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' shy = > THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign https://archive.org/details/tamingoffrontierOOaikm 898T NI OSvd 1m THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER EL PASO : OGDEN : DENVER : ST. PAUL SAN FRANCISCO : PORTLAND : KANSAS CITY CHEYENNE : SAN ANTONIO : LOS ANGELES BY TEN AUTHORS EDITED BY DUNCAN AIKMAN NEW YORK MINTON, BALCH & COMPANY : 1925 Coryricut, 1925, By MINTON, BALCH & COMPANY. Printed in the United States of America by J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK 20 Mer- 3S 778 #i¢t CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . Rui a nate yl, EL PASO: “The Ainge Baia on the Frontier . By Owen P. White OGDEN: ‘The Underwriters of Salvation . By Bernard De Voto DENVER: Washed Whiter’n Snow By George Looms SAN FRANCISCO: A eaiaann of Bo- hemia . ; By Idwal Jones ST. PAUL: The Untamable Twin . By Grace Flandrau PORTLAND: A Pilgrim’s Progress By Dean Collins KANSAS CITY: Houn’ Dawg vs. Art By Henry J. Haskell SAN ANTONIO: The Unsainted Anthony By Dora Neill Raymond LOS ANGELES: Ballyhooers in Heaven By Paul Jordan-Smith CHEYENNE: The Wild West Sells its Atmosphere . By Cary Abbott — 904841 PAGH Xi 27 63 99 125 157 201 237 293 ILLUSTRATIONS RNEERSONAN LOGS 5 Nets kil yi chia aly je, Lert POMS OIECE FACING PAGE Salt Lake City, Utah Territory,in 1857. . . . . 40 POE LPeet TT eONVerUIN WLSGOe 46) tlisc\!' a) heen) le) a se nO Baeeranciscosiny tie Late Pitties 303 )ie)\) 0) Velie es, hae Pere YC G te WEMCLON Se, tye!) he! wire aka ti%er)) (eet oka Court House Park, Portland, in the Eighties . . . 182 PO SPCALY DUD RL OOM ee hai ihe) ) eho elt ah tele) ee san Antonio in the Highties.. . . 2. « « +» 248 Povendcelies mm the Late Wiftiess, (is sae ee a STZ The Last Trip of the Cheyenne-Deadwood Coach on ET MET VOU LSAT ter belie ate Vey gh ihe yh eee Od CONTRIBUTORS Owen P. Wuirr, though he is now in his forties, is the oldest inhabitant of American parentage born in El Paso. He is the author of “Them Was the Days,” a retrospect of frontier life, and “Out of the Desert,” a history of El Paso, and is a frequent contributor to the American Mercury. At present he is on the staff of the New York Times. BrernarpD Dr Voro, a native of Utah, is an in- structor in English at Northwestern University. His first novel, “The Crooked Mile,” was published in 1924, GrorcE Looms is a former dramatic editor of Denver newspapers and is the author of three novels: “Stubble,” “John No-Brawn,” and “The Caraways.” Ipwau JongEs is an ex-machinist and a writer of special articles on the San Francisco Examiner. His first novel, dealing with gypsy life in America in the 1850’s, will be published in the fall of 1925. Mrs. GracE F'LANDRAU, a native of St. Paul, is the author of two novels, “Being Respectable” and “Entranced.” Dean COLuins is a feature writer for the Port- land (Ore.) Telegram and a frequent contributor to magazines. 1% whys CONTRIBUTORS Henry J. Hasxe.u is chief editorial writer of the Kansas City Star. He is a contributor to The World’s Work, The Outlook, and The Indepen- dent. Mrs. Dora NEttu Raymonp, a native Texan, is assistant professor of history in Sweetbriar Col- lege, Virginia. She is the author of “British Policy and Opinion during the Franco-Prussian War” and “The Political Career of Lord Byron.” Pau JorDAN-SMi1TH, a Californian of long resi- dence, is the author of a book of essays, “On Strange Altars,” and two novels, “Cables of Cob- web” and “Nomad.” Cary ABBOTT is a native of Cheyenne and a former editor of the Yale Literary Magazine. The publishers are indebted to the editors of The American Mercury for permission to reprint “El Paso” by Owen P. White and “San Francisco” by Idwal Jones, INTRODUCTION The legend of the standardization of American cities is easy to believe. There is an appalling amount of supporting evidence. While New Orleans hacks down its “galleries” to make room for office buildings, Keokuk imports “California- Spanish” bungalows and Santa Barbara imports Iowans. Spokane and Peoria and El Paso func- tion with impressive efficiency as each other’s un- conscious mimics. There is justice even in the cruel saying that, despite the fame of its criminal intel- ligentsia, Chicago is but the Los Angeles of the Great Lakes region. Serious defenders of vivacity and variety in our national life have good grounds for complaining to the police about wanton cruelties inflicted by all this high pressure uniformity upon that unfortu- nate animal once called the American individual. What chance has he in a civilization which only asks that he get into a groove and never under any provocation flop out of it? How can he survive except in a secret and ironic anguish in a society which demands that as go-getter, up-lifter, high- powered executive, fundamentalist, Labor Union business agent, home town booster, Yale alumnus, or Country Club play boy, he run one hundred per cent true to type seven days a week? xi Xii INTRODUCTION One cannot read of these ten cities, or, indeed, be alive in any American city today without realiz- ing how the gods of individualism in both personal and community life have been thrown down to make way for the gods of standardization. Out in the West especially, where a generation or two ago the pioneer imposed his individuality upon raw and uncouth towns at the point of his six-shooter, today the group prejudices of boosters and breed- ers to type impose their pet conformities with ges- tures scarcely less ferocious. Laugh publicly and rationally at the slogans and statistics of the Boosterburg Chamber of Commerce and you will see. But is all this merely a truth of temporary ap- pearances, or one of those devastatingly eternal truths from which there is no escape short of trans- Jation to a reasonably variegated Hades? These articles supply an answer, and a glimmer of encouragement. Standardized, as these ten western cities are, where there was so little of ancient and deep- rooted tradition to keep off the coming of uni- formity, they are by no means ten finished Booster- burgs. Drawing upon some inexhaustible blandness in her ancestral heritage, San Antonio has fought the boosters and their conformities to a standstill. No blows exchanged, no rough stuff. It is merely as if a travelling drummer or the Rev. Dr. Sunday had hoarsely criticized the gown of a princess, and she, not deigning to attend his discourse directly, INTRODUCTION X1il had thereafter worn the garment with a slightly more studied carelessness. In San Francisco, it is true, the modern Ap- polyon fills the streets more and more with the stench of his realtorian ethics, the windy sound of his Kiwanian back-slappings and of Lions roaring booster slogans in chorus. But San Francisco still fights Appolyon in the name of ancient and fantas- tic gayeties; in the name of personal idiosyncrasies too acid to merge easily with the digestive fluids of Main Street which would, if they could, convert us all to the same chemical substance. Appolyon may have begotten a Boosterburg upon San Francisco. But the damsel’s term is not due yet, and, considering her sophistication and the hectic life she leads, there may be a mishap. The other eight cities are perhaps further gone along the Boosterburg way. Yet even so, much is to be said for them. ‘The state they have attained, is the same, let it be granted: Kansas City and Los Angeles are two peas of slightly different size and structural appearance from the same pod. But into this very sameness, they have grown by what different processes, with what varying motives! Portland to preserve the good name of her soiled Puritanism by a noisy display of it! Denver seek- ing in intolerant conformity an effective check upon an individualism once intolerably and criminally violent! Los Angeles realizing that that municipal standardization which makes the loudest noise upon this planet will best qualify its realtors financially to entertain angels of Hollywood! Ogden resolute XIV INTRODUCTION with the smug cunning of its stupidity to make a fat living out of conformity while the chance lasts! El Paso whipped on by the inferiority complex of a small and remote community to risk all on doing, however clumsily, “the right thing”! Kansas City struggling pathetically and inharmoniously, but more encouragingly than some others, to deter- mine what the “right thing”’ is! For these are, despite their more or less common ending, varied tales—fully as varied as the million and one romances which have concluded “and so they were married.” Fiction apart, that is a coin- cidence which has, by proof in the vital statistics, occurred in the lives of several billion historical persons. May there not be a similar biological impulse, a similar necessity of growth and develop- ment, which requires one to chronicle of a certain period in the lives of cities “and so they were standardized?” So it would seem from these ten chronicles of progression toward a goal at least as appalling and dangerous to individuality as is matrimony itself. Yet we have the modern novel to thank for the revelation that the phrase, “and so they were mar- ried,” is by no means the end of the story, or even the end of diversity. May it not be thus also with the melancholy con- clusion of so many of these histories? May not these very diverse motives which within living mem- ory have pushed ten of our outstanding western cities into a standardization both odious and amus- ing to contemplate, push them onward, when the INTRODUCTION XV momentary coincidence has passed, into an indi- vidualism as sharply diverse as that of the Italian cities of the 15th century? We shall know better when our grandchildren contribute their sequel to this symposium. Mean- while, may not the very vigor and dash of these protests against our sterile urban conformities be signs from the God of cats who walk by themselves? Tuer EnpIror. * ed SAY Oe ee ey h rs Baan a Bas Ae LN a aed) Noe ' AS ea ed Rk ad Waivers + ch 4%, EL PASO: “THE RicgHt THING’ ON THE FRONTIER By Owen P. White THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER EL PASO S I look back over the few short years that intervene between the reign of Ben Dowell, E] Paso’s first potentate, and that of Dick Dudley, its present dictator, and compare the paved, pious and stolid city of to-day with the rough, uncouth and very gay town in which I was born, I cannot refrain from heaving a deep and comprehensive wheeze of regret. Where life was once cheerful, filled with alarms and worth living, it is now flat, decorous and commonplace; where men were once publicly and delightfully naughty and openly belli- cose they are now only surreptitiously so; where the leading citizens once wore six-shooters and Win- chesters they now wear wrist watches and golf sticks, and where—God save the race!—the com- munal sports, in days past, were wont to drink hard liquor out of the original carboys and to play poker with the North Star as the limit they now absorb coca-cola with a dash of tequila in it, and bet on mah jong at a twentieth of a cent a point. It’s pathetic. It really is. And it began in 3 A Tur 'TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER 1873. Before that calamitous year, from time im- memorial, all the residents of El Paso, of both sexes, had been in the habit of bathing freely, openly and nakedly, in the sight of God and any- body else who cared to look, in the irrigation ditches that ran hither and yon through the adjacent fields and vineyards, It was a delightfully primitive and intimate custom; one which everybody enjoyed and indulged in without thought of evil or blush of shame. And then, in the year mentioned, suddenly and with no adequate reason, El Paso, with its three combined saloons and gambling houses, its one hotel, its two stage stations and horse corrals and its three stores, took unto itself the idea that it would some day become a great city, and in antici- pation thereof held an election. As was right and proper, Uncle Ben Dowell, whose saloon was the biggest in town, was chosen mayor, and to assist him he was given a board of six aldermen whose secular occupations ran all the way from the un- profitable one of an Episcopal minister out of a job to the lucrative one of a Jewish merchant. Im- mediately these seven men, newly intrusted with legislative control over the liberties of their fellow citizens, proceeded to commit a deed of imperish- able shame by writing in large, flaring letters on page one, in book one, of the Ordinances of the City of El Paso the words “Thou shalt not!’ It became a high crime and misdemeanor for any per- son, male or female, brown or white, married or single, to wade, paddle, dive, duck or swim in the waters of any irrigation ditch within the corporate “THe Ricuot THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 5 limits of the city! Civilization had arrived with a bang. The old days were no more. El Paso, in those years, was not much to look at. Mud, mere primitive mud, mixed with straw and baked in the sun, was all that the town was made of, and although all the other settlements along the Rio Grande had their mission churches, it had none, and so there was no belfry on the sky-line to break the monotony of the low, flat-roofed houses. But the location of the town, even though it was forgotten by the men of God, made it important in the eyes of certain other men. Standing in the door- way of his saloon and looking to the north and south, Uncle Ben Dowell, in his leisure moments, could allow his gaze to wander along a trail—the oldest in the United States—which wended its ad- venturous way through the two thousand miles of perils that separated Santa Fé in New Mexico from the City of Mexico down in the old country. And looking in the other direction, to the east and west, he could see the celebrated Butterworth stage route, which meandered along over its sandy and sinuous course clear through from San An- tonio to the Pacific Coast. Thus El] Paso stood exactly, to the very inch almost, at the cross-roads formed by two great continental trails. It is due to this one unassisted fact that the town owes its origin and also—with humble apologies to those who fancy that it will cease to function as soon as they pass on—its present existence. Over these two great trails came the stages by which El Paso kept in uncertain touch with the rest of the world, 6 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER and from one of these stages, every now and then, some stranger would descend. Those were the days when no man in the South- west asked any other man where he came from or what his business was. El Paso, indeed, had no credentials of her own to exhibit to strangers and so.she asked none from them. Any visitor who dropped in was free to go as far as he liked so long as he paid his way, restrained his curiosity, and refrained from entering into an alliance with the private soul-mate of a permanent resident. For those who, either because they were tired of life or because they were ignorant or reckless, disregarded these proprieties there was a cemetery provided. As for the regular residents of the place—and there -were only twenty-five or thirty Americans among them, the rest being Mexicans who cultivated the grape to turn it into wine and agwardiente—they did practically nothing except watch for dust clouds along the mesa rim, play monte, poker or faro, bet on straight-away horse races and cock fights, and drink the beverages composed by the Mexicans. During this period of its life EK] Paso, under the rule of Ben Dowell, J. F. Crosby, Joseph Magoffin, Sam Schutz, Parson Tays, and James Hague, was hard but it was not vicious. Men lived loose, irregular and immoral lives because they lived nat- ural ones. There were some laws, true enough— those of the State, the nation and God—but in- asmuch as none of these authorities kept a repre- sentative on hand to enforce them the duty of “THE Riegut THING” ON THE FRONTIER 7 preserving his life and protecting his property devolved upon each individual. The result was that men were indubitably he; they read each other’s eyes and not the Book, and a word was as good as a bond. But Utopias, of course, never last, and an end had to come to this one. Ever since 1859 El Paso had been marked on the map of progress as arailroad center. Frémont and even the great Baron von Humboldt had forecast a great future for the little cluster of mud huts. But it was not until 1879 that anything of a defi- nite nature occurred. In that year, suddenly and thrillingly, four great railroad trunk lines—not merely one, but four—began to build feverishly in the direction of Ben Dowell’s saloon, and the mo- ment it became generally known that his bar was to become an important junction, men of all classes, from all parts of the United States, began to hasten to it. These newcomers, alas, were not like their heroic predecessors. They were of a lesser and ignobler breed. ‘They were border parasites coming in to prey upon the railroad payrolls. At first these men, and the women who were with them, came in slowly, but as the railheads gradually drew nearer and nearer the influx increased, until by the middle of 1880 people were arriving at the rate of hundreds a day. They came in ambulances, in buggies, in wagons, on foot and on horseback; they ate what they could get; they slept any- and every-where they worked during the day erecting adobe houses to live in and caroused joyously through most of the night. In short, El Paso had 8 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER a boom and everybody was happy and hilarious, especially the old-timers who had waited so long. But their joy was soon mixed with sorrow. Within a few months after the beginning of the rush, and almost a year before the first railroad finally reached the town, the city fathers found that they were up against a new and a hard proposition. The former bad men, the gun-toters of the plains, the Mexican bandits, the Apache Indians and the brown-skinned sefioritas who loved for cash were species which they knew how to handle. But when it came to managing the new element in the popula- tion, made up principally of crooks who had taken their Ph.D. and LL.D. degrees in the great me- tropolises of the East, they found themselves stumped. Murders which were unwarranted and unethical, even from the free and easy point of view of the frontier, became too frequent to be tolerated, and ‘petty criminals, a class heretofore unknown to the Southwest, began to operate enor- mously. Life and property thus became unsafe, and so El Paso once again organized itself for the protection of its honest citizens, and a newly elected council set about looking for a man upon whom to wish the job of city marshal. The gentleman finally honored with this office was a warlike character by the name of Campbell and, in order that his administration might be made a complete success, he was given an assistant in the person of one Bill Johnson. ‘To the two was intrusted the business of putting the fear of God and a respect for the Constitution into the hearts “THE Ricut THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 9 of El Paso’s new and unregenerate citizenry. Meanwhile, the town had begun to grow in size as well as in population. In place of one short street and three saloons it now had two _ pretentious avenues and between twenty and thirty drinking resorts. In place of being fed at two chile joints, the populace ate in style at half a dozen Chinese restaurants. And now it boasted, too, of several new dance halls, with dirt floors, and two variety theaters, one of which, the Coliseum, owned by the Manning brothers, was the largest in the West. Over the social activity for which these suddenly acquired municipal improvements furnished a back- ground, Marshal Campbell and his able assistant were supposed to exert a restraining influence. But they never did. On the contrary, under their control the town went from bad to worse, until at the end of a month or two a condition prevailed which made Ben Dowell and Joseph Magoffin and Samuel Schutz, who had been on the border since °59, and who thought they knew something about real wickedness, blush for shame at the contempla- tion of their own innocence. Campbell struck up an intimate friendship with the Manning brothers and with the proprietors of the other resorts and would arrest none of their patrons, and Johnson stayed drunk all the time; in consequence, the new town lock-up stood untenanted. 'The new element in the population, in brief, did as it pleased, and since its tastes ran largely to robbery, riot and bloodshed, it soon became apparent to all right- thinking men that something had to be done. 10 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Finally the mayor sent for the marshal and de- manded a show-down. Campbell replied by declar- ing that his salary was not large enough to justify him in wasting any more energy on his job than he was already putting into it, but he assured his Honor that an increase in pay would bring about an increase in the number of incarcerations. Whereupon, much to his surprise and disgust and to the chagrin of his friends, he was promptly fired and his badge and baton transferred to his inebri- ated assistant. ‘Then the whole town, with the new marshal and his former chief in the van of the drinkers, went on a spree. ‘This lasted for about a month and then, as a wind-up, ex-Marshal Camp- bell and his friends proceeded to carry out a plan they had formed for restoring him to his old dig- nity. Shorn of detail, this plan was to shoot up the entire town at one great blast and so scare the mayor into hiring Campbell again, and at his own figure. Accordingly, at two o’clock one morning, when all communal festivities were at their height, when love looked love to eyes that spoke invitation, when the men on the graveyard shift in the gambling halls were ready to take their places, when the bar- tenders, working hard, were telling the line to form to the right, and when the girls in the variety thea- ters were most industriously a-hoof, the word was given and hell was let loose. In every saloon, dance hall and chink restaurant in the town and in both of the variety theaters it was the same. No place was spared. Every light in E] Paso went out “THE Rieut THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 11 under a fusillade of shots and in the ensuing dark- ness, aS men cursed and women screamed, all sorts of herculean deviltries were engaged in. Men were assaulted and robbed, girls were pinched and kissed, and many an eminent citizen was sent home on the run with six-shooter bullets kicking up the dust under his heels. Nowhere in the West had the shooting-up process ever been carried out with such scientific thoroughness. When it was over the con- spirators relighted a few kerosene lamps in the least damaged of the saloons, pulled the bartenders out from their holes, and, soothed by their ministra- tions, sat around and waited for daylight to arrive, confident that the mayor and all others concerned were by now convinced that Campbell, and Camp- bell alone, could handle the situation. But the mayor was made of harder stuff. Next morning, when the six-shooter smoke had cleared away and men were beginning to poke their noses out of the doors of their shacks, he sprung a sur- prise of his own. Instead of sending for the dis-, charged marshal and reinstating him in office he did something that was entirely unheard of. He sent down to Ysleta, a small settlement thirteen miles away on the Rio Grande, where a camp of Texas rangers was located, and asked that a de- tachment be sent up to police the town until he could make some arrangement to handle it himself. His call was promptly answered. Capt. J. B. Gillett, than whom no better man ever stuck foot in a stirrup, came galloping in at the head of his men, and from that time on peace and quiet prevailed. 1. THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER But as the rangers were State officers whose busi- ness it was to patrol the frontier and not to do police duty in towns, they were lent to the mayor for the period of the emergency only, and so the council found itself under the necessity of finding a man to fill Campbell’s place permanently. He appeared almost at once, and, as it seemed to the harassed burghers, almost providentially. His name was Dallas Stoudenmire. Accompanied by his brother-in-law, Doc Cummings, he came down from New Mexico, called upon the mayor, pre- sented his credentials, asked that he be made cus- todian of the peace, and was forthwith given the job and told to go to it. Stoudenmire was a German blond, six feet four inches in height, weighing two hundred pounds and carrying two six-shooters. When he was told to go to it, he went. Bill Johnson had never been re- moved fiom office officially, even while the rangers were in town, but this trifling omission made no difference to the new head of the Polizei. The moment he pinned on his badge of office he called upon Johnson and demanded the keys to the jail. The drunkard, not being acquainted with Stouden- mire, and also, perhaps, still thinking that he had some legal rights, refused to deliver them. There- upon the giant seized him by the collar, turned him wrong side up, and shook him until the keys dropped from his pocket. For a day or two after this everything was serene. ‘Then, presumably when Stoudenmire was not around to take a hand “Tor Ricut THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 13 in the fray, his brother-in-law, Doc Cummings, was killed in a gun fight following an altercation with the Manning brothers. This killing, for which Jim Manning, whose bartender and not he was prob- ably guilty, was tried and acquitted on a plea of self-defense, resulted in an enmity between Stoudenmire and the Mannings which brought bloody results. The first trouble, coming within a week, pre- sented itself to the new marshal as a fortuitous opportunity to display his prowess and place him- self squarely before the connoisseurs of the town. An unimportant inquest had been held over the carcasses of two Mexicans, found murdered on the outskirts of the town. At its conclusion a quarrel arose between Johnnie Hale, an old resident and a close friend of the Manning brothers, and a man named Gus Krempkau. For the purpose of ter- minating the argument, and probably desiring to get home for lunch, Hale pulled out his artillery and shot Krempkau dead. Immediately Stouden- mire, who had come up and joined the crowd, went into action. With his first shot he killed a Mexican who looked as if he was about to pull a gun, with his second he sent Johnnie Hale’s soul winging to the angels, and then, turning just in time to see ex-Marshal Campbell, who was directly behind him, reach for his weapon, he killed him too. This spectacular masterpiece at once established his reputation. Three men with three shots, any- where in the Southwest in those days, constituted an almost perfect score and thereafter, for a few 14 Toe TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER weeks, the marshal was allowed to lead an unevent- ful and undisturbed life. During these weeks the town was quieter than it had ever been before, and the town lock-up, unused during the Campbell- ‘Johnson administration, nightly sheltered swarms of felons upon whom the hand of the law, as rep- resented by the mighty grip of Dallas Stouden- mire, had been ruthlessly laid. This activity, how- ever, only served to increase the hatred that the sporting element harbored against Stoudenmire. It was bad for business to have men put in jail who still had money in their pockets and were drunk enough to spend it. Therefore, combining the high motive of business expediency with the more archaic one of revenge, the Campbell crowd got together and decided to put Stoudenmire out of the way. For that purpose they made use of the animosity of Bill Johnson. Bill was filled with fighting whiskey and it was suggested to him that he ought, in common decency, to kill Stoudenmire. Hadn’t the marshal treated him like a Mexican when he shook the keys out of his pocket? Bill, thus plied with persuasions, finally agreed. It was a dark night, a fine one for a murder, and he was given a double-barreled gun loaded with buck shot, and led to a point across the road from Ben Dowell’s saloon. At this place, which is now the intersection of the two principal business streets of El Paso, there stood a pile of bricks to be used in the erection of the town’s first brick building, and behind it Johnson secreted himself to await his victim. When he went into ambush Stoudenmire, “Toe Righut THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 15 whose movements were being closely watched, was down at the Acme Saloon, but it was well known that he would soon make his evening round of the town. It was not long before his enemies, a num- ber of whom had hidden themselves across the road from Johnson’s hiding place, saw him ap- proaching, and when he was within twenty feet of the brick pile they saw Johnson rise up behind it and fire both barrels of his gun. But either be- cause he was suffering from a severe attack of buck ague or stage fright, or because he was unsteady from too much whiskey, he missed. Then Stouden- mire, drawing his pistol, quickly filled the would- be assassin’s body with bullets. The men on the other side of the road now opened fire on him, wounding him in the foot, but, drawing another gun, he charged them head on and quickly put them to flight. From that day until he resigned from office Stoudenmire held imperial sway over El] Paso. He kept order, sometimes by shooting his man, some- times by merely bringing down his gun upon the offender’s head. Unluckily, like most men of his class and time, he had one great fault. He was a copious drinker and, although he could carry an almost incredible cargo without loss of his faculties, there were still times when it would get the better of him and he would become dangerous even to his friends. Finally, after a year of service during which he wrote his name, principally with blood, upon the imperishable records of Kl Paso, he was politely asked to resign, and the Captain Gillett 16 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER already mentioned was appointed to succeed him. Within a few months after his resignation Stoud- enmire was killed in a gun fight with two of the Mannings, Jim Manning, as usual, being tried for the murder and acquitted on his regular plea of self-defense. In 1881, shortly before Stoudenmire resigned, the first railroad reached the town and immediately, over night almost, its entire aspect underwent a second change. Physically the metamorphosis was striking. Before the locomotives puffed their way in there had been only one brick building, no board floors, and according to legend, only two glass windows in the place. Such Babylonish luxuries as mahogany fixtures in the saloons and square pianos in the dance halls were unknown. But within less than a year all of these deficiencies, as well as some others of which the town had been theretofore ignorant, had been supplied. Brick buildings began to take the place of the old adobe ones; ornate bar equipment and costly gambling tables replaced the makeshift devices formerly in use; men who had never before tripped the light fantastic on anything but Mother Earth could now hear the tapping of their own boot heels, and a new element, a peroxided, hand-decorated, fe- male one, recruited in the East and Middle West and shipped in by the carload, came to supplant the brown-skinned, black-eyed, dusky-haired sefio- ritas of the day before. Night life in the town now became more alluring than it had ever been. “Tre Ricot THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 17 A wonderful prosperity was about to come to the Southwest, and Vice, knowing that the pickings were going to be easy, garbed itself becomingly for the harvest and assumed an air of affluence. The blonde women wore beautiful gowns—cut too high and too low, but beautiful none the less; the bar- tenders discarded their flannel shirts and corduroy pants and began to wear white jackets and thou- sand-dollar diamonds; and the gambling fraternity blossomed out in all the glory of imported tailor- made garments and kept women. Behind all this was the constant thought of money. Up to the time when the news that the railroads were on the way had changed a village that was actually admirable for the heroic quality of its badness into a border town whose population was made up largely of abject apostles of vice, nobody had cared very much for cash. Money had been a convenience but not a necessity. A man’s social standing had then depended much more upon his capacity for handling his liquor and his ability to shoot straight than upon the number of fifty or hundred dollar bills that he could display to a sordid public. In the pre-railroad days money was not the swmmum bonum of the El Pasoans. But it became so the moment the boom was under way. In addition to unloading blondes, bar fixtures and building materials, the trains also began to deliver a class of men who came for the purpose of embarking in more or less legitimate business. These newcomers became just as busy as the sports. They set about making the town a good one for 18 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER trade, as the sporting fraternity had already made it a good one—the best in the Southwest—for en- tertainment. Thus El Paso soon became the Mecca towards which every honest soul in the Southwest who had his pockets full turned at least once and usually several times a year. The dia- mond-studded bartenders, the beautifully tailored gamblers and the wonderfully painted ladies ex- tended to the visitors, one and all, an invitation to enjoy themselves. ‘They all came and they all had a good time. The resorts were open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Thus, for more than twenty years, ranch owners, cow-punchers, miners, prospectors, traveling men and merchants from all over Texas, Arizona and New Mexico made an annual pilgrimage to El Paso, ostensibly to transact business, but really to be painlessly relieved of their accumulated wealth. Men who had entered into legitimate business saw it increase wonderfully; they began to grow rich. Corner lots which had been valueless a short time before made fortunes for old-timers who had held on to them, and showered down a golden har- vest upon delegations of realtors from Missouri, and upon a trio from Tennessee who had come in early enough in the game to grab some choice loca- tions. The advance in cattle prices turned former cowpunchers into plutocrats; prospect holes out in Arizona and up in New Mexico transformed their previously poverty-stricken owners into mil- lionaires. Everybody made money, and everybody was happy. El Paso grew; the sporting element “Tor Ricut THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 19 continued to prosper; the derby hat and the white collar became tolerated; marriage licenses began to be issued with some degree of regularity; ministers of the gospel made their appearance; church spires pierced the heavens. And then the war was on! For the first few years there was only desultory skirmishing. But in 1894 there began a struggle which soon had most of El] Paso’s “better” element side-stepping with as much agility as a flea shows in hopping. By better element, of course, I mean that portion of the population which was not en- gaged directly in operating saloons, gambling houses, dance halls, variety theaters or stews. Naturally, this element was large, but if I were to say, in place of “directly operating,” “interested in” or “profiting by,” the number, I fear, would be somewhat reduced. In fact, everybody in El Paso, and even the city itself, was deeply involved with the sporting element. For years the revenues derived from licensing gambling houses, dance halls and bawdy houses ran the city, thus relieving the taxpayers of a heavy burden and allowing the pious to contribute heavily to foreign missions and Bible societies. But that was not all. In addition to helping the city fathers with their financial prob- lem EK] Paso’s sports did the business men of the community a more direct service. They made the town highly attractive to all the citizens of the adjacent States, and brought in thousands to buy bolts of calico, picks, shovels and barrels of dill pickles who might have just as well placed their 20 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER orders in Denver or Los Angeles. These cus- tomers came in person, transacted their business during the day, and then at night, as a matter of hospitality, they were shown the town, chaperoned, as a rule, by the merchant or banker or broker with whom they had had their dealings. Of course, the El Paso business men didn’t like this duty—in fact, they hated it—but as it was established by custom they performed it uncomplainingly, and, as a matter of additional politeness went as far as their visiting friends in the way of having a good time. Thus, during the intensely busy years between 1881 and 1904, when the doors of the “public” gambling houses and dance halls were closed for- ever, many of the prominent citizens of the town acquired an indirect interest in the operation of the communal dens of iniquity, and were thus un- able to lend their whole-hearted support to the closing movement. Their indignation had to be concealed. It was well enough for a man to agree with his wife when she said to him at the breakfast table: “George, dear, this is a hell of a place to raise children,” but it was an entirely dif- ferent matter when George got down to his office and checked up his books. ‘There he found that if the rent didn’t come in from the saloon build- ing that he owned on the corner, he wouldn’t be able to come across with that thousand dollar sub- scription to the new Methodist Church; that if Madame X and her girls didn’t pay for the gaudy gowns bought last month he couldn't settle for “Tor Ricgut THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 21 the simple little things that his own girls, under- going a polishing treatment on the Hudson, said that they had to have; that if Old Man Taylor, the gambler, didn’t kick in with the agreed price for four corner lots, the wife couldn’t, during the coming social season, tilt her head at the right angle. Altogether, it was a difficult situation for Chris- tian men. It was met by turning it into a political issue. Vice entrenched itself for a siege and the reformers, few at first but strong in spirit, formed for the assault. It was a long and beautiful battle and at the end of ten years the reformers got the decision. After that the blonde heads of the ladies from Utah Street were no longer to be seen in the dress circle at the old Myar Opera House, dis- tracting the attention of the men from the play upon the stage; the whir of the roulette wheel and the rattle of the poker chip no longer called busy merchants from the barroom to the upper floor of the Gem Saloon, and the banging of the piano no more invited the transient cowpuncher and the itin- erant prospector into the caressing arms of the frescoed beauties of Louis Vidal’s dance hall. These things were gone, gone never to return! What took their place? They took their own place. That is to say, they took a legal but not a physical departure from the town. El Paso became, externally, very decorous, and the reformers, lay and clerical, proud that vice had been swept away, pulled down their white waistcoats and said in loud tones, “Let us render 22 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER thanks!” For what? Simply for a coat of white- wash. But El Paso, unluckily, began to advertise its virtue far and wide, and so the rest of the world began to lose interest in the town. Between the years of 1904 and 1907 it blossomed out into the small metropolis phase of its career and the citizens began, hastily, to change their habits. With as much earnestness as they had before displayed in enjoying themselves in a free and unrestrained manner they set about learning how to live according to the rules which their wives, who were now taking annual trips back Kast, brought home and inserted into the family curric- ulum. Early in the game the leading business men took a great fall upward. Regular fellows, men who had been cowpunchers, had pounded drills, had weighed out chile and frijoles by the pound to nickel customers, and some even who had driven ice and butcher and grocery wagons and had learned to know the community through its back doors, suddenly found that the possession of virtue made it incumbent upon them to conduct their business from within the confines of private offices. This advance into obscurity made another step imperative. Dignity, hike youth, must be served, and there was one other thing, besides writ- ing letters and signing checks, which, according to the system now borrowed from Salt Lake City and Denver, Colo., the financial barons of the town must do away from prying eyes. That was their drinking. Public conviviality had become un- “Tre Ricut THING’ ON THE FRONTIER 23 seemly and so these men who had for long, long years been in the habit of calling bartenders by their first names and doing most of their business with one foot on the rail got themselves together and began organizing clubs. For the first time the community made acquaintance with the post- prandial orator and with those other highly decora- tive municipal improvements, the club president, the club director and the club committeeman. Men who, a short fifteen years before, had been content to sit on their heels and roll their own while they conversed freely and openly with the world, now found themselves confined in a close pasture where etiquette demanded that they smoke perfectos at four bits a throw and associate only with other un- fortunates whose genealogies, like their own, were beginning to appear in the new issues of the herd books of Dun and Bradstreet. These poor men now shaved daily, boasted of the cold plunge every morning, changed their clothes by the clock, and began to play golf. This was the end. OGDEN: Tue UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION By Bernard DeVoto OGDEN HE Overland Limited stops at Ogden for fifteen minutes. ‘The tourist, a little dizzy from altitude but grateful for trees after miles of desert, rushes out to change his watch and see a Mormon. He passes through a station that is a deliberate triumph of hideousness and emerges at the foot of Twenty-fifth Street. Beyond him are the peaks, the Wasatch at more than their usual dignity, but in the foreground are only a double row of shacks far gone in disintegration, stretching upward in the direction of the hills. The gutters, advertised as sparkling with mountain water, are choked with offal. The citizenry who move along the sidewalks are habituated to the shanties, but the newcomer, who whether from east or west be- lieves in a decent bluff of progress, is invariably appalled. What manner of folk, he wonders, what kind of Digger Indians, can suffer this daily as- sault upon the credo of Kiwanis? He thinks of the First National in Kokomo, or the Biltmore in Racine. He shudders. He hurries back to the train, pausing on the way to buy a postcard to which is attached a bag of table salt from Great Salt Lake. That at least is up to date. Robert Louis Stevenson, the one poet known to have passed through Ogden, faced these same shan- 27 28 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER ties when they had withstood some forty fewer years of drouth. His only contribution to the booster-literature of the city was a note on the Chinese immigrants, who, he observed, displayed a far greater personal cleanliness than the natives. Lest an Ogden spirit be offended, let me make amends. It is true that the one new building on Twenty-fifth Street since 1900 is the Pullman por- ters’ club. But let us take the tourist blindfolded through the city, past the Cornville Center palaces of the wealthy and the bungalow-warrens of the bourgeoisie, to Ogden Canyon. Past that, still blindfolded against the Keep Kool Kamps and the Dewdrop Inns, to some ridge whence he may see the joists and rafters of a continent, with the city insignificant on the plain. Here he will see Ogden as it is, an oasis, a garden in the desert, with the peaks splendid above it—lines that sweep the eye irresistibly onward, distances and colors that carry the breath with them, the mountains in which the gods of the Utes walked in the cool of the day. For majesty, he will be willing to forget the measles of the street. Better still, let him arrive on one of the three or four midwinter days when the smoke has drifted westward and left the sky clean. Then, emerging in a heliotrope twilight, he will not see the shanties or the filth. The city is blotted out and there are only ridges deep in snow, saintly and whitened peaks with collars of mist half way down their slopes—mist slowly burning to its core of tourma- line, with sapphires winking at the edge. Night Tur UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 29 brings its erasure of hideousness, the good folk ride homeward in the world’s worst trolleys, and pres- ently they are fed and stalled. But almost till the time they are abed, the eastern peaks, above their chasubles of mist, are luminous with a garnet flame that tints the snow against the night. Infinitely cold, the mist and the darkness; but warm the glow —a fire burning on the very hearth of heaven. But do not conclude, because the city is resolute in shabbiness beneath the peaks, that it is leading a schism from the faiths of Rotary and Mr. Bok. Its hideousness, its squalor, are no protest against The Ladies’ Home Journal. Your Ogdenite, in- stead, sees his city as those dreams come true. He peoples these streets with the chaos of State and Madison, lines them with Wrigley Twins, roofs them with elevateds. To him the Eccles Block is sixty stories high, and the constable at the corner, who is flapping a hand at three Fords and an Over- land, is waving back six rows abreast of Packards as far as the traffic towers stretch toward the Chi- cago River. Or if not now, at least by to-morrow noon. An idealist, he sees the illusion in front of the fact of dirt and mediocrity. A dreamer, he dwells for ever in the city of his hopes. Besides, when you come down to it, he asks, turning his back on the Broom Hotel, what city its size?