like a Frenchman, declared it could not be brought about--was a dangerous matter to attempt, and might bring all concerned into trouble" -- Omoo by Herman Melville

SCENES BEYOND THE WESTERN BORDER 

Robidoux undertakes to give me the boundaries of the buffalo grass, which extends to the Missouri river, and within eighty miles of the State boundary; he says, "that throughout New Mexico, where the buffalo do not keep it down, it grows a foot high; bis cattle and sheep live on it exclusively, and keep fat in winter; and improve in size on the original breed; the mutton is superior in flavor to ours."

This man prays for the annexation of New Mexico, as necessary to develope its mineral riches: he asserts, "that he knows districts where, for twenty miles, it is impossible to find a handful of dirt without gold."

"Why in the world have you not made your fortune collecting it?"

"I sunk," he replied with a true Frenchman's shrug, "eight thousand dollar."

--Scenes Beyond the Western Border - September 1851; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

I am told

Melville habitually borrowed from the writings of others.  In the middle section of White-Jacket (1850), with the frigate Neversink at anchor in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, Melville increasingly depended on his source-material, according to Howard P. Vincent:

"More than ever, then, Melville turns to his sources, weaving paragraphs from suggestions in Mercier, Leech, and Nicol."  (The Tailoring of Melville's White-Jacket, 116)

As I say, this approach for Melville was habitual.  In his first books Typee and Omoo Melville borrowed extensively from published narratives of South Seas travel and adventure by Charles S.Stewart, David Porter, and William Ellis.  Vincent's The Trying Out of Moby-Dick documents Melville's deep debts to whaling narratives by (among others) Beale, Bennett, and Scoresby.  "Benito Cereno" rewrites the eyewitness narrative of Amasa Delano.   Israel Potter, serialized in Putnam's Monthly Magazine before publication in book form, rewrites Trumbull's pamphlet biography, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter for a start, then appropriates other sources including biographies of  Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones.

Examining Melville's borrowings from Leech in White-Jacket, Vincent noticed that the phrase

" 'they told me' is one of Melville's favorite coverings for literary theft."
(The Tailoring of Melville's White-Jacket, 116)

Variations on this device are "he told me" or "_______ told me" and "I am told" or "I was told."

I find this same device used in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," to introduce otherwise uncredited borrowings from the journals of Henry S. Turner and topographical engineer William B. Franklin.

Turner, for example, reported a sighting of bees, or bee-like insects:

"July 17  A march of 8 miles this morning brought us across 2 more branches of Horse Creek... A strange insect resembling the honey-bee was seen in swarms:  a perpendicular clay bank on the side of the stream had been perforated in innumerable places by them & when discovered were flying about, & running in & out of the holes they had bored in the surface."  (H. S. Turner, 1845 "Journal of an Expedition"; Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1822-1860 at Fold3)

Turner's observation is introduced in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" with a variation on Melville's favored device. 

We passed two bold branches of Horse Creek;  a gentleman told me he saw bees hiving their honey in holes in a clay bank; they are rarely seen so far away from plantations, or from trees.  (May 1853)

 Note too the poetic style employed in the rewrite; instead of "running in and out of the holes" the bees are "hiving their honey in holes."

In similar fashion, two borrowings from William B. Franklin's journal are introduced with the expression,

"I am told."  

Franklin on the Oregon emigrants:

".... those in the rear found the women all crying and the men looking very sad.  Poor people!  they felt that in passing us they broke the last link that bound them to the United States."  (March to South Pass, 22)

The same observation turns up in the September 1852 of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," introduced with the trusty expression "I am told":

"I am told, that by the time our rear passes their companies, toward what they will ever consider their homes, the women generally are seen to weep.  Heaven help them!"  (554)

Here the writer or ghostwriter appears to forget that two pages earlier, the narrator claimed to have witnessed the sight for himself:

I saw a poor woman weeping. The sight of our return! the home! the friends behind! the wilderness before! (552)

Earlier in the series, in the June 1852 installment,  the narrator's "Imaginary Friend" borrows Franklin's comparison of Scott's Bluff to Stirling Castle, which he introduces with "I am told":

"One view of it, I am told, resembles strongly some picture of Sterling Castle."

