Neo-Victorianism on Screen:

Postfeminism and Contemporary

Adaptations of Victorian Women 1st
Edition Antonija Primorac (Auth.)
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION
AND VISUAL CULTURE

Neo-Victorianism
on Screen
Postfeminism and Contemporary
Adaptations of Victorian Women

Antonija Primorac
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA

R. Barton Palmer
Department of English
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA
This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode
of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is
its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations,
and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as
videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and
nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute
to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one,
form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts
that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other
pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres,
appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series espe-
cially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between
adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome pro-
posals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance
of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual ­culture.

Editorial Board
Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK
Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK
Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US
Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK
Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK
Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK
Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada
Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US
Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US
Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia
Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia
James Naremore, Indiana University, US
Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US
Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Turkey
Robert Stam, New York University, US
Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia
Imelda Whelehan, Australian National University, Australia
Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Universite de Bretagne Sud, France

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14654
 Antonija Primorac

Neo-Victorianism
on Screen
Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations
of Victorian Women
Antonija Primorac
Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences
University of Split
Split, Croatia

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-64558-2 ISBN 978-3-319-64559-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64559-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949208

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
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 Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the making, and I would therefore like to
thank my family, friends, and colleagues for their patience and sup-
port. The seeds were sown at the 2nd Annual Association of Adaptation
Studies conference held in 2007 at Oglethorpe University, Atlanta,
USA, where a panel on nineteenth century on film brought a wide-
eyed and somewhat opinionated PhD candidate together with inspira-
tional academics pursuing research on adaptation studies. It was the start
of many a conversation on the shape-shifting beast that is adaptation,
leading eventually to fruitful work collaborations, university exchange
programmes and the organisation of an international conference, Neo-
Victorian Networks, held in Amsterdam in 2012. Had that cross-­Atlantic
trip not been possible, my life would certainly have taken a different
turn, so I am immensely grateful to the Croatian Ministry of Science for
its generous funding programme for young researchers’ international
conference attendance (sadly no longer available).
I would like to thank the US Department of State for awarding
me the Fulbright scholarship that enabled me to spend a year at New
York University’s English Department in 2008–2009 where, with the
­generous help of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and John Maynard, I started
to develop my initial musings on film adaptations of Henry James’
novels. I was also fortunate enough to be awarded the Fulbright Alumni
Grant that went towards academic journal subscriptions n ­ecessary
for a continuation of research at my home institution. The resulting
PhD, written in Croatian and defended at Zagreb University’s English

v
vi Acknowledgements

Department, was supervised by Borislav Knežević, to whom I am

indebted for his guidance and support. I would also like to thank the
head of my PhD committee, Nikica Gilić, for his constructive comments
and encouragement.
A huge thank you goes to Eve Patten whose invitation in early 2013
to use the library facilities at Trinity College Dublin was a turning
point that made the idea of this particular book project plausible. The
Visiting Fellowship at TCD enabled the much needed access to valuable
resources and helped me to develop some already published articles into
a full-blown book written in English.
The completion of this project would not have been possible without
the non-stipendiary Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of English
Studies, University of London from July to September 2013. The
lengthy stay in London was made possible thanks to the generosity
and hospitality of Wendy Bracewell and Robert Shoemaker, Andrew
Asibong, Zoran Milutinović and Alan Kennedy, to whom I offer my
deepest thanks. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Faculty
of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, for the short-term
research trip grants that made holding the Visiting Fellowships at IES
and TCD financially feasible.
While in Split, my research often relied on the comradeship of
­colleagues at universities abroad with better access to databases and j­ournal
subscriptions. Thank you Erik Steinskog, Ana Franjić, Christine Ferguson,
Emily Elizabeth Direen, Joyce Goggin, Tara MacDonald, Monika Pietrzak-
Franger, Ivan Lupić, Lejla Kučukalić, Linda Warley, Sarah Artt and Eckart
Voigts—without you the completion of this book would have been
­well-nigh impossible.
I am indebted to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Lina Aboujieb
and Karina Jakupsdottir, for their continuing support and assistance.
A special thank you goes to my husband Aidan for patiently reading
through the different drafts and offering his insightful editorial advice—
all this despite his heartfelt dislike for costume drama (and heritage
cinema in particular).
Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, Slavka and
Ljubo, and my sister Jaka for their unwavering faith in me and my work.
Od srca hvala.
A version of the chapter on the adaptations of Irene Adler was pre-
viously published as ‘The Naked Truth: The Postfeminist Afterlives of
 Acknowledgements vii

Irene Adler’ (2013) and is here revisited with the kind permission of the
general editor of Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke. A shorter
version of the chapter entitled ‘In the Grip of the Corset’ was published
in the inaugural issue of Film, Fashion & Consumption as ‘Corsets, Cages
and Embowered Women in Contemporary Victoriana on Film’, and is
rewritten here with the journal’s approval. A smaller part of the chap-
ter on the representations of colonial space and gender roles was previ-
ously published by Palgrave Macmillan as ‘Cultural Nostalgia, Orientalist
Ideology and Heritage Film’ in The Politics of Adaptation: Media
Convergence and Ideology (2015) edited by Dan Hassler-Forest and
Pascal Nicklas.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Neo-Victorianism on Screen

and Postfeminist Media Culture 1

2 Postfeminism and Screen Adaptations of Sherlock

Holmes Stories: The Case of Irene Adler 27

3 Re-presenting the Past: Gender, Colonial Space

and Cultural Nostalgia in Neo-Victorianism on Screen 55

4 In the Grip of the Corset: Women as Caged Birds

in Contemporary Victoriana on Screen 97

5 Re-fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations:

Tailoring and Shape-Shifting as Queer Adaptation
and Appropriation 133

6 Conclusion: No Country for Old Women 177

Index 191

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Caught between two worlds: woman as exotic spectacle

in Ripper Street’s Season 2, Episode 1, ‘Pure
as the Driven’ (detail). BBC 84
Fig. 4.1 Victoria being tight-laced in Tim Burton’s
The Corpse Bride (2005), Warner Bros. Pictures 100
Fig. 4.2 a, b The corseted centre of the film. Stills from
The Portrait of a Lady (1996), dir. Jane Campion.
PolyGram Filmed Entertainment 105
Fig. 4.3 Nicole Kidman as Satine performing ‘Diamonds
are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Moulin Rouge! (2001), Bazmark
Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox 112
Fig. 4.4 Caged birds. Joanna singing ‘Green Finch and Linnet
Bird’ in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (2007), DreamWorks
Pictures 114
Fig. 4.5 Crinoline as shelter: Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993).
Australian Film Commission/CiBy 2000/Jan Chapman
Productions 116
Fig. 4.6 Dressed up for the part of a Victorian wife. Jane
Campion’s The Piano (1993). Australian Film
Commission/CiBy 2000/Jan Chapman Productions 117
Fig. 5.1 Hosing down the sins of the body. Still from ‘Closer
than Sisters’ (2014 Series One Episode 5), Penny Dreadful.
Sky Atlantic/Showtime 152

