America's Older Toxic Masculinity: Brotherhood and Bloodshed in Jimmy L. Bryan Jr.'s "The American Elsewhere"

Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. | The American Elsewhere: Adventure and Manliness in the Age of Expansion | University Press of Kansas | 2017 | 408 Pages

In 1844, painter Charles Deas created Long Jakes, which would later come to symbolize the American frontiersman on the cover of Jimmy L. Bryan’s new book, The American Elsewhere: Adventure and Manliness in the Age of Expansion. The image presents the Western adventurer in all his complexity. His red shirt represents vitality and bloodshed. His rifle at the ready is a symbol of his lethality and steadfast nature in the face of peril. His pants, made of buckskin appropriated from the Native American culture he both revered and sought to destroy, and are highlighted by the now easily-recognizable fringe, itself a dandyism representative of his rejection of traditional masculinity and his unconscious acceptance of the feminine. His horse paws the ground in a forward motion, even as he looks back to stare past the viewer into the vast landscape of the Western frontier. This image captivated nineteenth-century art enthusiasts and epitomized the Western adventurer, who occupied an increasingly central role in the accounts men brought back from the frontier. These stories, sent home in letters and brought to publication houses upon their return East, formed a new literary genre called the adventurelogue.

Analyzing both adventurelogues and art of the period, Bryan reinterprets the traditional image of the cowboy, arguing that those who ventured West embodied the American version of European Romanticism, a movement in literature and thought that emphasized individualism and self-improvement through strong emotion. Unsatisfied with traditional masculinity and finding themselves in one way or another incompatible with eastern domesticity, young white men sought sensation and emotional fulfillment in the “elsewheres” of the Western frontier. This call to escape eastern civilization, in the view of both Bryan and nineteenth-century writers, was itself an expression of American exceptionalism. Where else in the world were young men leaving their homes to seek peril and emotional sensation in unexplored wilds? To be sure, Europeans also sought emotional sensations, but Americans added to Romanticism the pursuits of peril and profit. Bryan reminds us that nineteenth-century masculinity was not typified by harsh stoicism, but was a thing of great emotion, where cowboys openly wept at the sight of beautiful mountain ranges and “bundled” together in the cold desert nights for both warmth and companionship. Some cowboys engaged in these affectionate and sometimes sexual relationships to stave off the melancholy caused by the American West’s desolate landscapes.

However, Bryan does not allow this flowery and peaceful image to absolve Western adventurers of the destruction they exacted upon Native American and Mexican civilizations. If emotional sensations could be found in panoramic views of beautiful, open landscapes, it could also be found in bloodshed—and adventurers openly sought fulfillment through martial violence. In this vein, exceptionalism became the result of adventurism as much as it was its cause, and American society used it as an excuse to overlook the atrocities being committed by their beloved adventurers out West. In discussing the Texas Rangers, author Charles Webber commented that the average American “possessed no authority to judge because the ranger existence transcended theirs.” By embodying American exceptionalism, adventurers had themselves become exceptions to the American standard and were therefore free from criticism or tether. Such anonymity and freedom from the constraints of American society further encouraged adventurers to indiscriminately kill natives and openly lust after young native boys and girls. Bryan vilifies the “devout narcissist” adventurers—and the readers who adored them back home—for the ease with which the adventurer slaughtered Native American and Mexican peoples and appropriated their cultures.

The strength of Bryan’s argument is in its cohesiveness. He examines the adventurelogue with skill and constancy such that he successfully portrays the seeming incongruity of Romanticism and martial violence, which, as an expression of exceptionalism, existed simultaneously within American adventurers. However, the adventurelogue as a source itself places limitations on Bryan’s work. Presenting a cultural history is always a difficult task, as Bryan admits, because the sources with which one measures culture are often insular and highly subjective. Bryan dedicates an entire section to describing how the stories adventurers brought home were often greatly exaggerated and purposefully omitted details that may have been considered unsavory. On top of this problem, Bryan discloses that historians lack data on the popularity of adventurelogues at the time of their publication; instead of that data, Bryan argues that the fact that these accounts are still in publication today is evidence of their popularity. Beyond this, Bryan can, at best, only interpret the adventurelogues through a modern lens. For example, he cites Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” while acknowledging that modern historians are unsure if Poe’s writings were intended to be a fictional adventurelogue or a parody of the genre. Despite these limitations, Bryan presents a compelling new image of the American frontiersman.

At its base, The American Elsewhere is a valuable analysis of a little-known genre of American literature and its influence within American culture as a whole. Whether intentionally or not, Bryan adds to, and at times challenges, the historiography of American masculinity. Although his work only briefly mentions other gender historians, like Gail Bederman and Kristin Hoganson, Bryan’s book provides further cultural context to their works while also issuing a slight challenge to their research by shifting their timelines backward by a generation or two. Future historians will continue to examine the history of American masculinity, and, with this compelling new analysis of the hyper-masculine adventurelogue, Bryan has ensured that his The American Elsewhere be a valuable part of that research.