—etc. Follows a list of statistics from the Weber Club, of mines and sugar beets, of warehouses and factories, of jobbers and railroads and farms. . . . And so on—a small backwater American city, less immaculate than 30 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER most, less energetic, less comfortable, but at one with its fellows in drowsiness, in safety. Yet once, even the tourist must remember, once the frontier marched through Ogden with its char- iots and its elephants. Once there were demigods and heroes. Once there was desire and splendor— something of courage and adventure, something of battle, life a hot throbbing in the veins. Where now there are culture clubs and chiropractors, there ‘ was a city shouting its male-ness to the peaks. For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of Roughnecks. Into the Mormon hegira of 1845-47 went much heroism, much genius, much suffering. And yet the Mormon was a prosaic fellow. His prophet had been martyred, he himself undertook the desert for religious freedom, he conquered the wilderness and, neighboring with the coyote, brought forth a state. And so on—the recital is familiar. Yet he did all this without humor and without imagination —did it with poverty-stricken realism, and above all with an intangible smugness, a bucolic megalo- mania, a self-righteousness which assured him that the Lord God Jehovah, whose hinder parts Moses and Joseph Smith had seen, watched over all his businesses and made them sound. So, for twenty years after their arrival in the desert, the Latter Day Saints practiced a religion of thrifty visions. They were such folk as would be attracted to such a religion. The Church, after settling all disputes that had racked Christendom Tur UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 31 for nineteen centuries, made its own contributions to theology. It taught a plurality of gods, and, later, the opportunity for any Mormon to become a god. It gave its pious swineherds the power to in- terpret visions, to speak in tongues, to recognize and cast out devils, to hold conversations with an- gels. It taught the imminent end of the world; baptism of the dead; the evil of tobacco and cocoa; the true nature of ectoplasm; and much other ex- travagant nonsense. And, of course, it taught pol- ygamy. So much absurdity has been preached about this last doctrine, the only one associated with Mor- monism in the public mind, that the facts have been obscured. In Utah polygamy was practiced on an extensive scale only by Brigham Young, and a good third of his concubines were purely honorary, veterans of the hegira, widows of the prophet Jos- eph, or similarly decrepit alumnae who were awarded a fraction of his name as a sort of decora- tion. Only a few of the nobility practiced it at all, and they did so with not wholly unanimous felicity. Heber Kimball remarked, with a sincerity that touches the heart, that if God ever set a curse on him, it was wives. The truth is that polygamy was established to justify certain deplorable impulses of the prophet Joseph. The vigorous nature of Brigham Young was adapted to the opportunity thus created, and these precedents fastened the doctrine on the Church as the commandment of God, let him fol- low who might. The institution was breaking down 32 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER of its own weight when the national government, by attacking it and rousing the always violent mar- tyr-complex of the Mormons, prolonged it beyond its time. And the reason for its decline, as we shall see, was the one reason whose cogency the Mormon Church has ever recognized. It was an economic mistake. It didn’t pay. For Brigham Young had left Nauvoo with a religion, but had established the State of Deseret with a commercial system. Here they were, in great Salt Lake City during these twenty years, planted on a desert, creating wealth, unhampered by interference. Mr. Werner has recently declared that Brigham’s genius for organization and finance entitles him to rank among the greatest minds of his century. At his death his private estate, built up from nothing, was worth three million, and while he was amassing this, he laid the foundations on which the Mormon Church has become the greatest financial power in the intermountain west. Such a man deserves mention with the Belmonts and the Goulds of his time. What Brigham might have done, given stockyards or railroads or steel plants, only those who know most about him are able to imagine. While he lived Brigham Young was Utah; it fol- lows that, during the first two decades of Salt Lake, he was the city. Fortunately, though the head of the most colorless of American heresies, Brigham was a man of color and power. In the midst of thousands of fanatics who had virtues in abundance but never a jot of imagination, he was one who THE UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 83 easily caught fire. In a creed where any communi- cant of humor must have laughed himself into apos- tasy, he had humor—was the one Mormon in all the history of Mormonism who could laugh. Above all, he was energy. And the frontier, the frontier that stirs the heart, was only energy. Day by day he was driving more surely the stakes of Zion. Nor did he forget that a prophet deserves well of the church he is giving an inside track to heaven. The statutes of the early Territorial legis- latures are confined almost exclusively to granting Brigham Young the timber-rights of this canyon, the water-rights of that, the sawmill privileges here, the toll-gate privilege there. He builds houses, stores, bridges; he sells drygoods, flour, horses; he directs a theater; he invents apartments; he estab- lishes a university. When the Territory is sur- veyed and opened to homesteads, he builds a house on wheels which his pensioners set down where four section corners meet, and thus files on government land by wholesale. He has a finger in the invention of an alphabet, a purely Mormon language based on the one spoken in heaven and designed to crowd out the Gentile tongues on earth. He creates a Mormon currency, the “wooden money” of later Gentile sneers, and perhaps the one legal tender of all history based on the promises of Almighty God. He publishes a newspaper. He even organizes a sect of communists, who deed over to him as trus- tees in trust, the last run of their possessions—deeds conveying to him chickens and beds and underwear are on the records of Weber and Salt Lake coun- 84 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER ties. And all businesses in the valley have him as an active or a silent partner,—banks and barrooms, freight-companies and the mills that manufacture the holy union-suits of the faithful. In the midst of all this activity, he is watching over the souls of his Saints—and is a little troubled by them. Week by week he is thundering at them in the Tabernacle, roaring a diapason of wrath and praise, promising them triumph over the Gentiles or God-damning them as loafers. For the prophet had dwelt too long among the Gentiles and had ac- quired a certain vocabulary. In the “Journal of Discourses” these sermons are printed today, no less vigorous for being foul-mouthed, no less pro- ductive of piety for being Rabelaisian. Brigham, simply, could not express himself in other ways. Here before him was a crowd of Saints, honest men but so inferior to him that he seemed godlike, mul- ish and dull, incapable of seeing their own best in- terests, slow to see anything at all. He would, he said, infinitely rather kill a man than suffer him to lose his soul. On occasion, no doubt, he had the execution performed, but for the most part, swear- ing sufficed. For, in these meetings, you must remember, this bearded man was not merely Brigham Young the glazier and the millionaire, but was Brigham Young the seer and revelator, the vicegerent of God, whose words came down from heaven. Faces, ten thou- sand at a time, looked up at this little man, and saw what Christ had seen on the morning of Resur- rection. . . . This frontier Moses made annual pro- THE UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 35 cessions across his domain. The cavalcade, with banners and outriders and bodyguard, with Amelia or perhaps several of the less favored wives, struck out across the territory. Everywhere children were scoured and ruffled and drilled to decorum. Young girls threw flowers—the blossoms of desert plants or the more cherished hollyhocks of the dooryard —beneath the wheels of the chariot, and sang their pious doggerels to this little man, who held one hand beneath his flatulence and nodded as he fan- cied God would nod. And old men and women hobbled back home, happy that they had lived an- other year to witness the passage of the holy one. “Tl say we got knives here as well as the boys in San Pete,” he had shouted last Sunday in the Tabernacle, referring to the irremediable humilia- tion of a young man who had looked too often on a maiden designed for his bishop. “Get out your knives, boys.” The Saints hearkened. This was the prophet of God, the practitioner of polygamy, telling them that they must not commit adultery. What Brigham aimed at was a commonwealth of Saints, wherein all labored for a common end, where the will of God and the prophets was law, and where the United States was a foreign power. For twenty years that was what he achieved. Now and then, some Saint’s voice was raised against the despotism: there was thunder in the ‘Tabernacle and a repentance or an exile. Sometimes, it must be remembered, there was even a corpse. The Mor- mons of to-day call the Danites a myth; no doubt they were, but there was Porter Rockwell, there 386 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER was Bill Hickman, there was John D. Lee; the last, deserted by his church after the massacre it had directed, was shot beside his coffin. Gentiles came to the valley, forewarned. Some- times they set up their stores, sometimes offered merchandise below the prices of the Saints. Soon neat signboards appeared above the doors of the faithful—the all-seeing eye of God, sacred in Mormon symbolism, and above it “Holiness to the Lord.” And men loitered about. A Saint, ap- proaching the Gentile store, felt a tap on his shoulder. “Brother Brigham favors the Jones es- tablishment,” he was told. The Gentile came to terms. When he didn’t, when his tribe increased so far that it was cutting the ground from under the Church stores—for a bargain is a bargain even under the all-seeing eye—Brigham organized a chain, the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institu- tion, which has grown into one of the largest of the Church’s immense properties—and licked the Gentiles once more. Governor, judge, and marshal—one by one they beat out their precedents and sovereignties against the little bearded man. They had from him smiles when he wanted to bestow them, but more often contumely. Cut-throats he called them, and em- bezzlers, and lick-spittles, and all opprobrious things. Every Sunday saw him in the Tabernacle reviling the governor, pouring out on him un- imaginable abuse. Always he won. Arrested, his own courts gave him habeas corpus. Denounced, he replied in kind. Ordered to submit to the Tur UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 37 United States, he declared by proclamation that the territory was his to do with as he willed. Gov- ernor gave way to governor, all gladly, some made laughing-stocks, some disgraced. If their own foolhardiness did not betray them, it was always possible to trap them in a trumped-up brothel and so be rid of them. In Utah there was no power but Brigham. He was superior to the United States, not only by virtue of his agency from God, but actually by power of arms. So, when the United States sent an army against him, he outgeneralled the bril- lant Albert Sidney Johnston, burned his baggage, holed him up in winter quarters outside the Ter- ritory, and treated as an equal with the United States. The expedition, which cost the govern- ment some seven million dollars, added almost that much wealth, by auction and the spoils of war, to the victorious Church. . . . But it was Brigham at his darkest hour. Boasting to his followers that he would deliver Zion, he found out what it was to doubt in secret. The terms of peace allowed the troops to save their faces by marching through Salt Lake City and to build a camp some forty miles beyond. The Mormons had reason enough for their hatred of the United States, their prophecies against it, and their oaths of disaffection. If they had always met the government with treason, the government had always betrayed them. ‘The troops coming through Salt Lake City, who knew but they might have orders to shoot down all who 38 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER got in their way, and generally to lay waste the Jerusalem the Saints had built up with their sweat in: the! desert? ys). That day the quickstep echoed through empty streets. No one was in sight, beyond an occa- sional Gentile waving his hat at a corner. The Mormon women and children were miles away, with their pottery and their blankets, and most of the men were with them. There, too, was Brigham in his chariot. Here and there about the city a Mormon was hidden, ready if need be to light the faggots that were piled behind the doors. Brigham, in valedictory, would bring the city down on the heads of its despoilers. For once this low-comedy prophet reached dramatic heights. Silent in his chariot, miles away from his Jerusalem, holding up his paunch with an arm, he was planning out his course if the city must be burned. Between the Mormons and the Americans must be war forever—as he had known for years even before the prophet Joseph collapsed over the windowsill at Carthage jail. No longer would he delude himself with hope of peace. He would lead his Church on a second flight, this time to the Canyon of the Colorado, to the bad- lands where an army could never penetrate. There he would conduct the feud without mercy forever- more—Mormon against American, to the death, while an ounce of powder remained to the faithful. The tragic heights subsided. The city, of course, was not burned. ‘The wives came back and the Sunday rhapsodies continued. Soon the troops THE UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 39 were called back to a more extensive battlefield and not even a pretence of authority was kept over Brigham. As for the deathless feud—that, too, has been buried by the years, and for the best of Mormon reasons. It was useless extravagance. It didn’t pay. The colony at Ogden, thirty-five miles to the north, had been founded by divine command. Brigham thumbed through his tithing-lists, selected those who suited his purposes, and sent them off to plant another stake of Zion. So, during these years, Ogden was a scattering of log and adobe huts, well off the main currents of the frontier. There is much that is pathetic in the scene of these earnest Mormons going out to plough their alkali fields and bring down water from the hills in the name of God. There is more that is side- splitting. For, when you meditate on the piety of this persecuted breed, on this religion that led thousands across the desert, remember of what in- gredients that faith was made. Equal parts of smugness, ignorance, and superstition is the for- mula. Remember that the God of this Israel was a person very much in the likeness of Brigham Young, a fat old man with a bad temper, who used abominable English, who had begotten mankind by actual sexual congress with a polygamous harem of she-gods, and who had undertaken to deliver the earth into the hands of his anointed. That is where the earthly humor of Mormon- ism enters. These simple folk, who ploughed the 40 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER desert under and out of the alkali brought forth bread, these tired, almost dehumanized men were Chosen People. They walked their furrows by day and lay down in their shanties by night con- fident that they were building brick by brick the new Jerusalem whence some day God and Joseph Smith and Brigham Young should direct the uni- verse. ‘These fences of cedar were really the bastions of a new earth. These poplar barns were the granaries of the Lord, incrusted with pearls. These trickles of white water—were they not piped from the four rivers of Paradise? The frontier passed them by, thirty-five miles to the southward. Through Salt Lake City went the pageantry of the American folk-wandering. Through Salt Lake City streamed the Forty- Niners, hellbent for California, with their wash- bowls on their knees. They swarmed their hour about Brigham’s boulevards, bartered their lux- uries for staples at extortionate rates, and hurried on. The Church made a good thing of them, as it had of the Mexican War before them. In their wake came the Overland Mail, with its Concord stages thundering into town behind a dozen mules, captained by men of a grandeur not to be equalled off the deck of a Mississippi packet. Followed the second great mining stampede, to Virginia City this time, and another wave of violent men, swaggering their male-ness down avenues dedi- cated to God and God’s dollars. After that, the pony express, following the stage-route, a venture that bankrupted its backers but gave the West its LG8L NI ‘AYOLINYAL HVLOA ‘AGIO AMV WIvs Tuer UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION Al most colorful legend—a legend of galloping hoofs, foamy flanks, and the halloo of a rider who was swallowed up by dust or darkness as soon as he was seen. All this energy, all this restlessness and aspira- tion, streamed through Salt Lake City, under the eyes of Brigham who saw in it the end of his isola- tion, perhaps, but also an immediate source of profit. Ogden it passed by. Ogden was a settle- ment of pious Mormons who tilled their fields and obeyed the prophet, who looked at the mountains but saw the meadows of Jerusalem. And then word came that the Pacific Railroad was not disposed to adopt the prophet’s sugges- tion. “Why,” said the engineers, “should we build over an extra divide merely to get to Salt Lake City when we can follow a water-level route through Weber Canyon?’ And Weber Canyon debouched a mile or so from Ogden. ‘Then sud- denly there was a freight-line from Zion, and a little later came the surveyors from the east and from the west. Then a new goldfield, poised on the present boundary between Idaho and Wyoming, opened up. An adventurous Gentile made a trail to it, shortened its line of supplies two hundred miles, and the first affluence Ogden had ever seen began. There were two streets—then three, then four. Saloons came, bringing progress—bright lights, tablecloths, store shirts, flowered vests, the eti- quette of the Colt. The miners came, and scarlet women; such women as Ogden had never seen. 42 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Women with laces and silks, with rouge and rice powder. Women who were all that Mr. Service has declared their Alaskan sisters to be, but who brought civilization to this cowpath settlement. Women who, it may be, troubled the souls of their Mormon sisters. For Mark Twain, looking im- partially.at the evidence, has said that a man who married one Mormon woman was a hero and a man who married a dozen of them was a large- scale benefactor of the human race. Strange sights by day in the streets that had seen nothing more extraordinary than a drove of pigs. Ox teams by the dozen plodding ahead of a freighter’s wagon with seven-foot wheels and a bullwhacker snaking his whip above their ears. Mules singly or in tandem packed with the out- fits of prospectors, their owners trudging in their dust. Gamblers, settlers, bartenders, Mexicans, Chinks, remittance men. And by night what sounds! In the saloons, the roar of good men singing, the fellowship of males, the debate of a hundred disputants at once, each one an authority. Above them the seduction of fiddles where the women consorted with their prey. In the streets, strayed revelers taking the long way home, the clop-clop of horses as belated ones arrived, the click of dice, sometimes the voice of the Colt... . It was a little different from discussions as to the true nature of Satan’s fur, or from the hymns with which the Mormon dances had begun. Sin had come to Ogden. And now descended on Ogden the Hartigans THE UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 43 and the McCarthys and the Flahertys. Through the mouth of Weber Canyon, racing against its ten-mile day and the Chinks of the C. P., the Union Pacific burst like a spring flood. Now came Hell on Wheels to Mormonry. Not long did it pause, this mobile terminal, but never again would righteousness be quite the same. The Irish roared and sang and hammered, like happy devils assaulting the earth, and laid their steel and passed on. On to Corrine they went, on to Promontory Point, and met the Chinks and sniped at them from behind ties or seized them bodily, when the scientific spirit was strong, and took them apart. Those last eighty miles of rail- road building, both companies roaring for land and fame, were a romancer’s dream of strength and trickery and violence. They ended; dignitaries came to drive their golden spike; and the Central Pacific built on into Ogden any way, in the hope that it could swindle the government of fifty thou- sand acres more. And the Irishmen all came back. For Ogden was now a railroad town. ‘Those who had swung picks, fought Indians, and sniped at Chinks, would now undertake to keep the U. P.’s cars on its tracks. A race of men, these. For the most part Union veterans, they were old be- fore their youth was done; their arms were like the girders of the bridges they built; and they, who had tamed spring rivers and battened rails across the spine of a continent, were afraid of neither God nor devil. Still less were they afraid 4A THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER of men who were anointed to hold converse with both. It was Porter Rockwell who learned as much soon after the first roundhouse was built at Ogden —Porter Rockwell, mysterious emissary of Brigham, who, if he performed one-tenth of the murders attributed to him had disposed of more Gentiles than Brigham had married wives. Bearded and very hard was Porter Rockwell, a man to set strong men wailing in their dreams, a man who had publicly allowed that the temple union-suit he wore, blessed by Brigham, would turn any bullet ever fired by Gentile. He was strolling down Spring Street one day, newly come from mysteries of retribution, and he was listen- ing to the earth quake in terror of his passing. Appeared now one twisted Flannigan, deplorably gone in drink. “Are ye Port Rockwell?” the half-size Irish- man demanded. The strong right arm of Brigham nodded. “Then by God, y’are the man whose un- derwear will turn bullets, and I’m called of God to put it to the proof. ’Tis a revelation, y’under- stand, to speak accordin’ to Mormon.” In something less than a second Porter Rock- well was on his knees in Ogden’s dust, and had swallowed five inches of steel barrel. For ten minutes the railroader marched round him, dic- tating enormous obscenities about Brigham Young for his victim to acclaim, and then marched him off down the street for exhibition, the Colt prodding his pants. THe UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION A5 Ogden was frontier. From Salt Lake Brigham built his railroad, the Utah Central, to connect with the U.P., and from Ogden northward into his Idaho dominions as the Utah Northern. One landboom after another rocketed city lots. The land agent came, and with him both fortune and bankruptcy. Northward the freighters sent their cavalcades, long files of wagons under the white- gold cloud of dust, creaking of axles and grunt of oxen, oaths and laughter—the strain and vigor of life. Came too, not only Bret Harte’s gambler, but his aristocratic cousin, the confidence man, of der- ringer and long-tailed coat, who worked the pas- senger trains and fleeced his traveling companions at faro or sold them mountain peaks or rivers or franchises to build ferries in the desert. The good and the great came, to see what the railroad was doing in the waste places. And now that other symbol of the west began to come,—the cowboy making his long drive northward from Texas, his face hidden in his bandana, his lungs choked with alkali. Ogden was as far west as the Long Trail ever came, as far west as the dionysiac joy of the buckaroo ever set the peaks echoing. One and all they made their way from bar to bar but ended at the Chapman House. French Pete, other and true name unknown, was the civilizing influence that turned many a man toward the arts. Here is a menu of French Pete’s, preserved to this smaller age. Turtle soup, 46 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER crackers; mountain trout, Columbia river salmon, oysters San Francisco; antelope steak, shoulder of venison, beef Chicago; breasts of sage hen, prairie chicken in cream, quail, mourning doves, Canada goose; southern yams in candy, peas, celery, wa- tercress, potatoes O’Brien; hot biscuits, corn- pone; honey, watermelon, peaches and cream. ‘The little slip indicates that one was expected, not to make a choice from this ecstasy, but to down it all from the first to the last. ‘The other side is an equally heroic list; cocktails named after railroad presidents, Indian chiefs, and mining camps; punches, cordials, highballs, fizzes, rickies, Juleps; it ends, “Irish whiskey, fifteen cents a glass.” And one line reads, “Champagne: California, $1.00. Imported, $2.00.” A pint? No, a half-gallon. To the Chapman House came the mining and railroad millionaires, the Einglish cattle-barons, actors and singers making continental tours, and more than one princeling from Graustark or beyond. The register, if it could be recovered, would be a miniature history of the frontier. Per- haps most curious of its names would be the curtly signed “Bill.” This was Rattlesnake Bull, who came for some weeks twice or thrice a year, to eat the savories of French Pete, and to sit for hours on the upper veranda, smoking, chatting, looking down at Fifth Street or out at the shadows deep- ening on the peaks. Innumerable legends cluster about this man of the white sombrero above the long black curls. No one ever ventured to ask his name. No one knew THE UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION A whence came the money that clad and housed him so magnificently. One heard that he was a Mason sent to murder Mormons, that he owned a secret bonanza surpassing the Comstock Lode, that he was successively all the desperadoes who plun- dered the mines and the mail, that he was the illegitimate son of a British prince and once a month received an order on the royal exchequer. He had killed, one understood, his dozen; he had led men on desperate piracies beyond the hills; he had said to men in New York, in China, or in London, “Do this,” and it was done. But there he sat, smoking cigars that were never bought in Ogden, telling stories to the Chapman children, and bowing to men and women who counted his nod an accolade. Once a year he con- tributed to Catholic, Mormon and _ Protestant Churches; and at Christmas time all railroad men on duty and all wayfarers fed at his expense on French Pete’s cooking. He died one night in the Chapman House, of an apoplexy. No papers were found in his buffalo trunk. But there were books there: Childe Harold, a Shakespeare, sev- eral originals of Voltaire, and a volume of strange devices which pious Saints believed to be the orig- inal of the Book of Mormon, which would have made Bill the angel Moroni. But it proved to be only a sixteenth century Odyssey, whose ex libris had been obliterated. Near the Chapman House was Gentile Kate’s brothel, incomparably the leader of its kind. Kate was herself a respected part of the business life } 4S THe TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER of the town, a speculator in real estate, the most liberal customer of the stores; she was, too, an unofficial great lady. When a railroad dignitary or a visiting Cabinet member was to be banqueted, she was always bidden to provide conversation and fine raiment above the reach of Ogden. No one was ever swindled at her establishment; no one was ever disorderly there, twice. A person of dignity was Gentile Kate, and of more than a little wit. But her annoyance was Mormons— perhaps because she disliked their colorlessness, perhaps because she felt that their multiple mar- riages were sabotage against her profession, per- haps because she had knowledge of certain patri- archs and bishops who, by day, denounced her in their meeting-houses. Doing almost a bank’s busi- ness in loans and mortgages, she never lent a penny to a Mormon; and the one unladylike ex- pression in her vocabulary coupled a vivid gene- alogy with the name of Joseph Smith. Early in her career, Brigham Young died of overeating, and soon there was an auction of his effects. Of late years he had taken to parading the streets of Salt Lake in a new carriage—a barouche made for him in the East. One sees the picture: Brigham at his portliest, at his most be- nignant, leaning back in the wine-colored cush- ions, one arm bracing his paunch, his eyes stray- ing over the multitudes who uncovered and bowed their heads as the right hand of God went by. An equipage of splendor, behind gray stallions, on one side the all-seeing eye, carved and glistening, ° Tur UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 49 on the other side the beehive of Deseret, and on the rear the angel Moroni ascending to heaven from audience with Joseph Smith. But only a carriage, after all. The Utah Central, one day, bore it up to Og- den. Next day, behind the same gray stallions, bearing the same insignia of Mormonry, it rolled up and down the streets of Ogden, and haughty in its cushions was Gentile Kate. Meanwhile, following the Irish, other people were settling in Ogden, putting up their stores, shipping their freight to the multitudes of little towns that had germinated in the railroads’ wake. Much money was being made in Ogden—and this, as it was Gentile money, gravelled the Mormon’s souls. Now begins the last protracted struggle, between the faithful and the damned. As always, it gave the Mormon more than his native color. Unmolested, he is only a fanatic worshiping out- rageous gods; but fighting the Gentile, he is laved with all the high-lights of martyrdom and sanctity and desperation. Brigham Young was dead, but behind the figureheads of the presidency was George Q. Cannon, who was scarcely less a gen- eral. Politics had served the Church well in [llinois; perhaps the Mormon ability to cast ten thousand votes as one might help out now. For a dozen years the battle waged unequally—centered, of course, in Ogden where alone the Gentiles might make a stand. ‘The town began to glow. Its 50 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER somnolent avenues to-day bear no hint that they have witnessed emotions no less intense than those that followed Bloody Mary about her realm. They were for the most part bloodless, but were no less bitter; only, the Irish kept them on the comic side. Your Mormon, battling at Arma- geddon for his dollar, is no light-minded man; he regards levity as the sin against the Holy Ghost; his god, as the god of this world, centers his inter- est in cash, wherefore to be else than solemn is to risk hell. But the Irish, who had created and obliterated the frontier, were less awed. A merry decade it was, these ten years of the People’s Party and the Liberal Party—ten years of plot and counterplot, of stuffed ballot boxes and bribed judges, of scandals built to order and set off at the right moment; of broken heads, of oratory and defiance. From Mormon pulpits streamed curses that had for their model the chap- ters of Deuteronomy which raise cursing to an art. From Irish bar-rooms streamed the laughter of men. Sometimes a Gentile Machiavelli was set upon by night in an alley and his head was bashed. Sometimes one was bought outright or another caught with the goods. In the last case he would be tried by Mormon jury before a Mormon judge, with his comrades—who wasted no sympathy on a man who could get caught—swearing him into centuries of prison. Sometimes a madness would come upon the Irish, and they would go out for entertainment. Bishop Jones, hurrying to priesthood meeting, Tur UNDERWRITERS OF SALVATION 51 would find himself captive to a dozen brawlers who would, perhaps, drag him to the new steam laundry, strip him, and immerse him in a vat of soap with lewd parodies of the Temple ordinances. Did he believe Brigham Young had taken to wife Semiramis and Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba? Down with him into the suds! Did he expect to beget souls in heaven? Let the soap cover him! And so on till the bishop, recanting Mormonism, precept by precept, emerged a bishop of the black mass. _ They went forth to battle, these Irish, but they always died. Till one November the auguries pointed the other way and the Irish swaggered down the middle of the streets. Election day saw two machines perfected. One by one, in the out- lying districts where no Gentiles lived, the Mor- mons filed in, voting for themselves, for their wives, their children, their great grandparents, and the legions they had taken to wife in celestial mar- riage. A Gentile election-judge nodded jovially and called them by their first names. All day long till the polls closed. Then, out of nowhere, came rigs galloping; hard men descended on the polls, lifted the ballot box, and disappeared with the Gentile judge. Down the Weber and Ogden rivers flowed streams of ballots sanctified by the Lord’s chosen. Word had reached the Liberal headquarters that special trains had come up from Salt Lake City and that the Mormons were voting all the names on the tombstones. Headquarters grinned 52 Tut TAMING OF THE FRONTIER and consulted watches. Aorta - « art ca ae, q kas mete - v ° c ~ ~ = - - * 7 A my - wy = 7 me « . . 7 : ? ~ a f “ ce ' = ah 4 ea ¥ " “ > m4 ‘ ’ os, “ ¥ a , P ed rs ' 7 ‘ ’ i, ri 2 ‘ =] re - . } “ Ay : | : fe ; * . : j _— : . bi : : * % ad by ‘ | : S34 Shag pe « —_— coded — : ~~ : : ic | i . = ne “ ae | > - ~ a Pat. c Fi <_—s WasHEeD WHITER'N SNOW 81 tain notions in the aboriginal head that white supremacy was on the toboggan. So the ranchers in remote quarters began to suffer, began to lose their scalps. One night it was rumored in Denver that the Indians were coming to wipe out the town. There was tremendous excitement. Fires were lighted. Women and, children and some of the less hardy males were crowded together into fireproof build- ings. Outposts were stationed and sleep was abandoned. But the night passed without un- toward incident. Shortly after this episode the Governor of the territory made a public proclama- tion in which he urged “all citizens of Colorado, whether organized or individually, to go in pursuit of the hostiles and to kill and destroy them wher- ever found and to capture and hold to their private use and benefit all the property they could take.” Colorado had a National Guard at the time un- der a Colonel John M. Chivington. The Colonel had been a Methodist minister in Iowa or Ne- braska before becoming a pioneer. His civic responsibility had been high for a long time. The proclamation of the governor made an impres- sion on his stern nature. Like William the Silent in the Bois de Boulogne, he received its import without resorting to comment. Being titular and actual head of Colorado’s military forces he em- barked to a council with some Indian chieftains, among whom were Black Kettle of the Cheyennes and Bull Bear and Left Hand of the Arapahoes. 82 $$‘TuHEr TAMING OF THE FRONTIER The conference, like most disarmament confer- ences, resulted in nothing more than some pic- turesque bits of oratory. The Indians were not in the least servile; hardly were they courteous. They held a lot of trumps up their sleeves. The parley broke up in some confusion without an en- tente cordiale coming to flower. Colorado’s gov- ernor went to Washington on business and the Military Commander of the Department, a Gen- eral Curtis, delivered himself of the opinion that the governor had had no authority and no ‘right to conclude a separate peace with the Indians anyway. Thereupon Chivington set out for the south quietly on his own responsibility. He took his regiment with him. In November he came upon Left Hand and Black Kettle in camp about forty miles south-east of Fort Lyon. Without parley he set upon the Indians, having first seen that their camp was well surrounded. A very effective slaughter was accomplished. Of the nine hundred Indians encamped, nearly every one was slain, in- cluding Left Hand himself who came forward holding up his hands palms outward, signifying that he knew when he had had enough. Chiving- ton had ordered his men to take no prisoners. They obeyed his orders. Five years in Colorado, exposed to its natural dangers, had taught the Colorado guardsmen the best aboriginal practice. Among the victims of their thoroughness were nearly all the Arapahoe women and children. The white soldiers scalped WasHED WHITER'N SNOW 83 their victims and their work was said to be above the reproach of the best aboriginal critics. The victorious guardsmen returned to Denver and were received by a committee from the Chamber of Commerce and commended on the thoroughness of their work. The city gave itself up to a general rejoicing; business men meeting each other on the street would shake hands and comment on the fortunate riddance. Somewhat to the surprise of the city, the event, later known as the “Sand Creek Massacre,” was labelled as a deplorable incident by foreign chambers of com- merce who, because of their remote point of view, had not the proper sense of values and expedi- encies. “Sand Creek” is an evidence of the growing homogeneity of Denver. And homogeneity being the first necessity in any social gathering reveals itself in a young city as an outstanding virtue. For four years the body politic had labored to preserve itself from forces of disruption within. Then had come the need to preserve itself from forces of disruption without. On the whole it was a crystallizing process. Then in 1893 to meet a great emergency, Governor Davis H. Waite proposed to his legislature that if the Government of the United States was shortsighted enough to dispense with the coinage of silver dollars, thus striking by judicial fiat at Colorado’s foremost in- dustry—the mining of silver—he, the legislature and the State of Colorado should engage in the coinage of silver dollars on their own account. 84 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER He proposed shipping the bullion to Mexico and having the money coined there to avoid certain awkward social formalities. This manly recognition of the first law of nature was not endorsed by the representatives and Colorado slumped into the worst panic she has ever known. The governor’s uncompromising gesture toward the great social menace of bank- ruptcy is not lessened in glamorous significance by the timidity of the agents of his people. Denver is sixty-seven years of age. It covers an area as large as the town-site of the Borough of Manhattan. It has endorsed a slogan, “Five Hundred Thousand by 1930.” From the number of street signs embellished with this slogan, she is going to do it or bust. Certain of her detractors say that she will never do it. For, they say, she has not the robust civic virtue she once had. Justice, having fattened on irrigated fields, her cheeks like red pippins from the bright sun and lusty winds, is becoming obese. She is a stay-at- home listening to radio programs. ‘The robust Denver of the early sixties has become softened by an overpolite usage, they say. The stringy and hard bitten civic body has been taking on flesh and losing its sunburn. It has ceased to eliminate its natural body poisons in the natural civic way. There is a feeling that the sixty-seven year old town has overfed herself so obscenely that she no longer has the character to put her system in order or even to call in a doctor. These are harsh words. It has been suggested in the foregoing chronicle WasHED WHITER N SNOW 85 that Denver’s early life was vigorous if nothing else. Her rule of thumb was a simple one, made up of articles six and eight of the code Mosaic. But this simple code was enforced with what even Denver’s most rigorous detractors must admit was a direct and prompt assumption of respon- sibility. After 1860 the city may have begun to lose some of its civic interest in the upkeep of virtue, turn- ing naturally to other concerns. Womenscame to Denver. There is a biologic proof of that. And hangings began to diminish in number. There is visible proof of that in the records. How the citi- zens of Denver behaved privately in these years is not recorded. ‘That Denver did not differ mate- rially in her private life from other cities is not to be proved nor is there any desire to prove it. There are many wild oats in every public granary. Very little sex stuff appears in Denver’s early news sheets. But they were not printing that sort of thing in news sheets anywhere in those days. Then in 1892 and 1893 and thereabouts, one notes in a careful perusal of the records that an idea seems to have been bruited about to dispense with certain practitioners—professional people— certain filles de joie—to drive them out of and away from certain regions around about Larimer and Market Streets—away from Denver alto- gether. But the merchants got together and without ostentation effectively bashed the idea. What could the dizzy theorists have been thinking of? 86 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER The world is always crowded and shouldered into uncomfortable corners by rattle-brained enthusi- asts who have never paid any of the practical costs of “building up” a business or a city. “The Den- ver of the early sixties was a fine, upstanding town,” these gentlemen assured their consciences. “Let there therefore be no picayunish interference with the private life of our ‘who’s who,’ the gents who put us on the map.” So for seven or eight years the town grew into adolescence. And while she suffered some financial misfortune in that time and grew a bit meagre about the girth as a result of the disastrous governmental fiat against silver, still she breathed in the free air of her great open spaces, was bluff and hearty of speech, ate with her knife and kept her self respect. But along about the year 1900 a change seemed to come over the town. The joy of living began to slip behind some sort of shadow. The bluff and hearty transgressors of the social code no longer took zest in the moral maladversions that they used to take. ‘There began to be heard an occa- sional ‘“‘shush” when the maladversions of the fore- going generations were touched on conversation- ally. The head of the house may found a fortune but it does not automatically give him a permit to come into the parlor in his sock feet and sus- penders, to spit into the gas grate or to rest his feet on the mantel. Once the level of the upper crust is achieved the mode of the upper crust must be observed. In 1900 the pioneers of the sixties were ap- WasHED WHITER'N SNOW 87 proaching their three score years and ten. They were likewise approaching a position of social eminence comparable to the eminence of that frost-bitten crew that landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. All their barbers, cooks, and sutlers be- gan to acquire eminence. 'That some of them may have eaten their companions in times of great gastronomical pressure was not to be mentioned, or if so, with the proper deprecation. Of course the ends justified the means. And if there had been any informalities in any matters of wedlock —why, what was a man to expect in a mining town? In short, while Denver was becoming so- cially conscious, while she was getting her first taste of suavity, she showed a fine broad spirit of understanding and forbearance. The attitude of the merchants toward the ladies of Larimer Street illustrates the point. But along about 1900 certain private matters concerning certain first families began to be noised about. Along with the gossip and conversation came some attendant snickering. It all seemed to come from the same source. It was the sound a pair of peeping toms make to each other between gasps as they peer into a strange bed-room. At first this behavior received the disregard that it deserved. But it was repeated. Time and again it was repeated. Down the list of “who’s who” went these naughty peeping boys. No one with a financial rating escaped. Old motheaten yarns of old motheaten adulteries be- gan to go the rounds again. Now it is one thing 88 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER to hold up to light the sexual misbehavior of a young and sprightly pair. And it is another thing to lug out of camphor the old dead passions and indulgences of a couple whose frangible bones will no longer stand up under mundane stresses and whose eyes have lost their lustre, and to trot them up and down a runway for public speculation. The latter somehow savors of passing around sec- ond hand cough-drops. But the practice was not confined to baiting the senile. Wild oats became a drug on the market. If a young blade felt the urge of a spring fret, it was up to him to take it to far distant pastures or else be prepared to pay liberally for his indul- gence in cash or exposure. For it is not to be inferred that this new insti- tute for the preservation and encouragement of virtue owed its inception to any altruistic motive however misguided. ‘The gentlemen who con- trolled its destinies were merchants in the com- pletest sense—not evangelists. They had come to Denver frankly for the mazuma. They had looked over the field and decided to build up a market for silence. No one had been peddling that commodity in the town up to that time. No one had recognized the great oppor- tunity. It was virgin country for that sort of © thing. Up to that time Denver had behaved frankly and unashamedly as a child behaves toward all adult taboos. In 1900 Denver was reaching her adolescence. She began to have a sort of adolescent shame of showing to strangers ‘WaAsHED WHITER’N SNOW 89 her nude civic body. By 1900 many of the aes- thetic values of the General Grant era had trickled into Denver; the legs of its womankind were not included in its symbolical picture of her. In 1900 the new virtue merchants recognized with discernment that the time was at its ripest for their venture. So they went to work. Silence being a negative quality owes its im- portance solely to its contrast with its antipodes. One cannot measure the quality of a silence save by a comparison with the racket which it displaces. Its quantity of course is measured by the length of its duration. The price of silence, like the price of other com- modities is to be determined by its quality and its quantity and it lkewise depends on the laws of supply and demand. Hence to make silence valu- able, the first step obviously is to make it a rare thing. That is the first thing these itinerant mer- chant princes proceeded to do. In the early days water had been the rarest, the dearest, the most unique natural blessing in the town. In a few months it was displaced at the head of the list of community rarities. Man—Colorado man—for- got the sound of his great open spaces. Nature lost her voice in the babel. The immigrant ped- dler princes knew their stuff. Then customers began coming in. “What will be the price of three years of silence concerning my aunt Majolica?’—“TI want to run for district judge and I would like a six months’ respite for my character. How many franchises will it cost 90 Tue TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER me?”—‘My bank is having a little rough sledding right now—last summer so hard on the stock, you know. What’s the tax for keeping mum until we can get over the hill? Can I buy an exemption outright or do you folks want it on a royalty basis?” To the superficial observer Denver is a fine, moral town. A clean town. The robust splendor of the early sixties apparently has not been dimmed. In the cartoons of her daily sheets the typical Denverite is always pictured as a some- what dour gent in a broad brimmed hat with fat, capable hands and a banker’s mustache, a trace of a paunch draped with a fourteen carat chain and a Masonic emblem. He usually stands in a manly if informal posture, taking a farmer or a laborer into his pleasant confidence. He is usually pic- tured as telling these latter that so long as they behave they may inherit God’s footstool with him—that this Colorado of his’n is undoubtedly God’s footstool, and that the climate like which there is nothing comparable was probably made possible by his farsighted and well chosen friend- liness with the Almighty. Colorado is a place where men are men and it is a privilege to live. For there are no slums in Denver. There are no sinks of iniquity. There is no mud in the gutters, due perhaps to the fact that the dust there has never felt the degenerating touch of rain. Denver is a clean town. But after a visitor to its well swept environs has begun to get the lay of the land, he begins to hear WasHED WHITER 'N SNOW 91 a few thin-voiced complaints, whispers in queru- lous key. The self-same stereotype who rests his paunch on the gate post and disclaims so gustily about the weather is for the most part a fiction of the cartoonist. He is on dress parade for the Tourist Bureau. See him in the home and you will find him a bit bare as to hair, a bit run down at the heel, a bit runny at the nose, nervous and jumpy, furtive and blustery. You will observe that he keeps a weather eye on his family closet. Never for one moment, while you are watching, will he get out of sight of the door of it. He may have in his pocket the receipt for ten years’ silence, covering all members of his immediate family, his own past behavior, the reputations of all his progenitors. But he never can tell how soon an eldest son may see fit to fly off on a hideous tangent or a daughter run away with a soda jerker, making it necessary for him to rush immediately forth and draw up a new protective contract covering all these new idiosyncrasies. It’s a rotten life for a man who knows his duty when he sees it. It will be claimed that despite the imperfec- tions of the system, virtue is its own reward. Per- haps it is. If so, then these peddler princes of privacy will doubtless be interred as to bones and gristle in some future American Canterbury, there to be revered as they deserve. But as is customary with most dogmatic saints their popularity is not marked. The bluff and ready Coloradoan who 92 Toe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER makes such a fine show of crossing their palms with silver so as to make the procedure simulate the best business practice, in secrecy would like nothing better than to have some of those sacred bones to feed into some pleasant coffee mill. In the privacy of his club, in the comfortable corner of his overstuffed divan, under the cover of the harsh voice of his new “loud speaker” he may ad- mit to himself, may even admit to some trusted Damon or Pythias that “things ain’t what they used to be” and that “‘some day all this monkey business’ll have to stop.” Not so very long ago a certain Denver citizen, owner of a large semi-public utility, was closeted with a number of his peers. The walls were her- metically sealed. Great doors shut out the Colo- rado sunshine. This gentleman stood and de- livered the customary platitudes. And then he began to yield to emotion. But first he caught a surreptitious look behind him. 'Then he lowered his voice. “I’m a native Coloradoan,” he whis- pered. “I’m a Westerner. And by God Ill not stand for this sort of thing much longer.” He paused and gulped dramatically. “Some day I may want to leave the state. And if I do—and if anything is—if there’s any conversation about it—or me—or mine—by God somebody’s going to be hurt.” He did not seem at all happy at the prospect. It is rather an odd contrast to the behavior of, say, W. H. Middaugh, who trailed young Gordon across to Coffey County, Kansas, thirty-two hun- WasHED WHITER 'N SNOW 93 dred miles, with a rope and a six-shooter and a natural buckram along his spine. A few months ago the Denver Chamber of Commerce issued one of its usual spawn of slogans. Due notice of it appeared in the birth and death columns of the Denver papers but no one saw fit to comment editorially, for the birth of a slogan of a Chamber of Commerce is now thought to be reasonably commonplace. But the foreign press picked one out of the scramble and held it up for ridicule. Poor little thing, it was so weak and helpless it did not know what the laughter was all about. And its parents were covered with a natural confusion, not feeling too sure about it somehow. This particular little slogan said: WORT” And then, following this positive adjuration, it appeared to lose some confidence, lapsing into a weaker, negative parlance. ‘The words then ran: “I will speak no evil. “TI will hear no evil “Of Colorado and Denver. “IT will always “uphold my State “and City. “Denver Chamber of Commerce.” The foreign press characterized it as mere Chamber of Commerce piffle. But actually it is more than that. It is the faint and plaintive pro- test of a community that has been threatened to death. Printed on red and white window cards 94 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER it appeared in thousands of Denver windows, on the posts and fences of Denver. Of a certainty there were some nailed to the physical properties of the Bandit Virtue Trust itself. There is a law on the statute books which for- bids the buying and selling of silence. But the law is helpless before an organized morality. So it sits in its chair of state and mows and trembles and gives off an occasional shrivelled cachinna- tion. For the collectors of the Virtue Trust’s levy are not without a certain Rabelaisian humor in the performance of their self-appointed tasks. The Denver Chamber of Commerce is fright- ened lest the Virtue Trust may seek to peddle its wares to the city. They are afraid lest the pure white symbol of the city’s honor may be sub- jected to some adverse remarks. They shrink from the display of her nude civic body. And lest they be ordered by the Trust to “kick-in” with the usual lagniappe in kind, they are voicing this plaintive little protest. Denver’s past, present and future are not to be impugned. ‘They are attempting to build up a moral code forbidding such a thing. And the Virtue Trust is laughing up its sleeve. It knows what it can do. | As for the silence concerning Denver’s past, is it really worth anything—that silence? The old Denver possessed at least one homely virtue that seems lacking in the Denver of to-day. She had adequate bowels for battle. She had the stuff to keep her house in a sort of gusty order. And she laundered her own ’scutcheon. WasHEeD WHITER N SNOW 95 The Denver of to-day seems to be desirous of nothing so much as to keep her reputation clean. She seems willing to dust on a little rice powder over the dirt. She has no heart to come to grips with the Virtue Trust and she has the character to make a deal with them, a perennial contract for silence—civie silence—which the Virtue Trust merchandizes also. But fearing that the price which she may have to pay may savor of distor- tion she is predicating her civic need with the aforementioned slogan. Her civic wise-men are of the same stripe as the Punic merchants of Hamilcar’s day. Fatuously they imagine that by the weight of their accumulated august presences they may bring the price of silence down. In their hearts they know better. All of Denver’s élite know better. The truth of the matter is: the Denver of to- day lacks guts. Suavity and slogans have bleached her to a poor anaemic yellow. Nice town, yes, but Just who is the Virtue Trust? Write and ask any member of the Denver Chamber of Commerce. SAN FRANCISCO: A Retrospect oF BOHEMIA By Idwal Jones SAN FRANCISCO NE of those Stygian tule fogs had swirled through the Latin Quarter and got into our throats. My friend, a tenor of resounding fame, was apprehensive for his vocal cords, therefore we entered a bar in Columbus avenue and asked for strong drink. ‘The barkeep looked as_ stone- hearted as Tagliagola, the Calabrian bandit. Pro- hibition informers had faces even more innocent than those of ours reflected in the mirror. And he had been raided twice. It was a critical moment. “Ah, un bel di!” warbled the tenor. Tagliagola melted. His Bourbon was good. Then entered a personage. He was crowned with a huge cappello, and his cloak, smeared with clay and paints, was fastened at the neck with a silver chain like a bull- dog’s. “Signori, an artist,” explained the barkeep. “Mister Giovanni Muschio!” Noblesse oblige, so we offered him a glass. Later, Muschio demanded that we be served with a dinner sufficiently worthy of us. So down cel- lar we went, a black cave alive with squealing rats. A light revealed a table covered with oil- cloth and set about with decrepit chairs. Taglia- gola banged pots on the stove and yelled infer- 99 100 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER nally, and some quite charming persons came down: an Italian editor, a scene-painter, a fiddler and a singer among them. A miraculous banquet was evolved: gnocchi, vitello con salsa, chicory salad and zabaglione. 