Morning in the West

THE WESTERN JOURNALS OF WASHINGTON IRVING--Edited by John Francis McDermott--University of Oklahoma Press ($3.50).

Early in May, 1832, Washington Irving returned to New York after 17 years in Europe. He found his heart beating hard, and when New Yorkers asked him how long he meant to remain in the U.S. he answered: "As long as I live." He began to travel about the country, suddenly happier than he had ever been in his life.

His happiness was compounded of simple pleasures, the sight of the roads through the magnificent country, the cheerful little taverns, the abundance of good plain food, the clean fresh rivers where he bathed morning & night. Morning after morning he awakened before dawn, breathing the pure air and listening to the sounds of the forest, the wind in the trees, the bells on the horses, sometimes the distant howling of wolves. Often he lay awake at night, seeing the moon and stars through the treetops and listening to the subdued talk of the frontiersmen.

Irving traveled through the West with two Europeans. Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales, 19, had been sent away from Switzerland to sow his wild oats in some other country. His tutor was Charles Joseph Latrobe, nephew of the architect of the Capitol, a botanist, geologist, musician, artist. With these companions Irving joined a Government expedition bound for Fort Gibson in the Indian Territory (near the present site of Tulsa, Oklahoma). Irving wrote Tour on the Prairies as a result of the trip, after filling five notebooks with his observations. The Western Journals of Washington Irving prints the notebooks in full for the first time.

Better than Irving's books, his hasty notes evoke the freshness of that vanished time. On Monday, Sept. 3, 1832, at 5 in the evening, the steamer Messenger left Cincinnati and carried the traveler into a land of enchantment: "--light of fires--chant & chorus of Negro boatmen--wavering light of moon & stars--silent, primeval forest sleeping in sunshine--on each side still forest--forest--forest."

Past the mouth of the Wabash, whose peaceful blue-green waters merged with the yellow Ohio, out on the Mississippi, with its streaming files of ducks and geese, the boat sailed on. "Red-yellow moon," wrote Irving, "silver star--calm, cobalt-green sky reflected in river . . . wide, treeless, prairie--trembling with heat--here not a tree or a shrub was to be seen --a view like that of the ocean . . . beautiful clear river, group of Indian nymphs half naked on banks. . . ."

They traveled through a country of night hawks, deer, bears, panthers, wildcats, and hunted turkeys by moonlight. At St. Louis they drove across the prairie through flowering and fragrant shrubs, past orchards bending and breaking with loads of fruit, where boys rode by on calico ponies "hallowing & laughing." Around the houses were "fat Negro wenches, drying apples & peaches on boards under trees," and in the villages were strapping Indian squaws from the tribes famed for the beauty of their women. Irving thought the Indians were like strange, wild, magnificent prairie birds. They rode by in scarlet turbans with plumes of black feathers, their legs and thighs bare.

When Irving came to write the formal account of his travels, he couched it in the style of his Father Knickerbocker history, and much of the savor was lost. But his original jottings are like glints of sunlight on the unspoiled rivers of the young land he describes.

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