Charles McLoughlin, frontispiece to Thomas J. Green's Journal of the Texian Expedition against Mier (1845). Courtesy of the Texas State Library

The American Elsewhere
Table of Contents

Introduction
1: The Adventurous Impulse

• The Occurrences Here Are Called Adventures
• Seekers of the Fairer Phantom
• The Charm in the Basilisk Eye of Danger
• The Reckless Generation
• The Amorphous Archetype
• Eastern Reviews

2: The Storyteller Nation

• Like a Coach at the Door
• The Adventurelogue
• A Wide Unexplored Sphere
• Competing and Counter Narratives
• A Shared Subjectivity

3: An Aristocracy of Buckskin

• The Personal Revolution
• Nature's Great Seal
• Emblems of Peerlessness
• Philosophy of Savage Life
• The Picture of a Man

4: Sentimental Frontiers

• The Angel in Him Moans
• The Wanderer's Lament
• The Erotic Elsewhere
• The Graceful and Manly Mien
• The Affections of Julius Rodman

5: The Companionship of Peril

• The Expedition as Stagecraft
• Campfire Narrations
• Every Man His Own Captain
• Mechanisms of Restraint
• The Texas Ranger Mystique

6: Romantic Invaders

• The Van in the March of Civilization
• The Motley Aspect
• Wilderness Explorers
• Patriot-Warriors
• Commerce of the Elsewhere
• The Barbaric Yawp

Epilogue: Legacies of Adventurous Manhood