^{Note 1 in page 613} Melville's own statement appears in the MS. copy, but was omitted from the printed version, of a sketch written for J. E. A. Smith's History of Pittsfield (1876). Evidence concerning the trip itself is found both in a letter written by Melville's mother to Peter Gansvoort on 16 May 1840, saying that Herman was thinking of going to the “far west,” and in the poem “Trophies of Peace,” which Melville subtitled “Illinois in 1840.” See Harrison Hayford and Merrell R. Davis, “Herman Melville as Office Seeker,” MLQ, ? (June 1949), 168, where the omitted statement and letter are referenced by Davis, who was the first to notice them, in his Yale dissertation, 1947. Jay Leyda, in his forthcoming Melville “Log,” refers to letters from Eli J. M. Fly, an early friend of Melville, and from Robert Melville, which indicate that they too may have made the trip to Galena in 1840; and Henry A. Murray in the notes to his edition of Pierre (1949), pp. 487–488, provides information about Fly with the suggestion that he may have been Melville's companion on the trip.

^{Note 2 in page 614} Thomas Melvill, Allan Melville's older brother, born in 1776, was educated at Boston Academy and sent to Paris on business when he was eighteen. He failed in his mercantile mission, but remained in Paris as a banker for fourteen years, and lived in Spain for two years. While in Europe he married a French girl of Spanish descent. In 1811 he returned to the United States with his wife and two children, was commissary of prisoners under General Dearborn in the War of 1812, and gained the rank of Major. He was sent to Pitts-field, where he set up with his family at Broadhall. His first wife died in 1814, and in 1815 he married Mary Ann Hobart. With her and the children he emigrated to Galena, Illinois, about 1837. In Galena, Thomas Melvill became a prominent figure. By 1840 he was in business as a notary public and commissioner for real estate, and ran a general agency office. He remained in Galena until his death in 1845, serving as secretary-treasurer of the Chamber of Commerce, superintendent of the Government Lead Mining Office, agent for an insurance company, etc. His family continued to live in Galena, his sons John S. and George Rawleigh operating several public businesses.—Hudson-Mohawk Genealogical, ed. Cuyler Reynolds (New York, 1911), I, 62, and the files of the Northwestern Gazette and Galena Advertiser for the years 1839–53. Even after Melville was publicized as a writer the local newspaper gives no recognition of him in connection with the relatively prominent Melvill family in Galena.

^{Note 3 in page 615} J. M. Peck, A New Guide for Emigrants to the West (Boston, 1837), p. 373.

^{Note 4 in page 615} See the reference to his mother's letter in note 1, above.

^{Note 5 in page 615} Robert Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, or the Emigrant's and Traveller's Guide to the West (Philadelphia, 1834), p. 184.

^{Note 6 in page 616} In Mardi tobacco smoke suggests a Michigan wigwam, and in Redburn Liverpool docks recall the chain of intercommunicating Great Lakes.

^{Note 7 in page 616} Milo M. Quaife, Chicago's Highways, Old and New (Chicago, 1923), pp. 87–103.

^{Note 8 in page 616} See also Omoo, where potato growers cleared a thirty-acre tract “as level as a prairie”; While-Jacket, where the author and his taciturn friend Nord “scoured the prairies of reading”; Moby-Dick, where the whale's brow is described as “full of a prairie-like placidity”; and the chapter on the physiognomy of the whale entitled “The Praire [sic].”

^{Note 9 in page 617} Later in Moby-Dick the sailors' fears are routed as “timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison”; in Mardi, a capsized hull is likened to a “stricken buffalo brought low to the plain.”

^{Note 10 in page 617} In “Trophies of Peace” he likens the files of prairie maize to “hosts of spears”—armies—which, when reaped, provide golden stacks of grain as monuments, the only war monuments to be found on the prairies. In Clarel, Nathan's father, an emigrant to Illinois, was buried near some ancient Indian mounds on the prairie; and Deism, like a prairie fire, burned out Nathan's heart, leaving it a fit soil for weeds. The pantherine lily of the prairie, the groves of trees here and there like islands (see also “the isle-groves of August prairies” in the story “The Paradise of Bachelors”), the wilderness mirage which looked “like western counties all in grain,” and the man riding a horse like an Osage scout are other western allusions in Clarel.

^{Note 11 in page 617} Although these poems were printed after Melville's midwestern lecture tour of 1859, I believe that the latter trip figures very slightly if at all in his creative use of western imagery. By this time his novel-career was practically over, and the poetic allusions, it will be noticed, are quite similar to those used in earlier years. In 1859 Melville was forty years old, on the decline as a writer, and less susceptible to impressions than he was twenty years earlier. That his poetry reflected his first trip is also indicated by the actual dates he uses in two of the poems: “Prairie Maize” is subtitled “Illinois in 1840,” and in “John Marr” the retired sailor settles in the West “about the year 1838.” Other internal allusions to “recent” Indian wars and to conditions of transportation in “John Marr” (see text) suggest reminiscences of the earlier trip. Finally, the facts that Melville travelled swiftly by train, making unsuccessful one-night stops in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Rockford and Quincy, Illinois, and that he made no later reference to his lecture tour indicate that it was at best only a money-making proposition rather far removed from the center of his poetic soul. See Merrell R. Davis, “Melville's Midwestern Lecture Tour,” PQ, xx (1941), 46–57

^{Note 12 in page 618} In Journal Up the Straits these birds are mentioned by Melville in his description of the Pigeon Mosque in Constantinople where “the pigeons covered the pavements as thick as in the West they fly in hosts.”