(379; corrected to Stirling in Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

In his journal of the 1845 March to South Pass, Franklin saw a resemblance between Scott's Bluff and the Scottish fortress, as follows:

"At the point where we left the river the rock bore a great resemblance to the representations of Stirling Castle."  (March to South Pass, ed. Frank N. Schubert, p11)

manner of encamping, with details from Carleton

Quoting most of a long passage from Scenes and Adventures in the Army on the routines of breaking and making camp, Hamilton Gardner recommends the account to "military students" who "will be interested in Cooke's description of a typical day's routine of this period"  (Colorado Magazine 30, October 1953, p267)."  Gardner cites only the 1857 book version, not realizing that the same material had appeared previously in the final installment (August 1853) of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border."  More importantly, much of Cooke's description has been creatively adapted from J. H. Carleton's chronicle of a different march, A Dragoon Campaign to the Pawnee Villages in 1844.  First published in the New York Spirit of the Times, Carleton's 1844 narrative has been edited by Louis Pelzer in The Prairie Logbooks.  In Chapter II (Pelzer, 10-17), Carleton gives elaborate descriptions of the dragoons' "Manner of encamping" and "Manner of starting in the morning."  Below, a few examples for comparison...

Carleton:

"The bugles are sounding the "Reveille" at the first appearance of light in the heavens, and the men turn out and after arming themselves completely, fall into line by companies for roll call and inspection."

Cooke:

     August 4th.—We marched at half-past 6 o'clock.  That means that two hours earlier a trumpet had called us all from sleep to sudden labours; first, arms in hand,—there is an inspection,

Carleton:

'stable call' again sounds, when the animals are led out of the square to fresh spots of grass.

Cooke:

—then a "stable call," which the poor horses know well, although they have perhaps forgotten what a stable is, or have despaired ever to see one again; possibly they retain a vague memory of the grain, which, on a time, was served to them at that signal. Now they whinny a morning greeting to their masters, and seem grateful for a little rubbing of their stiffened limbs, and removal to fresh grass.

 Carleton:

The ceremony of guard mounting is then gone through with, when the new guard is marched on and the old one relieved.

 Cooke:

Then, at the signal for the new guard to saddle, baggage is prepared and packed in the wagons; the ceremonies of guard mounting over, the assembled trumpeters sound " boots and saddles," when, in a quarter of an hour—all bridle, saddle and arm, and the last preparations are completed... 

 Carleton:

So this beautiful spot of ground, which but one hour ago was so still, so retired; almost shrinking away from view among those old trees, with it modest loveliness, is now covered with a little city, with its streets, its smokes, its noise and bustle.

Cooke:

 After eight or ten hours, happily finding water and grass, at the climax of fatigue, with the energy of necessity, we commence the settlement of a canvass village in the wilderness.

Deleted in Revision: "those famous guides to travellers and engineers"

"Buffalo, Thermopolis, WY"

Photo Credit:  Penny Clayton

Compare this, from the March 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border":

"After remounting, yesterday, we threaded the labyrinth before us by aid of the river and old paths of the buffaloes,—those famous guides to travellers and engineers.— One would say there had been war there, among what our fathers called the elements."
(March 1853)

With the same passage as revised for the 1857 book, Scenes and Adventures in the Army:

"July 8th.—After remounting yesterday, we threaded the labyrinth before us by aid of the river, and old paths of the buffalo. One would say there had been war there, among what our fathers called the elements."  (388)

What's wrong with emphasizing in broader terms the usefulness of buffalo paths?  Why bother to edit out the seemingly harmless reference to "travellers and engineers"?

Particularly suggestive is the reference to engineers.  The narrative at this point closely follows that of engineer William B. Franklin in his journal of the 1845 Kearny expedition, March to South Pass:

"By keeping along a buffalo path we have a very  little difficulty in getting down....Keeping along the bank for about a mile, we crossed the river just above the Hot Spring gate, again using a buffalo path to guide us. Just as we arrived at the top of the hill two buffalos rushed past us, descending on the other side with a sure footedness and swiftness wonderful for such unwieldy animals.  They looked fiercer and more dangerous than those we met on the plains, and some remarked that they were the demons of the Mts:  certainly they looked the character." 
(March to South Pass, ed. Frank N. Schubert, Engineer Historical Studies No. 1, p21)

The reference to engineers was deleted perhaps because if retained it might draw uncomfortable attention to the expropriation of material from the journal of a topographical engineer.  William B. Franklin's sighting of two buffaloes had been rewritten once before already, in the previous installment of  "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (September 1852):

"Unwillingly we turn away, to seek a circuitous outlet, guided by buffalo paths over a lower mountain of confused and many-shaped peaks. At the highest part two monstrous buffaloes suddenly met us in the way:  the gaunt keepers of the pass paused in astonishment, and seemed to stare the question, "What did we there?" or, "Where are we safe?" thought they — if buffaloes think."  (September 1852) 

