This trip was supposed to be an escape from winter in Lackawaxen and a splendid opportunity to relax and fish, but it was far less romantic than Dolly and Zane had expected. Dolly was pregnant, and the travel aggravated her morning sickness and made her miserable. While they were in Merida, Zane pushed for a fishing trip to the Alacanes reef off the coast of Yucatan. The boat trip was very hard and their accommodations were wretched. Afterward, Dolly urged Zane to continue and she returned to the United States via Havana.73 “I must have been a brute to drag you out there,” Zane wrote to her following their separation. In order to complete his research for his travelogue, he headed for Mexico City. In San Luis Potosi, he discovered that his trunk was missing and then came down with a vicious case of diarrhea when he reached Mexico City.74 “What a miserable farce this whole trip has been. I wish I were home,” he complained to Dolly.75
Grey’s commitment to his serial carried him back to Tampico and to the material he had tentatively assessed in “A Night in a Jungle.” “Down an Unknown Jungle River” starts from the same remote village of Valles, and recounts his journey down the unexplored Panuco River from its headwaters high in the mountains, over a long stretch of uncharted, impenetrable jungle, to the river’s outflow into Tampico’s estuary. Although this boat trip represented an enlargement of “Canoeing on the Delaware” and “James’ Waterloo,” it was serious adventure with true risk. George Allen, an American then living in Tampico, helped Grey to locate a usable boat and a guide named Pepe, who misrepresented his outdoor experience and knowledge of the area. Grey was hoping these men would save him from the fiascos of his night in the jungle, but they only compounded his problems. George fired his rifle at everything that moved and seldom hit anything. At one point he put holes in the boat when he missed his quarry and then broke one of Grey’s favorite fishing rods. Pepe was pitched overboard when he made a bad decision to stand up in the boat. The many wild animals terrified him. Both were so inept through a challenging stretch of rapids that they almost destroyed the boat.
At various points in his account, Grey exploits this incompetence for comic relief, but it provokes enough concern that he has to take over and serve as leader. In striking contrast to the bumbling novice of “A Night in a Jungle,” he emerges as both skillful and resourceful. His deft maneuvering through the difficult rapids compensates for the mistakes of the others. Pepe proclaims him “grande mozo,” and both men quickly learn that when Zane reaches for his rifle, the perceived threat will be eliminated. As in “Roping Lions,” ordeals bring out the adventurer in him, but here they show him to be superior to the others. As he explains:
This was a dare-devil trip, and the dare-devil in me had not been liberated. It took just the nervous dread, hard work, blunders and accidents, danger and luck to unleash the spirit which alone could make such a trip a success. Pepe and George by this time had a blind faith in me. They could scarcely appreciate the real hazard of our undertaking and I had no desire to impart it to them.76
Over the course of the trip, the group has to cope with many dangerous situations and a few that are harrowing. They encounter hungry alligators and an unnerving disappearance of the river into dense overgrowth that compels them to lie down in order to pass under low-lying limbs encircled with large snakes. A herd of javelinas attack, but Grey evades them by adeptly scaling a nearby tree. A wounded jaguar occasions the trip’s most dramatic moment when his charge brings him close enough to cough blood onto Grey’s shirt before dying from gunshot wounds. By the time the battered boat approaches its destination, the dangers, ticks, bad water, and sweltering heat have drained the trio and left them seriously ill. Fifteen years later, Grey would continue to suffer from ailments he incurred. Needless to say, this trip was a major accomplishment.
When Grey returned to Lackawaxen in March 1909, he was so sick and spent that he started with the easy job of completing his travelogue and rewriting The Short Stop.77 Casting about for opportunity and money, he originally wrote this first of his books for boys as a serial but was unable to place it. In early May, McClurg agreed to bring out his rewrite as a book. Unsure of how to convert his travel experiences into a novel, Grey experimented with a series of short stories set in Mexico and Arizona that were conceived as market tests for a new novel without the Zanes or Ohio. “Tigre,” “Don,” and “The Rubber Hunter” were published over the next couple years. “Naza,” “Old Walls,” and “Thunder River and Buffalo Jones’ Hardest Escape” either disappeared or were renamed. It is possible that “Yaqui” and “The Great Slave” originated during this period even though they were not published until the 1920s. Between May and June of 1909, nine of his ten offerings were rejected and he wrote in his journal: “I do not know what way to turn. I cannot decide what to write next. That which I desire to write does not seem to be what the editors want. This mood is distressing. I am full of stories and zeal and fire; yet I am inhibited by doubt, by fear that my feeling for life is false, that my imagined characters are not true, that my outlook is not sane.”78
This uncertainty was worsened by the financial collapse of Outing, which was unable to pay Grey royalties for 5,000 copies of Plainsmen.79 By mid-July, he was so demoralized that he ceased writing for the remainder of the summer.80 By fall, Dolly’s impending delivery spurred him to resume, and then deepened his depression when his efforts again faltered. In New York City, following the birth of his son Romer on October 1, he was bedridden and “out of my head.”81
In mid-November, Zane mounted a desperate rebound and hurled himself into writing a new novel with a crazed determination to finish. Long days of writing that sometimes extended into the evening and even past midnight enabled him to complete his first Western on January 23, 1910.82 Initially, he entitled his novel Mescal, the name of the Indian maiden involved in the story’s romance.83 Originally he may have conceived of this book as a Betty Zane with an Arizona setting, but the writing shifted his focus to Mescal’s suitor and produced a quite different result. The finished novel, which was published as The Heritage of the Desert in September 1910, introduces the reader to a twenty-four-year-old Easterner named John Hare, who has journeyed to Salt Lake City to recover from a vaguely defined ailment that has left him as weakened and vulnerable as Zane was when he started his novel. Mistaken as a spy by local outlaws, he is forced to flee to the southern desert where he loses his way and finds himself “alone in the world, sick, and dependent upon the kindness of these strangers.”84 Grey intrudes an ominous foreboding upon Hare’s plight and future with a riveting scene that evidences how quickly the competence of his Tampico description evolved into artistry. Rhythmic, sinuous sentences masterfully transform particulars of landscape into powerful images and portentous mood. Eerily and impressively, the first pages of his first Western flourish full development of his hallmark skill at converting scenery into a grand stage set for his unfolding drama.
