| For many historians, "adventure" and "adventurer" are throw-away terms used to dismiss those qualities in their subjects that they deem unimportant or fleeting. As a group who succumbed to irrationality and ego-centric wanting, adventurers did not easily fit within the rational world of socio-economic expansionism. Recent historians of the U.S. west have used the idea as a foil against which to render their own subjects more important. Dedicated to unraveling traditionalist ideas of white, masculine triumphalism, they regarded adventurism as an unfortunate myth that begged for correction.; This study, however, reveals how deliberately and significantly adventurers shaped their world. Americanness and whiteness, landscape and violence, commerce and expansion, adventurism and manliness represented malleable categories that easily yielded to the manipulations of the expansionist generation. As both products and creators of this culture, adventurers demonstrated that emotional sensations, capricious desires, and irrational visions drove expansion as surely as social, economic, political, and diplomatic imperatives.; As an important cultural phenomenon of the early nineteenth-century United States, adventurism played a crucial role in defining a generation of American men. It not only created new models that countered the image of Jacksonian self-restraint, it also contributed to the racial and gendered justification of U.S. expansion. Adventurers further demonstrated that, however elusive in definition, romanticism exerted powerful forces on the early nation. It fueled appetites for sensory experiences, enabled vision for innovative enterprise, and transformed the landscape into adventurous spaces.; As patriot warriors, adventurers incorporated the ideas of duty, sacrifice, and renown with violence and aggression to fulfill their mission as the vanguard of expansion. As men of enterprise, they demonstrated the corporate nature of frontier commerce and drew the marketplace into the remote regions of North America. When they came into contact with Native American men, they discovered models of masculinity and sought to appropriate what they perceived as native vitality and unrestraint. In the minds of adventurers, Indian women represented objects of desire, but they also threatened adventurous manhood with avarice and miscegenation. Adventurers encountered mexicanos, but unlike their views toward Indian men, they expressed little admiration. In many ways, they re-wrote the old Black Legend that criticized Spaniards in the New World to fit their nineteenth-century ambitions for expansion. By emasculating Mexican men, adventurers could cast them as unworthy of the bounties that they enjoyed. Mexicanas and the Mexican republic represented these bounties---both serving as exotic allures and as objects of conquest. |