'To drink there was Asti spumante, Tipo Chianti with wicker bellies, demijohns of sparkling Zin- fandel. The talk was stimulating, an intellectual tornado. We made speeches that were vocifer- ously applauded. Muschio eulogized our pleas- ant traits. ‘Tagliagola arose, vowed that his life had not been lived in vain, then collapsed, through excess of emotion. It was that Asti... At 5 a. m. we encountered the dawn. Who paid for that fabulous dinner I never knew. It was not Muschio. We conducted him down Third street, among the Hellenic coffee-shops, while he looked up at the signs. Beneath one: “Beds. Two Bits a Night,” he halted. Borrow- ing a quarter, he wished us a buona notte and disappeared into the flop-house of Big Gus the Greek. The tenor, being a man of fine instincts, wept, and swore he would live in San Francisco forever. However, he sobered up, and left that very morning. | After that, Muschio, in compary with a Jugo- Slav painter, came often to my garret in Cali- fornia street to argue. A militant anti-clerical, he spoke with pride, nevertheless, of some years’ time he had served on a Jesuit organ in Milan, writing editorials. His Russian was even better than his Italian, so much had he travelled. He A Retrosrect oF BOHEMIA 101 made living painting imitations of Zuloaga and Gauguin—an incredible mixture. Heaven only knows where they are. Probably in museums. Some of his Gauguins were better than the orig- inals. Desperately hard up though he was, he enter- tained in the most lordly fashion. The last affair he staged in the chambers of a woman painter now dead. THe assessed all of us a dollar. He pur- chased miles of spaghetti, boiled it in a baby’s washtub borrowed from the Jap _ housecleaner downstairs, and made a bucketful of sauce. These feats he performed over a gas-burner, up in his attic. ‘The comestibles were hauled off in a cab, and he stopped en route at an undertaker’s parlor to buy a pair of white cotton gloves. The dinner was a splendorous success. The stuff was edible. That man could have made a ragout of a tough hippogriff. Muschio donned the gloves and dished out the paste by handfuls. We were short of tumblers. As luck would have it, George Wharton James kept here his famous collection of Pompeian tear-jars, and out of these lachrymatories we sipped the blushful Hippocrene. At “dress-up” feasts he always came two hours late; and small wonder, for he kept his velours hat at Bigin’s, his cane at La Campana, his best trousers back of the wine kegs at Buon Gusto, a pair of pointed shoes at the Tour Eiffel, under the bar, and his collars—he had forgotten where. Even the best-certified Bohemians marvelled at Muschio, the while they prophesied a dire fate. 102 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER The worst did come to pass. He visited Los Angeles—some elderly lady had become infatu- ated with him—and he tarried. Now this gai sabreur has been painting scenery for Tom Mix. The amount of money he makes must be prodi- gious, and in frock-coat he rides about in a limou- sine driven by a high-priced Japanese with a face like a bronze. He was the last of the guerilla artists, and his defection caused no surprise. For Bohemia had long been on the wane. Muschio recalls the vanished triumvirate that made the beer-halls of San Francisco the envy of Munich: Tofanelli, a braggart of the first water; Benvenuti, the eagle-faced and violent old man whose forebears for generations had been the official painters at the Vatican; and Cristodoro, a fat and morose genius whose taste in gnomes, kobolds, Gothic landscapes, and cavern scenes with a medieval flavor of rapine and bloodshed made beer-drinking at the Louvre, the Olympia, the Zinkand, the Pabst and the Tait an emotional experience. The merry and turbulent days were dying out. More thoroughly than Baron Haussmann had changed Paris, the fire of 1906 had transformed San Francisco. The genus loci had been inciner- ated. The old haunts were destroyed. The energy of the people was absorbed in the task of recon- struction, and there was a hiatus in the artistic life until the building of the exposition. A. RETROSPECT OF BOHEMIA 103 When the lath and stucco city began to rise on the Marina, the painters and sculptors, who had fled elsewhere, drifted back, and with them hun- dreds of European craftsmen. That task com- pleted, plastic artists did gingerbread for the architects. The brushmen got jobs with the poster companies. A thousand lots within the city limits were screened about with hoardings that concealed craters filled with weeds and fused brick. So bill- board painting became the principal art of the town. The affiche has progressed in San Francisco beyond anything done this side of the Atlantic. Collars, ginger-ale, butter-substitutes, Coca-Cola, hats, automobiles, chocolates, bifocal glasses, vacuum cleaners—these are emblazoned on the noblest billboards west of the Mississippi. At night they are dressed up with electric sparklers. A majestic Navajo—a Maynard Dixon Indian— stands on an illimitable desert and contemplates a salmon-pink sunset. ‘The moral is to buy some- body’s tires. But what of it? This is a commer- cial age, and to paint such is remunerative work. The aesthetic nature of the present generation has been nurtured on these billboards, just as in England the prose style of the most esteemed writers has been formed on Eno’s Fruit Salt ad- vertisements. The billboards are vanishing before the triumphal progress of the concrete-mixer, and must soon take refuge in the far hinterland. Some ten artists are painting pictures to hang on walls. There are still homes left to put them 104 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER in. But the majority of citizens are genuinely urban and dwell downtown. Even millionaires live in midget apartments, for the immigration laws have made the problem of domestic help more acute than ever. The wall-bed is a San Francisco invention, and when the contraption preempts too much of the wall space for anything to be stuck up larger than a photograph. Where are the Bohemians of yesteryear? Gone into commerce, and prosperity has befallen them. They keep respectable ménages in “gum finish” apartments. And they are probably all at home. Call up any of a score, and no longer do you hear the significant, and sacramental phrase: “The line is temporarily disconnected.” The writers? Gone to New York, where all the publishing houses in the country are. They don’t commit the folly of shooting at long distance when they can make a killing just a block away and save postage. The weekly periodicals that bred a superb crop of literati here in the previous three decades are non-existent. Folk used to lay in a supply of local weeklies to read over the week-end as religiously as they brougdt home the sabbatical gallon of steam beer. 7 Golf and the automobile have usurped Sundays. But what killed the weeklies was the distrust of periodicals that were not standardized, that were not precisely what people read in New York, Chi- cago, Boston and everywhere else. The urbane and erudite stylist, who seasoned his articles with the salt of in situ allusion, was damned as provin- A. ReEvTrRosPEct OF BOHEMIA 105 cial. He hadn’t a chance against the rotogravures of bathing beauties. Prohibition, of course, wrecked the topography of Bohemia. Gone are all the haunts, from Mar- shall’s of Bret Harte’s day, where the romancer discussed sherry and baked venison marrow with the prototypes of Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin, to the last of the botteghe raided in the Latin Quar- ter, where the bright spirits foregathered to spend unlimited hours at trifling cost and cultivate the fine art of conversation. Leveroni’s, the gayest of cellars; Maggini’s, re- nowned as the stamping ground of the wits of the “Suicide Club”; Lucchetti’s, famous for its “‘bread- ball” barrage and fried halibut; Papa Coppa’s, with “the jug behind the door,” the rendezvous of the Irwins, Jimmy Hopper, Jack London, George Sterling, Martinez, with the bandeau over his Aztec locks, and the seigniorial Ambrose Bierce, dropping in after visits to the Morgue where he had gone to inspect the “floaters” in from the bay; Negro and O’Brien’s; the early Fior d'Italia, otherwise the “Fire of Italy,’ where newspaper- men were ranked one notch higher than the lesser angels—the litany is now like a strain on a Louis XIV harpsichord. Reverent souls will point out their sites for you. They are soft-drink parlors, or they are placarded with those saddest words of tongue or pen: “This Corner to be Remodeled to Suit Tenant.” At times a Latin pities those whose souls were once warmed with the ichor of the true Falernian, 106 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER and starts a cenacle. The hired snifters creep in. They gladhand the illuminati, bedevil mellow talk on paint and words, and after indefatigable ef- forts succeed in inducing the cook to give them a sip from the kitchen sherry bottle. Then a badge is flashed; everybody gets hauled off to the Bastille, and broad and genial tolerance is once more foully slain. And in a state where viticul- ture but a few years ago was glorified as the noblest of arts. Civic indulgence perished before the onslaught of the Methodist forces in 1916. Their leader was an Lowa Savonarola, the Rev. Paul Smith, pastor of the Central Methodist Church. Their first ob- jective was that roaring spectacle, the Barbary Coast. Roughly, it embraced Broadway and Pacific street, where the Thalia, the Wave, the Swede’s and a score more dance halls gave enter- tainment to lusty youth from the mines, the lumber camps and the deep sea, and the adjacent alleys where twinkled the lights o’ love. It was in a mean part of the town; less flagrant than the Paphian belt of New Orleans, and little more wicked, though more noisy, than the Cannabiére of Marseilles. The vice-fighting parson let loose his philippics. The police commissioner protested that the region was more orderly than any in Chicago or New York, but the row was on. The pastor threatened to print a roll of dishonor with the names of the plutocrats who owned property in the district. The city quaked with anticipation, but the idea A. Rerrosrect oF BOHEMIA 107 fizzed out like a damp farthing candle, for only an obscure real estate agent got shown up—much to his annoyance. Then the pastor organized the Law Enforcement and Protective League, with himself as president and a Y. M. C. A. secretary as promotion manager. All the professional wow- sers rallied under the banner and fought with the exaltation of mullahs. The filles de joie were aghast, then consumed with indignation. They appeared in a body at the Central Methodist Church, and made their complaints likewise at the City Hall. But the game was up, and the alleys were puri- fied. The dance-halls were abolished, the French restaurants chastened, and the beer-hall devotees disciplined to the meekness of Quakers at a meet- ing-house. The vice-fighting parson paused not. He determined to carry his reform all over the United States. The first step was to employ the movies, and to film the great fight as an object les- son. So “The Finger of Justice’ was made. The church scene was filmed with the Reverend Smith in his own pulpit, supported by a vested choir of thirty-six, with the pipe organ going at full blast, and the congregation in the throes of hysteria. Gilded sin was depicted in the cabaret scene, which cost $5,000. Little Jane O’Roark, attired in shim- mering scales, writhed as the vamp; Crane Wilbur, star of “The Perils of Pauline,” had the hero’s role, and the Rev. William L. Stidger, an able young ecclesiastic, now in Henry Ford’s entourage, es- sayed the part of the cop. 108 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Two hundred Methodist persons attended the first showing, and shattered the canons of their church by sanctioning the Sunday exhibition of the film. Inspired by his meteoric rise to the front pages, the Rev. Paul Smith resigned from the min- istry to become head of the International Church Film Corporation, and left for New York. There, much to the chagrin of the League, the license com- missioner of the State, one Gilchrist, barred the film as subversive of public morals! The Barbary Coast, boarded up, is now the haunt of stray cats and mechanics contemplating the opening of small tire-repair shops. Otherwise it is as deserted as the North Pole, except at eight o'clock of evenings, when the Salvation Army, ever faithful to the spot, bangs the tambourine and ex- horts the empty air, exorcising the ghosts of dead sins. On the boundaries, below stairs, are dismal and empty Little Bethels. At times a Jack Tar strolls through, striking matches to hunt for once familiar numbers, and then hies himself to a Wild West movie or to blaze away fifty cents at a shoot- ing gallery. The Los Angelization of San Fran- cisco is almost complete. The latest innovations are orange-juice stands and buffoons in costume ballyhooing in front of the movie palaces. The pas- sion for uniformity rages. Until recently the town had a complexion peculiarly its own. But not now. The annals of San Francisco are vast and ex- travagant. In the seventy-five years of its exist- ence there was more fulgurous life than in three A Rerrosrect oF BOHEMIA 109 cycles of Cathay. In a twinkling a trading post had become a Gargantuan camp which the tur- bulent youth of fifty nations transformed within a decade into a city of the first rank. The town had become old before it ceased to be young. It had a Bohemia from the very beginning. The first Bohemian was Jacques Raphael, the witty chef-de-cuisine of the old Tehama House. He had been cordon blew at the Rocher de Can- cale, Paris—the rendezvous of Balzac’s Rastignac. Alexander Dumas rhapsodized over his baked partridges. When the roi-citoyen Louis Philippe went to pot, Murger’s Boheme died the death, and Mons. Jacques quit France, in a great hurry. The next year gold was discovered in California, and in a tent pegged down on a San Francisco sand- dune the once illustrious chef, in top boots and sombrero, was ladling out slumgullion a la Maza- rin to the Argonauts. La carriére ouverte aux talents! 'That was Mons. Jacques’ brave device. He advanced to omelettes a la Morny, made from seagulls’ eggs. His sauce to disguise the fishy flavor was a culinary triumph. His business grew, and he put up a huge corru- gated-iron shed. Spanish aristocrats, Mississippi steamboat gamblers, sailors, the frail sisterhood, gunmen, Sydney “coves,” miners insane through sudden wealth—these poured riches in Mons. Jacques’ lap. He formed a cenacle that included the wits of the camp: two nephews of Victor Hugo, the fiery Lola Montez, just banished from her Aspasian 110 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER couch in Bavaria—surely the man had talk and charm enough about him. San Francisco, a city of sand-hills, tents, sheds, Peggotty houses made of ships sunk in the teeth of rifle-fire by schemers preempting the waterfront lots; a city harried by the cutthroat “hounds” and policed by the no less dreadful Vigilantes—it was not Paris. But Mons. Jacques enjoyed himself hugely. That summer the first artistic event was held— a concert. ‘The solid citizenry attended en masse, with the Governor and his staff; the barbarians tried to “crash the gate,’ but were repulsed by the gendarmes. ‘The front row was reserved for the ladies, and four hetairz availed themselves of the privilege—the entire house standing until they were seated. The affair was a terrific success. The cheering was maniacal, corybantic. Canes, hats, chairs were hurled into the air. It would have turned the head of Taglioni or Fanny Elssler. Mons. Jacques declared, “It was a Romantic demonstration that eclipsed that over ‘Ernani.’ ” What was the feast? Merely a spectral tenor, a Pierre Gringoire who had been dining through his nose, warbling “Take Back the Heart that Thou Gavest” at a tinkly piano in the schoolhouse. That tenor was Steve Massett, later renowned for having eaten a whole cooked goose at a New York salon. Above the tower on the Butte Montmartre in Paris clanked a semaphore. Atop Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, an eminence destined to become the Montmartre, nay, the Parnassus, of A Retrospect oF BoHEMIA vt the western world, likewise clanked a semaphore. The analogy pleased Mons. Jacques. He died, a satisfied exile, and was promptly forgotten. ‘The candle of la vie bohémienne had been lighted by one of apostolic succession. So far the boundaries of Bohemia had not been defined. Attics were let out at fabulous sums. Social unorthodoxy prevailed. What is Bohemia but a minority revolt against provincial narrow- ness? The town was gay, sprawling, uproarious and peopled by men tolerant of mind and by na- ture nomadic and lively. By the middle fifties Bohemia, such as it was, was the milieu of dandies, viveurs and gentlemen of fortune. The high-rollers consorted on Mer- chant street, massively built up with brick edifices reinforced by iron doors and shutters, and hardly wider than an alley. The gourmands were to be found at the Ivy Green Saloon where Bass’s Ale was to be procured. Bolton and Barron, the quicksilver kings, had here their offices and ban- quet-room; their chef was paid twice the salary of the President of the United States. He cooked the fifteen-pound turkey, washed down with twen- ty bottles of sherry, that the corpulent banker Eugene Duprey consumed at one sitting to the awe of the assemblage. He won a bet of $500 thereby. Without, like a crowd by the Quirinal awaiting the result of a Papal election, were throngs of tribudores come up from the mines, arrayed in velvet jackets bedecked with silver buttons, their faces stained red with cinnabar ore. 112 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER As the crapulent hero strode forth, they cheered him as rapturously as the Florentine populace ac- claimed Giotto or Cimabue. The poet O’Connell celebrated that feast in measures right worthy of Ossian. What passed for the aristocracy kept house in South Park. It was gotten up like Kew Gardens, and here cattle barons, shipping masters, bankers and diplomats gave routs and dinners to three hundred people at a time. Young bucks drove thither to ogle the damsels promenading from Mile. Zeitska’s Female Academy. Bewigged foot- men stood guard at the portals. ‘'Trades-persons went around to the back areaways. Within ten years this citadel of the bourgeoisie had become shabby genteel, so fast were the changes in the social fabric. Mons. Louis Bacon, drawing master and sculptor, tendered himself daily in this park, with snuff-box and clouded cane. So far as I can learn, he was the first artist. He was “bang-up society.” Also he did funerary art, and his stone urns and weeping-willows still evoke the megrims in the abandoned graveyards. By happy chance, he ran into a Maecenas, one Ah Sing, an adept in Chinese rituals who kept a private joss-house. Ah Sing was a master-hand at funerals. Flute and drum players, banners, im- mense dragons a block long, drays hauling a thou- sand roast pigs to lay upon the tomb—customers got a run for their money. Ah Sing had his little vanities. He was wont to bestow largesse upon all artists who made a good portrait of him. Mons. SdILdId ALVI AHL NI OOSIONVYd NVS A. ReErTROSPECT OF BOHEMIA 113 Bacon made a cartload of statues of his illus- trious patron, and was able to retire shortly after. Grief among the artists was unutterable when Ah Sing returned to China in 1870, his departure hastened by the police. The sixties were a prosperous decade for the artists, who found it the Land of Cockaigne. The town was large and as substantial as Boston. The very exuberance of the people, their prosperity and undisciplined taste gave birth to a rococo, an efflorescence of ornaments that was astounding. Exteriors were tricked out with pagodas, bell- towers, porte-cochéres, garbels and _ verandas, laden with serpentine carvings and colored win- dows. Homes were crammed with ormolu, bronze Arabs, cozy-corners of spears and draperies, sculptured fruit and lacquered cherubim. The lawns bristled with cast-iron fauna. Domesticity and the pseudo-arts interpenetrated. Bohemia, peopled by souls in revolt, became acutely self-conscious and localized. Most of it was to be found atop a fortress of a bank on Clay street—penury above the money-bags. The spirit of Sefior Arriola, a painter of oil portraits, per- vaded the establishment. He had been drowned off Acapulco on a return home to visit a fickle in- namorata. From Red Dog and Whiskey Gulch came red-shirted miners to climb the stairs and get their pictures made to send back East. Nobody would do but Arriola! These customers were obliged by Pascal 114 THe TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER Loomis, the dog painter, or else by Charles Brooks, the salmon virtuoso, or Jules Tavernier, who did landscapes. A delightful coterie, all of whose names were illuminated on Arriola’s door. That door was unique among all doors in the world. It was nearly a foot thick, made of solid oak, and placed at the head of the staircase, like a barricade. That effectively shut out ruffians. Ar- riola had carved and painted his coat-of-arms upon it. This procedure was followed by the elders. In fact, to have one’s name thereon was an honor surpassed only by achieving the Prix-de-Rome. A most amiable little man was Brooks, the doyen of the group. The accuracy with which this Meissonier of salmon depicted scales was the despair of both artists and icthyologists. His method was simple enough, he stencilled them on, using a square of Brussels lace. He burned with simple fervor before his masterpieces. No painter had a larger heart. He had taken a lease on the entire floor, and sublet studios only to impecunious artists. He lent them cooking utensils, got tick for them at the butcher’s, and saw that the vint- ners furnished them with the necessary claret. Between Brooks’ establishment and the Julien . and Gerome ateliers in Paris flitted men of unde- niable gifts. And here lived the incomparable Harrington, who painted Madonnas and quattro- centista saints. 'The other day a prizefighter took us to Jim Griffin’s, the referee, whose saloon is about the only landmark left of the old Barbary Coast. Above the bar was an excellent little A. Rerrospect oF BOHEMIA 115 painting of “Andromeda Chained to the Rocks,” with flesh tints and a palpable modelling all too rare. It was a Harrington. We lament that we know of no other example of this joyous Dionysian save that gem in the Andromeda Saloon. A. burly, roaring Celt, with a bulbous nose and plug hat, very much like a hackney-driver, Har- rington was the cock of the walk until the advent of the Gariboldi. This paragon of Bohemia arose in the middle seventies. He entered a café on Montgomery Street, and called in such stentorian voice for a waiter, that words died on the lips of the patrons —journalists, models, artists, actors and the like. He threw back his dolman to reveal the blood- red lining. He demanded a salad. Some wit, to mock him, likewise ordered a salad. ‘Then fish, a dish of paste, etc. ‘The wit echoed each item. “Wine in a quart glass!” sang out Gariboldi. “Wine in a quart glass!” shouted the wit. By this time the whole café was in turmoil. Gariboldi twisted the head of his cane and pulled out a glittering rapier, felt the point, and with a muttered imprecation, thundered: “A sword, cameriere! And bring it sharp!” The death-like silence was broken by cries of delight and a fusillade of handclapping. Gari- boldi sprang full-panoplied into renown. ‘The town was full of originals, but none more pic- turesque than Guglielmo Gariboldi, whose aspect 116 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER and unique talents dumbfounded even Bohemia. The times were made for him. He had marked the city for his own, and with his sword split it open like an oyster. This was the era of the colossal. The treasure- box of the Comstock Lode had been broken open. The Ophir, the Yellow Jacket, the Chollar-Potosi poured into the town a deluge of riches. Great as was the display of the mining magnates, it was outdone by the railroad kings. The last spike of the Southern Pacific had been driven in, and the newly-crowned kings spent their wealth in San Francisco. Mark Hopkins, the Southern Pacific financier, was building his castle on Nob Hill. ‘The granite wall, with bastions and portcullis, about the lot, cost a million dollars, and the house, a masterpiece of the Pullman school, cost two million more. It was admittedly a fright. Gariboldi arrayed himself like a Grand Duke, with epaulettes, spent his last dollar on the hire of ‘an imposing equipage, drove up and demanded the job of furnishing that house. He got it. The commission was close to $100,000. The Napoleonic Hopkins quailed before those personal grandeurs and that challenging eye. Once a month Gariboldi, with his acolytes, jogged down with a buckboard to the railroad offices for payment. Sweating clerks loaded the rig with two pine boxes, like coffins, filled with $10,000 in gold coins. The horses could barely crawl up Pine street to the cottage, and an escort A ReEtROosPECT OF BOHEMIA 117 of Bohemians aided the ascent with shouts and pulls on a rope. The counting of the specie lasted until mid- night. These nights were celebrated with a satur- nalia of roast ducks, bouillabaise and champagne. We have met aged men who shed tears at the recollection of these Neronic feasts. “Il Magnifico” has left no trace behind him. The theaters he decorated in his flamboyant style; the Hopkins chateau, with its frieze of wooden angels—naught has survived the fire. It is to his elder contemporary, Pietro Mezzara, a Sicilian stonecutter, that San Francisco owes what vestiges remain of its traditional Bohemia. He deserves more than a footnote, for he was the first sculptor to make a statue of Abraham Lin- coln. Not that good Pietro was a rabid Repub- lican, or anything like that. He deplored the laxity of the Jeff Davis protagonists in not rais- ing a fund and getting something equally hand- some. But the fact is indisputable that this was the first Lincoln, and so Mezzara is secure of his place in the hagiology of the West. The statue weathered forty years in front of a school on Market street. Lincoln was depicted as a fiery Balmaceda, thrusting a document at the Powers of Darkness. Even Harriet Hosmer— disciple of Canova and Gibson though she was— confessed to a shudder as she passed by. It was a piece of wartime bravura, and its loss in the disaster of 1906, is to be measured solely in terms of sentiment. 118 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER A creature of extraordinary zeal, Mezzara helped found the art school. It was perched over the California Market, a popular charcuterie and fish-shop down town. This was a happy propinquity. Whenever a pupil or master was seized with the pangs of hunger and lacked change, all he had to do was to knock off a canvas and trade it with the clerks downstairs for a steak or a plate of tripe. The school throve mightily, like an indigenous plant. The Cytherean, though often foggy, air of San Francisco was propitious to the aesthetic spirit. The mass of the students was Anglo- Saxon. The leaven was Italo-Gallic. The élan of such leaders as Mezzara infused the academy with a heady self-consciousness that manifested itself in fétes of volcanic gaiety—masquerades with Afghan chiefs, Corsairs, houris, Amazons, the cahut, the can-can and the galop infernal. With what glee the tragedian Salvini describes these Paphian revels in his memoirs! Decorous beyond reproach is social life at the academy these days. It has become an adjunct of the state university, and the elders regard it with patriarchal benevolence. Some years ago a philanthropic dentist plastered the city with statues of himself, cast in a Con- necticut iron foundry. They were of a horrific ugliness. A band of valiants headed by Gelett Burgess made a sortie under cover of darkness, lassoed the statues by the Ruskinian pot-hats and A. ReEtTrRosPEct oF BOHEMIA 119 hauled them to the dust. The dentist clamored for capital punishment. The Board of Super- visors was apathetic. What could one say to artists ? Two months ago at the annual art exhibition, the Brahmins were aghast at a small nude hung on the wall. The lady, forsooth, had no shirt on. She savored of La Vie Parisienne. So down she went to the basement, though the Grand Jury had awarded her a prize. Art in San Francisco is still praised, though re- garded as a little bawdy. But not for worlds could we dispense with that vague entity known as Bo- hemia. ‘The journals without some lickerish ref- erence to artists, those high-priests of nudity, or to some lunatic raving in free verse about the moon would be as savorless as the breakfast egg without salt. Pleasant, pleasant fellows those artists we used to meet in brighter days. Economic pressure had not ground the iron into their souls. In that rookery on Polk Street, the last redoubt of Bo- hemia, there were a dozen it was a high privilege to know. It has been torn down to make way for an ornate apartment house. Rent was high at ten dollars a month, but the landlord could always be stood off. Claret was fifteen cents a quart. They sustained their virtues, pride and ideals on the oc- casional sale of a sunset or “View of Mt. Tamal- pais.” There is small room for them now in the busy world, and still less for their old haunts in the Latin 120 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Quarter. Rents have shot up in that region desig- nated by mastodonic electric lights as “The Heart of Bohemia.” Parnassus is heavily over-capital- ized. The Café Momus is become a spaghetti Versailles. At the door stands a giant Senegam- bian in brass buttons and shako. Where congenial souls once talked over the slen- derest consummation—that corner is cataclysmic with a jazz orchestra whanging and bellowing off key while a chocolate-colored lady in green ballet skirt gives an imitation of Sophie Tucker. Touch not the pasta. Even the Italian waiters are looking flabby and scrofulous through lack of the antidote for excess of gluten—the tannin present in the fermented juice of the grape. Their look of hebetude is due to the speeches of the Rotarians and the Civic Improvement Club members they have had to wait on. It were enough to debilitate the most rampagious Camorrista! Telegraph Hill, groomed and fitted with a palisade for the protection of tourists, is now a park. Down the slope flutters the wash of some surviving artist, and it flutters in the salt breeze like defiant oriflambs. ‘The bay-scape is by Tur- ner, palpitant with haze and whorls of mist- scarves blown in through the Golden Gate. Dis- posed in broken planes of grey and purple the city lies on a dozen hills. The colors would de- light Veronese. Under the group of eucalypti whose fronds clatter in the wind sits an artist with coat collar buttoned up. He faces the heart of the city, look- A ReEtrosPect oF BoHEMIA 121 ing down Montgomery street, the purlieus of the old Bohemians. He adumbrates with gusto the towering shafts of the Telephone Building, the Standard Oil, the Dollar Line, the Pacific Gas and Electric—the enormous piles springing up in accordance with the new art of vertical design. These are the tongues of the city, the tongues of a great metropolis. They are calling him. He packs up his kit and whistles for a taxicab. He has to deliver a snappy talk on color in commerce before the Ad Club. The mirthful, leisurely Bohemian days are gone with the provincial ways that conditioned them. Vale, messiewrs—the play is ended. It was an infinitely amusing’ spectacle. SAINT PAUL: Tuer UNTAMABLE TWIN By Grace Flandrau ST. PAUL S is well known, St. Paul, among western cities, is not like other girls. She did not rise from the blue shirt of the miner and the lumber jack, the diamond studs of the faro king or the girl- ish ladies of fifty odd who dazzled the frontier with their mauve face powder, gold fillings and lemon colored hair. On the contrary, she took off at a different point altogether and although she has made vast and solid progress in the columns of Dun and Bradstreet, her career has been, in cer- tain other respects, a descent. An army post, a great fur company, an amaz- ing mad Utopian in Scotland, Indian annuities, and the Catholic Church, in the person of a young French priest with a singularly fine and charming face, are all concerned in the origins of the city. In 1819 what is now Minnesota—then a part of an immense indeterminate region known as . Michigan Territory—was a country physically | co-eval with the Garden of Eden. Aside from half a dozen quite insignificant exceptions, it re-— mained precisely as it had blossomed forth after the last glacier oozed its slow way southward a few eons ago—if that, indeed, is what the glacier did do. The insignificant exceptions were a thin scattering of fur-trading posts set down here and 125 126 Tur TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER there on lake and ‘stream in the great stillness of the wilderness. These posts had been established by those gal- lant, high living, hard drinking, aristocratic pri- vateers of commerce, the Nor’Westers of Canada and a rival company known as the Mackinaw, and were operated by them with great profit and success. But the earnest attention of a rather formidable gentleman in New York City, Mr. John Jacob Astor, had been focussed for some time on the exodus over the border of American furs, taken from American Indians and producing what should have been American dividends. By 1816 he had brought about the passage of an act forbidding any but American ditizens to trade with the Indians within the territorial limits. The North West Company moved across the border and the American Fur Company, owned by Mr. Astor, took over the posts. It retained the French-Canadian voyageurs and engagés and much of the tradition of the Canadian company. Young Americans were put in charge of the posts and in some cases Frenchmen who belonged to the old company hastily took out Americanization papers and remained in the business. The government now sent out expeditions to ex- plain matters to the Indians. It must be made clear to them that they had an entirely new Great Father, must respect a new flag, no longer wear medals bearing the effigy of King George III, and, above all, never trade with the British across the line. But the Indians showed a marked preference Toe UNTAMABLE TWIN i ys for their previous Great Father, for the whiskey, trade goods, flags, medals and appurtenances in general of their old friends the North Westers and, encouraged by the latter, traveled across the border whenever possible with their furs. To combat British influence with the Indians and protect American trade and American traders, it was decided to construct the forts along the new frontier planned for some years earlier. Fort Snelling was accordingly built during 1819-22 at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers—a strategic point between the territories of two great warring tribes, the Chippewa and the Sioux. Within the precincts of the military reser- vation an Indian agent was established and across the Minnesota River (then called the St. Peters) at a place known as Mendota, the American Fur Company established its Northwestern head- quarters. In 1834 a young man of twenty-three, Henry H. Sibley, a clerk and later partner in the com- pany, arrived to take charge of the establishment. His appearance on the scene marks, in my mind, the real beginning of St. Paul. We must, however, before we proceed to the portentous moment of its birth, briefly glance at a most curious and seemingly irrelevant person- age, the Scotch Earl of Selkirk. This interesting gentleman was of all Uplifters one of the most determined and bemused. ‘The victims of his pas- sion for service were certain evicted Scotch and Irish peasants and, later, the downtrodden of other 128 Tuer TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER States, lured doubtless from their native lands by inspirational advertisements setting forth the ad- vantages of the new Utopia. This is not the place to tell the singular story of this undertaking. Suffice it to say that ship- loads of protegés of the good earl were discharged on the semi-arctic shores of Hudson’s Bay and obliged thence to make their painful way seven hundred miles southward by canoe, on foot, or on snowshoes to the vast domain he had bought for them north and west of Minnesota in Canada. They settled on the Red River of the North near the mouth of the Assiniboine and there for some years they variously froze, starved to death or were butchered by the bois brilés—a crew of savage half-breeds set upon them by the North West Company, which objected to having its trapping grounds spoiled by settlers. We however are only interested in a band of Swiss watchmakers who, driven out, it is said by floods, grasshoppers, and rats, escaped from Sel- - kirk’s Utopia and made their way southward to Fort Snellino. Here some of them remained, under the quite erroneous belief that they would be welcome on the reservation. ‘They were not. They were twice compelled to move from their houses and small plantations under a misappre- hension as to the extent of the military reserve. At last they got safely off it and established them- selves on what has since become the center of St. Paul’s business district. There was in the vicinity of Fort Snelling and THe UNTAMABLE TWIN 129 especially at Mendota, a considerable sprinkling of French and half-breed voyageurs who had set- tled there with their families—enough good Cath- olics to warrant the maintenance of a priest among them. When the Selkirk pilgrims started a new community across the Mississippi River from Mendota the good father decided they too must have a church. So in the year 1841 he built a log chapel among them and called it St. Paul’s. I am aware of an irreverent rumor that the City of St. Paul really derives from a slough sev- eral miles south known as Pig’s Eye. An occa- sional writer still states that St. Paul was orig- inally known as Pig’s Eye. ‘This is not the case. Father Galtier records that the small community of Pig’s Eye was indicated to him as a possible location for his chapel, but that he chose the Swiss settlement, as it offered the best steamboat land- ing in the whole region—a fact of immense signi- ficance in the history of St. Paul. Besides the docile Swiss agriculturalists, the only non-military residents of the region were the before mentioned hangers-on about Fort Snelling and the trading post at Mendota and, strung safely along the east bank of the river, which was neither military reserve nor Indian land, the whiskey traders, who nefariously inebriated both soldiers and savages. These various elements gradually congregated at St. Paul’s during the earliest days, and French was almost universally spoken there. But the men who were to occupy positions of prominence and power and to put their 130 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER stamp on the community did not rise from this stratum. They were superimposed upon it. They were for the most part Mr. Astor’s, or later Mr. Chouteau’s, young men, imported from the East- ern States to take charge of their posts in Min- nesota:—Pratte Chouteau & Co. of St. Louis, bought out the Western branch of Astor’s busi- ness in 1834, Now the fur business, which was about as ethical as buccaneering in the days of the Virgin queen, was nevertheless the aristocrat of commerce. From the time when Prince Rupert, cousin of that most fashionable Stuart king, Charles II, became presi- dent or general manager of the Hudson’s Bay Company, it has possessed tradition, manner, a certain chic. This the Nor’ Westers inherited from the Hudson’s Bay, and the American Fur Com- pany took it from both. When the good old Nor’ Westers set out from Montreal to meet at the half way house on Lake Superior the winter- ing partners from the far west, their birch bark canoes carried silver plate and champagne and French cooks into the wilderness. They took their valets to dress them for dinner, polish their silver buckles, and disengage them from the débris un- der the banquet table when the still forest dawn stole into the lofty dining hall at Fort William. But it was not all champagne and silver plate. There was an aristocracy of character that must not be overlooked. The factor in charge of a remote fur post was carefully chosen and was a kind of king. His Tuer UNTAMABLE TWIN 131 power was absolute. His job was difficult, dan- gerous, and delicate. His voyageurs and engagés were ignorant, wildly superstitious, and unruly. He must establish a lasting ascendancy over them. He had to satisfy, overawe, and exploit savages who outnumbered his men hundreds or thousands to one, and inspire in them both fear and liking. The Indians were as capricious, intuitive, un- reasonable, and sharply intelligent as children and as sensitive to personal quality. They recognized and intensely responded to dignity, courage, and good manners. ‘Those men, it will be found on ex- amining the history of a period now gone forever, who had the widest influence with the American savages, when the latter were still powerful and to be feared, were not only, as Ouida would put it, Men but Gentlemen,—if gentlemen in the Eliza- bethan rather than the Methodist Episcopal sense. The men who dominated early St. Paul and whose power continued long after pioneer days, were with some notable exceptions, fur traders. Not the free, so called whiskey traders, but the representatives of responsible firms—chiefly the American Fur Company. And while St. Paul was a ruffian infant of “birch roofed cabins and whis- key shops” these men were still scattered about the territory in charge of their various posts. It is too bad that there should have been no contemporaneous chronicler with a salty tongue and an eye for reality, to have made adequate por- traits of those young adventurers. All Western Americans are familiar with the thick biographical 132 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER subscription books full of beards and bombast which have visualized for us the daring, royster- ing, serious, law-making, law-breaking, law-en- forcing youngsters of the frontier. We see them as middle-aged rabbis in frock coats, with all the playfulness of a Baptist undertaker burying a Rockefeller. I think by the time pioneers get old and have paid many fifty dollars to have their autographed steel engraved portraits in many such books, and each and every one has an Hon. in front of his name, they think of themselves that way. But there really was a time when they were young and wore, not beards—oh, I believe they did, even in their teens—but beaded moccasins and coon-skin caps and bright sashes, and danced Chippewa mazourkas at Long Kate’s and at all night balls in the cabin of Bottineau, the half breed. | There was young Sibley at Mendota: a crack shot, expert canoe man, so good a boxer that in the whole territory only “Bully” Wells could stand up against him; head of the American Fur Company’s wide spread business in that region, and, when scarcely out of the twenties, justice of the peace of a county as big as several European states; a power among the formidable Sioux, so liked, trusted, and feared by them that no govern- ment negotiations could be carried on without him. There was Henry M. Rice, like Sibley a young man of excellent family and striking personal THe UNTAMABLE TwINn 183 dignity, trading now among the Winnebago, now among the Chippewa, obtaining over them by the charm, courtesy, and tact of his address an ascendancy which surpassed if anything Sibley’s power with the Sioux. Both men were to win nat- ional responsibilities and distinctions later on. Oakes, a young New Englander, and Dr. Charles Wulf Borup, a cultivated Dane, repre- sented the Fur Company at Yellow Lake and later became, in St. Paul, the first bankers of the territory. At Pembina on the Red River of the North, just south of the Canadian line, Norman W., Kitt- son traded with the Chippewa and the French Crees and shipped furs, buffalo tongues, and pem- mican to Mendota in the famous Red River wooden carts. He himself frequently made the long journey on snow shoes or dog sledge, not see- ing a human habitation during the whole tive hun- dred miles. Later he was to enter into partner- ship with James J. Hill. Their steamboats were to navigate this river and Kittson was to partici- pate to some extent in Hill’s great railroad enter- prise which opened the valley to immigration. Kittson was a step grandson (whatever that may be) of Alexander Henry, early explorer, trader, and partner of the North West Company, whose diary is the most revealing and fascinating piece in all the original literature of the fur trade. Martin McLeod, stationed at Lac qui Parle, was a Scotch Canadian described by a contem- porary as, “a man of commanding presence, cul- 1384 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER tured intellect—eloquent, dignified and charm- ing.” With the annual supplies sent to him through Sibley, went important historical and scientific works and French classics in the original. It was to McLeod that later much excellent edu- cational legislation was due. I have alas seen no notice that these gentlemen were teetotalers or that they failed to fight and swear and, frequently, during the hot political fights of the fifties, to fall out with each other and fling about unpleasant epithets and accusations which, however, always failed to stick. And as to women it may be said that one or two of them mar- ried their squaws but mostly they didn’t. In fact, I think it is likely they were many things (the possessors of good manners included) which some of our Latter Day reformers would have condemned wholesale. Yet their forcefulness, breadth of view, public spiritedness, loyalty and— whatever the accepted ethics of politics or the fur trade—their personal integrity have seldom since been surpassed. In the late forties Minnesota, which had been successively a part of Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin Territories, decided to be- come a territory herself. Sibley was sent to Washington to bring it about and in 1849 the ob- ject was achieved. Minnesota Territory was cre- ated with St. Paul as capital city. The fates were kind to the infant community. The administration was inspired to send out as territorial governor a man actually fitted for the job. The happy appointee was a former Con- Ture UNTAMABLE TWIN 135 gressman from Pennsylvania, Alexander Ramsey by name. The territory was at this time enor- mous, including besides Minnesota much of the Dakotas and extending westward to the Missouri River and so remote that the Ramseys’ neighbors wondered whether they could reach it by sailing round the Horn or crossing the Isthmus of Panama! It had a large savage population and presented difficult problems as regarded Indian affairs, Indian trade, and the pressure of immi- gration already impatient to cross the Mississippi and overflow the Indian lands beyond. The territorial governor was thirty-four, young it seems, but older than most of the men who were making the history of the state. The frontier, however, could be a beneficent and powerful teacher. Let this memoir from the pen of a man who was later to achieve many distinctions speak for these youthful adventurers, of whom he was one: “If a young man of ability migrates to a coun- try over which no government has yet extended, he finds himself confronted with the solution of large issues. Fundamental and philosophic prob- lems force themselves upon him; he becomes an original thinker himself and finds a virgin field on which to test the experimental creations of his genius.” Ramsey was abundantly a man of ability. He promptly and efficiently organized the territory, convened the first legislative assembly and de- livered four remarkable messages, practical and 136 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER prophetic, shining with common sense and with real wisdom. The legislative session opened, we are told, “with prayer” and as the governor and many of the influential members became St. Paul’s foremost citizens, it is pertinent to glance at its activities. Besides routine administrative measures, much of the legislation was, to quote a contemporary, “of a moral and educational nature.” It provided generously for free schools, founded a historical society, righteously established stringent Sunday laws, prohibited sale or gift of liquor to the Indians and licensed the general sale; while at its second meeting in 1851 it decided upon and made ample provision for the creation of a State Uni- versity, and also this remarkable body of fron- tiersmen revised the code of laws left over from the previous régime and did it well. Sibley was sent to Washington as territorial delegate; H. M. Rice, Borup, Oakes and other prominent traders came to St. Paul to live; James Goodhue, the notable editor of the first newspaper, the Pioneer, began his brief but bril- liant career in St. Paul. He was aggressively a Puritan; he stood violently for law, order and vir- tue—so violently indeed that within three years he had died as the result of a shooting and stabbing affair. He had, as was the journalistic manner of the day, roundly insulted a political opponent. The brother of the latter stabbed Goodhue three times in the stomach while Goodhue was engaged in THE UNTAMABLE TWIN 187 shooting at him. The populace joined in the fray and a brief but lively scene of stone throwing and clubbing took place. Both of the principals died subsequently as a result of the encounter. But occurrences such as this were rare; St. Paul was, for a frontier city, decidedly orderly. It must be remembered that precisely at this time California gold called like a siren from the Pacific coast. But the long transcontinental journey was full of danger and the reward at the end as prob- lematic as the fall of dice. It was the adventurous, |: the high spirited, and the desperate who streamed — across the deserts and over the mountain passes to the Pacific—those who despised danger or dis- dained work or were expert in relieving the lucky of their easy money. A very different class pro- ceeded safely up the Mississippi in comfortable steamboats to the city at the head of navigation. The heroic days of the fur trade were about over; the pine forests, waiting to create a bright new galaxy of millionaires, had not, although exploited to some extent, as yet attracted widespread atten- tion; the richness of the iron deposits was of course not known. Climate, natural beauty, the privilege of hard work in the fields, and the commercial possibilities of a growing river port were the solider and more prosaic lure of Minnesota and at- tracted a corresponding class of men and women. As to commerce, the Indian trade -must not be overlooked. I have said the fur trade was declining. But the Indians were receiving large cash annuities for lands sold to the govern- 138 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER ment, and St. Paul and neighboring posts were the disbursement headquarters. ‘To the traders who flocked to the payments with their beads and kettles, blankets, whiskey and bright calicoes, specie was even more welcome than muskrat skins. The gold passed through the hands of the Indians as through a sieve, into the coffers of the trader- merchants, and thus the infant St. Paul was nourished to prosperity. The Sioux lands immediately west of the Mis- sissippi were acquired by the government. The city grew rapidly. A constant stream of immi- grants flowed through the small port. Profes- sional men of considerable distinction—lawyers and journalists in particular—attracted by the beauty of site and healthfulness of climate, per- haps too by the reputed “gentility” of the place, arrived and became part of the pioneer body. The prominent pioneers married and for their wives went back to the places and generally superior social class from which they themselves derived. Ladies in flounces and sacques and long lace mitts and tiny perched-up hats, holding bot- tles of smelling salts in their hands, stepped daintily off the gangplanks into the mud of the levees and brought to their frontier houses, smell- ing of new pine lumber and frequently of Sioux and Chippewa callers in smoky blankets, the man- ner of life to which they had been accustomed. In 1854 the Chicago and Rock Island railroad was finished to Rock Island, Illinois. In truly -modern style the management organized an excur- THe UNTAMABLE ‘TWIN 139 sion. A large group of prominent Eastern people were invited to make the trip over the new road and on up the river in steamboats to St. Paul. Twelve hundred important and highly respectable persons, including “many of the divinity,” are said to have accepted and to have returned to the Kast spreading lyrical reports of the beauties of the wide river, the wooded bluffs, flowering prairies, sweet untarnished air and gracious stillness of this empty Eden known as Minnesota. A particularly modern note which I cannot refrain from quot- ing is the sermon preached by one of the enthusi- astic divines: title, “Railroads in the Higher and Religious Aspects.” “My hearers! Some of you have tickets that will lead you to Hell. The car of death is hastening on. We urge you to change that ticket. Christ is always in his of- fice——”’ All in all the publicity which followed the ex- cursion helped to increase the enormous incoming flood of people the following year. St. Paul went into a boom state. Real estate soared, interest rates soared—to 5% a month; everything and everybody soared; fine raiment and high stepping horses appeared; gamblers, speculators, crooks of all kinds—a most un-St. Paul-like type of people began to arrive. Then the panic of ’57 struck the little city like a cyclone.” Banks broke; money practically disappeared; the dubious high finan- ciers fled away to more propitious fields, and St. Paul gradually settled down into the stride that has been hers ever since. 