People and places you'll
enjoy in this new Holbrook
treasury . . .
ANNIE OAKLEY ... Her flavor was
unique and of her time. It was a sort of com-
bination of Lillian Russell and Buffalo Bill,
a merger of dainty feminine charm and lead
bullets.
JOE KNOWLES ... the original "Na-
ture Boy." Tabloids screamed of his exploits
as the "Dawn Man" who plunged naked into
the forest and conquered nature with his bare
hands . . .
NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA ... is
proud that its First National Bank was one
bank the James Boys couldn't rob ... and
proud of possessing the right ear of one of the
raiders "now desiccated and brown as an
autumn leaf, but patently an ear . . ."
HOME COLONY . . . this forgotten col-
ony of radicals on Puget Sound made head-
lines that would have shocked and stunned
the Brook Farm inhabitants.
BOSTON'S TEMPLE OF BUR-
LESQUE ... No theatre in America has
had so implausible a beginning, nor so odd a
career as the "Old Howard." In the 1870's
its tone began to lower, and business grew
better.
ED SCHIEFFLIN . . . This silver pros-
pector uncovered the Tough Nut Lode, a
$75,000,000 strike and left behind a mys-
tery.
LITTLE LUKE SHORT ... The deadly
(continued on back flap)
Jac\ei design by James Alexander.
$3.50
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI PUBLIC UBftARY
SEP 1 e 1335
920.07 H72
Hall
Little Annie Oakley &
other rugged people
1948.
920*07 H?2 66-05597
Holbrook
Little Annie Oakley & other
rugged people
MAIN
LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY
and Other
RUGGED PEOPLE
books by STEWART H. HOLBROOK
Burning an Empire
The Story of American Forest Fires
Ethan Allen
Holy Old Mackinaw
A Natural History of the American Lumberjack
Iron Brew
A Century of American Ore and Steel
Lost Men of American History
Murder Out Yonder
None More Courageous
Tall Timber
Little Annie Oakley
BY STEWART H. HOLBROOK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK
1948
COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY STEWART H. HOLBROOK
All rights reserved no part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except
by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.
Third Printing
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FoT WILLIAM M. DOERFLINGEK
who suggested it
PLAZA
6605597 MAR 2 11966
Anther's Note
OVER a period of years almost any
American writer will have developed an interest and often an
enthusiasm for a wide variety of things native to his country.
Ours is a big country, too, yet big as it is, I never cease to marvel
at the incredible number of places, people, and events, both
past and present, that I should like to write about. But were I to
have the lives of four men, placed beginning to end, I could
scarce accomplish the object.
In the past twenty years and more, however, I have many
times come upon subjects which for one reason or another were
so compelling as to cause me to lay aside whatever book I was
working on and devote gladly enough my time to them. They
appeared in magazine or newspaper articles, commonly referred
to among the higher literati as fugitive pieces.
Then, one day, came a friend, William Doerflinger, to suggest
that a modest portion of the book-reading public might enjoy a
collection of my fugitives between hard covers. The editors of
the periodicals concerned were without exception both prompt
and graceful in granting permission to use the pieces in book
form; and I thank the men of the American Mercury 9 the Ameri-
can Scholar, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Saturday
Review of Literature, Life, Esquire, and the Country Press.
Portland, Oregon, STEWART H. HOLBROOK
Contents
LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY 1
THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN 8
MURDER AT HARVARD 19
THE LATE CALAMITY JANE 31
ETHAN ALLEN, AUTHOR 39
SALOON IN THE TIMBER 45
THE BANK THE JAMES BOYS DIDN'T ROB 53
ANARCHISTS AT HOME 63
LIFE AND TIMES OF NED BUNTLINE 78
A SALUTE TO BUFFALO BILL 88
GENERAL WALLACE AND Ben-HuT 102
WESTERN MALES ARE SISSIES 107
BOSTON'S SCOLLAY SQUARE 113
BOSTON'S TEMPLE OF BURLESQUE 122
BOSTON NOCTURNE 131
THE MAN WHO NAMED TOMBSTONE 139
KING OF THE BULL COOKS 148
LITTLE LUKE SHORT 157
FRANK MERRIWELL 161
THE LAST OF THE WOBBLIES 167
KIT CARSON 177
THE GREATEST CORPORAL SINCE NAPOLEON 182
CONTENTS
BUGHOUSE CAMP 190
FIRST BOMB 201
LUMBERJACKS* SATURDAY NIGHT 207
THE WILDEST MAN OF THE WEST 216
WHISTLE PUNKS 225
THERE THEY STAND, THE YANKEES 230
LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY
and Other
RUGGED PEOPLE
I he could shoot the head off
*a running quail, could
Little Annie Oakley
WHEN she was almost nine, little
Phoebe Mozee took down the enormous cap-and-ball rifle that
hung over the cabin fireplace, and went out into the surrounding
woods where she blew the tiny head clean off a running quail.
The remains of that bird should have been stuffed and sent to
the Smithsonian Institution, for it had served as the first target of
the future Annie Oakley, "Little Sure Shot," the world's greatest
markswoman and the sweetheart of generations of American
males. Annie died in 1926, pretty much forgotten. Twenty-two
years later she again became one of the greatest personalities
in show business. As the heroine of Annie Get Your Gun (por-
trayed by Ethel Merman), which celebrated its second anniver-
sary still going strong, she was the toast of Broadway. Although
Broadway's "Annie" has better lines, the real Annie had a life
no librettist could improve on.
Annie Oakley unquestionably was wonderful. She stood quite
alone in her celebrity, which cannot be likened to that of any
currently famous female. Her flavor was unique and of her time.
It was a sort of combination of Lillian Russell and Buffalo Bill,
a merger of dainty feminine charm and lead bullets, the whole
draped in gorgeous yellow buckskins and topped with a halo of
powder -blue smoke.
The phenomenon was born Phoebe Anne Oakley Mozee, in
1860, in the backwoods of Darke County, Ohio, the sixth of eight
Copyright, 1947, by Stewart H. Holbrook. Originally published in Life.
1
2 LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY
children of Jake Mozee and his wife Susanne, both Quakers.
Jake died from exposure in a blizzard when Annie was four. Her
mother remarried and the new home was a pretty dismal place.
Her stepfather was not much of a provider. That there was al-
ways food on the table was due largely to little Phoebe's uncanny
and natural ability with a muzzle-loader. And presently, when
she learned that hotels in Cincinnati would pay actual cash for
quail and rabbits, she became a market-hunter.
Shooting matches were the favorite sporting events of the time
and place. Darke County, Ohio, like all other back-country re-
gions, could muster any number of expert riflemen. One after
the other, and to their considerable chagrin, the little Mozee girl
mowed them down. A professional named Frank Butler swag-
gered into Cincinnati and challenged anyone in those parts to
shoot for $100 a side. The Mozee girl took him on.
Little is known about the match except that live birds were
used and so were shotguns a weapon the Mozee youngster held
fit only for little children and that the girl won the match. She
also shot an arrow straight into the heart of Frank Butler. Mr.
Butler married her and they went on the road as a shooting act.
It wasn't long before the girl, who now dropped the Phoebe and
became Annie Oakley, was the featured part of the act.
In the spring of 1885, the team of Butler and Oakley signed
on with Buffalo Bill's Original Wild West Show, just getting
into its full stride under the able management of Nate Salsbury
and the inspired press-agentry of Major John W. Burke, without
question the mogul of all press agents. No honest account of
Annie Oakley, or for that matter of Buffalo Bill, can be written
without reference to Major Burke.
Burke would be wholly incredible today. He wore his hair
long and occasionally called himself Arizona John. He hailed
from that suburb of Arizona we know as the District of Co-
lumbia where he was born and reared. He had been a tramp
LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY 3
newspaper man and once was manager of a trained-animal act.
Dressed impressively in a Prince Albert and striped pants, he
wore his whiskers in the prominent banker or flying buttress
style and his sole interest was that Buffalo Bill's Original Wild
West Show should become and remain the most gigantic, the
most stupendous and the most amazing spectacle on the face
of the earth.
Fifteen years before, a journalist called Ned Buntline had
taken hold of William F. Cody when Cody was an obscure cav-
alry scout and had blown him into the magnificent character of
Buffalo Bill, Prince of the Plains. When Buntline and Cody
parted company Burke got a firm grasp on the Buffalo Bill leg-
end and built it into even greater stature, built it so solidly, too,
that no reliable biography of Cody has been or ever will be
written. And now, in 1885, Major Burke took little Annie Oakley
by the hand.
Among Burke's many talents was a gift for getting along with
American Indians. The best-known Indian villain of the day was
the surly yet bighearted old Sioux medicine man, Sitting Bull.
Burke and Salsbury inveigled him into joining the Buffalo Bill
show, and presently the press of the country broke out with a
wonderful story, namely, that Sitting Bull, whose name was still
a terror to all palefaces, had joined the show simply to be near
his adopted daughter, who was none other than Annie Oakley.
Moreover, swore Burke (and newspapers printed every word of
it as gospel), Sitting Bull had made Annie a "full Indian prin-
cess" and named her "Watanya Cicilia" which, so Burke re-
lated with awe, meant Little Sure Shot.
Although, just as in the case of Bill Cody, Major Burke
dreamed up the character that Annie Oakley became, her shoot-
ing itself needed no ballyhoo. It was as near perfect as shooting
could be. At thirty paces she would slice the thin edge of a play-
ing card held by Frank Butler. She exploded cartridges thrown
4 LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY
into the air. While she sighted by looking into a mirror formed
by the glittering blade of a long bowie knife, she broke a ball
whirled around Butler's head. She was pretty good with a six-
gun, too, and one of her favorite stunts was to roll a tin can along
the ground with a tattoo of bullets from a pair of Mr. Colt's
double-action revolvers.
Great days were ahead for Annie. The show went abroad, first
to England, where it set up at EarPs Court in London. After a
run of middling to poor business the gate picked up. Lady Ran-
dolph Churchill engaged a box. So did the Messrs. Gilbert and
Sullivan. So did Sir Charles Wyndham, the noted actor. And
presently, on a wonderful day that Major Burke never permitted
the world to forget, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward
VII), his princess and their three daughters, together with other
assorted royalty, came for a special performance. By heroic
measures Burke managed to keep Buffalo Bill, one of our really
great topers, sufficiently sober to appear on his white horse and
break a few glass balls with his rifle. The yelling Indians, the
eareening Deadwood coach, the bandits, all proved exciting to
these princelings, whom Burke insisted on calling "crowned
heads," but it was Little Sure Shot they had come to see. Next
day Buffalo Bill received a note: "Sir; Will the little girl, Annie
Oakley, who shoots so cleverly in your show, object to shooting
a friendly match with the Grand Duke Michael of Russia? We
will arrive at Earl's Court at 10:30 this morning." It was signed
"Edward."
Bill Cody was upset. He believed, and with reason, that no
matter how good a marksman the grand duke was, little Annie
would shoot rings around him. And, when asked, Annie said that
was exactly what she would do. Buffalo Bill thought it would be
quite terrible to have a grand duke outshot by a commoner and
a woman at that. Annie was not to be moved. While the argu-
ment was going on, four whole carriage loads of assorted royalty
LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY 5
and nobility rolled up to Earl's Court and the shooting match
started. The duke was a better-than-good marksman but not in
Annie's class. He missed fifteen out of fifty targets, Annie only
three.
The incomparable Major Burke announced to reporters and
cabled back to the U.S. that the grand duke had really come to
England to win a British princess in marriage and had even
progressed to the engagement stage, but that his losing the shoot-
ing match to a woman had caused him also to lose face. Hence
the engagement was broken by the princess. "How magnificent
this little woman of the Great Plains!" marveled Burke. "She
and her magic gun won two matches from the grand duke the
shooting trophy and the hand of the princess." Even Annie Oak-
ley came to believe it.
The sporty Prince of Wales liked the Wild West Show. He
came again and again, and near the end of its run he presented
a fine medal to Miss Oakley. And at last Queen Victoria could
stand it no longer. She commanded a special performance, while
Major Burke's long whiskers fluttered as never before. It was
all the same to Miss Oakley. Her eye unfogged by royalty, her
hand still true, she stood out there in the arena and broke ball
after ball, punctured card after card, then bowed and retired
gracefully in a cloud of smoke.
Whether Annie's success had made her too big for her pants
or whether, as more likely, too many members of the show
simply felt they were being ignored is not known. Whatever the
reason Buffalo Bill and his crew sailed home without Mr. and
Mrs. Butler. The Butlers went to Berlin where Annie gave ex-
hibitions and later toured Germany. Then they returned to
America, though not to the Original Wild West Show. Annie got
mixed up with a stage show entitled Deadwood Dick, one of the
most dreadful turkeys ever seen. A tour of vaudeville was not
6 LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY
much better. What Annie needed was the inspired touch of Major
John Burke.
In 1889 the Butlers were back with the Wild West Show. They
toured France, Spain and Germany. In Berlin, at the special re-
quest of the young Kaiser Wilhelm, Annie shot the ashes off a
cigaret held in his mouth. Two years later she was a sensation
at the Chicago World's Fair, and for the next seven years she
did not miss a season nor a single performance with Buffalo
Bill. Then, in 1901, as the train carrying the show was steaming
south to go into winter quarters, it ran head-on into another
train. Four performers were killed and almost one hundred in-
jured, among them Annie Oakley, who was pulled unconscious
from the wreck by her husband.
