With us the name of the savage is a byword of reproach - Francis Parkman's insensitivities, such as they are

When Francis Parkman traveled up the Oregon Trail in the summer of 1846, he had already decided, at age 22, to write a massive, multi-volume history of the "American forest," as he described the subject.  He meant the exploration and settlement of French America, and the conflicts with the English.   At the center of the work, always, were a dizzying variety of Native Americans.  Parkman thought he needed to get to know them.  Thus, his trip west, his sojourn with a band of Lakota Sioux, and his first book, The Oregon Trail. 

Parkman was violating my Guideline #1, letting the culture of one group (one subgroup of one group) stand in for the whole.  Thus his all-too-common generalizations about the "mind" or "character" of the Indian.  In fairness, though, Parkman's descriptions seem more observed than received.  But today's historians have to be more careful.

Another problem for - I was about to say "the modern reader," but I mean "me" - is Parkman's incessant use of the word "savage."  Here, he's using a word that is essentially forbidden now.  Too many malignant connotations are attached to it.  Yet Parkman does say, in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, just what he means:

With us the name of the savage is a byword of reproach.  The Indian would look with equal scorn on those who, buried in useless lore, are blind and deaf to the great world of nature. (end of Ch. 5)

Or later, describing a soldier's murder of a group of Shawnee, including his own wife and children, for the price of the scalps, Parkman writes:

His desertion was pardoned; he was employed as an interpreter, and ordered to accompany the troops on the intended expedition.  His example is one of many in which the worst acts of Indian ferocity have been thrown into shade by the enormities of white barbarians. (Ch. 27)

It's here in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, actually, that Parkman presented the proof (which he discovered) that English officers considered using smallpox-infested blankets as a weapon against the Indians (see Chapter 19).  Parkman was appalled; professional, but appalled.  He never violated Guideline #3: to Parkman, Native Americans were people.

Syle in History

I'm stealing the title of a Peter Gay book (1974) that I have looked at but not read, a study of the styles of a number of European historians (Gibbon, Burckhardt, etc).  I want to write a bit about the style of some American historians.

This week I have presented a few samples of Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire, enough to demonstrate that he's a good, concise professional writer.  The difficulty of the book comes not from its style, but from the huge mass of material and the difficulty of organizing it: two centuries, three borderlands, multiple European nations, a multitude of Indian nations.  Hämäläinen himself succumbs to the problem a time or two.  See the beginning of Chapter 5, where he resorts twice in two pages to the "In this chapter" formulation.  I recognize the symptom, and can diagnose the problem - that section must have been a beast to write.  At some point, he gave up - "Good enough, it works." 

It is good enough, and it does work.  Like I said at the beginning of the week, the book is a triumph.  A generation or more of American history students are going to have to work their way through it.  If I were one of them, the first thing I would do upon re-reading is to make a giant timeline, which would have been a nice addendum to the book.

As I have been writing about The Comanche Empire, I have been reading a different book about a different episode of Native American history, Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851).  Parkman's book about the 1763 uprising of the Great Lakes Indians immediately following the French and Indian War was a similarly path-breaking history in its time.  That hardly explains why the book is still in print, as part of the Library of America, along with the rest of Parkman's massive France and England in North America, all seven fat volumes, and God willing I'll read them all.  The Conspiracy of Pontiac was excellent.

Parkman's books are still read for their style.  He is one more author writing under the shadow of Walter Scott, and the somewhat more transparent shade of James Fennimore Cooper.  It for some reason had never occurred to me that Scott's historical novels might influence not only novelists but also historians.  If a novel can include history, why can't history read like a novel?

Well, there are lots of good reasons why it can't, but Parkman really worked on the problem.  Some of the best scenes  in The Conspiracy of Pontiac are at least as exciting as Scott's battle scenes (the siege of Detroit, for example).  Other sections are more traditional - dense but necessary summaries of the political or military background of an event.

