Zane Grey
Page 9
Two factors influenced Grey’s decision to head for more distant Tampico. First his aversion for the Tuna Club and its influence sent him looking for somewhere less developed and less regulated. Second, Tampico was far less known and therefore a more promising opportunity for articles about it. So far, the published information about the area consisted of an informative letter to the editor that appeared in the March 1905 issue of Forest and Stream. In it, J. A. L. Waddell reported that there were only a dozen boats fishing during peak season and that these were dispersed over a vast area teeming with large tarpon. Visitors stayed at a single hotel, the Hildago, whose rooms were small but accommodating and inexpensive. So far there had not been enough visitors for another hotel or a better one. On the other hand, boats and knowledgeable operators could be rented for low fees.18
The greatest drawback was the slow, hot, dusty train trip necessary to get there. Until 1900, when Edward Doheny was attracted to the region’s rich reserves of oil, Tampico was an isolated seaside village backed by densely foliaged mountains. The lazy outflow of the nearby Panuco River created a large estuary that was ideal habitat for tarpon. Doheny’s need for transportation speeded the 1903 completion of a railroad spur from San Luis Potosi to Tampico. This connection to the Mexican Central Railroad made Tampico accessible and deseminated news of its fabulous fishing.19 Although the oil industry eventually polluted the estuary and destroyed the fishing, the area was still pristine and untapped in 1906. The exhausting three-day train ride from Lackawaxen to San Luis Potosi and the punishing final leg to Tampico were formidable obstacles, especially for Dolly, but the prospects for fabulous fishing and saleable articles fired Zane’s determination.
Grey wrote three articles about the tarpon fishing—“Byme-by-Tarpon,” “Three Strikes and Out,” and “The Leaping Tarpon.” These avoided the informational detail of Waddell’s letter and sought instead to dramatize the experience. In these apprenticeship efforts, Grey consciously strove to develop his fishing adventures into stories or “Tales,” as he entitled the books that later reprinted his articles on sport. All these articles celebrate the natural beauty of the area and the excitement of the fishing, but were consciously crafted as reckonings with defeat.
“Byme-by-Tarpon” recounts Grey’s first attempt at tarpon fishing and opens with a colorful portrait of the setting that establishes an upbeat note of anticipation:
Under the rosy dawn the river quivered like a restless opal. The air, sweet with the song of blackbird and meadow lark, was full of cheer; the sun, rising, shone in splendor on the water, and on the long line of graceful palms lining the opposite bank, and the tropical forest beyond, with its luxuriant foliage festooned by gray moss. Here was a day to warm the heart of any fisherman; here was the beautiful river (613).
The boatman Attalano is accomplished and optimistic, and Grey soon hooks a large tarpon. The fish makes unbelievable jumps, a powerful run, and a long fight ensues. Near the point of exhaustion himself, Grey realizes that the tarpon is also spent. As he prepares to boat the fish, it makes one final desperate lunge, snaps the frayed line, and escapes.
With the title of “Three Strikes and Out,” Grey employs the familiar phrase learned from his baseball experience to characterize a similar setback—he gets and misses three very promising strikes. The tarpon are described as numerous, large, and game, but the emergent theme is again failure. In this case, Grey acknowledges that he is not a novice, but admits that he also lacks wisdom. “Every fisherman of wide experience knows that when a day starts badly, it almost invariably ends badly,” he observes. “This thought has occurred to me often, at times when, if I had accepted the fatalistic portent, I might have been spared much pain” (201). Not only does Grey respond poorly to his three strikes, but his disregard for his bad luck and his refusal to quit worsen the day for him.
“The Leaping Tarpon” offers a third variation of this thinking. Grey recounts a series of missed tarpon, but here disappointment compensates him with a valuable lesson in the importance of a positive attitude. Grey and an unnamed companion from Chicago encounter two disappointed fishermen and one of them complains about his lone catch of a “five-foot minnow.” Zane’s friend sarcastically inquires whether the two anglers are “in the fish business” (156–57). When this same friend catches nine tarpon the next day, he furnishes the article’s conclusion with his triumphant exclamation: “Tampico no good for tarpon? The fishing here is the best in the world. I’ve been around some, and I know” (157). This obvious allusion to the disgruntled fisherman from the day before encourages Grey to look beyond his disappointments and to appreciate Tampico’s uniqueness.
