Their Audience, Walter Ufer, 1917 (Snite Museum, Notre Dame)
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Their Audience, Walter Ufer, 1917 (Snite Museum, Notre Dame)
James Steele: New Mexico's First Local Colorist
This essay was published in The Midwest Quarterly, 21.4 (Summer 1980): 484–92.
James Steele's
Frontier Army Sketches (1872-3) provides an interesting example of the
failure of regionalism in the Southwest. As a casual observer of New Mexico for
several months,
Steele disparaged the native Indian and Mexican cultures
and
advocated a stronger military regime to eradicate the Apaches and hasten the
progress of Anglo culture. Steele was a man of his age, respecting technological
progress and advocating post-war expansion in the West. Consequently, he saw the
native cultures of New Mexico as nothing more than impediments to progress and
advocated the uniform adoption of Anglo customs by everyone. There is nothing
original in any of Steele's ideas, but for this very reason his book has
historical value. More importantly, as the first writer to attempt a
Southwestern
regionalism, Steele demonstrated the problems with it, which have
never been solved, and suggested a nationalism that proved to be somewhat
prophetic to New Mexico, if not to the West in general.
Steele was born in Illinois in 1840, spent his childhood in Topeka, and began
college in Indiana. But in 1861 he left to join the Union Army and served until
1863 as a clerk in a Nashville military hospital. Because of illness, he left
the army for a year, but received a commission in 1864 and served another year,
seeing action and being wounded. Like other postwar veterans, he was bored with
civilian life and in 1867 rejoined the army to serve in Kansas and New Mexico
for three years. Then, back in Topeka, Steele helped found the Kansas Magazine
and supplied twenty-three sketches for its first three issues in 1872-3.
Eighteen of these were collected in The Sons of the Border, a title which
Hamlin
Garland only slightly changed in his
Son of the Middle Border. Over the next
twelve years, two variant editions appeared, West of the Missouri and Frontier
Army Sketches.
The first sketch of the book, depicting a young frontier army officer, casts its
shadow over the whole, with Captain Jinks or his type making at least cameo
appearances in most of the other tales. In other sketches, Steele portrays
cowboys, miners, gamblers, pioneer women, Apaches, and Pueblo Indians, as well
as army mules, buffalos, and coyotes, but it is clear from the outset that the
army officer is not "a mere frontiersman like the rest," but is "what, for want
of a better name, we call a Gentleman."
Steele begins his sketch of Captain Jinks with some mild satire on "his very
foolish airs," which is reminiscent of
Colonel Simon Suggs and illustrative of
local color humor. Like a Southern gentleman, "Jinks is somewhat frivolous,
over-polite, and nonchalant, and carries a very high nose." To balance this he
has Yankee business acumen fostered by Army bookkeeping and responsibility "for
all the houses, fuel, forage, animals, tools, wagons, and scattered odds and
ends of a post as large as a respectable village." Furthermore, an officer "is
like an autocrat and justice of the peace" who combines the offices of
"physician, priest, and executor." While in the "changeless empire of monotony
and silence," which is the desert, he is a Stoic explorer, but at the military
post¾which Steele never fails to
idealize as an altar of Eastern civilization¾"Jinks is something of an epicure." And it is in this antagonism
between Stoic and Epicure that we first see the antagonism between the
undeveloped wilderness of New Mexico and what Steele believes it should be under
the tenets of
Manifest Destiny . Steele sees the New Mexico landscape as "a world
of loneliness and lost comforts, where cities, banks, railroads, theatres,
churches, and scandals have not yet come." To the young officer, the vastness of
the barren landscape was an affront to the grandiloquent rhetoric of progress
and the excitement of the recent war. Consequently, "the days, unchanged by the
ceremonies and observances of civilizations, are all alike, each as melancholy
as a Puritan Sabbath."
This is not to belittle the suffering of Steele, who had led troops of the Army
of the Potomac into battle and now faced boring duty in isolated desert forts,
but to suggest that far from having an attachment to the land, Steele had reason
to hate it. In fact, it was this intolerable duty that caused Steele to resign
the army career that he so obviously desired. Therefore, Steele was in the
strange position of writing about a land in which he not only had no roots, but
which he actually resented, "a land where nature in all her forms seems to
delight in coarseness and ruggedness." Steele even went so far as to ignore the
blue sky and call it "a dreary land." Moreover, Steele was nearly compelled to
exaggerate the importance of the land because of the conventions of local color,
which were fast becoming, if they were not already in the 1870's, a series of
formulas that dictated how frontier material could be used in the Gilded Age. In
fact, the adherence to the clichés of local color demanded by the Eastern
publishers retarded the development of an authentic regional fiction in the
Southwest, which like other regional literature had to grow out of an intense
relationship with the land and its demands for survival. The regionalist
explores how the land subtly
influences the unconscious development of a culture. To be aware of such
subtleties, the author almost has to be a member of that culture or subculture.
