Remaking OREGON, HO! in prose and dialogue

Remaking "Oregon, Ho!" in prose and dialogue by Scott Norsworthy

DRAGOONED: Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853). Number 9.

Read on Substack

 

Giorgia Meloni's electrifying speech at the World Congress of Families, ...

2019 speech in Verona, Italy at the World Congress of Families...

Defending the "unenlightened" Middle Ages around 6:30

"But they think everything we propose is crazy.  They think it's unenlightened, that we want to take away rights... the middle ages ... You know the middle ages was also the time of the cathedrals and the abbeys, the founding of the comuni, the universities, the parliament, the epoch of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Saint Francis, Saint Benedict ... People who don't know where Matera is, let's not expect them to have read history books."

Meloni sounded like Ungar debating Derwent in Melville's Clarel.

 

In Ungar's longer view of history and art, the great cathedrals of medieval Europe proclaim

A magnanimity which our time
Would envy, were it great enough
To comprehend.  -- Clarel Part 4 Canto 10 A Monument

Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (New York, 1876). Edited by Walter E. Bezanson for Hendricks House, Inc. (New York, 1960).

Crazy prophecy in Melville's CLAREL

 

 

From Melville's religious epic Clarel: A poem and pilgrimage in the Holy Land part 4 (Bethlehem), canto 21 (Ungar and Rolfe):

                                 "Know,
Whatever happen in the end,
Be sure 'twill yield to one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. Sequel may ensue,
Indeed, whose germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pygmy parts —
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be:
Man disennobled—brutalized
By popular science—Atheized
Into a smatterer ——

                                “Oh, oh!” 

“Yet knowing all self need to know
In self's base little fallacy;
Dead level of rank commonplace:
An Anglo-Saxon China, see,
May on your vast plains shame the race
In the Dark Ages of Democracy."

America!

 -- Clarel Part 4 Canto 21 

https://books.google.com/books?id=BvRDAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA526&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

Arvin on Derwent

Meanwhile, one misses much of the intellectual tragicomedy of Clarel, much of its deceptively quiet play of irony, if one fails to observe how the cheery Derwent, who begins by striking one as a merely fatuous Yea-sayer, grows in grace as the poem proceeds, developing lights and shades of personal quality one had not suspected, inspiring a more and more genuine liking in the very Melvillean Rolfe, and giving expression in his modest and kindly manner to insights that Melville elsewhere expresses as his own. One must attend to both Ungar and Derwent, as well as to some of the others, if one wishes to distinguish all the intonations of Melville’s own voice.  --Newton Arvin

Herman Melville's Clarel (1876) 4.20

Ungar's forest name

The name "Ungar" of the unhappy ex-Confederate in Clarel sounds like and possibly suggests "hunger" or "anger." Both of which English words might fit the self-exile whom critics often call "embittered." Few of them ever get round to saying exactly how is Ungar Indian. One sparkling exception is Vincent Kenny, quoted below. Before looking up Kenny on Clarel, I was trying to work it out. Well, Ungar's ancestors are supposedly Maryland Catholic and Indian. As suggested in a previous post, Ungar seems descended from somebody quite like Giles Bent who married princess Mary Kittamaquund,

orphaned daughter of a Piscataway leader who had been raised by Margaret Brent and Jesuit missionaries who had converted her and her father to Christianity.

Musing on Ungar's mixed blood a fellow pilgrim imagines

An Anglo brain, but Indian heart

 and describes the name "Ungar" as his "forest name," the Indian name he adopts as a whim or "freak":

(In freak, his forest name alone
Retained he now)....  --Clarel part 4 canto 5

Maybe the "R" in UNGAR marks the way Melville pronounced his a's. Lecturing in Detroit, Melville spoke of Padua and the newspaper reporter heard "Ardua," meaning that Melville must have said PARDUA.

--Can Art not Life make the Ideal?

So, forgetting the R:

UNGAR = UNGA.

