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The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, Volume 1The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, Volume 2The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, Volume 3

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-3789401

1527-5477

Harald E. L. Prins,

Central European and Russian historical studies

By the early 1830s, the idea of the “vanishing Indian” was not just romantic fantasy but a morbid foreshadowing of an indigenous doomsday. Anticipating there would be no “free Indians” roaming on the northwestern frontier of the expanding American republic, adventurers like the Yankee artist-author-showman George Catlin and the Prussian naturalist Maximilian von Wied, in company with the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer, risked their lives to document this primeval universe before it disappeared.A retired military officer, von Wied had studied under Dr. Johann Gottfried Blumenbach at Göttingen University and was an experienced traveler who previously collected a mass of precious ethnographic, botanical, and zoological information during a two-year voyage to Brazil’s coastal region—fifteen years prior to his journey to the Missouri River. A major travel and trade route for hundreds of generations of indigenous Americans belonging to dozens of tribal nations, this long river meanders southeast from a high mountain spring in Montana to a spot in the North American heartland where it merges with the Mississippi River about twenty miles north of the ancient Indian mounds at Cahokia.Von Wied embarked on his privately financed voyage a few months after Alexis de Tocqueville returned from a nine-month journey through Northeast North America. On the Missouri, he witnessed the vanguard of world capitalism made up of trading post agents, crews on steamships, armed rangers, and Indian-hating vigilantes. More lethal than bullets or whisky were invisible mass killers—viruses and bacteria. Especially after the invention of steamships and later trains, cholera bacteria in contaminated food and highly contagious viruses causing influenza, whooping cough, or smallpox quickly made their way up the Mississippi and its tributaries. Beyond skulls and bones or ethnographic artifacts discovered in archaeological excavations or preserved in private and public collections, not much is left of the indigenous nations that perished. For that reason, the detailed descriptions and depictions made by von Wied, Bodmer, and, of course, Catlin are cultural treasures.Penning his 883-page Tagebuch einer Reise nach dem nördlichen America in den Jahren 1832, 1833, und 1834, Prince Max (as von Wied was known on the Missouri) created a unique trove of everlasting value. Relentless in his pursuit of specimens to identify, classify, and, if possible, possess, he followed the illustrious example set by Blumenbach’s star student Alexander von Humboldt. Among the many ethnographic artifacts, plants, fossils, animal skeletons, skulls, and skins packed up and shipped back home to Neuwied were neatly labeled human remains, in particular skulls. He valued Indian craniums not so much as trophies but as research objects and frankly described where, when, and how (sometimes lugubriously) he acquired these skulls. Some of these he packed off to Göttingen, where his old professor still directed the natural history museum.Even more massive than von Wied’s original journals is the current English translation: 1,550 pages supported by a huge number of footnotes, many of which offer additional detail, biographical or other background information, or commentaries, adding 856 titles to the bibliography. Also included are fourteen maps and many dozens of the author’s quick sketches of ethnographic details in pencil or ink, about half of which are water-colored pictures as originally drawn on the author’s journal pages. There are several supplements, including lists of words in various indigenous languages. Each volume ends with a huge index, one for general purposes and the other just for flora and fauna. Useful for reading these large tomes outside a library, the enclosed pdf version of the entire book on DVD is a godsend for quick searches on any fact, site, name, or date written in the omnibus. For this extraordinary work, we are indebted to the Maximilian Journals project director, her coeditors and advisory board.Von Wied’s first journal begins on 7 May 1832, when the middle-aged bachelor left the privileged comfort of his family palace located along the Rhine River in Neuwied (near Koblenz) and boarded the Concordia, which steamed to the seacoast. One of his companions was Bodmer, only twenty-three years old when the wealthy aristocrat retained him to produce an exact visual ethnographic and natural history record of the vanishing wildlife and remaining “free Indians” on the frontier. The other was a sharp-shooting hunter and experienced taxidermist from the family estate who had previously accompanied the prince on his two-year fieldwork trip to coastal Brazil (1815–17). The first massive tome ends with their arrival in St. Louis on 6 April 1833.The second volume, for ethnohistorians and anthropologists of special interest, begins with von Wied’s stay at St. Louis where he finalized travel arrangements with agents of the American Fur Company (AFC) and obtained trade goods needed to purchase indigenous artifacts. The trio embarked on the AFC steamer Yellow Stone on 10 April. Then almost fifty years old, Prince Max was in a good physical condition. A young fur trader aboard remembered him as being of “medium height, rather slender, sans teeth, passionately fond of his pipe, unostentatious, and speaking very broken English. His favorite dress was a white slouch hat, a black velvet coat rather rusty from long service, and probably the greasiest pair of trousers that ever encased princely legs” (3:206). Loaded with supplies and trade goods, the boat stopped at Fort Pierre, where a huge load of bison hides, packs of beaver, and other furs were stored, ready to be exported to Europe. There they transferred to the AFC steamer Assiniboine.This second journal ends when Prince Max starts his return voyage, arriving at Fort Union on 29 September 1833. This trading post was inhabited by about one hundred people representing about a dozen different nationalities, including Scots, Irishmen, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Italians, and