In contrast, Steele simply reviled the Apaches and thought Mexicans were at best
quaint. Genuine regionalism usually asserts that a local community order has
reached a harmony with the land that is superior to the larger order that has
lost its roots in dealing with abstract problems. As a member of an occupying
army, Steele saw none of this. His commitment was to the pseudo-community of the
army and to the arbitrary solutions provided by a force of arms. For example,
Steele saw no irony in this boast that Jinks remained insensitive to his
environment and destructive to the indigenous cultures: "From whence does Jinks
derive the mysterious quality that enables him to survive the crudest
associations, the wildest surroundings [...]
and still remain the inimitable J inks¾clean, quiet, nonchalant, transforming
the spot where he is bidden to abide, changing all the sensations of the place
where he has pitched his tent?" Steele suggests that this "mysterious quality"
derives from a blind loyalty to Manifest Destiny which causes the officer to do
"his whole duty in camp and field" oblivious to any local variations.
The most obvious duty of the officer is to kill Indians, who Steele endlessly
assures us were idealized by
James Fenimore Cooper. In actuality, they are
"filthy, brutal, cunning, and very treacherous and thievish." The Indian has a
quality of moral degradation which is "inborn and unmitigated." He has no
concept of a proper home and no notion of occupation. The Indian woman is as
beautiful as a gorilla: "squat, angular, pig-eyed, ragged, wretched, and insect
haunted." Moreover, "she is stoop-shouldered, bow-legged, flat-hipped, shambling,
and when at last she dies, nobody cares." Indian children are full of "malice,
cruelty,
filth, ill-temper, and general hatefulness." Indians have "no strictly religious
forms" and "nothing that is regarded as especially sacred." The medicine man is
distinguished as being "if possible, idler, raggeder, and lazier" than the
others. Steele believes that Indians do not have a proper language, and "in lieu
of a complete vocabulary they use many signs."
Taken out of context, these pronouncements may seem to be examples of local
color exaggeration. But in the context of the sketch and juxtaposed to the
realistic treatment of frontier hardships and the romantic praise for helpless
frontier women, Steele's hatred for Apaches is unequivocal. It was also typical
of its time. For example, it would be hard to surpass the hatred of Indians
found in
Nick of the Woods (1837). Another indication of Steele's ingenuousness
is found in the naive boast that "there are many men on the border who earn a
livelihood by outwitting the Indian at his own game." Apparently they must have
been better Indians than the Indians, just like Cooper's
Natty Bumpo. It was too
bad no one told
Geronimo whose ragged band of thirty-six men, women, and
children long evaded five thousand army troops. Finally, Steele was serious in
his contention that anyone who did not hate Indians simply did not know them
like the cavalry officer.
Shortly before Steele's tour of duty in New Mexico,
Colonel Kit Carson and
others led a campaign against the
Mescalero Apaches and the
Navajo. The Indians
were captured and imprisoned at
Fort Sumner. The
Navajo and
Apaches, mutual
enemies, were kept together as prisoners of war for five years while the
bureaucrats argued their fate. The military wished to remove them to the
Oklahoma Indian Territory and make them self-supporting farmers like the
Pueblo
Indians. But as the cost of maintaining nine thousand Indians grew, economy
dictated their repatriation in their traditional homeland. Although Steele was
in New Mexico during the last year of the imprisonment and when the Navajo
walked back across the state, he was never directly involved with these
operations.
Despite all the well-reasoned hatred, Steele acknowledged that the Indians were
victimized by treaties and "unscrupulous commerce," but judged these to be
insignificant in the fact of inexorable "migration from east to west," which was
"the sentence of doom [...] written against the red man, slow in its operation, but
utterly irrevocable." Seeing the virtual disappearance of Indians from east of the
Mississippi, Steele, like the military and other Indian experts, thought it
logical that they would also disappear from the West. Since there was no place
for them to go, they would simply have to become as extinct as the
buffalo.