Partial paralysis and five operations followed the injury.
Annie's hair grayed, then whitened. It was more than two years
before she took gun in hand again. Then she found she could
still shoot and shoot well. Soon she was out with another stage
horror, The Western GirL She left it and went into vaudeville.
The rest of her life was spent in and out of vaudeville and, dur-
ing the winters, in giving lessons in shooting at Pinehurst, N.C.
Annie died in Greenville, Ohio, in her native Darke County,
on November 3, 1926, and her body was cremated in Cincinnati.
Childless herself, she left eighteen orphan girls whom she had
befriended and put through school. Frank Butler died a few
weeks later. Both Bill Cody and Major Burke were long since
in their graves.
Until Annie Get Your Gun the new generation knew Annie
Oakley only as a slang term for complimentary tickets. It was
coined by the late Ban Johnson, the baseball impresario, who
referred to baseball game passes, all of which were punched as
though by bullets to distinguish them from paid tickets, as Annie
Oakleys.
It was small immortality for so wonderful a woman. All young
LITTLE ANNIE OAKLEY 7
men of the time, and old men too, lost their hearts to the tiny
buckskinned sprite and never quite got over it. No American
male of the era was wholly immune to the charms of Little Sure
Shot, adopted daughter of Sitting Bull and the creation of Major
John W. Burke, God rest his inspired and imaginative soul.
taked and alone in the great
\woods was Joe Knowles,
The Original Nature Man
ON SULTRY July 20, 1914, newspapers
up and down the Pacific Coast announced in blaring headlines :
EYES OF WORLD ON TEST OF MAN vs. NATURE. Reading on, West-
ern he-men learned that Joe Knowles, the Nature Man of Maine,
was about to plunge, unarmed and naked as a snake, into the un-
tamed, cougar-infested wilds of the Siskiyou Mountains of Ore-
gon.
Next day, the Examiner of San Francisco, sponsor of this
one-man scientific expedition, gave over a goodly part of its front
page to telling who Joe Knowles was, what he proposed to do,
and the conditions of this test of Man vs. Nature. The Oregonian
of Portland did likewise, and lesser papers of the Coast region
broke out with syndicated articles signed by Knowles at his jump-
ing-off place, Grants Pass.
To assure the public there was no fakery, the Examiner an-
nounced it had secured two eminent naturalists as special in-
vestigators. They were Dr. Charles Lincoln Edwards, B.S., Ph.D.,
head of the Nature Study Department of the Los Angeles school
system, and Prof. T. T. Waterman of the University of Cali-
fornia. The two savants would be turned loose in the same wild
district where Knowles was to perform and there circulate at
will, picking up messages that the Nature Man might write and
leave at agreed points. Also they were to set down their own im-
Copyright, 1936, by Stewart H. Holbrook. Originally published in The American
Mercury.
8
THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN 9
pressions of the experiment and generally act as "guardians of
the public interest" in the affair.
Two days later the story was still front-page stuff and getting
bigger and better all the time. Wearing a breechclout and noth-
ing else, with no implement of any kind, Joe Knowles had shaken
hands with professors and reporters, posed for Mr. Hearst's
cameraman, and vanished into the Siskiyou jungle. There he was
to remain for sixty days, unarmed, unaided in any way, living
on nuts and berries, or on game if he could snare it with his
bare hands; clothing himself as he could from the forest; and
pitting his naked body against the enemies of nature, which
ranged all the way from clouds of vicious insects to mean moun-
tain lions. WILD BEASTS ROAR INVITATION TO JOE KNOWLES bel-
lowed the Examiner in a banner, and there were echoes all the
way from Los Angeles to Seattle.
There hadn't been such a local story since the San Francisco
"Fire," and it was going great guns as July crept into its last
week. Joe was doing well and sitting pretty, he reported in mes-
sages written in charcoal on bark and left for the two professors
to pick up. He was living on fish and small game, taken in primi-
tive fashion, and he was about to snare a deer from whose skin
he would make himself more durable clothes than those he was
wearing. Red-blooded he-men, with whom the West Coast has
ever been infested, could scarcely wait for their morning papers
to read pop-eyed and envious what the Nature Man of Maine
had done the day before. It even got into the comic strips and
editorial cartoons.
Then came that sinister 28th of July, when all Europe started
blowing up. AUSTRIA DECLARES WAR ON SERBIA screamed head-
lines from coast to coast and on around the world. Twelve hours
later the Russian mobilization was under way, and the Kaiser
had declared war on the Czar. France rose to arms. On August
2, Germany demanded free passage through Belgium. Next day.
10 THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN
von Kluck's Big Berthas were bombarding Liege. And on August
4, Great Britain went whole hog into the riot.
It was a sad day for Joe Knowles. And you can guess what
it did to the Examiner's great experiment of Man vs. Nature.
The Naked Thoreau news from Grants Pass went into the back
pages next to the classified ads, and many a Californian doesn't
know to this day whether Joe Knowles ever got out of the woods.
Joe was annoyed, and with considerable reason. What a lousy
lime to start a world war! Here he was, exposing his hide to the
gnats and cougars, fighting a single-handed battle against all
the natural enemies of Man and Europe had to go and blow
him off the front page. . . .
II
This, however, wasn't the first time that Joe Knowles had
ventured alone into the primeval forest to prove that atavism
is not only easy and pleasant, but good for newspaper circula-
tion as well; nor was it his last trip of the kind. It was simply
the one when all the breaks were against him.
The time that Joe really knocked them out of their seats was
in 1913, a year before the Siskiyou affair. The setting was the
woods of Northern Maine, the paper was the Boston Post, and
the public included almost all the newspaper readers in New
England and Eastern Canada. The story was handled with beau-
tiful showmanship. When Joe went into the Maine woods in
August, 1913, he was an unknown artist, a struggling portrait
painter. Two months later he was a national figure, known alike
to adults and schoolboys, and the center of a controversy that was
second in noise only to that between the friends of Admiral
Peary and the friends of Dr. Cook.
His Big Idea came out of a dream. "Not much of a dream,"
Joe said, "but a damned real one. I dreamt I was lost in the
THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN 11
woods, alone and naked, with no hope ever of getting out. When
I woke up I got to thinking if and how a civilized man should
get along in such a situation. A day or so later I related my
dream at a small hotel dinner. How a New York newspaperman
happened to be present I have forgotten, but there was one; and
next day the Tribune carried an interview with me, telling of my
claims. In a day or two mail started flooding me."
The correspondence started a train of thought in Joe's mind.
Some of the letters agreed that a naked and unarmed man could
survive in the forest. Others said Joe was a fool who didn't know
what he was talking about. And then, almost simultaneously,
came letters from the Boston American, a Hearst paper, and the
Boston Post. Both said they would like to have Joe call on them
when he was in Boston. . . . The Big Idea was a-dawning.
First off, but in greatest secrecy lest the Vermonters have him
clapped into jail on disorderly conduct charges, Joe conducted
an undress rehearsal. Naked except for a G-string, and taking
nothing with him, he went into the wooded hills back of Brad-
ford and remained there a week. It was July. Berries were plenti-
ful. So were flies and mosquitoes. But the dawning Nature Man
rubbed his hide with wild spearmint and the pests passed him
by. He cornered trout in a small pool and caught them with his
hands. Fire was easy, for Joe had learned the secret years before
from Indians. All in all, he put in a pleasant and interesting
week. When he emerged from the Bradford woods he packed his
grip and went to Boston.
For reasons not at all clear today, the editor of the Boston
American hemmed and hawed. "You're losing the chance of a
lifetime," Joe told him as he walked out, and how true he spoke
any Boston newspaperman will tell you now.
So Joe went over to the Post. Even in 1913, the Post was an
old paper, but it wasn't doing well. The loud American, still
young and rowdy, was giving New England a sample of Hearst
12 THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN
at Ms best, or worst, and it had seemed to Knowles that the
Hearst sheet was the logical medium for his experiment. At the
moribund Post., however, Joe found a real welcome. Charles
E. L. Wingate, late general manager of the Boston Journal, had
just taken hold of the Sunday edition, and he was open to new
ideas. He also had some of his own. And so, late in July, Editor
Wingate wheeled up his heavy guns and fired a double-truck
barrage that startled the natives as they hadn't been startled
since Paul Revere rode through Middlesex.
A man, a naked man, a man used to all the comforts of civil-
ization, was about to plunge into the Maine wilderness to learn
whether the human race had become so sissified that it could no
longer combat the rigors and dangers which beset Primitive
Man. It was a highly dangerous test, the Post took pains to point
out, for fierce animals stalked silently through the forest lanes,
and there was ever the specter of starvation.
But Joe Knowles was a fine physical specimen. Harvard Col-
lege said so. Called in by the Post, Dr. Dudley Allen Sargent,
physical director of the university, looked Joe over carefully
and told the world:
Sandow was perfect in strength and development. Knowles is perfect
in strength and development. Further, Knowles has probably the staying
power of three Sandows.
Now all was in readiness for the great test. The Post thought-
fully invited newspapers of other cities to the remote point in
Maine where the Nature Man was to take off. The New York Sun
thought well enough of the story to send its ace feature writer,
Frank Ward O'Malley; and there were a score of lesser lights
from various dailies. On August 4, 1913, Joe bid them all good-
by and walked into the silence of the Dead River country, at-
tired only in a breechclout.
For the next sixty-one days, New England, New York, and
THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN IS
other parts of the country served by the Post's special syndica-
tion, were agog at the swellest feature story in a generation. It
was Steve Brodie, Nellie Ely, and Stanley-and-Livingstone all
rolled into one great juicy series. The reporters wrote their heads
off, and every day or so they would come across a birchbark
message, left in a forked sapling by the Nature Man; Joe had
been living on roots and berries he had caught and cooked
some fine trout he had made rude sandals of bark he was
digging a pit in which to catch a bear he had caught a bear
and was enjoying bear steak he had got some hemlock bark
and was tanning the bear's skin he would soon have a robe
he had caught a deer with his hands, and he was now wearing
hide moccasins.
At this, the game wardens of towns round about let out a howl.
It was agin' the law to kill deer out of season, gun or no gun,
and they were a-goin' to take this crazy man into custody. The
wardens hoisted their badges and rifles and struck into the
woods to arrest the Nature Man and newspaper circulation
soared again. Tipped off about the wardens by his contact man,
Joe headed northward and crossed the Canadian border late in
September.
The Canucks left him alone. Free once more from the harass-
ments of civilization, Joe turned out some neat sketches in char-
coal which the Post reproduced for a public that couldn't get
enough of its Nature Man. Circulation had jumped by now to
400,000 copies, or about double the normal figure.
The nights were getting chilly up in Quebec, Joe reported via
birchbark, but he was sleeping warm in his bearskin robe. Time
was beginning to hang heavy on his hands, too, for reporters
came across a painting not a sketch that Joe had made, using
the juice of roots and berries for his colors and a well-chewed
twig for a brush. Of course, there weren't messages from him
every day, but his terse dispatches were so expertly timed and
14 THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN
spaced that they kept the newspaper reading public on edge.
The Post 9 s circulation mounted to 436,585, and there must have
been a deal of groaning over in the offices of the Boston Ameri-
can.
ill
On October 10, Joe emerged from the woods at Megantic, Que-
bec. He was the picture of health, rugged, tanned, and bearded;
and he was met, you may be sure, by a small army of news-
papermen, both Canadian and American. Even a movie outfit
was present.
"My only regret at the time," Joe recalled in telling of it, "is
that I didn't manage to catch a cub bear alive. I thought it would
be a fine idea to come out of the woods leading a small and
tamed bear behind me on a leash of willow."
Escorted to Boston on a special train, Joe was distinctly the
man of the hour. Big shots of Boston flocked to the Copley-Plaza
for a banquet tendered the Nature Man. Newsreel men dogged
his steps, while low comedians at the Old Howard staged a Kno
Jowles burlesque. Vaudeville booking agents from New York
fought to offer a contract, and a janitor swept out Tremont
Temple for Joe's first lecture before highbrows. But now, amidst
the big whoopee, crept in that sour and envious note that so
often attends success in any form. The American told its readers
that on the morrow it would bring forth a "complete expose" of
the Nature Man. Its announcement hinted at gigantic skuldug-
gery on the part of Knowles and the Post, and it promised shock-
ing revelations.
The Post had got wind of the coming blast even before it was
announced. It also got a court injunction prohibiting the Ameri-
can from publishing a story which it held was a gross libel.
Things happened rapidly in the American office, once the in-
junction was served. The story was already out, in the early
THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN 15
bulldog edition, and men were sent forth to bring in all copies
of this edition. The front page was broken up, the expose story
killed, and there was no mention of Joe in the regular city edi-
tion. That is, no mention except for a striking full-page adver-
tisement announcing publication of "Alone in the Wilderness,
by Joe Knowles, the Nature Man." It was neatly timed: the book
sold more than 300,000 copies.