even Russians, as well as indigenous individuals from various ethnic groups. Indeed most of the AFC employees “were with their Indian wives or half-breed wives and children” (2:223).Among von Wied’s major informants was Kenneth McKenzie (“the King of the Upper Missouri”). Married into the Assiniboine Nation, this Scot happened to travel aboard the same steamship as the German-speaking travelers as he returned to his fortified trading post on the Yellowstone River. There, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, they would spend the winter together. During the long journey upriver, McKenzie briefed his honored guest on AFC business:Along the Missouri itself, the game and fur-bearing animals have decreased to an extraordinary degree in a few years, and in ten years this business will no longer be significant along this river. To the extent that the number of animals here [has] decreased, the American Fur Company has extended its activity more and more and thereby increased its profit. They now employ about four to five hundred persons—primarily engagés, French Canadians, but also individuals from all nations—who are distributed in various places. At each fort and with every Indian nation, they keep interpreters, mostly half-breeds, most of whom speak French. Besides the company’s paid employees, there are trappers (who catch beaver and otters in traps) in the Rocky Mountains and the other regions of the interior and hunters who hunt and catch animals on their own initiative. . . . Frequently the Indians have nothing to trade except their leather shirts and blankets. These, too, are accepted in large numbers in exchange for merchandise, but there is little profit in this. (2:242–43)In a footnote, von Wied offers an example of the stunning speed of game depletion as a consequence of market hunting: “In 1825 the Indians caught about 130,000 [muskrats] along the Rock River; [the] next year about half as many; two years later these animals could scarcely be seen anymore. The third year (1827), about 10,000. In the fourth year, it was not worth the effort to catch them. . . . The Indians migrated because the muskrats often vanished suddenly” (pp. 242).The third tome, chock-full of fascinating data, concludes on 25 August 1834, when von Wied arrived safely home. During his absence, his personal servant Joachim Quäck died. This Botocudo tribesman had joined Prince Max on his return from Brazil. His decapitated body was buried in a Roman Catholic ceremony, whereas his skull was destined for the anatomical museum of Bonn University. (In 2011, the thirty-four-year-old Botocudo’s skull was repatriated to Minas Gerais, Brazil.)Upon his return to the baroque palace he called home, von Wied unpacked his trunks and further annotated his observations, offering many footnotes supported by 138 titles of publications. These journals provided him with the material for his two-volume book Reise in das innere Nord America in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834, published in Koblenz (1839–41) and soon thereafter translated and published in France, followed by an abbreviated edited version in London titled Travels in the Interior of North America. He had personally illustrated his book on Brazil’s natural history, but his artistic skills were obviously limited (as is evident in the now-published journals). Instead, as per contractual agreement, he used a selection of eighty-one magnificent aquatints based on Bodmer’s pictorial documentation.Indeed, when reading a description, I frequently reached for Karl Bodmer’s America (1984), a large tome containing over four hundred beautifully reproduced sketches. The meticulous descriptions and precise depictions by these two travel companions uniquely and importantly complement each other. The portraits by Bodmer appear to have been remarkably accurate. Important Mandan tribesmen visited Fort Clark on 9 November 1833, as von Wied recorded, “among them, the Mandan chief Mató-Tópe, who liked our Indian portraits very much. He recognized several of them” (3:55). His eye for detail was such that his descriptions add significant ethnographic information, as is the case of Bodmer’s drawing at Fort Union of the heavily tattooed Cree Indian leader Mahsette-Kuiuab, known as Le Sonnant (“Tinkle”) by the region’s French-speaking coureurs de bois. On a day three weeks earlier, he noted:In the morning, very strong hoarfrost, cold; however, nice, bright sky [and] early bright sunshine. At seven thirty, 27°F [−2.8°C]. The Cree chief and medicine man came with Deschamps, and Bodmer wanted to draw him [the Cree]. He had very sick-looking eyes and did not sit still for a moment, so that the work was very difficult. He is a famous medicine man and shaman in his nation. [He] makes prophecies. Once he was with the Mandans and predicted that a rider on a white horse would arrive the next day and be killed. This happened. A Cheyenne Indian came on a white horse, was taken prisoner, and was killed. Mr. Kipp is supposed to have witnessed that event; he can verify [it].The medicine symbol [that Mahsette-Kuiuab] wore on his head was the scalp of a bear. He did not sit still at all; the light blinded his sick eyes. The drawing was not completed. (17–18)Without this description, that bear fetish, indicative of the Cree’s non-ordinary power as a shaman, is easily missed in Bodmer’s portrait of this tribesman. Unable to do justice to these marvelous journals, I end my review with one of the indigenous scalps Prince Max (a decorated combat veteran) took home, a body part severed from the warrior who had just killed Hugh Glass (the legendary “mountain man” featured in the movie The Revenant). The previous winter, this son of Scotch-Irish immigrants had told the agent at Fort Union “the story of his whole life, which,” wrote von Wied, “would make a very interesting book. [He] had numerous wounds [that] he owed to the Indians. Many of his friends had been shot by his side. Finally, it was his turn. I own the scalp taken from an Indian, an Arikara, when he was pursued; it was given to me by Mr. Chardon [a trader at Fort Union]. [And] Catlin made me a drawing of old Glass” (3:6–7; see also 301–2). That portrait appears to be lost, but the legend lives on. However magnificent the camera work and acting in the movie, the cruel and colorful reality of the “Wild West” as meticulously documented by Prince Max suggests it was far more hellishly extraordinary.