Albert Gallatin in A Synopisis of the Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains has a grammar chart of Indian pronouns and the first one is

I, unga

More specifically, the name Ungar evokes "Uncas" the Mohegan chief of historical fact and Cooper's fictions. Here is a suggestively worded overview from late in the 19th century:

Un-cas, an American Indian who was famous in the early annals of New England. He was originally a Pequod (see PEQUOD), who, with his following, revolted against Saasacus (about 1635), and formed a new band, called Mohegans, after the ancient name of the tribe. He acquired considerable power, and, with great foresight, allied himself steadily with the whites, and shared in their victories over the Pequods and other tribes, receiving grants of conquered territory. This made him new enemies among the red men, by whom lie was regarded as a traitor, and unsuccessful attempts were made to assassinate him. This led to his attacking hie old allies the Narragansetts, and in 1643 he overpowered them and captured their chief, Miantonomioh, in a battle that look place near Norwich, Ct, The English authorities at Hartford consented that this powerful and hitherto friendly chief should be savagely put to death by Uncas, and a monument now marks the spot on Sachem's Plain, north of Norwich, where he was slain. This whole episode was doubtless a quarrel fomented by the English in the hope of getting rid of the red race by each other's tomahawks. The remainder of the Narragansetts continued the struggle for some years, and once would have overcome Uncas had he not boon assisted at the last moment by English troops. Thus the whites played one against the other. He lived in the neighborhood of Norwich, Conn., to a great age, always a man of mental force as well as physical power, but always an unregenerate savage. He died in 1682, and is buried in a little plot in the city of Norwich, known as the royal Mohegan burying-ground, among the bones of ancestors long antedating his momentous career and the coming of Europeans. He was the "Last of the Mohicans," and, as such became the hero of Cooper's novel; and President Andrew Jackson dedicated the granite obelisk which now marks his grave.  --Imperial Reference Library

Originally a Pequod. A romantic hero then, after Cooper, type of the "noble savage" and "vanishing American" whose treason (in one view) might be said to parallel the treason of Ungar as rebel southerner.

Image Credit: Society of Colonial Wars

Vincent Kenny pointed out Ungar's nominal association with Uncas way back in 1973. What's more, along with the allusion to Uncas, Kenny sees a pun on "gar" as "spear" and ha!
G. A. R. (= Grand Army of the Republic, the patriotic and powerful organization of Union veterans):

Equally severe [as the name Mortmain] is the harsh sound of Ungar, the Anglo-American Indian. It echoes Cooper's famous Uncas; it also rhymes with the livid scar on Ungar's neck. Melville punned with the name; first, with the "gar" as a spear, or Ungar's prominent sword; and second as a jibe on the enemy he fought, the G. A. R. reduced by the negative prefix.  --Herman Melville's Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography p126

Ex-confederate Ungar, un-G.A.R., obviously does not wear the Grand Army badge:

Neither does the Union hero Jack Gentian, who in one of Melville's "Jack Gentian" sketches, stubbornly sports the aristocratic badge of the Cincinnati Society. Major Gentian's political rival Colonel J. Bunkum glories rather in the democratic symbolism of the Grand Army badge:

“the badge of the national brotherhood of veterans in whose Chapters the grade of the field is ignored, and the general salutes the private—comrade!”  --Great Short Works of Herman Melville

Getting back to Uncas, the description at CT Monuments of the Norwich monument refers to uncertainty about the spelling of his name:

The Uncas monument sits in a small burial ground on Sachem Street. The square base of the monument was dedicated in 1833, with President Andrew Jackson participating in the dedication ceremonies. The granite column was dedicated nine years later in 1842, after organizers had resolved several problems with the monument, including quarrying granite that met their specifications and reaching a consensus on the proper spelling of “Uncas.”

 For further study this looks too good to miss: Uncas, First of the Mohegans (Cornell University Press, 2003) by Michael Leroy Oberg. 