140 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Once more the fur trade came to the rescue. About this time the Hudson’s Bay Company aban- doned its long established canoe route via streams, rivers, the Great Lakes, and the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic. It began to ship its furs in bond by Red River ox cart to St. Paul and thence by steamboat and railway to Eastern ports. The long trains now swelled to five hundred carts and driven by the picturesque bois brilés screamed on ungreased wooden axles to the St. Paul levees. When the carts returned down the Red River val- ley to Canada they were filled partly with goods sent in bond from England, but also with supplies bought from the merchants of St. Paul. Let us now glance at the foundations of St. Paul’s social life as they were being laid in these important fifties, and as they have endured pretty well into the present century, almost to the time of that nemesis of all foundations, the late war. That they had been thoroughly shaken and were on the verge of collapse some time before heredi- tary St. Paul would dream of admitting it, is not _ surprising. Hereditary St. Paul—and the core _ and kernel of the city is still hereditary—does not admit things and never has admitted them. To err is human, to admit it is cynical. And St. Paul abhors cynicism. But to go back I have before me some letters. They were writ- ten during the fifties by three New England girls who came out at different times to keep house for their brothers in the Indian trade. Somehow, these letters give one rather a heartache—they are Tur UNTAMABLE TWIN 141 so young, feminine, superior, mid-Victorian, and real. And now all the writers, so sure of their good breeding and immortal youth, are dead. I knew one when she was an old woman—touch- ingly like the girl of frontier gentility. A few extracts may epitomize the beginnings of fashionable St. Paul. “This has been such a week of dissapation; Mon- day we were all invited to a pleasant little mob at the governor’s; it was a truly enjoyable party and very select. ‘Tuesday a brilliant party at Fort Snelling. The general handed me to table. I wore my flounced muslin and pink sacque with three rows of lace about the neck and two about the sleeves. Wednesday Miss B and the Colonel came in a buggy and we went a Sy ae apes Thursday night a tableau party at the F Saturday there was a surprise at the 8 iS! ay governor was my beau for the evening and the first thing he did, I had hardly got there, when he came up and wanted me to promenade. So I took his arm.” The polite “dissapation” seems to have been pretty continuous. “We were asked to Mr. and Mrs. W ’s at the Winsor House. There were just enough ladies to get up a cotillion.” Again: “A fine dance at Mazourka Hall. Not too many of the newcomers, .so quite select. The ladies dressed finely in white satin skirts and lace illusion over dresses.” Again: “The general sent his aid to invite us to a review of the Light Cavalry at the Fort, and to attend a party in his quarters 142 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER afterwards. 'The first officers of the country are here to attend a court martial and there are three young ladies from Virginia visiting. It was very select.” The pest of lectures too was in full swing as the decade advanced. Mr. Y- talks on “Europe: Their Manners and Customs’; Mr. L on “The Next Generation”; an Armenian missionary on “Syria’—“Church crowded and they put seats in the aisles. He was very smart.” Again: “Bayard Taylor lectured on Moscow last evening. It wasn’t much.” | Calling, it seems, was a veritable monomania. “T have thirty or forty calls to make this week; We do not call at the Y *s—she is not quite a lady. I called on Mr. R ’s bride. Felt I must. "Tis said her father was a mechanic in Hartford and that she has been a governess. ‘Too bad to let such a rumor get about. ‘The general is bring- ing that Mr. Sumner of Boston to call. I have on my delaine and black silk apron. When not busy I put my hands in the pockets. I have got my rosettes on my wrists. Thursday the Judge and Baron Jaw-Breaker” (a Swiss baron) “called and we went to their saloon for ice creams. Sabbath morning attended service at Christ’s Episcopal, _ though we usually go to Mr. Neil’s” (St. Paul’s beginnings were strongly Presbyterian). “Mr. R and Mr. S attended us home. In the afternoon three gentlemen left cards but we were not receiving. Monday the boys got back from payments. Brought Hole-in-the-day and two other THEe UNTAMABLE TWIN 143 Indians to call. Then Peter brought an Indian Agent from below and wife to stop. I was glad when they left, they were such plain people. New Year’s Day we had sixty calls, not so many as last year. I wore my black with red sacque, flowing undersleeves, and mitts.” As to New Year’s Day I will quote from the memoir of a prominent jurist: “My first New Year’s Day in St. Paul was in 1854; it was my entrée to St. Paul society. Four of us, all frisky young fellows, started with a good team and made one hundred and fifty calls by midnight. Whether we drank at every fountain that gushed for us on that day I will leave to the imagination, after saying that only the vaguest and most delightful impressions of the event linger in my memory.” Indeed the terrific gentility of this upper circle was in no way impaired by the notable prevalence of excellent wines, chiefly champagne, at all their gatherings—picnics, dances, Indian treaty and political meetings, dinners, and teas. And the champagne seems always to have been set off with oysters. Now as oysters in Minnesota even in these days of rapid transportation are something of an adventure, their presence in that epoch of summer steamboats and winter stages (occasional and most uncertain stages) does not cease to puzzle. We will take leave of our New England sisters with one more quotation: “Tom and a member of Congress have been waiting two days for Francois P to guide them to the Indian country. But he is after an actress, 144 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Bah—think of them waiting two days for him to gallant a dancing girl. And Sunny Marsh too, gone as far as Galena they say, with that Sally St. Claire!” For alas, a far racier company existed outside the select circle we have visited. It was made up of free traders, whiskey sellers, French mixed bloods and drifters of all kinds. Among the latter, a contemporary writes, were “many gentlemen of refinement” who “being too fond of their cups came here to overcome the habit. The worst place,” he adds with conviction, “they could have chosen.” One of the earliest meeting places of these con- vivial spirits was the bar, sitting room, “‘and every- thing else’ of Jackson’s house—whence at late hours they often repaired in a body to one of the informal all night dances perpetually going on in the houses of the French half breeds. It also ap- pears that most of the gentlemen who so punctili- ously left cards, attended pleasant little mobs, handed the flounced ladies to table or walked home with them after one of Mr. Neil’s excellent ser- mons, were the handiest of all with the demijohn at Jackson’s and similar hardy resorts. St. Paul, however, was not without its growing body of “plain people” who frowned alike on the ‘ champagne and oysters of the upper crust and the trade whiskey and half breed balls of the lower. Of these the immortal spokesman is the author of an edifying opus called “Floral Home.” 'The lady came out as school teacher and also opened the Tur UNTAMABLE TWIN 145 first Sabbath School, though not without misgiv- ings that the “Romish priests” and “emissaries of Papacy” might interfere with the attendance. In a chapter classically headed ‘““Rum’s Doings,” she writes: “The bottle was the unfailing attendant on every occasion, and stood confessed the life of every com- pany.” She attended an excursion to the falls of St. Anthony in company with the “first citizens.” When the refreshment was produced she was im- pelled to observe severely that that was the first time in her life she had been in a company where it was used. “Then,” replied a gentleman whose elegance of manner she had previouslv noted, “you are entitled to the first drink.” Follow truly horrifying and doubtless quite true instances of Rum’s black doings in the community; murders, suicides, delirium tremens, and the fre- quent accident of tumbling into the snow on win- ter nights and freezing to death. ‘Then, in the midst of the “moral darkness’”’ about her, she hears of the beginning of a temperance society. “Vic- tory, Victory, Victory,” she cries, only to deplore later in mixed and disillusioned metaphor that, al- though the organization had “laid the ax at the root of the tree—the monster, with its thousand heads, lives on.” She is much shocked by the nakedness of the in- fant and semi-nakedness of the adult savages, and the frequency with which they preferred their own superstitions and the “way which goeth down to death” to the “claims of the Gospel.” Neverthe- 146 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER less, in revealing a proposal of marriage made to her by a young chief she does not fail to advise us of his proud, graceful dignity of bearing, his mag- nificence of ornament and apparel, his eagle eyes and rich sonority of voice—and piquantly adds that, upon being refused, he tried (unsuccessfully ) to borrow a dollar. The writer did not suffer from a lack of con- genial company. ‘The region seems to have been pretty well dotted with missions, and churches of all denominations multiplied rapidly in St. Paul— where they were enthusiastically supported. Important events meantime had been taking place; Minnesota Territory had become a state with Sibley as governor, and an attempt been made to change the capital from St. Paul to St. Peter. This undesirable measure received a majority of votes and would have been carried had not St. Paul’s leading citizens resorted to a simple device. The committeeman who had the important bill in his keeping was induced to hide in a hotel bedroom where he remained, quite drunk, until the time limit for the act to become law had expired. He has since developed in local tradition to a semi- saintly figure and is called the savior of St. Paul. Rice, as United States senator, fought for land grant railroads; important but, at the time, abor- tive legislation was passed and the sixties came in without a mile of railroad completed in Minnesota. The Civil War, long threatened, now broke out, and the following year a smaller but more immedi- ate catastrophe took St. Paul curiously by sur- THE UNTAMABLE TWIN 147 prise. The community had maintained the usual smug attitude toward the Indian, characteristic of pioneers since the days of the Puritans, who first “fell upon their knees and then upon the Abor- igines.” The St. Paul citizenry did not precisely fall upon the aborigines but it fell upon their titles and annuities. Subconsciously it denied their right to exist; it never dreamed of looking upon them as human beings, but simply as nuisances—irrele- vant objects who were very much in the way: “The Indians have the small pox. Never mind, it will do them good,” writes a young trader. So we see St. Paul in lace mitts, unimagina- tively dancing cotillions and drinking tea on the extreme edge of a savage abyss—a region lately the property of a race still essentially belonging to the stone age: a race which, as realization dawned and it saw itself without land and most of the time without money and food, forgot the. half understood treaties and burned with hatred and revenge. Quite suddenly, a thousand of the immigrants who had been deposited on the levees of St. Paul, or had plodded through her unpaved streets in prairie wagons and settled in the “Suland,” were butchered, thousands of others driven from their homes and their property destroyed. Ramsey, once more governor, acted with his usual efficiency and promptness. While Flandrau, extemporaneously in command, turned the Indians back from New Ulm, the Civil War recruits col- lected at Fort Snelling were put under Sibley 148 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER and sent in pursuit and the rebellion was ultimately put down. With the termination of this affair, St. Paul’s frontier period may be said to have closed. For the next twenty years pioneer names and personalities dominated to a large extent the ad- ministrative, legal, banking and social life of St. Paul, although politically such powers as Doran and Kelly had arisen to control the Democratic party; and the brilliant Cushman K. Davis had ap- peared to become one of the stars of the Republi- can—of which Ramsey, territorial and state gover- nor, United States senator and cabinet minister successively, remained the outstanding figure. Other new and important forces were at the same time quietly developing. Long before the arrival of railroads, the head of navigation of the Mississippi was a natural transportation center. It was the objective point of wilderness travel by canoe, dog sledge, and wooden ox cart. The chief articles of early traffic—buffalo robes, fine furs, jerked meat, pemmican, tallow, Indian work— came up the Red River valley from Pembina to the trading post at Mendota and later to St. Paul. Here they met and were transferred to the steamboats ascending the river with supplies from St. Louis, Galena, and the gradually ap- proaching railroad heads. After railroad building began in Minnesota, St. Paul by orderly economic sequence continued to be the chief transportation center of the Northwest; while the simultaneous growth of her key industry, the wholesale business, SAILNGAGS FHL NI TONVd “LS THe UNTAMABLE TWIN 149 was equally a by-product of the location of the city and a logical progression from the early Indian and river trade. It is from this developing merchant class, far more than from the gallant frontiersmen, that the actual St. Paul derives. During the seventies and eighties the place grew from a straggling, unpaved village to a small city. Its social life, following the lines laid down in the fifties, continued select and complacent and church going, but put on more elaborate metropolitan Juxuries and frills. It went on, with some excep- tions, keeping its doors firmly closed to “plain people” and was augmented by newcomers from equally select circles of Eastern and Southern com- munities. The question “Who was she?’ continued severely to be asked. Turreted, spired, porticoed, cupolaed “palatial residences” began to be built along the sightly avenue that commands the river; fine driving and saddle horses appeared, flashing carriages, high tandem carts, unicorns, and four-in-hands. I like to think of the beautiful and dashing Mrs. It took two grooms, we are told, to hold the horses she rode and when she dismounted she patted the foaming nostrils of her steed with handkerchiefs of solid real lace and then lightly tossed them in the gutter. Champagne and oysters continued to be pleas- antly prevalent, venison, pheasants, wild geese, quail, and prairie chickens still enhanced the loaded dinner tables. Bank presidents loaned money on the security of good friendship and the glamorous 150 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER memory of frontier adventure shared. Money as such had not mattered seriously in frontier times; gain was always overshadowed by adventure; new beginnings were easy to make. The pioneer tradi- tion was, for the most part, lavish, casual, and elegant. Then along came the financial hurricane of ’93 and blew down all the cupolas that were not very firmly hooked into a rock foundation— and many of them were not. From this time the character of St. Paul changed. The nabobs of the fifties and earlier were getting old and dying. They left no fortunes. The influence and character of the merchants began more and more to be felt. They were not adven- turers, but preéminently business men. They built slowly and firmly; they saved; they put the seal of their solidity upon the city. Slowly too the formidable personality of James J. Hill, one of America’s greatest commercial and far more than merely commercial figures, had emerged. As this is St. Paul’s story and not Mr. Hill’s, we shall not dwell on his achievement. He made St. Paul the headquarters of his powerful railroad, with its rock-like financial foundation, its vitality, its capacity for continuous growth. It peopled the Red River valley, the northern reaches of Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Ore- gon. The road was Mr. Hill’s personal creation. He did everything but lay the rails and punch the tickets. 'The government had no part in its financing and, as many of Mr. Hill’s stockholders and associates were men of financial eminence in Tur UNTAMABLE TWIN 151 England and on the Continent, as well as in New York, St. Paul, through him, became a figure in international commerce. Its reactions toward Mr. Hill are interesting. It has sentimentalized him as a poet, prophet, seer and saint; cried him down as a man-eating tyrant, the assassin of Dutch bondholders, poor but honest trainmen and suffering superintendents; has given him torchlight processions and accused him of throttling St. Paul by turning it into a One Man Town. This dire and cryptic reproach has been es- pecially advanced as the reason why Minneapolis, a city situated some miles west of us, should have somewhat exceeded us in population. The One Man theory quite overshadowed other reasons for the greater development of Minneapolis such as the huge flour (and originally lumber) mills which her water power created; the preposterous immen- sity of the State University situated within her borders; the singular civic enthusiasm of her lead- ing citizens—to say nothing of my own private theory that it was also brought about by her pos- session of a large population of shrewd, long headed Scandinavians instead of our corresponding immigrant class of soft speaking, darling, shiftless Irish from Galway looking toward the Arran Isles. The one way that Mr. Hill did contribute to the growth of Minneapolis rather than St. Paul, was by populating the Great Open Spaces to west- ward with agriculturists who, when they came back to civilization to spend their hard earned dollars, 152 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER struck Minneapolis first and stayed there until their money was gone. But it must not be supposed that St. Paul spends much time in deploring census reports or anything else. The whole point is missed if St. Paul is not shown as she is, or at least has been most of her life—notably satisfied—complacent I should say, _if the word did not carry a slur. And I would not have it carry a slur. Com- placency is what we need. Americans and Ameri- can cities suffer from a disguised inferiority com- plex. That is the reason for all this boosting, bragging, and community-spirit-izing the hard boiled business of making a living. St. Paul, in spite of the advent of many impor- tant and powerful newcomers is still, at the core and kernel hereditary. The sons and grandsons of the sound merchant and banking class, still give their stamp to the community—Griggs, Gordons, Saunders, Finches, Deans, Noyes, Ordways, Skin- ners, Lindekes, and many others—the fortunes they have inherited were not made quickly or specula- tively, a tradition of conservatism has-been handed down withthem. Also they are safe and considerable enough so that their owners do not feel the urge that makes boosters and go-getters. Undoubtedly, like almost everybody else, these men want more money than they have and try to get it, but like civilized people they do not gloat and sing hymns over the process and talk about “service not gain” and indulge in the many tedious hypocrisies which some people sum up in the word Rotariarism— Tor UNTAMABLE TWIN 153 whether fairly or not I cannot say. I have no per- sonal knowledge of Rotarians, or of their alleged first naming, back slapping noon orgies. Although they do boost, the first gentlemen of St. Paul keep it rather dark; although they join things they do it languidly. They are not “joiners” at heart. Yes, they are still individualists in this age of lodges, slogans, and alleged community spirit. When something really important to the city has to be done they occasionally (our civic spirit is notably not robust) do it. But they do it under the leadership of one of their own coterie, a man like Gordon for instance, grandson of Dr. Charles Wulf Borup, far more than through the commerce organizations, which they, like the citizens of other modern communities, nevertheless maintain. There is the Association. A vague murmur will arise about its having “brought the Ford plant, the Armour packing plant, Montgomery Ward,” and so forth. Personally I believe it more prob- able that these prizes were captured by the method outlined above. Wishing to be fair I wrote and asked the Association what it had done. I quote from its reply: “Do you wish facts relative to the Saint Paul Association or the city of St. Paul? Your letter clearly asks for ‘literature describing the aims and achievements in St. Paul of the Association.’ ” I did not write again fearing that they would once more assault my dazed ears and eyes by ob- serving, You have told us quite clearly what you want— What is it? 154 Tut TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Socially St. Paul has conformed: that is to say, society in the sense of exclusiveness or even of a somewhat petty snobbishness, the sense that pre- vailed from the fifties well into the present century, even until the war, does not exist—the society that meant and exacted “background,” good manners, the appearance of morality, and the concealment of knees, thighs, and other innocent anatomical phenomena. Individuals possessing the old stand- ards, as they are called, exist in surprising num- bers in St. Paul, even in large groups, but not as a united and controlling group, not as society. Has jazz come and to a certain extent conquered ? Hereditary St. Paul, which, as we have stated, does not admit things, says no. Personally—but then I am not, in that sense, hereditary St. Paul. Doubtless the core of the business life will suc- cumb to the modern mores; perhaps it is already definitely beginning to do so. When it does there will be even more Ford plants, bigger and better slaughter houses and vaster census returns. With which hereditary St. Paul will (at heart) be rather bored. It is satisfied with its size, it loves its wooded boulevards curving about its sightly river, and what still remains of the quiet of its elm and oak shaded avenues. How many times have I heard it complain of recent developments ?— — “Tf this goes on we'll get bigger ‘and bigger, and then,” they exclaim aghast, “we might as well be living in Minneapolis.” PORTLAND: A Pincrim’s PRoGREsS By Dean Collins ae bi y ly wa ue y ray ; i ii vith ‘s ie AL) i iy eo : } ’ ‘ 1 . : ‘ : i Ay yaya j - / ‘ od ’ : j rif 1 : , u ‘ ‘ ee i ( ; é, ‘ n OF! Aa $ i te f ) ! t .s ae ye aK ~ a | J - x PORTLAND IGHTY odd years ago, Portland, Oregon, landed on the map of the Pacific Northwest, possessed of a full developed New England con- science and fleeing from the wrath to come. It was sired by New England traders, out of the settlement of Methodist missionaries at Oregon City, twelve miles up the Willamette River. It came into existence a comparatively ordered com- - munity, planted on the soil of two civilizations that had preceded it. This made it needless for Portland—like so many other frontier towns—to build law and order all anew. The peace and civilization of the Hudson’s Bay Company had dwelt in the territory at the con- fluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, earlier in the century where Dr. John McLoughlin, the “White Eagle,” ruled like an emperor. That order was not concerned with the taming of the wilderness, so long as the Redskin refrained from murdering British subjects and continued to bring in the furs with which the streams abounded. Hudson’s Bay civilization was succeeded by the Methodist missionary civilization at Oregon City. This was founded by one Jason Lee, now by way of becoming the prize canonized Protestant of the Northwest. As occasionally happens to saints 157 158 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER without regard to sectarianism, this Lee lost his job soon after his conversion effort approached an efficiency basis. His mission diverted its attention from the sal- vage of Indian souls, first to the spiritual needs of the incoming trickle of white immigrants; then to the grabbing of the fertile lands and water rights of the Willamette Valley; and at length to the final stripping of Dr. John McLoughlin. McLoughlin had flown in the face of Hudson’s Bay policy when he saved the missionaries and settlers from starvation and massacre by the In- dians, had resigned his almost imperial position at the head of the Northwestern territory of the com- pany’s widespread activities. He had cast his lot with the people he had befriended, in the town of Oregon City, which he had laid out years before and to which he had welcomed the Americans. The result of his choice was a cynical spoliation at the hands of the missionary leaders and settlers. It would have made Auschylus of Eleusis weep tears of pure esthetic joy, could the tale have come to his hands as material for majestic tragedy. The heads of the mission settlement, having already possessed themselves of commercial con- trol and of the lands of the Indians and of the deposed factor of Hudson’s Bay, efficiently took possession of the political government as well, and F’reedom began slowly broadening down from pre- cedent to precedent. As a climax to all this, Port- land the Metropolis, Portland the Victorian out- post in the Wild West, came to pass. A. PiuGrRim’s PROGREssS 159 It was a synthetic town built on a site predes- tined for a great city. The immediate cause of its existence was a bar in the Williamette River that interfered with F. W. Pettygrove, late of Port- land, Maine, in getting freight boats up to Oregon City, loaded with goods. So among the cedars on the river bank, where William Overton, another of The Founders, was splitting shingles for the Vancouver market, Pettygrove built his store- house and advertised his wares for sale “at the Red House in Oregon City and at Portland 12 miles below.” It was just as convenient as Oregon City had been, to the settlers from the Tualatin Valley. After Pettygrove had the town site properly surveyed, a settlement clustered about his store under the trees and in less than two years a school was opened (1847, if dates are of any interest to the reader). In the year following, the First Methodist Church was established on ‘Taylor street between Second and Third, facing North. Thus Portland hit her stride. But almost under a different name. A. L. Lovejoy flipped a coin with Pettygrove, in a con- troversy as to whether the town should be named Portland after the latter’s native city, or Boston, after Lovejoy’s. However, it could not have escaped the flavor of New England in its name, regardless of how the penny fell. That was in the blood which nourished brains that could think of names of no other flavor. 160 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Soon the Portland stride lengthened and be- came more pronounced. Came sailing around the Horn the Rev. Horace Lyman, of Massachusetts, and gathered the strong Congregationalist group together and founded a church. The Rev. James Croke opened a church at Couch and Fourth streets, under the wing of the Catholic organiza- tion that had antedated the Methodist invasion of Oregon City and which was—and still is—active in Indian missionary work. The Baptists, alas, gathered themselves together and had a zealous congregation by 1854. All of this progress went forward normally. One of the early Congregational ministers, the Rev. P. B. Chamberlain from Maine, set the com- munity by the ears, with an attack upon secret societies in general and Masons in particular. (“There were no Masons in his congregation,” says an Eyewitness who still survives, full of years and grace, “but some of their wives were.) In the controversy that followed, eighty members of the church “swarmed” and formed a group which they called Presbyterian, while the original con- gregation dropped to ten members. Later the in- surgent group returned to the fold and a formal foundation of a Presbyterian church was not made until 1861 a few years later. The minister whose sermons had precipitated the trouble was dismissed after failing to resign. A million square miles of wilderness might roar behind her back in glee unsanctified, but the im- fant Portland cherished the blessings of religious A. Pinerim’s PROGRESS 161 controversy like a child precociously “called” to the ministry. Meanwhile, Jewish traders coming up from Sacramento and San Francisco laid the founda- tions of the great department store systems that control the retail life of Portland to-day. More incidentally they founded Jewish religious groups almost simultaneously with the Christian develop- ments. So Portland traded and prospered and grew, while General Ulysses S. Grant and Phil Sheri- dan and others who later made Civil War history, then stationed at the Vancouver army post which had succeeded the old Hudson Bay’s most west- erly seat, did their apprentice work by polishing off Indians. Within a few hours’ modern auto- mobile ride from Portland, settler volunteers were riding their ponies to death and eating them in order to have strength to commandeer other ponies to ride to death in the task of stamping out the last resistance that the Indians opposed to conversion by the white man. Eventually the Indians were converted—into tragic reservation figures, wasting rapidly away under the too sud- den change from a nomadic life to the complexi- ties of pants, squirrel whiskey and a conviction of sin. And with each crisis, Portland’s moral stride lengthened. From his headquarters in Oregon City, 1847, George Abernathy, provisional gov- ernor and steward of the Methodist Mission, is- sued an encyclical calling attention to the use of 162 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER liquor on the part of some members of the flock and the Washingtonian temperance society was founded. There came no dash of godless fire to singe out the mature Puritan flavor of the Oregon settle- ments, in the big transcontinental covered wagon immigrations between the late thirties and the middle fifties—for Fate sat at the forks of the Oregon trail and winnowed the oncoming swarms. California, just wrested from Mexico, offering the lure, first of adventure and then of gold, drew southwesterly from the Oregon trail, the young men, the unattached and those whose temperament did not fit in with the sober respon- sibilities of settling and tilling the soil. The family men, the men with instincts for set- tlement and development rather than adventure and exploitation and those who earnestly felt the importance of filling up the land with enough American settlers to keep the Oregon country from coming under the British flag—these came on into Oregon and there blended readily with the Puritan civilization that had sailed round the Horn in advance and possessed itself of the cream of the land. Churches rose almost instantly with the planting of each new community and the stern New Englanders resumed the doctrinal controver- sies that their grandfathers had begun in Massa- chusetts. Those grim, eccentric, heroic figures, the pioneer “circuit riders” paddled the streams and rode the trails carrying their Bibles in their sad- A Priierim’s PROGRESS 163 dle-bags, bearing spiritual comfort to the outlying settlers, and diverting their harassed minds from the imminent fear of starvation and scalping parties, to the imminent dread of the wrath to come. The circuit riders knew no fear and gave them- selves no rest and Oregon prospered and stood firm in the faith. Except for minor lapses such as the liquor drinking against which Abernathy rallied the forces of morality at the outset, Sin bulked very small indeed. So here we have Portland, morally mature and full of grace, shooting church spires toward the sky in half a dozen spots long before Vice in any of its more flamboyant forms had presumed to rear its head. Just how little it figured—aside from certain gigantic and humanly almost impossible legends of venery that have sprung up around the figures of some of the earlier political and military heroes —is perhaps best illustrated by testimony from the same Eyewitness quoted earlier in this article. “When did Vice actually make its appearance in Portland?” The answer was given in perfect gravity: “The first billiard table was brought up by boat from San Francisco and Jim Fruiht and Donald Stewart installed it in a saloon, in 1851.” Thus came Satan out of the Babylonish city of the South and entered—somewhat handicapped by belated arrival—in the titanic struggle for the ~ Soul of Portland. 164 Tue TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER It is doubtful if Satan would have bothered to make the trip if there had been only the original settlers to consider—men of family busied with tearing a livelihood out of the soil and forests, and under the double inhibition of Puritan background and family responsibility to hold them from moral misadventure. But some of the boys, who had grown up here after crossing the plains, went down in the Forty- nine gold rush and into the gaudy sophistication of San Francisco. ‘They picked up some of the sophistication, even when they found no gold, and brought back home with them a taste for the world, the flesh and the devil. Their wickedness, however, did not cause much head-shaking among the elders until early in the sixties. Then the gold rush swung North into Kastern Oregon and into the Coeur d’Alene dis- trict in Idaho and the Yankee traders in Portland found themselves entertaining a type of customer quite different from the harassed, careful and frugal settlers. Their establishments became the headquarters for outfitting the stream of gold seekers pouring into Eastern Oregon and Idaho, for Portland in those ante-railroad days was the one point of contact with the Eastern cities that lay on the Pacific Coast nearest the district of the latest mining developments. Shipping increased around the Horn between Portland, Oregon, and New England, and side-wheelers began to thresh back and forth between Portland and San Francisco. A Prinerim’s PROGRESS 165 The middle sixties found Portland with a popula- tion of some 4,000 souls—half of which was transient. Now the incoming transient, en route to or from the gold fields, had no time to make contacts with the fixed population, had he been so inclined. He craved fiercer and more stimulating entertainment than was offered in the churches or in the meetings of the Washingtonian Society—remembering the colorful pitfalls of San Francisco. ‘The traders of Portland were practical men. They had come to Portland with the intention of furnishing the people of the West such things as they seemed to require. “Give the customer what he wants,” was their early, simple and eminently practical policy. So they set themselves to see that the demands for new commodities should be supplied to the sweeping, transient population—a population that remembered San Francisco and Spain and New Orleans and Vienna and London and Pekin and countless other places, and that did not remember New England. There arose saloons that were far more sinful than the one-billiard-table establishment of Jim Fruiht and Donald Stewart. There were hurdy- gurdy houses and dance halls and temples of Aphrodite that far overshadowed the simple ef- forts at disorderliness that poor old Madame Hamilton brought up from San Francisco a de- cade before. Satan claimed the transient popula- tion for his own. 39 166 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER The traders sold supplies to all, and collected their rents and prospered. ‘The permanent, Puri- tan population sighed as it watched the Baby- lonian revelry of the abandoned customers—and remained firm in the faith. Long since have the outlines of those early trader kings who succeeded the dynasty of Hud- son’s Bay and who held the whole fabric of this dual civilization in their practical efficient hands, blurred under the smudging of tradition. Their patriarchal care for the spiritual and intellectual and moral welfare of the permanent community; their ruthless vigor and resourcefulness, the heroic gestures with which they made and broke things and men in colossal battles for possession of the teeming resources of the new land; their virtues and their vices; their huge hacking strokes in the rough-hewing of a commonwealth after their own individualistic ideas and ideals—most of this has been faded into colorlessness by writers who wrote too mildly, and by tradition mongers who talked too gross improbabilities. Their figures in history have already become wax-work exhibits of long bearded gentlemen, with hands thrust in fine nobility in the bosom of their Prince Alberts, and a uniform expres- sion of high idealism graved upon their respec- tive brows. The turfs torn up in their struggles with the construction of the new commonwealth have healed over, and the third and fourth gen- erations have achieved the suavity of manner that comes with the habit of aristocracy, after the first A Pruerim’s PRoGREsS 167 primeval barons have finished hacking and hew- ing and swashbuckling and laying the broad foundations. This study, however, is not directly concerned with reconstructing the personalities of the late H. W. Corbett, William S. Ladd, Josiah Failing, John Ainsworth and those other gorgeous old individualists who came around the Horn or across the plains seventy odd years ago and established the dynasties that still rule Portland. They be- long in the picture only as a background along with the other fundamental elements, against which is seen the ‘pageant of evolving frontier society, passing in noise and motley and gradually losing vividness and picturesqueness and becoming —what shall be dealt with in due season. There was neither rail nor telegraph connec- tion with the East. All that came and went must come and go mainly around the Horn and through and under the hands of the early traders. These by virtue of their position became not only traders, but bankers and financiers and promoters, with- out whose moral and money support nothing might go forward in the new land. ‘Thus the early baronies were founded and grew. With them grew Portland, filled with the dual qualities of sin and sanctity which dwelt and functioned side by side, with little or no friction. Year after year the theologically controversial capitalist found larger and larger markets for strictly non-theological goods. In the ’60’s there were the miners roaring for hard pleasures. In 168 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER the ’70’s sprang up the grain trade between Port- land and Liverpool—with the inevitable corollary of influxes of British capital and its dual contribu- tion of staid Scotch and British branch offices here, and wandering and wastrel adventurers of the “remittance man” type. River traffic grew on the Columbia River, almost as in the lively steamboat days on the Mississippi. Railways began to throw out their organic filaments. All these elements brought still more of the transient, primitive, constructive type of human being that flourishes in lands that are in the newer processes of civilizing. The sailors, and the river- men, and the construction men were simple and direct in their desires, as had been the miners be- fore them—and there came to Portland those who can cater to the simple and direct desires of sailors, and rivermen and construction savages. They leased room for their businesses from the Founders and possessors, and Portland continued to be the trading point of the Northwest in which the transient traveler could buy whatever he might desire or require. ‘The trader-possessors collected their rents, and prospered, building more churches and founding schools, guaranteeing for their children and their children’s children the cul- tural and moral advantages that properly belong to children of a community reared in the tradition of righteousness and a respect for learning. Like Roman matrons of old, the matrons of the permanent population wrapped serenely around them the toga praetexta. They went un- A. PiueRim’s PROGRESS 169 ruffled about their life, ministering to their fam- ilies, meeting their church and social duties, pon- dering at one time if it would not be best to organ- ize a “New England Society’ to insure the preservation of the social lines of the earlier fam- ilies against obliteration by the inpouring tide of immigration that ran back to Ohio and Pennsy]l- vania and Missouri instead of to New England. Their contact with the shifting transient trading life that swirled parallel to their ordered com- munity life, was the slightest. It was not es- pecially good form to pay attention to it. Now added upon the deep sea sailormen who rolled in on the lime juicers, and upon the hard drinking, hard playing rivermen and the miners and engineers, came the “heathen Chinee,” for railroad building was in its earliest boom. With high hearts the Western communities saw the rail- roads coming, and since most of the effort of white men was engaged in land clearing and settlement, they viewed without great alarm the importation of thousands of coolie gangs from China. China- town came into existence in Portland, lying like a colorful dragon for half a mile between the shop- ping district along First Street and the district in which the sailors, and rivermen and gamblers and priestesses of Aphrodite moved. The trader’s and building owner’s task of sup- plying the transient visitor with what the transient visitor required in addition to grub, picks and pack saddles, made it inevitable that in time the bar- tender, the gambling house proprietor, the mas- 170 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER ter of the sailor’s boarding house, the business agent of Venus, should become part of the per- manent roll of inhabitants of Portland. They belonged unquestionably to The Adver- sary. But they were responsible about rent and taxes, and were practically indispensable in the business of purveying to the transient customers the social commodities they required. So the traders continued to collect their rents and pros- per, the permanent camp of Satan quietly in- creased in numbers, and the sinners and the sancti- fied dwelt in the ineffable peace of non-contact (except through the ledgers), with the buffer community of Chinatown lying between them. The soldiers of the Lord did not lack activity nor vigilance in those days, but their method of attack simply was different from the method em- ployed by the forces of righteousness to-day. The heresy of redemption through change of environ- ment, had not yet arisen. Satan’s City of Destruction was not disturbed. Whosoever was naughty enough to prefer it, knew precisely where it was and how to get there and the probable cost of the round trip. The movements that would be classified as “Uplift” were reserved mainly for the permanent community—with the exception of the forlorn forays into the bad lands, under organizations such as the Salvation Army. Fiven these were not, in those days, as they are to-day. : Recently Mr. and Mrs. Leslie E. Morningstar A. Pinerim’s PROGRESS 171 brought out a pocket booklet of “Snapshots of Portland History’—a most delectable volume— in which we find jostling one another on the page: “April 18, 1874—-Forty-six temperance workers arrested for praying and singing on the sidewalk. “January 18, 1876—Chief Lappens collects quarterly license from 71 saloons, $50 each.” Most of the temperance work and its allied works in Portland of the early seventies, was de- voted to the proper training and pledge signing by the youth of the permanent community, and business and morality continued to be able to thrive comfortably, side by side, with evil. But the City of Destruction inevitably grew in its permanent population to a stage where it made itself felt in politics. In the early seventies, the long line of responsible and pew-holding officials began to be broken by officials from the side of The Adversary. Thomas J. Holmes was elected mayor; the first time, according to traditionalists, that the strength of the Adversary became apparent as a dangerous thing to the community. With a mag- nificent swipe of pure romantic poetry, tradition further says that Holmes died on the night of his successful election, following or during cele- bration of his victory. The history of Portland during the remainder of the century is the history of how the City of Destruction, the old “North End,” dominated the politics of Portland and of Oregon—for the rest 172 Tuer TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER of the state in those days had just sufficient strength to be a likely pawn in the political games of the big personalities who wrought in the metropolis. After the positive entry of the forces of evil into the politics of the city, there came a closer division of the sheep from the goats, and that dis- trict emerged which has since that time been know as “The North End,” and designated otherwise as “the bad lands” by the gamblers; “the Big Eddy” by hobo loggers who circled around it in between jobs; and “the vice district” by the social workers, who emerged, by the way, long after it had in reality ceased to exist as a restricted district. Its rise and evolution are not without their sar- donic