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The Frontier and The Frontier and Midland Literary Magazines, 1920-1939 University of Montana Publications

5-1933

The Frontier, May 1933

Harold G. Merriam

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Recommended Citation Merriam, Harold G., "The Frontier, May 1933" (1933). The Frontier and The Frontier and Midland Literary Magazines, 1920-1939. 44. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/frontier/44

This Journal is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Montana Publications at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Frontier and The Frontier and Midland Literary Magazines, 1920-1939 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ■ MAY, 1933

■ H R

9 MAGAZINE O f THE NORTHWE ST

BLACK ■ | M O T H ER A Story by Elma Godchaux

RING-TAILED R fA R ER S H f i ■ V. L. O, CKittick

! ■ !------, WE TALK ABOUT REGIONALISM: NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, AND WEST I Ben A . Botkin

FORTY CENTS WESTERN MONTANA

t f S R t f i e Scenic Empire

^ Sitoated approximately midway between tbe two great National Glacier, Missoula literally may be said to b e m me heart of tbe Scenic Empire of theNorfchwest In H directions out of B Garden City of Montana are places of marvelous. beauty. Entering Missoula from the Bast, tbe pas- s e ^ e r on either of the two great transconiahental lines/ Milwaukee R B Pacific, or the automobile, tourist winds "for miles through Hellgate Oanypu. Westward tbe way is through I the Bo^maes which provide never-ending delights for the eye of the traveler seeking Nature’s beauty spots. Should the vacationist *s urge be in the direction o f Glacier, his route will take him through the Flathead Valley fringed by the beautiful Mission Bangs , of the Bookies. Snow-capped, glacier- fringed, the Missions are incomparable in their beauty. As might be expected, I Western Montana country is a place for sportsmen. a radius of 25 miles of tbe City of Missoula. During thHbig game season, hunters H Missoula know where to go. |S Oome to the West you’re heard about ail your Po the things 9 H a e y ^ dcme before end always wanted to. The dqde ranches aud recreatiou of We.v -n^bu irf^n .■ - 'itiOh/'S^b S bathi I H B mbing mountains, flyin g, and hunting in the heart of H $

T h e M i s s o u l a C h a m b e r o f C o m m e r c e 1 H 1 8 8 0 V M , The Editors of THE HOUND & HORN announce for spring publication:

MARX AND BAKUNIN, an essay...... by Max Nomad PSYCHOMACHIA, a poem ...... by Theodore Spencer D. H. LAWRENCE, an essay...... by Francis Fergusson AENEAS AT WASHINGTON, a poem...... by Allen Tate PHILIP REISMAN, an appreciation...... by Lincoln Kirstein LOVE STO R Y ______by Robert Smith MR. GILMAN: SIBELIUS: THE METROPOLITAN..by B. H. Haggin PUDOVKIN AND THE REVOLUTIONARY FILM by Harry Alan Potamkin SHORT STORIES AND POETRY by Cuthbert, Tate, Stafford, MacLeish, etc. CHRONICLES on Art and Architecture by Leon Kroll and Harold Sterner DOCUMENTS PHOTOGRAPHS BOOK REVIEWS The Book Review section of the HOUND & HORN will include articles on: The Eighteenth Century, by Clara Gruening Stillman; Soviet Russia, by M. R. Werner; Samuel Butler, by Richard P. Blackmur; Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, by M. Benardete; The Economics of O. D. H. Cole, by Lawrence Dennis; The Poetry of T. Sturge Moore, . by Yvor Winters; Life and Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Hazel Hawthorne.

THE HOUND & HORN, Inc. 545 Fifth Avenue ...... 19...... New York, N. Y. Gentlemen—Please enter my subscription to your periodical. I enclose ...... $2.00 for one year ($2.50 abroad) ...... $3.50 for two years ($4.50 abroad)

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i. T H E FRONTIER Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Muse and Mirror, Seattle, merged with The Frontier, April, 1932

Volume Thirteen MAY, 1933 Number 4

CONTENTS

Ring-Tailed Roarers, article. V. L. O. Chittick...... 257 After Appomattox, poem...... Gwendolen Haste...... 264 Two Heads, story...... F. A. Hardman...... 265 Black Mother, sto r y ...... Elma Godchaux...... 273 Poems Hands ...... Howard Nutt. .278 Dolores ______...... Jose Garcia Villa. .279 I Only Know...... Albert Richard Wetjen. .279 Roadhouse ____ :_____ ...... Don Stevens. .280 God Poems ...... Donald Partridge. .280 Stone Breaker ...... Merle Beynon. .281 Lullaby for Travelers...... Jane Morrill. .281 A Man Is Named ___ ...... John C. Frohlicher. ..282 Kettle Cache, story...... Howard McKinley Corning. .283 We Talk About Regionalism: North, East, South, West...... B. A. Botkin. .286 Cheeseman Park, poem______John Van Male. .296 Adam Cargo, second installment and conclusion of a novel...... Upton Terrell. .297 OPEN RANGE Old Timer: Ezra Meeker...... Maud Maple Miles. .307 With Custer, poem. .Orpah M. Gardner. .310 HISTORICAL SECTION Upham Letters from the Upper Missouri, 1865...... Edited by Paul C. Phillips. .311 NORTHWEST FOLKLORE Traditions of West Coast Indians.™...... Albert B. Reagan. .318 BOOKSHELF-LITERARY NEWS—ABOARD THE COVERED WAGON...... Front and Back Advertising Sections

BOARD OF EDITORS Editor...... Harold G. M erriam ' G race Raym ond H ebard (Grace Stone Coates Advisory Editors University of Wyoming Assistant Editors. (B rassil F itzgerald for the Histori- Pa u l C. P hillips ical Section------University of Montana F ran k B. Linderman A rcher B. H ulbert Jam es Stevens Colorado College Contributing Editors- L ew Sarett P h ilip A shton R ollins New York City H . L. D avis H elen M arino (V. L. O. Ch ittic k , Reed College Advisory Editors for the Folklore Section (H arry T urney-H igh , University of Montana Editor of Book Section Pat V. Morrissette, University of Oregon Manusci’ipts should be sent to the Editor; business communications to Frank Gal­ lagher, Business Manager; subscriptions to Harvey Thirloway, Circulation Manager—all at the State University of Montana, Missoula, Montana. ______Copyright 1933, by H. G. Merriam. Published in November, January, March and May. Entered as second-class matter May 4, 1928, at the postoffioe at Missoula, Montana, under the Act of March 3, 1879. ______THE FRONTIER is a member of the Missoula Chamber of Commerce. Order Magazines from T h e Frontier Subscription Agency Books about the West and Western Life

62/ Will Jam es Each volume profusely illustrated by the author All in the Day’s Riding “SS'sSSSSSSSK boy. There is a section on the cowboy’s work and outfit, from the reason why he wears a big hat to the reasons why his ‘hooks’ (spurs) are indispensable. There is a brief section on ‘the critter’ and long ones on horses. . . . Altogether it makes admirable anti- depressive reading.” —New York Herald Tribune. $2.50 Uncle Bill: The Tale of Two Kids and a Cowboy “ The pictures are of the inimitable Will James variety with action, spirited composition, and much knowledge of horseflesh. The prose is that simple, warm earthy stuff which is fast making Will James an important creator of Americana.” —Chicago Daily News. $2.00

Lone Cowboy: My Life Story ''t^ h,y-fSrS\ alone would make it that, and the illustrations are a valuable addition to the text.” —Saturday Review, illustrated in juiicolor. $2.50 Smoky Big-Enough Sand “ One of the few truly great “ Combines the lives of a boy “ Presents a view of life in horse stories in our lan­ and a horse inseparably and the open that is absorbing guage!1'— William T.Horna- convincingly. ’ ’ and illuminating." day. Library Edition. $2.00 —The Nation. $2.50 —Philadelphia Ledger. $2.50 Cow Country $1.75 The Drifting Cowboy $1.75 Cowboys/ North and South $1.75

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Patom ize F rontier Advertisers iii ABOARD THE COVERED WAGON

V. L. O. C h ittick (Portland), who sends this introduction, Ring-Tailed Roarers, to his collection of “Tall Tales,” is an editor of the Folklore section of The Frontier. From Port­ land, Oregon, also come the poems by A lbert Richard W etjen, an editor of The Out- lander, and M erle B eynon, and H oward M cK in l e y Corning’s fourth story to appear in The Frontier this year. From Spokane, Washington, come poems from Jan e Morrill and Orpah G ardner. Other Northwest writers are Donald Part­ ridge (Malta, Mont.), and Pa u l C. P hillips (Missoula, Mont.). Jo h n V a n M ale is a seller of rare books in Denver, Colo. A lbert B. R eagan (Ouray, Utah) is well known to Frontier readers. B en A. B otkin (University of Oklahoma) is perhaps the foremost student of literary regionalism in the United States. He edits the excellent volume, Folk-Sag. Jo h n C. F rohlicher (Kalispell, Mont.) is now editor of publications for Brown and Bigelow, St. Paul. D on Stevens (originally from Pony, Mont.) is a newspaper man on the San Francisco Examiner. Both were formerly students at the State University of Montana. G wendolen H aste (formerly of Billings, Mont., but now living in New York City) is the author of Young Land, a volume of poems. E lm a Godchatjx contributes (from Conn.) her second story to The Frontier. Jose Garcia V illa, who for a while edited Clay, left New York this month for England. H oward N utt is a Middle Western writer BETWEEN CHICAGO AND whose verse has recently been appearing in several magazines. M aud Maple M iles (Oak THE NORTH PACIFIC COAST Park, 111.) was for some years a friend of Ezra Meeker. F. A. H ardman ( San An­ We commend to you the new­ tonio) contributes his first story to The est of transcontinental trains, the Frontier. This second installment of Adam Cargo roller-bearing North Coast completes the novel by U pton T errell, Chi­ Lim ited. Luxurious accommoda­ cago newspaper man. tions— splendid service—"fa­ The next issue of The Frontier will come off the press on October 20. mously good" meals.

For information on travel, anywhere — see your nearest Northern Pacific representative, or write

E. E. Nelson Northern Pacific Railway St. Paul, Minn.

Tickets purchased at reduced rates are good on the New North Coast Limited iv Order Magazines from T h e F rontier Subscription Agency A Review of GRACE STONE COATES’ latest book Portulacas in the Wheat

“Any new book by this author deserves “ . . . This author is truly an eclectic careful attention. She has built up so poet. Her verse is addressed to the il­ fair a reputation, both as poet and essay­ luminated segment of mankind who un­ ist, that to be ignorant of her work and derstand words and the dictionary mean­ repute is to confess one’s provincialism ings of words. No plebian poet would at once. In the Northwest, where she offer such selective phraseology as “Reve- lives, writes and helps edit a magazine, nants,” “Diathesis,” “ renitenee and in­ THE FRONTIER, she towers well up amongst the tallest literary timber. Sev­ stancy,” and many similar to these. She eral previous books, and inclusion in is of the cognoscenti, surely. many of the best magazines, have estab­ “. . . This is a fine book of fine lished her name as a writer. verse . . . well worth the price and “In this book she is neither at her the effort. To one who is weary of ban­ unvarying best nor at her worst She alities, of hectic or insipid passions, of varies. But her worst here, let it be said, mechanical monstrosities in verse, this is far superior to a mediocre writer’s book unlocks a door to fairyland.” best. And let it also be said that she, when at her frequent best, is surpassed Walter John Coates, by few women lyric writers in America. Editor of DRIFTWIND. P. S. No relative of the accused.

Grace Stone Coates’ two volumes of poetry may be obtained from the distributors listed below, through any bookstore, or direct from the publishers.

PORTULACAS IN THE WHEAT MEAD AND MANGEL-WURZEL Published December, 1932 Published December, 1931 $1.50. $2.00.

The CAXTO N PRINTERS, Ltd. Publishers CALDWELL, IDAHO.

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Patronize F rontier Advertisers v TEACHERS j LITERARY NEWS ]

F r an k B ird L inderman, E dna K enton, ENROLL NOW FOR El m a Levinger, and Capt. E. Pryce M itch­ ell are authors of the March selections of The Junior Literary Guild. Mr. Linderman’s 1933 VACANCIES Stumpy, a chipmunk’s story, has received enthusiastic comment in both eastern and western press. May Lamberton Becker finds ALA SK A T O it devoid of the pernicious sentimentality sometimes found in animal stories for chil­ dren, and says, in part: “Man looks before N E W M E XIC O and after, makes comparisons, and grieves; and sometimes goes to war. But a chipmunk Certification Booklet Free cannot put two and two together to make a grudge.” One of the editors of the Junior with Enrollment Guild is Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Idaho Digest and Blue Book will go to press November, 1933. It is a 600-page statistical reference, a book of facts about E. L. HUFF Idaho, for Idaho people; it will contain a new, complete Who's Who of writers, offi­ Teachers Agency cials, and persons otherwise of prominence in the state. It is edited by G. C. H obson, Boise, Idaho, and published by The Caxton MISSOULA, MONTANA Printers, Ltd., at $10. Member N. A. T. A. A good many projected anthologies of verse whose editors had hoped to finance them through pre-publication subscription from contributors are failing to come through. Certain of the editors have found it easier to take money than to return it or supply the purchased books. In contradis­ tinction to the incompetent and dishonest, A. G. K ingslad of St. Louis, failing to as­ semble the verse he wanted, has returned all material and collections to subscribers. Ford B rassil Fitzgerald, assistant editor of The Frontier, has been hitting Collier's mar­ ket with a series of stories. Jason B olles Just Arrived of Bozeman, Montana, will make his first appearance in a forthcoming issue of Har­ per's. His wife, M azie M a x ie B olles, has completed an historical novel for entry in A Complete Line of one of the national contests. M r. and M rs. Jam es W illard S hultz have spent the win­ ter in Bozeman, in literary work. Mrs. The New Ford V~8's Shultz (Grace Donaldson) is completing a series of Indian stories for children. In its “News from the States” a recent Saturday Review of Literature character­ Ask for a Demonstration izes S. G. Phillips Book Store as an outpost of the book trade in Bozeman, Montana, and cites its sale of over seventy copies of C harles M. Russell’s Good Medicine, edited by Mrs. Russell, with foreword by Will H. O. BELL James (Doubleday, Doran & Co.). The Boze­ man correspondent of the Review, Polly Rob­ ertson, identifies R oger Scarlett (Murder COMPANY Among the Angels) as Dorothy Blair, daugh­ ter of a Bozeman pioneer. Miss Blair ad­ 2127 Phone 2127 mits to only half that identity, since Evelyn Page of Philadelphia is co-author with her vi Order Magazines from T h e Frontier Subscription Agency Be sure to try— MIGNON CLEANSING Dr. V. R. Jones CREAM DENTIST A Liquefying Cleanser

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SHELL MOTOR OILS JUL Jf uller S c Co. 312 N. Higgins Ave. PHONE 4570 —*4 Patronize F rontier Advertiners vii. of the mystery novels appearing under that signature. Both were formerly on the ed­ itorial staff of Houghton Mifflin & Co. Miss FLOWERS E dna Cobban, of Phillips Book Store, reports continued sale of Linderman’s Red Mother Lomax’s Cowboy Ballads—which she com­ are the ideal token for mends—and other westerns. expressing sentiment Caroline Lockhart’s Old West— and New, issued by Doubleday, Doran & Co. Miss FOR Lockhart runs her own ranch in Montana, and knows her West. Her first success was Sympathy The Dude Wrangler. Clarence E. M ulford’s Illness The Roundup, serialized in western papers, Birthdays also bears the imprint of Doubleday, Doran Banquets & Co. Initiation W il l ia m R. L eigh, nationally known painter of Western subjects, has written and Dances illustrated in color and in black-and-white Engagements his first book dealing with the West, The Marriages Western Pony. The foreword is by James Anniversaries L. Clark, vice-director of the Museum of American History. This monograph is the PHONE 3345 result, of twenty-five years of study. The color prints are by the house of Max Jaffe, Vienna. Limited edition, $10. The Spring issue of The Melting Pot. an Qarden City anthology of verse edited by Olive Scott Stainsb.v, box 178. Placentia, Calif., is ready for mailing. The summer issue is being com­ Floral Co* piled. Home Grown Flowers A group of artists, habitual patrons of a certain Seattle restaurant, stirred by the possibilities of the expanse of blank wall, appeared one noon with step ladders and buckets of paint. While other patrons gaped, they splurged the wall with avenues of color and entrancing designs. Many things can be born of infectious enthusiasm— WE PROVE IT for instance Seattle artists’ dream of a mono­ lithic peace memorial and airplane beacon revolving 1,050 feet above the waters of El­ E V E R Y D A Y liott Bay. The design for this monolith is the architects’ contribution to Seattle’s dream of tomorrow. Many of the group of design­ ers belong to the Pacific Northwest Academy of Arts. Recent gay discussions, in their meetings, have circled round the location of You can always a Utopia for all arts. The Outlander (Wetjen, Lee, and Lull) is do better considering a hook-up with the Metropolitan Press. Once the Northwest publishers master the problem of distribution, the Northwest will be on the road toward doing its own publishing. Oregon writers and illustrators AT are starting a new fortnightly, The Rainbow. The Driftwood ChapbooTc No. 1 under editorship of Seymour G. L in k and K enneth W. Porter, describes itself as humorous but merciless satire—A Bible Handbook for McCracken’s Young Babbits. Christ in the Breadline, by Porter, Li n k , and H arry E lmore H urd is another Drift'wind brochure. Stores Black Feather, a story of the pigmy Sheap- eater Indians of Yellowstone Park, an extinct tribe, is a first book by L a V erne H arriet F itzrerald of Great Falls, Mont. The Caa>- Continued on page 331 viii Order Magazines from T h e Frontier Subscription Agency SERVING

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The Outlander Spring, 1933 will contain:

Hobo Brigadier...... J ames Stevens Thou Art a Jewel...... Sewell. P easlee W right Up the Green Hill...... D avid Cornel D eJ ong Sarah...... Nard J ones June Wedding ...... F rederick M axh am A Letter to the Outlander...... T heodore D reiser Lost C r y ...... Sanora B abb And stories and poems by Jose Garcia Villa, Irene Richard Merrill, Albert Richard Wetjen, Eugene Joffe, Myron Griffin, Roderick Lull, Grace Stone Coates, Leland Davis, John J. Gross, and others.

Published quarterly by Albert R. Wetjen and Roderick Lull at 1305 Terminal Sales Building, Portland, Oregon. 35c the copy. $1.25 the year.

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OME persons buy for ap­ ed in everything about our S pearance— some for price— store. some for fashion — and When you buy a dress, you ex­ wise persons for quality I Be­ pect to wear it a reasonable cause bound up with quality length of time. You are not sat­ are the best aspects of the other isfied unless it stands the de­ three. mands you put upon it, and And the less you have to spend, still looks well. If you choose the more vital it is to buy wise­ a dress of good material, well ly. Whenever you buy on the made, up-to-the-minute in de­ basis of quality and not price, sign yet not ultra— it will give you save from first to last. satisfactory service. We have always maintained We try to keep all our merchan­ that quality is the foundation dise up to this high standard. of a successful business. We It is more economical, too, for like to think that this is reflect­ you, and profitable for us.

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“The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact" —T horeau.

RING-TAILED ROARERS Y . L. 0 . C hittick IKE Autolycus of The Winter’s half-brother to the cholera, nearly re­ Tale the ring-tailed roarer, that lated to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen ali- L pioneer creation who enlivens the gators and a bar’l of whiskey for break­ record of the American frontier, in both fast when I’m in robust health, and a fact and fiction, throughout the eighteen bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body thirties and forties, was, when of authen­ when I’m ailing! I split the everlasting tic horse-alligator stock, ‘ ‘ a tall fellow rocks with my glance, and I quench the of his hands.” He was an even taller thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according fellow of his tongue. When an imposter to my strength! Blood’s my natural he was tall in respect of his tongue only. drink, and the wails of the dying is In other words, the westerner indubit­ music to my ear! . . ably “ touched with the airthquake, * * in To which the second, after jumping into spite, of his “ all-fired” claims to fistic, the air and cracking his heels together and other prowess, would rather fight also, responded with: than eat. But the loud-mouthed imi­ tator of his ranting, or at most besides, “Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, of his rampant pose, was a chicken- for the kingdom of sorrow’s a-coming! Hold me down to earth, for I feel my hearted braggart, known to everybody powers a-working! Whoo-oop! Whoo- as just that and nothing else, who would oop ! I’m a child of sin, don't let me get a rather talk fight than fight. start! Smoked glass, here, for all! Don’t A faithful presentation of the latter attempt to look at me with the naked eye, gentlemen! When I’m playful I use the type of roarer is to be found in the pair meridians of longitude and parallels of of raftsmen overheard by Huck Finn, latitude for a seine, and drag the At­ in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. lantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my Readers of that classic of early days on head with lightning and purr myself to the Great River will recall that the first sleep with thunder! When I’m cold I of these sorry windbags, after jumping bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in into the air and cracking his heels to­ it; when I’m thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when gether, which with neighing like a stal­ I range the earth hungry, famine fol­ lion or crowing like a game-cock, was lows in my tracks! . . . I’m the man the roarer’s way of indicating that he with a petrified heart and biler-iron was spoiling for trouble, shouted, bowels! The massacre of isolated com­ “ Whoo-oop,” and then continued: munities is the pastime of my idle mo­ ments, the destruction of nationalities “I’m the original iron-jawed, brass- the serious business of my life! The mounted, copper-bellied, corpse-maker boundless vastness of the great Ameri­ from tbe wilds of Arkansas! Look at can desert is my enclosed property, and me! I’m the man they call Sudden I bury my dead on my own premises!” Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, darn’d by an earthquake, And the upshot of all this lurid tall talk 258 The Frontier was that the smallest man on board the Said I, ‘I’m that same David Crockett. raft, seeing that the pretending antag­ You know what I’m made of. I’ve got onists were never going to engage in the closest shootin’ rifle, the best coon dog, the biggest ticlur, and the ruffest more serious combat, soundly thrashed racking horse in the district. I can the two of them at once. kill more lickur, fool more varmints, and An example of the roarer who was cool out more men than any man you ever ready, and more, to sustain his can find in all Kentucky.’ Said he, ‘Good boast is provided in the titular hero of mornin’, stranger—I’m satisfied.’ Said I, ‘Good mornin’, sir; I feel much better the Sketches and Eccentricities of Col­ since our meetin’ ; . . . don’t forget that onel David Crockett of West Tennessee, vote.’ ” who, though a palpable creation of leg­ I end, derived from as close to reality as Tbe ring-tailed roarer seems to have any other tall tale character. made his entry into print by way of “I had taken old Betsy [his rifle],” verse, and to have been in the begin­ he is recorded as saying, “and straggled ning anything but a reckless spouter of off to the banks of the Mississippi river; and meeting with no game, I didn’t like empty vaunt. Early in the eighteen- it I felt mighty wolfish about the head twenties Samuel Woodworth, the author and ears, and thought I would spile if of “ The Old Oaken Bucket/’ published I wasn’t kivured up in salt, for I hadn’t his long since forgotten song, “ The had a fight in ten days; and I cum Hunters of Kentucky/7 celebrating the acrost a fellur floatin’ down stream deeds of the Kentucky riflemen who had settin’ in the stern of his boat fast asleep. Said I, ‘Hello, stranger! If you fought valiantly under Jackson in the don’t take keer your boat will run away defense of New Orleans. A typical four with you’—and he looked up; and said lines, referring to the inadequate breast­ he, ‘I don’t value you.’ He looked at work furnished the American troops, are me slantendicular, and I looked down these: upon him slantendicular; and he took Behind it stood our little force, out a chaw of tobaccur, and said he, None wished to be greater, ‘I don’t value you that.’ Said I, ‘Cum For every man was half a horse ashore, I can whip you—I’ve been trying And half an alligator. to get a fight all the mornin’ ;’ and the varmint flapped his wings and crowed Shortly after its publication Wood­ like a chicken. I ris up, shook my mane, worth’s song came under the notice of and neighed like a horse. He run his Noah Ludlow, a well known comedy boat plump head foremost ashore. I actor of the time, who was then playing stood still and set my triggurs, that is in the old French theatre in New Or­ took off my shurt, and tied my galluses leans. Seeing a chance to make himself tight around my waist—and at it we went. He was a right smart coon, but popular with that riotous part of his hardly a bait for such a fellur as me. audience composed of lately paid-off I put it to him mighty droll. In ten rivermen, he appeared on the stage in minutes he yelled enough, and swore I the costume of a Kentucky hunter, in­ was a rip-stavur. Said I, ‘Ain’t I the cluding the inevitable “ squirrel” rifle yaller flower of the forest? And I am and coon-skin cap, and sang the words, all brimstone but the head and ears, and that’s aqua-fortis.’ Said he. ‘Stranger, so timely lighted on, set to a rousing air you are a beauty; and if I knowed your that was already a favorite. The ap­ name I’d vote for you next election.’ plause that greeted The Frontier 259

We are a hardy, freeborn race, effort. As a matter of fact the “ half Each man to fear a stranger; horse, half alligator” men had no fixed Whate’er the game, we join the chase, place of area or origin, for they sprang Despising toil and danger; into being, both real and fictive, out of And if a daring foe annoys No matter what his force is, the desperate conditions attending em­ We’ll show him that Kentucky boys ployment on the various kinds of trans­ Are alligator-horses, port engaged in the commerce of the in­ was tumultuous. The place of the ring- land waterways until the advent of the tailed roarer in the— not so very— fine steamboat. (Thereafter negro roust­ abouts supplanted all other labor in the arts was thus definitely established. handling of river freights.) Like old A similarly motivated alteration of Ben Snaggletree of tall tales memory the the tall talk sort is credited to an actor Mississippi boat- and raftsmen were “ as playing the part of Frank Heartall in a native to the element as if . . . bora in frontier performance of The Soldier*s a broad horn” and they “ knew a snap- Daughter (c. 1820), who replaced the pin’ turtle from a snag, without lam­ original lines expressing the joy of a in ’.” Their work was cruelly rough, suitor on discovering that his supposed and hazardous in the extreme. If they rival for a widow’s hand is her brother survived it for a voyage, the whip-cord with, “ I am so happy that I could jump muscles and calloused minds it devel­ over the Ohio, wade up the Mississippi, oped made almost certain their indul­ and tow two steam-boats over the falls at gence, during the ensuing periods of en­ Louisville.” From the time of James H. forced idleness, in the coarsest and most Hackett’s impersonation of Colonel Nim­ brutal kinds of recreation. Not con­ rod Wildfire in Paulding’s The Lion of tent with the consequences of drunken the West (1831) down to the introduc­ roystering among themselves, that is, as tion of cow-boys and Indians in the Buf­ Carl Sandburg lists them in his Abra­ falo Bill shows of recent years the ring­ ham Lincoln, with the * ‘ gouging of tailed roarers were fairly common in eyes, thumb-chewing, knee-lifting, head­ plays dealing with frontier themes. Em- butting, the biting off of noses and ears, mon’s Tecumseh (1836) and Bernard’s and tearing loose of underlips with the The Kentuckian (1833) contain charac­ teeth,” they terrorized the citzenry up ters that are representative of the type. and down the river districts wherever Probably owing to Woodworth’s hav­ nerve and brawn to resist them were ing named Kentucky as the native state lacking. And having given their calling of his “ alligator-horses” the ring-tailed a thoroughly evil repute, they traded on roarers were frequently referred to as the power of its spell to frighten the Kentuckians, but the association of the objects of their raw-hide jests into ab­ two was by no means general. At least ject submission. one contemporary authority, G. W. Ken­ With all that made him a good deal dall of the New Orleans Picayune, at­ of a curse, however, the riverman is often tempted to identify the manners of the true-bred Hoosiers with those of the agreeably recalled not only as a highly roarers, though the Indianians could colorful figure in the life of his day but hardly have felt complimented with the as a necessary factor in the carrying on sampling of their stock utilized in the of trade throughout the length and 260 The Frontier

breadth of the Great Valley. His es­ out-jump, throw down, drag out and lick sential usefulness and romantic fascina­ any man in the country. I ’m a Salt tion have never been more discerningly River roarer; I love the wimming and stated than in the words of A. B. Hul- I ’m chock full of fight.” The tall talk bert in The Paths of Inland Commerce: claims of those of his kind who came “Yet the man himself remains a legend after him show no more variation from grotesque and mysterious, one of the the original formula than that reported shadowy figures of a time when history in one of T. B. Thorpe’s sketches of the was being made too rapidly to be writ­ southwest as, “ I am a roaring earth­ ten. If we ask him how he loaded his quake in fight, a real snorter of the flatboat or barge, we are told that ‘one squint of his eye would blister a bull’s universe. I can strike as hard as fourth heel.’ When we inquire how he found proof lightning, and keep it up, rough the channel amid the shifting bars and and tumble, as long as a wild cat;” or floating islands of that tortuous two that used to describe one Tom Bengali, thousand mile journey to New Orleans, engineer of the Arkansas-Thunder, as “ a we are informed that he was, ‘the very rearing, tearing, bar state scrouger, infant that turned from his moth­ [who] could chaw up any single speci- er’s breast and called out for a bottle of old rye.’ When we ask how he over­ ment of the human race— any quantity came the natural difficulties of trade— of tobacco, and drink steam without lack of commission houses, varying flinching.” standards of money, want of systems of II credit and low prices due to the glutting of the market when hundreds of flat- Not all tall tales are about ring-tailed boats arrived in the South simultaneous­ roarers, of course. But all tales about ly on the same freshet—we are informed ring-tailed roarers are tall. Both vari­ that ‘Billy Earthquake is the geniwine, eties of story, like the roarers them­ double-acting engine, and can out-run, out-swim, chaw more tobacco and spit selves, arose out of the unusually diffi­ less, drink more whiskey and keep sober­ cult circumstances of life on the frontier. er than any other man in these locali­ “ The humorist,” as Van Wyck Brooks ties.’ ” rightly states in his Ordeal of Mark In the novel the ring-tailed roarers Twain, “ was a type that pioneer society made but one appearance, that of roar­ required to maintain its psychic equil­ ing Ralph Stackpole in William Bird’s ibrium.” And of western humor in Nick of the Woods (1837), but they general Albert Bigelow Paine, whom tended to dominate the shorter forms of Brooks quotes with approval, has ob­ western story which were written so free­ served with equal insight, “ It grew out ly a little later, especially the tall tale. of a distinct condition—the battle with The prototype of the species in fiction the frontier. The fight was so desper­ may well have been the flesh-and-blood ate, to take it seriously was to surrender. hero of many a flatboat yarn, the notor­ Women laughed that they might not ious Mike Fink, known as “ the Snag” weep; men, when they could no longer on the Mississippi and as the *1 Snapping swear . . . It is the freshest, wildest, Turtle” on the Ohio. Certain it is that humor in the world, but there is tragedy he fixed the speech-pattern of his suc­ behind it.” Frontier barbecues, elec­ cessors in the horse-alligator line with tions, log-rollings, and “ frolics” of all his reiterated, “ I can out-run, out-hop, kinds, the settings for much of the pio­ 261 The Frontier neers’ story-telling, must have been the The tall tales, of the increase in the hilarious occasions they were mainly be­ writing and reading of which Field had cause those who attended them came, as taken cognizance, after having long been likely as not, emotionally wrought up part of the oral tradition of the frontier, by nerve-shaking, even if triumphant, finally made their appearance between encounters with hostile red-skins or sav­ the covers of a book in 1833, coincident- age animals or capricious nature. And ly with that of a closely related, almost the states of mind resulting from the identical, form of entertainment, the reaction to such adventures recounted comic Yankee stories from the outlying in surroundings of temporary comfort regions of the northeastern seaboard. and security regularly colored the yams Seba Smith's Life and Writings of Ma­ exchanged there. Commentators vir­ jor Jack Downing, of Downingville, tually contemporary with the scenes and Away Down East in the State of Maine, events about which they wrote seldom discloses the locale of its origin in its failed to speak of the indigenous humor title. That the anonymous Sketches and of the west, if not of its tragic back­ Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett ground. Writing in 1843, John S. Robb of West Tennessee emanated ultimately of St. Louis remarked that, “ . . . the from the southwest, wherever it may observer must lack an eye for the comic have been written, is quite as obvious. who can look on the panorama of west­ Interestingly enough the contents of both ern life without being tempted to laugh. books were devoted in part to the ob­ . . . That it here abounds as plentiful jects of political satire, Smith's relat­ as the minerals within its [the west's] ing the futilities of Maine's state legis­ bosom, there is no question, for every lature, and the Sketches and Eccentrici­ step of the pioneer's progress has been ties making occasional mention of Presi­ marked with incidents, humorous and dent Jackson and his greatly mistrusted thrilling, which wait but the wizard spell state “ bank deposits," and to his, in of a bright mind and able pen to call some sections, unpopular Indian lands them from misty tradition, and clothe bill. Later tall tales show comparatively them with speaking life." Though the little influence of the politics of the “ wizard spell" was consistently denied period, though they all afford conscious him, Robb's implied wish had already or unconscious evidence that the back- been in large part granted, if we may woods brand of democracy which insists trust the word of J. M. Field, his col­ that “ one man is as good as another, or league on the St. Louis Reveille, who a damned sight better" was becoming only four years later reported that, articulate. From the mid-thirties on “ certain scatterlings have been, for through the forties the printing of up­ some time back, scribbling queer things roarious yarns dealing with frontier for the amusement of the queer people. characters and happenings was wide­ . . . They are called eccentric, to be spread and continuous. First featured sure, but then they are tolerated as in the newspapers and sporting weeklies, being such, and satisfied with their re­ they were almost immediately collected ception, they are constantly multiplying into volumes, and eventually most of the their numbers—we will not presume to volumes were brought together in Carey say their influence— day by day." and Hart’s (afterwards T. B. Peter­ 262 The Frontier

