Zane Grey

by Thomas H. Pauly

  Grey’s dream of a public scoreboard, unencumbered by peculiar restrictions like those advocated by the Tuna Club, included a yearning for “virgin seas” and more record fish. Long before his trip to Nova Scotia, he worried that the locations that had long been so special to him—Arizona, Long Key, and Avalon—were no longer what they were when he first visited them. Increased population and development had altered their wild, pristine conditions, and the indigenous wildlife was diminished and wary.

  For Grey, Nova Scotia represented both an alternative and the first step of more ambitious plans. Prior to his visit, he had contemplated the purchase of a yacht to carry him to remote, little-fished areas of the world, and he came to Nova Scotia knowing that it was a center for boatbuilding with a lower standard of living that made everything less expensive. Thus he went shopping for a boat during his first week there. On August 11, Lillian wrote to Claire that he was “very excited” and debating whether “to either clinch or give up the purchase of a 3 masted, sailing schooner, 185 feet long, 35 feet wide.”61 Registered as the Marshal Foch, this ship weighed 351 tons when the Ward’s Brook shipyard in Cumberland County completed it in February 1919. The Marshal Foch had already crossed the Atlantic twice, and it currently held the record for the fastest run from Halifax to New York City. Though its original cost is unknown, a smaller 284-ton schooner built there the same year cost $62,000.62 Since owners of the Marshal Foch were willing to accept $17,000, Grey considered the price a terrific bargain. He would have to arrange costly renovations, but they would achieve everything he wanted for much less than the cost of a new boat. Lillian informed Claire that Zane wanted the boat “for trips on the Pacific Coast and maybe New Zealand, Australia, etc.” Unfortunately, he calculated that his modifications would take many months and would necessitate postponement of his plans to visit South America the upcoming spring.63 Grey fretted over the purchase and these complications, and only after his record catch was he confident enough to commit.

  At the time of his purchase, Grey wanted renovation of the Marshal Foch to be done in New York,64 but a visit to the Smith and Rhuland shipyard in Lunenburg and its economical bid changed his mind. He arranged for his schooner to be outfitted with two Fairbanks-Morse engines, an electric generator for lights and fans, an air compressor to drain water, and an emergency engine. He had tanks installed for 5,000 gallons of crude oil, 5,000 gallons of water, and 2,500 gallons of gasoline. Below decks he created eight staterooms, four bathrooms, a large refrigerated storeroom, a dark room, and storage for tackle.65 He transformed the central area into a joint saloon and dining area large enough to accommodate mountings of his two huge tuna on opposite walls.66 Grey decided that he also needed two new power launches as well as extensive modification to the one recently built for him in Florida. After contracting McAlpine in Shelburne to do the work, he got Sid Boerstler to supervise the renovations, to monitor the positioning of the power launches, and to recruit a crew.67 The biographical sketch of Grey prepared for his induction into the Hall of Fame of the International Game Fish Association states that “he was the first to use the ‘mother boat’ concept for keeping his smaller boats supplied without having to return to land.” All these modifications cost Grey $40,000, more than twice the ship’s purchase price.68

  After Grey arranged the main components of this renovation with Boerstler and the boatyard, he left them to complete the job because his hectic schedule did not allow him time for the details. Two days after his return to Altadena in mid-September, he and a large contingent of friends and support staff departed in three automobiles for a third visit to Oregon. After fishing the Rogue River for the second time and spending several days at Crater Lake, which he first visited in 1919, Grey took his group to Klamath Lake, Klamath Falls, and the Modoc Indian reservation, and then headed back to Altadena. The most eventful moment of the trip occurred outside Bakersfield when a careless driver slammed his automobile into one carrying Jess and Lillian. Jess had five cracked ribs and Lillian sustained face lacerations, but doctors were able to patch them so that they were able to follow a few days later.69

  In early October, Grey was off again for his late fall hunting trip in Arizona where he encountered a situation that took his mind off fishing, his new yacht, and even his hunting. In the North Rim area of the Grand Canyon, the deer population had swollen to the point that many people, including his old friend Will Dilg, were worrying that upcoming winter would kill thousands of them. Back in 1922, Grey had supported Dilg when he rallied fifty-four worried sportsmen and established the Izaak Walton League to fight the many menaces to wildlife. Even before this, Grey had become a committed conservationist, and he had written several articles denouncing the recent decimation of habitats for game and fish. When Dilg started the Izaak Walton League Monthly (renamed Outdoor America in 1924) to promote the league’s cause, Grey allowed his articles to be reprinted without charge, and contributed new ones as well.