features. Business began to press in upon the district occupied by the crib houses around Yamhill and Taylor streets. It became apparent not only from business policy, but also from the increasing protests of the Roman matrons against the necessity of having to behold vice ungirdled and abandoned, as they were walking to and from church or prayer-meeting, also near Taylor and Yamhill, that the girls must seek another work- shop. Two practical business men, one of whom has since passed to the bosom of his fathers, fore- seeing the change, decided to control it so that it should not be entirely in vain, from a business viewpoint. They leased from one of the Founders, the block at Fourth and Flanders—situate more A Pinterim’s PROGRESS 178 nearly in the heart of the sailor boarding house and transient district—and erected thereupon fully equipped and ready for occupancy a home for these wandering sirens. Then they lobbied through the city council, by the brief and efficient golden method in vogue in those days, the ordi- nance that commanded the women of Babylon, in the interests of higher morality to depart. The girls were ready when the command came forth and, picking up their already packed carpet bags, migrated. The City of Destruction became more compact and consolidated, business occupied the ground vacated by the migrating scarlet women, the sailors and miners had their girls, the eyes of morality were not offended by the vision of diademed priestesses of Aphrodite leaning upon the cushions at their windows, and all was serene. Two phrases recur anent those mythical days, from the lips of men who lived through them and still remember them without prejudice: “The men who controlled things in those days believed, to paraphrase a later utterance, in ‘Open-vice, openly arrived at.’” — “In those days everybody knew where he be- longed and he went there and stayed there.” Although there was in those days no lack of revivals and campaigns, and prayers and exhorta- tions against Babylon from the pulpits in the old town, the hosts never did get around to the actual point of marching against the citadel of Satan in the North End, because of his useful voting 174 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER power and practical efficiency system of handling votes at $2.50 per head. The Adversary was permitted to grow and prosper, and to pay his rent regularly to the holders of the land on which his sinful palaces were reared. Most important and most powerful among the angels of Lucifer were the proprietors of the sailor boarding houses in the seventies and eighties. Out of them and their organizations control of the other branches of the North End life eventually emerged. ‘The most famed and efficient of them were known, like Jim Turk, in all the seven seas. ‘Two hundred and twenty-five pounds of florid-faced, beef-fed Britisher, with a voice like a fog horn, a hard fighter and a great bluffer, and a man who knew the hearts of sailor- men, Jim Turk kinged it in the North End until his death. In the latter years of his reign rose up yet other sailor boarding house men, as shrewd and hard fighting and practical, loved by the ship captains who shared the split with them, cursed by the owners in England, who had to foot the bill for stolen crews and ship delays, accepted by the pro- fessional sailor men as part of the process of life, bogey men for farm hands and small townsmen from up-state, and for miners and cowboys who found their excursions into the bad lands con- siderably cramped by the possibility that they might wake up on the other side of the Columbia bar with a brown taste in the mouth and a bruise on the skull and nothing to do but enter a year’s A PiteRim’s PROGRESS 175 apprenticeship in seafaring under the belaying- pin of a British second mate who knew how to break men to his will. Shanghaied homesteaders sent them cordially to hell from Bergen and Singapore, from Cape Town and St. John’s, while Enoch Arden widows mourned them and others worked their claims. Bridget Grant and her husband came around from Boston, Massachusetts, and brought another phase of New England method to the West, when they opened a sailor boarding house in Astoria. Grant himself died ere many years, but his widow efficiently carried on, and trained a brood of tall sons in the business of sailor board- ing house management. In time she graduated them to achieve success greater even than Turk’s. When fully matured, Jack and Pete Grant moved to the more central location in Portland and extended the business. Astoria at the mouth of the river—reputed in those days to be the evil- est port in the world, and Portland, the point of loading and unloading the cargoes for Liverpool and Hamburg, cooperated in the business of manipulating crews. It was part of the procedure for the sailor-boarding house manager to put a guard on board at Portland and send him as far as Astoria, to make sure that none of the new crew escaped before the ship could get to sea. The procedure in sailor’s employment was sim- ple. When the ship came into port, the sailors either came ashore to seek diversion after their six months’ voyage, or were persuaded to leave 176 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER the ship by a runner from the boarding houses. On shore they were either persuaded to desert the ship and re-ship on another, or were laid away dead drunk pending a call for men from some short handed ship that was ready to depart, or a fight was started in the boarding house and when the police arrived complaints were filed against the visiting seamen and they were thrown into jail. In the latter event the captain of the ship would wait as long as necessary and then call upon Jim Turk, or the Grant boys or Larry Sul- livan or whoever was his employment agent, and the number of men needed would be sent out. When the boys in jail came out again they were ready for such employment as boarding house keepers could get them. It was no complaint from the regular sailors that roused the indignation of the community against the sailor boarding houses. Ordinarily the sailor was a philosophical person. His idea of life was to sail, and go ashore, and drink and riot, and sail somewhere else and go ashore and amuse himself again. ‘The intricacies of business were beyond him. He was glad to have a kindly boarding house man attend to the detail of re- shipping him when he had wound up his shore leave with an empty pocket and a headache and was ready for work again. What brought disapproval upon the sailor boarding house men was the roar of the cowboy and miner and farm hand, who came down to A Piuerim’s PRoGREss abrirg Portland to blow off steam and found himself unwittingly turned into a sailor; and the howls of the owners in England. The Grant boys, and Mysterious Billy Smith, and Larry Sullivan and Bunko Kelly, and the White boys and those others in the closed cor- poration that controlled the boarding house busi- ness in Portland, were busy and practical men. Some of them (like the Grants) were proud of the fact that their passed word was sound as money in the bank. They could not be bothered with things outside business, like international con- troversies, or national or state politics. So when James Laidlaw, the British consul, an- nounced steps he was about to take to wipe out the sailor boarding house evil, the Grant boys called at his office and told him, in a matter of fact way, that he was upsetting business and that they would kill him if he continued to upset it. The British consular policy was changed. The thing that they could best understand and deal with was the office of district attorney, and they frankly told those who took the trouble to ask that they didn’t care a damn who might be governor, or chief of police, or mayor or anything else, so long as they knew where the prosecuting attorney stood. So they faked a factional division and no matter who was elected district attorney, there was always one group of boarding house and gambling house proprietors, that had supported his campaign and made him beholden to them. Roars or crusades had little to do with elimi- 178 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER nating the sailor boarding houses. Changes in marine labor legislation, a temporary slump in shipping out of the Port of Portland, the dis- appearance of the old “lime juicers” and the rise of the steam freighters all conspired to bring a new order in which the sailor boarding house and its master had no place. As the importance of sailor employment fell off, lumbering increased. The sailor on shore leave was replaced by the lumberjack, foot-loose with his pay check, asking only a bath, a shave, a complete new suit or woolen underwear, and from there on—all that the bartenders and ladies north of Burnside street might have to offer. Gambling houses rose to dominance—but over them was the same ring that had controlled the sailor boarding houses. ‘Their systemized method of controlling and delivering votes made their in- fluence much courted by all political forces. The story of processionals of visiting sailors and log- gers and section hands, voting early and often as they were marched about the North End ward, receiving $2.50 per vote per head, is one that never grows stale in the hearing. The picture of Larry Sullivan, or Bunko Kelly, or any of the other of Lucifer’s archangels of the day, sitting above the ballot box with a sawed-off shotgun across the knees and keeping an eye on how the voting was done, has been preserved to us in the memory of eyewitnesses. Long ago the Southern Pacific Railway, which came into Portland on the west side and ran the A Piuerim’s PrRoGREss 179 full length of Fourth Street, to the Union Depot beyond Hoyt, installed a station downtown. ‘This was partly because of convenience to the shopping district, but chiefly, so tradition says, because the women folk coming to Portland from the Valley towns, objected to running the gauntlet of the reception committee of ladies of the Bad Lands, leaning out of their cushioned windows on either side of Fourth Street from the time the train passed Stark on until it reached the Union Depot. In the height of the wide open days, the rough- neck bars and gambling houses, “free-and-easy”’ theaters and such diversion polarized around Sec- ond or Third Street and Burnside. There the lumberjack and miner and sailor and rivermen and visiting young experimenters from the rural com- munities upstate, and moralists from the small towns who came to see how horrible it all was and report duly to the congregations back home, circulated and amused themselves according to their various natures. August Erickson’s, with its six hundred foot bar (held to be the longest bar in the world), over which a man could buy the biggest scuttleful of beer in the United States for a nickel, boiled with variegated life, and there the laboring man spent his money for wine, women and gambling accord- ing to his taste. There flourished the famous “museum” filled with more or less Rabelaisian ob- jects of art and curiosities. Here performed at one time the Ladies’ Orchestra, gowned in rose pink and chastely seated within a brass railed en- 180 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER closure, the rails of which were charged with enough electricity to stop the most amorous lum- berjack who might seek better acquaintance of the musicians. Fritz’s, Blaziers and a dozen others; bars and gambling tables, variety theaters where the girls took their turns on the stages and “worked the boxes,” startling the visiting yokel with beer at a dollar a bottle, which he could buy downstairs for about five cents a half gallon; Bob Smith’s Monte Carlo, with an orchestra playing in the ballyhoo over the street and any game you cared to try going inside. With such a catalogue one could go on indefinitely for pages. ‘The City of Destruction flamed and blared and gamboled beyond the barrier North of Washington Street and against the buffer community of Chinatown, slopping over in spots in the form of the higher class gambling establishments and the houses of Madame Fanshawe and half a dozen other famous madames, whose histories are inextricably inter- woven in the droll story of the political plots and counterplots of the time. The Arlington club, the oldest exclusive club of the city, was on West Park Street near Alder, and diagonally across from it, enterprising sisters es- tablished a shrine to Venus, rather more elaborate and ornate than the wayside shrines north of Burnside that called the lowly lumberjack and the hard-boiled sailor. These two institutions were not mutually unaware of one another’s existence, and some of the social and political history of A Piuerim’s PROGRESS 181 Portland haunts the ghosts of those buildings that have long since given way to skyscrapers. In Madame Fanshawe’s on what is now Broad- way and Morrison, occupied ironically by an exclusive ladies’ furnishings store, the “opium plot” developed according to testimony of the runner who turned state’s evidence. It was this plot that broke Jim Lotan as collector of customs and political boss, and his conviction and fine was attended by the flight of accomplices to China to live out the remainder of their lives. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were involved in the ring, with Lotan as collector of customs heading the Portland end of it, and the smuggling ships toss- ing over five tael cans of opium on floats in the lower harbor for the Portland gang to pick up. Chinatown with ten thousand or more inhabit- ants packed into its short stretch and ruled over by the high-binders of the day, featured promi- nently in the opium conspiracy. Chinatown was an unreclaimed pagan community in those days, paying its “cumshaw” to the police and bearing with oriental stoicism the working out of the white man’s doctrine that John Chinaman was fair game at any and all times. It was a show place for the curious with its endlessly noisy theater, its joss house, its Harvest Festival and bonfires and banquets and periodical celebrations that car- peted the street for miles with red and yellow and green firecracker paper. Labor in the railway construction, in the salmon canneries, in land clearing or what not, was fur- 182 THe TAMING OF THE E'RONTIER nished by the high-binders, who controlled the coolies with the hand of death and waxed rich off their labors. Tong wars still break out in the attenuated Chinese community but they are feeble things compared to the wars that raged in the eighties. When a tong war broke out, the police and the whites discreetly got off the street and left the mat- ter in the hands of the gods of the heathen Chinee. It reached its peak in the late eighties when one war broke out among the rival tongs that cul- minated in a pitched battle in which the number of killed and wounded has never been accurately determined. ‘The tong men lay in the picturesque bannered balconies overhanging the street and all day long the rattle of the old style Henry rifles went on, as they enthusiastically picked off China- men who showed in the street below, or potted one another at long range. Because of the firm stand of the men who con- trolled Portland, Chinatown escaped the catas- trophe that befe]! the oriental quarters in cities all along the Coast when the anti-Chinese riots were on in the late eighties. The firmness of the stand of the Portland leaders was partly due to Portland’s conservative attachment to the consti- tution and to the idea of sanctity of treaties, it is said. But the salmon canning industry furnished a certain incentive to diplomatic honor. i Millions in Portland capital were tied up in it, and it was a job that in those days depended en- tirely upon Chinese labor. Few white men could COURT HOUSE PARK, PORTLAND, IN THE EIGHTIES A Prierim’s PROGRESS 183 be persuaded to undertake the bloody task of hacking up fish all day long. ‘There was no great jealousy on the part of white laborers against the fish cutters, and the big packers knew that if they lost the ‘““Chinks,” the blow to their business would be almost irreparable. So Portland’s Chinatown continued its colorful existence until the Exclu- sion Act stopped its replenishment, and then it dwindled to its present day insignificance. Parallel with all the merry riot of the North End the old ordered community life outside the Bad Lands went on. The churches grew and ex- tended. Bridges spanned the Willamette River and brought into the city the quiet communities of the East Side. The railways brought from the Kast a God-fearing generation of Middle West- erners. The Multnomah Amateur Athletic club was organized with the tradition—preposterous in those days—of having no bar in its club-house. The tradition continues even under prohibition. Portland had achieved a working basis under which all types and conditions of men and women could live satisfactorily with nothing more dis- turbing than an occasional murder in the working out of the feuds that necessarily developed be- tween rival factions of gamblers and minor bosses. An itinerant typesetter of the day who called himself “Peter the Poet’? and who used to com- pose at the case, voiced the satirical attitude of Oregon in general toward its fantastic metropolis and the probability of its reform, when the Rev. Wallace was announced coming to the city on an 184 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER evangelical mission duly equipped with a whip of scorpions and a full quota of vials of wrath. Sang “Peter the Poet” Down in Portland, Reverend Wallace Raised on high his holy chalice, Saying: “The Lord shall eat His supper in this wicked river town.” Peter’s poem is about all the remaining history of the crusade of the Rev. Wallace or of others like him who came and preached and went their ways. But evolution was working the change. The sailor boarding houses were dwindled, China- town was fading under the Exclusion Act. The political battles between the Ins and the Outs in the rich fields of exploitation, and the vaulting ambitions of the political figureheads that they reared for banners and _ symbols, ultimately destroyed the simple $2.50 per head ballot system. Political reformers of a visionary and _ idealistic turn of mind were allowed by the bosses to bring in the Australian ballot. Two things that came on the turn of the cen- tury helped to perfect the ruin of the strongholds of Lucifer. Up to the early part of the century, water boards and dock commissions and various other organs functioning in the city, were named by fiat of the state legislature. The fight to seize and control these noble golden geese was waged in the legislature by the process of putting over from time to time a new charter, in which the A Piuertm’s PROGRESS 185 boards and commissions and what not, were dis- tributed according to the plans and specifications of the latest faction in power. Naturally the battle concentrated around the North End in Portland, with its flexible and purchasable voting control, and politics of the state as well as the city was in a large measure fought out north of Washington street. In the same confusion that allowed the initia- tive and referendum and other new-fangled de- vices to come in, the reform group put over a new charter, which wiped out most of the means of getting at the spoils via the legislature, and Portland city politics fell into a less dominant place in the politics of the state. The second event was the final crash of the Mitchell machine. It came when Roosevelt, in characteristic fury over the balking of his Panama Canal plans by the games and divertissements of the railroad bloc in Congress, started to smoke out Oregon’s Senator John Hipple Mitchell, who was the most serious handicap to the presidential program. In the process of Mitchell’s smoking out, William J. Burns and Francis Heney un- covered the Oregon Land Frauds, and succeeded in smoking out practically everybody of any im- portance in Oregon. Basically the land frauds amounted to a prac- tice, not confined to Oregon, nor to this particular time, of staking homesteaders to prove up on gov- ernment homestead and timber land, and, having gained title, to dispose of their homesteads to the 186 Tut TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER big timber interests that had swarmed to Oregon from the dwindled forests of Michigan. A com- paratively small number of the persons involved in the universal raid upon the public domain had the least notion that they might be engaging in something that savored of conspiracy or that might be construed as criminal. The indictment against Mitchell was largely technical. But the whole thing filled Oregon with alarums and excursions and the crash of political thrones. Heney flamed like a meteor athwart the field. Stripling politicians who thus far had been obliged to fall into line under machine bosses, fell upon the old masters and tore them, and began carving out careers for themselves. The war to smash the Mitchell Machine was a heroic war in which many men had been made and broken and the Oregon legislature achieved a fame for corruption that gave the world James Barton Adams’ poem, so immortal that it is now generally attributed to Anonymous, “Bill’s in the Legislature—but he didn’t say what for.” In the progress of this war, the political re- formers, typified by W. S. U’Ren, were allowed to bring in the Initiative and Referendum and the Direct Primary. The business got out of the hands of the anointed bosses and was snapped up by the lean and wily pirates of the Democratic party who were not supposed to have any rights in the state since the Civil War. The fabric of the old order was already rent and frayed here and there when Portland decided A Pixerim’s PROGREsS 187 to hold the Lewis and Clark Centennial World’s Exposition in 1905. The old political Captains were jaded with their mighty wars, the strength of the old underworld had been drained somewhat in the Klondike rush in the late nineties. Upon this situation leaped the reformers with the neces- sity of cleaning house for the visitors, as a talking point. Five of the biggest gambling houses in the United States running wide open would not be, they felt, the best advertisement in the world for exposition visitors. So they elected Tom Word sheriff on his pledge to close the gambling houses. ‘Tom Word was back from Alaska and possessed certain practical experience in dealing with hard-boiled persons in a hard-boiled way, and a most disconcerting in- difference to monetary suggestion, and Tom Word possessed a truly Rooseveltian talent for staging a first class show. “I’m responsible for Multnomah county,” said Word, and inasmuch as Portland was in Mult- nomah county, he sent word to the Chief of Police to clean up the gambling houses. He was notified to go to Hell. He sent word to the Grant boys, and August Erickson on Burnside street, and to the Warwick Club—most westerly outpost of Colonel Apple- gate of Kentucky, and all the other pool halls and gambling houses to close. He was told unanimously to go to Hell. So he gathered his deputies and moved upon the Bad Lands with wagons and axes, after hav- 188 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER ing sent three warnings. Portland rocked with excitement. George H. Williams, who as a former member of Grant’s cabinet and a leading figure in Oregon, had been elected to be “Exposition Mayor,” was horrified and outraged at Word’s undignified methods and at Word’s invasion of the Police duties of the city. He resisted with dignity but in vain. The axe campaign had captured the popular imagination. The juries said Word was moving too soon and too fast, and turned the gambling house proprietors loose. Henry McGinn, who had grown up with the soul of Portland, said to Word: “You are that strange and peculiar thing, a sincere and honest official, I believe. I will go down the line with you.” McGinn dug up old nuisance laws and prose- cuted joyously, while Word and his men smashed doors and arrested proprietors and employees and hauled crooked wheels and faked tables and other paraphernalia up to the courthouse to be ticketed as “Eixhibit A, ete.” Finally the gamblers sur- rendered and their outfits were returned to them on their signing an agreement not to re-open their places. The stampede was on to Goldfield, Nevada, and they took their establishments to the newer and less exacting field and prospered there. Gambling continued—discreetly under cover— the bars were ordered out of the houses in the restricted district and the girls were ordered up- A Pinerim’s PRoGREsSS 189 stairs and away from the windows. Portland dropped forever between its present and its varie- gated past, an asbestos curtain, showing a city of roses and homes, low taxes and undeveloped suburban acreage, lying like a jewel amid the emerald hills (Vid. immigration literature of the period) with Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, lowly and individual as Fujiyama, brood- ing in the background. Portland put on its best clothes, told its naughty children to stay in the background and keep their noses clean—and wel- comed the world to the Lewis and Clark Centen- nial Exposition. From as far as railway tourist rates extended, America east of the Rocky Mountains sent its emissaries. ‘They bore back home with them re- ports of a land flowing with the milk and honey of undeveloped lands, and blest with taxes so low as to be almost unbelievably light. The rush came on. Cow pastures that had lingered forlornly full of buttercups on the fringes of the city, began the cellular divisions that pre- saged new additions. The home owner of mod- erate means increased by thousands and tens of thousands. ‘There was talk about the iniquities of the paving trust. Old Portland sank gurgling under the herded and multiplied population of innumerable eastern small towns. It was the day of the real estate promoter. Efficiency and luncheon clubs appeared. Social workers began to worry about the environment of 190 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER the lumberjack and yegg. The bewildered rem- nants of the old army of Lucifer, broken and leaderless, and deriving no reinforcement from the new tide of immigration, dumbly beheld the coming of the end. Harry Lane, later Senator from Oregon, came into the mayorality with reform backing, and with a burning and bitter enmity against the folk of Babylon, for both the gambling and the red light district had struck blows close to his naked heart. Another vigorous, eccentric character, he pounced upon his enemies as picturesquely and petrifically as Word had pounced upon the open gambling. The restricted district had never had any legal standing in the community, existing only by com- mon consent and public policy of its day. So it shattered, and the daughters of Aphrodite scattered like spilled quicksilver among the hotels, apartment houses and rooming houses of the city, where they continued their calling under such pre- carious and temporary protection as they could afford. There remained openly still only the saloons, feudal adherents of the big brewing interests that had grown up with the city and already their hour was drawing near. The state at large went dry under local option, long before an effective move was made on the citadels of Portland, for Oregon consisted of many comparatively small towns, in which Satan was never allowed much considera- tion. Portland was looked upon not only as the banker and trader, but as the restricted district A PruGRim’s PROGRESS 191 for the state at large, and so long as there was Portland to flee to, substantial citizens of the smaller communities—if they were not conscien- tiously for prohibition—were, for the most part, quite willing to drive the devil out of their own door yards. The last of the mayors whose type savored at all of the old régime was A. G. Rushlight, who came into power around 1910—and came in with a wholesome fear of what the reform forces and the puritan thought of the community might do to him and his adherents. There was clamor for a new charter on the Commission plan instead of the Aldermanic, and he sought to forestall it by naming a charter revision committee of his own. A citizens’ charter committee was formed and while the Mayor’s and the citizens’ committees hacked away at the body of the old charter, various other charter specialists came in with extra suggestions. It became ap- parent that a compromise commission charter would be voted by the people—and it was very apparent that the first commission named under such a charter would have to have its skirts en- tirely clean of the stain of the old North End. Rushlight with forlorn hope appointed a vice commission, which deliberated and duly published a report viewing with alarm the parlous condition of public morals. A full page map, with the street lines carefully erased, showed in variegated dots, the relative location of apartment houses, hotels, rooming houses and what not, in which the daugh- 192 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER ters of Aphrodite had sought sanctuary from the besom of Lane. An hour after the report was published, draughtsmen in most of the architects’ offices around town had reconstructed the streets on the map. Portland guffawed and gobbled up the reports as fast as it could lay hands on them, and rules and compasses and dividers had a momentary boom on the market. One of the leading concerns in the city, having to do with building administra- tion and rentals, emerged roaring for the scalp of the Mayor and threatening damage suits by the score, because the committee report had plastered red spots on the majority of apartment houses un- der that company’s jurisdiction. It was Satan’s fatal fiasco. The commission form of government came in and Rushlight was hoisted out. Under H. R. Albee as Mayor, came in a commission against no member of which the god-fearing and law-upholding element of the city could protest. The memorable event in Albee’s administration having any bearing on this study of social evolution, was the enactment of the “Tin- plate Ordinance.” This required that the name of the owner of any building used as a hotel, rooming or lodging house, should be displayed on the build- ing on a tin plate of such and such size. It was imagined that in some mystic way it would be pos- sible to pin the responsibility for lurking sirens upon the ultimate consumer of the rental for the building. With a feeling of chilled horror, old established A PiIneRim’s PROGRESS 193 families and trust companies found what to them amounted to The Scarlet Letter, pinned upon the bosom of their most remunerative properties, while the peasantry smacked its thighs and roared with throaty mirth. But the novelty wore off and the joke slumbered, and it is doubtful if anyone gives more than passing notice to the tin plates on the lodging houses, hotels, apartment houses and rooming houses—even if they should see the patrol wagon drawn up in front of them, while the Police carry out a trunk of moonshine or a still or a - couple of experimenters in life against whom the next flat has complained. In the first election under the commission char- ter, George L. Baker, a theater man who had fig- ured in the city council since the early part of the new century, wistfully saw the collapse of all the campaigning methods that he had learned in his political career thus far. Unlike many of his confreres, he was willing to learn his lesson and wherever necessary to fall in line with the newer tendencies insofar as he could understand them. How far he was able to do this is perhaps best indicated by the fact that he came back into power as Mayor, in the election which with a slight reaction against the sincere, churchly and somewhat colorless administration of Albee returned that gentleman to private life. It was this election also that resulted in a realignment of the city commission. The half century fight for woman suffrage, which was long waged almost single-handed by 194 Tue TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER Abigail Scott Duniway, the sister of Harvey W. Scott, flowered at last in victory. While the politicians, still groggy from the other blows they had received, were trying to find out just where they stood and what they might ex- pect from the new voting element, state prohibi- tion crashed in and demolished the wheezy rem- nants of the battered old political machine of the North End. Then politics went into a gibbering panic, and since those fateful years, practical politicians have been burning punk sticks before what they refer to as “the church element,” and consulting oracles and installing dictaphones in a bewildered effort to guess what the churches and the Y. M. C. A. and the Anti-Saloon League and the League of Women Voters demand of them in return for continuance in the public service. Mayor Baker has done the best guessing thus far, it would seem, although one or two who took their training in the old school have come unobtrusively back into the city hall, without their checked suits. One guess is perhaps as good as another. Prob- ably the reason Mayor Baker seems to have done the best guessing is because he loves to be Mayor for the sake of being Mayor, because with all his practical political craft he registers sincerity, he sincerely loves Portland and believes in Portland and desires to make Portland a city of a million inhabitants. He might, if permitted to work steadily at the job of being Mayor (instead of having to hop into his dinted armor at a moment’s A PrnerRim’s PROGRESS 195 notice to defend his political existence almost every day), accomplish something of the ingenu- ous dream which he appears to cherish. But this is not permitted him. His life becomes a long series of heroic sallies in defense of his polit- ical life. A breathless interval in which he can consider the needs and welfare of the city he loves to reign over as Mayor—and in dashes a mes- senger with news that Birnam Wood is on the move again, and the Macduff is jimmying his way in at the side window of the city hall, or that Mal- colm has just called the young warriors to a coun- cil at the City Club, with a view to bringing about the delayed supper of which Peter the Poet sang. Out sword, up buckler and storm to the battle- ments, cursing the witches! In his later battling, Mayor Baker has, un- wittingly perhaps, pinned his faith almost entirely upon the formula that the old Founders found so effective and profitable in the beginning of things: “Give the customer what he says he wants.” It seems to be a good formula. It has not been many weeks since Mayor Baker responded to a toast at a luncheon of the Minis- terial Association at the Y. M. C. A. He towered ruggedly at the head of the table, a giant of a man with a look of profoundest earnestness struggling with a look of puzzled distress upon his face. “You see before you,” he said, “a man who not many years ago had very little respect for the so- 196 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER called ‘better element’ of the city and who felt a sort of contempt for them and the things they seemed to be trying to do. “You see before you to-day, a man who has the profoundest respect and admiration for this better element. You have said that you want Portland to be made a clean, law-abiding, up- right community, and I am here to serve you with what ability I have.” The association applauded roundly. Not long after the newspapers announced with enthusiasm that Mayor Baker ceremoniously in the presence of the assembled ladies of the W. C. T. U. had signed the pledge. Portland is back on her stride. For years now the politics of city and state have been as rich in theological implications as those of the physically ancestral New England or the spiritually ances- tral Palestine of the prophets. Portland of the early °50’s scarcely took such issues more seri- ously. And now, at the behest of the regenerated Mayor Baker and of the Portland Ad Club seek- ing regeneration yet more concentrated, the Rev. Dr. William A. Sunday is scheduled for a revival campaign in the fall of 1925. That left hand of Portland which did for so long what its right hand did not deign to notice officially, is due in its with- ered state for amputation and the last public im- palement of shame. Also,—among his other array of related exhibits, A Prierim’s PrRoGREsS 197 the reverend visitor will enter a Hereford bull at the livestock show. After all, even in saved Portland, these are the 1920’s. So even in the stride of sanctity regained lingers the faint, irredeemable tempo of jazz. KANSAS CITY: Houn’ Dawe vs. ART By Henry J. Haskell beri y ah. ele OU Ee i wae i. ; iby ht Gis ? ¥ " M why ¥ ft Mt Paty LAY ye? i han. ay Wh y . BETA E tan? So eae ori a fil KANSAS CITY TRUST I am a person of proper sensibilities. So it is with a fitting sense of shame and humil- ijation that I here record the fact that Kansas City of to-day, tamed, domesticated, Kiwanized, Cham- ber-of-Commerced, Heart-of-Americaed as it is, with the issue of its civilization still in the balance, nevertheless to me is more desirable, more inter- esting in every way than the bold, bad town that outfitted the Santa Fe and Oregon trade, the Pikes-Peak-or-Bust rush, and the cow country, and that grew maudlin in the House of Lords bar when it chanted the lament over the death of its hero: Jesse James was a lad that killed a-many a man; He robbed the Danville train. But that dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard Has laid poor Jesse in his grave. It was Robert Ford that dirty little coward, I wonder how he does feel. For he ate of Jesse’s bread and he slept in Jesse’s bed, Then laid poor Jesse in his grave. Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor, He never would see a man suffer pain; And with his brother Frank, he robbed the Chicago bank, And stopped the Glendale train. I recognize this preference for the modern city as a weakness, and I do not boast of it. Perhaps 201 202 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER it is due to unfortunate early training. For I dis- tinctly recollect that when I arrived in Kansas City many years ago I was quite unable to share in the enthusiasm of many of the older inhabitants for Jesse James, Jr., who was on trial on a charge of train robbery. Not that I was prejudiced against the son of the unlucky victim of the gen- tleman who shot Mr. Howard. He was acquitted. But I did not take easily to the fact that many reputable citizens were evidently less concerned in the evidence of his innocence than in the circum- stance that he was the son of the border Robin Hood. A chip of the old block, by gad, sir! It may be, too, that the town of the early days lacked some of the picturesqueness that belongs by tradition to a frontier community. It never was scalped by Indians, shot up by cow punchers, or debauched by prospectors with their pockets full of gold nuggets. Joseph Smith and his followers settled on its outskirts and might have contrib- uted variety to its life. But the settlers rose against the Mormons and they sought refuge else- where. The river trade offered possibilities. But the railroads choked it off. With their develop- ment in the ’60’s the frontier rapidly retreated westward. It had hardly restrained long enough to be seriously lamented. One day it was there. Next day Kansas City organized a Chamber of Commerce and lined up with the coming indus- trial age. It is difficult to yearn backward after one’s great-grand-aunt who only lived ten minutes. In the ’70’s the city’s only real frontier asset Houn’ Dawe vs. Art 203 was a legacy from border warfare days, the James gang. When Governor Crittenden invited politi- cal ruin by offering a reward for Jesse with un- expectedly successful results, as the ballad of the dirty little coward testifies, the community at the Kaw’s mouth was definitely turned toward stand- ardization. Its traditions were broken. The place was never even a typical cow town. By the time the big demand for beef cattle came, after the war, the railroads were tapping the range to the west of the Missouri. The great herds from Texas that were driven north over the Chis- holm and other trails, reached rail transportation first at Abilene, Kansas, and then at Dodge and Ogalalla. ‘Those were the centers of cowpuncher life. It was at Dodge, not at Kansas City, that Boots Hill cemetery was established for the con- venient disposal of the gentlemen who died with their boots on. The cattle were shipped from those railroad points to farmers further east or to the stockyards at Kansas City and Chicago. A few herdsmen rode the trains with them and gave a cow country atmosphere to the hotels, eating houses and saloons near the stockyards. But the boys with the high heel boots, chaps and spurs, were undeniably exotic in Kansas City. They were swallowed up in the larger life of the com- munity which was busy killing hogs, handling wheat, grinding flour, and supplying agricultural implements to the grain farmers. The city, as I just said, was on the road to a standardization of the commonplace commercial 204 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER type. From that catastrophe it was saved by Providence or a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Its placid progress was suddenly disturbed by a voleanic eruption. A bulky middle-aged man from Indiana came storming into town. After that it was never the same. Two things, I suppose, made Kansas City—the Great Bend of the Missouri and Nelson of The Star. The Bend requires more explanation than Nelson. Its importance is less obvious. The Mis- sourl sweeps down from the north past Omaha, St. Joe, Atchison, and Leavenworth. At the junction with the Kaw, more politely known as the Kansas, it turns abruptly to the east and goes swirling across the state to meet the Mississippi just above St. Louis. You see? Probably not. To the present gen- eration inland water transportation does not exist. But the outfitters for the overland trade, bucking the muddy current on the Felix X. Aubrey, the Cataract, the Sultan, the Silver Heels, the Star of the West, and other famous steamers, sought the maximum cheap water haul to the west. Where the up-river boats turned north goods were taken ashore for the long trek. That meant a trading post at the mouth of the Kaw where the overland trails whipped out their ribbons toward Oregon and Santa Fe. So the trading post developed with many vicis- situdes into an outfitting point and later a distrib- uting center. Until the eruption of 1880 it was Houn’ Dawe vs. ArT 205 distinguished only for its energy and a self confi- dence that was its real religion. William Rock- hill Nelson, the erupter, was a huge man, short of leg but enormous of frame. Julian Street wrote of him in his later years that he was more like a voleano than any other man he had ever met; mountainous in his proportions and also in the way he tapered up from his vast waist to his snow capped peak, with a Vesuvian voice, hoarse, deep, rumbling, strong. ‘When he speaks,” Street wrote, “great natural forces seem to stir, and you hope no eruption may occur while you are near, lest the fire from the mountains descend upon you and destroy you.” The eruptions escaped from under a long, quivering upper lip and were rein- forced by slaps with a heavy hand on the desk. They welled up from a temperament that was a combination of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Jim Hill, with a dash of St. Francis, Nietzsche, and Oliver Cromwell. Wherever Fate happened to plant Nelson he hoisted his flag and took charge. He took charge of the unkempt town where he printed his paper. It struggled, but it could not escape. A late photograph shows him seated with a huge hand in the foreground. “That paw is not overemphasized,” a stranger remarked, happening on the picture after visiting Kansas City. “It is all over the place.” | Nelson was of British stock. The family had been in America since the seventeenth century. But for all his Anglo-Saxon aggressiveness he was 206 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER . the embodiment of the Latin civilization which is the civilization of beauty. Instinctively he re- garded the industrialism of his day with the same abhorrence that France feels toward the monstrous industrial organization that is Germany. He might not have admitted it, but he had the Gallic apprehension that this terrible machine would some day come rolling down and destroy everything that made life worth while. “Don’t talk to me about a campaign to bring factories to Kansas City,” he exclaimed one day to a delegation of town boosters. “A city isn’t made by bringing in a horde of cheap laborers to make cotton prints. Put on a campaign for an art gallery and I’m with you.” So for thirty-five years, by sheer strength of a dominating will he sought to impose the things of the spirit on a chronically dismayed trading com- munity which habitually resented but could not evade his dictation. Kansas City is not to be un- derstood without understanding the long struggle between the frontier town of the stockyards, the checker board mud streets, and the Boston store, and this outsider, who without knowing it, was the incarnation of an alien outlook on life. Returning to the physical basis of things, I have said it was the Great Bend of the Missouri that determined that a city should exist at this par- ticular point. It was the advance of the ice sheet that made the Great Bend. Every spring the melting ice poured out flood waters from its Houn’ Dawe vs. Art 207 fringes. ‘These plowed a wide channel from the northwest to the south and east in which the shrunken Missouri still flows, the mere remnant of a once mighty stream. ‘The southwestern ex- tremity of the ice sheet covered northeastern Kansas. Around the glacier’s giant elbow swept the Missouri in its great bend to the east. Settlements clustered up and down the river at this strategic point. On the North side Kentucky settlers organized a county and named it for their hero, Clay, with Liberty as its county seat. On the south side settlers from Virginia called their county for the rival hero, Jackson, and named the county seat equally for the rights of man, Inde- pendence. Up stream appeared Leavenworth, Atchison, St. Joe, Council Bluffs. The river towns became competitors for the Santa Fe trade that began in the °30’s and the Oregon trade that started in the next decade. Early in the century French fur traders from St. Louis had established a trading post at the mouth of the Kaw. When the steamboats began coming up the river with goods for Santa Fe they discovered the best land- ing place by Chouteau’s warehouse at the foot of what is now Main Street, Kansas City. Traders found it convenient to route their stuff by Chou- teau’s landing and haul it over a trail made by a ravine to the main Santa Fe trail at the little hamlet of Westport that had sprung up on the trail a few miles west of Independence. A set- tlement developed at the landing and spread back on the plateau behind the river bluffs. There in 208 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER a tavern adjoining Colonel Titus’s palatial three- story gambling house, a meeting was held presided over by One-Eyed Ellis, who made his living sell- ing bad whiskey to the Indians, and the settlement was christened the Town of Kanzas. Later it became City of Kansas, and only within a genera- tion Kansas City. An Eastern newspaper man, Albert D. Rich- ardson, visiting the place in 1857 on a journey through the West, tells of the steamboat port with its “immense piles of freight, horses, ox and mule teams receiving merchandise from steamers, scores of immigrant wagons and a busy crowd of whites, Indians, half-breeds, negroes and Mexi- cans. Carts and horses wallowed in the mud. Drinking saloons abounded and everything wore the accidental, transitory look of new settle- ments.” But the people had the characteristic spirit of the pioneers which is incarnate today in the town booster clubs of the West. “There was much stir and vitality,” says Richardson, “and the population, numbering two thousand, had unbounded, unquestioning faith that here was the city of the future.” In the inevitable race for commercial supremacy Independence, Leavenworth, and St. Joe for a time were in the lead. Then Fate loaded the dice * and rolled them for the Landing at the Great Bend of the Missouri. The railroads discovered the water level grades converged at the mouth of the Kaw. Take a freight car two hundred miles to the northwest, west, or southwest of that CG8.T NI ALIO SVSNVM a a oon : Bonin cg 7 A -e Samim BAMA Ge 4 by “egancobyde onaa RY eas eae gees arenas FF : : : , eeeedl ° B, : re we PAP DOO BG diyve, e250: + es to Ceti er Fo 25009, 090 ee : + | = ie rae Suc ; . So ak : . a : — Ce SS = = 7 : oe Sor : ce E Houn’ Dawe vs. ART 209 strategic point, give it a shove, and it will coast down to Kansas City. That fact determined the location of the future distributing center. Eighteen fifty-seven was the highwatermark of the old river port and outfitting post. It is recorded that fifteen hundred steamboat landings were made that year. Then the border troubles and the war swept over the town and left only débris. The overland trade, interrupted by raiders, was diverted to Fort Leavenworth where the gov- ernment garrison offered protection. The City of Kansas withered. It was held by Union troops through the war, but most of the country about it had been settled from the South and was Seces- sionist in sympathy. Bands of marauders were organized in Missouri to raid Eastern Kansas, and other bands of marauding Kansans raided back. It was all done in the name of patriotism. To-day there are reputable families in Jackson County who still have Kansas loot, and a Kansas friend tells me that the piano in the old home near Lawrence was stolen from a Missouri farm house. The newspapers carried almost daily announce- ments that Major Long had killed six bush- whackers beyond Independence and burned three farm houses, and that Captain Liggett had cap- tured three Union soldiers outside Kansas City, cut off their ears and hung them to a tree. ‘These barbarities culminated in Quantrell’s raid on Law- rence in 1863 in which one hundred and fifty men of the town were killed. The bushwhackers were 210 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER sheltered by Southern sympathizers among the Jackson County farmers. So five days after the raid the Union commander at Kansas City, Gen- eral Thomas Ewing, retaliated with the locally famous Order No. II, under which all the in- habitants of Jackson and neighboring counties, except those in a few centers, were driven from their homes. ‘Those suspected of Southern affilia- tion were ordered out of Western Missouri. It was this sort of ruthlessness applied by Weyler in his reconcentrado orders against the Cuban insur- rectionists that aroused America against Spain. The effect on an English-speaking population was