But, of course, he did care. This concern exacerbated his worry that his trip and his book about it might not fulfill his literary aspirations. Jones’s stoic endurance of hardship became even more inspiring as Grey contemplated the real possibility that his account might be little read, and perhaps might not even be published. As he went on to explain in the same letter to Murphy:
The thing was wonderful, and[,] strange to say[,] that which made [the] most impression on me had nothing to do with sport. I starved on the desert, was lost on the desert, buried in sand on the desert, and I lived on the desert. I met some real men, men who live lonely terrible lives, who are silent, who perform heroic deeds as a matter of course and men who have hearts, who have loved and lost. … I want to justify Buffalo Jones. It seems many of these nature writers ridiculed his story last winter, when he claimed to have lassoed and tied a mountain-lion all by himself. Well, he did. I can prove it. I have photographs to show it. And I believe as Wallace said that we have a story which will make these same sit-in-the-hotel-parlor-writers crawl under their beds.52
Behind his sensitivity to the “lonely terrible lives” of these men who had “loved and lost” lay his lack of confidence in his literary talent and his thwarted yearnings for recognition. His loneliness and rejection became theirs. The many hours and long days Grey invested in writing up his Arizona experiences only deepened this brooding. Over the summer, he sank into a deep depression, and in a journal entry on the first of September, he wrote:
The summer is over. I write those words with mingled feelings of relief, shame, regret and pain. For in my long experiences this has been the saddest summer I have ever lived. Words are cold dead things. I need not put here in detail my wildness, my savage intensity of passion, my humiliation, my pain. For they have been burned indelibly into my heart.53
Only continued encouragement from both Dolly and Murphy enabled him to complete his book. In his preface, he explained, “As a man I came to see the wonder, the tragedy of their lives, and to write about them” (vii).
Unfortunately, Dolly and Murphy could not shield Zane from publishers and their frank estimate of his work. In January 1908, the manuscript was submitted to Harper and Brothers. Like his two previous novels, it was quickly rejected, but this time the editor Ripley Hitchcock delivered this brutal evaluation: “I don’t see anything in this to convince me that you can write either narrative or fiction” (4). In the section of “My Own Life” in which he describes this devastating setback, Grey claims that Hitchcock’s estimate so shell-shocked him that he did not register its full impact until he reached the street and suddenly had to grip a lamppost to keep from falling.
Grey also recalls that by day’s end, his confidence had returned and that he started work on a new novel to prove Hitchcock wrong (5).54 This self-serving commentary about his determination downplayed the prolonged devastation of this rejection. The novel he claimed to have started would have been The Heritage of the Desert, but he was unable to write this first Western until after he completed two more trips. The first was another hunt for mountain lions with Jones from mid-March to mid-May 1908, and the second was a return to Tampico from January to March 1909. After more rejections from Dodd, Mead, and Barnes, Murphy persuaded Outing Publishing to accept The Last of the Plainsmen the month before Grey’s departure for Arizona, but the relief of this news was short-lived. The December before, Murphy had placed an excerpt from the book entitled “Lassoing Lions in the Siwash” with the highly regarded Everybody’s magazine. Grey was so pleased that he wrote in his journal, “This is the first substantial appreciation that I have received in the four years I have been working at the gates of literature,”55 and he hastily granted the magazine the rights to his photographs. The editors at Outing decided that these photographs were so important that they demanded use of them as a condition of acceptance. For several weeks, Grey agonized that his carelessness had ruined all his hard work.56
Outing was best known for its sport magazine with the same name, and few literary critics noticed its books. Moreover, the $200 Grey received in royalties for The Last of the Plainsmen barely surpassed the $100 Everybody’s paid for his excerpt. However, sportsmen had enough respect for Outing’s books that this work, when it was published, gained Grey a reputation as a daring and accomplished outdoorsman. Certainly Field and Stream thought so. Previously this magazine had merely been receptive to Grey’s offerings, but after publication of his book it began to feature and promote them. Its backing of Grey at this critical moment of need sprang from its ambitious quest to become the premier magazine of sport. In 1906, ten years after the magazine’s start in St. Paul and ambitious relocation to New York City in 1898, the owners of Field and Stream were strapped with a debt of $18,000 and a meager circulation of only 10,000. They approached Eltinge Warner, then a printing salesman and circulation manager, and offered him 50 percent of the magazine to be its general manager. Within two years, he had achieved enough momentum to obtain financing to purchase the remaining 50 percent.57