son’s) once avidly read 4‘Library of ad lib. The result of his tireless activ­ Humorous American Works.” Former ity in rounding up every sort of wilder­ favorites among the titles included were ness and prairie adventure story was to W. T. Thompson’s Major Jones’s Court­ make the Spirit of the Times the out­ ship, J. J. Hooper’s The Adventures of standing tall tale repository of the years in which it flourished, and for that Captain Simon Suggs and The Widow above anything else its files are valued Rugby’s Husband, T. B. Thorpe’s The today. Mysteries of the Backwoods, J. S. Robb’s Justly proud of his services in pre­ Western Scenes, J. M. Field’s The serving the humorous record of the fron­ Drama in Pokerville, and Sol Smith’s tier Porter was naturally eager to urge Theatrical Apprenticeship. the claims of the tall tale to recognition Of the various sporting weeklies pur­ as a respectable branch of letters. But veying frontier laughter throughout the his statement that those who distin­ tall tale era unquestionably the most guished themselves “ in this novel and famous was the New York Spirit of the original walk of literature” were highly Times. Founded in 1831, it was edited educated “ country gentlemen, planters, and managed by William T. Porter until lawyers, etc.,” hardly makes his case. 1853, and by Porter in joint-control with It does, however, confirm the impres­ others down to 1858, during which time sion which any extended reading of tall its preeminence in tall tale dissemination tales creates, namely that in rare in­ was unchallenged, unless possibly for a stances only were their authors the per­ brief period by The Constellation, an­ sons, or the kind of persons, whose ex­ other New York weekly. Previous to ploits and mishaps they relate. Doubt­ the eighteen-thirties the American sport­ less most of them were told, and retold, ing journals had justified their right to at gatherings of the bench and bar dur­ be called such chiefly by reprinting from ing the periodic sessions of the frontier trans-Atlantic sources the records of the courts, and were finally written down British turf and field. Porter was quick by members of the legal fraternity or to perceive the superior possibilities of their friends among the border states diversion latent in the home-made humor journalists, the majority of whom must of the west, the transcription of which have known sufficiently at first hand from word-of-mouth repetition into print the conditions out of which such yam- was just beginning. In pursuing his ings grew to ensure their being, for all determination to specialize solely in their tallness, revelations of the essential frontier amusement features he searched truth involved. And in consequence the country far and wide for talent in their writings must be accepted as be­ tall tale telling and secured for his pa­ longing in a deeply real sense among the per at a number of points in the south­ more trustworthy memorials of the ring­ west the services of what he called *1 cor­ tailed roarers of the west, the poor respondents, ” though he used the term whites of the south, and the hard-bar­ indifferently to designate both those gaining tradesmen from “ down east.” who submitted their contributions di­ Their portraits of all-night rioters who rectly to his scrutiny and those who preferred being “ licked” to not fight­ wrote the sketches which he clipped ing, quick-on-the-trigger marksmen, ex­ from the columns of his contemporaries pert lynching “ sweeteners,” card- The Frontier 263 sharpers and thimble-riggers, ultimate still lasted. It is an even more surpris­ consumers with insatiable thirsts, and ing fact that such a desire was felt, and bad men in general, are on the whole acted upon, by a person who was not probably dependable. So are their de­ only not a citizen or a resident of the scriptions of bullet-, snake-, and claw- United States but a Nova Scotian Su­ proof hunters, explorers, guides, and preme Court judge, Thomas Chandler trappers, as well as of the equally amus­ Haliburton, who published two three ing, if milder mannered, circuit lawyers, volume sets of tall tales, the most com­ village gossips, travelling tin-men, and plete array of them ever assembled by country greenhorns once common along one editor, Traits of American Humor the fringes of western settlement. Rela­ (1852) and The Americans at Home tively little of deliberate over-drawing (1854). And yet as surprising as it is falsifies their depiction of such scenes as that an alien, and one of pronounced shooting-matches and reckless killings, anti-republican sympathies, should have hair-raising escapades and “ tight fixes’ * conceived of and carried out this partic­ of all sorts, bee hunts, coon hunts, and ular enterprise, for Haliburton it was ‘ ‘ b ’ar ” hunts, gander pullings and quar­ not an altogether extraordinary under­ ter-races, Mississippi river-boat rival­ taking, since before engaging in it he ries, timber-jams and log-runnings, and had achieved international fame as the prairie fires and cattle stampedes; or creator of the best known character in their accounts of hinterland quiltings, the field of ludicrous “ down east” say­ picnics, and barn-raisings, or of horse ings and doings, the Connecticut clock- swappings and other varieties of keen­ pedlar, Sam Slick. Anyone with a flair witted rustic trading; or even their re­ for Yankee humor, and Haliburton’s cital of conventional fish-stories. was indeed most marked, might reasonably be expected to have a I ll flair for western humor also. For the Though Porter compiled two volumes fundamental difference, if any, between of at one time familiar tall tales, The such typically Yankee jests (or what Big Bear of Arkansas (1845) and A passed current for such) as describing Quarter Race in Kentucky (1846), and a man so tall that he had to climb a his friend T. A. Burke another, Polly ladder to shave himself, or a clipper ship Peablossom’s Wedding (1851), neither as so “ tarnation fast” that she left her editor could have had any other purpose shadow three and a half miles behind in mind than to profit by the wide­ her, and the common reports from “ out spread demand for divertissement of this west” of hunters being able to grin the order on the part of the reading public, bark off a tree or run a bear so hard for their collections were much too lim­ that its “ inards” would turn to grease, ited in range to be the work of connois­ is not easy to detect. Even more diffi­ seurs interested in collecting for collect­ cult is it to perceive the distinction in ing’s sake. It is a surprising fact that comedy values between declaring of a none of the fellow countrymen of the certain New England “ ornament to cre­ tall tale writers seems ever to have been ation” that he “ Chaws chain cables for impelled by the desire to bring together ‘ bakey, ’ takes gunpowder for snuff, a thoroughly representative assortment blows his nose with a tin pocket handker- of their productions while their vogue Continued on page 340 264 The Frontier

AFTER APPOMATTOX G wendolen H aste

Let there be heavier fruit large among leaves, A golden heaping of sun on earth. This will be a year of reaping, When the warm body soft under leaf shadow Will tremble beneath urging hands. Let no cloud hide this fire of summer.

Forget that which has been lived And was called girlhood. Girl days should flutter with hidden loves— Happiness of early arbutus and birds among the evening trees. That which is over Has been terrible with enduring, Loverless, noisy with the names of the dead. Thrust the years of drouth away. Remember only childhood with apples and sunlight. Tears are not good to remember.

Girlhood lived with death ; But now there is no death, Only the sweet wild plum ripening, The corn tasseling in the steamy heat. Now there is a seeping into the land, A return of that which has been gone. There will be thin leaping men in farmhouses, Voices that burn. No longer the blurred notes of old men nor the clatter of women. There will be shouts and whistling in the fields.

It is a summer for ripeness. Put aside the close dress, Smooth the hid ribbon. This is a summer for glancing and laughter. Remember the ways of dancing, The words of bright songs. Quicken your tongue to answer. There will be questions.

It is for this that the live breast pulls the bodice, For this flesh is cool and honey-pale. Take the flecked sun on cheek and lip— A woman is passive before the intruder. Listen for a foot on the roadway, A voice at the wide door. The Frontier 265

T W O HEADS

F. A. H ardman

/ / y ’LL let you know tomorrow,” the distance, where a single buzzard said Matthews to the salesman, was floating and tacking above the “ I’ve got to talk it over with jack-oaks. It was five o’clock, but the the wife first.” His brown eyes, sun still burned his face with the heat flanked with smile wrinkles, squinted of midday. He searched the sky from pleasantly from under the wide brim horizon to horizon for a cloud, but there of his straw hat. was not the tiniest break in the blue. The salesman put one foot on the If it didn’t rain pretty soon, the June bumper of his Ford, parked in Mat­ corn would be ruined. Anyway, the thews’ front yard. cane and oats were already raked and “ And remember, if you take the stacked. He wouldn’t do so bad, even tractor, we give you a big reduction on if the June corn didn’t make. There the mower and binder. I sure hope for were about a hundred frying-size your own good you won’t go on using chickens, and eleven hogs that he could this antique stuff.” He waved his sell in July . . . hand in the general direction of the About this machinery. There was barn, from which they had just come, still a little doubt left in his mind. The after looking at the old implements. salesman said it would pay for itself. The sale was as good as closed, he Maybe it would. He didn’t know. But thought. He was pretty good on sales there were other things to be consid­ psychology, and could tell when a man ered. The land, their second seventy- was getting ready to sign up. Well, five acres, was not clear yet, and he it was about time. They’d been argu­ must make sure he could take care of ing off and on for months. the payments on that before thinking of anything else . . . Of course, they “ I’ll think it over and see you to­ weren’t in any danger. Everything morrow.” It was a dismissal. Mat­ had gone fine so far. Perhaps . . . thews walked away toward the house. Anyhow, he’d have to talk it over with The salesman got into his car and Jen. Pretty good head on her, the old started down the driveway. The radi­ girl had. ator of his shiny ’32 model gleamed like a miniature sun. He glanced back But there was something else, some­ at the prospective buyer, who had thing concerned with himself alone. It reached the gallery and was wiping his was probably foolish of him to think face with a handkerchief. He smiled. about it in that way, but he did. No It’d be the third one he’d sold this doubt it was better to keep up with month, if only the wife didn’t ball modern progress . . . One man couldn’t things up . . . H e’d be able to make fight against a “ universal movement,” the payment on the car after all. as the salesman said. But that didn’t John Matthews changed his mind change his feelings. about going in the house, and sat down Each summer, he made ten or twenty on the porch. He cupped his chin in trips to Floresville, to market the hogs, his hands and gazed reflectively into and the grain. Having no truck, he 266 The Frontier

always went in his big three-ton wagon, smell of the cane, would be drowned in the only one like it in the county. On the roar and stink of a motor. the road, the automobiles would whirl He got up and walked toward the by him, filling the air with their sicken­ barn. Steely heat-waves were rising ing stench, and their racket. He de­ from the corrugated iron roof. He spised the sly, inhuman whistle of mo­ mopped his forehead with a checkered tors. The good, clopping jolt of a handkerchief that smelled of sweat as horse’s hooves suited him much better. it passed his nose. Two little pigs ran It seemed to re-echo inside him, with a across the yard in front of him. Each kind of music. From the high seat of had an intent vacuity in its eyes. Put­ the wagon, he would look down on the ting out his foot, he pushed one of the racing cars contemptuously, feeling him­ pigs over on its back. It gave a frantic self above them in more ways than one. squeak, righted itself, and see-sawed But the people in the cars never noticed through the yard and out the gate. Mat­ him. They usually had a tense, strained thews shook with silent laughter. look on their faces, as if something were The barn was like a furnace. The paining them, and kept their eyes glued roof, instead of keeping out heat, seemed to the center of the road. He wondered to draw it. The dirt floor was covered where they could all be going, and why with old hay and manure, tramped hard they were in such a hurry. I f he blocked by generations of horses. Last year he the way for a second or two, the drivers had built a new shed for the animals, would glare at him. Some would even and the barn now housed his machinery. curse. Could it be they all had impor­ There were two double-disk plows, a tant engagements they were rushing to mower, a planter, a baler, and a turning fulfill? plow. The rake was in the field; Henry Of course, it didn’t make much dif­ was using that. ference to him who they were, or where Somehow he didn’t like to part with they were going. But it made him think. these old implements. His father had He had plenty of time for thinking up helped him buy them sixteen years be­ there on the wagon. A vague enmity fore, right after he got married. He toward these people had taken root in looked affectionately at the mower, over his heart. And now, with the tractor whose blade he had seen so many weary salesman trying to sell him a new set acres of cane flatten to the ground. He of machinery, he had the same antag­ knew all its good qualities, and its fail­ onistic feeling. All his life he had been ings, as well as if it were part of him­ used to slow things, a wagon, a horse self. Every nut and bolt and spring plow. The acrid, sweaty smell of the from the shaft to the tip of the cutter animals, the slick leather between his was familiar to him. It wasn’t pleas­ fingers . . . He liked it. When harvest ant to think of it being junked by some time came, the clatter of the mowing dealer, who might consider it useless be­ machine was even more pleasant to his cause he didn’t know how to remedy its ears than the strange “ sonater” records little peculiarities . . . Genevieve played on the phonograph. If He sighed heavily, and started on his he bought the tractor, these sounds that usual round, to feed the stock. he had come to love, and the sweet, pure The pigs came first. Their squealing, The Frontier 2 67 audible for miles around at this time was doing almost as much work as his of evening, indicated that they knew it father. Last week somebody had said as well as he did. Their wild commo­ he was in love with the Terrell girl tion often called him home to supper. . . . H e’d be getting married soon. He filled a bucket with shelled corn, But Henry’s opinion didn’t count for and another with slop, and walked much. He was too young yet. Gene­ sturdily toward the pen. The squeals vieve was the one to help him decide. became deafening. He watched their She would naturally consider first the eager, senseless eyes in amusement. The interests of Jack and Maisie, who were gleam of hunger gave them a human much younger than Henry. Jack was look. There was a kind of relation be­ in the fourth grade, but Maisie was tween him and the stock he raised. His just beginning school this season. After horses, the brood sows, the setting hens, Henry was born, Genevieve had made and the cows, those that lived a long up her mind she wasn’t going to have time, and made a place for themselves another baby for several years. He’d in the farm routine, were like friends. never heard of such a thing, and had Old Muley, Old Dominick, Grunter . . . argued with her. But in some matters And, farther in the past, Nell, the moth­ Genevieve simply couldn’t be changed. er of their line of horses, Potrack, the It had taken her five years. And then first guinea . . . He didn’t think of another five to decide she wanted a it often; but when he did, it was a little girl. Maisie was a sort of “ after­ horrible to imagine these hogs of his thought,” as Genevieve sometimes said, being shoved down a long, bloody run­ jokingly, as she patted the child’s curls. way, with a knife waiting at the end . . . A strange woman, Genevieve. He didn’t He poured the slop into the trough understand her thoroughly even now. and stood a while watching them eat. Anyway, he could always depend upon Their yellowish white snouts sucked her for a good sound word of advice. voraciously at the milk. Others He fed the chickens and cows less crunched corn with a solid gusto. After reflectively, and then headed for the all, what more could beasts want . . .? house. He was hungry. He was in an unusual mood today. The odor of frying bacon hung in the Such thoughts as these seldom occurred air as he entered. Genevieve stood over to him. It must be the prospect of the wood-stove, pushing at the bacon having to make an important decision with a fork. When she heard him come before tomorrow. in, she turned. Maybe the salesman was right. May­ “ Y ou’re a little earlier than usual.” be all those new contrivances he’d seen “ Yes, I left Henry in the field to in town, radios, washing machines, finish up.” vacuum cleaners, were not “ finery for “ How’s the oats?” softies” as he had once believed, but “ Pretty good.” He glanced around, absolute necessities. soaping his hands over the sink. Henry said he thought they should “ Where’s Maisie and Jack?” have them all, if other people did. “ Sent ’em down to pick strawber­ Henry was fifteen now, and had fin­ ries. There’s a few left down by the ished school. He knew quite a bit, and river. ’ ’ She broke the eggs on the rim 268 The Frontier

of the skillet, and dropped them into do as she pleased. He had been twenty- the bacon fat with upward motions of two, and had already worked several her wrists. Her face was shiny with years on his father’s farm in Wilson perspiration. She smoothed her hair County. His father had seen that he with a tired gesture. Matthews had was pretty sensible and not afraid of seated himself at the table and was work, so he had taken a chance and watching her. She sensed something helped him buy a place of his own. a little out of the ordinary in his gaze. Genevieve had been quite beautiful *‘Hot in here, ain’t it?” when he married her. A t first he could “ Kinda. But I’m used to it.” hardly believe she was his wife. Not “ Guess I ought to buy you a new that he considered himself undeserving oil-stove. See where they’re havin’ a of her, exactly. But it was a little . . . sale at Sears Roebuck in San Antonio. a little . . . For one thing, she was You and Henry could go up and get half Italian, and the Latin side of her one any time, or order one sent. W on’t often puzzled him. When she was be much work from now on till plantin’ younger, she had been changeable and time.” flighty, and had a way of saying things “ I like a wood-stove. I t ’s only a he couldn’t understand when she be­ couple of hours a day I ’m in the kitchen, came angry. you know.” As a housekeeper, she was a bit un­ His eyes went the length of her body. tidy and careless, but he laid that to She certainly didn’t look run down, or her easy-going Latin blood. For months, weak. Her figure was still solidly sometimes, the house would shine like handsome, and her hair showed only a a new pin. Then she would change, strand or two of grey. Her eyes, also, and have a sleepy spell, neglecting had retained some of their youthful everything but the most necessary charm. Their heavy lashes and dark work. It was during these spells that brows gave a lazy look to her otherwise she read the books she borrowed from energetic face. a friend of hers, who worked in the As he sat there by the table, watching Carnegie library. her take the eight eggs out of the skil­ Her favorite book was one that she let one by one, he let his thoughts wan­ had bought, and always kept handy, so der into the past. she could read from it whenever she Sixteen years ago, they had been mar­ wanted. He couldn’t make head or ried at a little church in Floresville. tail of it himself, although when she Her family was more prosperous than read him some of the pieces, they his, and she had just been graduated sounded fine. It was deep stuff. Across from a high school in San Antonio. All the cover was written “ LEAVES OF her people were against the marriage, GRASS,” in an unsteady scrawl. At but she had overruled their objections first he had imagined it was about how and married him anyhow. He was only to grow a lawn, or maybe Sudan. But a farmer, her family had told her, and there was nothing at all in the book would never amount to anything. But about grass, and he did not try to Genevieve loved him, and loved the read it. farm. Too, she was eighteen and could Although he considered these things The Frontier 269 childish and not the proper amuse­ When the children had gone to the ments for a woman of her age, he really well for water, still arguing about the had little to complain of. strawberries, Matthews turned to his They still loved each other almost as wife. they had during the first years of their “ Jen,” he said, “ I want to talk to married life. He often thought it pe­ you about a business matter tonight. culiar that a middle-aged couple, with Henry’s going to town, and you can three children, should continue acting put the children to bed early . . . So toward each other as if they were very w e’ll be alone; I want us to be alone.” young. It was not his doing, though. “ All right, John.” Periodically, without any reason that Henry came in late, after the others he could see, Genevieve would become had already eaten. He was in a fright­ suddenly loving, and insist that they ful hurry. The rake had given him were missing a lot of pleasures. He some trouble, and it had taken him half got used to the whims after a while, an hour longer to finish the last patch. and asked her what made her that way. He bathed noisily, splashing water on She laughed, and pointed to a book on the walls of the bathroom and leaving the table. “ Bo-cottchy-o, perhaps,” his clothes on the floor. Then he put she said. on his best suit. His reflections were disturbed by a His mother came to the door of his shout in the front yard. He turned room and looked in. Henry was her toward the window. Jack and Maisie favorite of the three children, perhaps were coming up the walk. Jack had because he looked so much like John dropped his basket of strawberries, and when she first met him. Maisie was scolding him. They opened the screen and came in. “ Where you goin’, Hen?” Maisie put her basket of strawberries “ Town.” He stood before the mir­ on the table with an air of duty done. ror, giving the finishing pulls to his She took off her sunbonnet, and a head bright necktie. of curly golden hair fell around her “ Got a date with Mary?” shoulders. “ Uh-uh.” “ Mama, Jack dropped his basket on “ No need of saying * uh-uh’ because the dirty ground and got his strawbees you have! ’ ’ all messy.” “ N aw !” “ I didn’t!” cried Jack. “ They’re “ Y es!” not dirty! Look, Papa, and see if they In pretended anger, Henry chased are!” his mother through the hall and into “ You did, you did s o ! Um-mm, story­ the kitchen, where he sat down at the teller!” She raked one index finger table. over the other. Matthews, in his accustomed chair, “ All right, children. Quit arguing was propped against the wall smoking and wash the strawberries for mother. ’ ’ his pipe. Mrs. Matthews tried to be severe, but “ Dad,” said Henry, “ that rake gave she could scarcely keep the amusement me the devil this evening. The lever out of her voice. wouldn’t work, and I was in a hurry. 270 The Frontier

I'm glad you weren’t there to hear machinery these days. Nobody uses me.” a horse plow anymore, or carries their ‘ ‘ Did you push it over to the left stuff to town in a wagon. And a right hard ? ’ ’ tractor and a Ford is what—is neces­ “ Sure. I pushed and pushed till I sary. If you want to stay up with the was black in the face . . . I tell you times. ’ ’ He stopped to draw at his pipe. what, Dad, that thing’s just too old. His lips made little popping sounds as It’s worn out. The prongs are loose, he let out the smoke. “ I t ’s not myself and the points worn slick.” so much. It’s you and the children. Matthews sighed. He knew Henry. I ’ve been thinking how hard you work. If everything didn’t go to suit him, he Maybe we could get a washing machine, got mad and was liable to break some­ and a vacuum cleaner . . . ’Course thing. No use telling him, of course. that would take electricity. But the H e’d been the same way when he was salesman says all those things’ll pay young. If a boy had any sense he’d for themselves . \ . You know, Jen, find out those things for himself. we really are awful backward out here, so far from town. The new things don’t Henry ate a great deal, but gulped reach us like they do the city folks.” his food, and was done in a few min­ utes. Mrs. Matthews was listening quietly, “ Well, give her a kiss for me,” his her head on one side. mother laughed, as he snatched his hat “ I kinda thought we might get that from the rack. machinery. We still owe some on the When the children had gone to bed, place, but we could manage, I think Matthews and his wife went out to sit . . . If the crops are good:” on the gallery. A strong south breeze “ How much would a tractor and a was blowing now. The sun had gone truck cost, John?” down, and the first stars were appear­ “ About fifteen hundred, the sales­ ing. man says. ’ ’ Matthews had a sudden feeling of “ Fifteen hundred.” quiet security. He lit his pipe and “ About.” puffed white clouds of smoke toward “ How long would it take to pay for the rising moon. them, if we had good crops every “ Jen,” he said, “ I guess you know year ?’ ’ what I want to say. It’s that new Matthews struck a match to his pipe. set of machinery the salesman from “ Well, I figger we could do it in four San Antonio has been trying to sell years, and carry the debt on the land, me. I promised to let him know to­ too.” morrow evening whether I want it or “ That’s the main thing. We can’t not. I thought I ’d ask you—what you miss a single payment on that.” think.” “ Yes ...” He paused for a moment. Crickets “ And the crops aren’t always good, began to scrape on the night stillness. are they?” The moon an amber arc bulging the “ I reckon we know that’s so by this horizon. time, don’t we?” He laughed ruefully “ The salesman says everybody’s got at the memory of nineteen twenty-two, 271 The Frontier and nineteen thirty. “ Oh, there’s two they’d lose everything, and sold out. sides to the question all right. A n ’ The boys helped persuade her, I think. ’ ’ another thing, a car burns gasoline, and *1 Where did you say say they was ? ’ ’ so does a tractor. Sometimes they get “ They’re in San Antonio. Been there out of order, and it costs money to have two years. I saw Mrs. Carson last time them fixed. You can’t raise gasoline I was in town. Things are high there, on a farm. An’ I ain’t no mechanic.” and you have to buy so much more “ I thought of that, too.” . . . And the boys got a car. She “ I knew you would.” He leaned didn’t want them to have it—none of back against his w ife’s knees. “ Only them has got a cent. It’s an awful thing somehow I didn’t reckon on it myself, to be in a fix like that, John.” that is while the salesman was here. Matthews listened to every word. It You know, I can’t think straight when was not often Genevieve became so that fellow’s around. He comes when wound up over anything. Her talk I ’m busy as the devil, and talks and brought back to him with a new clarity talks . . . As if he knew more about his own first arguments with the sales­ my farm than I do. Then as soon as man . . . When everything was going he’s gone, I begin to recollect a thou­ so well, why begin to make changes? sand things he didn’t consider.” There was no real need for more money. “ If it were myself, I’d tell him to To him, the farm was a success in more stay away,” Mrs. Matthews put in. ways than just financially . . . If there hadn’t been any such thing as “ A man can’t do that, Jen. The money, for example, his feeling of sat­ fellow’s just trying to make a living, isfaction wouldn’t have altered a bit. like us, an’ I was pretty interested.” And as for speed, where was the neces­ “ I wonder if you remember the Car- sity of it? He might not be able to sons ? ’ ’ plow a hundred and fifty acres in ten Matthews turned sidewise so he could days, but he plowed them, didn’t he? see his wife’s face. He knew by her And raised some of the best crops in tone that she was going to tell him the county on them, didn’t he? what she really thought about it. The full moon had crawled slowly up “ Yes, sure.” from the horizon, shedding a purer bril­ “ They bought five thousand dollars liance as it rose. Now it seemed to be worth of new stuff, tractor, car, lights, hanging on the eaves of the barn, like all that. And where are they now?” a globe of quicksilver. Its light, re­ “ Moved to town, didn’t they?” fracted from the white floor of the “ Yes, but not because they wanted porch, illumined their faces. He looked to . . . It almost killed poor Mrs. at his wife from the corners of his eyes. Carson to leave. They had a farm as Her cheeks were smooth and almost good as ours when Mr. Carson died, beautiful in the moonlight. Her arms, but the boys got messed up with some reposing on her lap, were round and salesman, and he sold them the whole strong. line. Said it would enable them to live Tired, yes he could see she was tired. better. They couldn’t meet the pay­ But she didn’t complain, for she knew, ments, and Mrs. Carson got scared as he did, that it was good to be tired. 272 The Frontier

What was better than to go to bed at more’n I ever could . . . But aren’t night and sink into the peaceful sleep you happy?” of exhaustion? There was a long silence. He was A mocking bird whistled its tune about to speak again when they both somewhere in the corn fields— plain­ heard a dim sound from inside the tive, various, rich. house. Mrs. Matthews turned her head John Matthews felt inspired to talk. and listened. One of the children was He could seldom put things as he want­ crying. She got up quickly and went ed to, but this time there was something in. he had to say, something he had to After a few moments she returned know before he could make the deci­ to her chair on the porch. sion. “ Maisie wanted a drink,” she said. “ Jen, I wonder if you’ve— if you’ve Matthews nodded. “ I ’ve been think­ ever got tired of the farm? If you’ve ing about that machinery business while got tired of working, day in and day you were in there,” he said. “ And out ? And not seeming to get any­ I ’ve decided what to do.” where?” His tone was so resolute and inde­ “ Have I ever complained, John?” pendent that a sudden fear shot through “ No. But there are a lot of things his w ife’s heart. After all, it was up we feel and don’t talk about. I to him to say the last word. thought . . . I sometimes think you “ What is it?” and the children have a pretty tough “ I ’m going to tell the salesman he time of it . . . I want us to have all can keep his machinery in town, where those things we mentioned . . . But it belongs.” He rose, knocked out his going into debt for them, without know­ pipe, and prepared to go in. ing we can pay— it’s dangerous. What “ Night, Jen.” if I should get sick, or die? Every­ “ Night, John.” She understood. thing would fall to pieces. All those There was nothing else to be said. years of labor wasted . . . Perhaps, Mrs. Matthews went to her bed in some day . . . But why talk of some the children’s room thinking what a day? Aren’t we getting along all fine husband she had. There was a right? Tomorrow never comes, Jen. kind of music inside her, a high, clear Unless we can say right now, today, aria resembling the song of the mower this minute, ‘ I am happy’ or at least on a cool spring morning. ‘ I am not miserable,’ there is no hope John Matthews stood a while on the • • • •” He had put it clumsily. He porch looking at his moonlit yard, hear­ leaned over and looked into his w ife’s ing the noises of the night—horses stir­ eyes. ring out back, and a whisper of wind “ Of course you know all that. Those in the live oaks . . . Then he went books you read, I reckon they tell you quietly in. 273 The Frontier BLACK MOTHER