Some atmospheric but overwritten, even ridiculous, Parkman:

The wildcat glared from the thicket; the raccoon thrust his furry countenance from the hollow tree, and the opossum swung, head downwards, from the overhanging bough. (Ch. 28)

And some of Parkman at his best, the very last paragraph, on the fate of the murdered Chief Pontiac:

Neither mound nor tablet marked the burial-place of Pontiac.  For a mausoleum, a city [St. Louis] has risen above the forest hero; and the race whom he hated with such burning rancor trample with unceasing footsteps over his forgotten grave. (Ch. 31)

Guidelines for the historical study of Native Americans - it's so complex!

Exam question: Describe the material conditions of 13th century Plains Indians.

Answer: It's a trick question.  There were no Plains Indians in the 13th century:

The dry period that had begun in the thirteenth century had plunged the plains' vast bison herds into a sharp decline, discouraging the Shoshones from entering.  In fact, the decrease in animal populations was so drastic that most plains people had sought refuge from the bordering regions, using th grasslands only for seasonal hunts. (The Comanche Empire, 21-2)

This startling fact is not Pekka Hämäläinen's own, but is borrowed from the work of archeologists and anthropologists and such.  See David A. Baerreis and Reid A. Bryson, "Historical Climatology of the Southern Plains: A Preliminary Survey," Oklahoma Anthropological Bulletin, March 1963.  Note carefully, 1963!  Note also that this coincides with the Medieval Warm Period.  Note also (also) that it lines up with the collapse of Cahokia, which was not on the Great Plains at all. 

I'm developing some personal guidelines for the study of Native Americans.  Please add more, or tell me I don't know what I'm talking about (since I don't).  Mayeb they're all obvious.
1. Categories are necessary, but any statement beginning "Native Americans were" or "Native Americans did (not)" is likely to be wrong wrong. Be specific.

2. Expect nothing to stay the same, large or small.  Civilizations rise and fall.  Climate changes.  Cultures intermingle and split.  Fish and fowl were taboo foods for the Comanches, until the catastrophic drought of the 1850s, when the starving Comanches "routinely ate both" (302). 

3. Native Americans were human (I just violated Guideline #1).  Some were innovative and adaptive, others were stubborn and hidebound.  They made use of their physical environment to increase their material comfort.  The Comanches deliberately turned western Texas into an enormous grazing land for their horse herds, driving out the buffalo, on which they traditionally subsisted.  Timothy Pauketat, who wrote the short book on Cahokia that I recently read, is withering in this subject.  An older generation of researchers told him that Cahokia could not have been a city, because Native Americans did not build cities.  It could not have been ruled by a imperial religious elite, whose power was partly based on mass human sacrifices. 

At the peak of Comanche power, during the 1830s, about one-sixth (very roughly) of the population of Comanche territory were slaves (see pp. 250-1). About one-sixth of the population of the United States at that time were slaves. Comanches were human.

These guidelines of course applies to the study of anything.   I always know something is going to be wrong when a sentence begins "In Europe during the Middle Ages..."  Whatever follows may very well be true for England or parts of France, but rarely has much applicability to medieval Poland or Greece or Iceland.

Scholars continually divide and recombine. The historical study of Native Americans seems to be in an aggressively divisive stage.  It's intensely interesting.

How to miss (and see) evidence - the obese Comanche chiefs

Chief A Big Fat Fall by Tripping, it is told, owned fifteen hundred horses, but he was so fat that he could not ride any of them and had to be moved around on a travois. (The Comanche Empire, 259)

I want to discuss an example of how we (I) misunderstand evidence that is directly in front of us (me!), and how professional historians do their job.

The Comanches may have been the greatest horsemen in American history.  They culture was fundamentally mounted, as was much of their economy, which was based on a mix of seasonal buffalo hunting and raiding for horses, cattle, and humans.  Wealth was often measured in horses.  Yet they were also a trading nation. Meat, hides, horses, and slaves were traded for carbohydrates (squash and corn) and metal goods.

George Catlin, in Letter 42 of Letters and Notes of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841), describes his meeting with "a huge mass of flesh," the Comanche chief Ta-wah-que-nah (The Mountain of Rocks - see left for Catlin's portrait).  The chief "would undoubtedly weigh three hundred pounds or more," and was a "perfect personification of Jack Falstaff."  Catlin is baffled by the man, since "[c]orpulency is a thing exceedingly rare to be found in any of the tribes, amongst the men."