Under Warner’s stewardship, Field and Stream published three of Grey’s Tampico articles and “Tige’s Lion.” Although Warner paid a pittance for these, he saw Grey as an upcoming writer whose unusual experiences and engaging style would attract new readers and boost subscriptions. He also believed in aggressive promotion. After reading The Last of the Plainsmen, Warner contacted Grey and encouraged him to take another lion hunt and write a long serial. Over the eight months between Grey’s April 1908 departure for Arizona and the publication of the first installment of “Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon” in the January 1909 issue, Warner labored to build anticipation. First, he ignored his policy against book reviews and ran a very positive one of The Last of the Plainsmen in the October issue. In bold contrast to The Nation, which denounced the story’s “hero worship” as “so pronounced that one can hardly read it without suspecting an unconscious over-coloring,”58 Field and Stream maintained:
It will stand unchallenged as the most graphic and interesting description yet written of the wonderful region of desert and mountain bordering the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. The author has that happy art, shared by so few, of losing himself in his subject, rising superior to hackneyed tricks of style or expression, and writing as the men of the West talk, straight from the heart, forcefully, yet with an easy swing.59
Two months later, the magazine came out with an announcement of the upcoming serial that greatly exaggerated the importance of Grey and the success of his book:
Next month we shall commence publication of Zane Grey’s new serial, “Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon.” … Ours is the story of a second expedition to the wilderness of desert and mountains in northern Arizona, the wildest and most picturesque in America, so nearly inaccessible that it still teems with big game as in the days when the first white man gazed upon its wonders. The first lion hunt met with success and was chronicled in Grey’s book ‘The Last of the Plainsmen,’ which met with a phenomenal sale—an entire edition being required to fill an order from London … he has a second hunt to tell about, more successful, more exciting, and with double the interest of the first. We can promise our readers a rare treat in this serial. It will be more widely read and discussed than any feature ever presented by a sportsmen’s magazine.60
For the first installment, Warner fashioned a profile of the author that quickly evolved into a standard practice; beneath a large photograph of Grey, Warner offered this colorful characterization of his experience:
This is the newest of sports, strenuous and replete with peril, but alive with the thrills which sportsmen accept as full payment for their toils and risks. But few men have as yet shared in its delights, and one of these few is Zane Grey. … “Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon,” commencing in this issue, is the true account of a notable hunting expedition—the most notable ever undertaken by American sportsmen.61
Whatever misgivings Warner harbored over Grey’s return to the same area of the Grand Cany
on for more mountain lion hunting were quelled by trust that his variation would be interesting and successful. More accurately, he was betting on it.
During his two-month trip over the spring of 1908, Grey kept another journal.62 Its more abbreviated entries reveal that he followed a similar route and relied more on memory than notations. The trip from Flagstaff to Lee’s Ferry and on to the ranch at the House Rock Valley was the same except for an overnight excursion to Tuba. From the ranch, Grey, Jones, Owens, and Emett crossed the Utah desert to Kanab and Fredonia. They headed south through Snake Gulch and established their lion-hunting camp at Rock Creek. “Roping Lions” dispenses with routing and concentrates instead upon the hunting. There is no mention of the day trip he took on April 20 to a cliff overlooking the Surprise Valley of the Thunder River. During his previous visit, Grey learned about this inaccessible, little-known area from David Rust, and he wrote Dolly about his excited wish to visit it:
Mr. Rust knows of a canyon where no man, except prehistoric, besides himself has ever put a foot. He reached it after a long, though not hard, climb over the Marble Walls below. This is a most beautiful place. There are great cottonwood trees, grass, and flowers, a great spring and stream, and deer and beaver.
No one suspects this. No one has ever seen it save him. From here the canyon looks like a dark thread.
