Rewriting the Sweetwater, August 1852

Photo by Tom Rea via WyoHistory

This is only a sample of the extensive rewrite inspired by Philip St George Cooke's 1845 description in Sketches of the Great West of the "coquetting" Sweetwater. The rewrite, including added dialogue between the narrator and his imaginary prairie friend "Frank," runs through two installments of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1852 and September 1852. Here I want to isolate a few of the elements added in revision.

From Cooke's 1845 Sketches of the Great West:

The beautiful Sweetwater, pure as the ice from which it flows over golden (mica) sands, seems carefully to avoid a blue range of fir-clad mountains, which bounds its wide valley at the south, and cleaves to the primitive rocks―

From "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," August 1852 installment:

... certain it is, this merry little river, whose sparkling waters often demurely purl over golden sands, this very coquette of all the mountain offspring, if it ever approaches the fir-clad mountains of soft, inviting blue, turns suddenly back; leaves, too, the grassy bed of the valley, and cleaves to the stern rocks....

"beautiful" revised to "merry little"
"a kind of merry little walk" --Melville's January 20, 1845 letter to his sister, Kate 

sparkling added: a favorite adjective to describe water in Melville's writing, for example: 

"streams of sparkling water" --Encantadas Sketch Fourth 

"flows" changed to "demurely purl"

"Down each of these little valleys
flows a clear stream, here and there assuming the form of a
slender cascade, then stealing invisibly along until it burst upon
the sight again in larger and more noisy waterfalls, and at last
demurely wanders along to the sea." --Typee

"watered by purling brooks"  --Typee, chapter 2

grassy added

Oh, grassy glades! --Moby-Dick, The Gilder  

the grassy billows --John Marr 

"primitive" revised to "stern" 

"... some stern thing of antediluvian art." --Herman Melville's Pierre

Melville's use of "stern" with "antediluvian' in the Enceladus chapter from Pierre makes a fascinating association in view of the revision from "primitive rocks" to "stern rocks" in Scenes Beyond the Western Border. Melville's narrator also is describing remarkable rocks, and one in particular named "Enceladus" after the ancient Titan. Melville's expression "stern thing of antediluvian art" involves the same mental or conceptual association of "primitive" and "stern" evident in the 1852 revision.

In mid field again you paused among the recumbent sphinx-like shapes thrown off from the rocky steep. You paused; fixed by a form defiant, a form of awfulness. You saw Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the giants, writhing from out the imprisoning earth;—turbaned with up-born moss he writhed; still, though armless, resisting with his whole striving trunk, the Pelion and the Ossa hurled back at him ;—turbaned with upborn moss he writhed; still turning his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally in vain assailed by him, and which, when it had stormed him off, had heaved his undoffable incubus upon him, and deridingly left him there to bay out his ineffectual howl. 

To Pierre this wondrous shape had always been a thing of interest, though hitherto all its latent significance had never fully and intelligibly smitten him. In his earlier boyhood a strolling company of young collegian pedestrians had chanced to light upon the rock; and, struck with its remarkableness, had brought a score of picks and spades, and dug round it to unearth it, and find whether indeed it were a demoniac freak of nature, or some stern thing of antediluvian art.

Image Credit: Stone Structures