E lma G odchaux

/ ^ a LL yuh niggers is trash!” “ But dey doan need us niggers.” ZJk yelled Ludie as she stood on Ludie laughed tauntingly as she sat **• ** the edge of her gallery, tall, down on a sagging rocker too low for skinny, her black skin showing through her. She crossed her long legs; one her thin calico dress. She raised her knee nearly touched her chin and one long arms and her hands looked like big bare foot stuck out making a funny dark spread wings in the moonlight. black splotch on the whiteness of the “ Yuh is all trash. What yuh all got to night. She sat much higher than the do wid white folks’ business?” negroes about her and looked like a god It was summer in Louisiana and war surrounded by prostrate worshippers. was drafting negroes. Negroes had al­ The negroes below her whispered to­ ready gone off into the unknown leav­ gether and looked up at her, but she sat ing others full of consternation. They indifferent to them pulling on her pipe. held meetings after their work was done. Her head was full of thoughts. White Every cabin in the two long rows that folks were so proud. Why did they need formed the quarters spawned its quota niggers to help fight? Niggers ought of negroes. They listened to Ludie’s to mind their own business. It didn’t high-pitched voice that seemed to poise pay niggers to mix with white folks, to on the still air and pervade all distances. do what white folks did. Niggers ought “ Yuh is all trash!” to do like niggers. She did her stint Fanny snuggled closer to Atee. The of work for the white folks and earned pressure of his arm across her shoulder her money. Making her living as a field was almost more than she could bear. digger she held no truck with the whites. That and her mother’s words. An enor­ She was like the river, going her way, mous moon lit the earth and under the paying the white folks no mind. She heat like a weight it was hard to breathe. was like the river and could understand Most of the niggers sprawling on the it the way no white folks could. When crowded galleries were half-naked like her lips relaxed on her pipe stem to form Ludie, but Fanny wasn’t. She was words the people raised their heads to laced in her high corset and arrayed try to hear what she said. But she like on Sundays in her long-sleeved black talked to herself or the river; their ears taffeta dress. were not attuned to such talk; they “ Trash!” cried Ludie. “ Mistah could hear nothing, but they could see Kaiser ain’t done nuthin’ to us niggers. ’ ’ her little head against the lighter sky “ Dat so,” someone called out. outlined exactly, the strong jaw thin like And from other galleries, “ Yas, a man’s, the high cheek bones and the Hunh-huh.” People bowed their heads long tapering negro fingers busy at her and clapped their hands like in church. pipe bowl- “ Dat’s right. Dat’s right.” At last Fanny moved as if in protest “ We needs de white folks, ain’t dat’s against the self-abnegation of the others. right?” pressed Ludie. She stepped over the half-reclining “ Dat’s right. Dat’s right.” forms. And Atee followed her. She 274 The Frontier

was trying to get away from the sight But he didn’t want patience. “ Le’s of her mother and the sound of her g o !” he cried. “ We kin run away to voice. ‘ 1 Trash!” It rang in Fanny’s mah Mamma down to Bayou Teche. ears, followed her as she walked toward Guv’ment can’t never find me ’mongst the levee. Talk, talk, black folks always all de niggers they got down there. talking, and most of the time their talk Le’s g o !” didn’t mean nothing, but her ma was A black shadow stood above them, be­ different. Her talk bit, bit into Fanny’s tween the moon’s bright light and them desire for respectability. Fanny hated like a heavy storm cloud. It was Ludie the sight of the black people lounging with bare feet spread apart, thin head around half-naked and her mother’s big high, pipe between her teeth. She had black foot and her skin tight as a man’s to watch Fanny. Fanny, her daughter, showing through her wrapper. Fanny would go against her to shame her before laced herself into her high corset every her people. But Ludie did not doubt single day like the rich white folks. her strength. It was like the river’s; When Atee was drafted she encouraged it carried all before it. So she stood him with tales of khakied grandeur to looking down with disdain upon her come. He was alarmed by his fate, but daughter and her lover. Niggers lost he loved her and tried to meet it as she their strength when they got too near wished him to. They sat close together white folks, she thought, studying them. now on top of the levee. Kissed and Then her gaze shifted to the busy waters slapped at the mosquitoes. The silk of of the Mississippi rushing by just at her her dress damp with sweat gave out a feet. The September rise was on and peculiar heavy smell in the heat. He the river carried off with it logs, pieces was oppressed by his trouble. He was of houses, green branches of trees, all going away. He didn’t know where, kinds of truck. “ More trash than usu­ but far away from home, far away. He al, ’ ’ Ludie muttered. 1 ‘ Maybe hit gonna slouched forward staring at the quick take trash like yuh all is, niggers dat brown river. doan act like niggers.” Her voice rose, ‘ * Oh, Gawd! ” he cried at last. ‘ ‘ When a thin voice, but strong. “ Yuh is fool A h’m cornin’ back?” With their arms to go after dis here Kaiser. Yuh hear around each other they rocked their me, fool nigger? Yuh take yuh woman bodies back and forth in rhythm with ’cause Ah done tole yuh Fanny mah his fears. “ Ah hears Kaiser’s far from chile an’ mah chile doan act like no here. ’ ’ white woman. Not no long time. Nig­ “ Lissen, chere,” she spoke quietly as ger, yuh hear m e!” When he didn’t if to soothe him, patiently as if she had speak she despised him for a coward. not told it before. “ We all gotta have She bent her long back low to sneer patience. De white folks, too. They in his face. “ Yuh ain’t no man. What knows how to wait quiet an’ easy. They Fanny want wid yuh?” Then she turned writes lovely letters like de kind A h’m away sticking her cold pipe between her gonna write. Yuh can’t marry a sojer straight lips; thinner than negro lips dat’s gone away, they say. ’ ’ She leaned they were, but blue black, so black. A closer to him. “ A in’t Ah gotta have moment longer she stood looking at the patience, too?” river, grinned, mumbled a few words as 275 The Frontier though communing with it. She reck­ and respectable. She was happy. But oned she knew how to teach her own when least expecting it she'd meet Ludie. daughter that white folks' business and Ludie would come out of the darkness niggers' business was different. She walking toward her in great swinging turned to them as Fanny and Atee strides. Then likely as not next morn­ watched her furtively. “ Yuli all ain't ing somebody would tell Fanny he had got no strength to fight river an’ m e," seen Ludie walking in the fields at just she told them. “ Yuh all ain't nut- that time, scaring poor Fanny to death tin’ !" And to show her disgust she as though her mother could be in two spit straight in front of her with power places at once like a witch. That was and precision. And so she also did when what Ludie loved, to have folks in wide- she passed a free looking high yellow on eyed speculation over her. Their wonder the road. Blood like business—it was fed her power. It was true Ludie had no good to mi* it. a lot of business at night. Often a negro The next morning dauntless Fanny returning from a late shift at the sugar walked with Atee down the railroad ties house would see a dark blurred figure, to the little yellow station in the midst but tall, moving along the furrows. He of the cane fields. Walking with Atee would know it for Ludie. Only at night her mother's threats meant nothing to did she visit her old mother, part Indian, her; she went sedate as she saw fit. She who lived all alone in that tumble down felt proud. Was she not respectable in shanty way off yonder by the drainage high corset and black taffeta f But the machine. When folks saw Ludie scramb­ dust that lay thick on the cane leaves ling around alone so late at night they soon covered her, too, greying the fine said it was her Indian blood that made black taffeta. When she came walking her so brave. That and her knowledge slowly back alone she could see Ludie, of things they couldn’t understand— old head a pin point on its high column of river, for instance. Also they believed a neck, long hands active the way they she knew more about hoo-dooin' than her were in church, and she could hear silence told. Any other nigger but Ludie's voice just as plain. ‘ ‘ Mah chile Ludie, they said, would be afraid to ain’t gonna act like no white woman. cross the fields alone so late at night, it Not no long time!'' The voice followed was so lonesome out there and the buz­ her all the way home, pervaded her; she zards and owls were busy in the dead could but listen in fear; her breath trees at God ‘knows what. But, they seemed actually to wait on that com­ explained, Ludie was so strong she didn't manding voice. have to be afraid and when she got mad, But she wrote her letters as she had God! she was strong then, strong as a dreamed she would, like a white girl. sumpter mule. Fanny considered her She wrote them over at “ de residence" mother's goings and comings at night where she worked for the white folks, evil. Nobody went behind to the drain­ and she seemed well hidden from her age machine unless they had to or were mother. Nights she walked on top of fishing for crayfish, the mosquitoes and the levee to the post office down the snakes were that bad. And nobody went road and often took with her letter one at night. Fanny thought her grand­ of the white lady's; She looked quiet mother a bad old woman living where 276 The Frontier snakes and owls lived. Fanny never as her mother’s love of power. Also went to see her. Neither did Ludie’s Fanny had a fathomless faith in the other children. And all of them were Lord. He would surely be on her side frightened of their ma. None of them if she followed the white folks, because would have dared to stand up against He was on their side. It did not matter her, only Fanny who was fat and seemed if her mother and the river were old easy-going like her dad. Her sisters friends. They could not prevail against wondered how Fanny found so much Him. And Fanny did not believe in courage. Fanny wondered, too; but she such friendship. River minded its own had been house servant to the whites a business. But what was it that made long time now and she was sure the Lord her mother afraid of nothing, nothing was white. She wanted to have the in the swamps or on the river bank? same chance with Him as a white wom­ She could see her mother now, tall, skin­ an had. Why couldn’t Ludie leave ny, strong and dominant above the her alone? Why couldn’t she be like heavy brown flood of the Mississippi in the other negro mothers who never both­ a gesture at once of appeal and com­ ered much about their children? But mand as though making the river’s pow­ Ludie wasn’t so easy-going. The good er her power. But Fanny knew river Lord had made her a mother, she said, minded its own business. and thanks to Him she knew how to use Of all things Ludie loved church her power. Ludie halted Fanny on the nights when she could stand up before levee bumping into her heavily. “ What her people. Not even the preacher had yuh doin’ now?” she demanded stoop­ more power as a healer than she had. ing low over Fanny’s chunky figure. The people all stretched their necks to “ What yuh doin’ ? Studyin’ ’bout white look at her as she stood erect and ex­ folks’ business?” She gave Fanny a alted and with her long thin hands shove. “ Go on home now.’ ’ She closed moving above her head, moving, moving in on Fanny’s rear mumbling as she in never ceasing motion as though she went, “ Done raised me up a fool apein’ wove a spell. She knew she wove a white ways.” Fanny’s ways were an spell with her long hands moving and insult to her mother. *4 Fool not to take her body moving. All the people moved yuh man! ’ ’ Ludie laughed in that mim­ when she did, moaned and cried to God icking derisive way of hers. ‘ ‘ Dat Atee when she did. “ Mah Father. Oh, mah done give yuh all de promises, but some­ Father.” Fanny moved and groaned body else gittin’ de shoah ’nough.” against her will. She knew she was Poor Fanny could only march in si­ being hoo-dooed; her beliefs were losing lently at the cabin door. She never ground. She always felt that way in talked back to her mother. In her bed church; but never so much as now. She she called to God and cried. I f her sis­ made quiet prayers to her Lord within ter, who lay beside her, heard she never herself, within the clatter Ludie made. stirred nor made a sound. Fanny sobbed Sobs shook her; her heavy breasts rose aloud, hopelessly, but she did not intend and fell. She couldn’t see Him; only to give in to her mother. Her desire her mother standing high above them for respectability—to be respectable the all. Her mother’s face shone like pol­ way the white folks were— was as great ished ebony and her small erect head 111 The Frontier was encircled by a high peaked crown her mother, heaving breasts stretching trimmed with spangles from a Christmas the black taffeta. “ A in’t dat’s a tree. Her strength was crowned. In the shame, ’ ’ she cried. ‘ ‘ De Lawd doan give white gown she wore her height was in­ nobody His Power!” Consternation finite. She was long and thin, thin as took everybody’s breath. Ludie’s little any starving friar, but so straight, and head on its long thin neck darted for­ Fanny could feel the hard glint of her ward and she made a noise in her throat strong body through the folds of her as though anger struck her dumb. But white robe. The musty smell of the the others hardly breathed. Then Ludie sweating negroes pressed down. Fanny raised those strong thin hands. For a couldn’t breathe and could only see her second they seemed to menace Fanny mother’s black hands thin and fine and like an axe while she stood stranded waving like reeds in a breeze. “ Mah there, trembling beneath her mother’s Father! Mah Father!” All moaned as wrath. She didn’t seem able to move if all felt the whip across their backs. under the awful threat of that wrath. But Ludie’s moans were dominant, and Then she broke the spell, turned and her black sensitive hands weaving, weav­ ran, her silk rustling in the now funereal ing spells. Fanny hid her face. Those quiet. Ludie went after her in long hands would never touch her, never, oh strides with back bent and outreaching mah Father. Fanny pressed her eyes shut. She didn’t want to see the black hands. Fanny screamed and pulled her folks writhing in joy, in pain. But how skirts away from those hands. Rushed could she shut out the sound of Ludie’s out into the night bright with moon and wails? They came from everywhere, stars. She stumbled up the levee. She rose above all other sounds like cries knew a place where a boat was tied; from on high. ‘ ‘ Follow m e! Oh, follow could row out on the river safe from her me!” People got up and pushed mother. Ludie was coming up the levee toward her, stumbling, shoving, stamped­ swiftly on long legs. Fanny’s corset ing to Ludie. And as they came she squeezed her breath. She ran on pant­ went on crying. ‘ * Follow me! Oh, fol­ ing. The two women running down the low me. Yuh ain’t gonna be alone. narrow path were silhouetted darkly Oawd gonna be here, too. Follow me. against a passive sky, Ludie close to Follow me!” They fell upon her, grab­ Fanny. Poor Fanny was never a match bing her hands. And she let them have for her ma, who was swift and strong her hands and the hands were laid down like most field niggers. The two women on breasts and thighs and legs. “ A h’m met with a sudden impact like a blow. bathin’ in de blood of de Lamb. Fol­ Struggling they made a strange dark low me.” Her hands went sweeping in shape like the shadow of a contortionist long strokes down breasts and backs and against the light summer sky. But Fan­ legs. “ Oh-h, Lawd. Oh-h-h, Lawd.” ny hardly fought; her mother’s assault Ludie knew that this was Power. The felled her. Terror and her mother’s people saw it ; they knew it, too. Nobody hands strong as steel overwhelmed her. thought of Fanny. And there she was Her mother’s hard thin body shut out pressing through the circle with all the the sky. Where was the Lord of the strength of her stout body. She faced white folks? All her body ached for 278 The Frontier

Him. Ludie’s quick little bullet head shape against the sky. Tiny head high rammed her belly. Now Fanny lay still, and motionless, she watched her stub­ felt nothing. Ludie arose stiff and tall, born daughter roll over, on the cow- hands on the long arms hanging inert kicked unevenness of the levee, into the by her sides. She watched the river (like river; she saw fast flowing river accept herself) black in the moonlight. Her Fanny with scarcely a new ripple and ally. Who could stand up against river take her along. Then Ludie without a and her? Stooping quickly she gave sound turned and went majestically in Fanny a shove and again was a tall quiet those long strides of hers down the levee.

HANDS

H oward N utt

Today I was frightened by a waving of hands . . .

All day the wind blew west on Illinois All day the sky was ribbed with blue and grey And met the prairie like a folding arch, But in the tall grey prairie grass There was a sad waving of hands. Hands there were in a wistful mist Red hand, brown hand, hand of the white man A history a legend of hands in the tall grey prairie grass.

The prairie has you now, You men who swept her like a wind You men who darkened her like a cloud shadow Your hands are soft with mold. The prairie has you now . . .

So let me know when you have come to stay You strong and eager people, let me know. All day the wind blows west on Illinois.

Today I was frightened by a waving of hands. Into the grass and under the grass they waved me Beckoned me— a mist of fingers over a thousand years: “ Not you, you shadow-caster, You of the lean white nervous hands, not yet; We, too, are the hands of men who came, who conquered, We are the hands of men gone down In a wilderness of sunshine A heartache of sunshine A cataract of wind in this here-to-sky of grass.” 279 The Frontier

DOLORES

J ose G arcia V il l a

I Dolores have loved to love’s death, have been slain lovelily, fingers to my breast, clutching my love’s red wound: a red camellia;

this my lover should kiss, should kiss with gentleness love’s red camellia: he has gifted it to me;

if you see him come tell him this, tell my lover this, that I Dolores have loved to love’s death, have been slain lovelily; tell him to kiss gently (for I keep it gently) his red camellia.

“I ONLY KNOW”

A lbert R ichard W etjen

I only know her reverent hair was spun By singing fairies working in the sun;

While from the sea-left, azure pools they drew The limpid deeps to make her eyes of blue;

And gathered from the distant mountain crest The faint and blue-veined whiteness for her breast.

I care not if all men say thus and so, With rule and rhyme, with book and logic meet, Holding that fairies never lived—I know They fashioned almond blossoms for her feet! 280 The Frontier

ROADHOUSE

D onald S tevens

|| You see the highway— fierce eyes rushing near And glaring, plunging past you with a leer. Then, flashing, darking, winking evermore, You see a lure that guides you to a door. And entering you come upon a din Of rhythms and a reek of flesh and gin— And give your fevered soul up to a quest Of madness as a substitute for rest.

II. I see a done-in dogteam and a moon, That listen to a wolf pack *s moaning tune. I see a dimming trail— and hungry death— And paw-prints red— and steam of panting breath— And, oh, at last, I see a steady light! A little cabin*s heart against the night! And now I hear a shout and grip the hand Of one whose place is sacred in that land.

GOD-POEMS T o Carl Sandburg

D onald P artridge

Sandburg is a writer of poems, of he-poems and steel poems; he makes poems that stand with the skyscrapers, and poems that sink with the coal-shaft. Always his poems are strong like the iron and brave like the working man. None of his poems are frail and fit only for fancy. Doing his bit in each poem, he makes of it strength and endurance. Building each word as it were a large spike that girders together the framework. Ugly, like men that work on the railroad, his poems for that are reality. Rough as the rough-hewn timber, his poems are tough and substantial. God speaks in the poems of Sandburg, and the poems of Sandburg are God! 281 The Frontier

STONE BREAKER M erle B eynon The thunder of dreams Lifts against the sky in a gray smoke— Laughter of countless voices, And I hear but one— The strain of the cropped bird, A half-tremolo, Swording the majesty of a gaunt world In vain; Tearing its frowned silence But a little way, And washing back the cleaved parts With the tears of its despair; Crying out as an entity Of miniature wrath, With blind eyes to the rock Of its opponent, With blind eyes to the beauty Of unapproachable strength. This wing-clipped bird Will some day feel itself, And the renewal of its jagged pinions, Will some day gain the vision To see its own smallness of powers— Then it will sit at this Gibraltar And never move a stone!

A LULLABY FOR TRAVELERS J ane M orrill Night and the green curtains of pullman cells . . . Sleep . . . From the car’s end the last loud talker boasts again, While rhythms bright as crickets cheer the brain To wakefulness . . . Sleep softly, children of speed; Dream to the gentle rumble of moonlit rails; Dream while hurtling to another state, Passing green trees marching, sky-pointed and black. While, panting, the train throws itself Onto the knees of a girl hill, Passing between her breasts softly, in dreamy speed . Sleep . . . 282 The Frontier

A M A N IS NAM ED

J ohn C. F rohlicher

Young Frank Brown, on a bright spring morning, Rode up the trail toward the big gold strike In Alder Gulch. He laughed at the warning Of the mountain men: “ They’re all alike, These un-named kids,” said Bighorn Mike, “ That boy will wish he had died a-borning When the Blackfeet catch him.” Across the dyke Of hills Frank rode, all caution scorning.

Where the river splits on a white sand bar He made his camp in the sunlight’s fading; He smoked his pipe as the first green star Gave signal for the moon’s parading. And five young Blackfeet bucks, out raiding, Grinned as they sized Frank up from afar; They planned right then to make some spading For the next white man who would cross that bar!

The boy awoke in the river mist; His rifle talked as the braves came sneaking Up to his bed. Two arrows hissed A short reply to the powder’s speaking; Two braves dragged off, the bright blood leaking. The others lay where the lead had kissed Their buckskin shirts and set them reeking, And young Frank walked with a trifling list.

The sun was centered when he came to town— His gun held high and his pony running— He tossed three limp, wet scalplocks down; , “ I reckon,” he said, “ Mike wasn’t funning.” And the old man, getting his daily sunning, Looked at the boy with a grim, hard frown. “ Young man,” said Mike, “ that’s right good gunning, Y ou’ve earned a name, young Sandbar Brown!” The Frontier 283 KETTLE CACHE An Episode at Sixes

H oward M cK inley Corning

T first I thought it was Pap comm* able. Maybe yuh could stir sumpen up home. H e’s got enough dust, I quick like. Think so ? ” A sez, an’ now we can go away, like * # # he said. But if it was Pap he’d brung He was big an’ shockheaded an’ his someone with him, for I heard their eyes kep’ lookin’ at ever-thin’. The steps an’ their voices talkin’ an’ next young fella didn’t watch me much. I they hammered on the door, hard like. guess I slunk over by the stove right Then when I was openin’ the door I away. I shivered, but I wasn’t cold thought about the kettle: if it was Pap none. Then the big fella come up closer, cornin’ he’d have enough to fill it . . . rubbin’ his hands. I had to look at him, But it was too late— but I wanted most to look at the one he • * • called Gaff. He looked sort of pale. But “ Come on, Gaff, shove in. That’s I was ’fraid and kep’ watchin’ the big right, sister; let a couple fellas in ; darn one. They was both wet an’ their shoes cold, this rain.” sucked as they walked. I knew they was “ Where’ll I— ” cold so I slunk back by the stove. Pretty soon the big one picked up the poker. ‘ ‘ Oh, sling it, Gaff. My God! let the # • • duffle slump down anywhere. Be aw’- “ Got a have more fire if we’re goin’ right.” do any eatin’. Where’s your wood? “ Well. Lord! that’s some easier! . . . ’A t’s a mite better. Give ’er a Wet! Look at me!” draft. Now fetch to, sister, we ain’t got “ Aw, ease up. Sure, we’re wet. But all night. Drag out the skillet an’ slice ain’t it jes’ what we want—this rain? up some spuds. That’s it, some .a them. Poke up the fire, girl. Here, Gaff, shut An ’ some bacon or jerkie— all the same. the door. That’s right, poke up. Get Powerful hungry! Here— ” a bit dry.” • * • • « * He was doin ’ as much lookin ’ as talk- I kept thinkin’ about the kettle. They in’. Pretty soon I figgered they must mustn’t see it. It hung sort of in the of knowed I was here alone. The little comer, in the shadow like. I looked at chap kep’ watchin’ of the duffle he’d it some. I guess I hadn’t ought of. The dropped at the door. He turned his big fella—the one who was doin’ most back on the stove, like he was warmin’. of the talkin’— saw me. I wondered I went to work then. ’bout Pap. I was scared. Right away • # # I knowed I shouldn’t have let ’em in. “ Some taters, that’s it. A n ’ some * * * bacon. You’re doin’ jake. Now le’s “ Listen, sister, how’s for a snack see— ” apiece? Been trampin’ in the rain. # # • Goin’ on down valley an’ a bite a food’ll I thought of the kettle on the wall. make us feel right smart more comf’t­ # # • 284 The Frontier

“ Le’s see; them there onions hangin’ face. He sat down then. He watched in them twists. A few a them onions me peel and put ’em to fry. He jes’ would taste ’bout right. What say, sat by an’ watched. I guess the onions G aff?” got in my eyes, sorta. I kep’ thinkin’ “ Sure. A w ’right here.” ’bout Pap an’ tryin’ not to cry. He “ Some a them onions. Yessir. Keep had oughta come. I tried not to look the blood pure. Better eat right when at the kettle any more, but I guess I we can, sez I. Bile ’em, too. H uh?” did some. Then I ’d look at the big “ Sure. A w ’right here.” fella an’ he was lookin’ at me. The young fella kep’ warmin’ his back an’ “ Well, now sister, what’ll we bile ’em not lookin ’ ’round much. I cooked in? Didn’t I see— ” • • • things as fas’ as I could. After while they got done an’ I said they could I thought of the kettle. * * * eat. They pushed up. I could see their faces better in the light. The young “ W e’ll use that ’ere kettle.” • # * fella was gettin’ some nervous. He didn’t wanta talk. I guess I wasn’t He pointed at it. I was shakin’ like feelin’ ’fraid of him much now. But a leaf. Right away I figgered he it was the big fella. He was so sorta knowed. But how could he of? They bluff and brutal when he smiled his was both strangers; I hadn’t never seen hard, knowin’ way. Now if it was jes’ ’em afore, either of ’em. • # • the young fella— * * • “ That ’ere kettle. W e’ll bile these here onions in that.” “ Ain’t yuh hungry, sister? Better * * * eat.” • • • I was shakin’ too much to move. • • • I pushed back by the stove where I “ Here— ” could be near the kettle. I wanted ’em * * * to go. I was thinkin’ ’bout Pap; I He took down a twist a onions. They knowed he oughta be comin— • * • fell apart when he handed ’em to me. “ Let’s fry ’em,” I sez; “ let’s fry ’em “ That’s good food, girl. Darn cold with the taters. They ’re healthier. out—that rain. This’ll warm us up Warm yuh up better. Or with the ba­ right smart.” con.” He stood there, big like, lookin’ “ Yeah, this is good food aw’right. at me. He had a kind a knowin’ smile Them onions— ” at the corners of his mouth. His big # # * eyes was kinda squintin’. They both ate a lot. But the little # # • fella got through first. He looked at “ Aw’right. Aw’right. Jes’ so we me some. His face was kinda pale. Then get some onions. Huh, G aff?” he got to his feet. He didn’t feel right, “ Aw’right ’ith me.” the way he acted. “ Sure. Jes’ so we have some.” # * * * * * “ Come on, Shadduck; better get go- But he kep’ that funny look on his The Frontier 285

“ Take it easy, Gaff. Let them onions “ Say, you gettin’ yella?” settle some. We got quite a piece to “ Well, she fed us—poor kid! An’ go; all that duffle to carry. Besides— her Pap— ” Well, maybe we had better.’ * “ So, you’re turnin’ soft, are yuh? • • # Well, see, we’re goin’ to take it. Yessir. They was both standin’. I tried to This here, with what we’ve got. A n ’ ’pear easy like, hopin’ they’d go right by the way, the poke yer Pap was bring- off. Then the big one come up to the in’ home is over there in that ’er duf­ stove. fle.” • # • “ Come on, Shadduck; le’s go.” “ A w ’right, G aff.” “ Thanks a lot, sister. A n ’ now, le’s • • • have that kettle.” • • * When he swung the kettle down I screamed. He looked in it an’ laughed. I knowed right away they knowed all Then he carried it over an’ stowed it in along. I guess I gasped. I was tremb­ his pack. The young fella had pulled lin’ terrible. Why hadn’t Pap come? • • • the door open an’ the rain was beatin’ in. They picked up the duffle. They “ Your Pap told us ’bout it two days was goin’. I wanted to call out to the back. We met him cornin’ over from younger fella but the big fella was smil­ Gold Hill. He had a right sizable poke in ’, hard like and with a kinda leer. on him an’ he let us have it. We got Then he drew a pistol from his coat. I him t ’ understand.” saw it was Pap’s. He flung it on the * # • floor. I knowed then . . . I was He laughed in a hard, leerin’ way. tremblin’ and gettin’ angry an’ forget- The little fella was hangin’ back. I knew tin’ to feel afraid. Pap wouldn’t be then somethin’ musta happened to Pap. cornin’. I tried to speak, but the big fella cut in. • * * # • • “ Yer Pap was dreamin’ when he told “ —let us have it. Then he sez t ’ us ’bout the kettle. He said, what with tell you there was more in the kettle. the dust he had—-this here in his poke— Didn’t say who it was for, but I reckon it would jus’ fill it. I reckon he never since he let us have t ’other he must a had that kind a dream afore.” meant us to have this here, too, or he • # • wouldn’t a told us. A in’t that the way I sprung fo r’ard an’ picked up the of it, G aff?” gun. I could of killed ’im ! But it was “ Aw, hell! let ’er keep it. Come on.” all fired out . . . 286 The Frontier

WE TALK ABOUT REGIONALISM— NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, AND WEST

B. A. B otkin

I ing life as well as literature according e g i o n a l i s m is an inclusive to the needs and resources of interre­ term for a variety of movements lated regions. R to relate the artist to his region. The conscious or unconscious basis of The region includes an environment— all regionalism is the geographical con­ the physical and social scene, the cul­ cept of the natural region as a complex tural landscape— and, arising in reci­ unity of physical features favoring dis­ procal relation to environment, a body tinctive types of utilization of the land. of experience and thought known to And correlated with each attitude are some as culture and to others as tradi­ a certain area and type of culture in the tion. The difference between one re­ United States, the Localist being strong gional movement and another is a dif­ in the frontier-conscious Northwest, the ference in attitude and emphasis— the Naturist in the aboriginal Southwest, difference between environment and the Traditionalist in the agrarian South, tradition or between one and another of and the Culturist in the metropolitan the elements composing them. The em­ and cosmopolitan East. phasis may be laid on place or the spirit of place or on the metaphysical, ethical, II aesthetic, or social values through which With the aims and methods of the the individual or the community seeks Localist group of the Northwest The to wrest a significance from and beyond Frontier, A Magazine of the Northwest, place. is closely identified. The program and From these divergent attitudes four policy of the magazine, as outlined in distinct types of regionalism and re- 1931, may be said to constitute the plat­ gionalists emerge. The Localist is the form of the Localist party. According empiric, matter-of-fact regionalist, in­ to an editorial circular: terested in developing local or native This magazine is presenting the life materials rooted in a specific soil. The of the Northwest in authentic pictures. Naturist is the mystical, cosmic region­ In its pages you see the people of the alist, with a philosophy of the land and West as they are and not as dressed-up the folk, of the Good Life and the indig­ figures of impossible romance. In its enous, interested in developing native verse and stories are the atmosphere of this spacious region with its great modes of expression mediating between mountain ranges, prairies, rivers; with man and the universe. The Tradition­ its timber and vegetation and animals; alist is the humanist, creative regional­ with its mines and railroads and ist, interested in a usable past as the ranches; with its people building a civ­ source of personal symbols and values, ilization and a culture. There is no aesthetic and ethical. The Culturist, other magazine devoted to just such por­ trayal. The editors demand not only finally, is the social, cosmopolitan re­ that its contributions carry interest but gionalist, combining and transcending that they be written with sincerity out the other approaches, interested in shap­ of knowledge of the life they present. 287 The Frontier

As a “ definitely regional” medium, as well as materials. It is good to pre­ The Frontier conceives its “ unique” serve local documents but we must also function to be fourfold: that of a “ reg­ find local instead of derivative methods. ister of what is being written in the We in New Mexico are all getting our­ Northwest” (through book reviews and selves reborn New Mexicans. What “ Literary News” as well as original brings us together is the failure of old contributions), a “ repository of hitherto methods, the conviction that everything unpublished historical source material” is sawdust. In rejoinder Mr. Merriam (in a “ Historical Section,” devoted to admitted that The Frontier does not “ some authentic account, diary or jour­ have the same impulse; that it is diffi­ nal or reminiscence, preferably of early cult to get the Northwest regionally days in this region of the country” ), a conscious; that the Northwest is back­ “ carrier of reminiscences of old-timers ward-looking. Brassil Fitzgerald went told in their own language” (in the a little further and gave as reasons, not “ Open Range,” consisting of “ actual” only the lack of homogeneous culture in “ accounts of personal outdoor experi­ the Northwest, but the danger of be­ ences” ), and a “ publisher of folklore coming artificial and the need of rep­ of the Northwest” (chiefly Indian eth­ resenting the educated as well as the nology and mythology). illiterate— “ all voices.” Or, as he put The actual and factual tone of all it in the January, 1933, Frontier, re­ this is significant. To the Localist the gionalism “ is more than preoccupation native is the local; the natural is the with dialect, the collecting of folk tales, outdoor; the personal is the objective and the searching for primitive rhythms, and first-hand; and the field of litera­ though it is concerned with these mat­ ture is life and people, its aim is presen­ ters. 77 tation, picture and portrayal, its re­ Native modes of expression, it is true, quirements are knowledge and atmo­ have their roots in the unwritten tradi­ sphere, and its tests are the authentic, tion of the folk, but the tendency to sincere, and interesting. In his empha­ identify the folk with the primitive and sis on realistic treatment and the heroic illiterate is responsible for much of the note the Localist finds himself at odds misunderstanding of regionalism and for with both the Naturist and the Tradi­ many of the errors and limitations on tionalist, to whom regionalism is a mode the part of regionalists. By the “ dan­ of expression or a quality of experience ger of becoming artificial77 is probably conceived in terms of revelation or judg­ meant what Carey McWilliams has ment. called the “ will to be naive.77 But the At the round table on regional publi­ naive is frequently only another name cations held at the University of Mon­ for the integral and organic, a quality of tana Writers7 Conference in July, 1932, intuitive sophistication which the mod­ Mary Austin, speaking for the Laughing ern mystical artist may sense and evoke Horse, wanted to know why The Fron­ as naturally as the primitive. It is the tier had not similarly developed native cosmic sense of the whole that makes modes of expression instead of conven­ such art integral and organic, and al­ tional ones. Her argument ran some­ though the Naturist like Mary Austin thing like this: We need our own forms may come to the cosmic along the paths 288 The Frontier

