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)