Margaret Fuller (33 page)

It wasn’t the
Wanderjahr
she longed for either; there would be only four months of travel. Margaret’s “summer on the lakes,” as she would title the book about her trip, meant Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan, not Rydal Water, Grasmere, and Windermere, where Coleridge and the Wordsworths had rambled. But the journey to the edge of the American West, traveling over rutted wagon tracks through the prairie, by canoe and “fire winged”
steamboat on restless waters, was in tune with the originating mood that had driven her to write “The Great Lawsuit.” Margaret would tell a friend afterward that Europe “lost its interest” as she “looked upon these dawnings of a vast future” in an open landscape whose unfamiliar terrain and peoples alternately overwhelmed and inspired her. She had beheld “the newest new world,”
and the experience would bring about what she’d hoped for in putting New England behind her, if only for a season—“the birth of a soul.”

Beginning with the first overnight train ride from New York City to Albany through a “dripping” rain, during which Margaret was awoken frequently by the conversation of fellow passengers or her own fragments of dreams, the journey would retain an “effect of phantasmagoria” that never quite dissipated.
Cary Sturgis traveled with the party as far as Niagara, only to turn back after a week at the falls, claiming indifference to them and any sights farther west—she had “known it all before” through travel books.
But on returning to Concord, her recollected impressions apparently became more vivid. A giddy Waldo Emerson noted in his journal that Cary arrived “with eyes full” of Niagara, “dreaming by day & night of canoes, & lightning, & deer-parks, & silver waves.”

On the riverbank overlooking the falls, Margaret had also struggled to “woo the mighty meaning of the scene,” to determine “the Americanisms of the spectacle.”
But the thundering torrent resisted her efforts to ascribe meaning. Rather than respond to the great wall of water, the rising mists and churning rapids, with the expected wonderment—female tourists were known to burst into tears, their hands turn icy in shock—Margaret found the “continual stress of sight and sound” oppressive, “so much water in all ways and forms.”
There was “no escape from the weight of a perpetual creation,” no escape, whether “awake or asleep,” from “this rushing round you and through you.”

As with Cary, it took moving on—in Margaret’s case westward—to recognize that these confounding first impressions
were
the “Americanisms” she sought. The West itself was a “perpetual creation,” its young cities doubling or tripling in population every year, its prairie lands sprouting sod huts, log cabins, and the occasional elegant frame house. As Margaret reached Buffalo and then Chicago, traveling in company with “hordes” of immigrants from as far away as Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, who “crowd[ed] the landings”
and swarmed the decks of riverboats, the sense of a great force “rushing round you and through you” would not abate. The nation’s “life-blood rushes from east to west, and back again from west to east,” she would write in
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843.

Another vision from Niagara would haunt her as well, more specter than spectacle: the sight of an eagle taken captive and chained “for a plaything.” Rude tourists taunted the pinioned bird with “vulgar” language, verbal “thrusts and blows” that, with “his head averted,” the silent creature “ignored.” In words recalling her translation from Goethe’s “Eagles and Doves”—the “inly-mourning bird” who had “lost the power to soar”—Margaret imagined that the Niagara eagle “listened to the voice of the cataract” and heard “congenial powers flow[ing] free,” feeling “consoled, though his own wing was broken.”
The eagle’s struggle in Goethe’s verse to resign ambition was a lesson Margaret also read in the extravagant futility of the falls themselves: “the conspiring waters rushing against the rocky ledge to overthrow it at one mad plunge, till, like topping ambition, o’erleaping themselves, they fall on t’other side, expanding into foam ere they reach the deep channel where they creep submissively away.”

