“Italian Music in Dakota”
The Sevententh – the finest Regimental Band I ever heard
THROUGH the soft evening air enwinding all,
Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,
In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes,
Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,
(Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before, 5
Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,
Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house,
Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,
Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish,
And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;) 10
Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
Music, Italian music in Dakota.

While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl’d realm,
Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,
Acknowledging rapport however far remov’d, 15
(As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit, )
Listens well pleas’d.
18811

1Whitman’s poem attempts a daring collocation of the frontier and Italian opera and is usually seen as the expression of a successful fusion between nature and culture. Thus, David Oates writes that it “connects the spirit of nature with human artifice” and Joann P. Krieg that it “reconciles and dispels apparent disparities” between Italian opera and the West.2 As against such readings, I will here question the logic of reconciliation that “Italian Music in Dakota” apparently foregrounds, by emphasizing on the contrary its underlying pattern of discordance, displacement and strife. To be more specific, I will argue that the transfer of European music into Dakota Territory, of which the 17th Regiment’s band is the apparent vehicle, conceals an obverse transfer of Native Americans from the same Territory—a removal which becomes visible when one reads the poem’s loaded signifiers against the historical backdrop of Indian Wars and white settlement in Dakota. This hidden transfer, I will contend, constitutes the poem’s deep subject, what it is really about, and illuminates Whitman’s problematic allegiance to the tropes of Manifest Destiny, whose impact on his work is both more pervasive and more ambiguous than one might at first think.

2In the following commentary, I will first look at some of the heterogeneous historical materials which Whitman builds into the poem’s gestalt, suggesting that the latter may be read as an idiosyncratic metonymy of the conquest of the West. I will then outline the poetic process through which Native Americans are repressed from the poem’s scene into its scenery, in a gesture that both replicates the logic of colonialism and unconsciously betrays its hidden violence. And, to conclude on a cultural note, I will end by sketching a comparison between “Italian Music in Dakota” and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which also deterritorializes the “Indian problem,” as it was then called, and reconfigures it in ways that are both parallel and complementary to Whitman’s.

The Making of a Gestalt

3From a chronological point of view, “Italian Music in Dakota” is poised between the Black Hills War of 1876-77 and the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 1890. Probably written between 1879 and 1881, after Whitman’s trip to the West,3 it was published in the 1881-2 edition of Leaves of Grass, at a time when the “Indian Problem”—still a burning issue in these last years of the Indian Wars—was very much focused on the Dakota Territory, in particular the Black Hills region. Moreover, as Ed Folsom notes, Whitman was intensely aware of the “problem” throughout his life, the more so as he was the only major American poet to have been employed (for a few months in 1865) in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior and thus to have met several Native American delegations.4 These delegations came to Washington, as is well recorded,5 for the main purpose of trying to save what they could of their shrinking territories, the remains of which were taken away from them by white settlers and the US army in the 25 years that followed the Civil War.

4Given this historical and personal background, the single most striking feature of Whitman’s poem is probably its omission of any direct reference to Native Americans, especially those very Dakota or Lakota Sioux who gave their name to the Territory (and thus, indirectly, to the title of the poem) and who, under the leadership of Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, put up a last-ditch resistance to the invasion and confiscation of their land. Turning his back on Native Americans, Whitman chooses to focus on the opposite side. The headnote expressing his admiration for the 17^th Regimental Band suggests (it wouldn’t be clear otherwise) that the poem records a personal impression felt during a musical performance by this band in the Dakota wilds. The impression is, by all accounts, invented, as Whitman never went to the territory except in imagination. The 17^th Regiment, however, was closely associated with the history of Dakota, where it was stationed for sixteen years (1870-1886), fighting the Sioux at the battles of Pine Ridge, North Dakota, and Little Big Horn. These feats are emblazoned on its coat of arms, adorned with Indian arrows.