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Neo-Victorianism on Screen

and Postfeminist Media Culture

In his Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland

introduces two related concepts: ‘legislated nostalgia’, which he uses
to describe a phenomenon whereby ‘a body of people… [is] force[d]
to have memories they do not actually possess’, and the ‘Now Denial: To
tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only
time that may ever be interesting again is the future’ (Coupland 1991,
p. 41). Published in 1991, Coupland’s book captures the fragmented,
self-consciously retro ennui of the early 1990s in the West with uncanny
precision. This postmodern, self-conscious backward gaze has found
prominent expression since the early 1990s in a proliferation of ­historical
fiction set in the Victorian past and in screen adaptations of Victorian
literature and culture. Whether they have sought to retrieve the certain-
ties of the pre-modernist narrative and its attendant social structures or if
they aimed to challenge received ideas about the past through a critical
rewriting and re-visioning of the Victorians, what all these adaptations
and appropriations of the Victorian era have in common is a desire to
retrieve and re-present the past by translating it into a vocabulary under-
standable and relatable to contemporary audiences. The representations
of the long nineteenth century that have been brought to life on the big
and small screens alike can be read as variants of Coupland’s ‘legislated
nostalgia’ and examples of the ‘now denial’: as cultural products created
for, and often consumed as anachronistic cultural memories by, audiences
in the Anglosphere, and which, more often than not, end up disseminat-
ing their versions of legislated nostalgia on a global scale.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Primorac, Neo-Victorianism on Screen, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation
and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64559-9_1
2 A. Primorac

Whereas before 2012 it was unusual to come across the ­ adjective

outside academia, ‘neo-Victorian’ has by now become a widely accepted
term used to describe these adaptations and appropriations of Victorian
literature and culture across media.1 As Cora Kaplan pointed out in one
of the first studies of the phenomenon, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions,
Criticism (2007), the interest in the material remnants of the Victorian
era started in Britain in the 1960s and gradually expanded so that all
other aspects of the period came to be appropriated and used in art,
literature and design (pp. 2–3), and also, crucially, since the 1980s, in
political discourse: first through the appropriation of the ‘Victorian
Values—thrift, family, enterprise’ by Thatcher’s Conservative govern-
ment, which was followed by Blair’s retooling of ‘Christian Socialism’ in
his branding of New Labour (Kaplan 2007, pp. 5–7). Neo-Victorianism
has gathered momentum in the last couple of decades, and it now refers
not only to the numerous screen adaptations of Victorian literature and
Victorian-inspired TV series and films, fiction and graphic novels, but
also to the ways in which fashion, art and interior design have hearkened
back to the Victorian era, which has also led to a mainstreaming of the
Steampunk and Goth subcultures’ aesthetic.2 After some terminological
jousting in which the prefix neo won out over the backward looking ones
of post and retro,3 neo-Victorian studies has emerged as an academic field
of endeavour, and this was solidified with the launch of the open access
journal Neo-Victorian Studies in 2008.4
However, even though neo-Victorian studies has grown rapidly in
the last decade, its critical spotlight has, so far, primarily been directed at
fiction (including, to a smaller degree, graphic novels5), resulting in, as
Caterina Grasl noted, the marginal status of neo-Victorianism on screen
in the field (Grasl 2015, p. 21). What attention has been paid to film and
theatre6 adaptations of Victorian and/or neo-Victorian fiction has usu-
ally been in the context of a broader discussion of the relevant adapted
text7; indeed, neo-Victorianism on screen as a subject in its own right
has rarely been dealt with independently8: it is usually a part of the big-
ger argument about neo-Victorian afterlives.9 Like the two special issues
of Neo-Victorian Studies (2:2 and 4:2),10 book-length studies of neo-
Victorian screen adaptations have primarily focused on filmic adaptations
of Victorian literature that critically interpret the lacunae of Victorians’
attitudes to gender, race, class and empire.11 This does not come as a
surprise, since the field itself took off within literature studies, with focus
on explorations of self-conscious, postmodern takes on the historical
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 3

novel set in the Victorian period; as such, it has generally been aligned to
the genre of historiographic metafiction. What is surprising, as the adap-
tation studies scholar Imelda Whelehan notes (2012), is the persistent
reluctance to approach neo-Victorianism on screen on equal terms with
neo-Victorian literature, especially as from its inception as a discipline,
neo-Victorian studies scholars recognised adaptation as ‘a fundamental
part of neo-Victorianism as a concept’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010,
p. 244). Whelehan stresses that neo-Victorian studies’ approach to neo-
Victorian adaptations (understood as both adaptations of classics that
offer new readings of Victorians’ silenced or marginal points of view, and
screen adaptations of neo-Victorian texts) has mostly treated them as sec-
ondary to literary texts:

A favoring of reading over spectating and a nagging belief that reading is

better because “adaptations often flatten out the complexities of Victorian
fiction” (Hadley 2010, 142) positions screen adaptation as the ersatz
“nineteenth-century dress-ups,” as if historical authenticity (even reim-
agined history) is the peculiar domain of fiction. Neo-Victorian fiction’s
intertextual universe is part of “a cultural memory, to be re-membered,
and imaginatively re-created, not revised or understood” (Mitchell 2010,
7); whereas adaptation’s intertextual potentialities roam across eras and
genres in fantastic and dangerous liaisons yet to be emulated by the neo-
Victorian novel. (Whelehan 2012, p. 289)

The hierarchical approach to neo-Victorianism on screen is all the more

vexing because, as Whelehan points out, ‘neo-Victorian literary texts are
themselves adaptations; even when they do not refer back to a single
Urtext, they remain compatible with contemporary definitions of adapta-
tion and appropriation’ (Whelehan 2012, p. 272). Since screen adapta-
tions of Victorian classics by and large belong to the genre of costume
drama, these connections are all the more pertinent because, in Julianne
Pidduck’s words, ‘historical fiction and costume drama alike depict the
past through the stylistic, critical and generic vocabularies of present cul-
tural production’ (Pidduck 2004, p. 4). So far, the only monograph deal-
ing solely with the nineteenth century on screen that gives equal space
to adaptations of classics as well as to neo-Victorian meta-adaptations
(original screenplays set in the nineteenth century) is Iris Kleinecke-
Bates’s Victorians on Screen: The Nineteenth Century on British Television,
1995–2005 (2014). Kleinecke-Bates also introduces a chapter on a genre
not usually examined in the context of costume drama—the so-called
4 A. Primorac

factual history programming, characterised by popular TV shows such as

What the Victorians Did for Us and The 1900 House, where she analyses
the transformation of the latter genre under the influence of reality TV
in the UK and reads it within the broader context of the affective turn in
the humanities.
This book aims to address this imbalance in neo-Victorian studies by
focusing solely on neo-Victorianism on screen, which is here understood
as an umbrella term that encompasses adaptations of Victorian texts that
offer a critical re-visioning of Victorian narratives; screen adaptations
of neo-Victorian texts; contemporary biopics of Victorians; and meta-
adaptations of Victorians (mash-ups and appropriations of more than
one Victorian text, as well as original screenplays set in the Victorian era
that play with and adapt received ideas about the period). Central to this
analysis is the figure of the Victorian heroine and how she is represented
for contemporary audiences, because the Victorian woman—with her
corseted body epitomising her repressed sexuality, limited social roles,
career and life choices—is the pivotal image through which contempo-
rary ideas about the period are dramatically tested. Following Pidduck,
these representations of the Victorian woman are examined in terms of
their ‘stylistic, critical and generic vocabularies’. The adaptations I con-
sider span the period from 1993 (the premiere of The Piano) to 2016
(the premiere of ITV’s first season of Victoria). My aim is to highlight
and examine the important role that films and TV series have played in
this period in contemporary understandings of the Victorian past in gen-
eral and in notions of women’s agency, gender, colonial space and family
in particular.
1990 is most commonly taken as the beginning of the boom in neo-
Victorian fiction, marked as it is by the publication of one of the most
studied and by now canonical neo-Victorian novels—A.S. Byatt’s Booker
Prize winning Possession: A Romance.12 The early 1990s have also been
identified by film studies scholars as the time when the nostalgic, imperi-
alistically inclined subgenre of historical film—heritage cinema—started
to change in tone and focus, giving way to darker, more critical visions
of the past in adaptations of the classics and begetting variants usu-
ally dubbed post-heritage or anti-heritage13 (more on the heritage film
debate and its relevance to neo-Victorianism in Chap. 3). From the point
of view of feminist media studies, this was also a time when a perceiv-
ably postfeminist sensibility started to permeate cultural production in
the West.
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 5