The desert, gray in the foreground, purple in the distance, sloped to the west. Eyes keen as those of hawks searched the waste, and followed the red mountain rampart, which sheer in bold height and processional in its craggy sweep shut out the north. Far away little puffs of dust rose above the white sage, and creeping specks moved at a snail’s pace. … A broad bar of dense black shut out the April sky, except in the extreme west, where a strip of pale blue formed background for several clouds of striking color and shape. They alone, in all that expanse, were dyed in the desert’s sunset crimson. The largest projected from behind the dark cloud-bank in the shape of a huge fist, and the others, small and round, floated below. To Cole it seemed a giant hand, clutching, with inexorable strength, a bleeding heart. His terror spread to his companions as they stared (2–3).
Hare’s struggle to survive introduces him to the therapeutic redemption in the desert’s menace and desolation: “The wildness of it all, the necessity of peril and calm acceptance of it, stirred within Hare the call, the awakening, the spirit of the desert” (53). A significant amount of this rehabilitation is
due to the people who aid him. August Naab, a devout Mormon elder, is an imaginative synthesis of Jones and Emett. Even though Naab suspects that Hare has ties with his enemies, he is so steeped in the Bible that he feels compelled to help. He hides Hare from his pursuers, furnishes rest and nourishment, and introduces him to the Mormons’ simple, antimodern values, like the battered silver cup, generously left at a water hole years before, that has been much used and never taken. Naab discerns Hare’s potential and introduces him to the outdoors and hard work that develop it.
Naab’s strength of will and resourcefulness includes a resolute opposition to killing that handicaps him against Holderness, who threatens everything for which he stands. Holderness is a selfish, acquisitive businessman wholly committed to an ethic of owning, developing, and profiting.85 Hare’s evolution into a compensatory son for Naab, a foil for his corrupt real one, prepares him to confront Holderness, though Hare has to become a gunman to do this.
Mescal, whose Indian name means “desert flower,” completes this rehabilitation. Hare is introduced to her through a feigned involvement that diverts the men hunting him, but the couple discovers that their love is real when Hare goes off with Mescal to herd sheep on a verdant high plateau. Her Indian sensibility introduces him to the spirit within their environment that intensifies their romance and completes his recovery:
He [Hare] saw himself in triumphant health and strength, earning day by day the spirit of this wilderness, coming to fight for it, to live for it, and in far-off time, when he had won his victory, to die for it … but it was Mescal who made this wild life sweet and significant. It was Mescal, the embodiment of the desert spirit. Like a man facing a great light Hare divined his love. Through all the days on the plateau, living with her the natural free life of Indians, close to the earth, his unconscious love had ripened. He understood now her charm for him; he knew now the lure of her wonderful eyes, flashing fire, desert-trained, like the falcon eyes of her Indian grandfather. The knowledge of what she had become to him dawned with a mounting desire that thrilled all his blood (89–90).
Grey glosses the primal emotion that Mescal awakens in Hare, but hints that it is more elemental than love.
This idyll is shattered when Mescal reveals that she is supposed to wed the already married Snap, Naab’s prodigal son. In order to avoid the injustice of Mormon polygamy, she flees into the desert on the day of her marriage. Grey likens her to a captured mustang that must live free or die. Hare initiates a belated, implausible search over a vast expanse of desert, through a punishing sand storm, and into a maze of slot canyons until he arrives at a secret oasis that resembles the Surprise Valley of Thunder River. There he finds Mescal gravely ill and near death. He remains with her and nurses her back to health and this second exposure to the wild teaches him the desert’s final lesson—“to strike first and hard” (251). This lust to slay completes his Zane-like initiation, and he returns to kill Holderness. Hare’s encounters with the patriarchal Naab, the mystical Mescal, and the rugged, majestic landscape transform him from a sickly fugitive from the East into a potent avenger who guns down the menacing exemplar of modern commercialization.