Since all three articles present Grey failing to catch a tarpon, a reader might conclude that he fared poorly. However, several badly faded photographs of mammoth tarpon, especially one of Grey standing alongside a fish that is longer than he is tall, verify that he actually had terrific success. Another, of Dolly posing with a pair of large tarpon, suggests that she did well too. So why did Grey dwell on his failure? Part of the explanation lies with the fish. Grey wanted his readers to believe that Tampico’s tarpon were very challenging; his failure made his adversary appear more formidable and the fishing more exciting. Since his articles were read mostly by men who had never fished for tarpon, they could relate more readily to his defeat than to his success. As a newcomer to tarpon fishing, Grey was aware of his limited skills and truly believed that the main goal of fishing should be appreciation. Grey was also enough of a newcomer to writing about sport that he felt more comfortable with the identity of a deficient enthusiast.
“A Night in a Jungle,” Grey’s account of his overnight trip into the jungle, cultivates a variant strategy. During his train ride over the mountains to Tampico, he beholds a dazzling expanse of wild jungle and decides that it would be perfect for the outing that Shields had proposed. Another friend and advisor, Alvah James, also influenced this decision. James was a recognized adventurer who went down the Amazon River in a raft in 1902 and published a serial about his trip in Field and Stream.20 Grey met and befriended James during a meeting of New York sportsmen and was thrilled when he accepted an invitation to Lackawaxen.21 Grey decided to take James on a canoe trip down an unexplored tributary of the upper Delaware River, and wrote an account of the experience entitled “James’ Waterloo.” James helped Grey to place this article with Field and Stream, which published it four months before his Tampico trip. The account characterizes James as a veteran adventurer disdainful of the canoe trip that Grey has proposed. He believes that the lazy waters of the side stream offer little challenge. This skepticism is overturned by hairraising obstacles and plunges that are exaggerated until they become comic. Bruised and exhausted, James judges the trip to be one of his worst experiences, and Grey is embarrassed over his foolhardy suggestion. Any sense of accomplishment is dispelled by his inept planning and anticipation.
“A Night in a Jungle” recycles both the adventure of his river trip and Zane’s self-deprecation. Since he knew nothing about jungle conditions or the area, Grey found it easy and honest to portray himself as a naïf. After he gets off the train at a remote village and surveys the dense foliage beyond, he sheepishly acknowledges, “My intention was somewhat hazy.” He violates his original agreement not to carry a gun because “a hunter who would venture into the jungle unarmed was crazy” (296). Unfortunately, his gun compounds his problems. Following an encounter with a jaguar that “checked my communion with nature,” he shoots a menacing javelina (wild boar). This provokes its companions to charge and chase him up a tree. “Happily,” he observes, “I was a good climber, though I dare say my conquest of that special coconut palm was essayed at the expense of athletic grace and dignity” (297). Later that night, when another jaguar is attracted to the dead javelina, Grey again reaches for his gun, but his nervousness mars his shot and jams his weapon. Luckily, the wounded cat flees. He is relieved when morning arrives and his humiliating outing is over.
Grey
’s comic presentation spoofed conventions of macho achievement and finessed his lack of qualification. As much as he wanted to be a daring, venturesome explorer, his aspiration was checked by the hard fact that he was merely an ex-baseball player, ex-dentist, and recreational camper. His qualifications were a good-natured enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. Being a greenhorn adventurer and fledgling writer, Grey succeeded by mocking his longings for achievement, but he silently worried about the limited life for this identity.