‘Postfeminist sensibility’ was introduced as a term by Rosalind Gill

in her Gender and the Media (2007), where she developed Angela
McRobbie’s interpretation of postfeminism as a ‘double entanglement’
of anti-feminist and feminist ideas (cf. McRobbie 2004). Gill suggests
that since ‘postfeminism’ has accrued many, often contradictory, mean-
ings—denoting at the same time the object of study, a period and an
approach—the analytical gaze should rather be directed at the study of
postfeminist media culture and its resultant sensibility. This approach
allows the discussion to move away from the impasse of debates about
‘authentic feminism’, and it can instead concentrate on identifying what
is new in contemporary representations and definitions of gender in the
media (cf. Gill 2007, pp. 254–255). For my purposes, it thus enables a
focused analysis of the many different, yet connected, ways that Victorian
heroines have been adapted and appropriated across contemporary exam-
ples of neo-Victorianism on screen.
Following Gill, the postfeminist media culture is one in which key
feminist notions of empowerment and choice have been appropriated
by the neo-liberal media that seeks to inspire women (especially young
women) to perceive their agency as that of active, self-monitoring, het-
erosexually desiring consumers who are now encouraged to choose tra-
ditional gender roles (cf. Gill 2007) as a way of tackling the social
imperative to ‘have it all’ (marriage, children and a career) (Negra 2009,
p. 31). Considering this context, it is not surprising that postfeminism’s
favourite author is Jane Austen because she has become, in Shelley
Cobb’s words:

a sign of female agency also doubly entangled. She is both popular and a
member of the canon; she writes ‘romances’ but is taken seriously; her life
does not match the stories she wrote, and forever some critics will call her
feminist and some an anti-feminist. For a contemporary woman to navi-
gate postfeminism and its expectations successfully is impossible; Austen
makes space to express the illegible rage against the oppression of agency
possible. At the same time, she offers the option to identify with someone
who did not fulfil the expectations of women in her life but who is remem-
bered as great for her work. (Cobb 2015, p. 136)

This postfeminist appropriation of Austen uncannily mirrors the

Victorian appropriation of Austen as an honorary Victorian. In this
guise, Austen appears in numerous postfeminist adaptations and appro-
priations, especially the popular ‘chick-lit’ and ‘chick film’ appropriations
6 A. Primorac

that Shelley Cobb analyses (such as Jane Austen Book Club, Lost in
Austen and Austenland) as well as in the academic studies of the film
adaptations of the long nineteenth century.14 This fact is perhaps best
exemplified by the way in which Austen has been visually represented for
generations. The most commonly used portrait—and the one chosen to
be put on the 2017 issue of the ten pound note—is, in fact, a re-visioned
Victorian adaptation of the only surviving en face painting of the nov-
elist by her sister Cassandra. Commissioned by J.E. Austen-Leigh, Jane
Austen’s nephew, for the 1870 publication of his Memoir of Jane Austen,
James Andrews’s portrait shows Austen remade for a Victorian audience:
the cross-armed and rather stern-looking Jane of Cassandra’s watercol-
our was transformed by the addition of hair-curls, bonnet frills, a wistful
look and a completely redundant wedding ring (luckily omitted from the
banknote design). As such, his portrait reflects Austen-Leigh’s reinven-
tion of the author in line with Victorian notions of femininity. Both the
portrait and the biography turn the highly sardonic, undeniably ambi-
tious and fairly unconventional author into the tame, apolitical and
sweet-tempered ‘dear Aunt Jane’. The Memoir further bowdlerised the
remaining letters (many of which had already been burnt by Cassandra
or revised by the author’s siblings) editing out any mention of politics,
drinking or, heaven forbid, passion. However, like the portrait, this sani-
tised Victorian image of Austen, which makes her into an author of sen-
timental and romantic plots rather than one of wit and irony, seems to
stubbornly prevail over and against all subsequent investigations of Jane
Austen’s life and writing.15 The endurance of Jane Austen’s Victorian
makeover can be quickly confirmed by the sheer plethora of Jane Austen
fan websites and fan fiction or by a perusal of the online debates that
ensued after the Bank of England announced in 2013 that it was going
to put her image on the ten pound note. More than anywhere else,
though, this makeover survives in the screen adaptations of her life16
and in TV and film adaptations of Austen’s novels, which by and large
prioritise romance and a nostalgic, class-specific, whitewashed view of a
utopian past of stately homes and bucolic countryside. Apart from influ-
encing the future popular perceptions of Jane Austen, Andrews’ and
Austen-Leigh’s joint makeover of the author’s image illustrates the way
different periods reinterpret writers and their works of art in accordance
with their own zeitgeist, and vividly demonstrates the nature of adapta-
tion as a process that generates subsequent perceptions of the adapted
text or image.
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 7

I have brought up the case of Jane Austen not only because of her
continuing status as an honorary Victorian in postfeminist media and
the numerous studies of Victorian adaptations, but in order to highlight
two issues pertinent to this study: the long-term transformative and gen-
erative repercussions of visual adaptations on the one hand and on the
other, the postfeminist context in which the adaptations I shall be analys-
ing have been created. While Jane Austen the honorary Victorian may be
the individual mobilising figure of postfeminist angst because, as Cobb
highlights, her life and work have been interpreted as emblematic of
both an anti-feminist and (proto-)feminist agency, the vacuum for more
or less nostalgic fantasies of the past created by a postfeminist media cul-
ture has arguably been filled by neo-Victorian adaptations. By providing
what Aantje Ascheid has identified as ‘safe rebellions’ (2006)—narra-
tives of (invariably heterosexual, white-, middle- or upper-class) women’s
struggle for self-fulfilment displaced into a repressive Victorian context—
neo-Victorian costume dramas’ representations of Victorian women offer
the fulfilment of postfeminism’s impossible goals, with the added frisson
of engaging with sexual taboos and corsets. Resembling the way in which
contemporary perception of Austen is still dominated by her Victorian
makeover, the success of these narratives depends heavily on certain pre-
sumptions about the period becoming cultural memories that, following
Coupland’s legislated nostalgia, the audiences are expected to share and
believe in. Yet, as I show in Chaps. 3 and 4 in particular, these presump-
tions often rely on unquestioned tropes and stereotypes about the past
which come to constitute cultural memories that are taken as immutable,
even when they invariably shift with time.
The relationship between neo-Victorian fiction and cultural memory
was examined by Kate Mitchell in her monograph History and Cultural
Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction (2010), where she argues that neo-Vic-
torian texts pose as ‘acts of memory’ (p. 4) and as ‘a means toward his-
torical recollection […] [wherein] nostalgia might be productive, giving
voice to the desire for cultural memory to which these novels bear wit-
ness’ (p.5). Moreover, she sees neo-Victorian texts as

less concerned with making sense of the Victorian past, than with offering
it as a cultural memory, to be re-membered, and imaginatively re-created,
not revised or understood. They remember the period not only in the
usual sense, of recollecting it, but also in the sense that they re-embody,
that is, re-member, or reconstruct it. (p. 7)
8 A. Primorac