In her critical study of the Western, West of Everything (1992), Jane Tompkins observes that Grey’s prose doesn’t sound like he had been reading Thackeray, Austen, or even Owen Wister. “It’s wonderful writing, but not in good taste,” she asserts. “For sheer emotional force; for the capacity to get and keep his readers, absolutely, in his grip; for the power to be—there is no other word for it—thrilling.”86 Although this estimate is hyperbolic, it has merit and warrants attention. At the time that Grey wrote his first Western, he was, in fact, reading Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Ruskin,87 but his own writing does not evidence the stylistic refinement of these Victorians. Instead, it consciously evokes a world of charged emotion.
Tompkins makes another important point in noting that his books were not read by the elite who favored these writers. Grey’s presentation was influenced more by the rising authority of journalism and its insistence upon concrete information and leaner sentences, but Shores of Lethe furnishes an important reminder of his indebtedness to the contrived emotion of nineteenth-century popular literature. Thrilling the reader was one of many emotions that Grey consciously strove to evoke. The one writing guide that he read and reread many times was The Forms of Prose Literature by John H. Gardiner, and the part he revered most was the seventy-page section on “Literature of Feeling.”88 Gardiner maintained that this kind of writing was more personal than the “Literature of Thought” and was distinguished by the manner in which the author recollected and represented his experience. Gardiner catalogued the many ways authors could put “emotional coloring” into plot and description, but insisted that the ways were not as important as the one principle that this coloring be the main objective. From Gardiner as his tutor, Grey was receiving old-fashioned advice and it left an old-fashioned patina upon his efforts. His subject matter, on the other hand, possessed a freshness and timeliness that editors and critics missed in their quick dismissals of his writing as overwrought and passé.
Grey was decidedly not the first writer to detect literary promise in the West. Since the Civil War, many dime novelists had experimented with it. Moreover, in the decade before Grey’s arrival, Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington had already celebrated it. Their attraction, like Grey’s, was that of outsiders, and they blazed a trail that he developed into a highway. In his groundbreaking investigation into the meaning of the West for Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington, G. Edward White discovered a pattern of uncanny resemblances in their personal lives. All three came from distinguished Eastern families, attended Ivy League universities, and originally went West to escape emotional or health crises. There they had memorable experiences that alleviated their problems and helped them to achieve successful careers that stressed both the West and its invigorating effect. For these three men to suggest that the raw, undeveloped West was preferable to the refined, class-conscious Eastern establishment from which they came constituted a betrayal of their heritage, and it was. The West exposed them to attitudes and skills that impressed them while they were there, but then dismayed them when they realized how little their peers respected these values. Convinced that this was a mistake, even a fault, they campaigned for change and acceptance.89
Although Grey’s immediate family was different, his experience and thinking conformed to this pattern, but moved beyond this kinship in associating the West’s therapeutic effect with an illness contracted in the East. Grey’s protagonists were so repeatedly afflicted with an ailment that it bespeaks his own debilities, but he also used these ailments to express the welling doubts among Easterners about their long-standing commitment to manners, industrialization, civilization, and cultural superiority. Increasingly aware of the physical and psychosomatic ailments caused by these forces, they, along with Wagner and Shields, were beginning to view the forces themselves as a form of sickness. According to this revisionist thinking, Buffalo Bill’s efforts on behalf of the railroad and progress destroyed not only Indians and buffalo but also the simpler, healthier way of life that engendered prowess, appreciation, and happiness.
By the time that Wister’s The Virginian achieved the best-seller list in 1902, it was clear that the West was outgrowing its narrow circle of privileged supporters like Roosevelt, Remington, and himself. Moreover, their West was that of the northern plains and the 1880s, and this area had changed radically between their original visits and their nostalgic recollections. In his introduction to The Virginian, Wister wrote, “Had you left New York or San Francisco at ten o’clock this morning, by noon tomorrow you could step out at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain for the reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those of which memory can take, will bring you to it now.”90 Grey’s Southwest, on the other hand, remained undeveloped and unspoiled. This area already ha
d a paradoxical reputation for being both more forbidding and more therapeutic than the rest of the country. Easterners suffering from commonplace bronchial ailments were noticing how the aridity of the Southwest improved their health. Although the summer heat could be withering, the milder climate of the other seasons was likewise gaining appeal. Visitors judged its air to be pure, not just because it was dry but also because it was far away from Eastern industrialization and pollution. This belief that lack of development made the desert healthier rapidly acquired psychological significance. In The Desert (1901), John Van Dyke maintained that desert inhabitants “have never known civilization, and never suffered from the blight of doubt. Of a simple nature, they have lived a simple way, close to their mother earth, beside the desert they loved.”91 In her influential The Land of Little Rain (1903), Mary Austin enlarged upon this estimate:
If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God’s hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm … there is the divinest, cleanest air to be breathed anywhere in God’s world. Some day the world will understand that, and the little oases on the windy tops of hills will harbor for healing its ailing, house-weary broods. … For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.92
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