of the aboriginal, it is superficial to gerald’s definition of regionalism in the damn Naturism with an adjective— as January Frontier as “ neo-primitive” or “ sentimental,” as fundamentally a new awareness of the “ going native.” power of environment in life and liter- . ature; a realization that the artist is It would be equally unjust to assume inescapably molded by his people and that the Localist is wholly indifferent his place, and is most himself when his to the indigenous, though by him this people and place speak through him much-abused term is more often than . . . an acceptance of life . . . the deeper realism, realism gladly aware of not apt to be associated with the frontier the flesh and of the spirit imprisoned and translated into terms of heroic ac­ within it, sensitive alike to ugliness and tion and “ bold untrammeled handling beauty, to the amusing, heartbreaking of material” —the pioneer heritage. mysterious business of living. Thus, in his preface to Northwest Verse, This would be all right if it did not lead while complaining of the “ lack of orig­ to a glorification of the healthily “ en­ inality” in the “ imitative rather than ergetic,” “ epic-like” qualities of “ gus­ indigenous” forms and rhythms of to,” “ sympathy and relish” (the Northwest poets, Mr. Merriam takes ob­ terms are Mr. Merriam’s in the Jan­ vious pride in the fact that uary Frontier) and a condemnation of There is truly not much inclination the “ rank weeds” of a more disillu­ among these writers to use sophisticated sioned and depressing regionalism, radi­ verse forms, and that is good, for life in cal and critical. For all his inveighing the Northwest, happily, has yet little commerce with smart or light sophisti­ against “ impossible romance” and his cation . . . A regard for things as avowed interest in the common man, the they are, and audacious directness in Localist remains an idealist, and life to expression should yield our poets stun­ him is the “ cultured life” (what Mary ning imagery. Austin would call “ being cultured” All regionalists oppose false sophisti­ rather than “ creating cultures” ), for cation as they oppose the false cosmo­ failing to take sufficient account of politanism that goes hand in hand with which Mr. Merriam scores the proletar­ it, but unless he is careful the Localist, ian and expressionistic regionalists who in his conservative provincial bias, is seem to him to say: “ ‘ Self-expression apt to confuse true and false sophisti­ and the reader be damned; see what a cation and throw both overboard. Es­ hard life I have le d / ” It is important pecially is it true that in veering from to draw the line between originality and the subjective and intellectualist ten­ decadence, but it is also important to dencies of modern literature he swings distinguish between literature that re­ toward the opposite extreme and em­ veals a decadent society and literature braces whole-heartedly the *1 strongly that glosses it over. A regionalist may narrative inclination,” “ to write of thus feel himself at the end of a tradi­ people and events rather than of states tion as well as at the beginning of one. of emotion,” which Mr. Merriam finds It is important, in other words, not to and approves among Northwest poets. cut regionalism off at the source from The same “ regard for things as they the thoroughgoing radicalism which not are” underlies and explains Mr. Fitz­ only takes root but grows and flowers in 289 The Frontier personality and freedom, enjoying what tle about regionalism and are very skit­ Emerson calls “ an original relation to tish about it; that they do not see the the universe . . . a poetry and philos­ possibilities in using the life about them and few show the possibilities; that save ophy of insight and not of tradition.’ 5 for the Portland group there is no vital And this radicalism includes those who, group in the Northwest to compare with refusing to accept a heritage that leaves the Southwest group; and that what re­ the individual in economic and cultural gional writing is being done in the bondage, ask, not only “ Where did we North is in the descriptive stage—there come from ?” but also “ Where do we is little interpretation. go from here?” —who are interested not It is a good sign, however, that Mr. only in submerged culture but also in Merriam distinguishes carefully between submerged society; who, posing the past regionalism and that local color which of their regional childhood and ancient simply exploits the picturesque quali­ mythologies against the present of Amer­ ties of a region, as in the “ pulps” ica’s “ pessimism of defeat” and “ ex­ (prompting his observation that the asperation of progress,” seek a way out. Western story magazines would go out That in their preoccupation with the of business if the Northwest stopped “ business of living” the Northwest writing) and to offset which The Fron­ writers who are “ observing life accur­ tier was founded; and between regional ately and eagerly and in most instances, writing, which is “ simply a way of writ­ lovingly, and recording it with sincer­ ing, a kind of presentation of material,” ity” are “ still in the descriptive stage” and regional literature, which requires is admitted in the preface to Northwest “ universal appeal and shaped contents.” Verse. It is not hard to infer, then, It is a sign that the Northwest Localist that the Northwest is still in the stage may go beyond his fundamentally sound of “ frontier literature,” which, accord­ (from the pragmatist point of view) ing to Mr. Merriam in his 1929 address conception of regionalism, so well de­ on “ Regional Literature” before the fined by Mr. Merriam in his University National Council of Teachers of English of Montana talk on “ Recent Regional (as reported in the January, 1930, Eng­ Fiction,” as “ the expression of a way lish Journal), “ foreruns regional liter­ of life characteristic of a region, affect­ ature,” inasmuch as “ Writers of a new ed by a soil, a geographical location, country gradually pass through the stage types of society, and the ideals and ideas of description to understanding and in­ resulting,” to a theory of regionalism terpretation of regional life.” In fact, (now disclaimed by Mr. Merriam) as a in his talk on “ Northwest Regional Lit­ “ philosophy of society or government erature” at the University of Montana or a salvation from the depression.” Writers’ Conference last summer, Mr. Merriam began by declaring that it is I ll non-existent, like the sidehill gouger, If to the Naturist like Mary Austin and closed with the following summary (writing in Contempo for December 15, of the state of regionalism in the North­ 1931) regionalism is, more than the ex­ west (I quote from my notes): that the pression of a way of life, “ an attempt writers of the Northwest are not region­ to express through the lives of the people conscious, all in all; that they know lit­ who live in it, the meaning of environ­ 290 The Frontier ment,” then the Localist objects that she one is taught these things by Nature attaches too much meaning to environ­ sounds a bit romantic. ment, even going so far as to identify For the Localist, as we have seen, is it with expression. Mrs. Austin is enough willing to admit the “ power of environ­ of a Localist to admit that her South­ ment” and even its inescapable molding western environment and her study of influence on the artist; but he is not its effect on the Indian are largely re­ willing for that reason to attribute om­ sponsible for her theory of environment. nipotence to the environment and to ad­ And in her books on the Southwest she mit that it molds even the artist’s way fulfills admirably the Localist’s require­ of expressing himself. The Localist re­ ments of the regionalist (stated by Mr. stricts environment to locality; he sees Merriam in his talk on “ Recent Region­ no need of extending it to include the al Fiction” ) that “ he know the region cosmos and the infinite. Least of all and write of it with love or hate and does he appreciate the Blake-like mad­ write through the region.” But Mrs. ness that inspires the hero of Starry Austin asks and gives more than knowl­ Adventure to see God in the aspens of edge and love. As a mystic she wants New Mexico, paralleling Mrs. Austin’s to get inside her environment, and that childhood experience of God under an means getting above and beyond it. So, Illinois walnut tree. In fact, why drag she writes in Contempo: God into it at all? He looks askance at I couldn’t see any reason why I such phrases as the “ feel of the pur­ shouldn’t let myself go in that environ­ poseful earth,” “ transmitted experi­ ment and show something of its working ences,” “ conscious unity in all things,” upon the individual spirit. Because that and the “ affective relation” between is what happens between man and his man and the universe. “ Man’s imme­ natural environment, its rhythms, pro­ morial gesture of getting inside the uni­ gressions, colors, its structure and plot. verse by imitating it” doesn’t appeal to They do something to a man inside, by which it comes about that when he makes the Localist; he finds it more comfort­ a decorative design, a musical melody, able to stay outside. a drama, or an elegy, it has always It must be admitted, of course, that something in it which the land taught Mrs. Austin does as much to the envir­ him. onment as it does to her, and that man’s This sort of thing is a little incompre­ gesture of imitating the universe is also hensible to the Localist and naturally the American’s gesture of imitating the puts him out of patience. He sees plenty Indian—in terms of which some would of reasons why Mrs. Austin shoudn’t let explain the whole history of the fron­ herself go. In the first place, he is too tier. And although her principle of much interested in the “ people of the the reciprocal relation between man and West” and in the “ civilization” they his environment is the principle of mod­ are building, in the community and its ern human geography, frankly she is “ atmosphere,” to bother much with more interested in poetry than in science, what is happening to the “ individual preferring to cloak her philosophy in spirit.’ 9 And in the second place, such cloudy symbols as Earth Horizon rhythm and structure, progression and (“ that subtle sense of relationship to plot, belong to art, and to maintain that the earth horizon which is the nurture 291 The Frontier of the spiritual life” ) and the Friend- from them. For although Mr. Tate in­ of-the-Soul-of-Man (“ a responsive ac­ sists that tradition is not a “ defense of tivity in the world about you,” which tradition” and is “ the liberator, not is the source of art and the goal of pray­ the confiner,” one cannot help feeling er). But whatever the intrinsic merits that all the time he is talking about tra­ or ultimate value of her thought, there dition he is thinking of, and faintly apol­ can be no doubt of its importance as a ogizing for, the Southern heritage; and stimulus and an influence, creative and that for a tradition to be genuinely lib­ critical, in American art and culture. erating and creative it must have more Stripping regionalism of all “ sentimen­ to seek and offer than tal romanticism for the local area or for the writer’s decorum in the widest sense, the historical period,” Howard W. a powerful instinct of selection and ar­ rangement . . . those ways of feeling, Odum penetrates to the heart of Mrs. those convictions of propriety, those Austin’s contribution by accepting, as ways of speaking, of which the writer “ part and parcel of the basic materials himself is hardly aware, and from which of regional social phenomena,” her con­ he cannot escape . . . the knowledge cept of the folk as “ to be shaped in of life that we have not had to learn mind and social reaction, and to some for ourselves, but have absorbed out of extent in character, and so finally in the life around us . . . fixed procedures that we can rely on in the larger pursuit expression, by one given environment.” of the good life. And her Naturism may even hold a les­ True, tradition so conceived may give son for the Localist in his pragmatic de­ the writer * ‘ the kind of detachment, very sire to know what the environment can rare at present,” to make “ not only do for him in the “ business of living.” perceptions of things, but judgments In the long run, the land wins. If the about them.” But, while this may be people does not adapt itself willingly and efficiently, the land destroys it and a safeguard against “ atrophy” of the makes room for another tribe. “ powers of contemplation,” which Mr. IV Tate sees as “ the plight of American fiction, the plight of Mr. Dreiser,” it We talk about regionalism, and by offers no guarantee against atrophy of this time it should be evident that the the powers of perception, which indeed region colors the regionalist’s views. seems inevitable. This is the Southern The way people write about regional­ ism interests me; their reactions to such dilemma. As the way out of the plight words as “regionalism,” “sectionalism,” of Mr. Dreiser, we are asked to choose and “local color” often suggest the very the plight of Mr. Tate. regions from which they come! I f we reject the alternative, it is for Thus Carey McWilliams wrote me on the same reason that we are reluctant reading Allen Tate’s “ Regionalism and to accept Mr. Tate’s substitutes for re­ Sectionalism” in the New Republic for gionalism and sectionalism— the terms December 23, 1932. Mr. Tate’s Tradi­ tradition and politics, which he finds tionalist view is colored by a note of dis­ “ least confusing.” His distinction be­ appointed resignation that stands in tween regionalism as private tradition sharp contrast to the optimism of both and sectionalism as public tradition is the Localist and the Naturist, comfort­ a good one as far as it goes, but like his ably rooted in time and place or released dichotomy between perception and judg­ 292 The Frontier ment, it rests on a “ dualism of con­ and surer ground in an earlier article templation and action,” on the basis of on ‘ ‘ American Poetry since 1920, 9 9 in the which he would erect a separation, if January, 1929, Bookman, in which he not of literature from life, at least of viewed in perspective the tradition of * ‘ fundamental human action ’ ’ from ‘ 1 its the most considerable group of Southern conscious social significance.” Concern regionalists, the Fugitives. In the bank­ with the former—“ direct contemplation ruptcy of aggressive and abstract Amer­ of character and emotion, of all the ideas icanism and industrialism, best typified and desires that sustain character, and by the Middle West, with its attempt to not social structure in itself ’ ’— is to him boom America “ in terms of the West,” the * ‘ normal literary attitude; 9 9 concern these Tennessee poets, headed by John with the latter is “ abnormal” — as if Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and social structure does not sustain the Mr. Tate himself, “ retired upon their ideas and desires which in turn sustain private resources,” took refuge in “ more character and action. And after all, the limited solidarities” than those afforded problem for the artist is not whether by the “ all - destroying abstraction, he takes his world as (in Mr. Tate’s un­ America.” These resources were to be fortunate word) “ final”—a matter of “ brought back to contact with the local point of view— but whether he can feel cultures from which, in each instance, and depict it as real— a matter of ar­ they originally sprang,” for the inten­ tistry. sification not of the local cultures but One need not, however, underestimate of the personal resources—a private as the justice or value of Mr. Tate’s stric­ distinguished from a public tradition. ture of local color, of the “ provincial In the history of American poetry, the vice” of “ antiquarianism” that besets Fugitives, as a group, have the impor­ writers who “ naively set out to •express’ tance of having led the way to a revival a community” by getting out the “ doc­ by a “ return to the provinces.” And uments, living and dead,” and of his in the history of regionalism they have plea that the regionalist “ approach the the importance of Traditionalists whose chosen subject matter with an instinct “ original approach to poetry was . . . for its meaning, rather than with an ab­ pure— that of craftsmen,” but whose stract theory about it or with an air of ideal of pure literature is not free from contriving for oneself all the properties aestheticism and prejudice— a taint of of the scene.” As Mr. Tate acknowl­ sterility approaching that which, in re­ edges the “ strategic value” of self-con­ gionalism mixed with sectionalism, Mr. scious and aggressive sectional groups, Tate finds * ‘ death to literature. ’ 9 such as the Poetry Society of South Car­ V olina, in clearing and preparing the In their attempt to derive from their ground for a “ purer treatment” of the local culture only a set of personal sym­ American scene, so regionalism is in bols, * ‘ supported by the prejudices, feel­ debt to him for clearing the critical air, ings, values into which the poets were in spite of the further clarification which born” (suspiciously like what Glen way his shifting and all but confusing of Wescott calls “ A patrimony, an un­ the issue makes necessary. earned inheritance, of knowledge of life, On the whole, he was on much clearer of skeletons in the closet; ” a patrimony 293 The Frontier haunted by ghosts—again quoting Mr. it has been left to the Culturist to Wescott: “ spirits so great, vain and ten­ glimpse, fashion, and champion. Its der as to resemble gods” ), the Tradi­ source and its goal are a broadly cos­ tionalists stand clearly apart from the mopolitan culture, but it is not unknown to the enlightened South and Southwest. Localists, who cultivate and exploit a Thus Henry Smith proposes in the Dal­ certain body of facts, and from the Na- las Morning News for January 3, 1932: turists, who cultivate and exploit the symbols and values of the land and the Why not regard such collecting of facts about the tremendously vital past folk. and present of the West and South, as The Localists, to quote Mrs. Fitzger­ but one step toward a fundamental re­ ald, “ as artists seek to understand and organization of American life? Our eco­ interpret the life that is around them nomic system ought to be arranged with and in them, and as readers seek to un­ more attention to geographical appro­ priateness ; we should become acquainted derstand the culture of which they are a with the treasures of legend and folk­ part” —within what limitations we have lore which yet survive from a past richer seen. The Naturists, to quote Mrs. Aus­ in its diversity than most of us had tin, “ write imaginatively, not only of imagined; our plants and animals should people, but of the scene, the totality be described and painted so that we can which is called Nature” and give them­ see them through artists’ eyes; our selves “ intransigent^ to the quality of houses should be designed from some other motive than that of copying anti­ experience called Folk, and to the frame quated European styles or of submit­ of behavior known as Mystical” — with ting to the real estate promoter’s taste. what temptations and dangers we have And a similar folk ideal is shared by also seen. The Traditionalists, at their John Gould Fletcher, a native of Little best, to quote Mr. Tate, conceive of re­ Rock, Arkansas, on the border of the old gionalism as “ only the immediate organ­ South and the new Southwest, who, by ic sense of life in which a fine artist his “ study of culture in general,” works. ’ ’ All three schools are interested through long European residence, has in culture, but each means a different been led to two conclusions: thing by it, envisaging it in terms of the . . . first, that the wider and broader “ buried culture” of his respective re­ aspects of cosmopolitan culture can only gion— the pioneer Northwest, the abor­ rest on a basis of regional culture; sec­ iginal Southwest, the agrarian South. ond, that regional culture cannot exist None of them has quite grasped the so­ and flourish in an atmosphere of inten­ cial and broadly cultural significance sive industrialism. and possibilities of regionalism as what As an antidote to the latter he pro­ Lewis Mumford calls a “ contemporary poses decentralization and desystematiza­ fact that must be assimilated and con­ tion, chiefly through a reform of educa­ sciously directed,” in terms of an inte­ tion, which, by placing its emphasis on gration and reciprocity of a “ diversity folk arts and handicrafts and regional of cultures.” studies, will proceed “ from below up­ This ideal of a regionalism, not wards rather than as at present, from simply of the past but of the above downwards.” present and of the future, not simply At the round table on Regionalism of separate but of interrelated regions, held at the University of Virginia in 294 The Frontier

July, 1931, two other Southerners took more abstract thinkers and partisan their stand with Mr. Fletcher for “ cul­ pleaders. In the New Republic for tural line-breeding” as against11 cultural March 25, 1931, he sets forth, in the inbreeding.” Stringfellow Barr, editor impartial light of criticism and history, of the Virginia Quarterly Review, issued the true nature of regionalism as a con­ this challenge to both the agrarian and temporary social reality and ideal. the industrial South: Regionalism as a modern social reality The best that can be said for an in­ does not mean the resurrection of a dead terest in the cultural aspects of region­ way of life or the mummification of local alism is, perhaps, that it is only through customs and institutions; nor is it de­ the vigorous life of each separate com­ pendent upon excessive interest in the munity that anything like universal val­ primitive, the naive, the illiterate. It is, ues are likely to be achieved. essentially, the effort to provide for the . . . as the proper alternative both continuous cultivation and development to blind traditionalism and blind pro- of all the resources of the earth and of gressivism . . . the only possible fash­ man; an effort which recognizes the ex­ ion in which any tradition can continue istence of real groups and social con­ to live is through a constant and intelli­ figurations and geographic relationships gent revision, just as the only means that are ignored by the abstract culture whereby an organism lives is through of the metropolis, and which opposes to constant re-adaptation. the aimless nomadism of modern com­ Howard W. Odum, editor of Social mercial enterprise the conception of a Forces, brings to the discussion the ob­ stable and settled and balanced and cul­ jectivity of the sociologist. Refusing to tivated life. be identified with what is often called The Traditionalist, too, it will be re­ “ the new regionalism in literature, membered, seeks a settled way of life, which is little more than ‘ the infatuation the “ good life,” but this is for the lib­ of the regionalists for their land and eration of the intellect, not for the liber­ fo lk / ” he visualizes (and in An Ameri­ ation of society. Closer to the culturist can Epoch, achieves) a regional portrai­ in his social vision is the Naturist, al­ ture in the national picture. though in his ideal of the “ Good Life,” Regionalism involves the local; but achieved through the “ mutual adapta­ much more. It involves the past but not tions of a land and a people, * ’ the latter merely the past. The local becomes is apt to put the emphasis on a distinc­ media for the understanding and char­ tive culture as expressed chiefly through acterization of the universal. The past creative activity, and like the agrarian becomes material for the study of the he is apt to flout the metropolis, which present and the future. Thus regional­ ism is of the essence of a group compo­ the regional planner seeks to maintain site which gives both explanation and in equilibrium with the indigenous areas. power to the whole social fabric as well For, contrary to critics like Lowry C. as to the separate regional units. Wimberly (in the Fall, 1932, Prairie Cultural regionalism, however, does Schooner) who look upon industrial not stop with theory but extends to standardization as death to regionalism practical programs of regional planning, (by which they mean the old provincial to which Lewis Mumford brings a con­ life, in the parochial sense) Mr. Mum- crete sense of form and a critical grasp ford (like Henry Smith, in Folk-Say: of values, free from the extremes of the 1930) sees modern inventions as making 295 The Frontier a new regionalism possible by making digenous and metropolitan, literature the region independent of the metropo­ and society, as may best be accom­ lis, while in the reciprocity of indigen­ plished by the integration of the four ous and metropolitan areas the function points of view described above, which is of the latter becomes “ that of incorpor­ in effect an integration of the science ating, reconciling, and concentrating the and the art of regionalism. diverse elements in the surrounding cul­ The science of regionalism is the tures. *9 Seeking to mediate between the stage of collection and description (Mr. local and the universal as well as past Merriam’s “ frontier literature” ) and and present, indigenous and metropoli­ even aggressive comparison of one re­ tan, Mr. Mumford states what might gion with another (Mr. Tate’s “ section­ reasonably be the ideal of both literary alism” )—a necessary stage on the way and cultural regionalism: to interregional literature and culture, The dangers of a sentimental and ret­ although the collector must not confuse rospective approach to regionalism conservation with creation nor, on the should be obvious. Local dialects are other hand, be intimidated by the interesting to the new regionalist be­ cause, like slang, they represent the liv­ charge of “ propaganda.” The science ing speech; local foods may be desirable of regionalism, when directed toward because they represent a better adapta­ the past, touches and utilizes folklore tion to the actual conditions of life; and history; when directed toward the local variants in architecture and cos­ present, it touches and utilizes sociol­ tume are significant because they are a ogy and journalism. And to its scien­ more living response to the total situa­ tion : the emphasis must not be upon the tific matter it brings a wide range of place, but upon what the place fosters, literary manner, varying, in tone and upon the quality of its life. It is pre­ value, from the primitive and provin­ cisely because no region can live to itself cial through the picturesque and quaint that each must have a firm center of its to the sentimental and sentimental- own, since intercourse and reciprocity satiric—-not even stopping at criticism can take place only between equals. and “ debunking.” But only when it This is the newness of the “ new re­ passes beyond fact and document to gionalism,” which many refuse to see symbol and significance does it become as new save in name only. It is new art. And the passage from one stage in its refusal to fall back upon the old to another is dependent not, as some provincialism and sectionalism and in would make out, upon accident of birth its insistence on an interregional life or residence but upon power of assim­ and literature in which “ all that is ilation and vision. In fact, the terms legitimate in folklore, historical curi­ regional and regionalism, if they have osity, and regional pride will thrive any value, are relative, and, like regions best when they are taken, not as es­ themselves, indicate parts of the whole. capes from contemporary fact, but as Those who think of them in terms of contributions to a living culture.” kind rather than of degree of experience VI or expression, as ends in themselves in­ The future of regionalism depends stead of means to an end, would do well upon just such an integration of past to bear in mind that there is a point at and present, local and universal, in­ which the regional becomes the univer­ 296 The Frontier

sal, just as—looking through the oppo­ are different needs and different roots, site end of the telescope— the universal on the basis of which four main types appears as the regional. This is the of regionalism have been distinguished— point at which, as Haniel Long has as­ the Localist, with roots in place; the tutely reminded me in a letter, “ aware­ Naturist, with roots in the land and the ness of anything picturesque in the sur­ folk; the Traditionalist, with roots in roundings ceases,” at which the vision personal heritage; and the Culturist, of the artist “ goes to all the horizons,” with roots in an interregional culture and he utters the “ speech of the spirit that is the combination and culmina­ confronting destiny in particularized tion of locality, folk, and tradition. The surroundings.” final lesson of regionalism for the future of literature, culture, and society in The differences among the various America, is that the individual, the ar­ stages and degrees of regionalism tend tist, inhabits two worlds, seen now as to be lost sight of under the blanket local and universal, now as social and term “ feeling for roots,” superficially intellectual, now as public and private, taken to sum up all movements that now as past and present— and that in oppose or resist the rootlessness of mod­ each case he can live more deeply, rich­ ern life. But under the common need of ly, and harmoniously in the one as he taking root, which all regionalists share, participates more fully in the other.

CHEESEMAN PARK J ohn V an Male

The trees stand dim and single in this light of death Reflected from the planet of the dead, As though they held their random breath In tainted dread.

The stone Memorial glows, a livid, sentient ghost, And Denver's myriad dwellings, roofed with light, Protect a cataleptic host Against the night.

Prom Greenland to the Land of Flame the earth is calm; A timeless peace succeeds the crude tattoo Through one unnoticed drop of balm In the witches' brew. 297 The Frontier A D A M CARGO U pton T errell Continued from the March Issue

great many things must have ized him at times. He himself was happened during the next few small and insignificant, not without A years of which he made no men­ certain assets, of course, and the Swede tion to me, but I believe he told me was immense, not only grand to look about the events of importance. The upon, but the personification of fact that he passed so quickly over a strength, courage and determination. considerable period led me to believe Adam’s restlessness, then, could he was omitting little I should know. hardly be attributed, even in part, to He left me troubled by his calm re­ a lack of confidence in Omar or to re­ lation of the manner in which he be­ morse. And he was not a coward. It came an outlaw, but I was troubled must have been idleness and superflu­ more when I endeavored to establish ous money which made him discon­ his attitude by the time he had been tented. He had all the money he need­ in Agua Blanca a few days. Was he ed and he did not know what to do regretful? He was definitely on the with it. Drink? Women? Gambling? outside of established custom now and He grew weary of all these amuse­ it was unlikely he could ever return. ments. But I got nowhere in my attempt, It was then he struck upon the idea except to ascertain that he was per­ of building on the Island. He com­ vaded with a greater restlessness than pleted his mental plans and disclosed ever before. There was no question in them to Omar. But the Swede was not my mind that so long as he was with interested. If they built a rancho on the Texas Swede he would continue to the Island it would be only a short be a bandit, not however, because the time before they would be discovered, Swede exercised a great influence over and every soldier in the country would him. No. I do not believe the Swede start after them. cared whether Adam continued as his “ Keep the valley a secret, a . . . partner. The Swede was a man who what do you call it?” he said. could have gone on alone. There was, “ A phantom?” Adam suggested. to be sure, a certain bond of loyalty “ That’s it. Some day we may be between them by this time, and they able to use it. There’s lots of feed up had learned that they were adaptable there. But, anyway, what do we want to each other (probably by force of a rancho in there fo r?” contrast) sufficiently to enable them But Adam was not ready to abandon to continue together. The Swede’s vir­ his scheme. He thought about it more, tues lay in his uncanny instincts, his and approached the Swede from a dif­ calmness and his fearlessness, and it ferent angle. The success of his second was these qualities Adam most admired. attempt convinced me that he under­ The Swede lifted him at once, gave stood his partner very well. It was his him courage, and continued to hold idea to build and equip a rancho with­ him aloft. I believed he actually idol­ out expending money, by stealing 298 The Frontier

everything necessary to make it com­ valley less than forty miles from the plete. And now Omar was interested. scene of the theft, although there was Exactly how they went about their little chance of discovery. Then they scheme I did not learn. The details took them north to the valley. It was were lacking. After they left Agua the Swede’s way. Blanca, however, they rode to the Cali­ Faced with danger, he met it un­ fornia trail and began a pillaging and flinchingly, but he never invited it. He plundering campaign. They stole a schemed before acting, listening at­ wagon loaded with household goods tentively to Adam’s suggestions, but on one occasion, burnt the wagon and always adopting his own plans when packed its contents off into the hills, there was a difference of opinion. eventually landing them in Phantom While I was listening, I was haunted Valley. And as months passed they by the thought that establishing a acquired more equipment in devious rancho meant more to Adam than he nefarious ways, finally inducing several permitted the Swede to believe. I Mexican families to emigrate to the thought he had a more profound pur­ Island. They gave the people every pose in building than he revealed, for assistance materially . . . the rich his plans were extensive and he went parks were easily tillable and there was to no end of trouble to acquire certain abundant feed . . . in so doing es­ things he wanted. As outlaws a cabin tablishing the nucleus of a colony, a anywhere in the wilderness might have wilderness village, rather than a single served as a rendezvous. There was no rancho which would be subject to de­ need of an adobe house, exceptionally struction by the military in the event well furnished, corrals, stock, cultivat­ they were discovered. There would ed patches and people to care for them. be no reason to destroy the homes of But at the end of a year they had humble Mexicans who asked nothing all these things. Their house had been more than peace, indeed, who had no built by the people they imported at interest in the affairs of state and did the south end of the Island in the shape not wish to be involved in them. of the letter U. The trees had been (I have told of this in a few words. cleared only enough to make room for It actually took considerable time.) its erection. It was surrounded by ma­ They did not hurry, for they were not jestic pines. At the other end of the building with a purpose, only to amuse Island was a pole corral and an adobe themselves. They could not derive a stable. Midway, close to the left creek, reward from their project, except its were three small houses for the Mexi­ success. If this was all they wanted cans to live in. Across the right creek they should have been contented. And water had been diverted to irrigate a I thought that Omar was. There was park in the forest. doubt in my mind about Adam. The danger of apprehension was The Swede was clever and he seldom after all negligible. They were not ex­ took unnecessary chances. The first ceptionally troublesome bandits, and time they stole horses and cattle, a the soldiers had many other problems mere handful, from a trail outfit, they with which to cope. Petty outlaws were held them for two weeks in a secluded numerous, but there were murderers, 299 The Frontier there were Indian wars, economic and days at a time. And carrying off fur­ political tangles, as well. And most of nishings, utensils, even stealing stock the wagon trains, trading outfits and was no longer amusing as a pastime. trappers were adequately protected. It Adam made the suggestion they build was the work of the cavalry to main­ a larger house, but a castle in the wil­ tain peace in the land and this work derness held no attraction for Omar. was far more important than the ap­ They compromised on a journey to prehension of individual badmen. I allay their increasing discontent, and understood that Omar and Adam were they set out for Colorado. In their not ignored. Quite the contrary. But several acts of banditry on this sojourn attempts to take them were few, and they took only money, and finding the only once were they actually in peril. excursion profitable they continued it. At Bernalillo they clashed with a de­ They passed through New Mexico once tachment of cavalry, six in number, and more and visited Arizona, but there was waged a running fight. When the un­ not much money there. They went east erring accuracy of the Swede's rifle as far as Kansas, cut back south and sent the horses of two troopers down rode into Mexico, reaching the City be­ the others abandoned the chase. The fore they stopped. Swede did not wish to kill, and for a The great Swede seemed happy, but very good reason. Adam’s restlessness and discontent “ Never kill a man unless you have were unquenched. to,” he told Adam. “ If you kill a sol­ • i • dier, then the gover ’mint begins to take I began to wonder about some his­ you seriously.” torical facts when we had come to this The Mexican people despised the point in the story. Certain events had Americans, their manners, their cus­ occurred in New Mexico of which I toms and principles, but the two out­ had read, and they would have had a laws were welcomed in the small settle­ direct bearing upon his life. Still I ments they visited. Precisely this was did not ask questions. If the coming because they were outlaws, hence ene­ of the railroad, for instance, affected mies of the government. But I sus­ him, changed him, I thought he would pected, and I believed one who knew eventually tell me. something of the nature of the Mexi­ He appeared at one time to be grow­ can people would agree with me, that ing weary of my company, and I re­ their popularity was due also to the mained away from him for more than fact that they were good spenders. So a week. At another time I did not see they found havens of protection from him for two weeks. I was fully pre­ the northern to the southern limits of pared to hear of another great change the territory. in his life, for he had remained an But at last the novelty of establish­ itinerant badman too long! Suddenly, ing a rancho wore away. They had I felt, he would do something. sufficient equipment — indeed, more One evening on which a cold wind than was necessary. And they had no bringing flurries of snow swept over use for the place. They did not care Santa Fe, I sat with him before his fire, to remain on it for more than a few warmed inwardly by his eternal nips 300 The Frontier

of whiskey (very good whiskey, for sound of dancing feet. Presently he it was brought up from Mexico for turned a corner and entered a narrow him) and outwardly by the pinon coals, street lined with small low houses. He which seemed almost as eternal. What came to a young woman sitting on a he told me that evening so astounded chair before a dark doorway. She lift­ me that I was inclined to suspect him ed her head as he approached and the of leading me on. But I had long be­ moonlight fell full on her face revealing fore learned to believe him implicitly its fine features. Her hair was combed . . . I had gone over all that. straight backward to a silver clasp They came back from Mexico City through which it burst like a spray of to the territory once more. Three years black, shining water. She leaned for­ had passed since that night they had ward and smiled. Speaking in Span­ held up the Trail House in Santa Fe. ish, she requested the time. Many things had changed in the coun­ He took a watch from his pocket, a try. Cattlemen were moving up the watch he had taken from the pocket streams from the southeast; new settle­ of a freighter on the trail. “ It is mid­ ments, trading posts had been estab­ night.” lished. There was talk of the railroad “ Thank you.” coming. He started on, but she stopped him They reached Albuquerque one eve­ by speaking quickly. ning at sundown and stopped at a Mex­ “ If you please ...” ican house on the edge of town. After eating Omar fell asleep, but Adam sat “ W ell?” smoking before the house. If in my “ Please sit down.” attempt to imagine his thoughts at this “ W h y?” moment I was correct I did not know. For an answer she smiled again. He I decided not to set them down and sat down on the doorstep. “ What is chance being wrong. But it was only your name?” he asked. just for me to say that I found them “ Rita.” to be thoughts which aroused a certain “ How old are you ?” sympathy in me for him. “ Fifteen.” He heard a bell toll. The moon was “ Fifteen! And in this business!” full and shed a blue light over the “ Yes.” adobe walls about him. Some one “ Do you speak English?” strummed a guitar softly across a “ Yes, like Spanish.” courtyard. He left the house and set ‘ ‘ Like that! How did you learn ? ’ 9 out leisurely along the street, walking “ My mother was an American.” until he had come near the center of “ Do you live with her?” the town. Lights fell from the door­ “ She is dead.” ways of saloons. Indians wrapped in “ And your father?” blankets lounged before dark houses. “ He is dead.” He did not know where the lane would “ Then you are alone?” take him. But he kept on, keeping in She nodded, gazing up at the moon­ shadow as he passed the saloons in lit sky. He looked closely at her face. which he heard music, laughter, the It was slender, young, finely molded. The Frontier 301

“ I came here to live only when the waved the knife. The other woman moon was young,” she said quietly. fled with wild cries. “ There was no one, no lover, then!” On the ground before them a woman “ He was killed.” writhed like a snake in death agony. He smoked. She sat looking away up Blood covered her face. the street. Then she turned to him. “ Drop the knife,” he commanded, “ Would you care to come inside?” and she obeyed him. He took her arm. Before he had answered a door “ Come on.” opened in the next house and two Cautiously they made their way women came out. They were laughing through the city to the house at the noisily. When they came before Rita edge where he had left Omar sleeping. and Adam they stopped, staring at her. He concealed Rita in a room. Then he One of them swayed slightly with liq­ went again to sit alone in the court. uor. It was at this juncture that the fort­ “ So this is the new girl who hides night interval between our talks oc­ from us. Why don’t you show your curred, and by the time I saw him face to your neighbors!” one said. again I had prepared myself for the “ The new girl,” said the other. future. I thought I knew what to ex­ “ Well, Lopez will steal no more.” pect, for now I knew for a certainty Both broke out in raucous laughter. what his thoughts were as he sat alone “ And there was a lover. He will in the courtyard after concealing Rita love no more.” in the house. “ And you will not cling to his legs At first I had thought nothing of while they shoot him. But now you his pulling his hat over his face when have other lovers.” the two women had approached Rita “ And they pay, too.” and him. I even was inclined to omit Adam had pulled his hat low over mention of the act. He would have his eyes when the two women ap­ done it under any circumstance, for he proached. He sat leaning back against was not safe in Albuquerque. But later the wall, his face in darkness. I grew suspicious, and suddenly I un­ Suddenly Rita leaped up. 1 ‘ Get ou t! ’ ’ derstood. The woman who fled when she cried. Rita drew a knife was Nina the nun. The two women pushed each other But if I thought I had anticipated gayly, amused at the defiance of the his story I was very much wrong. girl. He decided to tell Omar he had seen “ Proud,” said one. Nina, and the next morning took him “ Little cat,” the other cried. aside and related the details of the ex­ Rita took a step toward them. “ Get perience. The Swede said nothing un­ ou t!” til he had finished. Then he spoke. One of the women struck at her and “ I halfway expected to meet her she jumped back. A knife gle&med in again. W e’ll call on her this evening.” her hand. She sprang forward and Adam tried to dissuade him. “ It plunged the blade into the woman’s won’t be safe after the killing. And, throat. Adam stood up, keeping against anyway, you don’t want any more of the house wall. Rita screamed and her.” 302 The Frontier

