Journey to the Gold Diggins

Plot

Journey to the Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags is an oblong, 63-page album first published in 1849. It tells the story of the eponymous Jeremiah Saddlebags, an urban Northern dandy and “man of fashion,” who, looking for a way to invest an inheritance, sets out toward California “by way of the Horn” (as in, by ship past Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America).

In their passing mentions of Jeremiah Saddlebags, both David Kunzle (Father of the Comic Strip, 175) and Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Of Comics and Men, 4) are careful to note the similarities between the album and Rodolphe Töpffer’s work, which has been touched upon in several earlier posts. The principal similarity is that, like the American-published Obadiah Oldbuck, Jeremiah Saddlebags is choppily told, but no doubt a sequential art narrative in which panel follows panel and page follows page. It is, then, another early “comic book” (or, again, anachronistically, “graphic novel”). Indeed, illustrated as it was by brothers J. A. and D. F. Read, and published by Cincinnati publishing house U. P. James and in New York by Stringer & Townsend, Jeremiah Saddlebags is the first known American-made, original comics publication.

The album’s format, oblong (14 x 23 cm or ca. 5 1/2′ x 9′) with the strips printed horizontally, is also the same as the Wilson edition of Obadiah available at the Dartmouth College Library, which in turn harks back to Töpffer in Europe. If this last detail was not enough to suggest that Jeremiah Saddlebags was inspired by the American plagiarism of Töpffer’s work, other similarities inescapably present themselves. The graphic style of the latter album is similar to that of Obadiah, albeit somewhat “dirtier.” And both stories share the same semi-picaresque generic properties, introducing a roguish character involved in an increasingly absurd series of misadventures. As Kunzle remarks, many details in Jeremiah are also familiar from Obadiah, Töpffer’s French-language original Vieux Bois, and other Töpffer works: “violent emotions culminating in a tapage diurne [roughly, daytime disturbance], a pars pro toto scene of kicking out from Albert, a comic dog perched on a mast, a ship taken by pirates, whom the hero is forced to join, before being retaken.” (Father of the Comic Strip, 175.)

But Jeremiah Saddlebags is very much a product of its time and place. The year before it was published, 1848, marked the beginning of the big California “gold rush” that led to depopulation of other areas and, to borrow Murrell’s formulation, “a journey as ill-considered as was the Children’s Crusade” (174), undertaken by some 90,000 Americans. The urban dandy trying, and failing, to make it in the gold-strewn hills and valleys of California was a much-returned to figure in those days. Like so much of this type of popular culture, the album’s humor largely stems from misunderstandings and the stereotyped ill-fittedness of Eastern urbanites in the rugged West. Thus, when Jeremiah is convinced that there is gold to be found in California and begins to collect the necessary tools and materials for the frontier expedition, the first thing he buys is a baby cradle, because he hears that cradles are used for washing gold. After having readied himself, he sets out with a full load, in a picture reminiscent of other humorous drawings and caricatures of well-dressed and clearly ill-prepared middle class Eastern men heading out West to strike rich.

The album’s satire of the would-be gold digger, in which the comfortable world of the Easterner is turned upside down, is echoed narratively by Jermiah’s itinerary; his journey is itself a reversal of that undertaken by most, who instead wound up going West over land and East via Panama. That this route is dreamed up by Jeremiah after his own map study, and decided to be the best option, underscores his own incompetence in these matters. Jeremiah’s characterization makes him different from Obadiah who, in the nostalgic 1898 piece cited in the Oldbuck post, was acknowledged as an erstwhile resident of the Alps: “Translated into ‘Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck,’ the central figure in the Swiss idyl was as much at home with the boys of the Maine seacoast as he was among the lakes and mountain of his native land.” He was, in a sense, universal. Conversely, Jeremiah, who was not at home in the lakes and rivers of his own country or its neighboring lands, was a pretty typical, if not trendsetting [see below], late-1840s American creation.

Jeremiah Saddlebags did acquire some fame in his native land and, like Obadiah Oldbuck, if perhaps less so, the album did remain for a long time in living memory to some degree. To be sure, mentions of Jeremiah’s exploits are far fewer than of Obadiah’s, but he nonetheless appears as a figure of interest long before contemporary comics scholars “found” him. A Google Books search suggests that U. P. James issued a new edition in 1865. The album was added to the Library of Congress in 1869, which of course is no guarantee of immortality. But, Murrell wrote in 1933, Jeremiah Saddlebags was counted amongst the most amusing and influential American representations of the gold rush (175). The 1947 California Library Bulletin mentions it among other “cartoon and comic-book histories of the gold rush experience.” The Antiquarian Bookman noted, in 1948, that readers were looking for copies. In 1950, a full-color facsimile edition was printed (a few scanned pages can be seen here), with an introduction by literary critic and San Francisco Chronicle literary editor Joseph Henry Jackson, that is worth quoting at length:

Of the American comic books on the subject of the gold rush, the best known, although it is relatively scarce, is this Journey to the Gold Diggins […] [T]he energetic little Jeremiah Saddlebags*, the prototype–at least in the mind of the comic illustrator of the time in America–of the Argonaut who risked the hard journey to the gold fields, found that it was all a good deal more difficult than he had thought, avoided death by a hair’s-breadth time and again, and came home poorer than he went. It is the best of the American comic books on this theme. […] Jeremiah and his adventures reflect so precisely the rough-and-tumble humor of their time, and interpret so beautifully the attitude toward the gold rush which was to crystallize and become a firm part of the Great American Saga, that the Reads and their creation well deserve to be rescued–as they are here for the first time–from the shadowy realm of collectors’ and libraries’ shelves.

And, as a final example, in his 1975 book The California Gold Rush, historian John Walton Caughey mentions Jeremiah in a long list of pop culture attempts to cash in on the gold rush.

So, Jeremiah Saddlebags was, like Obadiah Oldbuck, recognized long before it was ever pulled from the shelves of recently obscure history, had the small amount of dust accumulated shaken off, and was presented as an example of American pre-Outcault comics history. If one should choose to argue that, because of this album’s American origin, it, rather than Obadiah Oldbuck, marks the starting point of American comics history proper (no more proto-comics), can one say that American comics were “born” in New York? No, I wouldn’t say so, even if the Read brothers worked out of the city. It is difficult to determine which edition came first, the New York one or the Cincinnati one. Most references to Jeremiah Saddlebags I have found only mention the one from Ohio, but comics collector and historian Robert Beerbohm dates the New York edition to June 1849, with the Cincinnati one appearing “soon after” (in the The Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide #38, 338). At best, it can be said from the example of Jeremiah Saddlebags and its protagonist’s dual residency that New York was part of the equation from the start, a conclusion that should surprise nobody.

Finally, in connection with what will be the main part of the project as it evolves, a word on setting: this, the first American-made comic book, was concerned not with New York, but with the trip to San Francisco and the then-widely represented experience in California of the day. Just as Jeremiah Saddlebags reminds us that comic books were not unequivocally “born” in New York, so does it remind us that neither are they concerned, then or now, only or primarily with New York, despite attempts by some to argue thus (something we will have occasion to return to many, many times over the coming weeks and months). To me, as will also be a recurring interest in the course of this project, the occurrence of New York, Ohio, and San Francisco in the history and contents of this album are an interesting foreshadowing of the century-and-a-half that would follow. As such, Jeremiah Saddlebags is a powerful testament to the mythic nature of the claimed New York–comics relationship.