  By 1924, Dilg was so concerned about the North Rim deer that he devoted the November issue of the league’s magazine to it, and he wrote an introductory editorial about the urgency of the problem:

  Believing the Kaibab deer herd to be one of our greatest national assets, the Izaak Walton League is vitally interested in the recommendation recently made by an investigating committee that the number of deer, estimated at approximately twenty thousand, be reduced to one-half that number to insure sufficient forage for the remaining deer throughout the winter months. … The columns of this magazine are open to anyone who can suggest a plan that will save this marvelous remnant of outdoor America made possible by that farsighted sportsman and conservationist Theodore Roosevelt.70

  When President Roosevelt declared the North Rim area a national preserve back in 1906, the year before Grey’s first visit, rough estimates placed the number of deer at 4,000. At that time, supporters of the preserve judged these figures to be low enough that they banned deer hunting. They also viewed the number of the predators as so high and so ruinous to the deer population that hunting of them was both allowed and even encouraged with bounties.

  During the fifteen years since Grey’s two lion hunts with Jones, government agents calculated that 700 cougars, 500 bobcats, and 5,000 coyotes had been exterminated. Jim Owens, the game warden who hunted with Grey and Jones, claimed that he himself had killed several hundred mountain lions. This slaughter of “enemies” allowed the deer to flourish so that they currently threatened both the environment and their food supply. By 1924, Forest Service officials estimated the current number of deer at 20,000, and some locals believed that this estimate was low.

  However many deer there were, everyone agreed that there were far too many of them. Acting in conjunction with the special investigative committee established by the secretary of agriculture, the Forest Service proposed a special hunt to thin its numbers. Despite pockets of support for this proposal, locals worried that it would set a dangerous precedent and jeopardize protection for the deer, and the National Park Service strongly opposed the plan.71 The impasse of this debate prompted Dilg’s special issue that included comments on the situation from the director of the National Park Service, the governor of Arizona, and the superintendent of the U.S. Forest Service.72

  By late October when the magazine appeared, George McCormick, a Flagstaff rancher with a large network of friends, had already persuaded the regional supervisor of the Forest Service and the game warden for the State of Arizona to issue him a special permit for a massive deer drive. He proposed to herd the deer from the North Rim across the Colorado River to the South Rim where feed was more plentiful and winters were milder. In a contract signed on October 20, 1924, the State of Arizona agreed to pay McCormick $2.50 for each deer that reached the south side of the river, and authorized McCormick to remove neither less than 3,000 nor more than 8,000 head.73 When Grey learned about this plan at his hunting lodge, he immediately contacted McCormick and offered his support. Their discussions revealed benefits for both and strengt
hened their alliance. Grey offered to make the drive even more lucrative for McCormick by offering him a lump sum for exclusive literary and motion picture rights to the event, which Zane had already convinced Jesse Lasky to underwrite.

  In early December, McCormick rallied a band of locals from Flagstaff at the North Rim, and began work on two six-foot-high fences of wire and cheesecloth. They started these fences several miles apart and constructed them so that they gradually converged over a stretch of three miles to the place where the deer were supposed to cross the river.

