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The History of Literature
786 Cherokee Novelist and Poet John Rollin Ridge (with Travis Franks)
00:57:07
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
It was a quiet day in the Jack Wilson studio. I was in my office troubling myself over Chekhov when the email came in. Dear Jack, I'm an assistant professor of literature, working mostly on Native American and Indigenous literature, and I'm hoping you might be interested in my current project on John Rolland Ridge. Ridge, the Cherokee writer most well known as the author of the Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta, is credited as the first indigenous author to publish a novel in the United States. But he considered himself a newsman and poet first and foremost because he was and remains a controversial figure. His family members signed the treaty that initiated the Trail of Tears. He owned enslaved people and supported the Confederacy. Ridge is still understudied. In fact, I recently came across and have begun publishing about Ridge's first and unknown poems, which reflect both his Indigenous identity and his Western education. I'd love to talk about how Byron and William Cullen Bryant influenced these poems and how they give us even more insight into into Ridge's life. Signed, Travis Franks. Well, yes, indeed I am interested in that project, so I invited Travis onto the program to tell us all about John Rowland Ridge. Plus, we'll have Chekhov as he takes his older brother to the woodshed today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast, etc. The first item of business is whether
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
I should say John Rolandridge or John Rolandridge.
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
Roland is kind of nice. It's R O, L, L, I N. How would you pronounce it, Rollin? Roland. Roland is kind of Roland. Apostrophe. If only there were an apostrophe to help me out. I would go with rolling all the way. So in such a When we're stuck in such a dilemma, we turn to AI to give us all the artificially intelligent information we can handle. The definitive source of AI and Here's what they say. How to pronounce John. R, O, L, L, I, N. Ridge, they tell us John. That's the pronunciation. They tell us first J, O, N, rhymes with on. I mean, it's spelled Johan, but AI tells us Jon rhymes with on. Well, thank you. Then they give us Ridge, R, I, J, rhymes with bridge. Thank you again. And then they give us Rollin and they say capital R. It's R, O, L, L, I, N, of course. But in AI they say pronunciation Rollin, capital R, capital A, capital H, hyphen, lowercase L, I, N. Okay, that's easy enough. Ra in all caps is ra and Lynn. So it's Rollin. But then there's a parentheses and it says rhymes with Polink. There we have it. Our friend the bot doesn't know either that my friends is artificially intelligent in the sense of not being intelligent at all, like artificial sincerity or artificial reality. And now artificial intelligence. Well, screw you, bot. Why not just say, I don't know. My first grader did that. The teacher showed me his paper at the parent teacher conference and I was looking at it. Oh, he got this one right. He got that one right. He got this one right. What is the character's name? And he wrote it down. And what is the title of the story? And he wrote that down too. What a smart little fellow. And then it said, what is the theme of the story? And he wrote, I don't know. And the teacher said, you know, that's actually a good answer. It's an honest one. A genuine response, one might say. A non artificial response, one might say. But before I get the angry bot army all up in my business, let's just move on. John Rollin or Roland Ridge had a fascinating life story. We'll get into all of that with our guest. So I won't belabor it here. Let's just bring out Travis Franks and then we'll hear the first part of our talk with him. And then we'll do an interlude with our man Chekhov in between interview segments. But we've got to get rolling or Rollin.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Okay. Joining me now is Travis Franks, who is an assistant professor of literature at Utah State University. Travis works mostly on Native American and
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
indigenous literature, and he's here today to
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
discuss his current project on Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge. Travis Franks, welcome to the History of Literature.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Thanks so much for having me.
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
So who was John Rollin Ridge?