The American said nothing more about Knowles. It didn't even
mention a suit for $50,000 which Joe had brought against the
paper for printing the "slanderous story" in the early edition,
copies of which had pretty well permeated New England outside
of Boston. But, in any event, a magnificent controversy had been
loosed. Was it true, as an investigating reporter of the American
had averred, that the Nature Man had spent most of two months
lolling around in a deserted but comfortable logging camp? Had
Joe been living like a backwoods potentate, attended by in-
numerable stooges in the form of guides, hunters, and bull
cooks? Was it so that no less than four small holes, suspiciously
like bullet holes, had appeared in the bear robe? Had a leather
expert of Boston vowed that the little deerskin had been tanned
by a commercial process? And was young Billy Lavaway lying
when he told a backcounty Maine paper that he had been sent
out of the woods by Joe to get some cigarets; and that when the
kid had returned with Piedmonts, Joe had angrily roared he had
ordered Sweet Caps? Did the American, in short, have it right
when it termed Joe Knowles the "Doc Cook of the Maine
Woods"?
Those were fighting words in those days, and Joe and the Post
fought back. They fought with heavy ammunition in the shape of
affidavits of Maine guides, opinions of nationally known natur-
alists, and of at least one United States senator. Joe took the
platform in Boston's Tremont Temple and challenged his de-
tractors to come forward. They came not, but the thing had be-
16 THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN
come a cause celebre and New England was in turmoil. It was
great for circulation, too.
With the booming of charges and countercharges ringing in
his ears, Joe took to the Keith Vaudeville Circuit for twenty
weeks with 24-sheet billing and $1,200 a week.
IV
Knowles later declared that because of the "expose" incident,
seven employees of the American were fired. In any case, the
hatchet was buried, for Hearst's International, a slick-paper
monthly magazine, came out with an editorial, done in bris-
banal style, paying high compliments to Joe:
We thank Knowles for his experiment. It is a noble piece of poetry. A
naked man against the tooth and claw of Nature, and coming out victor
clothed, fed, healthy; it is a deal more comforting to our proper
human pride than the erection of a Woolworth building.
Less than a year later, Joe took into the wild Siskiyous for
Hearst's Examiner of San Francisco, as related. Despite the
unseasonable breaking out of the World War, Mr. Hearst had
seen what a Nature Man could do for circulation, if but given a
chance. So he had Joe go to New York, and there, in the summer
of 1916, the Journal prepared to make up for what its sister
paper in Boston had muffed.
This time the stunt was to be appropriately enough, consid-
ering the sponsor a double-barreled affair. There would be a
Dawn Man, and a Dawn Woman, both of them naked and both
of them out in the Great Silence, but not together. (Remember,
this was in 1916.) The general routine was to be about the same
as that used by Joe in his Maine and Oregon-California adven-
tures. It was also announced that Knowles would give the Dawn
Woman a week of serious woodcraft instruction before she went
out on her own.
THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN 17
The Dawn Woman soon appeared, in the columns of the pal-
pitating Journal, in the form of Elaine Hammerstein, said by
the Journal to be "the beautiful society leader and well-known
actress." Joe, of course, knew he was to play second fiddle in
this experiment.
The country selected for the Dawn Woman's commune with
Nature was the timbered region near Old Forge, in Essex
County, New York, and the "special investigator" for the news-
paper was no less than the eminent Dr. Woods Hutchinson. Joe
took Elaine in tow (her mother was along as chaperon) and for
a week or so he gave her intensive instruction in firemaking,
weaving and fishing without tackle; and he showed her edible
herbs, roots and berries native to the country. As Joe told it
afterward, Elaine's enthusiasm for a Dawn life seemed per-
ceptibly to lessen day by day during the instruction period.
But Elaine told the reporters that she was Ready and would
Conquer. Boozy cameramen shot the pretty girl in all sorts of
semi-Dawn attire; and they also snapped Joe in all his Cro-
Magnon nakedness.
And then, on a blistering Sunday, the Journal double-trucked
a spread that would make editors of today's tabloids sit up in
envy. KNOWLES HURLS DEFY AT GRIM NATURE, said one banner;
while another, somewhat leeringly, told how DAWN GIRL SLIPS
NAKED INTO DARK FOREST. Young men decided to take up wood-
craft. Goatish old males simply drooled.
The Dawn Woman lasted long enough to send out a few pa-
thetic notes on birchbark. "Tango teas, Broadway, and matinees
are a far cry from the absolute silence of the great woods," she
wrote. At the end of seven days she came out of the absolute
silence, and undoubtedly returned to her swell Riverside Drive
home of which the reporters had made so much. "She just
couldn't take it," was Joe's only comment.
With the Dawn Woman back in her sissy boudoir, there wasn't
18 THE ORIGINAL NATURE MAN
any use sticking around, so Joe came out of the woods himself
and put on his pants.
For twenty years Joe Knowles made his home at Seaview on
a remote shore of the Washington coast.* The wild Pacific
breakers pounded his dooryard and high tides surrounded his
studio, where he painted and did etchings. At the age of sixty-
nine he was hearty and jovial. He held no animosity toward
those who sought to "expose" him, not even the guy who called
him the "Doc Cook of the Maine Woods/' But he made it em-
phatically clear that he would not answer letters or other queries
about his Back-to-Nature experiments.
"I'm still sorry I didn't manage to catch a bear cub, up there
in Maine," he said wistfully. "It would have been a knockout
parading out of that timber a-leading a bear like a Scottie. It's
just about the only regret I have. . . . That and that goddam
war breaking out when it did."
* Joe died there October 21, 1942, in the strange house he had put together, at
odd times over two decades, of the flotsam of and from -wrecked ships. Outside the
gate, the last time I -was there, still hung the sign "Stranger, Pause a While, Joe
Knowles."
* t happened only once in
i three hundred years
Murder at Harvard
NOT all of the sons of Harvard, not
even Harvard doctors of philosophy, appear to know that the
university on the Charles was the scene of one of the most cele-
brated crimes in American annals. This is a melancholy state
of affairs, for the setting of the murder was indubitably a college
building and the criminal, who was John White Webster, A.B.
1811, and M.D. 1815, remains the only Harvard professor to
perform lethally while a member of the faculty, and the sole col-
lege professor to gain entrance to the Dictionary of American
Biography on the strength not of his scholarship but of his stout
and murderous right arm.
The painful celebrity that came to Harvard has gradually been
dissipated in the ninety-nine years intervening, yet more than one
member of the faculty long felt the blight cast by Professor
Webster. Bliss Perry has related how his mother at Williams-
town, Massachusetts, refused to entertain a Harvard professor
who had come there, circa 1870, as a delegate to a convention of
New England college officials. Mrs. Perry vowed most firmly on
this occasion that she could not sleep "if one of those Harvard
professors was in the house." Incidentally, the professor, who
had to find quarters elsewhere than in the Perry home, was
James Russell Lowell.
One reason the crime achieved such notoriety was pungently
pointed out at the time by the eminent Jared Sparks. "Our pro-
Copyright, 1945, by Stewart H. Holbrook. Originally published in The American
Scholar.
19
20 MURDER AT HARVARD
fessors," said the then president of Harvard College, "do not
often commit murder." Another reason for notoriety was the
prominence of the victim. Dr. George Parkman. And witnesses
at the trial read like the index to one of Mr. Van Wyck Brooks's
charming studies of New England.
But let us move upon the corpus delicti.
II
At about half past one on the gray twenty-third of November,
in 1849, Dr. George Parkman, one of Boston's best-known cit-
izens, was seen afoot near the corner of Blossom and North
Grove Streets, moving rapidly toward Harvard Medical School,
on the Boston side of the Charles. He was always in a hurry, Dr.
Parkman, and his tall, lean figure, together with a prognathous
jaw and a set of false teeth so white they fairly glittered, made
him a marked man. Yet somewhere near or at the entrance to
the medical college he walked straight into Valhalla. Nor has he
been seen since.
A man of Dr. Parkman's standing could not disappear with-
out being missed immediately. It was he, a Harvard man him-
self, who had given the very land on which the then new Medical
School building stood. He had also endowed the Parkman Chair
of Anatomy, currently occupied by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
His family was prominent, and his brother, the Rev. Francis
Parkman, was a well-known clergyman whose son of the same
name was about to achieve fame as a historian. The Parkmans
were in-laws of many old Boston families, including that of
Robert Gould Shaw.
When Dr. Parkman did not return to his home on Walnut
Street that afternoon of the twenty-third, search was begun at
once by Charles M. Kingsley, the agent who looked after Park-
man's many properties in the city. And next day, Robert Gould
MURDER AT HARVARD 21
Shaw himself, after conferring with the Parkmans, had 28,000
handbills distributed announcing a reward of $3,000 for recov-
ery of the doctor alive, or $1,000 for his body. Mr. Shaw told
police that he suspected a man who several months previously
had robbed Dr. Parkman.
While police were looking for this unnamed thug, an aston-
ishing event occurred. On Sunday, two days after the doctor's
disappearance, there appeared at the door of the Rev. Francis
Parkman's home Professor John White Webster, who acted in
"an abrupt and peculiar manner." Webster said that he had
had an interview (a tremendous understatement, that) with the
missing man in the Medical School on Friday afternoon, at
which time he had paid Dr. Parkman $483 "and some cents. 9 '
The latter had then, said Webster, rushed out of the college. ATI
of which favored the popular theory that Parkman had been
waylaid, robbed, and doubtless murdered.
John White Webster was fifty-six years of age. After gradua-
tion from Harvard Medical School he had served in Guy's Hos-
pital, London, and married Harriet Hickling, a daughter of the
American vice-consul at St. Michael. Since 1824, he had taught
chemistry at Harvard, and from 1827 had held the Erving Chair
of Chemistry and Mineralogy. The Websters, who had four
lovely daughters, lived in Cambridge and were much given to
hospitality.
Hospitality of the sort the generous Websters lavished on fac-
ulty members and wives, as well as local and visiting celebrities,
cost a good deal, even in the Cambridge of a century ago. And
Professor Webster's salary of $1,200 a year was not equal to it.
True, he had the income from his lectures; but he was far from
brilliant on the platform, and the income from this source was
meager. Yet, while it was known to Robert Gould Shaw that on
November 23 his brother-in-law had gone to collect money owed
him by Webster, he did not suspect that Webster was responsible
22 MURDER AT HARVARD
for Parkman's disappearance. Who, indeed, could suspect any
such indiscretion in a faculty member of the college on the
Charles?
It was a fact, though, that the financial affairs of Professor
Webster had reached something of a climax. They were so in-
volved that many whole pages of finely printed testimony were
required, a bit later, to make them clear if ever they did be-
come clear to the jury. Briefly, it would appear that as early
as 1842 Webster had first borrowed money from Parkman, in
the sum of $400. For this he gave his note secured by personal
property. Then, in 1847, at a time when the first loan had not
been repaid, Parkman had been one of a group to lend Webster
more than $2,000, this time taking a mortgage on all of his per-
sonal property, which included a cabinet of minerals. A year
later, unknown to Parkman, Webster went to Robert Gould Shaw
and by pathetic tales of misf ortune prevailed on that kindly man
to buy the cabinet of minerals outright for $1,200. He failed to
mention that this collection was already in pawn to Parkman.
Well, it was bound to happen soon or late, and one day the
matter of Professor Webster's cabinet of minerals soon to be
the most famous collection in history occurred in a conversa-
tion between Gould and Parkman. Now, Doctor Parkman pat-
ently enjoyed a low boiling point, and he became furious. From
that moment onward poor Professor Webster knew what it was
like to have a Yankee bloodhound on his trail. His creditor was a
punctilious man who paid his own obligations when due and he
expected the same of everybody else, even a Harvard professor.
in
Nothing came of the search for Doctor Parkman. The Charles
was dragged. The Medical School was visited by swarms of po-
lice who also entered all of the college buildings in Cambridge.
MURDER AT HARVARD 23
Strangers in Boston were picked up by the score, to be ques-
tioned and released. The theory of robbery and murder still held
the fancy of both police and public, and apparently nobody sus-
pected Professor Webster until a morose and obscure man
named Ephraim Littlefield began to translate his brooding into
action. Littlefield was janitor at the Medical School. He must
have been of a particularly suspicious nature, for his entrance
into the case as an amateur detective was brought about by a
generous act of Professor Webster's. On the Tuesday following
Parkman's disappearance, Webster had presented Littlefield
with a thumping big turkey an outstanding event, since it was
the first gift the janitor had received in seven years of work at
the college. Littlefield brooded over the turkey, which one is
happy to note came from Foster's store, next door to the How-
ard Atheneum, which a bit later became the place where genera-
tions of Harvard undergraduates were to study anatomy. Little-
field not only brooded over the gift of the turkey, but he was
troubled because talk on the street had it that "they'll sure find
Doctor Parkman's body somewhere in the Medical School." (In
those days medical colleges, both abroad and at home, were held
to be notorious receivers of the products of professional body-
snatchers.)