But the captive eagle at Niagara, heckled by curiosity seekers, symbolized something more American than a figure in a German lyric, and more tragic than frustrated ambition: the broken race of Indians, the nation’s harassed and abused “aboriginal population,” in the phrase Waldo Emerson had used in an 1838 letter to President Van Buren protesting the infamous Cherokee removal by “sham treaty,” the exodus that came to be known as the Trail of Tears, warning that “the last howl and wailing of these tormented villages and tribes shall afflict the ear of the world.” Waldo knew firsthand only the itinerant Penobscot bands who camped each fall on the Concord River to sell baskets, Indians long disconnected from their “aboriginal” way of life—not the Cherokee of Georgia whose fate he protested, nor the Chippewa and Ottawa peoples of Michigan and Wisconsin whom Margaret would soon meet on her travels, only recently ousted from their homelands by more sham treaties to make room for the “hordes” of immigrant homesteaders. In his letter, Waldo had argued that surely these “savage” tribes would prove their “worth and civility” if “duly cared for”: all the Indian needed to “redeem” himself from the “doom of eternal inferiority” was an education in “the arts and customs of the Caucasian race.”
Margaret would see more—the “worth and civility” of Indian culture itself, the compelling beauty of Indian “arts and customs”—and ultimately hope for less, observing at close range the eagle pinioned.

At every turn she found these strands intertwined—creation and destruction, creation out of destruction. Margaret had looked forward to viewing stands of virgin forest in the Michigan woods, but when the ferry docked at the Manitou Islands to refuel, she found instead crews of Indians at work chopping down “real old monarch trees”
to “glut the steamboat”
and feed its fires. She was horrified by the Indians’ role, perforce, in defacing their wilderness. The “rudeness of conquest” necessary to support “the needs of the day” was “scarce less wanton than that of warlike invasion.”
Who could possibly “make amends to nature for the present violation of her majestic charms?”

For two weeks in Chicago, Margaret walked the sandy shores of Lake Michigan or kept to her boarding house, reading books on the Indians, while the Clarkes enjoyed their family reunion. The city of nearly eight thousand seemed to Margaret to have been founded solely “for business and for nothing else,”
yet there was an integrity to the Chicagoans’ single-minded pursuit of “
material
realities.” The women, she noticed, “do not ape fashions, talk jargon or burn out life as a tallow candle for a tawdry show.”
Here James Clarke’s younger brothers Abraham and William had opened a drugstore, now firmly established after eight years in operation, a feat that would have been virtually impossible, she knew, in the congested shopping districts of Cambridge and Boston.

Margaret was on the alert too for employment opportunities for her brother Arthur, soon to receive his degree from Harvard. Arthur planned to become a minister, and founding a western school of his own, Margaret thought, would turn a better profit than filling a mere schoolmaster’s post back east, the usual next step for a would-be divinity scholar with no family money. Although she had initially been repelled to hear the homesteaders she encountered on the docks “talking not of what they should do, but of what they should get in the new scene,” when Margaret thought of her brothers struggling to make their way in cramped New England she began to warm to the expansive “new scene.”
Later that summer she would write from Milwaukee to her brother Richard, offering consolation after he’d been passed over for an essay prize in his third year at Harvard: “I say that the award of Cambridge is no test of what the world’s will be.”

The two-week excursion she took by covered wagon, led now by thirty-one-year-old William Clarke, with Sarah Clarke and her mother, Rebecca, riding along, to seek out Uncle William Fuller, seventy miles northwest through the Rock River Valley to Oregon, Illinois, almost persuaded Margaret to make the move herself. It was mid-June when they set out on a meandering course through prairie grasses studded with wildflowers and the occasional “oak shaded knoll,” ideal for picnicking. To Margaret there seemed “room enough to wander on forever”
in this “country [where] it is as pleasant to stop as to go on, to lose your way as to find it.”
Accustomed to moving from house to house since childhood and reliant on lengthy stays as a guest in her friends’ homes, Margaret was reconciled to her vagrant existence as “one of the band who know not where to lay their heads.”
But now, as the group stopped for lodging along their way at a series of farmhouses selected in advance by William Clarke, it seemed to Margaret that there was no “pleasant or natural mode of life except travelling.”
She proudly counted herself a Yankee “born to rove.”

William Clarke himself provided much of the satisfaction of this journey. The two slipped into an easy intimacy, sharing the driver’s bench as William regaled Margaret with “every anecdote of the country whether of man or deer”
and Margaret responded with her impressions of the prairie’s “blissful seclusion.”
As James’s brother, William was familiar to her, yet his western life had given him a jocular confidence that James lacked—“we do not see such people in the east,” Margaret wrote later. William “drove admirably, with a coolness and self-possession in all little difficulties”: “He knows his path as a man, and follows it with the gay spirit of a boy.”
During the years of their most intense friendship, James had never quite managed to be either—and, in any case, he was married now. William was not.