5Interestingly, during the Civil War, in 1863-1864 to be precise, the 17^th Infantry Band was stationed in Washington and even played at the White House, “alternating with the Marine Band, with which it was favorably compared.”6 Whitman may well have heard the band there and then. It was a professional orchestra, known before the war as Poppenberg’s Band, from the name of its leader, Albert Poppenberg of Buffalo, NY. When the 17^th Infantry Regiment was established by Abraham Lincoln in May 1861, just after the beginning of the war, Poppenberg’s Band “was enlisted as an organization, and […] became the 17th Infantry Band.”7 This accounts for its musical level and classical repertoire, which might otherwise seem out of bounds for an average military band.8 Still, it is not likely that, for all its skills, the band should have played the Sonnambula, Norma and Poliuto in the Wild West, nor that it accompanied real opera singers there: these references rather point to Whitman’s recollections of Marietta Alboni, the Italian prima-donna whom he had heard in New York in 1852 and memorialized in “Proud Music of the Storm,”9 where her name is indeed associated with Norma and La Sonnambula.

Coat of arms of 17th Infantry Regiment.

6Furthermore, it would be an understatement to say that the musical performance imagined or recreated by Whitman jars with what we know of the recreational activities and cultural practices of Dakota settlers. These had invaded the Black Hills in 1874, in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, following General Custer’s declaration that he had found gold strewn in abundance on the ground. In the next few years, the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad sustained the population surge that had begun with the Gold Rush, leading to the mushrooming of several towns in the Territory. The most famous of these is Deadwood, the place where Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back in 1876 and where Calamity Jane would die an alcoholic in 1901. Deadwood also gave its name to that enduring dime novel hero, Deadwood Dick, Prince of the Road (created in 1877 by Ed Wheeler), an early instance of the literary desperado, whose emergence chimed with the national railroad strike of 1877 and the beginning of violent class conflict in Western mining towns10. Finally, although Deadwood boasted one of the first theaters in Dakota, the Gem, run by the notorious Al Swearengen who was also “the hub of the town’s opium trade”11, Swearengen’s idea of entertainment involved prizefighting and prostitution rather than Italian opera. The Gem’s early years are recorded by one John McClintock in his memoir Pioneer Days in the Black Hills, in which he describes it as “a defiler of youth, a destroyer of home ties, and a veritable abomination”12—a far cry from Norma or Poliuto.

7Seen from the vantage of history, “Italian Music” thus sketches a complex gesture of projection (of the poet into an imagined place), amalgamation (of his temporally and spatially heterogeneous experiences into one supposedly true and unifying recollection), euphemization (of the Indian Wars and desperado/ class violence) and sublimation (of the settlers’ rough culture into high art). And yet, for all the artificiality of its multi-layered construction, it remains true to the settlers’ and US army’s point of view, espousing their irrevocable movement from East to West and nativizing their appropriation of the West, “as if born here, related here” (l. 6). It can thus be seen as a partial and idealized metonymy of the very real appropriation and settlement of an alien territory. Just like the wandering settlers going West, the “wandering strains” of opera, played by an army band, strike root in Dakota, as the poem deploys its nativist claim: “Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home” (l. 8).

Where Have the Native Americans Gone?

8What happens in such lines as this is not so much the domestication of Italian opera by the Dakotan environment as the reverse: the domestication of the “endless wilds” of Dakota by a culture from back East, which “enwinds” them and turns them into its home. The insistently alliterative and even anagrammatic phonetic play between the words at the end of the first two lines ( “enwinding all” / “endless wilds”) seems to suggest the very domestication of the wilderness, the lassoing of wild horses and the coralling of the Native Americans onto the reservations. The pathetic fallacy (in all senses of the expression) which anchors these “wandering strains” into the native soil also enables Whitman’s poem to project the horizontal axis of space onto the vertical axis of time—as the conquest of the West becomes historical evolution—and the axis of nature onto the axis of culture as the “old soil” now produces operatic arias. At the end, it is not only, or not so much, Italian music that is naturalized in Dakota, but Dakota that has evolved into Italian music, its “last-born flower or fruit” (l. 16).

9Of course this mutation can be seen, in this poem as elsewhere in Leaves of Grass ( “Song of the Redwood-Tree” comes to mind, as well as “The Sleepers” and the late aboriginal poems “Osceola,” “Yonnondio” and “Red Jacket”) as an occultation of the violence of history and an elision of the white agency behind it. But what is perhaps more interesting is that hints or traces of this suppressed violence can, I believe, be detected in the poem’s linguistic unconscious.