terrific. Its results still linger more than sixty years after the event. After the war, when the railroads began to steam out along the water levels in every direc- tion, settlers flocked in and the town came back with a rush. But order No. II brooded over it and the community was torn in two by bitterness. The Northern crowd and the Southern crowd each developed its own social life, with separate society functions, separate churches, separate cemeteries. There are families that still caution visitors from New England not to refer to “rebels” in the presence of callers. As for politics, the results were far reaching. The central phalanx of the Unterrified Democracy of Kansas City is made up of families with war traditions. For them to vote a Republican ticket would be to make a covenant with hell. With this phalanx the Irish, on their way up from the ~Houn’ Dawe vs. Art. SIT section hand status, made a political alliance. The combination was invincible. The Southerners fur- nished the party its substantial side, its respecta- bility. The Irish were the trench workers who saw that plenty of ballots of the right sort got in the boxes even when voters were lacking, and supplied the bosses. At its best the Southern ele- ment in the post-war Kansas City represented a fine individualistic culture. At its worst it in- jected into the town’s life the houn’ dawg tradi- tion. Neither extreme was much concerned with public improvements. Neither was possessed of that Puritan missionary spirit which wishes to es- tablish certain standards for the rest of the com- munity. This attitude on the part of the closely welded Democratic bloc was to affect the city’s development for the next half century. In the boom that followed Appomattox, Kansas City had one short, sharp struggle with its vigor- ous rival, Leavenworth, over the first railroad bridge to cross the Missouri. By superior alert- ness and energy the town at the Kaw’s mouth won. A Burlington connection crossed the river into Kansas City. It was the second through line from the East. The race between the cities ended with Kansas City far ahead. The conditions of its settlement and growth were reflected in a joyous crudity. There it sprawled in the mud, an overgrown village with its saloons, dance halls, variety shows, its gorgeous accommodations for the transaction of keno, faro, chuck-a-luck, roulette, and stud poker, and such 212 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER other arrangements as the tastes of the times re- quired. There it sprawled, growing in size, if not in grace, until the year 1880 ushered in a new era. Nelson, editor of a small newspaper at Fort Wayne, Indiana, surveying the human comedy as it unfolded over the continent, decided that Kan- sas City offered the best location for the working out of his newspaper ideas. He started The Star in the Garfield-Hancock presidential campaign. I happened to know him fairly well in his later years. But I never was really acquainted with him. Nobody was. He was always a well of un- discovered possibilities. Kiven to himself he must have remained a good deal of a mystery. When he reached the Kaw’s mouth at the age of thirty- nine most of his possibilities were still undevel- oped. ‘Temperamentally he did not belong with the hell-roaring crowd that was dominant in the town. While he occasionally played poker with his fellow citizens, those associated with him noticed a certain aloofness. He did not quite know where he did belong. He was still trying to find himself. He was the product of the aristocracy of a small town. His forebears had taken a hand in public affairs. They were of the elect. His grandfather Rockhill had been the first man to plant a thou- sand acres of corn. His father had sent him from Fort Wayne, his birth place, to the discipline of that Botany Bay for bad boys of his time, Notre Dame. He was too much of a problem for the Houn’ Dawe vs. ART 213 Fathers, and they politely passed him back to his parents. He had made money in real estate, he had tried planting cotton in the South after the war, he had been a contractor, building roads and bridges; he had been Tilden’s Indiana manager, and then, thirsting to move men in the mass, he had tried himself out on a Fort Wayne newspaper for a year or two. He came to Kansas City to carve out a career, almost at middle age. His chief resources were in his head, and in the confi- dence of men of means back in Indiana who were ready to lend him money. When I said he was a combination of Lorenzo and several other gentlemen of mark, I was not speaking at random. I was trying to suggest some of the discordant elements that made him what he was. I did not understand the Lorenzo side of him until I had been in Florence and had seen the sort of splendor that flamed in the soul of the greatest of the Medicis, and that he had tried to build into the city on the Arno. Nelson had the same feeling for beauty and magnificence. Like Jim Hill he was a builder with imagina- tion. In some moods he had the altruism and piety of St. Francis. The beauty of the worship of the ritualistic churches appealed to him. In other moods he could be completely agnostic, and as ruthless and wilful as Nietzsche’s superman. One city political campaign he ruined by insisting on pounding on a trivial side issue because it hap- pened to be one of his whims. Yet for great issues that won him he was willing to take any 214 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER risk. The sudden slamming of a door would make the tears start. Yet in the face of danger he was absolutely placid. At such times he seemed with- out nerves. He cried when he accidentally stepped on a canary. But when an influential citizen, urging him to abandon a policy that was crushing an enemy, suggested it would be wonder- ful if he could go to bed thinking not a soul in town hated him, “By God,’ he boomed, “I couldn’t sleep.” As for the dash of Oliver, I ad- mit the imperfection of the analogy. Cromwell was a magnificent insurgent who finally triumphed and himself became the sign and symbol of author- ity. Nelson’s greatest victories, lke the mil- leniums he was constantly expecting to come marching at his orders, were always just around the next corner. He never transcended his in- surgency. He came to Kansas City from the small town atmosphere. He knew he was a rebel against authority and tradition. He knew his newspaper must be different from any other. He knew that ugliness and bad taste were intolerable. He knew he was for the under dog, and he sincerely be- lieved he was an intense democrat, not realizing that the only democracy he could endure was that imposed by himself as autocrat. In short he did not understand that he was essentially a Latin with Anglo-Saxon trimmings. Lincoln was never his hero. He could much more readily compre- hend Napoleon. It was by no accident that while he was abroad he spent most of his time in Paris, Houn’ Dawe vs. ART 215 It was his spiritual home. He liked the French and was more comfortable with them than with his ancestral English. By temperament and in- stinct he belonged to the civilization of beauty. That civilization was no part of the heritage of the pioneer. The medieval peasant could go out from his mud hut and help build Notre Dame of Chartres. The American pioneer often lived in a sod house, but cathedral building was not in his line. As for the town of Nelson’s choice, it was very much as C, L. Edson wrote in his Ballad of Kansas City: The herders and the traders and the sod corn crew, They planted ’em a city when the world was new, They planted Kansas City and the darn thing grew! The bear cat killers and the Dan Boone clan, The boys that taught the panther his respect for man— They planted Kansas City where the bull trails ran. Ships made Carthage, gold made Nome, Grain built Babylon, the wars built Rome, Hogs made Chicago with their dying squeal, Up popped Pittsburgh at the birth of steel; Come, Kansas City, make your story brief: “Here stands a city built o’ bread and beef.” Well, the herders and the traders and the sod corn crew, the bear cat killers and the Dan Boone clan in many respects are admirable. It would have been impossible to conquer the wilderness without them. ‘There was a spirit, an élan about them that their successors might well cultivate. But the city they built was not distinguished for 216 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER sweetness and light. They had come from the country or from small towns. Many of them ex- pected to make their pile and move on. They were not concerned over such refinements of civilization as garbage systems or paved streets. One day in the early eighties two Main Street merchants were standing on the wooden sidewalk, contemplating the sea of mud that was the street. One was overheard saying to the other: “You've got the worst mud hole of a town here I ever saw. Why don’t you pave your street?” “Me pave it?” exclaimed the other. “Hell, I don’t care if they never pave it. I live in Louisville.” A friend tells of a dinner he attended years ago at which the leading pioneer merchant was a guest. The great man complacently inspected the pic- tures on the walls of the living room. Coming to the Mona Lisa he stopped and looked it over care- fully with hands clasped behind him. “Ah,” he observed cheerfully, “the lady has a pleasant face.” In the present generation when an art commis- sion was proposed for the city a leading alderman opposed the measure in the council. “I don’t see no need of this,” he said. “Art is on the bum in Kansas City.” | At the time of Nelson’s arrival the outlook was not glittering. The city had an adequate district of painted ladies. Its most popular theater was the Comique variety show, its most pretentious restaurant a saloon. Stores and houses were gen- erally designed in the dry goods box style of archi- Houn’ Dawe vs. ArT 217 tecture. It was a community of go-getters with a houn’ dawg background. The go-getter spirit kept it on its toes fighting for railroads, fighting for trade. ‘The houn’ dawg tradition left it satis- fied to be stuck in the mud. Nelson used to say it was sheer selfishness that drove him into his never ending campaign to make the houn’ dawg town into a modern city. “I was going to live here, wasn’t I? Well, if I ever expected to get anywhere with my paper Kansas City had to be made into a place that somebody besides a few dollar swappers would want to live in. By God, it was a ground hog case.” But it was something more than that. He could no more help trying to shatter this sorry scheme of things in order to re-mold it nearer to the heart’s desire than he could help breathing. He was Restlessness incarnate. He was forever driven by the devils within him—or the angels—to smash and build. Within the first year of his advent began the long struggle to impose his alien civilization on the raw trading post. It was a struggle that was to last for a generation. A struggle that neither he nor Kansas City understood at first. But as it — went forward its objects became clearer and the struggle fiercer until both combatants were lost in the cloud of enveloping dust, and all that came to outside observers was the thud, thud of blows, given and taken, the heavy breathing of Nelson, 218 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER and the screams of the angry city as each repeat- edly knocked the other down and both returned to the attack. It was a lovely fight! The new editor had realized that with the devel- opment of cheap pulp paper there was a wide and unoccupied field in the West for the two-cent newspaper. That was the sort he undertook to print in Kansas City although he had to import kegs of pennies to enable his newsboys to do busi- ness. He had an instinct for the sort of human stuff the average person likes to read; especially the average woman. (“The wife decides what paper the family will have. Let the other fellows print a paper for the men. I’m going to take care of the women.) In his newspaper the news of the world capitals was slighted. (“‘I’d like to read it, but there are so few of me.”) It devoted itself to homely things, including the gossip necessary to humankind, and good reprint. (“Plato and Cicero and Shakespeare and Macaulay and Huxley wrote almost as good stuff as some of our modern maga- zine writers, you know. Why not go back occa- sionally and dig up some of the things they wrote?’ ) His own taste recognized a line of decency that must not be overstepped. A clergyman became involved in a particularly nauseous scandal. The news broke in Nelson’s absence from the office. The enterprising city editor got out an extra edi- tion with all the salacious details. The next morn- ing when Nelson came in the editor rushed up to him for praise. Houn’ Dawe vs. ArT 219 “What did you think of our extra, Mr. Nelson?” inquired the luckless one. “I thought it was an infernal outrage that no decent newspaper would have printed and that only a damned ass would have put out.” “Well, well,” exclaimed the gasping editor. “Da I understand you don’t want me around here any more?” “By God, could I make it any plainer?” But when the town’s leading merchant became involved in an affair that led to a fist fight with an enraged husband before a happy crowd at a street corner, Nelson ordered the event covered in full. Before the paper was out a lawyer stopped at The Star office. “T have a contract here for a thousand dollars’ worth of advertising,” the lawyer said. Hitherto the merchant in question had disdained to adver- tise in the upstart newspaper. “The advertising will begin tomorrow. By the way, you won't mention that unfortunate little affair at the corner this morning, I suppose?” “That thousand dollars looked mighty big to me,’ Nelson said, telling of the incident later. “But of course I knew that a newspaper that sup- presses news commits suicide. So I told him I would like the contract, but we were going to print the story, and he hinted I was an unpractical per- son and went away.” So The Star, informal, unconventional, spright- ly, refusing to sell its soul in any conspiracy of silence, won readers day by day. 220 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Then it was that the editor, viewing the town site with an appraising eye, felt sure enough of his position to begin suggesting that certain improve- ments must be made. The city was in the mud. It must be paved. It had wooden sidewalks. They must be made of permanent material. Gar- bage was dumped in alleys and vacant lots. It must be collected and disposed of. The city was in the grasp of a horsecar monopoly. There must be cable cars. There were no shaded streets. ‘Trees must be planted. ‘There were no public baths. They must be built. There was no hall adequate for large gatherings. The tight-wads must be shaken down and made to build one. There were no parks and boulevards—. But here an outraged houn’ dawg citizenry balked. Parks and boule- vards! 'That was too much. Nelson saw he was in for a real fight. He be- gan light skirmishing until he should be so well established that his enemies could not destroy him. In the first year of The Star he mildly suggested parks. For a decade he kept talking about their desirability. He employed engineers to make studies. Then he had a bill drafted empowering the city to acquire park land. By the time it had got through the legislature the community was aroused and the battle was on. The supreme court held the new law invalid. Nelson brought his heavy artillery into action. ‘The shrieks of the wounded resounded from the Missouri bluffs to Brush Creek and the dead filled the trenches. A charter amendment was drawn to grant the city Houn’ Dawe vs. ArT 221 the necessary authority. It had to be submitted to the voters and the issue was in doubt. ‘There was a rough-neck Irish police commissioner who had fought his way up from the ranks in politics. He had a spark in him that recognized a kindred spark in the editor of The Star. A few days be- fore the election he called at the newspaper office. “Colonel,” he inquired (for as Wilham Allen White once remarked, Mr. Nelson always was coloneliferous), “Colonel, you seem interested in that damned charter amendment.” “Why not? There isn’t anything more impor- tant to Kansas City.” “T don’t know as to that. I don’t know much about those things. But if you want it, by God, we'll put it over for you. Don’t worry.” So the People and pure Democracy scored an- other triumph through the medium of a benevolent autocracy. A recalcitrant and protesting city had a foreign park and boulevard system thrust upon It. Of course I do not intend to imply that this pro- gram was put over by one man single handed. He rallied to his banner people to whom his ideas ap- pealed. But he rode at the head of the proces- sion and while he believed in lieutenants and used them he did not care particularly for colonels on his staff. He could supply all the necessary ideas himself and the ideas of others, unless he could at once incorporate them into his own scheme, were rather a nuisance. One resourceful lawyer he particularly liked. O92, Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER “Tf you want the city to undertake something that isn’t exactly contemplated by the charter and the constitution and such foolishness, most lawyers spend all their time telling you how it can’t pos- sibly be done. Frank always says, “All right, I believe we can find a way to do that.’ ” With the winning of the park fight Nelson took his family to Europe. There he remained for two years. While he traveled extensively Paris was his headquarters. French he learned to read fluently. He entered into the life about him with the keenest interest. It made a profound impres- sion on him. There he found himself. Thereafter he was explicitly a part of the civilization of beauty, as the city built on bread and beef was to discover to its increasing disturbance. When he returned home the opposition newspaper had an inspiration. It published what was ostensibly an interview with him on his travels, with all his answers to the reporter’s questions translated into French. “Did you enjoy Europe, Colonel?” “Mais out, beaucoup. Trés beaucoup.” “Is it cold in Paris in the winter?” | “Rarement. Il y géle, naturellement, et surtout pendant les mois de janvier et février.” “What do you think of Bryan?’ “C’est un garcon comme il faut.” The city editor who conceived this idea was nearer right than he knew. Superficially Nelson had not changed. He still cherished an almost Houn’ Dawe vs. ArT 223 fanatical adoration of Kansas City. But whether he realized it or not—and probably he did not al- low himself to realize it—he returned from Europe more than ever a spiritual alien to the go-getter and houn’ dawg atmosphere that still pervaded Main Street, Walnut Street, Grand Avenue and the packing centers of the West Bottoms. In Europe he had become interested in painting. How interested was demonstrated in the final dis- position of his estate to which I shall refer later. He brought home with him the nucleus of an art collection—a large number of excellent copies of Old Masters, which he felt would be better than the few inferior originals that were available. These he gave to the city with the proviso then necessary that the collection should be open to the public on Sundays as well as other days. He had built for himself a home, a delightful rambling old English country house of native stone, covered with ivy. He acquired a large tract of land about it and set out to provide an example in town planning. He put winding roads through the tract, lined them with stone walls, planted rambler roses along the walls, set out trees, and used shrubbery in such masses as never had been seen west of the Hudson. Houses he built from his own design by the score; houses of modest cost to demonstrate that a small house need not be ugly. The English country side had appealed es- pecially to him. His district might have been part of an English village. The Baron of Brush Creek, the town called him, after a stream that ran 224 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER through the domain, and people said not inap- propriately that he was a feudal lord living among his tenantry. As his newspaper developed and his power grew and his purposes crystalized he became increas- ingly autocratic. He was going to make Kansas City over or know the reason why. Unluckily for his immediate success his social and political in- surgency blossomed so that his program for justice alienated the wealthy and cultured part of the com- munity that was naturally with him in his program for beauty. His policies forced a _ go-getter houn’ dawg coalition that was vigorous and bitter. Besides, people resented being constantly told what they ought to do and being driven with a club to do it. In his later years Nelson’s pet plans were mostly bowled over when the people got a chance at them. They might really approve of some project for beautification, but they didn’t propose to have it choked down their throats. Not if they knew it. In that era of revolt against what was common- ly called Nelsonism, the property owning class, with pretty general approval, might have put its case against Star dictation in about this fashion: Under the malign direction of Nelson The Star has kept things constantly stirred up. It has made tenants dissatisfied. They never used to complain about light and air. Now they won't look at a house unless every window opens on a flower gar- den with a humming bird in it. The Star won't let anybody alone. It insists on regulating the Houn’ Dawe vs. ArT 225 minutest detail of peopie’s lives. Its regulations are pernicious and extravagant. Its preaching about more parks and boulevards and breathing spaces and supervised playgrounds for children, and plant Dorothy Perkins roses, and swat the fly, and housing reform, and a new charter, and art galleries, and keep your lawn trimmed, and take a lot of baths, and throw out the bosses, and use the river, and cut the weeds on vacant lots, and read the Home University Library, and for God’s sake don’t build such ugly houses, and make the landlord cut a window in the bath room, and put goats in Swope Park, and why will mothers risk their babies’ lives by bringing them up on bottles, and plant your bulbs now, and teach your children manners, and what’s the use of lawyers, and cultivate a pleasant speaking voice, and build a civic center, and put out houses for the birds, and walk two miles before breakfast, and why are Pullman cars so hot in winter, and go to church, and cut out the children’s adenoids, and build traf- ficways, and sleep with your windows open, and the square deal, and build cyclone-proof houses, and smash the saloons, and pooh, pooh, on fac- tories that employ women, and reduce street car fares, and go look at Old Masters every Sunday, and use two by sixes instead of two by fours if you want your house to stand up, and move out in the suburbs, and tear down the tin bridges and build hard surface roads everywhere, and all the other things, has increased the cost of living and 226 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER given people inflated ideas, and pretty nearly ruined the town. That was about the position of the element that was in chronic rebellion against the Nelson dic- tatorship of the later years. ‘There was constant turmoil. Nelson fumed and fought and Kansas City fumed and fought back. But it was at a dis- advantage. It couldn’t get away from the editor. He went into every house in town twice a day— the greatest bargain in good reading, he used to boast, to be found anywhere on the globe; thirteen papers for ten cents a week; now is the time to subscribe! People may be careless readers or hos- tile readers. But if they keep on reading day after day, year after year, some of the ideas are bound to sink in. When Nelson died in 1915 after thirty-five years of storming at the stupid ugliness of things, he had appreciably changed the current of life in Kansas City. Without him it might have been simply another—well, say, Omaha. This sounds a reckless statement. It may properly be asked whether after all any one man could appreciably affect the life of a whole com- munity—whether eventually the current would not swing back into the old channel. Is not Kansas City essentially the same as the other mid-Western Zeniths, with hotels after Statler, stores after Lord and ‘Taylor, clubs after Rotary, activities regu- lated by the Chamber of Commerce, with a slogan, Kansas City Heart of America, which it felt Hovun’ Dawe vs. ART 227 should determine the arrangement of the flowers it sent to President Harding’s funeral? In the taming process has it not lost the picturesqueness of the days of the old overland freighters and be- come a commonplace, hustling, uninspired com- mercial center like a score of others? Fair questions. Still, the characteristics I have catalogued are rather superficial. Standardiza- tion, I take it, is not in itself necessarily objec- tionable. It is objectionable when it is an outward symbol of an inward dullness. It is objectionable when it means simply a stupidly imitative culture with no first hand appreciation of beauty and dignity and the finer things of the spirit; when it crushes creative ability; when it permits produc- tion only on the lower levels of existence. A standardized culture that means that Bourges and Rouen and Amiens and Rheims and Meaux all have cathedrals isn’t so bad; or that Amsterdam and Antwerp and Haarlem and the Hague have art museums; or that Caen and Rennes and Tou- louse and Grenoble have universities. A stand- ardization is deadening when it clamps down with no feeling for that complete humanization of man in society which Matthew Arnold said was civiliza- tion. It is possible for real culture to exist even in conjunction with bath tubs, telephones and motor cars. The crucial thing is whether people are experiencing and expressing a well rounded, interesting, vigorous life. The Nelson influence is still persistent and dominant in the physical appearance of the city. 228 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER His conception of beauty in a residence district, as embodied in the development about his own home, was caught and carried forward by an un- usual man, J. C. Nichols. So for miles beyond the property he first laid out are winding roads, lined with attractive homes. His interest in traf- ficways is perpetuated in a steadily developing municipal system. His concern with landscaping on the grand scale is reflected in the work in progress to provide the city’s entrance at the Union Station with a worthy setting and in the idea behind the war memorial that rises on the hill beyond. His taste and his artistic sense still live in the newspaper he established which retains the handsome typography he chose, the literary flavor he gave it, his ideas of good breeding, and which prints on the cover of its Sunday magazine a reproduction of a famous painting instead of a bathing beauty. Finally his passion to enrich the common life, embodied in the art collection he founded, came to full expression in his will by which eventually his entire estate will pass to the public, the income to be used in perpetuity to pro- vide paintings, sculptures, and other art works for the community. | In these respects the life of Kansas City has been lastingly affected by Nelson. So far it has a flavor of its own. But civilization is many sided. In some ways the showing is not so good. If the city’s balance sheet were made up it would be something like this: Industry and material comforts. Great. The Hown’ Dawe vs. Art 229 Chamber of Commerce will be glad to furnish sta- tistics on bank clearings, hog receipts, and wheat shipments. Home of the one room apartment with four room efficiency. A daisy. Roll up one wall, a kitchen; pull it down, a living room; clear off the library table, a dining room; manipulate a handle, a bed room. Literature. Little doing in spite of the gallant efforts of the Quill Club. Eugene Field wrote some of his verse for the old Times and ‘then moved on. Alfred Henry Lewis wrote numerous Wolfville stories for The Star and then went to New York. William Allen White as a youngster worked for The Star but retired to Emporia to sprout his fame. Music. The usual concerts, conservatories, and a Danish composer, Carl Busch. Ed Howe once said of Atchison that for fifty years every girl in town had practiced on the piano until she had driven the neighbors crazy, but Atchison had not produced a single musician. Broadly speaking his remark applies to Kansas City. Education. Excellent school plant culminating in a junior college. The cultural atmosphere that might be furnished by a college of the liberal arts is missing. Religion. Highly organized on an efficiency basis. Largest men’s Bible class in the country, with elaborate and detailed machinery for main- taining it; a wonder. In theology, overwhelm- ingly fundamentalist. Out of more than two hun- dred clergymen twelve or fifteen have organized 230 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER a Modernist Club and meet occasionally—in secret. Politics. A formal government, usually com- monplace or worse; an informal government of a few powerful interests. When these interests agree in really wanting something they can get it. Ordinarily they are not in agreement and the col- lective life marks time. A contribution the city has made in the field of municipal government is the combination of agencies usually independent into a comprehensive department of public wel- fare, with a municipal farm reformatory for the city’s prisoners, a loan agency in competition with the loan sharks, and a free legal aid bureau to which the victims of minor injustices may appeal. This contribution was worked out by two ‘one hundred per cent Americans, William Volker, a constructive philanthropist born in Germany, and Jacob Billikopf, a social worker, born in Russia. Architecture. A punk business district, with a few distinguished buildings and two or three ex- cellent churches. An unusual residential district, already referred to, starting with the Nelson Rockhill development and widely extended. Spanish architecture often used without seeming exotic—except where obviously misplaced and ec- centric—because of the traditional and the exist- ing physical connections with New Mexico. Art. Largely for the future, but assured by endowment. An art institute has several hundred pupils. In addition to the Nelson bequest for the purchase of art works Mrs. Nelson left her estate Houn’ Dawe vs. ArT 231 toward an art museum. With other legacies a fund of nearly two million dollars is already pro- vided for to be used in constructing the necessary galleries. When the Nelson endowment is avail- able Kansas City will have one of the important art foundations of the country. If we consider both sides of the ledger there are places where the balance goes deeply into the red. Undoubtedly Kansas City, like other cities, has de- vised a remarkably efficient machine for turning out the material basis for civilization, not by the yard, but by the mile. In America it is usually assumed that when this basis is ready the mechan- ism will be readjusted to a spiritual product. But the machine has acquired such terrific momentum, it has so thoroughly absorbed the energies of the entire population, it has created so dazzling an ideal of physical comfort measured by money as the real end and object of life, that at times it seems doubtful whether it ever can be stopped long enough to be readjusted. There is a chance that it may simply continue to grind out the same material comforts to the exclusion of the culture and the appreciation of beauty that make the comforts worth while. So we get back to our original proposition that the civilization of the go-getter tempered by houn’ dawg is still in combat with the civilization of beauty where the elbow of the ice sheet pro- truded and the Missouri made its Great Bend to the east. Sometimes one gets the upper hand, 232 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER sometimes the other. ‘The marks of the conflict, of the ebb and flow of battle, are everywhere. Kansas City has created a fine boulevard sys- tem. But it has allowed commercial interests to junk long stretches of it with filling stations and billboards. It has put up, or the railroads for it, a monumental Union Station. There is nothing in Kurope to equal it. But it permitted the station to stand for years facing a clay bank and it has stood by while the station plaza was flanked with shacks. It has erected a striking shaft for its war memorial on a commanding site. But it has per- mitted greedy property owners to crowd about with cheap and ugly buildings. It has its miles of winding roads with their attractive homes; if there are comparable residence districts in Kurope I have not seen them. But if culture be given Arnold’s broad definition as the capacity for criticizing life, these districts as yet have organized a cultural society only in spots. It has made elab- orate provision for its unfortunate and has fi- nanced many hospitals including one for children that cares for patients from every part of the Mid- dle West. But it has set up a monument for a saloon keeper boss and none for the overshadow- ing genius who left his great estate to the com- munity. Its public libraries have an unusual cir- culation of serious books. But its down town or- ganizations for their weekly luncheons frown on high brow stuff and call for pep talks by live wires. The city expresses a practical religion in gen- erous contributions to humanitarian movements, Houn’ Dawe vs. Art 233 and humanitarianism is a factor in civilization. But a leading clergyman who suggests that one may doubt the virgin birth and still be a Chris- tian, is frightened by a Fundamentalist outburst into pleading the next Sunday that he was mis- quoted; and of one hundred and fifty church notices printed on a Saturday. in The Star, one third are of eccentric sects. It has built some stunning viaducts, but has allowed the main en- trance to its shopping district to be made a bill- board alley. ‘There are stirrings of musical ap- preciation in its public schools, of musical compo- sition in its conservatories, of painting in the art institute. Indeed, it may fairly be said that these interests are increasingly vigorous and wide spread. But the overwhelming popular desire for music over the radio is Jazz and there has been no addition to the Nelson collection of paintings. A. genuine flair for dramatic production has devel- oped in recent years, and some young artists and actors are painting their own scenery and putting on their own plays. But there has been an even greater development of moronic burlesque houses. The two civilizations are still contending. As William James said of the universe, it feels like a real fight. ‘There is no certainty of a favorable outcome. The issue is in doubt. The city at the Great Bend, realizing its achievements and sens- ing its energy, is boundlessly hopeful. So am I. There is substantial ground for hope. But at times—I wonder. ey Kae eds 4A ea ; ' Fe aN + ‘ i Bs Soret i ‘ : . a | ‘ We i at * ; at : ‘ é , . Boa 2 ; a i " : ¥ 7 SAN ANTONIO: Tur UNSAINTED ANTHONY By Dora Neill Raymond H mea 1s} MMe: Veet ft SAN ANTONIO HE wall that guarded San Fernando has come to dust. The mission outpost of the Spanish Franciscans has expanded into the City of San Antonio, advertised by railway folders as easy of access. Do not believe them. ‘The City, too, has walls. There are some who think to enter via train, taxi, and registration at a “good hotel.” ‘They do not knock at the city gates and there is nothing opened unto them. If they pay appropriately they may experience in San Antonio the same creature comforts that a hundred other cities have to offer. They will find, it is probable, a fair share of the three-hundred-and-sixty-five sunshiny days which, by boast of the Chamber of Com- merce, make golfing possible throughout the year. They will make dutiful excursions to the Alamo and Missions, and depart in the same philistine manner in which they came. “San ’Tone,” they will call the city they have left. Tourist femina will remember it as the place where she solved that cross-word puzzle Cousin May Etta had tucked into her hand bag. ‘Tourist homo will remember it, perhaps, for a pleasant round of golf at the municipal links or a successful morning’s fishing at Medina Lake. 237 238 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER To these good people the city has very definitely been “not at home.” The years have brought many such strangers to her gates. Worse far, she has had to suffer from the permanent resi- dence of many of these people, withstand their efforts, constant and disconcerting, to make her over to their proper liking. ‘They would divest her of her mantilla, bob her hair, cap her with a cloche, give her gum to chew and a jazz tune to chew it by. It is no wonder that the City has be- come most adept in the art of withdrawal, that she has learned subtlety, is reticent, secretive, more prone to brood on memories of the past than smil- ingly to extend her hands in welcome to the present. But let no one mistake her seeming impassivity. She is not quiescent. She will not suffer her dig- nity and her traditions to be impinged upon. Let no one think that she will yield to-day, nor yet to- morrow, her gift of magic, her feeling for ro- mance. Nor does she mean quite to obliterate that strain of gay diablerie to which she owes no small part of her fascination. She may don the gar- ments of right living and wear them with a fine pretence of sober virtue. But that is only because she had found the reward of such behavior to be vastly agreeable—a revived appreciation, a fresher joy in the gipsy tatterdemalia of her vice. This much conceded, one need not despair of knowing such a city. It is not the hauteur of wealth, the dignity of age—most surely not the aloofness of virtue—that rings her round as un- Tur UNSAINTED ANTHONY 239 approachable. One has only to know how to play as well as to work, how to dream as well as to act, and the City will not beckon, it will embrace. She had at first merely stifled a yawn, not lifted her. eyebrows. Ah, but if you know how to amuse, how to appreciate, smiles the City, the matter is vastly different. There was an Irishman who learned to turn the trick. For half a century one Bryan Callaghan held firm the city’s favor. For a good part of that time, as mayor, he was a near approach to those Wild Geese of Ireland, who lorded it in South America and in the Latin cities of the Continent. Only a few of what was known as the better class of the Americans approved of him. It is probable he approved of them even less. Certainly he must have had a contempt for their misunderstanding of the City. Do but learn his method. A word of wooing Spanish, the leisure to enjoy, courtly phrase or impudent blarney, give these and you may take your pleas- ure. Such tales you will hear, such delights you will enter into as will mark you, to mutual con- tentment, as the City’s own. For the City is very like an aged coquette—all eager to display her wares so soon as she is sure you will appreciate. But always, like this old co- quette, she will keep something from you. Swift in change, constant in paradox, she will defy even a pledged lover’s effort to describe her. Once she was visited by a poet whose vision had been clarified by the suffering of a slow disease, by skill in music and long use of artful words. Even this man failed 240 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER in his metaphor. “If peculiarities were quills,” wrote Sidney Lanier, “San Antonio would be a rare porcupine.” ‘This is not apt, for it suggests discomfort, aggressiveness and rigorous upright- ness. San Antonio, in spite of its heroic history, has been in each of its two hundred and ten years a city of repose. That this has been is due, in part, to its geog- raphy. ‘The winding river that gives the City its name, gives it, also, its character. Always it ap- proaches, withdraws from the City’s heart, says farewell, and then returns to say farewell again. There must be bridges, and yet more bridges, that business may be carried on in the midst of such inappropriate dalliance. And the clipped staccato sounds of to-day in San Antonio must submit to a softening because of the murmurous, languid river. ‘Two men meet, give a brisk handshake, walk forward, make the air tense for a minute with their business jargon. A bridge is to be crossed. One points below to the “sea walls” that were built soon after Galveston’s disaster. They stop to argue over whether or not the embank- — ments serve or deride their purpose. A Mexican boy swims by with lazy strokes that scarce disturb the milky greenness of the water. But the flecks of white foam near his sunbronzed body suggest, somehow, the wish to go to Degen’s. Perhaps be- cause when a thought is close to the surface al- most anything will bring it into consciousness. The men repair to Degen’s. Herr Degen is an aged German with something Tue UNsAINnTED ANTHONY 241 more than the Rhineland’s classic Gemiitlichkeit to commend him; to wit, his own recipe for lager beer. He has long served those customers whom he pleased, at what hours he pleased; and if, to- day, he obeys the federal law and serves no one at all, he no longer upholds the tradition of San Antonio’s individualism. It is a matter that could be easily decided by determining the amount of sidewalk traffic on the two blocks between his home and the old Menger Hotel. The place was —is’—not a saloon. ‘There was no bar. The beer was served, not in steins, but in long glasses. One could walk to the rear and look out upon the old man and his assistants at work in the small brewery, the brewery whose product won first prize at the St. Louis Exposition, to the wonder of certain competitors from Milwaukee. There was another German, one of the modern city’s builders, Father Mahncke, whose palm garden, in days gone by, provided like diversion. Before six none but men entered, but at night they returned, with wives and children, to order Kalter Aufschnitt and more beer. For the Ger- man custom of family stein rights was early adopted by the Americans. But Father Mahncke’s greatest usefulness was in developing the City’s parks. And none can surely say whether he beautified these in order to create a proper suburban atmosphere for beer drinking or whether he encouraged the granting of concessions so that a mild imbibing might intensify the ap- preciation of nature’s harmonies. 242 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER These Germans, who have grown into the City’s life, came over, many of them, because of political troubles in their own country. The Lib- eral exiles of the forties were of finer mettle than the utilitarian emigrants that followed. In San Antonio, they lost their bitterness and called the street on which they built their homes King Wil- liam Street, in the belief that the new king might rectify those errors committed by his august brother. But though they gave the street a royal name, they dropped the vons from their own names,—Herff, Kalteyer, Gross, Duerler, Ditt- mar, Hummel, Meusebach showed their pride only in their honesty and obedience to the laws of their new government. They built a hall for concerts, kept themselves fit by their turnverein— retained the good of the old and gained much good from the new. ‘Their wives carried on the old customs, baked such nut cakes at Christmas as they had baked in Germany, had their windows washed on the accustomed days, whether or not a Texas norther blew or the rains descended in torrents. When the Great War came the name of the street was changed to Pershing Avenue, but the window washing, and cake baking, and the kaffee klatsches continued as usual. The street is still a pleasant, shady place, with cooling views of lawns that slope down to the River. Nothing in it chimes with its new name. One of these Germans who made himself be- loved above all others was Dr. Ferdinand Herff. —“The old Doctor,” he came to be called to dis- THe UNSAINTED ANTHONY 243 tinguish him from his son, who followed in his footsteps. He did grow to be very old, so old that he could answer only a few of the many who asked his services. But he never changed his fee-—‘‘one dollar”—even though the old figure under the grey shawl his wife had wrapped around him showed fatigue at a call made when younger physicians were sleeping. No wonder that others of his profession were angered! The old Doctor had more skill than any of them. His patients came from other states and the interior of Mexico. A. dollar, he would explain, had seemed much money in the old days, and seemed so still. He was consistently negligent in collecting this “much money.” It was his wife who, once in so many months, checked up his accounts and sent out his bills. In the afternoon one could see them driving together in leisurely fashion. His grey plaid shawl, her gently Victorian bonnet were pleasant parts of the City’s fine mosaic. Someday his let- ters will be published. ‘They will prove, not only the letters of a pioneer physician, but of a political exile who was constantly and intelligently con- cerned for the well-being of the Fatherland. The City’s annals tell of an earlier doctor, less skilled but no less picturesque. ‘This other fol- lower of Eisculapius lacked the advantage of ana- tomical study in German universities. Once after an Indian raid, he showed much jubilation over acquiring the body of a very tall Comanche. Next day he exhibited its still pink skeleton. The neigh- bors were curious as to how he had disposed of 244 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER those carnal parts that were superfluous. He ex- plained that, quite simply, he had thrown them into the River. Thereupon half the women in town became ill, for the River then supplied the drinking water. | But even such gory cargo as this could not keep the River long in deep disfavor, One cannot but think that the doctor must have been right when he claimed that the old stream had dutifully performed its unaccustomed mission in the night and made it- self fresh and clean by breakfast time. It is so hospitable to summer houses, to laughing children who swing out across its purling waters on their grapevine swings, to the pecan trees and the nut- ting parties that follow its twisting banks that one cannot believe it sinister. It is true that, in days less civilized, it was hos- pitable also to the deadly water moccasin. Nurses still tell stories of what has happened to children who ran away to play unguarded near the River. There is a very fascinating Elsie-Venner story of a girl who was veritably charmed by one of these snakes so that she went each day to gaze at it. Finally she brought her little brother that he might look too. Then the snake grew jealous, struck her and she died. The Mexicans have many legends of the River, for they best understand it. In the hurly-burly of to-day it still speaks their soft language, as it has ever since Don Domingo Ramon made good Spain’s claim against the daring young French lordling, St. Denis. It would have been well had THE UNSAINTED ANTHONY 245 Madame Candelaria been made to talk about this River. Madame Candelaria was so old that it seemed time had laid a set of lines upon her face to serve the younger women as a pattern for their drawn work. People said she must have been one of those besieged within the Alamo. Madame Candelaria sat in her wrinkles with her ugly pelon dog in her lap and did not deny the circumstance. Tourists began to come to see her every day. It was sug- gested that she charge a fee for their admission. This was done, photographs were sold, she evolved a story and was well paid for its repetition. The pelon dog waxed very fat and vicious, and the wrinkles, thankfully, did not diminish. Only the oldest inhabitants remained contemptuous of the history that was being made before their very eyes. But Madame Candelaria could have talked truth- fully of the River. Then the old tamale vender, with his odorous burden,—more pungent for the heat that came up through the brazier—he must know the River well. When he pauses on his rounds, it is always on some bridge or other. And on the bridges, too, stand the venders of Mexican candies,—merchants whose stock in trade is borne on a tray strapped to the neck or heaped upon a little folding table. What will you choose, sticky cakes of pecans or brittle, thin ones; sugary rolls, pink or white, with nuts as filling; long streamers of candy, pink or white, also, and very, very sweet, candied bits of pumpkin? One has but to observe the way these old men wave 246 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER their gaudy, ribboned “shoo flys” to know at once that they are River’s kin. In the hotels, now, one can buy these candies carefully wrapped and boxed with high regard for cleanliness. But those who passed their childhood in San Antonio think the dulces bought in the sun- light and dust of the street had finer flavor. Then, too, in dealing thus al fresco, there was the fascina- tion of getting a pelon. Has ever a hotel given a pelon? 