A work of bloody vengeance - Ruxton's Blood Meridian

When I described George Frederick Ruxton’s 1848 fictionalized account of the lives of Rocky Mountain fur trappers, Life in the Far West,  as “postmodern” and “my favorite Victorian novel” and so on, I was joking, up to a point, although it in fact does use several techniques associated with postmodern fiction, and is in fact a Victorian novel, however unusual its subject matter.  I could also have described it, more credibly, as an application of the methods of Walter Scott, or, for all I know, of Bulwer Lytton, to the place and time that Ruxton knew well and had witnessed for himself.

As much as I enjoyed Life in the Far West, the novel left no doubt why it is well-known among historians of the American West and entirely ignored by scholars of English literature.  Ruxton’s novel is competent but not complex; memorable for its material but not a strong candidate for re-reading.  Layers of meaning will fail to unfold, mostly.

But that material, that surface meaning!  About two-thirds of the way through the book, the fur trapper protagonists decide, for no clear reason, to become horse thieves, joining a party that plans to raid the herds of the California missions.  No, I am wrong, two reasons are clear:  the love of pure risk, and an undirected vengeance on Native Americans.  The raiders begin in Colorado.  It is a long way to California.  There are a lot of Indians in between.

Threats of vengeance on every Redskin they met were loud and deep; and the wild war-songs round their nightly camp-fires, and grotesque scalp-dances, borrowed from the Indians, proved to the initiated that they were, one and all, “half-froze for hair.”  Soon after Killbuck and La Bonté joined them, they one day suddenly surprised a band of twenty Sioux, scattered on a small prairie and butchering some buffalo they had just killed.  Before they could escape, the whites were upon them with loud shouts, and in three minutes the scalps of eleven were dangling from their saddle-horns. (140)

The most interesting aspect of Life in the Far West is Ruxton’s adoption of the moral perspective of the mountain men, who have themselves adapted the mores of the Rocky Mountain Native Americans.  Ruxton’s book is violent, but until this point the trappers and Indians existed in some sort of parity.  They squabbled and traded, fought and cooperated.  With this episode, though, the book turns into a prefiguration of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; the violence becomes concentrated, in purpose if not scale beginning to resemble genocide.

Actually, I doubt McCarthy ever wrote a sentence like this:

We will not follow them in their work of bloody vengeance, save by saying that they followed the savages to their villages, into which they charged headlong, recovered their stolen horses, and returned to camp at sundown with thirteen scalps dangling from their rifles, in payment for the loss of their unfortunate companion. (144)

McCarthy would have followed the mountain men, no matter how horrible the results, and would have intended the irony of horse thieves exacting righteous vengeance on other horse thieves, and savored the horrifying misapplication of the word “savages.”

My new favorite Victorian novel – Life in the Far West by George Frederick Ruxton

My favorite in a quite narrow sense.

Life in the Far West is a postmodern Western first published as a serial in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1848.  The novel describes the life of an American fur trapper La Bonté, his partner Killbuck, and a number of other real and unreal mountain men and Western adventurers.  Ruxton, himself an English mountain man with literary pretensions, in a classic postmodern gesture declared that the book was “no fiction,” italics his, I guess, which is correct if I add one little amending phrase, “except for the parts that are fictional.”

The book has in fact survived as a historical document.  As a novel, it is competent, sometimes just barely; as a description of the manners and methods of the mountain men, it is excellent.  The University of Oklahoma Press has kept it in print for sixty years, which is amazing but understandable.

The main interest in the mountain men is their reversion from civilization.  They voluntarily give up whatever is good and true for a life of freedom and wandering at the cost of hardship, starvation, and a violent and early death.  Their motive is only barely economic, since so few of them seem to be able to hang onto any money, or, in their worst moments, any possessions at all.  Today’s mountain wanderers are seekers after the sublime, like John Muir.  The mountain men may not have had so much interest in knowledge or aesthetics.  What they liked was risk.

Ruxton understands this point and mostly adopts a point of view that keeps a distance from his characters but adopts, or does not critique, their ethics.  Thus, murderous, vengeful expeditions against Native Americans are a part of ordinary life, as is scalping.  Cannibalism is terrible because it violates mountain man norms.  The purchase of wives is normal, bigamy is normal, marriage via kidnapping is normal.  Gambling and drunkenness are super-normal.

What is a current equivalent to Blackwood’s Magazine?  The New Yorker, perhaps.  I don’t want to say that everyone read Ruxton, but that would not be so far from the truth.  Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and so on would all have at least looked at Ruxton’s pieces, and the subject matter is so exotic and interesting that I do not doubt many of these writers read some or all Ruxton.   I find this amusing.

The novel ends, ludicrously, with the protagonist La Bonté’s return to civilization and marriage to his sweetheart of fifteen years past.  La Bonté has already had two (simultaneous) Indian wives and has engaged in all sorts of other non-Victorian behavior.  Thus, the novel’s status as my new favorite Victorian novel – it is a wonderful example of a novel that describes, coolly, calmly, all sorts of things that were supposedly off limits, that does things Victorian novels supposedly did not do. It is my new favorite counter-example.

Here is an exception, perhaps:

But in the sandy prairie, beetles of an enormous size were rolling in every direction huge balls of earth, pushing them with their hind legs with comical perseverance; cameleons darted about [etc…] (131)

Ruxton can describe bigamy, cannibalism, thievery, and murder without batting an eye, but he can’t give the dung beetle it’s name.  “Earth,” huh?

The author, poor fellow, died of an illness, age 27, just as the serial ended.  In a typical postmodern gesture, he appears in the novel, recognizable by his unusual double-barreled English rifle.