Well, you and I are going to camp in that canyon alone for two or three months. Mr. Rust will get some men to carry our outfit up on their backs—a burro can’t go—and we will stay there, and invite our souls.
Think of it! All alone amid the silence and grandeur of the canyon, far from the fretting world, and noise and distraction.63
The trail construction that kept Rust from serving as his guide prevented Grey from reaching this wondrous destination until his second trip. Curiously, he did not mention his momentous visit in his published account, even though he mailed Dolly an enraptured description of it. “Heart broken” because there was no access to the valley floor, he located a cliff overlook that unfolded to him the lush vegetation and towering walls that made the valley special. A wondrous river sprang from the side of a distant cliff, plunged 2,500 feet, and twisted its way through the center of the valley. (Thunder River is not only one of the world’s shortest rivers, but also one of the few that empties into a stream—Tapeets Creek.) After describing how he had launched a boulder that took an amazing eighteen seconds to reach the bottom, he repeated, “I expect to find my way down there, and some day take you in and camp a couple of weeks.”64 This memory would inspire the famous ending to Riders of the Purple Sage in which Lassiter topples a precariously balanced boulder that seals himself, Jane Withersteen, and young Fay in the story’s valley hideaway, making his romantic plans for himself and Dolly as important to this ending as the valley and his boulder.
Neither Warner nor Grey anticipated the most striking result of this trip: Grey’s emergence as an adroit adventurer. With his first trip behind him, he realized that he was no longer a tenderfoot. His eventual acceptance as an equal by the other hunters blocked him from replaying the role of novice and recycling his self-consciousness and self-deprecation. His previous experience demanded that he present himself as a veteran who understands what to expect and how to respond.
In “Roping Lions,” Grey dispenses with saddle soreness and horse control. Little is made of the discomforts of sleeping on hard ground and enduring cold nights and undesirable campsites. Although Grey’s year away from Arizona necessitated difficult reconditioning and readjustment, he copes with hardship as his companions do—without comment. Competence frees Grey from having to rely on others and diminishes his awe for their resourcefulness and prowess. The characterization of Jones is most affected by this change. He continues to be the consummate outdoorsman and undisputed leader, but Grey now notices when he falters and even has him fail. At one point in the account, a treed lion lashes out and tears Jones’s pants. Pulling away, he loses his balance, tumbles from the tree, and provokes everyone to laugh. The deaths of several lions cause him to question openly his abilities and goals.
Grey’s abandonment of his tenderfoot identity necessitated an alternative measure of the trip’s meaning. Since Jones is no longer his role model, Grey makes besting his lingering fears his objective. As he remarks several pages into his account, “I knew I had to be cured of my dread, and the sooner it was done the better.”65 Later, when he is near a lion, he explains, “I had to steel my nerve to keep so close” (75). These remarks prepare for the climactic moment when he matches Jones by climbing a tree after a lion without a gun. Proudly he asserts, “Fear of them [lions] was not in me that day” (149).
Grey linked this emotional reckoning to his heightened sensitivity to his awesome surroundings. “Roping Lions” presents fuller, more artful descriptions of the desert’s beauty. Dan Murphy sent Grey a copy of John Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901) while he was writing The Last of the Plainsmen, and he was so impressed by the verbal artistry of this art critic that he consciously studied his example.66 However, the allure of the desert for him involved more than aesthetics. His fascination with the panoramic colors sunlight elicited from this forbidding landscape included a therapeutic confrontation with elemental conditions and needs. However beautiful it might appear, this rugged, parched terrain made survival both a paramount concern and a significant component of his reckoning with fear. The hunt in this treacherous landscape occasions a complex thrill that breaks down his civilized inhibitions, projects him beyond the confines of selfhood, and integrates him into the vastness of his surroundings:
Something swelled within my breast at the thought that for the time I was part of that wild scene. The eye of an eagle soaring above would have placed me as well as my lion among the few living things in the range of his all-compassing vision. Therefore, all was mine, not merely the lion—for he was only the means to an end—but the stupendous, unnamable thing beneath me, this chasm that hid mountains in the shades of its cliffs, and the granite tombs, some gleaming pale, passionless, others red and warm, painted by a master hand; and the wind-caves, dark portaled under their mist curtains, and all that was deep and far-off, unapproachable, unattainable, of beauty exceeding, dressed in ever-changing hues, was mine by the right of presence, by right of the eye to see and the mind to keep (109).