10For example, we may wonder whether “Italian Music” does not offer a veiled echo of the battle of Little Big Horn in its relationship between indigenous nature and invading music. This becomes clearer if we read the poem in the wake, or in the light, of Whitman’s earlier “From Far Dakota’s Cañons” (1876), composed just after Custer’s death at Little Big Horn13. It can be argued that the “flowing hair” and “electric life” associated with Custer in “From Far Dakota’s Cañons” (l. 17 and 19) find an echo in the equally “electric” music which invades the wilds of Dakota in “Italian Music.” This music appears “Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown” (l. 11), a line suggesting that it has turned into some kind of ghostly body intercepting, or intercepted by, the rays of the setting sun: perhaps, again, the spirit of Custer. In both poems, at any rate, we have the “electric” illumination of a benighted, “dusky” environment by the light of civilization. And both Custer’s performance and that of the 17^th Infantry Band (which is, let us not forget, a military band) are represented as the epic flowering of an older historical substratum: the “old legend” of the white race or the “old root” of the territory, which are more or less synonymous with each other in Whitman’s Darwinian vision of the frontier—prefiguring later similar visions, like those of Owen Wister and Theodore Roosevelt, who was himself to build a ranch in Dakota in 1884.

11Other echoes of the Black Hills war are to be found in “Italian Music.” The opening of the poem, for instance, can be read as a miniature Desert of the Tartars, in which the enemy’s presence is vaguely felt, though it does not appear directly. Thus, the “Rocks, woods” and “endless wilds” of line 2 frame the “fort, cannon, [and] pacing soldiers” that occupy both the center of the line and the center of the land. And the “pacing” of the sentries suggests an ongoing watch for an enemy lurking behind the horizon. But, as the poem unfolds, it becomes apparent that, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Native Americans do not so much lurk beyond the poem’s scene as within it, in the lower forms of nature which occupy the second part of the poem and into which they have retreated. Indeed, while the Dakota name is assimilated into the American language and the poem’s title, the Dakotas’ bodies recede into the nameless “gnarl’d realm” of Nature evoked in the second part of the poem. The adjective “gnarl’d”, which can refer to trees as well as to human limbs, is particularly eloquent and illustrates an analogy between trees and Native American people which can also be found elsewhere in Whitman. Thus, the “Redwood-Tree” which welcomes its future demise in “Song of the Redwood-Tree” (1874) is a transparent metonymy for the Red Man:

Nor yield we mournfully, majestic brothers,
We who have grandly filled our time;
With Nature’s calm content, with tacit huge delight,
We welcome what we wrought for through the past,
And leave the field for them.

For them predicted long,
For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time,
For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings! […]
To be in them absorb’d, assimilated !14

12Similarly, Red Jacket, the grand sachem of the Iroquois, is compared to “some old tree” (l. 5) in the poem “Red Jacket”, composed in 188415. And again, as Folsom points out, when Whitman met Native American dignitaries at the Indian Bureau in Washington, he saw them not as specimens of culture but rather of nature. In “An Indian Bureau Reminiscence” (also 1884), he would write that they were “the most wonderful proofs of what Nature can produce […] tallying our race, as it were, with giant, vital, gnarl’d, enduring trees, or monoliths of separate hardiest rocks, and humanity holding its own with the best of the said trees or rocks, and outdoing them.”16

13Here again Native Americans are assimilated to “Nature”, “gnarl’d trees” and “rocks,” echoing the very words used a few years earlier in “Italian Music.” The Native Americans have not been physically effaced so much as pushed back into the mineral and vegetable realms, leaving the human realm, like the Redwood-Tree, to “a superber race”. This regression or involution is made more obvious l. 14, where Nature, “Lurking in barbaric grim recesses,” is seemingly pregnant with hostile aborigines lying in ambush, echoing the “Indian ambuscade” in “From Far Dakota’s Cañons” (l. 5). The word “recesses,” in this context, is also suggestive: originally meaning the “act of receding”, it derives from the Latin recessus, “a going back, retreat.” An illuminating use of the same linguistic root can be found at the beginning of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay on the Frontier, in which Turner writes that: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development” (my emphasis).17

14Such “recesses” or “recessions” in turn echo the Redwood’s retreat in “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” “leav [ing] the field” to Turner’s “American development”, as the white race marches westward. Similar connotations again appear in line 15 of “Italian Music,” where Nature acknowledges “rapport however far remov’d”: the verb “remov’d” irresistibly echoes, in such a context, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Great Removal of native tribes to the west of the Mississippi, completed by the time Whitman was in his early twenties.