Tampico was a beneficial introduction to adventure, but not promising material for a novel. Grey did not want to write a novel about fishing. His jungle trip was too brief and his limitations were too pronounced. His discussions with Shields and James carried him to uncharted territory, but sent him elsewhere for the opportunity he needed. Two months after his return, he was off again, this time for an outing into the Grand Canyon. Already thirty-five years old and a tenderfoot from the east, he understood that this would be a more grueling test. Assured of the scenery’s magnificence by his honeymoon trip, he knew it would also be equally demanding and dangerous. The water that was so plentiful on all his previous outings would be scarce and challenging to locate. Riding a horse would be hard and controlling it effectively would be even harder. Having suffered the pitfalls of going alone into the jungle, he realized that, first and above all, he needed a reliable guide.
Grey’s return to Arizona was inspired by a fortuitous encounter with C. T. “Buffalo” Jones. He met Jones in New York City when Alvah James took him to hear Jones’s lecture about capturing live animals out West. Even though the date and place of this talk have never been established, it occurred either during the late fall of 1906 or just after his return from Tampico the following spring, and this event was probably sponsored by the Camp Fire Club, which hosted presentations like this and had Jones, Grey, and James as members.22 In his discussion of this fateful meeting in “My Own Life,” Grey concentrated upon the audience’s reaction to Jones’s lecture. “He was pretty much hurt,” Grey explained, “by the fact that New York sportsmen ridiculed his claims as to the lassoing of wild animals.”23 Jones’s lecture was given at a time of exacerbated sensitivity to specious claims about nature and the outdoors. In an article entitled “Real and Sham Natural History” that appeared in the March 1903 issue of Atlantic Monthly, John Burroughs offered a six-page denunciation of Ernest Thompson Seton for excessive fabrication in his animal stories. He argued that the animals in his popular stories were depicted as humans preferred to think of them rather than as they actually were. This attack and an article of support by President Roosevelt launched a heated debate about “nature-fakers.”24
Grey was so impressed by Jones that he went to visit him in his hotel room. There he found Jones despondent over the criticism he had received and grateful for Grey’s interest. He asked Jones to include him on his next trip and proposed to write an account that would prove both Jones’s claims and his daring.25 This request represented another important step away from his reluctance to travel. At a May 1906 meeting of sportsmen, Zane encountered a man who had gone to Cuba to write a story about the Bay of Fundy and wrote to Dolly, “This sort of thing, in so many men, seems odd to me. I understand their wandering, or desire to see, hear, watch, study life, but Lord! To go one place to get far away from another to write about it makes me a little tired.”26
Grey’s proposal also contains a couple of puzzling incongruities. First, Grey says that Jones’s lecture was criticized even though it was accompanied by “motion pictures of wild animals he had caught.”27 Apparently his film showed only the animals and not the capture. On this next trip, Jones took not only Grey but also Grant Wallace, who was a skilled photographer and the owner of a motion picture camera. He was responsible for film footage that later showed Jones in action and verified his claims.28
Even more surprising is Grey’s plan to write a book that would discredit Jones’s detractors, since his two novels so far were romanticized history. Still, here and with the Westerns that followed, Grey consciously vindicated his stories with claims that they were based upon personal experiences or actual history. Charles Schreyvogel would construct his narrative paintings about the West from figures posing on New York City rooftops. Frederick Faust would write his Max Brand Westerns in a villa near Florence. Karl May imagined most of his popular Westerns for Europeans before his brief visit to the United States in 1908. Grey, on the other hand, believed that firsthand knowledge of his material was essential and that he had to experience the West in order to write about it. For this trip, he acquired the best portable camera that money could buy. The thousands of photographs that he would take over the years that followed were motivated by a deeply rooted need for a record and proof. Although he took photos to aid his memory, he valued them even more as verification. The photographs that always accompanied his articles on sport were the result of technological advances that made photographic reproductions possible and popular, but they also involved a hypersensitivity to “nature faking” and a conviction that they authenticated both his experiences and his writings. For such a romantic writer, Grey’s lifelong commitment to photography was as peculiar as it was compulsive.