His activity and the setting awaken a wildness at the core of his being that triumphs over fear, and even consciousness itself. As he explained more clearly in his later article “What the Desert Means to Me” (1924): “Nothing in civilized life can cast the spell of enchantment, can grip men’s souls and terrify women’s hearts like the desert. It has to do with the dominating power of wild, lonely desolate places. … Men love the forbidding and desolate desert because of the ineradicable and unconscious wildness of savage nature in them.”67
This romantic transport could easily have been shattered by a careless mishap or a mauling by a lion, but it is not. Grey presents it glibly as a stimulus to hunt that sends him racing across fields of scree and down steep drops with total abandon. When he spots a lion in the distance, he charges after it, oblivious to danger. With “sheer delight” and no heed for safety, he pursues it along a narrow ledge. When the trail leads to a dead-end, he coolly photographs the cornered beast. “What would follow had only hazily formed in my mind,” he explains. “But the nucleus of it was that he should go free” (130–36). Unfortunately, the lion does not comprehend this intent and attacks. Suddenly aware of danger for the first time, Grey draws his pistol and shoots the beast between the eyes.
This death and that of another strangled lion intrude a dissonant note of loss that qualifies his triumph over fear and liberated wildness. Grey leads the reader to believe that he was so intoxicated with the emotional effect of his experience that he was oblivious to consequences. However, the seeds for future change are planted early in the account when he has an opportunity to examine closely a lion that has been captured and bound. Gazing into the eyes of this mag
nificent creature, he suddenly beholds that the same wildness that Aldo Leopold, the renowned naturalist, discovered years later in the eyes of a dying wolf:
I wanted to see a wild lion’s eyes at close range. They were exquisitely beautiful, their physical properties as wonderful as their expression. Great half globes of tawny, amber, streaked with delicate wavy lines of black, surrounding pupils of intense purple fire. … Deep in those live pupils, changing, quickening with a thousand vibrations, quivered the soul of this savage beast, the wildest of all wild Nature, unquenchable love of life and freedom, flame of defiance and hate (75).
In his recounting of a similar experience in his landmark conservationist essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold would claim that the “fierce green fire” in the eyes of a dying wolf turned him against the policy of extermination for so-called predators.68 Having depicted how his wild surroundings and the wild animals awakened the wildness within him, Grey does not comprehend this allied threat until late in his account when several lions end up dead and he, in his conclusion, offers a troubled reflection that hunting “taught mutely, eloquently, a lesson of life—that men are still savage, still driven by a spirit to roam, to hunt, and to slay” (168). Though his surroundings provoke and license this lust “to slay,” he agonizes over the consequential loss of life and threat to wildness. When the wild activates a similar desire “to slay” in his novels, the results are much worse, and Grey dispenses with second thoughts.
When the first installment of “Roping Lions” appeared in the January 1909 issue of Field and Stream, Grey was back in Tampico. Warner was so pleased with this serial and the steady growth in subscriptions to his magazine that he invited Grey to contribute another serial about Tampico.69 However, Will Dilg and the Ward line helped as much to make this trip possible. The friend in “The Leaping Tarpon” whom Grey characterized as “the best angler in Chicago” was Dilg, who worked as a publicist for a large advertising company in Chicago.70 He had been visiting Tampico for several years prior to meeting Grey there in 1907, and in an article about these visits, his wife revealed that they were introduced to Tampico by a “vice-president of the Mexican-American S. S. Company.”71 This would have been the Ward line (also known as the New York and Cuba Mail Steamship Co.) whose steamships carried passengers from New York to Cuba and several other Caribbean locations. Whether or not Dilg worked for this company, his friendship with its vice president was undoubtedly responsible for two little-known Grey pamphlets entitled Tarpon, the Silver King (1908) and Nassau, Cuba, Mexico (1909) that were financed and distributed by the Ward line as promotion.72 For writing these booklets, Zane received free passage for himself and Dolly to visit Tampico a second time.
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