This approach is based on a reading of Svetlana Boym’s notion of

‘reflective nostalgia’ that is open to ambiguous and/or critical inter-
­
pretations of the past (see Boym 2001, p. xviii; for more on Boym and
cultural nostalgia see Chap. 3). For Mitchell, cultural memory thus
becomes a part of ‘the “matrix” (Rigney 2007: 53) formed by history,
historical fiction, film, memory, memorials and material heritage, all of
which contribute to the way we, in the twenty-first century, think about
ourselves historically.’ (Mitchell 2010, p. 31, added emphasis) Mitchell’s
approach to neo-Victorian fiction as ‘memory texts’ that re-member the
past offers the most developed, if culturally and linguistically circum-
scribed, interpretation of neo-Victorianism’s relationship with cultural
memory: circumscribed because it is culturally limited to the notion of
a shared Anglophone culture and history in which re-visiting and re-
membering the Victorians is important because of the role ‘they’ play for
‘us’ and ‘our’ own feeling of history. Mitchell’s exploration of cultural
memory is thus beholden to the idea of a shared past that leads to (seem-
ingly uncomplicated) post-imperial, contemporary, Anglophone identi-
ties. This assumption is problematic on several levels. As Aidan O’Malley
has noted, such a conception of nostalgia relies on a very limited per-
spective on the varieties of experience in the Victorian era—even within
the Anglosphere. Nostalgia cannot name any sort of approach to the
Irish Famine, as O’Malley argues in his reading of Joseph O’Connor’s
2002 Star of the Sea, an immensely popular neo-Victorian novel that is
regularly overlooked by neo-Victorian scholars (see O’Malley 2015), nor
can it be applied to describe the workings of the British Empire in India
during the Opium Wars as described in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
(2008). Furthermore, such a conceptualisation of neo-Victorianism as
a memory-text contingent on nostalgia does not explain the persistent
appeal of neo-Victorianism to global audiences outside the Anglosphere
and its transnational popularity and consumption that goes beyond the
notion of a shared history, culture or language. While Mitchell proposes
the memorable figure of ‘re-membering’ as neo-Victorian fiction’s domi-
nant procedure (the how) of bringing the readers and writers together
in their attempt to ‘participate in making historical meaning’ (Mitchell
2010, p. 8), the crucial questions of who remembers what, where and
for what purpose are left open.17 Mitchell’s explanation that it is because
Victorians are important to us does not quite explain their uses or the
pleasure of their consumption outside the Empire-identified parts of the
Commonwealth.18 This focus on a shared experience brings to mind the
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 9

other side of nostalgia as theorised by Boym: the restorative nostalgia

that ‘stresses nostos and attempts at a transhistorical reconstruction of the
lost home’ (Boym 2001, p. xviii). As a work such as Mitchell’s suggests,
this lost home can be read as the lost imperial influence of the metropoli-
tan centre. While an identification of the metropolitan centre as home
was encouraged throughout the British Empire, this study explores how
the post-imperial legislated nostalgia of the analysed screen texts re-con-
firms this, only now far beyond the boundaries of the former Empire,
thanks to the cultural hegemony of the Anglosphere.
Neo-Victorianism on screen’s rapid global dissemination today has
been made possible thanks to several overlapping aspects of contem-
porary media consumption: the sharing of digital and digitised content
through social media; the easy global distribution of said content via
streaming services and sharing platforms (both legal and not); and the
possibility of consuming content in the original as box sets or, in the case
of pirated material, as torrents with quickly produced subtitles, thanks
to the status of English as a global lingua franca. It is no wonder then
that, in this new, digitally redefined space, the neo-Victorian campaign
for Hendrick’s gin—a recently revived brand made in Scotland and
debuted in New York—was created by a Madrid-based marketing agency,
DraftFCB Spain.19 What is more, the quirky, steam-powered Victorians
featured in the campaign’s ads owe as much to images from Edward Lear
and Lewis Carroll’s books as to Terry Gilliam’s collages and animation
for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.20 The latter phenomenon—the crea-
tion of neo-Victorian images as adaptations of adaptations of Victorian
images—is one that has raised questions about the issues of authenticity
in neo-Victorian studies.
Visual neo-Victorianism’s complex web of textual, visual and filmic
references which does not link an adaptation clearly to one or more iden-
tifiable adapted texts seems to be the reason at the heart of neo-Victorian
adaptations’ relatively subordinate status in neo-Victorian studies. Faced
with this characteristic of adaptations, Heilmann and Llewellyn raise the
following questions in their field-defining study Neo-Victorianism: The
Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009:

This internalization of the nature of adaptation, whereby adaptations speak

to themselves and one another rather than only to the precursor text, has
led to a paradigmatic shift in the nature of adaptation itself. What, now,
does it mean to adapt the Victorians? And what are we adapting: the
10 A. Primorac

Victorians/Victorian text or the mediation they/it have already undergone

in popular culture? Does each adaptation move us further away from the
Victorians, just as chronology creates a greater number of years between
us and them, or does this very fact represent a new challenge to adaptors
in terms of how they deal with the issue of authenticity itself? (Heilmann and
Llewellyn 2010, p. 212, added emphasis)

These unanswered questions about the issue of authenticity are picked

up in the recent polemic on the breadth of neo-Victorian studies’ pur-
view by Marie-Luise Kohlke (2014). Expanding the already broad
description of the field published in the ‘Aims and Scope’ section of the
journal of Neo-Victorian Studies (2008), Kohlke makes a claim for an
inclusive definition of neo-Victorianism that goes beyond geographical,
national, or linguistic divisions. She also argues against the field’s nar-
row focus on self-conscious, postmodern fiction’s revisiting and rewriting
of Victorian literature and culture and its attendant cerebral pleasures of
detecting intertextual links. Kohlke suggests that neo-Victorian studies
should examine

cultural and critical practice that re-visions the nineteenth century and its
latter-day aesthetic and ideological legacies in the light of historical hind-
sight and critique, but also fantasy—what we want to imagine the period
to have been like for diverse reasons, including affirmations of national
identity, the struggle for symbolic restorative justice, and indulgence in
escapist exoticism. (Kohlke 2014, p. 21)

Using Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) to point out

that the view that ‘rescription/revision is hardly postmodern (or ‘neo’)
and may have little more critical legitimacy or usefulness than the con-
cept of originality’ (Kohlke 2014, p. 25), and drawing on Hutcheon’s
caution that adaptations appear as variants of intertextuality only to
those who are familiar with the adapted text, Kohlke maintains that
even the ‘unacquainted may take pleasure of a different sort from the
adaptation: from a visceral immersion in the vividly re-imagined world,
a renewed faith in the power of stories, their moral purpose and poetic
justice – none of which require palimpsestic double-vision or knowledge’
(p. 25). However, Kohlke then shows reluctance bordering on unease
when addressing Heilmann and Llewellyn’s remark about adaptations’
propensity to adapt other adaptations (Kohlke 2014, p. 26). Despite
arguing for an inclusion of immersive examples of neo-Victorianism that
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 CHAPTER IX.
THE IMMEDIATE SUCCESSORS OF LA SALLE, AND EARLY COLONIZATION BETWEEN
THE ALLEGHANIES AND THE MISSISSIPPI.

