Ross,
Thanks for your thoughtful response to my meandering thoughts. And I apologize -- I should have said you were speculating on what brought Mr. Pinkerton to New Orleans -- and I was reading into your account a bit because of something that has intrigued me for a long time. However, what you said was:
Ross G Caldwell said:
Thus, there is no problem in seeing French-descended Americans in New Orleans in the early 19th century (thanks Julien for asking about Pinkerton, and thanks Michael for finding the answers, because it tells us how he might have got to the port-city of New Orleans and about when. If he were a sailor early in life, that might mean he started about age 16, which would be (depending on the date of his birth, given in the two accounts variously as 1809 or 1811) around 1825 or 1827. If we give him a decade or two at sea, he might have seen the game played in New Orleans anywhere from 1825-1845) playing Minchiate with Italian terms.
I'm aware that tarot was more of a society game -- but the upper ranks of the Navy and Army (in this time period) was often made of society-types. One reason this passage caught my eye was that tarot couldn't travel to the North American continent on foot -- it had to via ships. Even more importantly, Pinkerton was a citizen of the British Empire, and served in the British Navy. The diffusion of tarot TO England would be difficult to manage on foot, too. And, just in the name of outing myself a little bit – what I do in my professional life is study the movement of ideas within networks of elites… So I’m afraid that my speculations are at least partly fueled by other preoccupations… But what caught my eye in your post and was (for me) very exciting was this:
Ross G Caldwell said:
It is doubly fascinating for me to find evidence of tarot (or Minchiate) in America. A while ago I asked on various groups if anyone with German ancestry in America could research family archives to find evidence of tarock coming over with the first immigrants. I suspected it would be in the Mid-West primarily. I never thought to look in French New Orleans! (Duh) I'm sure there must be other early evidence of tarot in America - or French Canada.
My thoughts are inspired by two different sets of questions. First set: here we have indication from a former British sailor that tarot was in New Orleans by the early-mid 19th century… How did it get there? And, where else would we look – not just in the North American continent, but also in the Caribbean and Central/South America?
First, New Orleans is, as you say, a French port-city. And it’s a port city in the 19th century that serves the Caribbean (I’ll come back to this momentarily). But even by the early 19th Century, its also serving to move goods from all along the Mississippi valley. Until the St. Lawrence Seaway was in place in the twentieth century, goods had to travel either overland to an eastern port, or down the river to New Orleans. Not only would you want to look in French Canada, then, but you’d want to follow those trade paths, finding particularly large towns where groups of French Canadians and/or soldiers with gentlemanly officers in their ranks might have been playing the game. I live right in the middle of the Mississippi Valley (almost equal distances from Minneapolis and New Orleans), and I grew up in Minneapolis… French Canadian great grandfather was a fur trapper, and we have a family tradition of occult tarot coming from that line of women in the family. I couldn’t document where it came from, by my French Canadian great grandfather was married to a German immigrant…
Regarding the Caribbean… Now I’m thinking about a bit of history involving Puerto Rico, because I’m a little more familiar with it than with other islands in the area. Ships regularly went between Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Port of New Orleans, carrying not only sailors, but individuals who were migrating from one place to the other. The game could have disseminated along those routes… But the other thought for places to look in North America… Trade between New Orleans, Puerto Rico and BOSTON was very important through out the late 18th , the entire 19th, and much of the 20th century. In fact, the relationship between Puerto Rico and Boston is so important that Puerto Rico was put into the First Appellate Circuit Court of Appeals of our federal judiciary – keeping it in the same circuit as Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Now, much of what was moving was slaves or trade goods. However, elites moved because they had land holdings in the Caribbean… And there are, indeed, French Canadians in New England as well.
So, yes, the German immigrants might have brought tarock over… And the French might have brought it with them to part of French Canada and Louisiana… But maybe, also, someone should poke around in the Caribbean and see if tarot moved from there onto the North American continent through trade routes and emigration pathways.
Second set of questions – and here again, my non-AT self sees an interesting research puzzle…
The idea that one might be able to do a geographical study of how tarot moved --the diffusion of the any form of the game -- would be fascinating. Better yet, comparing the diffusion of the forms of the game and seeing how they overlap and where they do not, would be utterly fascinating from a critical geographical perspective. And there are computer programs, now, that we can use to do this sort of study... The trick would be finding data that was documented demonstrating that tarot was in a certain place at a certain time…
And you have to have some starting points. Experience and reading tells me that using major cities as centers where the card games/rules evolved (and were documented with dates) would be a place to start. Port cities still strike me as an interesting element -- even if most of the diffusion was on-foot, and the majorities where we find tarot is off the coast... That jumps from one continent to another… Had to happen via port cities... Didn’t they?
Okay, wild speculations – just some thoughts though that have my brain spinning. Thanks for listening!
Julien
