Early comment on the racy style of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1842 magazine version)

The confluence of the Mississippi (right) and the Missouri (left) Rivers.
Photo Credit: Doc DeVore via MU High School

Glad to know I'm not the only one who noticed the loose tendencies already evident in the first part of Scenes and Adventures in the Army. From the Augusta [Georgia] Chronicle, Wednesday, June 22, 1842:

We have read “Scenes and Adventures in the Army, by a Captain of U. S. Dragoons” —with a good deal of enjoyment. The style of composition is not so severely chaste as it might be, but it is nevertheless an agreeable and entertaining paper, especially after the matter-of-fact article of the Naval Officer.

--Found in the newspaper archives at Genealogy Bank.

The most obvious example of less-than-chaste style from the June 1842 installment has to be the extended metaphor of the Missouri River's confluence with the Mississippi as a persistent Indian lover's courting and conquering a white maiden. The candidly experimental and romanticized "conceit" of the "red warrior" and "fair damsel of the settlements" had not appeared in the earlier 1840 version (Army and Navy Chronicle 11, 23 July 1840, p61) of the narrative and would be deleted in revision for the 1857 book version. (Compare the three different versions here.)

The morning after, I passed the mouth of the Missouri. This river, after draining the vallies of the Rocky Mountains, and receiving tributaries throughout a course of three thousand miles, precipitates its turbid currents right across the placid bosom of the Mississippi, to which, losing its name, it imparts its character. A mind fertile in conceits might fancy in the coming of this turbid and soil-stained river of the west, to join the clearer and gentler stream, the approach of a red warrior to woo a fair damsel of the settlements; at first the white face edges away and keeps aloof from the strange lover, but his suit is vehement and irresistible, and soon she is in his dusky arms, and her gentleness is lost, and his wild nature gives its complexion to her own. To be sure the circumstance that the Mississippi is the acknowledged "Father of Waters" is an obstacle of sex, and hurts the conceit somewhat.  --June 1842 Scenes and Adventures

Up north, newspapers in Boston and New York City seemed glad to reprint the account of "An Indian Battle" from the July 1842 installment of "Scenes and Adventures in the Army" in the Southern Literary Messenger. The sketch was given under the following brief editorial introduction which did not appear in the original magazine series:

AN INDIAN BATTLE—[The Southern Literary Messenger, for July, has an entertaining article entitled “Scenes and Adventures in the Army,” which relates incidents which took place a few years since in the country watered by the Arkansas, and stretching from the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The following is a lively description of a contest with the Indians.]

Newspaper re-printings of the "Indian Battle" sketch from the July 1842 Southern Literary Messenger include:

• New York Sun, Friday, July 8, 1842 
• New York Evening Post, Saturday, July 9, 1842 
• Albany Argus, Tuesday, July 12, 1842 
• Boston Traveler Tuesday, August 2, 1842
• Vermont Gazette [Bennington, Vermont], Tuesday, August 9, 1842

None of these 1842 excerpts acknowledged the prior, 1840 publication of "Scenes and Adventures in the Army" in the Army and Navy Chronicle under a couple of different titles, the last being "Notes and Reminiscences of an Officer of the Army." The Indian Battle episode was first published in the September 10, 1840 issue of the Army and Navy Chronicle (volume 11) with the rest of No. VII of "Notes and Reminiscences of an Officer of the Army" by "F. R. D."

Army and Navy Chronicle 10-11 (1840)