grassy glades, with oh!

“Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, — though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, — in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm."

Moby-Dick (1851)

"110 Mile Creek."—Welcome as palm groves to the desert traveller,—as the bearer of glad tidings to the anxious soul,—welcome as home to the troubled and weary spirit,—so welcome thy forest, thy waters and grassy glades, oh! "Hundred-and-ten!"

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," January 1852) and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

solid comfort

"...the king of Hapzaboro; portly, pleasant; a lover of wild boar's meat; a frequent quaffer from the can; in his better moods, much fancying solid comfort...."  (Mardi)

 I. F. Bravo! I have hopes of you! Kill your meat with a good conscience, and daily labour and excitement over, solid indeed is the hunter's comfort!

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," January 1852) and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

what to do with a snake-bitten horse

Tennyson, Smoking

See how Cooke's careful and elaborately described treatment of a snake-bitten horse, back in July 1843, gets worked into the fictionalized dialogue between the Captain and his "Imaginary Friend" in the entry for October 7, 1843:

July 10
"... Just as I arrived on the Camp ground this evening a rattle snake struck a valuable led horse of mine in the rim of the nostril; I immediately scarified it deeply with my penknife, and had it copiously washed until—fifteen minutes after—the hospital wagon arrived, and I procured some ammonia, which I applied until the skin came off (which it soon did).  After swelling for twenty minutes, it is getting well."
(Cooke's 1843 journal)

October 7 
... After supper—The Hunter in the mouth of his tent reclines, with a pipe, upon a glossy bearskin;—before him, a desert expanse of grass and river;—his attention is apparently divided between the moon, suspended over the western hills; the flickering blaze of a small fire, and the curling smoke which he deliberately exhales. His friend stirs a toddy, reading with difficulty a crabbed manuscript.

Loquitur. "When I saw you yesterday, beside your usual duties, acting as guide, surgeon,—(for you have effectually cured the snake-bitten horse)—as hunter, or as butcher"—

"Say commissary!"

"I conceived hopes of you, that the poetic spirit was layed; and when at supper to-night you ate so heartily of the elk-steak, I little thought you had been indulging again in such pathetic"—

"Pshaw! it serves for a gilding to Life's bitter pill! The delicious supper should have mended your humour: for I stake my reputation on it— as 'guide, surgeon and hunter'"—

Imaginary Friend. "And butcher"—

—"That the flesh, cooked, as it was, with a little pork, cannot be distinguished from that of the fattest buffalo cow that ever surrendered tongue and marrow-bones to hungry hunter."

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," January 1852) and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Wonderful!

duty calls, stops dialogue

Same manner of leave taking with the same function in both instances of ending the dialogue.  Duty before pleasure!  The professional man, soldier or surgeon, has real work to do. 

"Do you remember the Malay chief and his red horse?"

I.F. "Remember them! It is a splendid picture of glorious bravery—of heroic action!''

"And now, sir, your eloquence must not detain me from 'drill.' There are a half-dozen fine young fellows here who have not had even so good an opportunity as this to put in practice their theoretical knowledge."

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," September 1851)
and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

"Euthanasia, Mr. Purser, is something like your will-power: I doubt its authenticity as a scientific term—begging your pardon again. It is at once imaginative and metaphysical,—in short, Greek. But," abruptly changing his tone, "there is a case in the sick-bay that I do not care to leave to my assistants. Beg your pardon, but excuse me." And rising from the mess he formally withdrew. 

(Billy Budd)

Resonances here run deep. This practical-minded surgeon in Billy Budd, as William B. Dillingham points out, justly may be regarded as "one of Melville's narrow men of science." (think Cadwallader Cuticle and Margoth).  In the example from "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," the just-concluded prairie dialogue with "I. F." featured talk of Trelawny with a special nod to Trelawny's ridiculously cruel surgeon Van Scolpvelt as "the eccentric and inhuman martyr of science."

And remember, "I. F." stands for "Imaginary Friend."

Fata Morgana

The storm which had followed the higher range, was now in our front; sporting as with fierce joy, amid the mountain tops. Suddenly, with a crash, as of a mountain of rock torn asunder, lightning revealed through a vista of black and magnificently wild array of clouds, Mount Pike,—splendent with the glare, but simple, serene, sublime amid the chaos of elemental war. Like a fata morgana, turned to stone. 

