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Abstract
In September 1870, explorer Truman C. Everts, a member of the Washburn-Doane expedition to the then little-known region of the Upper Valley of the Yellowstone River, became separated from the main party and found himself without his horse and supplies alone in the ‘wilderness’. Everts spent 37 days struggling to effect his escape from his life-threatening predicament before being rescued by a two-man search party. The news of his separation, conjecture as to his possible fate, and reports of his subsequent rescue caused a sensation both locally and nationally and consequently earned celebrity for Everts and, crucially, for the place where the calamity occurred. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and non-representational work in cultural geography which explores the relation between self and world, body and landscape, this article revisits Everts' 1871 account of his ‘perilous’ misadventure to consider how his encounter with Yellowstone was embodied and, through its retelling, ultimately became inscribed on the place itself.
En septiembre 1870, el explorador Truman C. Everts, un miembro de la expedición Washburn-Doane a la entonces poco conocida región del Valle Superior del río Yellowstone, se separó del cuerpo principal de la expedición y se encontró solo sin caballo ni provisiones en la ‘naturaleza’. Everts pasó 37 días luchando por salir de este aprieto que ponía en riesgo su vida, antes de ser rescatado por un grupo de búsqueda compuesto por dos personas. La noticia de su separación, las conjeturas sobre su destino posible, y los informes de su subsecuente rescate causaron sensación tanto localmente como a nivel nacional y consecuentemente convirtieron en una celebridad a Everts y, crucialmente, al lugar donde la calamidad había ocurrido. Basado en la fenomenología de Merleau-Ponty y su trabajo no-representacional en geografía cultural que explora la relación entre uno mismo y el mundo, el cuerpo y el paisaje, este artículo revisita la versión de Everts de 1871 de su ‘peligrosa’ desventura para considerar cómo su encuentro con Yellowstone fue encarnado y, a través de ser repetido, finalmente se convirtió en parte del lugar.
Acknowledgements
The authors first presented a version of this article at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Philadelphia in a session entitled ‘Theorizing the body through environmental practice’, which was organized by Bonnie Kaserman and Kevin Gould and discussed by Nancy Duncan. We wish to thank Nancy Duncan for her encouragement of our ideas and for her close reading of an early draft of our manuscript. The research contained in this article began as graduate work completed respectively in the departments of geography and philosophy at the University of Kentucky. The authors are especially indebted to John Paul Jones III, Rich Schein, Dana Nelson, Sue Roberts, John Pickles, Wolfgang Natter and Karl Raitz. The anonymous reviewers have been exceptionally generous in providing enormously constructive comments and suggestions on various drafts of the submitted article and the editors and editorial assistants for Gender, Place and Culture have been very helpful throughout the submission and revision process. Finally, the first author wishes to thank the dedicated staff of the Heritage Research Center and the former Research Library and Archive at Yellowstone National Park. Any inaccuracies contained in this article are fully the responsibility of the authors.
Notes
1. As Whittlesey (Citation1995b, xiii) points out, ‘[o]thers have been lost since him, but none for so long without dying. And none has ever recorded the experience in any comparable manner’.
2. Everts' essay was republished verbatim in Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana in 1904 (see Everts Citation1904).
3. Yellowstone National Park straddles the continental divide in northwestern Wyoming and extends over the state borders into southern Montana and eastern Idaho in the Rocky Mountain region of the Western United States. Primarily covered by post-glacial boreal forest and meadows, this high-altitude plateau is geologically and biogeographically diverse. Located over what volcanologists call a hot spot, it contains the world's largest collection of hot springs and geysers. The southern part of the park is dominated by Yellowstone Lake from which drains the Yellowstone River that flows northwards and at the Upper and Lower Falls cuts through the characteristic yellow rhyolite creating an impressive canyon. Locked in by domineering mountain ranges from virtually all sides, for a long time prior to the expeditions between 1869 and 1871 that Aubrey Haines (Citation1974) described as providing ‘definitive knowledge’ of the region, the Upper Valley of the Yellowstone remained a place of mystery to the world of letters (see Meyer Citation1996; Schullery Citation2004). Truman Everts, as a member of a party of respected Montana civilians (see Smith and Wyckoff Citation2001), was part of the effort to derive reliable geographical knowledge about the region. His account, and the interest his story generated, must be understood at least in part as a function of this effort (see Magoc Citation1999).
