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.