T
HE work begun by La Salle was taken up, after the peace of
Ryswick (1697) had terminated the war between the French
and English, by Lemoyne D’Iberville, a Canadian by birth, who,
in 1698, sailed for the mouth of the Mississippi from San Domingo,
accompanied by his two brothers, Sauville and Bienville, two
hundred colonists, and a few women and children.

After a successful voyage, our hero cast anchor in the present

Mobile Bay (N. lat. 30° 40′, W. long. 80°), and on the 2d February,
1699, landed his people on Ship Island, where huts were at once
erected for the temporary shelter of the emigrants. While this work
was in progress, D’Iberville explored the neighboring Bay of Biloxi
and the mouth of the Pensacola River—already, as we know, visited
more than once by the Spanish—and at the end of the month made
his way thence, with forty-eight picked followers, to the mouth of the
Mississippi.

Entering the muddy waters, encumbered by the floating trunks of

rotting trees, which formed the outlet of the great Father of Waters,
the explorers sailed slowly on between the low alluvial banks till they
came to a Bayagoula village, just below the junction of the Red River
with the Mississippi, where all doubt as to their having found the
mighty stream they sought was set at rest by the production of a
letter, in their own language, left with the Indians by Tonti long years
before.

Now completely satisfied as to his whereabouts, D’Iberville made

his way back to Ship Island in a south-easterly direction, through the
Manshac Pass and Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, so named
after two French ministers accompanying the expedition. Finding the
colonists suffering from the unhealthiness of their situation, their
leader sanctioned their removal to the Bay of Biloxi, where a fort was
at once erected, which was to insure to the French the peaceful
possession of the vast tracts allotted to them by their monarch,
extending from the Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo del Norte, now forming
the boundary between Texas and Mexico, to the 85th degree of west
longitude.

Having thus laid the foundation of what he hoped would become

a great French empire in the South, which should gradually extend
until it met and coalesced with that of the North, D’Iberville returned
to France to win new recruits for his enterprise, leaving his brothers
in charge of the infant settlement.

Thus left for a time to its own resources, the little colony struggled
on as best it could—the monotony of its life in the barren wastes on
which it had been set down broken only by an occasional visit from
some missionary, who would appear suddenly at the mouth of the
Mississippi, after a wild trip from his distant station, in his birch-bark
canoe—until its very existence was threatened by the sudden
appearance of two well-armed English vessels, under the command
of Coxe, a physician, who had bought up an old patent granting the
territory occupied by the French to Robert Heath.

Coxe had come to claim the lands on either side of the

Mississippi, and to explore his new possessions. Entering the great
highway, he sailed up unmolested for about fifty miles, when he was
met by Bienville, also engaged in explorations, who, seeing how
powerless he would be to resist the intruder, solved the difficulty by
assuring him that the river was not the Mississippi, but another
stream belonging to the French.
 Suspecting no treachery, Coxe turned back, and the spot which
witnessed this somewhat ignominious retreat is still known as the
English Turn. The emigrants—most of them Huguenot refugees, who
had accompanied the unsuccessful Englishmen—settled in Carolina;
and though they subsequently begged to be allowed to join their
fellow-countrymen in Louisiana, they were refused permission to do
so by the French monarch.

The close of the year witnessed the return of D’Iberville with sixty
emigrants from Canada, whom he settled at a spot about fifty miles
from the mouth of the Mississippi. While engaged in erecting a fort
for the protection of the new colony, he was visited by our old friend
Tonti, the companion of La Salle’s early explorations, and in
company with him he ascended the river as far as the Natchez
country, where a third settlement, first called Rosalie, and afterward
Natchez, was founded.

A little later, the knowledge of this part of the country was further
extended by a trip made by Bienville across the Red River, an
important tributary of the Mississippi, to Natchitoches; and about the
same time Le Sœur, another adventurous Frenchman, ascended the
great river as far as the Falls of St. Anthony, penetrating into the
prairies of Missouri, and spending a whole winter among the Iowa
Indians.

Unfortunately, these isolated efforts were not seconded by any

well-organized attempts to trace the courses of the affluents of the
Mississippi, or to gain information respecting the habits of the
natives; and the vast tracts on either side of the Father of Waters
remained pathless wastes to the European throughout the reign of
the French in the Southern States. That reign, however, was not of
very long duration. Yellow fever and other terrible complaints, which
still have their haunt in the low lands on the northern shores of the
Gulf of Mexico, soon began to work havoc among the settlers at
Mobile and the outlying homesteads; and in 1703, only one hundred
and fifty of the many emigrants who had settled from time to time in
Louisiana survived. In 1719, a fresh impulse, and that of an
extraordinary kind, was given to emigration to the most southerly
districts owned by France, by that gigantic commercial bubble known
as the “Mississippi Scheme,” which, projected by John Law,
Comptroller-General of the finances of France in the minority of
Louis XV., will long be remembered as having brought about the ruin
of thousands. The company to which the working out of Law’s
scheme was intrusted was called the Company of the West, and
owned the exclusive privilege of trading to the Mississippi, farming
the taxes and coining the money of the states to be formed.
Thousands of whites and hundreds of negroes to serve as their
slaves, were introduced to Louisiana under the auspices of the new
company; Bienville was appointed governor in the room of his
brother D’Iberville, who had fallen a victim to yellow fever; a site was
chosen for the capital of the empire, which was to rise from the
graves of so many Europeans, and the foundation stones were laid
of the modern city of New Orleans, so called in honor of the then
Regent of France.

Only one short year after this imposing beginning, the Mississippi
bubble burst; John Law became a bankrupt and an outcast; the
lands on the Mississippi, assigned at enormous cost to those whom
he had duped, remained unoccupied, and emigration suddenly
ceased. The seeds already sown bore good fruit, however, in the
gradual extension of the French outposts northward. The settlers
who had come out to make their fortunes remained to struggle for
bare existence, and the middle of the 18th century found the
northern half of Louisiana under the care of Jesuit missionaries,
while the seaboard districts were watched over by Capuchin friars.
The presence of these zealous teachers of Christianity could not,
however, prevent many a terrible struggle with the natives, who
again and again made a futile effort to rid themselves of the
intruders, the justice of whose appropriation of their lands they
naturally failed to see.
 NEW ORLEANS.

