About mortgages

Scored with pencil in Herman Melville's copy of David Dudley Field's History of the County of Berkshire:

Mortgage is certain to prove in the general, what the word signifies, a death-gage to the property upon which it is fastened, and to the prosperity of the man who allows it to be fastened upon his estate.  --Melville's Marginalia Online

This book is inscribed in ink on the front flyleaf:  "H Melville. / Pittsfield July 16, 1850" According to the Documentary Note on this volume at Melville's Marginalia Online, Melville

made notes on the verso of the rear flyleaf that indicate he consulted A History throughout the 1850s, using it as a source for Israel Potter and "The Apple-Tree Table."

Prairie near the Mouth of the St. Peters - Buffalo Hunt / Seth Eastman, 1846-8
Image Credit: Minnesota Historical Society

This unerring and deadly shot after so long and pertinacious a pursuit, gave him credit with us all; until at last, we came up; and there surely lay the bull: but, strange to say, no scrutiny could discover a wound!—and soon the marvel was, how he had lived so long; he had only closed a longstanding mortgage to the crows;—the ardent hunter was not there to dispute possession!  --June 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

I'm not claiming Field's History of Berkshire inspired "mortgage to the crows," which phrase gets one (and only one?) other hit via Google Books. But Melville had the burden of mortgage on his mind after privately borrowing $2050 from T. D. Stewart in May 1851, on top of his remaining debt for the Arrowhead farm. In his essay "Damned by Dollars" (first published in the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick; revised and condensed in the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man) Hershel Parker examines the details of Melville's financial difficulties and their impact on his writing.

Here's a related gem from the second volume of Parker's Melville biography:

What with Maria's daily reproaches for his religious lapses, Hope's and the younger Shaws' carping criticism of his lost reputation, what with his enormous debts and his defaulting on a payment on 1 May [1852], what with the failure of The Whale and Moby-Dick after publication and the humiliating American contract for Pierre and no English contract for it at all, Melville chose to escape as best he could: he went outdoors into the Berkshire spring. --Herman Melville: A Biography, V2.110

That buffalo hunter with his pertinacious pursuit sounds kind of like a prairie Ahab.