In 1906, Jones had acquired a ranch in the House Rock Valley on the eastern perimeter of the Grand Canyon, and at the time of his lecture, he had scheduled a lion hunt into the North Rim area. He agreed to include Grey if he paid. Grey claimed that this demand exhausted Dolly’s inheritance. Jones’s fee of $200–300 was a substantial sum, but it certainly did not deplete Dolly’s $10,000 inheritance.29 Grey was too intent upon avoiding the plight of his father or an enforced return to dentistry to gamble everything. Nonetheless, this investment was as momentous for him as his decision to finance the publication of Betty Zane, and his prospects for turning a profit were not any better.
Jones himself was in no position to help a needy writer. Until 1900, his life had been a series of unprofitable experiments with politics and ranching. At this time, he noticed the distressing fact that the once vast herds of buffalo had dropped to less than 1,000 survivors and began campaigning for the establishment of refuges. When he learned of plans to use Yellowstone National Park as a preserve for buffalo, he applied to be the park’s first game warden, and won the appointment. In this position, he arranged transportation for specimens from the Goodnight Ranch in Texas and supervised construction of a compound for them. His ensuing indifference to the details of management and bureaucratic procedures turned other administrators into enemies and led to his resignation in September 1905.
Deciding that his best prospect for income was raising cataloes, a crossbred of buffalo bulls with Galloway cattle, Jones obtained a federal land grant for his House Rock Ranch in the Kaibab range north of Lee’s Ferry, and quickly established a herd there. When the Grand Canyon Game Preserve was established in November 1906, Jones arranged for Jim Owens, his assistant in Yellowstone, to be appointed its game warden. Since this position brought Jim Owens a meager salary and Jones’s cataloes left him in debt, they collaborated on a plan for capturing mountain lions alive and selling them to zoos and private preserves. The terms of the preserve’s establishment stipulated that deer inside its boundaries were protected from hunting, but mountains lions, coyotes, wolverines, and wolves were designated predators and bounties were paid for them.30 That is to say, Grey was going hunting in a federal reserve with the game warden, and its regulations allowed, even encouraged, killing some of its wild animals.
Jones needed Grey’s fee to defray his own expenses. Both he and Owens had already hunted mountain lions in Yellowstone, but they had not been in Arizona long enough to be comfortable with its much different terrain and weather conditions. Consequently, Jones enlisted Jim Emett, a prominent but controversial local, and agreed to pay him $5 a day per person to guide and outfit his party. Whether Grey paid this cost or a higher fee to Jones is unclear.
Grey’s book was as important to Jones as his money. Jones did not expect it to co
nvert his skeptics, but he believed it would be good publicity and he had always wanted that. Jones’s grandstanding factored prominently into his feud with the administration of Yellowstone. He situated corrals for buffalo near Mammoth Hot Springs, then the park’s busiest entrance, so that tourists would have convenient access, instead of using a remote area that would have better served the buffalo.31 Jones then slighted their care and concentrated upon public appearances. When Theodore Roosevelt visited the park, Jones took his hounds and joined the party uninvited. He then pushed his agenda so hard that Roosevelt had to enlist help to be rid of Jones.32
Grey did not notice Jones’s flaws until he was under way and apprehensive. En route to the Grand Canyon, he dispatched Dolly a letter proclaiming “I miss my girl … [and] do not want to go away at all.” He reassured her, “Barring some unfortunate event I shall come back soon, and be better for my work,” but admitted, “I am groping. I am discouraged because of my insufficient training, not because of my gifts. It is a terrible handicap.”33 He arrived at the South Rim in a blizzard and complained to Dolly, “I am about sick and wish I were home with you. I hurt my back a little carrying my baggage.”34 Deciding that the outing should be delayed until the weather improved, the group opted for the warmth and sunshine of Los Angeles. From there Grey wrote to Dolly, “I am afraid that this trip started wrong, and will be a failure. … Col. Jones is such a selfish, forgetful old fool. He doesn’t know where he is half the time.” Jones was also “horribly stingy,” insisting upon coach fare and refusing to join Grey in the Pullman car on the train. In Los Angeles, he refused to pay twenty-five cents for a bus and Grey had to cover the fare for both of them.35