4. Here we draw on the thinking of Michel Foucault whose ideas of experience veered away from ‘phenomenological’ understandings of experience as alternatively a ‘marker for the immediacy of lived, pre-reflexive encounters between self and world … or as a marker for the cumulative wisdom over time produced by the interaction of self and world’ (Jay Citation1995, 157). For Foucault, who expounded on what he termed the ‘limit-experience’, an experience ‘is something you come out of changed’ (Foucault Citation1991, 27). The limit-experience, Jay explains, ‘undermines the subject… because it transgresses the limits of coherent subjectivity as it functions in everyday life, indeed threatens the very possibility of life – or rather the life of the individual – itself’ (Jay Citation1995, 158). For Foucault, referring to the work of Nietzsche, Blanchot and Bataille, experience has ‘the task of “tearing” the subject from itself’ (Foucault Citation1991, 18). Conversely, experience is something that is ‘always a fiction, something constructed’ after the fact (Foucault Citation1991, 36). Notwithstanding the limits that Jay identifies with the idea of ‘limit-experience’, Foucault's simultaneous proactive and reactive, existential and discursive understanding of experience offers a critical alternative to phenomenological and quotidian experience. In the context of the current article, ‘experience’ connotes the subject-transforming and even life-threatening meaning which Foucault developed; experience is something that ‘one has alone’ and, through memory and representational practices, a ‘fiction’ of sorts that others can ‘cross paths’ with or ‘retrace’ (Foucault Citation1991, 40).
5. Drawn from Butler's (Citation1990, Citation1993) Foucault-inspired writings on gender, performativity refers to the way that identities are discursively constituted through the day-to-day cultural practices and social processes individuals engage in and moreover are subjected to (see Rose Citation2002).
6. Flesh, as understood by Merleau-Ponty, is not crude matter but simultaneously a touching and seeing mass that ‘bursts forth’ toward things, always assimilating and dispersing them. Levin (Citation1990, 38) sums up flesh, saying, ‘we inhabit this world. But the world also inhabits us’. Flesh is a relation between oneself and the world, such that the two are not separated but sensuously bound together. Madison (Citation1990) proposes that Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh introduces alterity, the otherness of the world, into the very definition of the self. Flesh is thus the ‘connective tissue’ between seer and seen, between self and worldly objects.
7. In what might be seen as a resurgence of a properly humanistic geography[0] reminiscent of the early backlash against positivistic approaches in human geography in the 1970s (see Ley and Samuels Citation1978), recent approaches to landscape inspired by non-representational theory have sought to place the body and all its inherent complexities and seeming inconsistencies amidst landscape to tease out relations of the self-landscape (Wiley Citation2005, Citation2002a). Allied with the recent concern in geography for the hypersubjective realm of emotion as a valid form of geographical knowledge (Davidson and Bondi Citation2004; Burman and Chantler Citation2004; Gabb Citation2004; Robinson et al. Citation2004; Lossau Citation2005; Matthee 2004; Panelli et al. Citation2004), non-representational scholarly encounters in and experiences of landscape engage it, often in Deleuzian terms, as a continuous precession of embodied affects and percepts, though not as some transcendental meditative experience, a reverie in and of nature and environment, but with a cognizant and fully disclosed understanding of the informing registers – everyday and learned social, literary, philosophical and popular cultural referents – that necessarily mediate those encounters and experiences (see Wylie Citation2002b, Citation2005, Citation2006).
8. Similarly challenging the often assumed separation between inner and outer worlds, Bronwyn Davies (Citation2000, 23) writes that ‘Bodies and landscapes might be said to live in such complex patterns of interdependence that landscape should be understood as much more than a mere context in which embodied beings live out their lives’.