"I got tired," said Littlefield in explaining his next move, "of
hearing all that talk about the Medical School." Accordingly, he
procured what appears to have been a sufficient number of demo-
lition tools to have supplied wreckers for all of Harvard Univer-
sity. Into his dismal basement apartment at the Medical School
he lugged drills, hammers, chisels, crowbars. He told his wife
that he was going to do nothing less than to dig through the brick
vault under Professor Webster's room in the college. Mrs. Little-
field was dreadfully frightened. She objected that her husband
would be dismissed from his job, should knowledge of his sus-
picions reach officials of the college. But she apparently felt dif-
24 MURDER AT HARVARD
ferently about the matter after her husband related a conversa-
tion he had overheard between Webster and Parkman.
A few days before Parkman's disappearance, according to
Littlefield, the janitor was helping Webster putter around his
laboratory. The two men were busy and didn't hear a footstep.
But suddenly, as if from nowhere. Doctor Parkman appeared on
cat's feet. Immediately, said Littlefield, Doctor Parkman spoke
up quick and loud and harsh: "Doctor Webster, are you ready
for me tonight?" And Webster replied: "No, Doctor, I am not
ready tonight." Parkman moved back toward the door, raised
one arm and shook one fist. "Doctor Webster," he said savagely,
"something must be accomplished tomorrow." Then he went out.
For the next several days Littlefield brooded and wondered
whether, on the next call Doctor Parkman made on Professor
Webster, the latter had been ready for him. So, on what must
have been a gloomy and foreboding Thanksgiving Day, and
while Mrs. Littlefield stood watch for possible interruptions, the
janitor hammered and drilled and crowbarred his way into the
solid brick wall of the vault beneath Professor Webster's labora-
tory. Progress was slow. At noon Littlefield refreshed himself
with the astounding turkey, then returned to his labors, which
were great. They really laid brick walls to stay, in that era of
solid craftsmanship, and night found the janitor only part way
through the bricks. He was a determined man, however, and on
the following day, after performing his regular duties, he re-
sumed his attack on the vault. And that night he broke through.
"I held my light forward," he related, "and the first thing I saw
was the pelvis of a man and two parts of a leg. I knew," he added
darkly, "this was no place for such things."
Nor was it. Littlefield notified the police of his find, and when
they had taken one look at the ghastly contents of the vault, they
drove madly to Cambridge in a hack and called on Professor
Webster. Constable Derastus Clapp, a man of devious Yankee
MURDER AT HARVARD 2S
ways, told Webster they should like him to attend them at the
Medical School while a new search was being made. Webster
replied that although the building already had been searched a
number of times, nevertheless he would be glad to accompany
the officers. He got into the hack, which soon crossed the bridge
into Boston and continued on past North Grove Street and
toward Leverett Street Jail.
"Stop," cried Webster. "We are going in the wrong direction."
But devious Constable Derastus Clapp answered: "Oh, that's
all right, Professor. He is a new coachman and somewhat green,
but he will doubtless discover and correct his mistake." Boston
had constables in those days of Transcendentalism.
In a few moments, however, the professor realized that he was
not a free aid in a search, but a prisoner in Boston jail. Reporters
came, and next day the press and all the town went delirious-
"Horrible Suspicions!!" screamed the usually seemly and gen-
teel Evening Transcript, "Arrest of Professor J. W. Webster/*
And it continued:
Since last evening our whole population has been in a state of the
greatest possible excitement in consequence of the astounding rumor
that the body of Dr. Parkman has been discovered and that Dr. John W.
Webster, professor of chemistry at the Medical School of Harvard Col-
lege, and a gentleman connected by marriage with some of our most
distinguished families, has been arrested and imprisoned., on suspicion
of being the murderer. . . . Never in the annals of crime in Massa-
chusetts has such a sensation been produced.
And then, because Epes Sargent was editor of the Transcript?
and because he probably wrote the story himself, we get the full
flavor of the Evening Transcript's idea of reporting the crime of
the century. The item continues:
In the streets, in the market-place, at every turn, men greet each
other with pale, eager looks, and the inquiry, "Can it be true?" And
then the terrible reply, "The circumstances begin to gather weight
26 MURDER AT HARVARD
against him/' is wrung forth; the agitated listener can only vent his sick-
ening sense of horror, in some such expression as that of Hamlet
O, horrible! O 9 horrible! most horrible!
Never again, so far as I am aware, did the Transcript feel that
a murder called for Shakespeare. Not even the famous Richard-
son and Pretty Choir Singer affair of later years rated the Bard.
IV
The trial opened on the 19th of March, 1850, when Professor
Webster, "his step light and elastic, crossed and took his seat in
the dock, his countenance betraying a degree of calm and digni-
fied composure." He was quite short in stature, and seemed of
no great strength to "the expert stenographer," John A. French,
who noted and took down everything for publication in a "splen-
didly illustrated" pamphlet put out by the Boston Herald Steam
Press. I cherish a worn copy of this horribly printed pamphlet,
and had a distant forebear of mine not been otherwise so tre-
mendously occupied, family folklore might have added consider-
ably to my knowledge of the trial. Peter B. Brigham was excused
from jury duty at the Webster trial on the improbable plea that
he belonged to the Boston militia, was "liable to call at any
moment," and was "thus exempt by the statute from serving on
a jury."
The State promptly put Janitor Littlefield on the stand, and his
accumulated testimony was bad indeed for Professor Webster.
Defense attempted to throw suspicion on Littlefield himself, and
it also presented a long and highly distinguished array of char-
acter and other witnesses. The Hon. John Gorham Palfrey, his-
torian, former editor of the North American Review, and mem-
ber of Congress, declared sonorously that Professor Webster
was a man of some temper but of extremely good heart. Presi-
dent Jared Sparks of Harvard thought Webster "kind and hu-
MURDER AT HARVARD 27
mane." Nathaniel Bowditch, probably a son of the great mathe-
matician, said that Webster was "irritable though kind-hearted/*
Other witnesses included members of prominent families Bige-
low, Codman, Dana, Lovering, Sanger, Wyman. Oliver Wendell
Holmes, who gave his occupation as physician, testified at some
length, both for the State and the defense. For the former he said
that whoever had cut up the body alleged to be that of Doctor
Parkman had certainly been handy with surgical knives.
The State, of course, was attempting to prove that the rem-
nants of human mortality which had been discovered in the
vault, in a tin box filled mostly with tanbark in Webster's labora-
tory, and in the laboratory stove, were those of Dr. Parkman;
and the defense was doing its best to prove the fragments to be
those of almost anybody except Doctor Parkman.
While Dr. Nathan C. Keep was on the stand identifying the
mineral teeth found in the stove to be the very same teeth he had
made for Doctor Parkman, suddenly "here the City bells were
rung for fire, and it being announced that the Tremont House
was on fire, the Court granted an intermission, to allow the At-
torney General, who boarded at the Tremont, to save his papers/*
Upon resumption of the trial the spectators were given a grisly
enough treat when Dr. Woodbridge Strong took the stand to dis-
cuss the matter of burning bodies. "I have dissected a good many
bodies in my day," said Doctor Strong with evident relish. "I
recollect a pirate I had given me one time, and as I only wanted
the bones, I dissected him rapidly, and . . ." so on and on,
until some of the less avid spectators left the courtroom.
Little by little, over what must have been ten terrible days for
Professor Webster, the coils of circumstantial evidence could be
seen closing around him, and late on the eleventh day the jury
was charged by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, another Harvard
man (1800), in an address which is still considered by lawyers
28 MURDER AT HARVARD
to be one of the greatest expositions of the law of circumstantial
evidence ever delivered, and is referred to, in the quaint way of
lawyers, as Gushing 295. Three hours later the jury returned
with a verdict of guilty. There was no demonstration, for "an
awful and unbroken silence ensued, in which the Court, the jury,
the clerk, and spectators seemed to be absorbed in their own re-
flections."
Professor Webster wasn't quite ready to greet the hangman,
but his writ of error was denied, and he then addressed the
Governor and Council, protesting his innocence and piously call-
ing on the Great Searcher of human hearts as his witness. To no
avail. And long before Professor Webster's neck was broken,
quickly and efficiently, on August 30, 1850, he made a long con-
fession. Janitor Littlefield had been right. Professor Webster
was ready for Doctor Parkman, when he called on that fatal Fri-
day. What had happened, according to Webster's confession, was
this:
Doctor Parkman had come that day with the idea of getting
some money. When denied it, he had called Webster both liar
and scoundrel, and had shaken his fist in the professor's face.
Then, said Webster, "I felt nothing but the sting of his words
. . . and in my fury I seized whatever thing was handiest it
was a stick of wood and dealt him an instantaneous blow with
all the force that passion could give it." The one blow was
enough. Parkman fell, bleeding at the mouth. Webster hurriedly
bolted all the doors, stripped the dead man, hoisted him into the
sink, and there dismembered him with the deft professional
strokes that had been apparent to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The Webster-Parkman affair unquestionably has had mention
in more autobiographies and memoirs than any other murder
MURDER AT HARVARD 29
case in America. The case probably comes nearer to filling the
definition "classic" than any other crime in the nineteenth-cen-
tury United States. Boston never quite forgave Charles Dickens
for his interest in it. For, on his visit in 1869, when asked what
he should most like to see of the city's great landmarks, he
promptly replied, "the room where Doctor Parkman was mur-
dered." He was taken to see it, too, by nobody but Doctor
Holmes. And that evening, at a dinner tendered the distinguished
Briton, Henry W. Longfellow related a singular incident regard-
ing Professor Webster.
Longfellow had often been a guest in the Webster home in
Cambridge, and on one such occasion, a year or so before the
crime, Webster had the lights of the dining room lowered and
a servant brought a bowl of burning chemicals which shed a
ghastly luminescence on the faces of those at the table. Webster
then stood up, said Longfellow, took a rope from beneath the
table, and cast it around his own short thick neck, like a noose.
He then leaned over the glowing bowl, rolled his eyes, lolled his
head to one side, and stuck out his tongue, like one hanged. Some
of the guests thought it an odd idea of entertainment.
Perhaps the best bit of folklore, though, concerns sardonic
Ben Butler, to whom Harvard had failed to grant an LL.D. While
cross-examining a witness in court, and treating him rather
roughly, the judge reminded Butler that the witness was no less
than a Harvard professor. "Yes, I know, your honor," said Ben,
"we hanged one the other day."
For the next half century or more Harvard faculty members
were constantly undergoing similar pleasantries, according to
the late Albert Bushnell Hart, who told me that the ribbing was
still prevalent in his early days at Harvard, in the 1880's. And
in recent years, so Harlow Shapley reports, the chief comment
on the case concerns wonder that only one Harvard professor
aO MURDER AT HARVARD
has murdered another. This fact leaves the incidence of murder
among Harvard faculty members very low one in approxi-
mately every three centuries.
Actuarially speaking, the job of teaching there remains a
fairly good risk.
of the great and indestructible
f phonies of the West was
The Late Calamity Jane
How many times she married, or at
least changed consorts, is beyond knowing, and perhaps beyond
belief. She appeared at different times under the style of Hunt,
Blake, Burke, White, Dorsett and Dalton, but who these gentle-
men were, if they even existed, has been lost in the imperfect
records of the time and place. But the records seem to indicate
that Calamity Jane probably was born Martha Cannary in
Princeton, Missouri, on the first day of May, 1852. The qualifi-
cations are needed; it is best to qualify almost any statement re-
garding this all but indestructible character of the old West.
I like to think of Calamity Jane as the inspired person who
gave to the West its classic phrase, "Don't fence me in." I really
don't believe she uttered those words, but she lived up to them
well enough, and for forty years after the age of consent she
roamed and she ranged the West when it was wild and woolly
and when even such singularly unattractive women as she could
be sure of a bed and a bottle, and of male companionship. It will
shock all movie-goers to know it, but Jane was primarily what
is politely termed a camp follower.
Joe E. Milner, grandson of California Joe an unpublicized
but quite genuine old scout of the plains probably knew as
much about Jane and her career as anybody. He often related,
and even put it into print, that her father was Robert Cannary,
a farm boy who had married her mother "in a bawdy house in
Copyright, 1947, by Stewart H. Holbrook. Originally published in The American
Mercury.
31
a2 THE LATE CALAMITY JANE
Ohio to reform her, but did not do a very good job of it." The
family migrated to the Montana gold fields, either in 1864 or
1865, and Mrs. Cannary died at Blackfoot a year later. What
became of five other Cannary children isn't known; but Martha
and her father struck out for Salt Lake City, where he too died.
This left the daughter on her own, which, as her subsequent
career would indicate, was exactly what she most wanted.
There are men alive today who will tell you in all seriousness
that Calamity Jane was a plainsman, scout, prospector and In-
dian fighter without peer. They will tell you that she was a
trusted scout with General George Armstrong Custer. Others will
swear she served, in the form and style of a male scout, with
Crook, with Miles, with Terry. At least one windy old character
of the West told me Jane was once a scout with the Negro cavalry
commanded by the then Colonel (Pecos Bill) Shafter. There is
no shred of evidence to show she ever served, either as man or
woman, with any military body of the United States Army
that is, not in an official capacity. The Army did not carry camp
followers on its muster rolls.
Jane herself started most if not all of the stories about her
noble work as a scout, and she doubtless got the idea for her
romantic drolleries from an experience she enjoyed in connec-
tion with the Jenny Geological Expedition, of which, inciden-
tally, California Joe was one of the guides. This trek was headed
by Professor Walter P. Jenny, United. States geologist, and went
into the Black Hills in 1875 to investigate the rumors of gold
there and, in the usual manner of such scientific expeditions, to
make geological and topographical observations of a general
nature. To protect the professors a detachment of Federal troops
went along.