Edwin Fussell on Ungar, prompting a survey of ex-Confederate mercenaries in Egypt with glimpses of Giles Brent, his Piscataway wife Mary Kittamaquund , and Marylander Walter Hanson Jenifer (1823-1878)

Mary Kittamaquund Marker in Stafford, Virginia
via The Historical Marker Database

Besides the exhilarating survey of Melville's huge western streak in prose, there's a whole chapter on "Melville as Poet" in Frontier: American Literature and the American West. You can hardly blame Edwin S. Fussell for misprising Battle-Pieces when Melville's poetry was so generally ignored. On John Marr and Clarel Fussell returns to sparkling form (aided by the character synopses in Walter Bezanson's 1960 Hendricks House edition to which every reader of Clarel is indebted, one way or another):

The third notable Western character in Clarel [after Rolfe and Nathan] is one of the most prophetic figures in all Melville's dramatis personae, and a more than adequate refutation of the common notion that he never recovered from the Civil War. Ungar is everything an American should not be—Southern, Indian, essentially Catholic, unpatriotic—and he is obviously (after Rolfe) Melville's darling. This "native of the fair Southwest" even refuses to conform to the national haircut, but wears his hair long, "much like a Cherokee's." His face is copper, with high cheekbones, and his "forest eyes" are as sad as his "forest name." Ungar, "wandering Ishmael from the West," is the New World's surly answer to the Old, the butt-end of European Romantic projection. His bitterness is the inevitable product of the white man's perpetually sentimental aggressions:  "Indian's the word." Equally aghast at Southern slavery and the subtler exploitations of the North, Ungar especially despises Anglo-Saxons:                      

                                   "lacking grace
To win the love of any race;
Hated by myriads dispossessed
Of rights — the Indians East and West.
These pirates of the sphere! grave looters —
Grave, canting, Mammonite freebooters,
Who in the name of Christ and Trade
(Oh, bucklered forehead of the brass!)
Deflower the world's last sylvan glade! " 

... Although everybody senses that Ungar's charges are intemperately expressed, nobody can refute him. Nobody even wants to.  --Edwin S. Fussell, Frontier

Before leaving Ungar I have to wonder if anybody has found him, or rather his possible model, among ex-Confederate mercenaries? Hmmm, where to begin. Real Cherokee ex-Confederates of note include

• William Penn Adair
• Elias Cornelius Boudinot 
• Stand Watie
• Nimrod Jarrett Smith

and thus in Red Atlantic, Jace Weaver provisionally associates Ungar with "Stand Watie's brigade." These men never turned soldiers of fortune, however. Well perhaps a subordinate did. But wait, Ungar's Indian ancestry is distant (4.5.134-41), removed "far back" in time from his unnamed ancestor's "wigwam" wedding. Melville clearly has been reading up on the history of Catholic Maryland, including popular stories of how Andrew White the "Apostle of Maryland" worked among native peoples, baptizing Native American kings and princesses in their wigwams.

They could do their work more effectively, ad majorem Dei gloriam, in the rude Indian wigwam where they had established an altar, than in the hall of the legislative assembly. 

Lord Baltimore obtained lands from the Indians by purchase, and not by conquest, and colonists and Indians and missionaries were usually upon the most friendly terms together.  --Catholic World

Ungar might as well be descended from Giles Brent who married the daughter of Kittamaquund (or Chitomachon) famously baptized by the Apostle of Maryland.

Father Andrew White performed Kittamaquund's baptism on July 5, 1640. Governor Leonard Calvert, other Maryland officials, and Piscataway leaders all attended the ceremony. The ceremony took place at a chapel built with bark walls, just like other Piscataway buildings. During the baptism, the priests gave the Piscataway Christian names. Kittamaquund's name became Charles, and his wife was named Mary. Kittamaquund's daughter, Princess Mary, went to live with the Brent's and later married Giles Brent. Kittamaquund died in 1641. --Exploring Maryland's Roots

More on Giles Brent:

A final break with the Calverts prompted Brent and his equally influential sister Margaret Brent to move to Virginia about 1649 and settle near Aquia Creek. Giles Brent married the orphaned daughter of a Piscataway leader who had been raised by Margaret Brent and Jesuit missionaries who had converted her and her father to Christianity. If he had hoped that the marriage would secure him a claim to Indian lands and that he could promote her right of succession to her father's title, he was disappointed on both counts. Despite legislation restricting the rights of Catholics and occasional complaints about Catholic influence, the Brent family prospered in Virginia.
--Encyclopedia of Virginia

And certain details of Ungar's military career pretty clearly describe an officer--now tasked with "drilling troops" and inspecting if not trafficking armaments, formerly a cadet (West Point?). Weaver duly cites Hilton Obenzinger's discussion which is great and historically grounded, but unconcerned with finding any one Ungar in real life.

John P. Dunn has a potentially helpful book on Khedive Ismail's Army and a bibliography specifically on the subject of "Americans in the Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Army" in The Journal of Military History 70.1 (2006) 123-136 / Project MUSE.  Nobody there looks much like Ungar.

Closest single historical match I have found so far is Walter Hanson Jenifer who hails like Ungar from Maryland. Now for his ancestry, is it Catholic? Let's see, WHJ  is son of the Congressman Daniel Jenifer who was the nephew of founding father Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer. So then, Anglican / Episcopalian. But early Jenifers (including DJ the father of Daniel of St Thomas?) in Maryland certainly were Roman Catholic.

Agnes Dicken Cannon calls Ungar a "disillusioned ex-cavalry officer of the defeated Confederacy" (1976 Essays in Arts and Sciences, 146). I'm not quite sure how she knows the cavalry tie, but there's only one ex-Confederate cavalry officer in all of Egypt. Maryland-born! From an article on "American Army Officers in the Service of Egypt" in the New York Herald, September 22, 1871:

The only cavalry officer among the Americans in Egypt is

COLONEL JENIFER. 

The Colonel comes of the old family of that name in lower Maryland, and is a son of the late Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, many years a member of Congress and then Minister to Austria during the Harrison-Tyler administration. Formerly a captain of United States dragoons, then a general of cavalry in the confederacy, the Colonel now commands a regiment of Egyptian cavalry. He is well known in Virginia as the real hero of Ball’s Bluff, “Shanks” Evans, the commander of the Confederate forces, being three miles away when that brilliant engagement was fought. It is a curious coincidence that Jenifer, the victor, and Stone, the vanquished, in that memorable action, after escaping all the dangers and vicissitudes of the civil war, should now find themselves in a remote corner of Africa, both enlisted under the banner of the crescent and the star; but as “every dog must have his day,” he who was vanquished on the Potomac now commands upon the Nile, and this, perhaps, is the reason why, instead of being made Inspector General of Cavalry, a position for which he is better qualified than any man in Egypt, native or foreign, Colonel Jenifer has been assigned to the command of a single regiment.

Full heading of the Herald article reads as follows:

EGYPT AND AMERICA. American Army Officers in the Service of Egypt. Who They Are and What Have Been. Their Performances in the Past—Union and Confederate Soldiers Fighting Under the Same Flag.

In addition to Colonel Jenifer, the Herald profiles the following American officers in Egypt:

• Major General Thaddeus P. Mott,
• Brigadier General W. W. Loring 
• Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley
• Brigadier General Charles P. Stone
• Colonel Beverly Kenon, “specially charged with the coast defences, and has already given proof of his eminent fitness for the duty by the invention and construction of a fort which has elicited the unqualified commendation of all the engineers who have seen it.”
• Colonel A. W. Reynolds
• Colonel Thomas G. Rhett, “well known throughout the South as the able chief of staff to General Joseph E. Johnston. Being a first rate ordnance officer he has been assigned to that branch of the service in Egypt.” 
• Colonel Frank Reynolds, "greatly distinguished as colonel of artillery, commanding a brigade in the Confederate Army of the South.”
• Colonel Jenifer (see profile above)
• Colonel Sparrow Purdy (New York), 
• Colonel Vanderbilt Allan (“now colonel of topographical engineers”)
• Lieutenant Colonel Charles Caille Long, "a native of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; though quite a young man he served on the Union side throughout the civil war”)
• Lieutenant Colonel W. H. Ward (“a Virginian by birth”)
• W. H. Dunlap (Kentucky native, “now stationed at Damletta, drilling heavy artillery.”)
• Major William P. A. Campbell, “a fine type of the American sailor and officer. A Tennessean by birth, he entered the United States Navy in 1847. In 1861 he resigned and reported for duty to the Confederate government and was ordered to Florida to organize the defences of that coast.” WPA “now connected with the heavy artillery and is Chief of Staff to General Sibley."
• Major Wm. M’Comb Mason (Virginia native, “now in command of a party engaged in boring for water somewhere in Upper Egypt.”)
• Major E. Parys, “Belgian by birth, but a naturalized American citizen” Union veteran “now organizing a military Signal Corps for the Egyptian government."
• Major E. Hunt (Virginian, “now engaged at Aboukir teaching the natives how to handle heavy guns”) 
• Lieutenant Sidney J. Sibley (“In 1862 he made cartridges at the laboratory in Shreveport, La., later a courier with Burd’s battalion, First Trans-Mississippi cavalry.)

Most of these names appear again in another article headed "American Officers in the Khedive's Army," which ran in several New York newspapers including the New York Commercial Advertiser (September 28, 1871). Image below is from a reprint in the Ovid, New York Bee on October 18, 1871; found at Fulton History.

Colonel Jenifer is there, good. Charles Chaillé-Long was from Maryland but served with the Union army. Of the ex-Confederates, Frank A. Reynolds was born in North Carolina; Navy Lieutenant William H. Ward was from Virginia. Found this photo of Tennessean W. P. A. Campbell from Recollections of a Rebel Reefer by James Morris Morgan, online at Documenting the American South:

An 1887 history of  Kentucky (4th ed., 1887, Boyle County) states that W. W. Dunlap,

graduated from West Point. He entered the Confederate Army; was lieutenant-colonel of artillery in the army of the khedive of Egypt, from 1868 to 1876, and is now civil engineer in the mining region of Colorado. -- RootsWeb

Thomas Grimke Rhett was born in Charleston, South Carolina.

He resigned at the beginning of the Civil War, as a South Carolinian would indeed have been a rara avis in the Federal Army in 1861, and became an officer in the Confederate Army; while from 1870 to 1873 he was a Colonel of Ordnance in the Army of the Khedive. --Marian Gouverneur via ReadCentral

Is it William or Alexander Macomb Mason? Also known as Mason Bey and originally from Washington (District of Colombia). Accomack identifies E. Hunt as a Virginian, so he won't do for Ungar's prototype.

To be sure, Ungar looks like a composite figure, a hybrid inspired by factual details from more than one individual biography. Not only that, we have to allow Melville's imagination to work its magic. After all, Melville's Djalea puts Ungar on the shore of Jaffa

With Turkish captains holding speech
Over some cannon in a pile
Late landed—with the conic ball. --Clarel Part 4 Canto 5

and here we are still in Egypt.

Nevertheless, our Maryland native Walter Hanson Jenifer (1823-1878) is surely deserving of closer attention as one possible model for Melville's Ungar. Ex-Confederate, Cavalry officer, Maryland-born, almost Catholic, publicly identified with other American soldiers of fortune in the Khedive's Army--we're so close to home. If only Jenifer had something remotely like an Indian name. Or maybe one of the Virginians is kin to Giles Brent. A-ha, Marylander Brent Giles relocated to Virginia so really we should be looking there for any real-life English/Catholic/Indian forbears.

Which brings up another problem, for next time I guess: how exactly is the name "Ungar" Indian?

Related post

• Ungar's forest name 
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2015/09/ungars-forest-name.html