9. Exploration, Driver (Citation2001, 8) points out, embraces ‘a set of cultural practices which involve the mobilization of people and resources, especially equipment, publicity and authority’. Citing Jardine and Spary's (Citation1996) work on practices of natural history and drawing parallels with exploration, Driver elaborates that exploration consists of: material practices concerned with the making and organization of the physical aspects of scientific travel; social practices that embrace the forging of all the functional and productive relationships necessary to fund, arrange, and execute the exploration; literary practices that govern the style of exploration accounts as recorded in diaries and set out in popular narratives and official reports; bodily practices of enacting as well as experiencing exploration in the field and presenting findings and experiences within particular sanctioning or patronizing institutional settings; and reproductive practices that foster the broader transmission and dissemination of ‘knowledge’ generated by exploration.
10. That Yellowstone was constructed as infernal and a place for sublime wonderment was symptomatic of not merely a visually based epistemology and way of knowing but also of an engagement with the multiple senses of smell, hearing, touch, and taste. For many of the explorers, nature/landscape as an object embodied life, existence, being and was to be felt, both physically and emotionally. David Folsom and Charles Cook of the locally organized three-man 1869 expedition to the Upper Yellowstone recorded the effect on their senses of the ‘dense forest of spruce and pine’, registering ‘the somber depths of which no sound arises save the monotonous sighing of the wind through the branches’. The approaching darkness made ‘the voice of the night’ all the more audible since it broke ‘in upon the pervading stillness’ (Folsom Citation1869).
11. At the commencement of the expedition, Doane's right thumb had become infected. By the fourteenth day of the expedition, though hardly giving the issue a mention on the interceding days, Doane could stand the pain from his thumb no longer. As he stated in his report:
I had on the previous nine days and nights been without sleep or rest, and was becoming very much reduced. My hand was enormously swelled, and even ice-water ceased to relieve the pain. I could scarcely walk at all, from excessive weakness. The most powerful opiates had ceased to have any effect. A consultation was held, which resulted in having the thumb split open. Mr. Langford performed the operation in a masterly manner, dividing thumb bone and all. An explosion ensued, followed by immediate relief. I slept through the night, all day, and the next night, and felt much better. To Mr. Langford, General Washburn, Mr. Stickney, and the others of the party, I owe a lasting debt for their uniform kindness and attention in the hour of need. (Doane Citation1870, 19).
In a similar way that Dana Nelson recognizes that medical science symbiotically interacted with the Lewis and Clark ‘expedition's domesticating agenda, as the taming of bodily excesses, of nature, through the managerial application of reason to Other bodies’ (Nelson Citation1998, 71–72), so too does the fraternal management of the operation on Doane's thumb, performed ‘in a masterly manner’, simultaneously represent ‘mastery’ over the body (in this case of the ‘Self’) and over nature. Just as the landscape was fancifully likened to hell for the threatening otherworldly qualities of the geothermal landscape that necessitated the ‘domesticating agenda’ of western explorative practice, so it was for Doane that his suffering comprised of ‘infernal agonies’ that required taming in the form of a controlled ‘explosion’. In this way the intertwining textual movement between body and nature, experience and landscape is virtually imperceptible and serves, metaphorically, to underscore the domesticating imperative of the explorers in the face of life-threatening conditions.
12. By the following morning, Everts realized more fully his predicament: ‘Then came a crushing sense of destitution. No food, no fire; no means to procure either; alone in an unexplored wilderness, one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest human abode, surrounded by wild beasts, and famishing with hunger.’ Despite this awful realization, he resolved that ‘It was no time for despondency’ (Everts Citation1871, 3).
13. On just the third night away from the party, his second without fire, he was awoken by a ‘loud, shrill scream, like that of a human being in distress’ (Everts Citation1871, 4). Realizing that a mountain lion was in his midst, without hesitation he clambered up the nearest tree. Unperturbed by Everts' flailing and yelling, the lion encircled the trunk. As Everts himself recalled:
The terrible creature pursued his walk around the tree, lashing the ground with his tail, and prolonging his howlings almost to a roar. It was too dark to see, but the movements of the lion kept me apprised of his position. Whenever I heard it on one side of the tree I speedily changed to the opposite – an exercise which, in my weakened state, I could only have performed under the impulse of terror. I would alternately sweat and thrill with horror at the thought of being torn to pieces and devoured by this formidable monster. (Everts Citation1871, 4)
After a short time, the lion retreated back into the woods.
