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Appealing to the Sensible: “Mr. Parkman’s Tour,” Gold Fever, and Melville’s Ambivalent Westward Approach

Abstract: “Mr. Parkman’s Tour” remains underexplored in scholarship long concerned with how westward expansion—and perhaps more importantly, literary and popular discourses both stemming from and driving expansion—affected Melville’s intellectual development and figuratively haunted his mid-nineteenth-century writings. Yet Melville’s review of Francis Parkman’s The California and Oregon Trail distills the ambivalence with which so much of his fiction approaches the process, meaning, and consequences of narrating the western frontier at the height of US expansionism. Before praising Parkman’s efforts at the end of the review, he attacks the book on two separate fronts. The review’s second (and by far its most well known) section deplores Parkman’s disparagements of Native Americans. The opening paragraphs charge Parkman’s title with deceit, as there was “nothing about California or Oregon in the book.” While this opening section has been neglected in critical engagements with the review, Melville’s titular quibble reveals a concern with the disingenuous tactics by which authors and publishers exacerbated Americans’ obsession with California. After briefly discussing the latter two sections of “Mr. Parkman’s Tour,” this essay focuses on the opening section and its poignant critique of promotional rhetorics surrounding the 1849 California Gold Rush.