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
I mentioned that he was a Cherokee writer. I see that he was born in 1827. What else is there to know about him.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Right. So I think the way that he is most typically recognized today is as the first Native American to publish a novel in the US So he's the author of the Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta. But there's so much more to his life and his art than that. He didn't think of himself primarily as a novelist. He was a newspaper editor and a poet. He's also, as his last name suggests, he's part of a very famous and even notorious family from Cherokee history. He's the scion of one of the most powerful families in Cherokee history, the people who were the architects of the treaty that eventually allowed for what we know as the Trail of Tears to happen.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Yeah, right, let's talk about that, because it does seem like his family's background and their legacy of this becomes very important to the story. So he was born in Georgia, and his father was a Cherokee leader, John Ridge. His mother was actually a European American woman from Connecticut. I understand. But his father and his grandfather really had been important in Cherokee history. But then they signed that treaty that made them very controversial.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Yeah. So I think, you know, it's important to distinguish. He's born in 1827 in Cherokee Nation. It wasn't yet Georgia. It would become that because of Cherokee removal and the actions of Andrew Jackson. So you're right. Major Ridge, his grandfather's patron, paternal grandfather, and his father, John Ridge, are both incredibly important in terms of the politics of Cherokee Nation. Both of them were well known to the President of the United States. They traveled back and forth to Washington, D.C. to advocate for the Cherokee Nation and for quite some time resisted removal. But around the mid-1830s, it became apparent to them that a couple or several other elite landowning Cherokee members like themselves that there was no winning this battle against Georgia settlers who were encroaching in and the federal government with Andrew Jackson, who was supporting Indian Removal. And they made the decision to enter into treaty, the Treaty of New Echota, with the idea that removal and relocation to what was then called Indian Territory was the only way for the Cherokee people to survive. Major Ridge had been part of a law developed some time before that, though, that stated that anyone who gave up Cherokee land without the consent of the tribe would be punished by death. And so there's this somewhat apocryphal story probably about him signing the treaty and saying, I've just signed my death warrant. And whether or not that did happen, it proved to be true, because the Ridge family removed ahead of what we think of as the Trail of Tears, which happens in 1838, 1839, they went of their own accord, at their own pace. They actually, in what's, you know, one of those sort of hard to square moments of John Roland Ridge's biography, some of the. His father, John Ridge, took a slight detour while they were moving and stopped at Andrew Jackson's house in Tennessee. John Rollin Ridge actually had a brother named Andrew Jackson Ridge. So there's, it's, it's very, very complicated, their relationship with Andrew Jackson and the federal government. Nonetheless, they resettle in the new Cherokee Nation in Indian territory. And in 1839, when many of their countrymen who had been forcibly removed arrived in the new Cherokee Nation, there was a coordinated series of assassinations that saw Major Ridge, John Ridge and their relative Elias Budino assassinated. And John Rowland Ridge was 12 years old at the time and he was witnessed firsthand his father's murder. So the removal and the consequences that his family paid for it shaped his life from an early age and had a profound influence on the rest of his life. He only lived to 40 years old, unfortunately, but in that time he was preoccupied by that moment in his history and in a lot of ways was writing back to it constantly.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Yeah. So after he witnessed this assassination of his father at the hands of a rival Cherokee leader who had opposed the treaty, his mother took him to Arkansas for safety. I'm learning all this from you, by the way. Went to school in Massachusetts, he studied law in Arkansas, he married a white woman. And then in 1849, something significant happened when he came across someone who he thought was a sympathizer of, or who was a sympathizer of John Ross, the man who had killed his father. And he thought the man had been involved in his father's assassination, but he got into some kind of horse dispute with him or might have been self defense, but he, he killed the man and then he fled to California.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
That's right.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
So the nutshell I just gave there. Is that right or is there anything else to add?
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Yeah, I mean, it's, I would just specify that it wasn't John Ross directly involved. He's the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation at that point. And really the Cherokee Nation was divided. They essentially ended up fighting what was their own civil war over the issue of removal. And so the two major factions are often referred to as the Ridge or the Treaty party and then the Ross Party. And it's certainly true that John Rollin Ridge blamed John Ross for his father's death. But it was his political followers who were believed to have carried out the assassination on his orders. That's certainly how John Roland Ridge thought about it.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Right.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
And that ends up mattering because in some of the lore that John Rollin Ridge creates about himself, he may or may not have killed 30 of those men instead of just the one that we know about. That's the story he told later in life anyhow. And you mentioned that he went to Massachusetts. That ends up being relevant. He went to Great Barrington Academy for just under two years. It's a boarding school in Massachusetts. It's also where William Cullen Bryant practiced law for about a decade before moving on to New York and becoming the editor and poet that we all know him as today. So there's a sort of an odd connection there. It's almost certainly where he would have been exposed to Bryant's poetry, as well as Byron and other romantics. But, yeah, so he comes back, he starts publishing Poetry in 1846 in newspapers in Arkansas. He gets married. He's finally back in Cherokee Nation, and he feels safe being there because in the interim, there has been a treaty signed in 1847 that essentially ends that civil war between rival factions of the Cherokee Nation. And he is given quite a bit of money that was owed him after his father's death. So he inherits land and a little bit of wealth. It's the first time that he's had any financial security in his life. He also inherits enslaved people, which is another complicating part of this entire history is that the Ridges owned African and African descent and Afro Cherokee people, and that would be important for him going out to California. So he felt that he was antagonized and baited into a confrontation with David Kell, who was one of the Ross party, I believe. I think the story goes that one of his horses had gotten out. Kell took it and gelded it and then used that as a reason to confront Ridge. And Ridge told him, if you come at me, I'll kill you. And sure enough, he did. He shot him and killed him after the fact. He was convinced that this had all been a setup and that he would be hanged without any kind of trial or justice. And so, yeah, he ultimately fled west to California to become a 49er. He was caught up in the gold rush.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
So the years here really important because this is 1849, when he flees to California. California is kind of going through all kinds of. Of changes due to the Gold Rush. And just five years later, we see Ridge is writing under A pseudonym, Yellowbird. And he writes this novel that's often considered the first novel published by a Native American writer. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta, subtitled the Celebrated California Bandit. So what is that novel about? And then we'll circle back and talk about his poetry, which he had been kind of writing all along and maybe was a little closer to his heart. But let's talk about what he's most famous for, which is this novel. What is it about, and what does it tell us about Ridge?