Catlin paints Ta-wah-que-nah and moves on to the next portrait subject.  Reading Catlin (a great book, by the way), I did the same thing. 

I should have known better.  Pekka Hämäläinen knew better.  In fairness, he was aware of multiple examples of overweight Comanches, all from roughly the same time period, the peak of Comanche power.  They are evidence, not anecdote.  Hämäläinen calls these chiefs "the new elite men who led the Comanche society in the early nineteenth century."  They became leaders because they were extraordinarily successful traders, not warriors.  They were so rich that they could abandon core aspects of their culture yet maintain their status.  These men were organizers, entrepreneurs, managing enormous households of slaves, wives, and affiliated herders and raiders, producing goods for the American market. 

Their corpulence was a sign, just as it was in other contemporary societies, of their wealth - high calorie input, low energy output.  These men are evidence of a profound change in Comanche society.  Historians depend on witnesses like Catlin, who rarely penetrated past the edge of the Comanche Empire, and only saw disconnected fragments.  With the help of anthropologists and demographers and ecologists, historians like Hämäläinen can reassemble the pieces.

Hämäläinen saw what was going on.  Catlin and I missed it.

Pekka Hämäläinen's audacious The Comanche Empire

A sample of Pekka Hämäläinen's startling The Comanche Empire (2009):

The assault came in March 16, 1758, when an estimated two thousand allied Comanches, Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Hasinais appeared at the gates of the San Sabá mission, announcing that "they had come with the intention of killing the Apaches..." Their faces "smeared with black and red paint," equipped with lances, cutlasses, helmets, metal breastplates, and "at least 1,000" French muskets, and led by a Comanche chief clad in a French officer's uniform, they set fire to the buildings... (59)

Does this seem remotely plausible? A large band of Comanches approach a Spanish mission in Texas. Their chief is wearing a French military uniform. The warriors wear French helmets and armor, and wield swords. Try to picture it in a movie. An audience would snort - it would look ridiculous.  Is this how Plains Indians are supposed to look?  Yet it appears to be true, known through multiple eyewitness accounts.

Hämäläinen makes an audacious argument, that the Comanche-occupied territory (in contemporary terms, western Texas and parts of neighboring states) should, from the early 18th through the mid-19th century, be considered as a unified state, as an empire, subclass: nomad.  Like the Mongols, as a for instance.  Hämäläinen demonstrates that Spanish New Mexico, for example, was essentially a tributary province of the Comanches for about a century.

The book is filled with startling reversals like this.  It's become common for historians to simply flip perspectives - to look at America's westward expansion, say, from the point of view of the conquered peoples.  The Comanche Empire is doing something else.  Hämäläinen argues that for a long time the Comanches were the conquerors.  There is no reversed perspective.  Earlier perspectives were simply mistaken.

They were mistaken, often, because of partial evidence, the limited view of the participants.  Spanish residents of Taos and Santa Fe, desperate to scrape up enough tribute to buy off Comanche raiders, had no idea that the horses stolen in New Mexico ended up on the other side of the empire, in the hands of French traders in Louisiana.  Those Comanches in French uniforms and armor are not only plausible, but likely.  Hämäläinen, with the assistance of hundreds of earlier historians, is able to put all of these pieces together. 

I'll try to write about it for a couple more days.  It's a complex book, meant for academic historians and what one might call "advanced undergraduates."  Often, I found myself ill-equipped to judge it.  It's packed with "no way" moments.  Maybe I'll share a few of those.  The book's a triumph.

Happy Thanksgiving

Wuthering Expectations has gone to grandmother's house for Thanksgiving. A pie for every one!

Back next week.  Have a good holiday, or nice normal week, depending on who and where you are.

What I would be doing if I were not doing what I'm doing

No, not extending my research to mummified baboons, or bog cats.  I'm all done with that.