“ Not with her,” said the Swede, They looked at her contorted, white “ but I've got a hunch. And I think face. Then Omar grunted. it will be safe enough.” “ Raising it here ought to make it They left Rita in the house that eve­ proud of its mammy,” he spoke with ning, and made their way to the door malicious sarcasm. out of which Adam had seen Nina come. “ Get o u t!” she cried. “ You get out Omar pushed it open, and they stepped and let me alone! ’ ’ inside. He closed it quietly behind “ We w ill,” he told her. “ And we them. Light fell into the room from w on’t bother you no more. Unless beneath a curtain hanging in a parti­ . . . you’d like to go along?” tion door and they could make out a “ I ’d rather die,” she said, and then bed, two chairs and a table. They heard she laughed without moving her eyes some one move in the next room. from his face. “ Who is there?” Nina asked. “ Then what would you do if I took “ Two men,” Omar answered. the boy with m e?” She stiffened, and her face, hard- “ W ait.” lined from her life of dissipation, grew She pushed the curtain aside, emitted cold. “ I ’d go to the government with a low cry and retreated. They fol­ a story they’d like to hear.” lowed her into the lighted room. She The Swede took a threatening step stood beside a table, pale and trem­ toward her. “ After you tell your bling. story,” he said, his lips scarcely mov- “ You ain’t surprised, are you?” ing, “ you get out of the country pron­ Omar asked her. He looked about the to. It w on’t be safe for you here. The room. “ Well, I declare . . .” In a hoy goes with me.” corner a small child lay asleep on a He turned from her. She screamed. couch. “ I had an idea,” he said as Her hands came from behind her back. he moved toward it. He stood beside In one was a small pistol which she had the couch. “ Yours?” slipped from under the blanket on the “ Whose do you think?” she replied chair. She fired, the ball striking viciously. Omar between the shoulders. He He raised the cover and replaced it pitched forward, fell face downward, gently. “ Boy, too.” and lay still. She sat down in a blanket-covered Adam had turned to face her when chair, her eyes fastened upon him. she screamed. He had drawn his pistol “ A stranger might say I was its when he saw the weapon in her hand papa,” he mused. “ Blue eyes. My and fired with all the speed he pos­ hair. What do you think, Adam ?” sessed. But he was too late. The ball Adam moved across the room and from his gun, however, struck her in the placed a finger in the child’s mouth. breast and she fell dead. But she had “ Old enough,” he said. taken the Swede with her. She gasped and stood up, leaning Adam bent over his fallen partner, against the wall, her hands behind her. ascertained that he was dead, and stood “ Don’t you touch him again, either up. For a moment he seemed to have of you!” she said warningly. lost the power to move. Suddenly it 303 The Frontier returned to him. The child was now years. And then I wanted to apologize screaming with fright, and he quickly to our friendship for having such a took it up, covering it with a blanket. thought. He was not one to crawfish. Then he knocked the lamp over and To his dying day he would not back­ crawled out a window. Some one had water. Well, then, I had no other rea­ entered the front and was calling, son. “ What is wrong? What is wrong?” Time went on so easily with him, He ran down a narrow lane, smothering lost in the columns of words he uttered. the cries of the child as he fled. He jumped years ahead, came back to • * * go on where he had paused, and jumped (In Santa Pe today the people know ahead again. He made no effort to well Phantom Valley, the Mason Cattle relate events in chronological order. Company, the Island Ranch. In sum­ Still he never went far enough ahead mer they drive to the forests bordering to give me a clue as to a conclusion Cargo Creek and Cargo Lake to camp or a hint as to what to expect. He sur­ and fish. They know the old man who prised me continually, despite his lit­ first settled there with his great golden­ erary incompetency. Time in itself haired partner. They know Jules Ma­ was not counterpart to the facts of his son, who came along some years later story. I forgot it purposely, as he was and became the titular head of the com­ unconsciously disregarding it. I set pany. They don’t know how, and as down all the things I knew which oth­ I write this I don’t know how, the ers did not know. I retained to myself Island kingdom fell under his com­ nothing he told me. mand. But I know a good deal of the This was the first secret: He took people who have lived all their lives Rita and the child to the Island from in New Mexico and in Santa Pe don’t Albuquerque and established them in know about the little dark man, the the house. And that was all he said little old outlaw they see sunning him­ about them then. self like an old dog drowsing away his Something had happened to him. It last days in the Plaza. And for some took him quite some time to understand reason I hold a feeling of pride in my the change. When he did reach an knowledge.) understanding, he left the Island. I began to believe here that I was This was it: Suddenly he had found listening to a confession more than the himself alone, once more on the brink story of a life, although I had not of time. Omar was gone, and he could thought so before. But a man who has hold no hope they would meet again sinned does not sit up and tell about as he had done that day in El Paso. his wickedness for no reason at all. I While the Texas Swede had lived, had remarked at the beginning that I been his partner, he had never fully thought he only wanted to talk. It realized what such a loss would mean. sufficed as a reason. But I felt there I did not believe he mourned in, the must be another reason . . . now. common manner. Good Lord, no. But I wondered if he felt death creeping all at once everything had stopped. He upon him and had a desire to free a stood in a motionless world, not know­ secret he had carried with him all these ing which way to turn. Then finally 304 The Frontier he understood. He could not continue Omar in her arms when she slipped and alone the life he had lived with the fell into the water. A Mexican boy great Swede. His outlaw days were got Omar out. She could not swim completed. and being overcome with fright and And so he rode away from the Island. fighting madly she repulsed the boy’s He went back, but he left again be­ efforts to reach her. The swift water lieving he would never return. He carried her into a hole and she was went to Arizona and let the seasons drowned. pass. He returned to the Island, left But she was very happy during the again, and went to Mexico City, re­ three years she had lived on the Island. maining there the calendar round. He told me this and I had no alterna­ tive but to believe him. It was as if But something took him back to the he had granted her a reprieve from a wilderness ranch. Always some mys­ living death for that length of time. terious force drew him back. And each time he returned he found it un­ This tragedy took place one spring. changed, as he had left it. There was He remained on the Island until the more stock on the ranges in the forests. summer waned, wandering much of the There was little Omar, golden-haired, time in the high country with Gomez, a blue-eyed as his father had been. There Mexican vacquero. The cattle he saw was Rita. There were new Mexican (they were numerous on each range) babies, and some more Mexicans had started plans formulating in his mind drifted into the valley, built houses on for dispensing with them at a profit. the Island, and begun to till the bot­ It was a difficult problem to solve. tomlands. They were the progeny of the critters he and Omar had stolen, and because I wondered about Rita. He spoke of of their prolonged freedom they were her so briefly that I concluded he really as wild as the native animals about paid little attention to her, looking them. Fat creatures who had never upon her as a necessity. She was seen a rider, with the possible excep­ Omar’s mother now, but another might tion of wandering Indians; rangy, have served as well in the capacity. swift, vicious bulls; old cows acting I didn’t think he had an affection for more like deer than domestic animals; her. Perhaps he even felt a little bitter wide-eyed calves . . . toward her. If he had not met her It would not have been safe for him that evening in Albuquerque . . . But to gather a herd and drive it through he did tell me he noticed a favorable the country. At least, at first consid­ change in her at the end of a year. She eration he did not think it would have seemed to be content, even to take pride been a wise move. The only markets in her position as mistress of his house, available were the military posts and for after all he was a sort of wilder­ Indian agencies. They received most ness baron. I thought the change was of their meat supply from the ranches due in part to her renewed interest in on the plains far east. life. Then it appeared he abandoned the One afternoon she was crossing the thought, for he stopped talking about stream on a log footbridge carrying it. He bowled me over once more, 305 The Frontier without warning changing his course. ly. Then as if relieved of a burden He went to Santa F e ! she brightened and took his arm. “ I It was, as one might expect, evening am so happy. Why did you com e?” when he rode into town and dismount­ “ To see you.” ed before the Chavis house in Galesteo She smiled knowingly. “ Am I not Road. He stood in the shadow of the here?” patio gate watching a lighted door. “ I expected you would have a hus­ When she came out, at last, with a jar band and children by this time and be to get water from the acequia, he spoke gone away with them.” her name softly. She drew away from him and cov­ “ Magdalena!” ered her face with her hands. Sud­ She stood very still, the jar poised denly she faced him, an expression of at the water’s surface, and stared into defiance on her olive face. the darkness in which he was standing. “ You are disappointed then?” He stepped out into the moonlight. “ No, I am glad.” “ Mother of G od!” she breathed. This confused her and she forgot her “ Be quiet.” defiance. “ Glad?” She put the jar down and came hur­ “ Yes. I have come to take you away riedly toward him. “ How they have with me.” watched for you here!91 she whispered. Now she was astonished. Her mid­ “ And for the big Omar. Where is he? night eyes grew wide. “ To marry But wait! Come . . .” m e?” She led the way into a room which “ If you wish.” had only a small window covered with She fell to her knees, and again cov­ a dark curtain. ered her face. “ Mother of God,” she “ W a it!” moaned, “ I cannot marry you.” She went out, returning presently “ Why not?” he asked calmly. with a candle which she placed on a She looked up at him, hopelessness in her eyes. “ I am worthless.” table. “ Now . . . Ah, senor, I knew you He laughed. “ Get up,” he said would come back some day. I am gruffly. “ What do you mean?” so happy to see you. But you are not She rose slowly. “ Six different men safe here. They have not forgotten. have I taken and I can have no child. ’ ’ And the big Omar?” She struck herself. “ There is nothing “ He is dead.” in me. I am em pty!” “ Jesus! He was killed?” He laughed again, and she became “ By the woman who was the mother angry. She ran at him and beat on his of his child.” chest. He pinned her arms to her sides. “ Jesus, the sister.” “ Listen to me,” he said sternly. “ They know then?” “ You can live with me. The last thing “ Si. They know. We all know . . . I want is a child.” The child was killed, too?” She relaxed in his arms. “ I will go “ I have the child. But Nina is with you anywhere. What does it mat­ dead.” ter? I love you. By the Holy Virgin “ Jesus!” She signed herself quick­ Mary, I have always loved you!” 306 The Frontier

He ignored her passionate outburst. be easily carried off. The Island was “ But you can have a child. You can her world! The beyond belonged to have a son. I will give you one al­ all the others. She had her own space. ready growing fast. You can be his She ruled her own tiny kingdom. Was mother.” she not more fortunate, then, than all “ The son of the big Omar?” the others whose paths crossed on the “ The son of the big Omar.” other side of the stream? “ Jesus,” she murmured. I had an idea other forces than her When she was not with him, she kept imagination and her homely philosophy to herself, for she was not accustomed played important roles in her adjust­ to the respect the Island people at once ment. He did not tell me so. It was rare accorded her, and she was shrewd when he suggested to me that emotion enough to understand that familiarity entered into his life. But he did tell with them might reveal this fact. Often me that she had changed during the she would cross the stream on the same period he was away from her, that her log bridge from which Rita had fallen olive face was less pointed, that there to her death, and with little Omar go was a certain mature gracefulness in to sit in a park in the forest. her that he had not noticed before and She made no effort to hide the fact a certain becoming fullness to her fig­ that at first she did not like the Island, ure. He mentioned that she became nor altogether her situation upon it, al­ increasingly particular in her personal though she enjoyed certain advantages appearance and was never seen by the over her previous environment. But she Island people in unfavorable dress. She had a feeling of confinement, being sur­ spent hours oiling her hair in the sun­ rounded by water, narrow as it was, shine, bathing, and countless days mak­ which did not cease to trouble her. It ing dresses from goods he purchased seemed to her she was detached from for her. He was obliged on several oc­ the earth. And she wanted to return casions to take her to Albuquerque to to it. On the Island one could go only buy jewelry, Mexican and Indian so far, and then one had to go back, pieces, and not a few useless trinkets as a prisoner in a court. On the Island from the east, altogether too expensive the end of everything was discernible for her kind. . . . the world beyond was only a I had the feeling, nevertheless, that dream. it all had amused him a good deal, that But the few steps across the bridge he enjoyed it. It was at least divert­ dispelled these unpleasant illusions, and ing, something new. But I believed after each trip she returned with her also that it awakened something in him mind obviously relieved, with the en­ which had been asleep a good many couraging knowledge that the world years. after all was accessible to her. Even­ He took a desperate chance the fol­ tually, however, she began to look upon lowing fall. He gathered a hundred the question in a philosophical manner. beef animals and drove them out of the She was a young woman with a vivid valley. When he reached the wagon imagination, but she had experienced trail he placed Gomez in charge and life to the extent that she was not to Continued on page 321 307 The Frontier

THE OPEN RANGE Bach issue will carry accounts of personal outdoor experiences. Only accounts of actual experiences are solicited.

OLD TIMER: EZRA MEEKER

M au d M a p l e M iles

E was Ezra Meeker—I knew It the difference did it make? He noticed the sev­ minute I opened the door. Who else eral nationalities among the young people H could he be In his homespun suit of and was interested to find out the countries gray, his wide sombrero and his pleasant from which the foreign-born children had face wreathed in white hair and beard? He come. The one Chinese girl in the class told wore knee-length boots—I could tell that, something of what she remembered of China, although his trousers covered them. His and others gave reminiscences of their for­ eyes were blue, with a merry twinkle as he eign homes. Mr. Meeker rewarded them spoke. richly by telling, at length, of his pioneer “Are you the young lady who made that experiences in the West Santa Fe Trail Marker out in Penn Valley One story that he told I think has never Park?” been published. When Mr. Meeker was “Yes,” I replied, “that is mine and I know twenty-one and his wife eighteen they started you must be Ezra Meeker.” out over the Oregon trail. After stopping “ Now how did you know that?” he inquired one winter in Iowa, where their first child whimsically as he took off his sombrero and was born, they went on with a wagon train held out his hand in greeting. over the seemingly unlimited area beyond. He came into the studio and we talked One day, when in the farthest region of the about the old trails. Although no one living desert, their wagon-train found a lone knew half so much about them as he, yet prairie-schooner drawn up by the roadside. he was anxious to learn anything more that A little girl was dying in it and her parents, anyone could tell him. risking their own lives, had let their train Mr. Meeker had a slight “cast in one eye,” go on without them, since the jolting of the which gave him a somewhat roguish expres­ wagon caused the child cruel suffering. Mr. sion when he joked or laughed. Indeed, he Meeker’s party was very nearly out of water did have a sense of humor, and it kept him and had no idea how much farther they very much alive when he had reached an might have to go before finding any. As age of ninety-seven years. it was a matter of life and death to keep My studio interested him. I invited him going, the train went on ; but the young to sit for a picture. “Oh, let the women and Meekers stopped, even though their oxen were the girls sit for their pictures; I don’t think hanging out their tongues swollen from that’s a man’s job.” In vain I urged him, thirst The Meekers had but little water for but did not give up hoping, for I was de­ themselves. They remained with the par­ termined to make a record of this unusual ents of the dying child as long as she lived personality. and then helped the sorrowing father bury My high school art students were studying her. portraiture and, incidentally, facial charac­ Mr. Meeker was seventy-eight years old teristics. They invited Mr. Meeker to be when I finally induced him to sit for a por­ their guest at a luncheon in my studio. I trait. Upon first sight that painting simply don’t believe the old gentleman ever enjoyed depicted an aged man napping in his chair— anything more than he did that “ Bohemian I called it the Pioneer’s Reverie. However, social affair.” If we ran out of spoons we if one were to sit and muse before the pic­ stirred our coffee with modelling tools—what ture, out of the background the vision of his 308 The Frontier dream would appear: oxen drawing a prairie I saw the old blue eyes beginning to twinkle schooner which was just emerging into view, I knew that the danger of rebellion was over. mingled among the misty colors of the back­ “ Why, it doesn’t look so bad that way ground. I think I need not tell why the after all,” he granted. “Any man who has angelic face of a little child was there, too, lived as long as I have knows that a woman looking up into the face of the sleeping old will have her way sometime, whether she man. has it at first or not.” Mr. Meeker objected, at first, to sitting The friendship that began then lasted more for a side view. “Now Mrs. Miles,” he ar­ than twenty years. gued, “I have gone through life looking the He was well along in his nineties one time world square in the face so far, and I want when I went to New York on business. He to go on the rest of my life just that way.” was then President of the Oregon Trail Me­ This is how I finally persuaded him to sit morial Association with headquarters there. for a portrait. One day he came to my studio New York was having her big jubilee, and complaining that he was lonely between four Mr. Meeker invited me to attend one evening. and eight o’clock in the morning: “ I never I have never forgotten my feeling of amaze­ find anybody out of bed in Kansis City be­ ment when I learned that he took a street fore eight o’clock and I simply can’t stay car from his hotel to mine yet insisted that I, in bed after four. As far as I am concerned, forty years his junior, must go to the jubilee those four good hours are wasted every day.” in a taxicab. He returned me to my hotel “Why not pose for your portrait?” I in a taxi, dismissed it and took a street urged. “ It’s daylight at five o’clock. You car back to his hotel. He fairly tired me could be out here by then.” out because he would not let me overlook a single detail of the exhibition. A look of amazement brightened his face. Another interesting incident occurred on “Would you get up as early as that just to paint my picture?” a subway platform. As we got out o f our train at a transfer point, a young couple, “ Why, certainly I would.” evidently Yiddish, were sitting on a bench “If you want to paint one enough to do nearby. They arose at once and insisted that, I think I might just as well sit here as upon our taking their seats. Protesting, we in some hotel lobby all alone.” finally yielded and the young people stood One day when the painting was well on its aside, apparently studying Mr. Meeker’s face. way—he had insisted on looking over his The young woman approached me respect­ shoulder and gazing fixedly at the back of fully, saying, “I beg your pardon, but is that my canvas—he fell sound asleep for some the Old American?” time; I hastily sketched in the side view “Yes, this is Mr. Ezra Meeker, a pioneer of the head. I felt fearful that I would of the old Oregon Trail.” never again get a chance. He slept for an “ We are so glad to see him! We have hour or two while my brushes flew over the been in America two years and we have seen canvas. Finally he began to stir and rub old people of every nationality, excepting his neck, as though it pained him. American. We have read about the Old “I think I must have been asleep,” he re­ American in the newspapers, and I can’t tell marked. you how glad I am to see him.” “Yes, you have had quite a nap,” I shouted, His friends had us out to dinners and teas for he was very hard of hearing. and showed me a flattering amount of at­ Mr. Meeker was keen to notice that there tention. I learned that he had been praising must be some reason why I had let him sleep me extravagantly, right and left, giving a so long and when he awakened was so fever­ marvelous account of the portrait I had ishly at work. He stiffly climbed down off painted and the bas-relief that I made of him. the rostrum and came around to the face One lady, a friend of his, thought she of the canvas. I fairly held my breath while would entertain us by having a matinee he took a look at the painting. It was his party to see So This Is London. Mr. Meeker sense of humor that saved me. As soon as escorted us to the theatre, and to our seats, 309 The Frontier with all the courtesy of a “gentleman of the than he was, or convert the heroine into a old school.” baby-doll, or to defame any man’s memory When the curtain went up he excused him­ to supply a proper villain. I think he might self and did not reappear until the curtain have permitted some slight exaggeration of went down at the end of the last act. Then the heroine’s charms, but as to the men he he came to escort us home. Everyone I yielded not one iota. knew in New York called him “ Uncle Ezra,” They went so far as to photograph the so our hostess exclaimed, “ Uncle Ezra, where prologue, which picture shows a young have you been; why didn’t you tell me you mother with her children walking along didn’t like So This Is London?” Broadway. The children stop before the old “Certainly I like So This Is London,” he Trinity Church and go into the yard. They replied. “ I’ve read that it’s an extremely look at the old tomb-stones, reading the in­ good play and well worthwhile, but on a scriptions as they wander about. The chil­ sunny day like this why should I sit in the dren express interest in the olden times. house to look at a make-believe London while Then they see “ Uncle Ezra,” and call to him there is a real New York outside?” as he comes down the street. The children His New York friends had enjoyed the run to greet him and, with their mother, motion picture, The Covered Wagon, and take him in an automobile to their apart­ asked Mr. Meeker about it. He granted that ment. “ Daddy” comes home for dinner and it was a marvelous work of art but com­ after the meal they settle cozily before an plained loudly of certain discrepancies be­ open fire, begging “ Uncle Ezra” for a story. tween the story and the facts as he remem­ The story of the Oregon Trail was to fol­ bered them. Jim Bridger was represented low, but it never was completed. These de­ as a drunkard; Mr. Meeker maintained that voted friends of his tried every art and wile he was no such thing; that he was a man to overcome his prejudice. One gentleman, who could drink his liquor and “take it stand­ whose name I forget, overstepped the bounds ing up.” Drinking did not make him ridicu­ of literal truth in trying to persuade Mr. lous, like the Jim Bridger in the play. Meeker; his old blue eyes that could twinkle Mr. Meeker’s friends determined that they so merrily became as cold as steel as he con­ would preserve the true story of the trail and fided to me, “I caught him in a lie! I can photograph it while he was living. The plan overlook almost any other fault, but when­ was to have him go with an outfit and film ever I catch a man lying I never trust him the story as he told it, exact in every detail, in anything after that.” That, as far as I with the true scenes as the backgrounds. know, ended the filming project. The first step had to be a scenario, so Mr. Another incident comes to mind, which James Cruze undertook to write one. All happened while I was in New York. Mr. went well until the author and his co-workers Meeker and I had taken dinner in his favor­ wanted to work a little of the magic hocus- ite restaurant where they knew him and pocus, considered so important by authors, catered to his taste. After dining he said, into the true story of the trail. “ It’s such a nice evening, why not take a The old gentleman was firm in protesting. ride?” So we did, on the front seat of the “It didn’t happen that way and I am not top of a Riverside Drive bus. As we rode going to have it told that way.” he spoke of his New York friends and their The others argued, “But it will cost for­ “daily tubbing,” then told of the experiences tunes in money to make such a picture and no of the pioneers with baths. In the earliest one will go to see it unless we have a story. days, he said, the proper procedure was to The public demands a story with a hero who take a cedar, or oaken, bucket of warm water is brave, a heroine who is beautiful, and a away from the cabin and, in a nice grassy villain who is a demon.” nook behind bushes, apply soft soap and “But such are not the facts in the case,” hot water with a brush, scrubbing thoroughly insisted Mr. Meeker stubbornly. from head to foot, rinsing with a sponge or Nothing that could be said or done could a cloth and, as a finish, pouring the entire induce him to make the hero more heroic contents of the bucket over the head. 310 The Frontier

I never saw Mr. Meeker after I left New author, re-discoverer of the old trails and York, but I heard from him frequently until as a traveler in ox-wagons, airplanes, or au­ a few weeks before his death. tomobiles (to suit any occasion) are too well Mr. Meeker lived a long life, indeed. Truly known for me to do more than refer to them. he lived until the end. He never reached In the last twenty years of his life, beginning the “chimney corner age,” like some ancient at an age that few ever attain, he achieved sire who sits and mumbles of the deeds of more important deeds and found more fun his youth, forgotten by everyone other than in life than most men ever accomplish. himself. Mr. Meeker was as interested in There was nothing goody-goody about Mr. what went on around him, in every day life, Meeker, but the habits of his youth—cour- as he was in anything that happened in the rage, fineness, and cleanliness of body, mind, years before. His experiences as pioneer, and soul—bad become the man himself.

WITH CUSTER

O rph a M. G ardner

Dust and murk, and everywhere The sense of sickening despair— Hell in the hot and stifling air!

Hell broke loose through the smoking ground; Hell-hounds circling round and round This God-forsaken, ghastly mound!

One hour—two— three at the most . . . A soldier should know how to die at his post. I f help doesn’t come, it ’s Death will boast.

Damnable demons, yell! I t ’s your doom. One more!—To hell and blacken its gloom! Another, and another! Men, make room

Behind that horse! No time for wounds. The heat, the stench—the growing mounds— Closer and closer the circle . . . No sounds

Save those of the Indian ponies 9 retreat . . . Alone! And life was sweet—sweet! Death, old scout, . . . at . . . last . . . you beat! 311 The Frontier

HISTORICAL SECTION Each issue will carry some authentic account, diary or journal or reminiscence, preferably of early days in this region of the country.

UPHAM LETTERS FROM THE UPPER MISSOURI, 1865 E dited by P. C. P hillips

I ntroductory Note TTirnm "D Unham was one of the great stream of pioneers who came to the Northwest m the S fl^ s ix tie s . Most ^ f them were allured by the prospect of gold in the mountains. Upham left home apparently driven by disappointment in love. He was not drawn on }>y the P® w 2afh ” u t T a ^ wnung to became a clerk for an agent of the savage Blackfoot Indians Hiram D. Upham was born in Madison county, New York February 2-, *83 a Hiram and Delphia Upham. As a young man he went to Coldwater, htndsSm Jm aS collector of bounties, pensions, and back pay for sold era . ^ r h w V e ^ d r w e r n b n e r Wood with an exuberance of humor, and was popular socially. Miss Coe and and Miss Eugenia Coe, who were the recipients of the two ^ t e r s here p w l i ves In Tampa Wood were later married and their daughter, Miss V rginia. Coe Wood, now “ ve.?giL"„ ““g j; Florida. Hiram Upham fell in love with a friend of theirs, who is break the Thev were apparently engaged to be married but something happened to «re»K ine enjfgem en t^sldebecam e aCatholic and entered a convent. Upham sought a clerkship irt the Indian bureau and went to St. Louis and embarked on the steamer Twilight fo rth e Blackfoot country He retained this position until 1871, when he resigned to become a clerk for the trad­ ing firm of T. C. Powers and Company. His life as a trader led him into Canada and through the mountains of the Northwest. In 1878 he left the firm and in Partn^shlp with Joseph Kip. the famous ^ d i ^ inteijreten engaged in the merchandise business at Fort Conrad on the Marlas river The partnerslater became interested in ranching and carried on extensive irrigation projects. In 1885 Upham was still actively engaged in business at Fort Conrad, and after that there is no record or mm. At the time when Upham went up the Missouri many small steamers were engaged in the Indian trade. The Twilight was a side-wheeler 18'0 feet .long and 32 feet■wide. She» first as­ cended the Missouri in 1858 under the command of Captain John Shaw. She struck a snag to September, 1865, while descending the Missouri near Napoleon, Missouri, and sank. The Cora, which was the companion of the Twilight on the voyage up in 1865 and sunk near Omaha, was later raised and continued the Missouri river trade for several years. The headquarters of the Blackfoot agency was at Fort Benton, which had been built be­ tween 1848-1850 by Major Alexander Culbertson, for the fur-trading firm of Pierre Chouteau. Jr., and Company, generally known in the Northwest as the American Fur Company. Gad E. Upson had been appointed Blackfoot agent in 1863. He found the Indians turbulent, and in the fall of 1865 he with Upham’s help negotiated a new treaty with them which superseded.the Stevens treaty of 1865. By this treaty the Blackfeet agreed to cede to the United States all their lands south of the Missouri. He died at San Francisco in March, 1866, and Upham acted as Indian agent until the arrival of Upson’s successor. George B. Wright, a year later. Upham found many difficulties during his brief administration. The Blackfeet, Bloods, and Piegans soon after signing the treaty started war again. Upham wrote a report dated July 25, 1866, published in the Report of the Secretary of the Interior (House Ex oocs. /nd bess. 39 Cong, n , No. 81) describing the Indian depredations, and the difficulties of his position. The two letters written by Upham In the summer of 1865 to his friends, Ab and Jennie, are now printed for the first time. For years they remained in the possession of the recipients and from them passed to their daughter, Miss Virginia Coe Wood. They are now in the private collection of Mr. W . R. Coe of New York City, with whose permission they are printed. On Board the Steamer Twilight—450 miles I left St. Louis April 19th. I took passage below Fort Benton. on the Steamer “Twilight” which was ad­ Sunday June 18th, 1865 vertised to go in company with the Steamer Friend Ab— “Cora” for the purpose of assisting each On the 19th day of April last (2 months other in case of accident or Indians. The ago) I left St. Louis for Ft. Benton. During Cora however struck a snag and sunk a few all that time I have been waiting for some­ miles above Omaha which was the last of thing of interest to happen before writing to her. We had to take all of her passengers, you, but today being devilish dull on the Boat her freight was all lost. She sunk about 2 I concluded to let drive and give you a history miles from where the Steamer Bertrand of my journey as far as I have come. As I said sunk a short time previous. It is devilish 312 The Frontier slow work steamboating on the Missouri calves now, so you see we have all kinds of River. In the first place the current in the Buffalo—Old Bull, Young Bull, little Calf, River is very strong, over 5 miles an hour. Old Cow & hiefer but no steers. You would Next comes the sand bars, sometimes we laugh to see the old mountain men cut the are a whole day getting over a bar. There stones and tongue out of a Bull as soon as are 2 ways of doing it. 1st If the water on he is down. They are considered the choicest the bar is deep enough they “ Spar” over parts. Deer, Antelope, wolves, Bears and by using span and ropes with the machinery. Elk are also very abundant on the shores. If however the water will not allow this Indeed all kinds of game is so abundant that they have to “doubletrip.” The way they it has ceased to have any interest. do it is this—They take off freight enough After the Cora sunk we fell in with the below the bar to lighten the boat so that Steamer Lillie Martin bound for Fort Benton, she will pass over. Then go above the bar since which time we have traveled in com­ and take off as much more and then go back pany and will continue to do so from here and get the first pile after which they can to Fort Benton. Having government goods pass over. The ugliest things in the River aboard we are both armed with a 12 pound however are Snags. In the lower River from gun which throws grape & cannister, solid Omaha down the bank is very soft and is shot & shell. Besides this the passengers continually falling into the River taking the have rifles and Revolvers till you cant rest. trees with it. These trees make the snags So you see we are well prepared for any and when a boat strikes a big one under emergency. Now for the Indian subject. I water its rather certain death to her. We would like to have “Onewanke” hear this have been struck four times but luckily for part of the letter. The first fort of any size us none of them went through the hull. The after we leave the settlements is fort Rice1 last one was the closest call. It went tearing (after Fort Randall)9 When we got here through both the lower and upper decks and they told us we must look out for Indians as tore things generally but we got through it the last boat that went up was fired into all right. When the wind blows very hard about 2 miles above the Fort. There was a we have to lie up to shore and lay there large war party Sioux Indians on both sides until it goes down which was the case all day of the River above. The night before we yesterday. We do not run at all nights, got to the Fort one of the Pickets had been They have to cut wood and bring it on the shot by an Indian who crawled up on him in boat and work it up. There is plenty of the grass and killed him within 200 yards timber all along the River. Now for the of the Fort. The night that we lay at the game question. I can give you some Buffalo Fort a Lieutenant died who had been shot Stories which you might think rather large through the breast with an arrow a few days but which are true. I believe I have seen before by an Indian while out with a party 50,000 Buffaloes within the last two weeks. after wood. We wanted to get some beef at They are continually swimming across the the Fort. They have plenty of cattle back River in droves and very often they get on the hills—but having no cavalry they did caught in the current and carried right not dare go after them. The fact of it is the down by the boat so close that they are soldiers in all these Forts on the River are often struck by the wheels. The deck hands kept penned up by the Indians like so many can take a lasso and catch them in the water cattle. All the good they do is to keep the any day. They often get up under a steep River open for Steamboats and protect bank which they cannot climb and the boat traders and Indian Agents. The Government passes so near that we can shoot them with does not own any of them. They are built Revolvers. Their hides are good for noth­ and owned by the American Fur Company. ing this time of year. All the cows have Fort Union8 being the only one owned by 1 Port Rice was a military post built in 1864, near the mouth of the Cannonball river, 2 Fort Randall was originally the American Pur Company post of old Port Pierre built in 1830. The government purchased the fort in 1855 and in 1857 named It Port Randan • Port as the pr Inc h>a ffu r ^m ericanFur Company probably in 1827. For many years it wua me principal rur-tradlng post on the upper Missouri. 313 The Frontier

