How Much Do Travelers Know?
By Davis Bitton

You wouldn’t know it from listening to some of them, but historians have lots of reasons for humility.

I have been prompted to think along these lines by an English reporter who traveled to the United States and wrote about us yokels on the basis of his “first-hand” experience.  Consistently condescending, he could just tell by looking at people how ignorant and uninformed they were.  He was unimpressed by the standardized food at the restaurant.  The geography around Birmingham, Alabama, lacked variety.

A hilarious “fisking” by James Lileks points out some of the problems with the reporter’s article.

“Around Birmingham,” writes the reporter, “there is nothing but miles and miles of Alabama.”  Lileks responds: “Apparently around Birmingham, England, there is nothing but miles and miles of Belgium, Thailand and the Antarctic Ice Shelf.”

Desiring to show Americans to be parochial, the reporter says only one-sixth of all Americans possess a passport.  The fisker responds: “That’s because our nation is HUGE, pal; of course Belgians all have passports; their country is the size of an average American rumpus room.  They’ve burned out every available domestic vacation option by the time the kids are six — whereas this joint is so big our senior citizens retire, buy moving houses, and devote themselves to visiting each of the fifty states.  Plus, we don’t need passports to go to Mexico, which one could spend another lifetime exploring.@

The reporter, in the States on an expense account from his English newspaper, sits in a restaurant, looks out the window, talks to a local, and draws conclusions that support his preconceptions.

How reliable is travel literature?  It is a genre with a long pedigree.  One thinks of the travel accounts of Franciscan friars who went to Asia in the fourteenth century, of descriptions of native cultures by European explorers as preserved in Hakluyt’s Voyages.  One of my favorite essays is Montaigne’s “On Cannibals.”  He wasn’t the traveler, but purports to give a description of Native Americans in the Caribbean as told by one who had seen them.  Our good Michel de Montaigne employs the device to direct critical barbs at the Europeans of his own time.

When travelers came to Utah in the nineteenth century, they wrote letters.  Some of them wrote articles for newspapers and even books, describing the exotic land of the Mormons.  They were eyewitnesses.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that much of this reporting is superficial.  Attending a Mormon meeting, travelers heard talks.  Homey examples and perhaps less than perfect grammar could lead the visitor to conclude that Mormons were stupid and their religion incoherent.  Not up to the standard of Henry Ward Beecher, Mormon sermons, in the words of one observer, seemed like “strange ramblings.”

We can understand the reaction.  Do you ever have that feeling about some of the talks in our meetings even now?  On the other hand, there is little evidence that the outside observer was capable of recognizing the spiritual overtones that resonated among the local population.  Personal testimonies communicate powerfully, touching the heart — of those who are on the same wave length.

Looking at Mormon children, some travelers saw them as ill-mannered.  They weren’t making this up, for church leaders and many Mormon parents were similarly concerned about those children and teenagers.  Disrespectful, sassy, these youngsters were, in the vernacular of the time, “rowdies.”  Let=s see now, could such an attitude possibly be found in some children elsewhere?  Does this unflattering description fit ten percent of the children or ninety percent?  It does make a difference. 

More than this, to some visitors Mormon children appeared ill-favored, narrow of brow, sallow of complexion.  As Gary Bunker and I pointed out in an article, such a perception was not based on a scientific sample but on an expectation.  Polygamy, some thought, must certainly pollute the blood stream produce degenerate offspring.  By selectively choosing examples, the observer saw what he expected to see. 

A woman walks down the street.  If she was not grinning and laughing, the traveler looks at her pensive face and furrowed brow and imagines what she must have been thinking.  Obviously, thinks the traveler, she reflects the misery of being oppressed in a patriarchal society.  Oh, yes, of course, Mr. Traveler.  I couldn’t be more convinced that you knew what she was thinking if you had charts showing her brain waves.  I submit that she was troubled over the injustice of being misrepresented by travelers who couldn’t be bothered to ask questions and to listen.  That is why she was not smiling.

We are all familiar with Mark Twain’s famous description of Mormon women.  He came, he said, full of desire to achieve a great reform, “until I saw the Mormon women.  Then I was touched.  My heart was wiser than my head.  It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically ‘homely’ creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, ‘No — the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure — and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-hearted generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.’”