'The pelon is the little something extra— the lagniappe of New Orleans. The Mexican word comes from the old custom of giving the pur- chaser something to take home for the baby,—the bald-headed one, the pelon. It is true that some say the word is a shortening of peloncillo, a bit of candy, but the other explanation is the better. It affords a valuable commentary on Mexican prac- tice in feeding the young. Even the American grocers had to observe the custom at one time. Children asked quite boldly for pelon and that place was taboo that failed to yield it. It is not claimed that tamale venders ever paid this tribute, perhaps the indulgent Mexicans drew the line at feeding tamales. to their babies. Then, too, tamale mer- chants do not like to hear this word, pelon. Too often they have been accused of sacrificing a black, hairless dog or so, the better to plump out the fill- ing of their corn husks. Perhaps it is because of this omission that the number of tamale venders diminishes so steadily before the competition of the American managed restaurants. These are models of efficiency where Tuer UNSAINTED ANTHONY QA4T one may be served with an entire dinner in which the only course not seasoned with chile is the after dinner coffee. Atmosphere, too, is generously in- cluded. The walls are hung with Navajo blankets and Mexican serapes. ‘There is abundant pottery in evidence. Sometimes there is a glimpse on en- trance of a wizened crone, half hidden in the shad- ows, beating maize into a paste on a stone metate. This is for your tortillas. Very good these, when served just after the paste has been mixed with water and baked on heated iron. But if you try to eat them cold, you'll think stone has begotten stone, iron, iron and the corn disappeared, somehow, in the process. No such delusion ever troubled those who dined at Madame Garza’s. There the tortillas were of an unexcelled perfection. There was a fascination simply in going to Mad- ame Garza’s on Dolorosa Street. It was eminently respectable. Madame Garza, like Herr Degen, was an austere artist who made preparations for a limited number and was discriminating in her cli- entele. But her restaurant was in her home and her home bordered on a district of ill repute. Women of respectability never thought of walking down its streets alone, for no man wished to be seen there. It was only with a brother or a father that one went to Madame Garza’s. Then one walked with eyes straight ahead, though curiosity would have kept them active. It is true that part of this district had to be skirted on the way to the market, but then not on foot. For in San Antonio no one carries a market basket on the arm, as 248 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER women do in other cities. One could gaze at the Laclede. Windows would be open there. It had been a favorite hotel for gamblers. Men choose it still as a fit place for suicide. Past that, the houses grew secretive. The close shut windows, the al- most deserted streets, the hidden aspect of it all, was disconcerting, made one too restless to think in proper fashion of fruits, and vegetables, and family menus. Close by the market entrance, the Mexican wom- en crouched above the cages of little singing birds, gay-colored, helpless|s How old these women looked! Beneath the shadow of their shawls, peaked out to fend away the sun, their mask-like faces seemed insensible. And yet a tracery of pas- sion’s wrinkles showed they had felt much in van- ished youth. They sat with never lifted eyes that yet appraised their customers, their neighbors’ wares, nay, life itself. They had known all of it, its different marts, the worth of its merchandise, the worth of the pay, the worth of death at the end. It is well that, in the scheme of things municipal, a plaza is close by and the cool shadows of San Fernando’s. The plazas are always optimistically verdant, even in winter time. There are many of them, and those in the older districts have their histories. But now, except for the one that spreads its green before the Alamo, they do not suggest grim days of war. Even this one can content it- self with offering refuge to those who battle in this age of industry, with warring only against commer- SHILHSIGa AHL NI OINOLNV Nys ARIA 41 aw Tur UNsAINtTED ANTHONY 249 cialism. Here there shall be flowers, it says, and sunny benches, instead of gainful office buildings. At night, in the old days, there was music and the soft rustling of women’s dresses, the little moving lights of cigars and cigarettes, and laughter under the indulgent stars. ‘Travelers of half a century ago have written of the bespangled troupe of mountebanks who used to parade there, drum and trombone going clamorously before, to gain a crowd for their evening’s performance. Once the Banda Policia of the City of Mexico sealed friendship by playing its fine best before the Alamo. Never is the plaza gayer than on the twenty- first of April, when the city celebrates the victory of San Jacinto. The flower-decked cars and car- riages divide to circle it in opposite directions and a mock battle, with blossoms for weapons, is waged before the grey old Alamo. It was a congress- man’s wife, they say, who brought the pretty idea back from the Riviera. It has taken kindly to transplanting. This part of the spring carnival is always a success. Given flowers, pretty girls and an historic background, it cannot fail to be. Then, too, the Government, itself, lends aid. From Fort Sam Houston comes the regimental band, trim officers, fresh from the Point, complaisant cannon, their caissons rustling in an unaccustomed garni- ture of flowers. To be sure, Uncle Sam levies trib- ute, and to such extent that the City is becoming known as the mother-in-law of the Army. Its daughters make the sacrifice not unwillingly and having linked themselves with the Army seldom 250 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER leave it,—although they may indulge themselves more than once in a change of husbands. San An- tonio is a city as honestly proud of her record for divorce as of her record for matrimony. She boasts, herself, that she has flourished under seven flags. But carnival time is not the time to be taking thought as to which column of statistics one’s ac- tions may commit one. It comes when spring has made the night air soft and the heat is still but gentle. Arches of gay lights fling themselves across the streets, like the serpentine streamers of the crowds that pass beneath. Music, torchlights, Mardi Gras cars—massively grotesque with alle- gory, girls who queen it for a night, such a court of royalty as most delights democracy, who could be serious when the city flashes castanets? At night on the plazas, chile-stands spring up, spread with red table-cloths, lighted by oil lamps. Old crones, their sombre shawls draped gracefully, serve steam- ing dishes, each one more highly seasoned than the last. Children and pelon dogs play beneath the tables. The children one may step on. The dogs must be treated with consideration. At the Queen’s Ball there will be satin covered programmes, orchids and long-stemmed roses from St. Louis, French frocks and royal jewels sent from Tiffany’s. But the few within, as well as the crowd without, keep to the spirit of San Antonio. In New York, during the opera season, there are many who stand each night on the pavements for a glimpse of the exquisite ladies who must pass Tuer UNSAINTED ANTHONY 251 from their limousines to the entrance. No beauty is ever cheered, nor expects to be. It is gayer to go to the Queen’s Ball. Some years the court arrives in carnival cars, a milky way in motion down the wind- ing streets. ‘The crowd masses thick about them. Torch lights glimmer on upturned faces, pricked out, star fashion, in the dusk. ‘Those of the court who arrive first cluster at the windows to watch the approach of the others. It takes grace and poise to descend from a carnival car when all the world is looking. One princess of the night, in doing so, has left a pleasant memory. Those in the windows knew she had refused a Mardi Gras queendom out of loyalty to her own city. They called her name and cheered when the lumbering car that bore her paused and the ladder was placed against its tow- ering grotesquerie. The princess stood a moment in silhouette against the night, then raised both hands to throw a kiss up to the windows. Her cape fell from her and, quite spontaneously, a cry of ad- miration for her beauty came from those below. One man, an uncouth fellow from the Lord knows where, reached out his hand to help in her descent. With military quickness, an officer from the Post pushed him back and held his arms to her. But my lady ignored him, slipped her hand into that of the unknown cavalier, and descended with as pretty a grace as any princess in a fairy tale. This was Julia of the House of Armstrong. Her name should be recorded. | In April, the wild flowers, too, are holding carni- val, They are their gayest on Alamo Heights. 252 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER There is a bravura about these vagrant, fragrant denizens of the field that would shock their sisters of the north. Bluebonnets, purple verbena, wine cups, thistle blooms—thorned alarmingly—sturdy nigger toes thrusting themselves above the dainty tracery of queen’s lace handkerchief, all clamor pell mell for the favors of the sultan sun. And this they have done each year since the King of Spain set his seal to the deed that placed on Spanish maps, the township San Fernando. The wild flow- ers know the old boundaries as well as the City’s fathers: stone mound at the River’s head, stone mound around the live oak tree. More than a hun- dred years after the City’s founding, old men were summoned to court to tell what other old men had told them of the ancient landmarks. The lost deed they had seen, and described so well its contents that a young Canadian engineer was able to survey the township. The Supreme Court of the state sus- tained the City against those who had encroached on land within its boundaries. Six leagues by these old mounds, the Cibolo on the east, the Leon on the west, the Jacolitos, and, in between, the helter skel- ter lines of Texas wild flowers. To modern think- ing, the boundaries were perplexing. But, in those days, it would have been daring Providence and the Comanches had attempt been made to estab- lish metes and bounds more definite. Alamo Heights has seen fit, in these later days, to incorporate itself. The wild flowers are no longer to be picked. There is an Irish mayor, the bachelor brother of the Misses O’Grady whose din- Tue UNSAINTED ANTHONY 2538 ners are remembered by all of epicurean palate. If one is to remember San Antonio most pleasantly, one must dine at the Argyle. Its flavor then will linger. Army men and their wives have sung the praises of the sisters O’Grady in every part of the Union. Kipling’s Judy O’Grady is scarce less famous. Had Judy known how to chill a water- melon to exactly the right temperature, to plug it and fill it with champagne, as they do at the Ar- gyle, could she have tossed a cake together with the unerring abandon of the O’Gradys, no man would have coupled her shining name with that of a mere Colonel’s lady. Very different from the Argyle, but boasting its own peculiar gustatory excellence, was a curious little place in the old City Market House across from the Library. It was kept by Ernest— surname unknown. Bare tables, pewter knives and iron stone china ensured the place from feminine invasion. The excellence of its steaks and certain other dishes made it the noontime rendez- vous of all the lawyers who were too fortunately busy to return to their families. It was said that Ernest had been the head chef of Maximilian. The story made it easy to understand the peculiarly sad expression of the Mexican Emperor in that por- trait showing him just before execution. Eiven to a prospective martyr of St. Peter’s faith, Heaven could promise no glories such as Ernest’s steaks. Another famous dining place was, and happily still is, the Menger. It was built before the Civil War. It is said that Robert E. Lee knew it ap- 254 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER preciatively. Certainly a goodly number of lesser celebrities have passed its portals, lingered in its patio and bought gay boutonnieres from the little flower-sellers that haunted it at evening. In the old days it was the favorite meeting place for stock- men. There was always a line of chairs on the side- walks, in front and on the side, tilted at precarious angles. ‘The chairs would come down with a bang of protest against some yarn of more than usual exaggeration, more quietly when adjournment was taken to the bar. Aleck Sweet, of Texas Siftings, has told the story of the effect of the Menger on a cowboy of the days when the species was disingenuous. The cowboy was told by the clerk that dinner was served from twelve to three. He whooped amazement at the prospect of such gourmandizing. But at full meridian he ambled to his table and did not rise till three, when he announced that he “felt sort o’ sat- isfied and fixed up for business.” 'This last he found no doubt, in equal measure. There were any num- ber of places that offered opportunities for the con- tracting of such business as cowboys came to town for. In San Antonio, virtue has never raged su- preme. There was on Military Plaza and West Commerce Street, the Silver King, a gambling house conducted most courteously by Arthur Ware. Mr. Ware was a gentleman who had hospitable con- cern for the safety and well-being of his customers. In 1896, Harry Bennett, a noted gambler, was killed on the stairs by Bob Marks. An instant later, Mr. Ware administered capital punishment Tur UNsAINTED ANTHONY 255 on Bob Marks. Nothing less than the state law of 1905, making it a felony to conduct a gambling house and providing for injunction proceedings, could have put such a place out of business. On Main Plaza, flaunting itself before the Court House, was the Crystal. It had three proprietors, Billy Sims, Sam Berliner and Will Ford. It was this Billy Sims who was tried for the killing of Ben Thompson of Austin and of King Fisher. The two unfortunates were at the exact location where the Spanish fathers first pitched camp. They were not there for historical research but to observe from their box the sprightly performance on the stage of Jack Harris’s Variety Theatre. 'The homicide seems to have been planned with the nicety of a political assassination. Certainly there was con- certed action and the shots were fired by more than one. Everyone was satisfied with the result, in- cluding the prompt acquittal of Billy Sims. It seemed fair enough,—Ben Thompson had had his innings in the place. He had killed Jack Harris there with a double barreled shot gun. Sims was a quiet, well-dressed man with manners that would have been a credit to the gentlemen gamblers of Bret Harte. Most desperadoes, strangely enough, are reported as answering to the conventional description of a house dog—‘gentle, fond of children.” Aleck Sweet used to tell a story of how one of his sons was nearly killed by the misdirected kindness of Ben Thompson. Thompson. at one time was Chief of Police of Austin and his little daughter became 256 Tor TAMING OF THE FRONTIER a friend of Mr. Sweet’s son. One day she asked him to “stay to dinner.” Hestayed. Ben Thomp- son sat at the head of the table and when the little boy’s plate was empty would fix his eye on him and say, “Have some more steak, sonny. Have some gravy and hot biscuit.” That night a very sick little boy moaned that Ben Thompson had made him eat, and eat until he was ready to cry. Next day the too hospitable host met the father and mildly berated him for neglecting sufficiently to feed his offspring. Before the days of Ben Thompson’s fame, an old gambling house on South Flores Street had already added a quota to the picturesque wickedness of San Antonio. This was The Black Elephant, resort of stockmen, buffalo hunters and the old trail men. It got its name from a big slate colored elephant, painted on one of the outside walls. Here Melvin Ferrar gambled. He could afford the pastime. West of the Pecos his cattle roamed over a ranch of ten million acres. He set his stakes at some- where west of the North Star. Of equal age was The Buckhorn Saloon, which later degenerated into a sort of museum of horns, hides and snakeskins. It was here that there oc- curred the tragedy of the parrot. From 1850 on, the Butterworth Stage Road stretched its sandy, sinuous way for two thousand miles from San Francisco to the Buckhorn. Up to this time, re- ligious processions in the town were very common. The last sacrament was borne through the streets to the dying, while surpliced priests attended it Tuer UnNsAINTED ANTHONY 257 with pious chanting. “Ora pro nobis,” they intoned. And the parrot swung in his hoop and intoned, “Ora pro nobis,” also. After the bird took up its residence at the Buckhorn, it used to send its pray- ers after the departing stage coach. In view of the frequent Indian scalping parties, they were appro- priate. j The parrot was kept because the saloon keeper thought the “ora pro nobis” had a salutary influ- ence on the keno and poker games. Men felt that they were in the shadow of the sanctuary, if not of death itself. Honesty seemed the better policy. Later, the bird became corrupted and mixed foul oaths with its churchly chanting. 'Then he was shot by a gentle desperado, who could not sanction sacrilege. Just where sacrilege begins, of course, is a very fine point on which one cannot expect Methodists, mystics and desperadoes to be in full agreement. The Roman Catholics, alone of Christians, are cap- able of mixing the affairs of God and man with profit and satisfaction. ‘Take the matter of nam- ing the River. The Indians called it Chem-quem- ka-ko, “Old-man-coming-home-from-the-lodge,”’ be- cause it meanders seven miles between its springs and the City, whereas a sober river could get over the ground in about three. The Spaniards mistook this descriptive name for that of some tribal god, so they piously renamed the stream in honor of St. Anthony. ‘Thereupon the natives, believing their new friends had translated the name as best they could, concluded Saint Anthony to be a very jovial 258 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER saint. They accepted him, forthwith into their cal- endar. Very willingly, the Spaniards preserved the illusion and St. Anthony took his place in strange disguise above the altar of the old Cathedral. He appeared in this early mural, astride a mustang and in the war paint of a bold Comanche,—halo floating above and a buffalo scuttling before to es- cape his winging arrow. It came to be the custom for the Spaniards and their converts to do honor to the Saint’s day by riding through the streets at full tilt, in pious emulation of the metamorphosed Paduan. One can imagine that Captain Jack Hays was most contemptuous of the new St. Anthony and his halo. Captain Hays was one of those Indian fight- ers whose intimate knowledge of the different tribes led him to believe the only good Indian was a dead one. In command of the Rangers, stationed in the City before the Civil War, he much deprecated add- ing to the deviltry of the place any such celebra- tions as the Hispano-Indian saint evoked on his name day. Not, of course, that the Rangers were not sociable and fond, themselves, of celebrations. When the Indians came in with deer and buffalo hides to buy a big time, they were not disturbed in their purchase unless their exuberance became un- duly dangerous. Then the party was quickly elim- inated from the landscape. The City, whenever possible, has encouraged so- ciability. That is why retired stockmen and army officers make the place the home of their old age. That is why it is a favorite refuge for the political Tur UnsAIntep ANTHONY 259 exiles of neighboring Mexico. The City has a hos- pitable come-hither-air for those who seek it out for purposes not utilitarian. She offers, if you wish it, “a free and lazy, loloppy sort of life,”’ and tolerant indifference of conspiracy. But for those who come as the missionaries of commercial uplift, she has no welcome. They may go to Dallas and assist in the erection of a city on the 1930 model. Losoya, Sole- dad, Navarro, Flores, Dolorosa, these are not proper street names for the addresses of skyscrap- ers. They were bequeathed to the city by the Span- ish families who came from the Canaries. The Ver- amendi House, the old Twohig place, the Ursuline Convent, plead that their philosophy of life may still be cherished. A very modern department store advertises it- self as in the heart of San Antonio. Prospective grooms from Mexico come there, appropriately, to buy the trousseaus for their fiancées. Perhaps, geo- graphically, it is in the City’s centre. But the true heart of San Antonio is the Alamo, fronted by a quiet plaza and flanked by the drowsy, comfortable Menger. Some slight attempt, it is true, has been made to introduce business even into the citadel. There is a counter at the entrance where post cards and pamphlets can be bought. But sales are made most unobtrusively. The shades of the men who gave their lives there—men of sword, and bowie knife and gun, knew much of the starry heavens and the prairies, but nothing at all of ledgers. Even the most modern of the City’s merchants has had to bow to the local tolerance of beggary. 260 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER The only concession made is that, whereas the pro- fession of the unprofessional was once exercised at all times, it is now arranged that beggars, once a week, shall come for their dole direct to the busi- ness office, without molesting customers. This in- vasion of efficiency is a great handicap on the beg- gars. It robs them of all chance of developing technique. The artist in individualism now makes his living otherwise. There was Philip, or Felipe, who regularly car- ried on negotiations with the best business houses in San Antonio, and with no more expense to him- self than begging would involve. His stock was a bundle of yellowed papers. ‘These he wrapped carefully and delivered at stated intervals to regu- lar customers. May St. Peter note that he was never turned off empty handed. He worked from dawn to dusk, did no one harm, and his activities were quite as serviceable as those of many other citizens. Another odd character, a former slave, whose exquisite manners must have mirrored those of his master, evolved a costume of such mingled pathos and absurdity, that money was freely given him out of pity and as payment for amusement. His old black broad-cloth suit was extended to out- landish size by wires and paper padding, and yet worn with such unapproachable dignity that even children feared to laugh at him. The City understands these gentle zanies. It understood, too, young Sam Maverick. Son of the Sam Maverick who was one of San Antonio’s early heroes, he undertook to guide the destiny of the Tur UNSAINTED ANTHONY 261 Maverick Bank. Its failure hurt a very goodly number of the population. No one questioned the unfortunate president’s honesty, no one censured him. He gave everything that he had in atonement for his ignorance of business. Men seldom speak of his misfortune. They praise him as one of the bravest of the Terry Rangers and one of the or- ganizers of the famous Belknap Rifles, the City’s own. This crack squad, for fifteen or twenty years, was more the favorite with the fair than any com- pany at the Post. Recently there died in San Antonio, a New Eng- lander who long had made his home there and had increased his wealth to large proportions. He has left his estate to be used as a retreat for “elderly women of culture without means,’—a bequest in itself a gentle recognition of the City’s influence. Men say of him now that “while in a sense a foreigner and never quite naturalized, he was high grade.” There was a time, a horrible time to remember, when the City became commercialized. That was when the Government plopped down upon it one of the largest of the wartime concentration camps. San Antonio never will quite forgive this, nor, per- haps, will the men who were sent there. It brought to the surface in malignant form all of the evil ten- dencies that peace had kept in dark abeyance. The old Post had seemed no more than a suburb of the City itself. Its clock tower, its trim parade grounds, the shady lawns and hospitable homes of the officers did not suggest the shameless waste and 262 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER hurry, the mechanic thoroughness and devastation that is war. Within the City, closely nestled on the River, is the Arsenal. It is doubtful whether the children who were its neighbors knew just what an arsenal was for. It seemed so innocently pleasant a part of the landscape. There was a mound or two of can- non balls on the lawn, with some old fashioned can- non. ‘They seemed as void of harm as the weapons that visitors stared at in the Alamo. The officers had pleasant wives, were in search of maids for wives, or frankly ready for flirtation. The children from the Upper and Lower Post rat- tled to school each morning in the Government am- bulance. The Army seemed an aggregate of more or less happy families who had elected to spend their time in San Antonio. A new Post was being built that promised to become as pleasant as the old ones. In 1898, the City had known, for a time, a khaki army. There had been excitement over the barbari- ties that Spain was practicing on Cuba. ‘This, the City understood. Spanish cruelty was, perhaps, like that of Santa Anna’s men. “Remember the Maine,” she adjudged as similar to, but not quite so inciting, as the older cry of “Remember the Alamo.” She watched her men enlist with appro- priate enthusiasm. On the grounds where every year an International Fair was held (international because Mexico joined hands across the border), a heartily energetic gentleman from New York was organizing the Rough Riders. It was a little diffi- Tuer UNSAINTED ANTHONY 263 cult to become accustomed to a Rough Rider who wore eye-glasses. None of the bowlegged cow punchers, who before had helped to make the City’s history had ridden thus accoutred. But the gen- tleman showed himself no tenderfoot. He was granted a choice assortment of her sons. Also Captain McAdoo let down the bars of admission to the Belknap Rifles. The personality of Judge Robert B. Green was such that the recruits he gathered for his former company were impressed with the honor of their new connection. Other companies were formed. Some of the men were sent to Cuba and brought back glory, and some were only sent to Florida and a diet of embalmed beef. But the affair was shortly over. War time titles were dropped. Captain McAdoo returned, but died soon after,—one of those victims of war to whom it is not granted to die in battle. The rough riding gentleman from New York continued to cavort spectacularly, and sometimes to good pur- pose, but only athwart the field of politics. Fort Sam Houston dreamed and danced, paraded, flirted. In April of 1917, it was jolted into more martial action. The City that, long ago, had been chosen as the base for the frontier army at El Paso was selected as a base for the gathering and training of men to be sent overseas. Row upon row of ugly frame buildings sprang up. Men poured into them from the east, south, north and west. And the sins of the City went out to welcome them. Some wives came, worried and unhappy, or else feverishly gay. 264 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER But in the training camps there could be no place for women. Men were made into officers on the field. Lieutenants, captains, were college men, who a few months before knew less of drill than foot- ball or fraternity affairs. On Saturday night, the privates swarmed into the City. No force of State Rangers could have kept them in order, had they shown themselves unruly. But for the most part, they were pitifully obedient, ready to do as they were ordered, ready to believe as they were ordered, willing to die when that was ordered. Professors of history, patriotically deputed by the State Uni- versity, came to teach them quite all that they should know. The ladies of the City sent their cars to give the sick men outings. Privates were invited into homes that now they cannot enter,—and, perhaps, would not wish to. They were danced with and féted in a gorgeous orgy of democracy. Close to the Alamo, a fine old home was turned into a place of amuse- ment by the indefatigable “Y.” Matches were made, marriages hastened to ensure a proper quota for the generation that was to enjoy a world safe for democracy. Among the citizens there were end- less drives,—drives for money, drives for men. Merchants gave freely. They could well afford to. Their sales had doubled. All too often, their prices doubled also. No male clerk was safe from inquiry as to why he was not in uniform. Everyone must go. Their positions would be held open for their return. “Minute Men” spoke on the Liberty Loans at the theatres. Canada’s slogan was thrown out THe UNSAINTED ANTHONY 265 for the City’s emulation. “Give until it hurts. Then keep on giving.” Canny business men learned that they could make a tidy bit by using the swill from the camps to fatten porkers. On the streets they joked each other on the profits of their “hog ranches.” And the women sewed and made bandages or showed patriotic fervor by the multiplicity and democracy of their wartime entertainments. But the dress of the Red Cross no more means purity than an eve- ning gown may mean abandon. War, when it brings suffering, perhaps may purify but the prep- aration for war gives, surely, the same heightened opportunity for evil that it does for good. If the worst gossip of the city proved as nimble with her fingers as her tongue, her piles of bandages won her forgiveness. Only one form of criticism was taboo. Of the war, of the Army, of the Government, nothing but good should be said. When the son of one of the leading lawyers of the City lost control of his plane and crashed to his death, there were hushed whispers that through some oversight, some loss of medical certificates, he had been inoculated three times instead of once, that he had been in no condi- tion to go up. The Government named one of the flying fields for him. ‘The City became pleasantly proud of her young hero. Only a few remained curious as to the manner of his death. Their curi- osity, of course, was out of season. Nor was it patriotic to question the expediency of some of the entertainments countenanced by the officers, to in- 266 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER quire as to the prevalence of certain diseases, the causes of epidemics. San Antonio, cosmopolitan, leisurely, picturesquely wicked San Antonio, had become one hundred per cent American. ‘The United States Army had tilted an infantry hat at rakish angle on the City’s head, and called her, be- tween a hiccough and a shout, “San ’Tone.” She deserved it. How far away seemed then the Mission days, how impotent the River! And yet it was these ruined Missions, this murmurous River, things in- animate, that kept secure the spirit of their being,— waited until there would again be time to soothe and to engender dreams. Swift and smooth shin- ing, the stream meandered on, as in the old days when it charmed the poet, Lanier. There were, as then, vistas of sweet lawns to be seen from the bridges, willows bending low to lave their branches, trailing Spanish moss to touch its surface. The River still combed the sea green tresses of the wan- dering water grass. Its muted lisping still floated up among the noise of traffic, like some dove voiced Spanish nun, praying heaven’s mitigation of all battles of trade or arms. And in the early twilight, dreams still came whispering adown the current among the willow sprays. Year after year, the Mexicans have performed Los Pastores on the Fiesta de Santos Reyes. The old miracle play was enacted at Christmas time, as always. Its lesson,—a glorification of creation; its blessing of peace on earth to men of good will, after so many repetitions, unlearned and unappreciated. Tur UNSAINTED ANTHONY 267 Without the City’s boundaries, past disused ace- quias, rising above the low mesquite, the twin tow- ers of Concepcion, the exquisite window of San José, Missions Espada and San Juan, still offered the sermons of their crumbling stones. Soldier, priest, artist, patient Indian convert, whose work will best endure? All of them are the City’s fa- thers,—men of the frontier, leaving old worlds, old ideas, to master those that promise better things, and trailing still, as fetters, the faults and obses- sions that have made a heavy past. As it was with them, so it is with the City’s chil- dren. Something of the spirit of the old place has entered into them, penetrated to the marrow, or, as the Spaniards better phrase it, ‘hasta sus entraitas,” and must remain till death disintegrates their carnal being. How far can they go forward? What goal can the City reach? “Pues, quién sabe?” murmurs the old River. “The way is not always forward. It is well to go slowly. Life is good.” LOS ANGELES: BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN By Paul Jordan-Smith ‘You cannot speak to us, O George Washington, But you can speak to God: Tell Him to make us good American citizens.” (Inscription on the wing of a great bronze American eagle in the foyer of Grauman’s Metropolitan Theatre, illustrating the un- conquerable faith of the modern Angeleno.) LOS ANGELES HE Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Sefiora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, known to winter pilgrims as Los Angeles, and to the local inhabitants as Los, is, in reality, less a city of angels than a paradise of realtors and a refuge for the rheumatic. It bears, however, a much worse name, in the literary journals of this country, than it deserves. San Francisco, its bitter rival, receives to this day the polite huzzas of the elect, who are yet misled by a fiction. For the New Yorker, read- ing his history of American letters, is convinced that the northern city is still the Bohemian, pagan, intellectual metropolis of the far West. He is ap- parently unaware that the earthquake and prohi- bition have transformed the town of Mark ‘Twain and Bret Harte into a fair likeness of Kansas City and Peoria. Such is the vitality of tradition. For Los Angeles the same gentleman reserves the epi- thet,—‘The soul of Iowa.” Perhaps the fault hes in the ironic power of a name, for, if its history is to be credited, the place has never been angelic. For almost 100 years after its founding in 1781, it was a town of rough and ready, draw-yer-gun-and-be-damned-to-yuh west- erners, as independent in their ways and as true 271 272 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER in their aims as the gold-seeking gentry who made San Francisco famous. From the city of narrow, motor-crowded streets, anaemic mid-westerners, and sappy “metaphysi- cians” back to the days when swarthy dons stalked about the Plaza in tight green jackets trimmed with gold; when the caballeros came thundering by, gleaming with silver; when cafeterias were gay drinking places, and when a mild city ordinance suggested that white men should avoid consummat- ing their amours with Indian lasses in the public streets, is a far off shout. Yet once upon a time this Mecca of the middle classes was dominated by such gentlemen as Nasario Dominguez, Bernardo Yorba, José Sepulveda and Don José Maria Ver- dugo, who, in their picturesque serapes and wide sombreros, made this southern town a place of vivid distinction. Early of a spring morning one might see the haughty Don Antonio Maria Lugo come prancing by on his jet black steed, followed by a mounted procession of sixteen sons, all well over six feet in height and arrayed, each of them, in finery that exceeded by far the value of a modern flivver. Gone are the favorite sports of the Latin civili- zation that enlivened this southern Pacific coast. Once men shouted at bull fights, within a stone’s ' throw of the Plaza; once the streets were strewn with the carcasses of heroic cocks; once the gay balls and fandangoes and feasts lasted for half a week; once the streets resounded till midnight with the laughter of tipsy revellers and the playful shots SU IN THE LATE FIFTIES ANGELES iS) L BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 273 of care-free worshippers of Chance. Now all, all is still save the rattle of Fords and the clatter of thick plates in the steaming cafeterias. Once the populace of Nigger Alley so resented convention that when Henry Allen in deed and truth did lawfully take and marry Doria Concha it vented its righteous indignation, celebrated its dis- grace by mobbing the hapless bridegroom with old eggs and empty bottles. Now it brays with the Rotarians and joins the Eastern Star. Once the hills were clad with vines and the presses were hard put in the service of parched throats; once the lights were never dimmed in the Bella Union, and the El Dorado flowed with golden liquors. Now the Bella Union is no more and the El] Dorado long ago bore a steeple and was trans- formed into a Methodist chapel by Parson Bland. All is deadly, dumb and democratic. But these later consummations were a long and a furious time coming. In 1854, with a population of less than four thou- sand, Los Angeles “averaged one homicide a day for every day in the year.” * According to the same authority “The Southern Californian of March 7, 1855, carried this brief notice: ‘Last Sunday night was a brisk night for killing. Four men were shot and killed and several wounded in a shooting affray,’”’ The Los Angeles Star expressed its dismay con- cerning an unpleasantness in these words: “Men hack one another in pieces with pistols and other * A History of California, by Robert Glass Cleland. 274 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER cutlery as if God’s image were of no more worth than the life of one of the two or three thousand dogs that prowl about our streets.” In 1853 there were more murders in California than in any state of the Union, and Los Angeles proudly led the rest of California by a large major- ity. It may well be noted just here that Los An- geles had been the metropolis of the state for a period of sixty-five years during the pioneer epoch: San Francisco came into sudden prominence at the time of the gold rush of 1849. At about the same period, according to Mr. Har- ris Newmark,* there occurred a happy incident which is typical of the frontier milieu and its code of justice: A certain man “presented himself as candidate for the office of sheriff; and, in order to capture the vote of the native element, he also of- fered to marry the daughter of an influential Mex- ican. A bargain was concluded and, as a result, he forthwith assumed the responsibilities and dangers of both shrieval and matrimonial life. “Before the sheriff had possessed this double dignity very long, however, a gang of horse-thieves began depredations around Los Angeles. A posse was immediately organized to pursue the despera- does, and after a short chase they located the band and brought them in. . . . Imagine the sheriff’s dismay when he found that the leader was none other than his own brother-in-law whom he had never before seen! “To make the story short, the case was tried and * Sixty Years in Southern California, by Harris Newmark. BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 275 the prisoner was found guilty; but owing to influz ence (to which most juries in those days were very susceptible) there was an appeal for judicial leni- ency. Judge Dryden, therefore, in announcing the verdict, said to the sheriff’s brother-in-law,— The jury finds you guilty as charged . . . but the jury recommends clemency. Accordingly, I declare you a free man, and you may go about your business.’ Thereupon someone in the courtroom asked: ‘What is his business?’ ‘To which the Judge, never flinch- ing, shouted: ‘Horse-stealing, sir! horse-steal- ing! 9 99 From 1848 to 1854 there was only one prominent negro in this lively city, Peter Biggs, famous as the “Black Democrat” and the municipal barber. On the side Pete was go-between for lonely gen- tlemen and ladies of easy virtue. Moreover he was aspeculator. Inthe year 1849, according to Major Horace Bell, San Francisco was infested with enor- mous rats. Los Angeles, on the other hand, bristled with cats. The negro, having an eye to American business efficiency, undertook a monopoly of southern rat catchers for the northern city. Fur- tively he walked the streets at night and while the white and Mexican populations were busied in shooting, cutting, gambling, drinking and making unlovely love, he experienced but little difficulty in gathering cats. These were caged, crated and shipped to San Francisco, where they fetched in open market from sixteen to one hundred dollars apiece. A few years later the same gentleman had an 276 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER unfortunate experience as a result of social pre- judice. One of the characteristically democratic “grand balls” of the period was being given, and the belle of the room was a particularly popular prostitute, known familiarly as Dofia Ramona. Hither came one of the city’s elect citizens, Mr. Aleck Bell, seeking amusement and the lady’s hand for the opening waltz. Dofia Ramona informed the gentleman that she was engaged for the mo- ment, but would be pleased to grant him the sec- ond dance. But when the music began Bell was enraged to behold the damsel in the arms of none other than black Pete, now resplendent in correct evening dress, and radiating pleasure, pride and perfume. There was only one thing for a gentleman to do, draw his gun and have an immediate understand- ing. ‘The music was stopped by the flourish of a Colt, and in icy tones the Southern gentleman in- quired whether Madame preferred a nigger to a white man, “Sir,” she said, “I consider it a privilege.” In reply to this social heresy Mr. Bell opened fire, and the negro, with flying coat-tails, fled from the room, nor did he stop until he reached the har- bor of San Pedro, twenty miles away. To show the generous and forgiving nature of these warm blooded people, however, it is necessary to relate that next day the whole town grieved for its enter- prising barber, Aleck Bell repented of his little im- petuosity and the negro was received to the bosom of the metropolis once more. BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 277 One must, in fairness, say this much: The early American pioneers were not responsible for the present state of things. They were upstanding, fearless men who, seeing the tremendous opportunities that were here in the Fifties, and sensing a larger freedom than pre- vailed in New England, came to this spot to raise sheep, cattle and oranges for the good of their own souls and the greater advantage of their families. They dwelt in large, thick-walled, wide-doored com- fortable quarters, and exercised a generous hospi- tality; and, within the limits of decency, were men of their own opinions. They did not stampede nor snivel, Most of their descendants have shriveled down to dull conformity, or gone to the devil from too great a prosperity. The stranger, however, will find at least this remnant of the ancient ways: anormal and whole- some lack of suspicion. The Westerner going East finds that his Traveller’s check is more often than not suspected of being counterfeit, and at the bank to which he has been directed he will be treated as a possible thief. Here the EKasterner is astounded to find his practically unidentified check accepted with careless ease, his good standing assumed, and his person uninsulted. His only devil is the realtor. It is more than possible that the downfall of Los Angeles came about through the following sequence of events: The years 1863-64 were the rainless years, and during the severe and unexpected drought cattle perished by the thousands. The ranchers were desperate: many were utterly ru- 278 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER ined. One ranch of 27,000 acres was offered for the price of taxes—one hundred and fifty dollars —, and city lots, now worth hundreds of thou- sands, were refused at a dollar and a half apiece. Then it was that the ranchers opened great sec- tions of their land to colonists from the Middle West. At about this time the news had gone abroad that the now vaunted climate was inimical to the consumption germ. And then came the rail- roads. In 1877 the Southern Pacific ran down from the north, and in the early eighties it was joined by the Sante Fé. These two railway com- panies flew at one another’s throats in deadly com- petition. During the rate war that followed, the price of a ticket from the Mississippi Valley to the land of health and open spaces fell to the round sum of one hundred cents. Who could resist? The diseased poured in and spread their tents upon a thousand hills. 'The rheumatics were next, and they signalled to their neighbors, the retired farmers from the chilly corn belt. ‘Tuberculars, rheumatics and retired farmers! A susceptible crew,—easy pickin’s for the Boston mind-healers and preachers of spiritual uplift. The parasites swarmed in droves to the feast. Out of this mess there grew and fattened the livest and most persistent gang of land pirates that the world has ever known. It be- came a crime to criticise California; a felony to whisper of an earthquake; to frown upon the climate was equivalent to committing rape. The old timers, filled with nausea, sought their graves. Yet even while they still invigorated the earth BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 279 with the glamor of their haleness, the suggestion of a certain ill fame in the city’s officially angelic title was, as we have seen, already historic. And even this year of grace and puritanism (1925) the same suggestion is frequently noticeable. This is partly owing to the influx of eastern criminals who, be- cause of the inconvenient migration of millionaires from New York and Chicago, and because of the rigors of a severe climate, elect to spend their win- ters in Southern California: owing also to the al- leged immoralities of the moving picture kings and queens: owing, finally, to the grasping nature of the aforementioned realtors, who operate without regard to season. On the other hand, the ill repute of the city may arise from the disappointment of the expectant tourist who, having read of the above recited de- linquencies, hopes to find the place an American Port Said, reeking with wine and the hootcheekoot- chee. He arrives to discover a population of Lowa farmers and sun-burned old maids in an endless chain of cafeterias, movie palaces and state picnics. He bursts over a whole column of some obscure eastern magazinelet, and declares that the city of the angels is just as dull as the traditional kingdom of heaven. And he is exactly right; for Los Angeles is a wholly typical, post-Volsteadian, American big town. Its charms are matters of climate and out- lying scenery—things that most of our other cities do not have in such abundance. The buildings, streets and people might well be the buildings, 280 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER streets and people of Dallas, Cleveland or Des Moines. Apart from the climate and scenery, the sole things that stand out are glittering sedans of HKu- ropean make, owned by ex-farm hands and café wenches who, because of a dimple or a wart, have been enthroned in the gaudy kingdom of the screen. These vacant-eyed children of the back alleys pro- vide thrills for retired Iowans, whilst they them- selves seek new sensations in ancient vices imported from the sea ports of the Mediterranean. Well, what of it? If the place exhibits all the vices of the middle plains, it is also alive with the same eagerness in pursuit of an illusory progress and a conventionally idealized culture. I am con- vinced that there is much more familiarity with “high brow” books in this too frequently berated city than in any other considerable center of popu- lation west of Chicago. Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Paul Morand, Rémy de Gourmont and Jac- ob Wasserman are pawed over in a hundred women’s clubs every week, and the shelves of the average middle-class home are laden with the novels of Sheila Kaye-Smith, Brett Young, D. H. Law- rence, and Joseph Hergesheimer; the walls are hung with Austin Spares, and copies of Gauguin and Matisse; the pianos are scattered over with the dotted sheets of Strauss, Debussy, Palmgren and Rimsky Korsakoff. The people who thus decorate themselves may have no genuine culture; may, indeed, be addicted to the secret use of chewing gum, and be furtive BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 281 admirers of Mary Pickford: but these are national crimes and are not to be attributed to a local weak- ness. I repeat, therefore, that the citizens of Los Angeles may have the vices of the Middle West, but they also have its redeeming virtue—a fevered yearning for vaster mental horizons. Tame? Certainly. The people who daily flivver from Hill Street to Hollywood do the goose step to perfect time. They will stand for anything, vote for anything, believe anything that appears in pub- lic print. They will permit themselves to live un- der more nonsensical ordinances than any people on earth, A suburban example of this mania may be cited as fairly typical. The Long Beach fa- thers declared as follows: “No person shall indulge in caresses, hugging, fondling, embracing, spooning, kissing or wrestling with any person or persons of the opposite sex in or upon or near any public park, avenue, street, court, way alley or place, or on the beach, or any other public place . . . and no person shall sit or lie with his or her head, or any other portion of his or her person upon any portion of a person or per- sons of the opposite sex upon or near any of the said public places.” Provincial. During the season of 1924-25 Los Angeles undertook its first grand opera. The op- eras were not especially attractive, but the attempt was not to be discouraged, and many were hopeful. Then, on the occasion of the last performance, it seemed necessary that there should be a long mo- ment of self-congratulation. For this purpose the 282 Tuer TAMING OF THE F'RONTIER President, a jurist of local fame, was chosen spokes- man, and his pleasant task was that of advertising all the deacons, elders and dowagers who had made the supreme sacrifice of opening their homes to con- spiratory high teas, and had loaned their valuable names, or their stenographers to the laudable en- terprise. Appropriate pause was made after each illus- trious social climber was mentioned, to permit of enthusiastic hand-clapping from the boxes and the sycophants of boxes; and after several scores of souls had thus been made happy, and the eminent judge was about to make a regretful exit in favor of an impatient director, a vulgar yokel from the gallery boomed down the honest query: “Why don’t you drag in the stage hands?’ Perhaps the President of the first opera association would have done better to have named all the aspiring ladies of the city whilst he was about it, for it is now an- nounced that a rival organization has been formed to bestow upon the hungry citizens yet more ex- tensive means of self-display. At present the out- look is very dark. The same situation exists with regard to the inde- pendent theatre. At the close of the late war a few idealists got together for the purpose of launching what they called a “Theatre Arts Alliance.” A rather wonderful site was chosen, and thereon, amid sage-clad hills, was to be built a huge outdoor audi- torium for the presentation of Greek drama, con- certs and the like. For more intimate purposes, a part of this greater theatre was to be provided with BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 283 means of inclosure, and here not plays alone, but pictures, sculpture and dancing were to have their turn. Around this inspired spot dwellings were to be provided, wherein the artist might dream and create to his soul’s content. It was all very beautiful, very generous; but it required money. Then came the rich lady, with the gift—and the string. The gift was to be substan- tial, but the string was inevitable. For the lady was also an idealist, and her great dream was of an international, a world religion: and—she had writ- ten a play. The theatre was to be a means of re- ligious propaganda, and her play was to be the first, and, as it proved, the last consideration. Because of this the unmystical and pessimistic withdrew in confusion. Later the lady also with- drew and rolled her own. And that is how the Hollywood hills came to have “The Christ Play” for the greater delectation of the fundamentalists,* and their tourist relatives. The original group was left with a large plot of ground and a great out- door theatre, which is now given over to popular concerts. Following an example so richly productive of publicity, a number of other ladies organized thea- tres which have met with more or less ephemeral success. If some plan could be devised whereby every ambitious woman of limited beauty and un- limited wealth could be guaranteed a position of supreme, exalted and undisputed authority for even a single day during the season, no doubt Los An- * Derived from “fundament.” 