Cargoes for Crusoes

The use of history in fiction is at once an aid and a handicap to the writer. Where he is using historical persons, he may count upon a certain delight of recognition from some or all of his readers; offset by disappointment if the portrait doesn’t closely resemble a preconceived ideal. The use of an historical period is on the whole far more satisfactory, and an exact setting is the most satisfactory of all. For fiction is written to express a sense of meaning and to convey a feeling. Like all forms of faith, it creates its own facts. And, as in some other types of illumination, the most effective treatment of historical figures and occurrences by the fictioner is often—indirect lighting.

The three writers I am going to talk principally about in this chapter have certain resemblances and a marked divergence. Although two of them are no longer alive, their audiences were never greater than now. All three belong to the South and West, and two of them wrote novels which have been transformed into motion pictures of enormous influence and success. The third is usually spoken of as a writer for boys, although the boys who read him are, many of them, long past their teens. Both Emerson Hough and Thomas Dixon wrote books which are partly or mainly propaganda. Joseph A. Altsheler, avoiding any suggestion of such a thing, was remarkable for the accuracy of historical detail in his stories. Perhaps the most striking quality in common among these three writers—I won’t undertake to give it a name—is the fact that each, on more than one occasion, has had his huge audience waiting in line to get his book.

I. Emerson Hough

The author of The Covered Wagon was born in Newton, Iowa, 28 June 1857, and died 30 April 1923, when the motion picture fashioned from his novel was the sensation of Broadway—indeed, of America. The first class graduated from the little Iowa high school had three members, Hough being one. (It is perhaps not out of place to say that he pronounced his surname “Huff”). After a brief experience teaching a country school, the boy entered Iowa State University and was graduated with the class of 1880. “I had a university education, perfectly good and perfectly worthless,” he said in later years. His father, Joseph Bond Hough, had been a Virginia schoolmaster, and saw education in terms of a classical course leading to one of the professions. The young man read law in Newton and was admitted to the bar there.

Life began for him then. He went to White Oaks, New Mexico, half a cow town and half a mining camp, about eighty miles west of Socorro in the mountain region between the Rio Grande and the Pecos Rivers. Mr. Hough’s North of 36 has been attacked as lacking in authenticity because, when he came to White Oaks, “the frontier epoch had ended.” To which the novelist William MacLeod Raine has made reply: “Interesting, if true. Particularly interesting to me, because it was in 1881 that my father brought his family into the Southwest from England and went into the cattle business (with side lines of tie-making and lumbering). The nearest village was 30 miles away. I and my small brothers used to ride twenty miles to get the mail once a week. That outpost of civilization my memory can make the setting of a score of dramatic incidents. The frontier was not a hard and fast condition which can be defined as having vanished on a specific date. Civilization lapped forward here and there, leaving pockets which did not yield to its influence for many years.” And Hough himself said simply: “In this rugged field, among these splendid and sterling men, in an atmosphere not too law-abiding, but always just and broad, I got my first actual impression of life; learned to respect a man for what he really is.”

He became a sportsman from the first—the practice of law in White Oaks was not exacting—and all his life he was a great hunter and traveler. His father failed in business and something had to be done to make a living for the family. Journalism seemed to be Emerson Hough’s only chance; he had already sold fugitive pieces. After a little time in Des Moines and work on a newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio, he got, in 1889, the job of looking after the Chicago office of Forest and Stream. The job paid $15 a week. But he combined with it work for daily newspapers and for a newspaper syndicate. Most of his writing had to do with sport.

There were some bitter times. But, in fact, nearly all his life until within a few years of his death was to be a mixture of hardships and happiness. The hardships concerned money, except those physical hardships he endured out of doors in what were undoubtedly the happiest hours of his life. Out of doors journalism took him into almost every State of the Union and almost every Province of Canada; to Alaska, also. Sometimes he used to wonder if he had ever slept thirty consecutive nights under one roof. Desperately worried at times, he would say with a sigh of relief: “It is impossible to fret over things when you are wading a trout stream, following a good dog, or riding a good horse.” Within five years of his death intimate friends saw him, suffering from ill health, in tears over uncertainties regarding his work and discouraging certainties regarding his income; yet he lived through the swift, dramatic turn of his fortunes to taste the satisfaction of his very great ambition and to reap a substantial part of the money reward.