  Complications delayed the start of the drive until December 14. Reinforcements were slow in arriving, and far short of the numbers expected. Grey showed up with a band of experienced wranglers, but his priority was a favorable position for his camera crew. Worst of all, inclement weather arrived with biting temperatures and low visibility. At the outset, the motley crew of wranglers and Indians formed a long wavelike line, and moved slowly forward, using soft whistles to get the deer moving without spooking them. On the second day, as the drive entered the area of the fences, horsemen saw hundreds of deer ahead and realized that they were already hesitant and fidgety. That night a snowstorm hit and worsened the situation. The following day, as the fences checked their movements, the deer picked up the scent of the cameramen ahead and started bolting through gaps in the line. By day’s end, the bulk of the herd had escaped to the rear; Grey was struck by a fleeing deer and almost knocked from his horse. No deer reached the river, let alone the other side, and the cameramen did not get any usable footage. Lasky honored his agreement, and paid Zane $30,000 for the film rights, but he did not bother to complete the film. Grey received $35,000 more from Country Gentleman for the serialization of his novel about the drive, The Deer Stalker, but Harpers judged the story so weak that it did not published the novel until after his death. Grey responded to this fiasco with a statement claiming that a restoration of predators might be a better solution. As predicted, the next two winters took a heavy toll on the deer population.74

  Though the outcome embarrassed Grey, his involvement fulfilled a strong wish to act on behalf of his conservationist beliefs. While he was writing The Thundering Herd in January 1923, he had asked himself, “What is the younger generation to me?” and answered, “I am a faint little voice in the cataclysmic roar of the age.” Since 1917 and The Desert of Wheat, he had set his novels in the present, and used them to criticize current developments, but the success of Flaming Youth and condemnation of his work had left him feeling out of touch and over the hill. Fearing that he and his Westerns might be passé, he identified with the past, and began to use it as the setting for his stories and to campaign on its behalf. If citizens forgot the past, he asked with more than a little defensiveness, would not the present be diminished and the future imperiled?

  The Thundering Herd (1925), which was published a month after the hunt, supported this reasoning with a return to the 1870s when vast herds of buffalo still roamed the open plains. Grey presents this reversion to better times with an aggravated consciousness of looming disaster as whites come to hunt the buffalo. These brawny animals test the prowess of these hunters and fill their pockets with money, but Grey portrays the greatest challenge as comprehending the vulnerability of the animals before it is too late. Tom Doan, the chief character, is a young Buffalo Jones, and Grey even has him meet Jones at one point. When he initially decides to become a hunter, Tom is uneasy about his decision, but the hunting, handsome pay, and zealous application of himself dispell his reservations: “Tom felt that he hated to kill that glorious and terrifying beast, yet he was powerless to resist the tight palpitating feverish domination of his blood” (63).

  Milly Fayre revives Tom’s misgivings and alters his priorities. She and Tom fall in love early in the story, but are kept apart by a variety of impediments, including the fact that she, like Louise when Grey was writing the novel, is only seventeen and cannot marry until she is “of age” (118). Although Milly does not demand that Tom convert to her visceral opposition to the killing, she voices her objections, and Tom’s deepening love has this effect. A massive stampede precipitated by hunters reunites them a final time, and a forlorn, motherless calf left behind turns Tom against hunting for good:

  The calf scarcely noticed him. It smelled of its hide-stripped mother, and manifestly was hungry. Presently it left off trying to awaken this strange horribly red and inert body, and stood with hanging head, dejected, resigned, a poor miserable little beast. … Thousands and thousands of beautiful little buffalo calves were rendered motherless by the hide-hunters. That was to Tom the unforgivable brutality (372–73).

  Tom decides to marry Milly and to take up ranching instead.

  Although Grey hoped this ending would sensitize his readers to the impending extinction of these wondrous creatures, the best parts of his novel are the hunts and the hunters’ lust for them. Also, the noble cause of the ending was compromised by Grey’s lucrative alliance with the motion picture industry. The film version of The Thundering Herd opened two months after publication of the novel, and Jesse Lasky had discussed this project with Grey when he took over his film company and obtained exclusive right to his novels. At the time, Paramount was preparing two novels by Emerson Hough—The Covered Wagon (1923) and North of 36 (1924). Lasky’s production team increased the appeal of these stories of western settlement with stirring montages of wagons trains and cattle herds. Lasky urged Grey to invent similar scenes for his novel, and he obliged with the stampede.75 Unfortunately, the problem uppermost in Grey’s mind almost prevented his finale; there were so few available buffalo that Lasky had to appeal to Yellowstone Park officials for access to the herd there.76 The cooperation of park officials made the filming possible, garnered valuable publicity, and alerted Grey and Lasky to the cinematic opportunity in the North Rim deer drive, a spectacular variation that could never have been arranged.