Uncle Sam and that was purchased this went out to where they were. About % mile Spring. They are all garrisoned by paroled from the Fort was the “Big Medicine House” Rebel Soldiers. After we left Fort Rice we This was made by sticking brush about 10 took extra precautions and kept a double or 15 feet high into the ground in the shape guard on nights. Although we saw plenty of a circle about 75 feet in diameter with of the Red Devils at a distance yet they one opening for a door on on side into which dared not attack us, I think they are a little we were allowed to look but forbidden to afraid of two boats. They are a cowardly pass, by “ Big Medicine” an ugly looking set of whelps and never dare board a boat Indian blacker than any of A1 Dickenson’s no matter how many there are of them. niggers. These brush were hung on the Their style is to lie in the bushes along the outside with robes and skins. On the in­ shore and shoot the Pilot or such passengers side of this circle was another smaller circle as may be exposed. A few days ago the about six feet from the outer one. This Steamer Grant had five men out in a yawl was composed of Brush but not so thick as sounding the water. They got too near the the outer one. Upon these brush were hung shore and were attacked by Indians, three all sorts of Indians trinkets such as shields. were killed and the other two were badly Bows and arrows, fancy bead work and every wounded but succeeded in swimming to the Indian notion ever invented. If you was Boat. The Tawl was lost and was picked up to see it in a civilized community you would by the Steamer Benton coming down. When swear it was a Sanitary Fair or a Methodist we arrived at Fort Sulley4 we received more festival or perhaps a Hope Hase Dance. Be­ news about Indians. We arrived there in tween these two circles lay a Row o f War­ the morning. The evening before about 800 riors and those young Braves who were to Sioux Warriors made their appearance on become Warriors. This was the 4th day the opposite bank from the Fort and made they had fasted without tasting a mouth­ signs that they wanted to come over and ful of anything. Here is the way they make trade. The Captain at the Fort however Warriors. could not see it & ordered them to “get” In the centre of the circle is a pole about They did not “get” lively enough to suit him 20 feet high with a raw hide string or rope and he opened on them with artillery—and hanging from the top. The candidate for killed several. At the Fort were about 600 the honor of becoming a Warrior is brought friendly Indians and the morning we were forth. A Knife is then run through the there they were crossing the River for the fleshy part of his breast on each side and purpose of going on the trail of the retreat­ a thong passed through. The thongs are then ing Indians. You would have laughed to tied to the Rope and Mr. Indian begins to see the Redskins stripped almost to the skin, dance around the pole. He throws his whole with their war paint on and their scalping weight back on the Rope a certain number locks all ready for the enemy to lift their of times and if the thongs do not tear out hair, swimming the River with their ponies. he will do to go on the War path. They would strike in at the Fort and the All around outside of the Medicine House current would take them down so that they were laying those who had gone through the would land on the opposite side about % mile proofs and judging from their appearance below. The last we could see of them they they were as happy as a freshly made con­ would mount their ponies and give a war vert at a Methodist Revival. They lay all whoop and dash into the timber. At the covered up with Robes with nothing but Fort was one tribe (commanded by “ Bear- their faces visible and a Buffalo’s skull for Nose” ) who were going through a religious a pillow. During the war dance in the ceremony and consequently did not join the Medicine House the “ Musicians” played on War party. I will give you a description as drums and pounded on dried hides. It made near as possible of their proceedings. We me think of a Circus as I stood on the out­ were at the Fort all day and a party of us side and I wished for a good stock of ginger­ 4 OM Fort Sulley, built by Major General Alfred Sulley In 1863, was located about four miles southeast of the present Pierre, South DaJcota. 314 The Frontier bread and cider, for, between the Indians Indians were mounted and the Soldiers could and Soldiers I could have done a devilish not get near enough to do any execution and good stroke of business. These Indians raise after exchanging a few shots returned to the & fatten dogs for food—I believe I saw 500 Boat This is the nearest we have come to “purps” of all breeds, sizes & colours. At an Indian fight but as we are now fairly this fort they had an old Indian Trader in among them we shall probably have our fill the Guard House for selling Powder & lead of Indian fighting before many days. I am to the hostile Indians. I have since under­ like the fellow that eat the skunk, I can stood that he was taken prisoner by the stomach it but I am damned if I hanker Indians and in order to get off he had to after any. While at St. Joseph, Mo. I bought give them the Articles. He had seventy a Henry Rifle, a 17 shooter so you see I five thousand Dollars worth of Robes at the am prepared all around. I believe I have Fort. One pile of Buffalo Robes half as written everything of interest since we left big as your store. He was to be sent down S t Louis. I wish you would tell all the the River for trial in the first boat. Boys that I will write to them just as soon Nothing more of Interest transpired until as I get to Fort Benton. There is one little we arrived within about 50 miles of Fort matter there which I forgot & wish you Union. Here we met the Steamer Yellow would attend to for me. I bought a ticket to Stone from Fort Benton bound down the Chicago of A1 Eldridge and when I took it River. All three boats lay together that I did not have money enough into a Dollar night and here I learned of the Indian diffi­ to pay her. I came off and forgot it. I culties at Fort Benton. All of the tribes for wish you would pay her and as soon as I which Maj. Upson is agent are at War with get to Benton I will send the money to you. the whites. As near as I can learn some I would send it in this letter but I don’t drunken whites shot some Indians near Fort know how I shall send this letter and as Benton. The Indians went down to Sun soon as I get to Benton I shall send some River and murdered 10 white men and then money down the River by the clerk of this declared War—The Governor of Montana* Boat and that will probably be the best time has called for 500 mountaineers to fight for me to send the money to you. Give my them with and the prospects are that I shall love to Alice and tell her I forgot it & that see some warm times when I get there. I I will send her the first scalp I get I wish left Major Upson at St. Louis, he was ex­ you would tell Dick that I will write him pecting to go overland but had not arrived from Benton as soon as I see how the land at Fort Benton when The Yellow Stone left lays there. Give my love to Jennie if she the June 1st. It may be he started on the has returned and tell her to write. Tell Fannie Ogden but I understand that she and Sam, Doc, Big John Hase and all the boys another Mountain Boat have snagged and that I will write them as soon as I get to sunk in the lower River. The Lillie Martin Benton and I wish you would get them to­ (the boat in whose company we are trav­ gether the first Sunday after you receive elling) had some of our Indian Goods aboard this and have them go to work and write but they were all ordered off at Fort Union a joint letter. Do you boys have any “ Fairy” because the Indians above are at war. So now days. Tell Sam I will go 2 scalps open you see the Devil is to pay all around I may on the Jack. have to go back to Fort Union as soon as I expect Side will be at home when this I arrive at Benton. gets there. If so give her my love and tell While at Fort Union the Lillie Martin got her that I will write her as soon as I arrive a Guard of Soldiers to accompany her to at Benton which will be in about 8 days. Fort Benton and back. Night before last I expect to find a letter there from her. Did when we tied up we saw some Indians you receive that letter which I sent to you about half a mile off. The Lieutenant took for her. Please keep me-posted as to how his men and went out after them. The things are moving in that quarter. Tell

Sidney Edgerton was then governor of Montana. He left the territory In September, 1865, and Thomas Francis Meagher, secretary of the territory, became acting governor. 315 The Frontier those Corbes that the bull frogs and whip* rected to me at St. Louis but I left there porwills yell like the devil in this country. before they arrived and they were brought There is a steamboat in sight coming down to me by Mr. Upson (who came up on a Boat the River and I must close up and get this which left St Louis after I did) who arrived here about the middle of July. He also aboard. Give my best respects to Book, John D. brought me a letter from Side. So you see Toot & By. I will keep up a regular cor­ my letters were three months old when I respondence as soon as I get to Benton received them. I wrote a long letter to Side where I can mail my letters more regular. and also one to Ab while I was on the Boat, I would like almighty well to go around to but as yet I have received no answer from Dave William and Patch [?] this afternoon. either. I left S t Louis on the 19th of April Ale is 25c a glass on this Boat. When I get and was 72 days on the way. This Fort is to Benton I will write you a description of the last one of a chain of Forts owned by the the fare on this boat also of some of the “American Fur Company” and is Three passengers. Tell Billy Foster that I will Thousand and three hundred miles from St. make Six thousand per cent on my “stock.” Louis. One thousand miles takes us clear I may wait to order some more match safes out of the settlements (which end at Sioux of him. I had my “ stock” insured for 20 City) and the balance of the way lies through per cent above cost at St. Louis. a country inhabited only by Indians and Col McLane the member of Congress from wild beasts. Several hundred miles of it Montana is on the Boat returning from Wash­ lies through the Sioux Country. These In­ ington. He weighs 320 pounds and is a gay dians are the most hostile of any in the old Boy. In his State Room he has a big West, and being the most powerful and nu­ trunk. In which he has 1 five gallon keg merous Nation on the plains, they are giving of whiskey—1 Demijohn of the same and 9 Steamboats and emigrants over the plains a small bottles which are supposed to be filled great deal of trouble. The Boat ahead of us with whiskey. He keeps his clothes on the had three men killed by them, who were foot of his bunk to make room for the whis­ out in a yawl sounding the River. A Mac- key in his trunk. In my next I will tell you Kinaw Boat going down the River to the how he & myself stole 16 cans of preserved States which contained 19 men and 1 woman oysters from,the Boat and hid them in that got in a Sand Bar and was attacked by the same trunk, the grub being devilish poor and Sioux Indians who were in force on both none but the officers and their families get­ banks, and every one of them murdered. So ting Oyesters. you see navigation on the Upper Missouri But here is the boat. is attended with considerable danger. We Write soon and oblige travelled in Company with another Boat and Your Old Friend having a large number of passengers well H. D. Upham armed and each Boat carrying a 6 pound Direct H. D. Upham cannon, we were not troubled by the Gentle­ care of Major G. E. Upson men. U. S. Agent for Blackfoot Ind On the overland routes the passengers Fort Benton. Montana T. have, not only the Indians to contend with, but are also receiving some attention from Fort Benton, Montana Territory the Highway Robbers, or as they are more August 1st 1865 genteely called, the “Road Agents.” You have Dear Jennie probably ere this read the account of the Over three months ago I left the “ Noble attack on the Coach last week between Vir­ scenes of my childhood” to roam in this God­ ginia City & Salt Lake where four passen­ forsaken Country, and during that time I gers were killed and 3 wounded and the have received but two letters from any of coach Robbed of $60,000 in gold dust. Last my old comrades in Coldwater. One from year the Vigilance Committee hung up over Ab and one from John Parkhurst. These 30 of these gentlemen for some of those same were written soon after I left there and di­ little tricks and this year some more of them 316 The Frontier will swing. Last year the gang was headed are a daily occurrence, it makes everything by Henry Plummer Sheriff of Virginia City look lively. Four men have been shot since who was hung on the same gallows with 6 of I have been here. As there are but few his confederates. laws in force here, and no officers at all to The history of the Vigilance Committee of execute them, these chaps have it pretty this Territory* will soon be published and l much their own way. The office o f the will send home a copy. You should read it Indian Agency stands in about the centre if you want to see what cold blooded mur­ of the City. Over this Department at present ders men can commit. It will tell how these I reign Supreme. The Mansion itself is built desperadoes murdered men before their own of logs, and the large crevices between the families for the purpose of robbery and how logs are stopped up with mud. The roof is they murdered other men because they had made by laying down slabs and covering no money. It also gives a history of the them over with about 6 inches of dirt. The formation of the “Vigilantees” and how they following is the invoice of furniture which took these Robbers and hung them up as fast graces our one room. Offfice Desk, bureau, as caught—hanging 16 at one time and on Lounge—2 chairs, wash stand—spring bed the same scaffold. & matrass (only one in the City) 4 saddles I will give you a little description of this & bridles, 6 pr. spurs, 4 Revolvers 2 Rifles— place. Fort Benton is called the head of 8 Shot-guns and a fish pole. The chief pro­ navigation of the Missouri. Yet of about 20 ductions of Fort Benton are Frenchmen, Half Boats which have left St. Louis this year breed Indians, Buffalo Robes and Dogs. The for this place, only four have reached here. surrounding country abounds in Buffalo— 3 have sunk and the balance have been com- Deer—Antelopes, Elk, Mountain Sheep—rat­ peled, on account of low water, to discharge tlesnakes Mountain Lions, Grizzly Bear & their freight hundreds of miles below from Hostile Indians. So you see you have a whence it has to be hauled to this point by pretty good idea of my present situation. teams. Thousands of Tons of freight passes Maj. Upson is at present over the Mountains through here every year for the mines. One at Virginia City, looking for a place in the train of over 250 wagons left here yesterday mines to locate his Quartz Mills of which he to go down to Milk River after the freight has two coming up the River. This Terri­ of a couple of Boats that were compelled to tory is going ahead of California in its min­ discharge there. These Wagons are drawn eral production. The quarts ieads are the by from 4 to 8 yoke of oxen, and such a train richest and most extensive that were ever makes a big show. Fort Benton is built of discovered in the whole world. All it wants “Dobies” or large, square unburned brick. It is machinery to crush the quartz. But 2 or 3 was built and is owned by the American Fur quarts Mills are now in operation in the Company of St. Louis. There never have Territory. 10 or 12 now on their way here been nor are there now any troops stationed and more will come next year. Green backs here. The Fort stands facing the River. are not very plenty here, they are taken at Above the Fort (1. e. up the River a few 80c on the dollar. Gold dust is the “circu­ hundred yards) stands the imposing collec­ lating medium” Every man carries his bag tion of houses, designated by the inhabitants of Dust and when he purchases anything he thereof as “ Benton City.” These edifices all passes in his bag and the required amount face the River, between them & which runs is weighed out the “Broadway of Benton City.” We shall The Indians that belong at this Agency are have six streets here as soon as we get 5 the following tribes. The Blackfoot, Bloods, more. The city consists of 12 or 15 log Gros-Ventres & Piegans all of the Blackfoot houses. These are used as dwellings, stores, Nation. For many years they have been in warehouses and saloons. When the trains the habit of stealing horses from the Whites are in here things are very lively indeed. and committting other depredation. When­ The drivers then all get drunk and as they ever they came to the Fort to trade, there all carry a Revolver and knife and as fights being but few Whites there, the Indians were 8 Thom as .T. Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana, published at Virginia City in 1866. This was the first book actually printed in Montana. 317 The Frontier very overbearing and a white man was of Celebrated’’ and visions of ice cream, straw­ no account. About 4 weeks ago however a berries, Lemonades & c. crossed my memory. couple of old Mountaineers were sitting at About a month ago I received a letter from the corner of our office when some Indians Side dated in April soon after I left. She approached and began as usual to tell how told me in it that she was soon to be received many white scalps they had taken, what into the Catholic Church and seemed to big chiefs they were &c. The 2 white men think that it would cause all her friends pulled out their Revolvers and began to shoot. to desert her. She had laid plans out for They killed 4 Indians and threw them into her future career based on the presumption the River. Two Indians escaped and com­ of being left entirely friendless. I have writ­ municated with a Camp of Blood Warriors ten her since the receipt of her letter but Numbering about 150 who were in Camp 50 have heard nothing from her since last April. Miles from here. Below here 12 Miles at You can imagine with what anxiety I am the mouth of the Marias there were 10 young waiting for tidings from her so that I may men laying out a town. The War party of know her present situation. I do not believe Bloods proceeded to seek revenge. They that any of her true friends will leave her surprised the young men while at work and because of her having joined that Church. killed every one of them. Since then not It was all new and surprising to me when one Indians has shown himself at this point. I heard what her intentions were but I know They are camped an hundred miles from that Side is doing what she thinks te be here. We have sent an Interpreter out to her duty and I think none the less of her see whether they want Peace or War. If they for it I hope that she is in Coldwater now. wish for War they will get it as we are to I would give all the world for an hour or have plenty of troops here before we do two with her just about this time, How well anything with them. The mails are very I remember the good old times down at your irregular here. There is no post office nearer house. We can’t fully appreciate those things this point than Virginia City over 300 miles, until they are out of our reach. The hap­ from here, All letters and papers after pass­ piest hours of my life have been those spent ing through the dangers of the overland route with Side & you & Ab. As soon as I can and reaching Virginia City in safety, are hear from Side and know where she is I brought over here by the first responsible shall write her a good long letter and keep person who happens to be coming this way. up a regular correspondence. If she is in In the same manner we send them from here C. [oldwater] when this reaches there home. I was very much pleased about two please give her my love (and a kiss for me) weeks ago at seeing Mr. A. Sytte of C. Give my love to all the girls and keep me [oldwater] at this place. He & a party of well posted in local news. As soon as you Miners were on their way to the States. The receive this I want you & Side to both write Steamboats having all left, they built a me an awful long letter. Give me all that couple of Boats at this place & started. I has happened since I left there—who has sent letters home by him. I sent one to returned from the Wars—and everything else Side. Sometimes we get papers from home of interest. about a month old, When we have such Write me very soon and oblige we read from the first column right through Your Old Friend to the last, advertisements & all. I shall go H. D. Upham over to the Mines as soon as we get the Direct to Indian affairs straightened up. I am in Fort Benton, Montana T. hopes to winter over there. Give my regards to your father mother How I wondered what you were all doing George & Mary. Ask George if he ever gets the 4th of July. I must acknowledge I felt out that Hose cart without any hose in it a little homesick on that day. It was very now days. quiet here. Not a solitary firecracker an­ Tell Side to send her picture when she nounced that it was the “Glorious Fourth*’ writes. and as I set around the office all alone my Tell Ab to write to me soon. thoughts wandered back to former “ Days we Send me some local papers. 318 The Frontier

NORTHWEST FOLKLORE

SOME TRADITIONS OF THE WEST COAST IN D IA N S1

A lbert B . R eagan

B attle of C hinook from the bay o f Quillayute past the Quill- NE morning after the misty clouds had ayute Needles on their mission of revenge. rolled back to the horizon, the sun They proceeded to Hoh, thence on down the O shone out in great and sparkling bril­ coast to where Tahola now is, reaching the liancy on the forest covered land and the place under cover of the darkness o f their great ocean. Then one of our maidens, Nola- first night out from Quileute. They then bostub by name, stole out from the village landed and surrounded the village, only to of LaPush (Quileute), Washington, into the find it deserted, the Indians having gone adjacent woodland of the Olympic Peninsula, southward to a great feast that was being going there to pray to her deities and to held at Chinook; but the expedition was not bathe in a certain little stream near a cer­ to be abandoned without at least an attempt tain falls on the mainland. at revenge. The day following the landing at Tahola, Noon came and she did not return. Night they proceeded on down the coast southward, also and no Nolabostub. All parties con­ having a Chinook slave with them who told cerned began to be anxious about her. Every­ them the lay of the country about his village one became convinced that her being absent home and directed their movements. Then was due to some outside agency. Possibly she was lost in the woods. on nearing their objective, they approached a head of land that projected out into the Twenty men were sent out to look for her, surging surf where the slave had them draw but they hurriedly returned, stating that an their canoes up on shore and wait for dark­ enemy was in the region, as many tracks ness to cover their movements, saying that had been seen on the beach and a moccasin the village was just on the other side of of a pattern differing from that of the Quil- the point of land. They could even then hear eutes had been discovered. Accordingly a the din of dancing and singing. The time scouting party was immediately sent out, but for slaughter, however, was not at hand. unfortunately no trace of the skulking enemy So all concealed themselves in the woods could be found, except the footprints. It and waited. was therefore concluded that she had fallen It was towards the middle of the night into the hands of hostiles. The moccasin when the order to proceed was given. Then, was then carefully inspected and it was de­ according to a well worked-out plan, they cided that the invaders were Quinaelts or divided their forces into two divisions and Chinooks. So after a delay of three days, advanced to the assault upon the village. By during which the maiden was not heard of, this plan, one division was to take the canoes it was decided to send a war expedition around the promontory to the village land­ against the Quinaelt tribes; and two days ing and thus attack the place in front and later forty ocean canoes started southward also destroy the enemy’s canoes. This di- * JLy K,n^ rmfV?t?I in obtaining the traditions of these Indians we school G or^S Rk wnww? ? V?°£?ei\ P£11«ce L uke Hobucket, my assistant in the govern me 8 'mwf’ Hobucket (Indian) being the interpreter. in the SrSrii io#ilaiLnR t0* % LeviT ^^Pance is here omitted, as it has already been giv< that ^ X 2 5 ,ih£ * 12 1SSUP <>/ ™ E FRONTIER, pages 274-276. However, it should be stat< farther than that article records it and has the Clallam Indians’ f t z P ? ] } assembled Quileute-Cliimakums and massacre the whole assemblage there ai tnen, tnis massacre accounting for the Quileutes and Chimakums being so few in numbe when the white man arrived on the scene. 319 The Frontier vision, furthermore, was to cut off the ene­ joined by many other canoes that had been my’s escape by water and also prevent a left there at the first landing while the sea fight and chase, should the assailants be attack on the village was being made. These defeated. The other crawled over the land- canoes were manned by braves who had fled projection and prepared to attack the place from the village across the point to the land­ in the rear. ing. Consequently, they thought only of Within the village the feasting had ceased saving their lives; but a sea-fight could not and all had stretched their bodies in front be avoided, as the Chinooks were already in of the low fires in the respective lodges and hot pursuit So they turned about and en­ were sleeping away the short, after-midnight gaged their pursuers. The battle raged fur­ hours peaceably, not even dreaming that an iously. The Chinooks were worsted. Their enemy was in the region. Then a cracking canoes were captured, and every Chinook stick under a foot-tread suddenly woke a brave sent to the bottom of the salty deep. Chinook brave, and instantly his warhoop Obixsonon then prepared to re-attack the aroused every sleeping warrior. Forthwith village, but on approaching it he found that the battle was on. The attacking parties it had been hastily abandoned, everyone fell upon the place simultaneously from front having fled into the interior. So the ex­ and rear. Many they killed in their beds. pedition returned to Quileute, bringing as The houses they set ablaze. Then in the many of their dead as could be found and pent-up light they fought like demons; and carrying as trophies the heads of their dead the defenders fought like demons, as well. enemies. All, however, returned in sorrow, Some of them rushed to the waterfront and as their leader was with the enemy and there by a hand-to-hand contest of the fiercest many of their number had gone to the shades. kind captured and destroyed many of the On the return they buried their dead the Quileute canoes; while those at the village day they arrived at Quileute and performed routed the assaulting party and put out the the first death ceremonies over them. Then flames. they had the war dance over the heads of Again and again the Quileute chief, whose their fallen foes, but without exclamations name by some of the informants is said to of joy. The enemy had been defeated, it have been Poorakon, charged the village un­ was true, but the victory had been too costly. der cover of the darkness; but was each time Moreover, the recapture of Nolabostub, the ejected from its entrance, each time with end sought, had not been attained; in fact, the loss of many braves. At sunup he made she had not been even heard of. another desperate assault, and at this time his men even got on the house roofs and B a t t l e op N it t in a t had possession of all the streets for a min­ Days again came and went, but Nolabos­ ute; but the Chinooks rallied. Poorakon tub was not heard of and Poorakon did not himself was captured; his braves were driven return. It then began to be rumored that in panic-order into the woods and to the the Indians from the northland, from the waterfront, where they were rallied by Ob- west coast of Vancouver Island, as that ixsonon and another desperate battle was island is now called, were fishing now and fought. Obixsonon lost a hand but suc­ then on the grounds of the Quileutes at Cape ceeded in getting a canoe of braves launched Flattery and Tatoosh Island at the entrance and out of harm’s way for a moment’s time. of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Furthermore, It, however, was soon pursued: all the other it was also rumored that these northern canoes that had made a landing at the vil­ people expressed a desire to take that part lage and all the other braves who had tried of the peninsula around the cape and Neah to leave the place by these same canoes fell Bay as their own.* This, of course, aroused into the enemy’s hands, the braves to be the jealous ire of the Quileutes. slaughtered at once or kept for a worse Preparations for a raid into the Makah fate. country on Vancouver Island was at once Rounding the point, the fleeing canoe was begun, and in a few days more than one At this time the Quileutes still had possession of all the northern and northwestern part of the Olympic Peninsula. 320 The Frontier hundred war canoes set out for Nittinat, the near Ahkahlot to have rocks hurled at them old home of that tribe to the northward of by each passer-by.* the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Things, however, were not going on so Nearing the place, they went ashore and well for them in the Cape Flattery region; concealed themselves in the dense woods for while their feasting and war dancing until night came on. Then leaving a strong was going on at Quileute, death was being force in protection of the canoes, to prevent met out to their kinsmen in that section. a catastrophe like that which had befallen them at Chinook, the main body of the braves B attles op Neah B ay, W arm H ouse, crawled noiselessly through the brush to the AND OzETTE vicinity of the village. There in concealment When the Quileutes attacked the Makahs they waited for the unsuspecting villagers at Nittinat, most of the Nittinat braves were to go to sleep, as they had been having a away on a marauding expedition up the coast “potlatch” (give-away feast) and were still to the northward; on their return, finding fasting and playing games. Moreover, it their village obliterated, their rage knew no was near morning when they retired; when, bounds. Without stopping to camp they set feeling perfectly safe, they lay down to sleep out in hot haste in pursuit of the southern wherever they were, some on the sand on the army, at the same time erecting at the front beach, some in their canoes, and some on of each advancing canoe a board-shake on mats and robes in their lodges. which were carved and painted certain sym­ The moment for action had come. With bolic designs which were understood to mean the hideous warwhoop the raiding Quileutes a declaration of war. fell upon the sleeping victims. With whale­ On arriving at Neah Bay they landed bone and stone clubs, clam shell knives, and amid a shower of arrows from the shore and yew wood daggers they dealt death on every immediately laid that village in ashes, kill­ side. So terrible was the onslaught that ing or capturing every living soul in the panic took possession of the village, most place. Then they hastily proceeded to Warm of the Makahs being killed right in their House, between Cape Flattery and Neah beds. Some, however, defended themselves Bay, on the Strait side, at which place there with their bows, while others fled to the was quite a settlement of Chimakum-Quil- woods, and some also, trying to flee in their eute Indians, and there another desperate canoes, found that way of escape cut off. battle was fought. They surrounded the So most of them who were not killed were village and dealt death or worse to those captured. shut in it. Yet the defenders fought with The Quileutes gained complete possession desperation. of the village, with but few men wounded Here while his colleagues and friends were and with the loss of none. Then after the out in the streets trying to defend their battle was over, they cut off the heads of homes, Katset, the chief medicine man of the fallen foes and returned to Quileute by Warm House, was all alone in his medicine way of Neah Bay, taking the captured heads lodge incessantly calling upon his wolf with them as trophies. “tomanawis” and praying to his deities to On arriving at James Island (Ahkahlot at help him and his people at the very instant LaPush, near the present village of Quil­ that the enemy was in the act of taking pos­ eute), the victorious raiders were given a session of the very street his house was on. great feast which lasted for many days, ac­ As he was thus praying, a group of the ene­ companied by the blood-curdling war dance. my broke in the door of his lodge and rushed At its close many of the captives were burned into the large hall. Again he called upon alive and others were buried beneath newly his wolf “tomanawis” to help him. He then erected totem poles. Moreover, the human seized a whalerib dagger; and, his “tomana­ heads and trophies captured in the expedi­ wis” (witch-hpnotic-supernatural power) tion were thrown into the cave-burial place making him proof against any instrument of

* Sds^frnm he+ s®pured several of these skulls and probably skulls from other had 8roJk? thr!f«rnaAn sent tIJ® Smithsonian Insitute at Washington. They had naa rocks thrown on them as stated in the tradition. 321 The Frontier part of his person), they scaled the roof of destruction that might be hurled against his one of the houses and drove a whaling har­ body, he slashed right and left in every di­ rection until he had cleared the hall, killing poon through his head from above. The victors then carried all the dead foes everyone who had entered it. He then hastened to the street, only to out to the sea beach at low tide and laid find that the village was wholly in the hands them in a long line so that the flow tide of the enemy and the dead and dying cov­ would take them out to sea—you know, all ered the ground. Undaunted, he rushed Indians whose bodies are claimed by the forth with a dagger in one hand and a clam sea turn into owls, the worst thing that could shell knife in the other; and every thrust happen to anyone. Katset’s body, however, of the dagger or slash of the knife sent an was not to become an owl. That night the enemy to the land where the salmonberry wolf gods came and carried it into the dense bushes grow only six inches high and the woods, and later it became a rock at sea fish are all hardwood knots. jutting above the stormy billows, now a By this time the enemy was becoming landmark to warn the canoer to keep away panicky, for Katset’s wolf “tomanawis” had from the dangerous coast—made so because made him immune to their missiles. But It is the place where that enemy made a his time had come. In his rushing about to landing in that long ago. slaughter, he unfortunately ran between two Following up the victory at Warm House, houses so built that the space between them the Makahs rounded the Cape, captured the wedged in in the direction in which he was villages at the mouth of Tsuez and Waatch running so that he could not pass through rivers and then proceeded down the coast to the small exit—for he was a very large, the village of Ozette, as it was noticed that fleshy man. The enemy then closed in on in all their movements a woman occupied him while he was in such close quarters a position in the foremost canoe who was not that he could not use his weapon effectually. allowed to land. Reaching Ozette, another However, they could not kill him, as his fierce and terrible battle was fought, and the “tomananwis” still protected his body; but Chimakum-Quileute8 were slaughtered till as it did not protect the top of his head none were left. (he had not prayed to have it protect that To be continued in the November issue.

A D A M CARGO Continued from page 306

rode as a ghost outrider himself, keeping to goods, but that did not matter. It was his the hills, always concealed. He had coached first fight for freedom from the shackles his lieutenant well, told him under no cir­ of outlawry. But, perhaps strangely enough, cumstances to mention his name or tell where I was not impressed by my mental painting. the cows came from. Gomez was to say the I was not stirred as I should have been by stock was from his own rancho and that he what at first glance might have been con­ had raised it south of Albuquerque in the strued as an heroic stand against the forces Rio Grande valley. which surely would have destroyed him. Looking at the old man before me on that There was something missing from the pic­ evening he told me about the cattle drive, ture. I tried hard to picture him haunting the I searched it, analyzing its values, its hills, watching his cows crawling along the shades and colors, its forms and lines, its trail. It was his first attempt to come back individuals and its groups, and when I found into the world of law-abiding men. To be that which had been omitted I was genuine­ sure, he was making the attempt with stolen ly astonished. It was Magdalena! And in 322 The Frontier