In 1895 he explored the Yellowstone Park in winter, going on skis, and an Act of Congress protecting the Park buffalo was due to this adventure. By speech and by his writings he did much all his life to aid the protection and study of wild life and to support the system of national parks. The America he had known in the flush of his youth was really a passion with him. One day after he had finished a series of short stories on the old trails for his out of doors department in the Saturday Evening Post the editor, George Horace Lorimer, suggested that he take either the Overland or the Oregon trail as the subject of a novel. The suggestion was in itself the most magnificent of trails to such a mind as Hough’s. He wrote, then, The Covered Wagon.

His first book, The Singing Mouse Stories, which had to do with out of doors, appeared when he was 38; he was forty when, in 1897, he married Charlotte A. Cheesbro, of Chicago, and published The Story of the Cowboy, praised by Theodore Roosevelt. His first novel came three years later, and with his second, The Mississippi Bubble (1902), he attracted nation-wide attention. It is amusing to recall that he made five copies of The Mississippi Bubble and despatched them simultaneously to five publishers, each of whom sent an acceptance.

When he died, Mr. Hough left several completed books. Three of them were novels and the first of these, Mother of Gold, has just been published. A story of the present day, woven around the old legend of the lost mine of Montezuma, it has to a curious degree the pioneer zest and spirit of Hough’s romances of earlier times.

Of his earlier novels, The Mississippi Bubble and Fifty-four Forty or Fight are the ones that seem likely to be read longest; of his later novels probably The Magnificent Adventure (1915), dealing with the Lewis and Clark expedition and with Aaron Burr’s daughter as its heroine, The Covered Wagon, and North of 36, the story of the Texas cattle trail, have the best chance of permanence—always premising that work as yet unpublished may take its place with these.

II. Joseph A. Altsheler

To Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library, I am indebted for the best picture of what Joseph A. Altsheler’s work signifies. Both at the time of his death and since, he was and has been and is the most popular author of books for boys in America. He is more popular than James Fenimore Cooper, to whose work his own is probably most closely allied. He wrote over again, as Miss Moore has pointed out, the tales of our pioneer life and struggle “with a fresh sense of their reality.” His “deep love of nature, the ability to select from historical sources subjects of strong human interest, a natural gift for storytelling, and great modesty” were other qualities which the youthful reader senses and appreciates. “Boys who clamor for Altsheler,” says Miss Moore, “read history and biography as a natural and necessary accompaniment. Nor do they neglect Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or The Boys’ Life of Mark Twain. Never in the history of writing for boys has an author attained universal popularity on so broad a foundation of allied interests in reading.”[77]

Cooper wrote when American history was brief; another century and the breadth of a continent unrolled itself before Altsheler, who set about in quiet patience to make all that spaciousness and all those crowding events intelligible for the American boy. And because in modesty and patience he had gone far to achieve just that—taking the average boy into the wilderness, as Miss Moore says, “so that he may realize his heritage in the history of his country and take his place there more intelligently”—his death is a sharp loss. Miss Moore has told how, on 7 June 1919, boys came all day long to the New York Public Library, some with clippings from the newspapers telling of their favorite’s death. There they could look upon a full set of all his works, and his picture. Said a 17-year-old:

“He looks young in that picture but he could have lived all through American history—he makes it so true. You couldn’t do better than to read his books. You can even answer some of the Regents’ questions out of Altsheler’s books. I read every one of them and I got an A-1 mark for history.”

Eyes roved along the shelves over the volumes of the Young Trailers’ Series, the Texan Series, the French and Indian War Series, the Civil War Series, and the rest. They picked out individual titles—always simple and always touched with the imagination of a man who knew supremely how to kindle the youthful mind. Altsheler, indeed, surpassed himself in the titles of the eight books of his Civil War Series, a beautiful crescendo:

and then the point of rest, on a great chord, followed by a resolution and a final cadence:

—guns, scouts, sword, star, rock! The words sing. Then the shades of anguish, weariness, impending defeat, and at last the peace of the spreading tree....