14. About this time Everts (Citation1871, 5) recorded seeing ‘no ray of hope’ in ‘all the dreadful realities of my condition’.
15. According to Whittlesey (1995b, 17 n. 27), Everts probably camped among the Rustic Group of hot springs at Heart Lake.
16. Cirsium scariosum, a delicacy of the Flathead Indians and the variety of thistle on which Everts nourished himself, is also known as Elk Thistle or, more affectionately, Everts' Thistle.
17. In many ways, Everts' ordeal was portrayed as a classic Puritan duel pitting man against a wild and ungodly nature (Nash Citation1967). In this sense ‘deliverance’ suggested more than mere survival. Indeed, as Everts himself recited on the first page of his article, ‘“man proposes and God disposes,” a truism which found new and ample illustration in my wanderings through the Upper Yellowstone region’ (Everts Citation1871, 1).
18. According to Whittlesey (Citation1995b), it was a name that did not stick (see also Haines Citation1974). The mountain is now known as Mount Sheridan.
19. ‘I remember’, he wrote, ‘stripping up my sleeves to look at my shrunken arms. Flesh and blood had apparently left them. The skin clung to the bones like wet parchment’ (Everts Citation1871, 15).
20. A few nights after embarking for Yellowstone Lake, he awoke to find himself in the midst of a blazing forest fire. He burned his left-hand, singed his hair ‘closer than a barber would have trimmed it’ and most devastatingly lost his ‘buckle-tongued knife’ (Everts Citation1871, 10).
21. The resourcefulness and inventiveness he exhibited in mending his clothing should also be understood in this context.
22. According to a letter by Leander Frar published in the Helena Daily Herald, at the time he was found, Everts ‘was just alive, and that is all – [he] being unconscious, and speechless’ (quoted in Whittlesey Citation1995b, 36 n. 48).
23. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry (Citation1985) addresses the phenomenological inexpressibility of pain. She writes that:
When one hears about another person's physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person's body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth. (Scarry Citation1985, 3)
Scarry notes that while pain itself is not identical with the agent of pain, the agents of pain are often called on as a way of conveying the experience of pain itself. Doane's description of enduring the pain of his inflamed right thumb earlier on the same expedition employs this device when he projects the pain as being outside of his body, personifying it as ‘a felon of the most malignant class’ which subjected him to ‘infernal agonies’. This dissociation of pain from the explorer's body not only allows the sufferer the possibility of exercising control and mastery over pain, but perhaps more importantly translates that pain into a manifestation of nature itself. In this way pain's inutterability represented in externalized form serves exploration in providing embodied metaphors for the construction of nature as susceptible to managerial interventions. Control over the body implied control over the environment and nature more generally.
24. As referred to in this article, Romanticism was an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic movement promulgated in Europe in the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, William Gilpin and William Wordsworth, and was transplanted to America largely through the work of Hudson River School painters, most famously Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the first half of the nineteenth century. Romanticism invested nature with highly emotionally evocative themes, such as the presence and power of God, the inevitable cycle of life, and the insignificance of ‘man’, that inspired affective not merely intellectual response (Minks Citation1989; Allen Citation1992; Cronon Citation1995). Most relevant to this article perhaps, the Romantic tradition of the Sublime highlighted a sense of awe and terror inspired by certain experiences of Nature (McKinsey Citation1985; Cronon Citation1995). Early accounts of Yellowstone's landscape, including Everts' Scribner's article, drew heavily on tropes of the Sublime and appealed to the propensity the place to inspire fear, terror and an innate sense of danger (see Magoc Citation1999; Meyer Citation1996).
25. For an account of how nineteenth-century women travel writers characterized their heroic ascent of peaks in the Colorado Rockies in terms of hardship rewarded with sublime scenery, see Morin (Citation1999).
26. See note 18. The mountain that today bears his name is east of Mammoth Hot Springs and just north of the Grand Loop Road.
27. According to Haines (Citation1974), it is quite likely that Everts himself traveled to Washington, DC to assist in the lobbying effort to establish Yellowstone as a national park.