^{Note 13 in page 619} John William Bennett, Archaeological Explorations in Jo. Daviess County, Illinois (Chicago, 1945), p. 64.

^{Note 14 in page 619} Melville makes a specific reference to Galena in a well known letter to Evert Duyckinck (3 March 1849) in which he says he admires Emerson because he dives: “any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will.”

^{Note 15 in page 619} Cyrenus Cole, I Am a Man . . . The Indian Black Hawk (Iowa City, 1938), pp. 215–222.

^{Note 16 in page 620} Melville showed a great interest in the American Indian, as can be seen by allusions already noted to the Winnebago, Osage, Sioux, and Sax-Fox tribes. See also Omoo where South Sea Islanders are compared to North American Indians—specifically, the Pawnee-Loup.

^{Note 17 in page 620} See Murray's notes to Pierre (note 1, above), and the notes to “Bartleby” in Jay Seyda's edition of The Complete Stories (New York, 1949), p. 455.

^{Note 18 in page 620} Elizabeth Foster, who is editing The Confidence Man for the new Collected Works, very kindly sent me a transcript of this MS., which is in the Melville Collection at the Harvard College Library; the complete sketch will appear in her edition. After describing the area around the Falls, Melville writes rhapsodically about the river's farther course and tells how, at St. Louis, the muddy Missouri takes over, “dethrones his sire and reigns in his stead.” He alludes to islands, bluffs, prairies, deer, elk, bear, bison, Pawnee Indians, and the Susquehanna River.

^{Note 19 in page 621} Edmund Flagg, “The Far West: or, a Tour Beyond the Mountains” (1836–37), in Early Western Travels, ed. R. G. Thwaites (Cleveland, 1906), xxvi, 122, 123 n.

^{Note 20 in page 621} In Redburn an old English couple is astonished that Redburn was not acquainted with a relative of theirs who lived on the banks of the Mississippi; in Moby-Dick Melville compares the stump of a one-legged beggar with the stumps in a western clearing; in White-Jacket the martial discipline of the navy reminds him of the Grizzly Bear of Missouri; and in Journal Up the Straits the Po had an alluvial look and “was yellow as Mississippi.”

^{Note 21 in page 621} Needless to say, not all of Melville's regional references in this novel can be attributed to firsthand experience. In an unpublished dissertation, “Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, Its Origins and Meanings” (Yale Univ., 1942), Elizabeth Foster investigates the probable sources of Melville's allusion to Meason, the bandit of the Ohio; Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi; and the brothers Harpe, the Thugs of the Green River country in Kentucky, and shows how popular were the printed stories of the lives of these characters. She also carefully compares the story of the Indian-hater with Melville's almost certain source, Judge James Hall's Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West (Philadelphia, 1835), ii, Chap. vi. The story had appeared in print earlier.

^{Note 22 in page 622} The barbershop and bar near the captain's office, the three-decker rope-and-board bunks in the emigrants' quarters, and the picture of the gentlemen's cabin with solar lamp, public Bible, and combination stool and life preserver are all indicative of firsthand observation. But 1840 was a transition period in steamboat construction, and the passage wherein Melville describes “five promenades, domed salons, long galleries, sunny balconies, confidential passages, bridal chambers, staterooms plenty as pigeon-holes” seems to have come from observations of large eastern boats at the time Melville was writing (1856), rather than from his earlier experience. I am indebted to Captain Fredrick Way, Jr., of Sewickly, Pa., for information on early river boats and river lore. Capt. Way, well-known Ohio-Mississippi River pilot and historian of river boats, is the publisher of the Inland River Record.

^{Note 23 in page 623} For example: in The Confidence Man the man with the brass plate was in the intelligence office line “in the great city of Cincinnati”; in Redburn the young sailor makes conversation in an English cottage “about Illinois and the river Ohio,” and his friend Harry Bolton in his enthusiasm is ready to see the United States from north to south and “jump the River Ohio, if it comes in the way”; in While-Jacket the Ohio is used to symbolize the population of the middle section of the United States; in Moby-Dick myths about the Ohio honey-hunter (who drowned in the honey of a hollow tree as Tashtego almost drowned in the whale's head) and the White Steed of the Prairies (who led a herd of wild horses that streamed over the plains “like an Ohio”) are used; in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” it is on the banks of the Ohio that “men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born”; in the story “Cock-a-Doodle-Do” the death of Melville's good friend in an Ohio River steamer explosion is cited as an example of how man is often the pawn of natural forces; and in the Journal Up the Straits the bank of the Tiber, even in the midst of the century-old monuments, had a fresh look, “primeval as Ohio.”

^{Note 21 in page 624} Horace Carter Hovey, Mammoth Cave of Kentucky (Louisville, 1912), pp. 42–43.

^{Note 25 in page 625} The most probable routes, the choice depending upon weather conditions, time of year, etc., are as follows: from Beaver, Pa., at the head of low-water navigation on the Ohio, through the feeder to the Ohio-Erie Canal, and so home to Albany by way of Lake Erie; overland to Erie, Pa., or by Baltimore-and-Ohio stage route to Baltimore and then home by boat or train; or by canal and railroad from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, and then north by train. This latter route was recommended by the guidebooks, and, since the last stretch into Philadelphia lay along the Susquehanna River, Melville's allusion to this river already noted in his MS. sketch of the Mississippi, and his comparison in his Journal Up the Straits of the Grand Canal of Venice to the winding Susquehanna, would lend support to the possibility that Melville had once travelled this way.

^{Note 28 in page 625} See Jay Leyda, “Ishmael Melvill: Remarks on Board of Ship Amazon,” Boston Public Lib. Quart., i (Oct. 1949), 119–134.