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
So Joaquin Murrieta is a historical figure. All the details of his life are not known, but he became, during this period, in the late 1840s and early 1850s, he became a news sensation. So Ridge was publishing newspapers by this point. He was. I actually have found a poem that he published, and in a column right next to it, there's an update about Joaquin Marietta. So I know that it was on his mind, and it. It dominated headlines. He essentially was a resistance fighter or a terrorist, depending on, I guess, which side of the issue you were on. And I think in Murrieta, Ridge saw the noble outlaw character that he could tell a story about. Ridge is deeply romantic, deeply invested in romantic literature, and saw in Murrieta someone who he could tell this story about, who is somebody who was high born, who had great prospects, was truly a gentleman, but had been wronged over and over by Americans and white Americans specifically, and was left with no choice but to seek vengeance, and essentially went to war against white Americans in California. But it's the noble outlaw thing, I think, that is mostly that's really appealing.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
And this was a period where California had just been acquired by the United States in 1848, after the Mexican War. But prior to that, white American, Native American and Mexican cultures had all been there and intermixing for hundreds of years. But then there's this acquisition by the United States, and then there's the Gold Rush, which kind of raised the stakes of what California, what value it had. And the United States settlers passed some kind of egregious laws against Mexican miners that would require them to pay extra money in order to mine the gold. And there was just a lot of horrific treatment. And it sounds like Ridge put that
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
all into his book, that he had
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Murrieta, in his novel, undergoing this horrific treatment by the white people, and that's what turned him into a bandit.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
That's right, yeah. He essentially was left with no choice. And it was his wounded sense of nobility that sort of compelled him to do this the very end of the novel has this sort of explanatory note. It says, he also leaves behind and he speak. And this is Ridge, the narrator, speaking of Joaquin Marietta. He also leaves behind him the important lesson. There is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals, whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source, that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world, which is a beautiful notion. Also in a novel that is incredibly racist. You mentioned the racism towards Mexicans and the mining laws, but there's also so much anti Chinese sentiment in California at that time. Ridge just has no qualms with incorporating that into his novel. And we also have to keep in mind that this is a man who sold his rights to an enslaved man to finance his trip to California and took an enslaved man named Wakuli with him to work with him in the gold fields. And then when, when he realized that wasn't going to work, that he didn't want to do that for a living, he sent Wakuli back to Cherokee Nation to live out the rest of his life enslaved. So he's full of contradictions in that way.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
It is very.
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
How should I say it?
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
It's kind of counterintuitive from what I was expecting. Oh, here's the first novel published by an indigenous author in the United States. I would expect it to be about injustice, but I would expect it to be written by somebody who had experienced injustice, not somebody who was also a perpetrator of it by owning enslaved peoples, for example. And I would expect it, the injustice, to be about the treatment of indigenous people by the white people. And instead it's about the treatment of the Mexicans. I mean, I guess it kind of begs the question, I don't know that Ridge had any Mexican ties himself. It kind of begs the question of whether he was transposing things that he knew from his background and kind of laying it into this character of Murrieta that this was kind of like, why didn't he write about indigenous people? And is it because his family had become so controversial that that was a topic he wanted to avoid? Or it became complicated for him to talk about the stealing of land from Native Americans? What do we make of this guy writing this book about this topic?
