Birthdays and Deserts

Image Credit: YesterYear Once More

Later: forgot to mention that June 13th was also the birthday of Elizabeth Shaw ("Lizzie") Melville, Herman's wife.

Elizabeth Shaw was born June 13, 1822 in Boston, Massachusetts.
--Civil War Women  

"For her sixty-fourth birthday, on June 13, he bought for her four books which had been published in the year of their marriage [1847]...."  --Leon Howard, Herman Melville

Philip St, George Cooke, "Born in Leesburg, Virginia on June 13, 1809."
--Elmwood Historic Cemetery

Herman Melville paid attention to birthdays of writers. We know this from notations that he made in his books, for example this pencil notation, inscribed by Melville on the front flyleaf verso to Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse:

"July 4.  Born 1804"

You can see the above inscription at  Melville's Marginalia Online where the editors explain:

"In the copies of works he admired, Melville regularly inscribed the authors' birth and death dates, as well as other key dates in their careers."

In the July 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," the temporarily depressed Captain of U. S. Dragoons makes a melancholy reference to his own birthday on his birthday (June 13th, the birthday of Philip St. George Cooke). The Captain's unexpectedly dark allusion occurs in one of many prairie dialogues with his Imaginary Friend:

June 13th.—Twenty-four miles to-day, over a desert! hills and river valley equally a desert! In this last, we have seen many large cottonwoods seemingly the wrecks of a blasting tempest, mere limbless or distorted stems of trees: and others, the bleeched [1857: bleached] and desolate drift of a flood.

We came over a lofty bluff almost overhanging the river, which commanded a view over vast and sternly sterile plains, breaking up at last into confused mountain spurs, and dim blue peaks beyond; but to this gloomy grandeur the river far winding amid white sands and green islands, and at the foot of many another precipitous bluff adorned with evergreens, lent an element of softening beauty.

I. F. What oppresses you? You seem in mournful harmony with these silent wastes.  

C. Behold those spectral ruins of trees strangely white and gleaming in the starlight!— they are melancholy. But no—it is a day that ever, since it first gave me unhappy life, leaves its influences upon me. 

I. F. Such a mood should always be resisted. [1857: But better resist such a mood.] How do you succeed with your diary now? We are passing remarkable scenery; most wildly picturesque; and there is always some incident....
--July 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border and

Scenes and Adventures in the Army

A likely source for scenery and events of the 1845 march by U. S. dragoons to the Rocky Mountains is the narrative by J. Henry Carleton. Carleton's journal entry specifies that this June 13th in 1845 was Friday the 13th. Cooke's "spectral ruins" of whitened cottonwood trees are melancholy enough. According to Carleton, the cottonwood trees at the campsite of Friday, June 13th once held human corpses:

The reader knows that the Dahcotahs place bodies of their deceased friends upon scaffolds, and in the forks of trees, having previously wrapped them carefully in buffalo robes; so it is not worth while to describe how they do it, just at the bottom of a sheet. Many of the cotton-woods about our present encampment have borne aloft upon their branches this death-fruit. The fire having caught two of them and burned off their limbs, the charred and crackled bones have dropped down, and now lay in confused masses upon the ground below. I speak of this because one of the trees stands right in front of my tent, and while I sit here writing I can almost touch the bones with my feet.

--The Prairie Logbooks

Now I'm wondering what the other diarists of the 1845 expedition--H. S. Turner, and the engineer William B. Franklin--wrote about Friday the 13th, in particular about those cottonwood trees.  Let me check.

First, here's the matter-of-fact description by H. S. Turner, transcribed from his manuscript journal available with subscription online at fold3:

On this part of the river there has been a growth of Cottonwood & Ash, but from proximity to Fort Laramie & other causes but few trees remain. As we approach Fort Laramie the barrenness of the soil increases, little vegetation visible anywhere—scarcely more in the valleys than on the hills. Distance 24 miles. Direction about N. W. Weather of pleasant temperature: clear sky.

Turner's details closely agree with the beginning of the entry for June 13th in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border. Indeed, the first sentence in the June 13th Scenes Beyond the Western Border entry looks like a direct paraphrase, neatly reworking Turner's remark of "scarcely more [vegetation] in the valleys than on the hills":

June 13th.—Twenty-four miles to-day, over a desert! hills and river valley equally a desert!

How about Franklin? Same scenery of course but notice the lack of any comparable phrasing with the words valleys and hills in the full entry for June 13, 1845:

June 13. To-day we travelled 24 miles. Our direction for the first 12 miles was NW. We then struck the Platte again, and the direction for the remainder of the distance was 30° N of W. Far on our left were the high bluffs of sandstone perfectly barren, and on the right hills of gravel or sand, covered with a stunted or parched growth of grass. The river is lined with Cottonwood timber from where we struck it, and may be said to be slightly timbered from this point to the Sweetwater where we left it. We found a scant supply of grass in one of the bottoms to-night, but consoled ourselves with the expectation of getting to Laramie to-morrow. Every one looked forward to our arrival there as the end of all our troubles, we supposed that the voyageurs would have plenty of good horses, and that we could buy them for almost nothing, but we were undeceived before we left them.  --March to South Pass

Carleton's report of corpses in the cottonwoods near Fort Laramie is confirmed, and illustrated, by Lodisa Frizzell in her 1852 journal:

We are about 5 ms. from Ft. Laramie. Near by where we nooned to-day, there was 2 dead indians in the top of a cottonwood tree, this being their manner of disposing of their dead. They were wraped in well dressed buffalo hides, & then lashed to several small poles, which were fastened to the limbs of the tree, it was a very singular sight, they must have been there some time, as I found a part of an old rusty knife, which had probably been one of the many things which had been hung on the tree, such as, knife, bow & arrow, & whatever he might have posessed.  --Across the Plains to California in 1852

Tree-burial, as illustrated by Lodisa Frizzell
From Across the Plains to California in 1852