Skeptical readers of Wuthering Expectations may have noticed that despite my current specialization, I am not quite exactly really entirely committed to the 19th century.  Some might have discerned deviationist Modernist tendencies. 

If I were not reading what I am reading, that's what I would be reading.  Robert Musil and Robert Walser, Pound and Cavafy and Montale, various scruffy Surrealists and Dadaists and Symbolists and Vorticists and Lunatists and other Istists.  Virginia Woolf, definitely Virginia Woolf. 

See Nonsuch Books, which is hosting a group reading of four Woolf novels this winter.  Mmm, how tempting.  Mrs. Dalloway is one of my touchstone books, one that I've studied a bit and really wrestled with.  I say wrestled because I find some of its ideas very challenging.  I don't even like it that much.  Woolf, in her novels, is sometimes more of an enemy than a friend.  But fighting with her is enormously valuable.  She always wins, and improves my game, so to speak.  If I keep practising, maybe I will win a round someday.

But I don't think I'll read along.  I'm doing what I'm doing.  Scottish literature, and Native American history, and when will I get back to Hawthorne and Melville and Dickens and Eliot (G., not T.S.)? 

The other thing I would be doing if I weren't etc. is turning back to early modern literature, particularly the period from about 1580 to 1640, the Age of Shakespeare and the Spanish Golden Age (plus Montaigne).  It's the single greatest temporal congregation of literary genius I know, just unbelievably rich.

A little over a week ago, Jennifer at Early Modern Underground announced a discussion of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1630 or so), a bizarre and insane minor masterpiece.  That was another thing I was not going to do, but Michael5000's response to the play pulled me in, so I re-read it one evening last week and had a great time.  The discussion has been productive, too.  And this play is only the, I don't know, 19th best Elizabethan or Jacobean play not by You Know Who.

Really, what a time.  Donne, Spenser, and Jonson.  Marlowe, Webster, and more Jonson.  Calderon de la Barca, Luis de Góngora, Don Quixote, Francisco de Quevedo.  The Anatomy of Melancholy.  Most amazing, in a way, is how good the best poems of the minor poets are:  Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton and the Psalms of Mary Sidney and so on.  Not to mention Ol' What's His Name.  That's what I'm trying to say: it's a treasure trove even ignoring Shakespeare.

Maybe Early Modern Underground will host another one of these?  But for now, I doubt they'll mind if anyone wants to join in on John Ford.

And if you don't like any of those, how about The Lord of the Rings, hosted by Shelf Love and others. That one is definitely not for me, not anymore.

No, now, I'm reading what I'm reading.  But I wanted to plug these worthy read-alongs.

Egyptian cats doing unusual things

I came across one really interesting book in my mummy cat research.  I did not actually read the book, but it has pictures!  In the spirit of The Blue Lantern, I will look at some of them.  I should point out one difference between myself and The Blue Lantern, a truly fine art blog - she actually knows something about her subject.

Let's see, what's this?  "A cat and a mouse engaged in a boxing match supervised by an eagle."  From the 1st or 2nd century.  You can go see it in Copenhagen, if the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek happens to have it out on the day you visit.

Unfortunately the eagle umpire is missing its head.  I love that it's actually grasping the palm leaf with one of its claws.

Today's exercise has one point: mummified cats are the least of it!  How about another one.

On the left we see "A cat slaying the Anophis serpent in front of the ished-tree," on a Book of the Dead papyrus, circa 1280 BC.  This was actually a common subject.  I chose the goriest version available.  This one is owned by the British Museum.

One more, another surprisingly common theme.  This is "a cat herding a flock of geese and a fox looking after a herd of goats while playing the double oboe."  British Museum, again, circa 1150 BC. 

The double oboe is amazing.  The fox has one foreleg sort of hooked over part of it, I guess.  The herd of geese is also amazing.  As is every single thing in this crazy 3,000 year-old picture.

I'm omitting the rat being fanned by its cat servant, and the cat whipping a human while a rat looks on, and many other magnificent things, including plenty of mummifed cat containers, and an X-ray of an actual mummified cat.  If interested at all, be sure to acquire The Cat in Ancient Egypt by Jaromir Malek (1993, British Museum Press), the source of these images.*  Malek mentions the Liverpool auction using extremely careful and unobjectionable language.  I've read a different book by Malek, the Phaidon Press Egyptian Art, typically gorgeous.  But it is deficient in mummy cat.