While the Jenny party was being formed and equipped at Fort
Laramie, one of its enlisted men, Sergeant Frank Siechrist, met
THE LATE CALAMITY JANE 33
up with Calamity Jane who, as was her custom, liked to hang out
around an Army post, or for that matter any other place where
many men were congregated. Jane cottoned to the sergeant. He
was not especially coy himself. Being an observant person and
noting, no doubt, that Jane chewed tobacco like a trooper (she
could kill a horsefly at ten feet) and in addition was shaped more
like Adam than like Adam's wife, he procured a soldier's uni-
form for her. For all I know, Siechrist may have been a company
supply sergeant. Anyhow, he got Jane rigged up in the baggy,
shapeless clothes of the enlisted man of 1875, and away she went
to the Black Hills with the expedition.
Sergeant Frank Siechrist had at last accomplished what more
than one lonely soldier has wanted to do time out of mind. He
had his wife, or at least his consort, right with him in the ranks.
It was, of course, too good to last. At some stop along the way,
after the party had camped one evening, an officer strolling near
a stream to watch the soldiers swimming was struck dumb we
can presume for Jane was right in there with the boys and she
had troubled herself no more than they about a bathing suit. She
was promptly sent back to Fort Laramie.
II
Her brief experience with the Jenny Expedition was Jane's
nearest approach to being a military scout, yet on it she somehow
erected the whole preposterous legend of her Indian fighting,
adding to it, as the years passed, until not even a movie fan could
have stomached it. She even cooked up a particularly implau-
sible story to account for her nickname and tied it, of course, to
the Army. It is a story so implausible and so pointless that I
should prefer to let Jane tell it in her own words. "It was during
the Indian outbreak in 1872," she related, in barrooms from
Rapid City to Spokane and later in dime museums,
34 THE LATE CALAMITY JANE
when I was christened Calamity Jane. It was on Goose Creek, Wyoming,
where the town of Sheridan is now located. Captain Egan was in com-
mand of the post. We were ordered out to quell an uprising of the In-
dians, and were out for several days. We had several skirmishes during
which six of the soldiers were killed and several badly wounded.
On returning to the post we were ambushed. Captain Egan was hit.
I was riding in advance and on hearing the firing turned in my saddle
and saw the captain reeling on his horse as though about to fall. I turned
my horse and galloped back with all haste to his side and got there in
time to catch him as he was falling. I lifted him onto my horse in front
of me and succeeded in getting him safely to the fort. Captain Egan,
on recovering, laughingly said: "I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine
of the plains." I have borne that name ever since.
All of which, of course, is but never mind. Let it pass. I have
no idea how she came by her name, and I am too cagey even to
vouch for any of the score or more of reasons, all of them pat-
ently made up, to which long-winded raconteurs of the old West
have subscribed. Fll go even further; I just don't want to hear
any more reasons as to how she came by the "Calamity." If Ned
Buntline had met her* I would gamble that he devised the name,
just as he did that of Buffalo Bill; but I have been unable to
find that Buntline ever heard of the lady.
Practically all the men who knew Jane and who left any record
say that she was as able a consumer of liquor, either hard, vinous
or malted, as they had ever seen, equal, in fact, to such superb
topers as Bill Cody himself, a man who called for ten tumblers
of redeye daily when he was himself. Men who knew her seem
to be agreed, too, that she was of medium height, ruggedly built,
and had brown hair and eyes. I know of but two authentic photo-
graphs of her. Both indicate a fairly husky amazon, with a very
unattractive face. Unquestionably she was quite mannish, both
in appearance and manner; and for all her dalliance she seems
to have dressed in men's clothing during much of her life.
Like most such women, Jane was big-hearted, and on special
THE LATE CALAMITY JANE 35
occasions could rise to a level above the bog of the plains under-
world of which she was a part. In 1878, when there was a fearful
epidemic of smallpox in the Deadwood region, she worked night
and day ministering to the ill and the dying. There were few
women in Deadwood at the time. Jane went from shack to shack,
doling out the crude drugs she had bought herself, nursing and
doctoring, preparing the dead for burial. Deadwood hailed her
for it, and a quarter of a century later, when a ghostly Jane re-
turned to die, Deadwood still remembered.
In Jane's Deadwood days her consort had been Charles Utter,
better known as Colorado Charley. They lived openly together,
and perhaps happily. But Wild Bill Hickok, the celebrated char-
acter who had appeared with Buffalo Bill's show and at last died
in Deadwood (with his boots on) , paid Jane no heed. After his
death at the hand of Jack McCall, Wild Bill became a Deadwood
hero and immediately went into the hagiology of the West via the
dime novel route. It was then that Jane took him over, for she
knew a good thing. She mourned for Wild Bill as her "departed
sweetheart." She could weep copiously about it, too, and the
only manner in which kindly bartenders could stem the tears was
to set up a few more quick ones for Jane.
Calamity Jane was clever with horses. In 1878, after the
smallpox epidemic in Deadwood, she hired out as a teamster and
drove a big wagon from Rapid City to what was then Fort Pierre,
now South Dakota's capital. Her employers found her competent,
so long as she drove; but she had a habit of going off and getting
drunk at inopportune times. For a period she lived with that
is, kept house for a lonely rancher near Miles City, Montana,
and then wandered off again. Her trail dims, then becomes clear
for brief spaces. She turned up as an inmate of a bawdy house in
Green River, Wyoming, and worked at the same trade for several
months in Blackfoot, Montana. Then, somehow or other, she got
36 THE LATE CALAMITY JANE
wholly off her range, turning up In El Paso, Texas, to marry
so she said a Mr. Burke, and to give birth to a daughter.
But Jane soon started working her way north to her old graz-
ing grounds. She operated briefly what she liked to call a hotel
in Boulder, Colorado, in 1893; then set out on a trek that took
her (but don't ask me what became of Mr. Burke) through Wy-
oming, Montana, Idaho, and into Oregon and Washington. Then,
in 1895, Jane grabbed a train of steam cars for a trip back to
the old diggings of Deadwood.
Ill
By the time she returned to Deadwood Jane had become a con-
firmed barfly and drink-cadger. One man there estimated her
daily intake at this time as two quarts of 100 proof, or anything
else on hand. All the oldtimers would buy her a few drinks every
day, though some got tired of her talk. Then, it is said, a wealthy
woman who was visiting Deadwood because of its notoriety in-
terested herself in the aging strumpet and took her to Buffalo to
reform her. The process probably bored Jane, for she presently
disappeared from Buffalo and turned up two weeks later in
Deadwood, carrying a fearful hangover.
Jane was now something of a legend, and liars all over the
West sat up nights embellishing the story. The dime-museum
firm of Kohl & Middleton sent an agent to Deadwood to see what
sort of attraction Jane would make. He signed her up, got her
some fancy Western clothes, and on January 20, 1896, she was
presented to the public at the Palace Museum in Minneapolis.
Thereafter she toured the museums and honkytonks in many
towns throughout the West
Show business couldn't hold her, or, more likely, didn't want
to. In 1901 Jane had fallen onto hard times indeed. In February
THE LATE CALAMITY JANE 37
of that year the Anaconda Standard, a Butte newspaper, reported
that Jane was recovering from an illness in the poorhouse at
Bozeman. Apparently she had been working her way through
the state by selling copies of "The Life and Adventures of Ca-
lamity Jane, by Herself," a pamphlet composed of all the fic-
tions she could dredge from her alcoholic imagination. (I have
read it it isn't worth reading.) On this occasion Jane told the
press that she had never before been obliged to accept public
aid. She was still dressed in men's clothing and packed an old
revolver; but her clothes were ragged and the gun long since
rusty. Remarked the Standard: "Like the buffalo and the distinc-
tive characteristics of the plains and mountains, she is a pathetic
reminder of the vanishing glory of old pioneer days and the free
and easy life of the border."
Two years later, on August 2, 1903, she died in Terry, near
her favorite Deadwood. Next day the Deadwood Pioneer-Times
reported:
Mrs. Mary E. Burke (Calamity Jane), female scout, frontier woman
and one of the most picturesque characters of the early West, died in
the Galloway Hospital yesterday afternoon about 5 o'clock, aged 52
years.
The Pioneer-Times went on gallantly to recall Jane's noble
work during the epidemic of 1878, though it remained vague as
to her usual occupation. The funeral was held two days later,
with services in the First Methodist Church, which was packed
with old settlers. A Dr. C. B. Clark delivered a funeral sermon,
doing the best he could with the subject, and a Mrs. M. M. Wheeler
and a Miss Elsie Cornwall sang, while a Miss Helen Fowler played
the organ.
So passed the woman who probably gained more notoriety,
with less good reason, than any other female character in all
38 THE LATE CALAMITY JANE
the old West. Her grave is not gaudy, like that of Jim Fisk up in
Brattleboro, Vermont, nor is it so heavily depressing as General
Grant's tomb in New York. In Deadwood, however, her grave,
along with that of Wild Bill Hickok, is one of the landmarks
that all visitors are sure to be shown.
he celebrated Green Mountain Boy
was also a best seller.
Ethan Allen, Author
AT HALF past three on the morning of
May 10, 1775, a tall man with a sword loomed out of the mist
and rushed a sentry on duty at the south port of Fort Ticonder-
oga on Lake Champlain. The tall man was Ethan Allen, and a
few minutes later, at the head of eighty-three Green Mountain
Boys, he mounted the stairs to the commandant's quarters, shout-
ing profanity so dreadful that even the British regulars, who
were used to strong language, were charmed and a little stunned.
An instant later, if we are to believe Colonel Allen himself, he
delivered his deathless line about surrendering in the name of
the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.
What Colonel Allen actually said on this occasion is still a
matter of cherished controversy among Vermont historians.
There is, however, no doubt about the fort. Allen and his men
took it and it was a notable feat for a mob of bushwhackers.
But the event might not have become immortal had not Colonel
Allen himself become the best-selling soldier-author of his day.
His capture of "Fort Ti and his volume are what put him into
chipped marble and into the history books.
Shortly after his brilliant success at Ticonderoga, Allen and
a handful of farmers made a wholly improbable assault on the
fortress of Montreal. He was defeated, taken prisoner and loaded
with chains. For the next two years he was a captive in British
hulks, dungeons and stockades. On his exchange (at New York
Copyright, 1944, by Stewart H. Holbrook. Originally published in The New York
Times.
39
40 ETHAN ALLEN, AUTHOR
in 1778) he went back to Vermont, where he was received as a
conquering hero. The town of Bennington ceased all other activi-
ties, rolled out the barrel it was rum, not beer and gave
Ethan a welcome at the Catamount Tavern that he never forgot.
Nor did he recover for several days.
When his head cleared somewhat he sat down and composed
"A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen's Captivity, Containing
His Voyage and Travels, With the Most Remarkable Occurrences
Respecting Him and Many Other Continental Prisoners of Dif-
ferent Ranks and Characters. Interspersed with Some Political
Observations. Written by Himself, and Now Published for the
Information of the Curious in All Nations."
Ethan Allen was unmarred by any formal schooling, and he
was a gifted and natural storyteller. His "Narrative" had what
it took to head the best sellers. It is a racy and swift story of
what happened at Ticonderoga and subsequently. Writing almost
four years after the event, Ethan quite suddenly recalled that
he had demanded the fort's surrender by authority of the Great
Jehovah and the Continental Congress. It was the first time this
ringing piece of hyperbole appeared in print. It is also quite pos-
sible that the phrase did not occur to Ethan until he was in the
throes of composition, for none of his Green Mountain Boys re-
membered hearing it at the time. At least two of them seemed
to recall Ethan using a far different phrase one that could not
appear in print in Boston. *
The "Narrative" was and still is good reading. Bombastic and
modest by turns, it shows humor on almost every page. Its
studied understatements and irony read as well today as when
written, and the quaintness of the author's style (including a
syntax often as unorthodox as it is startling) gives it a freshness
that many contemporary narratives lack. Ethan relates how when
he and his squad of farmers were at the gates of Montreal, two
British generals at the head of five hundred trained troops, plus
ETHAN ALLEN, AUTHOR 41
a band of Indians, came out to repulse them. "I perceived at
once," says the author, "that this was to be a day of trouble if
not rebuke/' It was both. A bit later, when he is loaded down
with chains and manacles, his guard tells him casually that the
leg irons alone weigh forty pounds. "They were very substan-
tial," Ethan remarks of them.
There is fighting or violence of some kind on every other page.
There are monumental drinking bouts, attempted escapes, mu-
tinies. Unspeakable cruelties are mentioned. The book has every-
thing. Sex rears its head when two English officers plan to duel
over a loose woman of Quebec City, and Ethan is to umpire the
duel. He meets Lord Cornwallis and insults him to his face. "The
quarterdeck is for gentlemen," says his lordship frostily. "That's
why I am here," replies Ethan. To startle his guards he puts a
tenpenny nail between his teeth and bites it in two. There is a
zest and a naturalness throughout such as little formal writing
of the time can match. It is first-class, rooting, tooting, shooting
melodrama, as full of action as four reels of "Western" film,
done by a master of lurid narrative. And it is thoughtfully
weighted in spots with some of the best "atrocity" propaganda
imaginable stuff to make all Whigs see red.