Amazing! how the rewrite imagines the perspective of the buffaloes, whereas Franklin more conventionally and straightforwardly reports the viewpoint of the human observers.

tale of the x-ray specs, plundered from Emory's Notes of a Military Reconnaissance

Narrating the homeward bound journey of U. S. Dragoons from the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains in 1845, Philip St George Cooke (or his ghostwriter) relates a comical incident supposed to have occurred while visiting a friendly tribe of Cheyenne people in July 1845.  From the entry for July 16th [1845], originally published in the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border":

     But whilst engaged in the formalities of the council and distribution of presents, we were startled by shouts and laughter so vociferous and continued as to excite great curiosity, and induce some of us to retire to satisfy it:  a merry and comical confusion reigned without; very infectious, but difficult to understand:  it seems that while the young squaws were so gently engaged at their painting, a certain bachelor captain, whose countenance at home is considered quite mild and engaging, but whose wont is now to give of it but an uncertain view through a vast bunch of reddish hair, had the curiosity to take a closer view—he is near-sighted—of the colored design;—possibly he was artlessly examining a natural model;—a matter of highly civilized precedent and practicability:—be this as it may, the belle sauvage of intent and downcast eyes, suddenly raising them, was startled by this hairy apparition hanging over her shoulder; so much so as to indulge in a shrill succession of those shrieks so successfully practised by unfortunate heroines of the boards, and natural, of course, to very young or pretty ladies:  attributing it to his uncouth looks, for, according to his experience, no imaginable offence had been given, the captain's confusion was natural and complete; and so too was the astonishment of many, when this lady-like screaming was repeated by one and another,—all the young girls toward whom the hapless and blushing captain directed his appealing regards. They ran, shouted, hid, laughed; his own puzzled and innocent laughter was the most ridiculous; for an explanation soon began to be whispered about, which did not much abate the merriment. The captain wore spectacles; and we learned that these girls, lamentably ignorant of optics—as of science generally—were full believers in a little theory of their own, upon the subject of the mysterious glasses; and it was no less than that they enabled the fortunate spectator to penetrate opaque bodies; and consequently—although unusually well and completely dressed—they supposed that, to his eyes, their modest garments were no protection!

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," May 1853; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 397-398)

Nothing like the excitement of screaming girls and blushing bachelor is reported in the accounts of other participants in the expedition.  Engineer William B. Franklin relates:

"We had a talk and a smoke with them, made them a few presents, and in about half an hour, left them perfectly delighted with us."  (March to South Pass)

Captain Henry S. Turner dutifully reports the council meeting, giving a detailed account of Colonel Kearny's speech and the distribution of presents, but says nothing about the external commotion.

Cooke's story in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border"  is an elaborate retelling of an incident that actually happened in the following year, 1846, on the march of U. S. dragoons under S. W. Kearny to New Mexico and California.   The affair of the see-through spectacles took place among the Maricopas of southern Arizona, as first reported by Lieutenant W. H. Emory in Notes of a Military Reconnaissance (1848):

November 13 and 14.—With the morning came the Maricopas women, dressed like the Pimos. They are somewhat taller, and one peculiarity struck me forcibly, that while the men had aquiline noses, those of the women were retroussés.  Finding the trade in meal had ceased, they collected in squads about the different fires, and made the air ring with their jokes and merry peals of laughter. Mr. Bestor's spectacles were a great source of merriment. Some of them formed the idea that with their aid, he could see through their cotton blankets. They would shrink and hide behind each other at his approach. At length, I placed the spectacles on the nose of an old woman, who became acquainted with their use and explained it to the others.
(Emory's Notes)

"Mr. Bestor" is the civilian statistician Norman Bestor, who according to Richard G. Beidleman was "responsible for specimen collecting and sketching" while serving as Emory's "naturalist aide."  Speaking of Bestor, Beidleman can't help but mention the spicy anecdote of the specs from Emory's Notes:

"Bestor proved his worth, having wisely carried the chronometers separately in a basket on his arm.  Later he would also prove to be a source of amazement to southwestern Indians because of his spectacles."  (California's Frontier Naturalists)

dollar-dealing sinners

"Mrs. Morewood had freely hinted that his [Herman Melville's] New York friends thought him crazy, and the most intimate of them, Duyckinck, had commented upon Moby-Dick [in the Literary World] like a missionary on Typee and had reprinted the review in the Dollar Magazine."  (Leon Howard)

"A significant event around the same time of the Moby-Dick debacle was Duyckinck’s acquisition of Holden’s Dollar Magazine in early 1851.  This magazine was the opposite of what the early Young America movement had stood for, embracing no issue of substance and devoted merely to commercial success and reading of a browsing nature."  (Widmer, Young America)

 "To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!"