15And as we explore the historical unconscious of the poem, lurking in its linguistic recesses, we may perhaps glimpse the ghosts of the Vanishing Americans not only in the scenery—the “gnarl’d realm” of Dakota—but also in the arias evoked, in particular in the mention of “Norma’s anguish” (l. 9). Norma, among other things, is a tragic version of the Pocahontas story. Bellini’s opera is set in Gaul under Roman occupation, during a Gallic uprising against the occupier. It deals with the love between a colonial official, Pollione, and a native woman, Norma, who is the high priestess of the Druidic temple.18 It is not difficult to find analogies between this situation and that of the Indian Wars, as both involve a loss of indigenous “sovereignty” (cf. l. 13) over the territory; and it is tempting to read the “anguish” of the indigenous Norma as a counterpart of the implicit and repressed “anguish” of the Sioux aborigines. Thus, if Italian Music may be considered, as said before, as the metonymic vanguard of white settlement, it can also be interpreted, from another point of view, as the metaphorical obverse of the “Indian Problem.”

16All this underground linguistic turbulence contrasts with the last line of the poem, in which Nature “listens well pleas’d.” The rather bland conclusion suggests a forced return to order, as a formerly “sovereign” and “barbaric” West is transformed into a chastened vassal of the East and, like the Redwood, an acquiescing spectator of its own defeat. It brings to mind Thomas Pynchon’s epic of the gilded age, Against the Day (2006), in which the Robber Baron Scarsdale Vibe declares: “We will buy it all up, all this country. Money speaks, the land listens.”19 From this angle, Italian music chimes with the irrevocable advance of other agents of Eastern civilization: the settlers, the US army, the Northern Pacific Railroad and the flow of capital, to all of which the land must, in the end, “listen.”

17I would like to end this exploration of Whitman’s musical domestication of the Dakota wilds by balancing it against the cultural work performed by his younger contemporary, William Frederick Cody, alias Buffalo Bill. Cody’s show began in 1872 as a theatrical production of Ned Buntline’s play, Scouts of the Prairie, then evolved, in 1874, into the “Buffalo Bill combination”, before acquiring, in 1883, its better-known name of “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” As Eric Vuillard writes in Tristesse de la terre, Buffalo Bill’s success was largely based on its enlisting and producing “real Indians” for a thrillseeking and bloodthirsty audience in the East and later in Europe. Both Cody’s venture and Whitman’s poem were thus predicated on the separation of the Native Americans from their land, which enabled the transformation of their history into a spectacle—a form of symbolic violence that represents a further stage in the Native American ethnocide. As Vuillard writes:

La destruction d’un peuple se fait toujours par étapes, et chacune est, à sa manière, innocente de la précédente. Le spectacle, qui s’empara des Indiens aux derniers instants de leur histoire, n’est pas la moindre des violences.20

18Cody mostly employed Lakota Sioux in his productions, including such historical figures as Sittting Bull and Red Cloud, as well as many others21. They were brought to American and European cities as the show toured the US and Europe for three decades, bequeathing to us unlikely pictures of warriors in war paint and feathers on a Venice gondola22 or near the Eiffel tower in Paris. Thus Count Primoli, a nephew of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte and a friend of Flaubert’s and of the Paris intelligentsia, would take memorable photographs of the “Indian Sioux” at the World’s Fair of 1889, walking toward a bleak future a year before Wounded Knee.

19I would like to end on this last photograph, which creates a melancholy chiasmus between Dakota and Europe, opera and the western, Buffalo Bill and Whitman. In Whitman, we have the land emptied of its original inhabitants and occupied by European music, which is both a sublimation and a metonymy of the conquering settlers; in Cody’s show, we have the original inhabitants deported from their land to a European setting, mere extras in the celebration of a Yankee culture invading the global arena. In both cases, the link between the Dakota territory and the Dakota people is broken, while their bloody history is reconfigured as a performance in the deracinated spaces of modern culture, marking an early moment in the rise of the society of the spectacle.

G. Primoli, John Burke et certains Indiens Sioux de la troupe de Buffalo Bill en visite à la tour Eiffel (Paris, 1889). Fondazione Primoli, Roma, inv. 8278/A.