Captain Bonneville: Irving's Fur-Trade Journal
Washington Irving digests a soldier's Rocky Mountain journal into a chronicle of trappers, rival companies and Indian camps.
This is not a novel, though it reads at times like one. Washington Irving assembled it from the journal of Benjamin Bonneville, an army officer who led a party of trappers into the Rocky Mountains and the country beyond the buffalo range. Irving is candid on the title page about the method: the book is "Digested from his journal." What you get, then, is one man's expedition retold by a practised writer, and the seams between raw record and polished storytelling are visible throughout.
The shape of the book
The structure is a march. Chapters follow the seasons and the terrain rather than a plot, and each is preceded by a long dash-strung summary of its contents, so you always know a river, a chief or a rival trader is coming before you meet them. The pleasures are episodic: a card game broken up in the wilderness, a hospitable Nez Perce camp, a race to reach the buffalo ground ahead of a competitor. There is no single climax to wait for, which is both the book's honesty and its limitation.
Bonneville's stated aims give the wandering some spine. Irving lays them out plainly when the captain takes stock of his seasoned company:
One of these was to carry his expeditions into some of the unknown tracts of the Far West, beyond what is generally termed the buffalo range. This would have something of the merit and charm of discovery, so dear to every brave and adventurous spirit.
That phrase, "the merit and charm of discovery," tells you what the book values and what it does not scrutinise. Land is unknown because it is unknown to Bonneville; the people already living there appear as hosts, guides, traders and threats rather than as the point.
The texture of the prose
Irving writes long, orderly sentences with a taste for the wry aside. When a chief's name defeats him, he says so and turns it into a joke shared with the reader: the man is a chief "named Yo-mus-ro-y-e-cut; a name which we shall be careful not to inflict oftener than is necessary upon the reader." That gentle, buttonholing humour is the most modern-feeling thing in the book. It is also what carries you across the flatter passages, where the journal beneath shows through as logistics: horses in prime condition, superfluous baggage, a cache dug and then dug again two miles on because a spring burst up at the bottom of the first.
What dates it and what does not
What dates it is the frame of mind. Native peoples are sorted into the friendly and the dangerous, French and American trappers are compared as types, and the whole enterprise is measured by trade, discovery and national advantage. The vocabulary of "Indian banditti" and "maraudings" belongs to its period and should be read as such. What does not date is the concrete detail: wagons turned into boats to cross a river, a spring inconveniently welling up in a hiding-hole, the small tensions of men who must reach good hunting before a rival does. These stay vivid because they are exact.
Who will this reward? Readers interested in the fur trade, in early accounts of the American West, and in Irving's easy narrative manner. It sits well on a Business shelf, being at bottom a story of competing companies, supply lines and markets. Who will it bore? Anyone hoping for character, suspense or a story that builds. The book is uneven by its nature, brightest when Irving relaxes into a scene and dullest when he is merely transcribing the day's mileage. Read it as a chronicle to dip into, not a plot to be pulled through.
The book, free to read
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