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Yeah, I'm with you. I think one of the things that I always come back to rich with is that he's so frustrating. He's never the person or the writer that we want him to be. Right. And I think that's a really important part of the project. And I think it, honestly, I think it plays into why more is not known or written about him because of those things. He doesn't fit.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
He doesn't fit what we would want from him to. You know, this seems like this would be a great book to read and could read it in high schools and things like that because we, it could
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
teach us about the, the side of
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
history that we often don't hear. And instead, here's a guy who supported the Confederacy and, and believed in Manifest
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
Destiny and all of these things.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
That would be kind of. It just would be maybe more complicated than what we would want from a book that should be read by high school students. Right.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Well, and there's the fact that it's a literary first. It seems like something we should be celebrating.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Yeah, right.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
I wanted. To your point, why didn't he write about his own history or his people's history? There has been for decades now a line of scholarship that reads the novel in that way. The late Louis Owens actually refers to it as a masquerade, that he's masquerading Cherokee history through these Mexican characters. Right. And so I think there's a lot to do with that, but it's also very much a California story. It's. It captures somebody who was in the process of becoming a folk hero. Joaquin Murrieta was the biggest influence on the character Zorro. And so there's a line of scholarship that claims that Murietta is the origin story for not only Zorro, but everyone who he influenced, which includes Batman. Right. So there's, there's something about his story that is really fascinating. And if you were to just go in without the context of this being a native author, and you wanted a mid 19th century romance of the frontier with violence and, you know, these sort of swashbuckling bandidos that is this story. But there is a much deeper subcontext there that again, makes things even more complicated.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
I was just going to throw in the reminder that he was writing for newspapers. He was a newsman himself. And so it's not, it's not as if he spent all of his time writing about himself and his, his own autobiography and digging deep the way we might think that authors, you know, I may be kind of transposing a 20th or 21st century ideal on someone that you have to write about the thing that's most important to you and view your own identity as. As the thing that you have to
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
explore in a novel.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
It could be that here's a guy who he knew what was making headlines and he was excited about the stories. And he thought, boy, this would make a good novel. I'll rip it from the headlines and turn it into a really exciting book
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
that people will buy. I think that people will buy. Right, Because I mentioned that he had financial concerns. The work in the gold fields did not make him rich. He was pounded by money issues his entire life. And I think he saw the story of Joaquin Murrieta and the form of the novel as an opportunity to write a bestseller that would bring some financial security to him and his family.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Yeah.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Something that he desperately sought after his entire life.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Now my understanding is it made him more famous than wealthy. And in part of that was partly because it was highly plagiarized. Their copyright laws in those days were not as strong. And apparently, even though it was translated into several European languages and got mass attention, it didn't wind up making him wealthy. Is that right?
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
That's correct, yeah. I mean, well, it's always tricky because sometimes we're working with primary documents that he wrote. So there is a letter to his cousin, Stan Dwaty, who he was in correspondence with for all of his life, where he says the novel did not sell or the novel was popular, but the press collapsed and they absconded with all of my money. There's been some research into that that says that the press was still advertising years after that letter is dated. And so he was always asking Sandwity for money. So there's. It's hard to know what's true and what's not. What is known is true, is that it was plagiarized and that it was retold in various formats. And so he did not make the money that he could have made off of it. One of my really good friends in academia, Amy Gore, has a. A brilliant chapter on this issue of copyright and plagiarism in her book. And, and I just recently learned this. It's just another sort of wrinkle in this story. The novel was copyrighted, but he was the co holder of the copyright with a man named Charles Lindley, who. It's unclear what role, if any, he actually played in the novel coming to be. And that John Rowland Ridge's name is misspelled on the copyright. It's actually recorded as John R. Bridge instead of John Ridge. So at every turning point, there is things like there's more mystery and there's. There's more inaccuracy in, in the historical record.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Right. Okay, so I want to pivot here. Let's take a break and then when we come back, we'll talk about Ridge and his poetry. But before we kind of tie this up, did he ever write another novel?
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
No. This was the only one.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
This was the only one. Okay, so let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with more from Travis Franks. Hey folks.
- [26:51]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
Starting up this podcast was not easy. So many questions and decisions and soon I'll be launching a new press selling new books.
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
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Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Foreign.
- [29:03]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
We are in the middle of our interview with Travis Franks and it gets even better. So stick around. But I'm interrupting here to bring you another one in our series of Chekhov's letters on writing. I think the last time he talked about sparrows on manure. Feeling like that As a writer. Sometimes. In this one, he's hammering his older brother, Alexander. As we've seen, Chekhov could be marvelously generous and patient and kind and wise with even the most limited of letter recipients. If you wanted to write literature, he
- [29:34]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
wanted to help you.
- [29:36]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
And he met people at their level offering as much sincere advice as he could. The doctor, literally the doctor was in. Only his older brother Alexander, tested his patience. Like we are about to hear Alexander. Let's give some context for Alexander. This is a world where fiction was being published in newspapers and journals. There was a need for content, a market for it. It was something you could make money at. Chekhov himself was very successful, but he was also artistically ambitious.
- [30:09]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Alexander seemed to be not so ambitious.
- [30:13]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
He seemed content to write up his stories and cash in. And it drove his younger brother crazy. You have talent.
- [30:22]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
I've seen it.