Joseph Alexander Altsheler was born at Three Springs, Kentucky, 29 April 1862. As a boy he would lie on his back in the woods of the Daniel Boone country and dream of the pioneers until they came to have as strong a fascination for him as the myths of Greece have had for other minds. There were not many books, but he heard over and over again the stories of woodsmen and fighters, for he was descended on his mother’s side from Virginia and Kentucky borderers. And as a boy he knew personally Civil War veterans, both blue and gray, such as General Simon Bolivar Buckner, General Don Carlos Buell, and General Frank Wolford. The one writer who captivated him completely and to whom he afterward said he owed the most was Francis Parkman.

He was educated at Liberty College, Glasgow, Kentucky, and at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Then he went to work on the Louisville Evening Post. A year later he moved over to Henry Watterson’s Courier-Journal, for which he became the political reporter and legislative correspondent at Frankfort, the State capital.

After service as city editor of the Courier-Journal and as an editorial writer, he joined the staff of the World, New York. He covered the World’s Fair in Chicago and the events attending the dethronement of Liliuokalani in Hawaii, and then became editor and manager of the tri-weekly edition of the World, a job he continued to hold until his death. His first book of consequence was The Sun of Saratoga (1897), which still sells. The first of his boys’ books, so-called, was The Young Trailers (1906), written when his own son was eleven or twelve years old. But he made it a practice never to allow thought of the age of his readers to affect his treatment of a subject; and while this accounts for the number of older readers who enjoy his books, it probably also goes far to account for the success of his books with boys. He never wrote down to them.

His accuracy and his sense of reality are beyond praise. But the finest tribute to him is the fact that, as Miss Moore testifies, he is the only author whom older boys absolutely insist on having, for whose books they wait in line in the library, refusing to be put off with other titles.

III. Thomas Dixon

Although Thomas Dixon’s new novel, The Black Hood (1924), is a story of the Ku Klux Klan of 1870, and so a companion volume to The Clansman (1905), it is customary to speak of The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman, and The Traitor (1907) as a trilogy of the Reconstruction period at the South. Of those who admired this series perhaps the best known and certainly the most unqualifiedly enthusiastic was Max Nordau, who hailed the novels as undoing the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and giving the deferred answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Similarly, The One Woman (1903), Comrades (1909), and The Root of Evil (1911) are grouped together as a trilogy of Socialism, pleading for the development of individual character and opposing the Socialistic remedies for the ills of society.

Thomas Dixon was born at Shelby, North Carolina, 11 January 1864, the son of the Reverend Thomas Dixon and Amanda Elizabeth (McAfee) Dixon. The father was a Baptist clergyman. At 19 the son was graduated from Wake Forest College, North Carolina, with a scholarship admitting him as a special student in history and politics at Johns Hopkins University. A year later he became a student at the Greensboro (North Carolina) Law School. About the same time he was elected to the North Carolina legislature. He got his law degree, dabbled in politics, was admitted to practice in the North Carolina and United States courts, including the United States Supreme Court, had a part in two conspicuous murder trials of the day, and then, before he was 23, and some months after marrying Harriet Bussey, of Columbus, Georgia, resigned from the legislature to enter the Baptist ministry.

He held a pastorate for a year in Raleigh, North Carolina, and for a year in Boston before coming to the People’s Temple in New York. He preached in New York for ten years, 1889-1899. At the same time he became a lyceum lecturer and he continued to lecture until 1903. His outspokenness in the pulpit was coupled with a certain disregard of clerical custom; for example, he enjoyed going hunting. He began to publish books of sermons at least as early as 1891. He was 35 when he quitted the pulpit and turned to fiction.

Three of his novels are centered upon outstanding figures of the Civil War. The Southerner (1913) is constructed about Lincoln, The Victim (1914), about Jefferson Davis; The Man in Gray (1921), about Robert E. Lee. A Man of the People is a Lincoln play; The Fall of a Nation depicts the conquest of the United States by the Imperial Nation. Such a novel as The Way of a Man is more or less related to the novels dealing with Socialism; The Sins of the Father, a study of the results of miscegenation, belongs with The Clansman group.

It was in 1915, ten years after the sensational success of The Clansman, that David Wark Griffith produced his film based on the novel under the title, “The Birth of a Nation.”