*  In order, I borrowed images 100, 51, and 96. 

A mummified cat miscellany - featuring swedes, guano, and sensitive pre-Raphaelites

Frankly, when I started investigating the mummified cats, I was hoping to debunk it.  The story is usually told quite badly, with important details omitted or mangled, and exaggerated to the point of falsehood.  The most common exageration is to use the Liverpool cat auction as a stand-in for the other importations of mummified cats that must have occurred, even though no one wrote down a word about them.  I'm convinced that this was it.

Many, many thanks, by the way, to the indefatigable Obooki for the English newspaper articles supplied in comments here.  His work is a tribute to the historic Anglo-American Special Relationship. The articles answer more questions than they raise, which is progress.  For one thing, the seesawing tonnage of mummified cats is explained: there was one shipment (19 1/2 tons) and two auctions, half of the cats in the first, half in the second.  The same buyer "won," if that's the right word, both lots, paying 1.6 times more for the second lot - all of that newspaper publicity must have driven up the price.  That second auction sounds like a circus.  A circus whose only attraction is cat mummies.

Bones as Fertilizer:  19th century England had an active animal bone and bone ash import trade that dates from the late 18th century and continued well into the 20th century.  Bones were ground and directly applied to crops, or, as the chemical fertilizer industry developed, used to make superphosphate fertilizers.  Although "15 per cent were taken by bone-turners and other for non-agricultural purposes."*  I don't even want to know.  Bone ash china, ma femme suggests.  Good point.

The article that supplied that quote also has a handy table of fertilizer prices, 1840-1870, including nitrate of soda, Peruvian guano, and "half-inch bones."  If I am reading the table correctly, the supposed mummy cats were auctioned for a price per ton comparable to that of other bone imports, at least in the first lot.  But the bone price series is incomplete, so who knows if the cats were bought at a premium or a discount.

Did you know that almost all of the guano imported into England went onto turnip crops?  Turnips and "swedes"?  What the heck is a swede?  (It's a rutabaga).  All turned into animal feed.

My bone chemistry question: does the phosphate content of old bones change over time?  Would four thousand year old animal bones be as useful for fertilizer as new ones?  It's a mineral, so why not. 

Mummy Paint, Mummy Powder:  The thing that still puzzles me is that mummies were in fact imported to England for two high-end purposes.  They were ground up to powder for sale as a) medicine, and b) paint.  The scattered and poorly sourced references I've found to these trades refer to these as valuable items, priced per ounce, not per ton.  But I have no idea what amount of actual mummy went into paint and quack powder.  The medicinal mummy dust was notoriously faked.  And anyway, the key part of mummy powder was a mineral salt called natron, which is part of the rags, not of the bones.

I haven't been able to figure out which part or how much of the mummy went into "Mummy Brown" or "Egyptian Brown" paint, either.  I read a crazy story about the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema coming upon his assistants grinding up a mummy for paint.  Alma-Tadema, horrified to learn that there was human material in his paint, rushed off to tell Edward Burne-Jones, who also didn't know that "Mummy Brown" contained actual mummy.  They then - well, let's turn to Rudyard Kipling's memoir.  Burne-Jones was Kipling's uncle:

And once he descended in broad daylight with a tube of 'Mummy Brown' in his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharoahs and we must bury it accordingly.  So we all went out and helped - according to the rites of Mizraim and Memphis, I hope - and - to this day I could drive a spade within a foot of where that tube lives. (Something of Myself, Chapter 1, p. 10 of the 1990 Cambridge University Press edition).

Note that Alma-Tadema has vanished from Kipling's version, which was written fifty years after the fact.  Is any of this true?  I thought art historians had gotten interested in materials and prices and that sort of thing, but I can't find any real information about "Mummy Brown."