- [30:22]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
You could be doing so much better. You're lazy. You're taking the easy way out. That's Anton's general attitude toward his brother. He doesn't call him a whore in this letter, but that's kind of the implication. That's Fitzgerald's remark, by the way, when he described the stories he was writing for the Saturday Evening Post and other similar magazines. He was. He was probably bragging a bit, too. He wrote to Ernest Hemingway, the Post is now paying the old whore $4,000 a screw. That was his quote in 1929, talking about what he was getting from the Saturday Evening Post for a short story. That would be something like $75,000 in today's money. Not bad for a weekend's work, which is how long a story sometimes took Fitzgerald. To put it in perspective, when you get to the Pat Hobby stories, Pat Hobby being the Hollywood stand in for Fitzgerald. Pat hobby was making $2,500 per week in Hollywood's silent era. But then by 1940, he considered himself lucky to make $250 per week. $4,000 would have been a lot of money for Pat Hobby, the dude with red rimmed eyes and the soft purr of whiskey on his breath. Oh, F. Scott, it's so hard to quit. You okay? Chekhov time. This is a letter from February 1883. Chekhov is responding to a letter that Alex has written to their older brother. I'm sorry, their other brother, Nikolai, who was a painter. And Chekhov, starts talking about Alex's writing. He says, quote you, the strong one, educated and well read, should emphasize what is vital, what is eternal, what affects not only petty feelings, but true human sensibilities. You are capable of doing this. Of course you are. You are witty, a realist, an artist. For that letter of yours in which you describe divine service in a forest clearing, I would, if I were God, forgive you all your trespasses, voluntary and involuntary, in deed and in word. Nikolai, by the way, reading that letter had a terrible desire to paint that field. But even in your writing you lay too much stress upon trivial things. And you were not born a subjective writer. That kind of writing is not inborn in one, it is acquired. It is as easy to give up that self acquired subjectivity as to drink a glass of water. One needs only to be a bit more honest, to throw oneself absolutely overboard, not to push oneself as the hero of one's novel, to deny oneself for even half an hour. There is a story of yours where a young couple sit kissing each other all through dinner. Sitting and cooing and talking rubbish. There's not a single sensible word but thorough complacency. And you were not writing for the reader. You wrote because that chatter pleased you. Why don't you describe the dinner? How they ate, what they ate, what the cook was like, how vulgar your hero was, how satisfied with his lazy contentment. How vulgar your heroine, how ridiculous her love for that smug napkin overfed gander. Everyone likes to see well fed, happy people, that's true. But if you are going to write about them, it's not enough to tell what they said and the number of times they kissed a something else is needed. You must deny yourself the personal impression that honeymoon happiness produces on all unembittered persons. Subjectivity is an awful thing, even for the reason that it betrays the poor writer hand over fist. I bet you that all the vicar's daughters and clerks wives who read your writings are in love with you. And were you a German, you would drink beer gratis in all the beer shops where there are German barmaids. If only you would give up that subjectivity, you would become a most useful writer. You know so well how to laugh, to bite, to sneer. You have such a well rounded style. You have experienced so much and seen more than enough. Ah, material is being thrown away.
- [35:06]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
End quote.
- [35:07]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
Material is being thrown away. Let's try to avoid that in our own lives, shall we? We might not live up to Chekhov standards, but we can try part two of our interview with Travis Franks after this.
- [35:34]
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- [36:03]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
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- [36:31]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Okay, we're back. So, Travis, you mentioned this early on in our conversation, I think, but let's hear the story of the 1846 issue of the Arkansas State Gazette that you happened across. What were you searching for and what did you find?
- [36:49]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Right. So it's. It was a bit of productive procrastination. If I'm trying to explain what I was actually doing looking through those papers, I should say I'm not a 19th century Americanist. Ridge is a, I think is a fascination for me. The book that I'm working on is Contemporary US and Australian Literature has nothing to do with John Rolling Ridge whatsoever. But I just, I've come back to this project over and over throughout the last five or six years because it's like I said, it's one of those things. I just, it seems like there's always something more to find. And so Gordon Fraser, who's a fellow academic several years ago put out an article talking about having found what was believed to be the first poem by Rich. It's a poem titled To a Thundercloud was published in January 1847. And as I had been working on an article about another poem titled An Indian's Grave, I was coming across all these partial bibliographies and references to other works that I had never heard of. And I thought while I'm doing this, I need to just put together a working bibliography of all of his stuff. And once I did that, I started realizing there's kind of a pattern to the places that he's publishing in these Arkansas newspapers. And if the first one is In January of 1847, I thought, these papers have been digitized now. I thought, why not just start going
- [38:18]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
back and let me interject here that it would be a fair assumption that the 1847 poem might be the earliest poem because he would only have been 19 or 20 at that time. Right. So we're talking about a very young John Rollin Ridge.