The new novel of the Klan, The Black Hood, is concerned with the time when the original Ku Klux Klan had accomplished the work for which it was organized and was becoming more or less of a menace to the liberty of the Southerners among whom it flourished. Mr. Dixon’s hero opposes the Klan’s methods as being false to the spirit in which the Klan was founded. He is successful in his stand after many exciting adventures. There is a romantic interest interwoven in the story.

IV. Stephen Crane

The author of The Red Badge of Courage has lately been the subject of a brilliant biography. Mr. Thomas Beer’s Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters has the color and the abiding fascination of its subject, if sometimes a trifle too cryptic and oracular. The point of The Red Badge of Courage is its record of war as the experience of the individual, any war in any age. The book, a product of purely imaginative experience by a youth of twenty-two to twenty-four, lights up its single theme as completely as a Verrey flare exposes some small corner of a battle. Reading either Crane’s work or Mr. Beer’s study, one can no more doubt that Crane was a genius. He had the intense, piercing, personal vision of the isolated, unexplained (and unexplainable) artist. Such a figure is not to be produced by any sedulous process of education; it is not a triumphant burbank of literary cultivation. Although people remember, or, at least, generally have heard of, The Red Badge of Courage, there is a sharp need for republication of most of Crane’s work in a good edition; for The Open Boat and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky are of the utmost importance, the first on the evidence of Joseph Conrad, the second on the evidence of Stephen Crane. If one were asked to pick the American authors of most interesting significance to literature at large, one would do well, I think, to let both Poe and Hawthorne wait at one side while one weighed carefully Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane.

Other authors whose use of American history in fiction has interested huge audiences are Everett T. Tomlinson, Elmer Russell Gregor, Frederick Trevor Hill and Bernard Marshall. It is perhaps natural that their fiction should be spoken of, as Altsheler’s is often spoken of, as “stories for boys.” There is conclusive evidence, however, that about half of the readers of Altsheler are adults; and the percentage of adult readers for the books by Mr. Tomlinson, Mr. Gregor, Mr. Hill and Mr. Marshall is heavy. This might be inferred easily enough from the simple fact that between 1,250,000 and 1,500,000 copies of Mr. Tomlinson’s books have been sold.

Everett T. Tomlinson, born in 1859, had a boyish passion for natural history and another for baseball. From Williams College he went into teaching, becoming headmaster of a boys’ school, where he still played ball. For twenty-three years he was pastor of a church in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was appointed a member of the New Jersey Public Library Commission when it was formed in 1901, and became its chairman in 1921. His first book appeared thirty years ago. Besides many fictions, such as The Mysterious Rifleman and Scouting on the Border, he is the author of a Young People’s History of the American Revolution and such books as Places Young Americans Want to Know and Fighters Young Americans Want to Know. His new book (1924) is called Pioneer Scouts of Ohio.

Elmer Russell Gregor, born in 1878, was graduated from a military academy and spent twenty-four hours in the drygoods business, six months in real estate, and more successful periods as a farmer and stock raiser, and in lumbering, quarrying and mining. His real job since 1910 has been writing, but, as he says, his hobbies are Indians (foremost), ornithology, natural history, forestry, hunting and fishing, and breeding prize-winning dogs, chickens and pigeons, so “you see I don’t have much time for work.” He lives in Southport, Connecticut, but has traveled much and “my circle of intimate acquaintances includes cowboys, ‘sour-doughs’ (miners), Injuns, mountaineers, and lumberjacks—all good fellows.” The books that have been most popular with his readers are stories of young Indian chiefs, divided into two series, the Western Indian Stories and the Eastern Indian Stories, and, most recently, the Jim Mason series, which follows the fortunes of a white frontiersman in the days of the French and Indian wars. Captain Jim Mason (1924) is his latest work.

Frederick Trevor Hill, born in 1866, a graduate of Yale and a graduate in law at Columbia, on the staff of General Pershing and cited by Pershing, is the author of very widely-known books on the law, both as fact and as material for fiction. His interest in American history has led him to study the three or four outstanding figures in such books as On the Trail of Grant and Lee, On the Trail of Washington, and Washington The Man of Action. Why, it may be asked, two books on the Father of his country? And the response must be that On the Trail of Washington is, as the subtitle explains, “a narrative of Washington’s boyhood and manhood, based on his writings and other authentic documents,” and is concerned with the growth of early years; whereas Washington The Man of Action is an attempt to portray the mature man as he really was, not as the plaster saint of his earliest biographers.