284 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER geles could be assured one of the largest independ- ent theatres in the world. If the endowed independents have completely failed, the unendowed have fared but little better. After the Ordynski fiasco a few years ago, Mr. Frayne Williams—then just over from a long ap- prenticeship under St. John Ervine—organized the Literary Theatre, presenting such things as “The Shadow of the Glen,” ‘Hindle Wakes,” “John Gabriel Borkman,” “The Wild Duck,” “‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” “The Devil’s Dis- ciple’ and “Macaire” for more than five seasons. These plays have been skillfully produced under greater than ordinary difficulties, and there have been moderate houses; but the regulars have made it impossible to get adequate hearing, and the popu- lace as a whole has been indifferent. At present, under the auspices of the State University, his en- terprise is barely meeting expenses. Another theatre was beginning to attract atten- tion in 1924, and opened with “The Hairy Ape,” and “Six Characters in Search of an Author;” but when the regulars saw that there was danger of its becoming a success, they bought off certain of the leading newspapers, brought pressure to bear upon the owners of the theatre building, and, by depriv- ing them of both advertising and house, firmly put an end to their ambitions. The public moved on in apathetic bewilderment. But the town is not devoid of amusement, if one knows where to find it. There is the big Method- ist pow wow at Trinity Auditorium, with an ath- BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 285 letic champion of the Ku Klux Klan before its foot- lights,— a person with loud voice and enough absurdity to move the profoundest pessimist to im- moderate laughter. The Baptist clown does stunts at the Philharmonic theatre that cause the local shoe clerks and janitors to jam the doors, and give the cafeteria hounds hoochless hebie jeebies. ‘The “Four Square” gospeller—a screeching lady par- sonette—does a one act that brings joy to thou- sands. Any one of these three popular fundamen- talists is sufficient to insure this city of the sera- phim against the arrival of Dr. Billy Sunday. We simply do not need him: our three ring circus is enough. Also there are the cults. It is beyond question that there are more nonsense cults in the environs of this city than anywhere else on earth. They were emptied here out of Boston by way of Chicago. The milder climate enables them to keep the illusion that they have conquered disease through spiritual power. ‘They are the sick sur- vivors of New England transcendentalism, and while they are no more native than eucalyptus trees, they provide a sort of comedy that is not without its merits. All are here, from the venerable and materially respectable Christian Scientists on down to the fol- lowers of Frater Aleister Crowley, with their il- luminating rites of black, black magic. Some of these fakirs have handsome lodges erected at the expense of gullible millionaires whose intellectual culture had hitherto been confined to the higher 286 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER realms of swine breeding. Many a broken movie queen finds solace in these palaces of opulent op- timism. That the environment is healthy for more honest fakirs is shown by the comparatively recent experi- ence of “General” Nicholas Zogg. This suave gen- tleman had the insight and courage to select Los Angeles for a rather daring experiment. Here, within a stone’s throw of Mexico, he made the claim that he had but recently been one of the leading military commanders in the land of Porfirio Diaz, and, since it had happened that, on the way to some Damascus, the scales had fallen from his eyes, he now desired to become the savior of his most unfor- tunate country. He wished to begin reform from the idyllic re- gion of Yucatan, where, he declared, were thou- sands of Christ-like communists, living in a happy state of brotherly love; where ardent craftsmen, from the sheer love of beauty, created exquisite things from gold and silver and spread them out on the streets for the delight and possession of those who might care to see and take. The coun- try, however, was in sad need of funds. Dozens of sentimental ladies responded to the gentleman’s eloquent prayers, and thousands were raised for the coming civilization. Unfortunately the Federal authorities were in search of the great leader, who was wanted, so it was said, under sev- eral names throughout the states. He was literally snatched from the banquet tables of his admiring supporters, who were then ready to follow him into BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 287 the heart of Central America. General Zogg, it seems, had never spent more than six months in Mexico during his entire life, and was not notice- ably proficient in the use of Spanish. It cannot be said that Los Angeles is inhospitable. Nor is it unliterary. One of the chief methods for measuring the degree of success is the deter- mination of mass production, Just apply it to the business of letters in the precincts of this throbbing California super-town and see what you discover. Living on the fringes of Los Angeles are Upton Sinclair, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Will Levington Comfort, Rupert Hughes and Zane Grey: the combined annual sales of these indefatigible writers will run into millions, and will, I believe, excel the total production of all the novelists east of the Mississippi. Burroughs—author of the Tarzan tales—and Sinclair—author of “The Jungle’’—are the most popular of living writers, among the Bol- sheviki. And the democratic standards of taste— whatever they are—must ultimately conquer the world: that is, if we are to credit the opinions of the Rotarians. In a recent circular of his, Sin- clair announces that Johan Bojer has called him “Master.” What reply can a mere American critic make to that? Mr. H. L. Mencken, not long ago, made the as- sertion that more manuscripts came into his office from this region than from any other part of the United States: and, recently, a New York literary agent, after taking careful census, came to a sim- ilar conclusion. Both authorities make the gesture 288 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER condemnatory and agree that the bulk of the stuff is rubbish. From this Mr. Mencken infers that Los Angeles is hopeless. That seems to me a very su- perficial judgment. [If it be true that there is such a vast amount of—shall we say it?—scribbling in . these parts, it must go to show: 1. That Los An- geles is a degree less materialistic than other Ameri- can cities of comparable population,—that it con- tains more idealists. 2. That there is a greater hun- ger for what is popularly called culture: in a word, more ambition. That the writing is bad is but an indication that the West is yet unsophisticated. That the stuff exists in such quantities shows that it is not yet blasé and bored. If my conclusions are at all sound it may indicate that this abused region holds much for the future. In this connection one should, perhaps, point out the fact that for many years Los Angeles, and its immediate environs, has proved itself one of the most appreciative musical centers of North Amer- ica, and, as a further token of its unmaterialism, its suburban hills are fairly dotted with the palm- thatched studios of budding painters and sculptors. And now, being somewhat of a bibliophile, I must grow more serious. For not only has the Hunting- ton library come to the city gates; not only do the city walls hem in the largest collections of Dryden and Oscar Wilde in the world: but Los Angeles alone has the distinction of harboring the most ex- cellent book shops in all the West. To begin at the bottom, two of the largest de- BALLYHOOERS IN HEAVEN 289 partment stores—Robinson’s and Bullock’s—have sections that will compare favorably, both as to the extent and quality of stock, with Marshall Field’s in Chicago and Brentano’s in New York. Parker’s is one of the best places to buy new books in Amer- ica, and he one of the most intelligent of the old style bookmen. Besides a half dozen other shops for new books there are nearly a score of second hand stalls that boast of more old books than any similar places west of New York. Dawson’s is a place for rare books, where a certain air of old-worldiness persists in spite of the realtors and progressives. Except on the Atlantic coast he has no worthy competitor in the States. Moreover, one doesn’t need to pine for Rosenbach’s or George D. Smith’s when one can conveniently drop into George M. Millard’s exquisite collection of first editions, Kelmscotts and incunabula in the suburb of Pasadena. If one may judge by symptoms there is more reading and more discrimination in reading in Los Angeles than in San Francisco. Parker claims, I believe, never to have handled a novel by Harold Bell Wright. Well, there you have it. A rare mixture—of evangelical mountebanks, new thoughters, swamis, popular novelists, movie persons, solemn pamphlet- eers, realtors, ku kluxers, joiners of the thou- sand-and-one fraternal orders of good will and everlasting sunshine, artists, consumptives, music lovers, cripples, retired farmers, ex beer magnates, —mostly American to the core, and as typical as sign boards and peanut stands. ‘There is the old 290 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Plaza, the most interesting bit remaining, swarming with impoverished Mexicans and thrifty Japanese; towering hills in the mid-city, still bearing the de- caying houses of the old pioneers: the shifting busi- ness district, looking, for all the world, like St. Louis or Milwaukee: and the outlying heights, stretching toward Hollywood or the sea, and cov- ered now with new palaces in Italian villa, French Renaissance, or Hopi Indian architecture for the pleasuring of the plutocrats. In the midst of this strange hish-hash is the largest woman’s club in America, and the greatest number of God-fearing Puritans. A. few rebels look on and sneer, but their sneers are unobserved. ‘The crowd surges by, seizing fran- tically at the uplift pamphlets handed out by fagged and sad-eyed women for the enhancement of the town-boomers: “Take a free ride to Eve’s Garden, the Gigantic new subdivision planned for you by Fawn and Leach, the Realty Kings. Absolutely Free!” And yet, the bug of optimism seizes me; I suc- cumb, It is now my firm conviction, Mencken not- withstanding, that out of this motley throng of goose-steppers and propagandists there will grow the most splendid center of genuine culture and en- lightenment on this continent. For, with all its uncouthness, the place is alive with illusions, and illusions are the stuff of art. CHEYENNE: Tue Witp West Sets Its ATMOSPHERE By Cary Abbott CHEYENNE HORTLY after the Birth of a Nation had been achieved, another smaller but violent par- turition took place in what was then Dakota Ter- ritory in 1867. Of all the hectic origins of the Western cities, Cheyenne’s was the most thrilling. Even those communities which have a similar be- ginning concede to Cheyenne its premier position as the worst of the tough towns. Many conser- vative people who have endured life there since the early days have tried to live down this wild start, but they can do little about it but deplore the fact that most of America still believes that Cheyenne is a thoroughly “bad’’ place. It may be as respectable, attractive, and syn- thetically sophisticated a place as ever spawned a country club. Nevertheless, romantic legend persists in painting the town “red.” Cheyenne must be wide-open, cowboys shooting up the main street, vigilantes hanging desperadoes by the dozen, Jezebels playing Lorelei from the front porch, Indians and cattle kicking up dust in the outskirts, ete, etc. Unfortunately for those who crave “atmos- phere,’ Cheyenne is, and has been for years, de- void of these attractions. Drinking is only car- ried on in bathrooms and alleys as is customary 293 294 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER all over the United States; cowboys, except dur- ing the Frontier show, come to town in automo- biles wearing the quietest possible clothes; the nearest Indians doze through life a couple of hun- dred miles away, unless exhibiting their paint and feathers in Hollywood or London for a considera- tion; the cattle no longer rove the illimitable spaces, but are tended, nursed and dipped for various ailments like pet dogs or canaries; deni- zens (good old euphemism of the journals!) of the tenderloin are no longer denizens, as such; vigilantes’ committees were long ago replaced by the ponderous though less efficacious law; nothing of the old West is left but the dust, and even that is being conquered by paved roads and grain crops. Even the wind, the unforgettable Rocky Mountain Zephyr hymned by Bill Nye and cursed by everyone else,—even the wind has lost its virility. Yet the legend of the ideal tough Western town lives on. Surely, Cheyenne must have been a fearful affair in 1867, when the Union Pacific Railroad stopped its westward building opera- tions there for the winter. When the railroad land agent staked out his quarters against the simultaneous arrival of the construction gang and: the winter, all of the flotsam and a good deal of the jetsam of humanity who had been following up the Union Pacific as it was moving west, moved from Julesburg, Colorado, their last place of rev- elry. This aggregation moved up to Cheyenne on flat-cars, and the spectacle of all these wild Tue Witp West Setus Its ATMOSPHERE 295 characters and camp-followers of divers shady professions traveling in this al fresco manner earned the beautiful and appropriate name of “Hell on Wheels.” With this crew of holy terrors there arrived of course all sorts and conditions of people,—railroad men, soldiers, bull-whackers who were hauling the ways and means to set up winter quarters for the crowd, plainsmen, cowmen, settlers adventuring for the first time into the great West. Shacks, tents, dug-outs and a few more or less permanent structures arose out of the treeless prairie to form the semblance of a town. As the winter pro- gressed, the motley and volatile population amused itself in the manner beloved by all readers of fiction and all the “hounds” for Western movies. The vices all flourished, scarlet and un- restrained. Shootings and murders occurred with delightful frequency. Expensive, too, all this joy was, even by post- war standards. At McDaniel’s theater, which was really a dance hall, admission was gained by toss- ing a dollar into the barrel at the door, which each morning was rolled off to a bank to be emptied. It was a place, likewise, for the grandiose and romantic in gesture. Especially of virile friend- ship. An Old Timer spent two thirds of a long life entertaining a tamer Cheyenne with an oc- currence which made McDaniel’s even more famous than its general reputation for genial bawdiness. The Old Timer, then young, stood 296 TuE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER in the place one night beside a post in a far corner of the main hall. Gambling raged. Thirsty males roared and whined their orders over a full bar. A. score of fresh-painted damsels shrieked and postured suggestivities from the stage. It was a large night, in short, and nobody thinking about cemeteries. Then suddenly two shots boomed. They came in that curiously swift sequence which, to the so- phisticated, advertised that a two-gun man was plying his art. My Old Timer thought swiftly and painfully of cemeteries, as his left ear tingled from a bullet’s wind, and then his right. The Old Timer always concluded the account— and probably still does wherever in Elysium bed- time stories are told to the children of the Homeric heroes—this way: “When that fust shot come, I was skeert some- body was trying to pick me off. But when that second bullit just grazed my right ear, I knew it was just my ole friend Bill playin’ a joke on me.” And sure enough it was, for the tale is fairly well authenticated. Bill had come up from the wilder rural regions, and caught sight of my Old Timer before the Old Timer had seen Bill. So he played this gorgeous parody of the children’s game of coming up from behind, clapping hands over the eyes of an unsuspecting one and making him “guess who this is.”” Bill made the Old Timer “guess who this was’ by the way he shot. Such were the frolics of friendship in Cheyenne in the THe Wivp West SeEtxts Its ATMOSPHERE 297 careless *60’s. Foes were more careful only in that they took pains to shoot within the circle bounded by the ears. However, after the worst element became too free with other people’s lives and money, in ab- sence of law machinery, a vigilantes’ committee began the genial task of ridding the community of a number of the more callous gunmen. My sister’s godmother, arriving as a bride at night, saw, as her first glimpse of the golden West by daylight, two men hanging by their necks to a telegraph pole,—the successful result of the vigi- lantes’ handiwork. Even after the territory was organized, a mob one night clamored for the life of some particularly wicked character, and in spite of the pleas of the newly-made mayor and the thunders of the United States attorney, the crowd had to have its blood, and the desperado was duly lynched. In the spring the railroad went on its way west- ward, leaving the town to its fate. Unlike many Western towns with such hectic beginnings, Cheyenne’s geographic position made it per- manent. Shortly the Union Pacific built a line to Denver from there, as Cheyenne was the near- est point to the metropolis of the mining craze. Freighting outfits found Cheyenne a convenient center to haul to the Black Hills, to South Pass City where gold was exciting interest, even into Montana. Between Cheyenne and the neighbor- ing army post a great depot called Camp Carlin made its appearance, furnishing supplies to all the 298 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER numerous garrisons which at one time dotted the West. To be sure, after the first winter, when about six thousand people milled about like cattle on the bleak town site, the population dwindled as the greater part of the rag-tag and bobtail moved on with the railroad. Nevertheless, enough stayed to realize that money was to be made in the new dis- tributing center for the future Territory, and that cattle could be raised profitably in this grassy wilderness. With the continual pouring of set- tlers into the West after the Civil War, Cheyenne perpetually overflowed with adventurous souls, as fitted a self-confessed gateway to the unknown and boundless West. Lots sold for outrageous prices, stores, banks, schools and churches sprang up. Dwelling-houses and a gorgeous and more sybaritic type of saloon appeared. A court-house was erected, a building now destroyed to make way for a “bigger and bet- ter’ one; but the old court-house had a history as interesting as its appearance was hideous. So quickly did the town erect itself that it earned the name of “the Magic City.” The place was in- corporated. The territory was carved out of the mammoth Dakota and other vague empires, and organized. A capitol building then became neces- sary but pending the territory’s ability to erect it, the first legislatures held their sessions in the second story of a frame house. A handful of boosting and outwardly conventional persons ar- rived—precursors of the Babbitts of the 1920's. Toe Witp West Sets Irs ATMOSPHERE 299 Meanwhile, hardy pioneers and plainsmen had established, or were establishing themselves in various strategic places over the country, starting the cattle industry in a modest way, which in a few years was to become the paramount industry of the plains, wild and Indian-infested as they were. Cheyenne was almost the center of this region where great herds were trailed up from Texas or driven out from the country to the east—a region abominated by the great cow barons because cattle in large quantities could not thrive there, owing to the cutting up of lands for farms. Out in Wyoming Territory, the cattle ranged at large, identified only by the owners’ brands, and rounded up once or twice a year. ‘The wide, open-air life of the range, combined with the rising price of cattle on eastern markets, began to draw young and aristocratic bloods from our Eastern seaboard and even from England and Scotland. As a large majority of the cattle destined for market were driven into the Cheyenne stockyards for ship- ment, Cheyenne became the headquarters for the industry. Freedom from the conventions of more civilized communities throve in this high and windy atmos- phere. There were no uplift movements, no elab- orate programs of brotherly love to hamper one’s inclinations in those days. The cattlemen, both the pioneer, plainsman type, who had exchanged pot-shots with Indians and outlaws and the scions of refinement and old-world wealth, met on com- mon and frequently hilarious ground. ‘The 800 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Cheyenne Club became a social center such as has never since been approached in the West, and rarely elsewhere. During the eighties, when the cattle business was at its height, and the profits from the great companies, whose herds ranged from Canada to Texas, were tremendous, the cat- tle kings had little to do but spend their money wildly and enjoy liberty. Fine horseflesh was the fashion. ‘The streets of the capital city of Wyoming were alive with turnouts of all descriptions. Horses from Ken- tucky, thoroughbreds and Irish hunters, cayuses and wild-eyed plugs cavorted bravely through the streets. Tallyhoes, phaetons, traps, landaus, broughams mingled with vulgar chuck wagons, stage-coaches and the various noisy and springless contraptions that still find favor in the army. A race-course was built. Members of the Club jockeyed their own races and afterward re- paired to the clubhouse where something was en- joyed resembling 19th hole festivities raised to the nth power. The prize, which was always a large silver cup made at Tiffany’s, then became the nucleus for a champagne party. The Club’s par- ties were as famous as the membership, and to-day one may see the bullet-hole in a painting of a bull by Paul Potter, the proud scar of an exciting night. A. lady, noted alike for her horses and her wig, became embroiled one day in a bet with a bank president as to who owned the faster animal. After much argument, they decided to race to the THe Wip West Setizs Its ArmMosPHERE 301 middle of town, about half a mile distant. As the horses tore through the business streets to the goal, the lady’s hat and wig flew off, but she won the race and the bet. It was said that the wig had flown off to allow her the victor’s bay leaves. There were classicists in early Cheyenne who un- derstood such matters. But the populace scowled sardonically at the pretentious jest and parodied it with the quip that the lady had won the bay rum bottle. Fort Russell people, usually keen on horses, had one officer in those days, who showed strange knowledge of how to hitch up a horse. Very at- tentive to a town lady, one night he invited her to the post to a hop. Arriving at her house after - dark, he escorted her to the waiting carriage. On the way, she noticed that the horse seemed to be moving in a curious manner, and thought perhaps that it had partaken of a trifle too much as had her partner. However, on coming into the glare of light in front of the Post Hall, the poor horse was discovered by the much delighted throng to be hitched to the carriage in such a way that the animal was astraddle one shaft! Conviviality was rampant, and the gossip of the times was built on many merry episodes. Matri- mony arrived even during the railroad epoch, but did not always go hand in hand with the plateau’s new freedoms. There is a tale of a prominent cat- tleman who, arriving at his house after a pro- tracted “tear,” was greeted, by a bellicose wife armed with two pistols. It was several weeks be- 302 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER fore he was allowed to enter his domain, Even — this affair did not cure him. Before long, he was in his cups again. Next morning his wife was seen throwing all his clothes and belongings into the front yard. When asked the why and wherefore, she replied that he had been at it again, and that he was going to sleep in the barn indefinitely. This impatient Griselda has a window to her memory in one of Cheyenne’s churches. Whatever happened to the two men who were trundled home in a wheelbarrow by a third part- ner in crime, no one has ever heard. ‘The three had been “whooping it up” at the Club until num- ber three was the only ¢ irvivor. He deemed it proper to see that his friends got home to their respective and probably irate wives, so he used this means of getting them there. But after he had thrown number one out at his door and rung the bell, he was nearly exhausted. So when he came to number two’s house, he simply left him to bivouae, as it were, on his own stoop. There is the story of a young and festive cat- tleman, who rode over two hundred miles by relay into Cheyenne to see Lily Langtry play at the opera house Having accomplished this much, he became a sort of Lochinvar, and went on with the Jersey Lily to the Coast. The first sight to greet the eyes of a newcomer one day was a tallyho in full cry at the station. The passengers seemed to be busy trying to stay on the vehicle with bad success. It was whispered that these irrational persons were a crowd of THe Wi West Setis [rs ATMOSPHERE 303 Eingland’s bluest. At any rate, at this time, a daughter of one of the heads of a great cattle company (girls were scarce in those days, and had a most wonderful time), on being patronized by some superior person, informed her that she need not give herself such airs, as the night before she herself had sat down to dinner in her father’s house, the only girl with six British peers. Numerous social crises betray the somewhat pioneer state of things in the palmy days. ‘The wife of the governor, who was away somewhere, heard that the President of the United States was to stop in Cheyenne. Her train and the Presi- dent’s were to come in at the same time, giving her no time to prepare herself for the honor of entertaining him. There was nothing she could do about it except to change her clothes in the bag- gage car, her train being one of the old-fashioned variety that often carried no Pullmans. She did, and the President heard all about it at the re- ception. One old settler who had to make the stage trip to Deadwood often became frightened at the pros- pect of being shot by a road-agent who had been recently raiding all Black Hiulls-bound traffic. But he had to go, so he made his wife go with him, and she carried nearly twenty thousand dollars in gold on her person destined for a Deadwood bank, all because her timorous husband hoped the bandit might let the women go unmolested. There is no climax to this tale, as the lady was the only sufferer, since she had the gloomy pleasure of hav- 804 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER ing all that weight fastened on her fore and aft. She may well have been the deified ancestress of the modern wife who, also to protect her husband and his Cadillac, rides through cordons of woman- hood-revering prohibition agents with Scotch bot- tles dangling more or less imperceptibly from her girdle. But the old breed was sturdier. Quite obviously it had greater heft. Money flowed fast in the eighties. A proof is in the short career of two brothers who had been sent out from England by an irate father with one million dollars on condition they would not darken the ancestral doors again. At the end of their first year, which was spent on a great ranch, and enlivened with wine, women, and all the ex- travagances possible to wealth in the eighties, they had “shot their wad” and, returning to England, were given another million, which they took to South Africa. Evidently these Alexanders had found another world to conquer, or the campaign turned out to be less brief; at any rate, they never returned to Wyoming. But what can one expect of a town whose gilded youth danced cotillions at ten o’clock in the morn- ing? Perhaps the fact that Cheyenne was the first town in the world to have electric lights had something to do with it. Our age of electricity is characterized by mad restlessness; and possibly the presence of this element had its effect on the gay inhabitants of the little Western city who dined and gambled and got drunk under the “bright lights,” before gas-mains were laid. Cer- “om vee ital ig & gin Be * be -DEADWOOD COACH ON FEBRUARY 19, 1887 TYENNE CHE THE OF THE LAST TRIP Tue Witv West Sexzts Irs ArMosPpHERH 305 tain it is that the little electric plant used to have a hard time puffing up enough current to keep the lights going for those who insisted on turning night into day. As for luxuries, Cheyenne had fine stores, and a far better discrimination for this world’s delights than nowadays. Several times, when someone wished to have such delicacies as fresh fish or oy- sters at a dinner-party, or whatever might be in season back in the States, he had these things sent out by express in freight-cars packed in ice, a formidable undertaking before these days of refrigerator systems on railroads. One dinner for twenty people, given as a sort of thank-offering re- garding the successful outcome of a transaction in cattle, cost five thousand dollars. And those were the days when dollar-a-plate dinners were con- sidered an extravagance as far west as Kansas City! There is another side to the picture of Cheyenne in the cattle days, of course. While there were those who furnished more than enough “pepper,” there have always been conservative, quiet “salt of the earth” type of people, who have kept the balance of business and community life, some de- ploring the spectacular life of the gilded ones, others making their stakes without ostentation and smiling at the gay crowd, even as ants grinned at the sluggard. While the fine arts could hardly have been said to have flourished, a number of splendid homes were built, the new Capitol arose, and the usual schools and churches. 306 THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER Sometimes a regenerated magnifico lurched spectacularly from one side to the other. A prominent cattle king who had “got reli- gion” sufficiently to be desirous of baptism, in- vited a large party to witness his immersion in the tank at the Baptist Church. Unfortunately, either the Lord was not with him or the water- works were not functioning. The tank obstin- ately refused to fill. So the baptism was post- poned till another day; and, anticlimactical as it might be, all the friends gathered again, as they were determined not to miss the fun on any ac- count. Another important gentleman, whose religious feelings had not been suspected by his closest friends, gave a stained window to a new church. When he was asked by some highly surprised crony as. to how he, of all people, happened to do such a thing, he replied: “Why, I’m one of the pillars of the damn thing!” Thus passed Cheyenne’s glory. During the fearful winters at the end of the eighties, many fortunes made in cattle or in promoters’ paper collapsed. As cattle were unfenced, and allowed to shift largely for themselves, except for occa- sional roundups, the succession of severe snow- storms drove them to their death by starvation or suffocation in the drifts. Thousands and thou- sands of head perished, while human help was useless and futile. The “great open spaces” have a horribly seamy side, and eight months of winter is the seamiest, as any cattleman knows. The Tur Witp West Setts Its ATMosPHERE 307 cattle bubble was pricked, and those who had fam- ily or means to fly to for aid did so, while others braved poverty. ‘The business of cattle raising continues to this day, but on a smaller and far more careful scale. Only a very few outfits now- adays can begin to be compared to the baronial holdings common thirty and more years ago. One of the last, and certainly the most pic- turesque performance which the cattlemen un- dertook in concert was the campaign conducted to root out from the land the small settlers and homesteaders. ‘These people, who had been fil- tering into the country in the natural coursé of events, were looked at with wrath, as they were taking up lands in fertile districts, and cutting up the unfenced domain, thus hindering the free movements of the great herds. ‘They were also suspected of “rustling,” and with plenty of reason. Therefore, the plot was woven secretly, and sud- denly a large number of the cattle kings, with their various gunmen and riders left for the north. Johnson County, three hundred miles away, was the goal for this organized attack on the small potatoes; and the country was to be freed by force, if necessary, of new settlers and the desperadoes who stole the mavericks of the big companies. Be- cause of the prominence of many of the plotters, the true story of this now ancient tale of trucu- lence has never been properly told. The accounts vary a good deal as to the victims of the affair, some of whom were killed and others spirited out of the region. ‘The dramatic surrounding of the 808 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER cattlemen by the “rustlers” and their timely rescue by troops caused unheard-of excitement. This was followed by the technical arrest of the crowd of “invaders” by Government troops, and the raid ended farcically. Popular feeling, at first against the cattle inter- ests, veered suddenly. ‘The raiders were brought back to Cheyenne, and held in a very courteous imprisonment in a corral at Fort Russell. Soon even this mild detention, through mysterious means in Washington, ended. Furthermore, not a court would have convicted them, so strong had become the sympathy of the people in their favor. During their “incarceration,” the prisoners found it quite easy to get furloughs to go in to Chey- enne for business and pleasure. ‘The Government in those days could not take too seriously the as- sumed rights of a breezy and wealthy crowd of men in a remote country, up till this time prac- tically policed and controlled by such pioneers. The Johnson County “invasion,” however, was re- garded seriously enough to warrant the secret buying up of a book telling much too much, and thereby hurting some financial and_ political careers. As is usual with such publications, a few copies saw the light, and are to this day guarded with traditional secrecy. Politics had much to do with the dénouement of the raid, but then politics have been meat and drink, particularly drink, to Cheyenne, as being a capital from the beginning of things in Wyo- ming. Many people who point to Cheyenne’s THe Witp West SeExxts Irs ATMOSPHERE, 309 noble citizenry as the great-hearted souls who first gave women full suffrage, do not know what a mighty wrangling took place on the subject in the shaky old two-storied building where the first Solons, bearded far more than the pard, thrashed out this weighty subject. It has been said that the real reason why women were allowed to vote at that time was because of the paucity of in- habitants of the territory, and the consequent de- sire to swell the number of votes cast for ambi- tious candidates. This is related to the manner in which Cheyenne’s census was taken in later years,—by going through the transcontinental trains at the station and taking down the neces- sary data from passengers, which unwittingly made them citizens of a town they had inhabited for about twenty minutes. Later years proved that women in Cheyenne were not so proud of voting. For many elections, the politicians could only get them to vote by send- ing the old-fashioned “hired” hacks around to their homes to take them to the polls. This method finally became anathema to the sore-heads of a continuously defeated party, and was made un- lawful. By that time, too, the old hacks were so redolent of livery stables and departed drunks that many women declined the honor of a free ride, anyway. One of the most delightful scenes that the newly completed Capitol building witnessed was the spectacle of a new governor, who, finding his nor- mal entrance to his office barricaded by a prede- 310 THe TAMING OF THE FRONTIER cessor disputing the election, made his joyeuse entrée by means of a ladder through a window! Cheyenne has always been unpopular politi- cally through the state, because, being for years the center of government, she has doled out the various state institutions to the rising young com- monwealths. Here the insane asylum, there the home for adenoid sufferers, yon the reformatory or the experimental station where lambs lie down with lions in the most up-to-date manner. The original five immense counties have been butchered into many smaller ones to make county seats for office-seekers to find offices. As railroads grad- ually built their cautious way across the wide areas of Wyoming, Cheyenne, although in a far corner, became the only logical place to foregather for meetings of residents from the scattered settle- ments and towns. Cheyenne, for some obscure reason, has never been the fixed capital; and every few years an agitation starts to move the seat of government to some other place. The last time that Cheyenne was contemplating what it would do with its big Capitol building, a handful of the tried “old hands” quietly put through a measure in the legislature to appropriate a huge sum to enlarge the building for added office room. Thus, before the agitators were aware of their work, the state was saddled with a bigger and better Capitol—now too costly an affair to move for years to come. During the nineties, Cheyenne lost her glamour as the uncrowned capital of the wild and woolly Tue Witp Wesr Setts Irs ArmospHern 311 West. Railroads had put an end to the vast freighting business. With the decline of the In- dian into innocuous desuetude, the numerous little army posts were, one after another, dismantled, and Camp Carlin was left to decay. The hard win- ters, together with a slump in cattle prices, had wrought ruin to the great cattle companies, and the smaller ranchers gradually took over their lands. Sheep, too, made their appearance, much to the wrath of cattle-growers. Irrigation of lands for farming was initiated. ‘The handwrit- ing was on the wall for those to whom Cheyenne under the old order of life had been the rule. To-day, the “spirit of the West” is a somewhat sickly old man, carefully tended and nursed along to keep alive the old spark. Cheyenne is hor- ribly afraid that some day the “spirit’’ will die. Hence the now nationally famous and much ad- vertised institution known as the Frontier Days celebration. The idea of this, the oldest of all the now numerous “Wild West” shows, the “daddy of them all,” as reads the slogan (the old West sub- mits to a slogan like everybody else these days), sprang from a highly informal and immensely en- tertaining afternoon in 1897. A group of citizens whose like is to be found in all communities, decided to get together a number of the old cowhands and ranchers to put on an exhibition, or rather contest, to show their skill in roping steers, riding wild horses and trying their luck in a few races on cow-ponies. To give the affair a little atmosphere, one of the old stage- 812 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER coaches used in the Deadwood days was hauled out of its half-forgotten resting-place, some Sho- shone and Arapahoe Indians were brought down from their reservation on flat-cars, and some cavalry from Fort Russell was borrowed. ‘The prizes for the contests were simple, and the show did not pretend to be more than an afternoon’s amusement. As the grandstand was small, people went out very early, to insure getting seats, taking their lunches along. The show was sufficiently good to warrant another one the following year. Before the town was aware of the fact, the splen- did work of those marvelous horsemen of the plains in these early celebrations became known to neighboring states, and the show was staged annually. These early performances had many of the faults of amateurish management. Long delays between races and contests, combined with sudden dramatic climaxes unlooked for by the manage- ment, made the afternoons in the grandstand or on horseback in the arena both boring and thrill- ing. Occasionally a steer would climb over all possible obstacles apparently burning to gore everyone in sight. Sometimes a broncho would insist on kicking his way into the middle of next week. The Indian squaw races were always de- lightful, as the Shoshone women were immense, while their mounts were thin little things, with a habit of turning corners suddenly and upsetting their huge riders. The climax of the earlier shows was the pursuit of the stage-coach around the THe Witpv West SExtxs Irs ATMOSPHERE 313 track by Indians, to be finally rescued by the cavalry and cowboys. One year saw the coach loaded with the Secre- tary of Agriculture and other notables together with some ladies. The stage horses, frightened. by the yells of the Indians and the revolvers and six shooters popping, got beyond the control of the driver and tore around the track in magnifi- cent style. The stage careened beautifully, all the ladies shrieked, the Indians whooped, and the cavalry had a hard run to make good the proper end of the act. Everyone who saw it was im- mensely pleased, and only sorry that a massacre had not been committed to round the performance off in good order. As the years passed, riders from more and more distant places came to compete for the honors at Cheyenne. ‘The show became an affair of more than one day, due to the necessity of giving con- testants a fair chance to “do their stuff.” As more and moére people came to see the Frontier Days, the gate receipts made it possible to offer large prizes of money. Saddles have from the begin- ning been donated by the Union Pacific Railroad to the winners of the bucking contest, and other trophies have been offered at various shows. Grad- ually the older men who rode and raced and hog- tied steers to make the holiday a success gave place to the younger generation who had been born and brought up in the saddle. Other towns emulated Cheyenne’s show, and soon these boys began moving from one show to the next. 'To- 314 Tuer TAMING OF THE FRONTIER day riding at these numerous celebrations is al- most a profession, many of the performers not being native to the West and knowing little about the business of ranching as it used to be practiced. The show to-day is a great and glorious athletic contest, full of thrills and life, all sorts of diver- tissements being used to attract attention which had no part nor place in the ranch life of the cattle ranges. Fancy roping, acrobatics on horseback such as the Cossacks of Buffalo Bill’s show used to do, complicated drills by cavalry, etc., etc. The now indispensable “bull-dogging” of steers is an- other importation, a stunt which a negro from Texas brought into the program one year. ‘This man used to fasten his teeth in the nostrils of the steer, and by the power of his neck and jaws turn the animal over on its side. Nobody pretends to do that any more; it is thrilling enough to see a man jump from his horse to the steer’s neck and twist him over by his horns. The crowd which patronizes the show to-day is of course the automobile tourist horde. ‘They see four or five days of perfectly managed, amazingly wonderful horsemanship of all sorts. The grounds are well-kept, steel grandstand, parking for automobiles, all the necessities of taking care of a multitude. But as the stranger sits in the upper stand looking out over the arena and paddock, filled with the tumultuous movement of horses, Indians, soldiers, cowboys, all in the full panoply of their various professions, and then gazes beyond to the Tur Wi West Seuzs Its ATMOSPHERE 315 city buried in summer greenery, with its golden dome and church towers and array of houses and buildings reaching the long red line of the Fort Russell barracks and quarters, does it occur to him that in the whole area there is only one livery stable,—one inn for the stranger’s plug to be put up for the night? Does the guest of the city realize that if he stayed a month after the show he would hardly see a man on horseback in the streets of the “capital of the cow country?” Does he know that those Indians who are leaping about in front of the grandstand in a war-dance use aniline dyes to make themselves so gorgeous? That the Indians, the steers, the horses, the riders are hired under contract? In other words, that this spectacle can hardly be said to be the spon- taneous, untamed, gladhand West of the days that Owen Wister and Buffalo Bill and General Custer and Bill Nye and Colonel Roosevelt made immortal? Out of the acorn of 1897 a great oak has ma- tured; and because of the demand for ‘“‘Western”’ atmosphere, the Cheyenne show will last for many years. The business of being wild and woolly is highly lucrative these days. The riders make good money, the Indians have excellent pay and a won- derful time showing off, the contractors for the livestock get their rake-off, the city, which owns the show, managed through the Chamber of Commerce, gets both money and quantities of pub- licity. One will see many people on the streets at Frontier time wearing boots and spurs and, 316 Tue TAMING OF THE FRONTIER above all, the “ten-gallon” hats (a style imported into Wyoming in recent years, and in no manner resembling the less flamboyant and more prac- tical hats of twenty years ago), who, if they had to mount a horse immediately, would try to get on the wrong side or else discreetly flee. All this fol-de-rol is part of the “Western” spirit, resurrected in a form palatable to the great American public, whose appetite for Western “life” has been fed continually since the days of “The Virginian” by fiction and the movies. To the old-timer, viewing the same scene, the old picture of Cheyenne reverts to his mind occa- sionally, and, being human he thanks God that life is easier these days, creature comforts as much a part of Cheyenne as of any other city with a modern Chamber of Commerce, a country club and paved streets. A generation ago, there were few trees and they were all seedy-looking little things, much abused by the everlasting wind of cursed memory; the Capitol dome, just finished, looked rather lonely at the edge of a wind-swept, sun-bathed town, huddled around the railroad yards; Fort Russell was a compact but tiny circle of buildings off to the west. Yet there are times when “old-timer” will sigh for the days when to have a sense of humor was far more necessary than to have a bath; when horses spent the days and often the nights tied up at the hitching posts and rings down town, their owners busy drawing three of a kind or yelling “keno!” or taking on a few fingers of “licker.” 'The Dyer House and THe Witp West SEtxts Its ATMOSPHERE 317 the Inter-Ocean no longer shine brightly for the fellow who has just spent a weary three days in a stage or on horseback; the Opera house has dis- appeared where Modjeska and Patti and Ada Rehan once enraptured audiences that wore silk hats as well as six-shooters; Sir Horace Plunkett in far-off Ireland is no longer on the board of governors of the Club; even the days when Roose- velt, on his vice-presidential campaign, left his train and rode 60 miles by horseback to Cheyenne to make a speech, are dim to most. Changes in the West came violently. All the above rigmarole is myth and legend to many in- habitants. Many people are indifferent to the tra- ditions and history of the communities where they come to dwell. Those who drift with the vast tide of humanity who make of the United States a land of nomads, hardly stay in a place long enough to absorb the whys and wherefores of the community. Many Western cities have acquired in their short lives much history and background, which is to be had for the asking from the now fast disappearing pioneers and earlier settlers. Cheyenne, especially, has been fortunate in the number of interesting people who have survived the exciting decades of the cattle period. Yet what a contrast to their yarns is the life of to-day. Your modern cowhand comes to town in a Pullman and gets a room and bath at the Plains Hotel. Road-shows do their turn in a movie-house,—Modjeska wouldn’t draw a cor- poral’s guard in Cheyenne or any other American 318 Tur TAMING OF THE FRONTIER town nowadays!—The Cheyenne Club is now, alas! the abode of the Chamber of Commerce, where Frontier Day performances are cooked up, and where there is a “rest-room” for women auto- mobile tourists; Rooseveltian-mannered FPresi- dents do not await their hostess in the hall, amus- ing themselves by putting on war-bonnets that happen to adorn the room,—Presidents to-day are apt to be féted with a special Frontier show just as are trainloads of Shriners or luncheon clubs or groups of magnates who have made the front page in the newspapers. So Cheyenne passes to-day, the exponent supreme of the wild and woolly West. Dairy herds, dry farms, prohibition officers, the Y. W. C. A.,—progress, uplift, brotherly love—all ram- pant. It is just one more attractive, highly stand- ardized American city. Except for the ever in- genious youth of the community, who can occa- sionally work up considerable atmosphere redo- lent of the old days and ways, only two incidents have happened in recent years which recall the old West. One night, while a blizzard raged madly, a man struggling through the snow was suddenly con- fronted with two buffaloes. These belonged to a showman of the city, had got away from their moorings, so to speak, and were wandering help- lessly about. He who met these ghosts of yes- terday was, of course, accused of “having ’em again.” The other incident was the entertaining of the THe Witp West SeEtxs Irs ATMOSPHERE 319 “lady” who was traveling with the scion of a fam- ous French banking family, by means of a lunch- eon at the Country Club. 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