- [38:36]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
That's right, yeah, 19. And so I started going back and you Know, it's one of the cases where these papers have been digitized. And so sometimes you can do a keyword search and it'll just pull, it'll just deliver to you this new poem that nobody's ever seen since it was published. But that's not always the case with the text recognition software. So I was just scrolling back and like I said, you could see a pattern. If he published a poem, it was usually in roughly the same spot in the newspaper every time. And so, yeah, I just, I kept going back and I found another poem titled A Light Broken Upon My Brain, which was published in the November 30, 1846 edition. And so it's, you know, this is my Indiana Jones moment. I found this lost first poem. Right?
- [39:28]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Yeah. Did you, did it say. By John Rollin Ridge?
- [39:33]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
It was signed Yellowbird. That's actually.
- [39:34]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
Oh, Yellowbird.
- [39:35]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Right.
- [39:35]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
In these early poems, his name, Yellowbird, which is actually the English translation of his Cherokee language name. So not only did the papers reprint his name, but they also reprinted the place where he wrote it and the date that he had written it. So those, the dates that it's written and the date it's published never correspond. But it ends up being incredibly helpful for filling out his timeline. We know where he was, when he was, but this poem, because we can't have nice things. This poem, as I mentioned, is published on November 30, 1846. It's dated November 31, 1846, which is a date that does not exist.
- [40:12]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Does not exist. Interesting. Okay. And thank you for that clarification. I guess I've been saying pseudonym, but it might be more accurate to just say that that's the name under which he's publishing.
- [40:24]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Yeah, he went by Yellow Bird especially early in life and when publishing poetry, and then John R. Ridge professionally when he was working as an editor.
- [40:34]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
So a light broke in upon my brain. You probably felt like a light was breaking in upon your brain.
- [40:40]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
I did. I'm alone in my office on campus, it's late, and I look around to make sure that everyone witnesses this great discovery that I've made. And I don't want to bury the lead here, I have to acknowledge, because the, the research bug is never, you know, it's never satisfied. I've just continuously been working on this and it's. And you know how these things go. As soon as you make this announcement that you've made this discovery, you'll find out that you're wrong. And I. And it turns out I am wrong in Two very important ways that I want to clarify here.
- [41:14]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Yeah.
- [41:14]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
So first, it turns out I am not the first person to have found this poem. Another researcher named Charlie Allison, who up until a few years ago was publishing an online literary magazine called Ozark Hollow. Charlie Allison found this poem and reprinted it there, which, of course, I didn't know until way after the fact. So I want to make sure that he is credited with having found this poem and rediscovered this poem and recognizing it for what it was. And then I'm like, well, you know, my whole career is out the window now. If I'm not the guy that found the first poem, who am I? So I went back to the proverbial chalkboard, which in this case was just newspapers.com and kept going back issue by issue. And it turns out there is an even earlier poem, which I feel like is what someone would say if they were faking these things. Right. But it turns out there is actually an untitled poem in the October 19, 1846 edition that for now, appears to be the earliest poem he ever published.
- [42:24]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
Wow.
- [42:24]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
I feel like that movie. Do you ever watch that movie? The King of Kong and the Donkey Kong players kept breaking each other's records. And I feel like the judge in that, that I'm sort of being called upon here to weigh in. But I'll go with your discoveries as now the earliest known ones.
- [42:43]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
But let's talk about the substance of the poems.
- [42:47]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
I mean, his most famous poem is probably an Indian's grave. And that gives us the myths of Indians with noble savagery and vanishing races and Indian ghosts and so on are disappearing. And that's chock full of the kinds of things that give scholars a lot to chew on. Right. It's got a lot of the themes that we would expect to see and people can argue about, and maybe it's more nuanced than people previously thought. It has a lot of stereotypes, but it also challenges some of those stereotypes or challenges the position of white people and whether they can claim the land as their own and so on, and whether they destroy evidence of Indigenous history. It's almost like a poem you would write if you are trying to set people up to write academic papers about the poem. But what about these earlier poems that you're finding? I mean, is he writing about nature and love? Is he writing about indigenous themes in these earlier poems as well? And how do these discoveries that you've been making change the way we might view his poetry?
- [44:04]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Yeah, so he's. And you already mentioned this, but it's important to keep in context, he's 18 and 19 years old. Right. So this is. I know, your episode about having written bad poetry yourself. I'm right there with you. Right. God forbid, some scholar 150 years from now is pouring over our teen angst poetry the way that I'm doing with his.
- [44:26]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Right.
