Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 11

18. Stagecoaches, Freighting

A GOOD INTRODUCTION to a treatment of the stagecoach of the West would be Thomas De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach." The proper place to read about the coaches would be in Doctor Lyon's Pony Express Museum, out from Pasadena, California. May it never peris.h.!.+ Old Monte drives up now and then in Alfred Henry Lewis' _Wolfville_ tales, and Bret Harte made Yuba Bill crack the Whip; but, somehow, considering all the excellent expositions and reminiscing of stage-coaching in western America, the proud, insolent, glorious figure of the driver has not been adequately pictured.

Literature on "Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail" is pertinent. See also under "Pony Express."

BANNING, WILLIAM, and BANNING, GEORGE HUGH. _Six Horses_, New York, 1930. A combination of history and autobiography. Routes to and in California; much of Texas. Enjoyable reading. Excellent on drivers, travelers, stations, "pa.s.s the mustard, please." Bibliography. OP.

CONKLING, ROSCOE P. and MARGARET B. _The b.u.t.terfield Overland Trail, 1857-1869_, Arthur H. Clark Co., Glendage, California. Three volumes replete with facts from politics in Was.h.i.+ngton over mail contracts to Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River.

DOBBIE, J. FRANK. Chapter ent.i.tled "Pistols, Poker and the Pet.i.t Mademoiselle in a Stagecoach," in _The Flavor of Texas_ 1936. OP.

DUFFUS, R. L. _The Santa Fe Trail_ New York, 1930. Swift reading. Well selected bibliography. OP.

FREDERICK, J. V. _Ben Holladay, the Stage Coach King_, Clark, Glendale, California, 1940. Bibliography.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. Chapter v, "The Stage-Coach Mail," in _Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier_, ill.u.s.trated by Harold Bugbee, San Angelo Standard-Times, San Angelo, Texas, 1952. Strong on frontier crossed by stage line.

HUNGERFORD, EDWARD. _Wells Fargo: Advancing the Frontier_, Random House, New York, 1949. Written without regard for the human beings that the all-swallowing corporation crushed. Facts on highwaymen.

INMAN, HENRY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, New York, 1897. OP. _The Great Salt Lake Trail_, 1898. OP. Many first-hand incidents and characters.

MAJORS, ALEXANDER. _Seventy Years on the Frontier_, Chicago, 1893.

Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Majors was the lead steer of all freighters.

ORMSBY, W. L. _The b.u.t.terfield Overland Mail_, edited by Lyle H. Wright and Josephine M. Bynum, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1942. Ormsby rode the stage from St. Louis to San Francisco in 1858 and contributed to the New York _Herald_ the lively articles now made into this book.

ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. _The Overland Stage to California_, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. A full storehouse. Basic.

SANTLEBEN, AUGUST. _A Texas Pioneer_, edited by I. D. Affleck, New York, 1910. OP. Best treatise available on freighting on Chihuahua Trail.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_, 1871. Mark Twain went west by stage.

WINTHER, O. O. _Express and Stagecoach Days in California_, Stanford University Press, 1926. Compact, with bibliography. OP.

19. Pony Express

"PRESENTLY the driver exclaims, 'Here he comes!'

"Every neck is stretched and every eye strained. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky. In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling sweeping towards us nearer and nearer--growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined--nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck [of the stagecoach], a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go swinging away like a belated fragment of a storm."--Mark Twain, _Roughing It_.

A word cannot be defined in its own terms; nor can a region, or a feature of that region. a.n.a.logy and perspective are necessary for comprehension. The sense of horseback motion has never been better realized than by Kipling in "The Ballad of East and West." See "Horses."

BRADLEY, GLENN D._ The Story of the Pony Express_, Chicago, 1913.

Nothing extra. OP.

BREWERTON, G. D. _Overland with Kit Carson_, New York, 1930.

Bibliography on West in general.

CHAPMAN, ARTHUR. _The Pony Express_, Putnam's, New York, 1932. Good reading and bibliography.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. Chapter on "Rides and Riders," in _On the Open Range_, published in 1931; reprinted by Banks Up shaw, Dallas. Chapter on "Under the Saddle" in _The Mustangs_.

HAPEN, LEROY. _The Overland Mail_, Cleveland, 1926. Factual, bibliography. OP.

ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. _The Overland Stage to California_, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Basic work.

VISSCHER, FRANK J. _A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express_, Chicago, 1908. OP. Not excessively "thrilling."

