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At Sea on the Plains with James Beckwourth

2023; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnc.2023.a921879

2166-7438

Arielle Zibrak,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

At Sea on the Plains with James Beckwourth Arielle Zibrak (bio) Since moving to Wyoming in 2014, I've been reading Western history. As an East Coaster and a scholar of nineteenth-century writers who spent most of their days in that part of the country as well, my forays into learning about the American West have been a way to render this place I came to as a stranger a little less strange. In Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), I encountered James Beckwourth, also known as Medicine Calf. A fur trapper, adventurer, scout, and spy, he was hired by Colonel John Chivington—one of the American nineteenth century's most odious villains—to serve as a guide to locate a Cheyenne-Arapaho encampment at Sand Creek. But Beckwourth took ill and never led Chivington to Sand Creek. Brown writes, "For a guide Chivington conscripted sixty-nine-year-old James Beckwourth, a mulatto who had lived with the Indians for half a century. Medicine Calf Beckwourth tried to beg off, but Chivington threatened to hang the old man if he refused to guide the soldiers to the Cheyenne-Arapaho encampment."1 Did Beckwourth "beg off" because he was sick, as Brown claims? Or did he not want to be accomplice to the massacre where Chivington and his men murdered and mutilated the bodies of more than a hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho civilians? Would the fact of his being a mixed-race person from another region inform his unwillingness to participate? Such were the questions I brought to The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians—the 537-page narrative of his life published in 1856 by Harper and Brothers. I wanted to know at what point someone objects to the violence [End Page 225] that is everywhere around them. I wanted to learn how another stranger who lived in this place where I find myself strange managed to survive its violent past. Click for larger view View full resolution James Beckwourth, ca 1860. Via WIkimedia Commons. While Beckwourth's narrative was written well before Sand Creek, I was looking for clues to his general attitude toward the Cheyenne and the Arapaho as well as toward the US government that perpetuated their genocide and relocation. But I found no clear answers to where his allegiances lay. Instead, I found a guide to something else: my own uneasy relationship to a place whose history comes in and out of view like a distant object on the horizon as I move through its daily contradictions. When I first moved to Wyoming, I was most concerned about living so far from the ocean. I grew up in Boston and went to graduate school there. Pre-pandemic, every summer of my life was spent on the Massachusetts shore. On winter days, I would drive to the nearest beach just to stare at the vast expanse of water stretched out before me and feel [End Page 226] very much like Melville's Ishmael, who famously confesses, "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet . . . I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."2 I have a habit of reading this passage with the Rockwell Kent engraving of Ishmael perched on a post in mind. My Ishmael was he who sits by the edge of the sea with longing, not he who sails out to plunder and discover. My desire for the sea was a desire for emptiness, to imagine a world free of other inhabitants and their complications, to enjoy a vista of nothingness rather than a vista cluttered with what others have desired and done, dreamed and ruined. I learned, to my surprise on relocating, that the plains promised the same relief. Whenever I found myself growing grim about the mouth in the West, I would drive outside of town, climb a rock or a mountain, and look out at the miles...