- [44:27]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
So there's that. It is about nature, it is about love, but it's also very much. It sort of satisfies that desire that you mentioned earlier. Like, why is he not writing about himself and his own experiences? And it turns out it's lyric poetry. So he is. He is in the process of turning himself into a Byronic hero, is the way that I read these poems. It's often about unrequited love. It's about how he has this curse that prevents him from becoming close to anyone. That poetry is the only thing he can turn to. That. And in fact, the poem A Light Broken Upon My Brain is a reference. It's a quote from Byron's poem the Prisoner of Chalon, which comes out in 1816 and is about the imprisonment of Genovese monk Francois Bonivard in chillon in the 16th century. And so a historical figure who was imprisoned. The poem the Prisoner of Shalon that Byron wrote is not historically accurate, which is important. But the scope of that poem written from the perspective of Bonivard, is that he and his brothers have been imprisoned in the chateau for their father's beliefs. Their father has been martyred, burned at the stake, and now his sons are being punished. And ultimately Bonivard, the speaker of the Prisoner of Shalon, ends up being the last of the siblings alive. And he, you know, there are different ways to read it, but I think the light breaking in upon his brain is this realization that he can construct his own reality. So I think for an 18 or 19 year old John Roland Ridge, who is profoundly shaped by his own father's assassination, which he would have seen as a martyrdom, he reads this poem and he thinks, that's me. This is my experience, this is who I want to become. Would we assume that the earliest native authored lyric poetry is in reference to Byron? Probably not. But Ridge is unique in so many ways. Right. He had that education in Great Barrington Academy. He was trained in Latin, in the classics, and had a true liberal arts education. But it is also undeniably about Cherokee history. It's just not as literal or as transparent as we might assume. So he's making the connections between Cherokee history and Byron's poetry, of all things.
- [46:57]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Did that seem to Him. I mean, obviously witnessing your father's assassination is something, a kind of trauma that you could see a 19 year old thinking, I'm going to rise above this part of my past and I can. I can still forge my own destiny and that kind of thing. Does he view Indigenous history as something that is weighing him down and saying, I know I'm pigeonholed by my family history or by the legacy of the Cherokee Nation and my family's role in it, and that's something I need to move past or shed. Do you see that in there as well, or is he kind of embracing it as part of who he is?
- [47:44]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Yeah, I would say he is embracing it. And he's very defiant about the fact that he is proudly Cherokee, which is one of the sort of ironic things in terms of how he's been written about as an assimilationist, as someone who sold out or wanted to be white. He. He saw himself as a, quote, unquote, modern or progressive man. And he saw a place where people like him in the U.S. right. He was pro Union. Even though he supported the Confederacy, he was always pro Union. He wanted there to be a. Essentially an ethnic state in the Union. He wanted Cherokee Nation not to be a domestic dependent nation, as the Supreme Court had ruled, but as an actual state in the Union.
- [48:30]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Yeah.
- [48:31]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Which means he also did not see all indigenous peoples as being like him. We mentioned that he wrote about the indigenous peoples of California, and while on the one hand he was calling out settlers or committing massacres against these people, he was also writing about them in very derogatory terms and all of the trappings of savages and them being a primitive race. He believed that the Cherokee like him were proof that there could be a place for indigenous people in the future of the nation, that they were not all at that stage now, but that at the very least, I mean, this is how low the bar is in this regard. He's saying, stop killing these people and let's see if they can essentially modernize in the way we have. It's not this, like, rousing repudiation of settler colonialism and the violence that comes with that. It's another one of those things. It's not what we want him to say. Right. Or not the way that we want him to say it.
- [49:38]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Yeah.
- [49:38]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
But it's also really important that he is one of the very few voices registering these types of arguments at this time.
- [49:46]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
Well, what did he want to keep?
- [49:48]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
I mean, if it's. I guess that's the thing. I mean, it's One thing to say we should maintain the race itself, that it shouldn't be extinguished, but it's another thing to say we should. Not only should you not kill us, but don't worry, give us time and we'll go to the fancy schools and wear the clothes that you're wearing and speak the language you're speaking and basically be the kind of people that would be fine and upstanding as judged by your standards. I mean, where did he fit into that spectrum of how much of his Cherokee culture did he want to preserve?
- [50:28]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Yeah, in a way, it's like he's a century ahead of the post war model minority. I always think about it in terms of he wanted to be one of those hyphenated American categories, Cherokee American. Right. Like in the way that we think of Italian American or Irish American. So you, as an ethnic minority that is absorbed into this larger national project, he doesn't want to. The main thing that he's. He's fiercely protective of is Cherokee history. And it's very important to him that Cherokee history be told in a particular way in which his family is not villainized.