that moment I thought of her the entire scene and then brought them to the patio where changed. She had taken Omar’s place, even Adam was sitting. though she performed none of Omar’s feats. The men were Abe Spencer and Jay Swig- She was behind him now. And then the gin. Spencer was a short, thick-bodied man picture became vivid, strong, and complete. with long brown moustaches and a scarlet Gomez sold the cows . . . a feeble ges­ face. He wore a loose buckskin jacket open ture. I know what it meant to Adam. I to his stomach, the hair of his chest showing could understand. It brought to him a sense thick and curly on his sunburnt flesh; a of security he had never experienced before, small, round hat, worn and dirty; buckskin even when Omar was alive and with him. trousers and moccasins which tied over his He had blasted the gateway to a new trail, insteps. Swiggin could not have been more and this gave him courage. the opposite physically. He was tall, very * * « thin, and had remarkably green eyes, a long, We went on swiftly now. It seemed to me sandy moustache and yellow hair. He walked we were on a new road travelling faster with a slight limp; and wore a flat-topped than ever before. More cows went to the hat, a denim shirt much too large for him, military, the government, in time. He be­ tight leather leggings bagged at the knees gan to send men into the forest to drive and tall boots. them into grass valleys. He began to count The two had come recently from south noses and he ran the Island brand on every Texas. It was merely by chance they had critter found. ridden into the valley. After reaching Santa The Island / . \ Fe, they travelled north and west, carried Brand y ( 0 ) J on by their curiosity to see what lay beyond the blue mountains ahead of them, the range Then suddenly everything in the country over which, they learned, few people had was changed. gone. The railroad came, cutting a smooth “We’re really hard hit,” Spencer said. swath across the desert and through the “And we’re looking for bed and board.” pinon hills, disturbing their peacefulness. “ You’re the first to come in here,” Adam The wagon trains vanished. A new era had told them. “ In all the years I’ve been wan­ come. New Mexico was no longer an iso­ dering around in here, no other American lated empire beyond the finger tips of civil­ has come in.” ization. Cows came and went on wheels. I wondered how he felt in that moment. But more important than anything else as I would like to have known his thoughts. far as he was concerned was that the po­ The coming of Spencer and Swiggin was of litical and social complexion of the country great import. They were the forerunners was completely transformed. Although he of a tremendous invasion, and certainly he still feared the forces of the law it was now must have understood it was coming. a negligible fear. Civilization was conquer­ But he did not pause,to reflect upon such ing the country, and with civilization always subjects. We were going ahead too swiftly. comes a complicated system of government, I had little time to consider a thing, except an involved administration of law enforce­ at the time he told me about it. ment. The old order of things vanishes, the In a wide circle west, south, and east new sweeps in without memory, without tra­ claims were taken, homesteaders erected dition in such cases where the transforma­ cabins. The desert, that wide reach over tion is accomplished almost overnight which he and Omar and Nina had ridden the road ahead is straight as wind blows so many years before when they were fleeing . . . and men forget. into the wilderness, was now a friendly bar­ They came, the inevitable, two American rier, for it halted most homeseekers. Only ranchers to settle on government claims fifty the very adventurous and the unattached miles southeast of the Valley. And one day such as Spencer and Swiggin traversed it two men rode into the Island and dismounted Some day, however, others would come . . . before the corral. Gomez talked with them, He sent beef animals to the railroad now 323 The Frontier each fall, to the booming cattle markets of mist, slight in the low north, swelling to a the east, and because his investment was dense sparkling fog directly overhead, and practically nil, his overhead small, he reaped fading away over Antarctica. The outline handsome profits. of bills to the east was broken abruptly by Faster we traveled to a conclusion . . . vast unfriendly space where their lines ended the years slipping by us . . . passed him and began, as if drawn with a wide brush once more . . . on the shadowy canvas of the night. Then came that terrible June which old He nodded, and fell into a light troubled residents of New Mexico have not forgotten, sleep. He dreamed he was descending. Sev­ the Year of Desolation, it is called in books. eral times he took long steps unexpectedly. Since April there had been no rain west The ground under his feet was running down of the Jemez. The grass which had started into a dark pit. He stopped and stood very with the melting of the high snows was still, filled with fear. He might walk off a burnt to powder and the ranges lay parched cliff . . . If he had a long stick with which and bare. Cargo Creek was almost entirely he might feel his way . . . He looked ahead consumed by the thirsty earth, only a trickle and caught the outlines of the tops of tall flowed in a red scar which marked its course pines in silhouette against the stars. He through the valley and across the lower strained his ears to catch a sound, but heard plain. The leaves of trees curled and fell, only the slight breeze stirring the dry grass. and the bare limbs, gray with blowing dust, A hand touched his shoulder and he pointed upward like the bare arms of gray started. ghosts uplifted in appeal to the sweep of “You’ve been sleeping,” said Magdalena. azure sky and the merciless hall of fire “My poor Adam. I am so sad.” traveling across it The needles of the pines He sat very still, looking away at the turned red and fell, the chinky pins were stars . . . how many nights had he watched weasoned, the pines were dying, shaggy and the stars? How many days had he stared at cracked like disreputable old men and the speckless sky? women. The wild creatures were gone from “Do not wait longer,” she whispered as the forests. The wilderness was empty, dead. she sat down at his feet. “God has died.” The cattle drifted. The vacqueros, still He shrugged his shoulders. “Get them out, hoping, rode night and day turning them you mean?” back, stopping them from wandering into “Yes. To the railroad. Take the cows and country from which all water had gone. calves southwest and pray for rain. Take Cattle the men on the ranch had never seen the steers to the mountains.” came out of the forest, old bulls with ragged “The mountains!” He sat up in his chair. horns, cows wild as bears and swift as deer, “The mountains! The Jemez! There’s al­ aged critters, gaunt and rangy which never ways clouds over the Jemez. It must rain in their lives had been driven by man. up there . . . even now. The mountains- The vacqueros constructed dams to form I just dreamed I was walking in them.” pools which might serve as reservoirs, but “ It is an omen!” she cried. often embankments were trampled down by “The high country north is dry.” fighting animals and the precious liquid es­ “The creeks tell us that. The snow be­ caped. hind us is gone. The Jemez is the only place. It was a problem with which Adam had There the clouds are broken like egg shells.” never been obliged to cope. There had been “ But I don’t know whether we can get years when drouth had threatened. He had into them. There’s only one canyon on this not worried. He had not cared! But each side that a herd could go up to high enough time the mountains had broken the clouds country. And there’s only a little water in and the blue rain brooms had swept across it. But it might be enough.” the ranges in time to avert disaster. She was impatient. “Do not try to think. Sitting in a chair before the house one Have you not dreamed?” evening, he looked through a fringe of dying “ I dreamed I was walking in the dark. I pines at the sky. The stars were like silver could not see. Wait for day was all I could 324 The Frontier do. Then you woke me up. I wish I had powerless to stop them. They raced on mad­ finished that dream.” ly, rumbling like thunder, and the sound “But I do not understand! You have gradually died away. The riders followed dreamed . . them moving cautiously through the smoke He placed a hand on her shoulder. “All which had now become so thick that the right.” rims of the canyon on each side were hidden A youth golden-haired and blue-eyed, sit­ from their view. ting straight in his saddle, rode at the head East of the mountains Adam rode with his of the herd moving toward the railroad. cowboys pushing a ragged mass of cows and His eyes, dust-burnt, scanned the empty land calves over an endless earth, holding them to the rim of the great blue bowl of sky. each night where a few pools of water re­ Behind him came the army of the strong mained. from Phantom Valley, dust-coated, their tongues hanging white. Each dawn was like a silent explosion of • • -All these days they marched with coral and peach. The sore herd staggered only the sound of the bawling stock, the to its feet. All day a great cloud of dust rumble of hoofs on sand, to break the monot­ hung over it. Under the sunken sides of ony of a perfect silence . . . all these nights their mothers the calves stumbled over the when the stars of the high plains wheeled powdery, burning ground. They dropped, overhead in silver millions and the strong struggled to rise, and fell back, and over were held between vacquero chants. their tortured bodies the hooves passed until From dawn until dusk the herd showed the flesh and bones had become dust. The on the vast expanse as a mere dot, a dot bed grounds were strewn with dead that crawled slowly southward with the each day the men at lead and drag rode zenith moving above it. Only the sun closer to each other. changed, and the moon. Throughout the day the herd passed Far behind the army of the strong, in the through great orange heat waves which fol­ blue rise at the edge of the north, men drove lowed each other across the land like clouds a mile of steers along a rising canyon floor. of fire. The sun fell from an unmarred A dense, perfumed forest closed about them. sky to a flaming death. Purple shadows Their calls and curses, the cracking of their crept over the ranges. The amber mesas whips, the bellowing, the rattle of hooves became cobalt; the cobalt became garnet; on rock, started the echoes and obliterated the garnet became ruby; the ruby became them in constancy. A tiny stream trickled pea; the pea became rose; the rose became along one side of the canyon, and in open la vendor; and the chill of night left nothing places between willows the steers paused in for contemplation, except the noise of suf­ little groups to dip hot muzzles in cool liq­ fering cows calling calves that could not uid. It was the trickle upon which Adam answer them. rested his hope of success. The last of the railroad herd were aban­ In the afternoon a wind began to blow doned in a short grass valley to fight death down the canyon, steadily increasing in as best they could. Omar led the men back force. The rider in the lead gazed with a to the Island. frown at the sky ahead. It was growing The steers which had been started toward dark, a great cloud sweeping across it. Then the high Jemez had trampled each other to he began to smell smoke. death, plunged over cliffs or become injured The men held the herd in a wide place in by rocks and trees in their mad stampede the canyon. The smoke was coming down to escape the smoke. The vacqueros re­ on them, growing in volume. The steers were turned empty-handed. coughing, bellowing warnings of the danger The little dark man had looked down on they sensed. They milled nervously, broke a few hundred dying animals from a hill­ out, and were returned to the herd by the top, all that remained of the mass with riders. Then as if at a given signal they which he had started out from the valley started down the canyon and the men were hoping to reach a living stream before they The Frontier 325 perished. He waved an arm in signal, and by the terrible drouth, began to take home­ the men turned about and started back. steads, to build . . . to invade. There was nothing left. The valley had Ten miles west of the Island, the Buckskin been abandoned to a scourge more powerful Hills rise up before the skyline like bent red than man’s cunning. backbones. Cargo Creek in its course toward One morning he rode away from the its destination on the great alkali flat to Island alone. He went to sit on the brink the south passes along the eastern edge of of a high cliff and listen . . . and listen the hills in a miniature canyon in which the in tense stillness, awaiting the promising water can be reached in only one place . . . whisper of the wind. But it came to him where an ancient landslide cut away the wordless. The dry pines behind him stirred precipitous canyon walls and formed a slope with the empty voices of dead limbs. He to the stream’s edge. The place is called the gazed out over the patchwork of brilliant Crossing to the West. colors as far as he could distinguish earth Late one afternoon Omar rode toward the from sky, and he saw nothing but a beauti­ Crossing. He kept his horse at a trot, for ful desolation. he wished to reach it before sundown. He His shoebutton eyes became knife slits in sat easily in his saddle, his lithe body scarce­ his small wrinkled face. Suddenly he leaped ly moving, and even when his half-wild to his feet, shook his hard little fist at the mount shied at a sage rabbit, as it did often, expanse of heaven and earth, and shouted: seeming never to learn that they were harm­ “By Christ!” less, he did not raise himself at all from his He sat down again, leaned on his knees, seat, but simply tightened the reins and the motionless. pony fell back into a calm pace. On the way back to the Island, he met He wore a black hat with a wide curving Omar and Spencer and Swiggin, who had brim, a band of tiny silver conchos strung on come from the head of the valley where they horse hair around the crown; a denim shirt had been building a reservoir to provide of Navajo pink, the pink in the eyes of young water for the horses. He spat words at rabbits; a pair of soft deerhide trousers them. shaped to the back of a horse and fringed “Get everything ready. We leave in the on each leg; and tall boots. morning for the east, for Kansas, to buy His face with its finely molded features cows. We’ll hold them down country until was copper colored. His eyes were blue as the fall rains. I ain’t going to stop . . .” morning sky. His teeth gleamed in two even Spencer shouted. “By God, by God, look rows. His slender body moved as a tree there!” branch dipping and rising with intermittent Over the Jemez hung a great bank of blue puffs of range wind . . . earth muscles clouds, and as they watched they saw long playing with the playful forces of the vast­ curved blue rain brooms sweeping dust from ness above them. His hair was sun color, the peaks. The clouds ascended rapidly, and when he removed his hat it was blown moving toward them on a strong wind. And into a golden spray. before they had reached the Island they He was on a serious mission, and he had were riding through a steady downpour. been told by Adam to take another man with That night he went to stand beside the him, but he had chosen to go alone. creek and listen to it singing that song of Two events had taken place which once life which a month before would have been more, as when the railroad had come, filled so welcome to his ears, but which now was Adam’s mind with startling thoughts. only a dirge. These were the two events: * * * A young man had come into the country He began again. He bought cows and and built a cabin at the Water Hole of the brought them into the valley. He founded Wolves, halfway between the valley and San­ a new kingdom on the ruins of the old. The ta Fe. He had brought with him a small herd years were bountiful once more, and once and turned it loose on the range. Adam had more the people, held away from the country gone with two of his men, Clem Bartell and 326 The Frontier

Henry Beebe, cowboys who had come to work them no call, stood as shadowy hulks on for him when he had bought cows in the the hillside. east, to visit the newcomer. They had met The rider stopped and levelled the rifle. a quiet young man with sandy hair, clear At that instant a gun was fired on the other gray eyes, and a ruddy face over which a side of the draw and the rifle slipped from smile was wont to spread quickly and as the rider’s hands. He slumped in his saddle quickly disappear, as if he had no control and leaned forward over the horn. over it His name was Jules Mason, and The cattle, stampeded by the sudden erup­ he had migrated from the Panhandle, driving tion of fire and noise, surged up the hill­ his cattle overland. side in a rumbling mass and disappeared And at the Crossing to the West a home­ in the wall of darkness beyond; and the steader had established himself. Adam had impressive silence, now amplified by its sud­ sent Omar to investigate. den resumation after the shattering inter­ Behind the Buckskin Hills the falling sun ruption, settled again over the creek and the had set afire the western sky. A herd of grove and the dark hills. cattle which had held throughout the hot * * * afternoon to a grove of trees at the bottom The summer night had wrapped the of a long draw had altered its position little Island in a blanket of starlit serenity. Light during all these hours. At the top of the and capricious airs from the creeks brought slope leading down to the creek was a wagon the odor of damp vegetation and the heavy and a white tent. Under a large iron kettle perfume of the pines. a campfire smouldered. Before the black cavity of an open door The cattle had come shortly after midday to a low adobe building a man reposed in to the Crossing and had met with an in­ sleep, half covered in blankets thrown care­ soluble situation. The wagon, the tent and lessly on the ground. At his feet a large the fire kept them from reaching the water, dog was curled, one sharp ear erect like standing before them a thing incomprehen­ the spike of a warrior’s helmet At inter­ sible, hence a thing to be feared. vals it lifted its head and sniffed at the air to the west Once it growled deep in the Earlier in the afternoon they had proceed­ recesses of its heavy throat low and men­ ed to investigate cautiously, singly and in acing like far-off thunder. Suddenly it stood pairs, at first by a series of careful ap­ up, its nose pointed toward the western sky, proaches with outstretched noses; but each and viciously snarled. time either a tent flap moved or a girl came The man sat bolt upright in the blankets. out and shook a stick at them, and they He stared about him as if somewhat be­ retreated in disorder. When dusk approached, wildered, then pushed the cover aside and their thirst increased and their patience ex­ in his bare feet stepped into the shadow of hausted, they began to drift toward the open the building. The man was Clem BartelL hillside. In single file they advanced until In the early evening he had been drinking the leader saw a lone horseman on the crest too freely, and when he' went to bed he ahead. It stopped and assumed a statu­ moved his blankets outside where he might esque pose. obtain fresher air. The rider, silhouetted against the red of He had not long to wait before a rider the sunset sky, appeared like an image in fallen forward on the horn of his saddle bronze. He looked down upon the suspicious rode slowly down the opposite bank of the herd without visible motion, as if attempting creek into the water and came out before to outstare the hundred curious eyes peering the building. Bartell stepped from his hid­ up at him like small luminous dials. ing place, holding a revolver in readiness, After scanning the country, he descended for he suspected a trick. Then he stopped the hill slowly and rode along a fringe of and stared, suddenly lunging forward. A trees in the draw, holding a rifle in readi­ curse burst from his lips. ness. The cattle, moved to a safe distance He lifted Omar from the saddle to which from the mysterious horseman who gave his belt had held him during his ride home 327 The Frontier and placed him on the blankets. Then he star had hung during the dark hours of ran toward Adam’s house. When he returned his pacing and contemplation. with Adam Omar was dead. When he had come back into the room * * * after having partaken of a cup of coffee No one came to disturb Adam that night prepared for him by Magdalena, he found In the south window a lone star glistened as her lying on the floor. He stood looking if hung there to light the dark room. He down at her and she made a motion as if paced back and forth across the floor. The to retreat. nicker of a horse sent him to the window “Get up,” he said. to peer out, but seeing nothing, he turned He was aware that she was making an away and paced the floor again, his hands effort to calm herself. He beckoned her to in his pockets. a chair, which, after a moment’s hesitation, At last he took a chair and settled just she accepted without removing her eyes from outside the doorway. When the first streak his face. She kept a hand to her throat, of dawn had risen above the eastern hills, caressing it with nervous fingers, a throat he saw the shadowy figure of a man moving smooth and palpitating with life, supporting up the path toward him, and he recognized a delicate face tanned by wind and sun. Her the lumbering gait and bulk of Abe Spencer. dark hair fell in disorder over her slender Spencer squatted down beside the doorway shoulders. and smoked. Presently he spoke. Looking down at her he wondered at her “Jay and me took old One Ear and went daring. He leaned toward her quivering to over to the Crossin’. The dog pulled Omar’s his finger tips, his face distorted; but this hat out of the brush. We saw some one only brought from her a look of mingled running for the tent, and we covered him. fear and curiosity. Quickly her eyes fell It was a she. She’d been waitin’ in the trees and she drooped on the chair like a flower to shoot some one else, but I reckon she caught in a sudden withering blast. lost her nerve when she saw two of us. We “Did you do it?” he yelled at her. saddled her horse and brought her along.” She stiffened, trembled and leaped to her Still Adam remained silent. Spencer wait­ feet so suddenly that he took a step back­ ed for him to speak and when he did not, ward. She backed away and stood rigid began to talk again. against the wall. “It seems her mother has fever. She’s “Why?” he demanded. sick in the tent. Her old man has gone “He was going to shoot into our tent!” back to Santa Fe to get some things they She sank to her knees, shaken with con­ left there. They figger to settle for good vulsive sobs; and he went to stand beside at the Crossin’. The old man told her before the window. he left to watch out for greasers and bad- There was nothing more to be done. He men. started to speak and stopped . . . Yet, there “Now, she tells us that Omar was about was much he could do . . . to shoot into the tent when she got him. He walked to the other side of the room The tent and wagon stand right on the trail and stood facing her. Across the few steps to the water and no cows could go past it. of that floor she seemed to have grown I reckon it made Omar sore.” smaller in his eyes. An immense space “What is her name?” Adam asked. stretched between them. She had become “Her name is Joella Rust, and she’s about merely a distant speck under a sky that sixteen.” flung light and heat on an impassable desert “That will be enough,” said Adam with separating them. a finality, and Spencer rose and walked He, possessing all the physical power in away slowly into the paling shadows. the world, could do nothing to change mat­ It was mid-morning when Adam faced ters. He could take her in his arms and Joella in the room where he had spent the crush her. He could be vengeful, savage. night. A wide strip of golden sunlight now To what avail? He could ruin her life in fell through the window in which the lone a dozen ways. To whose satisfaction? Not 328 The Frontier

his own, for he was not that easily satis­ Several hours after she had left the Island fied. He could wave his arms, shout and to return to her dead mother, he rode alone heap curses on the earth and its creator, to the Crossing. He did not know exactly and he could likewise dash his head against the reason for his going, but neither did he a stone wall. Only an imbecile gets a thrill know what else to do. He felt himself com­ out of killing a toad with his foot. pletely inundated by an avalanche of insol­ He knew well the truth of terror uble problems. I did not believe sentiment and of affection. And although he did not drew him toward the place where Omar the entirely understand his attitude of the mo­ second had met his end. I would never be­ ment, he made no effort to analyze it. He lieve that sentiment figured in his actions. only felt as if he wanted to spurn her as There was no one there. He stood beside a lion hunter would spurn a rabbit. the black ruins of the wagon and tent in There was nothing more to be done. Look- the stillness of sun and shadow in the wil­ at her steadily, in a warning voice, he mur­ mured : derness . . . the great silence he had known so many years, which after all had con­ “You had better go back to your mother.” quered his restlessness, had brought to him He turned and left the room, going to sit in its own way the few things he had de­ alone in the patio. There Spencer found him later in the morning. sired, which had given him the courage he “ You sent her off?” he asked. had needed, which had set him on the right trail . . . the wilderness which in the end Adam nodded. Spencer scratched his head. had brought to him his greatest problem of life. “ Well, me and Jay met her on her way At last he turned and walked to where the back to the Crossin’. She was ridin’ fast.” “ Well?” asked Adam. body lay covered in blankets at the foot of a tree. He stood staring down at it Pres­ “ She won’t find much left. We went back ently he knelt down and lifted a corner of there at sunup and looked in the tent. The the covering, and as he gazed at her face, old lady was dead. We took her out in a smooth and relaxed in the peacefulness of blanket. Then we burnt up the wagon and death, he slowly stiffened. His hands be­ tent and the rest of the stuff. gan to tremble. He swept his hat off with Jay says to the girl when we met, he a quick motion and bent closer. He began say, ‘You’ll find your maw asettin’ out un­ to shake as if a miniature earthquake was der the trees.’ She didn’t answer . . . just passing over him. Then he cried out, a started to ride harder than ever.” wordless, hoarse cry, and leaped up. He “I don’t care,” Adam said as if with great turned to right, to left, took up his hat and effort, and Spencer left the patio. staggered toward his horse. * * * As he mounted, a wagon appeared on the During the last few times I talked with slope across the stream. There were three him I could see the end in sight, and if I Mexicans in it. They had come to take had thought that his tale was shaping into the body to the park in the forest near the a first-class tragedy, now I was somewhat Island in which Rita and several others had horrified by the conclusion which formed in been buried, there to inter it. He rode madly my mind. A girl named Joella Rust without past them, leaving them to stare after him in warning had appeared and seemed to be hold­ open-mouthed astonishment, and disappeared ing his destiny in the palm of her hand. He over a hill. must have seen his castle crumbling about Now something happened which made me him. He must have understood that no long­ fear that I should never hear more of his er could murder and outlawry defy the law story. He suddenly refused to see me and with impunity. That time had been long more than a month passed before I talked gone. He could not fight this situation as with him again. Meanwhile I had gone out he would have done in the day when he to the Island Ranch and found the Masons rode with the Texas Swede. Yet, what could he do? there for the roundup. One evening Joella Mason and I sat in the patio of the old 329 The Frontier house. It was a warm fall evening with He hurried out Returning with a horse, scented airs wafting up from the creeks. The he found her sitting at the table her head perfume of the pines was mingled with the on one arm. sweetness of planted flowers in a garden “You better eat, miss,” he said. “You before the house. can’t ride without food. Where are you We sat looking off to the south, at the going?” stars sweeping along the faint outline of “To Santa Fe.” hills. She was a woman with a young “Well, you eat, or I won’t let you go. I’ve face, although her figure bespoke the quanti­ got a horse here that will carry you in.” ty of her years. Her hair had grayed in She drank some coffee, and he placed mush keeping with her time of life, but her eyes and biscuits before her. were gay and her voice was full and pleas­ “Eat or you can’t go,” he said laughing. ant She seemed to force some of the mush down She laughed when I told her Adam had her throat refused to see me, and asked me where he When they went outside he told her about had left his story. When I told her a shad­ the horse, a shaggy buckskin. “ He’ll take ow seemed to pass over her face. you to Santa Fe today, but you must let Then she told me she would go on, for him set his own gait If you don’t he’ll she thought she could tell me better than fight you and wear himself out After ten he about the particular episode which prop­ miles he’ll settle down and really travel. erly I should know at this point You might spell him some on Turquoise Hill. Reaching the Crossing after she had left Then he’ll take you on into town without a the house on the Island that morning, she stop.” paused only long enough to kiss her mother’s The buckskin’s white tail and mane trick­ cold lips. To reach her father was the led down the wind as she turned him toward thought uppermost in her mind. She turned town and rode away from the cabin. Jules her horse toward Santa Fe. watched her until she had crossed a wide She did not remember very clearly the flat and begun to climb the first hills. When trip, for her mind was numbed by the sudden she had disappeared into the sky beyond disaster, and she rode mechanically, at times the crest, he turned toward the cabin. Then verging on complete hysteria, all the time suddenly he swore and started running to­ filled with a terrifying fear. At dusk she ward the corral. stopped before the cabin of Jules Mason He saddled a tall bay, which whirled as and dismounted with difficulty. He helped he mounted, danced and arched its back. her into the house, to his bed, and gave her “ Save it, save it,” he said soothingly. water. She drank and then collapsed in a “You’ll need it before we get to town.” state of complete exhaustion. She had rid­ The bay danced like a great cat out across den halfway to Santa Fe in a day, a distance the flat, but presently it began to move with saddle-hardened cowboys would not attempt machine-like monotony, seldom breaking its to travel in that short time! stride. Mason covered her, wondering at her con­ This was the only time I set down a part dition and at her mission, then went outside. of the story of Adam Cargo as it was told He found her horse dead. to me by another person. For the next day “She's not sick,” he reasoned. “ She’s Tid­ on returning to Santa Fe I learned that he in’ to get some place quick.” had sent a boy to tell me to come to his The sun was higher than a man above room. I went at once, filled with expecta­ the horizon when she wakened and sat up tion. He had never sent for me before. on the bed pale and trembling. He had food He asked me bluntly as I walked in if I prepared for her. was honest. When I had assured him I con­ “I must go on . . . at once,” she told sidered myself honest, he told me just as him. bluntly that he would not tell me any more “All right,” said Mason. “I’ll get you a of his story unless I promised to keep it a horse. You eat.” secret until he was dead. He meant that 330 The Frontier

part he had not yet told me, and I promised. He only said he was going back in the morn­ My disappointment must have been apparent ing.” to him, but he was not concerned. “ Where is he?” Adam asked. He finished his tale that evening. “That's him, right there,” said Spencer. He told me then that on the morning after “ We been waitin' to see what he does. He’s Omar the second had died, and before he been hangin’ against the bar all afternoon. had gone himself to the Crossing, he had Adam looked at a great hulk of a man sent Spencer and Swiggin to Santa Fe to with rounded shoulders. He was unshaven warn Rust not to return to the Crossing, and roughly clothed, and slouched against but to leave the country and take his daugh­ the bar. Underneath the sagging brim of ter with him. his hat his face was long and thin, his cheek bones high. He seemed to be gazing at After he had ridden out to the Crossing nothing, staring into space. ahead of the wagon which was to carry the “ I want to talk to him,” said Adam. body to its final resting place in the forest park and had looked at the dead woman, he He got up and made his way to the bar had set out for Santa Fe himself. where he drank. Then he turned and walked slowly toward Rust For the woman he found wrapped in blan­ The two men at the table were watching kets at the Crossing was Mary Lunce. closely. They noticed that Rust’s eyes fol­ Spencer and Swiggin sat at a table in the lowed Adam. Then they saw Rust slowly Trail House near a side entrance. It was drawing a pistol in such a position that dusk outside. The polished oil lamps cast Adam could not see the movement. fantastic shadows about the large bar room. Spencer waited until Rust’s gun was clear The light glinted on glassware behind the of the holster before he shot Swiggin fired bar, and in the pig eyes of a shaggy buffalo only an instant later. Rust staggered against head above it. Shadows danced among boots the bar and fell to the floor. and table legs. Adam stood over him staring down into Spencer appeared to be totally consumed his sightless eyes like a man looking down with a game of solitaire, but in reality he into a clear pool which reflected the sky, watched the movements of the men about fascinated by the infinity of its false depth. him. He played his cards methodically (and He turned away. Spencer and Swiggin had incorrectly), his hat brim low over his face. moved to stand beside the door. No other Occasionally he paused in his game to pre­ man or woman in the crowd stirred. pare a cigarette. He blew the smoke leisure­ Then behind Spencer and Swiggin sounded ly from a corner of his mouth. a wild weird scream. They turned to face Swiggin’s hand touched his arm. Adam Joella Rust. She screamed again and started had come in the front door. forward, but Jules Mason sprang into the I knew what this meant to him. It was room behind her, swept her from her feet the first time he had ever entered the Trail and carried her out. House since that evening years before on Adam drew a pistol and fired into the which he and the Texas Swede had carried ceiling. the money pouches out of it. “Everybody stand still!” he yelled. He stood near the door gazing about the The gun in his hand, he backed to the room. Then he saw Spencer and Swiggin door. (It was the second time he had backed and he came toward them and sat down at out of the Trail House.) their table. “Anybody who follows will die!” he said “Well?” he said. viciously, and disappeared. “ We told him to get out as soon as he He found Jules struggling with a horse. got his girl,” said Swiggin quietly. “He Joella had fainted and lay limp across his laughed at us. He ain’t a man easy scared. arm. He sprang into the saddle on the near­ We told him what had happened at the est horse, and Jules lifted Joella up to him. Crossing, and that it wouldn’t be healthy “Bring an extra horse,” he hissed, and for him or his girl to stay in the country. dashed out into the road leading from the 331 The Frontier plaza, Jules following with a horse on lead. It was on an evening a fortnight later When they reached the open country north that I called at the Mason house In town. of town they turned into an arroyo and I found Joella sitting before a fire in the emerged onto a sand flat. They rode until living room. Jules had gone east with a they had struck an Indian trail which would shipment of cattle. She poured me a nip of take them across the Rio Grande . . . to whiskey (it was a cold, blustery evening) and as I drank it I had a peculiar sensation safety. * ♦ * in my throat. One day a little old man went to sit in “Do you know where Adam was horn?” I the Plaza in Santa Fe. His face, covered asked her. with many layers of sun tan, was small and “Not exactly,” she replied. “He always wrinkled. His hands were withered, knotted said ‘just Texas’ when anyone asked him.” and hard. His eyes were two black shoe- buttons moving in narrow white slits. His “Did you ever hear of the Valley of Sing­ beard and long hair were like white silk ing?” I said. and contrasted beautifully with his corru­ She shook her head. “Where is it?” gated umber skin. His shoulders were sharp “It’s the Valley of the Mississippi,” I and drooped. His boots, shorn of high heels, answered. were soft and flat. “The Mississippi . . .” As he sat there on the bench beneath the “Yes. That’s where Adam was born.” locust tree, a multitude of tiny white clouds “The Mississippi . . .” she repeated softly. drifted across the blue expanse of sky. Like a great herd of cattle they moved eastward Then I told her that part of the story she struck with the gold of the sun. They came did not know, that part which in all the out of the beyond beyond the Jemez blue years she had known Adam and Magdalena . . . two abreast, four abreast, ten abreast, (before Magdalena died a wrinkled, bent old twenty abreast, a great mass, twenty abreast, woman, and after he had come to live in her ten abreast, four abreast, two abreast. And house in town) she had never heard. Who there were outriders moving along detached was there to tell her? from the herd. And when I went away that evening and They passed from sight over the moun­ left her sitting before her fire, I felt that a tains eastward, lost in the infinity of noth­ great weight had been lifted from my shoul­ ingness. ders. And it was then, and only then, that The old man sat motionless on the bench. I thought I knew why the little outlaw of His head had fallen forward. His small, Santa Fe had told me his story, but I shall knotted, saddle-brown hands rested in his never be sure. lap. * * * (The End)

LITERARY NEWS terest and promise. It has been launched because “poets in this country [England], Continued from front advertising section and in this period of the victory of the masses, aristocratic and bourgeois as much ton Printers, publishers, have given it an as proletarian, which have captured the in­ exceptionally attractive jacket and good struments of access to the public and use format. them to convey their own once timid and The current bulletin of the American Fic­ silent vulgarity, vulgarizing all the arts, are tion Guild, 178-80 Fifth Avenue, N. Y., con­ allowed no longer periodical means of com­ tains material of significance to many municating their poems.” Such names as writers. It will be mailed on request, and Naomi Mitohison (To Some Young Com­ speaks more competently for itself than a munists from an Older Socialist), H erbert resume can speak for it. R ead (Poetry and Belief in Gerald Manley New Verse, published by Geoffry Grioson Hopkins), and I. A. R ichards (D. H. Law­ at 4a Keats Grove, London, N. W. 3 and rence as a Poet) are assurance of quality printed by W. Lewis, M.A. at the Univer­ in the magazine. Bi-monthly. Vol. I issued sity Press, Cambridge, is of exceptional in­ January, 1933. 80c the year. 332 The Frontier

BOOK SHELF Under the Editorship of Pat V. Morrissette

Los Angeles. Morrow Mayo. Knopf. 1933. with a genuine understanding based on an $3.00. intimate acquaintance. His early chapters “Man’s first conquest of California was are aware of incopgruities and are interest­ simply a footrace, with England and Russia ing, though not elaborate, with details of moving down the Pacific coast, and Spain pioneer life—the Chinese massacre, lynch- moving up. Spain was faster on her feet.” ings, the American seizure—hut they are not It is in this familiar journalese that I jos keen with irony as are his chapters dealing Angeles is written, informally but not flip­ with the recent scene. The author is fair. pantly. And it is with the quoted sentence He is not ignorant of, nor blind to, the nat­ that Morrow Mayo has begun his own con­ ural charms of Southern California smoth­ quest of El Pueblo de Nestra Senora la ered beneath the progressive spirit. Had he Reina de Los Angeles. Easily he has moved been less a writer and more an Iowan, he from the settlement and early growth, might have been fettered by the climate and through the “Hell-Hole of the West,” to the reduced to “a booster, a cheer leader, and arrival of the Southern Pacific and the sub­ a confector of literary egg-kisses.’* sequent boom from which influx of Iowans Broolcings, Oregon James Crissey the city has never quite recovered. In Mike Fink: King of the Mississippi Keel- chronological order he treats upon the bomb­ boatmen. Walter Blair and Franklin J. ing of the Times in 1910, the Rape of Owens Meine. Henry Holt and Co. 1933. $3. Valley (which is the finest single piece in From the day of his birth Mike Fink was the book), and finally the contemporary faced with the alternative of developing the phenomena of Hollywood, Sister Aimee, cunning of a weasel, the strength of a bull- Hickman and the results of the Cornbelt moose, and the vitality of a catamount, or mind acting concertedly in the land of fruit not surviving. Mike survived. He was born, and flowers. it seems, about 1770 at Pittsburgh, Ohio, in Although its four hundred and forty-two a pioneer’s cabin which in respect to house­ square miles have made Los Angeles the keeping arrangements was nothing if not largest city in the United States in point of primitive. By the time he was thirteen he area, the predominance of middle-western was so expert with his rifle that he was ideals has dwarfted it from a cultural stand­ assigned a port-hole at the local fort, and point. Lacking the metropolitan air of San even given a place in some of the expeditions Francisco, which has half the population, against the redskins. At seventeen he won Angelites refer to a trip to the bay region five out of the six “quarters” of beef of­ as “going to the city.” The All-Year Club fered as prizes at a shooting match—and of Southern California has issued more than four quarts of whiskey by betting on the side. ninety million separate advertisements over The whiskey being consumed he boasted he a four months’ period, but to a painting of could “outshoot and outfight ary man in Aimee Semple McPherson hovering in a cloud Pittsburgh, at the drop of a hat,” and he over the Angelus Temple went the city’s art made good his vaunt. Thereafter shooting- awards. matches when he was around were an­ The basis for this overgrown village atti­ nounced as “for five prizes, with Mike Fink tude is logically presented. It is rooted in excluded.” Having served as a scout against the spirit of Baptists on the loose—well-to-do the Indians long enough (and it couldn’t farmers idling in the sun and selling this have been so very long, at that) to be recog­ commodity, Los Angeles, to the folks back nized as sufficiently “ring-tailed” to qualify home. One sees through the author’s eyes for the infinitely tougher life of a keelboat- the largest Chamber of Commerce in America man, he signed on for his first trip along the suckling and growing fat on the life it si­ river-ways to New Orleans and return. From phons from the wilting Owens Valley. It is then until the passing of the keelboats his easy to understand the trampling underfoot career was of the violent sort imposed on of a philanthropist’s dream of Venice, the him either by the arduous days of unending support given a movement to install bibles toil on their decks or by the riotous nights in public schools, the purchasing of liquor of hell-raising sprees at any one of their from taxicabs being considered more decor­ various landing-places. He became succes­ ous than buying drinks over a speakeasy sively a head poleman, a steersman, and a bar. patroon (captain). He earned the right to Mayo has written vividly of his subject wear the red feather that marked him as the The Frontier 333 best man of his boat’s crew in a fist fight terrors, along with the timber, of the forests. Later he earned the title, too, of undefeated Particularly welcome are the tributes thus champion of the entire tribe of rivermen, paid to the talents of Morgan Neville, Emer­ no matter what the contest. son Bennett, and J. M. Field. As the years went by tales of his prowess For myself I could wish that the implied in marksmanship, of his daring hand-to-hand purpose of the authors of Mike Fink to pro­ encounters with “varmints,” and of the terri­ mote the reprinting of Bennett’s melodramat­ fying lengths to which he carried his prac­ ic novel about their hero might be deflected tical jokes, multiplied and grew taller and into a decision to render a similar service to taller. Even those told of the last phase of the sketches of Field, which deserve it more. his life, that of a trapper on the upper But this is no place for parading private reaches of the Missouri, when his powers opinions. Rather it is one for recording might reasonably have been supposed to be thanks. And among the many delights still failing, lost nothing in tallness. If in the unmentioned for which I am deeply in debt growth of the cycle of stories about him he to this latest collection of frontier material was never raised quite to the level of im­ I have space left for naming no more than mortality accorded to other creations of the illustrations. To fall into the only idiom mythology (such as his contemporary fron­ in which one could do them justice: “I’ll tiersman, Davy Crockett, for instance), he be fly-blowed to a sartinty if they ain’t the at least came as near recognition as an un­ cap-sheaf of the hull book.” dying figure of legend as to have his death Portland, Oregon V. L. O. Chittick reported in eleven different versions! And Yunini’s Story of the Trail of Tears. Ada then, unlike no more authentic heroes of the Loomis Barry. Fudge and Company. Lon­ western advance than, say, Daniel Boone, don, 1933. Jim Bridger, or Hugh Glass, he appears to The trail of tears is the sad path towards have been forgotten completely. Mike Fink oblivion trod time and again by simple peo­ deserved a better fate than that. And now ples conquered by superior numbers and at long last he has come into the very kind equipment. Under the vae victis doctrine of of reward to which his deeds so fully entitled classical antiquity, the trail to extermination him. He has reappeared as the title char­ was short. There was a certain fierce, sto­ acter, and in every sense the leading char­ ical dignity about such death. One misses acter, in a volume of mingled history and any kind of dignity in the attrition of the folk-lore, the equal of which for informing American Indian. It was accomplished more and delightful entertainment the limitless by promises broken, treaties ever violated, stores of our frontier annals have not pre­ and the soft-spoken word of Christian viously yielded. brotherhood never put into practice than by Messrs. Blair and Meine in writing this military valor. Almost always the Indian book have done a good deal more than merely believed, and almost always he paid the to collect and stitch together the numerous price of credulity. Our experience makes it items of fact and fiction that make up the hard to deny the Touareg proverb, “With Mike Fink record. They have also hunted the plow enters in dishonor.” out, and woven skilfully into their narrative, Yunini’s Story of the Trail of Tears is an an astounding amount of detail relevant to excellent presentation of the via dolorosa as pioneering customs, and to regional color, walked by the civilized Cherokee nation. settings, and conditions. And in consequence Miss Barry effectively uses the device of for the whole of their work must be claimed having one Yunini recount his people’s tra­ what they too modestly claim only for the ditions to encourage them to bear their last tales upon which it is based: that it brings political injustice. It is a convincing story back “the strength, the exuberance, the roar­ which one might easily believe the author ing laughter of America in her glorious heard from some such person. Both Yunini youth.” More persons, by far, than the “king and Miss Barry are good story tellers. The of the keelers” are recalled to life as the book shows what an ideal continent this result of scholarly devotion to a task that was, from the Indian’s viewpoint, before the has been carried on for years. Nor are they white man came. It shows how the red man all river rowdies, wilderness hunters, and was constantly betrayed by the British their like. What students of frontier letters Crown and its lieges, and later by the United will be grateful for above everything else States of America. The author not only are the brief sketches, interpolated here and shows herself a good spinner of yarns, but there, characterizing those early writers who also a sound historian. first set down on paper the credulity-strain­ An ethnographer, however, is always look­ ing and humorous accounts of their fellows ing for a literary person or an historian who who mastered the shifting mazes of the knows enough about Indian life to satisfy water-routes, endured the diseases and dis­ the critical requirements of their respective comforts of the swamps, and cleared out the crafts. If one is interested in such things, 334 The Frontier

