"This delightful country:" Lansford W. Hastings' The Emigrants ' Guide to Oregon and California and the tradition of the California prospect in pre-Gold Rush travel literature
Date
2002
Authors
Peddle, Kirsty Joanne
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Abstract
The pre-Gold Rush literature on California is marked by little variation in either content or form. From the earliest account, published in 1808, American visitors saw California as an earthly paradise in the hands of an undeserving Other. While historians have often attributed the repetitive nature of pre-Gold Rush travel literature to California itself, I argue that the forces that shaped early American responses to California are not found in California. hut outside of it. When Americans came to write about the California landscape in the years before the Gold Rush, they fell back on conventional ways of ordering the landscape that have their roots in the earliest moments of American colonization. By the time Americans began visiting California in the early years of the nineteenth century, a primary American landscape had been articulated in the pages of American travel literature generally. Rather than develop new aesthetic strategies for responding to California. these early travelers employed these traditional aesthetic responses to create a California landscape that was a variation of a larger American landscape. In California. American visitors fell back on to deeply rooted topoi to shape their prospects - the Paradise tradition and anticipation.
Lansford Warren Hastings' The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California, published in 1845. included a seductive vision of California's present condition and future prospects. In placing Hastings within the context of the more than twenty works published in the United States on California before the Gold Rush, and within the larger context of the literature of American discovery and exploration, it is clear to see not only an awareness of earlier California accounts, but of a national tradition of landscape description. Using Hastings' work as the guide, this paper examines the creation of these topoi in the national literature generally and their specific application in the pre-Gold Rush literature of California.