If, by the end of her summer on the lakes, Margaret would dismiss westerners as “so all life and no thought,”
it would also be on account of William; as the party circled back toward Chicago, the younger man began to clam up in the face of her ardor. But on the trail to Oregon, Illinois, all seemed hopeful. Margaret felt, she wrote to her brother Richard, “overpaid for coming here.” She envisioned settling on a farm with him in the Rock River Valley—in June a fresh green canyon with fertile plains extending on either side—after his graduation from Harvard. Farm labor would be “a twentieth part” what it had been in Groton, she guessed, recalling the long days in the fields that had worn down, possibly even killed, their father, and “would pay twenty times as much.” The siblings would “have our books and our pens, and a little boat on the river,” and find themselves “at least
as
happy as fate permits mortals to be.”
She had begun to sound like a handbill advertising the benefits of western migration.

Margaret’s health improved with the “free careless life” in the open air.
She didn’t even mind stretching out for sleep one night on the supper table in the barroom of a boarding house from which its “drinking visiters” had been “ejected” for the sake of the traveling women, who took over the parlor couches as well.
She spent the Fourth of July, 1843, with her uncle William, who promised to help select a parcel of land in nearby Belvidere suitable for Arthur’s school. The townspeople of Oregon, Illinois, put on a homespun celebration with ice cream and fireworks, but what made Margaret think afterward, “I had never felt so happy I was born in America,”
wasn’t the “puffs of Ameriky” from the orator and fife-and-drum band.
Instead it was the morning hike up a bluff overlooking the Rock River, where she found open pastures “decked with great bunches of a scarlet variety of the milkweed, like cut coral, and all starred with a mysterious-looking dark flower, whose cup rose lonely on a tall stem.” The purple flower claimed Margaret’s imagination: “My companions disliked, I liked it.”
Her habit of personifying flowers caused her to fancy that the blossom sprang “from the blood of the Indians, as the hyacinth did from that of Apollo’s darling.”

Everywhere she was alert to the plight of the Indians. Her delight in the landscape deepened her understanding of their loss, and she collected anecdotes from the Yankee newcomers she stayed with to use later in her book. Her uncle’s family had dug into a grassy mound on their property to discover three corpses “seated in the Indian fashion.”
In her letter to Richard, she told of a homesteader finding “the body of an Indian woman, in a canoe, elevated on high poles, with all her ornaments on.”
Another settler told Margaret of looking up one day to see a tall Indian “standing at gaze,” arms folded, on a knoll above his house, surveying the land until, catching sight of the white farmer, he “gave a wild, snorting sound of indignation and pain, and strode away.” Margaret wondered how the Indian could “forbear to shoot the white man where he stands.” Rather than express “compassion” or “remorse,” the homesteaders complained bitterly about the occasional return of Indians to hunt game the newcomers considered rightfully theirs. Sensitive herself to slights from the “white man,” Margaret heard in her informants’ callous recitals “the aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded.”

After William Clarke had seen them safely back to Chicago, with Margaret’s feelings for him rekindled by a last intimate conversation, spurring her to ponder, as she wrote to James, whether his younger brother was “most engaging as a companion, or most to be loved as a man,” the women set off on their own into Michigan and Wisconsin.
There, encounters with Indians became more frequent. Margaret was drawn to such sights as a statuesque “Roman figure” of an Indian draped in a red blanket, “sullenly observing” his fellows dancing for handouts in front of the taverns in Milwaukee,
his expression implying “he felt it was no use to strive or resist”;
and a “beautiful looking, wild-eyed boy, perfectly naked, except a large gold bracelet on one arm”
at an Indian encampment near Silver Lake. But Margaret engaged directly with the women: a girl who explained to her the “medicinal virtues” of wildflowers, another who expertly ferried the party across the Kishwaukee River.
At Silver Lake, where Sarah Clarke took out her sketchbook to render the scene, an Indian woman of “sweet melancholy eye”
welcomed the Yankee women to take shelter in her tent during a sudden violent thunderstorm. It was here that Margaret began to observe the “worth and civility” of America’s true first families: their consideration and tact amid living conditions radically different from any she had known, a “delicacy of manners”
from which “the educated white man, proud of his superior civilization, might learn a useful lesson.”