The "Narrative" sold like buttered rum. First published as a
serial in the Pennsylvania Packet, it was an amazing success
from the first installment and was immediately (1779) put into
book form by Robert Bell, "in Third Street, Phila. Price Ten
Paper Dollars." (Inflation was present.) The public promptly
bought every copy. Bell hurried a second printing, then a third.
At the same time Draper & Folsom, in Boston, made a large
printing, to be followed almost immediately by another. Three
more printings were made in the following year, one each in
Newbury and Danvers, Massachusetts, another in Norwich, Con-
necticut.
42 ETHAN ALLEN, AUTHOR
T3ae "Narrative" sale did not die quickly, as with most war
books, but went on and on. New editions were brought out in
Philadelphia, in 1805; in Walpole, New Hampshire, in 1807;
in Albany, New York, in 1814. Subsequent printings were made,
from two to four to the decade, during the 1830's, the 1840's,
and 1850's. The last reprint I know of was made in 1930 for the
Fort Ticonderoga Museum, with an excellent introduction by
John Pell.
How much the author received for his best seller isn't known,
but it was likely little enough. He may have been paid a few
of those "paper dollars" for the serial, and possibly something
more from Printer Bell. But all of the other printings, eight of
which appeared in the author's lifetime, doubtless brought Col-
onel Allen nothing except fame.
Both high and low read the "Narrative." The Rev. Jeremy
Belknap, one of New England's most illustrious writers of the
day, read the "Narrative" and found it good. He said Allen was
"an original in his way, but as Rough and Boisterous as the
Scenes he has passed through." Ebenezer Hazard said that "had
Allen's natural Talents been cultivated by a Liberal education,
he would have made no bad figure among the sons of Science;
but perhaps his want of such an education is not to be Lamented,
as, unless he had more Grace it would make him a Dangerous
member of society."
Indeed, and so it might. The "Narrative" was just something
to pass the time with. Ethan was saving his really dangerous
work until later, and in 1782, between alarums of invasions of
Vermont by the British, he sat him down in small Sunderland,
Vermont, to produce his supreme effort. His libfary is known to
have included Pope's Essay on Man, Salmon's Geographical
Grammar, Rathburn's Account of the Shaker Sect, a Bible, and
two dictionaries, one of which was Dr. Johnson's. More impor-
ETHAN ALLEN, AUTHOR 43
tant to the work in hand was an uncompleted manuscript by
Dr. Thomas Young, recently deceased, an old friend of Ethan's
and the man who coined the name "Vermont."
From these works and his own free-wheeling mind Ethan com-
posed Reason the Only Oracle of Man, or a Compendous System
of Natural Religion, an odd philosophical treatise which free-
thinkers promptly christened "Ethan Allen's Bible." It was an
attack on theology, all theology, well in advance of Paine's Age
of Reason. Allen's friends the printers, Watson & Goodwin of
Hartford, Connecticut, wouldn't touch it, nor for two years would
any other printer. They knew it was dynamite. In 1785 it ap-
peared from the press of Haswell & Russell, in Bennington, Ver-
mont.
Only a few copies were sold, but they were sufficient to set the
parsons in full cry. They leaped to preach sermons against the
recent hero. Somebody referred to the author as "the Horned
Devil of Vermont." Paid space was taken in the newspapers to
discredit the author. And presently the Great Jehovah himself
lent a hand. Lightning struck the print shop, and nearly all of
the 1,500 copies were burned. Printer Haswell was so shaken
by the Visitation that he presently "committed the remaining
copies to the flames and joined the Methodist connexion."
Attacking the current theology called for courage greater than
that for attacking a fort. And the book, despite its small sale,
has had a sinister influence on Allen's reputation. All early bi-
ographers and historians felt it necessary to be horrified at what
they termed "certain blemishes" in his character, by which they
meant his lack of formal religion. And for the next century-
many an orator, while paying tribute to Allen's courage and
ability, announced themselves distressed by his "atheistic" opin-
ions. Even the marker on his grave, beside the Winooski River,
notes that "His Spirit Tried the Mercies of His God."
44 ETHAN ALLEN, AUTHOR
Much of the "Oracle of Reason/' which appeared in a fac-
simile edition as recently as 1940., is amusing to read today, but
more of it is hard going. Allen's "Narrative", however, remains
fresh and exciting. If Hollywood ever hears of Colonel Allen
his best seller will likely be good for several more printings.
notable drinking emporium
\ was Big Fred Hewlett s
Saloon in the Timber
THE most interesting place I ever
drank Bard liquor in was Big Fred Hewlett's Humboldt Saloon,
back in the very tall timber of Western Washington. There were
bigger saloons than the Humboldt and many that boasted more
brass and mirrors, but not one of them had the Humboldt's flavor.
It was unique, and so was Big Fred Hewlett.
Big Fred was a State-of-Mainer. He came to Aberdeen, in the
Grays Harbor country on the Washington coast, in the late
nineties. He looked the situation over and decided that the hus-
tling raw village was destined to become another Bangor or
Saginaw, two of the most famous lumberjack towns on earth. He
was correct. Within a few years Aberdeen, and nearby Hoquiam,
were cutting a billion feet of lumber every year.
A billion feet of lumber calls for an ungodly lot of logging,
and an army of loggers. Big Fred, as they say, drove his stakes,
and his stakes comprised the Humboldt Saloon, which he built
in that part of town lumberjacks designate as the skidroad. By
the turn of the century the Humboldt was well established as
headquarters for the fifteen thousand wild jacks who were cut-
ting the cloud-crashing Douglas fir and bringing it down to Aber-
deen's sawmills. It continued to be a loggers' Mecca until 1920
and Prohibition. I will come to its subsequent history a little
later on.
When the Humboldt was opened, Aberdeen fairly swarmed
Copyright, 1940, by Stewart H. Holbrook. Originally published in Esquire.
45
46 SALOON IN THE TIMBER
with cutthroats and harpies, bent on taking easy and lots of
dough from the loggers on their periodic busts in town. If a cash-
laden lumberjack didn't "roll" easily, his body might be found
in the Floater fleet for which the murky waters of Grays Harbor
soon became notorious. During a period of approximately twenty
years, there just was not any law in Aberdeen to protect the lads
who blew their rolls there.
In this den of skulduggery the Humboldt was uniquely honest.
Big Fred had a rule that no woman, good or bad, was ever to
cross the threshold. So far as is known, none ever did. Nor were
any sort of fancy men, card sharps or hangers-on allowed in the
place. And when you bought a drink of whiskey in the Humboldt
you had no need to fear knockout drops. The whiskey, too, was
whiskey, and not alcohol colored with tea and flavored with
prune juice, which was the concoction commonly served to lum-
berjacks. Big Fred had his own brand, "Double Stamp" in
strength as he called it, or 100 proof, and none other. On every
bottle appeared a pleasing likeness of Fred, done in colors, and
the same picture graced the cover of the Humboldt's boxes of
cigars. Fred was a man who stood solidly behind his wares.
Big Fred's picture hardly did him justice; there wasn't room
on a bottle or box for a real likeness. He stood about six feet
two inches and is best described by saying he was a moose of a
man and letting it go at that. His was a strong face, decorated
with an elegant mustache of medium size, black as night. He
wore good clothes of sober black broadcloth, a low collar with
black string tie, and across his vest was strung a watch chain that
was believed to weigh exactly eight ounces. He was a peaceful
man, for the time and place, and never looked for trouble, but
if he saw trouble coming, he met it head on.
In Aberdeen at the time was a heavyweight who had once
stayed six rounds with John L. Sullivan, and he was something
of a local terror. It was his custom to enter a saloon, start at the
SALOON IN THE TIMBER 47
near end of the bar, and one-two, one-two he'd knock down the
drinkers, one after the other, before they knew what was going
on.
Well, one day this plug-ugly reached the Humboldt. Big Fred
had heard of him and was ready. As the bully came in, Fred
stepped briskly around the end of the bar and came up close.
"Listen, you big bum," he said quietly, sticking out his chin,
"Fm the first man you knock down in here."
The big boy looked at him, apparently very surprised, but he
didn't make a move. Fred went on: "Now, I'll tell you how it is
in here. I don't mean to kill you but I'm planning on breaking
your arm maybe both of them. Understand?"
Fred made no move. Neither did the tough guy. The mug who
had stayed six rounds with John L. Sullivan laughed nervously,
then set up drinks for all hands, and departed.
"I'm glad he acted that way," said Fred. "I don't like no
brawling in my museum."
Big Fred didn't like brawling and he didn't like dudes. A
dude to Fred was possibly anybody who was not a logger, a saw-
mill stiff or a sailor, but a dude once got into the Humboldt.
"Bartender," the dude said to Fred, "mix me a Manhattan
cocktail." He couldn't have done worse. In that time and place
a man who would drink a cocktail was considered on a par with
a cigaret smoker, which was to say, a degenerate.
Big Fred didn't bat an eye. "What kind did you say?" he in-
quired politely.
"Manhattan," said the dude.
Big Fred went to work. He bit off a chew of the plug he liked
and reached for a bottle. Putting one of the Humboldt's generous
beer mugs on the bar, he poured a good shot of whiskey into it.
To this he added a slug of gin, another of rum, a dash of real
brandy, of bitters, of aqua vit', and then filled the remainder of
48 SALOON IN THE TIMBER
the mug with beer. Placing this dose in front of the dude, accom-
modating Fred stirred it slowly with a huge forefinger.
"There, mister," he said obligingly, "is your Manhattan cock-
tail/'
The astounded city slicker protested. "That isn't a cocktail,"
he began. "It's a mess of . . ."
"Drink 'er down/' growled Fred, whose growl was like that
of a Kodiak bear, just waking up and ornery. The dude drank to
the bottom of the mug and went away.
It was one of the little things that made Fred popular.
But it was Big Fred's reputation for square shooting that got
the boys coming and held them. Loggers who wouldn't think of
entrusting their money to a savings bank flocked into Fred's,
cashed their checks, kept what they thought they needed for the
night, and turned from fifty to a thousand dollars over to Fred
for safekeeping. Fred put each roll into an envelope, marked the
logger's name on it, and placed it in his big safe, which had a
nice oil painting of Niagara Falls on its doors.
It was common, in season, for this safe to contain as much as
twenty thousand dollars, all of it the property of lumberjacks
who didn't want to be rolled by the horde of pimps and bawds
who infested Aberdeen. Moreover, if one of the boys returned
to the Humboldt too plastered to know what he was doing, Big
Fred would never allow him to draw more than five dollars.
"Come back tomorrow," he'd tell the souse.
Year after year better than $600,000 in loggers' checks was
cashed in the Humboldt. There is rio record or rumor of a man
claiming to have been shortchanged. When a man returned to
the woods, he took a free bottle of liquor with him, to aid the
sobering-up process. Once a week Big Fred made a visit to the
Aberdeen hospital, leaving cigars but never cigarets to log-
gers who had been in woods accidents or had been beaten up in
fights. It all paid dividends.
SALOON IN THE TIMBER 49
Big Fred and the Humboldt were different in other ways, too.
Fred didn't go in for art. He wasn't an art lover and no fat nudes
in gilt frames hung on his walls. Fred was a notable patron of
the sciences, though. I spent many a happy, and fairly sober,
hour in the Humboldt. Some of the boys called it the Congress
of Curiosities. I liked to think of it as the Hewlettonian Institu-
tion and once told Fred so. He was immensely pleased.
In glass cases along one wall was a respectable collection of
minerals from all parts of the world, labeled and classified.
These specimens had come in one at a time from fellows Big
Fred knew. Fred probably didn't know what "ethnology" meant
but his place displayed the tribal garb, weapons and "medicine"
of Indians from the Blackfeet to the Pueblo. A galaxy of ord-
nance included flintlocks, percussion locks, and pistols that had
played parts in more or less celebrated murders and holdups. A
meerschaum pipe was reputedly one that Cole Younger, the ban-
dit, smoked to while away the long hours in the Minnesota State
Prison. There was an Oregon Boot said to have been worn by
Harry Tracy, Oregon's noted bad man.
Various freaks of nature were shown in bottles of alcohol. In
a discreet corner was a certain part of a whale. Fred did not give
this exhibit the prominence it deserved because he had become
tired of hearing loggers make the same lewd or envious remarks
about it. Stuffed cougars, mink, owls and snakes stared and
glared at the customers. There were some pieces of huge bone,
thought to have been those of a mammoth, that a lumberjack had
come across in a bank of the Hoquiam River. Fred gave two
quarts of his best liquor for them.
Another find was made one Sunday by two loggers returning
to camp from town. Near a creek they noted a long mossy heap.
It turned out to be an Indian dugout canoe. It had been there
for a long time and eight inches of moss had grown over it. Near-
50 SALOON IN THE TIMBER
by was the huge and ancient stump from which the dugout tree
had heen cut.