After the litany of horrors regarding the Apaches, it is a bit of a shock to
find that Steele thought there was a "Good Indian." Indeed he said that "the
Pueblo is only an Indian by the general classification." The chief virtues of
the Pueblos that led to this estimation were their agricultural pursuits and the
fact that they were "the only ones of the original races who have always been
friendly to the white man." Steele thought that they were doomed by progress,
but that "when the poor Pueblo shall finally leave his seed to be sown with a
patent drill and his harvest to be reaped with a clattering machine, he will
merit at least the remembrance that his hands were never red with Saxon blood."
In "New Mexican Common Life" we find that the Mexican "is remarkable only for
placidity." "To dance and smoke seem to be the two great objects of Mexican
life," and Steele speculates that Catholicism has made the race docile and
cowardly. In other stories, Steele tells us that even "Mexican women of the
better class" are "ignorant of all nerves and proper sensations," and
that in a crisis a Mexican woman will go to pieces "praying rapidly after the
fashion of her race." The men "are not of that class who of their own accord
long for freedom" and consequently, "the alert and vivacious Saxon has
established himself at the corner of every street in his chiefest villages."
These characterizations are, of course, offensive, but no worse than other
newspaper prose and popular novels of the period, and they are historically
accurate records of Anglo attitudes. There are also infrequent scenes of realism
which, unlike Garland, Steele never developed beyond poignant scenarios. For
example, consider this realistic and common frontier sight: "the grotesque
procession of lean and melancholy cows, multitudinous and currish dogs, rough
men and barefoot girls, and, lastly, the dilapidated wagon, with its rickety
household goods;" or the despair of the miner and gambler: "that look upon faces
that tells of the homelessness of years, the days of toil and sacrifice, the
months of delving and hoping, all gone in a single night." Unfortunately, Steele
did not recognize the potential depth in scenes like these and blithely pursued
the jingoistic prose of Manifest Destiny. Consequently, his use of local color
remained superficial and mechanical, displaying none of the shrewd and sardonic
insight into character of Mark Twain or Bret Harte.
The interest of Steele's book is that it illustrates the problems of local color
and regionalism in the Southwest and proposes a strange, if not impossible, blend
of the local and national. In his fine essay, "Regionalism in American
Literature," Benjamin Spencer suggests that the diversity of cultures in the
Southwest has retarded a regional consciousness and that "the
Anglo-Spanish-Indian elements have not been culturally fused even to the degree
that the Anglo-Negro elements have been synthesized in the Southeast." The
diversity among Leslie
Silko's
Ceremony, Edward
Abbey's Fire On the
Mountain,
and
Rudolfo Anaya's
Bless Me Ultima, illustrate that the
mosaic of cultures in
New Mexico is unlikely to coalesce into a single regional voice. Steele's
solution was simply to belittle all the cultures except the Anglo. His frontier
local color was actually an extension of the frontier ethic, which after the
Civil War produced the
Robber Barons; it was simply exploitative. Whatever the
region possessed was conceived as raw material for the nation. Even the idea of
wilderness became a commodity in the rhetoric of Teddy Roosevelt. And in fact,
there is some parallelism between Steele's and
Roosevelt's thinking. Certainly
Teddy would have thought some of Steele's fiction "bully," not least of all the
idealism of the frontier cavalry. Finally, there was some curious prophecy in
Steele's nationalism. For the largest social industries in New Mexico are
creations of the federal government: The Forest Service, Bureau of Land
Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Los Alamos Labs, Sandia Labs, White Sands
Missile Range, Kirtland and Holloman Air Force bases; while the physical
industries continue to be exploitative: gas, oil, uranium, and other mineral
extraction. Nor has there been any real progress in communication among
cultures. There has been a general erosion by the dominant Anglo culture and a
continued silent resistance and isolation by the most traditional elements in
Indian and Spanish cultures.
So Steele, the first to attempt to evoke the regional uniqueness of New Mexico,
was the first to fail. And while the state has had many voices, none of them
spoke for the whole, nor is it likely that anyone can. What is strangest is that
the national identity that Steele foresaw would supersede a regional identity
has occurred, not in the jingoistic way Steele thought, but as the only unifying
identity for otherwise diverse cultural groups.
Biographical information on James W. Steele was taken from the introduction by Philip D. Jordon to Frontier Army Sketches (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969).
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