Bernard Marshall was born on a farm twenty miles south of Boston, one of a family fond of books and music. Having resolved to be a writer, he thought he could play in orchestras and make a living until he had his foothold as an author. Thereupon twenty years were passed as a musician, a legal stenographer, a writer of technical articles and in advertising work. Then, after trying to help build ships to win the war, Mr. Marshall settled in Berkeley, California, a half mile from the university, and began to write historical romances, Walter of Tiverton, Cedric the Forester, and The Torch Bearers. The last two and his new American historical romance, Redcoat and Minute Man, form a Liberty Series, showing three crucial points in the history of the Anglo-Saxon struggle for popular liberties, Magna Charta (Cedric the Forester), Oliver Cromwell (The Torch Bearers), and the American Revolution (Redcoat and Minute Man).

BOOKS BY EMERSON HOUGH

SOURCES ON EMERSON HOUGH

The Men Who Make Our Novels, by George Gordon. Moffat, Yard and Company. Page 140 et seq. This book now published by Dodd, Mead and Company.

Autobiographical article in the American Magazine: 1918 or earlier.

Editorial article in the Saturday Evening Post, April or May, 1923.

“A Defense of the American Tradition,” by William MacLeod Raine, in the Author and Journalist, Denver, Colorado, 1923.

BOOKS BY JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER

The Young Trailers Series: Frontier Life in the Revolution. Two boys, Henry Ware and Paul Cotter, and three scouts are the chief characters:

The French and Indian War Series. The period is from 1754 to 1763 and the central characters are Robert Lennox, an American boy; Tayoga, an Onondaga Indian; and David Willet, a hunter:

The Texan Series. Three stories of the Texas struggle for independence, with an American boy, Ned Fulton, in the foreground:

The Civil War Series. The principal battles of the Civil War are covered. In four of the stories Dick Mason, who fights for the North, is the leading character; in the other four his cousin, Harry Kenton, fighting on the Southern side, is featured:

Indian Wars of the West and Southwest. Not a series:

The Great West Series:

The World War Series. John Scott, a young American in Germany when the war opens, and Phillip Lannes, a young French friend, are the central figures:

Historical Romances. More definitely for older readers. Not in series:

SOURCES ON JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER

“Joseph A. Altsheler and American History,” by Anne Carroll Moore. Pamphlet published by D. Appleton & Company.

Article by Anne Carroll Moore in The Bookman for November, 1918. Reprinted in Roads to Childhood, by Anne Carroll Moore.

“Some Worthwhile Books,” by Robert Page Lincoln in The Review.

“A Kentucky Writer of Historical Novels,” by John Wilson Townsend, in the Lexington (Kentucky) Leader for 18 May 1912.

BOOKS BY THOMAS DIXON

SOURCES ON THOMAS DIXON

“The Men Who Make Our Novels,” by George Gordon, page 249. Moffat, Yard and Company (now published by Dodd, Mead and Company).

Articles on the photoplay, “The Birth of a Nation,” made from The Clansman are too numerous to be cited. The reader may consult the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature for 1915-16.

BOOKS BY STEPHEN CRANE

SOURCES ON STEPHEN CRANE

Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters, by Thomas Beer. Alfred A. Knopf: 1923.

BOOKS BY EVERETT T. TOMLINSON

(For more complete list, see Who’s Who in America: 1924-25)

SOURCES ON EVERETT T. TOMLINSON

“The Historical Story for Boys,” by Everett T. Tomlinson. Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company.

Who’s Who in America.

BOOKS BY ELMER RUSSELL GREGOR

Jim Mason Stories. The hero is a young frontiersman.

Western Indian Stories. The hero is White Otter, a young Sioux chief:

Eastern Indian Stories. The hero is Running Fox, a young chief of the Delawares:

BOOKS BY FREDERICK TREVOR HILL

(For more complete list, see Who’s Who in America)

BOOKS BY BERNARD MARSHALL