  Grey’s The Vanishing American (1925) appeared as a novel and a film later the same year. Originally written before The Thundering Herd, this work was far more controversial than either The Day of the Beast or The Call of the Canyon, and both versions were delayed over two years for changes and modification. With the deer drive and The Thundering Herd, Grey’s lucrative alliance with the film industry posed no real threat to his commitment to conservation, but The Vanishing American intruded a harsh reminder this capitulation had some very painful costs. Grey’s revision of The Vanishing American left him feeling compromised and betrayed.

  The Vanishing American was the first of Grey’s Western to make a Native American the main character. While the novel involved another component of the national heritage threatened by the advance of civilization, Grey was so aware that the demise of the Indian was an overworked convention that he intentionally situated his protagonist, Nophaie, in contemporary Arizona, long after the familiar battles had ended. If Grey did not want his novel to be reconfigured Cooper, he was not averse to reworking his own material. In the same way that The Call of the Canyon and The Code of the West updated The Light of Western Stars, The Vanishing American recycled The Rainbow Trail. Like Nas Ta Bega, Nophaie is the son of a chief whom whites have taken away from his tribe and educated in their culture. When he returns to his roots, he too gets slammed by a wave of modernization. His people have relocated to a reservation that is controlled by Christian missionaries and government agents. Unable to identify with the debased culture of his people or the exploitive one of whites, Nophaie feels like the defrocked Shefford, unhappily searching for direction and spiritual redemption. His grim future, his “vanishing,” arises from the fact that he is unmarried and has no offspring, but Grey implies that his crisis is essentially one of faith: “That was Nophaie’s tragedy—he had the instincts, the emotions, the soul of an Indian, but his thoughts about himself, his contemplation of himself and his people, were not those of the red man.”77

  Believing that his Indian blood makes him a warrior, determined to avenge the mistreatment of his peo
ple by German missionaries, and longing to escape his tortured thinking, Nophaie enlists to fight in the war. Like the protagonists in Grey’s recent novels, he gets wounded and has to battle disillusionment when he returns to Arizona. There he discovers that 3,000 members of his tribe have been killed by the influenza epidemic, and he too contracts the illness. Nophaie’s physical infirmity mirrors his spiritual condition, and he treats his illness by striking out for the canyons of Naza where he discovers an awesome arch that cures him as the Rainbow Bridge did Shefford. Grey presents this encounter as a resolution of the conflict in his Indian and white thinking, but Nophaie’s hybridized faith is transparently Christian at its core:

  In this deserted, haunted hall of the earth, peace, faith, resurging life all came simply to him. The intimation of immortality—the imminence of God! That strife of soul, so long a struggle between the Indian superstitions of his youth and the white teachings forced upon him, ended forever in his realization of the Universal God of Indian and white man [and his acceptance of Christianity] (302).78

  This climactic communion with nature, so characteristic of Grey, exposes how little Native American culture Nophaie actually possessed. His experiences and responses were so similar to those of Grey’s other protagonists, and so different from those of his tribe, that he is a token Indian at best. Although Nophaie’s needs and thinking were supposed to make the character comprehensible and engaging to white audiences, Grey quickly discovered that his journey into Indian country was fraught with more peril than he anticipated. With his previous novels, Grey’s outspoken complaints provoked little opposition. Although his fulminations may have weakened the appeal of his novels, critics flayed them for other reasons. Grey’s strident attacks had so little effect that he sorely underestimated their potential offensiveness. To him, missionaries and government agents were more examples of misdirected modernization; they, not he, were ones who misunderstood Indians and exploited them. However, when the serialization of The Vanishing American started to run in Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1922, the magazine was deluged with angry letters from religious groups, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs vehemently denounced his depiction of their efforts.79