I was speechless with delight.
It had stirred up Frank. I heard him repeating:

"—Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder!"

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger 17 (May 1853): 314; and (with significant revisions) Scenes and Adventures in the Army

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.

(Moby-Dick, 1851)

Black Hawk War comes to Melville's Albany

The narrative of the Black Hawk War in all versions of Cooke's "Scenes and Adventures in the Army,"  referenced in our post on "wilderness/wilds then," is a rewrite of primary sources, heavily indebted to the eyewitness account (signed "H.") by Henry Smith, "Indian Campaign of 1832", published in the August 1833 issue of the Military and Naval Magazine of the United States. 

via Monroe Memories and More

As soon as it appeared in print, Smith's first-hand narrative of the Black Hawk War was particularly recommended to readers of the Albany Argus:

"The August number of the Military and Naval Magazine, has just been published, and is for sale by the agent, Mr. Little.  It has reached its sixth number, and of course completed its first volume.  The present No. contains several original articles of interest.  It is an improvement in this respect upon the previous numbers, so far as they have met our observation.  Among these is a narrative of the Indian campaign of 1832, being an account, more or less in detail, of the expedition against the Sauks (as the writer has it) and the Foxes."

Albany Argus, Friday, August 9, 1833

Without knowing the identity of  "H.," Cooke's biographer Otis E. Young nevertheless perceived the essential link between Cooke's telling and Henry Smith's article in the Military and Naval Magazine:

"Although certain statements made in this article are in contradiction to known facts of Cooke's life, the style is very similar to his.  Furthermore, the author witnessed the battle of Bad Axe and reported his experiences with about the same emphases and orientation as Cooke in Scenes and Adventures.  This evidence suggests that "H", if not Cooke himself, either owes or is owed something by Cooke." 

(The West of Philip St. George Cooke, page 58, footnote 16)

The debts in this appropriation all belong to Cooke, or Cooke's ghostwriter:  "is owed" is right.

wilderness (wilds) then, now

Found this one while browsing old photocopies from the Army and Navy Chronicle. Installment "No. XI" of the series Notes and Reminiscences of an Officer of the Army (October 29, 1840) by "F. R. D." begins to chronicle the Black Hawk War, mostly corresponding (but with some changes) to "Chapter XXI" in the magazine series "Scenes and Adventures in the Army" in the Southern Literary Messenger Volume 8 (October 1842) pages 655-658. 

Compare this revised version in the 1842 Southern Literary Messenger

We passed over a fine country of woods and prairie interspersed; but the soil was rich and soft; and our progress with heavy laden wagons was tedious.  -- October 1842

to the original in the 1840 Army and Navy Chronicle. Changes include the deletion of  everything after the semi-colon, including highlighted words:

We marched over a pretty country, with a pleasant succession of woods and prairies, so advantageous for farming; a wilderness then, now smiling settlements, with four-horse stages running through, and very far beyond. -- Army and Navy Chronicle, October 29, 1840

Then this, from the prose introduction to Melville's "John Marr":

The remnant of Indians thereabout--all but exterminated in their recent and final war with regular white troops, a war waged by the Red men for their native soil and natural rights--had been coerced into the occupancy of wilds not very far beyond the Mississippi--wilds then, but now the seats of municipalities and States.  -- John Marr

Thus we have a rich set of correspondences--not only the same structure and pacing of

wilderness, wilds then / now

but also the probable geographical place and historical context here are the same for Melville as for Cooke: Galena, Illinois  and the Black Hawk War of 1832.

Bigelow on Gregg

John Bigelow via NYPL Digital Collections

In Garden and Forest Volume 7 (January 10, 1894), John Bigelow (1817-1911) describes his editorial "laundry work" on Commerce of the Prairies, and the personality of its author, Josiah Gregg: 

It gives me pleasure to comply with your request for such information as I can furnish about Mr. Josiah Gregg and my humble part in the preparation for the press of his Commerce of the Prairies.