Into the terrible details of Indian massacres and French

retaliations we need not enter here; suffice it to say, that when, in
1754, an English grant of lands to the Ohio Company brought on the
French war, the soil of the Mississippi valley had already received
that baptism of native blood which seems to have been everywhere
a preliminary sowing for the harvests of the white man. The struggle
which gave to Great Britain the vast hyperborean regions of
America, and to which we shall have presently to refer again, also
shook the power of France in the South, and resulted, first, in the
cession, in 1763, of the lands on the east of the Mississippi to
England, while Spain acquired those in the West; and, in 1804, in the
purchase by the American Government of the whole region between
the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, a transaction doubling the
area of the United States, and ushering in a new era of discovery.
Before we accompany the heroes deputed to explore scientifically
the newly-acquired districts, however, we must complete our story of
the colonization of the so-called middle states by joining Daniel
Boone, to whom is due the honor of having been the first to settle
beyond the Alleghany Mountains, which had long formed the
western limit alike of colonization and travel.
 Boone, whose
early life was passed
in North Carolina,
was first led to turn
his attention to the
“Far West,” as
Kentucky and
Tennessee were
called in the early
days of which we are
writing, by the
glowing accounts
given of the
exuberant soil and
vast quantity of game
met with on either
side of the Kentucky
River by a hunter
named John Finley.
In 1767, Finley
penetrated almost
into the rich cane-
brakes of Kentucky;
and two years later,
he and five other men
of a similar stamp persuaded Boone to be their leader in an
exploring expedition to the newly-discovered hunting-grounds.

On the 9th June, 1769, the little band started on their arduous trip
from Boone’s house on the Yadkin, and made their way on foot up a
rugged mountain of the Alleghany range, the summit of which was
reached as the sun was setting. Before them lay the fertile valley of
Kentucky, with its rolling plains, tenanted by the buffalo, the deer,
and other game, alternating with rugged hills, while beyond stretched
vast forests haunted by the wild red men, members of the
Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Shawanol tribes, who were as yet
untamed by intercourse with the white man.
 After a couple of months of successful hunting, the party divided
for the more thorough exploration of the country. Boone and a man
named Stewart, whose fortunes alone concern us now, reached the
Red River north of the Kentucky, where, as they were preparing for
the night, they were surprised by a party of Indians, who made them
prisoners, and treated them, some say with reckless cruelty, others
with rude hospitality. In any case, they were not very securely
guarded, for, on the seventh night after their capture, they managed
to get away, and while wandering about in the woods, they were met
by Boone’s brother, who had followed his track, and another
adventurer from North Carolina, who had followed the track of the
pioneers through the wilderness.

Cheered by good news from home, and by the companionship of

the newcomers, Boone resumed his explorations with fresh courage;
but a little later he and Stewart again fell into the hands of Indians.
This time Stewart was scalped, though Boone escaped and rejoined
his brother, with whom, and the third white man, he decided to spend
the winter in the wilderness, and collect furs with which to trade in
the spring. The third white man, whose name does not transpire,
shortly afterward got separated from his companions, and was never
again seen alive. A skeleton and some pieces of clothing, found long
years afterward near a swamp, are supposed to have been his, but
no details of his fate were ever discovered.

In spite of this second tragedy, the brothers carried out their plan.
Building a comfortable log hut to shelter them at night, they spent the
days in hunting game, and when the spring of the ensuing year
approached, they had collected a vast stock of the skins of wild
beasts which had fallen beneath their unerring aim. It was now
decided that the elder brother, Squire Boone, should return to North
Carolina for supplies, while Daniel remained alone in his primitive
habitation to protect the peltry and add to the stock. For three
months Daniel wandered about alone, making a tour of observation
to the South, and exploring the country on either side of the Silt and
Green Rivers. On the 27th July, Squire Boone returned and the
brothers together made their way to the important Cumberland River,
a tributary of the
Ohio, where they
found traveling
difficult on account
of the number of so-
called sink-holes,
the depressions
resulting from the
sinking of the earth
after heavy rains in
a limestone country.

In March, 1771,
we find the
energetic explorers
again on the
Kentucky River,
where they resolved
to form a settlement,
and whence they
started in the
ensuing month for
BACKWOODSMEN.
the Yadkin of North
Carolina to bring out
their families. Two years elapsed before the necessary
arrangements could be made, and meanwhile rumors reached the
Eastern States of explorations made by other parties, who, without
any preconcerted plans, were simultaneously wandering about on
the banks of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. In June, 1769,
but one month after the first entry into Kentucky of Boone, some
twenty men, from North Carolina and West Virginia, made their way
over the Alleghanies, and through the Cumberland mountain pass to
the river of the same name, into the south-west of Kentucky, the
whole of which they thoroughly scoured, returning home in April,
1770, laden with the results of their hunting excursions.
 In the same year, 1769, a second company of hunters built a boat
and two trapping canoes, and in them paddled down the
Cumberland River to the Ohio, and again down the Ohio to the
Mississippi, embarking on which they made their way to Natchez,
where they sold their furs to great advantage. This was of more
importance to them than the fact that this trip of theirs connected the
work of the English from the East with that of the French from the
South, which alone entitles them to a place in our narrative.

In 1771, the Cumberland was again navigated, this time from the
north, by Casper Mansso and some half a dozen companions, who
penetrated into the so-called barrens of the south of Kentucky, where
they met other hunters from the East. Thus, by the time of Boone’s
return in 1773, Kentucky, though still unsettled by any white man,
was no longer the unknown district it had been on his first visit, and
he appeared to have many rivals in the field.

The little caravan of settlers, which included Boone’s own family

and that of five others, started on its arduous journey across the
Alleghanies in September, 1773, and in the now well-known Powell’s
Valley its numbers were augmented by forty well-armed men, who
had determined to throw in their lot with the emigrants. The transit of
Powell’s Gap or Pass was succeeded by that of Wallen’s Ridge, and
the augmented party were entering the last of the triple range of
mountains by the way of Cumberland Gap, when they were suddenly
attacked by Indians. Six white men, including Boone’s eldest son
James, were killed, and the cattle were dispersed, before the Indians
were driven back. This tragedy so disheartened the emigrants that
they declined to go further; and though Boone, in spite of his intense
grief at the loss of his boy, would have persevered, he was obliged to
yield to the numbers against him.

Back again then the survivors tramped, and took refuge at an

outpost in the south-west of Virginia, where Boone remained, eating
his heart out in compulsory inaction, until June, 1774, when, to his
intense delight, he received an appointment as agent to a North
Carolina company for purchasing lands in Kentucky. At the head of a
party of surveyors, Boone joyfully started once more for the land
which he looked upon as his own, and after a long journey, of which
unfortunately, no details have been preserved, he stood again upon
the shores of the Kentucky River, which he thoroughly surveyed with
the help of his comrades, returning in safety in the ensuing year to
his family in southern Virginia.

The reports given by Boone and others of the fertile lands in

Kentucky resulted in the formation of a company, at the head of
which was a man named Richard Henderson, for the purchase from
the Cherokee Indians of a vast tract of land in Ohio and Kentucky,
the natives having, by various hostile demonstrations, given proof of
their intention not to permit the quiet appropriation of their soil.
Daniel Boone, as having already had some intercourse, though not
of the most encouraging kind, with the Cherokees, was chosen as
the agent in the negotiation, and, after much speechifying, he
obtained a hundred square miles of territory on the Kentucky and
Ohio, an old warrior closing the final bargain with the words,
“Brother, we give you fine land, but you will have trouble in settling
it.”