- [51:05]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Right.
- [51:06]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
And that John Ross is villainized in terms of the language and the religious practices and all of that. It's not simple, of course, but he was not an advocate for Cherokee people living a traditionalist lifestyle, by and large. But there were elements and parts of the belief system and the cultural practices that he did want to preserve. He wanted citizenship in the US Nation to coincide with a cultural identity. And he thought you didn't have to give up one for the sake of the other.
- [51:42]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Right. And I mean, a lot of this is probably, unless he, he wrote an essay about it or a treatise. You're gleaning this from poetry and novels that he's writing about other subjects and so on. And did he leave behind any letters or anything where some of these issues might be more spelled out?
- [52:03]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Yeah, he's sort of scattered throughout the archives. And so some of his correspondence gets collected in the Ridge family papers. But most of what we know about his correspondence is because stand waty his relative ended up being so important historically that there are collections of his papers that John's are collected within. But, you know, he's writing editorials for newspapers about these issues as well. So there is correspondence, there's also the newspapers. And then James Parents has written the only biography on John Rolandridge, and it's a very important work. His book on John Roland Ridge is sort of the touchstone, I think, for anybody doing this kind of work.
- [52:48]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
What do you think might still be out there? Do you think there are any other discoveries to be made thanks to newspapers.com or are there any untapped sources?
- [53:01]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
We have for sure. Luckily, so much of this stuff is already digitized or is being digitized. And so I also want to point out that whatever glory there is in finding a John Rowland ridge poem on Newspapers.com, which I feel like somehow just I'm not Indiana Jones at all. And I just have to confess the fact that I paid for a trial membership on newspapers.com to find these things, but so much stuff is being digitized.
- [53:27]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
It's the 21st century equivalent of running to the. You know, to the airplane with the. The. With the treasure in your pouch and having arrows being shot at you and all of that. We can say that you're a keyboard warrior.
- [53:45]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Exactly. I just feel like the ghost of some Harvard classics professor is going to come back and rip the patches off my corduroy jacket and say, you're not one of us. But honestly, just searching around online, I found two other poems which have never been published before. They exist in handwritten manuscript form, and one of them is called Fame. And another colleague of mine, Ryan Carr, has actually reproduced parts of that in an article. And that one's worth mentioning because in this poem, Fame, where a young Ridge is thinking about, like, what am I going to have to give up to be famous? He actually references Byron in there and Napoleon Bonaparte. Right. And how Byron dared to challenge his God and Bonaparte wrote his name with his sword and blood on the annals of history. And. And he's going to do the same thing, I guess. But in poetry, there's another poem titled two dash dash dash, which, you know, very of the style and very on brand for Ridge. He's withholding the name. So there's two handwritten poems that I've gotten copies of and transcribed. So one of those is in the special collections at University of Tulsa. The other is in the special collections at Southern Methodist University. And along with one of those poems, there's a portrait of John Rowland Ridge that's been digitized in the special collections at Southern Methodist. And the picture of John Roland Ridge that gets used all the time is the one that James Parents used for the COVID Ridge was a very striking figure. He was incredibly handsome at this point, beautiful wavy hair and a full beard and. And these really, you know, piercing eyes. That picture gets reproduced all the time. There are always things coming out there. I mentioned that. I put that bibliography together, part of that has been finding titles of poems that are mentioned in newspaper clippings that I still haven't found. There's a posthumous collection of poems put out in 1868, and by way of biography, they reproduce a letter that he had sent to a friend. And then there's this part after he recounts having watched his his father been assassinated and everything and going to Great Barrington Academy. There's this editor's note that says, we've taken out the paragraphs that talk about his dealings with essentially that Civil War, what he did in those years of 1846 and 1847, because we thought it didn't belong here. I want to find that letter so bad.
- [56:22]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Okay, well, let's put the podcast to the test. If any listeners out there know where
- [56:27]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
that letter is or has a pile
- [56:30]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
of old letters sitting in their attic or something that they can go through and see if we can put Travis in touch with that letter so we can all benefit from from the scholarship that will result. Let's do that.
- [56:42]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
That sounds great. There goes another one of my patches on my quarterly bus, though now I'm crowdsourcing.
- [56:50]
Host 2 (co-host or interviewer)
Well, we're in the 21st century. We use 21st century tools. Travis Franks, thank you so much for joining us on the history of literature.
- [57:00]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
Thanks so much for having me.
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- [57:09]
Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
That's a great attitude.
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Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
I thought you were a clone.
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Host 1 (likely the main podcast host)
Well, clones aren't real, dummy.
- [57:23]
Travis Franks (guest, assistant professor of literature)
And time machines are super grounded in reality.
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