Is this all the result of a large mummy trade?  Or the product of a small number of mummies smuggled out of Egypt (I've seen sources that imply this)?  Or is the amount of actual mummy rather more homeopathic?  And why couldn't the cats be used for this more valuable purpose?  You can order your own supply of mummy-free Mummy Brown right here.

How to read late 19th century newspapers:  One thing I've learned here is that I don't really know how to use these sources.  To what degree should I trust what I find in a late 19th century newspaper?  Of all the newspaper articles I or Obooki found, only one (The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, Feb 11, 1890) reads like an eyewitness account.  Newspapers today have been known to print lightly edited press releases.  They're a source; sources have problems; be careful out there.
Perhaps it's better that the mummified cat story is true. It's so ridiculous.  So unrealistic.  So much fun.


*  All guano and bone-related information from Mathews, W. M. "Peru and the British Guano Market, 1840-1870." The Economic History Review, 23:1 (April 1970), pp. 112-28.  That bone-turner business is from footnote 6, p. 121.  The table with the price series for various types of fertilizer is on p. 120.  Note that the period covered here ends before the legendary mummy cat auction.

Horrible Result of Using the "Egyptian Fur-tiliser" - or Punch as proof

So last March we were genially discussing a misapplied Mark Twain quotation when the Curse of the Mummy Cats was somehow triggered and I got sucked into their dusty world, which smells vaguely of fish.  Nile perch, I think.

Mark Twain had put me in a skeptical mood, so I decided to look around.   My first attempt to debunk investigate the story that cats were imported into England for fertilizer led me right to:

Wake, Jehanne. Kleinwort, Benson: the History of Two Families in Banking. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Specifically page 118, visible at Google Books right here:

Kleinworts also financed the import of cotton from Egypt for Stucken and Co. of Liverpool. And in February 1890 gained notoriety over another of their Egyptian imports. When their client refused to accept a shipment of fertilizer, Kleinworts were left with the cargo. This consisted not of fertilizer but the raw material for it, namely 180,000 mummified cats excavated from their ancient burial ground in Egypt. Kleinworts consigned the 19 ½ tons of embalmed cats to auction where they fetched £3 13s. 9d. per ton; the auctioneer knocked the lots down using one of the cats’ heads as a hammer.¹⁸

So it seems that I had already found the cats.  I just needed to inspect footnote 18, which would tell me how we knew all of this.  The footnotes were not available through Google Books, so I needed the actual book.  Here's what I found (note that KBA means "Kleinwort Benson Archives, Fenchurch Street") on p. 453, footnote 18 in its entirety:

Punch and Daily Graphic, 15 Feb 1890, Press Clippings file, KBA.

Punch?  Punch???  That's a comedy magazine!  I don't have access to the Daily Graphic, but Punch is easy to find.  Let's see, 15 Feb, 1890.  Here it is, p. 81:

Horrible Result of Using the "Egyptian Fur-tiliser."  Click to enlarge, so you can really appreciate the foreshortening of the hind leg of the fleeing farmer, and the ghostly mummy cat eyebeams.  Now, once I saw this magnificent creation, I knew I had to write about mummified cats, sometime, somehow. 

But please note what's going on here.  A historian supports a complicated and unlikely story about the importation of mummified cats for use as fertilizer not with a newspaper account, or an internal memo, or a letter, but with a file folder that contains the above Punch cartoon and, if I understand what the London Daily Graphic is, yet another illustration.  Isn't the footnote supposed to tell me where to find the information being footnoted?  Oxford University Press!  And then there's this Routledge book I found - no, that's enough whining about footnoting.

Perhaps if I can see the Daily Graphic article, or the Daily Paper article mentioned in the caption of the Punch cartoon, or the London Times articles I mentioned yesterday, this will all be straightened out, although I doubt it.  It's just that, see, if a historian writes a book about the history of a Liverpool merchant firm and all he can find in their own archives about one of the oddest events in their history is a pair of clipped cartoons, maybe something else is going on.

Tomorrow:  Peruvian bat guano, mummies as medicine, mummies as paint, and guest appearances by Rudyard Kipling and Edward Burne-Jones.