The shrewd sachem was right, for Virginia refused to recognize

the purchase from the Indians as valid, and claimed all the lands
between its western boundaries and the Mississippi for its own. Not
until after a long and weary period of litigation was Boone able to
realize the wish of his heart, and lay the foundations of the first
settlement in Kentucky. His company had to be content, after all, with
a very limited district to colonize; and after he had built his first fort,
to which the name of Boonesborough was given in his honor, on the
south side of the Kentucky River, he was greatly harassed by the
treacherous attacks of the Cherokees, who, although they had
received the value of two thousand pounds sterling in goods for their
lands, lost no opportunity of annoying the white intruders.

In spite of all these difficulties, Boonesborough was ready in 1774

for the reception of Mrs. Boone and her children, and in the ensuing
year the infant settlement was reënforced by the arrival of three
other families. The summer of 1775 also witnessed the
establishment of many other stations, including that of Louisville, on
the Ohio, which soon became a kind of rendezvous for hunters, and
a harbor of refuge for emigrants seeking a suitable site for the
building of their new homes in the wilderness. Gradually the forests
of oak, maple, walnut, etc., of Ohio, the now well-cultivated
agricultural districts of Kentucky, and the less fertile cretaceous
regions of Tennessee, became dotted with the homes of settlers,
each of which in time sent forth new pioneers yet further to the
westward.

The conclusion of the war between Great Britain and her mighty
colonies in 1783, which gave to English America a political
constitution of its own, was succeeded by a tide of emigration across
the Alleghanies, and all the best districts for settlement in Tennessee
and Kentucky were rapidly filled. In 1788, the Ohio Company, from
New England, formed a settlement of considerable size on the north-
west of the river from which it took its name, and after a long,
desultory struggle with the Wyandots, Delawares, ♦ Potawatomies,
Kickapoos, Piankashaws, Miamis, and other tribes occupying the
surrounding districts, obtained a legal claim to their lands in 1795 by
their purchase from the natives by the United States Government.
The peaceable possession of these rich territories thus secured, they
were soon portioned out into townships: city after city rose in the
wilderness; and, to quote from a traveler who crossed the
Alleghanies at the period of which we are writing, “Old America
seemed to be breaking up and moving westward.” Every state sent
forth its bands of emigrants, and no traveler on the now well-worn
tracts across the formidable mountain ridge, dividing the old homes
from the new, could advance far without coming upon family groups
pausing for the return of some father or brother who had seen his
dear ones part of the way.

♦ ‘Pottawatomies’ replaced with ‘Potawatomies’

By the close of the 18th century, Ohio was also completely filled
up by the settlements of the white men, while the natives, who had
sold their birthright, slowly retreated before them into the present
states of Illinois and Indiana. But yet again the same programme
was gone through. The whites, to whom so much room had already
been given, clamored for more; again their Government listened to
their demands. The level lands, watered by sluggish streams,
between the Ohio and the Wabash, were bought as those of Ohio
had been, and received, as if in irony of the unlucky Indians who had
taken refuge there, the name of Indiana. In a similar manner was
formed the State of Illinois, the Sack, Fox, and other more northerly
tribes ceding their territories as readily as their southern neighbors
had done.

Now and then some pioneer penetrated into the southern districts
of Michigan, where, as we know, the French had long since
established outposts, and in which were now situated Detroit and
Mahimillimac, the two chief seats of the Canadian fur-trade. In 1803,
the purchase by the Americans of five millions of acres between
Lakes Michigan and Huron brought the emigrants from the States
face to face with those from Canada. There were no more
unoccupied districts to be bought in the neighborhood of the Great
Lakes; and it will be in company with the scientific explorers of
modern times that we shall renew our acquaintance with the border
lands between the American Republic and Canada.

Returning in the wake of emigration to the South, we find the

cession of French territory to the Americans in 1763 resulting in the
influx, into the districts between Georgia and the Mississippi, of a
vast number of adventurers from the old states and the new. The
general name of Louisiana, given by the first comers to the whole of
the valley of the Mississippi, became restricted to the small state
between the Father of Waters and the then Spanish Texas, while the
new and important American settlements on the east of the great
river were called Mississippi in its honor. A little later, the tract
between the new state of Mississippi and Georgia was settled under
the title of Alabama, and of all the eastern districts between the St.
Lawrence and the sea there remained but Florida—still, in spite of a
temporary change of ownership between 1763 and 1801, in the
hands of the Spanish—to be acquired by the ambitious American
Government. That its possession was eagerly coveted will be readily
understood, and after a long series of negotiations, combined with
the occasional use of force, it was annexed to the great republic in
1821.

As a matter of course, the Mississippi was not long allowed to

present any barrier either to emigration or exploration, and the taking
possession of the districts on the east was but a preliminary step
toward the acquisition of the vast tracts stretching away to the Pacific
on the west.

After a long and somewhat stormy series of negotiations, Texas,

first visited by La Salle in his vain quest for the mouth of the
Mississippi, and afterward colonized by the Spanish from Mexico,
was ceded to the all-powerful American republic, and, being rapidly
settled by enterprising emigrants from the East, it soon in its turn
formed the starting-point for new expeditions westward. First
California, and then Arizona and New Mexico, became the property
of the United States, while the intervening districts between the first
state on the Pacific seaboard to become the property of the
American republic and the Mississippi were gradually filled up by an
ever-increasing tide of emigration from the East and from the South,
from the North and from the West. Step by step, little by little, the red
men receded before the march of the whites, making every now and
then a deeply pathetic, but ever futile attempt to stem the advance of
their insidious destroyers. What was originally a vast population of
some millions of aborigines—ranking among them, to quote the
words of their great historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, “every phase of
primitive humanity, from the reptile-eating cave-dweller of the Great
Basin to the Aztec and Maya-Quiché civilization of the southern
table-land ... vanished at the touch of European civilization, and their
unwritten history, reaching back for thousands of ages, ended....
Their strange destinies fulfilled, in an instant they disappeared, and
all we have of them besides their material relics is the glance caught
in their hasty flight, which gives us a few customs and traditions, and
a little mythological history.”
 Simultaneously with the advance of the Americans westward, the
districts now collectively known as British America were being rapidly
opened up by enterprising explorers of various nationalities; but, to
avoid any further break in the continuity of our narrative, we will
reserve our account of the Hudson’s Bay and other companies who
took part in the great work in the North for a future chapter. We will
follow first the fortunes of the earliest heroes sent forth by the United
States Government to survey the regions west of the Mississippi,
which, when purchased, were as little known as the heart of Africa
before the journeys of Livingstone, Butler, Speke, Grant, Baker,
Stanley, and others.
THE UPPER MISSOURI.
 CHAPTER X.
PIKE’S VOYAGE UP THE MISSISSIPPI, AND DISCOVERY OF THE SOURCE OF THE
ARKANSAS; THE DISCOVERY OF THE SOURCES OF THE MISSOURI BY LEWIS AND
CLARKE, AND THEIR VOYAGE DOWN THE COLUMBIA TO THE PACIFIC.