Very funny, Mr. Twain.  The gag writers for Jay Leno and David Letterman could easily come up with something similar about your relatives in Hannibal, Missouri.  The rigors of overland journeys and pioneer settlement no doubt took a toll on one’s complexion and general physical health, but that was true everywhere, from Colorado to Australia, from Arizona to Siberia.  Besides, some of us have the photographic evidence that our foremothers were alert, attractive people of strong character.

Writers of travel accounts tend to be superficial and to see what they want to see or expect to see.  But not all travel literature is on the same dubious level.  Some travelers spent more time among their hosts.  Although limited by their lack of in-depth understanding, travelers could look at a place with fresh eyes.  They missed much, but sometimes they perceived connections the local people failed to see.

Our friend Jo Snow, who with her husband Marcellus lives in Honolulu, has studied William Chandless and his 1857 book A Visit to Salt Lake.  In her view, Chandless, even though only twenty-six years old at the time of his sojourn in Utah, was conscientious and quite reliable.  Another celebrated traveler was the colorful adventurer Sir Richard Burton, who wrote The City of the Saints (1861).  Burton’s book is not without its problems, but some of his observations, especially those based on a comparison of cultures, are acute.

Much depends on who the traveler talks to.  Some early travelers to Utah spent their time with anti-Mormons who filled their minds with horror stories.  JoAn and I have been guides on Temple Square.  What we used to say there, I suppose, amounted to a simplified and ritualized account of Brigham Young’s “This is the place” pronouncement, the miracle of the seagulls and crickets, the sacrifice and exertion of building a tabernacle in the desert, and so forth.   I think that was of value to most visitors.  At least they would know how the Mormons saw themselves.

We later had the opportunity to take a tour of Salt Lake City’s historic sites with a different kind of guide.  At every location the guide, obviously no friend of the “local culture,” regaled the visitors with stories and jokes about the Mormons and their strange ways.  I was reminded of the hack drivers who did the same thing for visitors in the old days.  Realizing what visitors were being told led to the decision in 1902 to establish a bureau of information on Temple Square. 

A recent book-length general treatment of the Mormons shows some desire to be fair and avoids the obvious falsehoods of many such books.  Yet it is not profound and shows evidence of being strongly influenced by a small number of Mormon-watchers and malcontents.  On the other hand, to cite an opposite example, the English scholar Douglas Davies has been able, perhaps because of his training in cultural studies, to make important contributions to our understanding by respecting the evidence produced by the Mormons themselves and placing it in an understandable context.

Oversimplifying and doing less than justice to another people, religion, or culture is not confined to writing about the Mormons.  It is safe to say, I think, that Mormons who have spent some time in travel, even two years, often return with a limited, slanted understanding.  Speaking more broadly, I think we can say that military and foreign service personnel who spend a tour of duty in a given country often betray little understanding of the politics, the literature, the history of that place.  Yet some learn a good deal.

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality,” said Samuel Johnson, “and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”  By all means, let us travel and see with our own eyes.  But there’s the rub: seeing things “as they are” is easier said than accomplished, and travel is no guarantee of a full grasp of truth.

In approaching other cultures and world religions, we should expect to find complexity, stresses and strains between generations and subgroups, and change across time.  That awareness should stop us from the sweeping pronouncements we sometimes hear.  We should do a lot of listening.  Perhaps we should do more quoting, thus allowing people to represent themselves.  Let them say what they think and explain why they do certain things.

In imagination the historian goes to a different time and place, learns some things, and reports what he finds.  What kinds of questions does the historian ask?  How many witnesses (primary sources) does he or she examine?  Some of those “witnesses” are travelers, and some of those travelers are like the English reporter mentioned at the beginning of this essay who sat in a restaurant and saw (or imagined) what he wanted to see.

We enjoy descriptions by travelers but should be aware of their limitations.  What bias did the traveler bring?  What lens did he look through?  Who were his informants?  What questions did he ask?  What confirming or disconfirming evidence is available?

As I said at the beginning, historians have good reason to be humble.  But isn’t that true of all of us?  Here for a brief period of time, dependent for our information on a limited number of sources, we are all travelers in a sense, pilgrims and strangers.