The two men went to Fred with the news. The stump was five
hundred feet from a road. Fred gave the boys five gallons of
liquor to swamp out a trail through the brush and to cut an
eighteen-inch section from the stump* The markings on it looked
to he those of a stone ax. Fred sent a generous slice of the stump
to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to learn if
possible what sort of a tool had been used in felling the tree, and
when. The Institution could only reply that the felling had been
done before 1792, when the first metal axes were brought to the
Pacific Coast. Until the Humboldt's end, the stump, with the In-
stitution's letter tacked to it, was a prized exhibit in it. Big Fred
was inordinately proud of this item. "Shows what a feller could
do with a stone ax when he got up a sweat," he used to say.
In time, the Humboldt museum's fame reached far places.
Two men from the National Geographic Society spent several
days taking pictures of Fred's collections of firearms and bows
and arrows. Professors from Yale, Stanford and Cornell came
to look at the old bones and other things. A number of times the
Smithsonian wrote Fred about this or that. He got a big kick
out of these doings for he really took a great deal of pride in his
collections.
From time to time Fred spent more money in adding to the
museum. From sailors he collected coins from every land on the
globe. These were labeled and put into cases. Somebody toted in
a hunk of meteorite from Central Oregon. Swede and Finn log-
gers gave him miniature ships in bottles. Fred gave a standing
order to the local photographer to take a picture of every lumber
schooner that docked in the harbor. He had over a hundred of
them. And just before the last of the bull teams was routed from
the logging woods by the coming of locomotives, Fred had the
photographer go into the timber and get shots of old Cy Black-
SALOON IN THE TIMBER 51
well, the fabulous bull puncher who encouraged his oxen by leap-
ing onto the backs of the rear team and walking the full length
of ten yokes, in his calked boots, yelling like a crazed Indian*
"Some day/' Fred said, "these pictures will show how the boys
used to do it."
It was probable that no town of Aberdeen's size could boast a
museum to touch the Humboldt's. Big Fred told me he calcu-
lated he had spent some $75,000 on it, and no one of the items
had cost very much. As for Fred himself, he remained a lumber-
jacks* saloon keeper until the end. He kept peace in his place, he
served honest liquor, and he protected patrons not only from
others but from themselves. And he set knowledge before them,
too. Many a logger got his first interest in things outside his own
narrow world from a visit to the Humboldt.
During its two decades of heyday, the Humboldt had a new
floor laid twice a year. The floor was of one and one-half inch
hemlock, a tough hardy wood. This floor, after each Christmas
and Fourth of July, was chewed into splinters by the sharp calks
in the boots of countless loggers.
It was said you could tell the state of the lumber market by
the appearance of the floor. In 1907, for instance, which was
a panic year everywhere in the country, Fred laid only one floor.
Prohibition, as I said, did away with the old place. Even be-
fore that awful day, Aberdeen had ripped up its plank sidewalks
and put down hard concrete. Loggers come to town had to take
off their calked boots or fall and break their necks and to
wear light shoes, same as any city slicker. Then, came Volstead.
Fred kept the place open for a few years, always at a loss, out
of plain sentiment. He sold only soft drinks, for he would not
do any sort of bootlegging. "Selling liquor is an honest busi-
ness," he said, "and by God I ain't going to run no blind tiger."
Dust gathered on the finest saloon museum in the United
States. Finally, and with a sad heart, Fred closed her down. The
52 SALOON IN THE TIMBER
City of Aberdeen talked of buying the collections, but the de-
pression came on, and little by little the museum was dissipated.
I have a few of the photographs, but where the rest have gone,
even Big Fred doesn't know.
Perhaps it is just as well. Today's lumberjacks like fancy
joints with chromium plate, where they sit on red leather stools
and do their drinking which is often cocktails. There wouldn't
be any room in such a place for Big Fred's Congress of Curi-
osities, not even for Cole Younger's pipe or that piece of whale
that was relegated to a corner.
\he funds of the First National of
Northfield, Minnesota., remained intact.
The Bank the James Boys Didn't Rob
THE pleasant village of Northfield, Min-
nesota, as its citizens like to inform the visitor, is the proud
home of Carleton and St. Olaf colleges, notable outposts, respec-
tively, of the Congregational and Lutheran churches; and it is
also, and with no qualification whatsoever, the Holstein Center
of America, no less than ten thousand head of that excellent
breed of horned cattle chewing their contented cuds in the com-
munity. The village, moreover, possesses the Oddfellows' State
Home, ten churches, and a nine-hole golf course.
Northfield is old by Midwestern standards. It was settled in
1855 by a group composed almost wholly of New England peo-
ple, and this is important to bear in mind, for the early Yankees
set the character of the place which prevails, in no small part
and in spite of thousands of Norwegians, to the present day. The
character prevailed also and in greater degree in 1876, and be-
cause of it, on that year's 7th of September, Northfield became
a town in the American legend, a place fit to compare with Lex-
ington, Massachusetts, with Harpers Ferry, Virginia, or Johns-
town, Pennsylvania, in that the towns themselves live in the
shadows of the tremendous events that took place within their
borders.
It was Northfield, you understand, where the celebrated
James- Younger gang broke, as the saying has it, their pick. They
broke it on the flinty character of the Yankees in residence there,
Copyright, 1947, by Stewart H. Holbrook. Originally published by The American
Mercury.
53
54 THE BANK THE JAMES BOYS
men who did not propose to permit their First National Bank to
be robbed with impunity. Nor was it robbed. In seven seething
minutes that clouded the street and village square with the blue
haze of exploding powder, the enraged Yankees made history.
Aghast at the indecency of strangers who should attempt to steal
their hard-earned cash, they shot all hell out of the raiders, kill-
ing two on the spot, wounding four, and permitting only two to
escape to their native Missouri, never to attempt Minnesota
again.
And lest present-day descendents of the First National's de-
fenders grow effete and forgetful, there reposes in a fine plush-
lined case in a Northfield home, a relic which I have had the
honor to see and which would jog almost anybody's mind. It is
the authenticated right ear of one of the raiders, now desiccated
and brown as an autumn leaf, but patently an ear, warning
enough, surely to leave Northfield institutions alone.
II
On its great and wonderful day, Northfield drowsed in the
welcome midday warmth of typical September weather. The
melancholy haze of fall hung over the surrounding fields, and
cicadas ground out their farewell to summer, as sad a song as is
to be heard in bucolic America. Mild heat waves shimmered
around the gristmill and sawmill along the banks of the Cannon
river that meandered through the village.
During the noon hour, five strangers, all mounted, all wear-
ing long linen dusters, ate dinner in a restaurant on the west side
of town. They talked little but stowed away a prodigious quantity
of victuals. Presently, three of them rode across the bridge into
the village square, then into Division Street, where they dis-
mounted in front of the First National Bank and threw their
bridle reins over hitching posts. It wasn't quite time yet. The
DIDN'T ROB 55
three strangers strolled leisurely to the corner and sat down on
some drygoods boxes outside Lee & Hitchcock's store. The trio
were, probably, Charlie Pitts, Bob Younger, and Jesse James.
Just before two o'clock two more strange horsemen, Cole
Younger and Clel Miller, rode slowly up Division Street from
the south. As they approached the First National, the trio got off
the packing boxes and went into the bank. Thereupon, Miller
dismounted, went up to the bank, and closed the door. Cole
Younger also dismounted and pretended to be fumbling with
his saddle girth.
At this moment J. S. Allen came upon the scene, a hardware
merchant from his store around the corner, to deposit some
money. Before he could get to the bank door, Miller grabbed
him. "Stand back," he commanded.
Merchant Allen, a man of quick perception and direct action,
jerked free of the stranger's grasp and ran for his store, shout-
ing: "Get your guns, boys, they're robbing the bank!"
At that instant young EL M. Wheeler, sitting on the steps of
his father's store, across the street from the bank, roused. He
leaped to his feet and gave cry. "Robbers!" he shouted, "rob-
bers!"
The preliminaries were now over, and precisely at two o'clock
the show began. As young Wheeler gave his shout, Clel Miller
and Cole Younger jumped to their horses and started to ride up
and down the street, yelling like Comanches, shooting at every-
thing that moved. As they rode, they were suddenly joined by
three more horsemen who came out of nowhere Frank James,
Bill Stiles, Jim Younger who also were riding and shooting
and yelling.
Now the sleepy street came to life, swift and terrible, as aston-
ished townsmen made for cover, while bullets broke windows
and ricocheted from stone buildings into long mean whines
that sang of death. Down went Nicholas Gustavson, a Swedish
56 THE BANK THE JAMES BOYS
immigrant who neither spoke nor understood a word of English,
a bullet near his heart.
Captain French, postmaster, looked out upon the astounding
scene. He locked his doors, then started searching for a weapon.
None was at hand. Being a Union veteran, he knew that some-
thing would be expected of him in this sudden emergency. He
stepped into the alley behind his place, picked up an armful
of sizable rocks, then went into action, heaving his missies at the
two-gun wild men spreading terror in Division Street. Two other
citizens quickly joined the neolithic artillery as Elias Hobbs and
Justice Streator found good thro wing-rocks.
Meanwhile, the raiders inside the First National were discov-
ering the bank employees to be anything but cooperative. As the
three robbers entered, Teller Bunker stepped forward to peer
into the tunnel-like openings of three of Mr. Colt's patent revolv-
ing pistols. "Are you the cashier?" demanded one of the stran-
gers.
"No," said Teller Bunker in a tone that seemed to close the
subject.
One of the guns waggled at Joseph Heywood, behind the coun-
ter.
"Are you the cashier?"
"No," said Mr. Heywood, bookkeeper who was acting-cashier.
Nor would the assistant bookkeeper, Mr. Wilcox, admit to being
the cashier. The three Yankee employees of the Yankee First
National Bank simply answered "no" to everything and would
have no further part in a conversation they obviously considered
pointless. It was an impasse new to the raiders. But something
had to be done at once; the uproar outside in the street was
growing by the moment. The inside robbers climbed over the
counter, guns ready. One of them indicated Heywood. "You're
the cashier," he said, "now open up that safe, damned quick."
A second robber ran to the open vault and stepped inside. Hey-
DIDN'T ROB 57
wood jumped to his feet and attempted to slam the heavy door
of the vault. The third robber grabbed Heywood. "Will you
open that safe?" he cried.
"No. It's got a time lock." The robber belted Heywood over
the head with his gun, felling him. Then he turned on Wilcox
and Bunker who also insisted on the fiction of the time lock.
The shooting and yelling in the street rose to new heights.
Time was growing dreadfully short for the raiders.
Heywood was down on the floor of the bank. One of the rob-
bers placed his gun close to the fallen man's head and pulled the
trigger. The bullet passed into the vault and through a tin box
containing papers and jewelry. Heywood did not stir.
Bunker and Wilcox had been compelled to get down on their
knees on the floor. During the instant the robber was firing in
an effort to frighten Heywood, Bunker took a chance. He jumped
to his feet and tore through the directors' room to the rear door
of the bank, one of the robbers close on his tail, shooting. The
second or third shot caught Bunker in his right shoulder. But he
was now in the alley.
Bunker's pursuer ran back into the bank. Wilcox was still
down on the floor. Heywood was staggering to his feet, bleeding.
Shouts and shooting outside indicated the street battle was going
badly for the raiders. The three inside bandits started to get out
of there. As they departed one of them stepped close to Heywood
and drilled him through the head as wanton an act as ever was
committed by a member of the James-Younger gangs.
The battle in the street had indeed been going badly for the
men in the linen dusters. For one thing, young Wheeler, who had
been sitting on the steps of his father's drugstore opposite the
First National, had gone into action. He ran into the Dampier
Hotel next door, laid hands on an old Army carbine, then took
up a fine position at a second-story window of the tavern.
Storekeeper Allen, who had been prevented from entering the
58 THE BANK THE JAMES BOYS
bank, high-tailed around the corner to his hardware shop and
proceeded to break out guns and ammunition from his stock for
the rallying citizens. Nor had the embattled farmers of Lexing-
ton, Massachusetts, rallied more quickly than these Yankees
transplanted in Minnesota. Dashing into Allen's place, and com-
ing out armed with shotguns, were Elias Stacy, Ross Phillips,
John Hyde, and James Gregg, loading as they ran for the scene
of battle. These were angry men, furious that strangers should
attempt to steal their money.
Northfield's other hardware merchant, A. R. Manning, had
heard Allen's cry of warning. He promptly armed himself with
a fine breech-loading rifle and stepped out into Division Street
to find something to shoot at.
The action of the battle was swift, and brief. Streator, Hobbs,
and Captain French were still heaving rocks at the five horsemen
when Elias Stacy came around the corner with one of Merchant
Allen's shotguns. Clel Miller was just mounting his horse. Stacy
let him have it, and a handful of buckshot bloodied the bandit's
face. But he mounted.
Now came Merchant Manning, bewhiskered as Moses, with
his fine rifle. He up and shot the horse out from under one of the
raiders, then dropped back around the corner to reload. He re-
turned to the street of battle an instant later, now fearful with
the whine and thud of bullets. Clouds of smoke whirled and ed-
died, hiding, then revealing the raiders. Cole Younger was near-
est, and Manning shot him for a bad wound. Again, Manning
dropped back to reload, then resumed his firing position, to get
Raider Stiles in his sights. Taking good aim this time he shot
Stiles plumb through the heart. The bandit fell from his horse
dead.