T
HUS far our heroes have, with few exceptions, been pioneers
rather of Christianity, emigration or commerce, than of
discovery properly so called. Early colonization in America was
not, as in Africa, preceded by scientific exploration. We have no
trans-Atlantic Park or Bruce, no Lander Oudney, or Clapperton; the
white martyrs who baptized the soil of the New World with their blood
fell, not in the cause of geography, but in that of their homes or their
religion. Only in the extreme North have we any romance in
American travel which can at all compare with that so inseparably
connected with the winning of each of the secrets of that sister
continent so aptly named the Dark.

The great lakes, rivers, and mountains of America, which we will

in our turn call the “Fair Continent,” were rather found than
discovered. The emigrant, seeking water for his cattle, or timber for
his log hut and his fire, pitched his tent by some vast inland sea or
rushing stream, unconscious that he had done more than choose
well for his immediate temporal needs. Other log huts rose beside
his own; the neighboring lake or river or forest received the name of
the first person who turned its resources to account, or retained a
corrupted form of its original Indian denomination. Peculiarities in the
manners, customs, or appearance of the natives, which would have
been full of significance to men such as Park or Bruce, Livingstone
or Stanley, passed unnoticed by the lonely squatter of the woods,
and whole chapters of discovery were left unwritten by the
unconscious agents in the opening up of new tracks.

Not until the beginning of the present century can we be said to

have possessed a literature of inland North American discovery, and
our narrative has hitherto been culled little by little from piles of
volumes dealing with other subjects than ours, and referring en
passant only to geographical problems. The young states forming
the infant republic had too much to do in welding into one whole the
varied and often incongruous elements of which they were
themselves composed, to be able to pay much attention to the
enterprising spirits who went forth from among them to found new
homes in the wilderness. But when the turbulent infancy was over,
and what we may call the young manhood of America began under
the enlightened guidance of the great Washington, first President of
the United States, a new era of discovery was ushered in. The
republic, no longer content with its ignorance of the course of its
rivers, the height of its mountains, and the resources of its vast tracts
of prairie and forest lands, began the organization of exploring
expeditions. The first of these was that sent out, under Major Pike, in
1805, with instructions “to explore the Upper Mississippi, to inquire
into the nature and extent of the fur-trade, with the residence and
population of the several Indian nations, and to make every effort to
conciliate their friendship.”

Pike embarked on the Mississippi at Fort Louis, a little below the

mouth of the Missouri, on the 9th August, 1805, in a keel-boat about
seventy feet long, accompanied by an escort of twenty soldiers, and
after successfully navigating the somewhat difficult current, then
much impeded by sandbars, he reached the mouth of the Missouri in
safety. Above its junction with its chief affluent, the name of which
signifies the Mud River, the course of the Father of Waters is
comparatively smooth, and no incident of importance occurred till, on
the 6th September, the mouth of the Wisconsin was reached, where
the arduous portion of the young officer’s work began.
 SIOUX VILLAGE.

Having obtained guides at the Indian village of Prairie des

Chiens, then an important outpost of the French fur-trade, Pike
continued the ascent of the great river till he came to the mouth of
the Iowa. Here he was met by a party of Sioux or Dacotah Indians,
whose chief gave him a hearty welcome, assuring him that the
redskins had tried to keep themselves sober in his honor. In this,
says Pike, they had not been very successful, and in their unsteady
gait and wild salute of three rounds of ball fired at random, to the
great risk of their guests, the young leader noted some of the first
symptoms of the fatal effect of the influence of the whites on the
once simple and manly natives. At a dinner of a semi-civilized
description, the Sioux chief gave Pike the pipe of peace, telling him
that it would insure his friendly reception among the “upper bands” of
his tribes, and begging him to try and bring about peace between his
people and the Minnesota Indians of the East.

Thanking his host for the pipe of peace, the power of which had
already been proved by his French predecessors on the Mississippi,
and promising to do his best with the Minnesotas, Pike pursued his
way, between hilly country and prairies dotted with the encampments
of the Sioux, till he came to the mouth of the majestic Chippeway on
the east, succeeded, a few miles further up, by the yet more
beautiful Minnesota, or St. Peters River, on the west.

The explorers were now approaching the summit of the central

table land of the North American continent, where, 1,680 feet above
the sea-level, are situated the sources alike of the St. Lawrence, the
Mississippi, and the Red River of the North, the three great arteries,
bound, the first for the Atlantic Ocean, the second for the Gulf of
Mexico, and the third for Hudson’s Bay. As the common home of the
infant streams was neared, the navigation of the Mississippi became
more difficult, the river between the mouth of the Minnesota and the
Falls of St. Anthony consisting of a series of rapids dashing over
huge rocks encumbering the bed of the stream. Pike persevered,
however, in his work of navigation, his little bark experiencing many
a narrow escape in its passage between the frowning precipices,
until the Falls themselves were reached, when he was compelled to
leave his own boat and take to small canoes.

For four miles above the Falls, in the grandeur of which Pike
owned himself a little disappointed, all went well, but the remainder
of the trip was fraught with difficulties and dangers of every
description. Again and again the travelers were compelled to
disembark, and wading through the water, often not a foot above the
rocks, drag their boats after them, while every now and then some
wild Sioux warrior would appear upon the beetling heights shutting in
the now restricted Father of Waters, and brandish his spear above
the heads of the defenseless whites.

On the 4th October the mouth of the Crow River was passed on
the west, and the first signs of dangers of a new description were
noted in the wrecks, lying here and there of bark canoes, cut to
pieces with tomahawks, and with broken paddles and arrows lying
near. Pike’s interpreter told him that the canoes were of Sioux and
the arrows of Minnesota construction, pointing to the conclusion that
war was raging hotly close at hand. Further examination of the relics
revealed marks on the paddles of the canoes signifying that Indian
men and women had been killed, and the guide was eager in urging
retreat, on the ground that their party would be taken for Sioux
invaders, and be cut to pieces at the first Chippeway village before
any explanation could be given. Only a little time before, three
Frenchmen who had ventured up the river had been murdered by
the Chippeways; surely the white man would not risk sharing their
fate?

But the white man, true to his English blood, was not to be
intimidated, and pressed on in spite of all difficulties, till, about two
hundred and thirty miles above the Falls, in N. lat. 45°, his men
began to drop from fatigue and the severity of the cold. It was
evidently impossible to proceed further by water, and Pike realized,
now that it was too late, how fatal a mistake had been made in
starting so late in the season. After consultation with his party, it was
resolved to leave a small detachment with the bulk of the provisions
in a log fort, and proceed in sledges with the hardiest of the men to
the sources of the Mississippi.

The fort was built with infinite difficulty, and it was not until mid-
winter that the sledge journey was begun. Following the course of
the Mississippi, now dwindled down to a small stream, scarcely three
hundred yards wide, creeping sluggishly along through a flat,
uninteresting country—its wide snow-clad stretches tenanted only by
troops of elks, with here and there traces of recent conflict between
the Indians of the North and the Sioux of the South—the pioneers
reached the mouth of the Pine River, flowing from Leech Lake—the
most southerly of the cluster of small reservoirs forming the sources
of the great river—on the last day of the year.

Here a deserted Chippeway encampment of fifty wigwams—or

lodges, as they are called in this part of the country—was found, the
marks about it, as interpreted by the Sioux guide, signifying that fifty
warriors had recently marched against their enemies and killed four
men and four women. The quaint record of the conflict consisted of
four painted poles, sharpened at the ends to represent the women,
placed about four cedar puppets representing the men, the whole