(Melville's Pierre to the fictionalized Evert Duyckinck)

"For Melville to portray Duyckinck in this manner, exploiting their personal correspondence, was to break the friendship…."
(Higgins and Parker, Reading Melville's Pierre)

Revision to the August 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" inserts new references to  a "fling" at "dollar dealing sinners," with a new excuse for the "fling":  calm down, it was "only a love tap."

Friend.—You are a monomaniac, by Jove! incapable of argument, or even conversation.

"I detest argument! it is the favorite resort of fools, to convince—themselves. 

"I am only in a mood ; buoyant and bitter; tameless as the Arab coursing his native desert; free as yonder soaring eagle! it's this wild mountain air! Let us have a fling at the world,—the poor dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens—"

Friend.—But you began by a fling at me—

"Only a love tap, Friend; my way of argument. 

(Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

observations and conjectures about the interrupted publication of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853)

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border" resumes in the March 1853 number of the Southern Literary Messenger after a hiatus of five months.  The interruption was long enough to require some explanatory cue when the series resumed, hence this formal acknowledgement at the start of the March 1853 installment:   

"(Continued from Sept. No., 1852.)"

The length of the gap between published installments possibly reflects a break of some months in the writing, The next installment (May 1853) begins with the same cue, "(Continued from Sept. No., 1852.)." One final installment appeared in August 1853.  The three installments published in 1853—March, May, August—may have been submitted as a single batch, concluding the series. 

Thematically, the defensive posture of the narrator in relation to critics and audiences appears also to link at least two of the three installments appearing in 1853.  The specter of Pierre, or rather the specter of two negative reviews of Pierre in the New York Literary World (August 21, 1852) and New York Herald (September 18, 1852), hangs over the March and August numbers.  In March 1853, the mock tragedy "Cub" effectively burlesques the putdown of Pierre in the New York Herald; in August 1853 the last dialogue on the prairie between the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons and his imaginary friend (!) "Frank" precisely invokes the terms of Evert Duyckink's attack on Pierre in the Literary World.  Duyckinck repeatedly faulted Melville for literary sins against "nature and truth."  As if speaking (and protesting) for Melville, the injured Captain answers:

"But I have been writing, Frank, something for your especial approval; I have been setting forth grim realities;—and most philosophically.   I did strike at last, but most naturally and truly, a little vein of—"

F.— "—Poetry, perhaps?  by the merest accident in the world." (August 1853)

In between, the May 1853 installment evokes the music-box incident at Balance Rock.  The Captain fantasizes a fairy dance that seems to recall (and celebrate) the association of Sarah Morewood with fairies and fairy lore, and with enchanting costome balls at Broad Hall.

"Methinks I see a 'high hall,' whose lights might shame the day; the many white robed fair,—the far-reaching couples, floating in that fairy dance,—revolving, like the moon around the sun, in circling circles."  May 1853

Dubbed "Fairy Belt" by Cornelius Mathews, Sarah Morewood contributed a chapter on "That Excursion to Greylock"  for Taghconic (1852) by Godfrey Greylock (J. E. A. Smith), where she had plenty to say about fairies in the wild:

The pathway up the mountain side is rough, but filled with beauty; and some of the openings in the woods almost persuade one that the days of fairy gambols are not yet past, but that in these spots, in these very rings of fresh, green grass—so fresh and green that they seem just to have awakened from their Winter sleep—the elfin revels must still be nightly held.

… I feel sure that had we remained only a little while longer, we should have seen more than the pen of the author of “Pilgrims of the Rhine” has yet been able to describe, of forest fairy gayety.
(Taghconic 1852)

The May 1853 fairy dance sequence in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" charmingly provides the "forest fairy gayety" that Melville's friend Sarah Morewood said she expected in her chapter on Greylock for Smith's 1852 Taghconic. 

Melville mentions Taghconic in the second "Agatha Letter" to Hawthorne on October 25, 1852.  The first Agatha letter to Hawthorne was written August 13, 1852 a week before the review of Pierre appeared in the Literary World.  In February 1852 Melville had canceled his subscription to the Literary World, or tried to, but they kept sending it anyway.  Complementary copies? I figure he saw the review one way or another.  And I'm guessing the March-May-August segments from 1853 were written in between Melville's first two Agatha Letters to Hawthorne, in the wake of those bad reviews of Pierre, September-October 1852.  Ha!  The fairy content in the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" appears in-between the self-consciously literary and reactive episode titled "Cub: a tragedy in three acts"  in March 1853 and the Captain's self-conscious apology in August 1853 for poetical experimental writing.