20. Surge of Life in the West

THE WANDERINGS of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, De Soto, and La Salle had long been chronicled, although the chronicles had not been popularized in English, when in 1804 Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark set out to explore not only the Louisiana Territory, which had just been purchased for the United States by President Thomas Jefferson, but on west to the Pacific. Their _Journals_, published in 1814, initiated a series of chronicles comparable in scope, vitality, and manhood adventure to the great collection known as _Hakluyt's Voyages_.

Between 1904 and 1907 Reuben Gold Thwaites, one of the outstanding editors of the English-speaking world, brought out in thirty-two volumes his epic _Early Western Travels_. This work includes the Lewis and Clark _Journals_, every student of the West, whether Northwest or Southwest, goes to the collection sooner or later. It is a commentary on the values of life held by big rich boasters of patriotism in the West that virtually all the chronicles in the collection remain out of print.

An important addendum to the Thwaites collection of _Early Western Travels_ is "The Southwest Historical Series," edited by Ralph P. Bieber--twelve volumes, published 1931-43, by Clark, Glendale, California.

The stampede to California that began in 1849 climaxed all migration orgies of the world in its l.u.s.t for gold; but the l.u.s.t for gold was merely one manifestation of a mighty population's l.u.s.t for life.

Railroads raced each other to cross the continent. Ten million Longhorns were going up the trails; from Texas while the last of a hundred million buffaloes, killed in herds--the greatest slaughter in history--were being skinned. Dodge City was the Cowboy Capital of the world, and Chicago was becoming "hog butcher of the world." Miller and Lux were expanding their ranges so that, as others boasted, their herds could trail from Oregon to Baja California and bed down every night on Miller and Lux's own gra.s.s.

Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) was ma.s.sing in San Francisco at his own expense the greatest a.s.semblage of historical doc.u.ments any one individual ever a.s.sembled. While his interviewers and note-takers sorted down tons of ma.n.u.script, he was employing a corps of historians to write what, at first designed as a history of the Pacific states, grew in twenty-eight volumes to embrace also Alaska, British Columbia, Texas, Mexico, and Central America, aside from five volumes on the Native Races and six volumes of essays. Meantime he was printing these volumes in sets of thousands and selling them through an army of agents that covered America.

Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900) was building the Southern Pacific Railroad into a network, interlocked with other systems and steams.h.i.+p lines, not only enveloping California land but also the whole economic and political life of that and other states, with headquarters in the U.S. Congress. Then his nephew, Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), taking over his wealth and power, was building gardens at San Marino, California, collecting art, books, and ma.n.u.scripts to make, without benefit of any inst.i.tution of learning and in defiance of all the slow processes of tradition found at Oxford and Harvard, a Huntington Library and a Huntington Art Gallery that, set down amid the most costly botanical profusion imaginable, now rival the world's finest.

The dreams were of empire. Old men and young toiled as "terribly" as mighty Raleigh. The "s.p.a.cious times" of Queen Elizabeth seemed, indeed, to be translated to another sphere, though here the elements that went into the mixture were less diverse. Boom methods of Gargantuan scale were applied to cultural factors as well as to the physical. Few men stopped to reflect that while objects of art may be bought by the wholesale, the development of genuine culture is too intimately personal and too chemically blended with the spiritual to be bartered for. The Huntingtons paid a quarter of a million dollars for Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy." It is very beautiful. Meanwhile the mustang grapevine waits for some artist to paint the strong and lovely grace of its drapery and thereby to enrich for land-dwellers every valley where it hangs over elm or oak.

Most of the books in this section could be placed in other sections.

Many have been. They represent the vigor, vitality, energy, and daring characteristic of our frontiers. To quote Harvey Fergusson's phrase, the adventures of mettle have always had "a tension that would not let them rest."

BARKER, EUGENE C. _The Life of Stephen F. Austin_, Dallas, 1925.

Republished by Texas State Historical a.s.sociation, Austin. Iron-wrought biography of the leader in making Texas Anglo-American.

BELL, HORACE. _Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early Times in California_, Los Angeles, 1881; reprinted, but OP. In this book and in _On the Old West Coast_, Bell caught the lift and spiritedness of life-hungry men.

BIDWELL, JOHN (1819-1900). _Echoes of the Past_, Chico, California (about 1900). Bidwell got to California several years before gold was discovered. He became foremost citizen and entertained scientists, writers, scholars, and artists at his ranch home. His brief accounts of the trip across the plains and of pioneer society in California are graphic, charming, telling. The book goes in and out of print but is not likely to die.