I owed the acquaintance of Mr. Gregg to the late William Cullen Bryant, to whom, in 1843, Mr. Gregg applied for a reference to some competent person to revise some notes of his and put them in shape for publication. Mr. Bryant advised him to call upon me. I found Mr. Gregg to be at that time a man about forty years of age and about five feet ten inches in height, though from the meagreness of his figure looking somewhat taller; he had a fine head and an intellectual cast of countenance and temperament, though his mouth and the lower part of his face showed that he had enjoyed to but a limited extent the refining influence of civilization. He had fine blue eyes and an honest, although not a cheerful, expression, due, as I afterward learned, to chronic dyspepsia. He was withal very shy and as modest as a schoolgirl.  We were soon at work together. He had previously confided his notes to Count Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro, subsequently and for many years a translator in the State Department at Washington, but their views of the way in which the work they were engaged upon should be executed were so widely divergent that their partnership was speedily dissolved. As I became more acquainted with Mr. Gregg I had no difficulty in discerning the cause of their incompatibility. He had no notions of literary art and he knew it, but he was morbidly conscientious, and nothing would induce him to state anything that he did not positively know as if he did know it, or to overstate anything. Tasistro had no such infirmity. Then Gregg had about as little imagination as any man I ever knew, while Tasistro had such an excess of it that he had no difficulty in believing and affirming things that never happened. It was not strange, therefore, that they soon parted with opinions of each other not in the least improved by their association.

I soon found that all I had to do was to put his notes into as plain and correct English as I knew how, without in the least modifying the proportions of his affirmations. He would not allow his version of a fact to be expanded or contracted a hair's-breadth, no matter what might be the artistic temptation, nor however unimportant the incident; he always had the critics of the plains before his eyes, and would sooner have broken up the plates and reprinted the whole book than have permitted the most trifling error to creep into his description of the loading of his mules or the marshaling of one of his caravans.

Although Mr. Gregg's early education had been limited and his reading not extensive, he had a vague notion, not unnatural to a frontier man of reflection, that there is no fame so enduring as authorship, nor any way in which a man may multiply himself so many times by the forces of other men as by writing a book. His whole soul, therefore, was completely absorbed in the work upon which we were engaged, as if it involved the destiny of empires. He had no family; he had a competence for all his moderate wants, and he dreamed of a fame from this work which should place him among the authors of his generation and compel his acquaintances to look up to him as he himself was accustomed to look up to those whose writings had delighted or instructed him.

Josiah Gregg via Missouri Encyclopedia

Mr. Gregg had his lodgings at the Franklin Hotel, then standing on the corner of Broadway and Liberty or Cortlandt Street, and in his room there he spent pretty much his whole time, when not eating or sleeping, upon his manuscript and proofs. He rarely went out, except to the store of his publishers under the Astor House; he never went to the theatre, or, indeed, to any place of amusement. He took no recreation of any kind so far as I could learn. He did not appear to visit anywhere, nor did he appear to have any acquaintances. His heart was wholly in his book; it was his joy by day and his dream by night. His stay and life in the city during its incubation was his great trial. He pined for the prairies and the free open air of the wilderness. New York to him was a prison, and his hotel a cage. Whatever value his book possesses—and as a history of the trans-Mississippi commerce before the invasion of the railway, it has, I think, great and enduring value—was due to him and to him only. My laundry work added no more value to it than the washing and ironing adds to the value of a new garment.

Nowhere in all our literature can be found so full and entirely reliable an account of our early transcontinental commerce, and of every kind of life that flourished over the territory which it traversed, as in The Commerce of the Prairies; and the time is not distant when very little can be learned of the condition upon which that commerce was conducted, except from his book. It was favorably received by the public, and in due time reached a second edition. His publishers were unfortunate, and I doubt if Mr. Gregg ever derived any pecuniary advantage from his literary venture; that was a secondary matter with him, though there were some circumstances connected with his failure to receive the pecuniary returns to which he was entitled that did not enhance his respect for the publishing trade, and may have strengthened his preference for the frontier life and the unsophisticated dwellers of the wilderness. 

-- Garden and Forest January 10, 1894

In Scenes and Adventures in the Army, Philip St George Cooke's ghostwriter has done as much inventing and rewriting as editing, but the straightforward, practical character of Gregg reminds me very much of Cooke the "stern" and "forbidding" dragoon officer remembered in the History of California:  lacking in imagination and literary polish, but strongly motivated by the desire for high reputation as a published author.