Working backward then.  August 1852 is clearly a high, in some ways the creative climax of the series:

"O! my friend! Is there not then a pure soul-love, a deathless friendship, 'passing the love of women,' which all life's trials and the world's baseness cannot soil or sap?"

I. F. the imaginary friend becomes Frank, and the dialogue of F. and C. zings, revealing perhaps something of the tension between Melville and Duyckinck that led Melville to satirize his critical friend in Pierre, in the late chapters on Pierre as juvenile author.  September 1852 appears to retain vestiges of Pierre, for example in the assertion of a genuine American aristocracy, but also seems to reflect rejection of Melville's terms by his English publisher Bentley, in the bitter polemic for international copyright and against "cockney condescension" and "foreign fashion-loving public taste."  So then, July 1852, August 1852, September 1852 probably formed a batch, probably written March-April 1852.

April 1852  begins new matter of 1845 (previous installments covered military escort of Santa Fe traders in 1843).  Now drawing on new source material, including Carleton's "Occidental Reminiscences."   The narrator's odd preoccupation with professed experts on "Human Destiny" lines up with Melville's, suggesting these installments may have been composed, say late February 1852.  Probably this batch contained the installments published in April, May, June 1852.   We know a batch containing the May 1852 material was sent to John Esten Cooke on March 14, 1852.  Writing from Carlisle Barracks, Philip St George Cooke complained that editor John Thompson had only been providing one copy of published installments, when PSGC had specifically "asked him to send two of each" (my emphasis).  Later on in the March 14 letter to his Richmond nephew, PSGC wanted clarification of something in the manuscript.  Evidently perplexed by the use of the word "braggart," he asked JEC for editorial assistance:

"There is an omission, page 3, of the name of the Spanish Com[mander] who went to Vera Cruz with a large force commissioned to supercede Cortez; you, or Jno. T. can supply the name:--I have not a book to refer to:  I suppose he was a 'braggart'?"
(Letter to John Esten Cooke, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University)

 Before publication in May 1852, JEC or John Thompson did in fact identify the "braggart" as Narvaez:

"The master-stroke of the career of Cortez, was his desperate march to Vera Cruz, his attack and defeat of the braggart Narvaez and his vastly superior numbers." (May 1852)

Though confusing to PSGC, the use of "braggart" to characterize a superior opposing force is pure Melville, as when the biblical giant Goliath, unnamed as such, is described as "the great braggart of Gath."  (Mardi)

Again, April-May-June 1852 installments were probably written in February 1852.

December 1851, January 1852.  Echoes of Moby-Dick in the December 1851 number, some altered  or expurgated in revision.  Written c. October 1851?

1.  June 1851, September 1851.  September number prints two installments in one issue.  Exuberant tone, opening echoes that invitation to Hawthorne from May 1851 where Melville says

"Don't trouble yourself, though, about writing; and don't trouble yourself about visiting; and when you do visit, don't trouble yourself about talking. I will do all the writing and visiting and talking myself."  (Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne)

I would guess these first installments, beginning with the June 1851 number, were probably written sometime in April 1851.  They were enclosed for consideration by the Southern Literary Messenger with a letter dated May 15, 1851 from PSGC to John Esten Cooke, then acting as guest-editor.  Writing from Carlisle Barracks, PSGC told his nephew he would accept minor corrections but otherwise wanted no editorial interference:

"If you see any mistakes, please to correct, for I am rusty & was never classical—but as to altering, omitting &c. to any extent, —by any one, — I had rather not print—."

(Letter to John Esten Cooke, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University)

One especially revealing statement in this letter from PSGC to JEC of May 15, 1851, gives away the existence of a ghostwriter. PSGC describes the manuscript enclosure as follows:

"These few pages (eno' to fail, or be refused) are copied almost verbatim from what I wrote 29 Aug. 1843, in my tent after a hot hard day's march. As to the heading or title, I care not.  The "Written on the Prairie" part at least, might be omitted, or the fact expressed in some other way.  Editor's note?  that it is the offhand prairie production in reality, which if rough & faulty, may have a relish too of real impressions &c."

The real "offhand prairie production" is Cooke's 1843 Santa Fe Journal,which served as the main source for the highly literary, maybe hyper-literary rewrite that begins in the first installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border." Another day, perhaps, we can look more closely at what somebody did to Cooke's 1843 journal.  It's a long way from verbatim.