he will find this lack of knowledge the dis­ wea’s subsequent life had never found ade­ appointing feature of the book. An ethnolo­ quate treatment; indeed, as this volume gist would hardly read beyond the opening. shows, had never even been suspected in any The first white shadow which fell across detail. Cherokee land was made by De Soto's gold- Dr. Hebard’s researches led her to a mass grubbing Spaniards. That De Soto, as re­ of documentary evidence, and to much care­ lated in the first few pages, should have fully gathered Indian testimony, now no with him an Aztec princess is credible. But longer possible, since the older witnesses that she should have accompanied the ex­ have passed away. It is but another re­ pedition in the capacity of interpreter does minder of the rapid passing of the old fron­ not ring true. Would a Spaniard, speaking tier. Many of these witnesses knew Saca­ a language of the Indo-European linguistic jawea in person. Very few of such remain family, take an interpreter from a nation today. Perhaps most dramatic in the evi­ speaking a Shoshone-Nahuatlan tongue, to dence was the unexpected proof that Bap­ communicate with tribes speaking languages tiste, half-breed son of Sacajawea and the and dialects within the Caddoan family? expedition’s French-Canadian guide, Char- Would an Arab, receiving a letter from a bonneau, had spent seven years in Germany Norwegian, hunt up a Japanese to act as with Prince Paul of Wurtemberg, once fa­ translator? mous North American traveller. He, like Certainly, little is accurately known of the his mother, died on the Shoshone reservation old life of the Cherokees, or any other tribe of central Wyoming, where the passing era inhabiting the region known technically as left him in slow degeneration after a repu­ the Southeast Woodland culture area. The tation as one of the best guides and inter­ best authority on these peoples was Brinton, preters of the old West. and our author did not even cite his work in Sacajawea’s story covers her years in St. her bibliography. House types from all over Louis, her semi-exile among the Comanches America are made to sprout on Cherokee of Oklahoma, and her painful trek to her soil: tipi, wickiup, wigwam, and even the own people in the Fort Bridger country of Navaho hogan, most of them as much at southwestern Wyoming. With them she home there as Chartres cathedral would be moved to the reservation, sharing with her in Pekin. This same lack of study makes adopted son, Bazil, and with Chief Washakie the illustrations in this handsomely fabri­ a voice in the councils. The book is thus a cated volume somewhat less than meaning­ glimpse of Indian and frontier life, as well less. The agricultural Cherokees are shown as a definitive biography of Sacajawea. It dressed as hunting nomads from eastern is a definite contribution to the history of Montana. the older West. The volume is attractively These are objections springing from the prepared, and is furnished with a thoroughly well-known crotchetiness of anthropologists. annotated bibliography, as well as hitherto But aside from technicalities, it is too bad unprinted pictures. that this fine book perpetuates such terms Laramie, Wyoming w . O. Clough as “squaw” and “papoose.” From what In­ dian language are such opprobrious words A CHILD’S BOOK SEEN BY A taken? Are not “woman” and “child” under­ NINE-YEAR-OLD standable terms? The dubbing of the digni­ Stumpy. Frank B. Linderman. John Day fied Cherokee religious leaders, priests as Co. 1933. $2.00. genuinely so as Father O’Malley or the Stumpy is a wonderful book with all its Flamen Dialis, as “conjurers,” is the same narrow escapes. I have been wondering kind of white man’s scornful carelessness. what happened to Stripes. I think all of But pay no attention to scientists. This Mr. Linderman’s books are nice, especially book is good reading, and it is essentially Stumpy. Stumpy was a chipmunk. He was true. It also serves the healthful social called Stumpy because his tail was so short. purpose of showing the white man for what He was the oldest chipmunk on Goose Bay, he can sometimes be. too, so they called him Old Stumpy. This Missoula, Montana Harry Turney-High book is laughable, too. Some people may not think so because I mentioned thrills and Sacajawea- By Dr. Grace Raymond Heb- narrow escapes. But it is. Stumpy’s little ard. Arthur II. Clark Company. 1933. $6. friend, Fatty, will make you laugh. A jolly Dr. Hebard has long been a tireless worker little fat fellow who got chased by a skunk in the field of western history. The present and Stripes laughed at him, but Fatty got volume is the culmination of thirty years of even with Stripes. I am telling too much research into the tangled threads of the of the story. I hope you all enjoy this book story of Sacajawea, Indian woman guide of review and if you buy the book I am sure the famous Lewis and Clark expedition of you will enjoy it. The pictures are cute, 1804-05, to whom tribute is paid in the I think. Journals on more than one page. Sacaja- Missoula, Montana Alan Merriam 335 The Frontier

How Could I Be Forgetting. Ben Hur deputy sheriff who accompanied Sheriff Pat Lampman. Metropolitan Press. 1933. $1.50. Garrett on the trip which ended in the death It is not to the people of Portland, Oregon, of the outlaw. Poe wrote down the true alone and to the readers of the Oregonian, account somewhat reluctantly, to counteract with which newspaper the author of this false legends already under way. volume has been identified for the past seven­ Mr. M. G. Fulton, in an introduction about teen years, that the work of Ben Hur Lamp- half the small volume, adequately tells the man is appreciatively known. His essays story of William H. Bonney, alias Billy the and poems written over this period have Kid, and his share in the outlaw ’70’s of found a wide audience through the pages of Lincoln county, New Mexico. Billy the Kid numerous American periodicals and maga­ gradually emerged as a “public nuisance,” and, like most outlaws, flourished for a zines of verse. The title is taken from one of the poems time on the fear and admiration of his pub­ and is connotative of the things which Mr. lic. His escape after his first capture by a Lampman finds good and beautiful. Al­ posse headed by Garrett but added to his though a journalist's miscellany, the collec­ fame. But Garrett was a determined man. tion has internal unity—a unity inherent in and, accompanied by his deputy, Poe, he the mood of the writer as he contemplates trailed the outlaw to the Fort Sumner area, his Oregon of mountains and seashore, of long a rendezvous of the gangs. Here the noble forests and of roaring streams. bad man of 21 was killed on the night of They are not sentimental effusions, these July 14, 1881. poems and essays. The writer possesses the This small volume details the incident eye of an artist-naturalist and the passion as Poe witnessed it. It concludes with the of a lyric poet. It is, in truth, this lyricism, Spanish document which reported the find­ blending and unifying the objects in which ings of the coroner’s jury. The final words his eye delights, that gives the work of Mr. exonerating Garrett’s act as justifiable homi­ Lampman its charm and its distinction. His cide are proof of the general relief felt in eye is sensitive to color shades. For him the the community, for the jury concluded that neck of the Mallard drake has “the sheen Garrett deserved the gratitude of the com­ of such satin as the shops do not keep—a munity, and that ‘es digno de ser recompen- green so lustrous that it emits rays like an sado,” “he deserves to be rewarded.” emerald;” the crow’s feathers are “of black Laramie, Wyoming W. O. Clough opal blazing with strange fireand witness China's Foreign Relations 1917-1931. Rob­ this description of a spider’s web in Marco ert T. Pollard, pp. x, 416. The Macmillan Polos of the Wind—“a long and undulant Company. New York. 1933. cord of pliant nacre—” He can use words, Dr. Robert T. Pollard, assistant professor this journalist—accurate words—and he is of Oriental Studies at the University of master of the magic phrase that projects the Washington, has produced a most valuable living image. study of China’s recent foreign relations. It is in certain of the poems scattered At a time when observers anxiously search through this volume that Lampman’s creative for the latest accounts of developments in impulse reaches finest expression—in “To a Eastern Asia it is gratifying to have at Sea Bird Dying,” in “Darkling She Strode hand a scholarly study of the fourteen year to Westward,” and in “If You Have Loved period before Sino-Japanese rivalries and All These” there is passion and beauty. The antagonisms flamed into armed conflict. Al­ artist eye wakens the spirit to song—a song though the movement of events since Sep­ in which mystical faith in nature wars with tember, 1931, is unintelligible without an death and decay and achieves a victory. understanding of backgrounds, until the pub­ Although the reader might wish Lamp- lication of Dr. Pollard’s work none other man’s metrics less suggestive of Swinburne had appeared which covered the extensive and Kipling, and his philosophy freer from field so comprehensively. That information a vague pantheistic deism, he cannot fail to which otherwise must be sought in scattered feel in How Could I Be Forgetting that he is documents or in varied secondary works is in the presence of a personality rich in the now presented in one study. Every student wisdom of human experience and attuned of modern Chinese problems must familiarize to the rhythms of nature. himself with Dr. Pollard’s book. Walla Walla, Washington Ray Lapham Eugene, Oregon Harold J. Noble The Death of Billy the Kid. John W. Poe. Lucky Baldwin. C. B. Glasscock. Bobbs- Houghton Mifflin. 1933. $1.25. Merrill, 1983. $3.50. This first-hand document puts to rest any Every age of expansion seems to create for mystery that may still cling about the death itself a number of personalities through of the frontier outlaw, Billy the Kid. John which it finds expression. The expansion of W. Poe, who died in 1923, long a respected England produced such men, who find their citizen of Roswell, New Mexico, was the type and spirit in Sir Walter Raleigh. The 336 The Frontier

westward expansion of the United States, I theaters. Here Mrs. Ernst has adapted the believe, produced similar romantic figures methods and material of regionalism to the touched with as much powerful and inex­ theater. It is the second of her plays with plicable glory as were any of the Eliza­ an Alaskan background and one which aptly bethans. In his personality Lucky Baldwin demonstrates her power to create a poignant typifies our ravishing conquest of Califor­ atmosphere through the skilful presentation nia. He plundered his way west by the of character. It has been revised since its shrewd bargaining of tea, coffee, wine, whis­ first publication in Theater Arts Monthly. key and horses. He battled to the top at San Francisco by the shrewd trading of O Pioneers. Willa Cather. Houghton Mif­ hotels and by investments in real estate. flin. 1933. $2.50. He gathered the gold of California to his This is the seventeenth impression of Miss pockets by his shrewd buying of mining stocks. Cather’s first regional novel, and a com­ He made millions in gold. He built ranches, plete new edition which should be studied wineries, race tracks, theaters, hotels, towns, for changes the author might have made. cities. He spent lavishly on wine, women The continued popularity of the book is and horses. He had four wives and many heartening to the thesis of regionalism. women claimed illegitimate children by him. Five judges of the supreme court agreed that Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox. in all the implications of the word he was Upton Sinclair. Published by the author, a libertine. He won the big money on every Los Angeles, West Branch. 1933. $3.00. big track in the nation. He took with equan­ In the United States senate in February imity a three-million-and-a-half loss when his Senator Borah remarked: “I think it ( TJp- hotel at Powell and Market in San Francisco ton Sinclair Presents William Pox) is one burned. Yet the path of his glory did not of the most remarkable stories in regard lead to an early grave. He died an old, old to such matters I have ever read.” When man enjoying the bounty of the Southern one turns to the book to find out why the California ranches which the national panics story has jarred the senators, he needs not could not wipe away. His heirs divided to look for long. The recent crash of Wall twenty-five million. Glasscock in his por­ street and the whole credit structure of the trait has added to his reputation as a biog­ nation left Big Business stranded like a rapher of western characters, and E. J. Bald­ whale rotting on a dry beach. Sinclair has win has found in it that monument which exposed this one stench from the great car­ he could not construct for himself. cass with more vehemence and venom than he has used for some time. The materials Man of Two Worlds. Ainsworth Morgan. which he uses are not his own, and much Bobb8-Merrill. 1933. $2.00. of the book is written in direct quotation to This is a first novel of a Northwest writer acknowledge the indebtedness to William which has for its central thesis the clash Fox. of an ancient native culture with a modern civilization. Aigo, the man of these two Adventures in a Man's World. Courtney worlds, is an Eskimo of northernmost Green­ Borden. Macmillan. 1933. $2.00. land who is made painfully conscious of his The man’s world of which Mrs. Borden race and habits by a visit to London. Mor­ writes is the world of the hunter, the fisher­ gan has not romanticized the situation, nor man. She approaches her subject with such has he reduced the thesis to a banal sermon enthusiasm and appreciation for outdoor life on the racial problem, but he has made his that she creates a desire, in this reader at Eskimo actual, a bit conceited even, and a least, to be gone to the woods. Her narra­ trifle dirty and crude, and above all does he tive is fresh with a spirit bold enough to present him as Aigo, a man of two bitterly recall heroism, yet colored with a mood that real worlds. Although one grows conscious can have no other adjective but feminine. at times of the problem of the author, and Her adventures, however deliberate, are not realizes that his Eskimo, however sympathet­ lacking in thrills. She shoots the bears of ically, is being dissected, the fascination Alaska, the grouse of Michigan, the canvas- which the reader has for the strange charac­ backs of Saskatchewan, the quail of Missis­ ter does not subside. Morgan has caught the sippi. She casts for the steelhead in the tragedy of the native in our modern civiliza­ Rogue river of Oregon, and for trout in the tion with more sympathy and art than many lakes of Wisconsin. She has covered the others who have been trying artistically to country, and she tells her story as a woman embody the same thesis for a number of should, with charm. years. All in the Day's Riding. Will James. The Valley of Lost Men. Alice Henson Scribners. 1933. $2.50. Ernst. Row, Peterson and Company. 1 9 3 3 . This is another of Will James’ studies of This is a one-act play in the Gateway cowboy life for children. It is a large book series, especially edited for use in little printed in clear type and illustrated with the introduction to western ranch life and the “cowboy of today.” The cowboy vernacular which he employs adds both ease and elo­ FRATERNITIES quence to his descriptions of the West, and puts these western sketches on a plane with SORORITIES the Uncle Remus sketches of the South. Eugene, Oregon Pat V. Morrissette For your next party Stories of Shakespeare’s Popular Comedies PHONE 4153 Told in Rhyme. Julia La Barre. Metropoli­ tan Press. 1933. For that Delicious An effort of this kind, the presentation of the comedies in remarkable form, should be highly distinguished—as charming, for in­ Golden Glo Ice Cream stance, as the verses of A. A. Milne. But such distinction the author does not ap­ We are the makers of proach. Such lines as those beginning her version of The Merchant of Venice: MELLOMOON ICE CREAM A queen of the sea is the city of Venice It's New and Different But in that fair city one cannot play tennis. or the following from As You Like It: That she had a lover was nothing to him He'd easily rid her of clownish William. G olden G lo or these from The Winter's Tale: He was in high favor with his father, the Creamery Co. king But nothing he knew of that little change­ Butter Milk Cream ling. Buttermilk Cottage Cheese are little short of ludicrous. And yet this i ' I paraphrase is not a parody; the effort is Punch for Parties serious. Nor are the above citations mis- 1 representative. The verses suffer all the more for the inclusion of some of Shake­ speare’s own lyrics. The contrast is violent. The reader, be he young or old, is not aided in memory work. Missoula Rufus A. Coleman COM E T O What Is American? Frank Ernest Hill. John Day. 1933. $2. In answering the query, “What is Ameri­ can?” Mr. Hill responds that to be American The New Hut is to be different. American environment, physical and intellectual, has been unique, differing not only in degree but in kind from FOR the environment, activity, and thought of European nations. To account for the unique, the individual character of Ameri­ Delightful Breakfasts cans, the author dramatically recapitulates our history. He shows us a people faced Tasty Luncheons by a gigantic, unsubdued land; flooded by the mingled blood of all Europe; challenged and lured by an ever diminishing frontier; Delicious Dinners freed from a national church and hence cre­ ating and tolerating new, often fantastic, religions; and committed to the untried ven­ or if it's only a “coke” you'll find ture called Democracy. W hat European, he asks, grows to a welcome from maturity with the legends and songs and faces of black men and red men about him and the blood inheritance of every nation in Europe? BOB and JACK After a survey of these molding forces, the book ends with a discussion of the Ma­ chine Age, the latest adventure confronting Just off University these peoples, fused into a nation by the adventures faced in the past and now chal- — si Patom ize F ro n tier Advertisers 337 For a Successful Party or Banquet

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Order Magazines from T h e Frontier Subscription Agency familiar sketches of the author. The pecu­ liar realism of his approach provides a good lenged by this latest, perhaps most signifi­ cant, factor in their development. This is the It is a quiet, contemplative book, drawn on broad, simple lines. Mr. Hill, scholar and research worker, has laid a foundation for 31st Anniversary his thesis by rapid recapitulation of well known facts. To many, doubtless, this quick marshalling of known facts into new pat­ terns, and the interpretation of those facts of the founding of the as forces molding national thought and phil­ osophy will prove the most interesting phase of the book. Whether the tug of the soil is as important a molding force as the author would have us believe; whether the Indian J*C. Penney Co* has influenced American thought as funda­ mentally as is here represented; whether we may, indeed, regard the future as optimis­ THE PIONEER tically as is here suggested are all questions that the reader must answer for himself. But organization of the west, that Mr. Hill is also a poet, and to many readers the charm of the book will lie in the re­ started so humbly in Kemmerer, freshing re-creation of the past against a W yo., in 1902, now numbers background of up-turned, black earth, of brown, sun-steeped prairie, of rolling hills over 1500 stores in 48 states. and snow-capped peaks. What Is AmericanT provides the reader with food for thought, a philosophic view of the past, a sane, sober, 1902— 1933 yet on the whole optimistic facing of the future. Missoula Lucia B. Mirrielees

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SATISFACTION chief, [and] sleeps between iron sheets, which in winter are made red hot,” and maintaining of a Mississippi river-boat that it drew so little water it could steam right away across prairies, meadows, bottoms, wheat-fields, and the like, i f there had been a heavy dew! There was another, and more decisive, reason why Haliburton should have been led into tall tale collecting. He turned to it, in short, to keep his major comic creation interestingly alive. And out of his pursuit of it for that special pur­ pose there arose an inevitable, and strik­ ing, transmutation in the nature, or at IS ASSURED WITH least in the make-up, of the humorous MISSOULIAN PUBLISHING character is salvaged. While Sam COMPANY JOB PRINTING Slick quickly won acceptance as a “ gen-u-ine” Yankee, he was in down­ right reality a spurious Yankee almost UR Equipment, best ma- from the beginning, and that wholly terial, great care and atten­ apart from his having been presented tion, and the rigid tests to which to the world as a spokesman of American all work is subjected, makes every democracy advocating British imperial­ ism. In his endeavor to keep his clock job we do satisfactory. vendor supplied with an endless succes­ sion of yarns of ‘ ‘ the universal Yankee IT HAS TO BE nation” Haliburton garnered them in­ cessantly from every available source. American newspapers and reprints from their feature columns were always con­ veniently at hand, and Sam Slick’s Call on us for estimates. steady drift toward the ring-tailed roar­ er type of comedy and away from that of the simon-pure down-easter shows how persistently they were read. Ulti­ THE mately he came to stand, in the minds of those who perhaps knew him better MISSOULIAN by hearsay than by any other means, PUBLISHING COMPANY quite as much for the caricature of a COMMERCIAL PRINTING DEPT. western as of an eastern stock figure. So that a broadsheet bearing the title Phone 2162 “ Sam Slick the Yankee Pedlar,” which was hawked about the streets of London in the eighteen-sixties, probably occa-

340 Order Magazines from T he Frontier Subscription Agency sioned no special comment regarding its incongruous blending of regional loca­ tions, although it contained such pat­ ently hybrid tall talk as this: “ It isn’t every day that you see a genu-ine Yankee doodle, I calculate! Oh, no! Now look at me. I’m cast iron all over, and pieced with rock. One of my INTERSTATE blows is either sudden death or long sick­ ness. If I was to hit a fellow it would LUMBER COMPANY knock him into mortal smash, and it ’ud take about eternity to pick up all the pieces—it would, I reckon! We Yankees are a tarnation cute race; we make a for­ QUALITY tune with the right hand, and lose it with the left I’m half fire, half love, and Building Material a touch of the thunderbolt! . . . And I can ride on a flash of lightning and and catch a thunderbolt in my fist I’ve the prettiest sister and the best shooting Fuel rifle in all Virginia. I’m the most glor­ ious, original, and never-to-be-forgotten, 8mash-biler-bu’sting, free and enlighten­ ed nigger-whipping Pedlar as ever was raised, and no soft-sawder. So, go ahead!” Much of his tali tale gatherings, as being insufficiently anecdotal in form, Haliburton was unable to make use of in outfitting his clock-peddling Yankee with politico-moralizing narrative. But all was grist that came to his mill. What­ SWIM ever tall tales he found he hoarded, if only because he had an inordinate appe­ tite for anything that was odd, or whim­ sical, or grotesque, or in other ways The Wilma Plunge likely to provoke laughter. The eventu­ al outcome of his indefatigable gleaning DELIGHTFUL, PURE, from sporting weeklies and paper-backed INVIGORATING WATER ‘ ‘ comics” was the publication of his two voluminous collections of original fron­ General Swimming tier humor, which remain to this day Class Instruction what they were when first printed, un­ rivalled records of the dialect curiosi­ Private Lessons ties, queer customs, and hard living con­ ditions which once prevailed in an Enjoyable Swim Parties America that has all but vanished. Un­ Moderate Prices rivalled records they remain, too, of the ring-tailed roarers who played so large PHONE 5996 a part in making the legend, if not the for party appointments history, of that same America.

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“ The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.” —Thoreau.

VOLUME XIII November, 1932, January, March, May, 1933

MISSOULA, MONTANA Published at the State University of Montana by H. G. MERRIAM

Copyright 1932; Copyright 1933 INDEX Volume X III, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1932-33 VERSE Beynon, Merle ______...Stone Breaker ______...281 Bolles, H. Jason ______...Good Y e a r __ ...... ______...______... 47 Bundrandt, William C., Jr. —Stranger from the Ridges ....______...114 Clapp, M ary Brennan...... Paralytic ______... 48 Clayton, Ruth ______...Prairie Grave ______...200 Clements, Albert Edward.. ...Lost in Air ______...______... 48 Coates, Grace Stone...... Insult Out of Amity ...... _105 Elmendorf, Mary J...... The L egacy...... ______...126 Freund, Otto ___...______...Vachel Lindsay Enters Heaven...... 113 Frohlicher, John C______...A Man Is Named ______...282 Ghost Camp Today ______-1 2 2 Fuller, Ethel Rom ig ...... Glacial Stream ______- 46 Gardner, Orpah ______..With Custer ...______....______...310 Goodpasture, G. Frank...... Dual ______... 12 Necessity _____;...... 13 Night Clouds ______... 13 Salmon Eggs ______. . . 12 The Shipwreck ...... _____ ...... ______... 12 Green, Mary Walter...... Dream Not Too Much ______„214 Grissom, Irene Welch______..Sand Hills ______" ..212 Hammond, Eleanor ______..Second Love (eight lyrics)...... 175 Haste, Gwendolen ______..After Appomattox ______..264 Hogan, S teve______..Trails ______,. - - ..225 Hoster, Grace Madelin____ ..In the Country______..191 Johnson, Dorothy Marie...... Mountain Meadow ______.. 91 Kidd, Walter Evans...... Calf Pasture G a te ______..147 Kresensky, Raymond...... Prairie D w eller______.. 70 Lechlltner, Ruth ______..To One Sleeping ______..104 Lister, Queene B. ______..Thad ...... 14 Littell, Lydia B. ______..By the Sea ______.. 33 Lodge, Rivers ______..Treasures ______...... 151 Macleod, Catherine______..Fantasy ______..230 Quaking Aspen ______.. 46 Maring, Helen ______...... The Endless March ...... 113 Miller, Maude Barnes ...... In Steamboat Days ______..137 Moody, Minnie Hite ...... Prairie S ta rs______..176 Morrill, Jane ______..A Lullaby for Travelers...... 281 Negherbon, William Ovide. .Mountain Burial ______..101 Nutt, Howard ....____ ...... Hands ______....______.278 Olsen, Charles Oluf__ __.... .The Blind, The Sleeper, and The Dumb...... 14 Olson, Ted ...... Ski ______.192 Partridge, Donald ...... God Poems (to Carl Sandburg)...... 280 Pratt, Laurence ...... Montana Mountain ______.. 46 Ransom, Jay E llis...... ■Sage ______.200 Robinson, Lucy M. C...... Threshing ...... 84 Sayre, Melville ...... New Ropes ______.105 Sell, Francis E...... A Mountain Laughs ....______.182 Spencer, Lilian White ___ ... .Indian Letter ______.189 Stevens, Donne Montana...... Prairie Death ...... 201 Stevens, Donald ...... Roadhouse ...... 280 Thomson, Claire Aven...... To One Stricken at the Roots...... 45 Some There Were at a Boarding House Table on Christmas Day ...... 102 Vigil ...... n . . 45 Tracy, Paul E ...... Circuit Rider ...... 92 Van Male, John ...... Cheeseman Park ...... 296 Villa, Jose Garcia ...... Dolores ...... 279 Vinal, Harold ...... Winter Sabbath ...... 24 W ard, W illiam Allen ..... Coahuila ...... 47 Waters, Elizabeth ...... Season ______. 44 Wetjen, Albert Richard. “I Only K n o w "...... 279 Wilhelm, Gale ...... Quest ______..._____.... 48 Zuker, Anne ...... Drums of the W in d ...... 11 STORIES Appel, Benjamin ------— ...... Understanding ...... — 186 Corning, Howard McKinley—...... The Coffin Boat ...... —■ 202 Kettle Cache ...... — .283 The Sixes Runs to the Sea . 1 Winter Apples ______.116 Driggs, H a l______Up the Hill ------.183 Fitzgerald, Brassil ...... Fraternity ------. 38 Godchaux, Elma ______Black Mother ------.273 Slaves ...... 81 Hardman, F. A. ______Two Heads ------.265 Huse, Harry G. ______Two Against the S k y ------. 25 Moore. Virginia ______Heart-Shaped L e a f------.123 Ward, Fred J. ______Journey ------.193 NOVEL Terrell, Upton ______Adam Cargo (first installment)...... ------165 (conclusion) ------...------.297 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE Botkin, B. A. ______.....__ ...__ W e Talk of Regionalism, North, East, South, West. 286 Chittick, V. L. O . ______Ring-tailed Roarers ------.257 Clemens, Cyril (editor)______The Mississippi in the 60’s ------.129 Derleth, August ______A Day in March ------.189 Fisher, V ard is______Myths About Authors ------.177 Fitzgerald. Brassil ______Genius in F lig h t------.106 Howard, Capt. John— See Clemens, Cyril Hubert, E. E. ______Day’s Work (four sketches)...... — 152 Kline, John M . ______The Reservation ....------...— ....------49 McWilliams, Carey...... _The West, a Lost Chapter — ....------. 16 Miles, Maude Maple ______Ezra Meeker ------.807 Robertson, Pearl Price______Homestead Days in Montana...... — ...... 216 Stewart, George R., Jr. ______Some Bret Harte Satires ______. 93 HISTORICAL MATERIAL Hebard, Grace Raymond (editor)..Letters from Tom Rivlngton...... 148 Lehrbas, Lloyd (editor)...... War Department Records, 1862 and 1865...... 226 McLemore, Clyde ...... The Keogh-Bismarck Stage Route...... 140 Overholser, J. F...... Livestock Growers Threatened by Indians...... 68 Phillips, Paul C. (editor)...... Upham Letters from the Upper Missouri, 1865...... 311 Redington, J. W ...... Scouting in Montana in the 1870’s...... 56 Rivlngton, Tom See Hebard, Grace R. Upham See Phillips, Paul C. NORTHWEST FOLKLORE Clark, June______...... Old Blue, a Tall Tale ...... 71 Calland, Annice ...... Indian Legends of Puget Sound (verse) .138 Reagan, Albert B...... Traditions of the West Coast Indians.. .318 Wagner, Glendolin Damon .Old Man C o y o te ...... 212 Study Montana Educational Problems at Montana Institutions

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c o a t s B B B $10.75 $16.75 $19.75 AMERICANA DESERTA 1 Edited by IBernawdHH H i This series concerns itself with such items of Americana as have hitherto been feithir overlooked or inadequately appreciated and which genuinely preserve some­ thing that is native and peculiar to America; It confines itself chiefly to the first six decades of the nineteenth century. Professor Kenneth B. Murdock of Harvard University writes: “ The series is likely to he most important for all lovers of [American literature, whether students or general readers/* Bach volume is priced at $3.00. Order from your bookseller or from the publisher.

TALL TALES OF THE SOUTHWEST THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF An Anthology of Southern and South* JAMES P. BECKWOURTH western Humor, 1830-1860* By T. D. Burner Edited by FrankUn J. Maine | Edited, with an Introduction, by “ Here we get on rich ground . , .• Tile ed­ Bernard DeVoto itor has dog op moch more than the light* A classic of the fur-trade and the Indian hearted ribald*? o f an exuberant people frontier. “A feeling of having been engaged; Ton T ele* belongs with American literary in some glorious, gory and eminently thrill­ history/’—Harry Hansen. ing adventure lingers after finishing this ex­ alted tale.”—■The PhiL Public Ledger; THE PARTISAN LEADER By Nathaniei* Beverley Tuckks Edited, with an Introduction, by THE GENTEEL FEMALE Carl Bridenbaugh An Anthology This “Cavalier” love story, first published in Edited by Clifton / . Furness 1836, is an invaluable historical document. A highly amusing portrait of the frail and It predicted many o f the Incidents o f the pious Victorian female as seen in novels, g ift/ Civil War, and In 1862 Charles Sumner d e books, model-letter-writers, and poetry/ elated It was positive proof of thirty years “Grand s tu ff/ says The New Pork Time* M o f Southern p erfid y ^

PIERRE THE AMERICAN DEMOCRAT B y H jsrmast H W W M By J am sb F enimore Cooper With an Introduction by Edited, with an Introduction by j® Robert 8. Forsythe 1?. & M encken The text of this edition; substantially that / This tittle-known but vigorous book was thus, Ot the first edition published in 1852, is the first major onslaught by a native American nearest approach to what the famous author against the democratic vulgarity of his cou&jf pt Moby- pick actually; wrote and his con- fl trymen. It is here reprinted for the first- temporaries read. i , B I time since its publication in 1838.

A l f r e d A > K jn o p f 7 * 3 0 F i f t h A v b 1 N • Y