Young Wheeler, peering down at the street battle from the
upper floor of the hotel, now opened fire. His first shot went wild.
DIDN'T ROB 59
His second passed through what the coroner later termed "the
sub-clavian artery" of Clel Miller. That worthy fell from his
horse. He was dead when he hit the ground.
Out of the bank charged the three robbers to run into salvos
of buckshot, bullets, and Rice County stones. Just then deadly
Merchant Manning came around the corner again, rifle at the
ready. Bob Younger, Colt in hand, came running toward him.
At this moment young Wheeler shot Younger's gun out of his
right hand. Younger picked up the weapon in his left, his right
dangling uselessly, and went at Manning once more, shooting.
But it was high time to get out of Northfield. The raiders
started to get away right now, Bob Younger mounting double
behind his brother Cole. The battle was over. It had occupied
seven minutes.
Six of the raiders were in flight, two of them badly wounded.
In front of the First National lay the dead horse. A few feet
away was Clel Miller's corpse, in the thick dust of Division
Street. A few yards beyond lay Bill Stiles, thoroughly shot and
dead. On the plank sidewalk lay poor Nicholas Gustavson, the
innocent bystander, who was shortly to die. Inside the bank lay
the remains of brave Joseph L. Heywood, the acting cashier who
would cash nothing for strangers in linen dusters. ("Faithful
Unto Death," says the bronze plaque marking the spot.)
ill
The raid was over, but not the hue and cry, nor yet another
battle.
The remnants of the band galloped out of Northfield by the
Dundas road, leading southwest. At the farm of Philip Empey,
they stole a dapple-gray horse and a saddle for Bob Younger.
They rode on to Millersburg. News of the raid had not yet ar-
rived but it was on the way. The telegraph office at Northfield
60 THE BANK THE JAMES BOYS
was clicking madly with the greatest story Rice County was ever
to send out.
Throughout southern Minnesota farmers and townsmen left
their work to swell the total number of possemen to more than
a thousand. But the six outlaws were holding to the Big Woods,
the long and narrow strip of mixed hardwoods that marked the
region. The band pushed on into Le Sueur County. They were
sighted near Mankato but escaped without a shot being fired.
Then, on September 21, Oscar Sorbel, young Norwegian youth
who worked on a farm near Madelia, in Watonwan County, was
accosted by two strangers. He didn't like their looks. When they
had departed young Oscar mounted a farm horse and rode as
fast as that animal could move to Madelia village, where he
sought out Sheriff Jim Glispin.
Glispin responded quickly, raising a posse and taking off im-
mediately. The posse soon discovered the fugitives, only four
in number, making their way on foot in the Hanska Slough coun-
try of neighboring Brown County, and had no trouble hemming
the bandits into some five acres of ground, well covered with
willow and box elder, between the Watonwan River and a steep
bluff. Six volunteers, who included Sheriff Glispin, and a Cap-
tain Murphy, advanced ahead of the main posse through the
thick brush. They had moved but a few yards when gunfire broke
out all along their front.
This time, when the posse opened up, the action was at thirty
feet. Cole Younger went down with eleven bullets in various
parts of his tough body. Jim Younger fell with five wounds. Bob
Younger was hit once, in the breast. Charlie Pitts was struck five
times, any one of which would have been fatal. Only Bob
Younger remained on his feet. "I surrender/' he shouted.
"They're all down but me."
Of the posse, only George Bradford and James Severson were
DIDN'T ROB 61
grazed. Captain Murphy was hit in the side but saved from a
wound because the bullet was deflected by a brier pipe in his
pocket which must have nonplused the Brown County Anti-
Nicotine Society.
The three wounded outlaws were locked up at Faribault for
safekeeping. The body of Charlie Pitts was permitted to fall into
the hands of some thoughtful medico, who removed the right ear
and a portion of cheek flesh, which relics are among the cher-
ished possessions of old Bill Schilling, Northfield's most emi-
nent character. Old Bill also has the veritable First National
safe, a bar-and-padlock job no time lock made by Evans &
Watson of Philadelphia.
The capture of the three Youngers, the killing of Pitts, and the
two dead raiders back in Northfield, accounted for all but two of
the gang. Those two were almost certainly Frank and Jesse
James. Frank had a badly shattered foot from the Northfield
battle. He and Jesse had broken away from their fellows when
the band stopped near Mankato. The two moved fast, traveling
day and night on stolen horses, and turned up, on the 17th, in
what is now South Dakota where they made prisoner Dr. Sidney
Moshier, of Sioux City, Iowa, from whom they .obtained surgical
and medical aid for Frank James's wounded foot and leg.
The two James brothers then rode on, crossing the Missouri
river at Springfield, and continuing as far as Columbus, Ne-
braska. Here they sold their horses, "took the cars for Omaha,"
and from there went straight to their native hangouts in Mis-
souri.
IV
The Younger brothers served long terms in the Minnesota
penitentiary at Stillwater. Bob died in prison in 1889. Jim and
Cole were paroled in 1901, and the former committed suicide. In
1903 Cole was granted a pardon. He later teamed up with Frank
62 THE BANK THE JAMES BOYS DIDN'T ROB
James in a Wild West show, and died in bed on March 21,
1916.
Jesse James, as almost everybody ought to know, was shot
and killed by one of his own gang in 1882. Frank James lived
well into the present century, dying of natural causes.
The James gang, however, was never the same after the North-
field raid. It virtually cured them of hankering after banks. They
did stage one train robbery in 1879, two more in 1881; but most
of the time they remained in hiding. Northfield had been their
supreme disaster. And Northfield's favorite summing up of that
affair is the official historian's dry remark: "The funds of the
First National remained intact."
forgotten colony of radicals
\ on Puget Sound were the
Anarchists at Home
ONE of the great glories of the Puget
Sound country is the serene tide-washed community of Home.
This community is fading now with a graceful nostalgic air, but
it still retains many of the spiritual vestiges of what was once
America's sole anarchist colony in its heyday one of the most
celebrated or notorious spots in the United States. Home is never
mentioned by the booster organizations, and even the evangelical
churches have given it up as a Sodom fit only for the fires of the
Pit.
The place lies on the pretty shores of Joe's Bay, an arm of the
Sound, and is approximately 2,530 miles (as few if any crows
have flown it) west of Roxbury, Massachusetts, site of Brook
Farm, the short-lived and tremendously unsuccessful attempt
of Yankees to found a colony in the manner laid down by M.
Fourier. There is almost no intellectual connection between the
two communities, and although I know of Brook Farm only by
the vast literature that has been coming out about it for a hun-
dred years past, I have spent considerable time at Home, right
in the bosom of anarchist families, and I should rather have
lived there than at Brook Farm. I also think it long past time
that Home Colony was called to the attention of the many Ameri-
cans who never heard of it.
I doubt that the Brook Farmers had a great deal of enjoy-
ment. There was constant bickering over the division of tasks,
Copyright, 1946, by Stewart H. Holbrook. Originally published in The American
Scholar.
63
64 ANARCHISTS AT HOME
there was much worry over getting the substantial contributions
of cash needed to support the fancy play-farmers, and the near-
est thing to excitement was old Bronson Alcott's heaving in for
a free meal and delivering himself of a few Orphic Sayings. It
was all very daring, and quite dull. Read the Brook Farmers'
own accounts, if you doubt me.
Life at Home Colony was assuredly never dull. Never. Home
accepted no contributions or advice from anybody. It did not
labor under the many inhibitions that plagued the Brook Farm-
ers. In fact, Home had no inhibitions whatever, and several times
it made headlines that would have shocked and stunned the pale
maidens of both sexes who inhabited Brook Farm. To the good
people of Tacoma and Seattle who remember it, Home was and
largely is a place of smoking bombs of the Johann Most variety,
and of unspeakable orgies unequalled since the times of Messa-
lina. Yet for half a century it has successfully fended attacks by
incendiary and murderous mobs, by the courts, by private detec-
tives, Secret Service agents, and United States marshals. Jay Fox,
so far as I know the sole surviving anarchist in the United States,
who has lived at Home for forty years, says it has been a sort of
Wild West Brook Farm, with overtones of Oneida Community
and Nauvoo.
Home grew out of the failure of a socialist community called
Glennis, in 1896. Fed up with the internal battles which seem
to bedevil all socialist communities and also with the lazy para-
sites who always attach themselves to "cooperative common-
wealths" three disillusioned members of Glennis, situated near
Tacoma, built a boat with their own hands and struck out to
cruise Puget Sound, seeking a likely spot to pitch an out-and-out
anarchist paradise. These founding fathers were George Allen,
University of Toronto, class of '85, 0. A. Verity and F. F. Odell.
They soon found a primeval spot that looked pretty good and
still does. Towering Douglas fir grew down to the beach. Ducks
ANARCHISTS AT HOME 65
swarmed in the bay. Clams held conventions there. Bees worked
on the fireweed. No man lived here, or for miles. There were
no roads. Twenty-six acres could be had from a bloated capitalist
for $2.50 an acre.
The three men mustered a total of five dollars to make a down
payment. Then Allen went to teaching school, while the others
worked at anything handy to earn money for the move. In the
spring of 1897 the Allen, Verity and Odell families, wives and
children, voyaged to Joe's Bay and began pioneering. They tore
into the gigantic trees with ax and saw, and quickly made cabins
in which to live until they could build frame houses. They also
formed the Compact, which was called the Mutual Home Colony
Association.
There was nothing of socialism in this group. The Association
was as near pure anarchism as the laws of the land would per-
mit, and its sole reason for being was "to obtain land and to pro-
mote better social and moral conditions." It did not even attempt
to define anarchism, although Founders Allen, Verity and Odell
considered anarchism no matter what Bakunin or Kropotkin or
Josiah Warren said as a society so imbued with decency and
honesty that no laws were required to regulate its members.
Each member paid into the Association a sum equal to the
cost of the land he or she was to occupy, not more than two
acres to a member. The land remained the property of the As-
sociation, but the member could occupy it indefinitely simply by
paying such taxes as were imposed by the Enemy, which in this
case was the State of Washington in the style and form of Pierce
County. Any improvements, such as barns and houses, were
personal property and could be sold or mortgaged.
Like the thoroughgoing fanatics they were, the Home colonists,
as soon as they got shelter over their heads, started a paper, the
New Era, which from the start intimated that the Association had
no interest whatever in the personal lives of its members. "The
66 ANARCHISTS AT HOME
love principle of our being," said an early hand-set editorial,
"is a natural one, and to deny it expression is to deny nature/'
This was clear enough, and the implied sanction of casual rela-
tionships between men and women was in time to bring an as-
sortment of cranks, malcontents and plain Don Juans. But the
early settlers were too busy with recalcitrant stumps to worry
very much about the love principle in their being, for if there
is anything to hold old Adam in bounds it is the science and art
of removing stumps of Pseudotsuga taocifolia. Before their homes
were finished, the busy colonists had whacked up Liberty Hall, a
sort of meeting place and school, where Founder Allen was the
first teacher.
Within six months half a dozen new families had been added
to the original three, and along came Charles Govan, a wander-
ing printer, who proposed a new paper which should take the
colony's message to the far corners of the earth where mankind
still lived either in savagery or, worse, under imposition of State
and Capital. Govan also induced James F. Morton to leave the
staff of Free Society, a noted anarchist sheet of San Francisco,
and come to Home. Morton (Harvard, 1892, and Phi Beta
Kappa) was later to become a noted Single Taxer, but he was
pure anarchist when he arrived at Home, and there he and Govan
brought out the new paper under a masthead that was sheer
genius: Discontent, Mother of Progress.
This paper was presently to be notorious from one end of
the country to the other, but its early issues were read mostly by
other radical editors and by persons who were predisposed to
what Discontent said was anarchism anyway. There appears,
from a close reading of the yellowing files, to have been more
about sex in Discontent than about economics. A leading article
dealt with "The Rights of Woman in Sexual Relations" which,
it appeared, were many and interesting. Another piece asked
"Is 'Sin' forgivable?" It seemed that it was. The early issues
ANARCHISTS AT HOME 6?
also looked at Home with a realistic eye, stating that hard work
was necessary to clear the thickly timbered land, and warning
intending settlers to make inquiries before coming, lest they be
disappointed. There was no balm in the anarchist Gilead, simply
hard work and FREEDOM (to use their typographical emphasis) .
Discontent went on to say there was nothing of socialist coopera-
tion about Home. Everything was on a purely voluntary basis.
These ex-socialists were determined they should be free of the
easy-riders who had hamstrung and wrecked Glennis and nearly
all other cooperative communities.
It wasn't long before Discontent, hand-set and hand-printed
among the stumps that were still smoking, began to attract at-
tention. Emma Goldman went to Home to lecture in Liberty
Hall in June of 1899. New families arrived from San Francisco,
from Virginia, from Michigan. A tract of sixty-four acres adjoin-
ing the original colony was made available at reasonable rates. A
Tacoma boat line put Joe's Bay on its list of ports of call. The
colonists, proud as sin, built a floating wharf and a neat shelter.
From Portland, Oregon, where they had got into trouble edit-
ing the Firebrand, which the courts held to be "obscene and oth-
erwise unmailable," c 
